The Chamber of Ten hc-3

by Christopher Golden

  She waited for another touch, but perhaps it had been wishful thinking.

  Domenic guided her through the streets, steering her through the neighborhood like only a person who had lived here all his life could. When she would have gone left onto one of the main streets, he went right and they ducked through archways and courtyards, lost in a part of that amazing city where even the ever-inquisitive tourists rarely found themselves. She let him lead, but when she realized where they were she started running, heading for her building and trying to gasp out Nico’s name. But she was too out of breath, and felt queasy from the filthy water she had swallowed.

  He’ll be in the apartment, in the shower, confused at what happened and apologetic for scaring us all so much. She dug out her keys as she ran, narrowly avoiding being run down by a boy on a scooter. She burst through the main doors and hurtled upstairs to the second floor, and Domenic was still behind her when she unlocked her own door and threw it open. Nico wouldn’t have locked it behind him, she thought, and even before the emptiness of the flat became apparent she knew he was not there.

  “I’ll call Ramus,” Domenic said quietly, because the people back at the library would need to know that they might be looking for a body.

  Geena folded into her sofa and let the tears come, but when she shifted she started retching. Domenic was with her when she vomited, holding a towel and wiping her mouth afterward. She looked into the towel and all she could think of was that slick stuff dripping between Nico’s fingers.

  “What has he done?” she asked. But Domenic shook his head, because he did not, could not, understand.

  In Geena’s dream, she relived that afternoon on a continuous loop. They arrived, Domenic made some food, she ate even though she thought she could not, and then he fetched a bottle of wine from the kitchen. Pouring, she knew she could not drink. Drinking, she knew she could never sleep. And finally falling asleep, she would find herself arriving at the flat’s front door again, realizing its emptiness and knowing she could never eat, drink, or sleep until they had found Nico, one way or another. The dream was disturbing partly because it was so normal, and partly because she knew she was dreaming. Her life would be stuck in a loop until Nico was found, and her subconscious stated that most obviously whilst asleep. Each time she reached the drinking part and Domenic reached for the phone, her hopes would rise… but then she’d see his face when he answered, and recognize her friends’ concern when he turned away to tell them how she was. I’m not good, she thought, downing another glass of wine and knowing she would never sleep.

  I know I’m dreaming yet still I hope, and how cruel is that? She finished the bottle of wine and Domenic helped her into her bed, her body showered clean and filthy clothes replaced with a loose shirt and pair of sweatpants, and she fell asleep again, waiting for her arrival at the flat’s front door with hope once more burning bright.

  This time the door did not open. Darkness flooded her mind, and when she opened her eyes she saw the vague outline of the bedroom windows, curtains shifting slightly beneath the sea breeze.

  “This is different,” she whispered, and then she knew she was no longer dreaming. She sat up and breathed in deeply, ran a hand across her chest and felt the buttons of the clean shirt she’d put on. Nico’s shirt. He liked seeing her dressed like this.

  Then she turned and saw Nico’s body lying on her bed.

  Geena screamed. She couldn’t help it, even when Nico sat upright and reached for her, muttering calming noises, tears glittering on his cheeks. She screamed because her dreams had convinced her there was no hope and that nothing changed, and here she was with Nico lying beside her as he had so many times before.

  Domenic rushed into the room and snapped on the light, silver hair in disarray and eyes squinting from sleep.

  “Nico!” he shouted, and the joy in his voice drove away the last of Geena’s fear. She fell sideways with her arms out, and because Nico had already been coming for her they propped each other up, hugging and crying.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said with her face pressed into his neck. She felt his pulse against her cheek and that made her cry even harder. He stank, and she breathed in the stink because even below that she could smell his familiar scent.

  “I thought I was lost,” he said, sobbing into her neck.

  “Nico, you crazy bastard!” Domenic said. He joined them on the bed and hugged them both, and Geena took so much comfort from the contact that she did not allow either man to let her go for some time.

  “Tell me this isn’t a dream,” she said at last.

  “Which part?” Domenic gushed. “Petrarch’s library, almost drowning, or nearly losing this idiot?”

  He laughed out loud, and beneath his laughter Geena heard her love whisper, “I can’t tell you it’s no dream.”

  She was too relieved for it to register. Later, she’d have cause to think back to that moment, go over what he had said again and again, and she would realize that Nico had lost the ability to discern the difference between reality and nightmare. I thought I was lost … I can’t tell you it’s no dream.

  But right then all that mattered was the rising sun, the City of Bridges welcoming in another day, and that they were alive.

  III

  I’M NOT used to being away from you,” she said. “Being so out of touch. I didn’t like it one bit.” And it scared me, she wanted to say. But now was not the time, because being scared was connected to whatever had happened down there. Maybe later they would talk about that, but not now. Nico looked so tired, so drained, yet unprepared for sleep.

  “Neither did I,” he said. “I didn’t do it on purpose, Geena. It wasn’t my …” Had he been about to say fault? If not his, then whose? “Wasn’t my intention,” he finished.

  “I don’t blame you,” she said. “I’m just glad to have you back.”

