The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  But the room was empty. Not even a curtain at the window that might have explained what she had seen from across the square. Jo came out, puzzled, and started to check the other rooms, feeling that strange reluctance to enter any of them. All she found were crusted paint pots, dirty rags and a glass jar containing a dried-out paintbrush that smelled faintly of white spirit. Outside, thunder rumbled and muttered.

  On the topmost floor, at the back of the house, a long room ran the whole width of the building: the door to this stood slightly ajar. She pushed it, anticipating nothing again, but it swung in lightly and much further than she had expected. Something fell to the floor with a noise like the end of the world, making her swear explosively and get a full ripe breath of the foul stench, which set her coughing.

  When her heart had stopped racing, she ventured cautiously into the room, and the mystery of what had fallen was solved: more decorators’ debris in the form of a plank and two stepladders, which the door had caught glancingly and sent tumbling. But she forgot it as she saw what was on the floor in the centre of the room, clearly visible in the light that stole round the sides of the ill-fitting shutters at the windows.

  There a figure had been drawn, a circle enclosing some other shape which was too scuffed for her to recognize, and in the centre of that, something flayed. Jo gulped, clasped her hand-kerchief more firmly over her nose and mouth, and advanced towards it.

  The animal was unrecognizable, rags of decaying flesh and gobs of dried blood. It had been spreadeagled, pegged out by its four limbs, and eviscerated. Disgusted, she turned away, only to see a small pale pile of fur that had been flung to one side. She approached it, and almost stooped to look, but realized in time what it was and turned away, gagging.

  It was the pelt of a white cat.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ she whispered. ‘God, oh, that’s disgusting.’ Why would someone do that? It was evidently a ritual of some kind. Divination by entrails? Summoning demons? What sort of demon would be impressed by the sacrifice of a cat? Unless, as Scimone had apparently believed, cats really were more than they seemed.

  Don’t be so damned stupid, she admonished herself. The man believed in ley lines. You’ll be looking for aliens next.

  Although, in a house built by Scimone, the sacrifice might take on a deeper significance.

  A necromancer . . . Giordano’s words came back to her. She swallowed, suddenly apprehensive, and the back of her neck prickled; she felt sweat slide down her ribs. The stench of the murdered cat filled her nostrils, coated her tongue, making her want to spit. Moving her head from side to side, she moved towards the door, and as she did so some trick of the shadows made the walls of the room appear to bulge inwards for a second.

  Her heart gave another unpleasant startled little lurch, and she paused her hand on its journey to the doorknob.

  Whatever you do, don’t open the door. The thought popped into her mind with such utter certainty that she stood stock-still, convinced beyond all reason that something inimical was outside. She knew it without needing to see it, just as she knew where everything stood in her own home, how to persuade the sticky back door to open in wet weather, and which stairs creaked.

  From the hag and hungry goblin

  That into rags would rend you . . .

  Jo shook her head to clear it. Quickly, she crossed to one of the windows and peered out around the shutter. Rain teemed down outside, and she turned away in despair, believing herself trapped completely.

  Her gaze flicked around the room, skittering away from seeing the cat’s remains, but they were centre stage and not to be pushed aside. Perhaps, she thought, she could remove it, even – assuming she could get out of the building – give it a decent burial. The difficulty of doing this in Venice did not enter her mind.

  To this end, she inspected the tumbled decorating apparatus by the door and found a paint-scraper and a tray encrusted with solidified emulsion. Armed with this, she advanced upon the pathetic little corpse.

  But the moment her foot passed the smudged circle, the floor seemed to fade beneath her, and she fell, gasping with alarm, clutching at nothing – but it was not, she realized a second later, the dizzying headlong fall from a top floor to shatter on a pavement, but, incomprehensibly, more as she imagined free fall to be: buoyed on the air itself, floating on something completely insubstantial. Around her, a wind from nowhere began to blow, forming a spiral around her so that she drifted in the centre of a vortex.

  And still she fell.

  II

  Death in Venice

  Por dinheiro bailo o perro.

  The dog dances for money.

