by Richard Farr
“They’re saying a lot of people were killed.”
“Only one or two—unfortunate passersby. About half the people inside the building seem to have survived. If one can call that surviving.”
“Are you saying—?”
“Mysteries, Daniel, yes—right here in Rome! Which might seem a bit of a puzzler, because almost all the other ones were associated with mountains. But I do have a theory about that. Anyway, I got the whole story from a neighbor, and what you won’t hear on the news is that someone bought the building months ago, quietly ripped the guts out of it, and built an elaborate four-story concrete structure inside.”
“Shaped like a ziggurat.”
“Clever boy, made that connection, have you? You could still see it quite clearly, even in the rubble. A neighbor said a group of people had been standing outside for days, going on and on about our dear friend Mr. Quinn, to anyone who would listen. Locked the doors, weren’t seen for a couple of days, bit of chanting, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Bob’s what?”
“Just an expression.”
“Did they—” I’m thinking of the Colberts’ footage of Mom’s last seconds in Patagonia. “Did anyone see anything?”
“Oh certainly. There are half a dozen witnesses jabbering hysterically about shining lights, demons, voices—all sorts of quasi-religious language that will be written off as Post-Traumatic Whatever. But the whole thing was quite obvious. You see, the building itself was totally destroyed, blown up from the inside out. And that caused damage to the buildings around it, as you’d expect. But the thing inside, the ziggurat, not a scratch. The authorities are dismantling it now. They say it’s unsafe. The truth is, they don’t want people to see it.”
“What’s happening, Professor?”
“Our friend Mr. Quinn is nurturing a power he does not understand. They’re getting stronger, you see.”
“Who are?”
“The Architects! My guess is that they’ve been picking people off in ones and twos since the beginning. But they obviously prefer to drive us in the direction of cities, organization, ritual, religion: that gives them whole groups in the right frame of mind at the same time, and they seem to thrive on that. Obviously Strongyle was the jackpot, and probably the whole Bronze Age Collapse was a sort of mopping-up operation. But then they went away, more or less. I wonder why that was, don’t you? Scared off by something? And why have they come back now?”
He lets out a high giggle, like a twelve-year-old girl. I get the impression it’s the noise he makes when he’s excited, and also the noise he makes in states of extreme anxiety.
I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.
“Are you there, Daniel?”
“I’m here.”
“Do my ideas sound crazy enough for you so far?”
“Definitely crazy enough. Have you heard from my father yet?”
“Not a word.” Suddenly his voice drops, becomes more serious. “Listen to me, Daniel. They are onto us. I’m worried about your father, and I’m worried about the information I have falling into the wrong hands. Come to my office as fast as you can. You have the address? Good. I want to show you what I’ve found.”
As fast as you can is always a relative term in Rome—even more so during a terrorist attack that’s really something else. There’s a collective groan in the terminal when they announce that the train connection has been shut down for the remainder of the day. A tsunami of people heads for the taxi ranks. When we join the wave, it only results in us waiting in line for over two hours. By that time, traffic is so epically snarled that it takes another half hour of honking and swearing just to get out of the airport.
Then our taxi’s AC stops working.
Then things really slow down, and we sit motionless for fifteen minutes on the autostrada entrance ramp.
The engine’s running and all the windows are open. At last the fumes get to be too much even for our driver, who bangs the dash, blurts out a stream of angry-sounding Italian, and switches the engine off.
“He thinks we should bomb Iran,” Morag says, translating. “Never another traffic jam, if you did that.”
“We could walk into the city faster than this,” Rosko says, stating the obvious. Then, when he opens the door and gets out of the taxi, I realize he’s serious.
“Rosko, it’s about ten miles or something.”
“Hey, we have almost zero bags, how long could it take? Three hours, tops?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Rosko,” Morag says. And to me, “You should call Partridge again. Tell him we’re going to be late in any case. At least find out how long he’ll be there.”
