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“You think he’s gone out that way?”
“Long gone by now.” He hesitated. “Show me that baptistry first.”
“Are you crazy?”
“He’s gone, Kate.”
“But why do you…?”
Ned looked at her. “History lesson? You promised.”
She didn’t smile. “Why are you playing boy detective?”
He didn’t have a really good answer. “This is a bit too weird. I want to try to understand.”
“Ned, he said he’d killed children.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think…that means what we think it means.”
“And that sounds like a line from a bad movie.”
“Maybe. But come on.”
“This where the creepy music starts?”
“Come on, Kate.”
He got up and she followed. She could have left by herself, he thought later, sitting on the terrace of the villa that evening. They didn’t know each other at all that first morning. She could have gone out the way she’d come in, saying goodbye, or not, as she pleased.
They walked together down the three steps into the baptistry and stood above the grate, beside that inner ring of pillars. The light was beautiful after the dimness of the cathedral, streaming down through windows in the dome above the shallow well in the centre.
Ned knelt and peered through the bars of the grate. If it was supposed to be a viewing point, it wasn’t much of one. It was too dark down there to see where the sunken space might go.
“Here’s the bit about the tomb,” Kate said. She was at the west wall, in front of some tourist information, a typed, laminated sheet, framed in wood. Ned walked over. Basically, it was just another map-key to this part of the interior. Kate pointed at a letter on the map, and then the text keyed to it. As she’d said, it seemed someone was buried there, “a citizen of Aix,” in the sixth century.
“And look at this,” she said.
She was pointing to an alcove on their left. Ned saw a really old wall painting of a bull or a cow and below it an almost obliterated mosaic fragment. He could make out a small bird, part of some much larger work. The rest of it was worn away.
“These are even older,” Kate said.
“What was this place, before? Where we are?”
“The forum was here. Centre of town. The Roman city was founded about a hundred and something years b.c. by a guy named Sextius when the Romans first started to take over Provence from the Celts. He named it after himself, Aquae Sextiae. Aquae, because of the waters. There were hot springs until recently. That’s why there are so many fountains. Have you seen them?”
“We just got here. The cathedral was built on top of the forum?”
“Uh-huh. There’s a sketch of it on the wall. Where your dad is now was like the major intersection of the Roman town. That’s why…that’s why I still don’t understand someone being buried here, back then.”
“Well, it was hundreds of years after, wasn’t it? It says sixth century.”
She looked dubious. “It was still taboo, I’m almost sure.”
“Google it later, or I will.”
“Boy detective?” Kate sounded as if she was trying to tease but didn’t actually feel like it. Ned could relate.
He shook his head again. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, or why. He looked at that faded bull on the wall. It sure didn’t look like any church art he knew. This place was really old. He shivered. And perhaps because of that, because he felt scared, he walked quickly back, knelt again by the grate, put both hands on it, and pulled.
It was heavier than he’d expected. He managed to shift it a bit, making the scraping sound they’d heard before. The man had broken some clasp or catch, Ned saw. He just had to lift and slide, but…
“Help me, this sucker’s heavy!”
“Are you insane?”
“No…but my fingers’ll be crushed if you don’t…”
She moved, to the part he’d levered up and, on her knees beside him, helped slide it over. There was an opening now, large enough for a small man, or a teenaged boy, to get through.
“You are not going down there,” Kate said. “I am not staying to watch—”
“I bequeath you my iPod,” Ned replied, handing it to her. And then, before he had time to think about it and get really frightened, he put his feet over the edge of the pit, turned so he was facing the side, and lowered himself. Just as he did he started thinking about snakes or scorpions or rats skittering through the dark, ancient space below. Insane wasn’t a bad word to use, he decided.
His feet touched bottom and he let go. He looked down, couldn’t even see his running shoes.
“You wouldn’t by any chance have—”
“Take this,” said the girl named Kate, in the same moment. She handed him a small red metal flashlight. “I keep one in my pack. For walks at night.”
“Efficient of you. Remind me,” Ned said, “to introduce you to someone named Melanie.” He turned on the beam.
“You going to bother telling me why you are doing this?” she asked, from above.
“Would if I knew,” he said, truthfully.
