The Undrowned Child

by Michelle Lovric

  The apple fell out of Teo’s hand. She shuddered—the headless man who came out of the sacristy!

  The newspaper concluded, For all our Signor Rioba rants about Turks and Butchers–there were no witnesses to the theft of the hero’s skin. The police are mystified.

  “Yes, there was a witness!” thought Teo. “But no one will be able to hear me tell them what happened.”

  The next item was about Teo herself.…

  Teodora Stampara, who was suffering from suspected concussion, was last seen on the night of June 1. A nurse found her bed empty, and signs of a struggle. Strangely, no one saw the girl leave the hospital. Posters of her have been put up around the city. Her parents and police have expressed grave fears for her safety. She may be suffering from loss of memory.…

  Teo was indignant. “But I’m not! I remember everything, almost. The mean nurse, the Brustolon, the doctor. And the book.”

  What was it that the book had said, that it would take her, where was it? Oh yes, between-the-Linings of the city? Had she somehow got trapped between-the-Linings? And that was why no one could see her? The pain, the fever—was that what happened when you moved from one side of the Linings to another?

  Yet it sounded quite comforting, “between-the-Linings.” Teo imagined something silky and soft, herself safely tucked up inside, like a chrysalis in a cocoon. Also, if this was true, then The Key to the Secret City should be able to show her a way out of the Linings and back to the real world.

  Teo pulled the book from inside her pinafore. The girl on the cover looked concerned. Teo nodded to her and opened it to the place she had been reading that night at the hospital. She addressed the page reproachfully. “Now help me! You got me into this mess!”

  Even as she spoke, the words disappeared and luminous pictures filled the creamy paper, lively as a tableau inside a shaken snow-globe.

  Faces smiled and screamed from those pages. Stories unfolded like plays. The sun rose and set inside the book. Perfumed senators strutted in their red robes in San Marco. The vicious flaying of Marcantonio Bragadin happened in front of her horrified eyes. The Doges’ Palace burnt and was rebuilt. Masked dancers romped at balls. The original Brustolons appeared in elegant drawing rooms. Napoleon arrived to conquer Venice; the city grew dark and subdued. The Austrians marched in. San Marco was silent. The city was under siege, with cannonballs pounding the buildings. Cholera raged through the population and the stench of death hung in the air. Funeral dirges were sung. Then the Austrians slunk out, and the city gave itself up to joy.…

  Hours later, Teo shook herself. Her neck was stiff, her leg had gone to sleep, and the sun had gone down. For a while, she had almost been able to forget her predicament.

  It was immediately brought back to her.

  The door handle turned and her mother’s sorrowful face appeared, lit up with a faint ray of hope.

  Her father’s voice urged, “No, Leonora, don’t torture yourself so.”

  “You’re right, Alberto,” replied Teo’s mother in a pathetically small voice. “She’s not here. But I could not resist checking. Don’t blame me for that. Look, a maid has dropped an apple-core on the floor!” She tutted.

  Teo closed the book and lay back on her bed with the warm weight resting comfortingly on her chest. She fought back the tears.

  How could she make contact with her parents, and explain that she was perfectly safe, only inconveniently invisible, hopefully just for a little while?

  “But am I truly perfectly safe?” Teo finally forced herself to face the hideous possibility that had haunted her all day.

  The possibility that she had died.

  “I died in the hospital,” she whispered aloud. “That’s why no one can see me. That’s why I woke up on a tomb in a graveyard. I never thought to read what it said! Was it my name on the headstone?”

  Teo remembered the funeral gondolas bearing children’s coffins down the Grand Canal. The doctor had spoken of too many children sick, too many cases of fever. The little boy with the shaved head and the black swelling on his neck—what was that? Had she too fallen victim to whatever was killing the children of Venice? Or was it the Brustolon … he could have …? Had the mayor ordered her to be buried secretly? So even her adoptive parents would not find out?

  Could the mayor of Venice be so devious? So cruel? Teo pondered the smooth face, that lustrous black croissant of a mustache. He could certainly be that smooth.

