The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  However, he understood that it was some kind of rat demon that Della Quercia needed the cat’s death to summon, because that, apparently, was the purpose of the amulet. The necklace was its lodestone and blood its magnet; and, according to Della Quercia, demons could be compelled to reveal the whereabouts of hidden treasure.

  Nineteen years before, Da Silva had killed a man whom he had caught in the act of rape – killed him with his long knife; yet the thought of cold-bloodedly slaughtering a cat made him squeamish. He did not regret his earlier action, since he was still married to the woman he had helped that day; indeed he knew he would do the same thing again. Unfortunately, though, the man he had killed had been named Aldo Della Quercia, and his elder brother had witnessed the entire incident. His revenge had been nothing so subtle as the Bible recommended: Da Silva’s sentence had been life, not death.

  So he did not watch what the Venetian did to the cat. The poor beast’s yowls were bad enough, and the iron stench of its blood.

  At last the animal’s sounds of pain ceased, and Da Silva looked up, alerted by some sixth sense. His eyes narrowed, and he stared suspiciously past the blazing banks of candles. Della Quercia was still muttering in some kind of bastard Latin, but the quality of the darkness in the room’s corners seemed to have changed. The shadows were thick and clotted, like congealing blood; the candle flames themselves looked blurred, as if they had slowed. A peculiar deadness crept into the air, a heaviness that was the opposite of languor, for it bred a reflex of fear, a desire to flee. Da Silva wiped sweat from his face, and found his hand was shaking slightly. His mouth felt dry.

  Della Quercia finished his incantation, and held his hands up. His arms were streaked to the elbows with scarlet. For a bare instant, everything seemed to hold its breath, and then Da Silva smelled, rich and corrupt, the feral stink of rats.

  In the centre of the figure Della Quercia had drawn, where the bloody rags of flesh that were all that was left of the cat lay crucified, a form began to take shape. It coalesced, as far as Da Silva could see, out of the very air itself; and yet, as it grew, it seemed more substantial, more solidly real, than the increasingly shadowy image of the Venetian.

  Da Silva had been leaning against the wall; now he tried to burrow into it. What he saw was not, as he had expected, a monstrous rat: it was worse than that. Though it had characteristics of rathood – something in its stance, a hint of fang, of disease in its yellow eye – it was manlike in form, down to its dangling genitals. The captain shuddered, and growled like a dog, yet he found himself unable to look away.

  The creature dipped its horrid head to the butchered cat, and Da Silva heard an appalling sucking noise. He unsheathed his long knife, but gave serious thought to taking out his revolver too. Not for the rat-demon: he knew it would have no effect. For himself. It looked up then, and eyed him knowingly, drawing its lips back from long yellow teeth. There was far too much intelligence in that gaze, too much cunning.

  From a long distance, he heard Della Quercia’s voice, imperative in command although he could make out no words – he knew that tone well enough – and knew with terrible certainty that it would not work, that his employer could not compel this thing.

  And then he realized what was wrong. For all that Della Quercia was the one with arcane knowledge, despite his having told Da Silva what the amulet’s purpose was, he had not put it within his diagrams of protection.

  He was wearing it around his own throat.

  Though the traitorous thought went through Da Silva’s mind that letting this rat-thing kill Della Quercia would solve all his problems, he let it slide by without considering it. As, within the barrier that he knew was useless, the creature flexed its corded muscles and prepared to pounce, Da Silva crossed the room in two strides and knocked the Venetian to the floor, reaching once again for the clasp of the amulet.

  But he was too late, for the rat-demon was faster than any man could be. It flung him aside, a clawed hand slashing casually across his face, and he crashed into the wall six feet behind with an impact that turned the world black for a second.

  When he came round, an instant later, his left eye was too full of blood to see out of, and the pain took his breath away; but with his other eye he saw the summoned thing, grown huge now, bend and suck at Della Quercia as moments ago it had fed off the cat’s corpse. Which had, he noticed, vanished completely; though he did not think the rat-demon had, precisely, eaten it.