He shone the beam along the dark grey stones beside and below him. He knelt. The slabs were damp, cold, really big, like for a road—which is what she’d said they’d been.
On his right the foundation wall was close, below the grate. Straight ahead the flashlight lit the short distance to the sunken well, which was dry now, of course. He saw worn steps. The beam picked out a rusted pipe sticking out, attached to nothing. There were spiderwebs entangling it.
No snakes, no rats. Yet.
To his left the space opened into a corridor.
He’d been expecting that, actually. That was the way back towards the main part of the cathedral, where the placard on the wall had said a tomb would be. Ned took a deep breath.
“Remember,” he said, “the iPod’s yours. Don’t delete the Led Zep, or Coldplay.”
He bent low, because he had to. He didn’t get very far, maybe twenty steps. It didn’t go farther. It just hit another wall. He’d be right under the first nave here, he thought. The roof was really low.
His flashlight beam played along the rough, damp surface in front of him. It was sealed, closed off. Nothing that even vaguely resembled a tomb. It looked like there were just the two corridors: from the grate to the well, and this one.
“Where are you?” Kate called.
“I’m okay. It’s closed up. There’s nothing here. Like he said. Maybe this whole opening was just for getting down to fix the pipes. Plumbing. Bet there are other pipes, and more grates around the other side of the well.”
“I’ll go look,” she called. “Does this mean I don’t get the iPod?”
Ned laughed, startling himself as the sound echoed.
And it was then, as he turned to go back, that the bright, narrow beam of Kate’s flashlight, playing along the corridor, illuminated a recessed space, a niche cut in the stone wall, and Ned saw what was resting in it.
CHAPTER II
He didn’t touch it. He wasn’t that brave, or that stupid. The hairs were actually standing up on the back of his neck.
“Another grate,” Kate called cheerfully from above. “Maybe you were right. Maybe after they covered up the Roman street they just needed—”
“I found something,” he said.
His voice sounded strained, unnatural. The flashlight beam wavered. He tried to hold it steady but the movement had illuminated something else and he looked at this now. Another recess. The same thing in it, he thought at first, then he realized it wasn’t. Not quite the same.
“Found? What do you mean?” Kate called.
Her voice, only a few steps away and up, seemed to Ned to be coming from really far off, from a world he’d left behind when he came down here. He couldn’t answer. He was actually unable to speak. He looked, the beam wobbling from one object to the other.
The first one, set in an egg-shaped hollow in the wall and mounted carefully on a clay base, was a human skull.
He was quite certain this wasn’t from any tomb down here, it was too exposed, too obviously set here to be seen. This wasn’t a burial. The base was like the kind his mother used on the mantelpiece or the shelves on either side of the fireplace back home to hold some object she’d found in her travels, an artifact from Sri Lanka, or Rwanda.
This skull had been placed to be found, not laid to some dark eternal rest.
The second object made that even clearer. In a precisely similar hollowed-out recess beside the first, and set on an identical clay rest, was a sculpture of a human head.
It was smooth, worn down, as if with age. The only harsh line was at the bottom, as if it had been decapitated, jaggedly severed at the neck. It looked terrifying, speaking or signalling to him across centuries: a message he really didn’t want to understand. In some ways it frightened him even more than the bones. He’d seen skulls before; you made jokes, like with the one in science lab, “Alas, poor Yorick! Such a terrible name!”
He’d never seen anything like this carving. Someone had gone to great pains to get down here, hollow out a place, fit it to a base beside a real skull in an underground corridor leading nowhere. And the meaning was…what?
“What is it?” Kate called. “Ned, you’re scaring me.”
He still couldn’t answer her. His mouth was too dry, words weren’t coming. Then, forcing himself to look more closely by the light of the flashlight beam, Ned saw that the sculpted head was completely smooth on the top, as if bald. And there was a gash in the stone face—a scarring of it—along one cheek, and up behind the ear.
He got out of there, as fast as he could.
they sat in the cloister in morning light, side by side on a wooden bench. Ned hadn’t been sure how much farther he could walk before sitting down.
There was a small tree in front of them, the one on the cover of the brochure. It was bright with springtime flowers in the small, quiet garden. They were close to the door that led back into the cathedral. There was no breeze here. It was a peaceful place.
