Getting Wilde (11 page)

I picked up the pace.   
 

True to Armaeus’s words, the world of Ceres made heavy use of ancient underground passageways hewn through the rock. The space remained blessedly empty of anything but stone and the occasional rat at first, but after the first quarter mile or so, bodies started showing up. I had clearly made it beyond the boundaries of the Old City. Some of the chambers were stacked with cloth-wrapped corpses as old as time itself, but others were filled with figures with a distressingly
fresher
feel. Holding my breath as much as I was able, I darted through the
makeshift crypts, using the cards to guide me when I had a choice of more than one passageway. From time to time, I could sense the passages soaring above me and almost hear the distant traffic as the catacombs reached toward the streets of Rome. Other times, I could barely move, once shimmying on my stomach through a crevice carved into the rock, slick with running water. Apparently, I’d reached the Tiber River. I made pretty good time despite all that, covering the terrain in a little over an hour, before something decidedly different hung in the air around me.
 

It all started feeling…cleaner.
 

I slowed my steps, sweeping the penlight on the ground and up around the walls. Fewer cobwebs and dust, I decided. That was it. Someone had clearly strolled this way recently—at least within the last century or so. The air was lighter here as well, the narrow passageway between the stacked bodies seeming almost spacious.
 

I pulled another card, rolling my eyes as the Devil once again showed his ugly mug. The second proved more useful, however: the Sun.
 

I dimmed my light and advanced, realizing that the gloom of the space had lifted somewhat as well. Not enough for me to get away without using light of any sort, but enough to make me feel like I was no longer trudging through the bowels of hell. As I moved from one chamber to the next, I felt something else too.
 

The sudden sense of eyes on me.
 

“Hello, there.”
 

I turned around quickly, sweeping the light.  
 

“Who’s that?”
 

Silence greeted me. “Armaeus?”
 

But no. And truth to tell, the voice in my head hadn’t sounded like Armaeus. It was…younger. More carefree. Either way, “you’re not invited, whoever you are.” The silence
continued, and I felt unreasonably satisfied about that. So there, imaginary friend. Go pound sand.
 

To make certain that no one was behind me, or ahead of me either, I arced the beam around. Nope, nada. I shook it off. After having traveled through the graves of what felt like half the ancient Roman population, I should expect to be a little jumpy. I hit it again, moving through the passages with more determination. They had begun to tilt upward, and as I passed one cleft in the rock, I paused, something once more murmuring in the back of my mind, just out of reach.
 

I cycled up my penlight and flashed it over the surface to the right. Not stone at all here, but a metal door, deeply recessed into the wall and hung with shadows. I didn’t need to pull the Hierophant card this time—the papal seal was boldly emblazoned on the metal, immediately above the door’s old-style lock.
 

Transferring my penlight to my teeth, I reached up high inside my jacket and pulled my picklocks free. This would not be delicate work with a structure so old, but torque was important. I didn’t want to lose my precious tools in the mouth of a stubborn iron lock.
 

The mechanism worked, though not without protest, my wrists easing the picks through their dance with steady pressure and a few choice swear words. Clearly this wasn’t a common entrance or exit for the Vatican staff. That also boded well.
 

I pushed past the door and found more catacombs on the other side, along with a fair number of empty indentations in the wall. Too small for dead bodies, but clearly something had been placed here at one point—placed and then removed.
 

At length, the passage ended, and I was left in a room with no exit—just four stone walls and the entryway I’d come in. I flickered the penlight up over the stone surface overhead and frowned. A constellation had been etched into the chamber’s ceiling, the earth at its center, the planets and sun revolving around that overlarge orb. I slid the light to the right of the earth, past
the moon and to the large sun, its center pierced with a thick dot. A circumpunct, one of the oldest symbols of the sun—or of God—that existed. Peering up into it and remembering the last card I’d pulled, I flashed around the space at my feet until I found a big enough chunk of stone that was not so large I couldn’t move it. I shoved it into place, then stood upon it, dimming my penlight again and flipping it over. I stuck the bottom of the flashlight into the groove created by the chiseled dot and pushed hard.
 

