The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  “What is this?” Francis asked. “Marzio, explain yourself.”

  “Permesso.” Marzio bowed stiffly. “We gather in honour.”

  “In honour of what, blast it?” Francis asked. “For the duration of our stay, I am the master of this house and I will give you permission or otherwise.”

  Tall as he was, Marzio seemed to cower.

  Francis moved to the sitting room and she followed.

  In the room, the strangers dropped their hands and turned with expressions of contrition or contempt. Gathered on the table in front of them, Francesca saw something familiar. A child’s drawings of Venice.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked at once.

  Marzio turned to her stiffly.

  “The family,” he began, “the Lombardi, in their absence, we may borrow this room.”

  “They allow it?”

  Marzio gestured with his hands, but he didn’t quite nod.

  “You should know your place,” Francis said.

  “These drawings,” Francesca said. “These are the ones I found in the wardrobe.”

  To her horror, she felt the eyes of all the servants turn to her. The mournful look on the face of the old woman changed to something between wonder and horror. Her hands rose, twisted together in the shape of prayer.

  “You see?” the woman asked. “You see?”

  Francis interrupted, “I see that whatever you’re doing here is unchristian. You must desist at once. Kindly take your leave!”

  At first the gathered people sat still like they’d collapsed there, wilting in the heat.

  But then the oldest man stirred. He rose to his feet, bobbing his head and uttering strange, accented apologies. The others followed, making their way to the front door of the house where Marzio bowed to each of them as they left.

  “Francis,” Francesca whispered, “They were trying to speak to the dead child.”

  “Oh, hang the child,” Francis muttered.

  She reeled. “Francis!”

  His face twisted and something rose in his eyes, hot like the air. But then he righted himself with an effort.

  “I’m sorry, cherie,” he said. “The fever. And the servants! Where did Marzio go? I would speak with him first.”

  “I didn’t see. Perhaps to the kitchens. Go,” Francesca pushed him. “I’ll take some air.”

  “Not alone.”

  “Knaus will accompany me,” she said.

  “See that he does. A house empty so long they think they own it, not just serve it. It’s not decent.”

  Francesca wanted to say that the house wasn’t empty, that even without the fact of the servants, something moved in here, wetly, through the hot air.

  But she let Francis disappear towards the kitchen and watched his candle narrowing in the darkness of the vast hall.

  Knaus had remained behind, putting out the lamps with a pronounced methodicalness. Darkness took over the room, spreading with slow certainty.

  Francesca took a seat in the room where the drawings of the unknown child still lay on the table. “Knaus?”

  “Si?”

  “Your name isn’t Italian. You’re from Austria?” she asked.

  “My family,” he shrugged.

  He shrugged like an Italian, she couldn’t help thinking, that careless grace she was growing used to.

  “These drawings are very old.” She indicated where they lay on the table.

  “Si, they are from a long time ago.”

  “Do you know of a ghost in this house?”

  Knaus chuckled. “Only one?”

  “Then there are ghosts here?”

  “This is Venice.” He gave that shrug again.

  “Yes. This is,” she said. “Who were you trying to contact?”

  Knaus frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “During the séance, what spirit were you hoping to raise?”

  His frown lifted into something that looked like a grin. “You think we contact the dead?”

  He threw his head back and laughed.

  “Then, what?” Francesca insisted.

  “That is not for me to say,” he grinned. “How is this you say, a séance?”

  “What, then?” Francesca gestured with both hands towards the tall ceiling. “Wait, don’t tell me. That is not for you to say.”

  Knaus might have shrugged again, but by then she was on her feet.

  “Come with me,” she said, with as much insistence as she could manage.

  Knaus looked at her as if she were mad.

  But he followed when she marched to the front door, through the dark, the candles neglected on the sitting room table. She pulled open the heavy door and stepped out, and turned once to make sure he followed.

  She found the old couple boarding a gondola. From this distance it looked like a floating coffin on the dark waters of il Canalaso.

  She rushed towards them, crying out in whatever Italian she could manage. “Aiuto!”

  It wasn’t the right word. She pulled at Knaus’ sleeve and urged him forward.

  The old man in the gondola only looked confused, but the woman with the sad eyes, she stopped and watched and waited until Francesca joined them at the water’s edge.

  “I should like to know,” Francesca breathed, “about the child.”

  “The child?” the old man muttered.

  She could feel Knaus’ stare burning into her back. Away from the overheated rooms of the Lombardi house and the overheated salon of Contessa Rossi, she didn’t feel so afraid. Outside where the air moved and she could breathe at last. The Ponte di Rialto sat in canopied splendour across the Grand Canal. The breeze cooled her skin, soothing the strange ideas the house had put into her head.

  The gondoliere spoke to Knaus in rapid, staccato Italian. Too fast for Francesca to understand.

  She clambered into the gondola, feeling it rock under her feet. It was lacquered black, like they all were save for the official boats of the papacy. The small cabin where the old couple now sat was embossed with curlicues and shapes like swirling vines. Thin blinds let in slants of light across the couple’s faces.