His hands, holding Kate’s red flashlight, were still trembling.
He must have left Melanie’s brochure in the baptistry, he realized. They’d stayed just long enough to close the grate, dragging it back across the open space, scraping it on the stone floor. He hadn’t even wanted to do that, but something told him it needed to be done, covering over what lay below.
“Tell me,” said Kate.
She was biting her lip again. A habit, obviously. He drew a breath and, looking down at his hands and then at the sunlit tree, but not at the girl, told about the skull and the sculpted head. And the scar.
“Oh, God,” she said.
Which was just about right. Ned leaned back against the rough wall.
“What do we do?” Kate asked. “Tell the…the archaeologists?”
Ned shook his head. “This isn’t an ancient find. Think about it a second.”
“What do you mean? You said…”
“I said it looked old, but those things haven’t been there long. Can’t have been. Kate, people must have been down there dozens of times. More than that. That’s what archaeologists do. They’ll have gone looking at those…Roman street slabs, searching for the tomb, studying the well.”
“The font,” she said. “That’s what it is. Not a well.”
“Whatever. But, point is, that guy and me, we’re not the first people down there. People would have seen and recorded and…and done something with those things if they’d been there a long time. They’d be in a museum by now. There’d be stuff written about them. They’d be on that tourist thing on the wall, Kate.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m pretty sure someone put them there just a little while ago.” He hesitated. “And carved out the spaces for them, too.”
“Oh, God,” she said again.
She looked at him. In the light he could see her eyes were light brown, like her hair. She had freckles across her nose and cheeks. “You think for…our guy to see?”
Our guy. He didn’t smile, though he would have, another time. His hands had stopped shaking, he was pleased to see.
He nodded. “The head was him, for sure. Bald, the scar. Yeah, it was there for him.”
“Okay. Um, put there by who? I mean, whom?”
He did smile a little this time. “You’re hopeless.”
“I’m thinking out loud, boy detective. Got your cereal box badge?”
“Left it behind.”
“Yeah, you left this, too.” She fished his brochure out of her pack.
He took it from her. “You gotta meet Melanie,” he said again.
He looked at the guide. The picture on the cover had been taken this same time of year; the flowers on the tree were identical. He showed her.
“Nice,” she said. “It’s a Judas tree. Who’s Melanie?”
Figured, that she’d know the tree. “My dad’s assistant. He has three people with him, and someone from the publisher coming, and me.”
“And what do you do?”
He shrugged. “Hang out. Crawl into tunnels.” He looked around. “Anything here?”
“Fresh air. I was getting sick inside.”
“Me too, down there. I shouldn’t have gone.”
“Probably not.”
They were silent a moment. Then Kate said, in a bright, fake tour-guide voice, “The columns show Bible tales, mostly. David and Goliath is over there.”
She pointed to their right. Ned got up and walked over. His legs seemed okay. His heart was still pretty fast, as if he’d finished a training run.
He saw a linked pair of round columns supporting a heavy square one, which in turn held up the walkway roof. On the top square were carved two intertwined figures: a smooth-faced man above the much larger head and twisted-over body of another one. David and Goliath?
He looked back at Kate, who was still on the bench. “Jeez, how did you figure this out?”
She grinned. “I didn’t. I’m cheating. There’s another guide thing on the wall farther down. I read it when I came through from outside. The Queen of Sheba is on the other side.” She gestured across the garden towards the walkway opposite.
Because she was pointing, Ned looked that way, which he wouldn’t have done otherwise. And because he was standing where he was, he saw the rose resting against the two round columns of another pillar on the far side.
And it was then—just then—that he began to feel really odd.
It wasn’t fear (that had been in him awhile by then) or excitement; this was like something unblocking or unlocking, changing…just about everything, really.
Slowly, he went around that way along the shaded cloister walk, past the door to the street that Kate had used to get in. He would have gone out that way with her a moment before. Only a moment, and the story would have stopped for them.
He went along that side and turned up the far one, opposite where they’d been. Kate was still sitting on the wooden bench, the green backpack on the stone paving beside her. Ned turned his eyes to the pillar in front of him, with the single rose leaning between the two columns. He looked at the carving.
