House of Dark Delights (24 page)

Except that it didn't really happen, it couldn't have—just as she couldn't have really lost her virginity this afternoon, despite how tender she still was between her legs. She'd imagined it—hadn't she? Would she ever know the truth of what had transpired in that strange little bedchamber in the cave?

Possibly not. Probably not.

Just because you don't know the answer doesn't mean it's not
there. Something
happened. A hallucination or…something else. Oddly enough, given Catherine's analytical nature, she felt no need to solve this particular mystery through rigorous application of the scientific method. Perhaps, as her father and Thomas maintained, not all answers could be found within the realm of bloodless science.

And perhaps some mysteries were never meant to be solved.

Catherine unpinned her hair and lowered herself into the rose-scented water, sighing as it enveloped her. Laying her head back against the lip of the tub, she closed her eyes and let the warmth of the water permeate her bone-weary, dirt-caked body.

She stroked the flesh of her inner thighs, which felt just as chafed as it looked. Tentatively, for this was new territory for her, she felt between her legs until she located her vaginal opening, which stung when she touched it. She probed it gingerly, finding it smaller and tighter than she would have thought, given what it had accommodated this afternoon, and slick with secretions.

Emboldened, she explored the delicate little folds and furrows of her sex, her inquisitive fingers exciting a buzz of pleasure that, paradoxically, seemed to transport her out of her body. Closing her eyes, she let her mind drift where it would.

She saw Thomas smiling that sad, resigned smile…
It's all right…
She saw the books straightening themselves on the shelf in that little bedchamber in the cave, saw the candles puffing out of their own accord…She saw her walking stick quivering on end, felt the thrill of penetration, the wholeness of it, the rightness of it…

She heard her ragged breaths and the lapping of the bathwater, felt the pleasure mounting toward its inevitable climax, panic squeezing her heart…

“You're afraid,” he whispered. “Don't be. Let it happen. Give us a chance. I love you, Catherine. I want to marry you.”

The pleasure exploded and ran its course, leaving her breathless and reeling, her face wet with tears.

Four

T
HIS IS
the nemeton?” asked Elijah Wheeler in reverential tones around noon the next day as Lili and Inigo led him into a sun-speckled clearing in a grove of ancient, strangely twisted oaks. In the center stood a stone altar, and next to it a patch of ashy earth enclosed by a circle of soot-blackened stones.

“This is it, brother.” Setting down the wicker hamper their cook had packed, Inigo took the blanket from Lili, shook it out, and laid it on the grass.

Elijah was filled with awe as he approached the ancient altar, essentially a table supported by four lava boulders. The top was a rectangular slab of the same dark stone about the shape and size of a door, its edges scoured by time—for it was at least two thousand years old, possibly a good deal older.

Elijah circled the altar slowly, tracing with his fingers the timeworn, convoluted pattern inscribed on its surface. The center bore the inscription
DIBU E DEBU
surrounded by a design of oak branches knotted together. In each of the four corners was carved a circle about eight inches across, enclosing a different stylized image.

“These corner symbols would appear to represent four of the most important Celtic deities,” he said. “This female figure on the horse has to be Epona, a goddess of fertility. She was especially revered among the Gauls. The old man with the bow and club is Ogimos, god of warcraft and poetry. The figure cutting branches with an axe is Esus, the god of agriculture and commerce. And this three-headed fellow with the raven on his fist is Lugus, whom Caesar equated with Mercury. He was a very important deity to the Gauls, the protector of travelers and source of all the arts. I can't believe a relic this extraordinary has stood here undiscovered for all these years.”

“Seigneur des Ombres takes great care, as did his ancestors before him, to keep Grotte Cachée's historical artifacts away from prying eyes,” said Lili as she knelt to empty blue china plates, cut crystal glasses, and covered dishes from the hamper out onto the blanket. She was clad, as she'd been yesterday until supper, in a saronglike swath of colorful silk—gold-trimmed plum today—which she called a
lubushu
. Her hair hung in a single braid down her back; her only jewelry was an exotically archaic-looking gold and lapis anklet. Not once, in his entire life and all his travels, had Elijah met a female as unself-consciously sensual as Lili. When he'd asked where she was from, she'd said she'd been born on the bank of the Euphrates, and changed the subject.

“Is anyone hungry?” she asked, unwrapping a linen napkin from what looked like a large, golden brown onion tart.

“First things first,” said Inigo as he uncorked a bottle of wine—one of four local vintages tucked into the hamper.

                  

“No more—please,” Elijah said in a drowsy slur a couple of hours later, as Inigo, reclining next to him on the blanket, tilted a bottle over his half-empty glass. “I haven't drunk this much since I was in college. I won't be able to keep my eyes open.”

