The Dark Temple

by The Dark Temple (retail) (epub)

  Signora Busetto paused and began to rub her hands together anxiously, her retelling of this story clearly troubling to her. ‘One night the police responded to a reported disturbance right here, and what they found still haunts the memory of the locals who witnessed it.’

  ‘What did they find?’ Harker asked so impatiently that he was sharply nudged in the arm by Stefani.

  ‘Let the lady finish.’

  Signora Busetto appeared grateful for the pause, then she continued with a look of genuine sorrow on her face. ‘They found the supervising priest mutilated, so the newspapers reported, and the body of one of the eldest children treated in much the same fashion. I don’t know exactly what, but such terrible things had been done to both of them that the details weren’t fully reported.’

  ‘Oh my God, that’s awful,’ Harker mouthed, massaging his forehead vigorously, as the woman nodded slowly.

  ‘I know. The things some people are capable of can be quite overwhelming – which is how the surrounding community reacted at the time.’

  ‘What happened to those other children?’ Stefani asked, and her expression remarkably hard given the nature of the atrocities they were learning about.

  ‘They didn’t find all the… body parts,’ Signora Busetto replied cryptically, ‘but I do know some remains were found at the bottom of the canal just a few streets over from here.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Harker muttered sympathetically.

  ‘I know, that’s how the whole local community felt, and it is also the main reason we were allowed special permission to demolish those rooms of the building in which it actually took place and had this garden built in its place. It’s also the reason my husband planted these passion vines surrounding us: to honour those poor little souls.’

  There were few things in the world that Harker could not find some semblance of understanding for but when it came to the rape, abuse or murder of children his heart, like most people’s, was turned to stone and the retribution of an eye for and eye seemed not just justified but a human duty. ‘Did they catch anyone?’

  She shook her head mournfully. ‘There was an arrest but the fellow was released without charge and, although he was innocent, a stain like that doesn’t easily wash off. I read somewhere later that he became a recluse and drank himself to death… but, apart from that, no one was ever apprehended.’

  ‘How about the bodies of the other children? Were they ever recovered?’ Stefani intervened, her voice quivering slightly.

  ‘That’s possibly the worst part of it,’ replied Signora Busetto, who stopped fumbling with her hands and laid them out straight on the chair’s arms. ‘They were discovered several weeks later just a few miles from here, on the island of Poveglia. They had been drowned and were then piled up on one another like in some kind of sick monument. No shred of evidence regarding the killers was left behind except this “gross shrine to pure evil”, as the newspapers put it. You don’t forget a headline like that. They later placed a memorial up there as I remember.’

  Stefani sat back in her seat and exhaled deeply. The other woman leant forward and tapped her warmly on the hand.

  ‘I would therefore say you’re extremely fortunate,’ she gave a caring smile. ‘If you hadn’t been adopted when you were, I suppose you’d have ended up like the others.’

  It was a disconcerting thought and, seeing how deeply it affected Stefani, Harker began to shift the conversation along. ‘I’ve heard of this Poveglia island many times. It’s got a grim history, hasn’t it?’

  Signora Busetto pulled back her hand and placed it in her lap where she began to fidget with her fingers. ‘Every city in the world has its own dark past.’

  ‘Why, what else happened there?’ Stefani now sat straight up in her seat as if glad to be distracted from brooding on the lucky escape fate had afforded her.

  ‘It was a quarantine station during an outbreak of plague back in the eighteenth century,’ Harker explained, ‘when thousands of the citizens were abandoned there to die and their bodies later burnt in an effort to control the epidemic.’ He was well aware of the island’s unpalatable history, which was well known. ‘It then became a mental hospital in the 1920s but got shut down sometime in the ’60s after they caught one of the doctors performing crude lobotomies and a number of other nasty goings on – in the name of medicine.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Signora Busetto confirmed, seeming more than happy to discuss such a morbid topic. ‘The same doctor committed suicide by throwing himself from the top of the bell-tower after being tormented by the ghosts of those he defiled, so the story goes. Even today there’s a saying amongst Venetians that when bad people die they don’t wake up in hell but instead are imprisoned on that island for all eternity.’

