The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (18 page)

Nonno had decided earlier we would leave the scaffolding up for an easier climb tonight. Francesco started up first. Emilio stood apart, speaking in a low voice with Uncle Matteo while Bernardo and his father waited. Then I saw Bernardo head out to the street. Uncle Matteo faded into the shadow of the courtyard with Signore Tedesco.

“Mia,” whispered Francesco, and I saw him gesturing to me. I started climbing, looking over my shoulder one more time. I saw Bernardo standing near the bank, looking back at me.

I felt my body freeze with embarrassment. It didn’t matter that he’d seen me climb this a hundred times. My foot slipped and I felt a firm hand on my calf.

“Take it slowly,” said Giuliano. “But go.”

I remembered myself and pulled myself off the scaffolding and onto the balcony, feeling it creak under my weight.

Nonno took his time, and Anna Maria came last. Emilio remained on the ground, looking up.

“I believe this is the lock our ancestor used for the door to the palace,” Giuliano whispered solemnly.

“Er, no—it isn’t,” I whispered back, before I could stop myself. Three pairs of eyes widened toward me in the dark. “I went ahead in the notes. It got blown to bits by another demon, a couple of years later.”

Giuliano blinked. I heard a smothered snort, probably from Anna Maria.

“Oh! Oh, well. It’s got strong wards, anyway,” he said, and chuckled.

He took the key from his pocket. It was so small it would have slipped through the floorboards if he had dropped it. Thankfully, he didn’t.

I hadn’t thought about it when Emilio had fitted the lock, but I found that now I wanted a big, ponderous lock, with a large, clanking piece of iron for a key. I wanted a lock that would keep in the dead.

I wanted it even more when Nonno began to recite the transliterated Akkadian poem, the words soft, then crunchy, then sonorous by turns: the chant of a goddess as she stood before the portals of the Land of the Dead. Earlier, I’d seen the translation.

I shivered, staring at the plain wooden door with its iron fittings and silver nails, the tiny silver lock beneath a battered brass knob, and just for a moment I felt farther from home than
I ever had in my life. Then Giuliano reached forward, fitting the key in the lock while he went on reciting the commands of the ancient Queen of Heaven.

He turned the key, put his hand to the doorknob, and opened the Second Door.

The first thing that happened was that a cold wind blew past us, almost throwing me into Francesco. Giuliano lost his balance ever so briefly, then whipped his head around and called softly into the courtyard, “Emilio!”

Emilio spoke from below. “Here, Nonno. I’ve got it.”

I turned and peered down over the edge of the balcony, just in time to see Emilio apply a match to a large candle. The wind that had blown past us was whipping around him. I watched Emilio’s black collar flap against his neck. He held up the candle, its slip of a flame wavering frantically, and as I watched, a knot of wind tied itself around the flame, narrower and narrower, until with a final sucking sound the last breath of air disappeared into the flame. It swelled, slightly, then ceased to flicker and burned straight upward, calmly, as if nothing at all had happened. Emilio slid a silver candle snuffer over it.

He placed the candle in Giuliano’s black bag, then passed the bag to Uncle Matteo as he emerged from the shadows at the foot of the scaffolding.

“Safely stowed for now,” Emilio said. Uncle Matteo nodded and walked off with the bag. I saw a movement up by the street, Bernardo turning to watch us again. I saw his father leaning
against the wall of the bank, nearly invisible in the darkness.

Then Emilio climbed up to us. His grandfather had turned back to the door and stood facing it, waiting. The balcony creaked once more with Emilio’s weight. For a moment, I thought we were waiting for the others—Bernardo and his father, Uncle Matteo—but then I realized Giuliano was waiting for something else. I looked around at Anna Maria, Emilio, and Francesco. They, too, were intent on the Second Door.

“Nothing more,” Nonno said at last. He lifted his notebook and read the final, guttural request of the goddess:
Let me in
.

The air in the doorway condensed into a heavy, broad-shouldered form.

“Enter, then,” a voice said, and blurred back into the dark.

Giuliano looked at us.

“I think that is all the invitation we can expect,” he said.

