The Night Villa (30 page)

I was not at all sure that I could find my way. Here, in the poorer section of town, the streets were more chaotic. More damage had been done to cheaper edifices. Rubble blocked the narrow alleys and the smell of smoke and incense hung in the air, as well as the smell of blood as the inhabitants killed animals to appease the gods. There was chanting amidst the crying of children and the lamentations of women. I stopped outside one house to listen to voices raised in song. Looking up, I saw carved above the lintel waves, a mother and child, and a boat—signs, Iusta had told me, that her religion held sacred because their leader was a fisherman and his birth had been a miracle. The singing was coming from inside the house.

In the garden, I found Iusta, who in only a few hours would play Persephone to my Hades. She was seated in a circle of men and women singing a prayer. A silence descended on the group when they heard me enter. Since Nero punished the Christians for setting Rome on fire some fifteen years ago, the sect had been driven underground, which was why, of course, Iusta had made me promise not to reveal her affiliation with it to her mistress. Her compatriots, though, might not know that I had agreed to keep her secret. As they looked up at me I sensed distrust. What I did not sense, surprisingly, was fear. Unlike the rest of the townspeople I had passed on my way here, this fellowship appeared calm. I couldn’t help wondering if their faith gave them this peace, or if perhaps they were too simple to appreciate the danger.

“Your mistress sent me to bring you back to the villa,” I said, addressing Iusta, ignoring the glances of the other members of the group. One of them, a young man with dark curly hair who wore the iron neck ring of a slave, was glaring at me most rudely.

“She’s not her mistress,” he began, but Iusta silenced him with a look.

“It’s all right, Tiro. After tonight, I’ll be free.”

“But at what price?” Tiro asked. “Is this the man who has the temerity to play a god?”

“Enough, Tiro!” Iusta spoke sharply to the youth and he blushed. She laid a hand on his arm and whispered something in his ear. Then she got up and came quickly to my side. “Let’s go,” she said, steering me away from the angry young man. “The smell of sulfur and fear have no doubt made Calatoria more eager than ever to proceed with the rites. We might as well get them over with.”

We made our way through the town, which had grown quieter now that the time of the siesta had come. It must be near the seventh hour. I had been gone longer than I’d thought. Calatoria would be anxious. I hurried us through the Porta Marina, but just as we were coming out onto the seawall, we heard a loud explosion and the ground jolted beneath us. I grabbed Iusta’s arm just as a crack opened up in the stone beneath our feet and pulled her to safety—or at least the closest I could find to safety. As we crouched in the shadow of the seawall, I saw that the great stones were rolling like dice thrown by the hand of a giant. I felt fine dust and small pieces of rubble sifting down on our heads, and when I looked up, expecting to see the wall above us toppling over, I saw instead that the dust and rubble were falling from the sky: a gray rain that had dimmed the sun. I looked back toward the town, expecting to see the buildings reduced to rubble, but the town was intact. What had changed was the mountain behind it. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. The summit of the mountain, which had appeared snow-capped earlier, was gone. In its place was a silver crown—a great plume that rose above the peak like the trunk of a tree and then swelled like the branches of an umbrella pine, only this tree was made of clouds and stood taller than any tree I had ever seen.

I put my hand out to feel the patter of dry rain and it quickly filled with ash and small porous rocks that were warm to the touch.

“What is that?” Iusta asked.

I looked down at her. There was a streak of gray ash across her right cheekbone and one on her shoulder where her dress had torn. Her face looked white in the dim gray light and different somehow—younger, more open. It was the first time I had seen her really frightened and I realized then that what I had thought was fear on the first night she came to me had been an act. This is what she looked like when she was really afraid.

I wasn’t sure what was happening. I had never seen anything like it. But I didn’t want to admit my ignorance to this frightened girl.