It wasn’t the Queen of Sheba.
He was as sure of that as he’d been about anything in his life. Whatever the printed sheet on the wall might tell you, that wasn’t who this was. They didn’t always know, the people who wrote brochures and guidebooks. They might pretend, but they didn’t always know.
He was aware of Kate getting up and coming towards him now, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the woman on the pillar. This was the only one of all the slender, doubled columns here that had a full-length figure on it. His heart was pounding again.
She was worn almost completely away, Ned saw, more eroded than any of the other, smaller carvings he’d passed. He didn’t know why that was, at first. And then, because of what was opening up inside him, he thought he did know.
She had been made this way, barely carved into the stone, the features less sharply defined, meant to fade, to leave, like something lost from the beginning.
She was delicately slender, he saw, and would have been tall. You could still see elegant, careful details in the tunic she wore and the robe that swept to her ankles. He could see braided hair falling past her shoulders, but her nose and mouth were almost gone, worn away, and her eyes could barely be seen. Even so, Ned had a sense—an illusion?—of a lifted eyebrow, something ironic in that slim grace.
He shook his head. This was an eroded sculpture in an obscure cloister. It should have been completely unremarkable, the kind of thing you walked right past, getting on with your life.
Ned had a sense of time suddenly, the weight of it. He was standing in a garden in the twenty-first century, and he was sharply aware of how far back beyond even a medieval sculpture the history of this ground stretched. Men and women had lived and died here for thousands of years. Getting on with their lives.
And maybe they didn’t always go away after, entirely.
It wasn’t the sort of thought he’d ever had before.
“She was beautiful,” he said. Whispered it, actually.
“Well, Solomon thought so,” said Kate mildly, coming to stand beside him.
Ned shook his head. She didn’t get it.
“Did you see the rose?” he said.
“What rose?”
“Behind her.”
Kate dropped her pack and leaned forward over the railing that protected the garden.
“There aren’t…there aren’t any rose bushes here,” she said, after a while.
“No. I think he brought it. Put it here before he went inside.”
“He? Our guy? You mean…?”
Ned nodded. “And he’s still here.”
“What?”
He had just realized that last part himself, the thought arriving as he formed the words. He’d been thinking, reaching within, trying to concentrate. And it had come to him.
He was scaring himself now, but there was something he could see in his mind—a presence of light or colour, an aura. Ned cleared his throat. You could run away from a moment like this, close your eyes, tell yourself it wasn’t real.
Or you could say aloud, instead, as clearly as you could manage, lifting your voice, “You told us you were leaving. Why are you still up there?”
He couldn’t actually see anyone, but it didn’t matter. Things had changed. He would place the beginning, later, as when he’d walked across the cloister and looked at the almost-vanished face of a woman carved in stone hundreds of years ago.
Kate let out a small scream, and stepped quickly back beside him on the walkway.
There was a silence, broken by a car horn sounding from a nearby street. If he hadn’t been so certain, Ned might have thought that the experience underground had rattled him completely, making him say and do entirely weird things.
Then they heard someone reply, eliminating that possibility.
“I will now confess to being surprised.”
The words came from the slanting roof above and to their right, towards the upper windows of the cathedral. They couldn’t see him. It didn’t matter. Same voice.
Kate whimpered again, but she didn’t run.
“Believe me,” said Ned, trying to sound calm, “I’m more surprised.”
“I guarantee I beat you both,” said Kate. “Please don’t kill us.”
It felt so strange to Ned, over and above everything else, to be standing next to someone who was actually speaking words like don’t kill us, and meaning them.
His life hadn’t prepared him for anything like this.
The voice from the roof was grave. “I said I wouldn’t.”
“You also said you’d done it before,” Kate said.
“I have.” Then, after another silence, “You would be mistaken in believing I am a good man.”
Ned would remember that. He’d remember almost everything, in fact. He said, “You know that your face is down in the corridor, back there?”
“You went down? That was brave.” A pause. “Yes, of course it is.”
Of course? The voice was low, clear, precise. Ned realized—his brain hadn’t processed this properly before—that he’d spoken in English himself, and the man had replied the same way.
“I guess it isn’t your skull beside it.” Real bad joke.
