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cataclysm, the rats which infested the waters had jumped onto me, running over my face and fouling me with their excrement.

I touched my face. It was true. I wiped myself with a sleeve, with my stomach turning in disgust.

'We were fortunate,' continued Atto, while he guided me around the island, 'for, between one scream and another, Ugonio and I managed to free ourselves of those disgusting beasts.'

'Rats, not beasties,' Ugonio promptly corrected him, while he gazed at a sort of cage which stood at our feet.

'Rats, mice, what you will! In short,' Abbot Melani finished explaining to me, 'we succeeded in bringing you and the bark out of that accursed sewer and finding our way into this underground lake. Fortunately, the three hooded ones did not attempt to follow us, and here we now are. Courage! You are not the only one to be cold. Just look at me: I too am soaked to the skin and covered in mud. Who could ever have imagined that I should ruin so many magnificent clothes in your wretched hostelry… But, come on now.'

He showed me the bizarre workshop which occupied the centre of the isle.

Two large blocks of white stone lay on the ground and served as pedestals for two tables of dark, rotting wood. Upon one, I discovered a great array of instruments, pincers, pointed little knives and long butchers' knives, scissors and various blades without handles; bringing our lantern closer, I noted that they were all caked with congealed blood, of all shades from carmine to black. The table stank horribly of rotting carcasses. Among the knives were a couple of large, half-consumed candles. Abbot Melani lit them.

I moved to the other table, upon which lay other more mysterious objects: a ceramic vase, complete with its lid, decorated all over and with a number of holes in its side, which seemed strangely familiar to me; a little phial of transparent glass, the appearance of which also did not seem new to me; next to it, a voluminous orange-coloured earthenware basin about an arm's length in diameter, in the middle of which stood a strange metal harness. It was a sort of tiny gallows.

Upon a broad tripod stood a vertical stem which ended in two curved arms which, using a screw, could be hooped and tightened at will so as to garrotte any unfortunate homunculus attached thereto. The dish was half-full of water, so that the little scaffold (which was no higher than a jug) was completely immersed, apart from the garrotting hoops at the apex.

On the ground, however, stood the most singular item of the whole mysterious elaboratory: an iron cage, as tall as a small child, and with rather close, narrow bars; as though it were designed to imprison minuscule, lively and volatile creatures like butterflies or canaries.

I noticed a movement within the cage and looked more closely. A tiny grey creature was, in its turn, looking at me, fearful and furtive in its nest: a little wooden box filled with straw.

Atto brought the lantern closer so that I could see what he and Ugonio had already discovered. Now the sole hostage of the isle, visibly scared by our presence, I descried with surprise was a poor little mouse.

Around the cage, piled one against the other, stood other sinister devices, which we examined with cautious disgust: urns filled with yellowish powder, drippings, secretions, bilious humours, phlegm and mire; little jars filled with animal (or human?) fat, all mixed with ashes, dead skin and other revolting elements; retorts, alembics, glass jars, a bucket full of bones, surely of animals (which Ugonio nevertheless examined meticulously), a lump of putrescent meat, the rotting peel of fruit, nutshells; a ceramic vase filled with locks of hair, another glass one containing a mass of little serpents preserved in spirits; a little fishing net, a brazier with its bellows, old firewood, half-rotten leaves of paper, coals and pebbles; finally, a pair of large, filthy gloves, a pile of greasy rags and other sordid and vile objects.

'It is a necromancer's den,' said I, thoroughly disconcerted.

'Worse still,' retorted Atto, while we still roamed around that mad and barbarous bazaar. 'It is the den of Dulcibeni, who lodges at your inn.'

'And whatever would he be doing here?' I exclaimed in horror.

'It is difficult to say. What is certain is that he is doing something to rats which does not find favour with Ugonio.'

The corpisantaro was still pensively observing the butcher's table, completely undisturbed by the mortiferous stench which emanated from it.

'He imprisons, he strangulates, he bistourifies. Thereafter, however, it surpasses all apprehension,' said he at length.

'Many thanks, thus far I too had come,' said Atto. 'First, he captures rats with his fishing net, then he puts them into cages. Then he uses them for some strange sorcery and he strangles them using that strange little gallows. Then he quarters them, and in the end I have no idea what else he may do,' said Atto with an acid smile. 'All, no doubt, in accordance with the pious prescriptions of the Jansenists of Port-Royal. The one in the cage must be the sole survivor.'

'Signor Atto,' said I, nauseated by this triumph of obscenity, 'does it not seem to you that there is something here which we have already seen?'

I pointed to the phial on the table, next to the miniature gallows.

By way of a reply, Atto extracted from his pocket an object whose existence I had practically forgotten. Unwrapping them from a handkerchief, he exhibited the fragments of the glass phial full of blood which we had found in gallery D. Then he compared them with the phial that was still intact.

'They are twins!' I remarked with surprise.

The broken phial was indeed identical, both in its form and in its greenish glass, to that which we had just found on the island.

'But we have already seen the decorated vase with a lid,' I insisted. 'It was, unless I am mistaken…'

'… in Tiracorda's secret room,' added Atto, coming to my help.

'There we have it!'

'No, no. You are thinking of the vase in which Dulcibeni was rummaging when his friend had gone to sleep. This one, however, is far bigger and the designs painted on it are far more intricate. The motif of the decoration and the holes in the sides are, I will allow, almost identical. Perhaps they are the work of the same artisan.'

The vase found on the islet also had lateral air-holes on it and was likewise decorated with pond plants and little swimming beings, probably tadpoles which played about between the leaves. I opened the lid, raised the vase to the lantern and immersed one finger: inside, there was greyish water, in which floated fragments of light white gauze; at the bottom, a little sand.

'Signor Atto, Cristofano told me that it is dangerous to handle rats during a time of pestilence.'

'I know. I thought of that, too, the other night, when we encountered those two moribund rats which were spitting blood. Clearly, our Dulcibeni feels no such fear.'

'The insula is not goodly, not justly, not sanitary,' warned Ugonio in grave tones.

'I know, you brute, we shall be leaving it very soon. Instead of lamenting, you could at least tell me where we are, seeing as it is thanks to you that we came here.'

'It is true,' said I to Ugonio. 'If, at the fork in the river, you had chosen to take the other branch, we should never have discovered Dulcibeni's island.'

'It is no opera of delight, in as where and what concerns the occupation exercisioned with great artifice upon the altar of the insula.'

Abbot Melani raised his eyes to heaven as though in extremities of distress. He fell silent for a moment, and suddenly cried out: 'Then will somebody tell me where and what the deuce this damned insula is!' and his cry caused the whole vast cavern to reverberate.

The echoes died away. Without opening his mouth, Ugonio invited me to follow him. He pointed at the back of the huge stone block which served as the base for one of the tables, and nodded his head with a grunt of satisfaction, as though in reply to Abbot Melani's challenge.

Atto joined us. On the stone, a high-relief was visible, in which the figures of men and animals could be distinguished. Melani drew even closer and began impatiently to explore the carved surface with his fingertips, as though to confirm what he had just seen with his eyes.

'Extraordinary. It is a Mithraeum,' he murmured. 'Look, look here. A textbook example! There is everything here, the sacrifice of the bull, the scorpion…'

Where we stood, there had once, long ago, been an underground temple in which the ancient Romans adored the god Mithras. He was a god originating in the Orient who had in Rome come to rival in popularity Apollo, who,