Free The Undrowned Child by Michelle Lovric Page B

again. And your mayor is giving messages for him. Ca’ Dario is a sign. Take notice, while ye still can. Time is running out.
    “Ancient enemy”? That was new.
    Squinting at the lettering, Teo grew dizzy. She felt queasy and her head ached. It was hard to steal nutritious things like poached eggs or potted shrimps, which slid between her fingers and splattered on the floor, making the hotel cook swear horribly. A diet of cakes and fruit left her body as weak and disconsolate as her thoughts.
    “What would my parents do to make me feel better?” It was a desolate notion. As was the answer: Teo dosed herself with Dottore Dimora’s Nerve Pabulum Pills, washed down with a swig of sour spirit of Scurvy Grass from the Morelli Pharmacy at Rialto. The only effect was to make her rather queasier than before.
    By now her spirits had sagged so low that she was almost ready to welcome the sight of Maria. And in that forlorn state she made her way to Maria’s room. Her knock went unheeded. She opened the door and gasped. Even though it was late at night, Maria’s bed lay empty and untouched. A brown insect scurried across the floor on a hundred tiny legs.
    Teo returned to her own bedroom. She stood by the window, gazing out at the black water lit only by a few wretched stars. A procession of funeral gondolas quietly slipped down the Grand Canal, each with one pathetically small coffin aboard.
    the morning of June 5, 1899
    It was then, as if sensing that Teo had reached her lowest point, that The Key to the Secret City began to introduce her to its own circle of acquaintances.
    Those acquaintances were ghosts.
    It started on the traghetto. Teo made her way unseen into the gondola that ferried people between San Samuele and Ca’ Rezzonico. The sun beat down on passengers crowded together like stalks of asparagus tied in a bunch. Venetians, the book had explained to Teo, always stood up in the traghetto. Only tourists and foreigners lacked the sea legs to balance as the boat crossed the Grand Canal.
    “Move over!” The voice was gruff, and the nudging elbow cold as ice. Teo flinched away.
    “I’m talking to yer, girlie! When Pedro-the-Crimp talks, yer listens, right?”
    Teo turned to face a snaggle-toothed man in moth-eaten breeches and a velvet jacket that looked a hundred years old. His face was deeply etched with misery.
    “You can see me?” she asked eagerly.
    “And why not? I’s dead. I’s got the pleasure of watching all the living. Lucky sods. They don’t know they’s born. What I wouldn’t give for an hour in their sweaty shoes …”
    At that moment Teo noticed that the man’s feet hovered an inch above the floor of the boat. She reached out a hand towards him. “Wait! So you’re a ghost?”
    “Which bit of ‘dead’ are yer not understandin, girlie?”
    “But I can see you.”
    “Children can always see us ghosts. But it don’t bother ’em, not s’far as I can see. They don’t usually see any difference between grown-ups, living or dead. Children is always bound up with their own affairs—all adults is in another world, s’far as they’s concerned.”
    “But you can see me. Adults … just … can’t at the moment. How is it that you can see me? Does that prove that I am a ghost?”
    “Whoa there, girlie. Pedro-the-Crimp don’t know what yer is. There’s something missing about yer, s’true. Yer cold, but yer isn’t cold enough … how did yer die?”
    “I didn’t die! At least, I don’t remember dying.”
    “Doesn’t even know if she died, does she?” jeered Pedro-the-Crimp. “Is it mad yer are? Well, I can tell yer that yer’s not prop’ly alive, girlie, else the grown-ups would see yer. Yer don’t look much like an angel to me. Tell me what yer did, and I’ll tell yer if yer is a ghost.”
    “What I did?”
    “What bad thing?”
    “You mean to be a ghost you have to do a bad thing?”
    The thin man looked shifty. “Well, some people, the lucky ones, the simple ones, they