Whispering Bones (11 page)

She felt the air around her face shift slightly. The hair at her nape suddenly rose. Her pulse pounded loudly at her temples as she opened her eyes a fraction, unable to stop herself from looking. Rosaria almost screamed, but quickly shoved a fist into her open mouth to stifle it. She must not scream.

The pus-ridden corpse standing next to her bed leaned closer, staring at her with terrible, dead eyes.
Don’t make a sound
. She squeezed her eyes shut again, keeping her hand over her mouth to muffle the sound of her cries.

Rosaria did not fear death. What she did fear was that she would end up like those patients who had returned to her ward last week, their eyes blackened, unable to feed themselves. Whatever Rossi had done to them, it had the effect of turning them into imbeciles. No, she was not afraid to die, but the thought of ending up like those
disgraziati
was unbearable. Even though the minds of those poor unfortunates no longer functioned properly, Rosaria knew they could see them, too—the rotting corpses. She could not risk suffering the same fate, remaining alive, but unable to defend herself against the creatures stalking her.

A slimy finger ran along the hand covering her eyes and she pulled the covers over her head, burrowing down deep.
Don’t scream
.

* * * *

Rossi reviewed the daily charts for the nine patients on whom he’d conducted his new procedure last week. He mentally congratulated himself on the outstanding results. Out of the nine, eight had completely ceased behaving violently and no longer appeared to be suffering from paranoid delusions. Granted, their mental capacity had been somewhat diminished, in some cases by a substantial degree. In addition, three of them had become incontinent. On the whole, though, he felt they had effectively been cured by the procedure. The ninth, however, was another story. Carbone. His condition had, for some reason, worsened. He’d been transferred back to quarantine on the day following his surgery, after he’d begun ranting wildly and striking out at the attendants, posing even more of a threat than before. One of the attendants had been badly injured while trying to restrain him. He would need to keep Carbone under close observation before he submitted his report to the hospital officials in two weeks’ time.

Rossi glanced at his desk clock. With another half hour before his scheduled afternoon rounds, he decided he could use some fresh air and left to take a walk around the grounds.

The scorching mid-day heat prompted him to head for the grove of poplar trees beyond the field, a part of the island he’d not yet explored. As he made his way across the open area, his pace slowed. The undergrowth seemed to tug at his legs as he walked. He hadn’t traveled twenty paces into the field when dizziness assailed him. Rossi stopped and shook his head to dispel the lightheaded feeling that had come over him, but it only increased. Beads of perspiration formed on his forehead.

“
Hnh
. The heat.”

His vision doubled, trebled, and the next thing he knew, he was falling, the ground rushing up to meet his face.

When he opened his eyes, Rossi was lying face down in the field.

With a start, he got to his knees. Must’ve fainted... He leaned back, sitting heavily and bringing his knees up in front of him, then lowered his head to allow the dizziness still clouding his mind to pass. His clothes and hands were covered with the peculiar white, chalky soil of the island. He’d never seen whitish earth like this anywhere else, something which had struck him on more than one occasion since his arrival here. As he brushed the ashy dirt from his hands and trousers, a shadow fell across the ground in front of him. He glanced over his shoulder, thinking someone had come up behind him, but when he looked, no one was there. Facing forward again, he noticed the shadow had disappeared.

Rossi tried to stand, but before he could get his footing, he heard a low, rumbling sound and the earth beneath him suddenly shifted, like the onset of an earthquake. He put his hands out for balance, to keep from falling. A moment later the ground stilled again and became silent. He looked wildly around the field. What was happening here?

Fear swept over him, an overwhelming sense that if he remained here, something terrible would happen. Sweating profusely from the heat and the irrational terror which had seized him, he hurried away on shaky legs in the direction of his office. Seconds later, he was running, gripped by the certainty he would die if he didn’t get away from the field immediately.

