“I saw them and said hello. Welcomed them to the batjet. They want to get together again in Istanbul.”
“Maybe you should be the captain here,” the pilot said as he noted they were now at 12,700 feet, ten minutes out of Rome.
Suddenly the plane lurched so hard the captain’s hands were knocked off the controls.
No one knew the cargo door hadn’t been properly locked. It looked secure when final checks had been made prior to take-off. The door to the lower hold blew open, luggage full of tourist trinkets and Christmas gifts were swiftly sucked out. Abrupt decompression forced a floor above the hold to heave, shoving upward through ranks of passengers. Four people, still buckled in, were pulled through this gaping breach, their shrieks siphoned off into the freezing Tremontana. At the same moment, every cable for the tail section, the engine, and the navigational controls snapped. Even as the captain tried to right the plane, it nosedived like a dove with a shattered spine. It cracked open in the air, dropping passengers like confetti into the wind.
A young couple—a Frenchman and his Italian fiancée—had driven out of the city just before dawn to go to Tivoli. They saw a fireball and thought the sun had risen twice. An enormous black plume of smoke came next, accompanied by a noise like an approaching thunderstorm dogging the steps of an earthquake.
“Gerard! Oh my god,” the woman began, then crossed herself with a soft prayer.
“It’s only a couple of miles away, Linda. Hang on,” he told her as he floored the accelerator and began racing to the disaster.
They arrived at a field, wreckage everywhere, gruesome chunks of meat unrecognizable as having been people fused with burned metal. Some trees were on fire, many had become just broken matchsticks. Others were full of body parts and blood fell to the ground like rain. Clothing flapped in forked branches like panicked bats. Linda screamed, seeing two halves of a woman hanging in two different cypress trees. She choked on a ghastly stench of incinerating resins and jet fuel. She was reminded of something she’d read in school, that the cypress was a graveyard tree, considered a symbol of death. The cross upon which Jesus had been crucified was said to have been cypress.
An object plopped from one of these and rolled lopsidedly to her feet. It was so mangled she couldn’t tell what it was until part of it sprung and she saw teeth. Somebody’s crushed head.
The DC-10’s severed nose had plowed through the grass and evergreens for almost 200 feet, carving a deep furrow about twenty feet down into the ground. Almost as if there really had been an earthquake and this was where the land had opened up along a faultline. The grass at the edges of this trench smouldered, just beginning to burn. Gerard jogged over and looked down. Earth and rock had been scraped and shattered, an evisceration. But not far from where the nose had come to a halt, he spied a tunnel. The tendrils of roots and grasses hung down across the entrance, creating almost a bead curtain of natural threads of varying thickness and clumps of earth. Squinting, focusing until his vision virtually telescoped (giving him one hell of a headache) he caught sight of a bit of smooth stone. A step, and then another.
It was a tunnel graveyard. He was positive! It was an old catacomb.
He heard a cry for help down there. Was this even possible? Could anybody have lived through such a crash? No, he knew they must have all died—if not as the plane broke apart in the air then surely due to the fall. The cockpit had virtually disintegrated. No one had survived that.
Yet he was certain he heard someone calling. Linda came alongside him, trembling, tears on her face.
“Do you hear something?” he asked her.
“Yes, a voice—female. Calling for us to help her,” she replied. “We should go get someone…”
“No time,” he explained, glancing about for a way to climb down.
Linda shouted, “Súbito, signora! Présto, fra póco!”
Gerard swung back to his fiancée and said gently, “I’m not sure she’ll understand you, Chéri. She’s French.”
“No, her cries are in Italian,” Linda politely insisted.
Both of them were college students majoring in business. Gerard spoke no Italian and Linda no French, but both were fluent in English. This was how they always communicated with one another.
He cocked an ear and listened intently, then shook his head. “That’s definitely French…”
Linda put a hand on his arm. “Wait. Tell me exactly what you hear.”
