The Venice conspiracy

CHAPTER 5

Present Day Venice The stranger looks different now.

No longer the good Samaritan who helped her when she was lost in the labyrinth of shadowy streets.

No longer a friendly local lending a helping hand to a confused and anxious teenager who'd stormed off after a row with her father.

He's dressed differently too. Long black robes and a sinister silver mask shielding his face.

The girl grimaces as her bound and gagged body is dragged along the moss-slimed deck boards. He's taking her to his sacred area. The libation altar. The spot where he will let her blood feed the water.

He pushes the teenager's head over the edge. Makes it dangle in that supernatural space between sky and earth. Limbo. The place where he'll steal her soul.

Only when she stares directly up at him does he begin.

An incision by the left ear. A long red slice beneath her cute little chin.

A popping noise in her slender throat.

The gag in her mouth slackens.

A fountain of red. Then a splutter. The greedy black water drinks until she's bled dry.

Indifferently, he drops her skull with a dull thump on the wooden decking, then unwraps the tools he needs to complete his bloody ritual.

He kneels and prays.

A doctrine handed down across the centuries. A verbal chain of unbreakable belief.

Now there's a whispering in his mind. A swelling choir of voices. Communal prayers of those who came and killed before him. The chants of the believers climax as he completes his ceremony.

He wraps the sinner's sticky corpse in sheets of black plastic then tucks it beneath the tarpaulin in the gondola and waits for night to come.

Ribbons of milky moonlight finally flutter across the boards of the boathouse.

A long, deathly nothingness hums in his ears and fizzes in his blood.

He breathes it in. Absorbs its blackness. Feels it transform him.

The unlit, black gondola glides invisibly through the city's canals and out into the lagoon.

The end is beginning.

An end planned six hundred years before the birth of Christ.