  It drank and guzzled for only a short time before looking up and meeting Da Silva’s gaze again with that dreadful knowing expression. Then it licked its bloody lips with a pointed tongue that reminded him too much of María Alvares’s and slid, in a way he could neither comprehend nor describe, into the body of Arturo Della Quercia.

  Da Silva cursed weakly, tasting his own blood in his mouth. The offhanded way the rat-thing had thrown him against the wall made him doubt his capacity to fight it. But appalled, he knew he had to try.

  He retrieved his knife and staggered to his feet, gasping at the pain in his face and his left eye. Perhaps the creature was still disoriented; perhaps it could not immediately coordinate the body it had seized.

  And perhaps, again, Da Silva thought wearily as Della Quercia lurched to his feet, this was just a novel way of committing suicide.

  ‘Threaten me, little man?’ It was Della Quercia’s voice, but somehow distorted: the timbre hollower, louder, like a shout but with blurred edges.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Da Silva said, and lunged with his knife, opening Della Quercia’s arm from elbow to shoulder. Blood followed the slash, but sluggishly. Da Silva would bleed to death quicker from his head wound. He ducked under a flailing blow and hit out again, catching Della Quercia glancingly in the neck – on the amulet itself, he realized at the sudden spark, and tried to follow it up, to hook the point under the chain. But the other grabbed the blade of the knife and twisted the stroke aside with terrible strength.

  Wincing at the very thought of grasping the knife – he knew how sharp it was – Da Silva fought just to keep hold of it. Sweat ran into his good eye, and he knuckled it away. He was close enough to the possessed man to attempt a knee in the crotch, but Della Quercia caught the blow on his thigh and backhanded Da Silva across the face again. His fingers had to be nearly severed by now, but he seemed to feel no pain – unlike Da Silva, who was almost blinded by the anguish of the last blow.

  They were so close now that he could smell rat-stink on Della Quercia’s breath, and see the yellow that had crept into his eyes. He had only one chance now, and so he let go of the knife’s handle and used both hands to reach round the back of the Venetian’s neck and unfasten the amulet once more.

  It slipped from his sweaty fingers, and both he and Della Quercia went for it. But the moment it lost contact with the possessed man’s flesh, the Venetian collapsed to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Da Silva kicked the necklace across the room, out of reach, then doubled over, breathing heavily, his hand over his face, trying to relieve the pain flaring through his head.

  Looking down, he saw brown suddenly bleed into the prone man’s eyes again, and Della Quercia looked out of them for a final time, his mouth opening and closing, but no sound coming out.

  Kneeling, Da Silva picked up his knife, drew back the man’s head by its hair, and cut his employer’s throat. The blade slid through the Venetian’s flesh as though it was cutting butter, but the blood trickled out so slowly that it reinforced the captain’s thought that Della Quercia had been dead for at least a quarter of an hour. Neither was Da Silva surprised when the corpse crumbled into dust much as had that of María Alvares; although he was relieved that no body was left to be discovered on the top floor of the palazzo.

  He still had to dispose of the amulet, though, tired to the bone and in pain as he was; and covered in his own blood as he was, he had no intention of touching the item. Getting to his feet made him dizzy and he staggered, a floorboard creaking as he trod on it. By the door, he
recalled, there was a loose board: he had felt it move earlier. It came up easily with the point of his knife.

  Some months later, the one-eyed captain, Luís Da Silva, left Venice for good, taking his wife and children to Lisbon aboard his ship, the Isabella.

  In the walls of the Casa Della Scala, the rat-demon waited.

  III

  Jo was in a place of Escher architecture, a place of more than four dimensions. Whether that was the reality, or she was seeing by metaphor, she had no idea.

  But real or imagined, her feet were on the ground again, such as it was, and it made her feel better. Her mind did not understand how she had got here, wherever ‘here’ was, so she put that on the back burner and set about looking for a way out.