He obliged. “She repeats, ‘Aidez-moi. Je me suis perdue. Depéchêz-vous. S’il vous plait…en bas.’”
He started to turn away again to climb down. She tightened her grip, saying, “I clearly hear her calling ‘Aiuto! Mi sono smarrita. Fácia présto. Per pavore…a in giú.’”
Gerard blinked, then gazed back down into the pit where he could see the damage and then the entrance to the catacomb. “It is odd that I hear her saying she’s lost. Not that she’s hurt—but lost.”
Linda agreed. “That’s what I hear, too.”
The hackles rose on both of them. The fine soft hairs on Linda’s arm stood up and traveled in rippling, tingling static to raise the hair on Gerard’s arm where she held him fast.
“There is no way I’m letting you go down there,” she said, voice shaking but adamant.
They both realized at the same moment that, despite the burning debris in the trench and fire spreading in the grass to either side, what air rose from it was cold. Colder than the Tremontana.
“We’d better get out of here,” Gerard told her. “We don’t want to get trapped by the fire, and it will soon be out of control in this wind. Let’s find a telephone and get real help.”
Knowing as he spoke the words that all of these wretched souls were beyond rescue.
They sped back up the road toward Rome, stopping at the first petrol station they saw. Linda rang the authorities. Then Gerard Godard called all the way to the United States to talk to his cousin, Louis Godard.
Humanity and six degrees of separation.
««—»»
Jim Singer slept on the plane. Nightmares. Stained glass windows which, to him as a boy, had seemed as unnatural jewels while he tried to pretend he was anywhere but with the man in black, behind him but with big hands coming around to the front of him—and down. Never able to talk about it for fear it would turn out he was ratting on God. The term “Father” was a double-edged sword, Father to whom you confessed your most wretched crimes and Father On High who could throw a lever and drop you into Hell. Make you drink His holy water, a special communion of blood and flesh no one else must ever know about, pain/fear/shame.
Raised a Catholic in Philadelphia, he had no faith now and no religion. He thought he’d outgrown this, it had happened so long ago, in the ’50s when such things were never even breathed. When a kid didn’t dare tell his parents for being such a dirty little butterball sinner. Because he wouldn’t be believed and he’d end up excommunicated and the devil would possess his defiled ass without the sanctuary of the blessed Jesus. Jim had thought the terror was over, yet perhaps no damaged child ever really let it go. Some betrayals went too deep.
He moaned in his sleep, in his dream having run down the aisle past gleaming mahogany pews, racing for the altar where he expected to be safe but with the stained glass windows of tormented saints casting blood shadows on him. In his dream there were more pews than the church really had, and the aisle was long, going on for miles perhaps. As dark as it was and with a regular ceiling instead of a vaulted one, it seemed like a tunnel. And all down the aisle, on both sides in the pews were children, endless numbers of them, their faces a blur of tears and pain. He ran and glanced left and right. Man, where did they all come from? They were different races and wore clothes from a lot of time periods.
“Don’t leave us!” they cried out to little Jim.
“Fix us!” they begged him.
But eventually he made it to the altar. The stained glass shadows cast on him had changed from blood red. Now they were simply dark an
d disgusting. The man in black who pursued him smelled of roses and Ivory soap, hands cold as the bells over the roof.
Hands on his shoulder…
“Wake up, Jim,” Louis said gently.
And he opened his eyes, found he was sweating even more than he usually did. Jim forced a chuckle.
“I hate these long trans-Atlantic flights,” he said, yawning with exaggeration.
“Bad dream?” the other doc asked him.
Jim chewed his lip. “Why? Did I say anything…”
“No, nothing,” Godard replied with a smile. “Simply whined like a puppy. And the flight is almost over. Rome is below.”
Louis rolled up the map of known catacombs he’d been pouring over. The disaster site wasn’t on it. The catacombs the plane crash had revealed had been undiscovered for over a millennium.
“This is my chance to do something important,” Louis said.
