Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  No, they didn’t. He knew perfectly well what they made him think of. Stained glass and blood shadows, tormented saints and altar boys, being pursued down the aisle so long, endless, connected to…yes! The underworld. Underworld assassins not so far off, after all.

  “That’s us. What can we do for you guys,” Jim asked, stopping himself from calling them, what, Fathers? That double-edged sword.

  Godard trotted up in his stocking feet and peered into the hallway, his eyes round as those of a marmoset.

  “May we come in?” requested this older priest. “We promise not to take up too much of your time.”

  “Can’t you just leave a pamphlet for us to throw away like the Jehovah’s Witnesses do?” Jim asked sarcastically but stepped back.

  He almost added, We’ll either read it or use it to wipe our asses with. Either way it’ll serve its purpose.

  Jim turned around and noticed that Louis had thrown a blanket over the video camera and the piles of film cassettes and photographs. The epistle had been carefully boxed earlier and was in the bathroom. He wanted to leave the door open, not that he could have told why he felt this way—and strongly, too. The mere notion of being in a closed room with men wearing Catholic collars made him want to hide under his bed.

  But one of the Fathers closed the door, after they were all inside. It shut like the entrance to a vault. Apparently they were concerned about privacy.

  “I am Father Malvezzi,” the senior priest said with a bigger smile now. Then he indicated his companions. “This is Father Cubberly and that is Father Paolo.”

  “To what do we owe this honor?” asked Godard, smiling back, matching the man tooth for tooth.

  Malvezzi sucked his smile back in but still gave the outward appearance of cordiality. “It has come to our attention that you had been trespassing on Vatican property. By which we mean the catacombs where the unfortunate Turkish flight crashed on December 21st.”

  Jim grunted, noticing the younger two never smiled at all. They were rather big for priests, he thought. But why couldn’t clergy work out? Maybe the Vatican had a state-of-the-art gym, to make the priesthood stronger for grappling with Satan…and little boys. “You mean the Catacombs of St. Aureola.”

  He didn’t say it as a question. He meant it as a correction.

  Malvezzi frowned now. “There is no saint by that name.”

  True, only the Church could decree someone a saint. Probably only Aureola’s followers had believed her to be that.

  Louis shrugged. “We found these catacombs to be—-to all appearances—abandoned, apparently forgotten. I researched and found nothing to indicate the Vatican had any claim here or even any knowledge of it. We do, naturally, apologize, if this is in error.”

  Jim interjected, “We were going out tomorrow morning to see about proper permits to do our scientific thing.”

  Malvezzi blinked. “There will be no scientific…‘thing’. Aureola and her followers were outlaws of the cruelest order, dangerous blasphemers. They committed heinous acts and even killed people…”

  “And then were killed themselves, right?” Jim concluded out loud, thinking of the chamber strewn with bones, skulls with obvious breaches by sharp weapons. This wasn’t simply where niches had been opened and the contents dragged out.

  Godard cleared his throat, making Jim wonder if perhaps he shouldn’t have said this. Considering the mural, text and epistle, it was easy to leap to the notion that these Christians (however wayward and, oh what the hell, freaky) had been murdered by other Christians, a deed perhaps sanctioned by Mother Church itself, such as it was in those early years.

  “Anything that you have seen…we would consider it a great favor if you would not report it,” Malvezzi told them.

  “We’re scientists. We don’t sit on history to please anybody,” Jim retorted, feeling more uncomfortable the longer these priests remained in the room. The closed room, he reminded himself. He was beginning to feel as claustrophobic as he had in the catacombs. “Come on, guys, it isn’t like it’s the first time in history the Catholic Church has shed blood for dubious interests.”

  They gave him such a look, one that silently called him a dirty little butterball sinner. One meant to show their power here. God’s team. Malvezzi probably figured him for a lapsed Catholic the moment Jim opened the door and reacted.

  “The interests in this case are not dubious,” Malvezzi replied.