When he reached the safety of his office, he closed and locked the door behind him. Rossi leaned against the heavy wood and waited for his breathing to return to normal. He hoped no one had seen him running from the field like a woman. Once he regained his composure, he removed his pocket watch from the vest he wore under his lab coat, stunned to see that almost three quarters of an hour had passed since he’d set out. What the devil had happened to him out there?

Knowing he was already late for his rounds with Fenelli, he hurriedly brushed the remaining dirt from his clothes, unlocked the door and left, doing his best to dispel the remnants of fear clinging to him. He purposely avoided looking at the field as he headed for the hospital.

Venice, Italy

Present Day

By the time they arrived back on the mainland, some of Anna’s apprehension had dissipated. She and Alejandro stepped off the boat into the drizzly rain and made their way to the square, where they would part ways to return to their hotels.

“I’ll meet you at the dock at nine tomorrow, okay?” she said to him before setting off.

Alejandro called her back, and she turned around.

“I was wondering...” He looked awkwardly at her. “I was wondering if you’d like to join me for dinner tonight,” he said. “Truth is, I hate dining alone.”

The idea of spending the evening alone certainly held no appeal, not after having seen the apparition again this afternoon. And, aside from her physical attraction to Alejandro, she genuinely liked him and enjoyed his company. Maybe she’d even find a way to bring up the subject of what had happened over dinner. “Sure, I’d like that.”

“Good. I could meet you in the lobby of the Gritti at, say, eight?”

She caught a flicker of something in his hazel eyes—anticipation? Anna felt something stir inside her. She remembered how surprisingly gentle he’d been while tending to the cuts on her arms earlier. His frank look sent an unspoken message that did not go unnoticed.

“Yes. I’ll see you at eight then.”

She could feel his eyes on her as she walked away in the direction of her hotel and a smile crossed her lips. It had been a long while since a man had elicited this reaction from her. Even so, images of the island kept intruding on her pleasant thoughts about Alejandro, making her uneasy.

Once upstairs in her hotel room, Anna cracked open a large window in the sitting area and lit a cigarette from the pack of Nazionali she’d purchased on the way back. Although annoyed with herself for picking up the habit again, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. She took a deep drag, savoring the hot, familiar smoke as it filled her mouth and lungs.

She tried to rationalize what, exactly, she had seen—twice now. After today’s sighting of the apparition on the island, she no longer believed she’d had a nightmare the previous night. What had appeared to her, first in her hotel room, then on the island, could not have been the result of the trauma of her childhood rape and pregnancy. For one thing, the corpse-like figure of the girl had, on both occasions, been garbed in clothing that, even though tattered and filthy, appeared to be from another era, centuries old. For another, after both sightings, the apparition had disappeared in the blink of an eye. Only one explanation seemed logical to her. She arrived at the conclusion she’d seen a ghost.

And yet, she told herself, she had seen this ghost twice, once in her hotel room and once on the island, two locations fairly distant from each other. Ghosts, she had always assumed, haunted
places
, but this one appeared to be haunting a person—her.

A chill ran through her as she recalled its face, and the way it had appeared to be grinning at her with its ruined mouth. Her skin crawled just thinking about it.

The sightings of the phantom aside, she also could not shake the notion that there was something not right about the island. Their discovery of the crematorium might have contributed to the feeling, but her thoughts kept returning to the eerie stillness of the place and the fact she’d not seen another living creature, not even an insect. She remembered, too, the oppressive atmosphere in the field—a heaviness that seemed to seep into her bones. Not to mention the strange lethargy she’d felt before passing out for almost three hours in the field. It didn’t make sense.

She crushed out the cigarette and, seeing it was after seven, headed for the shower to get ready for dinner with Alejandro. She had pretty much decided she would find a way to mention all this to him tonight.

* * * *

An hour later, Anna stepped off the elevator into the lobby, outfitted in a sleeveless black dress that hugged her tiny waist and fell to just above the knee. Her hair, freshly washed, cascaded in shiny waves down her back. She looked around for Alejandro, ignoring the stares of the men milling about in the lobby, and spied him standing next to the front doors. In the few seconds before he spotted her, she found herself once again admiring his strong build, noticing the way his biceps bulged at the sleeves of the neatly tailored suit he wore.