“You’ve done lots of important things,” Jim countered. “The powers that be simply chose to ignore them.”
The older man sighed. “This time it will be different, yes?”
Jim grinned. “I feel it’s going to be very different.”
But he was uncomfortable from the moment he got off the plane. It was Christmas Eve. This might have accounted for why he saw so many priests at the airport. The black suits made him twitch.
««—»»
“Hello. I am Dr. Godard and this is Dr. Singer. We are here to help you if we may.”
Their passports were examined. Yes, papers identified them as doctors—but didn’t say of archaeology. They were added to the large team sent to the crash site. Volunteers had come from all over Italy and other countries to assist with the tremendous job of cleaning up this tragedy. There were guards to keep spectators and scavengers beyond the perimeter. The catacombs were not even a consideration at this point.
“I know it is terrible to misrepresent ourselves,” Godard admitted in a hushed voice. “But they aren’t letting anybody in who isn’t with the crash team. I am afraid if we don’t get in now, we never will. The more time goes by, the more chance grave robbers will destroy whatever real history there may be.”
Singer didn’t argue, just as excited about the prospect. But neither of them had truly been prepared for what they saw once they reached the field where the DC-10 had gone down. Only a few days had passed. There had been time for emergency personnel to verify there were no survivors but not for the bodies—and the many pieces of the bodies—to be picked up.
The stench was horrible. Jet fuel. Blood. Carnage. Even though both wore masks, Godard felt so dizzy he stumbled and Singer caught him.
“I just became a vegetarian,” the old man said, trying to breathe through his mouth.
“Will you be all right?” He was worried about Godard, who at age seventy was no longer a man in his prime.
“Just you keep a hold of that bag,” Louis rasped.
They’d had to show the contents of it, of course. But they weren’t the only men there with both regular and video cameras. Used to record items for identification by the families, whether it be a half a finger with a signet ring or a glass eye the color of a sapphire or a jawbone with a tooth imprinted with a gold crescent moon and silver star. And others had flashlights, too, for looking inside wreckage and down in the holes in the ground the wreckage had created. It was going to take a long time, for the area had to be gridded and then every single piece—whether McDonnel Douglas or human—had to be recorded as to exactly where it was discovered within the grid.
It seemed like a dreadful lie, employing a ruse after such a tragedy to be the first into this catacomb. Dishonorable. But they had both suffered so many career disappointments. Hell, Jim knew this would likely be Louis’ last hurrah.
Going into the trench which the plane’s nose had carved didn’t elicit any unwanted attention. They slipped away, descended carefully into the crevice, away from the severed nose of the plane. A miracle it hadn’t caused a cave-in. They set their feet into the ancient tunnel, and didn’t even consider turning back.
««—»»
First thing as they stepped into the darkness, the two docs stepped on bones. Turning on their flashlights and aiming away from the entrance, so that hopefully they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves, they saw narrow, steep steps going further down toward a bottom they couldn’t see.
“Should there be remains at this point?” Jim wondered outloud.
“Hmm. Not human. They look canine,” Louis said.
Jim chuckled.
“What is funny?” his friend and mentor wanted to know.
“You ever see The Omen?”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind.”
They went down the steps, slowly, creeping toward a pitch blackness that virtually swallowed their lights after only ten to twenty feet. It was much colder once they reached the stairway’s end and crossed a threshold. It was a good thirty to forty degrees below what it was just outside in the trench. They were glad it was December and they’d both worn coats. Grappling with the flashlights, they began to walk down the silent passageway, stopping now and then to snap a picture of some simple carving in the tufa, the softly porous stone which had commonly been used in catacombs, it being easy to work with.
“The niches are closed. The tiles limed over their entrances are intact,” Louis commented. “This columbarium has never been disturbed.”
“It’s very plain,” Jim noted. “I’ve seen photos of others with colorful tesserae and stucco artwork.”
