On the Fifth Day (14 page)

cluded with a jokey, self-deprecating shrug.

The young archaeologist smiled.

"Hold on," he said. "I'll see if I can get you in."

The young archaeologist walked slightly ahead, his gait easy, the bunch of ancient keys he had retrieved from some

where dangling carelessly from his left hand, his long, brown, muscular arms swinging as he walked. Thomas stared straight ahead and said nothing. He doubted he was about to make some great discovery, but he felt a thrill of anticipation at his minor deception.

At the house, the archaeologist opened a juddering gate and brought him inside, snapping the padlock back in place as soon as he did so.

"I come with you," he said. "Touch nothing and be careful where you walk."

Thomas nodded and followed him into the dimly lit house.

"This the Tuscan atrium," he said, gesturing to a spacious chamber with a low roof.

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He paused, as if waiting for his guest to take the lead, so Thomas walked purposefully into another room and consulted his clipboard in a businesslike way. The floor inside was a different-colored marble and there were extraordinarily de

tailed paintings on the walls. He considered a delicate fresco in russet and sea green of cupids playing some kind of over

sized lyre, scribbling random numbers on his pad for the ben

efit of his guide before going quickly into the next room, and the next.

There was a garden surrounded by porticoes and a large hall, all bespeaking the opulence of the place and its impres

siveness as an archaeological find, but why his brother had marked it out for special study, Thomas still had no idea.

"Can we go upstairs?" said Thomas, trying to make it less a real question than a directive.

"We can go up the ladders, but the floors are not safe to walk on."

He pointed to one of the rickety wooden stepladders and Thomas began to climb. The upper story was divided into two sections. Thomas paused, peered into the deep shadows, and saw immediately what had interested his brother. Against one wall was a charred wooden cabinet, its doors open. Above it, in a square of unusually pale plaster, was a dark shadow, an outline, as if it marked where something had been mounted on the wall, something sufficiently precious to the owner of the house that it had been pulled from the plaster as the deluge of volcanic mud bore down on the town. It was shaped--quite unmistakably--like a crucifix.

The cross was tall, the horizontal beam short and high. It would have been at home in every Catholic church Thomas had ever been in, except that this one had been put up no more than forty-five years after the death of Christ. CHAPTER 23

Thomas drifted down Cardo IV toward the exit lost in thought. If his brother had been doing some work on early Christian presence in Pompeii and Herculaneum, what could he possi

bly have done or discovered that could put him into danger?

The cross in that upper room seemed perfectly orthodox, as did the Our Father inscription--if that was what it was--in the Pompeii "magic square." It was interesting stuff, perhaps, for church historians and the like, but it couldn't have been news to any of them. He wandered in a desultory fashion from house to house, through
thermopolia
and bathhouses with their mosaics of sea divinities and strange-looking fish. Outside he stopped for a second, looking to see if he could catch sight of Sister Roberta. His dealings with the House of the Bicentenary had sapped most of his enthusiasm for being alone. Roberta's brown habit would stand out a mile even among the huddles of milling tourists and busloads of local schoolkids. He was scanning the street ahead when a man stepped out of a building only a few meters in front of him. He was studying a book as he walked, and his eyes were low

ered, but there was something about the curly hair and the goatee . . .

Parks!

The man who had raided Ed's room in Chicago, the man who had escaped from Thomas and Jim by brandishing a sword . . .

Thomas stepped hurriedly into the nearest doorway. Part of him wanted to confront the man, chase him down among all these people where he could do nothing except talk. But as soon as the idea occurred to him, he knew it would yield nothing and would blow what seemed to be the only ad

vantage Thomas had yet achieved. He looked back out into the street. Parks was still there, considering his book, a long 99

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nylon bag slung over his shoulder, a bag large enough to hold a weapon.

Another reason to keep your distance.

Thomas ducked back into the house and, for extra security, stepped into the next room, where there was a dazzling, shrinelike wall mosaic of Neptune and Aphrodite in vivid blues and greens. When he looked back out into the street, Parks was moving away from him purposefully. Thomas followed, stay

ing close to the doorways, poised to duck into what slim shad

ows the high sunlight afforded.

This could be no coincidence. Parks was following him, or--like Thomas--was recreating Ed's footsteps. At the Decumanus Inferior, which bisected the excavated portion of the town, Ben Parks--or whatever his real name was--took a left. Thomas, still keeping a good thirty yards behind, picked up his pace. The other man paused in the street and rotated the book in his hands. He was following a map.
So he doesn't know the site any better than you do.
Then he was moving again. They were getting close to the southeastern limit of the excavations. Above, Thomas could see the ramp down which he had entered the site. Parks moved through some rambling and dilapidated ruins braced with scaf

folding, a move that put him on the very edge of the dig. Thomas stole a glance at his map.

Where the hell is he going?

When he looked up, Parks was gone.

Thomas hurried to where he had last seen him. To his left was what his map called the Palaestra, a large open space with a colonnade down the northwest side and a ceremonial space with a marble table that could have been an altar. Directly ahead lay the rock wall of the dig itself with the houses of the modern town sitting high above, and behind him was a sharply declining jumble of excavations. There was no sign of Parks. Thomas cursed and moved forward, scanning wildly all around. According to the map, he was standing just to the left of something that--now that he looked at it--made a large cross on the ground plan in clear but dotted lines. Thomas 100

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glanced around him, expecting to see some large structure he had missed, but there was only the stone cliff that rose up to the entry ramp. He checked the map again. According to the scale, the cross-shaped building should be huge: fifty or sixty yards long.

So where is it?

He walked a little farther, wondering why the cross was marked in dotted lines. Did that mean it was only a founda

tion, that it belonged--perhaps--to an earlier settlement?

