It was as if the fate the world had long dreaded had come to pass, and Venice was already fathoms deep in stagnant water. The city was engulfed in a fog that swirled around a crumbling well head and a saturated line of clothes strung across a corte. He had absolutely no idea where he was. His mind was a flood of confused images and realisations. This was the full truth of the saintly Mortensa and the villainous Borsini. He knew now the fate of the young man who had disappeared so abruptly. That dreadful, tragic wreck of a thing had led him, weakly at first, then with growing strength of purpose, to let the world know what had occurred, the real nature of the relics they worshipped, and what lay buried beneath Mortensa’s church. Summers shivered, clutched his thin jacket about him and began to look for a sign that would tell him where the hell he was.
After some minutes of searching he came upon a wall of yellow plaster crumbling away to reveal ancient brickwork, in the centre of which was a great face of stone grimacing out of the fog at him. Carved folds of fabric swathed the head and were gathered at the top like a shroud. Below, familiar words were carved.
He was standing before the Bocche di Leone, its mouth a slot into which accusations had been placed. That he should stumble upon this of all places at that moment could hardly be chance. This was the very mouth into which Mortensa had posted his denunciation, and by so doing saved his own skin by blackening the name of his innocent victim.
With an overwhelming sadness he thought of that wretched spectre walking the dusty shelves of the library through how many years, clutching his own ragged shreds of skin around him like the mantle of some acolyte in agonised devotion to the cruel god who had torn him from himself. Summers found some comfort in the thought that he at least had the power to set the record straight.
Perhaps, he reflected, the Contessa’s companion might not be as mad as she seemed. Had there not been a desperate tone of warning in those weirdly expressed effusions? She had been speaking of something horrible, monstrous, an intruder, but she had not meant him. Something other than eccentricity had driven the women to the cramped confines of one barricaded room. They had seen what he had seen.
Finding the way around Venice was hard enough on a clear day. In the fog it was impossible. He stumbled upon a café and sat for a while, warming his chilled hands around a cup of coffee. The fog began to clear. Armed with detailed directions back to the Via Serpente, he became lost again almost immediately, and may have wandered off his course but for a cleric in a skull cap and cassock glimpsed through the thick veils of mist. When he called out the name of his destination the figure pointed the way. Passing through the narrow calle indicated, Summers came to a halt, facing the mist—wreathed waters of a canal lapping at the green step before his feet. The smell of rotten vegetables was on the air. Evidently, the cleric had directed him into an alley used for loading and unloading barges. Now he would have to retrace his steps.
A bell began to toll very close by, and he recognised it: San Bartholomeo must be directly in front of him. At that moment the mist parted to reveal the pale façade of Mortensa’s creation. So he could be no more than a turning or two from the palazzetto, perhaps almost alongside it, though the view was a little different.
The tolling of the bell was subtly hypnotic, bringing to mind the movement of weed in ocean swell. The mist was dispersing swiftly and the great façade was becoming clearer. In the growing light the shadows on its surface shifted like expressions on a vast, pallid face. What had Mortensa written about the power of shadows? They certainly made the church façade look deep and hollow as a cave, an infinite distance out of which a familiar cassock-clad figure emerged, gesturing rhythmically to the tolling of the bells.
And Summers saw then who—or what—was approaching him with those hypnotic passes of the hands, and realised too late how naïve he had been to think that so formidable a being, capable of raising a temple to the ancient gods under the very noses of the Council of Ten, would allow him to destroy a reputation so cunningly created, and so ruthlessly preserved.
Summers felt compelled to look down and saw on the slimy stone between his feet a symbol or hieroglyph deeply carved. He peered at it, the bell booming through his head, as the symbol filled his vision. It was as if the very stones of Venice were speaking through the cold metal tongue of the bell, telling him to come down and learn what only the stones could know, what they kept hidden from the eyes of man.
He was dully aware that he was toppling into water, was sinking. Despite the bell and the hieroglyph that filled his mind, his desire for life was strong. Gulping in foul water through nose and mouth, he kicked desperately, felt himself sucked down, kicked again and felt his face, a mask of green slime, rise into the air. He took a mouthful, half water, and went down again, his limbs working madly. But something in him could not deny the cruel knowledge of the bell and the symbol. Even as his body struggled, he continued to sink, deeper, it seemed, than a canal could possibly be, down past hieroglyphic-carven walls and shattered columns and vast, impassive faces of stone. The cold arms of the sea embraced him, and still he seemed to sink, married forever, like the Doges of old, to the dark green waters.
Simon Kurt Unsworth
THE NIGHT RUN
SIMON KURT UNSWORTH was born in Manchester in 1972 and is beginning to despair of ever finding proof that the world was awash with mysterious signs and portents that night. He lives in an old farmhouse miles from anywhere in the Lake District with his wife, the writer Rosie Seymour, and assorted children and dogs, where his neighbours are mostly sheep and his office is an old cheese store in which he writes horror fiction (for which pursuit he was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story in 2008).
PS Publishing released Strange Gateways, his third collection of short stories, in 2014, following Quiet Houses (Dark Continents Publishing, 2011) and Lost Places (Ash Tree Press, 2010). His fiction has been published in a number of anthologies, including Exotic Gothic 3 and 4, Terror Tales of the Cotswolds, Terror Tales of the Seaside, Where the Heart Is, At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, Hauntings, Lovecraft Unbound, and Year’s Best Fantasy 2013 and Best British Horror 2014. This is his seventh appearance in Best New Horror, and he was also included in The Very Best of Best New Horror (2010).
He has a further set of stories due out in an as-yet-unnamed collection that will launch Spectral Press’ Spectral Signature Editions imprint. His debut novel, The Devil’s Detective, appeared from Doubleday in the US and Del Rey in the UK in 2015, with a sequel due next year.
“‘The Night Run’ is one of those stories that came from a single image nestling in my head, and simply unfurled from there,” recalls the author. “I kept seeing a woman driving a private ambulance along a lonely midnight road, hearing the beating of wings, and turning to see something terrible in the seat next to her.