I bite down hard, yank fabric roughly over hips; a body pushes into mine. A cry of pleasure and pain, and after, the world burns.
Josie’s voice wails. Her smile is blade-edged, her tattoos unmistakable, now. They slither across her shoulders, beneath the neckline of her dress, chasing the ghost of my fingertips across her skin. Josie tips her head back, throat working. The song becomes a scream, her body shuddering, eyes rolling white between agony and ecstasy.
The bar squirms in murky half-light. Tentacles unfold. They undulate across the walls, wrap my arms, lift my hair. I drift in the green deep and they caress my bones.
I stagger for the door, retch on fire-scored pavement. Chill air slaps my face; I shift without meaning to. The threads binding past to present catch me, hurl me forward in time. My bones nearly shatter, filled with desire to part company with my flesh. I want to scatter wide enough that I don’t have to remember anything ever again.
In another reality, following another skein of time, I follow Josie back to her tiny, hot apartment, overlooking S. Francesco della Vigna. We listen to distant water lap. We fuck. Her tattoos writhe; she whimpers with pleasure and fear. I taste her while she screams. She tells my future in her sleep. I say goodbye. And she forgives me this time.
I brace myself against a wall, trembling. Damp, heavy breezes push air through the narrow, winding streets. My skin cold-sweats with borrowed dew. Where am I? When?
I walk, boots hushing over time-worn stone. I sympathize with Marco. I wonder why I’m hunting him. The Senator’s envelope presses against my chest. I want to get this case over with and pretend there’s a place I can go to that will feel like home.
Blonde hair, the smell of leather in the rain. I survived; he didn’t. Fire scored my back with a thousand whips, tracing the shape of wings.
I walk along the waterfront, fighting memories that insist on surfacing, no matter how many times I try to give them away. I’ve begged the dark spaces teeming with star-ripe tentacles to take them away, but they never do. There are no refunds on the price of survival, once it’s paid.
I pass a nightclub where a church used to stand. Tentacles—half-seen—lash the night. Shadows obscure the stars and they are just right. The club-beat is a heart-sound, a pulse-thump. The building sways. It shivers. Pigeons weep and mourn in cages embedded in walls of slick, trembling flesh. Overhead, gulls still scream their laughter, but then they would, wouldn’t they?
I know where I’m going now. Farther down the wharf, where, once upon a time, goods used to be delivered in rusting, corrugated containers, is the man I need to see.
Vincenzo sits at the end of a pier jutting out into the water. The piles are ghosts against the lapping dark. Each weed-slicked piece of wood is topped with a creature with too many arms, suckers gripping rotten wood. They sing.
The eerie-sweet sound licks my spine, too much like the timbre of Josie’s voice. But instead of smoky-hot, the tentacles sing cold. How can things without mouths sing?
Their voices—if they can be called that—are vast, reaching distances but also reminiscent of the deeps, of cavern-glow and waving fronds. Their tears—should they ever cry—would taste of copper, iron, sulfur, and flame.
Vincenzo cocks his head. He hears me coming, but he doesn’t pause. His arm moves, his brush stroke jerky, involuntary.
“Ara.” He doesn’t turn.
The scant, pulsing light falling from behind me illuminates the rotting pier. The dark water shimmers, bioluminescence touching the waves but never what lies beneath. It shows Vincenzo’s face and the gaping spaces where his eyes are not.
I was the one who found him. The bathroom tiles—staggered white and black—slick with blood. Vincenzo’s head rested against the edge of a claw-footed tub. He wept.
Rather—his body shook with sobs and his eyes lay next to the drain in the otherwise-spotless tub, darker than the most cerulean sea and incapable of tears. Blood had spattered where they’d fallen, but otherwise, the porcelain remained white, white, white. His palms were stained rust-dark; so were his clothes. I nearly slipped in the blood covering the floor, but in the vast, arctic space of the tub, there were only a few drops, trailing from the drain back to the eyes.
“I can still see.” Vincenzo’s sobs turned to laughter while I held him. I couldn’t make his dreams stop, either, but at least I resisted the urge to taste his bloody tears.
“Hello, Vincenzo.” I can’t tell if he flinches or not when I lay my hand on his shoulder.
“You smell like her,” he says. Did I tell him about Josie? My stomach turns.
“I need information.” My soles should be hard after years of running; my soul should be hard after years of leaving myself behind. Some things R’lyeh will never cure. Not in any place—not in any time.
It’s what I was counting on.
“Watch the painting.” Vincenzo’s voice holds the same quavering tone as Josie’s song.
Pain flickers through the space where his eyes should be, stars shifting through black, bloody caverns. I see blue, crimson-tinged spheres against porcelain-white; I feel him shaking in my arms. It’s too late for apologies.
Vincenzo sets aside a canvas of writhing blues and greens. The paint is still wet, fresh and thick. I want to run my hands through it and feel it between my fingers like river mud. I want to drift in it and be seen by a vast, opening eye. I want to be told I did the right thing.
Vincenzo places a fresh canvas on the easel. His arm jerks, spastic. I watch over his shoulder as he paints. Flames. Venice burns.
“Thank you.” I put my lips close his ear. Vincenzo’s body hitches; he might be bleeding the paint—crimson, saffron, umber. He doesn’t stop. I leave him to his colours and his pain.
I shift. Sideways, cross-wise, moving through a cold space as crushing as the deepest parts of the sea. My lungs compress. I could not scream if I wanted to. Tendrils wrap me, loving me. They lap my heart, sucker-hold it; they caress every part of my spine. They take a bitter-sweet song sung in a smoky voice like burnt almonds. I shiver as it fades; salt lingers on my tongue. It leaks from my eyes and I don’t bother to brush it away.
Venice burns.
Heat batters my cheeks, drying stinging eyes. I throw an arm up to shield my face. Inhuman tongues hiss unknown words, shiver laughter, babbling inside the flames. The stars spin. The canal heaves. Angles and rounded nubs of stone-not-stone—worn by untold eons—rise, dripping. The city would shudder in revulsion if it could; instead, it screams as it burns.
Against all reason, I turn toward the city’s fire-wrapped heart. Sweat pools beneath my leather. My scars itch, pulling tight between jutting blades of bone.
Marco is here. I was wrong. He wasn’t seeking the end of the world, just the end of his world.
I find him in the little restaurant off Calle Mandola—Josie’s restaurant. The soles of my boots have almost melted. Heat-cracked, multi-coloured glass from the shop across the street crunches under my feet.
The restaurant’s walls are black, curling with smoke-wrought shadows. They don’t shift and unfold yet, but they will. Everyone else has either fled or burnt to death. Only Marco remains, belly-up to the bar. His hair, greasy as it is, should burn. Instead, it clings to his collar, loving. I think of water-wet tendrils cupping pale skin.
He turns a pock-marked face towards me, unsurprised. Flame makes his already-dark skin ruddy. His eyes shine, and not only with the glow of alcohol. He mimes a toast, lifting his glass, and throws the liquor back, grimacing.
“I knew my mother would send someone.”
I don’t bother to answer. How long until the flames reach us? I pour myself a drink, and refill Marco’s glass. Nothing unfolds against my tongue as I drink. My eyes don’t water. It’s only alcohol.