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“You think that’s what that guy was? A tomb robber?” he asked.
“I don’t think anything. Really. He said he wasn’t. But he also said…” She shook her head. “Can we go?”
Ned nodded. “Not through the front, we might step into a shot and my dad would kill himself, and then me. He gets intense when he’s working.”
“We can leave the way I came in, through the cloister.”
A penny dropped for Ned. “Right. That’ll be how he got in, I bet. Between my seeing it locked and your finding the two doors open.”
“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 (#ulink_52a9868e-bb38-5c66-acdc-9cac78aec54d)
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?”
