The Orpheus Descent (46 page)

Stay away
, Agathon warned me. But it was too late.

I turned up the mountain.

The hunt was in full cry: baying, barking, closing its net like in one of my nightmares. I climbed and climbed, never resting, but each time I heard the pursuit it was closer. At least Diotima might have got away. The slope steepened. The stitch spread through my body like a crack. The ground became loose, crumbling underfoot, so that with every step I’d already slipped halfway back before I could take the next.

I staggered over a rise and stopped. The two steep hills loomed over me, left and right. A silver birch grew in the saddle between them, and underneath it stood the temple.

It was a simple building: a small white house, flat-roofed, blank-faced. Two columns supported a porch over a black doorway, with a marble garland winding across it and a black stone altar in front. Ants crawled over the altar, making a hairline procession into the bronze cup someone had left there.

I touched the gold locket. It seemed to tremble, like a metal bowl placed next to a vibrating string. The birds had stopped singing.

The Mansion of Night
, the tablet said.

‘What’s inside?’

Come and see.

As I reached the steps, a white hound bounded out of the trees. I thought it would tear me apart but, just in front of the altar, it suddenly skidded to a halt, legs splayed, ears back, barking and growling. I didn’t look twice, but dived into the temple.

The moment I crossed the threshold, something changed. I could smell it in the air. Dark as incense and sweet as poison. As the darkness covered my eyes, I saw a dull glow at the back of the empty room, a square hole lit by flickering flames from within.

A black and nameless terror welled out of the hole. At the same time, shouts drifted through from outside, voices from another world. I remembered something Socrates said.

If you’re out of your depth, it doesn’t really matter whether you’ve fallen into a little bath or the middle of the ocean. You still have to learn to swim.

I went down.

He was flying. A long way down, the blue sea raced by. Ahead, almost at eye level, the cone of Mount Etna swelled into the sky, a giant mouth exhaling a long plume of smoke.

He looked over at Adam. ‘Are you going to drop me in the volcano?’

They hadn’t given him a headset: Adam couldn’t have heard him over the clatter of the rotors. But he got the sense. He gave a tight, inscrutable smile and shook his head.

Up front, the pilot glanced back and muttered something into his microphone. Adam peered forward between the seats at the smoke coming off the volcano, thick and black like an oil fire. A thin film of ash clouded the helicopter’s canopy.

Jonah remembered how an Icelandic volcano had closed down European airspace a couple of years ago. Lily had been at a conference in Florence, trapped with the millions of others who’d suddenly woken up into a world where easy air travel no longer happened. If a volcano a thousand miles off could be so dangerous to jets, what about flying a small helicopter a few hundred yards away?

He looked around the cabin – the three guards, dark shades over scarred faces; Ren; Adam, like the Angel of Death in his black clothes and bulging black flight helmet.
And you’re worried about some ash?

The helicopter buzzed over the side of the mountain. Jonah had never been so close to a volcano before. Black lava fields, miles wide, spilled down the slopes. Further around, a vast crater had been blown out of the mountainside, leaving a bare plateau of knotted lava. Strands of smoke and cloud blew past the helicopter, while a row of serrated peaks guarded the mountain’s flank. It felt like a lost world.

As they came around to Etna’s southern face, Jonah saw the mountain spreading down to the Catania plain beyond. Well past the point where the slope levelled off, a series of rounded hills bulged out of the landscape.

The helicopter banked and headed towards a pair of the hills which rose out of the middle slopes of the mountain. There was a strange, geometrical symmetry to them: each like the other, and both almost perfectly conical. Their tree-covered hilltops stood out like a pair of fertile islands in a frozen sea of rock.

The pilot put them down on the tarmac road that wound up the mountain, below the hills. A black Mercedes
4
x
4
, as long as a house, had parked across it to block off the traffic. Jonah gazed at it as if it were a creature that had sprung from his nightmares, remembering the rush of air as it blew past him on the road outside Sibari. He didn’t have long to look. The shades bundled him into the car, Adam jumped into the front seat and the helicopter flew away. Soon, the Mercedes was grinding its way up a track that led towards the twin hills. They were taller than they’d looked from the air.

