Ysabel (3 page)

“The door to the cloister is locked. I was there fifteen minutes ago.”

“Nope. Open. The far one out to the street and the one leading in here. I just came through them. Come look. The cloister is really pretty.”

It began then, because they didn’t get to the cloister. Not yet.

Going across, they heard a sound: metal on metal. A banging, a harsh scrape, another bang.

“What the hell?” Ned murmured, stopping where he was. He wasn’t sure why, but he kept his voice down.

Kate did the same. “That’s the baptistry,” she whispered. “Over there.” She pointed. “Probably one of the priests, maybe a caretaker.”

Another scraping sound.

Ned Marriner said, “I don’t think so.”

It would have been, in every possible way, wiser to ignore that noise, to go see the pretty cloister, walk out that way afterwards, into the morning streets of Aix. Get a croissant and a Coke somewhere with this girl named Kate.

His mother, however, was in the Sudan, having flown far away from them, again, to the heart of an insanely dangerous place. Ned came from courage—and from something else, though he didn’t know that part yet.

He walked quietly towards the baptistry and peered down the three steps leading into that round, pale space. He’d gone right past it when he came in, he realized. He saw eight tall pillars, making a smaller circle inside it, with a dome high above, letting in more light than anywhere else.

“It’s the oldest thing here,” whispered the girl beside him. “By a lot, like 500
A.D
.”

He was about to ask her how she knew so many idiotic facts when he saw that a grate had been lifted from over a hole in the stone floor.

Then he saw the head and shoulders of a man appear from whatever opening that grate had covered. And Ned realized that this wasn’t, that this couldn’t be, a priest or a caretaker or anyone who
belonged
in here.

The man had his back to them. Ned lifted a hand, wordlessly, and pointed. Kate let out a gasp. The man in the pit didn’t move, and then he did.

With an air of complete unreality, as if this were a video game he’d stumbled into, not anything that could be called real life, Ned saw the man reach inside his leather jacket and bring out a knife. Priests didn’t wear leather, or carry knives.

The man laid it on the stone floor beside him—the blade pointing in their direction.

He still didn’t turn around. They couldn’t see his face. Ned saw long—very long—fingers. The man was bald, or had shaved his head. It was impossible to tell his age.

There was a silence; no one moved.
This would be a good spot to save the game,
Ned thought.
Then restart if my character gets killed.

“He isn’t here,” the man said quietly. “I was quite sure . . . but he is playing with me again. He enjoys doing that.”

Ned Marriner had never heard that tone in a voice. It chilled him, standing in shadow, looking towards the soft light of the baptistry.

The man had spoken in French. Ned’s French was very good, after nine years of immersion classes at home in Montreal. He wondered about Kate, then realized she’d
understood because, absurdly, as if making polite conversation—with a knife lying on the stone floor—she asked, in the same language, “Who isn’t here? There’s just a Roman street under there, right? It says so on the wall.”

The man ignored her completely, as if she hadn’t made any sounds that mattered in any way. Ned had a sense of a small man, but it was hard to tell, not knowing how deep the pit was. He still hadn’t turned to look at them. It was time to run, obviously. This wasn’t a computer game. He didn’t move.

“Go away,” the man said, as if sensing Ned’s thought. “I have killed children before. I have no strong desire to do so now. Go and sit somewhere else. I will be leaving now.”

Children?
They weren’t kids.

Stupidly, Ned said, “We’ve seen you. We could tell people . . .”

A hint of amusement in his voice, the man said dryly, “Tell them what? That someone lifted a grate and looked at the Roman paving?
Hélas
! All the gendarmes of France will be on the case.”

Ned might have grown up in too quick-witted a household, in some ways. “No,” he said, “we could say someone threatened us with a knife.”

The man turned around, inside the opening in the floor.

He was clean-shaven, lean-faced. Dark, strong eyebrows, a long, straight nose, a thin mouth. The bald head made his cheekbones show prominently. Ned saw a scar on one cheek, curving behind his ear.

The man looked at them both a moment, where they stood together at the top of the three steps, before he spoke again. His eyes were deep-set; it was impossible to see their colour.