  She turned to Knaus. “Please tell signore il gondoliere that I should like to be returned here when we deliver this couple to their home. And I will pay him handsomely.”

  Knaus sneered, but he spoke to il gondoliere. From what she could gather, the man seemed to agree.

  They slid through the canal and the dark night. Francesca felt the air swell around her, cool and smooth, but still dense with seawater.

  She settled into the rock of the boat. The push as the gondoliere levered the oar into the water from the stern was soothing, a steady press of boat through water with the night-calmed city around her.

  Most houses featured a window or two where light still showed, but they seemed stilled, their broad facades and evenly-spaced windows calmer than the day. Even the spires didn’t pierce, and the arches only beckoned. She realized she could surrender to this Venice, this softer place of night and dark.

  “Il mio nome è Francesca,” she said.

  “Signore Neri,” said the old man, “e Signora.”

  Francesca felt her way forward, as much into the language as the topic. “Tell me about the child.”

  The couple exchanged a glance.

  For a long while, no one spoke. Francesca thought of Contessa Rossi’s stories. She thought she should like to pay the woman back with stories of her own.

  “I found drawings,” she prompted, “in a child’s hand. Drawings of Venice. What do you know about them? Were they your child’s?”

  The couple was silent, immobile as stone. As if they had been painted to the inside of the lacquered cabin.

  “We used to work for the Lombardi,” the old woman said at last.

  Her voice issued hollowly from the cabin. The light from the blinds lit her brown cheeks and left her eyes dark.

  “Yes?” Francesca asked.

  “Our daughter would play in the rooms of the Lomba
rdi. They indulged her. We thought they were . . . kind.”

  “Certo,” Francesca said. “Where is she now, your child?”

  “She is lost.”

  The old woman’s voice broke and with it, something inside Francesca seemed to break, too.

  “I lost a child, too,” she said, in earnestness. Venice, she thought, could have all her secrets. “My child died.”

  Above her the sky was bright with stars, and the water dark at her sides.

  The old woman said, “She did not die.”

  “Excusez-moi?”

  The old woman leaned forward, out of the cabin and into the light. Her hair was silver and dark grey, and the lamp that swung from the bow of the gondola lit her face into masks of the carnevale.

  She gave Francesca a piercing stare. “Our daughter did not die. She was taken from us.”

  “Ah!” Francesca said. “Is it so? What took her?”

  She thought perhaps plague or cholera had claimed the girl, perhaps this was some great family tragedy from which the Neri, servants of the Lombardi, had never recovered. She thought, too, she could repay Contessa Rossi handsomely with this story.

  The old woman continued, “She was bellissima. All who saw her could not resist. And so, they took her from us.”

  “They?”

  “The Lombardi,” she said.

  “The . . . ?”

  “The family,” the old man interrupted, “who own the house you stay in. They took our nipotina to raise as their own.”

  “No!”

  The couple only nodded, their expressions forlorn.

  “But then,” Francesca hesitated. “Why does she haunt the house?”

  The couple reeled and turned to each other, their hands entwining in a motion that was practiced and perfect. Light bounced on the lacquered black finish either side of them, light slid along the carvings of vines that looked like serpents.

  “Haunt the house?” the old man said. “She does not! She lives.”

  “But I was told a child haunts the house.”

  “Her memories, perhaps?” The wife explained. “They haunt all of us.”

  Francesca tried to understand. “The family, The Lombardi . . . they took her alive, then?”

  “Si.”

  It seemed so evil, but an evil so much more mundane than Francesca had expected. “Where is she now, your little girl?”

  The woman gestured as if it were all the same to her. “She is grown to a woman in Innsbruck. But to us, she will always be our lost nipotina.”

  “Ah.” Francesca was still. “But it’s not the same. Non, it is not the same at all. To lose a daughter to a different life, and not to death.”

  She was ashamed of her disappointment. The child lived, after all. She lived.

  “My child died,” Francesca said. “She died.”

  Francesca wanted to explain that a child being raised in wealth and the semblance of whatever honour the Lombardi could bestow, that was not a child who had died. She was not truly lost as long as she still lived.

  But when she thought of all those lost children, the ones stolen from Italy to beg, the children taken and dead, she wasn’t sure herself if that was true. Too many children never found their ways home.

  She saw now that to a parent, any missing child was a loss that broke them in half.

  The old man eased back into the cabin, waving a dismissive hand in Francesca’s direction. “Your child was chosen by God to return to Heaven.”

  Francesca didn’t reply. She couldn’t. Was the cruelty of the Lombardi anywhere near as bad as the cruelty of God?

  Francesca blinked away tears. She caught the gondoliere frowning at her, so she turned to watch the progress of the houses and the people making their passeggiare in the lamplit streets.

  “So, there is no ghost?” she asked softly.

  Signore Neri let out a noise that might have been a sigh of disgust. “You long for ghosts? Life is hard enough.”

  “Life is very hard,” she corrected him. “So I would like to know, for sure . . . if there is something more. For our children, at the very least.”

  No one replied.

  The gondoliere made a sharp left into a canal.

