"Venice runs on spritz, sirens, and walls that have been drinking the lagoon for centuries"
Grace Mbeki is twenty-eight, an architect-conservator from Cape Town on a three-month fellowship at a Venetian restoration foundation. She tastes walls to identify their salts and carries a battered moisture meter named Nomvula, after her grandmother. A 1631 contract she found in the state archive describes a painting commissioned for the great hall of a Cannaregio palazzo, and when a short-let landlord turns her rented room into a Giudecca Dream Loft, she moves into that very palazzo, which is now a hostel. The owners will let her survey the piano nobile if she makes some heritage content for their Instagram.
The Palazzo Umido, the Damp Palace, belongs to a London fund that has painted it phone-case pink, hung a neon sign over the door that says EMBRACE THE DAMP, and set the Wi-Fi password to JustBreathe. Grace licks the wall and it tastes bitter. Tavio, the custode, who wears chest waders and a cat on his shoulder, calls the Partner Hub el Fongo, the mushroom. Around them are Chiara on reception, who rows her own boat; Mr. Tanabe, a retired flood engineer who came for one week in 2020 to watch the MOSE barrier rise; Luis, an almost-sommelier who declares the whole palazzo corked; Midge, on day four of Venice in 36 Hours; and Jess Kowalski, fresh from Singapore in a rhinestone respirator, unable to use a single chemical in front of the Sistine Chapel of mould. And there is Tobias Reinholt, a Viennese writer in black velvet researching a novel called Morbidezza, who has booked the romantic canal room for two weeks. Its previous guest fled at dawn without her shoes, swearing a plague doctor had stood at the foot of her bed. The warnings keep coming. Nomvula maxes out at his door. The hostel app says the air is a perfect 54 per cent while the wall by Grace's pillow reads 92. A plaster cherub drops onto Jess's pillow, and it is black all the way through.
Then the Hub creates an event of its own: Il Ballo Umido, a masked ball at high tide on the night of the Festa della Salute, planned from the tide forecast. Mr. Tanabe, pencilling columns in his notebook, thinks the forecast is too low. On Saturday the lagoon comes up through the drains, the sirens start, and sixty people in wellies and plastic masks begin to dance in forty centimetres of water. At half past nine Tobias wades out in a black suit and an ivory plague-doctor mask, dances one slow, old-fashioned dance with Midge in the black water, bows, and goes back to the romantic room.
Age: 28
Type: Architect-conservator from Cape Town
Fatal Flaw: Licks walls in public, for science
Role: Protagonist
Age: —
Type: Viennese writer chasing the romance of decay
Fatal Flaw: Calls toxic black mould a poem
Role: Victim
Age: Late 20s
Type: Night reception, day reception, sometimes plumbing
Fatal Flaw: Knows exactly what is wrong and has to say Embrace the Damp anyway
Role: Ally
Age: About 70
Type: The palazzo's custode, in chest waders
Fatal Flaw: Settles every argument with an oar
Role: Keeper of the building
Age: About 75
Type: Retired hydraulic engineer, here since 2020
Fatal Flaw: Came for one week and trusts only his own tide tables
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Stanza Romantica"
The floor was wet.
Not damp. Wet. Her bare feet came down in a cold, thin film of water that covered the terrazzo from wall to wall and gleamed in her torchlight like black glass. It was coming in under the grille of the arch, silently, in a smooth sheet, with little bits of leaf and a cigarette end riding on it. The rug was soaked through. Her suitcase, which she had left open on the floor like a slob, was sitting in a shallow puddle, and her good sweater was floating in it.
"Merde—" She grabbed the sweater. It dripped on her feet. The mist from the diffuser lapped around her ankles, cool and sweet, rising, and the harpsichord went on playing its tinkling little tune, and she turned with the sweater in her hands to grab the suitcase, and swung the torch, and there was somebody standing at the foot of the bed.
She screamed.
It was very tall and very black. A long coat, or a cloak, falling straight to the floor into the mist. A wide-brimmed black hat. White gloves. A cane in one hand, held out, pointing at her. And under the hat, where a face should be, a mask: smooth, pale, like old ivory, with two round glass eyes and a long, curving, downward beak, the length of a forearm, ending in a point.
A medico della peste. A plague doctor. She had sketched a dozen of them in the mask shops in Calle dei Fabbri on her first afternoon, lined up on shelves with the harlequins and the Columbinas and the gold-leafed bautas, all staring at her with empty eyes, forty-five euros each, eighty for the one with the feathers.
This one was not on a shelf.
Its head tilted. Slowly. To one side, like a bird listening for a worm under the earth.
"C'est une blague," Élodie whispered. "It's a joke. It's a prank. It's a—" Her voice went up. "WHO IS THAT? QUI EST LÀ?"
The plague doctor said nothing. The harpsichord played. The canal breathed. The Hub's amber light pulsed on the ceiling and made the glass eyes of the mask glow like the eyes of a cat in headlights.
Élodie did what anyone her age would have done. She held up her phone and hit record.
On the screen, at the foot of the bed, there was nothing. Just a black coat. Her black coat, the long wool one she'd bought for this trip to feel like a tragic heroine, hanging from the tall iron hook on the bedpost where she'd left it, with her black felt hat on top of it, and her white knitted gloves stuffed in the pocket so that the cuffs poked out. And behind it, on the wall, the stain, grey and soft and beaked.
She lowered the phone.
The plague doctor was still there.
It took a step towards her through the mist.
And it spoke. Its voice was soft and wet and papery, like a page tearing slowly underwater, and it said a single word, patiently, the way you'd say it to a child who was crying.
"Respira."
Breathe.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Palazzo Umido, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "So atmospheric!!" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Bit damp lol but that's Venice!" — FreeToWander guest
⭐ "The room floods. The mould on the walls MOVES. The air freshener makes you sick. At 3 a.m. there was music in the walls and a man in a plague mask at the end of my bed and the door locked itself and I could not get out. I am not joking. I am not drunk. I have a Beaux-Arts degree. Please, please do not book this room." — Élodie M., Lyon
☠ "humidity noted. thank you for wandering." — @HostelReaper