The Black (31 page)

"There is more below," he exclaimed, and worked to pull up a few more planks.

My heart was in my throat.

"Stop. Just stop!" I shouted, but not too loudly for fear that someone passing by would hear us and call the police.

Ennis pulled up two more planks. For a change, he was sweating. He grabbed his flashlight and shone it into the hole.

"Stairs," he declared. "We can drop below right here."

"No, we can't," I insisted. "We must be breaking a dozen laws. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a Greek prison."

Ennis stopped working, took a breath to calm himself, and looked to me.

"Terri," he said patiently. "You always talk of people who are afraid to step out of their comfort zone and take chances. Now you sound like the very kind of person you disdain. "

"Comfort zone? This isn't even
close
to my comfort zone."

"All we are doing is exploring an old structure. If the authorities have a problem with that, we will tell them that we are overzealous tourists, which is exactly what we are. This is an opportunity. We may find nothing but another empty room, but what if there is more? How can we not take that chance? You of all people should understand that."

"I do, but I'm also a mother with a son."

"And what will Marshall say when you tell him you turned your back on such a simple adventure? You have always taught him to look beyond the obvious. Is that not exactly what we are doing here?"

Common sense told me to get the hell out of there. What was a suburban mom from Connecticut doing in an abandoned temple on the edge of nowhere? I knew I should turn and walk away.

But I wasn't just an SUV-driving soccer mom. I was someone who chose to travel the world in search of images that told stories and spoke to people. My family was my life, but I had a passion for discovery. I can't say that I would have planned the adventure we found ourselves in, but looking into that dark hole gave me a thrill. I admit it. What was down there? What could I bring back to the world? As much as the safe decision would have been to leave, I found it impossible to turn back.

"Be careful," I said.

Ennis went back to work. In no time he had pulled up enough of the old floor to create an opening large enough for us to drop through.

He peered below and said, "There are stairs but this is no trapdoor. This room was intentionally sealed off."

"Is that good news or bad news?"

He slid his feet below the floor and stood on the top of
the stone steps. Ennis was breathing hard. He was as excited as I was.

"There may be nothing of interest down there," he said. "But then again . . ."

"Let's stop talking and find out," I said.

Ennis smiled, knowing that I was on board. With the flashlight beam ahead of him, he carefully navigated his way down the stairs. I watched as he slowly dropped below the floor into the dark void.

"It is safe," he declared. "A simple flight of stone stairs. Keep your hand on the wall for security."

I climbed through the window into the small room and followed Ennis through the hole and down into the dark. "Go slow," I cautioned.

Ennis was careful to keep the light beam on the stairs so we could both navigate. The worn stone steps were flush to the foundation of the temple. There was no handrail. I didn't want to think of what would happen if we stumbled and fell. I kept one hand on the wall and the other on my camera to keep it from swinging. As old as the temple was, it felt as if we were descending through time. While the stonework of the building above was precise and clean, the foundation below looked crude and haphazard.

"This seems to have been constructed in a much earlier era than the temple," Ennis commented. "These are two distinct structures."

The long flight of stairs took us down to a deep basement, where it had to be thirty degrees cooler than outside. We stood together on the dirt floor, examining the space with the flashlight beam. The ceiling was mostly made of stone, except for the opening we came through that had been sealed with wood. The basement, or whatever it was, was empty. And small. It might have taken up a quarter of the footprint of the temple.

"Nothing to write home about," I declared.

Ennis scanned the walls until he came upon a stone archway.

"Maybe in there," he declared, and walked toward it cautiously.

"Wait. That can't be part of the basement. The temple ends at the wall."

Ennis's eyes lit up. "Then let us see where it leads."

I followed him to the archway and curled my fingers around his belt at the small of his back. I didn't want him getting too far ahead of me. Once through the portal, we entered a narrow passageway that had walls made of the same stone as the foundation. Unless my sense of direction was totally off, we were no longer beneath the temple. He moved forward cautiously, but deliberately. I didn't try to stop him or talk him out of going farther. My curiosity had been teased. We were in it, for better or worse.

The walls were constructed with layer after layer of carefully placed stones that came together in a point overhead, the force of gravity working on each side to keep it from crumbling. Whoever had made this tunnel knew what they were doing. It was crude, but solid.

"Impressive," Ennis noted.

"People must know this exists," I said. "I mean it's not like it was hard to find."

"I agree," Ennis said. "I wonder if there is some reason that it was sealed off."

"Please," I scolded. "I'm nervous enough."

We followed the tunnel for several more twisting yards. I was about to suggest that we turn back when Ennis stopped suddenly.

"What?" I asked.

"There's light," he said, pointing ahead.

Looking beyond him, I saw narrow shafts of light filtering
through from above. Daylight was almost gone so the light was faint, but there was no mistaking the fact that this tunnel was constructed to allow in light from outside. Dozens of small beams of light crisscrossed one another, lighting up small sections of
the wall. There was just enough illumination that Ennis was able to turn off his much brighter flashlight.

"We should wait a few seconds to let our eyes adjust," Ennis suggested.

As the two of us stood shoulder to shoulder in that ancient, narrow tunnel, the true nature of this structure slowly revealed itself.

I felt Ennis grow tense.

"We are in a place for the dead," he said with a gasp. "It's a catacomb," I declared. "I think we found the back entrance to the
Necromanteio."

