The Chamber of Ten

She hesitated, hand clutched tightly around the phone. If she let someone else into this craziness, what would happen? It already felt completely out of her control, but at least for the moment it was still between her and Nico. Intimate. Their problem and nobody else’s.

But she knew that was a lie. Their intimacy had been shattered, turned into a twisted mirror of itself. Whatever they were sharing now, it wasn’t natural, and it frightened her.

“It’s Nico,” she said. “He’s gone missing again. I … I don’t think he’s in his right mind, Dom. I’m afraid something terrible is going to happen.”

As she spoke the words, the water ambulance pulled up to the edge of the canal and two EMTs jumped out with their gear, hurrying toward the front door, the crowd clearing them a path.

“I’m afraid it may have happened already.”

The hand of a soldier…

The very idea was abhorrent to Nico, and he’d been trying his best to turn his mind away from what it might mean. But he was finding it difficult to concentrate. His thoughts were scattered, darting here and there, calling up images and pushing down recollections that could not be his. As one thought seemed to coalesce, another would stalk in and rip it to shreds. His head ached, his eyes throbbed, and he felt more apart from this city than he ever had before.

The thing inside him, though—Zanco Volpe—that felt very much at home. And he had to accept now that the presence lurking in the shadowy corners of his mind was not merely an echo. Somehow, it had will and purpose. Volpe’s ghost? Nico didn’t know. But he knew for certain this was more than psychic residue.

Nico was being steered and directed, his movements dictated by the subtlest commands from deep inside. From Volpe himself. Sometimes he thought he heard a voice—deep, guttural, and cruel—and other times it was like walking through a waking dream. He knew he was dreaming, but he had no control over where this dream took him. Volpe could usurp Nico’s consciousness, sometimes with only a thought or an urge, but other times blotting it out completely. Those were the blackouts, and they frightened Nico the most. Bad enough that Volpe could take him over, make him see through his own eyes without any control over his body, but the idea that he might come awake at any time to find himself having done something hideous made him sick.

What if he had killed the man in that apartment, where Il Conte Rosso had once lived? Christ, how do I stop this?

Leaving the old mansion he had struggled to fight against this loss of control, and for a while he had stumbled through the streets with the book clasped to his chest. He must have looked like a drunk, staggering into walls, talking to himself in a dialect he had only ever seen written in books. More than once he had come close to falling into a canal.

Maybe that would be for the best, he’d thought, and then that presence within had reared up and screamed, raging with anger at such a casual intimation of death. Nico had drawn back, terrified, and the landscape around him had changed, as if a panorama of yesterday was always just below the surface of his perception. For a time after that, Volpe had walked him through the city, and Nico had shivered in the dark, cool places of his mind.

Now it was Wednesday afternoon, and he was on his way to San Michele. Sitting in the small water taxi and watching the cemetery island draw closer, Nico could relax against Volpe’s influence. The old Venetian seemed to have eased back a little—

Does he need rest, is that why? I have to remember that. Have to file it away somewhere deep, where even Volpe can’t reach.

—which meant that Nico could close his eyes and try to rest as well. But only try. Because the darkness behind his eyelids was filled with the impact of fist against flesh, and flashes of terror in that man’s eyes.

The boat rocked from swell to swell as it crossed the Canale delle Fondamente Nuove. The driver sat rigid in his seat, eyes focused on their destination, and he had never once turned around to try to enter into conversation. Nico had only vague memories of boarding the boat—Volpe had been at the fore then, aiming his flesh-and-bone host in the direction he wanted—but he sensed fear in the man’s stance, and a nervous set to his shoulders. What did I say to him? he wondered, and almost laughed at the acceptance that had already settled in him. Acceptance that it was not only Nico in this body now, but someone else as well. Someone powerful and determined, whose aims were still clouded in mystery.

He rested the book on his knees. Sometime during the noon hour he’d entered a store and bought bottled water and sandwiches, and the book was now wrapped in the carrier bag. Its cover was unstained by the blood from his grazed hands, as if the bindings had absorbed the moisture after being so long hidden away. He had vague, flashing memories of huddling in doorways or beneath street lamps and trying to open the book, but each time that happened he’d woken somewhere else, with the book wrapped in the bag once again and Volpe’s presence a smiling, excited warmth in his mind. What else has he just found out? Nico knew that the volume must be both terrible and amazing. It belonged back at the university, where Geena and he could examine and translate it with the others in their team, but even the merest thought of trying to transport it there—

My book, my hands hold it, my eyes read it, my talents use it. Volpe’s voice was shockingly loud inside his head, and Nico gasped and stiffened against the fiberglass seat.

The boat’s pilot pushed on the throttle, breaking speed limits and risking his license. They reached one of the many jetties and the driver swung the boat expertly against its edge. He remained staring straight ahead as Nico climbed out, unnerved or perhaps even afraid.

“A tip,” Nico said, holding out a folded bill. He did not like having this effect on people.

Those thumps, that face filled with fear, the thunk! as he fell into the bathtub …

But buying forgiveness could never be that easy. The driver throttled away without taking the money, leaving a raging wash behind him as he aimed the boat back across the lagoon. Nico stood for a while watching him go, thinking of heaving the bagged book out over the water and letting it soak and sink, pages disintegrating, whatever arcane knowledge contained within—

Darkness struck like lightning.

He blinked, vision clearing, and found himself walking through the cemetery on the Island of the Dead. Bile rose in the back of his throat and an icy chill ran up his spine. Who the hell had Zanco Volpe been when he lived here in Venice? Who, and what? A psychic? A fucking magician?

No. Not magic. Nico wouldn’t believe that. Telepathy was only science not yet fully understood, psychic abilities were facets of the mind. Somehow Volpe’s mind had not died with his body, it still lingered, but that didn’t make him a ghost.

Yet even as this certainty filled him, a low, chuffing laughter rippled through the hidden places of his mind, as though Volpe stood behind some curtain like the Great and Powerful Oz, pulling levers, so sure of his control.

Nico clapped his hands to the sides of his head. Get out! he screamed, inside his own skull.

But the presence growing like a tumor in his brain was silent for once.

No words were necessary. Nico’s thoughts and Volpe’s were intimately intertwined now. He knew what was necessary, and why Volpe had directed him here to the island of San Michele: the hand of a soldier.

He’d been here before many times, because a man with his interest in the past could not resist the melancholy air of a cemetery. It was an incredible location, a cemetery island in a city of islands, a burial place for two hundred years. Two islands originally, the canal that separated them was filled in the early 1800s, and since then bodies had been ferried to the island on funeral gondolas, buried for a decade, and then exhumed and kept in huge banks of ossuaries. Space restrictions meant that being put to rest on San Michele was never a permanent arrangement.

Nico had always loved cemeteries, partly for the fascinating array of tombs and memorial stones, but also because of their timeless atmosphere. They kept their history on view, and every grave told a different story. A couple of times Geena had come with him, and he remembered standing together before Stravinsky’s tomb, holding her hand and leaning in so that their shoulders were touching. She’d told him …

I won’t think of her, he thought. He closed his eyes and came to a standstill,