Giacomo muttered a fervent prayer, a thing he had last done when a vicious combination of wind and tide had caught him and Filippo on a lee shore just beyond the northern mole at the entrance to the Porto di Lido. It had worked then, but he was less sanguine that his patron saint would intercede for him this time. Fishing was one thing, his present business quite another. Still, reciting the prayer helped to calm his panic. Disentangling himself from the briars, he worked his way through the undergrowth, searching for one of the signs which marked the path, trying not to think about what he was grinding and crushing under his boots.

When the man in white appeared, blocking his path, Giacomo felt a brief surge of relief at the thought that he was no longer alone. Then he remembered where he was, and terror rose in his throat like vomit. He forced himself to look again. The figure was still there, splayed across a mass of brambles, the panels of its jacket rippling and heaving as though in the wind. But there was no wind. Then he saw the face, what was left of it, and the rats running in and out of the sleeves. He took it in at one glance — a mass of half-eaten meat and tissue, the chest a bloody cage, the white suit ripped to shreds — and dropped the bag and fled, powered by an irresistible dread, a superstitious horror which sent him stumbling across that dune of human bones, tearing through the vegetation parasitic on that rich meal, running for his life and his reason from the isle of the dead.

On the way home from the bakery, she stops to buy some salad and fruit. The pale rain is still falling limply, covering the pavements in a greasy sheen and raising a rash of pockmarks on the surface of the water. Sebastiano and his son huddle over their produce under the green awning jury-rigged from the masts at either end of the barge.