October 20, 2023

"Amore, remember when I implied telling your sister about Poveglia couldn't have been that big a deal?" Gino's head swivels as he talks—the prospect of catching patrolling authorities' attention has been filling him with paranoia. "I take it back. I should've kept my mouth shut at all costs."

Stella nods, no-mercy style. "I agree."

"The boat isn't all that big," Jamie comments. "I can hear you both just fine."

Gino, apparently satisfied with the current lack of imminent threats, ups his boat's tempo. "I mean this in the kindest way imaginable: you were supposed to."

Nathan shivers, uncomfortable on the water once more. He can't tell if the nausea pulsing through him is brought forth by the sea or his ailing health—perhaps each strain simply amplifies the other. He doesn't have the courage to look at his hands and the blackness sneaking steadily through his veins and up his arms for too long. The Doctor's venom corrupts healthy blood, poisoning his body.

For once, Nathan appreciates the magic embedded in his soul. He is convinced it may be the only thing keeping this new force of malice at bay, preserving his sanity and ensuring he's still standing. It forms a barrier between him and whatever unspeakable fate may already have befallen him otherwise.

But not every barrier is guaranteed to hold.

Never in his life has Nathan felt as small, weak and helpless as in this moment, sitting in a boat headed for a hellish island, wanting nothing more than to curl up in a foetal position until the fear and pain are gone for good.

It isn't even Poveglia itself that scares him anymore. Returning almost feels like coming home.

That scares the everliving shit out of him.

"So this is the infamous Poveglia Island." Stella regards the corpse of the old asylum looming in the distance with interest, ready to dissect its body and discover what once made it tick. She shudders. "You spent the night in this mass graveyard? How did your flight responses not go haywire?"

"Actually, I was sleeping fine until the revenant showed up. That cut the night a little short." The look Jamie throws at the ruins coming closer and closer holds far more revilement. "This time I'm not running anywhere until we've done all we need to do."

On Nathan and Jamie's instructions from memory, Gino finds the landing spot Giovanni employed and moors his boat there. Darkness is starting to fall; all the stars are in hiding in an overcast sky. Daylight would've served them better for confronting the Doctor, but stocking up on new and better weaponry took up precious hours, as did combing through half the canals of Venice to determine if the Doctor still dwelled within the city itself. They spent too long searching fruitlessly—Jamie's crucial connection of peculiar dots came later than it ideally should have.

The sun sets early in October. They'll have to make do with dusk.

They reach the island and, when Nathan sets foot on it this second time, he feels ever so slightly better. Healthier, as if the atmosphere leeches off his sickness, cleansing him. But this strange effect on his body, despite the relief it brings, cannot be benevolent. Nathan welcomes it as much as Poveglia does visitors.

They move steadily onward alongside the fence, undaunted by the forlorn, intense silence.

"Can you feel it, Nate?" Jamie asks, fixated on the bricked-up clock tower, as if the Doctor might show up on top. "The revenant's presence?"

Nathan's body has been aching so much it has numbed him. Tracing any one of the many strands of pain currently residing in his flesh to the Doctor is impossible.

"Can't tell. We'll just have to see if your theory is correct."

Jamie clutches one of the crude stakes they made tighter. Nathan fashioned them out of hardware store-bought wooden sticks—Bishop Nikulasson taught him well. "It has to be. What else could your dream mean?"

They enter the asylum again first; it doesn't look any better now than it did when Nathan first ventured inside. Still a goddamn mess, a horrid concoction of debris and dust and graffiti on the walls. So much graffiti, some of it marking the end of Raffaele Mezzanotte's days on Earth. Amateur paint everywhere—but not, according to Jamie, in the disturbing space they're heading for.

"Santo cielo," Gino murmurs when the human-sized furnaces enter their line of sight. "We have to go through those?"

Stella, who spends most of her work week in or around a hospital morgue, barely flinches. "If Jamie survived it the first time, so can we."

Knock on wood for that one.

This time around, Nathan can't get away with staying behind. He goes in last, after Gino, coughing due to all the dust. He fears he is the only one in the group smothered in a strong smell of ashes, fighting to keep hold of his sanity and struggling against claustrophobia. The furnace may have gone out of service long ago, but it cooks up vivid images in Nathan's head. Images of people burned alive.

Could be the Doctor's venom. Minor hallucinations designed to torture. Hallucination or not, Nathan resists the urge to push Gino out of the way so he himself can exit earlier. Once he's safely on the other side, he releases a shaky breath.

Jamie was right. This otherwise inaccessible part of the building is more intact than the rest of them, and there is no graffiti to be found.

"Let's see... I think..." Jamie pauses to ponder the way—she reviewed her own footage five times to be able to figure it out from memory, but it still might not have stuck all that well. "Yeah. In the back on the left, I suppose."

She retraces steps she set last week, Nathan and company following as she goes. Nathan's stomach flips, his senses going wild with paranoia. This space fills him with the urge to run away. But also, perhaps, the urge to slip into a frenzy, lunge at something or someone and maim without stopping until the victim will never get up again.

