The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Dr Stein did not tell his wife what he had seen. He sat in the kitchen long into the evening, and was still there, warmed by the embers of the fire and reading in Leonardo’s Treatise on the Replication of Motion by the poor light of a tallow candle, when the knock at the door came. It was just after midnight. Dr Stein picked up the candle and went out, and saw his wife standing in the door to the bedroom.

  “Don’t answer it,” she said. With one hand she clutched her shift to her throat; with the other she held a candle. Her long black hair, streaked with grey, was down to her shoulders.

  “This isn’t Lodz, Belita,” Dr Stein said, perhaps with unnecessary sharpness. “Go back to bed. I will deal with this.”

  “There are plenty of Prussians here, even so. One spat at me the other day. Abraham says that they blame us for the body-snatching, and it’s the doctors they’ll come for first.”

  The knocking started again. Husband and wife both looked at the door. “It may be a patient,” Dr Stein said, and pulled back the bolts.

  The rooms were on the ground floor of a rambling house that faced onto a narrow canal. An icy wind was blowing along the canal, and it blew out Dr Stein’s candle when he opened the heavy door. Two city guards stood there, flanking their captain, Henry Gorrall.

  “There’s been a body found,” Gorrall said in his blunt, direct manner. “A woman we both saw this very day, as it happens. You’ll come along and tell me if it’s murder.”

  The woman’s body had been found floating in the Rio di Noale. “An hour later,” Gorrall said, as they were rowed through the dark city, “and the tide would have turned and taken her out to sea, and neither you or I would have to chill our bones.”

  It was a cold night indeed, just after St Agnes’ Eve. An insistent wind off the land blew a dusting of snow above the roofs and prickly spires of Venice. Fresh ice crackled as the gondola broke through it, and larger pieces knocked against its planking. The few lights showing in the facades of the palazzi that lined the Grand Canal seemed bleary and dim. Dr Stein wrapped his ragged loden cloak around himself and asked, “Do you think it murder?”

  Gorrall spat into the black, icy water. “She died for love. That part is easy, as we witnessed the quarrel this very afternoon. She wasn’t in the water long, and still reeks of booze. Drank to get her courage up, jumped. But we have to be sure. It could be a bungled kidnapping, or some cruel sport gone from bad to worse. There are too many soldiers with nothing to do but patrol the defences and wait for a posting in Cyprus.”

  The drowned girl had been laid out on the pavement by the canal, and covered with a blanket. Even at this late hour, a small crowd had gathered, and when a guard twitched the blanket aside at Dr Stein’s request, some of the watchers gasped.

  It was the girl he had seen that afternoon, the perfumer’s daughter. The soaked dress which clung to her body was white against the wet flags of the pavement. Her long black hair twisted in ropes about her face. There was a little froth at her mouth, and blue touched her lips. Dead, there was nothing about her that reminded Dr Stein of his daughter.

  Dr Stein manipulated the skin over the bones of her hand, pressed one of her fingernails, closed her eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Tenderly, he covered her with the blanket again. “She’s been dead less than an hour,” he told Gorrall. “There’s no sign of a struggle, and from the flux at her mouth I’d say it’s clear she drowned.”

  “Killed herself most likely, unless someone pushed her in. The usual reason, I’d guess, which is why her boyfriend ran off to sea. Care to make a wager?”

  “We both know her story. I can find out if she was with child, but not here.”

  Gorrall smiled. “I forget that you people don’t bet.”

  “On the contrary. But in this case I fear you’re right.”

  Gorrall ordered his men to take the body to the city hospital. As they lifted it into the gondola, he said to Dr Stein, “She drank to get courage, then gave herself to the water, but not in this little canal. Suicides favour places where their last sight is a view, often of a place they love. We’ll search the bridge at the Rialto – it is the only bridge crossing the Grand Canal, and the tide is running from that direction – but all the world crosses there, and if we’re not quick, some beggar will have carried away her bottle and any note she may have left. Come on, doctor. We need to find out how she died before her parents turn up and start asking questions. I must have something to tell them, or they will go out looking for revenge.”