“It appears to be a cloud of ash,” I replied, “disgorged from a fire burning inside the mountain. I believe Strabo recounts something like it in Sicily…. Luckily the wind is blowing most of it away from us. Come, when your mistress sees this she will surely decide to abandon the rites and seek a refuge farther away from the mountain.” I looked back at the top of Vesuvius and saw that the cloud was spreading a pall of black over the eastern side of the bay. I could no longer make out the towns of Pompeii or Stabiae or Surrentum. “We should head west along the coast road to Neapolis, perhaps farther to Puteoli or Cumae. Don’t worry,” I said, putting my arm around her. “As long as the wind continues in this direction, we should have plenty of time to reach safety.”

“And you would leave without recovering the scroll that was stolen from you?” she asked.

“Yes, of course! Do you think I would risk all our lives for a mere book? No matter how ancient or rare?”

She didn’t answer at first. I felt her dark eyes holding mine, looking for something in my face. We had no time to waste, though, so I turned us toward the villa and hurried her along, thinking as we went that there should be some way to convince Calatoria to admit she had stolen the scroll and get it back before we departed on the coast road to Neapolis. Maybe she had already retrieved it from its hiding place in preparation for our departure. I had meant what I said to Iusta—that I would choose our lives over an old book—but I hoped I wouldn’t have to make that choice. And when we got back to the villa, I found I didn’t. Calatoria had already made her choice.

The lower courtyard was full of women, all dressed in black robes, their hair loosened around their shoulders. Calatoria held a torch in one hand and a sheaf of wheat in the other. “Hurry. Hades has sent us a premature dusk to urge us early to the rites. My handmaids will prepare you, Phineas, while Iusta descends below to make the Chamber of the God ready for you.”

“But my dear Calatoria,” I began, “do you think it wise to stay? If another tremor should strike…”

“The underground chambers are carved into the cliffside. They have survived hundreds of years and tremors far worse than this. There is no place safer. It’s what the gods demand of us and we won’t be safe until we appease the god of the underworld and he has his bride.” She looked at Iusta as she said bride and Iusta turned her eyes to me. I saw that same look I’d seen on the seawall—fear, yes, but also something else. She trusted me to make the right decision. I had told her I wouldn’t sacrifice our lives for my lost scroll, and yet, clearly if Calatoria believed the underground caverns were the safest place to be…

“Very well,” I said, turning from Iusta to Calatoria. “Let’s be quick about it, then. Let the rites begin!” I had tried to make my voice sound calm and cheerful, but instead it rang hollowly in my ears. Had Iusta noticed? When I turned to her, she was already gone. “You must give me half an hour to prepare myself,” I told Calatoria. I went back to my chambers where my clothes had been laid out for me: a clean white linen tunic and a robe of purple silk. But before I changed into my garments, I wrote down all that had happened this remarkable morning while my impressions were still fresh. The account took up the rest of this scroll and so I will take a new scroll of papyrus with me to recount what I experience below. And so I prepared myself in less than a half an hour for my journey to the underworld.

So Phineas must have taken both scrolls with him, I reason, but he dropped one in the courtyard where the excavators found it. How frightened he must have been to leave his precious book behind! I lift my eyes from the page and am startled to find that we are close to the shore. The modern coastline is some distance from the ancient city and all that can be seen of it from here is a wall of tufa, but I can see Mount Vesuvius, looming over the bay, and its sudden closeness, after what I’ve been reading, gives me an uneasy feeling. Agnes, too, has lifted her eyes from the laptop screen and is staring at the apparently peaceful volcano.

“Poor Iusta!” I say. “She must have been afraid that if she refused to go with Phineas, he would expose her as a Christian to her mistress—and expose her friends as well. But if she had left Herculaneum right away, she might have survived. As it is, she probably died under the villa, trapped in those underground tunnels.”

Agnes turns to me and I notice that her face is wet. Tears? I wonder, or just salt spray? “Maybe,” she says, “but then I wonder about that ‘dark-haired youth’ at her mother’s house. Maybe he came to find her at the last minute and he rescued her.”

“Maybe,” I say, without really believing it, but not wanting to extinguish Agnes’s hopes. She has cast herself in Iusta’s role and sees the “dark-haired youth” as Sam. She finishes typing something on the laptop, taps the mousepad with a decisive strike, and snaps the lid closed. I can’t help but think that whatever message she’s sent is like the papyrus Phineas left aboveground before going down into the tunnels—the same tunnels we’ll explore today—another missive to the living by those headed toward the underworld.