  Portuguese proverb

  A multitude of candles sputtered and smoked, so many of them that it might have been the inside of a church. The heat they gave off filled the room, and the ceiling above them was blackened; apart from the candles, the room was bare. It was a long room, stuffy and airless; heavy curtains covered its five tall windows, and the curtains, like the ceiling, were stained with soot. Despite all the candles, shadows lurked in its corners.

  Leaning against the wall, Captain Da Silva watched, a frown on his face, as Della Quercia inscribed an elaborate figure on the floor with chalk. Da Silva was an unremarkable man, not tall, his only memorable feature a pair of blue eyes – legacy of an English grandmother – but he had a competent, reliable look. Right now he was a little nervous, a little sceptical, a little annoyed; and more than a little sickened, knowing what his employer intended to do with the white cat which stared out with golden-green eyes between the bars of the cage. And he badly needed a smoke.

  Most of all, though, he wished very heartily that he had never got involved in this at all, but that would have been impossible anyway. He shook his head irritably, annoyed at wasting time on pointless speculation: Della Quercia owned him, more or less. Owned the Isabella, his ship, anyway, even if she was mortgaged to the gunwales – like everything else the Venetian had left of his forefathers’ empire. This house included.

  Da Silva had spent most of his life at sea, and had thought that he had seen and endured enough to be pretty much hardened to anything life could throw at him. Until Arturo Della Quercia had commandeered the Isabella and flung him into a world far removed from the mundane dangers of Cape Horn and the Roaring Forties; though he would have preferred a hundred-foot sea or a screaming hurricane any day, given the choice. Which, of course, he wasn’t.

  Like Venice herself, the Della Quercia fortunes and influence had declined over the centuries, and a once-proud shipping empire had dwindled to a single vessel and a decaying palazzo whose ground floor was unusable thanks to the combined effects of acqua alta and neglect. Even here, on the top floor, a damp and stagnant odour lingered.

  Now Della Quercia, like many a desperate man before him, intended to wager everything upon one last throw: to take a final gamble for all or nothing. Yet the stake the Venetian was playing with was a higher one than Da Silva would ever hazard. He was wagering his soul.

  Months before, he had taken passage on the Isabella to Macau – not, in itself, a particularly unusual thing for an owner to do. But he had also had a task to demand of her captain.

  It had been in this house, Da Silva remembered, that the nightmare had begun. In the room directly below this one. And he hadn’t even known it for a nightmare at the time.

  ‘I need your help, Da Silva,’ Della Quercia said, twirling his glass in the lamplight so that the wine, quickened by the flame, turned a deep, translucent ruby. ‘Have you ever heard of Marco Polo’s amulet?’

  The Portuguese captain shook his head, and sipped at his own wine, an unexpected and uncharacteristic courtesy from his employer. ‘No, Signore. Is it valuable?’

  A deep laugh shook the older man. ‘Yes, Captain – you might call it valuable. But suffice it to say that it was once in the possession of my family, and now it is not. I am told, however—’ he looked at Da Silva as if summing him up ‘—that it is, at present, in Macau.’ He drained his
glass, and refilled it at once from the decanter.

  ‘Was this thing stolen from your family, then?’ Da Silva asked.

  Again, Della Quercia laughed, but there was no mirth in it. ‘Inasmuch as the person in whose possession it is now paid no money for it, yes.’

  Da Silva sighed, but soundlessly. Della Quercia liked this sort of game, got pleasure out of needling him. But he had learned long ago that you did not show impatience, or for that matter any kind of expression or emotion, in the Venetian’s presence. Not if you wanted to keep your freedom as well as your job. And Da Silva had no wish to sample the hospitality of an Italian jail, far less the hempen embrace of a noose. ‘Then I assume you wish to acquire it back from this person? In Macau?’

  ‘Yes, Captain, I do. But I shall need you to do the “acquiring”. Since the person is a Portuguese person and speaks no civilized language.’

  He did not mention at this stage that the Portuguese person was, in fact, a dead Portuguese person, nor that she had been dead for more than a hundred years. Not, Da Silva thought ruefully, that it would have made any difference. When Della Quercia said ‘Jump!’ all he could say, all he could ever have said, was ‘How high?’