  If the girl had jumped from the Rialto bridge, she had left no note there – or it had been stolen, as Gorrall had predicted. Gorrall and Dr Stein hurried on to the city hospital, but the body had not arrived. Nor did it. An hour later, a patrol found the gondola tied up in a backwater. One guard was dead from a single sword-cut to his neck. The other was stunned, and remembered nothing. The drowned girl was gone.

  Gorrall was furious, and sent out every man he had to look for the body-snatchers. They had balls to attack two guards of the night watch, he said, but when he had finished with them they’d sing falsetto under the lash on the galleys. Nothing came of his enquiries. The weather turned colder, and an outbreak of pleurisy meant that Dr Stein had much work in the hospital. He thought no more about it until a week later, when Gorrall came to see him.

  “She’s alive,” Gorrall said. “I’ve seen her.”

  “A girl like her, perhaps.” For a moment, Dr Stein saw his daughter, running towards him, arms widespread. He said, “I don’t make mistakes. There was no pulse, her lungs were congested with fluid, and she was as cold as the stones on which she lay.”

  Gorrall spat. “She’s walking around dead, then. Do you remember what she looked like?”

  “Vividly.”

  “She was the daughter of a perfumer, one Filippo Rompiasi. A member of the Great Council, although of the 2,500 who have that honour, I’d say he has about the least influence. A noble family so long fallen on hard times that they have had to learn a trade.”

  Gorrall had little time for the numerous aristocracy of Venice, who, in his opinion, spent more time scheming to obtain support from the Republic than playing their part in governing it.

  “Still,” he said, scratching at his beard and looking sidelong at Dr Stein, “it’ll look very bad that the daughter of a patrician family walks around after having been pronounced dead by the doctor in charge of her case.”

  “I don’t recall being paid,” Dr Stein said.

  Gorrall spat again. “Would I pay someone who can’t tell the quick from the dead? Come and prove me wrong and I’ll pay you from my own pocket. With a distinguished surgeon as witness, I can draw up a docket to end this matter.”

  The girl was under the spell of a mountebank who called himself Dr Pretorious, although Gorrall was certain that it wasn’t the man’s real name. “He was thrown out of Padua last year for practising medicine without a licence, and was in jail in Milan before that. I’ve had my eye on him since he came ashore on a Prussian coal barge this summer. He vanished a month ago, and I thought he’d become some other city’s problem. Instead, he went to ground. Now he proclaims this girl to be a miraculous example of a new kind of treatment.”

  There were many mountebanks in Venice. Every morning and afternoon there were five or six stages erected in the Piazza San Marco for their performances and convoluted orations, in which they praised the virtues of their peculiar instruments, powders, elixirs and other concoctions. Venice tolerated these madmen, in Dr Stein’s opinion, because the miasma of the nearby marshes befuddled the minds of her citizens, who besides were the most vain people he had ever met, eager to believe any promise of enhanced beauty and longer life.

  Unlike the other mountebanks, Dr Pretorious was holding a secret court. He had rented a disused wine store at the edge of the Prussian Fondaco, a quarter of Venice where ships were packed tightly in the narrow canals and every other building was a merchant’s warehouse. Even walking beside a captain of the city guard, Dr S
tein was deeply uneasy there, feeling that all eyes were drawn to the yellow star he must by law wear, pinned to the breast of his surcoat. There had been an attack on the synagogue just the other day, and pigshit had been smeared on the mezuzah fixed to the doorpost of a prominent Jewish banker. Sooner or later, if the body-snatchers were not caught, a mob would sack the houses of the wealthiest Jews on the excuse of searching out and destroying the fabled Golem which existed nowhere but in their inflamed imaginations.

  Along with some fifty others, mostly rich old women and their servants, Gorrall and Dr Stein crossed a high arched bridge over a dark, silently running canal, and, after paying a ruffian a soldo each for the privilege, entered through a gate into a courtyard lit by smoky torches. Once the ruffian had closed and locked the gate, two figures appeared at a tall open door that was framed with swags of red cloth.

