by Amy Plum
“Perfect timing,” I said, walking up to the gates and reading the sign. “Closing time, five forty-five p.m.”
The museum was housed in a massive fifteenth-century abbey that took up most of a city block, and had been built next to first-century ruins of Gallo-Roman baths, an ancient ancestor of today’s spas. Crumbling walls extended three stories above grassy grounds, the ceilings and floors having disappeared centuries before. High up on the walls, monumental arches in red brick spanned the white stone, tracing the outlines of the palatial rooms the Roman soldiers once wandered through, moving from thermal pool to frigid bath to sauna.
In the hazy darkness of early evening, the abbey looked like a haunted castle and the ruins around it like its unearthed dungeons. I was suddenly glad for my armed escort. As if sensing my thoughts, Ambrose smiled and patted the hilt of the sword he wore under his coat. “See any numa in the area, Vin?” he asked and, apparently satisfied with Vincent’s answer, relaxed a little.
You look nervous, mon ange, Vincent told me.
“Nervous? Me?” I said. “Never.” Which was a total lie. I was about to go into a cave, deep down in the earth. I had never told Vincent about my claustrophobia. I hadn’t needed to.
Going down into the sewers hadn’t bothered me. We were in wide man-made spaces just below street level. But Bran’s cave was sure to be different—it threatened to reach right back to my childhood fear and paralyze me once I was in its depths.
My family had visited Ruby Falls in Tennessee when I was a kid. At one point the guide turned the lights out to show us how dark it was in a place sunlight never touched. I freaked out, and once we got outside, it took an hour for my mom to calm me. Since then, even the thought of spelunking made me break into a sweat. But I wasn’t about to admit that to Vincent. A little claustrophobia didn’t matter when much more important things were at stake. Like his very existence.
I wiped my forehead with my palm and tried to appear calm.
“The healer said the entrance was at the southwest corner of the monument,” Arthur said, pointing through the gate to one side of the ruins.
“How are we going to get in?” I asked, eyeing the twenty-foot-high cast-iron fencing running the perimeter.
“Never fear, Zombie Man is here,” quipped Ambrose, and wrapping his hands around two of the bars, he began pulling at them, as if he was stretching them apart. He let go after a second, turned to me, and winked. “Just kidding,” he said. “Bending iron bars is, sadly, not in my superhero résumé. I suggest we try that instead.” He nodded toward a small iron door closed with a padlock. Just behind it were steep steps leading down into the ruins.
“Probably the caretaker’s entrance,” I said as we approached it.
Arthur took out his key chain and fumbled through the keys until he found a tiny silver lock-picking tool. In a second the padlock was off. After waiting until no passersby were watching, we slipped through the door and down the stairs into the grassy area, hiding in the shadows until we were sure no one had seen our illegal entry.
It was chillier among the ruins, as if by descending into the ancient maze of open-air rooms we had actually traveled to another place and time. Like Siberia in mid-winter. I drew my coat more tightly around me and led the way through the dark maze, heading in the direction Arthur had indicated. A minute later, we were standing in a completely unremarkable corner at the juncture of two fifteen-foot-high walls. There was no door carved into the side. No suspicious cracks in the walls. No sign of a passageway of any sort.
“How about using that volant future-sight ability, bro, and telling us where to look,” Ambrose said. After a second, he nodded and said, “Vin says that in a few minutes Kate is gone and we’re here waiting for her, but he can’t see where she went or anything about how it happened. There must be some weird guérisseur juju goin’ on around here blocking revenant powers. Which means we must be in the right place.”
My spine tingled as I wondered just how powerful Bran and his people actually were. They seemed so . . . ordinary. Especially his mother, who had looked like any other little old lady knitting in front of her fireplace.
“Well, I guess we gotta do things the hard way,” Ambrose said. He dropped to his knees and began feeling around on the ground, knocking at places where the grass had worn away. “There doesn’t seem to be a trapdoor or hollow space,” he said. Arthur and I took opposing walls and began feeling our way along them with our fingertips.
