On the Fifth Day (25 page)

"I am sorry."

"It's okay," said Thomas, biting back his horror, staring into the man's face to avoid seeing the rest of him. "It's okay."

"
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,
" he whispered. 181

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My fault, my fault, my grievous fault . . .

"What did you do?"

"Tanaka," he said.

"The Japanese guy? What about him?"

"Took him inside."

"Inside where?"

But Pietro closed his eyes again and tears squeezed out, though whether they were from pain or memory, Thomas couldn't tell. The priest was dying. He had only seconds left.

"Ed's papers," Thomas breathed, forcing himself to ask, feeling callous for doing so, but knowing this was his last chance.

The priest smiled softly. He was already slipping away, fading.

"
Il Capitano,
" he said.

"What?" Thomas gasped. The priest's eyes had closed.

"
Capitano?
What do you mean? Pietro? PIETRO!"

And then the eyes opened again, like a fish using the last of its strength to turn against the current, and one hand grasped Thomas's wrist with sudden and surprising power. His mouth opened, but though the eyes seemed to strain and the muscles of his throat constricted, the words didn't come.

"What?" asked Thomas, begging, coaxing. "Tell me."

The grasp on his wrist tightened still further, pulling him close, and the monsignor's mouth whispered into his ear, each urgent, terrible word forced out with the last of his strength.

"
Il mostro,
" he gasped. "The monster. He. Is. Still. Here."

And then he was gone.

The silence that followed his last breath was broken by a sibilant, hissing snarl, and Thomas turned to see the creature he had glimpsed in Paestum, nestled at the top of the stairs not ten yards from where he stood.

CHAPTER 47

It was a man. Just. He was naked to the waist, pale and spindly with large splayed hands, broad shoulders, and a crumpled baby face with small pale eyes. When he snarled, Thomas could see that his teeth had been filed to V-shaped points. He was hairless and blood-streaked and he exuded malice. In one hand he held a long, curved blade, light and honed to what promised to be surgical sharpness, but broad and hooked like a sickle.

Thomas didn't need to see the man move to know how deadly that weapon would be in his hands. There was no other doorway, no other staircase save the one in which the goblin man was crouching. Without a second's thought, Thomas grabbed the trailing end of the chain in both hands, tossed the length of it over the iron railing, and vaulted into the air above the chancel.

The chain kicked and slid in his hands as his weight came to rest, and then he was loosening his grasp and sliding the rest of the way. He was on the sanctuary floor before Pietro's killer had scurried to the railing.

He expected his would-be attacker to descend by the stairs, so there was something doubly alarming about the way the man leaped froglike out to the chain, following him down with easy precision. Thomas moved fast, making for the sacristy door.

He tried it just as the other completed his descent: locked. He ran to the back of the church and the main entrance that would put him back into the street where there were people, but this too was locked. For a moment he shook the handle and cursed, and then he turned and saw the man with the bat face skulking slowly up the left-hand aisle, loping, almost on all fours, and Thomas could see only one other door that looked as if it might get him out.

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He ran down the right aisle, scanning for the fallen gun. There was no sign of it. He neared the door.

Be open. Please God, be open.

It was. It put him in a passage like that on the opposite wall that led to the sacristy, and Thomas ran down it, relief turning to panic as he saw that the passage ended in another door. If this was locked he'd be trapped . . .

He tried it. The latch clicked but the door did not move. He pulled and pushed, conscious of the hissing snarl of the killer in the church behind him, and only then did he see the black key in the lock. He turned it, hands fumbling, and then shoved. Too soon. He felt the lock stick and had to take his shoulder from the door while he turned the key all the way. He could hear the killer getting closer.

The latch clicked. Thomas pushed, eyes wide, heart ham

mering, and tore through it. He slammed the door behind him, realizing too late that he could have taken the key and tried to lock it from this side.