Maybe, but that didn't help with where Parks had gone. Then he saw it. Ahead and to his right was a dark, rectan

gular doorway into the cliff, braced with what looked like concrete supports on either side.

He moved cautiously toward it. The town here was largely unvisited by tourists and was curiously silent, which was prob

ably why he suddenly felt so vulnerable. He could leave now. Just walk away and wait for Parks to reemerge in some more populous place.

In truth, Thomas had never liked dark, enclosed places where you couldn't see who was sharing the shadows with you. After a while he always started to feel as if there might not be enough air . . .

No.

Ed had marked this place in his notes and now Parks was snooping around it as well. He had to see what was inside. There was no sign of Parks within.

It was larger than he had feared it would be, and it was cool and dark: a cave, effectively, though Thomas doubted it had always been such. The rock above him was the mottled gray tuff produced as the lava mud cooled. In AD 79, this place had been open to the air like the streets outside. But unlike the streets and houses, this part could not be cleared because of what sat on top of it, so the excavators had tunneled in at the ancient ground level, fashioning a cave out of what had been a sunny expanse.

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But an expanse of what?

It was hard to say. There was no artificial lighting. The tun

nel moved into the cliff, the rock ceiling rising into an irregu

lar dome, and there, in the center, was a roped-off square of black-and-white mosaic several yards across. There was a strange bronze sculpture, perhaps a fountain, now green, its features hard to determine in the dim light, though it seemed to be serpentine and many-headed. The mosaic was gray with dust, though Thomas could make out a large anchor, a man ap

parently diving into water, and a strange fish with oversized front fins.

He squinted at the cross-shaped outline on the map. Could it have been a swimming pool?

And then Thomas heard footsteps on the gravelly earth be

hind him. Someone was coming in through the tunnel. He spun around.

It was Parks.

Thomas moved quickly deeper into the cave, knowing that there was only one entrance. He was trapped in the dark. CHAPTER 24

Parks stopped just inside the cave and slipped the long nylon bag off his shoulder. He didn't speak, didn't act as if he knew anyone was in there with him.

Thomas could see little more than a silhouette, the only light coming from the tunnel entrance behind the other man, but he knew that as Parks's eyes adjusted to the dark, his chances of remaining unseen would fade to nothing. The place just wasn't that big. He could try to bolt past him, trust

ing to surprise, but there was no way he could slip by unno

ticed, and with his sprained knee he could hardly trust to speed. He could confront him, he supposed . . . 102

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Play the action hero? You're a high school English teacher.
Or you were . . .

He had to get out.

He tried to recall everything he had heard about the city, the eruption, the subsequent excavations: anything that might give him an option other than crouching here in the darkness, waiting for Parks to see him. If the other man hadn't been so focused on whatever he was getting out of his bag, he would already have done so.

Thomas began to move, inching carefully to his right, hug

ging the cave wall. The Bourbon excavators had moved al

most at random around the ancient city, dropping tunnels and trenches, pillaging the place for statuary and other artifacts for their private collections. Maybe there was more than one way into the cave they had hewn out of the tuff once they had found the great cross-shaped structure in the earth. He took another excruciatingly silent step, his fingertips tracing the smooth contours of the rock at his back, groping for an alcove, a recess of some kind in which he could hide. Thomas heard a distinctive metallic
swish.
Parks was setting up a piece of equipment.

A tripod?

A moment later he heard the faint rising whine of a flash unit charging, and a jolt of panic went through him. He had only seconds of invisibility left.

He moved with reckless haste across the cave wall, still pushing back against the rock, his breath held, sweat beading on his brow despite the chill of the cavern. And suddenly, just as the flash was about to fire, there was empty space behind him. Thomas shrank into it as the cavern suddenly flared in the camera's blue-white brilliance, the shadows leaping and van

ishing in a second. Had he been seen? He waited through the agonizing clunk of the camera's shutter, then the drone of its power wind, and then, as Parks shot off another picture, Thomas took a second step back into the darkness of the alcove. But it wasn't an alcove at all, as was clear when he turned into it and found he could move still farther in. It was a tunnel, 103

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albeit only about waist high, one the excavators had made two hundred fifty years earlier. He would have to crawl, and he would have to be absolutely silent since every sound would echo back into the cave, but he might be able to get out: as

suming there was enough air, assuming the walls didn't close in on him till he felt like screaming.

Of course, if Parks heard, he would have Thomas like a trapped rat . . .

Better make sure he doesn't hear then,
he thought. With agonizing slowness, Thomas started to crawl. The flash fired again, and though he knew he wasn't visible from the tripod, the light bounced alarmingly around the tun

nel. If Parks was to vary his positioning by only a few feet, he would see Thomas the moment he depressed the shutter re

lease.

The stone was cold and hard on his knees, but smoother than he had feared. Ten feet farther on the tunnel bent slightly, and the darkness softened. If he could keep his head--and his luck--for a few more seconds, he might see daylight. He might get out.

Just before the bend in the passage the roof lifted and he was able to sit up for a second, take some of the weight off his aching knees, but as he did so he felt something brush against the back of his head. Something soft. He reached up instinc

tively, and felt the weight of something in his hair. Something that moved as he tried to unsettle it. His fingers passed quickly over fur and a cool, elastic substance like skin, but edged with a tiny hooklike claw.

A bat.

He flinched involuntarily, trying to shrug the thing off, banged his head against the rock in the process, and gave a grunt of pain and revulsion, stifled a second too late. He heard rapid movement in the cavern behind him. Parks was moving to see who was in there with him.

Thomas abandoned caution and scrambled forward, scrap

ing his forehead on the tuff as the rock ceiling lowered again. But then there was light that brightened to an almost unbearable 104

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