He gave her a slow, lazy smile as she approached him.

“You look amazing.”

“Thanks. You clean up pretty nice yourself.”

“There’s a place that looked interesting just off the square I thought we might try.”

She followed him outside into the warm night. The rain had stopped and they took their time making their way along the wet streets through the throng of tourists and locals. At Piazza San Marco, they turned down an alley and entered an inconspicuous, narrow building. The restaurant took up three floors, but they chose to enjoy their dinner in the umbrella-covered garden.

The house
Proseco
arrived as they nibbled on antipasto—tidbits of crayfish, octopus, baby squid and scallops. For the main course, they settled on risotto and charcoal-grilled grouper. Anna could not believe how much better everything tasted here than back home, and enjoyed every bite. For afters, Alejandro ordered a black-and-white soufflé and a glass of
Mosacto
d’Asti
, a dessert wine, for each of them.

As they lingered over dessert, their conversation, which had remained generic until now, turned slightly more personal.

“Have you ever been married, Anna?”

“No,” she replied, “never.”

“But there must be someone special back home.”

“No, not at the moment.”

“Hard to believe,” he said, giving her an appreciative look.

“Work keeps me pretty busy.” Anna shifted the conversation back to him. “And you?”

“Divorced,” he said. “Five years now, a serious case of incompatibility. At least there were no children, no one to pay for our mistake except ourselves.”

Anna took a sip of wine, more pleased than she had a right to be to learn of Alejandro’s divorce. A tiny alarm sounded inside her, telling her to tread carefully. The man sitting across from her could easily get under her skin if she allowed him to.

After a moment, Alejandro said, “I hope I’m not overstepping myself here, but I have to ask you again... What happened to you on the island today? I saw your face as you were running. You looked absolutely terrified.”

Anna concentrated fiercely on the soufflé in front of her. She didn’t want to spoil what was turning out to be a very pleasant evening, but if she planned on saying anything, now would probably be a good time. She lifted her eyes to meet his. “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise you won’t think me crazy.”

He grinned. “Now you’ve made me curious. I promise not to judge. Tell me.”

She took a deep breath. “All right. I know how this is going to sound but... I
think
I saw...a ghost.” She scanned his face, but didn’t detect any sign of ridicule, only a flicker of surprise in his liquid eyes. “And,” she continued, “I’ve seen this...apparition, or whatever it is, twice now—once in my hotel room last night and once on the island this afternoon.”

Alejandro leaned toward her from across the table. “What did you see, exactly? What did this apparition look like?” he asked, as if what she had just told him was nothing out of the ordinary.

Anna breathed a tiny sigh of relief. He had not scoffed at her. She had been right to trust him.

“It looked like a young girl, but...”

“But?”

“She looked...diseased would be the best way to describe it, I suppose. Her skin was riddled with sores. And her eyes were all black and filmy. Still, I had the impression she was seeing me. She had on a tattered dress, but it looked like something from another era, centuries ago.”

“And you say you saw this ghost twice since arriving here in Venice?”

“Yes. The first time was in the middle of the night in my hotel room. I thought I’d had a nightmare. But when I saw her again near the grove of poplar trees on the island this afternoon, I knew I hadn’t dreamt it. Both times, she—it—vanished within seconds.”

Alejandro appeared to ponder what she had told him. Finally, he said, “l don’t pretend to know what you saw, but Venice certainly has a long history. I imagine there are places here that might be haunted. Could be you picked up on something that’s manifesting itself to you. I can’t say I believe that one hundred percent, but... I suppose it’s possible. Believe me, I’m the first to admit things happen in this world that we don’t understand and maybe never will. I honestly don’t know what to make of it, though.”

“No,” Anna said. “Me either.” She played with the remainder of her dessert for a moment, then pressed on. “Did you happen to notice how quiet it was on the island today? I didn’t see or even hear any birds at all. Seems strange with all the trees there wouldn’t be any.”