The Night Villa Read Online Free Page B

The Night Villa
Book: The Night Villa Read Online Free
Author: Carol Goodman
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weight of his body thud hard against the table, but the fifth shot’s already been fired. It goes straight into the table, blasting the wood above my head into pulp, releasing a corona of gold dust that dazzles my dark-accustomed eyes. It’s like the sun exploding inside my chest and the sky falling. And then it’s like the coldness of deep space as I fall back into the dark.

O nce, when Ely had locked himself in his study to meditate and chant, I pressed my ear to the door to listen to what he was chanting. At first all I heard was a low rhythmic hum and then, when I realized there were words beneath the hum, I couldn’t recognize their language. I thought for a moment that he’d added speaking in tongues to his repertoire of miracles, but as I listened I realized he was chanting three repeated lines of Greek hexameter verse. It took me another hour to transcribe and translate the three lines. I don’t know what I was expecting. A summoning of Satan? A prayer for help? An invocation to the dead? Certainly not these three questions:
    Where did I go wrong today?
    What did I accomplish?
    What obligation did I not perform?
    Later I found out that they were a fragment from a Pythagorean text called
The Golden Verses
—reputedly the lost work of Pythagoras, or possibly a third-century-AD forgery. Practitioners of Pythagoreanism were supposed to ask themselves these three questions every night. I never came across a classical reference to using them as a chant. That must have been an innovation of the Tetraktys, the particular Pythagorean cult that Ely had joined.
    I hadn’t thought about the questions in years, but when I opened my eyes in St. David’s Hospital I could have sworn that the sweet red-haired nurse standing over me in her surgical green scrubs asked me, “Where did you go wrong today?”
    I tried to answer—I was pretty sure the right answer was “By getting out of bed”—but I discovered that my mouth was taped shut. Two vertical lines, like quotation marks, creased the young woman’s brow and, consulting her chart, she tried another question.
    “What did you accomplish?”
    She smiled at the end of this one as if we were sharing a joke. “Getting myself shot” was one obvious answer, but then the other possibilities—getting Barry Biddle killed and Odette Renfrew shot—pushed up my throat and struggled against the plastic and tape strapped over my mouth until I could feel myself choking.
    The nurse reached over my head where a crescent moon gleamed in the pale green light and performed some motion that released a stream of hot molten silver into my veins. I could taste it at the back of my throat. When her face reappeared above me, she looked weary and many years older as she posed the third question.
    “What obligation did you not perform?”
    Although I couldn’t speak I found I could move my head slightly up and down—a motion that caused me great pain but brought a beatific smile to the nurse’s face. Yes, I imagined her thinking, you see where you failed! If only you had heeded the portents and signs! The code of rings, the message of the tower, the sign of fire in Odette’s skin! Only a blind person could have failed to see what was coming! The nurse turned to summon an audience for my confession. I didn’t mind, I was prepared to come clean, it was a relief really, but when a trio of masked men arrived at my bed I found my courage failed me. What good did it do to confess my sins now? What good did it do Odette and Barry? I tried to convey an expression of regret before I sank back into the embrace of darkness that lay like a cave beneath my rib cage. A place I could see, by the tubes attached there, had been hollowed out in a vain attempt to lighten my burden of guilt.
    The next time I woke up my aunt M’Lou was there. The tape was gone from my mouth, but tubes still ran from below my ribs to a pump beneath me that gurgled and rasped like a giant mouth sucking in seawater. I told

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