  Godard sighed. “Dr. Singer is right. We publish our findings, whatever they are. You shouldn’t take it so personally, Father. It happened a long time ago but it is still history. The world has a right to know the past, it being the only way to enter the future with any hope. Wisdom can be a warning to the wise, and vice versa.”

  Jim had to admit to himself that Louis put it better than he did, not getting defensive and not snapping. And not acting as if he suspected they had the tools of the Inquisition under their somber coats. (Are those thumbscrews in your pocket, Father, or are you just glad to see me?) In the over twenty-five years he’d been working on projects with Dr. Godard, he’d never had occasion not to admire the Frenchman. He even understood that he would never measure up to this man.

  Malvezzi argued blandly, “The world is full of children, young and old. Not equipped to deal with some topics. We must protect them as we always have. We will protect them.”

  Jim laughed now, mostly to cover the incidence of his profuse sweating. Was the room too hot or what? “Is that a threat?”

  And he was perspiring—sluicing saltwater might be a more appropriate term—because he kept seeing this priest in front of him but feeling him behind him, smelling of roses and Ivory soap, hands cold as bells…

  Malvezzi shrugged. “It is not your fault that the entrance was opened after so many years under sacred seal. The tragedy of the Turkish plane crashing was the cause. The catacombs will be sealed again tomorrow morning. The plane’s foremost section…”

  He glanced at the other two priests.

  One said, “The nose.”

  The other said, “The cockpit.”

  Malvezzi nodded. “Yes, this has been removed by crane today and so the canyon it cut in the ground can be filled back in. After we seal and bless the entrance. But there is more than one way for evil to escape and that is through the dissemination of information. This is why we are here. To request your silence.”

  There was another knock at the door. Malvezzi opened it this time. There stood the waiter with the docs’ tray.

  “Good evening, gentlemen. I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay in Rome. As archaeologists, you might want to consider visiting the Vatican. We have some of the finest museum facilities and collections in the world. Of course, I’m afraid many things are kept separate. Not for public or profane view.”

  The Fathers left.

  Jim signed the waiter’s slip and tipped him. Then closed the door.

  Louis had started changing clothes.

  “Hurry,” he told Jim.

  “Why? Where are we going?”

  The older doctor pulled a long, comically incredulous face. “To the catacombs. He said they would close them tomorrow.”

  Jim grinned. “And we have tonight.”

  ««—»»

  Malvezzi had said the entrance would be sealed. And then he’d mentioned the crash site. Obviously the Church didn’t know about the other entrance. The docs boxed up everything they had so far. Louis called his cousin Gerard to come pick it up, leaving a key for him at the hotel desk.

  They drove out to the second field, a good four miles from the crash site. They descended the steps with flashlights, looking carefully about, seeing no one and no sign that this entrance had been disturbed since when they’d left it, earlier that day. The fact that there was no guard here helped to assure them this doorway was unknown to the Vatican.

  Their plan was to take one or two things more, choosing carefully. Items which might bolster the findings they would later publish. So what if the Church wa
s embarrassed? They already had some pretty convincing evidence. Perhaps the Italian government would overrule the Vatican once they saw the video tapes on PBS. (Jim didn’t know if Rome got PBS. Yet he was sure they’d hear about it, after the Americans ran the piece. He wouldn’t even permit himself to consider that PBS would turn it down.) Yes, Italian archaeologists would champ at the bit, he was sure. That is, he couldn’t picture scientists without the same drives he and Louis possessed.

  (Even if there had been plenty of scientists who’d looked at their past finds and merely thought the docs possessed. But times had changed a lot, hadn’t they? Well, there had always been a few treatises by anthropologists writing about so-called primitives and their personal and peculiar views on substances the so-called civilized world considered unclean…as long as their premises weren’t too prurient. It was in the same manner in which nudity on the cover of The National Geographic was acceptable. As long as the subjects could be viewed as uncivilized. Then they could be put on par with animals. And animals ran around with their naughty parts showing, right?)