“What was it exactly that the guérisseur told you?” Arthur asked as he worked.
“Same as what he told you,” I responded. “He just said that the entrance was in the southwest corner of the ruins and that I could enter by using my signum.” I pulled the pendant out from my shirt, and the little crystal memento mori clinked against it as I pulled them over my head and held them up.
What’s that you’re wearing with the signum? Vincent asked immediately.
“It’s a lock of your hair,” I responded. Arthur and Ambrose glanced at me quizzically but returned quickly to their work. For the hundredth time I thought how weird it must be for them to constantly have volant spirits around and only catch the part of conversations that were directed at them. “Jeanne gave it to me,” I continued self-consciously.
As I turned the signum in my fingers, the light of the streetlamp above flashed on the gold and reflected off something shiny embedded in the wall. I leaned forward to take a better look. Something metallic was set into the stone and completely covered in white dust, making it invisible from a few feet away. I brushed it off to uncover a golden signum bardia the size of my own.
“That’s our girl,” Ambrose crowed.
Be careful, I can’t see anything in the future from this moment forward, Vincent told me.
“I will,” I promised, and glanced to Arthur, who leaned forward, inspecting the signum. He stepped back and nodded his go-ahead.
“Let’s see what this baby does,” Ambrose said eagerly.
I held my pendant up and pressed it against the symbol on the wall, my cabochon sapphire depressing a button in the center as the encircled triangle slotted snugly into place. Arthur, Ambrose, and I stood, watching for any sign of movement. “Well, that felt very Indiana Jones-ish,” I said after a pause. “So what happens now?”
At that second, the ground rumbled slightly under our feet, feeling as if a Métro train were passing directly beneath us, and a section of the wall swung forward into the dark. Ambrose’s eyebrows shot up. “Awesome!” he exclaimed.
Not awesome. At all, I thought, peering into the pitch-black space behind the door. Noticing a flashlight hanging from a hook on the wall just beyond the opening, I tentatively reached through to detach it and quickly pulled it out. Flicking it on, I pointed it down the passageway.
A narrow tunnel carved into the stone appeared in the yellow beam of artificial light. It went straight ahead a long ways, then sloped downward at a steep rate until it turned to the right and disappeared. My chest tightened with anxiety, and I started sweating again. This didn’t look like a cave. It looked like a tomb.
I don’t want you to go in there alone, Vincent said.
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t mind if you came along,” I admitted, wiping a clammy hand on my jeans. Who knew that palms could sweat this much? I thought.
I just tried to enter, and I can’t. It’s like there’s an invisible wall blocking the door that burns when I touch it, Vincent said.
“Vincent says he can’t get in,” I said. Arthur placed his hand on my shoulder. “We should probably inspect this initial passageway before you enter. I’ll give it a go,” he said gallantly. As he stepped into the black tunnel, a bright light flashed before his head. He leapt back, yelping in pain and rubbed his face frantically. Something smelled like roasted marshmallows.
“Let me see!” I said, and pulled his hands from his face. “It singed your eyebrows and the front of your hair!” I exclaimed.
Ambrose’s face was red from sup
pressed laughter. He gave up. “Oh, man,” he sputtered, tears leaking from the sides of his eyes. “You should have seen your expression.”
Arthur’s cheeks grew as red as Ambrose’s, but he wasn’t laughing. “You try,” he challenged.
Ambrose patted his short-cropped hair protectively. “The ’do is sacred,” he said, and leaning cautiously back, he reached his arm through the doorway. An orange spark flew from the end of his index finger. “Ow!” he yelled, and stuck the burned finger in his mouth.
“See,” Arthur said, looking mollified.
You can’t go in there, Vincent said.
“I was able to reach in for the flashlight, so it looks like I actually can,” I said. “And I guess I’m going to, if you saw that I had disappeared with your future-sight or whatever.”
