Christopher Golden - The Chamber of Ten

There were frescoes on walls, secret chambers, and artifacts in long-abandoned rooms and buildings across the city that were being eroded away by salt and sewage and prolonged exposure to the water. Her team—which for a time had mainly been herself and a group of graduate students—had been rescuing what they could and documenting whatever they couldn’t in some of the oldest buildings in the city. And then one day, tearing away a crumbling brick and mortar wall in a semi-hidden alcove at the back of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana—the National Library of St. Mark’s—Geena herself had noticed that the salt from constant flooding had worn tracks in the original wall. But the tracks weren’t consistent, and upon closer inspection, she discovered that they marked the seams around a secret door, long since sealed but now being undone by salt and time.

Behind the door, they had found a hidden staircase. Some of the graduate students had been amazed, but Geena had taken it in stride. In centuries past—perhaps in Italy more than anywhere else in the world—secrecy, betrayal, and paranoia had been the order of the day, and hidden passages and chambers had been commonplace. The trope of the secret room existed in fiction because it had so many real-life examples. But people loved that crap, and if it helped to continue to get her work funded, Geena was all for having the media make a big deal out of the city’s secret history and mysteries.

The water taxi pulled up to the dock and they waited while a crewman hauled the boat snug against the bumpers before disembarking. Normally Geena used the vaporetti —the boats that functioned as buses in this streetless city—but the university would reimburse her for the additional cost of the taxi.

They set off along a tree-lined path toward the wide cobblestoned entrance to the Piazza San Marco. Small waves from passing boats rolled up onto the stones, but the plaza was not flooded today. The Doge’s Palace loomed ahead. Over the tops of buildings she could see just the tip of one of the domes of St. Mark’s Basilica. But they did not have even that far to walk.

“Before we get there,” Finch said, “I must ask … do you really believe what you’ve found is Petrarch’s library?”

They walked alongside the Biblioteca, its wall visible through the trees. When they reached the cobblestones, Geena turned left and pulled Finch along in her wake. On such a perfect day the Piazza San Marco was breathtakingly beautiful, the sun making it all seem almost pristine. An illusion, Geena knew, but a lovely one.

She stopped twenty feet from the Biblioteca’s front door.

“How much of the history do you know, Mr. Finch?”

He smiled, and a flicker of hidden intelligence shone in his eyes. “Call me Howard,” he said. “And I’ve done my research, Dr. Hodge. Petrarch had what was essentially a circus train of wagons that traveled around with him so he could keep his library close at all times. But eventually he realized how impractical that was. Inspired by ancient stories of public libraries like the one at Alexandria, he arranged to set one up in Venice. In—what was the year?—1362, I think, the poet moved his entire library here, hundreds of volumes of writing, much of it from antiquity, detailing philosophies and histories and the lives of the ancients, not to mention poetry, of course. Priceless works, many of which modern scholars consider lost, or even pure myth. The Venetians set him up with a posh house—”

“Palazzo Molina,” Geena put in.

Finch waved away the interruption, nodding. “Time goes by, he has a falling-out with the city and pisses off to Padua—a major slap in the face to Venice. A few of the items turn up later in the Vatican Library and other places. Some are in the Doge’s Palace. But the bulk of them were lost or ruined. The only thing most scholars have agreed on is that when Petrarch left Venice, his library left with him.”

By now, Geena found herself smiling. Finch might not know a hell of a lot about the current state of the high-water crisis in Venice, but he had certainly done his homework where Petrarch’s library was concerned.

“Something funny?” Finch asked, apparently irritated by her smile.

“No, no. Sorry. I’m just glad I don’t have to go through the whole backstory for you.”

“Fair enough. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Well, Professor Schiavo showed you some of the best preserved examples of the books we’ve already taken from the chamber. We’ve recovered hundreds of pieces.”

“And they are impressive, no doubt, and their antiquity is not in question. But how can you be certain of their origin? You’re convinced that all those scholars were wrong—that Petrarch never removed his library from Venice after all and instead just moved it into this secret chamber of yours?”

“We’ve found ample evidence,” she told him. “Records that include a catalog of all of the works collected in the library, some written in Petrarch’s own hand and noted as such. My assistant, Nico Lombardi, will give you access to all of that and run it down for you. Those records are evidence enough, but the architectural details support the finding as well.”

Finch smiled and opened his hands. “Let’s pretend I know nothing about architecture.”

Geena could not help smiling in return. Finch might be pompous, but he wasn’t utterly lacking in charm.

“While we walk?” she said.

“By all means.”

“Like most cities,” she said as they approached the library’s front doors, “Venice is far older than what you can see, going back the better part of a thousand years. Scholars have been frustrated for centuries by the lack of any written record of the city’s origins, but most agree that the bulk of its original settlers came here fleeing the constant invasions of Roman-era cities by barbarians and Huns.”

They reached the door and, though the Biblioteca was her province, Finch opened it for her. The quiet from within seemed to reach out and draw them in, and Geena lowered her voice as she entered.

“The Doge’s Palace was constructed over a period that spanned most of the 14th century and beyond, on top of what remained of much older fortified buildings that we know very little about. The years that Petrarch lived in Venice fall squarely within that period.”

A woman behind a desk glanced up and smiled at her, and Geena waved as she guided Finch through the foyer and into the vastness of the Biblioteca. They made their way to a room that had once been more a shrine to books than a library. Several people sat at long tables, studying or reading in silence, but the books they were perusing had come from the stacks upstairs. None of the books were shelved or stored on the ground floor anymore.

“This building is not the original library,” she whispered as they passed through the room. “It dates only from the 16th century. But the staircase we found and the chamber below it are much older. They had been completely sealed, and Petrarch’s collection extraordinarily well preserved. We’ve found documents that indicate the existence of the room was a closely guarded secret.”

“And no water damage? No evidence of flooding?”

“None.” Geena led him through a narrow corridor. “At some point, we theorize that all of those who knew of the chamber died and the secret of its existence died with them.”

The corridor ended at the double-doored entrance to another room that had once housed books. Two large staircases inside the vaulted room led up to the second floor. The corridor turned to the right just in front of those doors, but to the left was a little jog in the corridor, and it was through this fragment of labyrinth that Geena led Finch. There lay the small alcove room where she had discovered the hidden door.