  One was a man dressed all in black, with a mop of white hair. Behind him a woman in white lay half-submerged in a kind of tub packed full of broken ice. Her head was bowed, and her face hidden by a fall of black hair. Gorrall nudged Dr Stein and said that this was the girl.

  “She looks dead to me. Anyone who could sit in a tub of ice and not burst to bits through shivering must be dead.”

  “Let’s watch and see,” Gorrall said, and lit a foul-smelling cigarillo.

  The white-haired man, Dr Pretorious, welcomed his audience, and began a long rambling speech. Dr Stein paid only a little attention, being more interested in the speaker. Dr Pretorious was a gaunt, bird-like man with a clever, lined face and dark eyes under shaggy brows which knitted together when he made a point. He had a habit of stabbing a finger at his audience, of shrugging and laughing immodestly at his own boasts. He did not, Dr Stein was convinced, much believe his speech, a curious failing for a mountebank.

  Dr Pretorious had the honour, it appeared, of introducing the true Bride of the Sea, one recently dead but now animated by an ancient Egyptian science. There was much on the long quest he had made in search of the secret of this ancient science, and the dangers he had faced in bringing it here, and in perfecting it. He assured his audience that as it had conquered death, the science he had perfected would also conquer old age, for was that not the slow victory of death over life? He snapped his fingers, and, as the tub seemed to slide forward of its own accord into the torchlight, invited his audience to see for themselves that this Bride of the Sea was not alive.

  Strands of kelp had been woven into the drowned girl’s thick black hair. Necklaces layered at her breast were of seashells of the kind that anyone could pick from the beach at the mouth of the lagoon.

  Dr Pretorious pointed to Dr Stein, called him out. “I see we have here a physician. I recognize you, sir. I know the good work that you do at the Pietà, and the wonderful new surgical techniques you have brought to the city. As a man of science, would you do me the honour of certifying that this poor girl is at present not living?”

  “Go on,” Gorrall said, and Dr Stein stepped forward, feeling both foolish and eager.

  “Please, your opinion,” Dr Pretorious said with an ingratiating bow. He added, sotto voce, “This is a true marvel, doctor. Believe in me.” He held a little mirror before the girl’s red lips, and asked Dr Stein if he saw any evidence of breath.

  Dr Stein was aware of an intense sweet, cloying odour: a mixture of brandy and attar of roses. He said, “I see none.”

  “Louder, for the good people here.”

  Dr Stein repeated his answer.

  “A good answer. Now, hold her wrist. Does her heart beat?”

  The girl’s hand was as cold as the ice from which Dr Pretorious lifted it. If there was a pulse, it was so slow and faint that Dr Stein was not allowed enough time to find it. He was dismissed, and Dr Pretorious held up the girl’s arm by the wrist and, with a grimace of effort, pushed a long nail though her hand.

  “You see,” he said with indecent excitement, giving the wrist a little shake so that the pierced hand flopped to and fro. “You see! No blood! No blood! Eh? What living person could endure such a cruel mutilation?”

  He seemed excited by his demonstration. He dashed inside the doorway, and brought forward a curious device, a glass bowl inverted on a stalk of glass almost as tall as he, with a band of red silk twisted inside the bowl and around a spindle at the bottom of the stalk. He began to work a treadle, and the band of silk spun around and around.

  “A moment,” Dr Pretorious said, as the crowd began to murmur. He glared at them from beneath his shaggy eyebrows as his foot pumped the treadle. “A moment, if you please. The apparatus must receive a sufficient charge.”

  He sounded flustered and out of breath. Any mountebank worth his salt would have had a naked boy painted in gilt and adorned with cherub wings to work the treadle, Dr Stein reflected, and a drum roll besides. Yet the curious amateurism of this performance was more compelling than the polished theatricality of the mountebanks of the Piazza San Marco.

  Gold threads trailed from the top of the glass bowl to a big glass jar half-filled with water and sealed with a cork. At last, Dr Pretorious finished working the treadle, sketched a bow to the audience – his face shiny with sweat – and used a stave to sweep the gold threads from the top of the glass bowl onto the girl’s face.

