The Ancient Curse (23 page)

‘Do you think Angelo might be here, hidden somewhere?’ asked Francesca. ‘Maybe he’s watching us from the top of one of those ramps. Maybe he likes sliding down the banister! I’d always do that when I was little and I lived with my parents in the Annibaldi villa at Colle Val d’Elsa.’

Fabrizio stepped forward and tried calling, ‘Angelo! Angelo, are you there?’

All he got back was an echo in the huge empty chamber.

‘I’d like to go up. It’s the only way to know whether he’s here or not. Maybe he’s fallen asleep somewhere.’

‘If those footprints were his,’ Francesca reminded him.

‘Right,’ agreed Fabrizio.

He tried pressing a light switch but nothing happened. The electricity had probably been disconnected years ago. They began to climb the staircase slowly, keeping to the outside, until they got to the second floor, where, to their left, they found another hall as long as the entire mansion. It was closed on one end by a huge set of French doors that must have led to a balcony over the main door at the front of the palace, where they’d seen the stone shield.

The odour of dust filled the place and as Fabrizio trained his torch beam down the length of the vast hall he jumped at the sight of two long rows of bizarre, grotesque figures that appeared to be glaring at him from either side of the room. An astonishing collection of stuffed exotic animals loomed to the left and right: lions, leopards, gazelles, antelopes, jackals and hyenas baring their yellowed fangs in dusty sneers.

Both Francesca and Fabrizio found themselves tiptoeing among the beasts of this unexpected taxidermy gallery.

‘This guy must have been crazy!’ gasped Fabrizio. ‘Did you know this was here as well?’

‘I thought the contents had been donated to a natural science museum . . . Perhaps they were, at one time, but no one ever came to claim them. Maybe it would have cost too much to transport all of them. Anything can happen in a country like Italy. Anyway, there are side rooms along both walls,’ observed Francesca. ‘And here’s a candleholder. You go that way with the torch and I’ll search this way by candlelight.’

They began their inspection of the side rooms, with Fabrizio constantly calling out, ‘Angelo! Angelo! Are you in here?’ But the rooms were filled only with more specimens of the grotesque collection of creatures. One featured night birds on their perches: long-eared owls and little owls, tawny owls, scops owls and screech owls. There were daylight birds of prey in another, ravens and crows in another, and yet another filled with fish, sharks and octopuses, all covered with a shiny wax and impaled on stands. They looked like suffering souls. He opened the last door and cried out, slamming it closed. The door banged so loudly that Francesca turned in alarm and ran over to join Fabrizio, who was pale and shaking.

‘What’s in there?’ she asked.

Fabrizio shook his head. ‘It’s nothing. These things are just so weird.’

Francesca took him by the arm. ‘We’ve seen dozens already. What’s so special about that room that has you trembling like a leaf? Let me see.’

She strode towards the door and opened it decisively, lifting her candle to see inside. She closed it instantly and leaned hard against it, drawing a sharp breath. ‘Oh, Good Lord!’ she exclaimed.

‘I told you this felt like the circles of hell! But I never thought I’d meet up with him here.’

‘Oh, God, you’re right,’ gasped Francesca. ‘It’s horrible!’ She was still trying to catch her breath. ‘Do you feel up to taking a second look?’

‘Do I have a choice?’ asked Fabrizio.

He slowly pulled the door open and shone the beam of light inside. At the centre of the room stood an animal which appeared to be identical to the beast he’d seen ripping out Pietro Montanari’s throat two nights before. He turned to Francesca.

‘It’s pretty shocking, isn’t it?’ he offered, trying to keep his gut reaction under control.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ agreed Francesca. ‘It looks just like the animal we saw. My God, it’s a monster. What kind of breed . . . Fabrizio, what does this mean?’

‘I have no idea. Don’t ask me. I only know I really want my life back – as soon as possible!’

‘What’s stopping you?’

‘Nothing . . . No, a lot of things. I don’t want to leave you on your own here . . . and . . .’

‘And?’

‘I want to know how this ends up.’

Francesca nodded and circled all the way around the stuffed animal. It was a kind of dog, with a dense, bristly coat. Its huge jaws were gaping in a show of enormous fangs. Its long, thick tail was also covered with shaggy hair. The stuffed creature was completely covered with dust, giving its black coat a greyish cast.

