Whispering Bones (19 page)

Run!
her mind screamed. She turned to flee from the entity, but its boney hand shot out with supernatural speed, clamping onto her forearm like a vice, pulling her back. Anna rocked on her feet as something powerful slammed into her. Suddenly, she was...

* * * *

...lying on her back in a deep hole in the ground, her body wracked with agonizing pain. She looks at her hands, impossibly small, and the festering sores covering them.
Towering above her, standing at the edge of the excavation, the cloaked figure of a man.
She sees the long black coat he wears, but his face is hidden by a strange white mask. The smell of death and decomposition surrounds her. She turns her head and looks with horror at the decaying and disease-ridden bodies upon which she is lying. Unable to move or speak in the nightmarish dimension she has entered, she watches as the man standing at the edge of the pit leans on his shovel and speaks.

“There is no place at the
Lazaretto,
it already overflows with the dead and dying...
Y
ou have been brought to
Poveglia
.” He fills his shovel with dirt. Some part of her mind tries to tell her this is not really happening, but then a shower of earth strikes her face, stinging her open eyes and the sores covering her. More dirt rains down on her, entering her mouth and nostrils when she tries to breathe. Within seconds, she is suffocating, choking on the vile dirt...

* * * *

Anna came to with a start, lying on her back in the tangled vines of the field, rain pouring down on her. She looked all around, but the creature was gone. On her forearm, she could clearly see the bruised imprint where the demon child had touched her.

Relentless rain shocked her all the way awake, and the vision of having been buried alive rushed through her again with the force of a freight train. She rolled to her side and managed to get to her hands and knees, too weak to stand. Half insane with fear, she poked her head above the bushes and glanced around the field. Through a sheet of rain, she spied the dead men and women still milling about in the vicinity of the trailer. Some of them, she now saw, were garbed in white hospital gowns, and the tops of their heads were...gone. She recognized one of them as being the woman strapped to the gurney she’d seen in the hospital and felt her stomach lurch.
Dear God, please...please help me to find Alejandro and get off this awful island
.

She looked over her shoulder at the trees behind her, knowing she could not take refuge there. The creature had come from the forest and might still be lurking nearby.

Her mind worked furiously. She trained her eyes on the building nearest to her, the office. The door to that building was approximately ten feet from the edge of the field. If she could make it inside without the atrocities moving around nearby spotting her, she might be safe—for a while, at least.

Staying low to the ground, she began to crawl in the direction of the office. As she dragged herself along, pelted by rain, the terrifying sensations she’d been subjected to in the vision haunted her. It dawned on Anna that what she had experienced, what she had been shown, must have happened to that...that creature. The images had come from her. Except, she told herself, it hadn’t been a monster then. It had been a child. She had sensed as much while immersed in the dreadful vision. It was why her hands had looked so tiny.

A child had been buried alive, right here on this island. And from what had been shown to her, she knew that beneath the ground over which she crawled, a mass grave rested. The bodies upon which she had been lying in the vision had appeared disease-ridden, and Anna deduced the island must have been used as a disposal site during one of the plague outbreaks that had ravaged Europe centuries ago. The thought caused her to shudder. No wonder the damned place was haunted. Something akin to pity for the doomed child rose in her. But then she remembered its sinister eyes, and the malevolence radiating from them, and Anna knew that, even if the apparition had once been human, it was something else entirely now—something unspeakably evil.

Venice

1927

At sunup,
Luogotenente
Carelli, the lieutenant in charge of the police station, surveyed the six asylum employees gathered in his office. He listened without interruption as each of them repeated the same story. Something had happened on the island the previous night, they told him. There were creatures on the island, walking corpses that had tried to kill them. They’d had no choice but to flee, using the emergency boats. They’d made it safely back to the mainland in the middle of the night, but had agreed among themselves to wait until daylight to approach the police. None of them were willing to return to the island at night, not after what they’d seen.

Luogotenente
Carelli did not believe a word of the ridiculous tale. When the last of the six men finished talking, he shot them a withering look.

“Surely you do not expect me to believe this nonsense. Do I need to remind you of the penalty for making a false report?”

One of the men jumped up. “I swear,
L
uogotenente
, we are telling you the truth. I know how this must sound, but we all saw the creatures with our own eyes. We are not lying.”

The rest of the group murmured its assent.

Carelli studied the men’s faces for any sign this might be a prank. All of them appeared genuinely frightened.

“And where is the head surgeon? I would be interested to hear what he has to say.”

The men avoided his gaze, until one of them said, “
Dottore
Rossi was not with us when we boarded the boats. He must still be on the island.”

The words caused Carelli’s anger to rise. “Do you mean to tell me you did not seek him out when you felt yourselves to be in danger? That you left him on the island with no means of return?”

“There was no time,
Luogotenente
. None of us would be alive now if we had stayed to locate him.”

Only then did Carelli jump into action. Whatever had happened to frighten these men, they had fled like cowards, leaving the head surgeon alone on the island with a hospital full of insane patients. If something happened to Rossi, and Carelli did nothing, the blame would surely fall on his shoulders.

He certainly did not believe the wild tale recounted by the men, but he supposed there was a possibility some of the patients may have gone on a rampage. Wasting no time, he commandeered his men. A half-hour later, with the hospital staff in tow, Carelli and a group of his men boarded a small fleet of police boats and set off for the island to investigate.

The boats pulled up to the landing and the men disembarked. The hospital employees led the way to the main building, Carelli and his men right behind.

