Brotherhood of the Tomb (28 page)

He closed his eyes tightly, blotting out the room, telling himself it was all a hallucination brought on by something called focal epilepsy. He only had to ignore it and it would go away. He would wake up and it would have left him. And if it returned, he would have a CT scan and they would give him drugs to make it go for good. But though he sat and thought of other things and told himself he was asleep in a flea-bitten pensione in Mestre, the smell of the canal and the thinner odour it concealed persisted in his nostrils. He opened his eyes at last to see black curtains and candles that had scarcely burned down.

Suddenly, he heard footsteps approaching. A door opened, a section of curtain was pulled aside, and a man in eighteenth-century dress entered the room. He was followed by a second and a third, then others, until the room was full. Each one, as he entered, bowed slightly towards Patrick, then moved to stand along the wall. At the end, four women came into the room, all veiled in black lace, and joined the men.

Someone began to speak in a low voice, then others joined in, until the entire assembly spoke in unison. With mounting horror, Patrick realized that he too was speaking, his voice mingling with the others’, rising and falling in a gentle chant. At first he did not recognize the language, then, without surprise, realized it was Aramaic.

‘l tsbqnn’ ‘lh’ bhswk’

‘I tlsbqnn’ bhswk’ bry’ wbsryqwth

‘l t’lnn’ mr’n’ b’tr’ dy I’ bh nwhr’

Y thsyk ynyn’

Do not leave us, O God, in darkness.

Do not abandon us to the outer darkness and its emptiness.

Do not lead us, O Lord, to the place where there is no light.

Do not close our eyes with its blackness.

The chanting continued for about five minutes in similar vein, a long address to the Deity beseeching salvation from the terrors of the grave. And then the mood began to change. Patrick realized with dismay that he had begun to lead the incantation, speaking short verses to which the others responded. He was fully aware of what was happening, yet powerless to stop himself, as though someone else were speaking in his voice.

Suddenly, the door opened and a man entered, leading a boy of ten or eleven by the hand. The boy was dressed in a white shift. His hair was long and tied back with a red ribbon, and he seemed bewildered. A second man stepped forward from the congregation and took the boy’s other hand. Together, they turned him to face Patrick. The boy was trembling. Patrick stared into his eyes. He looked as though he had been drugged or hypnotized.

The men removed the boy’s robe and set it to one side, leaving him naked and shivering. Patrick tried to protest, but all power of movement or speech had been taken from him. It was as though he was present, but in another’s body, without power over it.

One of the men produced a rope, pulled the boy’s arms roughly behind his back, and tied him firmly by the wrists. The second man took a long silver knife from a leather satchel and handed it to Patrick. Patrick watched as his hands received the knife. For

the first time he looked down. In front of him was a high marble slab, a sort of altar.

The men raised the boy to the altar. In the room, the chanting started again. The men stepped back into the congregation, leaving Patrick at the altar with the boy.

‘We offer you this sacrifice,’ he intoned.

‘Accept what we offer in Christ’s name,” the congregation responded.

‘Take the life that you have given this child, and give us life eternal in return.’

‘Grant us eternal life with Jesus, the Everlasting Sacrifice.’

He watched in horror as his hands raised the knife. Beneath him, the terrified child struggled against his bonds. Why did the boy not cry out? Why did the knife feel so light, so insubstantial in his hands?

Something happened to the boy. He began to scream, loudly, in the tones of an animal at the slaughterhouse, that has seen its companions dragged to the knife’s edge. Patrick tried to close his eyes, but they would not shut. He tried to drop the knife, but it was as though it had been glued to his hand. He felt his hand move, felt the knife touch the boy’s naked flesh, felt a shiver of erotic pleasure pass through his loins, felt the appalling silence crush him as the screams cut short and blood flooded across his fingers.

He woke out of blackness into light and looked round for Assefa. But it was still the same room, hung with black curtains, lit with candles that had almost guttered to nothing. He felt sick and dizzy. His hands were sticky. Standing, he caught sight of the altar in front of him, empty now and clean of blood. He could close and open his eyes again, control his

every movement as though once more in possession of his own body.

