Giorgio tightened his lips.
“That’s right,” Mr. Todd said. “It’s consistent with the other artists you represent, but unique. Original.”
Giorgio sipped his coffee.
“I love it,” said the young woman.
Brigham raised his brow.
“I agree,” said the young man.
Giorgio put his coffee down and stood, his left hand supporting his right elbow, right hand on his chin. “I have too many artists as it is.”
“Yes, you do,” said the young man. “You need to pare down and get some new blood.”
Perhaps Brigham had misjudged this lad.
“Hmm,” Giorgio said, nodding. “Could I take pictures of your paintings? I need to give this some thought.”
“I’ll do better than that,” Brigham said. “Take two paintings—”
“I don’t do consignment,” Giorgio said.
Brigham held up his hand. “I’m not asking you to. All I want you to do is take them with you, see how they look, and you’ll have them to show whoever it is you need to consult with.”
“Well—”
“You decide not to represent me, stick them in a corner, and I’ll come get them myself.”
“Great idea,” said Mr. Todd.
Giorgio was quiet for a moment. “All right. I’ll take them and get back to you in a day or so.”
“Wonderful,” Brigham said. “Take your pick.”
ROSE STEPPED INTO THE COOL GREEN world of the labyrinth. She had to go left or right. Brigham had a rule: when in doubt, go right. This rule proved to be wrong on all but the rarest occasions, so she went left.
The sun still sat low in the morning sky and hit only the very tops of the hedge with pale orange light. A faint mist coated the grassy floor of the maze. Rose turned to see the view behind her so she would recognize it coming from the other direction. Better to go back to the entrance than come back to her last position. This was the same technique she used to learn her way around Venice, which itself is a maze. She didn’t fancy getting lost, and she didn’t know how large it was.
She repeated this process a couple of times but stopped doing it because she felt comfortable that the maze was not so large, and she could easily find her way out. She moved through, turning a corner, coming to a dead end, turning around, and continuing in the other direction. Whenever she came to an intersection, she turned left.
The sun climbed to shine into the maze so that each path was partially in sun and partially in shade, which indicated which direction was south.
After a time, she realized she was lost. Of course. This was a maze, and that’s what they’re for. If only she could climb up and have a look to see where she was relative to the exit. The hedges, however, although large, would not support climbing. She stood, turning in all directions, but it looked the same. She sat in a sunny corner to rest and to contemplate what to do next.
The sky was cloudless blue. A small blackbird with a yellow beak landed not far from her and began to peck at the grass.
“Hello there,” she said.
The bird pecked twice, throwing bits of grass to the side with a jerky motion and stopped to look about for danger. It repeated the process several times, then flew to the top of the hedge and sang a beautiful song.
“Aren’t you lucky?” she said. “I wish I could just fly out of here.”
From a distance came a voice. “Signora?”
It was the woman who tended to her. “Sono qua! I’m here!”
“Dove?” Where?
Rose was pretty good at Italian, but she didn’t know the words for maze, hedge, or bushes. What else? Trees. “I’m in the trees,” she shouted in Italian.
“Stay there! I’m coming!”
Rose stood. The bird flew off.
After a moment, the woman called again. “I’m coming. Keep talking so I can find you.”
Keep talking. Okay. No one has ever told her to keep talking. She began to recite The Raven. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary—”
“That’s good.”
The voice was getting closer.
“—Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping—”
“Keep it up! I’m close.”
“—suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping—”
The woman appeared around a corner. “Ah, there you are.”
“I’m glad to see you,” Rose said.
“Che cosa fa?” the woman asked. “What are you doing?”
“I was curious about the…” She waved her arm to indicate the maze.
“Il labirinto.”
“Sì.”
“No, it’s very dangerous.”
“I see that.”
“You would never have gotten out alone. I know the way. Andiamo.”
As they walked through the narrow paths, Rose asked the woman what year it was. She looked at Rose with a knitted brow, then her expression softened, she smiled faintly, and nodded. “Settecento cinquantasei.” 1756.
“You know I’m not from this time, don’t you.”
It was not a question.
The woman said nothing.
XVII
The bells chimed midnight as Brigham arrived at Charles’s house. He was admitted to the courtyard, where Charles was waiting. As they approached the bricked-in door with the screaming head, it opened and then shut behind them with the sound of brick sliding over stone, like a mausoleum door.
Charles led him down a long corridor. A light shining from behind sent their shadows ahead, long and thin, like giant men from another planet. Things that Brigham couldn’t rightly see scurried away as they passed, but caught in fleeting glimpses they looked like pigs with the heads of men. Brigham and Charles walked silently through the shadowy light to stone steps leading down into darkness.
Pale eyes followed them from below, moving away as they approached. At the bottom, a strip of pavement ran along an underground canal, which disappeared into the blackness. A low, vaulted brick ceiling arched overhead. Rats plunged into the water and swam rapidly into the void as they passed. Moaning and crying echoed faintly in the distance.