Before they arrived at the asylum, Carelli spotted a group of men and women on the path ahead of them. The disheveled-looking patients were clad only in hospital gowns, roaming barefoot on the grounds, clutching at each other and muttering incoherently. Several had their hands in their hair, as if some calamity had befallen them. Others just stood staring at the sky. These were no doubt the “corpses” the men had seen the night before.

“Round up those patients,” Carelli barked. “Get them back in the hospital. You,” he said, pointing to one of the staff. “Where is the head surgeon’s office?”

The man directed him and Carelli set off at a trot after ordering his men to locate and account for every patient in the facility.

Blood stains covered the path leading to the office. Not a good sign. When Carelli arrived at Rossi’s sanctuary, the door stood wide open and he stepped inside. His jaw dropped in surprise when he surveyed the large room. Blood was everywhere. It covered the floors, the walls, even the ceiling. Judging from the amount of blood, the man could not possibly have survived.

Shards of glass crunched under his boots as he made his way across the room, and he noticed several empty liquor bottles lying on the floor. The only other doorway led to the lavatory, and he found no sign of Rossi and no blood there. He left to round up his men in order to conduct a search. On his way to the door, he spied something on the desk in the center of the room and moved toward it. His heart sped up when he got close enough to see that the grey, gelatinous matter sitting on the tray appeared to be a brain. What in damnation had been going on here? He hurried outside to locate his men.

From the blood trail, it appeared Rossi had been attacked in his office and carried or dragged along the path leading back to the hospital. When he returned to the asylum, some of his men were waiting outside for him. They pointed out the two large blood stains, one in front of the hospital doors and another on the front grounds below the bell tower. Carelli informed them of what he’d found in the office. As a result, he issued immediate orders that every building in the complex be searched from top to bottom.

Two hours later, having searched the entire complex, the only evidence Carelli had uncovered was more blood on the stairs leading up to the bell tower and in the open top of the structure—and the jars. His men had turned up no less than four jars in the operating room cupboard containing more human brains. One look at them was all it took to convince Lieutenant Carelli that Rossi had been up to no good in the asylum. He intended to get to the bottom of what, exactly, had happened, but first he had to locate Rossi, or, more likely from the looks of things, Rossi’s body.

From the blood on the stairs and in the bell tower, it appeared to Carelli that Rossi had either fallen or jumped from the tower. The large amount of blood on the ground directly below corroborated this. Perhaps Rossi had committed suicide. That would not surprise him, especially after his discovery of the jars. But if so,
where was the body
?

Carelli and the twenty men who had accompanied him spent the next several hours searching every inch of the island for Rossi, leaving no stone unturned. They formed a line and beat the bushes in the field and searched the forest in the same manner.

At six that evening, Carelli ordered a halt to the search. The body had not been found, nor did they uncover any evidence of its disposal. There was no place left to search on the tiny island. The employees had used the only two boats to flee the night before. Rossi appeared to have vanished into thin air, and he was not the only one. A patient, a woman by the name of Rosaria Marino, remained unaccounted for as well.

The lieutenant ordered several of his men to return to the mainland with the hospital employees. The staff would have to remain in police custody until the matter of the missing doctor was resolved. He had not ruled them out as murder suspects. The patients, too, would need to be removed from the island and transferred to a mainland facility, where they would remain under police guard. They would have to be questioned as well. He shuddered at the idea of having to interrogate the insane patients, but one thing was clear. The head surgeon of the asylum had either been killed or had taken his own life, the body missing, as was one of the patients. There was also the matter of the contents of the jars they’d discovered. Only Rossi could have been responsible for that. His activities during the time leading up to his death would have to be investigated as well.

* * * *

At eight-thirty that evening, Serafina sat in the drawing room, having just put the children to bed. She picked up the letter that had arrived earlier today from her sister in Genoa and reread it. The tone of the letter struck her as curt, and Serafina knew her sister was not pleased at the prospect of having her and the children come to live in Genoa with her family. But, having already investigated her options, she knew there was nowhere else to go. Julia and Vittorio were her only concern. If ensuring their safety meant burdening her sister, she would do it.

The children had stopped asking about their papa weeks ago, and she suspected Alberto’s treatment of them, and seeing what he had done to her, had marked them in more ways than one.

With a sigh, she moved to the desk and sat to pen a response to her sister’s note. A loud knock sounded at the front door, making Serafina jump in surprise. Too late for visitors, her first thought was that Alberto had returned. Silently, she walked to the front entrance, her heart beating double-time.

“Who is it?” she called out from behind the locked door.

“
Luogotenente
Carelli,
Carabinieri
. Please open the door.”

The
Carabinieri
? Why were the police at her door? “Yes, just a moment, please.”

She slid the deadbolt back and unlatched the door to see a tall man dressed in the distinctive navy blue uniform and red-plumed hat.

“
Signora
Rossi. May I come in?”

Serafina stepped aside to allow Carelli in and closed the door behind him.

“How can I help you,
Luogotenente
?”

“I’m sorry to say I have come to deliver unfortunate news,
Signora
, regarding your husband.”

Serafina remained silent, wondering what happened to warrant the high-ranking official’s attendance at her home. She led him into the drawing room and indicated he should take a seat.

“Please tell me what has happened,” she said when they were both seated.

“
Dottore
Rossi—your husband—appears to have gone missing.”

“Missing? What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

The man skipped a beat before saying, “I’m afraid,
Signora
, that your husband may in fact be dead.”

Serafina blinked in surprise.

The man must have interpreted her silence as shock, for he said, “I am truly sorry to be the bearer of this news, but I am also obligated to tell you that, although he is presumed dead, your husband’s body has yet to be located.”

Serafina’s pulse sped up. “How can you be certain my husband is dead if no body was discovered?”