  There was a faint snap, as of an old glass broken underfoot at a wedding. The girl’s eyes opened and she looked about her, seeming dazed and confused.

  “She lives, but only for a few precious minutes,” Dr Pretorious said. “Speak to me, my darling. You are a willing bride to the sea, perhaps?”

  Gorrall whispered to Dr Stein, “That’s definitely the girl who drowned herself?” and Dr Stein nodded. Gorrall drew out a long silver whistle and blew on it, three quick blasts. At once, a full squad of men-at-arms swarmed over the high walls. Some of the old women in the audience started to scream. The ruffian in charge of the gate charged at Gorrall, who drew a repeating pistol with a notched wheel over its stock. He shot three times, the wheel ratcheting around as it delivered fresh charges of powder and shot to the chamber. The ruffian was thrown onto his back, already dead as the noise of the shots echoed in the courtyard. Gorrall turned and levelled the pistol at the red-cloaked doorway, but it was on fire, and Dr Pretorious and the dead girl in her tub of ice were gone.

  Gorrall and his troops put out the fire and ransacked the empty wine store. It was Dr Stein who found the only clue, a single broken seashell by a hatch that, when lifted, showed black water a few braccia below, a passage that Gorrall soon determined led out into the canal.

  Dr Stein could not forget the dead girl, the icy touch of her skin, her sudden start into life, the confusion in her eyes. Gorrall thought that she only seemed alive, that her body had been preserved perhaps by tanning, that the shine in her eyes was glycerine, the bloom on her lips pigment of the kind the apothecaries made of powdered beetles.

  “The audience wanted to believe it would see a living woman, and the flickering candles would make her seem to move. You’ll be a witness, I hope.”

  “I touched her,” Dr Stein said. “She was not preserved. The process hardens the skin.”

  “We keep meat by packing it in snow, in winter,” Gorrall said. “Also, I have heard that there are magicians in the far Indies who can fall into so deep a trance that they do not need to breathe.”

  “We know she is not from the Indies. I would ask why so much fuss was made of the apparatus. It was so clumsy that it seemed to me to be real.”

  “I’ll find him,” Gorrall said, “and we will have answers to all these questions.”

  But when Dr Stein saw Gorrall two days later, and asked about his enquiries into the Pretorious affair, the English captain shook his head and said, “I have been told not to pursue the matter. It seems the girl’s father wrote too many begging letters to the Great Council, and he has no friends there. Further than that, I’m not allowed to say.” Gorrall spat and said with sudden bitterness, “You can work here twenty-five years, Stein, and perhaps
they’ll make you a citizen, but they will never make you privy to their secrets.”

  “Someone in power believes Dr Pretorious’s claims, then.”

  “I wish I could say. Do you believe him?”

  “Of course not.”

  But it was not true, and Dr Stein immediately made his own enquiries. He wanted to know the truth, and not, he told himself, because he had mistaken the girl for his daughter. His interest was that of a doctor, for if death could be reversed, then surely that was the greatest gift a doctor could possess. He was not thinking of his daughter at all.

  His enquiries were first made amongst his colleagues at the city hospital, and then in the guild hospitals and the new hospital of the Arsenal. Only the director of the last was willing to say anything, and warned Dr Stein that the man he was seeking had powerful allies.

  “So I have heard,” Dr Stein said. He added recklessly, “I wish I knew who they were.”

  The director was a pompous man, placed in his position through politics rather than merit. Dr Stein could see that he was tempted to divulge what he knew, but in the end he merely said, “Knowledge is a dangerous thing. If you would know anything, start from a low rather than a high place. Don’t overreach yourself, doctor.”

  Dr Stein bridled at this, but said nothing. He sat up through the night, thinking the matter over. This was a city of secrets, and he was a stranger, and a Jew from Prussia to boot. His actions could easily be mistaken for those of a spy, and he was not sure that Gorrall could help him if he was accused. Gorrall’s precipitate attempt to arrest Dr Pretorious had not endeared him to his superiors, after all.