Nothing’s moving, so Morag and I get out as well. To the amazement of our driver, and a large Italian family crammed into a small Fiat in the lane next to us, Morag stands on one leg in a yoga pose, I put my foot on the hood of the car to stretch out my quads, and Rosko gets down on the roadway and hammers out a couple of dozen push-ups.
“Go on,” Morag says from behind closed eyes. “Call him.” I’m just about to when the traffic ahead of us lurches forward, our driver leans out the window and yells a sarcastic “Ehi, ginnasti! Saltate in macchina!” and my phone rings.
Partridge. And he’s neither drunk nor cheerful now: he’s hyperventilating.
“Daniel? Daniel?”
“Yes, Professor. We’re still in a t—”
“You need to come now.”
“We can’t. The traffic is barely—”
“All right. Just be quiet and listen carefully. I don’t have much time. I was followed again on my way back to the office. When I got here, I found that the place has been, well, ransacked. I know they didn’t find what they wanted, because I’ve got it on me, but I—I think they—oh dear. I don’t like the look of this.”
I’m wondering how to calm him down and which of fifty questions to ask, when I hear a thudding noise, like a dropped box or a car door being slammed. In my still-dazed state, I think someone’s banged on the back of the taxi. I’ve spun all the way around before I realize the noise is coming out of the phone.
“Professor? Are you there?”
There’s a pause, a wheezing noise. I wonder if he’s having a heart attack. Then a sound like someone rummaging around in a pile of papers, and loud banging. When his voice comes back, it’s a hiss.
“Daniel, are you listening? They’re here. In my building. Now.”
“Who?”
“They’re going to be looking for The Key to All Mythologies—have you got that? It’s a book. I’m going to have to hide it, and hope that I can put them off the scent. They—”
A pause. Another, even louder bang. Then a whisper, “Got to go. Be brave and don’t give up. Get the book. Behind the desk. Everything depends on you now.”
“Professor. Professor Partridge—”
Nothing.
“Well,” Rosko says after I’ve repeated everything to them. “I don’t know what he was talking about. But The Key to All Mythologies I do know. Morag?”
She looks blank and slightly annoyed—she can tell he’s testing her.
“Sad that it’s the German who knows his English Lit.”
She rolls her eyes. “Spit it out, Eisler.”
“The Key to All Mythologies is a famous book. Written by a Victorian expert on mythology, the Reverend Edward Casaubon. He was obsessed with the idea that all the world’s mythologies are linked.”
“Sounds like an early version of Dad.”
“Wait,” Morag says. “I’ve heard the name. Casaubon. D, remember the note from Partridge, the one Bill showed us just before he left?”
“Yeah, he mentioned Casaubon in that. Dad said it was something he gave to Partridge.”
“I guess we’re supposed to find Partridge’s copy of the book.”
Rosko’s shaking his head. “He can’t have a copy.”
“How do you know that?” Morag asks.
“Because The Key to All Mythologies is a boo
k that doesn’t exist.”
“But you just said—”
“Edward Casaubon isn’t real. He’s a character in a novel—and even in the novel he never finished the book.”
“Oh, fock.”
It takes another hour to crawl into Rome. Because I’m alternating between calling Partridge (nothing), calling Dad (nothing), and replaying the conversation with Partridge in my head, the slowness of the traffic is even more agonizing now.
At last the taxi loops around the Colosseum, passes the end of the Via Cavour, and drops us nearby, just a few hundred yards from Partridge’s office. We walk past his building twice; nothing seems to be wrong, but again he’s not answering the phone. So we install ourselves in a window seat at a café across the street, where an elderly waiter with a stained white shirt and a crooked smile is instantly hovering over us.
His exaggerated bu-on gi-OOORRR-noh could be old-fashioned politeness, or could be mild mockery. Clearly he knows we’re tourists, but he’s charmed by Morag when she keeps up our innocent appearance by saying something about the weather, telling him she’s so delighted to be back in Rome after being away so long, and then ordering a round of espresso ristretto and sfogliatelle.