  At the thought that her life was over, before it had really begun, Teo was overcome with grief. She let the tears roll down her cheeks and onto the pillow. Then she sat bolt upright with a scream. “If it wasn’t the Brustolon, was I killed by the Butcher Biasio? He has a taste for children! Signor Rioba said so. But how can I be dead?”

  She rallied her spirits. It was better to be bewildered than dead. “I am all in one piece, not cut up for a stew! But if I’m not dead, what am I? A kind of a living ghost?”

  One of the big, ferocious seagulls cawed suddenly outside her window, in a note of triumph. No doubt it had caught itself something vulnerable.

  The Key to the Secret City stirred in her hands, as if trembling. The girl on the cover put her hands together beseechingly.

  June 4, 1899

  Teo began her new life as a living ghost.

  From that first night she still slept in her hotel room. But it was simply too painful to follow her parents as they searched for her through the streets and markets, showing her photograph to everyone, earnestly asking questions, shaking hands, looking hopefully into people’s eyes.

  Back at the hotel, she scribbled a letter to tell them what had happened. Yet as soon as she finished the page, the writing disappeared. She carried her dresses into her parents room and spread them on the bed. But when she returned to her own room, they were still hanging up in her armoire. She used her father’s shaving brush to write a soapy message on the mirror. Her words “Mamma! Papà! I am …” faded away before they had even dried.

  Even as she sobbed, Teo realized that, bad as they were, things seemed much worse because her belly was hollowed out with hunger. She helped herself to a rather eccentric meal of semi-baked piecrust, raw peas and stewed pear from the hotel kitchen while the chef was busy for a moment in the meat-safe.

  “My bed and board were paid in advance,” she told herself defiantly, as the chef set up a great howl about the big hole in his piecrust.

  Once she had eaten, Teo went up to her bedroom and tried to think through her situation. “There are always rules,” she reasoned. “I just have to understand how this works.”

  This much she had already understood: no one she knew could see her, or hear her. She cast no shadow. And anything she picked up, whether it was an apple or a cup of water, immediately disappeared from everyone else’s sight, though Teo herself could see those things perfectly well.

  After a few painful experiments, she learnt that she could not pass through doors or walls. Nor could she fly like an angel; she couldn’t even jump down five steps at once, as a badly skinned knee proved. She could not see through other people’s clothes, which was perhaps fortunate. But she still saw what they said written out in words above their heads. Using The Key to the Secret City, she tested all her old skills. She could still read upside-down and she could still remember whole pages of what she read, as if she had taken a photograph of the page.

  “Just like when I was alive,” she thought.

  And just as if she was alive, Teo still got hungry, thirsty, sleepy, hot, bothered and cross.

  “It’s just that I don’t exist for anyone else,” she whispered to herself sadly. “Except to make them feel a little cold. And why am I whispering? No one can hear me!”

  That afternoon she set out to lose herself in Venice, to try to forget what had happened to her. And, indeed, it helped. The constant panorama of new sights soothed the pain, for whole minutes on end.

  She had a guide, of course. The Key to the Secret City was now teaching Teo to andar
per le Fodere, to go between-the-Linings like a real Venetian child.

  Turn left here, the book told her. Now look up.… This is the place where the pirates came ashore to steal our women.… This is the palace where the devil in the shape of a monkey made a hole in the wall.…

  There were maps that came to life when she turned the page, with all the streets glowing in sequence to show her how to get to her destination. The Key to the Secret City had torn pieces of paper stuck inside it too, and fingerprints from small hands. There were old faded sweet wrappings and yellowed advertisements carefully cut out of newspapers.

  “At least one Venetian child’s already made good use of this book,” Teo supposed. The girl on the cover smiled before lowering her eyes discreetly.

  The Key to the Secret City seemed to be able to read Teo’s mind. She had only to think, “I wonder where Marco Polo lived?” and a quick secret route to the Corte del Milion would be illustrated on the page. If she felt hungry The Key to the Secret City showed her the way to the nearest pasticceria, and helpfully puffed out the delicious smell of its special cake, with a picture and a caption, so she knew what to grab and pocket.