  They were sitting at the small tile-topped table in front of the open French doors of her living room, daylight washing over them. The balcony was so small that it housed only a couple of plant pots containing herbs—rosemary, coriander, some garlic bulbs—but she had the table placed so that it gave the impression of sitting outside. At this time of the morning, sunlight streamed over the rooftops of the facing buildings, splashing the table and warming the room, offsetting the refreshing coolness of the retreating night.

  Sometimes blinds clattered open across the narrow street from her, and she would always wave a polite greeting to anyone who glanced over instead of pretending to ignore them. She knew that was appreciated. There was the old man who lived with a dozen cats, the young professional couple with two delightful kids and a live-in nanny not much older than her charges, and the young single man who always made sure he looked her way. She indulged in an innocent flirtation with him, but not this morning. She saw his curtains drawn back and his own doors opening onto his tiny balcony, but she kept her eyes on Nico. He had so much to tell her, but she did not want to scare him off.

  That was how he seemed this morning—scared. There was a fragility to him that she had never seen before, and he would not meet her gaze.

  “Where did you go?” she asked. She wanted to say, What happened down there, why did you pick up the stone jar, why did you scream, what did you see, why did you run? But there was still a rawness to things, as if the previous day’s events involved blood and death rather than water and worry.

  The knives, the dripping blood …

  “I wandered for a while,” he said, picking at a plate of dried meats. He had not actually eaten anything yet, though he’d drunk three cups of coffee and was working on his fourth. “After I finished running, that is.”

  “But what were you running from?”

  He dropped his gaze, unable or unwilling to respond.

  She tried again. “Where did you go?”

  “Nowhere,” he said. “No destination, I mean. Through alleys and courtyards. Into places I didn’t think I’d been before, but which I found myself remembering.
And even the streets I travel every day had a familiarity about them …” He shook his head, draining the coffee and checking to see if there was more left in the pot. “But it was a strange feeling.”

  “Strange how?”

  Nico thought for a moment before replying, and when he did, he gazed into the middle distance as if he were trying to remember the answer to a riddle he’d first heard years before.

  “You know how sometimes when something is removed from a familiar landscape—a line of trees, or a building, a fence of some sort—and at first you don’t recognize exactly what is missing, but you know something is different? Absent?”

  Geena nodded, buttering some bread.

  “Like that, except all the way through the city. Every time I turned a corner into a place I knew, there was something not quite right. I still knew it, but not how it was.”

  He began to shake with growing frustration, gaze darting about the room as if searching for answers that would never be found within those walls.

  “So what do you think—”

  “Enough! I don’t know,” Nico said, standing abruptly and spilling coffee over the tablecloth.

  A chill went through her. Christ, what had happened to him? “Nico?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “I’m fine, really. Just a bad day. My mind … I’m always picking up traces and echoes of this and that, and sometimes things … seep in.”

  “You never told me that,” Geena said.

  He stalked back into her bedroom, drawing the shades to block out the sunlight and hiding in the gloom. Geena followed and stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. He still stank of that rancid water; strange that she should only notice that now.

  “You really need a shower,” she said, and was delighted when he smiled.

  “I just …” He stood, already unbuttoning his dirty shirt. “A scare. Panic. Excitement at what we’d found.”

  “I understand that,” she said, and she did. But that did not account for the way he’d acted, nor for what she’d seen and sensed through him. Does he even remember? She still had the butter knife in one hand and she touched it to the other palm, casually, stroking it across the skin and feeling a slick of butter left behind.

  Nico glanced at her hand—

  —the splash of blood, light darkening from pink to red, a collective groan that echoed—

  —and then turned quickly away, shaking as he unbuttoned his pants.

  Geena gasped and held on to the door frame. She blinked away the flash of vision. Not even an image. Just a sensation. Then she looked down at her palm, certain that she’d cut herself. But there was only butter, already melting from the warmth of her skin.

  Nico pulled down his trousers and boxers and stepped into the bathroom. Moments later she heard the water turn on, then the sound changing as he stepped beneath the spray. He sighed, groaned, and she heard the soft thud as he rested his head against the tiled wall.

  Geena went back and cleared the breakfast table, trying to fill her mind with inanities rather than let it dwell on the image of blood. She scooped up the plates, piling them on top of each other, then carried the empty cups through to the small kitchen. Filling the coffee machine with water and fresh coffee, she leaned against the counter and smelled the gorgeous aroma of brewing coffee filling her flat once again.

  For a moment I thought I’d lost him.

  She and Nico had met two years before at a lecture she was giving, and the attraction had been instant and mutual. He’d persisted in asking her on a date, and it had taken three days for her faltering professional concerns to be cast aside. She knew that fraternizing with students was frowned upon, yet there had been something about him that drew her from that first moment. His good looks and youthful fitness didn’t hurt, but his was also a mind that she perceived as an equal to hers. His eyes betrayed an intelligence and quirkiness that matched her own, and more than anything she’d sensed a passion in him about the past. For many, history was simply times gone by, but for Geena it was a more rounded, real, whole place than the present. The past was set and immutable; it had walls and boundaries, rules and certainty. The present was unreliable.