For a second, feeling the cool night air on his face, he thought he was free. Then he saw how the ten-foot concrete walls rose up on each side of the path, how the path led to a rock wall only yards ahead. Overhead, the night sky was half shielded by tree limbs that stretched out over the open-topped tunnel. But the door at his back was starting to open again, the snarling suddenly louder.

Thomas stumbled forward, his eyes wild, looking up and around for a way out of the blind alley. Nothing. Not, at least, till he looked down.

There was an opening in the rock, human-made, round like the mouth of a well, and inside it was a long wooden ladder, down into the dark earth. On a hook in the rock above the hole was a black rubber flashlight.

Thomas looked back once, saw the door open, and began to climb.

Five feet, ten, twenty, thirty feet down into increasing blackness, and then the pale, moonlike face of the killer ap

peared at the top, with his hard little eyes and terrible teeth, 184

A. J. Hartley

and Thomas was jumping the rest of the way, dragging at the ladder, pulling it away like Jack hacking down the beanstalk before the giant could follow.

The ladder fell with a resounding crack that boomed all around him, echoing through the stone caves and passages. The killer could not come that way, but he might use the chain to climb down, might even be able to do it unaided. Thomas was not safe yet, and even if he had been sure of his escape, he would have felt little better, because he knew beyond any doubt where he was.

He was in the Fontanelle.

And may God have mercy on my soul,
he thought. CHAPTER 48

He didn't want to see, but he couldn't move around without light, not with that monster up there. He clicked the flashlight on and it produced a soft, yellowish beam. Thomas turned it up the shaft and saw nothing but stone and the distant fronds of green leaves against the sky. No goblin face, no wiry frame creeping down the wall . . .

He rotated the light around him, expecting a tight, dank tunnel like that made by the archaeologists in Herculaneum, but the cave was large and square, evenly carved and massive to the point of airiness. The ceiling was a good twenty or thirty feet above him, the walls angled up slightly so that you might imagine that the outer form was pyramidal. He breathed in. No foul odors; no musty, stagnant air; no claustrophobic sense of being entombed. Not yet.

It's not so bad,
he thought, starting to walk. The relief, after the horrors he had feared and those he had just experienced, made him want to laugh aloud.
Just find another exit. It's not bad. Could be much worse.
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It was.

His flashlight had fallen on a low wall, perhaps a couple of feet high that ran the length of the passage on both sides. In fact it was a kind of shelf and on it were stacked strangelooking objects, pale and regular, vaguely familiar even at a distance but somehow unclear until he got a little closer. They were bones. Heaps of them. Human bones. Long thigh bones placed end to end and stacked like logs. Then a row of skulls facing forward. Then more femurs. More skulls, working up the wall in a regular pattern. In this part alone were the re

mains of several hundred people, just lying there, arranged like bricks, each one once part of a living human being. Thomas had seen human bones before, but this was differ

ent. For one thing, there were just so many of them, just sitting there so that he could reach over and touch them. He stared as if stricken, as if he had never confronted death before, his eyes wide, gooseflesh breaking out on his arms and down his back.

There were just so many of them . . .

He walked forward till he came to an intersection in the great vaulted corridor, and the passages seemed to extend all around him, receding into darkness, all lined with the same stacks of bones. The patterns of the arrangement varied, but that only made them less easy to get used to, as did the occasional inclusion of other parts: a pair of shoulders, an intact rib cage. In places some of the skulls had been placed in glassfronted boxes, one, two, or three at a time. Many were labeled with names, but they were, Thomas thought, the names of those who had adopted the bones, not of the dead themselves. The eyeless skulls that watched him from the shadows were all completely anonymous. It was like stumbling into a mass grave behind a death camp, and though these people were largely the victims of disease rather than murder, he felt their presence keenly so that the hairs on the back of his neck stood upright and a deep chill settled into his own bones. The place was huge. He turned down one of the broad pas

sages, trying not to look too closely at the ranked remains, and 186

A. J. Hartley

found he was looking at three virtually life-sized crosses, the middle one slightly taller than the other two. He panned his flashlight beam down and saw that each cross rose out of a pile of human skulls.