  They drifted past a white house with red roof and a cluster of short trees, their foliage black in the evening light, limned with moonlight at their untidy tops. The gondoliere pulled his boat to a halt beside a modest square.

  The old couple moved to depart. Signore Neri alighted first, so he could turn and offer a hand to his wife.

  Signora Neri leaned forward and squeezed Francesca’s wrist. “You must leave the house. Bad things happen there. Cruel things.”

  Francesca felt a hollow open up in her stomach. She nodded and looked away quickly so the old woman wouldn’t see her cry.

  She heard the Signora heave herself from the gondola and felt the sway of the narrow boat as the other woman left.

  Francesca did not watch them go.

  The canal was too narrow to turn in, so the gondoliere navigated backwards to the entrance where it joined il Canalaso. He gestured at Francesca, almost like he was waving her away.

  “You leave here,” he said.

  “I do not,” she replied. “The understanding was to return to where you collected me.”

  “You leave here,” he repeated, his voice neither insistent nor harsh.

  Francesca made to argue. She’d had enough of the lack of respect in this city. But two men lumbered towards the gondola, greeting the gondoliere like an old friend. They stepped into the gondola, sending it rocking, and only then did they seem to catch sight of Francesca.

  “You travel to Murano?” one asked.

  “No, I return to il Ponte di Rialto,” Francesca corrected him. She tried to keep the alarm out of her voice.

  “It is the other direction,” the second man said.

  “We had an agreement—” she began.

  The gondoliere waved her off. “Not with me! And not with your manservant, Knaus.”

  Francesca edged forward from the cabin of the gondola. If needs must, she could walk from here, back to the Lombardi house and the savage heat it trapped inside. But she had to get out now. If they took her to the island of Murano, there would only be the gondoliere to return her.

  She stood and made for the embankment, ignoring the hand of the man who tried to help her alight.

  They sniggered as she tripped and nearly fell. A hand reached out to shove her higher up the embankment.

  With a splash the gondoliere pushed off.

  Francesca watched them go. She stood under the darkness of the trees and tried to quell the anger that rose.

  This would never happen in France! Never would a young woman alone be dumped onto a dark and empty street.

  And then she realized that everyone who’d been out walking had, as if by mutual agreement, disappeared to their houses. The windows here were dark and empty, the houses looked abandoned like toys floating in a dark bath. She shivered despite the heat.

  The canal where the Neri couple had exited was between her and home, and there was no bridge. Even had there been a bridge, the house on the other corner took up the whole block. There was no place to walk. It was the same when she tried to move from the trees and along the canal to her right. Everywhere she was blocked her.

  Francis often spoke of how easy it was to lose oneself in the serpentine streets of Venice. Now she knew the truth of it. The only direction she could take was away from home, in the hopes she might find another bridge like the Rialto to carry her over to the other side and then, hopefully, back to a familiar safety.

  She marched as fast as she could in the wrong direction, looking for a way back. She had no idea where she was, had never travelled this far alone. The houses that had looked so cheerful in the daylight now loomed tall, almost bending beneath the dark sky.

  It was quiet, and her footsteps were too loud against the paved embankment. She began to tiptoe, watching her feet.

/>   “Aiuto!” someone called.

  Francesca froze.

  The voice came again. Aiuto! Aiuto! Someone was calling for help. Softly, like they were far away. The sound echoed off the water and stone of Venice.

  “Hello?”

  Aiuto!

  Francesca froze. The sound was coming from the canal she’d just left. She turned, but saw nothing except the shadows of the trees, almost solid under the moonlight.

  The voice was fading, but something even worse than that occurred to her then. The voice was the voice of the child.

  She stood, listening for it over her heavy pulse. The night was silent, even the faint breeze along il Canalaso seemed to have died completely.

  Aiuto!

  It wasn’t a voice, she realized.

  It was a group of voices, crying in unison.

  It wasn’t an echo. It was children.

  “Where are you?” she cried.

  She ran along the embankment, pulling at her skirts to free her knees, but even then she had a tottering gait, the dress clinging to her damp skin. She ran away from the sounds of the cries, away from home. She almost cried out herself, but she was afraid of rousing whatever was behind the blank Venetian glass of the windows around her.

  She slipped, and skidded over the embankment.

  She hit the canal with a splash and for a moment the moon was obscured by dark water. It was warm, warmer even than the air. Warm like something alive. Long skirts carried her down and she gulped water.

  She kicked off her thin shoes and grabbed for a mooring sunken deep in the canal. She hauled herself up.

  The stars danced in blurred patterns above her. She kept her head up, out of the water.

  Something in the dark canal seemed to wrap around her, pinning her green dress to her body. Something hooked around her ankles, something pulled on her toes and knees and dragged her down.

  Something was in the water with her, its small hands pulling her under.

  “Help!” she called. She choked and coughed and spat sour water. “Help!”

  No one was there to help her. It was as if the whole city of Venice had emptied out.

  With a lunge, she made for the embankment and dragged herself, dripping, onto land. Her elbows shook as she raised herself from the water.