But real or imagined, her feet were on the ground again, such as it was, and it made her feel better. Her mind did not understand how she had got here, wherever ‘here’ was, so she put that on the back burner and set about looking for a way out.
Instead of the stairs and interiors that she associated with Escher, this was a place of bridges, interconnecting roads and paths, and cats scampering across them, pursuing rats hither and thither, up and down, upside down. White cats, black cats, piebald cats, grey cats; ginger, calico, tabby; tiger-striped and leopard-spotted.
It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out, Jo thought, laughing.
So it was a dream, she concluded; and as if to reassure her that that was all it was, the scene changed. A pulse boomed in her head, centred on her brow, drilled through like a migraine, and a red mist suffused her vision. She blinked, and flinched back as a huge rat’s face swelled at her and receded. It was hideous, but she was only dreaming—
— And she was back in the room at the palazzo and it was still there.
Jo backed away until she hit the wall, then realized that the giant rat was confined by the figure in the centre of the floor, which now looked fresher and sharper, newly drawn. Not only that, but the beast was fairly insubstantiaclass="underline" she seemed to be able to see through its edges, as though it were an image projected into the room.
But it was still pretty frightful, and an almost palpable stink of menace radiated from it like heat from a stove. It was because it was so big, she realized: almost any small thing blown up huge offends one’s sense of what is right; as if it no longer fitted into the small rat-shaped hole in her map of the world, and that made her hackles rise.
Belatedly, she noticed that the flayed cat was no longer pegged out in the centre of the chalked diagram. Had it ever been really there? Or was she still dreaming? She still felt a presence with her, but could not determine whether it was in the house or of the house.
‘Delia Quercia,’ she said, and her voice cast strange echoes in the empty room, off the pallid faded walls, the stained ceiling. ‘Delia Quercia, what do you want?’
Her mind answered: he wantsyou. And that seemed to clarify everything. It cut through her panic and left her head clear, as if she had woken healed after a long illness.
Keeping her eyes on the monstrous rat, she sidled to the tall central window and fumbled at its latches, finding bolts top and bottom in addition to the central fastening. A sense of urgency pressed her, but she pressed it back firmly. The window open, she sought for catches on the shutter, and found those too after a moment. It banged back in the wind, and chilly rain blew in; the cold light illuminated the gigantic thing crouched scratching in the middle of the room, trying to dig through the barrier of air that surrounded it. It hissed at her as she looked in its direction and caught its malevolent yellow eye: the thought of its getting free, and the sight of it, insubstantial as it was, impelled her to make haste.
Skirting the circle, she crossed the room again. As she passed the imprisoned rat, it started to fling itself against invisible walls in a frenzy, clawing at the barrier it could not pass through, biting at it. The sight of its great curved fangs was the stuff of nightmare.
Trying to ignore it, and the horror it engendered, Jo examined the plank her entry had dislodged. It was about eight feet in length: she hoped it would be long enough. It was also heavy, and awkward to carry. In the end, she simply dragged it to the window and pushed the end out, balancing it with her own weight, towards the cat tower.
Slowly, infinitely slowly, and taking infinite care, she inched the plank across the gap. It was so heavy that she had to struggle to keep control of it; the rain lashed at her, sweat ran down her sides, her arms shook with the effort, but inch by inch it moved across the gap. The opening she was aiming for was somewhat lower than the window, a fact for which she was extremely grateful, even though it made her worry that her bridge might slip when she tried to cross it.
As the end neared the cat tower, the plank grew more and more difficult to control. But at last it thumped onto the sill of the opening she’d been aiming for, and she breathed a great sigh of relief. At the same time, she felt rather than heard a sound like a chord of music, so loud it could have been the plucking of the constellation of the Lyre, and the back of her neck prickled. It gathered momentum, swelled; became, suddenly, perfection: too much to bear, because she was only human. Tears sprang into her eyes at the sheer beauty of it.
And in that melodious instant, the bridge grew whole again, despite its being only a plank of wood. Stones grew around it, coalesced out of the air that was nothing, and nowhere, and endless, into the semblance of a real bridge; and as she watched, the white cat jumped up onto the far end and sauntered across, flirting its tail.
Following their white pathfinder came a feline army, more than in her dream, dozens of cats, a myriad of them, moving purposefully and in silence across a road closed to them for more than a hundred years, coming to confront their old enemy.
Jo stood to one side to let the white cat spring lightly down to the floor, and as it did she felt a burning sensation in her back pocket, as if something in there had suddenly gone red-hot. She yelped and hauled it out: it was the antique necklace she’d forgotten picking up, and it burned her hand as she flung it away.
In mid-air it exploded, a flash of actinic light splashed with sparks like phosphorus and a number of lesser cracks that shot tiny burning shards of shrapnel across the room. At the same time the cats launched themselves like furry missiles at the giant rat, straight through the barrier that confined it. It cowered back, squealing, as the cats tore it to pieces, Jo fled from their fury.
She stepped up onto her bridge, and though she knew that it was just a narrow plank and there was far too much air below her, she also knew that harmony was restored and the Casa della Scala was complete again, after too long in limbo.
Rain lashed through the open sides of the bridge as she crossed it, but she took no notice. At the other end she stepped through into the cat tower with a gasp of relief, then sank to the floor, her legs gone suddenly wobbly. She sat and hugged her knees, closing her eyes thankfully for an instant.
An insistent miaow brought her back to the present, and she looked up to see a pair of bright yellow-green eyes in a white-furred face. Jo stroked the cat, but it wanted to be away, so she got to her feet and followed it down the stair.
From below, it still looked like a plank, but if she half-closed her eyes and tried not to look directly at it, she could see a kind of ghost of what the bridge should be.
‘Yes, I’ve got it,’ said Giordano. ‘How remarkable. I wonder if my cousin Pasquale can see it.’
‘Now it’s your turn,’ Jo told him.
‘I think you credit me with too much knowledge, if that’s not an oxymoron. I don’t know the contents of all the books in the library.’
‘Maybe not,’ she acknowledged as they walked along the calle that led to Roberto’s. ‘But I expect you have some family history you can delve into.’
‘Well, I don’t know a huge amount about my wicked ancestor, except that he was said to dabble in black magic. Summoning demons, or trying to.’
Jo stopped, as she always did, to look in the mask shop. ‘He managed to summon one, anyway,’ she said, watching her own reflection, a palimpsest on the display. ‘With that necklace, I think.’
The other nodded. ‘Yes, an artefact like that could well be used for summoning a demon.’
‘He wanted me to put it on,’ Jo said thoughtfully, starting to walk again.