Golgotha,
he thought, with a shudder. What the Gospels called "the place of the skull."

It was no wonder Giovanni hated the place, no wonder the Church had closed it. It wasn't merely macabre, it was redo

lent with superstition and something deeper and more unset

tling still: the arranging of the bones hinted at ritual, at a close, even habitual relationship with the dead, with the very idea of mortality.

Thomas recalled images of a chapel in Rome where the bones of the monks had been incorporated into the decoration. That was bizarre, but its pious aesthetic had nothing of the power of this place, whose order and simplicity was so much more ambiguous. The Roman chapel showed death as a portal for the believer, inevitable, but easily transcended by the or

thodox Christian. This was just death laid out in its grimmest and least gilded might, and Thomas felt like Hamlet in the graveyard, finally getting something everyone knew but some

how managed to ignore.

Thomas checked Roberta's phone, but there was no signal, not that he had expected any under all these tons of tuff. He began walking again, flashlight fixed forward on the path so that he did not see those countless, long-dead faces.
You mean, so they don't see you.

That too.

But then he was in a new cavern, and here a kind of mas

sive structure had been built, like the front of a church, per

haps thirty feet high, divided into niches surrounding a central statue of the Sacred Heart. Each niche was full of bones, more bundled femurs, more watchful skulls, stacked in their hun

dreds to the cavern roof, so that for a moment Thomas felt overwhelmed by the insistent presence of the dead massed at the limit of his flashlight beam, and gathered rank upon rank in the darkness beyond.

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He had to find a way out.

He stood there staring, and was ready to walk away when he turned and for a brief second saw tiny pinpricks of light high in the darkness to his left. He took a few paces that way, raising the flashlight, but that didn't help, so he turned it down. He stopped, recoiling from the sight of a large glass pane set into the stone floor, beneath it a jumble of brownish skeletons, scraps of ancient clothing, maybe even some desiccated ribbons of flesh. This was how the bodies were found, he thought, before they were gathered up into the Fontanelle's strange, nurturing embrace. He went around the glass panel, still looking up, and suddenly there it was again: tiny spots of light like . . .
Stars.

He was looking at the night sky.

He moved forward faster, scanning with the flashlight, and found that the passage narrowed as the vaulted ceiling became limitless. The walls were no longer the sheer and sloping rock face from which the caverns had been carved, but stone blocks some fifteen feet high. He began to run, elated, sure of his exit, but then the darkness in front of him changed, solidified. He was looking at a solid wall of wood and metal, black and substantial, topped with spikes.

There was a door in it. Thomas tried it, pushed it, rattled the handle, but it did not move, did not make a sound. He stepped back to consider it. It was painted and slick, without ledges or handholds. It had been designed to keep people out.

And will do just as well to keep them in.
He considered the walls of the passage, but they looked no more promising. Then he remembered the ladder down which he had come. If he could find his way back . . . He shivered. Going back meant meandering back through that ghastly mausoleum, back to where the killer had seen him enter. By now the creature--it was still hard to think of him as merely a man--might have used the same length of chain he had threaded through Pietro's torso to clamber down into the cemetery after him. He could be waiting in the 188

A. J. Hartley

shadows, nestled in some pile of eyeless heads, whetting that sickle-shaped blade . . .

But here Thomas was trapped. If the killer emerged from the cavern proper, caught him here in the confines of what must surely be the main entrance, being close to the door would avail him nothing. He was better off in the caves with the bones. Thomas closed his eyes for a second, set his teeth, and breathed out. He had no choice but to go back in.

He took three reluctant steps, paused to find some semblance of determination, and walked back into the great stone vault. He edged around the glass floor, moving left into a tunnel, keeping the beam of his light low so as not to disturb the bones. But then something stirred in his memory and he stopped. When asked what had happened to Ed's papers after the fire