  Instead of the stairs and interiors that she associated with Escher, this was a place of bridges, interconnecting roads and paths, and cats scampering across them, pursuing rats hither and thither, up and down, upside down. White cats, black cats, piebald cats, grey cats; ginger, calico, tabby; tiger-striped and leopard-spotted.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out, Jo thought, laughing.

  So it was a dream, she concluded; and as if to reassure her that that was all it was, the scene changed. A pulse boomed in her head, centred on her brow, drilled through like a migraine, and a red mist suffused her vision. She blinked, and flinched back as a huge rat’s face swelled at her and receded. It was hideous, but she was only dreaming—

  —And she was back in the room at the palazzo and it was still there.

  Jo backed away until she hit the wall, then realized that the giant rat was confined by the figure in the centre of the floor, which now looked fresher and sharper, newly drawn. Not only that, but the beast was fairly insubstantial: she seemed to be able to see through its edges, as though it were an image projected into the room.

  But it was still pretty frightful, and an almost palpable stink of menace radiated from it like heat from a stove. It was because it was so big, she realized: almost any small thing blown up huge offends one’s sense of what is right; as if it no longer fitted into the small rat-shaped hole in her map of the world, and that made her hackles rise.

  Belatedly, she noticed that the flayed cat was no longer pegged out in the centre of the chalked diagram. Had it ever been really there? Or was she still dreaming? She still felt a presence with her, but could not determine whether it was in the house or of the house.

  ‘Della Quercia,’ she said, and her voice cast strange echoes in the empty room, off the pallid faded walls, the stained ceiling. ‘Della Quercia, what do you want?’

  Her mind answered: he wants you. And that seemed to clarify everything. It cut through her panic and left her head clear, as if she had woken healed after a long illness.

  Keeping her eyes on the monstrous rat, she sidled to the tall central window and fumbled at its latches, finding bolts top and bottom in addition to the central fastening. A sense of urgency pressed her, but she pressed it back firmly. The window open, she sought for catches on the shutter, and found those too after a moment. It banged back in the wind, and chilly rain blew in; the cold light illuminated the gigantic thing crouched scratching in the middle of the room, trying to dig through the barrier of air that surrounded it. It hissed at her as she looked in its direction and caught its malevolent yellow eye: the thought of its getting free, and the sight of it, insubstantial as it was, impelled her to make haste.

  Skirting the circle, she crossed the room again. As she passed the imprisoned rat, it started to fling itself against invisible walls in a frenzy, clawing at the barrier it could not pass through, biting at it. The sight of its great curved fangs was the stuff of nightmare.

  Trying to ignore it, and the horror it engendered, Jo examined the plank her entry had dislodged. It was about eight feet in length: she hoped it would be long enough. It was also heavy, and awkward to carry. In the end, she simply dragged it to the window and pushed the end out, balancing it with her own weight, towards the cat tower.

  Slowly, infinitely slowly, and taking infinite care, she inched the plank across the gap. It was so heavy that she had to struggle to keep control of it; the rain lashed at her, sweat ran down her sides, her arms shook with the effort, but inch by inch it moved across the gap. The opening she was aiming for was somewhat lower than the window, a fact for which she was extremely grateful, even though it made her worry that her bridge might slip when she tried to cross it.

  As the end neared the cat tower, the plank grew more and more difficult to control. But at last it thumped onto the sill of the opening she’d been aiming for, and she breathed a great sigh of relief. At the same time, she felt rather than heard a sound like a chord of music, so loud it could have been the plucking of the constellation of the Lyre, and the back of her neck prickled. It gathered momentum, swelled; became, suddenly, perfection: too much to bear, because she was only human. Tears sprang into her eyes at the sheer beauty of it.

  And in that melodious instant, the bridge grew whole again, despite its being only a plank of wood. Stones grew around it, coalesced out of the air that was nothing, and nowhere, and endless, into the semblance of a real bridge; and as she watched, the white cat jumped up onto the far end and sauntered across, flirting its tail.