Though we were hundreds of yards from the official entrance to the ruins of the Oracle of the Dead, I had no doubt that we were standing in a far-flung offshoot of the labyrinth of tunnels that made up the mythological gateway to the afterlife. We walked farther and saw cutouts in the walls that were occupied by the mummified remains of ancient Greeks. Some were wrapped in rotting cloth. Others were in stone shells. Still other cutouts held multiple remains with dozens of skulls piled on one another like bricks in a wall. Some still had the shreds of leathery skin clinging to the bone.

"I don't think this is part of the regular tour," I said.

I had actually photographed the catacombs under Paris, so I wasn't totally repulsed. But that was a well-known spot that always had visitors and charged an admission. This place didn't look as if it had been visited by anybody who was still breathing in a very long time.

Ennis took a few tentative steps forward, examining the gruesome remains.

"How old could these be?" he asked.
"No way to tell, at least not by me."

Ennis started moving faster, giving each morbid cubby a quick look before moving on.

I said, "Do you think one of these is your boy Damon?"

"No," he answered with authority. "His final resting place was more of a prison. He would not be with the general population."

"Of course not," I said. "Wouldn't want to put a dead cannibal in with the riffraff."

Ennis scowled at me as if I was being disrespectful of the dead. Maybe he was right.

We reached a junction where the tunnel forked into two different routes.

"We should stop here," I offered. "The last thing we want to do is get lost."

Ennis didn't listen and kept moving, choosing the right fork.

"I am going by your theory," he explained. "This should take us farther away from the town."

"Ennis, we're not going to search this whole place. These tunnels could go on for miles."

"If he is here, we won't have to go far. My research said the temple was erected over his burial spot."

"So how will you know if you've found him? These guys pretty much all look the same to me . . . bony and bald."

"I am not looking for skeletal remains. I am looking for a tomb. Or a vault. Or something like—"

Ennis froze and I nearly ran into him from behind. "Something like that," he declared.

We had hit a dead end. The only illumination came from the last faint rays of light that seeped in from the tunnel behind us. It was too dim to make out detail, but I could see that the tunnel opened
into a room and there was something large and solid on the far side.

I instinctively went for my camera.

Ennis lifted his flashlight. When he turned on the beam, I could see that his hand was shaking. He began to raise the light toward the mysterious object, when I grabbed it.

"If that's it, we take some pictures and then we're out of here. If not, we're out of here anyway. Understand?"

Ennis nodded.

"How will you know if it's Damon's tomb?" I asked.

When he spoke, Ennis's voice cracked. He was more nervous than I was. "Supposedly there were six locks. Or seals. The translations I found weren't any more specific than that. Whatever ritual they used to imprison Damon's spirit, it took six locks to do it."

"So if there are six locks, it's Damon?" I asked.

Ennis gave a nervous chuckle. "I don't know. I suppose."

I let go of his hand and let him raise the flashlight toward the object. The beam revealed the unmistakable lines of a sarcophagus. It sat on a pedestal so that the top was a few inches higher than eye level. It was carved out of gray stone and looked to be large enough to hold a coffin, though I didn't think they used coffins back in ancient Greece.

Ennis didn't move. I, on the other hand, wanted to know what we had found so I skirted around him and approached the stone box.

"One thing's for sure," I said. "Whoever's inside there is special. Everybody else in this
horror show was pretty much stacked up and left out for anybody to see. Look at the lid. It must weigh a ton. He could have been one of the Oracles of the Dead. Or a priest. Or one of those sorcerers you talked about."

"Or Damon of Epirus," Ennis said, barely above a whisper.

He had gotten his legs moving and joined me at the sarcophagus. I took his flashlight and shone it on the intricate carvings that covered the outside of the large box.

"I have no idea what any of this means," I said. "I don't see six locks either. Or anything that could look like six seals or six of anything."

"What about that?" Ennis asked.

He pointed to the top of the sarcophagus where a stone box sat that was roughly the size of a shoe box. It too was covered with carvings and Greek lettering.

"I suppose those symbols would explain what it was," I offered. "Can you read them?"

Ennis shook his head.

I grabbed my camera. "I'll take some shots and we can bring them to somebody who can translate." I gave Ennis a playful shove and said, "Looks like you made a big discovery after all, Indy."

I switched on my camera and took a few steps back while pulling off the lens cover. I hated using the built-in flash. It was ugly light. But this was about getting a clear image, not about art. The whine of the flash powering to life cut through the quiet of the tomb.

"Take a couple of steps back," I said to Ennis. "I want to get every detail."

Ennis didn't move. He kept staring at the sarcophagus. "It's not going anywhere," I said playfully. "Let me shoot this."

Still, he didn't move.

"Ennis?"

Instead of backing off, Ennis reached out and grabbed the box on top of the tomb.

"Whoa, what are you doing?"

It was like he was in a trance. He pulled it toward him, the stone of the smaller box scraping across the top of the sarcophagus.

"Don't! That probably hasn't been moved for centuries—" What happened next seemed to unfold in slow motion.
It’s incredible to think how life can change so quickly and so completely, with no warning. Ennis dropped his flashlight and pulled the small stone box off the sarcophagus. It was heavy and he had to tilt it as he brought it down. The cover on the box wasn’t secured and it slipped off instantly. I brought my camera up and started shooting. The room was so dark that I only saw brief moments of detail as each flash fired. When the lid came off, it crashed to the floor and shattered. For one brief instant I saw what was inside. It looked to be six golden balls, each about the size of a plum. Six balls. They could have had etchings on them but it all happened too quickly to tell for sure.