This time, I didn’t have to wait for my reward. The penlight broke right through the thin layer of dirt, and shavings cascaded around me as a burst of light poured down over my face. The block moved easily enough at the push of my fingertips, stone scraping on stone, and with two hands, I was able to push it up and to the side, revealing a hole large enough for me to climb through. Dim yellow light shone down from the chamber above, and I could see a tiny portion of its flaking ceiling.
 

I’d reached the Vatican necropolis.
 

I hauled myself up through the opening, trying to get my bearings. I was in an ancient room, but not as ancient as where I’d come from. It was one of the painted crypts of the necropolis, the sides layered in a rich terra-cotta orange, the floor decorated with an elaborate ornate mosaic. My entry square was in the center of a long line of similar squares, each with a hole in its center, and I was familiar with their function. The tiles had been used originally as food portals so that the ancient Romans could more easily deliver feasts to their dead relatives.
 

Very thoughtful, the Romans.
 

Now, the centers of most of the tiles were stuffed with dirt and clay, sealing them off. I swung my feet clear of the hole and scowled around, every sense on high alert, but no guards came pounding toward me, no alarmed cries went up. Nevertheless, I set the stone back in place and scattered rock dust over it for good measure. Wiping my gloved hands on my leggings, I reached the doorway of the ancient tomb and glanced back. From this vantage point, I couldn’t tell the floor had been disturbed. Good.
 

I found myself in a long brick-and-stone corridor bathed in an eerie yellow glow coming from a line of recessed lights. I quickly made my way to the end, glancing into the empty crypts on either side of the passage, noting the ornate frescoes and striking images in some, the utter
barrenness of others. At the end of the corridor, just as Armaeus had described, I found the original tomb of St. Peter, or whatever they were calling it these days. No way the guy’s actual bones were still here, but the space itself had a strange feeling to it that made me slow down, the cards seeming to almost shift in my jacket as I poked my head into the narrow space.
 

Bingo.
 

I saw the gold box almost immediately, but it wasn’t as if
that
took any special skill. It was lying right in the open, sitting in a sort of cut-out section of the wall, enshrined on purple and red vestments, candles lying around its base. A strip of red cloth lay crisscrossed over the relic, which, as Armaeus had suggested, was about the size of my hand from fingertip to wrist. There was no high-tech energy force field down here protecting the thing, just the cloth sash, and I frowned at the setup, inching closer. The light seemed particularly strange, surrounding the reliquary in a luminous glow. Was it a luminous
electrically charged
glow? That remained to be seen. I glanced around, listening, but no sound emanated from anywhere in the crypt except my own thundering heart.
 

Once again, I felt it. That strange sense of being watched.
 

I checked my watch. Four thirty a.m. The sun would be rising in less than two hours, and I had no idea how I’d get out of the catacombs anymore. I certainly wasn’t going to be getting back out through the Forum. All of which meant I couldn’t waste any more time here, not when I had a long flight into nowhere ahead of me.
 

Using one of the ceremonial candles lying to the left of the reliquary, I pushed the sashes off the box. There was a faint crackling noise as the candle connected with the beam of light. But God didn’t cry out in holy fury, so, so far, so good. I squatted down, trying to eye the platform beneath the gold. No way to tell what was under it, and I stood again, weighing my options.
 

Just get it over with
, I thought, feeling strangely inclined to laugh. Sometimes, it really was that easy.
 

I reached out with my right hand and plucked the golden box off its pool of vestments. Something seemed to
shift
, and, frowning, I swept the vestments back—just as a green light on a technical-looking platform clicked to red. And started blinking.
 

“Crap!”
 

And sometimes, it wasn’t.
Time to go.
 

