Free The Chamber of Ten by Christopher Golden

regained his balance. His thoughts were muzzy and he tried to shake the feeling. The morning seemed to be burning off the shadows in his mind just as it did those that had cloaked the city.
    Think. You kissed Geena while she slept, got out of bed and dressed, careful not to wake her, and left her place
.
    That much he did recall, along with the confusion that had roiled within him. His departure had been urgent and he had hurried through the maze of passages and bridges to the edge of the Grand Canal, with his pulse racing and the sense that some vital task must be accomplished. Paranoia made the small hairs stand up on the back of his neck and he had reached out with his thoughts, seeking the heightened emotions he could often sense. Fear had its own flavor. And malice. How many times had he escaped violence in a bar or club by departing just before things turned ugly?
    But he had sensed no malice, no violent intentions, no one following him. Why he should think someone might be following him, Nico didn’t know. It made no sense, but he could not escape that suspicion and had hurried onward, more frantic than ever to reach his destination …
    … only he didn’t know where he was going. Not at first. It felt to him as though some enormous hook had been set into his rib cage and was tugging him forward. He had hurried along the edge of the Grand Canal in vain hopes of discovering a water taxi running in the pre-dawn hours, knowing that crossing the water was the next step toward his destination.
    His memory had holes in it. Blackouts, like some awful drunk.
    He remembered sitting in a creaking
traghetto
, its small motor buzzing, echoing off black water below and black sky above. Somehow he had persuaded the man to take him across the Grand Canal from Guideca to San Marco. The fellow had looked exhausted; he’d probably been up all night ferrying revelers to various hotels and clubs. Nico had tried to pay him, but the man had gottena pale, frightened look on his face and had shooed him away.
    Only when he walked through the vast emptiness of St. Mark’s Square at half past three in the morning, and then into the labyrinth of alleys and bridges and canals beyond, did it occur to him where he was headed. The destination had popped into his head the way a song title might once he had given up trying to remember it.
    He had nearly turned around then. Geena had been soft and warm and in need of reassurance. Yet the compulsion had been impossible to resist, sending him out to wander Venice in the small hours of the morning with only the sounds of scurrying rats and the water lapping the sides of the canals to keep him company.
    Now he found himself here, gazing up at the beautiful face of this church, and he could recall only about half of that journey. Portions of his memory, even of the path he had taken to get here, were blacked out.
    In their place, other memories rushed in—vivid recollections of the sounds of construction, the stink of men working, the hoisting of statues into place, sculptors at work.… His hands trembled as he stared at the church.
    “Impossible,” he whispered, there in the light of the rising sun.
    Yet if he closed his eyes he could practically see the workers constructing the church’s façade, placing the pilasters, laying the brickwork around the enormous circular rose window that lit up now with the dawn’s light.
    “What the hell is happening to me?” he asked the sunrise.
    A piece of paper skittered across the tiles in the breeze, eddied in a circle, then continued on its way. He ought to turn around and go back to Geena, spoon behind herand press his nose into her hair, breathing in the scent of her. That was what he wanted to do. But somehow the commands did not travel from his brain to his muscles, and his body did not obey him. He felt like a marionette.
    Go in
, he thought.
    Or someone thought for him. That was exactly what it felt like. The ideas that kept bubbling to the surface