‘Is this where you’re keeping Lily?’ Jonah shouted. His ears were still ringing from the helicopter.

‘This is the place in the tablets.
Where hundred-headed Typhos shakes open the earth, I went down into the bosom of the goddess.
Typhos was a titan who was chained underneath Etna.’

Jonah looked out through the window. On the ashy track, a plume of fine black dust streamed out behind them. A smoky red haze covered the sky, like a solar eclipse or the end of the world. Sharp black rocks and spiky brown plants were the only things that grew here.

He thought of Lily swimming; the moistness of her mouth; her skin softened by years of gentle English rain. This place was as far away from her as you could get.

Ren leaned forward. ‘Is the volcano erupting?’

‘On the other side,’ said Adam. ‘We’re too far away for it to matter here. Even if it does come, we’ll have plenty of warning. Etna’s lava moves at about four miles an hour. You can walk away from it.’

The car stopped in the valley between the two hills, at the edge of a trench excavated from the flow. In the bottom, white ashlar blocks lay where they’d been cut free from their lava prison. They made a simple rectangular foundation, with two round column bases together at the front like cats’ paws. At the back of the chamber, a second hole sank into a deeper darkness.

‘Did you do all this in the last week?’

But even as Jonah said it, he could see that wasn’t right. The trench’s edges were weathered smooth; the rubble heaped up by the edge wasn’t nearly enough to have come out of the hole.

‘The original temple was buried in an eruption around
400
BC
. The Italians excavated that in the seventies. We got here three days ago.’

‘Do they know you’re here?’ said Ren.

Adam shrugged. ‘This is Italy.’

He skirted around the edge of the pit to a green tent that had been pitched beside it.

‘I’ve brought them,’ he said through the canvas.

The flap lifted and a man ducked out. He was bigger than Jonah and built like a boxer: a short thick neck, a flat face, olive-black skin and bloodshot eyes. A mop of dark hair hung in lank ringlets almost to his shoulders. Jonah had never seen him before, but he knew him from his nightmares.

‘Ari Maroussis,’ said Adam.

He didn’t even look at Jonah. ‘The tablet – you got it?’

Adam gave it to him. The fragile leaf vanished in a fist the size of a brick.

‘I knew your sister,’ he said to Ren. He turned to Jonah. ‘And your wife.’

Be still
, Jonah told himself. He tried to imagine holding a chord, sustaining it as a single line against every dictate of rhythm, against the movement of the crowd and the fluctuating world. Perfect stillness.

‘Where is she?’

Ari licked his lips, letting his tongue linger where a berry-red scab split the flesh.

‘You will find out.’

The chord broke. Jonah launched himself at Ari. But he was tired, sore – and Ari was ready. He put out an arm and grabbed Jonah by the throat, holding him back. Jonah struggled, but Ari was strong as a horse.

Hands grabbed his arms and held him from behind. Ari tightened his grip, squeezing Jonah’s neck so hard he thought he’d crush it. His sight misted over; he couldn’t breathe. An arm’s length away, the red-veined eyes stared at him with childish delight. Ari was smiling. Nicotine stained his teeth yellow.

‘
Stamata!
’ said a voice from close by. ‘Stop it!’

With a final squeeze that nearly snapped Jonah’s windpipe, Ari pulled back. The hands holding Jonah’s arms let go. He collapsed in a heap on the ground.

When he was able to look up again, a new figure had appeared. Socratis Maroussis, still dressed like an Edwardian gentleman who’d been snatched out of time. Two of the shades flanked him.

Jonah spat out a gob of bile. ‘I thought you were a prisoner on your island.’ Every word was like drawing a fat steel cable through his throat.

‘We have reconciled. Always, the son comes back to the father in the end.’

Standing beside him, Ari glowered. His dark skin flushed, a child who’d been caught out.

‘Where’s Lily?’

Ari began to say something, but Maroussis stopped him with a wave of his hand. ‘You have nearly found her.’ He glanced at Adam, who had come out of the tent with a pile of ropes and harnesses. ‘You are ready?’

