The first sweep of lamplight revealed a kaleidoscopic rush of strange objects to his sight. He knew at once it was a wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities, a cramped, oppressive space whose walls were lined with pitted Venetian reflecting glass, at least in those places where it was possible to see the walls at all. Here Mortensa had gathered the dark mysteries of the world into one place. He saw the branches of corals and the tusks of narwhals, festoons of bones, stuffed reptiles. Everywhere stood jars of preserved specimens, some stewed by time into unspeakable broth, others still clear enough to reveal heads with too many mouths or eyes, claws, or humped backs. Magnificent écorché, surely the work of Lodovici Cardi, capturing every sinew and tendon of their skinless torsos in marble. Chalices of bone and many books, some with great metal clasps, and all bound in the same pale hide.
There were foetuses, human and animal, mandrakes and baby dragons, dry withered mermaids and other unrecognisable monsters. Summers was horrified to see sections of human bodies and internal organs, but realised that they were far too highly coloured and solid, too sharply, glitteringly fresh to be anything but perfect wax models. It was a treasure-trove, even for a building such as this. Keep calm, he told himself, remember this moment. For if his lungs and nostrils were sending accurate messages, no one had entered this space for a very long time.
He glanced over the titles of the books. Liceto: De monstrorum causis natura et differentiis. Aldovrandi: Monstrorum historia. Giovanni Rinaldi: Il mostruosissimo mostruo. Despite the tension and fear, Summers had to smile at the last of these titles, at the linguistically monstrous idea of the expression “monster-est of monsters”.
The next book was a once-sumptuous elephant folio of Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica. Clearly that dark rumour about Vesalius’ methods had not put Mortensa off after all; quite the reverse it seemed. On examination it proved to be no ordinary edition of the work. Bound in that troubling, pale soft hide, not quite like pigskin, the pages finest vellum that had resisted the atmosphere of some damp place sufficiently to retain a kind of warped, chlorotic integrity. The printing was blurred in places but was quite decipherable.
The contents were quite unlike any copy of Vesalius that Summers had ever seen. The known work is unforgettable enough, a haunting combination of beauty and horror produced by those images of flayed, dissected bodies strung up on cruel systems of pulleys, twisted into elegant contortions on ropes, or just gracefully walking, muscle and sinew hanging in shreds from delicately poised limbs, a dead parody of graceful sentience. But those plates seemed to have been intended to serve a noble purpose, to unlock the mysteries of human life. This black, occult Vesalius, stamped on its title page with a head of Tiberius, depicted its frayed, skeletal bodies in parodies of The Stations of the Cross, and delineated tortures devised for one purpose only—the infliction of insufferable pain. The text was equally grotesque. One chapter, entitled ‘De Monstris’, was devoted to the creation of monsters, and told how demons assumed the form of their tortured offerings. An architectural sketch in the margin showed a body laying below the foundations of a church accompanied by the words Aufer caput, corpus ne tangito. (Carry away the head, but don’t touch the body.)
The illustrations gradually descended into madness, depicting anatomical specimens slaughtering and butchering each other, skeletal figures locked in cannibalistic embraces, a world in which the tortured and the torturer had become indistinguishable.
Summers put down the book and wiped his hands along his sides. His first instinct was to leave that oppressive, foul-smelling place, but something had caught his eye. A small doorway stood in the wall opposite the entrance. So there was more. The door concealed a cramped stair that coiled down into darkness. Cautiously descending the slimy steps, he came into a chamber constructed of huge stone blocks.
The walls were disfigured with a lacteal canker of mineral damp. Slippery mosses flourished on the floor, forming a spongy, saturated carpet under foot. What he could see of the roof was covered with dripping stalactites and tumorous green humps. At intervals around the walls were gruesome variations of the Karyatid, marble figures of Marsyas suspended by his wrists and flayed, the torn raw condition of the body depicted with repulsive skill by the choice of red and white porphyry.
Between the figures the walls were hung with mirrors, but not the Venetian glasses of the cabinet. These were huge, irregular, dully tarnished as sheets of old corroded steel, but still throwing back contorted reflections of strange tools or weapons that hung from the walls or lay in heaps. In the middle of the chamber stood a Roman altar, once finely carved with Tritons and Nereids, now worn until its figures looked deformed or maimed, its darkly-stained top rounded off and scarred by countless cuts that made it resemble the butcher’s block it undoubtedly had been. Setting down the lamp, he peered around him.
Now he could make out some of the protuberances jutting from the ceiling, corroded metal rings that still held fragments of chains and pulleys.
From the moment he had entered the chamber it had been strangely familiar to him. He knew it from something he had read recently. Then it came back to him. The book of the secret ritual of the Doge.
As he stood wondering over the purpose to which those rusty tools had once been put, a wave of chill, stagnant air swept over him, and a cold hand clamped around his wrist. He cried out and struggled to pull away, but the grip was at once sinewy and slick, five bands of clammy steel around his arm, radiating a chill that flooded through him like an evil injection. A redly-glittering, venous head came thrusting towards him, its thin lips working as they whispered something unintelligible. Reaching the other sinewy claw to the surface of the altar, as though drawing strength from contact with the place of its last pain and ruination, that which had once been Borsini seemed to burgeon for a second into human likeness, so that Summers found himself looking into the face of a young man still full of hope and belief. Something very like a human mouth opened, and a single word issued like sirocco through parched grass.
“Guistizia.”
The hand fell from the altar, and humanity dropped away from the figure as quickly as it had come. Summers last vestige of nerve broke then and, pulling free, he fled. By the light of the lamp—which he was leaving behind at every step—he just about made the foot of the stairs, and buffeted his way up through a narrow, slippery spiral of darkness.
The cabinet was, of course, pitch-black, and he scrambled blindly through that cluttered space, his hands falling upon objects whose yielding or bony contours felt more horrible for being indefinable. A glass jar toppled with a deafening crash, spilling its contents in a wave of unutterably nauseating odour. Slithering through the spilled mess, he overturned a stack of books and fell against a panel with a handle on it, which he turned.
The panel would not open. He threw himself against it, but it would not give. As he struggled a voice close to his ear whispered, “Guistizia!“
In desperation he tried pulling instead of pushing and was released into light and space. The panel slammed behind him as he fled from the palazzetto. He was dimly aware of running beside water, then nothing until, some while later, he stopped and looked around.