A Beast in Venice: (Literary Horror set in Venice) (17 page)

Steam and the smell of warmed paper curled up from each page. Most had no secret writing on them, but some had it between the printed lines. One of the pages had a map drawn on it in the invisible ink. He studied it carefully. At first, he didn’t recognize the streets it depicted, but when he turned the book upside down it became obvious. It showed the location of the house where the vampire parties took place.

He studied the writing. In between the printed lines of text someone had written a sort of diary.

Written this last day of October, 1759. To he who comes after, be warned. The evil to which you will be subjected, and in which you must take part, is a high cost for the benefits, or imagined benefits, of eternal life.

The hand that wrote it shook and clearly labored to scrawl the message, but it was still legible.

Blood are the wages, and death the currency of your life. Pain and suffering of others is your legacy. Every day you live, someone else must die. You will tire of and lament your life, whether your conversion to this creature be done of your own volition or contrary to your will. I have for years now prowled the streets of Venice hunting and killing. Children were not outside my desire for blood. And not only blood. That is the worst of it. What one must do to his fellow creatures is beyond description.

Writing by an actual shroud eater. Fascinating.

Stay away! Better you should die than live forever as an animal. They come to you smiling, offering life eternal, particularly at a time in your life when you contemplate your own mortality, or when you know death is near. Resist them! Live your life and then die. I write this in a cell under the city of Venice where I have been locked away for many weeks. I learned the secret of undoing their evil conversion and was brought here, caught by them in the middle of the process. Know, however, that it can be undone by
…

The line of ink slid down the page as though the author had fallen asleep. Brigham searched the book for the conclusion of this sentence, but it wasn’t there. The only other thing he found was a couple of pages with lines and numbers on them. They made no sense to him. He would study it in depth later. Rose hadn’t returned, so he called her cell. It rang in the bedroom. Well, it wasn’t the first time she left her phone home. As for the door being open, sometimes the dogs were hard to get back into the house. If she were in a hurry, and didn’t plan to be gone long, she might leave the door unlatched so the dogs could get back in.

He turned off the iron, packed up the book, and headed out the front door. As he was leaving he noticed Rose’s house keys on the hook by the door. Shit. She had left the back door open, left her phone,
and
left her keys. There was a reasonable chance that she might do one of these things if she went to the store, but to do all three was very unusual–not like her at all. She must have left in a hurry. Perhaps it was time to panic. On the other hand, maybe the big heavy front door fell shut behind her when she took out the garbage, or something. That happened to him, once. He had no phone, no keys, no nothing. He had had to go to Campo Santa Margherita and get someone to make a call for him. That must be it. Maybe she went to the studio and they crossed paths. There’s more than one way to go. If she went there and didn’t find him, she would definitely go to Campo Santa Margherita.

He hurried there to look for her. Although she had judged him wrongly and harshly, he couldn’t leave her locked out of the house. She probably didn’t even have her coat.

He ran from place to place. No one had seen her. If she were looking for him, there were two places in the world he would be: Campo Santa Margherita or his studio. Running around would do no good. Stay in one place. He went to his studio.

HE PAINTED FOR A FEW HOURS with no word from Rose. He tried to call her, thinking that maybe she had returned home and somehow gotten into the house. Maybe she had another set of keys. No answer. He called Mauro, but he hadn’t heard from her.

He went back to the apartment. Still no Rose. He decided to stay there and wait. If she came home he would be there to let her in. If something were wrong, she would find a way to call him.

As it got later, panic overtook him. Her suitcase was still in the closet, and all the things she normally took on a trip were still there. He didn’t want to call her sisters or her mother because they would worry, and it was probably nothing. After a while he did call one of her sisters, but she hadn’t heard anything. At about 2:00 a.m. he called the police.

A couple of officers came to the apartment. They listened to his story, took notes, and looked around briefly, but wouldn’t file a missing person report because it hadn’t yet been twenty-four hours. She probably got mad and went to a friend’s house, they said. Wait until tomorrow; she’d be back. They did make calls to check the hospital and the morgue, but there was no record of her.

What could have happened to her? There was no note, and it didn’t look like there had been a struggle. Everything seemed normal in the house, as though Rose had gone down to get a carton of milk and never came back. All he could think to do was to call Mauro, who came to the apartment later that morning.

“You sure she didn’t go to a friend’s house?” Mauro asked, as he sat in the kitchen.

“No,” Brigham said. “Your wife is her only friend in Venice. And she’s been gone all night. Her phone and keys are still here. Doesn’t make any sense. I think she’s been kidnapped.”

“Why would anyone kidnap her?”

Brigham poured them each a cup of coffee. “Good question. She never did anything to anybody.”

Mauro blew on his coffee. “What did the carabinieri say?”

“The police are fucking worthless. They wouldn’t take a report because it hasn’t been twenty-four hours.”

“Brig, I wouldn’t worry too much. Maybe she decided to take a vacation from you.”

“Very funny. You think she would up and leave without her phone and keys, not pack anything, and not tell so I could take care of the dogs?”

“Now that you put it that way…”

The corgi sauntered into the room, peered into his empty food bowl, then put his front paws on Mauro.

Brigham put his head in his hands. “What am I gonna do?”

Mauro petted the dog. “Your dog wants food.”

“Look at him. Do you think he’s starving?”

“No. He certainly doesn’t look like he’s gone without food.”

“Get down,” Brigham said to the dog. “It’s not time to eat. Go lay down.”

The dog walked slowly into the other room.

“I wonder whether Rose disappearing has anything to do with the people who have pushed you and chased you through the streets,” Mauro said.

“I don’t see any connection.”

Mauro put his cup on the marble table with a clatter. “I’ll bet you it has to do with these shroud eaters.”

