I do not know how long I have been here. I counted the changing of the tides for a while, but with no way to mark them, I lost count. It seems a lifetime, but it could be only days. I try to imagine Brabantio and his family moving in the manse above me, and I think I can hear voices, or the ringing of a bell, but I can’t be sure. The sounds I hear in my head, the voices of the dead, are as real to me as anything I might hear from outside.

I talk to them, the dead, who come to me in the dark, and if I squint, I can see them, those phantoms of my past, blue-gray against the blackness. Lovers, friends, enemies, tossers, walleys, lick-spittles, catch-farts, slags, hags, and bum-snipers. People who I don’t remember ever having seen before pass by, pause, look at me, their eyes as black and empty as everything else. I don’t know if I dream them, or if I even sleep. The tide takes the weight off my chains and I drift. Just drift.

I always scream when she comes, sliding in by my knees, around the chamber, back behind my legs. Even if I have been waiting, anticipating, even if I am aware of her in the chamber, in that moment when she touches me, I am startled, terrified, and I can hear my pulse pound like a battle drum in my neck. My chains rattle and I fall, crucified in my shackles before her.

She will not harm me, until she does, but I am given to that. That first time, when the Montressor’s poison and fear were still high in my blood, I felt it was a shark or a great eel in the room, saw in my mind’s eye the saw teeth tearing pieces from me. And when claws or spines fastened into my loins and something soft—ever so soft—like honey in water, wrapped upon my manhood, my mind could find no picture to put on the creature. What thing of the vasty deep was soft, gentle, yet strong, spiny? I had seen octopi alive in buckets of seawater in the fish market in Venice, and a fishmonger had dared me to touch one, and yes, it was soft, and disgusting, little more than a tripe with a purpose. “You fucking Venetians will eat anything the sea pukes up, won’t you? This looks like something shat out by something too disgusting to be allowed near a kitchen, and I am from a race of avowed offal eaters.” The fishmonger laughed.