  Stefani looked up at her host with a grimace, to which the woman gave a dry smile. ‘As I said dear, every city has its own dark history, and Venice is no exception.’

  The gloomy atmosphere was suddenly broken, much to Harker’s relief, when one of the waiters stuck his head out through the open kitchen door and called out to Signora Busetto.

  ‘Martina, can you give us a hand. It’s getting really busy up-front.’

  Mrs Busetto waved a hand elegantly in the air. ‘I’ll be right there, Lorenzo,’ she replied and heaved herself to her feet. ‘If you want to have some lunch here, I would be happy to show you upstairs as well if you’d like. Not that you’d remember much as it’s changed quite a bit since you were here last.’

  Stefani stood up, shaking her head and Harker also rose to his feet. ‘Thank you but I think we’ve seen enough,’ she said bitterly and their hostess immediately noticed how sad she looked.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s a horrible story, but I’ve lived with it for so many years that I may have become somewhat numb to it.’

  ‘That’s totally understandable,’ Harker replied, before shaking her hand gratefully, ‘At least we now know what happened.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stefani added quickly, ‘at least we know.’

  With a polite nod Signora Busetto headed back towards the kitchen, pausing at the doorway. ‘I’ll have some sandwiches made for you and waiting at the front desk. Consider it a parting gift, and if you take away anything from our conversation, let it be this. If fate had not smiled on you that day when you were adopted, you would not now be about to welcome your own child into this world, would you? That is surely something to be grateful for.’

  She then disappeared into the kitchen, leaving them alone together in what had previously looked like a charming back patio but whose brightly coloured flowers now only seemed like a bizarre testament to the horrors that had taken place all those years ago.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked Stefani.

  She looked up and gave him a brave look. ‘I’m fine, just a bit taken aback really. Putting all that to one side now, if it’s possible, I’m trying to understand why the message led us here?’

  In his mind Harker already knew the answer but for some reason he felt that he should not launch straight into it. ‘Well, if that message on the Prophecy was written by Cardinal Vicci a few centuries ago, then I’m still not sure what to make of it. But if it was your father who wrote it, then this place obviously had some significance that he wanted you to know about, or at least investigate.’

  ‘And that would be…?’

  He slipped his arm under hers and drew her towards the kitchen doorway.

  ‘The island of Poveglia.’

  Chapter 30

  The outer edge of the twenty-five-foot launch knocked gently against the jetty with each following wave lapping up against it as Harker secured the mooring line to its post. The time required to rent a boat and then sail the short few miles to Poveglia Island had taken far longer than anticipated, and with only half an hour of sunlight left, the skies were beginning to darken.

  The island was tiny – only a few hundred feet wide by three hundred feet long – and split in two by a narrow canal running directly through it. Its s
mall extent, though, was rendered far more mysterious by the overgrown trees and bushes that covered its entire area in jungle-type vegetation.

  Harker heaved himself out onto the moss-covered jetty and offered a hand which was grasped keenly by Stefani, who then managed to exit the boat with far more grace than he had.

  ‘So, this is the island of the dead,’ Stefani remarked, catching a glimpse of the crumbling bell-tower just visible above the treeline. ‘More like the island of the dilapidated.’

  If it was meant as a joke Harker didn’t laugh as he proceeded down to the end of the rotting dock to the gap where a clump of thick bushes had been pushed aside, no doubt by curious tourists wanting to add a scary element to their holiday snaps.

  ‘I think we can get through here,’ he decided, kicking a few fallen branches back from the opening. ‘According to Signora Busetto, the plaque can be found near one of the main buildings.’