  “Not stealing,” Teo told herself when the baker scratched his head at a sudden vacancy in his oven dish. “More like learning.”

  But in the bakery at San Barnaba, the baker’s young apprentice shouted at Teo when she lifted a hot sugared bun from his tray, “Oi, you! Drop it!”

  “You can see me!” Teo gasped.

  “I see a thief,” the boy grumbled.

  “Are you … a ghost too?” asked Teo.

  “And are you mad?” he retorted, reaching out to grab her arm.

  The baker loomed up behind his apprentice. “Talking to yourself again, scamp?” He boxed the boy’s ears.

  Teo had run away with a lesson learnt. Children could see her. And they didn’t seem to see any difference between her and themselves.

  Another thought crossed Teo’s mind. Perhaps it was only Venetian children who could see her? Now, that was something she could test on Maria. And if Maria could see her, well, then Teo could ask her to explain to her parents what had happened, insofar as she could explain it.

  Then it struck Teo that in all the time since her … “accident” … she had never once laid eyes on Maria. What was Maria up to? Was she with the young man with the too-perfect face?

  Teo sighed. Would Maria be any use, anyway? She might as well ask a pig to do algebra. “Can’t” and “shan’t” were Maria’s favorite words, unless it was some little thing she could do to ingratiate herself with the fashionable crowd. Teo turned back to the book and its comforting distractions.

  All day she’d been soaking up dialect as fast as she could. She eavesdropped shamelessly. Having no one else to talk to, she spoke to herself in dialect all the time. Her trick with Latin and French was working well, and soon she found that it was relatively easy to talk and think in Venetian.

  But when she helped herself to a little dictionary in a bookshop, she was put back in her place with a shock. The same fair-haired boy whom she had seen in the old bookshop at Miracoli suddenly materialized beside her. So she had not imagined him after all! He looked hard at the bulge in her pocket that marked the stolen dictionary, and muttered, “What can you expect from a foreigner?”

  He was as smartly dressed as before, with a different linen waistcoat, shining boots and a crisp white shirt. At least the Venetian boy did not denounce her to the storekeeper. And his reaction proved her theory—children did not see her as a ghost, but as one of them, an inferior specimen, to be sure, but nothing to remark upon.

  Outside the bookshop she winced at the sight of another of the LOST GIRL posters on a lamppost beside the canal. Her eyes slid to her reflection in the bookshop window. She was by now quite unrecognizable as the tidy little person in the posters. She looked more like an urchin who had been dragged by wolves through a forest.

  “Don’t ye fret, young Teodora, yer a credit to yesself,” said a hoarse voice comfortingly. Teo turned, but all there was to see was a ripple spreading in the still water of the canal.

  A hot wind blew a piece of paper around her ankle. It was the latest of Signor Rioba’s handbills.

  Teo brought the handbill back to her room and studied it alongside the discarded newspapers she had rifled from the manager’s waste basket.

  Apart from the gushing wells, the ghost bells, the floods and the sharks, there was a new problem, this time with Venice’s lighting. Each night, without fail, all the gas-lamps in the city flickered and then slowly spluttered out. Every expert in the Veneto region had been called in, but, night after night, just after ten, the lights died and the city was plunged into blackness.

  Even handheld lanterns appeared to be affected by whatever mysterious force had extinguished the gas-lamps … they never lasted long, and tended to fail just as people were making their way over bridges or walking near the edges of canals. From the black water came the ominous sound of loud splashing every time someone lost his footing.

  The newspapers were full of it—CITY ON ITS KNEES!—without its faithful gas-lamps. Even more sensational was the appearance of a ghostly light in the palace known as Ca’ Dario, which enjoyed the reputation of being the most haunted house in Venice.

  Ca’ Dario was a gigantic hunchback of a building, lurching sharply to the right, its foundations clawing into the bank of the Grand Canal. Funnel-shaped chimneys were clustered like toadstools on the top. No one had lived there since the most recent owner had committed suicide, the last in a long string of suspicious deaths inside. No Venetian wanted to enter its grim gates, not even the city rat catcher. Not even the city rats. The Key had taught Teo that these vast and fearless creatures were known to the Venetians as pantegane.