But, Kate, he said as I walked unscathed into the mouth of the cave. I was enveloped by a musty wet-chalk odor. It smelled like the tunnel had been recently excavated, although the walls and ceiling were blackened by centuries of torch soot.
I glanced back to Arthur and Ambrose, who watched me from as near the door as they dared. “Should we close the door to the cave?” I said, pointing to the signum that was still stuck in the wall.
“No!” they said together.
“We’re staying right here. No one can get in,” Ambrose reassured me.
Be careful, came Vincent’s words, sounding as if he was already yards away.
I shined the flashlight into the dark, swallowed hard, and before I could talk myself out of it, set off into the tunnel.
SIXTEEN
AS THE PATH DESCENDED, THE TUNNEL GOT smaller, and soon I was hunching over and bending my head to clear the ceiling. The increasingly tight space made me more and more anxious. The farther downward I walked, the heavier the pressure grew inside my chest, until it felt like my lungs were going to implode.
Finally, I couldn’t go any farther. My heart beat so hard that I felt it pounding in my ears. I leaned back against the tunnel wall and slid down into a crouch. Clutching the flashlight in a death grip, I attempted to talk myself out of a full-blown panic attack.
“Close your eyes and imagine being somewhere else,” my mom had said to me, deep inside the mountain at Ruby Falls. Okay, Mom, I thought. Where else can I be? And suddenly, I remembered the roof terrace on top of La Maison, where Vincent had taken me last month. Stretched out around us had been a panoramic view of Paris by night, the city sparkling like it had been decorated with a million strings of Christmas lights.
Vincent had kissed me there—in that most romantic of spots. We had rolled around on a sun bed kissing and laughing and—for a few blissful moments—forgetting that fate conspired against us. For a short while we loved each other without caring about anything else. It was on the rooftop that Vincent told me he loved me. That he couldn’t imagine a life without me.
I felt the cold winter air on my face, and Vincent’s finger brushing my lips, outlining my mouth before he leaned in and touched his lips to mine.
Then, in my fantasy, he disappeared and I was alone on the roof. The delicious warmth was gone—suddenly and violently—and the coldness of the winter night stung my face and hands. And suddenly I remembered our situation in the here and now: Vincent’s body was gone and his spirit was bound to a madwoman. And I was within mere yards of something that might help him.
My eyes snapped open and I stood back up, hunching over into an old-lady shuffle to make my way down the narrowing passageway. There were so many twists now that the flashlight illuminated only the few feet ahead of me. I was so deep that the rock walls were damp against my fingertips.
As I turned a curve, my foot landed against a pile of rubble, sending a stone flying forward. It disappeared around a corner and the echo that returned—of a dozen stones skipping across a vast hollow space—told me that I had finally arrived.
Ducking beneath a low shelf of rock, I suddenly found myself in a cavern the size of an Olympic swimming pool and maybe four times my height. I aimed my flashlight around the walls and located the massive wooden torches lodged in either side of the door. Pulling out the lighter Bran had told me to bring, I lit first one and then the other. I just lit a torch, I thought, immediately storing that nugget in a bizarre-things-I-have-done compartment of my brain that had been rapidly expanding over the last year.
As the flames flared to life, I coughed from the smoke and inhaled a deep gulp of stale cave air. The dark stone surface of the cavernous room danced in the flickering light of the torches, making it appear even more otherworldly.
The walls on either side of me looked like massive honeycombs. These were stacked on top of one another all the way up to the ceiling. I counted a few rows and estimated there were around six hundred in all.
The doors were painted with letters and flowers and organic swirly shapes that looked like tattoos. They all had one thing in common: In the center of each door appeared a hand with little yellow-and-orange-teardrop shapes at the tip of each finger, as if they were shooting out flames.
The doors closest to me on the left-hand wall looked ancient, all crumbling stone with only vestiges of their painted designs. Their condition grew better the farther down the room they were, until at the far end the doors were made of wood instead of stone and the paint looked less decrepit.