In a cold and gloomy chamber, where Brigham once again smelled raw meat, Charles lit a candelabra and held it up, throwing ghastly shadows as it revealed perhaps twenty human forms, hanging upside down, skinned, but alive. Stark light cast sinew and veins on bare, red musculature in high relief. Some of the people so detained whimpered. He pitied the living carcasses. Was this what Charles had to offer him? He needed to get out of here. Where would he go? How to get out?
“A bit of a shock, isn’t it?” Charles said.
Brigham found it impossible to push enough air through his dry throat to speak. Finally, his voice weak and shaky, he said, “I wasn’t expecting this.”
Charles nodded.
A man came in and cut the throats of two of the skinned. The blood drained into the canal and flowed slowly away as a black cloud in dark water. Brigham staggered as the blood rushed from his head.
“I should have warned you,” Charles said, clasping his hands together in front of him as if in prayer.
One of those hanging began to speak, begging to be killed. Not quite the sociopath he envisioned himself, Brigham longed to help the beggar for death and felt pity for him. As they moved past, one of the tortured grabbed Brigham’s leg and said, “Kill me,” in an airy voice raw from pain and thirst. Two men quickly appeared from the darkness with clubs and beat the man until, screaming in agony, he let go. They continued to minister to him in this way until he became silent.
Brigham shook from fright and the chill damp. They continued through the chamber and out the opposite side where it met up again with the subterranean canal.
“I see you are afraid,” Charles said, “or at least shocked by what you have seen.”
Brigham didn’t respond but continued to stare straight ahead, pale as bone.
“You see, lad, eternal life comes with a price. It is expensive. Its cost gives even the stoutest heart pause, but the true seeker of life will accept it. Look around us. You see death and the machinery of death. Unimaginable pain and agony.
“I am the high priest of death and human suffering. My students were the Romans and the Nazis and the Japanese. Everything medieval man knew of torture, I taught him. Every atrocity the Japanese practiced during the war, the skinning alive, crucifixion, whatever disgusting acts you can think of that those savages committed, I taught them. Oh, they were fertile ground. Their beastliness, their utter brutality, their barbarism and depravity shocked even me. But it was I who showed them. I taught the Apache, Iroquois, Comanche, and all the tribes. Do you know those bastards would skin their enemies with clam shells, one little bit at a time? They thought nothing of skinning a man, cutting off his genitals, and then roasting him alive over an open flame. And don’t get me started on the Chinese. Have you ever heard of death by a thousand cuts? They tie the wrongdoer to a post and then start cutting pieces off him. They start with his breasts, then the meat on his arms and legs, and… well, do you think the bloody Chinese thought of that? No, dear boy.”
Brigham’s legs felt weak beneath him. His reflection in the canal was the color of green ivory.
“Don’t misunderstand me. It was not for racial reasons that these people embraced my teachings. It was cultural.”
Brigham gazed into the water, eyes unfocused.
“Does an Arab strap a bomb to a child and send him to blow up other children because he’s Arab? No. He does it because his culture allows it. Perhaps demands it.”
Brigham did not respond as he silently considered how he might exit that place.
“And I tell you, that whatever movie you have seen or book you have read about vampires, ghouls, or zombies, or any conceivable atrocious and vile thing done by one person to another, it is the work of a Sunday school teacher when compared to what I do and compared to what you are about to become. Those people hanging back there skinned alive? We do that to add flavor to the meat. You think we just bite people on the neck or drink blood from a glass, sleep in our own graves, and have supernatural power or strength? That’s all the material of fiction and superstition and Hollywood. We have a total and absolute disregard for human life and a desire to see the kind of pain and suffering in the human animal that would cause any sane person to vomit. The shrieks of a man being roasted alive on a spit is to us a Bach violin sonata. We do things that even the Japanese wouldn’t do, just to add spice. A spice more delicious and rare than any you will find in the East. We commit acts the mere thought of which would have even the heathen on his knees praying to Jesus Christ for deliverance and salvation.”
Brigham’s heart pounded, and he felt light-headed and ill. They neared a room from which came screams of unimaginable agony—long, drawn-
out, wailing shrieks of pain. They moved toward the huge door, above which stood the head of a fat angelic cherub smiling happily down on them. Charles reached for the latch.
“Is it necessary to go in?” Brigham asked in a voice like rats’ claws over rough stone. “I think I should really get going. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“Don’t be silly, lad. It’s nothing. You’ll see.”
Charles opened the door. There, nailed to a cross, was a young woman from whom long strips of flesh were being sliced and peeled away, accompanied by shrieks of agony.
“Oh my God!” Brigham exclaimed and turned away.
“Come on, dear boy,” Charles said. “It’s not that bad, is it? Behold.”
The woman howled with each stroke of the knife. Staggered by the sight, Brigham involuntarily reached his hand out to her, but he was powerless to intervene.
They continued to a large, dimly lit hall where a long table stretched most of the length of the room. Several human forms, bound and gagged and in various stages of butchery, lay on large wooden planks. They drew nearer. The forms were attached to the planks with large iron spikes driven through their hands and feet. Blood flowed across the floor into the canal and streaked away, black in the water.
No, he had not expected this. Something on the order of the vampire club, perhaps, but this was wholesale slaughter. Although not a lover of mankind, Brigham was no butcher. This wouldn’t do.