  ‘After you,’ Stefani suggested, gripping tightly the LED torchlight they had bought in view of the approaching twilight. ‘Remind me why we’re doing this again?’ she added as Harker continued to wade through dense foliage.

  ‘Because we don’t have anywhere else to look,’ he replied, slapping a giant mosquito that had landed on his neck. ‘And, besides, why else would your father leave us a trail of crumbs leading to the orphanage… I mean to the restaurant.’

  Stefani said nothing to that, herself now batting away the increasing hordes of flies gathering around them in their eagerness for a feast.

  ‘I need to take a look at that commemorative plate left here for the lost children, and if it turns out to be a dead end, then we’ll head back and…’

  ‘And what?’

  Harker came to a halt and turned back to face her, his expression blank. Because if this venture went nowhere, and with the prophecy taking place within possibly hours then what else exactly could they do? Who knew as yet where this was all leading? Discovering the existence of the mysterious cult of Mithras, and its worrying ties to the Templars, had been a shock to him and extremely worrying in its own right. And he still needed to work out exactly why this group of zealots sought to bring about such a world-changing catastrophe as the three days of Darkness. Deep in his gut the idea appeared nothing more than a fanciful legend or the foretelling of a disastrous event that, like so many before it, would culminate in absolutely nothing. That is until he took into consideration his own apocalyptic vison. The otherworldly, supernatural events he had witnessed in his head had completely obliterated the normal scepticism and doubt that came naturally to him, and so he couldn’t shake off the nagging feeling that something really big was about to take place.

  As Harker pushed ahead along the overgrown path and deeper into the island, something else began to tease at his thoughts. That strange symbol he had noticed on the first blessed candle began to assume heavier significance the more he considered it. Two overlapping circles surrounded by swastikas had suggested, to his mind, a representation of heaven and hell – two kingdoms of the religious realm with Earth shrouded by the presence of both – but with Carter’s subsequent discovery of the Mithras cult they now demanded further examination.

  ‘Those engravings on the blessed candle we discovered in Athens,’ he began, just avoiding a small branch about to slap across his face as he moved forward, ‘we assumed they represented heaven and hell, right?’

  ‘Yes, why?’ Stefani recoiled as the same offending branch caught her right across the forehead.

  ‘But what if they represent the Mithras cult and the Catholic Church… two kingdoms fighting for the mind of humanity.’

  She now appeared more concerned with a small scratch the branch had left her with than any philosophical discussion, and merely offered an uninterested murmur. ‘There’s one problem with that,’ she added after a moment, ‘If we take Dr Marceau’s beliefs seriously then that same candle has been around since the dawn of time itself, and well before Mithraism was even dreamed up.’

  It was a fair assumption but Harker was now allowing himself to think beyond the rational and practical, again as result of experiencing that vision deep in the foundations of the Eiffel Tower. ‘What if destiny – fate – was a real and tangible thing?’ he asked, somewhat rhetorically. ‘What if there really is a guiding line constant through space and time which humans are unaware of, like a thread determining all events which a select number of people have the ability to tap into at some level.’

  ‘What, like visions of the future?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  The idea made her chuckle. ‘I’d say that you’d been smoking something you maybe shouldn’t have.’

  He shot her a reproving look. ‘I’m being serious here. What if a few people such as Nostradamus, were born with the ability to gain insight into this “thread”? A natural and biological capacity produced through evolution and mutation?’

  Harker’s thinking might seem pretty ‘out there’ but with a jolt of understanding, she realised what was causing it. ‘That vision you had really did have an impact on you didn’t it?’ she suggested, and he offered a silent nod of the head.

  ‘I haven’t mentioned it but, ever since it happened, my head has seemed all over the place,’ he then admitted, and he came to a halt as Stefani placed her palm on his back.

  ‘You’ve been through a lot over the past few days,’ she said sympathetically, before turning her attention to the clearing up ahead. ‘I don’t know exactly what to think right now, but I would say we found the right place for it.’