“Those are tombs for patricians.” Louis turned his light, revealing a crude yet lovely painting. “Still, look here. A fresco of The Good Shepherd and his flock. This marks it as definitely Christian.”
“And this etching here, of a wheel and a fish,” Jim indicated.
“That is not a wheel…”
“Just kidding. I know it’s round bread. Loaves and fishes.”
They stood inside a large quadrangular chamber. It was centrally supported by a large pier. There was row after row, nine in all, of arched “loculi” rising up to the ceiling, plaques carved with the names of those interred. There was a bench that went around the base of the chamber wall. Into it were two rows of jars set into the stones.
Every ten feet or so, Godard used a piece of chalk to draw a small arrow, pointing back the way they had come. It was just too easy to get lost down there. Catacombs were often miles long, with various levels and turning with separate chambers like a minor maze. They came to another set of steps and went down, teeth chattering with the cold, breaths hazy.
The passageways were so cramped, often no more than a meter wide, and Jim felt claustrophobic. (Was this that vast underground network he’d dreamed about so often? Not hell, near hell?) He told himself to calm down. After all, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been in snug regions before, inside tombs or in ancient caverns too small to turn around in, much less do the hokey pokey. But this place felt so oppressive!
Naturally, it had been closed with thousands of dead for anywhere from fifteen to maybe twenty centuries. Archaeological sites—especially subterranean ones—were usually stuffy at first. Many a student—and professor—had suffered a cavernous unease. It wasn’t unusual for a place to be sticky and damp and possessed of the sense of “crawl.”
And if this place held the remains of martyrs who had suffered the most heinous torments, then it might be no less psychically disturbing than touring through Auschwitz.
Jim had boned up on the subject after Louis received the tip from his young cousin, Gerard. There were dozens of catacombs known throughout Rome, although many more were thought to lie hidden from the modern world. At least sixty miles of them had been excavated, the earliest dating back to the Emperor Augustus.
There were the catacombs of St. Agnes. The story had it that Agnes had been a great beauty. At about age 13 she refused all offers of marriage, claiming she’d have no husband save Christ. Spurned suitors publicly denounced h
er as criminally Christian and she was dragged off to a brothel. Many young Roman men showed up to take advantage of this but were so awed by her spiritual presence that they couldn’t bring themselves to abuse her. Only one rotten kid attempted to rape her and he was immediately struck blind. She was eventually put to death in Domitian’s Stadium.
There was the St. Celilia. She was another who had vowed her virginity to God. She was ordered to be burned but the flames didn’t touch her. So they settled for beheading her.
St. Sebastion had catacombs named after him as well. Supposedly he was showered with arrows that failed to kill. His persecutors did succeed in beating him to death.
They turned a sharp corner, ninety degrees, and both stopped, catching their breaths. What an awful feeling! Both of them experienced it.
“Whoa!” Jim exclaimed in something akin to a startled blues shout. He grabbed at his gut which rumbled and sloshed. He almost bent double with a seismic cramp. He was genuinely afraid he’d have to excuse himself to find a dark corner to squat down in. Then it passed as quickly as it had come.
“…le ciel m’en preserve!” Louis said, his old body farting loudly. “Oh, excusez-moi. I don’t know where that came from.”
Jim chuckled nervously. “I think I do. Getting ready to change, isn’t it? And you feel it, too…”
“Indeed. And that is unusual for me. Ah well, I am an old man. Perhaps the closer one gets to one’s own end, the easier it is to feel the mortality of others.”
Around that corner was another square room. But here the jars in the bench had all been broken into, whatever had been inside dumped onto the floor. They were now filled with dust. And everywhere were large bowls and buckets. There were also entire skeletons, some in fetal positions. Others were stretched out and twisted as if in positions of writhing when the people had died.
“Look at this,” Jim pointed out in more than one of the bowls. “The same kind of bones we saw at the entrance. Dog, you said.”
“This is not right,” Godard replied, scratching his head. “These are serving dishes. Were they eating dogs, down here?”
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