  On their first date he had taken her to the Museo Archeologico, and that night they had made love in his small apartment, windows open, moonlight silvering their sweat-sheened skin, cool air flooding the bedroom. The next morning she had wandered naked into the bathroom, only to be startled by Nico emerging from the shower. His laughter at her shriek of surprise had melted her heart, just a little, and through the embarrassment she had found a smile.

  He was twelve years her junior, and she loved him because he did not make her feel younger than her age.

  The coffee machine was grumbling as the last of the coffee dribbled into the pot. She focused, trying to see if she could sense his mind reaching out to her, and felt only a warm, gentle satisfaction. She wished there were something more.

  Geena pulled off her shirt and slid down her sweatpants. She crossed the small living room, glancing out the window but not caring if cat-man or the young flirter were looking. Steam billowed from the bathroom—he must have the heat turned high—and she stood in the doorway for a while, watching his shadow through the shower curtain. She frowned, trying to sort her confused emotions from those of his she might be feeling; frustration, anxiety? And she thought about what the dreams had been telling her last night—that Nico was gone, that she would never hold him in her arms again, never feel him smile and shudder against her neck as he came inside her. Never again argue with him about who was the greatest painter or sculptor.

  She pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the bath. Nico still had his back to her, face turned up into the overhead shower and hands both clasping a tablet of soap. He was rubbing at his shoulders and chest, and his breath came in short gasps.

  She stepped forward and reached around to his stomach.

  Nico jumped and spun around, almost sending her sprawling. The shower reached her, and it was scalding hot across her face, shoulders, and chest. She gasped.

  “I just can’t get myself clean,” he said, and for the first time since she had met him, he sounded like a child.

  “I’ll help you,” she said. He nodded and smiled gratefully, and for the next half an hour as she scrubbed his skin pink, he projected only an unfamiliar, heartrending vulnerability.

  Domenic returned mid-morning with a doctor, and although Nico protested, he let the doctor look him over. There were no injuries and no obvious indications of any head trauma. He sat through the whole examination looking vaguely befuddled, and when the doctor stood to leave, Nico walked him to the door.

  “How is he?” Domenic whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Geena said. “It’s like he’s been away a lot longer.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She shrugged. How could she communicate to Domenic the subtle differences, the awkwardness between them that had never been there before? So instead she changed the subject. Divert your mind and sometimes the answers will creep up on you, her father used to tell her. He’d never given her a piece of advice that had failed her yet.

  “Is Dr. Schiavo angry that we’re not at the site?” she asked.

  “Of course not. You two have had quite a trauma—”

  Geena frowned. “Not more than anyone else who was down there when the wall gave way.”

  “Not true,” Domenic said. “I didn’t explain to Dr. Schiavo what had happened with you and Nico—that’s not my business to explain to him—but I told him you’d both had a close call. Ramus is site manager and he’s been there all day, talking with the city engineers about shoring up the canal wall, getting pumps in, all of it. You let us worry about all of that for today.”

  “Have you looked at the film yet?” she asked.

  “No, but your BBC friend is all over us.” Domenic rolled his eyes.

  “Let’s have a viewing here. Finch can come, too.”

  “You’re sure?” He lo
oked around uncertainly, and at first she thought he was still worried about Nico. But then she realized the source of his discomfort and smiled.

  “Sure. I don’t think we can pretend that Nico and I are a secret anymore, can we?”

  “I suppose not,” Domenic said, returning her smile. “I’ll call the others and get them here for … two o’clock?”

  “What’s at two o’clock?” Nico said, entering from the hallway.

  “We’re going to watch the footage Sabrina shot,” Geena said.

  “Of course!” he said, and his eagerness was troubling. He pushed past them with a vague smile and started picking up books and magazines, clearing the sofa, tidying Geena’s room in preparation for visitors. She watched him, wondering why she was unsettled, and it was only when Domenic touched her shoulder that it clicked.

  “Geena? I said, do you want me to pick up some food?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, and she went into the kitchen to fetch her purse. He still smells of the canal, she thought. As Nico had passed her by, she’d caught a whiff of Venice’s old, dirty water, even after all that scrubbing.

  As if it were as ingrained in his skin as it was in the foundations of the city itself.

  Domenic brought pizza and Finch arrived with two bottles of cheap wine, wearing a bemused expression at actually being invited. Geena welcomed him in and chatted inconsequentialities, and when he saw Nico standing by her living room window he nodded once.

  “Glad to see you’re well,” he said.

  Nico only smiled in response.

  Ramus and Sabrina arrived around two p.m., hot and hassled from their dash through the city. The temperature had been rising all day, and now the air had grown motionless and heavy with humidity. Geena had opened all her windows and turned on the ceiling fan in her living room, but all these measures only seemed to push the hot air around rather than provide a cooling breeze. She’d chilled the red wine, much to Finch’s consternation, and they drank from tall glasses filled with ice. She would happily forsake some of its subtler tastes to be refreshed.