  “I feel like a thief,” Godard confessed. “No better than a tomb robber.”

  “Yeah, so do I. But we haven’t been given much of a choice,” Singer admitted. “Once they seal this up again, they’ll make sure it’s for good. At least for another sixteen hundred years.”

  “But perhaps they’ll only seal that other entrance…”

  “I think if they’re that worried, they’re going to go through with a fine tooth comb. They’ll find this soon enough. As well as whatever other entrances there might be that we haven’t seen.”

  Louis stopped briefly to touch one of the chalk arrows. It wasn’t any of those he’d drawn on that first day they’d investigated.

  “Are we so certain they didn’t put these here?” he wondered out loud as he rubbed chalk dust between his fingers.

  Jim sighed heavily. “No, we’re not.”

  Louis patted his friend on the back. “Three’s the charm, mon ami. Now people won’t turn away. We shall have the recognition we deserve.”

  Through that horribly cramped passage, tall enough Godard could stand up but Singer had to bend forward a little. It was probably the reason he saw the coin, because he was hunched over and looking at the light to see where to put his feet down.

  “Hey!” he said as he picked it up, not quite in a shout but with enthusiasm. “By God, it’s a gold solidus!”

  He passed it to Louis who paused to hold it under his flashlight for examination. “That is the portrait of Emperor Honorius on it. It means late fourth or early fifth century. That, then, for certain. It’s what we suspected but without yet carbon dating the epistle or the ceramics…”

  Jim nodded. “Might have been dropped by one of the cult members. Or maybe by a soldier who was part of the kill-squad.”

  Of course, ancient coins were not particularly rare. One could buy them from mail order businesses that supplied various minor antiquities.

  Jim slipped it into a sandwich bag, along with some of the dust for comparison with the few other items they’d already retrieved. This went into his coat pocket.

  Louis started to walk again but then stopped, gasping, cocking his head.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “A voice. A woman’s, I’m sure of it.”

  Jim did hear something. Someone. Decidedly feminine.

  Godard made two fists and set his mouth in a thin line as he listened intently. “Aidez-moi. Je me suis perdue. Dépechêz-vous. S’il vous plait…”

  “I’m lost. I’m hurt. Please…”

  The two men glanced at one another.

  “This is what my cousin Gerard told me he heard. He and Linda. I take it you hear this in English as I hear it in French,” said Louis.

  “Yep,” Jim affirmed, nodding his head and then thwacking it on the tunnel’s low ceiling. If they went only another 100 feet or so, the roof would go up as the corner turned in to the chamber where the slaughter had been carried out.

  Then Jim saw a glimmer out of the corner of his eye. He swung his light. It came from one of the chalk arrows. They had passed it a moment ago and it was as before. But now it glowed. It had changed color to a neon yet dirty yellow. It flashed, on and off, slowly, then faster, strobing.

  Suddenly it winked out.

  Aidez-moi…

  Help me…

  They turned the other way, toward the sound. Before it had not seemed to have a proper direction. But down where they were, so far under the surface, in the chill air, a voice could easily seem disembodied. Why, even when they spoke to one another…

  They swung their flashlights that way and the beams jointly illuminated a bare stripe of mist, silvery with frost. It looked like a naked girl—no, a woman so thin she resembled a starving child. Her eyes were large and icily luminous, face and frail body framed by yellow hair. She looked right at the docs and each heard, “Help me,” in their own language. She curled the other direction as if crying to somebody behind her, “I’m lost.” Her back showed a savage gash from her left shoulder down to her right hip, a bloody arc through which ribs and spine showed with splinters and spleen. Anyone might have thought at first she had a dark red ribbon tied about her waist with the bow behind her, but it was only her kidneys falling out through the wound.

  I’m hurt…

  Then she faced the archaeologists again and repeated the entire thing.

