This Haunted World Book One: The Venetian: A Chilling New Supernatural Thriller

by Shani Struthers

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  They rushed to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the wall of mist, and arrived at the front of the asylum again. Louise was surprised to find herself still not as frightened as the rest of the group; rather resignation seemed to be the dominant emotion. The figure at the centre of the mist had been the veiled lady, she was sure of it. What did she want? Why had she forged this connection between them?

  Piero was bending over, his hands just above his knees, trying to catch his breath. Kristina had one hand in her mouth, teeth tearing at her nails. Rob looked bewildered.

  “What was that?” he asked, trying to make sense of it. “The way it was moving…”

  It was Kristina who finally answered him. “I’ve heard about the white mist before, how it comes racing towards you. Again, it is the stuff of legend, or so I thought. I have never believed it because I have never seen it.” She turned her head back the way they’d come as if checking that the mist wasn’t still in pursuit. “I have never seen anything here before.”

  “Nothing at all?” Louise quizzed.

  Kristina shook her head. “This may sound strange, but I have always found it peaceful on the island, quiet, a refuge almost. But then I have never been here after dark. I haven’t spent the night.” Her voice rose in alarm at the prospect. “I don’t want to spend the night!”

  Piero straightened up, murmured something to his wife in Italian and she nodded, even attempted to smile at him, albeit bleakly.

  “Piero, have you seen that mist before?” Louise continued.

  “No, but I have heard of it too. Tales are passed on you know, from person to person.”

  “What about the figures in the mist, have people mentioned them?”

  Piero looked at Louise, Kristina and Rob did too.

  “Figures?” Rob queried.

  “Yes, figures,” she repeated. “Didn’t you see…?” No they hadn’t, she realised. Once again, that had been reserved especially for her.

  Rob quickly forgot all talk of figures. He was shaking his head as if he couldn’t quite believe the situation he was in. “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  Strangely, Louise could believe it. It was as though she’d been waiting for this, ever since she set foot in Venice – the inevitable – but why, she didn’t fully understand yet.

  “We need to go into the asylum,” Piero answered, “continue our search.”

  “I don’t want to go back in,” Kristina was pleading with him.

  Before anyone could reply, Louise pointed to another building, a much smaller construction a few feet from the front of the asylum and largely covered by trees. “What’s that? I spotted it when we first arrived, I meant to ask.”

  Piero squinted as he looked to where she was pointing. “It’s some sort of living accommodation, a doctor’s residence I think. It’s the only one of its kind on the island as far as I know – certainly around the back of the asylum there are only the fields.”

  “But other staff must have lived on the island?” Louise said.

  “Probably, but it would have been in the main building, in a separate wing. Maybe if the doctor had a wife, a family, they were allocated the cottage, a home of their own.”

  “Have you ever explored inside?” she asked.

  “No, I… I haven’t.” Piero looked surprised, as if this was a revelation to him as well. “It’s always been the asylum that’s interested us I suppose.”

  “Because that’s where all the thrills are?” Rob’s voice was curt.

  “I… yes,” Piero replied. Clearly he’d decided there was no more use in lying.

  “Let’s go and have a look,” Louise decided.

  Despite Piero warning that they wouldn’t be able to go inside the building due to its advanced state of decay, Louise headed over. An animal could have dragged Kristina’s rucksack in there, it was an ideal lair, hidden and therefore undisturbed.

  Close up she could see it was indeed a cottage, its terracotta tiled roof caved in along with its chimney. The ground was very soft around the structure and consisted mainly of mud. Time and time again her feet sank into it and she had to work hard to yank them out, banishing the visions she’d had earlier of bodies lying beneath, waiting to claim her. At last they reached the front door, still intact although copious vines covered it, preventing any chance of entry that way at least. In the windows on either side, only lethal looking shards of glass remained. On one wall there was graffiti, but it seemed half-hearted.

  “We cannot get in,” Piero reiterated, shining his light over the structure.

  He was right and, if they couldn’t, how could an animal? Surely anything living and breathing would run the risk of impaling themselves trying to jump through a window. Even so, Louise suggested they shine the light in at various points, it was important to eliminate the cottage from their investigations.

  Both the men obliging, they peered into rooms long since abandoned and devoid of anything except vegetation, much of which looked withered as if the air inside was too rotten to sustain any form of life. As she suspected it would, the search proved fruitless. They had one more window to look through, on the far side of the house and not easy to reach as trees blocked their path, one of which had probably fallen during a storm long ago, and part of the reason why the roof had caved in. Refusing to be put off, she cleared the way as much as possible with her hands. Rob and Piero copied her, both of them swearing on occasions as branches that felt as sharp as any glass shard dug into them or they stumbled over a root. Kristina hung back, again biting at her nails. They weren’t so manicured now.