When he’s safely out of the way, we have a brief argument. Really brief, as in:
“Rosko, I think you should come with me. Morag, you stay here and watch the door.”
“Who are you to be giving all the orders, General Calder? And why is it the ‘little sister’ who gets to sit out all the fun stuff?”
“This is not going to be fun, M. It could be dangerous. And I just thought—”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t think.”
“Sorry. But—”
Rosko holds up his hands. “Guys, chill. Daniel’s right—one of us should stay here to watch the door and make sure no one follows us in. I’ll stay here, and you two go. I have no idea what this nonexistent book is going to look like anyway.”
Partridge’s building is more like a boardinghouse or an abandoned youth hostel than anything you’d associate with the word office. We reach the third floor up a long, narrow, dimly lit stairwell, then emerge onto a landing that smells of cabbage and cats. The sounds are muffled—nothing but creaky boards and the muted distant buzz of Vespa scooters and car horns. We peer at several unmarked doors before finding one down a short hallway that has a white three-by-five card, printed with the words:
DEREK PARTRIDGE, MA, MLITT, PHD
PROFESSORE DI STORIA ANTICA
“Pretty sad, aye?” Morag says in a low voice. “A professor of ancient history with a fistful of research degrees who has no college, no colleagues, no students—just wacky ideas no one will listen to, and a dingy office on a back street.”
The door is hanging open by an inch. I hesitate for a moment, but she pushes right past me and swings the door open.
The blinds are closed, so it takes a minute for our eyes to adjust to the dirty-yellow light filtering through from the street. But the space that unpeels itself from the gloom is very strange: it looks as if it’s been arranged by an Olympic gold medal neat-freak using white gloves, tweezers, maybe a laser level.
Messiest office I’ve ever seen: that’s what Dad said.
Ransacked: that’s what Partridge said.
Yeah, right—though I guess this could be one version of “ransacked.” Everything has been carefully placed, but nothing is in the right place. A swivel chair and a filing cabinet are parked on top of the desk. Bookcases have been emptied and pulled away from the walls. But there’s a surreal precision about everything. Files in boxes on a side table. Books on the floor—thousands of them—in piles so orderly they look like a miniature Manhattan. Someone has been here for a long time, searching.
Somewhere behind me a door slams. My heart pops like a snare drum in a marching band, and we both stand utterly motionless for a minute. Nothing. Then I walk to the street-side window. After almost falling over a box of papers, I push aside a blind and stand there looking down into the street until Rosko sees me and raises his hand.
Morag flips the switch, bathing the room in cheap workshop neon. Behind the desk, where he said the book would be, there’s precisely nothing except the largest of the empty bookcases.
“Damn,” Morag whispers. She’s already crouched on the floor between two stacks of books, running her finger up the spines. “I’d hoped by some miracle we’d be in and out of here in ten minutes. This is going to take forever.”
I take a circuit of the room, scanning the floorboards, the furniture, the ceiling even—as if staying still, just thinking and looking, will make some clue jump out to explain what happened here. The dust in the room, stirred up so recently, is making me itch: I have to stifle two big, powerful sneezes. Well, better get on with it—and I’m already kneeling down to join Morag in the search when I look at the big empty bookcase one more time.
It’s an institutional-looking thing in green metal, five feet wide by six tall. It’s obvious, when you bother to look, that it’s not supposed to be here.
“M. Look.”
Being empty, the bookcase is surprisingly easy to move. Hidden behind it there’s a classroom whiteboard. Taped on the wall above, a colored paper map covering an area from Italy in the west all the way to the Persian Gulf. On the left side of the board, in black dry erase, there’s a handwritten list that would look like an assignment for students, if Partridge had any students. The right side of the board is blank.
Morag’s looking at the list. “Ziggurats.”
“I didn’t know there were so many.”