“A few gendarmes would be interested in that, I grant you.” He shook his head. “But I am leaving. I see no reason to kill you. I will replace the grate. No damage has been done. To anything. Go away.” And then, as they still stood there, more in shock than anything else, he took the knife and put it out of sight.

Ned swallowed.

“Come on!” whispered the girl named Kate. She pulled at his arm. He turned with her to go. Then looked back.

“Were you trying to rob something down there?” he asked.

His mother would have turned and asked the same thing, in fact, out of sheer stubbornness, a refusal to be dismissed, though Ned didn’t actually know that.

The man in the baptistry looked up at him again and said, softly, after a moment, “No. Not that. I thought I was . . . here soon enough. I was wrong. I think the world will end before I ever find him in time. Or the sky will fall, as he would say.”

Ned shook his head, the way a dog does, shaking water off when it comes in out of the rain. The words made so little sense it wasn’t even funny. Kate was tugging at him again, harder this time.

He turned and walked away with her, back to where they’d been before. By Saint-Catherine’s chapel.

They sat down on the same bench. Neither of them spoke. Across the echoing, empty space of the dark cathedral they heard a clang and scrape, then a bang again. Then nothing. He’d be leaving now.

Ned looked down at the iPod on his belt. It seemed, just then, to be the strangest object imaginable. A small rectangle that offered music. Any kind of music you wanted. Hundreds of hours of it. With little white buds you could put in your ears and block out the sounds of the world.

The world will end before I ever find him in time.

He looked over at the girl. She was biting her lower lip, staring straight ahead. Ned cleared his throat. It sounded loud. “Well, if Kate is for Katherine,” he said brightly, “we’re in the right place. You can do the praying.”

“What the . . . ?” She looked at him.

He showed her the map, pointing to the name of the chapel. His bad joke.

“I’m not Catholic,” she said.

He shrugged. “I doubt that matters.”

“What . . . what do you think he was doing?” She’d seemed pretty confident, assertive, when she’d first come over to him. She didn’t seem that way now. She looked scared, which was reasonable.

Ned swore. He didn’t swear as much as some of the guys did, but this particular moment seemed to call for something. “I have
no
idea. What’s down there?”

“I think they’re just grates to let you look down and see the old Roman street. The tourist stuff on the wall also said there was a tomb, going back to the sixth
century. But that’s something I . . .” She stopped.

He stared at her.

“What?”

Kate sighed. “This is gonna sound geeky again, but I just
like
this stuff, okay? Don’t laugh at me?”

“I’m nowhere close to laughing.”

She said, “They didn’t bury people inside city walls back then. It was forbidden. That’s why there are catacombs and cemeteries in Rome and Paris and Arles and other places—outside the walls. They buried the dead outside.”

“What are you saying?”

“Well, the info thing posted over there shows a tomb here from the sixth century. A little over from where . . . he was. So how did . . . well, how did someone get buried in here? Back then?”

“Shovels?” Ned said, more out of reflex than anything else.

She didn’t smile.

“You think that’s what that guy was? A tomb robber?” he asked.

“I don’t think anything. Really. He said he wasn’t. But he also said . . .” She shook her head. “Can we go?”

Ned nodded. “Not through the front, we might step into a shot and my dad would kill himself, and then me. He gets intense when he’s working.”

“We can leave the way I came in, through the cloister.”

A penny dropped for Ned. “Right. That’ll be how
he
got in, I bet. Between my seeing it locked and your finding the two doors open.”

“You think he’s gone out that way?”

“Long gone by now.” He hesitated. “Show me that baptistry first.”

“Are you crazy?”

“He’s gone, Kate.”

“But why do you . . . ?”

Ned looked at her. “History lesson? You promised.”

She didn’t smile. “Why are you playing boy detective?”

He didn’t have a really good answer. “This is a bit too weird. I want to try to understand.”

“Ned, he said he’d killed children.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think . . . that means what we think it means.”

“And
that
sounds like a line from a bad movie.”

“Maybe. But come on.”

“This where the creepy music starts?”