  The place they came to eventually, after many false me-anderings, was deep in the maze of buildings around the docks, hidden in the twists and turns of alleys between the godowns. Unfamiliar stinks assailed their nostrils; and the place, though it seemed – but for the ubiquitous rats – deserted, was noisy in odd ways – bursts of confused shouting, snatches of song, strange brassy instruments being struck, even a roaring that sounded like some kind of engine. Da Silva did not know, and did not really want to know, how his employer had come by the knowledge that had brought them here. His revolver was in his hand, but privately he was more glad of the long knife he wore concealed down his back.

  It was also darker than it had any right to be, darker than the inside of a coal-sack, and Della Quercia’s lantern made everything around its cold beam even blacker by contrast.

  But they had arrived at last, and the captain knocked at the door in a rhythm that had been described to him. Presently a wizened, ancient Chinese woman, her face a mass of wrinkles, opened it a crack and peered out at them suspiciously.

  ‘We came from the White Unicorn,’ he said, in Mandarin, as he had been told, and passed her an ivory token.

  Unsmiling, the woman nodded, and let them in, tottering on bound feet, although she wore the black pyjamas of a lower-class Chinese. ‘Wait here,’ she said. The door banged shut behind them, and Da Silva put his revolver back in his pocket.

  They could see very little, although Da Silva identified the place as a dispensary. The scent of desiccated herbs was very faint, but Della Quercia’s lantern showed him labels on drawers: ginseng, phoenix heart, dragon’s claw. Presently the old woman returned and beckoned to them, her own hand like a claw.

  So far, so mysterious; but Da Silva had moved easily through this world thus far, since it was a milieu with which he was familiar, and one he knew how to manipulate. At some point as they descended the steep wooden stair, however, he suddenly felt as though he had crossed a barrier: moved sideways, as it were, into some place that was not so familiar. His neck prickled, and he wondered whether his employer had felt the same thing; although he doubted it, Della Quercia being, he thought to himself, an insensitive son of a whore. But what manner of person would inhabit the cellar of a Chinese pharmacist’s shop in an alleyway that was almost impossible to find? The answer came back at once: someone with something to hide.

  He was entirely unprepared, however, for the sight that met him in the cellar. For though the floor was of hard-trodden dirt, a magnificent table sat in the centre of the room, and on it was a coffin. No, the word was sarcophagus: the great, ornate, glass-sided casket reminded him of nothing so much as the tomb of St Francis Xavier – which held the saint’s uncorrupted mortal remains – in the city of Old Goa.

  Da Silva was not a particularly religious man, nor even as superstitious as most sailors, but he crossed himself before thought caught up with instinct, and muttered ‘Mary, Mother of God,’ under his breath without even realizing he had done so.

  Beside him, Della Quercia breathed out in triumph. ‘María Alvares,’ he whispered.

  God gave the Portuguese a tiny country as their cradle, but all the world as their grave, thought Da Silva sourly. The words were AntÓnio Vieira’s but the sentiment was pretty accurate.

  ‘So, with whom do I have to haggle for your charm, Signore?’ he asked with as much asperity as he ever dared to use with Della Quercia.

  ‘With her,’ the other replied, gesturing at the coffin. Da Silva felt his jaw drop. ‘With María Alvares, the necromancer, who stole it from my great-grandfather.’

  ‘I—’, began Da Silva, rendered momentarily speechless. ‘How?’

  ‘Open it,’ Della Quercia said. ‘Open the casket.’

  The captain looked round, but the Chinese woman had vanished; so he found the catches that secured the carved lid in place and snapped them open, then heaved at the lid. It was so heavy that he was half afraid its weight would drag out of his grasp and smash the glass side. But it opened smoothly enough, and rested solidly back on its hinges when he lowered it carefully down.

  Instead of the foul miasma he had expected, the breath from the coffin smelled faintly of roses. He let out the lungful of air he hadn’t realized he was hanging on to, and looked down at the woman in the casket. A trickle of sweat ran down his face: he wiped it absently with his hand.