‘Do you think this means the one we saw comes from here as well?’ wondered Francesca.

‘Who can say?’

‘I’d always heard that Count Ghirardini had a real reputation for being eccentric. He was famous for his game hunts in Africa and other exotic places. I don’t know much more than that, other than that he was quite private and reputed to be very strange.’

‘I’d say there’s little doubt about that. Anyway, this is Reggiani’s dream: seeing that animal pumped full of lead and filled with straw in some museum.’

Francesca leaned closer to illuminate the creature with her candle, but all of a sudden, part of the fur caught on fire. She cried out and Fabrizio tore off his jacket and hit the animal’s side hard to put out the flames.

‘Careful with that thing! This whole place might have burned down!’ he said.

Francesca held out her hand for the torch and shone it at the scorched coat to see how bad the damage was. She looked astonished at what she was seeing. ‘Will you look at that . . .’

‘Look at what?’ asked Fabrizio.

‘It’s fake.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘Look for yourself’ She tapped her knuckles against the animal’s side. ‘It’s wood. It’s not an animal at all. It’s an extremely realistic sculpture. As if Ghirardini, or whoever it was, had wanted to reproduce something that he’d seen but couldn’t have in his collection. If we had the time to search through here, I’ll bet we’d find sketches, drawings, notes. I’m sure of it.’

‘So Ghirardini saw it too,’ he said, raising his eyes to Francesca’s. ‘The animal has to be somehow connected to this place.’

‘Do you want to scare me to death? Come on. Let’s get out now. The little boy’s not here, Fabrizio.’

She hadn’t finished saying that when they heard a noise, in the distance, followed by a louder, sharper one.

‘What was that?’ asked Francesca.

‘I don’t know. It sounded strange.’

‘Is it coming from outside?’

‘No, it’s coming from inside. From upstairs, maybe . . .’

‘Fabrizio, it’s definitely coming from outside. I can tell. Let’s get out of here.’

‘No, I was wrong. It’s coming from downstairs. Hear that?’

‘But there is no one downstairs – you saw that for yourself.’

‘Maybe we didn’t look closely enough.’

‘Yes, we did. I want to leave, now.’

‘To leave we have to go back downstairs, don’t we? We can’t just walk out of the front door.’

Francesca gave in. ‘All right, then. Let’s go downstairs to see. At least I won’t have to look at these revolting animals anymore.’

They descended the stairs to the first floor and then went down the narrow steps leading from the corner of the main hall to the floor below. The sound was becoming sharper and more distinct. Hammering, against something hard: the ground, perhaps, or a wall.

‘See! I told you it was coming from down here,’ said Fabrizio.

‘I really am scared now.’

‘Come on. Nothing’s going to happen. Maybe someone else fell through the hole, ended up somewhere down below and is just trying to get out.’

‘Fabrizio, there’s nothing but an empty, doorless room down there, cut into the tufa,’ said Francesca, grabbing on to his arm as he continued to descend slowly.

‘So that’s all we’ll see,’ replied Fabrizio, setting his foot on the last step.

A slight luminescence shone from the room below, like the light of a candle. Fabrizio put his head around the corner as the noise stopped abruptly and directed the torch beam at the middle of the room. He stood gaping open-mouthed at what he saw.

It was Angelo, covered in mud from head to toe, and he was holding the missing bronze fragment in his hand. A candle stub at his feet let off a tiny glow.

The child smiled as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

‘See?’ he said. ‘I know how to be an archaeologist. So, can I stay with you now?’

15

F
ABRIZIO DREW CLOSER
carefully, slowly, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, as if that vision might vanish from one moment to the next. Angelo was standing hunched over in front of him, bowed under the weight of what for him was a very heavy bronze slab. He didn’t seem frightened or upset, or even uncomfortable, in that dark underground chamber. He looked like he had been biding his time, waiting for this very encounter.

‘Do you want to . . . give it to me?’ asked Fabrizio, holding out his arms.

The boy nodded and handed over the slab.

Fabrizio took it as he nodded to Francesca. ‘This is Angelo.’

‘It’s a pleasure, Angelo. I’m Francesca,’ she said, extending her hand.

Fabrizio noticed a pickaxe at the corner of the room, along with a pile of freshly dug earth, and asked, ‘How did you know where it was? Do you know who put it here?’