  Signor Rioba had plenty to say on the subject. Beware Ca’ Dario! Only evil flows out of that palace. Evil. And sickness. And death. Oh, ye could not be counting the number of lies they’re telling ye. More than the hairs on the poor flayed skin of Marcantonio Bragadin. More than the hairs up the nose of your great left-legged baboon of a mayor.

  The police were ordered to break down the doors and find out what was causing the strange light inside Ca’ Dario. Even they dragged their feet, making excuses about paperwork and protocols, until the newspapers jeered at them as cowards. Eventually a squad of no less than thirty nervous policemen forced the door down. They found nothing inside, except shifting moonlight, a pile of ebony wood, a huge vat of varnish and a heap of elephant tusks.

  Meanwhile the mayor, who fancied himself as something of an old-fashioned intellectual and a poet, sent a letter to the papers.

  Teo scanned the swollen paragraphs: The collective imagination of the town has created this phenomenon of light in Ca’ Dario … architectural genius … Each of those funnel-shaped chimneys is an oculus to draw the light of the full moon straight down inside.…

  “What is he going on about?” thought Teo irritably. She’d been to see Ca’ Dario glittering in the dark. “If that’s natural moonlight in Ca’ Dario, then I’m a polar bear!”

  The minister for tourism and decorum took up the cause too: … time to bury all these ancient superstitions about Ca’ Dario … not a place of evil … the city’s lighthouse in our present little difficulty. Brava, Ca’ Dario! … encourage more tourists to come to Venice, just to see our splendid Ca’ Dario by moonlight. And by the way, whoever’s pretending to be Signor Rioba is a mischief-maker and a clown. And we’re on his trail too.

  “Oh really?” Teo barked. There was something about the mayor that made her gnash her teeth.

  Another fish-scented handbill from Signor Rioba fumed: Take care, Venetians! Have ye all been beaten with the stupid stick, like your mayor, who has the immortal gall to tell ye everything goes well? Which is pure, distilled Fool’s Talk. Your ancient enemy is here again. And your mayor is giving messages for him. Ca’ Dario is a sign. Take notice, while ye still can. Time is running out.

  �
��Ancient enemy”? That was new.

  Squinting at the lettering, Teo grew dizzy. She felt queasy and her head ached. It was hard to steal nutritious things like poached eggs or potted shrimps, which slid between her fingers and splattered on the floor, making the hotel cook swear horribly. A diet of cakes and fruit left her body as weak and disconsolate as her thoughts.

  “What would my parents do to make me feel better?” It was a desolate notion. As was the answer: Teo dosed herself with Dottore Dimora’s Nerve Pabulum Pills, washed down with a swig of sour spirit of Scurvy Grass from the Morelli Pharmacy at Rialto. The only effect was to make her rather queasier than before.

  By now her spirits had sagged so low that she was almost ready to welcome the sight of Maria. And in that forlorn state she made her way to Maria’s room. Her knock went unheeded. She opened the door and gasped. Even though it was late at night, Maria’s bed lay empty and untouched. A brown insect scurried across the floor on a hundred tiny legs.

  Teo returned to her own bedroom. She stood by the window, gazing out at the black water lit only by a few wretched stars. A procession of funeral gondolas quietly slipped down the Grand Canal, each with one pathetically small coffin aboard.

  the morning of June 5, 1899

  It was then, as if sensing that Teo had reached her lowest point, that The Key to the Secret City began to introduce her to its own circle of acquaintances.

  Those acquaintances were ghosts.

  It started on the traghetto. Teo made her way unseen into the gondola that ferried people between San Samuele and Ca’ Rezzonico. The sun beat down on passengers crowded together like stalks of asparagus tied in a bunch. Venetians, the book had explained to Teo, always stood up in the traghetto. Only tourists and foreigners lacked the sea legs to balance as the boat crossed the Grand Canal.

  “Move over!” The voice was gruff, and the nudging elbow cold as ice. Teo flinched away.

  “I’m talking to yer, girlie! When Pedro-the-Crimp talks, yer listens, right?”