by A. L. Knorr
We emerged in a huge cavernous room with a vaulted ceiling that was a mashup between ancient and modern. A dusty desk and bookshelves occupied the wall to our left. But what was really curious was the way half the room had been divided from the rest by a thick wall of plexiglass. The plexiglass room had a clear door with a lock but no door handle.
Behind this glass was a doorway leading into another room. Also behind the barrier sat another desk, this one with a computer. There was also a bookshelf with volumes of texts both old looking and new, a table heaped with scrolls and other documents, and a rust colored office chair on wheels. A bare lightbulb hung over the desk but it wasn’t lit, instead there were three other sources of light sitting on the desk, two kerosene lamps and one camp light that looked battery operated.
In the office chair sat a woman.
She stared expectantly at us with wide, haunted eyes. Her hair lay over her shoulder in a thick brown braid, the curl of its tail dangling at her waist. A red paisley kerchief covered her head, knotted underneath the braid, giving her a pseudo Rosie the Riveter kind of look. She was not very old, my guess was mid-thirties, but the dark eyes that stared back at us carried the weight of several lifetimes. She wore a thick, knit cardigan so worn at the edges that yarn dangled from the sleeves and the hem. A loose scarf looped around her throat almost covered the choker of wide amber stones she wore. She had neatly manicured eyebrows and finger nails, but no makeup.
Tomio and I approached the plexiglass and she stood up, nearing the glass on the other side.
“Janet.” I put a hand on the glass.
She nodded and put her hand on her side of the glass, positioned exactly where mine was. She spoke in a voice that also sounded much older than her face looked, soft and accented. She was almost as pale as a porcelain doll, her naturally olive skin tone no doubt turned green from lack of sun.
“I can hardly believe you are real. I thought I hallucinated. Thank you for not giving up.”
Tomio lifted his hands to the glass. “You might want to step back.”
I was about to warn Tomio that there was a possibility that Janet didn’t know about Nero’s supernatural nature. But Tomio’s fingers and palms were already glowing and she had not screamed or appeared surprised.
“Wait!” Janet patted both palms on the plexiglass, her expression urgent. “If you break through this glass, the security cameras will wake up and record everything.”
We looked at where she pointed and saw two cameras had been fastened to the corners of the room, in the crooks where the walls and ceiling met.
Tomio lowered his hands. “They’re not on right now?”
Janet shook her head. “He doesn’t like to use the electricity unless absolutely necessary so he’s set motion sensors that trigger the cameras if anything other than pre-mapped movements take place, like me moving around my rooms. Coming through the cistern doesn’t trigger them because Nero believes no one would ever come in through the water.”
Tomio’s gaze darted back to her face. “Won’t it alert the system if there are two of us?”
“Normally, yes. But he had someone down here with him before he left and changed the system not to go off at the presence of multiple people. He didn’t reset it before he left. I can see how he sets his security system because he does it from there.” She pointed at the desk which sat at the wall opposite her clear prison. She had a perfect view of the desk, but no way of ever reaching it.
“He doesn’t care that you can see what he’s doing?”
Janet shrugged. “Who can I tell? He knows it is cruel of him to hide the tools to my freedom where I can watch him put them away. But now, I can tell you that there is a key to my cell door in the drawer of his desk. Let him put that in his pipe and smoke it.”
Tomio went to the desk and yanked open the drawer, snatching up the key with a sound of triumph. There was only one key on the keyring, a simple silver one.
As Tomio slid the key into the lock, Janet stared with the eyes of a woman who has seen the great gears of her destiny begin to turn in a direction she’d been powerless to incite herself. When the door swung open and Tomio stepped out of the way, she did not move.
“Come on, then. We won’t bite,” Tomio said.
Her chin wobbled with suppressed emotion. With a deep inhale, she stepped through the doorway. She looked at Tomio and extended a trembling hand. “Janet Silvestri. Nice to meet you.”