“Someone might have liked it to be.”
Ned dealt with that, or tried to. And then something occurred to him, in the same inexplicable way as before. “Who…who was the model for her, then?” he asked. He was looking at the woman on the column. He found it hard not to look at her.
Silence above them. Ned sensed anger, rising and suppressed. Inside his mind he could actually place the figure on the roof tiles now, exactly where he was: seen within, silver-coloured.
“I think you ought to go now,” the man said finally. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story. It is no place for children. Believe me,” he said again.
“I do,” Kate said, with feeling. “Believe me!”
Ned Marriner felt his own anger kick in, hard. He was surprised how much of that was in him these days. “Right,” he said. “Run along, kids. Well, what am I supposed to do with this…feeling I have in me now? Knowing this is not the goddamn Queen of Sheba, knowing exactly where you are up there. This is completely messed up. What am I supposed to do with it?”
After another silence, the voice above came again, more gently. “You are hardly the first person to have an awareness of such things. You must know that, surely? As for what you are to do…” That hint of amusement again. “Am I become a counsellor? How very odd. What is there to do in a life? Finish growing up; most people never do. Find what joy there is to find. Try to avoid men with knives. We are not…this story is not important for you.”
Ned’s anger was gone as quickly as it had flared. That, too, was strange. In the lingering resonance of those words, he heard himself say, “Could we be important for it? Since I seem to have—”
“No,” said the voice above them, flatly dismissive. “As you just put it: run along. That will be best, whatever it does to your vanity. I am not as patient as I might once have been.”
“Oh, really? Not like when you sculpted her?” Ned asked.
“What?” cried Kate again.
In that same instant there came an explosion of colour in Ned’s mind and then of movement, above and to their right: a swift, coiled blur hurtling down. The man on the roof somersaulted off the slanting tiles to land in the garden in front of them. His face was vivid with rage, bone white. He looked exactly like the sculpted head underground, Ned thought.
“How did you know that?” the man snarled. “What did he tell you?”
He was of middling height, as Ned had guessed. He wasn’t as old as the bald head might suggest; could even be called handsome, but was too lean, as if he’d been stretched, pulled, and the lack of hair accentuated that, along with the hard cheekbones and the slash of his mouth. His grey-blue eyes were also hard. The long fingers, Ned saw, were flexing, as if they wanted to grab someone by the throat. Someone. Ned knew who that would be.
But really, really oddly, he wasn’t afraid now.
Less than an hour ago he’d walked into an empty church to kill some time with his music, bored and edgy, and frightened beyond any fully acknowledged thought for his mother. Only that last was still true. An hour ago the world had been a different place.
“Tell me? No one told me anything!” he said. “I don’t know how I know these things. I asked you that, remember? You just said I’m not the first.”
“Ned,” said Kate. Her voice creaked like it needed oiling. “This sculpture was made eight hundred years ago.”
“I know,” he said.
The man in front of them said, “A little more than that.”
They saw him close his eyes then open them, staring coldly at Ned. The leather jacket was slate grey, his shirt underneath was black. “You have surprised me again. It doesn’t often happen.”
“I believe that,” Ned said.
“This is still not for you. You have no idea of what…you have no role. I made a mistake, back there. If you won’t go, I will have to leave you. There is too much anger in me. I do not feel very responsible.”
Ned knew about that kind of anger, a little. “You will not let us…do anything?”
A movement of the wide mouth. “The offer is generous, but if you knew even a little you would realize how meaningless it is.” He turned away, a dark-clad figure, slender, unsettlingly graceful.
“Last question?” Ned lifted a hand, stupidly—as if he were in class.
The figure stopped but didn’t turn back to them. He was as they’d first seen him, from behind, but lit by the April sun in a garden.
“Why now?” Ned asked. “Why here?”
They could hear the traffic from outside again. Aix was a busy, modern city, and they were right in the middle of it.
The man was silent for what seemed a long time. Ned had a sense that he was actually near to answering, but then he shook his head. He walked across the middle of the cloister and stepped between two columns and over the low barrier back to the walkway by the door that led out to the street and world.
“Wait!”
It was Kate this time.