He stepped through the doorway, Anna Maria following him, then Francesco. As Francesco’s shoulders disappeared into the dark, I realized I was frozen to the spot. Now, at last, face-to-face with this moment, I was terrified to enter the Second House, because I’d been there before.

B
ehind me, Emilio said, “Mia? Your turn.”

I turned my face to his in the pale streetlight.

“I can’t,” I said.

He frowned, raising one eyebrow.

“Why on earth not?” he asked.

“It’s … the Second Door. It takes us into Left-Hand Land, doesn’t it? It’s the other world. I’ve been there before, when I was possessed. I can’t go back,” I said. “I know it’s awful timing, but …”

We both looked at the doorway. I could see him thinking fast. He took my hand.

“This time, you are not alone, however,” he said. “This time, you go by choice.”

I gripped his hand tightly. Then I faced the door, took a deep breath—and let his hand go.

“You are sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and stepped forward into the dark.

It was like stepping inside a closet, only stuffier. What amazed me most was what I didn’t feel: neither the nauseating disorientation of possession, nor the excitement of being able to hear inside people’s heads and see through walls. I couldn’t see much of anything, here, but I didn’t feel as sick as I had during my possssion. My fear bled from me, replaced by relief—and then, suddenly, I could feel my demon: a distant flutter, far outside these walls.
You are here
, I thought I heard him say. But perhaps I was the one saying it.

“Mia,” Emilio whispered behind me. I didn’t move. I felt my demon more strongly, as if he’d moved closer, testing the protections around me—the bell around my neck, the family I walked with. I found myself wanting to feel his mind a little longer, to learn him. He must have sensed this, because I felt him pull farther and farther away, until I could not sense him at all.

“Sorry,” I whispered in response, and moved forward again.

“Pools of stagnation everywhere,” Francesco whispered from up ahead, and Giuliano grunted in agreement. The sounds pushed against my ear as if there were no room for them.

My sight felt weak, the walls faint outlines, the hall table looming up suddenly and only just avoided. I could smell every
inch of the upholstery fabric, could taste the wood polish, could hear
everything
—mice as loud as elephants in the walls, the thunder of our footsteps, the scratching of our shirts. I wondered if everyone else was experiencing the Second House the same way I was.

I wasn’t exactly sure what they meant by pools of stagnation, until I walked through an air pocket that felt constricted, rotten, as if my skin could smell something my nose couldn’t.

“Can’t the Strozzis hear us? Shouldn’t we whisper?” I asked.

Giuliano answered in what I knew would have been a soft voice, barely above a whisper, if it hadn’t been roaring in my ears.

“We are inside the Second House,” he said. “They can’t hear us at all. They could probably feel us, if they knew how.”

He added after a moment, “The demon will feel us soon.”

We kept walking. I heard Nonno choke and gag suddenly, then Anna Maria.

Then I could smell it and feel Francesco convulsing in front of me, as we both tried not to vomit. There’s no reason I should have known what a dead body left three days in a river would smell like, but I was pretty sure it smelled like that. The stench overwhelmed us, forced us backward, until we heard Giuliano growl, “Step through it.”

We forced ourselves forward, and I felt very glad my cousins were ahead of me, struggling just as I was. Ten steps seemed like a hundred, but they got me through to the other side of our
pocket, and I caught Francesco’s arm for support. He leaned against me.

Suddenly, I thought I heard my demon whisper beside me. Sweating with fear and anger, I waited for the bell around my neck to ring, until I realized the sound came from near the portraits on the walls—not from my demon, after all.

The spirits weren’t talking to us, at least, not yet. They were arguing, but it sounded like an argument that had taken place over and over, so that everyone just repeated themselves in dull, exhausted hisses.

“È una fonte necessario, una fonte necessario,”
growled the spirit of a stern old woman, shadowed and blurred, seated under a portrait of herself. “It is a necessary source, a necessary source.”

“Sì, è una fonte di pericolo, di pericolo,”
replied the spirit of a bishop opposite her. “Yes, it is a source of danger, of danger.”

The spirit of a monsignor whispered at both of them, “
Chi lo sa? Chi lo sa?
Who knows? Who knows?”