As Charles began to speak, Brigham shoved him into the water and ran.
“Stop him!” shouted Charles from the shallow water.
Brigham sprinted along the canal the way he had come. One of Charles’s men attempted a diving tackle and got hold of Brigham’s foot. He shook the man loose and kicked him in the face, sending him into the water. At the stairs leading to the corridor, Brigham encountered another one of Charles’s goons, this one toting a baseball bat. Brigham stopped for a moment, considering what to do. He could see no way out other than up the stairs. The goon came at him, cocking the bat over his shoulder, as if to hit a fastball. He swung, and the tip of the bat caught Brigham in the ribs and the pain blinded him for an instant. Before the batter had a chance to take another swing, Brigham regained his composure and kicked the man in the balls, causing him to drop the bat and fall to his knees. As Brigham picked up the bat, the pain of his bruised ribs seared through him, yet he mustered the strength to swing, striking the man in the back of the head, sending him to the ground.
Brigham bounded up the steps, down the corridor, and fell against the door at the end. He searched for a way to open it. Footsteps echoed on the stairs. Slivers of brick struck his face, accompanied by the crack of a gun. Another bullet shattered the bat. He squatted alongside the door to avoid the bullets. A small object protruding from the wall pressed between his shoulder blades. With a clank, the door slid open. As he leaped toward the opening, something crashed into the back of his head.
BRIGHAM FOUND HIMSELF in a ponderously large bed in a cavernous room. Rich fabric and Renaissance art covered the walls, and plush curtains hung at the windows. A beam of early-morning light cut through a slit in the curtains, giving life to bits of dust floating in the air.
He lay still, taking inventory of his parts to determine whether he still had his body and skin. He didn’t know what Charles had in mind for him, but there was a reasonable chance that he had been nailed to something and otherwise painfully tormented, though he had no recollection of it.
Once he determined himself to be intact, he moved to get out of the bed. His body hurt, his head throbbed, and he felt weak and tired, not unlike a hangover. He stood up. Someone had dressed him in clothes of the fifteenth century—a long robe of heavy, dark green brocade and slippers of purple velvet.
A mirror on the wall opposite the bed revealed a head of hair disheveled to the point of absurdity, and a pale gray face.
Charles entered the room. “How are you feeling, lad?”
“That must’ve been one hell of a party.”
Charles smiled. “You’ll feel better shortly, and the anemic look will pass. You should have known you couldn’t escape.”
“Seemed to be worth a try,” he said, rubbing the back of his head.
“Sorry about your head. My men take their jobs very seriously.”
Brigham ran his fingers though his hair. “Yes, right, that explains the head, but why do I feel so bad otherwise?”
“You are now one of us. We took the liberty while you were out.”
“One of us? You mean…?” Brigham looked at himself again in the mirror.
“Yes.”
Brigham sat heavily on the bed. “You took the liberty? What made you think—”
“Dear boy, why did you think you were here?”
He lay back on the bed gazing at the ceiling. “Undo whatever you did to me!”
Charles held up his hand. “I can’t do that.”
“I know you can undo it. I read—”
“No, I’m sorry—”
Brigham ran at Charles to tackle him, but Charles batted him away like a rag doll.
“I appreciate that you are upset,” said Charles, “but kindly control yourself.”
Landing on the floor next to the bed, Brigham sat up and dusted himself off. “How did you do it? How did you do it with me unconscious?”
“I hate to use a cliché, but we have our ways.”
Brigham got up from the floor and lay back down on the bed. “Now what?”
“You are going to rest here for a while, get back your natural color, change into your own clothes, and then go home.”
“I mean, now what am I supposed to do with myself? How can I go on? And where is my wife?”
“I told you, I can’t help you with your wife. So far as the rest is concerned, you will know.” Charles walked to the door.
“But I don’t—”
“You have eternity,” Charles said over his shoulder and left the room.
Brigham stared at the elaborately painted ceiling. A table covered in an oriental carpet, on which sat a bottle of wine, a glass, and a platter of fruit and cheese, occupied the middle of the room. Apparently, he wasn’t restricted to a diet of human blood and entrails but could still enjoy the pleasure of food and drink.
He poured a glass of wine, tasted it, and then bit into a piece of cheese, finding them both delightful, perhaps the best he’d ever had. He rested in a large chair, sinking into it comfortably, though still weak and tired. The wine and cheese made him feel better. At first, he felt quite unhappy about the circumstances in which he now found himself, but then remembered that he (ostensibly) would live forever. With this knowledge, he realized he was seeing things differently. Colors seemed brighter, and smells more intense. In his past life, he often thought about the walls and bricks of Venice, what they had seen over the centuries. They watched man’s folly and man’s suffering, knowing that they couldn’t be touched by it. The hours, days, years, centuries passed. Time was nothing to them. And now it was nothing to him. But the cost was high. He would have to kill and drink blood and commit other acts of depravity and atrociousness. Would it be a great pleasure or a terrible duty?
A Beast in Venice: (Literary Horror set in Venice) Page 17