Tomio shook her hand. “Tomio Nakano, nice to meet you too.”
With shining eyes, she turned to me, holding out a hand. When I clasped her palm and felt her vibrating on the edge of tears, I gently pulled her into a hug.
Her skin touched mine and I was alarmed at how cool she felt. “Ohhhhhh,” she sighed. “You are so warm.”
She hiccupped as she melted against me. I held her until she signaled she was ready to let go. She stepped back, rubbing at her eyes.
“It’s been a very long time since I’ve had human contact. It’s incredible how much we humans need it.” She caught herself and blinked up at me. “Does your kind need it too?”
I smiled. “Just as much as you do, yes.”
“You must be desperate to get out into open air,” Tomio said. “Is there anything you want to take with you?”
“Strangely enough, I am nervous to ascend. I’ve forgotten what life is like above. More importantly, since we are not in danger of being discovered, I would like to tell you how I came to be down here. Maybe my story will direct you to things useful in your search for your friend.”
I was relieved, desperate myself to know everything, pick up any clue we could, understand who this man was and what he was up to.
“Who was the second person Nero had with him recently?” I asked, stomach tightening.
“A new partner. Nero never brings guests, only people he is working with. But recently there were two. Not at once. He brought one, then the other. The first one was a young man he introduced as Wendig.”
“Ryan or Gage?” Tomio asked.
“I don’t know, he never said his first name aloud.”
“Did he have facial hair?” I asked, feeling my hands curl into fists. I forced them to relax, lest I alarm Janet.
“A little.”
“That’s Ryan. Who was the second?”
“Another young man, but he didn’t introduce us. This one seemed about the same age as the first, only he was clean-shaven and had a ponytail.”
“Dante. I know him.” I looked at Janet, feeling an unpleasant sensation in my stomach. I put a hand over my tummy, hoping I didn’t throw up my panini from earlier. “Did they discuss their plans in front of you?”
“Only partially. Nero and Wendig’s plan involved me so they had to, but they also had conversations through there where I couldn’t hear them.” Janet pointed to a closed door opposite her plexiglass-enclosed office.
“Any idea where they are now?”
Janet gave a wry smile. “Based on the most recent discoveries in my work, I would guess that Ryan has gone to Iran and Nero is in Yangjiang, China. If things went well there, he may already be on his way to Australia. I can’t speak to Dante’s whereabouts.”
Questions circled my head like a swarm of irritated ravens. As important as it was to us to rescue Gage, Janet was also in trouble and needed to be returned to her life and her family. But breaking her out of here might mean losing Gage forever, since she was the only connection we had to Nero, who had no idea we were here. Plus I still had to find a way to get Dante to go home. Before we left this place, we needed to understand more.
Stalking across the room, I grabbed the office chair from under the desk and rolled it over to the bench against the wall so we could sit facing one another. “I think you’d better take us back to the beginning.”
“I was born Johanna Silvestri in 1991 in Salerno,” she began. “My parents nurtured a love of history both modern and ancient, but came to love ancient history the most, specifically ancient languages. I attended the Un
iversity of Rome’s history program. My university schooling was heavily slanted toward classical Greek and Roman but I wanted more, I wanted to study the exotic, jeopardized, or unknown. When I graduated, I applied to attend a competitive post-graduate program run through a private school in Novilara that would feed my hunger. It was a dream come true when I was accepted. There, I was able to submerge myself fully in the study of ancient linguistics. I dreamed of working for a well-funded museum whose interest lay predominantly in deducing the origins of ancient languages and preserving endangered languages, if such a role could be found.”
I tilted sideways to stretch my back. My exhaustion was gone thanks to the excitement of finding Janet, but my body was tired. “How many of these rare languages are there? One would think that by now we’ve discovered everything there is to discover.”