‘Five minutes.’ Something like thunder rumbled through the ground, though the only clouds in the sky were smoke. Adam looked up at the mountain.

‘Can you check the instruments? See if we’ve got any readings?’

Maroussis and Ari went back into the tent. Ren and Jonah stayed outside, watched by the shades. Adam coiled the rope, each loop the exact circumference of the last.

‘Do you remember the oracle at Delphi?’ he said suddenly.

Jonah remembered it. What surprised him was that Adam did. Sitting squeezed into Lily’s car, singing along to ELO with the windows wide open. Surely it was a different Adam who’d been there.

‘A long time ago.’

‘You remember it sits on a fault line?’

‘Gas seeped out. The woman got high and told fortunes.’ He rubbed his neck. ‘Does it matter?’

‘The point is, I don’t think Delphi was the only place it happened.’

‘OK.’ He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. Perhaps his brain had lost too much oxygen. Perhaps it was easier than thinking about Lily.

‘Do you think it’s a coincidence that the world’s most profound philosophy sprang out of southern Italy? Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles – even Plato, it wasn’t until he visited Italy in his forties that his ideas really took flight. Somewhere underneath this mountain, there’s a place the ancients knew. A portal to a higher plane of existence, where we can see the mysteries of the universe firsthand.’

When Plato went to Italy, he found something that blew open his thinking like a hydrogen bomb.

‘Are you familiar with the work of Timothy Leary? The LSD philosopher?’

‘Tune in, turn on, drop out.’

‘He developed a theory of drug use, that there are two variables that determine the experience. The
set
and the
setting
. The
set
is the physical compound – the drug you choose and its biochemical effects. The
setting
is the environment in which you take it, not just your surroundings but also your state of mind. Your mood, your emotions, your expectations. The Greeks would have understood it as a ritual. Drugs don’t just write themselves onto your subconscious: they open a conversation.’

‘OK.’

‘Take Ecstasy. For years, psychologists prescribed it therapeutically. Patients popped it on the couch and it helped them relax. Work through their issues. Then someone discovered that if you take it while you’re dancing with a thousand other people, listening to overpowering music, it becomes the gateway to something transcendental.’

‘So I hear.’

‘Our minds are made for so much more than we use them for. We rely so much on our senses, by the time we’re grown up they completely own us. But they’re pathetic. We’re like supercomputers connected to a dial-up modem. There’s a world out there, and we get thumbnail images drip-fed into our consciousness. We need to find a way to rip open the connections, to increase the bandwidth so we can understand the full spectrum of reality.’

‘You tried that once before. It didn’t work out so well.’

Adam ignored him. ‘The problem with drugs is that they’re unreasonable. You can’t control the experience. They throw you into the ocean of the unconscious, but there’s nothing to steer by.’

‘Some people would say that’s the point.’

‘You know Pythagoras discovered the mathematical underpinnings of the universe. Parmenides is known as the father of logic. Plato maintains that the only way to understand his forms is through dialectical reasoning.’

‘They must have been off their faces.’

Adam missed the sarcasm, probably didn’t even hear what he’d said. ‘Whatever’s down there, it doesn’t bypass our critical faculties like drugs. It liberates them.’

‘Does that matter?’ said Ren.

‘What’s the point of experiencing the full spectrum of the world if you can’t make sense of it?’

Jonah stared at the small, square hole that had been excavated from the bottom of the pit.
Where’s Lily?
He wanted to scream it with all his voice, shake Adam until he told him or the whole mountain broke down. But, at the same time, he was afraid of the answer.

‘Isn’t there something you’re forgetting.’

Just for a moment, a line of uncertainty cracked Adam’s mask. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘In all these myths, nobody says they went to some blissed-out heaven where they lay on a beach and contemplated the universe. They say they went to Hell.’

Adam stared at him with his deep, soulless eyes.

‘That’s why we sent someone down to see if it’s safe. A canary in the tunnel.’

‘You’re going to send me down to breathe the air and see if I lose my mind.’

But he’d misheard.

‘
Sent
– past tense.’

He still didn’t get it. Adam steepled his fingers, a doctor putting on his white coat to deliver the bad news.