Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

Bending to retrieve it, he saw that Da Silva’s eyes were still open, though the captain was surely unconscious; he shook him roughly by the shoulder. At length Da Silva drew a shuddering breath, and sat up.

The edges of the jade circles had drawn blood from his hand, but the several little cuts from Maria Alvares’s fingernails hurt more. There were five blue crescents on his wrist and a further selection on his neck where they had dug into him. But that was not, would never be, the worst of it; for physical wounds always heal.

Da Silva had, without realizing it, closed his eyes at the recollection; now he opened them to find that Delia Quercia had finished his floorboard calligraphy. He ran his fingers over the faint scars on his wrist, and sighed, shifting his weight. A loose board rocked under his foot.

‘Bring the cat here,’ his employer instructed him, and Da Silva walked over to the cage and picked it up, his jaw rigid with distaste. Like most sailors, he liked cats: they killed rats, which were such a vile pest on every ship that ever put to sea. But that, Delia Quercia had told him, was precisely why a cat had to be sacrificed here; and why he had done away with the little bridge that had connected the house to that curious tower behind it, although Da Silva was still not entirely sure he comprehended the reason for that. He did not know why it had been called the cat tower, nor of the architect Scimone’s philosophies.

However, he understood that it was some kind of rat demon that Delia Quercia needed the cat’s death to summon, because that, apparently, was the purpose of the amulet. The necklace was its lodestone and blood its magnet; and, according to Delia Quercia, demons could be compelled to reveal the whereabouts of hidden treasure.

Nineteen years before, Da Silva had killed a man whom he had caught in the act of rape — killed him with his long knife; yet the thought of cold-bloodedly slaughtering a cat made him squeamish. He did not regret his earlier action, since he was still married to the woman he had helped that day; indeed he knew he would do the same thing again. Unfortunately, though, the man he had killed had been named Aldo Delia Quercia, and his elder brother had witnessed the entire incident. His revenge had been nothing so subtle as the Bible recommended: Da Silva’s sentence had been life, not death.

So he did not watch what the Venetian did to the cat. The poor beast’s yowls were bad enough, and the iron stench of its blood.

At last the animal’s sounds of pain ceased, and Da Silva looked up, alerted by some sixth sense. His eyes narrowed, and he stared suspiciously past the blazing banks of candles. Delia Quercia was still muttering in some kind of bastard Latin, but the quality of the darkness in the room’s corners seemed to have changed. The shadows were thick and clotted, like congealing blood; the candle flames themselves looked blurred, as if they had slowed. A peculiar deadness crept into the air, a heaviness that was the opposite of languor, for it bred a reflex of fear, a desire to flee. Da Silva wiped sweat from his face, and found his hand was shaking slightly. His mouth felt dry.

Delia Quercia finished his incantation, and held his hands up. His arms were streaked to the elbows with scarlet. For a bare instant, everything seemed to hold its breath, and then Da Silva smelled, rich and corrupt, the feral stink of rats.

In the centre of the figure Delia Quercia had drawn, where the bloody rags of flesh that were all that was left of the cat lay crucified, a form began to take shape. It coalesced, as far as Da Silva could see, out of the very air itself; and yet, as it grew, it seemed more substantial, more solidly real, than the increasingly shadowy image of the Venetian.

Da Silva had been leaning against the wall; now he tried to burrow into it. What he saw was not, as he had expected, a monstrous rat: it was worse than that. Though it had characteristics of rathood — something in its stance, a hint of fang, of disease in its yellow eye — it was manlike in form, down to its dangling genitals. The captain shuddered, and growled like a dog, yet he found himself unable to look away.

The creature dipped its horrid head to the butchered cat, and Da Silva heard an appalling sucking noise. He unsheathed his long knife, but gave serious thought to taking out his revolver too. Not for the rat-demon: he knew it would have no effect. For himself. It looked up then, and eyed him knowingly, drawing its lips back from long yellow teeth. There was far too much intelligence in that gaze, too much cunning.

From a long distance, he heard Delia Quercia’s voice, imperative in command although he could make out no words — he knew that tone well enough — and knew with terrible certainty that it would not work, that his employer could not compel this thing.

And then he realized what was wrong. For all that Delia Quercia was the one with arcane knowledge, despite his having told Da Silva what the amulet’s purpose was, he had not put it within his diagrams of protection.

He was wearing it around his own throat.

Though the traitorous thought went through Da Silva’s mind that letting this rat-thing kill Delia Quercia would solve all his problems, he let it slide by without considering it. As, within the barrier that he knew was useless, the creature flexed its corded muscles and prepared to pounce, Da Silva crossed the room in two strides and knocked the Venetian to the floor, reaching once again for the clasp of the amulet.

But he was too late, for the rat-demon was faster than any man could be. It flung him aside, a clawed hand slashing casually across his face, and he crashed into the wall six feet behind with an impact that turned the world black for a second.

When he came round, an instant later, his left eye was too full of blood to see out of, and the pain took his breath away; but with his other eye he saw the summoned thing, grown huge now, bend and suck at Delia Quercia as moments ago it had fed off the cat’s corpse. Which had, he noticed, vanished completely; though he did not think the rat-demon had, precisely, eaten it.

It drank and guzzled for only a short time before looking up and meeting Da Silva’s gaze again with that dreadful knowing expression. Then it licked its bloody lips with a pointed tongue that reminded him too much of Maria Alvares’s and slid, in a way he could neither comprehend nor describe, into the body of Arturo Delia Quercia.

Da Silva cursed weakly, tasting his own blood in his mouth. The offhanded way the rat-thing had thrown him against the wall made him doubt his capacity to fight it. But appalled, he knew he had to try.

He retrieved his knife and staggered to his feet, gasping at the pain in his face and his left eye. Perhaps the creature was still disoriented; perhaps it could not immediately coordinate the body it had seized.

And perhaps, again, Da Silva thought wearily as Delia Quercia lurched to his feet, this was just a novel way of committing suicide.

‘Threaten me, little man?’ It was Delia Quercia’s voice, but somehow distorted: the timbre hollower, louder, like a shout but with blurred edges.

‘Oh yes,’ Da Silva said, and lunged with his knife, opening Delia Quercia’s arm from elbow to shoulder. Blood followed the slash, but sluggishly. Da Silva would bleed to death quicker from his head wound. He ducked under a flailing blow and hit out again, catching Delia Quercia glancingly in the neck — on the amulet itself, he realized at the sudden spark, and tried to follow it up, to hook the point under the chain. But the other grabbed the blade of the knife and twisted the stroke aside with terrible strength.

Wincing at the very thought of grasping the knife — he knew how sharp it was — Da Silva fought just to keep hold of it. Sweat ran into his good eye, and he knuckled it away. He was close enough to the possessed man to attempt a knee in the crotch, but Delia Quercia caught the blow on his thigh and backhanded Da Silva across the face again. His fingers had to be nearly severed by now, but he seemed to feel no pain — unlike Da Silva, who was almost blinded by the anguish of the last blow.