Free Touch by Claire North Page A

hunted.
    My first encounter with this truth was in 1838. I was in Rome, and how they found me I will never fully know.
    They came in the night, men in thick leather gloves and black masks with long sweet-smelling beaks, plague doctors hunting a most unusual disease. They had tied rope around their sleeves, ankles and waists so that I might not burrow my fingers against their skin. Two of them sat on my chest while a third locked a collar on a three-foot pole around my neck then swung me up by my throat. I wheezed and scrambled and kicked and tried to catch at a hand, a hair, a foot, a finger – any stranger’s skin – but they were careful, so careful, and as they marched me on the end of my collar through the midnight streets, like a naughty dog on his master’s leash, they reminded each other, beware, beware, don’t get too close to the demon-devil, don’t let his fingers so much as brush yours in passing. In the dead dark of the night Roman emperors with broken faces, dead gods with shattered limbs, the weeping eyes of the Holy Mary and the hooded glares of the scuttling thieves as they slipped into the stone alleys between the leaning, stinking homes looked down and showed no comfort.
    In a stone cell beneath a stone tower built by a long-dead Roman and renovated by a long-dead Greek, they clamped me down with iron shackles to a wooden chair, so no part of my body could move. Then came the priests and the doctors, the soldiers and the violent men, who beat me with long cudgels, and swung incense in my face and said, begone, evil spirit. In the name of the father, the son, the holy ghost, I banish you, begone.
    On the third day of my captivity three masked men entered the room with a woman whose eyes were red from weeping and who tried, at the sight of me, to throw herself at my feet, to kiss my gloved and bound hands, and who was immediately restrained from crossing the line of salt that had been sprinkled around my chair.
    And she wept, and cried out, my son, my son, what demon has done this to you?
    If they hadn’t broken my ribs, poisoned me with their remedies and fed me no more than a little water and soggy bread with a very long spoon, I might have said, these men, good mother. These men that you see before you, they have done this to me. Come a little closer until your ear touches my lips, and I will tell you how.
    As it was, they had, so I didn’t, but sat limp and broken before her while she wept and wailed and called out for her boy and against all demons, until she was calmed and given a cup of wine with a little something extra to drink, and sat upon a low stool.
    Then the leader of my tormentors, a man in a great red cowl and huge crimson gloves that swelled outwards from his wrists, only to be clipped back in and tied to his forearm, knelt down before my mother and said, “Your son is dead, and in heaven. What you see here is a mockery of his flesh, a ghoul in the rotten body of your boy. We could have executed it without telling you, but you are his mother, and to not know the fate of your son is worse than knowing what horrors this creature has performed.”
    At this, she wept a little more, and I almost admired the compassion with which my would-be killer bestowed mercy on a mother.
    Then he went on: “This demon has fornicated with your son’s flesh. It has lain with both women and men. It has worn your boy’s face as it commits sin upon sin, revelled in its power, delighted in its wickedness. With every act it commits it brings dishonour upon the memory of your boy and it must die. Do you understand this, good mother? Do you forgive us the deed that we must now perform?”
    The woman looked up from this angel of death, to me, and I breathed, “Mother…”
    At once my killer clamped his hands tight around the woman’s own and hissed, “It is not your son. It is the demon. It will say anything to live.”
    And so my mother looked away from me, and with tears running down her face she