Ysabel (4 page)

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

H
e 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.”