  Following their white pathfinder came a feline army, more than in her dream, dozens of cats, a myriad of them, moving purposefully and in silence across a road closed to them for more than a hundred years, coming to confront their old enemy.

  Jo stood to one side to let the white cat spring lightly down to the floor, and as it did she felt a burning sensation in her back pocket, as if something in there had suddenly gone red-hot. She yelped and hauled it out: it was the antique necklace she’d forgotten picking up, and it burned her hand as she flung it away.

  In mid-air it exploded, a flash of actinic light splashed with sparks like phosphorus and a number of lesser cracks that shot tiny burning shards of shrapnel across the room. At the same time the cats launched themselves like furry missiles at the giant rat, straight through the barrier that confined it. It cowered back, squealing, as the cats tore it to pieces, Jo fled from their fury.

  She stepped up onto her bridge, and though she knew that it was just a narrow plank and there was far too much air below her, she also knew that harmony was restored and the Casa della Scala was complete again, after too long in limbo.

  Rain lashed through the open sides of the bridge as she crossed it, but she took no notice. At the other end she stepped through into the cat tower with a gasp of relief, then sank to the floor, her legs gone suddenly wobbly. She sat and hugged her knees, closing her eyes thankfully for an instant.

  An insistent miaow brought her back to the present, and she looked up to see a pair of bright yellow-green eyes in a white-furred face. Jo stroked the cat, but it wanted to be away, so she got to her feet and followed it down the stair.

  From below, it still looked like a plank, but if she half-closed her eyes and tried not to look directly at it, she could see a kind of ghost of what the bridge should be.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it,’ said Giordano. ‘How remarkable. I wonder if my cousin Pasquale can see it.’

  ‘Now it’s your turn,’ Jo told him.

  ‘I think you credit me with too much knowledge, if that’s not an oxymoron. I don’t know the contents of all the books in the library.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she acknowledged as they walked along the calle that led to Roberto’s. ‘But I expect you have some family history you can delve into.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know a huge amount about my wicked ancestor, except that he was said to dabble in black magic. Summoning demons, or trying to.’

  Jo stopped, as she always did, to look in the mask shop. ‘He managed to summon one, anyway,’ she said, watching her own reflection, a palimpsest on the display. ‘With that necklace, I think.’

  The other nodded. ‘Yes, an artefact like that could well be used for summoning a demon.’

 
; ‘He wanted me to put it on,’ Jo said thoughtfully, starting to walk again.

  ‘It’s a good thing you didn’t.’

  ‘Yes. That rat-thing could have . . . possessed me?’ The modern part of her mind expressed incredulity at the concept.

  ‘Oh, I think so,’ said Giordano. ‘Don’t you?’

  She did not reply, and they walked in silence until they reached the bar. At the door she turned and asked him, ‘How did your “wicked ancestor” die?’

  ‘Arturo Della Quercia? Nobody knows. He disappeared. No one ever found his body.’ Giordano followed her in, saying, ‘Ciao, Signora Renata’ in passing to the mustachioed proprietress.

  When they had found seats, at a minute table by the window, Jo took the key out of her pocket. ‘I should give you this while I think of it.’

  Giordano eyed it with suspicion. ‘If I were you, I’d throw it in the canal.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  Their espressos arrived, and Giordano spent some time sugaring his and stirring it. After a while he looked up and said, ‘Do you mind telling me where your family comes from?’

  Taken aback by the sudden change of subject, she replied, ‘Well, Portugal, as you might guess from the name. Lisbon. But there was some kind of family feud and the parents came to England before I was born. Why?’

  ‘Because you have blue eyes.’

  ‘What?’

  Her companion looked embarrassed. ‘It’s just that the captain of one of Arturo Della Quercia’s ships was called Da Silva.’

  ‘It’s a pretty common name,’ said Jo, picking up her cup.