The Serpent of Venice

The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore Read Free Book Online

Book: The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore Read Free Book Online
Authors: Christopher Moore
Tags: Fiction, General, Humorous, Historical, Mystery & Detective
light and warmth. Between bouts of soul-crushing despair, I busy myself slurping sips of water from my arm. A small triumph, the steady dripping from above that clapped on the ledge by my hand, like the tick of my life’s clock running down, has turned out to be my life blood. It is freshwater, you see, no doubt leaking from some cistern above, and if I am determined, and I position my chains just so, I can drink enough as it runs down the chains and my arm to quell the thirst. Sometimes I busy myself by singing a song, or shrieking until my voice breaks. But when the tide is high and the chamber fills with warm seawater, then she comes, and this dark hell is a different place.
    I do not know how long I have been here. I counted the changing of the tides for a while, but with no way to mark them, I lost count. It seems a lifetime, but it could be only days. I try to imagine Brabantio and his family moving in the manse above me, and I think I can hear voices, or the ringing of a bell, but I can’t be sure. The sounds I hear in my head, the voices of the dead, are as real to me as anything I might hear from outside.
    I talk to them, the dead, who come to me in the dark, and if I squint, I can see them, those phantoms of my past, blue-gray against the blackness. Lovers, friends, enemies, tossers, walleys, lick-spittles, catch-farts, slags, hags, and bum-snipers. People who I don’t remember ever having seen before pass by, pause, look at me, their eyes as black and empty as everything else. I don’t know if I dream them, or if I even sleep. The tide takes the weight off my chains and I drift. Just drift.
    I always scream when she comes, sliding in by my knees, around the chamber, back behind my legs. Even if I have been waiting, anticipating, even if I am aware of her in the chamber, in that moment when she touches me, I am startled, terrified, and I can hear my pulse pound like a battle drum in my neck. My chains rattle and I fall, crucified in my shackles before her.
    She will not harm me, until she does, but I am given to that. That first time, when the Montressor’s poison and fear were still high in my blood, I felt it was a shark or a great eel in the room, saw in my mind’s eye the saw teeth tearing pieces from me. And when claws or spines fastened into my loins and something soft—ever so soft—like honey in water, wrapped upon my manhood, my mind could find no picture to put on the creature. What thing of the vasty deep was soft, gentle, yet strong, spiny? I had seen octopi alive in buckets of seawater in the fish market in Venice, and a fishmonger had dared me to touch one, and yes, it was soft, and disgusting, little more than a tripe with a purpose. “You fucking Venetians will eat anything the sea pukes up, won’t you? This looks like something shat out by something too disgusting to be allowed near a kitchen, and I am from a race of avowed offal eaters.” The fishmonger laughed.
    This thing in the water, in the dark, was not an octopus, though. What did I know? But it worked away at me and after some time settled, curled around my feet, and stayed there. If it was to kill me, so be it. My legs were constrained, wrapped in coils of unrelenting strength up to my hips. I could not fight it, nor kick at it, and I had used all of my breath in shrieking at it. I fainted or surrendered, or was constricted until I choked, I don’t know, but when I was conscious again, the tide was out and I was alone in my chamber.
    When thirst moved me to try to arrange my chains to channel water down my arm, my hand landed on something alive and I shrieked. (Yes, I do a lot of shrieking here in the dark. There is little else to do between the terror and the suffering—perhaps the disembodied tosser voice is right. Perhaps I have gone mad? Oh, well, how can you tell in the dark?) But it wasn’t alive, what was on the ledge—recently alive, perhaps. I ran my hand over it gently, feeling the spines, the fins, the eyes—a

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