“Common as goat shit in Mesopotamia. Ashur. Uruk. Sialk. Ur. Eridu. Fifty or sixty that we know about, and probably three times as many more buried under the desert. But this includes stuff from all over the world.”
“Yeah, I recognized Chichén Itzá. That’s Mexico, right—and Cahokia also?”
“No, Cahokia’s in the US. American Mound Builder culture near Saint Louis. From about a thousand, maybe eleven hundred years ago.”
I’m already looking at the right side of the board, which isn’t quite blank after all. The black dot near the center, about the size of a pencil eraser, is not a dot—it’s a hole, and around it, there are traces of something sticky and dark.
“Is that what I think it is?” Morag whispers.
My skin is crawling. I rip the board from the wall, heave it aside, and the answer to her question is right there, embedded between two bricks: a flattened small-caliber bullet. I try to pick it out with my fingernails. In too deep.
“Look at this,” Morag says. She’s kneeling on the floor beside me. There’s a shape there, faint but unmistakable, drawn in blood. The broken triangle of the Seraphim.
I get down next to her, then lie on the floor, trying to imagine the scene. Around me there are floorboards. Balls of dust. The dark-green metal of the bookcase. The silvery-gray metal of an old heating vent that comes out of the wall at floor level.
And an anomalous stripe of rich blue.
The book has been tucked into the vent, with only part of the spine visible. I take off the vent cover and pull it out—an old hardback, bound in expensive-looking silk. I hold it out to Morag with the spine forward, so she can see the one word in black lettering on the spine: CASAUBON.
I get to my feet. “Let’s go.”
But Morag looks puzzled, weighs the book in her hand. “Must be three or four hundred pages. But it’s too light.”
She flips the cover open. Inside, there’s a creamy, almost card-like title page, brown and speckled at the edges just the way old books are:
THE KEY TO ALL MYTHOLOGIES
by
The Rev’d Edward Casaubon
William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
MDCCCLXXI
In the white space between author and publisher, Dad has written in his loopy, showy handwriting:
For Derek
Maybe we’ll write it for him!
With best wishes, Bill
Morag flicks the page with her thumb. We’re both expecting a table of contents or something, but this is where the pretense ends. No more words. No more book. Just a shallow compartment big enough for—what else?—a key.
There’s a noise from one of the lower floors. Probably just the plumbing, but we nearly jump out of our skins.
“Let’s get out of here,” we both say at once.
Rosko is exactly where we left him, hiding behind a magazine at the café window.
“Sorry about the long wait,” Morag says. “Anyone see us?”
“Nobody came to the door. Couple of guys wandered up and down looking suspicious, but then a police car cruised by and they vanished. I asked the waiter what’s been going on. All he would say is that no one in the neighborhood believes the official story.”
He points to the magazine. “Showed me this. A big feature on Quinn and the Seraphim, complete with a lot of useless speculation about what the ‘third home’ might be. Even an interview with a Seraphim figure saying, ‘It will be revealed,’ and a moon-phase diagram emphasizing how close we are to—whatever. You two look terrible. What happened up there?”
I glance round to check that the waiter’s not in hearing range, then describe the office: the stacks of books, the list of ziggurats, the obvious search, the bloodstains.
“You think he was killed up there?”
“That’s my guess.”
He has a blue espresso cup cradled in his big hands like a hummingbird. As he puts it down, it rattles against the saucer—it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him unnerved.
“Das ist ja furchtbar,” he mutters. “But you found the book?”
Morag puts The Key to All Mythologies on the table, shows him the hidden compartment with its key.
His eyes widen. “The key to all mythologies—really? OK, next step: if this is the key, where’s the lock?”
“Banco Popolare,” Morag says, reading the tag on the key. “Hang on a minute.”
She goes over to the counter and talks rapidly with the waiter, who nods and waves his hands at the door.
“Grazie mille!” And to us: “Just a couple of streets away. Let’s go.”