“Come on, Kate.”

He got up and she followed. She could have left by herself, he thought later, sitting on the terrace of the villa that evening. They didn’t know each other at all that first morning. She could have gone out the way she’d come in, saying goodbye, or not, as she pleased.

They walked together down the three steps into the baptistry and stood above the grate, beside that inner ring of pillars. The light was beautiful after the dimness of the cathedral, streaming down through windows in the dome above the shallow well in the centre.

Ned knelt and peered through the bars of the grate. If it was supposed to be a viewing point, it wasn’t much
of one. It was too dark down there to see where the sunken space might go.

“Here’s the bit about the tomb,” Kate said. She was at the west wall, in front of some tourist information, a typed, laminated sheet, framed in wood. Ned walked over. Basically, it was just another map-key to this part of the interior. Kate pointed at a letter on the map, and then the text keyed to it. As she’d said, it seemed someone was buried there, “a citizen of Aix,” in the sixth century.

“And look at this,” she said.

She was pointing to an alcove on their left. Ned saw a really old wall painting of a bull or a cow and below it an almost obliterated mosaic fragment. He could make out a small bird, part of some much larger work. The rest of it was worn away.

“These are even older,” Kate said.

“What was this place, before? Where we are?”

“The forum was here. Centre of town. The Roman city was founded about a hundred and something years
B.C
. by a guy named Sextius when the Romans first started to take over Provence from the Celts. He named it after himself, Aquae Sextiae.
Aquae
, because of the waters. There were hot springs until recently. That’s why there are so many fountains. Have you seen them?”

“We just got here. The cathedral was built on top of the forum?”

“Uh-huh. There’s a sketch of it on the wall. Where your dad is now was like the major intersection of the Roman town. That’s why . . . that’s why I still don’t understand someone being buried here, back then.”

“Well, it was hundreds of years after, wasn’t it? It says sixth century.”

She looked dubious. “It was still taboo, I’m almost sure.”

“Google it later, or I will.”

“Boy detective?” Kate sounded as if she was trying to tease but didn’t actually feel like it. Ned could relate.

He shook his head again. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, or why. He looked at that faded bull on the wall. It sure didn’t look like any church art he knew. This place was
really
old. He shivered. And perhaps because of that,
because
he felt scared, he walked quickly back, knelt again by the grate, put both hands on it, and pulled.

It was heavier than he’d expected. He managed to shift it a bit, making the scraping sound they’d heard before. The man had broken some clasp or catch, Ned saw. He just had to lift and slide, but . . .

“Help me, this sucker’s heavy!”

“Are you insane?”

“No . . . but my fingers’ll be crushed if you don’t . . .”

She moved, to the part he’d levered up and, on her knees beside him, helped slide it over. There was an opening now, large enough for a small man, or a teenaged boy, to get through.

“You are
not
going down there,” Kate said. “I am not staying to watch—”

“I bequeath you my iPod,” Ned replied, handing it to her. And then, before he had time to think about it and get
really
frightened, he put his feet over the edge of the
pit, turned so he was facing the side, and lowered himself. Just as he did he started thinking about snakes or scorpions or rats skittering through the dark, ancient space below. Insane wasn’t a bad word to use, he decided.

His feet touched bottom and he let go. He looked down, couldn’t even see his running shoes.

“You wouldn’t by any chance have—”

“Take this,” said the girl named Kate, in the same moment. She handed him a small red metal flashlight. “I keep one in my pack. For walks at night.”

“Efficient of you. Remind me,” Ned said, “to introduce you to someone named Melanie.” He turned on the beam.

“You going to bother telling me
why
you are doing this?” she asked, from above.

“Would if I knew,” he said, truthfully.

He shone the beam along the dark grey stones beside and below him. He knelt. The slabs were damp, cold, really big, like for a road—which is what she’d said they’d been.

On his right the foundation wall was close, below the grate. Straight ahead the flashlight lit the short distance to the sunken well, which was dry now, of course. He saw worn steps. The beam picked out a rusted pipe sticking out, attached to nothing. There were spiderwebs entangling it.