  Harker gave her a puzzled glance, then he turned and looked forward again to see what had grabbed her attention. What he saw there made him smile.

  About ten metres in front of them, and now visible amongst the bushes, stood a large white sign with thick black lettering. Reparto Psichiatria.

  ‘Psychiatric Department,’ he translated, ‘sounds about right.’ Then he shook his head. ‘I wonder what the food’s like?’

  ‘Not too good, I’ll bet. Let’s take a look around, shall we?’

  Just beyond the sign itself the vegetation fell away and they found themselves staring up at the long crumbling wall of a building whose roof had long since caved in. It ran along for some length and the entire bell tower could now be viewed clearly. Harker poked his head through a gap in the wall to find the interior exactly as one would expect of a place left to rot for decades.

  In the room in front of him he could see that all the flooring was missing and a mixture of dirt and dead brown leaves were scattered everywhere. Bolted to the side wall, rusting metal bars extended outwards in racks above a single scuffed metal drain hole, and Harker recognised their use instantly. ‘I’ve seen this set-up in books,’ he said, pointing up to the metal rafters. ‘When an inmate died, they would wash and drape the patient’s mattress over these and then leave it there to dry out for the next occupant.’

  ‘Very hygienic.’ Stefani turned up her nose up at the thought.

  ‘When these methods were in operation, health-and-safety wasn’t even in the vernacular,’ Harker responded with a grimace, before he made his way through the scruffy breach in the wall. ‘The commemorative plaque should be somewhere up ahead.’

  The building had been large and they had to carefully navigate their way through heaps of fragmented brickwork and past rotting chairs and rusting bedsprings. It wasn’t just through fear of catching themselves on sharp bits of twisted metal but more because this whole place stood as a filthy and terrible memorial to the thousands who had died here. Whether that was from the plague or as a result of the torturous experiments conducted later, there was a genuinely ominous feel to it all that was not just the result of its noxious dereliction, because Harker couldn’t shake off the impression that they were being watched.

  ‘What a dump,’ Stefani complained, carefully avoiding a partially melted black shower curtain draped across a foully stained mattress. ‘Who owns this place now?’

  ‘Private owne
r bought it years ago, I believe, and given its history it’s hard to envisage why. I can’t imagine building some sort of a hotel resort on an island known for nothing else than plague, death and torture.’

  The sound of shuffling in the next room brought them both to a standstill and, after glancing at one another anxiously, they stepped forward gingerly and peered inside. Like all the others the room was a wreck, but empty at least. And as they made their way further along the central corridor running the length of the entire building, they began to hear further scraping noises coming from all around them.

  ‘Just rats.’ Harker suggested confidently, but it didn’t stop him from quickening his pace. He sped on along the corridor with Stefani at his heels, not stopping until they had exited through the main entrance door and came out into a small open area, thankfully devoid of bushes, in the centre of the island.

  ‘Case of the willies,’ Harker remarked, looking slightly embarrassed at his display of nerves. ‘Let’s just find this plaque, shall we?’

  Stefani nodded, herself also looking twitchy, and she was about to take her first step when she noticed something in the bushes up ahead. ‘What’s that?’

  With the light around them getting dimmer by the minute, Harker focused in on the dark shape she was pointing towards. The covered object had no defining edges and, whilst craning his head for a better view, he took a few steps closer to the bushy thicket.

  ‘Pass me the torch, would you?’ he asked with hand outreached and Stefani obliged, clicking it on as she passed it over.

  Its intense beam illuminated something solid but it was still impossible to discern exactly what, so Harker moved closer and then, once satisfied it at least was not something alive, he pushed his way further into the thick brush. Within a second he had barrelled his way to the other side, only to find himself in a cavity within the bushes which was covered completely overhead by the sprawling branches of the surrounding trees. This leafy ceiling was over four metres up, allowing Harker to stand upright while the hedge acted as walls for this forest hiding place.