“You needn't keep them open on our account.” Lili, sitting behind him, lifted the glass from his hand and pressed down gently on his shoulder until he was lying with his head in her lap.

He should have refused—the only woman he'd ever had that kind of physical contact with was Julia—but dreamily contented as he was, with his belly full of wine and wonderful food, and in the company of such agreeable companions, he couldn't bring himself to protest.

“Go ahead,” she murmured as she stroked his face very lightly, her fingertips soft, cool, hypnotic. “Close your eyes.” She whispered a singsongy phrase over and over again in a language he'd never heard before—like Aramaic, but not quite—as she continued to caress his brow and cheeks and chin. The intoxicating scent of jasmine enveloped him. Warm breezes ruffled his hair, or perhaps it was her breath.

Inigo, sounding oddly distant, started saying something in an entirely different, but equally unfamiliar language. Except that it didn't really sound like Inigo. It was another voice, that of a much older man.

Elijah opened his eyes, thinking how unseemly it would be for strangers to happen upon him lying there with his head in Lili's lap. He expected to see her face smiling down on him. Instead, all he saw was the sun glittering through the canopy of oak leaves overhead.

He turned his head toward the old man's voice and discovered, to his bewilderment, that there was no soft leg beneath him, no blanket either, just the cool, prickly grass. Lili and Inigo were nowhere to be seen, but under one of the old oaks at the edge of the clearing there sat two men, one young and one quite elderly. The old fellow, bearded and wizened, sat on a squarish boulder against the tree, the clean-shaven, blond-haired young man a few feet away on a tree stump, leaning over a plank of wood balanced across his lap. A large, powerfully built dog—a mastiff, or something like it—slept between them with its broad-skulled head resting on the old man's feet.

The younger man was writing, Elijah realized, with a reed pen on a length of paper—or was it parchment?—as the old man droned on. He paused and asked the speaker something, addressing him as Brantigern; upon receiving an answer, he nodded and continued writing, as if he were taking dictation. There was an Italic quality to many of the words and phrases that Brantigern spoke, but Elijah was at a loss to translate them.

Their clothing was exceedingly odd. They both wore woolen tunics—the older man's saffron, the younger, a rusty brown—and trousers that had stripes woven into the fabric. More curious still was their hair, which was as long as Elic's; but instead of tying it back in a queue, as Elic did, they'd plaited it into multiple braids that hung down past their shoulders.

There were isolated pockets of peasant folks all over Europe who still wore their ancestral garb and spoke nearly extinct dialects. Elijah hadn't been aware of such indigenous folks in Auvergne, but that didn't mean they didn't exist. Clearly, they did.

Elijah stood up, feeling surprisingly sober, and walked toward them. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

They ignored him entirely, perhaps because he'd unthinkingly greeted them in English.
“Bonjour, messieurs,”
he said.

Were they deaf?

Although only a few yards away from them now, he raised his voice and waved an arm.
“Bonjour!”

There was no response from the two men beneath the oak, but from the woods to the south, toward the chateau, a boy's voice yelled, “Brantigern! Sedanias!”

The two men and the dog all looked up sharply as the boy, also in traditional clothing, but with his red hair flying loose, burst into the clearing from the path in the woods, yelling something breathlessly as he pointed in the direction from which he'd come.

The young man, Sedanias, bolted to his feet, hurriedly rolling the scroll around a stick. He wrapped it in a length of leather as he sprinted toward the altar, which looked different than it had earlier, during the picnic—newer, less timeworn. One of the circular corner designs, that depicting Lugus and the raven, was missing, leaving a hole where it should have been. Sedanias shoved the leather-wrapped scroll vertically into the hole, then lifted a stone disc from the grass and fitted it into place, positioning it just so.

Brantigern, meanwhile, tucked the wooden plank between the tree and the boulder on which he sat, then gathered up the younger man's reed pen, ink pot, and pen knife, and stowed them in a knothole.

The boy darted back into a different section of the woods as hoofbeats approached along the path.

A man around thirty years of age with dark, neatly shorn hair rode into the clearing, reins in one hand, a club in the other. Elijah gaped in astonishment at the horseman's appearance, for he was clad in a belted, Roman-style
tunica
—white with a wide purple stripe from right shoulder to hem—and red boots secured by leather thongs. The iron ring he wore, in conjunction with the
tunica laticlavia
and the red boots, identified him as a patrician male of ancient Rome. The horse was draped with a long scarlet saddlecloth trimmed in gold braid, on which the rider sat directly, without benefit of saddle. Like the two peasants and the boy, he seemed entirely, perplexingly, unaware of Elijah's presence.

Reining in his mount, he pointed his club at Sedanias and barked out, “You, there!” in Latin—not quite the classical form with which Elijah was most familiar, but still reasonably understandable. “What do you think you're doing here, Sedanias? You're supposed to be cutting marble down by the cave. Are you that eager for a beating?”

