Christopher Golden - The Chamber of Ten

Caravello glares at each soldier as he boards the boat, and every one of them averts his eyes .

Volpe grins. “Enjoy your small victories. They will be your last.” Then he presses both hands together before him, chanting, shoulders tensing, and Caravello falls onto his back in the boat. He shouts, but his voice sounds muted and pained. A hazy redness surrounds his face .

“Go well,” Volpe says. He turns his back on the boat and walks toward the heart of the city, and as he passes by, the canal turns from red to black .

Geena snapped awake, gasping into her pillow, reaching for Nico but finding only cool sheets. She sat up and scanned the gloom of her bedroom, but he was not there.

I knew everything they were saying , she thought, but already the vision seemed to be fading. Like any vivid dream, it seemed to be built on air and mist, and waking cast the first eddies that would disperse it.

“That was no dream,” she said out loud, hoping to hear a reply. But her apartment was silent, empty of anyone but her. She sat there for a while, sore from the night before, wondering where Nico had gone and wishing for the safety of dawn.

IV

NICO STOOD on the tiled courtyard in front of the church of Madonna dell’Orto, watching the rising sun lighten the brick façade from brown to rose to a pale peach. The arched windows of the bell tower were steeped in shadows, as though the night had barricaded itself inside to try to outlast the sun. The white stonework of the arches and the various statues in the façade all seemed to be emerging from shadows themselves, and gleamed like ivory as the morning light revealed them.

The Madonna dell’Orto at sunrise was a sight to behold. But Nico would have been better able to appreciate it if he could have remembered precisely how he had come to be there.

He swayed a little, then regained his balance. His thoughts were muzzy and he tried to shake the feeling. The morning seemed to be burning off the shadows in his mind just as it did those that had cloaked the city.

Think. You kissed Geena while she slept, got out of bed and dressed, careful not to wake her, and left her place .

That much he did recall, along with the confusion that had roiled within him. His departure had been urgent and he had hurried through the maze of passages and bridges to the edge of the Grand Canal, with his pulse racing and the sense that some vital task must be accomplished. Paranoia made the small hairs stand up on the back of his neck and he had reached out with his thoughts, seeking the heightened emotions he could often sense. Fear had its own flavor. And malice. How many times had he escaped violence in a bar or club by departing just before things turned ugly?

But he had sensed no malice, no violent intentions, no one following him. Why he should think someone might be following him, Nico didn’t know. It made no sense, but he could not escape that suspicion and had hurried onward, more frantic than ever to reach his destination …

… only he didn’t know where he was going. Not at first. It felt to him as though some enormous hook had been set into his rib cage and was tugging him forward. He had hurried along the edge of the Grand Canal in vain hopes of discovering a water taxi running in the pre-dawn hours, knowing that crossing the water was the next step toward his destination.

His memory had holes in it. Blackouts, like some awful drunk.

He remembered sitting in a creaking traghetto , its small motor buzzing, echoing off black water below and black sky above. Somehow he had persuaded the man to take him across the Grand Canal from Guideca to San Marco. The fellow had looked exhausted; he’d probably been up all night ferrying revelers to various hotels and clubs. Nico had tried to pay him, but the man had gotten a pale, frightened look on his face and had shooed him away.

Only when he walked through the vast emptiness of St. Mark’s Square at half past three in the morning, and then into the labyrinth of alleys and bridges and canals beyond, did it occur to him where he was headed. The destination had popped into his head the way a song title might once he had given up trying to remember it.

He had nearly turned around then. Geena had been soft and warm and in need of reassurance. Yet the compulsion had been impossible to resist, sending him out to wander Venice in the small hours of the morning with only the sounds of scurrying rats and the water lapping the sides of the canals to keep him company.

Now he found himself here, gazing up at the beautiful face of this church, and he could recall only about half of that journey. Portions of his memory, even of the path he had taken to get here, were blacked out.

In their place, other memories rushed in—vivid recollections of the sounds of construction, the stink of men working, the hoisting of statues into place, sculptors at work.… His hands trembled as he stared at the church.

“Impossible,” he whispered, there in the light of the rising sun.

Yet if he closed his eyes he could practically see the workers constructing the church’s façade, placing the pilasters, laying the brickwork around the enormous circular rose window that lit up now with the dawn’s light.

“What the hell is happening to me?” he asked the sunrise.

A piece of paper skittered across the tiles in the breeze, eddied in a circle, then continued on its way. He ought to turn around and go back to Geena, spoon behind her and press his nose into her hair, breathing in the scent of her. That was what he wanted to do. But somehow the commands did not travel from his brain to his muscles, and his body did not obey him. He felt like a marionette.

Go in , he thought.

Or someone thought for him. That was exactly what it felt like. The ideas that kept bubbling to the surface of his mind did not feel like his. Sensitive to the thoughts and emotions of others, able to touch their minds with his own, he had spent his entire life learning to sort out the difference between his own internal voice and those of others, and he knew that this voice did not belong to him. Nico was afraid, and yet fascinated as well.

The stone jar , he thought. The urn . And he knew it had begun with that. Down in the strange subchamber beneath Petrarch’s library, he had tapped into some enormous psychic repository from Venice’s past. He could see and taste and smell things as they had been in centuries past. These sensations came in flashes and visions and in whispers in his mind.

As a boy, whenever he had changed schools and been surrounded by new people—even when he had first attended university—he had needed to take time to adjust to the tidal wave of new minds around him, to build up fresh walls. A day or two would be all he needed to sort himself out, to quiet the voices in his head and reassert his own thoughts. To be himself.

This would be the same, he felt certain. Somehow he had tapped into some kind of psychic reserve and now it echoed around inside of him, making him feel as though his thoughts were not his own. For now, that meant trying to shut out the rest of the world—even Geena—and focus on this opportunity. He could see the past as though his own eyes had witnessed it, feel the power of the man whose memories had seeped into his own … for certainly he had been powerful. And a psychic as well. He must have been, for Nico to pick up such powerful emotional residue from that chamber.

What are you thinking? You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about .

He mocked his own presumptions. True, he had never experienced anything like this, nor even heard of anything remotely resembling this turn of events in the research he had done about his own abilities. But what else could it be? It made a bizarre kind of sense. He thought about scientific theories concerning haunted houses, in which “ghosts” were explained as the resonance left behind by traumatic or otherwise emotional events. He wasn’t sure how much of that he believed, but he knew what he felt right now, and “haunted” was as good a word as any.