W
hen well-diggers in Resina, the modern town that sprung up over Herculaneum’s ashes, struck carved marble instead of water in 1709, there were no trained archaeologists, no protocol for excavating ancient ruins. Herculaneum’s theater became a quarry for an Austrian prince’s Portici villa. Later, after the Austrians were expelled from Naples, Herculaneum was a treasure trove for the Bourbons. Charles III assigned his engineer, Alcubierre, to the excavation of Herculaneum, which meant tunneling into the ground and retrieving whatever they found of value: statues, friezes, wall paintings, vases, bronzes. The Villa della Notte lay undiscovered until the mid-eighteenth century, when tunnelers happened upon the central courtyard’s bronze statue of the goddess Nyx, which gave the villa its name. Luckily, the Swiss engineer who was then in charge had the foresight to restrict tunneling to only what was necessary to make a plan of the villa. The bronze statue and charred papyrus scrolls were removed to Naples, but most of the villa was left intact and unexcavated inside its tufa carapace until John Lyros began excavating five years ago.

“If the eighteenth-century
tombaroli
had known about these wall paintings just on the other side of their tunnels they would have taken them, too,” Lyros tells us as we stand outside the entrance of the tunnel that Simon went into yesterday. He steps into the tunnel and holds up a battery-operated lantern to illuminate the section of wall that collapsed on Simon. The wings of a swan are visible just above the gaping hole, as though the huge bird has been hovering behind the wall, just waiting for a chance to break out of the crypt that has kept him captive for nearly two thousand years. But when I step beside John and hold my lantern up to the gap I see that this swan is otherwise engaged—his enormous wings beat over the spread legs of a naked girl, his long neck curved sinuously between her breasts. Zeus come as a swan to ravish Leda. Even faded and peeling, the painting has the power to disturb by its erotic power.

“I thought these tunnels were dangerous,” Agnes says from behind me, her voice trembling. I wonder if it’s the safety of the eighteenth-century tunnels or the subject matter of the painting that has frightened her. Last night she’d sounded so eager to come with us.

“They
are,
” Lyros answers. “I’d never agree to going any further into the tunnels dug by those Bourbon looters—death traps, all of them—but remember what Calatoria told Phineas: this stairway and the passages below were carved out of the cliff thousands of years ago. If they didn’t collapse during the eruption, I don’t think they’re going to cave in now.”

“I’m not sure I agree with your logic,” Elgin says. “It could be that the vibrations of our footsteps are all that’s needed to set off a collapse.”

“If you’re afraid, you needn’t come with us, Dr. Lawrence,” Lyros tells Elgin. “None of you do. This is a strictly voluntary exploration.”

“And an unauthorized one,” comes a voice from outside the tunnel. Maria’s slim figure, clad in black capris, snug T-shirt and silk head scarf—an excavation outfit as imagined by Gucci—is silhouetted in the lit entrance to the tunnel. “I stopped by the excavation offices and I noticed that you haven’t requested a permit for this excavation.”

“What excavation?” Lyros asks, holding his hands up, his lantern dangling from his right hand, his left empty and turned up to the tunnel ceiling. “We’re merely taking a stroll down a path that has fortuitously opened up for us. Did you lodge a complaint?”

I lift my lantern up so I can see Maria’s expression, but the light makes her turn her head away and shield her eyes with the back of her hand. “No,” she says. “As you say: it’s not technically an excavation.”

“And besides,” Lyros says, smiling, “aren’t you curious about what we’ll find, especially now that we know Iusta was a Christian? Who knows? Her diary might contain a debate on the relative merits between Christianity and pagan worship. Wouldn’t that be something for Church historians? Perhaps we’ve found ourselves an early Christian martyr. I know Dr. Chase must be dying to see the diary. I think we’re all pretty curious about what we may find down there, aren’t we?” He swings his lantern in a slow circle from face to face. No one says anything. “I thought so. The only problem is that one of us should stay up here to call for help in case there is a collapse.”

