Free The Undrowned Child by Michelle Lovric Page A

still water of the canal.
    A hot wind blew a piece of paper around her ankle. It was the latest of Signor Rioba’s handbills.
    Teo brought the handbill back to her room and studied it alongside the discarded newspapers she had rifled from the manager’s waste basket.
    Apart from the gushing wells, the ghost bells, the floods and the sharks, there was a new problem, this time with Venice’s lighting. Each night, without fail, all the gas-lamps in the city flickered and then slowly spluttered out. Every expert in the Veneto region had been called in, but, night after night, just after ten, the lights died and the city was plunged into blackness.
    Even handheld lanterns appeared to be affected by whatever mysterious force had extinguished the gas-lamps … they never lasted long, and tended to fail just as people were making their way over bridges or walking near the edges of canals. From the black water came the ominous sound of loud splashing every time someone lost his footing.
    The newspapers were full of it—CITY ON ITS KNEES!—without its faithful gas-lamps. Even more sensational was the appearance of a ghostly light in the palace known as Ca’ Dario, which enjoyed the reputation of being the most haunted house in Venice.
    Ca’ Dario was a gigantic hunchback of a building, lurching sharply to the right, its foundations clawing into the bank of the Grand Canal. Funnel-shaped chimneys were clustered like toadstools on the top. No one had lived there since the most recent owner had committed suicide, the last in a long string of suspicious deaths inside. No Venetian wanted to enter its grim gates, not even the city rat catcher. Not even the city rats. The Key had taught Teo that these vast and fearless creatures were known to the Venetians as pantegane.
    Signor Rioba had plenty to say on the subject. Beware Ca’ Dario! Only evil flows out of that palace. Evil. And sickness. And death. Oh, ye could not be counting the number of lies they’re telling ye. More than the hairs on the poor flayed skin of Marcantonio Bragadin. More than the hairs up the nose of your great left-legged baboon of a mayor.
    The police were ordered to break down the doors and find out what was causing the strange light inside Ca’ Dario. Even they dragged their feet, making excuses about paperwork and protocols, until the newspapers jeered at them as cowards. Eventually a squad of no less than thirty nervous policemen forced the door down. They found nothing inside, except shifting moonlight, a pile of ebony wood, a huge vat of varnish and a heap of elephant tusks.
    Meanwhile the mayor, who fancied himself as something of an old-fashioned intellectual and a poet, sent a letter to the papers.
    Teo scanned the swollen paragraphs: The collective imagination of the town has created this phenomenon of light in Ca’ Dario … architectural genius … Each of those funnel-shaped chimneys is an oculus to draw the light of the full moon straight down inside.…
    “What is he going on about?” thought Teo irritably. She’d been to see Ca’ Dario glittering in the dark. “If that’s natural moonlight in Ca’ Dario, then I’m a polar bear!”
    The minister for tourism and decorum took up the cause too: … time to bury all these ancient superstitions about Ca’ Dario … not a place of evil … the city’s lighthouse in our present little difficulty. Brava, Ca’ Dario! … encourage more tourists to come to Venice, just to see our splendid Ca’ Dario by moonlight. And by the way, whoever’s pretending to be Signor Rioba is a mischief-maker and a clown. And we’re on his trail too.
    “Oh really?” Teo barked. There was something about the mayor that made her gnash her teeth.
    Another fish-scented handbill from Signor Rioba fumed: Take care, Venetians! Have ye all been beaten with the stupid stick, like your mayor, who has the immortal gall to tell ye everything goes well? Which is pure, distilled Fool’s Talk. Your ancient enemy is here