  It tore at their hearts. She seemed so helpless, such a waif. They knew she was only a ghost, a spiritual repetition, a fragment of a song replayed over and over in a record with a scratch in it. (Might she even be Aureola herself? Wouldn’t that be something! Well, no matter who it was, it was amazing.)

  It was interesting that Gerard and Linda heard her right away but that it was the docs’ fifth—and final—visit for them before this little revenant addressed them.

  Jim thought about a popular sci-fi movie he’d seen in the ’70s. Star Wars? A hologram or some such thing coming out of a robot, in which a space princess repeated over and over again her recorded plea for help. The other day, entering the catacombs and finding a dog’s skeleton had made him think of the jackal bones in The Omen. Actually he didn’t see that many films.

  Suddenly she blurred, moving in and out of focus in their flashlight beams. Then her smoke turned all of a hard blue as she growled at them, her face becoming lupine, eyes shining a dirty yellow like her hair.

  Her growl turned into a hackle-raising howl, magnified until a crack appeared at the roof of the tunnel. It startled both men, being such an animal thing, beyond language.

  The sound of the first explosion immediately followed. (Could a mindless glitch in time’s dimensions do that?)

  “Jesus!” Jim yelled, clutching Louis’ shoulder. “Back! Back to the entrance!”

  The explosions might have originated from the crater-site doorway but shook the ground the entire four mile length, harder with every one which thundered after the first. From the sound, the first might have detonated in the initial chamber where they’d found the intact niches, then another where the dog bones in bowls had been discovered, then in Aureola’s chamber. Of course, it might have begun in the saint’s vault. The clouds of black dust rolled toward them like a mob of black ghosts, replete with shadowy faces, the thunder in such voices actually a howling for blood.

  They fled, dust everywhere, not able to properly see as Louis’ flashlight went out and Jim’s barely showed them where to put their feet. They could have sworn they heard the whole place shake like a giant box full of bones.

  Then the explosions stopped as abruptly as they had begun. The men probably hadn’t run for more than a couple of minutes yet it had seemed much longer. Godard was shaking, out of breath, the mask across his nose and mouth flattening against his face as he gasped for air. Jim put his arm around the old man, the ground still trembling below, around, and above them.

  “Damn those sons of bitches!” Jim
cursed. “They said they were sealing the entrance, not blowing it to Kingdom Come.”

  The steps going up were not far away. But they were dark, descending too deep from the surface for even a full moon to help brighten them. And was there a full moon tonight? Jim didn’t know.

  “It’s okay. I’ve got you. I’ll get you out,” Jim promised, afraid for his elderly colleague. Godard was now showing every one of his seventy years (and then some.)

  “I just can’t believe they would blow it all up,” Louis said. “Such a find. What a waste.”

  When the ground and walls began to shake again, it wasn’t from another round of explosions. What remained of the ancient tunnel started to collapse. It came down in a wave, as if the cave-in were deliberately chasing them. Jim hoisted the old man over his shoulder and began to sprint. In doing this he dropped the flashlight but never heard it if it broke. Racing through pitch blackness and blinded by dust, he went on instinct. The roar of the disintegrating catacombs deafened him. Disoriented him, too. He’d seen the steps—that way? Stumbled, felt crumbling stucco and tufa knocking against his head and arms, feared what it might be doing to Louis. Felt the first step under his right foot and fought to go up. Jesus Hoppalong Christ hurry up…

  Then he heard a cavernous, groaning HHHHHAAAAA-AAA! A few million tons of earth, dissolving stonework, and whatever force had gathered enough momentum, caught him and blasted him up the rest of the steps as if he and Louis were flies caught in a great exhale.

  He lost consciousness. When he opened his eyes again, he told himself, yes, there is a full moon tonight.

  The force of the cave-in had thrown both men all the way up the steps and into the field. It had also blown out a great deal of stonework. Jim was pinned under something; he couldn’t move his legs. He saw Louis next to him.