The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper Read Free Book Online Page A

Excitement makes you more alive.
    But the fact is, as the morning sun rises to beat shadowlessly down on the old city, it feels less like excitement and more like fear.
    W E START AT THE D OGE ’ S P ALACE . I T ’ S A SHORT WALK FROM THE hotel to San Marco, and once we step out onto the broad plaza, we take in the structure’s immensity from a distance. It’s true what one of the guidebooks said: the long arcade of columns on the building’s lower level lend the walled floors atop them the illusion of floating. I hadn’t expected the sheer size of it, the tons of stone, no matter how gracefully assembled, suggesting long-buried narratives of labor, injury, lost lives.
    Among these lost lives, I tell Tess, were the condemned men brought here to be given a final chance at salvation.
    “Why were they condemned?” she asks.
    “They’d done bad things. And then they had to be punished.”
    “But they were brought here first?”
    “So the story goes.”
    “How does the story go?”
    I tell her about the column. The book said it was on the exposed side facing St. Mark’s Basin, opposite the island of San Giorgio. Count three columns in and there it is: worn around its marble base from all the prisoners and, over the centuries since, curious tourists attempting the impossible. The challenge is to put your hands behind your back (as the prisoners’ hands would have been bound) and, facing outward, step around the entire column. For the condemned, it was a cruel offering of potential freedom, as the myth holds that the task has never been achieved.
    Tess thinks I should go first. I slip my fingers into my belt and get up onto the base’s edge. A single sliding step and I’m off.
    “Can’t do it,” I say.
    “My turn!”
    Tess reverse-hugs the marble, faces me, grinning. Then she starts. Little shuffles on her heels, inching around. And keeps going. I stand there with my iPhone video camera ready to capture her fall, but instead she disappears as she circles the column. A moment later she emerges again, still shuffling around. Except now the grin is gone. Inits place is a blank look I take to be severe concentration. I return the iPhone to my pocket.
    When she’s made it all the way around to the starting point she stands there, looking out over the water, as though listening to whispered instructions from the lapping waves.
    “Tess!” A shout meant to awaken her from wherever she’s gone as much as to celebrate her accomplishment. “You did it!”
    She steps down. And with her recollection of who I am and where she is, her smile returns.
    “What do I win?” she asks.
    “Your place in history. Apparently nobody’s ever done that before.”
    “And salvation. Do I win that, too?”
    “That, too. C’mon,” I say, taking her hand. “Let’s get out of this sun.”
    W E WALK ACROSS THE ALREADY-CROWDED PLAZA TO THE BASILICA. The sun, aloof but scorching, makes even this short journey fatiguing. Or maybe the early rising after a long flight has me weaker than I figured. In any case, by the time we enter the cool of the cathedral, I’m feeling tilted, as though standing on the deck of a sailboat.
    It’s partly an excuse to regain my balance when I stop to point up at the mosaic decorating the dome above us. The images tell the story of Creation: God’s invention of light, Adam in the garden, the serpent and his temptation of Eve, the Fall. There is an astonishing simplicity to the images, especially in the context of the building’s overwhelming, Byzantine architecture. It’s as though the builders intended to distract one from the real materials of faith, rather than depict them. Yet here, in this overhead pocket, is the familiar narrative of Genesis, laid out in an almost children’s book illustration, and the impact of it takes my breath away.
    At first, I assume this is an aesthetic response: a man in awe of towering artistic achievement. But it isn’t the beautiful that transfixes me. It is the