The cat head-butted her in the shin. She sat down to stroke it, despite not considering herself a cat person, and it surprised her by jumping onto her lap and sitting there with none of the usual kneading.
‘Oh, all right, if you insist,’ she said, and picked up the newspaper.
Morning light flooded in, chill and white, without a hint of fog. It brought with it an air so icy that it might have come straight from the peaks of the Dolomites. Jo woke cold and cramped, but with a warm place in her lap that evoked a very recently departed cat. Surprised, she stretched herself, got up carefully in case of cricked necks or other joints, and closed the window — not without a faintly suspicious glance out onto the campo. Which was deserted: she looked at her watch and found the hour ungodly.
Some time later, washed, brushed and flossed, she headed towards Roberto’s with an extra key in her jeans pocket. She had also, for some reason, picked up the antique necklace.
There was still a marked chill in the air, heralding that summer’s tenacious rearguard might finally be admitting defeat. The bright sky was already clouded over, grey above the wind. Jo tucked her hands deep in the pockets of her duffel-coat, and walked faster.
In the steamy espresso-scented warmth, La Strega’s daughter said to her, ‘I hear that house has been sold at last, the one you were asking about,’ and put a small cup on the table. Jo drank her coffee thoughtfully, and forgot to leave a tip.
At the front door, Jo paused to check whether she was observed; seeing no one, she quickly inserted the key and turned it before she could change her mind. The door swung inward, its hinges creaking only very faintly, and she stepped inside as soon as the gap was wide enough. Behind her, it shut quietly, leaving her in a shadow-hung hall that smelled of mildew and the sea, musty and salty, damp and sharp. And under that, another, ranker odour, like something left to rot: a drainy, sewery stench.
Her feet crunched on the floor as she took a tentative step, and she looked down to see fallen plaster shards. They had flaked off the walls, leaving them with the look of diseased flesh. Further down the passage lay decorators’ detritus: a pair of scabrous buckets, a grubby dust sheet piled in a heap, a paint-stained stepladder. As she started up the wide staircase she heard rain start to rattle outside. Vague ideas of accessing the cat tower flitted through her thoughts, but the pull of the open window was too strong.
Part of her mind noted in passing that the upward leprousness of the walls ceased halfway up the first flight of stairs, and presumed that the house had fallen victim, during its disuse, to the curse of acqua alta — no respecter of persons or places, palazzi included. What she was noticing much more insistently, however, as she ascended further, was the smell. Now the sweetish stink of decay had gained the upper hand, making her try to breathe shallowly. But her heart was pounding with anticipation and her lungs wanted extra oxygen, not less; so she resorted to pulling a hanky from her pocket and hiding her nose in that. It had, unfortunately, very little effect.
Something’s dead up here. The conclusion was inescapable. Jo started to sweat, felt it crawling through her hair. Suddenly she didn’t want to enter the room, but her volition carried her to the door and put her fingers round the handle; even as she turned it, pushing the door open, her mind was telling her not to go in.
But the room was empty. Not even a curtain at the window that might have explained what she had seen from across the square. Jo came out, puzzled, and started to check the other rooms, feeling that strange reluctance to enter any of them. All she found were crusted paint pots, dirty rags and a glass jar containing a dried-out paintbrush that smelled faintly of white spirit. Outside, thunder rumbled and muttered.
On the topmost floor, at the back of the house, a long room ran the whole width of the building: the door to this stood slightly ajar. She pushed it, anticipating nothing again, but it swung in lightly and much further than she had expected. Something fell to the floor with a noise like the end of the world, making her swear explosively and get a full ripe breath of the foul stench, which set her coughing.
When her heart had stopped racing, she ventured cautiously into the room, and the mystery of what had fallen was solved: more decorators’ debris in the form of a plank and two stepladders, which the door had caught glancingly and sent tumbling. But she forgot it as she saw what was on the floor in the centre of the room, clearly visible in the light that stole round the sides of the ill-fitting shutters at the windows.
There a figure had been drawn, a circle enclosing some other shape which was too scuffed for her to recognize, and in the centre of that, something flayed. Jo gulped, clasped her handkerchief more firmly over her nose and mouth, and advanced towards it.
The animal was unrecognizable, rags of decaying flesh and gobs of dried blood. It had been spreadeagled, pegged out by its four limbs, and eviscerated. Disgusted, she turned away, only to see a small pale pile of fur that had been flung to one side. She approached it, and almost stooped to look, but realized in time what it was and turned away, gagging.
It was the pelt of a white cat.
‘Oh, shit,’ she whispered. ‘God, oh, that’s disgusting.’ Why would someone do that? It was evidently a ritual of some kind. Divination by entrails? Summoning demons? What sort of demon would be impressed by the sacrifice of a cat? Unless, as Scimone had apparently believed, cats really were more than they seemed.
Don’t be so damned stupid, she admonished herself. The man believed in ley lines. You’ll be looking for aliens next.
Although, in a house built by Scimone, the sacrifice might take on a deeper significance.
A necromancer. . Giordano’s words came back to her. She swallowed, suddenly apprehensive, and the back of her neck prickled; she felt sweat slide down her ribs. The stench of the murdered cat filled her nostrils, coated her tongue, making her want to spit. Moving her head from side to side, she moved towards the door, and as she did so some trick of the shadows made the walls of the room appear to bulge inwards for a second.
Her heart gave another unpleasant startled little lurch, and she paused her hand on its journey to the doorknob.
Whatever you do, don’t open the door. The thought popped into her mind with such utter certainty that she stood stock-still, convinced beyond all reason that something inimical was outside. She knew it without needing to see it, just as she knew where everything stood in her own home, how to persuade the sticky back door to open in wet weather, and which stairs creaked.
From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend you.
Jo shook her head to clear it. Quickly, she crossed to one of the windows and peered out around the shutter. Rain teemed down outside, and she turned away in despair, believing herself trapped completely.
Her gaze flicked around the room, skittering away from seeing the cat’s remains, but they were centre stage and not to be pushed aside. Perhaps, she thought, she could remove it, even — assuming she could get out of the building — give it a decent burial. The difficulty of doing this in Venice did not enter her mind.
To this end, she inspected the tumbled decorating apparatus by the door and found a paint-scraper and a tray encrusted with solidified emulsion. Armed with this, she advanced upon the pathetic little corpse.
But the moment her foot passed the smudged circle, the floor seemed to fade beneath her, and she fell, gasping with alarm, clutching at nothing — but it was not, she realized a second later, the dizzying headlong fall from a top floor to shatter on a pavement, but, incomprehensibly, more as she imagined free fall to be: buoyed on the air itself, floating on something completely insubstantial. Around her, a wind from nowhere began to blow, forming a spiral around her so that she drifted in the centre of a vortex.