by A. L. Knorr
I paused to take a drink of water, but an excited shout from Tomio shot my heart into my throat and my legs into a sprint.
Ten
Underground Swim
Sliding around the corner of Tomio’s dead-end, I saw him standing at the end, his hand-torch held high. His fire cast a glow toward the ceiling, revealing a series of cracks weaving between the broken bricks. Tomio was staring upward but when I followed his gaze I couldn’t see anything special. Cracks might be interesting if we could reach them, but these were high up. Too high to be an access point for a person.
“What is it?” I gasped, panting from my run.
When Tomio turned his head to look at me, it was like a chilly breath blew across the back of my neck. He looked pale in the dark, and his eyes were wide with shock. He raised a finger to his lips, then put it in the air, pointing toward the cracks.
“C’è qualcuno?” asked a rusty sounding female voice.
I jumped like a freaked out cat and just barely kept in a shriek.
She sounded like she was coming from inside the wall. My heart began a steady gallop as I craned my neck to look for some opening through which the voice was drifting.
“Ciao?” She sounded like a young woman, albeit a tired one on the edge of tears. “Ho visto la tua luce,” she said.
She was saying she could see our lights. This woman was afraid, she needed help. What the hell was she doing down here? I hadn’t found my voice yet and Tomio hadn’t spoken either, afraid to fully give ourselves away. But instinct and her tone told me that this woman was no enemy, she was not a trap.
She spoke louder this time. “Per favore aiuto!”
“Parle ingleze?” I forced a calm into my voice that I did not feel.
“You are American?” I heard a windy laugh of disbelief, followed by a dry cough. “Yes, of course I do. Who are you?”
Her sound changed, like she’d moved closer but had to go higher in the process. In the gloom it was difficult to see what were cracks and what were shadows.
“Keep your light on,” I told Tomio. “I’ll climb up to her.”
I kicked off my shoes and raked off my socks, tucking them into the toes of my sneakers. Shucking the backpack, I dropped it on the dusty floor and took off my baseball cap so I could see better.
“We will come up to you,” Tomio called. “Is there a hole near you? It sounds like it.”
“Madonna, there are two of you.” She gave another dry laugh. “Yes, there is a place here.”
A scratching sound overhead was accompanied by a scattering of dust falling around us.
Tomio lifted his fire to send the light further up the wall. Movement small enough to belong to a mouse drew our gazes to a crack between stones where something emerged and retreated.
“How did you find me?” she asked. “You cannot be polizia. Did my father hire you?”
Hooking my fingers into the shallow crack between stones, I sent my fire into my grip and used slow-burn to pull myself up the wall. Toes hot and hard, fire oozing into my limbs and digits in smooth and fluid motions, I ascended to the place I’d seen movement and brought my eye level with the crack.
At first, I saw nothing, then she shifted and a pale shaft of light illuminated an eyeball staring back at me.
“How long have you been down here?” I asked.
The eye blinked and she took a moment to respond. “Then my family did not send you. Otherwise you would know that I was taken from the university three years ago.”
I almost fell off the wall. I stared at the shadowed eye and it stared back at me.
“We’re looking for a secret place,” I told her. “The place of a dangerous man.”
“You’ve found what you were seeking,” she replied. “I was taken by a dangerous man. I have been forced to work for him these last three years.”
“Nero?”
The eye widened and bobbed up and down as she nodded. “What is your name?”
“I’m Saxony, and my friend below is Tomio. You?”
“My given name is Johanna but I’ve gone by Janet since I was a little girl. Janet Silvestri.”
Heat fluctuated through my body as I clung to the wall like a spider, holding myself steady enough that I didn’t lose view of her eye.
“How do we get you out of there?”
She murmured, “I suppose it unlikely that you have a combination for the door, otherwise we would not be talking through the wall.”
“Combination? No.”
“Then you must go through the water.”
“What water?” Then I thought of the cistern we’d passed and a lump formed in my throat. “The cistern?”
“Yes. It’s the only other way.”
My belly gave a sickly drop. “But it must be six hundred meters from here.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she replied.
“Do you know how we can get through the water?”
“I can’t tell you. I wasn’t conscious when I was brought down here, but sometimes when he arrives, the door with the code does not open. I listen. I know all the sounds by now. I hear him walk across the room in wet shoes. I cannot tell you how the water leads here, but I know that it does.”
“What is she saying?” Tomio said. “I can’t hear.”
My mouth felt pasty and I desperately needed another drink of water.
I looked down at Tomio. “Give us a second.” I looked back at Janet’s hopeful eye. “Do you know when he will return?”
“No. But it won’t likely be soon. It could be in several weeks or even months.”
“Okay. We will try to find a way through the cistern.” I began to move away.
She gasped with a sudden cry of panic. “Please, don’t give up. Don’t leave me here. You’re the first hope I’ve had in three years that I might see my family again.”
“We won’t give up,” I promised, suppressing the urge to hyperventilate myself. Just the sound of her fear was contagious. “Is there anyone else in there with you?”