“I’ll stay,” Agnes offers. “But how will I know if there’s a problem, and what should I do if there is one?”

“Here—” Lyros removes three walkie-talkies from the canvas bag he has slung across his chest and distributes them to Elgin, Maria, and me. He then hands the bag to Agnes after removing a bottle of water and a coil of nylon rope, which he gives to me to put in my bag. “There’s another walkie-talkie in there, a cell phone, and my laptop. If you get a distress call from any of us, e-mail George and then call the Scavi office here. The number’s programmed into my phone along with the local police and hospital. And then run to the office just in case. But really, don’t worry. We’ll be back in an hour.”

As I step into the stairwell, I smell, faint but unmistakable, the briny breath of the sea. Could it really be? Two thousand years ago this stairwell led down to the sea, but now the shore is five hundred yards away. Growing up on my grandparents’ ranch outside Austin, I used to find chunks of fossiliferous limestone imprinted with the ridged fans of ancient seashells from the inland sea that had dried up seventy million years ago. When I pressed their chalky and coolly curved surfaces to my face, I would catch the faintest whiff of that sea-smell. If the scent could last seventy million years in those lumps of stone, why not in this sealed stairwell? Or maybe the smell is suggested by the paintings that leap to life under the light from our lanterns as we make our way down the steps.

“It’s like an underwater orgy,” Elgin remarks, holding his lantern up to a painted octopus. Its long tentacles are entwined in a sea nymph’s hair, its suckers attached to her breasts and, I see as Elgin moves his lantern lower, insinuating themselves between her legs. Most disturbing though is the nymph’s expression—a mixture of fear and ecstasy.

“Hmph!” Maria sniffs. “What an abomination! Imagine how morally deficient and jaded these people must have been that they needed to invent such strange couplings to excite themselves.”

“And yet,” Lyros says from a lower step, “if these images were meant solely as titillation, why have them here, underground, and not in a bedroom? It feels to me more like an explosion of barriers than an exercise in pornography. The initiate as he descended past these images would shed his preconceptions of
categories
—of what went with what….” His voice trails off as his lantern lights on the leering face of a satyr mounting a sea horse.

“In other words: anything goes, eh?” Elgin says. “It certainly sets a mood. Poor old Phineas probably thought he was in for the time of his life—not the end of it.”

“We don’t know that he died here,” I say, turning to Elgin and stopping a few steps above Maria and Lyros. “If they came down here just after the initial eruption, it was only about one o’clock in the afternoon. They had time to perform the rites and still get out.”

Elgin shakes his head. “If Phineas survived this, we’d have heard from him again. He’d never be able to resist writing this up. You heard him in the last section. He brought papyrus and pen along to take notes! Besides, I have a feeling that he might not have gotten out of here even if there’d been no eruption.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just have the feeling he was being set up by those women—Calatoria and her cronies, Iusta…”

“Iusta? But she was a powerless slave, a plaything for Calatoria’s amusement.”

“You’re underestimating her,” Elgin says. While we’ve been arguing, Lyros and Maria have reached the bottom of the stairs. Elgin puts his hand on my arm and whispers in my ear. “I want you to stay close to me when we get down there.”

I stare back at him, surprised. Ely had said it was Elgin’s decision
not
to tell me that Lyros was the
magos.
Has he changed his mind?

“Why?” I ask. “Have you figured out who the Tetraktys informer is?”

“No,” he says. His eyes slide away from me the way they would slide to me when he was spinning some outrageous yarn at Schultz’s Beer Garden. He’s keeping something from me. “But until we know who it is, you should be careful around everyone, especially—”

“Let me guess: especially John Lyros?”

Elgin looks as if I’ve just slapped him, perhaps because I’ve guessed the identity of the Tetraktys informer or perhaps because he suspects who told me. But I don’t get to find out which because we’re interrupted by John Lyros’s voice calling from below.

“We’ve found it,” Lyros calls. “We’ve found the Chamber of the God!”