The wall facing me at the end of the hall had none of the half-moon-shaped doors, and was instead covered completely in wall paintings. Next to it, at the far end of the wall to my right, the painted doors began again, these looking almost new. There were only a few rows of brightly painted doors and then they stopped, leaving rows and rows of long empty holes stretching toward me.
I ran my fingers against the mouth of the one nearest me and, shining my flashlight inside, knew immediately what it was: a tomb. I had seen the same style of funerary niches in several Roman ruins I had visited around France. The Romans had carved holes horizontally into rock walls and laid their corpses to rest inside.
I shone my flashlight cautiously around the room before stepping farther in, scanning for booby traps. And then I remembered who had sent me: Bran would have warned me of anything I needed to watch out for.
I was in his family’s secret “archives” as he called it. More like mausoleum, I thought, although one could consider it an archive of bodies. Reassured that Bran would never put me in danger, I turned off my flashlight and stuck it in my bag.
In the gleam of the torches, I saw, at the far end of the room, a table holding stacks of books and shining metal objects. That was what I was here for—Bran had told me the books he needed were among them. As I walked farther into the room, I noticed that the final door on the right wall had been decorated with fresh flowers: roses and lilies and white lilac.
As I came closer, the odor of fresh paint mingled with the fragrance of the flowers. This door had recently been decorated. Something strummed painfully in my chest as I neared it. Even before I was close enough to read the letters carefully painted across the bottom of the door, I knew what they would spell.
Gwenhaël Steredenn Tândorn
Bran’s mother. He must have buried her here just a couple of days ago. I knelt down to look more closely at the ground-level tomb and admired the carefully painted hand-with-flames and decorative tattoolike swirls around it. Bran was no artist, but he had obviously spent a lot of time and care creating his mother’s memorial. I spotted a small card tied in with the flowers, and held it between my fingers. In tiny spiderlike script, I read, “This is for you, Mom. I will miss you every day.”
My heart tugged. I brushed away the tear that ran down my cheek. I knew exactly how Bran felt. For me it wasn’t as fresh a wound, but it was one that would always bleed. I missed my parents. And even though I had finally stopped thinking of them every minute of every day, when memories did come the pain returned full force.
“Good-bye, Gwenhaël,” I whispered, and, standing, walked toward the lone table. I spotted the books that Bran had mentioned
on the left edge of the tabletop: a stack of red leather-bound tomes. But before I reached them, I paused, my eyes drawn toward the paintings covering the entire surface of the end wall. They reminded me of a place I had visited in Florence with my mom—the Basilica of Santa Croce. Just like the walls of that church’s multiple small chapels, this wall had been divided into strips of separate scenes and placed row on row, like a comic book.
In the basilica the panels had been filled with pictures showing stories from the Bible or of Italian saints, each chapel decorated by a single artist. Here, the panels were all painted by different artists—in different styles, and seemingly from different periods. The peeled and fading paint of the upper levels suggested that they were the oldest, so I began there, reading the images as stories like my mother had taught me.
The first panel reminded me of the amphora I had seen in Papy’s gallery, showing two armies of naked men fighting one another, the soldiers wearing what looked like ancient Greek helmets. One side was led by a man with a golden red halo that flared out from his head like flames. The enemy army’s leader had a halo that looked like a cloudy haze of bright red blood. A couple of figures in the corner of the frame were hovering over dead and mutilated bodies and holding their hands over them, as if they were healing them. Their halos looked like little sparks of fire—five sparks above each head, like the flames above the hands painted on the tomb doors. This must be the symbol for the guérisseurs, I thought.
The next image reminded me of the medieval paintings of saints being martyred. Men dressed like priests, with big popelike hats, stood aside watching as soldiers killed a group of people with swords. Their victims were bound hand and foot to wooden stakes, and had the same gold and red haloes as in the previous image, while others had round yellow haloes—the typical ones you see in religious paintings. Under the gold guy was written “bardia,” the red had “numa,” and the round halo “bayata.”