The Doctor. Yes, the Doctor. Nathan would like to tear the revenant apart limb from limb.

These truly must be Poveglia's wickedest halls.

The room Jamie leads them into must once have been a Spartanly furnished office. It still contains a desk-chair combination, wood rotting, half of the drawers missing and nowhere in sight.

Jamie ignores this, making a beeline for a bookcase still filled with decaying old books that could crumble to dust in Nathan's fingers. Stella surveys the state of them as if their unfortunate fate might make her cry.

"This was what I considered the strangest spot when I filmed this part of the building." Jamie comes to a halt in front of the bookcase. "I mean, the lack of graffiti shows clearly people tend to stay away from this place, and I can see why. It feels... worse than any other place on the island somehow, and that's saying something considering the mass graves and all. Still, you'd think some bad vibes wouldn't stop every looter who came by in the past decades, right?"

"If anyone could still find something of value here," Gino mutters, "they deserve a medal."

"Then be aware I'll settle for nothing but gold, G. I didn't think that much of it at the time, but..."

Jamie lifts up the remains of an old book, revealing an object previously half-hidden behind it. A statuette of Saint Mark's Lion, icon of Venice.

"...it doesn't make any sense. The books, they're unsalvageable. No antiquarian is going to take those off your hands for decent money. This statuette, though... It's just there for the taking, yet it's still here."

Nathan chased a lion through the asylum last night. "My dream tried to lead us to this room."

Jamie goes a little twitchy. "The Doctor may have been showing you where to come find it. Almost like it invited us here. Or challenged us, depending on how you look at it. I wouldn't be surprised if this office was his when he was still a human being who worked in the asylum."

"Nobody could steal the statuette if it's attached to the bookcase," Stella theorizes. "And that could be the case if–"

"–if it conceals a mechanism," Jamie finishes for her. "Ten bucks says there's a door hiding behind this thing." She pokes and prods at the statuette, unleashing a few different tactics on it—pulling, twisting, pushing.

Pushing it backwards does the trick.

A faint click resounds. Nathan joins Jamie at the bookcase, helping her pull its heavy weight away from the unlocked entrance. A short staircase leads to a subterranean, mineshaft-like corridor, bathing in darkness as black as the plague.

Nathan killed a man once, but comprehends the true smell and feel of death only now.

"Well then." Jamie releases a nervous chuckle, fidgeting with her watch. "I don't really like being right anymore."

Nathan isn't jumping with joy at the prospect of going in, either. He tears his gaze from the shadows, studying the bookcase. Before he lost consciousness that fateful night on Poveglia, he felt the Doctor approach from outside—not from inside the building, from the underground lair to which this hidden corridor must lead. Yet, the revenant would have reached him and Jamie much easier if it had chosen that route.

What made it pick another?

"I don't like splitting up, but maybe we should," he suggests. "Wherever we end up once we go in, we won't know where any other exit is in a pinch. This one may be an entrance, but considering our first encounter with the Doctor, we can't be sure if it will open again from the inside should we close it. Or worse, something else could close it for us."

Stella looks around as if a poltergeist may just materialize on the spot. "That's a good point. We could end up trapped. Unless somebody stays here to ensure it remains open."

Nathan doesn't know what would be worse: going down to face the revenant or lingering here, alone, vulnerable to would-be attackers and left to agonize over the others' fate. But he couldn't do the job himself even if he wanted to. He has been the Doctor's true target from the start.

"I can do it," Gino volunteers. "I'll... I'll keep the door open. If anything happens, I'll shout."

"We'll come running right back if you do," Stella promises in an instant. "But if one of us shouts... Stay put. We need a reliable escape route more than anything else."

Gino nods in understanding, but his fingers, wrapped around an axe handle, tremble. "Come back alive. All of you. I don't want to ferry any corpses into the city."

Before they took to the water, Jamie jotted down a message on a post-it note. Slipped it under her parents' hotel room door after each member of this doomed little party had signed it with their name. We're out on Gino's boat, clearing the air, it read. We'll be back soon. Love you despite it all.

Before the night ends, that could be everything left of them to find. A scrap of yellow paper on a hotel floor.

"Nobody except the Doctor is going to die," Jamie assures him with conviction. She takes a first step down the stairs. "Can we get a flashlight in here, Stella? Nate and I don't have phones right now."

"Yes. On it."

Gino and Stella share a hug and a kiss before they'll be separated. Nathan watches this, thinks he'd like so badly for Jamie to be right. Nobody except the Doctor will die. Gino and Stella will live to experience their own wedding. Jamie will be there to attend it; Nathan will be her plus one. And this, all of this, will be a nightmare half-forgotten, an unpleasant memory  from what might have been a whole other life.

At least, Nathan likes to believe as much when he gives Gino an encouraging nod and follows the women into the Doctor's lair, a knife in his pocket and a stake in his hand. He thought his heart rate would speed up while descending, but it actually calms down. He is on a mission, determined and ready as he'll ever be. Nathan Devereaux has never been afraid of the dark.

And before the night is over, he will kill again.