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Authors: Andrew Pyper
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back to her. Make sure she’s okay, then get on the next flight to New York—to anywhere—whether I’ve got malaria or worse. We have to go .
First, though, I’ve got to find my way to the Grand Canal. Any vaporetto stop will do. It shouldn’t be too hard. Not that I have any idea where I am. So long as I keep moving, I’ll eventually come out at the water.
It doesn’t work.
I’m lost even worse than I was with Tess in our stroll around the hotel last night. And instead of charm, what I feel now is a crushing panic so great I’m grinding my teeth on tears. There is the need to return to Tess, the anxiety of not knowing where I am, the fever that twists the calle before me into an undulating tunnel. And there is also the certainty that I am being pursued. Something hulking and close, just behind me.
I break into a run again. Turn a corner. As I do, before I see what’s there, I smell it. The same barnyard smell that clung to the Thin Woman.
But it isn’t she standing in the lane in front of me. It’s a herd of pigs.
A dozen of them or more. All turned my way, nostrils flaring. Impossible, yet undeniably there . Too detailed in their appearance to be a side effect of whatever is making me feel poisoned. Too aware of who I am.
The animals come at me. Squealing as though scalded. Their hooves clattering over the stone.
I back up and swing around the corner I just turned. Wait for their teeth to find my skin, to break it open and eat.
But they don’t come. I look around the corner. The ramo is empty.
Don’t stop to understand. You may never understand any of this.
My internal O’Brien again.
Just keep going .
So I keep going.
And at the end of the next calle I turn onto—one whose length I’m sure I have already run down at least once if not three times—there is the Grand Canal. Appearing out of nowhere as though at the turning of a page.
Don’t stop.
Something is happening.
But she’s safe.
There’s no such thing anymore.
How do you know?
Because it knows who she is.
7
I SIT AT THE BACK OF THE BOAT, BITING AT AIR . T RY TO THINK only of Tess, of returning to Tess, of escaping with Tess. Relieving the babysitter, calling the airlines, arranging a water taxi. Putting this sinking city behind us.
Yet other thoughts muscle through. My professor’s brain providing footnotes, interpretations. The text at hand is the last hour of my life. And the reading—nonsensical, unstoppable—is that my experience reflects what has been written of previous encounters between man and demon.
I try to bring Tess’s face to my mind. Instead the man in the chair appears. His skin pulling away to reveal the true face of the thing inside him.
It swings my thoughts away to something else.
The Gerasene demon. Twice noted in the gospels by Luke and Mark. In the telling, Jesus came upon a naked, homeless man living in the tombs, a man “which had devils a long time.” Upon seeing Christ, the demon begged not to be tormented. Jesus asked its name,and it answered “Legion,” for it was not a single demon but many that possessed the man. And the savior cast them out, transferring them into a nearby herd of pigs.
Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were drowned.
The man strapped to the chair at Santa Croce 3627, bound as the possessed man at Gerasene had been repeatedly and unsuccessfully bound, also claimed to be without a name, though composed of many. And then the herd of pigs stampeding toward me in the maze of lanes. Either I hallucinated it, or it is a coincidence well beyond the random.
Stop this! the O’Brien in my head tells me.
But it can’t be stopped.
Another ancient text, this one apocryphal. The Compendium Maleficarum, written by Brother Francesco Maria Guazzo in 1608, has been taken by the Vatican and other theological bodies as a primary guide in the matters of demonic possession and exorcism.
First, though, I’ve got to find my way to the Grand Canal. Any vaporetto stop will do. It shouldn’t be too hard. Not that I have any idea where I am. So long as I keep moving, I’ll eventually come out at the water.
It doesn’t work.
I’m lost even worse than I was with Tess in our stroll around the hotel last night. And instead of charm, what I feel now is a crushing panic so great I’m grinding my teeth on tears. There is the need to return to Tess, the anxiety of not knowing where I am, the fever that twists the calle before me into an undulating tunnel. And there is also the certainty that I am being pursued. Something hulking and close, just behind me.
I break into a run again. Turn a corner. As I do, before I see what’s there, I smell it. The same barnyard smell that clung to the Thin Woman.
But it isn’t she standing in the lane in front of me. It’s a herd of pigs.
A dozen of them or more. All turned my way, nostrils flaring. Impossible, yet undeniably there . Too detailed in their appearance to be a side effect of whatever is making me feel poisoned. Too aware of who I am.
The animals come at me. Squealing as though scalded. Their hooves clattering over the stone.
I back up and swing around the corner I just turned. Wait for their teeth to find my skin, to break it open and eat.
But they don’t come. I look around the corner. The ramo is empty.
Don’t stop to understand. You may never understand any of this.
My internal O’Brien again.
Just keep going .
So I keep going.
And at the end of the next calle I turn onto—one whose length I’m sure I have already run down at least once if not three times—there is the Grand Canal. Appearing out of nowhere as though at the turning of a page.
Don’t stop.
Something is happening.
But she’s safe.
There’s no such thing anymore.
How do you know?
Because it knows who she is.
7
I SIT AT THE BACK OF THE BOAT, BITING AT AIR . T RY TO THINK only of Tess, of returning to Tess, of escaping with Tess. Relieving the babysitter, calling the airlines, arranging a water taxi. Putting this sinking city behind us.
Yet other thoughts muscle through. My professor’s brain providing footnotes, interpretations. The text at hand is the last hour of my life. And the reading—nonsensical, unstoppable—is that my experience reflects what has been written of previous encounters between man and demon.
I try to bring Tess’s face to my mind. Instead the man in the chair appears. His skin pulling away to reveal the true face of the thing inside him.
It swings my thoughts away to something else.
The Gerasene demon. Twice noted in the gospels by Luke and Mark. In the telling, Jesus came upon a naked, homeless man living in the tombs, a man “which had devils a long time.” Upon seeing Christ, the demon begged not to be tormented. Jesus asked its name,and it answered “Legion,” for it was not a single demon but many that possessed the man. And the savior cast them out, transferring them into a nearby herd of pigs.
Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were drowned.
The man strapped to the chair at Santa Croce 3627, bound as the possessed man at Gerasene had been repeatedly and unsuccessfully bound, also claimed to be without a name, though composed of many. And then the herd of pigs stampeding toward me in the maze of lanes. Either I hallucinated it, or it is a coincidence well beyond the random.
Stop this! the O’Brien in my head tells me.
But it can’t be stopped.
Another ancient text, this one apocryphal. The Compendium Maleficarum, written by Brother Francesco Maria Guazzo in 1608, has been taken by the Vatican and other theological bodies as a primary guide in the matters of demonic possession and exorcism.
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