“It's my fault,” said the old man as he struggled to his feet with the help of a tall, age-burnished oak staff that was peculiarly twisty and knotted toward the top. Elijah hadn't noticed before that he had only one hand, the left. His right arm ended in a stump above the wrist.

“Brantigern Avitus.” The horseman bent his head in respectful greeting, which struck Elijah as odd, as did his use of the cognomen Avitus, which suggested something akin to a grandfatherly relationship. “I didn't see you there.”

“I heard of the death of the great Augustus,” Brantigern said, “so I asked my grandson to bring me here, to our sacred place, to beseech the gods to welcome the Emperor as one of their own. Forgive me, Quintus Vetus—and forgive Sedanias, too, I beg you. He was only indulging a trying old man.”

“Yes. Well,” said Quintus, clearly at something of a loss. “Praying for the late Emperor…It's a most commendable gesture, but I hope you understand that I can't have slaves just walking away from their assigned tasks without asking my leave.” To Sedanias, he said, “Return to your work. But first, see your grandfather back safely to his hut. If anything happens to him, it's I who'll take a beating, at the hands of my father. You know how he depends on the old man's soothsaying.” He turned his horse around and left.

Sedanius and Brantigern shared a conspiratorial little smile. “Come, Yannig,” said Brantigern, and then the two men and the dog disappeared down the path, the dog staying close by the old man's side as he shuffled along with halting steps, leaning on his staff.

Was he going mad? Elijah wondered. This didn't feel like a delusion, and he'd never once, in the past, experienced any form of mental derangement. Why, then, had he just seen what he'd seen?

He saw a hint of movement and looked up to see a gray cat walking along a branch of the oak tree beneath which the pair had been sitting. It jumped down, looked directly at Elijah, and mewed.

“Well, at least I'm not invisible to
you,
” Elijah said.

The cat strolled through the clearing to the edge of the path and sat, staring at Elijah, who walked over to it. When he was about a yard away, it got up and padded down the path.

Elijah took one last look around the clearing, wondering what the devil had become of Lili and Inigo—never mind his sanity—and then he followed the cat along the path toward the chateau.

Only, when he emerged from the woods, the chateau, which should have been tucked into the lowest part of the valley about two hundred yards away, wasn't there. In its place, he saw a sprawling white house with red-tiled roofs surrounded by formal, colonnaded gardens.

“A villa,” he whispered, for it looked precisely like the country homes built by wealthy Roman citizens, both in Rome and in their provinces. With every blink, he expected it to disappear, but there it stood, like a drawing in a history book.

He recalled what he'd said last night, about Julia telling him he'd never be satisfied unless he could travel back in time and witness historical events for himself. Was it possible this was all a dream in which his desire to know more about Grotte Cachée's enigmatic past was being subconsciously fulfilled? A tempting theory, except that this didn't feel remotely like a dream; it was far, far too real.

So if he wasn't dreaming, and he wasn't mad, what on earth was happening here?

There had been times, many times, in his studies of occult phenomena and his sojourns among peoples who believed in such things, that he'd found himself weighing the possibility that certain forms of “magic” might fall within the realm of reality. There were, after all, many unanswered questions in the universe, and physical scientists had barely scratched the surface in terms of what they knew about space, time, and matter. That given, was it entirely impossible that the things he was seeing had actually existed some two millennia before? The best course of action, Elijah decided, would be to relax, observe, and remember.

Oh, and figure out how to exit this new reality and return to that in which he'd been living his life for the past forty-six years.

Elijah heard a repetitive
thunk, thunk, thunk
from the direction of the bathhouse—or where the bathhouse should be, at the entrance of the cave in the extinct volcano on the eastern edge of the valley. He made his way through a small woods that didn't exist in his own time, at the edge of which a team of axe-wielding men dressed like Sedanias and Brantigern—slaves, he presumed—were felling trees in order to enlarge an already sizeable clearing. Not one of them turned to look as he walked past.

In the clearing, other slaves, shirtless and sweating in the harsh afternoon sun, were cutting slabs of white marble into smaller blocks with hammers and chisels. An enormous white linen tent stood against the base of the mountain, concealing the mouth of the cave. From within it, Elijah heard a man saying, in Latin, “Not much longer now, my darling Inigo. Just mind you stay good and hard till I'm done with you.”

Inigo?

“Tita, keep those legs spread. What do you think you're getting paid for?”

Elijah found an opening in the tent and slipped through. Inside, bathed in a haze of filtered sunlight and marble dust, he found the bathhouse, or a partial version thereof. There were no walls and no roof, just the marble floor, the pool itself—devoid of water and with the mosaic half-finished—and the four columns, each with a massive chunk of white marble appended to it.