We kept moving, and the portrait I remembered from my visit with Nonno came into view, the man who looked exactly like Tommaso Strozzi, his powerful hands full of rings. His spirit faded in and out of his portrait and spoke in the softest whisper of all.

“Non … vale … la … pena,”
he struggled to say. It’s something Italians say all the time—“it’s not worth the trouble”—an ordinary, flippant everyday phrase that translated easily inside
my head. But the way his voice dragged out every syllable made it sound like a terrible warning.

Listening to him, I remembered the candle, the one that had burned down when Tommaso Strozzi had come to the shop. I remembered thinking then that the key to the problem was a sensation, a smell like a stagnant pond: the same sensation I’d felt as I walked through the strange, tight air pockets.

Avidità
, I thought. Greed. And then realized I’d spoken out loud. Francesco turned in front of me. Ahead of him, Giuliano and Anna Maria stopped.

“Yes,” Nonno said. “But be quiet about it.”

The ancestors went on arguing in low voices that walked across our skins. Maybe all families kept on arguing until they were nothing but air and sound and spirit.

Now Giuliano walked ahead, leaving the voices behind, and leading us to Signore Strozzi’s study. Even though we were inside the Second House, we still had to open the ordinary door. Giuliano’s hand slipped on the handle a couple of times, but he seemed to expect that and finally got a grip. We stepped inside.

The room wasn’t empty. Signore Strozzi stood in his nightclothes and gown, his back to us, looking down into the courtyard, his shoulders tight and square.

He wasn’t what I saw first. The demon enveloped him in a huge, dark, human form, blurring and flickering, fading in and out so that Signore Strozzi’s broad back was visible through the
spirit. When I could see the demon more clearly, I saw that he glowed dimly, as if underneath he were filled with magma. His skin writhed, as if creatures of some kind were crawling all over it. We could smell him, too. I felt as if I had my face pressed against a corpse or I was drowning in a rotting pond. My head spun. I felt fear in the pit of my stomach.

The bell around my neck began to shiver as if it were about to ring. I came back to myself, still trembling, and felt the same calm come over me that I’d tasted on Christmas Eve, when I’d discovered that I
could
face my demon—that while I might still be scared, I wasn’t the terrified, shell-shocked girl who had arrived in Milan three months earlier. I straightened up.

As calm as I felt, I nearly screamed when the demon turned around. Crawling over his skin were hundreds of tiny human hands. They inched and walked and turned over, wriggling like bugs to right themselves. They grasped at the air; they plucked and pulled at the demon’s skin. “Your symbolism is pathetic and obvious,” Emilio said coolly.

The demon roared so loudly he burst through the muffled, thick air of the Second House like the siren on an ambulance. Hundreds of hands suddenly shot out toward us. Emilio and Francesco each grabbed one of my shoulders and pushed me behind them, at the same time that Giuliano thrust his mirror in front of the demon.

“Behold yourself!” roared Nonno, almost as loud as his adversary.

I guess the demon had eyes, though I couldn’t see them. Above the wriggling torso was a hump, shadowed and blurred, and it was this that leaned toward the mirror, even as the hands fell limp, withdrawing. The demon tipped the hump back and forth as he gazed at himself.

“Is that me?” asked an elegant voice. I thought I saw a blur move within the hump, something that might be a mouth. “Good gracious, I
am
handsome.”

I couldn’t help laughing out loud. I couldn’t imagine a more hideous being, stink and all, and I certainly hadn’t expected him to talk like some upper-class Italian.

“I suppose so, if you like that sort of thing,” Giuliano said severely. “But now you must go.”

“The rite of Ticinum, Emilio,” he added after a moment.

“Yes, Nonno,” said Emilio, pulling out his case.

“Francesco, candle,” Nonno ordered.

“Yes, Nonno,” said Francesco.

I saw Francesco place a stubby candle in a thumb holder, then pull a box of matches from his case. Emilio began to chant. I didn’t recognize the passage he read from his notebook, nor could I understand it easily, since he seemed to be speaking in the old Milanese dialect, but I did recognize the sweet, solemn sound of Anna Maria’s Tibetan bell.