I shoved the box into my jacket, sparing a few extra, precious seconds to throw the vestments back over the blinking red light, as if that was going to have some meaningful effect on anything. Then I dashed into the long corridor leading away from St. Peter’s tomb, moving fast. Sticking my hand in my pocket, I yanked out another card—
Chariot
.
 

I frowned, picking up my pace.
Chariot?
I’d expected the Sun again, dammit. Surely the best idea would be to go back to the room where I’d entered the necropolis.
 

The sudden crack of pounding boots on stone shot my attention toward the edge of the corridor as I skidded past a room dominated by an enormous mosaic of—
 

“Do
not
mess with me,” I gritted out, swinging into the room and turning around, then around again. The chariot on the floor in black-and-white was unmistakable, and for added points, the scene it depicted was the freaking kidnap of Proserpina, daughter of Ceres—but there was
no
door out of this room,
no
big flashing arrow pointing anywhere, and I was out of time.
 

“Double Crap!” The box in my right pocket suddenly seemed to gain about a thousand pounds, and I hurtled forward, smacking facedown onto the floor. Just then, two guards ran past the crypt’s doorway, their flashlights sweeping the space, but not stopping. Spitting out rock dust as quietly as I could beneath the tramp of their feet, I squinted up—and then I saw it. A grate at
eye level in the floor, maybe added after excavation to shore up splintering rock or to cover a dangerous hole, who knew. The important part was it was
there
—and darkness loomed behind it.
 

I scrambled for the grate and tested it quickly, realizing it wasn’t attached. Seriously, who were these architects? Hadn’t they heard of security systems? Still, not one to look a gift escape in the mouth, I yanked out the grate and stuck my penlight into the space, tossing more rock dust down. Nothing but open air lay beyond the hole, and then,
finally,
the pebbles struck bottom, loud enough to almost reassure me I wouldn’t break every bone in my body trying to make the drop. Dare to dream.
 

As shouts erupted in St. Peter’s tomb, I resecured my light and zipped up my jacket, then snagged the grate. I shimmied down into the hole, pulling the grate behind me until it clanked into place over the opening. Then I hung for another sickening moment in the open air.
 

And dropped.   
 

The weight of the gold box eased up in flight, and I landed with only the usual amount of pain, sprawling onto the chamber floor with a grunt, then rolling into a tight ball to spread the agony around a little more. The place was black as pitch, and I wrenched out my penlight again, flipping it around as I squinted into the darkness. The chamber held two doors, so, fine, two cards: Hanged Man and Sun. “Oh great,
now
you give me the Sun.”
 

I’d take it, though. I was starting to feel a little claustrophobic. Probably because I was forty feet underground.
 

I headed back into the darkness through the east-facing door, the one indicated by the Sun, and prayed for a quick exit.
 

I didn’t get one.
 

The cards started playing hard to get from that point forward, showing me the Devil at every turn as the weird half-echo of spectral laughter dogged my steps. Finally I gave up and
started jogging, taking whatever passageway seemed like it was leading up. My last intelligent card had been the Sun, after all. Well, the sun was in the sky, right? And the sky was up.
 

Finally, after what felt like hours but which my watch confirmed was only ninety minutes, I stumbled into a space that seemed ever so slightly newer than third century AD. A wide cistern of some sort had been cut into the floor, holding a deep well of murky water. I craned my neck upward, my penlight barely picking out a catwalk high upon the wall. And hanging down from that catwalk, bolted against the wall…
 

“Finally.” I raced over to the side of the cavern, then stuck the penlight in my mouth again—never mind where else it’d been stuck during the last several hours—and attacked the ladder with newfound energy. Hand over hand, I climbed up the side of the sheer wall, not bothering to look down until I finally collapsed onto the landing of the catwalk far above, my lungs blowing hard. From there I could totally see where I was, if only I spoke Italian. The underside of an official-looking manhole lay above me not six more feet.