Janet shook her head, eyes wide. “Not remotely so. The more we discover, the more we realize the huge gaps in our understanding of history. Artifacts are found on a daily basis that baffle historians, I’ve known some professionals who retired from pure overwhelm and frustration. Yes, there are many languages and cultures we can classify, we can say this belongs to such and such era, but there are just as many items who appear not to belong in any known family but must be classified in a group unto itself. This work is why I am here.”
Tomio shifted to a cross-legged position on the floor, a posture I guessed he found comfortable thanks to all his years spent in a dojo. He was nodding. “I know what you mean. In Japan we have an indigenous group called the Ainu who were unlike any of our other ethnic groups.”
“Exactly.” Janet punctuated her words with a finger to emphasize. “The Ainu are both culturally and linguistically different from the Japanese and are said to have migrated to your country as far back as fourteen-thousand B.C. Ainu is very endangered. Only a handful of people in the world, including me, know the language because it has no written form.”
“So you’re an expert with a rare set of skills, but what are you helping Nero to do?” Tomio leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees.
“Don’t jump ahead, we don’t know yet how she ended up down here,” I said.
Janet shot me a grateful look. “Thank you. It’s been so long since I’ve spoken to anyone but Nero, and I’ve never been able to speak my story out loud. I’ve written it down, of course, but this is the first time its coming out naturally.”
I was amazed at the pure control over her emotions she was exhibiting. “You’re doing perfectly.”
She smiled wistfully. “I cried all my tears a long time ago. I made things very difficult for Nero in the beginning, but eventually accepted my fate. Nero has agreed to release me when his goals are met, but honestly, I don’t know what would prevent him from just killing me, so sometimes I draw out the work longer than it needs to be. Isn’t it funny how one can go from suicidal despair back to viewing life as precious. Even a life like this.” She gestured to her clear cage.
I’d never been suicidal, but I’d had my own turn on the dancefloor with despair so I could relate in some small way.
Janet looked far away, lost in a distant memory. “I don’t know how long he searched for the right candidate. I think he probably narrowed in on my school first and then chose a target, someone who excelled at language analysis, which I do. He even set up what I know now was a fake interview.”
Tomio’s jaw dropped. “What a snake!”
“I was excited because I thought he worked for the Louvre. He brought me three very interesting artifacts, all of which contained some form of ancient writing. He wanted me not only to decipher them, if I could, but to present any connections they made with other cultures. I was so absorbed in the task I did not think to ask him for credentials or grill him about his own studies.”
My mind immediately jumped to the orbs Basil had been trying to recreate in the studio below his office. “What were these artifacts?”
“A stele, a small statue, and a scabbard overlaid with gold. They were beautiful, but it did not take me long to identify their sources as North Picene, Vinca, and Etruscan.”
“You had seen the languages before?”
“Yes. All three of them had obscure and disputed origins. He told me he had work for someone like me, if I was interested. Of course, I was. When the interview was over, he told me he would call. He never called. Instead, he took me from the campus late at night the following week. I don’t even remember being taken, which is why I suspect he used chloroform. It can cause amnesia. I woke up here. Not in this side of my cell, but through there.” She turned and pointed to the door at the end of the narrow galley that functioned as her office.
“What’s over there?”
“The rest of my space. I’ll show you.” Janet got up and led us through one of the doors. This room had been divided into two sets of living quarters. A plexiglass box with a locked sliding door had been installed mid-way up the wall dividing the space. It was where he would have passed supplies through to Janet.
Instead of an office, here was a larger space that functioned as a kitchen: a hot-plate and a mini-fridge, as well as a small sink and cupboards. She twitched aside a red fabric curtain to reveal a pantry full of dried goods.
“I have all kinds of lentils, beans, dried fruits and nuts. I can sometimes make a guess for how long he will be away based on how much dried food he gives me. He always gives me too much, though. I never run out before he gets back. Not so far.”
“Doesn’t he give you anything fresh to eat?” I asked. Dried fruits and nuts were fine but after weeks or months of them? I would have major bathroom issues.