“No. I am alone.”
“Did Nero bring any other captives to this place recently? Maybe for a short time and then took them away again?”
“Captives? No. Not that I heard. Why?”
“We’re looking for a friend of ours who was taken.”
“Ah. I am sorry.”
I nodded. “I’m going down now. It might take us some time to find you, but we won’t give up.”
“Good luck,” she said, hesitantly, like she wanted to say a lot more but didn’t want to hold us up. “Thank you.”
Fire sliding across my back and down my legs, I retreated down the wall, dropping the last several feet to the floor. I eyed Tomio’s shadowed features, the worry line between his brows made deeper by the fire-light.
“What did she say?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
Ten minutes later we stood on the edge of the cistern, looking into the large square pool of dark water. Cracked and broken mosaics on the pool’s bottom mingled with rough scale and pebbled concrete. It wasn’t particularly deep but neither was it inviting, in spite of the lazy current that kept it from stagnating. A longing for Targa squeezed at my heart as we looked around for diving equipment or places it might be stored. No dice.
The pool edge was lined on two sides by a crumbling edge of brick and stone. The rest of the pool vanished beneath uneven walls, broken by a set of stairs leading to an impassable doorway full of rubble. The sound of trickling water echoed through the cavernous room. Several yawning holes far overhead marked the places where, at one time, those living in the villas above would lower their water jugs to fill them.
Tomio and I kicked off our shoes and left our hats and backpacks on the floor. Our phones weren’t waterproof so we zipped them into a pocket. Sitting on my butt on the edge of the cistern, I lifted my legs over and lowered my bare feet into the water.
“Cold?” Tomio tucked his wristwatch into a side pocket of his backpack.
; “The temperature isn’t what concerns me,” I muttered, eyeballing where the water vanished beneath the wall as I waded in, chest deep, toward the right-hand corner. “You take the other side. Holler if you find a through way.”
“How can I holler from underwater?”
“Come back and yell at me, obviously.”
The water’s surface rippled as Tomio got into the pool. It lapped at my torso. The smell of damp stones and minerals filled my nose as I approached the wall. Running my hands below the water’s edge I discovered the wall ended at knee height. My fingers slipped around the edge and underneath.
“Here,” I said, looking over at Tomio with my cheek pressed against the cold wall and my chin underwater.
At the other end, Tomio was running his own hands down the wall as he turned to look at me. “Here, too. The wall ends.”
Feeling our way toward one another, we discovered that the entire bottom two feet of the wall did not exist. Tomio and I stopped when we came together and straightened, sharing a look of apprehension.
“Nero does it, so can we,” I said. “Right?”
“Right.” But Tomio cast his gaze doubtfully toward our feet. “What if he’s boobytrapped it?”
I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Why did you have to go and say that?”
His lips twisted into a wry, humorless smile. “Wouldn’t you? If you were some psychotic mastermind bad guy trying to protect your secret lair?”
“I think you’re giving him too much credit,” I replied quickly.
“You’re choosing to believe that.”
“Yes, because otherwise I would never go cave-diving under a massive, ancient multi-ton wall with an end we can’t see. What other option do we have?”
His eyes widened with hope. “The front door?”
“We don’t know where it is and we don’t have the code.”
“Janet can tell us where it is. The door, I mean.”
“We still don’t have a code.”
“But we have fire-power.”
“But if we damage the door then we’ll have given ourselves away and there’s no coming back from that. Right now, Nero has no idea that we’re here, that puts us at an advantage.”
“Why?”
I spluttered. “What do you mean why? You’re wasting time. You know why. You’re the freaking battle strategist here, not me. Why do I have to explain—”
Tomio put a hand on my shoulder as an enlightened look appeared on his face. “Do you suppose he uses his fire to get through the water?”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Like, boils it so it evaporates and lowers enough so he has an inch worth of air to breath to get through?”
“I don’t know if you noticed, but the water here is chest deep.”
“Yeah...”
“And the entrance is knee-deep.”
“Yeah...”
“Where exactly is all this water supposed to go?”
He pointed a finger toward the hole in the ceiling. “Through there.”
“You don’t think all the steam emerging above us might attract attention? Plus it would take hours. We could have been out the other side by now if you weren’t holding us up.”
His expression went deadpan. “You’re right.”
“So we go?”
He nodded, taking a chest-expanding breath. “We go.”
“Ok.” I took a deep breath and was about to plunge under the wall when he grabbed my shoulder again. “For Pete’s sake! What now?”
He templed his fingers together and tapped them a few times. “It’ll be dark under there.”
“Yes. And?”
“Can you keep a flame going underwater? Because I can’t.”
“You want me to make a torch?”
“If you don’t mind. You lead, I’ll follow.”
“Fine. But I can’t promise it won’t go out.” I had made fireballs underwater before but I’d never tried holding a flame steady.
“Just try.”
“Fine.” I took another breath and bent my knees.
“Wait!”
I let my air out on a groan.