  ‘The amulet keeps her uncorrupted,’ said Della Quercia quietly; but uncorrupted did not mean unchanged, for the corpse thus revealed was exactly that: a corpse. María Alvares, whoever she had been, had mummified in her coffin: the flesh had shrunk off her bones, her skin had dried and tanned to leather that had moulded itself to the shape of her skull, the contours of the skeleton. Her hair still lay black as the night before moonrise, glossy and thick, but her eyeballs were desiccated in their sockets and her lips were drawn back from her teeth.

  She wore her funeral finery, a dress of black silk, and around her hollow throat was the amulet: a necklace of pale jade and opals with fiery depths that took Da Silva’s breath away.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said softly.

  ‘Take it,’ said Della Quercia. The captain hesitated. What was the catch? ‘Do it, Da Silva.’

  Grimacing, the captain reached behind the mummy’s neck to unclasp the jewel, forcing out of his mind the memory of living women around whose necks he had fastened trinkets of far less value. But the contact was too intimate and too similar to forget entirely.

  Then the shrivelled eyes rolled round in their sockets, and a wizened hand gripped his wrist before he had time to react, the nails digging into his flesh like talons. The skull snapped upward, leaving the mass of shining hair behind like a pillow, and the dead jaw moved.

  ‘And who, pray tell, are you?’ rasped the corpse.

  For a long moment the captain was quite incapable of speech. Then, shaking with horror, he managed to croak, ‘Luís Da Silva.’ He tried to pull away from her iron grip, but without success; then she sat up and seized the back of his neck with her other hand. The bones, in their glove of skin, clutched him like a vice and drew his face close to hers.

  ‘Of what city, Luís Da Silva?’ Her voice put him in mind of stones clashing together.

  ‘Lisbon,’ he whispered.

  ‘At last,’ replied María Alvares, and he fancied he saw a topaz glint in her shrivelled eyes. Then, knowing it had to be done but dreading it with all his soul, he asked the question Della Quercia had brought him here to put to her.

  ‘What price do you want for this necklace?’

  María Alvares seemed to exhale a breath of roses; she seemed to smile. ‘A kiss,’ she said, and pulled his head down.

  Da Silva’s mind wanted to go away somewhere, the way the body fights the agony of dreadful wounds by shutting down. But, quite to the
contrary, everything was terribly clear: her dried lips, her leathern tongue, her coated teeth, and worst of all, his own desire that rose treacherously despite the fact that he was being kissed by a corpse and that he could feel blood trickling down the back of his neck from the sharp grip of her claws. With his free hand he fumbled for the clasp of the necklace, and managed to unfasten it; the amulet came away and María Alvares fell back into her coffin in sudden decay, the scent of roses turning mephitic in an instant.

  He sank to the floor, his legs unable to support him, the opal-and-jade necklace clutched in his hand.

  Della Quercia had never seen naked horror so clear on anyone’s face before, but the matter was only of academic interest to him: the Portuguese had retrieved the amulet from his long-dead countrywoman, and now it could return to its rightful place – and its rightful use.

  Bending to retrieve it, he saw that Da Silva’s eyes were still open, though the captain was surely unconscious; he shook him roughly by the shoulder. At length Da Silva drew a shuddering breath, and sat up.

  The edges of the jade circles had drawn blood from his hand, but the several little cuts from María Alvares’s fingernails hurt more. There were five blue crescents on his wrist and a further selection on his neck where they had dug into him. But that was not, would never be, the worst of it; for physical wounds always heal.

  Da Silva had, without realizing it, closed his eyes at the recollection; now he opened them to find that Della Quercia had finished his floorboard calligraphy. He ran his fingers over the faint scars on his wrist, and sighed, shifting his weight. A loose board rocked under his foot.

  ‘Bring the cat here,’ his employer instructed him, and Da Silva walked over to the cage and picked it up, his jaw rigid with distaste. Like most sailors, he liked cats: they killed rats, which were such a vile pest on every ship that ever put to sea. But that, Della Quercia had told him, was precisely why a cat had to be sacrificed here; and why he had done away with the little bridge that had connected the house to that curious tower behind it, although Da Silva was still not entirely sure he comprehended the reason for that. He did not know why it had been called the cat tower, nor of the architect Scimone’s philosophies.