The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

fish. Dead, but recently so—as long as my forearm and as big around. And the flesh had been scored, I could feel the cuts through the scales. I assumed the posture of prayer, where both of my hands could meet, and I ate the fish’s flesh, willing myself to slow down, not to swallow the scales or bones. It was the finest food I had ever eaten, and I felt my very being envelop it, making it part of me as if I were absorbing nourishment from the very dark itself.
    The creature in the dark had left the fish for me, scored it for me, saved me from hunger if not delirium. What rough beast knows charity? What shark’s cold eye shines with kindness? None! These are human things, but even as a man can act a beast, can a monster show the character of a man? A woman?
    She came to me on the next high tide and I yipped when roused from my reverie, but I did not kick at her as she brushed by me, again and again, rubbing against me as she passed, the way a cat will. Then, again, the creature wrapped around my legs, and I waited, again, for the bite that might take my leg, as the great slick coils of muscle constricted me. The claws came again, piercing my haunches. I shrieked, but these were not the tearing slashes that had scored the fish, but only just broke the skin, then the pleasant drift and I felt her soft parts begin to assail my manhood.
    It was that second time that I realized what was in the water, was able to put a picture in my mind’s eye to the sensation, began to think of the creature as female. The calm drifting feeling that overcame me was not exhaustion, or terror, or the residual effect of the Montressor’s poison, but the venom of the mermaid. Had I not seen a hundred such sirens portrayed in signs of alehouses and on the prows of ships? The mermaid was as common as the lion of St. Mark in the statues around Venice, and here, in my dark chamber, open to the sea, I had been seduced by one.
    I let the venom and the passionate attentions of the mermaid take me until I was spent, then I collapsed into a floaty daze of a briny after-bonk, the mermaid curled around my legs, taking my weight off the chains.
    And so, once again, as when I was a boy locked in the cupboard, I made friends with the dark. The tide would come in, and with it the mermaid, her dreamy venom then a sea-frothing shag and a slippery cuddle to wake to a breakfast of raw fish, sometimes two. Drink water and drowse in the dark until the tide comes in again.
    What magical creature, what wonder had found me there, in my most desperate time? Why had no one written of this, why was this tale of the mermaid not told? Did she—did they—only come to the doomed? Perhaps I am already dead? Perhaps I am a ghost, bound to these chains to haunt this dark chamber evermore, and be tortured by the bawdy ministries of a fish-girl.
    You know there’s always a bloody ghost. Perhaps I am he?
    When you think of ghosts wailing and suffering, you don’t think of it as constant and eternal, do you? Bit of wailing around midnight, chain rattling and a cold breeze, grab an ankle on the stairs now and again to really get them shitting themselves, then you’re on about your day, aren’t you? Floating about, lots of naps, perhaps some tennis—stop by the abbey to have a laugh at the vicar’s expense, wouldn’t you? You don’t really think about bloody eternity chained to a damp wall, revenge grinding at your conscience like a rotten tooth, regrets and grief and shivering filling in the meantimes. There is the shrieking, which, as I said, I do a fair amount of. Composing the occasional song lyric of a thousand couplets or so, to make sure you’ve not gone bloody barking. The future gets rather abstract for a ghost—revenge fantasies really more of a mental game you play to keep yourself busy. But I don’t think so. There’s an end. I can feel it. Maybe not far on.
    She’s more fierce each time she comes to me. Her claws, or spines, whatever they are seem to go