Lyros is crouched at the bottom of the stairs brushing dust off something on the ground while Maria holds the lantern above him. Emerging beneath the layers of dust is a circle carved into the floor—about five feet in diameter—with some kind of raised design in its center.

“It looks like a manhole cover,” I say. “How thick is it?”

“I can’t tell. The lid is flush to the floor. There seem to be holes in the center that could be used as a grip. If you two could hold your lanterns up…there…” Lyros sits back on his heels so we can all see the design. It’s a face, crudely carved into the stone, wreathed with snakes, the mouth open in a gaping howl.

“Medusa,” I say. “I suppose she’s there to discourage interlopers.” I’d been about to say
grave robbers,
forgetting for a moment that this isn’t a tomb.

Lyros slides his index and middle fingers into the Medusa’s eyes and his thumb into her mouth, like he’s grasping a bowling ball, and pulls up, but the stone doesn’t budge. “The weight of this thing alone would discourage all but the most dedicated. I don’t see how Calatoria or any of her women could have opened it.”

“But Phineas wrote that Iusta opened it herself,” I say. I kneel down on the ground and run my fingertips along the perimeter of the circle. I find a small hole, no wider than a pencil, that looks like it was drilled into the stone. Feeling along the rim, I find another hole about six inches away.

“See if you can find any more of these holes,” I say. “Maybe there was a pulley attached to them.”

Elgin kneels down and begins looking with Lyros and me for the drill holes. Maria remains standing, holding the lantern aloft. “If there was a pulley, then where is it now?” she asks.

“The women might have removed it after they sealed Phineas in here,” Elgin says. “I bet they had no intention of letting him out.”

“You seem awfully suspicious of the opposite sex,” John says, smiling at Elgin—only in the glare of the lantern the smile looks more like a leer. It looks, I suddenly think, like the expression of that satyr we just passed on the stairs. “Bad relationship history, eh?”

“It’s not women I mistrust,” Elgin replies. “It’s cults. It’s the surrender of reason to the herd mentality that I distrust. Hey, I’ve found two more holes.”

“Me too,” Lyros says.

“Okay,” I tell them, glad they’ve been distracted from their argument. Had it been my imagination, or had Lyros flinched when Elgin mentioned
cults
? “Now look for holes on the stone outside of the circle. I think you’ll each find two pairs, one of which will line up with a hole inside the circle—”

“Yeah, here’s a pair…and here’s another,” Elgin says.

“I’ve found two pairs as well,” Lyros says. “What do you think they’re for?”

“I have an idea.” I lean forward and slip my fingers into the eyes and mouth of the Medusa. The stone is cold and smooth, curving inward so that my fingers curl toward my thumb. Instead of lifting, I rotate my hand clockwise as if I were putting a spin on a bowling ball. The rasp of stone grating on stone, like the hoarse gasp of a dying man’s last breath, fills the chamber. “Tell me when the interior hole is in the middle of the two exterior ones,” I say.

“Now,” Lyros and Elgin both say at the same time.

I stop rotating the stone and rest my fingers for a moment. Then I pull straight up. The stone lifts a quarter inch. My fingers feel like they’re being yanked out of their sockets, but I keep lifting. The stone lifts another inch and then another—enough so Lyros and Elgin can grasp the sides and help lift it clear of the hole.

“Let go, Sophie. You’ll break your hand,” Elgin tells me.

I let my fingers slip out of the three holes and step back as the two men lift the stone circle and slide it clear of the hole. A rank odor fills the landing—no longer the smell of the ocean, but a reek of sulfur and decay so putrid it makes my eyes sting and the back of my throat clench.

“Dio Mio!”
Maria says, crossing herself. “It smells like the pit of Hell.”

“Some
thing
or some
one
sure as hell died in there,” Elgin says. He takes out a bandanna and starts to cover his nose with it, but then he offers it to me. I take it gratefully and tie it over my mouth and nose. It smells like the lemony aftershave Elgin uses. A scent that once had the power to make my knees weak, it now steadies me enough so I can hold the lantern over the gaping hole we’ve uncovered. The hole is too deep for the light to reach the bottom.