“Oh, yes. When he is in Naples, he brings me a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. When he’s not here I make spirulina and vitamin smoothies.”
“How kind of him,” Tomio said wryly. “And he even gives you a nice comfy bed to sleep on.” He gestured to a dingy pallet with a thin mattress, a stained pillow, and a collection of small, square cushions that looked scratchy.
“I don’t sleep there. Not anymore. I’ll show you where I sleep now.” She led us through another door opposite the one we’d just entered. Tomio followed Janet and I followed Tomio, which was why I crashed into the back of him when he came to an abrupt stop.
“No,” Tomio breathed. “You sleep in a sarcophagus!?”
“What?” I peeked around Tomio to see another room divided by a plexiglass wall. There were two entrances for this room, the one we’d just used, and the one behind the clear barrier inside Janet’s cell. Behind the plexiglass and against the far wall sat a large, thick-walled black box with a lid propped open and leaning against the stones.
Janet laughed. “It does look like that, doesn’t it? It’s a lead-lined box.”
Upon a closer look we saw bedding inside. These linens looked much newer and cleaner than the ones on the pallet in the kitchen. Janet pointed out the slits along the sides. “Those allow air to come in if I put the lid down. That is how I saw your lights.” She gestured to a hole in the wall above the lid. “He had it made for me after he returned from his second long trip abroad. After he came back... different.” Janet’s expression looked faraway as she remembered something.
My skin prickled at her expression. “Different how?”
Her gaze cleared. “When he went to Brazil, he was gone for five weeks. When he came back, I began to notice that if he came too near me, I would feel strange. I would get a mild headache and sometimes I would lose my appetite. Then he went away a second time in January. He was gone for even longer.”
“Where did he go that time?” I asked, tearing my eyes from the crazy coffin-bed.
A place called Karunagappalli, in India.”
“What is he doing when he travels?”
“I don’t know exactly. I know he looks for things, artifacts of interest, because he always brings back more items for me to study. But when he came back from India, the sick feeling if I was too close to him for too long was worse. He began to
bring me tinctures and more green vegetables to eat. He brought me ingredients to make the vitamin-rich smoothies. He gave me this to protect my thyroid.” She put her hand up to her throat where a pretty choker made of amber snugly encircled her neck. “I’m not sure it actually does anything but I wear it because he seems to think it does. He brought in the lead-lined box for me to sleep in whenever he is home. It is actually much more comfortable than the pallet, so I sleep in it even when he is not here.”
“He acts like he cares for you,” Tomio observed.
“His motives are purely selfish, like someone else we know,” I muttered.
Janet agreed. “She is right. He is nice to me, but only because I have the skills he needs. Without me, his work would take much longer. Maybe it would never get done. He is protecting my health because if I am not feeling well, I’m not productive.”
“But, are you saying that when he comes back from these long trips, that he returns radioactive?”
“It appears so,” Janet replied. “I’m a scientist of sorts, though I don’t work in a lab and my specialty is ancient technologies, specifically languages. Without tests, I couldn’t say for certain that he returns radioactive, but he seems to think he is dangerous to me, and I don’t disagree. The lead-lined box and the tinctures, mushroom lattes and algae smoothies do make me feel better, as disgusting as they sound. He even provided me with a light to boost my vitamin D levels because it has been years since I’ve seen the sun. I am certainly not as healthy as I would be if I were a free woman living the way I please. I miss swimming in the Mediterranean more than I can say. But when I ask for something, Nero does his best to supply it for me, and I’m doing work that I love. I find reasons to be thankful.”
Tomio blew out a long, slow breath at these words.
She nodded like she knew what he was thinking. “I have to keep positive any way that I can, otherwise I would commit suicide.”
“You never thought of it?”
She waved a hand. “In the beginning I threatened it, though I had no easy way of doing it. I had only a bed and the toilet and shower that is through there.” She pointed to a curtain similar to the one covering her pantry. “Nero made all of my meals because at that time, he lived down here permanently.”