“Why? She doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“No, but you’ve been rubbing elbows with vampires—”

“They’re not vampires. They’re sanguinarians.”

“Rubbing elbows with vampire wannabes, then, and I’m sure you made an impression on that friend of yours you thought was a shroud eater and spilled the potion on.”

“I don’t know. None of it makes any goddamn sense. Is someone trying to get to me through her? Why don’t they just deal with me?”

“Maybe they’re trying to get your attention. There’s something they want you to do, and she’s their insurance.”

Brigham frowned. “But no one has asked me to do anything.”

Mauro shrugged. “Not yet. Maybe taking Rose is a sort of preemptive strike.”

“What do I do, Mauro?” Brigham slurped his coffee.

“All you can do is wait, keep checking with her family and friends, and then make the police report after twenty-four hours.”

“Maybe it’s just someone who thinks I’m rich. They want money.”

“Could be,” Mauro said. “I bet they’ll send a ransom note or some other kind of message.”

“But they must know I would go to the cops.”

“Sure. But they know it doesn’t matter. The police are fucking worthless, as you say.”

“Yeah, and the note will tell me not to go to the cops.” Brigham waved his hands. “I can’t talk to them anymore.”

“No, Brig. You must report Rose missing.”

Brigham nodded. “I know. You’re right.”

They sat silently for several minutes. The morning sun slanted through the kitchen window, shining a spotlight on the table and its contents, including the book on vampires. Mauro picked it up and examined its spine. “What’s this?” he asked, paging through it. “Looks really old.”

“It is, but I can’t think about it now. We gotta figure out what happened to Rose.”

“Somebody wrote all over the pages.”

“Leave it alone.”

Mauro studied a page with the secret notations. “Why does the writing look so funny?”

“Christ, you’re persistent. They wrote it in invisible ink, probably lemon juice.”

“What do you mean ‘invisible’? I can see it.”

“It was invisible when I bought the book. I discovered by accident that there was writing there you can see if you heat it up. Now let me think.”

“That’s wild,” Mauro said. “Where’d you get it?”

“The used bookstore in Dorsoduro. Now be quiet.”

Mauro put the book down.

XV

The moon hung as a sharp and narrow crescent, white against an ultramarine sky, the deep blue of a clear evening just before nightfall. Below the moon shone a bright star, probably Venus. Brigham had shown it to her with his telescope one night. From Earth a star, in the telescope a crescent. Yes, it must be a planet. It didn’t twinkle; another fact learned from Brigham. A thin band of high clouds caught the red of the setting sun, no longer visible over the horizon. Rose stood before the large window formed from small panes of leaded glass that looked out across a canal dug into the countryside. The water reflected the sky like a glowing strip of silvery-blue ribbon stretched across ground covered with green down.

Definitely not Venice. Where, then? The Brenta? Brigham must be going crazy looking for her. It must be days by now, though she had lost count.

Rose thought back to the first night of being held captive, when her terror at being abducted had subsided but not her annoyance. At that point, all she knew was that they had been taking decent care of her, and there did not seem to be any imminent danger. She remembered her throat being sore from yelling, demanding to be let go or to know who had taken her and where she was. In the intervening days, she had been provided simple meals, though no one who had brought them spoke a word to her.

Presently, she turned from the window to the small, cozy room to which her captors had brought her. A single bed stood against one wall, a large bookcase full of ancient-looking books occupied another. A fireplace with a triangular hood of stone was cut into the wall opposite the bed. The walls were covered in salmon-colored damask, which gave off a pleasant sheen in the dim light. There was no electricity. The only light came from a candelabra standing on a small round table between two armless, cloth-covered chairs with high backs. With lunch had arrived an elaborate gown, similar to ones she had seen in eighteenth-century paintings, which had been laid out on the bed. The dress was a golden fabric trimmed in stones and pearls. The gems glittered, even in the candlelight, leading her to believe they were real. Rubies and emeralds arranged in swirling patterns, punctuated by pearls whose satiny sheen reflected the candles and the gems. Beautiful as it was, she had no idea how to get into it, although it was clear she was meant to do so.

There came a knock at the door, hesitant and light, as if the knocker was tacitly begging forgiveness for interrupting or intruding.

“Come in,” Rose said.

The door slowly opened, and a small woman in her fifties stepped in. Rose hadn’t seen her before, and she smiled at the contrast between this plain woman and the elegant room in which she found herself. The woman closed the door behind her and went straight to the bed and lifted the dress. In Italian she asked Rose to come and put it on.

Rose did not move but stood near the table, hands behind her back, peering at the woman. “Am I going to a party?”

The woman did not respond. It was unlikely she spoke any English, so Rose asked her the same question in Italian.

The woman held up the dress, imploring Rose to get dressed. She was expected at dinner shortly, and it was the woman’s job to help get her there on time and appropriately dressed. Rose’s first instinct was to tell her to stuff it, but dinner sounded good, and it looked like a nice dress, so why not? Maybe it would shed some light on why she was here and who her host was.

With the woman’s assistance she got herself into the dress, at which time the woman opened the door and motioned for her to go through, saying, “
Prego
.”

The woman led her down a corridor lit only by candles standing in sconces of Murano glass. Again, no electric lights and no apparent source of heat. The dress swished uncomfortably. She was not used to wearing such things except at Halloween. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she thought the dress didn’t look half bad, but they had not bothered with her hair, the style of which did not fit the dress. She should have on a tall powdered wig, or something.

They came to a large room completely covered in frescoes, including the ceiling. In the center of the room stood a large dining table set for two, one place at the head, another on the side. At the head sat her host, who rose when she entered.

BRIGHAM RETURNED TO HIS STUDIO and found an envelope under the door. Good quality, heavy paper, with Brigham’s name written across the front in an elegant script in black ink. He removed its contents.