“Should we go under with a rope? Tie it to something here so we can pull ourselves back if we get too far and there’s still no air?”
“We don’t have rope. We opted for sandwiches.”
“There’s rope up there.” He pointed again to an old dangling jug.
“Will you quit stalling!”
He put up a hand, splashing water into my face and hair. “Ok, ok. Don’t get your knickers in a bunch. Can you blame me? I’m fond of oxygen... and living. So...”
“So?”
He gestured to the submerged passage. “Ladies first.”
I rolled my eyes but it was good-natured. Tomio’s banter had actually worked to fortify my courage. I was just as nervous as he was but I believed that if Nero could make this swim, then we could make this swim.
I took a deep breath and held it. Just before water filled my ears I heard Tomio chanting, “Omigod, omigod, omigod,” under his breath.
The cold closed over my head and soaked my hair. Hoping it would not sting, I opened my eyes as I sent fire down my arm and into my hand. Flames burst from my palm and fingertips, hissing and sizzling as they met with water. I quickly discovered that it took too much energy to keep a flame flickering underwater, but illuminating my hand to make a glowing appendage was enough to cast the shadows back and wasn’t difficult to maintain.
Thrusting my hand under the wall, I pulled myself down and into the space. My ears made little popping sounds and I realized with a short moment of unpleasant panic as I pulled myself forward with my left hand, that the passage tilted on a slight downward angle.
My vision blurred but it was good enough to see the rough, algae-coated floor as it rolled past. Silt drifted along the stones with the current that brushed by my skin with a gentle caress. The splashes and trickles of Tomio entering behind me accompanied the audio of my knees brushing the floor. Tomio’s hand wrapped around my ankle and clasped gently, letting me know he was following.
My glowing hand pushed the darkness back and back as we pulled ourselves forward and forward. I expected to see the stone surface above us disappear at any moment but instead two ghastly pale things emerged in the gloom to my right.
I paused, my lungs just starting to complain, to identify two human skulls. A low moan of horror rumbled in my throat. I felt Tomio’s grip tighten on my ankle as he saw what I was seeing.
When the initial shock of seeing the skulls eased, I realized they’d been positioned to face one another. Beyond them, two more pale blobs hinted that another pair had been strategically placed. They were providing a grisly road through which we had to pass.
Tomio followed as I propelled myself between the two skulls, noting with no small amount of relief when I got close enough to make out the details, that they were Halloween props, not actual skulls. Still, what kind of weirdo were we dealing with?
The second set of skulls zoomed by as I picked up speed, feeling pressure build in my lungs and head. My chest was burning as we passed a third set of staring skulls. A black edge ahead told me the ceiling ended and relief rushed through me. Hooking my fingers over the edge I gave a fierce fire-enhanced pull, enough to speed myself and Tomio, who still gripped my ankle, toward the exit.
My head broke the surface as the light in my hand went out. Taking deep breaths, I turned toward Tomio spluttering in the dark.
“We’re through,” he panted. “I can’t believe it, what kind of nutjob uses skulls for landmarks?”
“They’re fake,” I gasped, filling my lungs with air.
“Still.”
When I’d recovered my breath enough to regroup with my fire, I lit a hand-torch and held it up.
I had to clamp my other hand over my mouth to suppress a scream.
We’d emerged into an arched catacomb lined with hundreds, maybe thousands, of grinning, staring s
kulls.
And these ones were not plastic.
Eleven
Captive
Tomio and I gaped around, hair plastered to our heads and skin raised with goosebumps. I shuddered and waded toward the edge of the cistern, loosing a sound of disgust.
“They’re old,” Tomio said as he moved toward the stone lip and crawled out. “Too old for Nero to have put there.”
“How do you know?” Getting out of the pool, I took my hair out of its pony and shook it out. It was too dark to inspect the skulls close enough to determine age, even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t.
“I don’t, but it makes me feel better to think so.”
Pushing heat into my skull and skin, clouds of steam lifted from my form as the water soaking my clothing and hair evaporated.
Tomio had to close his eyes and concentrate to do the same. His water steamed off in uneven clouds, starting in his torso and head, then moving down to his legs and feet. He opened his eyes and looked at me, starting to laugh.
“What?”
“Your hair.”
I smiled and patted down the thick mass of frizz I’d created. Letting my hand-torch go out, I twisted my locks into a rough braid and fastened it with the elastic. Relighting, we discovered that the cavern of skulls transitioned into a large bricked room which ended with a set of dusty steps leading up to a doorless passage. A pretty herringbone pattern in the brick had been topped with horizontal bricks laid by some later civilization, the Greek style, followed by the Roman way of laying brick. They had each left their marks here.
Climbing the steps, we passed through the doorway and into a long, dark tunnel. Using hand-torches, we walked until the passage turned to the right, then continued on until it turned left. It went on in this zigzag way with no doors or windows or even holes in the walls.
Turning a corner for the umpteenth time revealed a source of low light and an end to the passage.
