The Chamber of Ten by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online

finished.
    “I don’t blame you,” she said. “I’m just glad to have you back.”
    They were sitting at the small tile-topped table in front of the open French doors of her living room, daylight washing over them. The balcony was so small that it housed only a couple of plant pots containing herbs—rosemary, coriander, some garlic bulbs—but she had the table placed so that it gave the impression of sitting outside. At this time of the morning, sunlight streamed over the rooftops of the facing buildings, splashing the tableand warming the room, offsetting the refreshing coolness of the retreating night.
    Sometimes blinds clattered open across the narrow street from her, and she would always wave a polite greeting to anyone who glanced over instead of pretending to ignore them. She knew that was appreciated. There was the old man who lived with a dozen cats, the young professional couple with two delightful kids and a live-in nanny not much older than her charges, and the young single man who always made sure he looked her way. She indulged in an innocent flirtation with him, but not this morning. She saw his curtains drawn back and his own doors opening onto his tiny balcony, but she kept her eyes on Nico. He had so much to tell her, but she did not want to scare him off.
    That was how he seemed this morning—scared. There was a fragility to him that she had never seen before, and he would not meet her gaze.
    “Where did you go?” she asked. She wanted to say,
What happened down there, why did you pick up the stone jar, why did you scream, what did you see, why did you run?
But there was still a rawness to things, as if the previous day’s events involved blood and death rather than water and worry.
    The knives, the dripping blood
…
    “I wandered for a while,” he said, picking at a plate of dried meats. He had not actually eaten anything yet, though he’d drunk three cups of coffee and was working on his fourth. “After I finished running, that is.”
    “But what were you running from?”
    He dropped his gaze, unable or unwilling to respond.
    She tried again. “Where did you go?”
    “Nowhere,” he said. “No destination, I mean. Throughalleys and courtyards. Into places I didn’t think I’d been before, but which I found myself remembering. And even the streets I travel every day had a familiarity about them …” He shook his head, draining the coffee and checking to see if there was more left in the pot. “But it was a strange feeling.”
    “Strange how?”
    Nico thought for a moment before replying, and when he did, he gazed into the middle distance as if he were trying to remember the answer to a riddle he’d first heard years before.
    “You know how sometimes when something is removed from a familiar landscape—a line of trees, or a building, a fence of some sort—and at first you don’t recognize exactly what is missing, but you know
something
is different? Absent?”
    Geena nodded, buttering some bread.
    “Like that, except all the way through the city. Every time I turned a corner into a place I knew, there was something not quite right. I still knew it, but not how it was.”
    He began to shake with growing frustration, gaze darting about the room as if searching for answers that would never be found within those walls.
    “So what do you think—”
    “Enough! I don’t know,” Nico said, standing abruptly and spilling coffee over the tablecloth.
    A chill went through her. Christ, what had happened to him? “Nico?”
    “Forget it,” he said. “I’m fine, really. Just a bad day. My mind … I’m always picking up traces and echoes of this and that, and sometimes things … seep in.”
    “You never told me that,” Geena said.
    He stalked back into her bedroom, drawing the shades to block out the sunlight and hiding in the gloom. Geena followed and stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. He still stank of that rancid water; strange that she should only notice that