Swaying slightly, as though still drunk, he took several steps towards the door. Was this hallucination never going to end? He pulled back the curtain, revealing the low wooden door through which the others had come. The handle was iron, cold to his touch. He turned it, sweating.

A narrow hallway led to another door. He walked down it softly, as though frightened that he might waken someone. The floor was a mosaic, with spirals of golden angels. On the face of one angel, he saw a drop of glistening blood, still wet.

He opened the door and stepped inside. It was brightly lit by electric bulbs. On the wall facing him, a spotlight gave brilliance to a painting by Moreau. Near it stood a bookcase, its shelves tightly filled with paperback books. A television set in one corner was tuned to a game show. The volume had been turned off, but from somewhere there came the sound of low music. He recognized it at once as Albinoni’s Oboe Concerto No. 2 in D minor, a favourite from his years in Dublin, when Francesca had introduced him to the splendours of Venetian baroque: Vivaldi, Tartini, Marcello and Galuppi. This had been one of their best-loved pieces, played over and over in a recording by I Solisti Veneti. He looked round, as though expecting to see her come through the door.

Turning back, he caught sight of the television again. The game show had been replaced or interrupted by what looked like a news bulletin of some sort. People milled about in confusion. A SWAT team was tidying up in the background, while police tried to hold back a large and angry crowd. Red and blue lights flashed. Without sound, accompanied only by the
 
ethereal tones of the music, the
 
scene had

the appearance of a nightmare snatched out of the unconscious and projected on the tiny screen.

Suddenly, the camera shifted. On the ground, rows of bodies were being lined up by rescue workers. The camera moved in, greedy for spectacle. Patrick saw blood-stained faces, children’s faces, shattered bodies, severed limbs. The camera moved along the rows, its hunger growing. The music swelled. He saw small teeth pressed against bloodless lips, eyes fixed in death, hair matted with blood and plaster. He closed his eyes, and still bloody images marched across his vision, the screaming child, the knife, the flesh tearing, his hands plunging into the open chest, the steaming heart. He opened his eyes and saw the television faces again, saw the room rock, heard the music grow and fade, grow and fade, the walls bulge and close in. As he fell, he heard the voice of the oboe change to a last, despairing scream against the darkness.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Between Burano and the mainland lie the mud-flats and shattered islets of the northern lagoon. It is a region of the desolate heart, wreathed for much of the year in mists and shadows, dull, remote, full of reeds and marine sadnesses. Its narrow channels are marked by tall bricole, long wooden stakes that pattern out the shallows from the navigable deeps. They stand high in the tired sunlight like stumps of an ancient forest from whose branches the birds have long since fled.

They had taken the water-bus from the Fonda-menta Nuove to Burano. They carried small bags, with a little food and two flashlights with spare batteries. The boat had travelled slowly, as though bereft of purpose, cold, unsteady, and almost empty. Four other passengers kept them company: two as far as Murano, the remainder to Mazzorbo. They had gone the rest of the way alone, save for the pilot and his assistant, reaching Burano by mid-morning.

Once there, it had proved surprisingly difficult to find a boatman who would either admit to knowing the whereabouts of San Vitale in Palude, or show himself willing to take them to its shores. It was as though a curse had fallen on the place. Patrick detected a mute uneasiness in all with whom he spoke. Once, bending to tie a shoelace, he had noticed an old fisherman to whom they had previously spoken watching with an intent and troubled expression. After a little while, the shaking of heads and the sullen silences combined to produce in them a state of despair akin to hopelessness.

They found their man just after lunch in a small bar not far from the little harbour.

‘They tell me you’re looking for someone to take you to San Vitale.’

He was old and rather down-at-heel, with a hard leather face that might have been stretched and moulded over a frame in Claudio Surian’s workshop. White bristles peppered a weak chin that had once been badly injured and reassembled by a clumsy surgeon. Unfocussed eyes suggested longer hours at the bar than at the rudder. He smiled toothlessly and without the least trace of warmth.

Patrick nodded.

‘How much?’ the old boatman asked.

‘I’ll give you one hundred thousand. There and back.’

‘Vaffanculo! What you think I am, mister? A fucking gondolier? Listen - you want a nice little trip up some nice little canals, you want some cunt to sing some pansy arias, get the fuck back to Venice. Two hundred.’