The man paused again, his back still to them. It was the girl’s voice, it seemed to Ned. He wouldn’t have stopped a second time for Ned, that was the feeling he had.
“Do you have a name?” Kate called, something wistful in her tone.
He did turn, after all, at that.
He looked at Kate across the bright space between. He was too far away for them to make out his expression.
“Not yet,” he said.
Then he turned again and went out, opening the heavy door and closing it behind him.
They stood where they were, looking briefly at each other, in that enclosed space separated, in so many ways, from the world.
Ned, in the grip of emotions he didn’t even come close to understanding, walked a few steps. He felt as if he needed to run for miles, up and down hills until the sweat poured out of him.
From here he could see the rose again between the two pillars, behind the carving. People said she was the Queen of Sheba. It was posted that way on the wall. How did he know they were wrong? It was ridiculous.
Directly in front of him the corner pillar was much larger than those beside it—all four of the corners were. This one, he realized, without much surprise, had another bull carved at the top. It was done in a style different from David and Goliath, and nothing at all like the woman.
Two bulls now, one in the baptistry, fifteen hundred years ago, and this one carved—if he understood properly—hundreds of years after that. He stared at it, almost angrily.
“What do goddamn bulls have to do with anything?” he demanded.
Kate cleared her throat. “New Testament. Symbol of St. Luke.”
Ned stared at the creature at the top of the pillar in front of him.
“I doubt it,” he said finally. “Not this one. Not the old one inside, either.”
“What are you saying now?”
He looked over, saw the strain on her face, and guessed he probably looked a lot the same. Maybe they were kids. Someone had pointed a knife towards them. And that was almost the least of it.
He looked at the sculpted woman where Kate stood and felt that same hard tug at his heart again. Pale-coloured stone in morning light, almost entirely worn away. Barely anything to be seen, as if she were a rendering of memory itself. Or of what time did to men and women, however much they’d been loved.
And where had that idea come from? He thought of his mother. He shook his head.
“I don’t know what I’m saying. Let’s get out of here.”
“Need a drink, Detective?”
He managed a smile. “Coke will do fine.”
kate knew where she was going. She led him under the clock tower and past the city hall to a café a few minutes from the cathedral.
Ned sat with his Coke, watched her sip an espresso without sugar (impressed him, he had to admit), and learned that she’d been here since early March, on an exchange between her school in New York City and one here in Aix. Her family had hosted a French girl last term, and Kate was with the girl’s family until school ended at the beginning of summer.
Her last name was Wenger. She planned to do languages in university, or history, or both. She wanted to teach, or maybe study law. Or both. She took jazz dance classes (he’d guessed something like that). She ran three miles every second or third day in Manhattan, which was not what Ned did, but was pretty good. She liked Aix a whole lot, but not Marie-Chantal, the girl she was staying with. Seemed Marie-Chantal was a secret smoker in the bedroom they shared, and a party girl, and used Kate to cover for her when she was at her boyfriend’s late or skipping class to meet him.
“It sucks, lying for her,” she said. “I mean, she’s not even really a friend.”
“Sounds like a babe, though. Got her phone number?”
Kate made a face. “You aren’t even close to serious.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because you’re in love with a carving in a cloister, that’s why.”
That brought them back a little too abruptly to what they’d been trying to avoid.
Ned didn’t say anything. He sipped his drink and looked around. The long, narrow café had two small tables on the street, but those had been taken, so they were inside, close to the door. The morning traffic was busy—cars, mopeds, a lot of people walking the medieval cobblestones.
“Sorry,” Kate Wenger said after a moment. “That was a weird thing to say.”
He shrugged. “I have no clue what to make of that sculpture. Or what happened.”
She was biting at her lip again.
“Why was he…our guy…why was he looking down there? For whatever it was? Could it have been the font, something about the water?”
Ned shook his head. “Don’t think so. The skull and the carved head were the other way, along the corridor.” He had a thought. “Kate…if someone was buried there, they’d have walled him up, right? Not left a coffin lying around.”
She nodded her head. “Sure.”
“So maybe he was thinking the wall might have just been opened up. For some reason.”
Kate leaned back in her chair. “God, Ned Marriner, is this, like, a vampire story?”
“I don’t know what it is. I don’t think so.”
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