But the child seemed suddenly alarmed, as he strained to hear sounds that the others were unaware of. ‘We have to get out of here before she finds us. Hurry. This way, fast . . . She’s coming.’

He was frightened now. He had taken Francesca’s hand and was tugging her towards the staircase. She gave Fabrizio a look and all three of them started up the steps. They reached the main hall and moved towards the front entrance. Angelo stood on tiptoe to push back the latch of the secondary door and Francesca immediately went forward to give him a hand, but it was stuck and would not move. Fabrizio had no better luck: the door had been bolted from the outside.

Angelo seemed paralysed for an instant, then looked up at his companions and said, ‘This way. Come on – follow me.’

He turned back and retraced his steps until he was halfway down the hall, then opened a side door and started to run down a long, dusty corridor filled with cobwebs.

Fabrizio was weighed down by the slab and was having trouble keeping up, but Angelo kept turning to say, ‘Hurry! We have to get out.’

He moved easily through that sinister place, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms leading into each other like a strange set of dominoes. Rats and beetles, the denizens of those abandoned halls, would start at the sudden intrusion and the wildly aimed torch beam, racing for shelter under rickety, worm-eaten furniture and behind old picture frames leaning up against the walls. All at once, while running through a larger room, the boy stopped for a moment to glance at a big canvas that depicted a man who appeared to be the master of the house standing alongside a large desk bearing a marble bust of Dante Alighieri. Jacopo Ghirardini, perhaps?

‘Do you know who that is?’ asked Fabrizio, panting.

The boy didn’t answer, hurriedly taking off down a very narrow final corridor, more of a passageway between two solid stone walls, at the end of which a milky light appeared to be filtering through from the outside. A thick iron grating covered an aperture of about fifty centimetres by one metre, secured by a bolt. Angelo slid the bolt open and pushed but nothing happened.

‘You push,’ he said to Fabrizio. ‘You’re stronger. Maybe there’s something outside blocking it.’

Fabrizio set the bronze slab down and applied all his strength, but the grating did not budge. He stuck his hand through and his fingers curled around a chain closed with a heavy padlock.

‘Damn. There’s a chain. Didn’t you know it was there?’ he asked Angelo.

The little boy shook his head with a baffled expression. That curious air of confidence had completely vanished.

‘The cellar,’ said Fabrizio to Francesca. ‘We’ll go back down to where we got in and I’ll push you up on my shoulders. Once you’re out, you can help Angelo out too and I’ll get out somehow as well. We have to hurry. I’m afraid the torch batteries are running down and we won’t get anywhere if we can’t see.’

Their haste and the child’s bewilderment had made them frantic, as if the building itself were about to collapse around them from one moment to the next. They descended underground and stumbled back along the path they’d taken, but when they got to the air vent they saw that the grating had been returned to its original position.

‘Damn! That’s all we need,’ swore Fabrizio. ‘We’re trapped.’

‘Wait! Maybe not,’ said Francesca. ‘Maybe a policeman or night watchman came by and pushed the grating back in place so that no one would fall in. Help me get up there. I’ll bet you it’s still loose.’

Angelo was becoming more and more nervous. He kept checking behind him and begging, ‘Hurry, please. We have to get out of here.’

When Fabrizio had put down the slab, Francesca took off her shoes and climbed on to his shoulders. She could easily reach the grate and gave it a big heave, but it didn’t budge a centimetre.

Fabrizio heard her sigh, ‘Oh, my God, no . . .’

‘It’s locked, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ she replied, dropping from his shoulders. ‘From the outside. What do we do now?’

‘We stay calm,’ said Fabrizio. He switched off the torch to save on the batteries and continued: ‘I really hate to look so stupid, but we have no choice. I’m calling Reggiani.’

He switched on his mobile phone but there was no signal.

‘This is not looking good,’ said Francesca in a tone that could not mask her rising panic.

‘All right. If we can’t get out from down here or from a side entrance, well get out from above. I’ll go up that damned spiral staircase to the attic. There’s got to be a skylight or dormer or something. We’ll get out on to the roof, call Reggiani and have him come to get us.’

‘That sounds good,’ said Francesca without much enthusiasm.

‘You and Angelo wait here. There’s no sense going together. But I’ll need the torch. You don’t mind being in the dark for a while, do you?’