Patrick shrugged. He was in no mood to argue. They had lost enough time already.

They left Burano in silence, creeping away like thieves whose movements are being watched. Having negotiated his price, the old man had clammed up. He evinced no curiosity about his passengers or their journey, expressed neither surprise nor disapproval. The last thing Patrick saw as their sandolo moved away from the harbour was a little knot of fishermen on the quayside, watching them turn into the channel that led to Torcello.

The only sound was the creaking of the oar turning in the rowlock. Patrick was reminded of his dreams. This, he thought with a stab of fear, was the dream’s continuation, its working out in the waking world.

But now that he felt himself so close, he feared a denouement, dreaded whatever revelation the next hours would bring. In the swirling water, he fancied he saw figures move across a television screen.

He had said nothing to Assefa about his dream of the night before. Waking at dawn, he had been covered in sweat and shivering, but he had not cried out. Images from the dream clung to his mind like flies to an old web; he could feel the feet of spiders moving close, but however hard he tried, he could not shake the images free. Above all, the sound of the child’s screams echoed across the empty landscape through which they passed. He dipped his hand into the water, as if to wash it clean of blood.

A low mist lay on the water like a mask. They were a small black shadow, a beetle or crab, crawling slowly across the flat white surface, pushing the mist aside only to see it form again behind their stern. It was cold out on the lagoon. Patrick and Assefa shivered, regretting they had not come better dressed. The old boatman seemed impervious to the damp chill of the place, as though his leathery carapace had been genetically created for the rigours of life on such desolate waters.

Once, Patrick thought he saw another boat move out from the shelter of an islet to their west, but when he drew it to Assefa’s attention, it had already gone. Here, beyond Torcello, the channels grew more treacherous and the bricole fewer and less certain. In places, fishermen had set thin willow-wands and rods of bramble to mark off their fish-traps.

They ran aground twice on hidden mud-flats, and all three men were forced out, knee-deep in mud, to push the sturdy little craft back into deeper waters. Here and there, a dismal islet showed the remains of an abandoned wall or gateway, tokens of vanished

glories: old monasteries long ago dissolved, forts useless now against a tide of tourists and international business executives, the wattle huts of fishermen, empty for the winter. Once, they passed a tall wooden tripod on whose top a shrine to the Madonna stood custodian over a particularly fretful channel. Faded flowers clung to her feet, and by her hand an extinguished candle marked the devotion of some passing boatman.

The old man raised one hand and nodded past the shrine.

‘La paluda maggiore. The great marsh. Not far now. Half an hour.’ They were the first words he had spoken since their departure.

Patrick felt uneasy to be so much at the old man’s mercy. Out here, in the lost reaches of the lagoon, where no sound carried and not even a sea-bird’s wing broke the expanse of mud and water, they could be left stranded without difficulty.

They drifted to a halt. The boatman shipped his oar and turned to face the side.

Why are we stopping?’ Patrick asked. Was the old man going to demand more money, now he had them in the middle of nowhere?

But he merely unbuttoned his trousers and proceeded to urinate over the side of the boat. Finished, he rowed on, but his brief action had further impressed on Patrick the man’s intimacy with this place: This is my lagoon, these are my waters, I piss in them as I would at home, they don’t mind.

Just over half-an-hour later, the hazy outlines of a low island appeared above the mist. As they drew nearer, it acquired shape and texture. Dark cypresses ringed the fractured lineaments of a squat, twelfth-century church. Closer still, the building developed depth and detail: the style was Ravenna Byzantine,

the materials chiefly brick and marble, both much distressed by inclement weather and long neglect. Beside the church, a free-standing campanile had lost its upper storey; it jutted up from the cypresses like an admonitory finger placed there to warn the curious away from the island’s deserted shores.

The old man beached the sandolo in a small cove just west of the church. Whatever landing-stage had once served the island had long ago collapsed or been covered by the tangled bushes that in most places crept unhampered to the water’s edge. They disembarked in two feet of water and helped the boatman pull the sandolo higher up, above the tide-mark. The beach was stony and green with water-weeds.