  “Shine the light in there,” Louise instructed, wondering if it would make any difference. It was so dark inside she half fancied no light could ever be strong enough to penetrate it. But the torches worked well enough, both of them doing a sufficient job of lighting up the interior. When they did, she wished her initial fancy had held true – what was in the room didn’t bear illumination. There were bones, so many bones, piled on top of each other to form a haphazard pyramid, some ivory white, others brown and crumbling – a mixture of old and new – the plague victims and the patients? On top of the pyramid was a skull, staring at them, at her in particular. With sightless eyes, she thought. It’s staring at me with sightless eyes. It was grinning too as if it was finding this whole situation amusing. She only just stopped herself from screaming at the macabre sight, a small part of her, a part that remained stubbornly rational, worried about upsetting Kristina further. Behind her she heard sharp intakes of breath but nothing more – the men were being considerate too.

  “What is it?” Kristina called, realising that something was wrong despite their efforts to conceal it from her. “What have you found?”

  “N… nothing,” Piero returned. “We are still searching.”

  The quake in his voice told Louise he hadn’t seen this sight before, that it was as much a surprise to him as it was to them.

  Her eyes travelled from the skull to the wall beside it – again not really wanting to see but knowing she had no choice. That she was meant to see.

  There were words written on the wall, dozens and dozens of them, some running into each other, some more spaced out. Wiping roughly at her nose with the back of her hand, she read words scribed not in Italian but in English – ‘get out’ imprinted in large letters and in small letters, from top to bottom, filling the entire width. And then something different: two more words, precise and neat as opposed to scrawled, on a downwards angle and in capitals: GO HOME. As alarming as she found that, what alarmed her more was the something lying at the base of the wall, on the floor, as if ‘Go Home’ was an arrow, directing her gaze. It was a scrap of material, frayed at the edges – and it was white.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  As all three stood and stared, there was a noise overhead, a loud clap of thunder that made them all jump. Rain started to fall – big fat drops that would quickly soak them to the bone if they di
dn’t react and get out of it.

  “Quick, to the asylum!” Piero shouted.

  Galvanised into action, she, Rob and Piero started to scramble over the fallen tree and the vine-like vegetation back towards Kristina. She looked shocked at the sudden change of weather too, her eyes wide as she stared upwards. It seemed to take an age to reach her but, when they did, all four turned as if they were one and ran through the grounds, over the sodden, sinking earth, towards the main building that was waiting so patiently. Although it was the last thing Louise wanted to do, to go back in there, be confined, they had no choice – they needed shelter or they’d risk hypothermia remaining in cold, wet clothes all night. All night? She’d resigned herself to that fact too.

  In the office, she grabbed the torch from Rob and scrutinised the room again, half expecting the furniture to be upturned this time, some ghostly figure responsible, but it hadn’t moved a second time. Whether that was a comfort or not, Louise couldn’t decide.

  “Bloody hell, your weather!” Rob spoke as though the Italians were solely responsible for such contrary elements. “Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse.”

  Piero stood shivering. “We must start searching.”

  “Then we split up as I’ve already suggested,” Rob replied. “It’s more efficient.”

  “No, please.” Kristina was still insistent. “It is so much safer to stick together.”

  “It’s just a building,” Rob argued but Kristina was having none of it.

  “It’s a dangerous building!”

  Rob exhaled loudly, raking one hand through his hair as he did so. All of them were standing apart, in various poses of frustration, Kristina still picking at her nails, Piero pinching the bridge of his nose. As for Louise, so many emotions were fighting for a stronghold: confusion, despair, acceptance and sympathy – the figures in the mist, how they clung to the veiled lady, it moved her. And, after the initial shock, the writing on the wall in the cottage had had the same effect; it seemed like such a desperate act.

  Earlier in the day there’d been a crash from upstairs but now there came a scraping sound, like someone dragging one of the metal beds across the floor.

  They all heard it but Kristina was the first to react. She almost leapt across the distance to her husband. “There’s someone here. There is!”

  “There’s no one,” Piero assured her. “If there was, their boat would still be outside.”

  “Jesus wept, this is ridiculous!” exclaimed Rob. “I’ll go and see.”

  Louise blocked his path. “Don’t.” Inclining her head, she whispered, “Kristina.”

  The other woman was crying again, one hand wiping at her eyes, the other still holding onto Piero. “My rucksack, where’s my rucksack? Who took it, who’d do such a thing?”

  Piero started speaking to her in Italian, his voice very low and very fast. Louise looked at Rob, who was looking back at her, his nostrils flaring. Whatever the sound had been, whoever had made it, it had been brief. Silence descended. But it wouldn’t last long, she was sure of it. There’d be other noises, other sights to endure. According to her watch, it was a little before six – there was still so much night to go.

  Piero continued to talk to Kristina, comforting her Louise presumed, but Rob clearly thought otherwise. He stepped forward, not a gesture of solidarity, there was a definite threat behind it. “Talk in English,” he demanded. “So we can all understand what you’re saying.”

  Piero looked stunned by Rob’s request. “My wife is upset.”

  “Talk in English,” Rob repeated. “I don’t want any secrets.”

  “Secrets?” Piero laughed but it was not the boom of earlier. “I don’t understand what you mean, of course there are no secrets.”

  Something in the way he said it made Louise frown, his voice had risen slightly, but that could just be nerves. Rob was a tall man, he was broad, and Piero, although not slight, was smaller. And Rob was angry, obviously angry. He’d had enough of being on the island, but hadn’t they all? It didn’t do to lose your cool, not in this kind of place. Whatever was here would feed on such emotions and grow stronger. All the books she’d read on the subject in the past, be they fact or fiction, all the films she’d seen, suggested that. Anger, panic and hatred woke things from slumber, things that should remain asleep.

  “Rob,” she said, “let’s get on with our search. The rucksack’s not outside as far as we can see. But it must be here somewhere. It can’t just disappear, that’s not possible.”

  Even as she said the words, she wasn’t sure she believed them. At this moment anything seemed possible. They’d entered into some sort of twilight zone in which the ‘Italian Dream’ had fast become a nightmare, and they the star players. The world was still out there, the normal world, the world she knew, but it was so far away. She clenched her teeth, screwed her eyes shut. Stay calm. She’d try but the others weren’t faring so well.

  Rob was much closer to Piero and Kristina now, standing in front of them. “Louise is right, it’s impossible that a bag could just disappear. Are you sure you haven’t hidden it, that it’s not part of your game?”

  “Game?” The word ignited Piero. He forced Kristina’s hand from him and squared up to Rob. For a second Louise wanted to giggle, insanely giggle. He reminded her of a terrier, small and brave, but stupidly so, not realising his limitations – that in a battle between them the Rottweiler would always win. “You think I wanted this to happen, for the rucksack to disappear, that I planned it? It is an accident, just an accident.”

  “A convenient accident.”

  “What is convenient about it, Rob? I don’t want to be here any more than you do! Not after dark.” He flustered. “I admit it is a mistake we’ve made, a bad mistake and one that I… that we will learn from but there’s no point in arguing. Time is getting on.”

  “Then tell me where it is!”

  “I’ve told you, how many times must I tell you, I don’t know!”

  Kristina stepped forward, wrestled the torch from her husband and started shining it haphazardly around, the light jagged as it bounced off the walls. “It’s here,” she was muttering, “it has to be here.”

  “It’s not,” Rob sneered at her, “unless you’ve returned it behind our backs.”

  “Behind your backs?” Piero exploded. “When, Rob, when?”

  “Ughhh!” The sound that escaped Rob was guttural. “We need to fucking find it.”

  Louise interjected, “Rob, come on.”

  All eyes looked towards the doorway, to what lay beyond. It was so dark, so unknown. What if… whatever had been in the mist was now in the asylum, external walls no barrier to such an entity. What if it had drifted through cracks and windows and was now clothed in the gloom of the interior, something black instead of white and therefore harder to spot. Beings that moved, that writhed, that were reaching out, the veiled lady herself, whom she’d already seen upstairs, who seemed to be stalking her, following her from the alleys of Venice to the corridors of Poveglia.

  Go Home. If they wanted that to happen, they had no choice, they had to go deeper in, observing Kristina’s rule about safety in numbers, even if two of that number weren’t to be trusted. The dining room was their first port of call. On the alert for any other sounds, they left the office and trooped towards it, the four of them huddled together, forming a barrier against what might suddenly appear as the mist had appeared. Turning right again, they entered a large room, a few tables and chairs in it as well as plenty of rubble covering the floor and vegetation that had lost all its colour in the low light. Piero and Rob were back in charge of the torches, shining them into every corner. There was a scurrying but before Kristina had a chance to react, Piero was on it.

  “Topi,” he said, “it’s just mice.”

  Mice? He was playing it down. It’d be rats, altogether more sinister creatures.

  There was nothing in the dining room, or in the day lounge except more empty chairs. The sight of them cau
sing Louise to shudder, it was easy to imagine patients still occupying them, some sitting perfectly still, others rocking back and forth whilst gazing fixedly ahead – spending hours that way, days, weeks and years. She was relieved to leave and enter the laundry room but her relief was short lived.

  As the men shone their torches into the mangles, Louise stumbled into something: it made a clattering sound as it fell to the floor. She looked down, half knowing, half fearing what it might be. She swung round, glared at the others, at Piero and Kristina in particular.

  “What are they doing there?”

  The other three came hurrying over.

  “What is it?” There was a note of hope in Rob’s voice. “Have you found the rucksack?”

  “It’s bones, more damned bones.”

  Rob looked crestfallen. “They weren’t here before.”

  “No,” agreed Louise, “I’m aware of that.”

  “More bones?” asked Kristina. “What do you mean?”

  Louise had to remind herself that Kristina hadn’t seen what was in the last room in the cottage, that she’d kept her distance. Deliberately? She turned to her, turned on her if she were honest. “Did you do this, put these here, you and Piero?”