by Dan Simmons
And the goddamn ten-florin lock would not budge.
Finally the point of my knife broke. I cursed, threw the knife away, and slammed the stinking lousy cretinous piece-of-shit lock and chain against the grimy stone wall. The padlock clicked open.
It was dark inside. If there was a light switch, none of us could find it. If there was an idiot AI somewhere controlling the lights, it did not respond to our commands. None of us had brought a light. After carrying a flashlight laser for years, I had left mine behind in my backpack this day. When the time had come to leave the Yggdrasill, I had stepped forward and taken Aenea’s hand without a thought to weapons or other necessary items.
“Is this the Basilica of St. John Lateran?” whispered Aenea. It was impossible to speak in anything above a whisper in the oppressive darkness.
“No, no,” whispered Father de Soya. “Just a tiny memorial chapel built near the original basilica in the twenty-first …” He stopped and I could imagine his thoughtful expression returning. “It is a working chapel, I believe,” he said. “Wait here.”
Aenea and I stood with shoulders touching as we heard Father de Soya moving around the perimeter of the tiny building. Once something heavy fell with the sound of iron on stone and we all stood holding our breath. A minute later we heard the sound of his hands sliding along the inside walls again and the rustle of his cassock. There was a muffled “Ahhh …” and a second later light flared.
The Jesuit was standing less than ten meters from us, holding a lighted match. A box of matches was in his left hand. “A chapel,” he explained. “They still had the stand for votive candles.” I could see that the candles themselves had been melted to uselessness and never replaced, but the tapers and this one box of matches had remained for God knows how long in this dark, abandoned place. We joined him in the small circle of light, waited while he lighted a second match, and followed him to a heavy wooden door set behind rotting curtains.
“Father Baggio, my resurrection chaplain, told me about this tour when I was under house arrest near here some years ago,” whispered Father de Soya. This door was not locked, but opened with a squeal of ancient, unoiled hinges. “I believe he thought it would appeal to my sense of the macabre,” went on Father de Soya, leading us down a narrow, spiraling stone stairway not much wider than my shoulders. Aenea followed the priest. I kept close to Aenea.
The stairway continued down, then down some more, and then more. I estimated that we were at least twenty meters beneath street level when the stairway ended and we passed through a series of narrow corridors into a wider, echoing hallway. The priest had gone through a half-dozen matches by this point, dropping each only after it had burned his fingers. I did not ask him how many matches were left in the small matchbox.
“When the Church decided to move St. Peter’s and the Vatican during the Hegira,” said de Soya, his voice loud enough now to empty in the black space, “they brought it en masse to Pacem using heavy field lifters and tractor-field towers. Since mass was not a problem, they brought half of Rome with them, including the huge Castel Sant’Angelo and everything under the old city down to a depth of sixty meters. This was the twentieth-century subway system.”
Father de Soya began walking down what I realized was an abandoned railway platform. At places the ceiling tiles had fallen in and everywhere except on a narrow pathway there were centuries of dust, fallen rocks, broken plastic, unreadable signs lying in the grime, and shattered benches. We went down several corroded steel stairways—escalators halted more than a millennium ago, I realized—through a narrow corridor that continued downward along an echoing ramp, and then onto another platform. At the end of this platform, I could see a fiber-plastic ladder leading down to where the tracks had been … where the tracks still were under the layers of dust, rubble, and rust.
We had just climbed down the ladder and stepped into the subway tunnel when the next match went out. But not before Aenea and I had seen what lay ahead.
Bones. Human bones. Bones and skulls stacked neatly almost two meters high on either side of a narrow passage between the rusted tracks. Great heaps of bones, the socket ends out, skulls neatly placed at meter-intervals or arranged in geometric designs within the knobby walls of human bones.
Father de Soya lit the next match and began striding between the walls of skeletal human remains. The breeze of his motion flickered the tiny flame that he held aloft. “After the Seven Nations War in the early twenty-first century,” he said, his voice at a normal conversational volume now, “the cemeteries of Rome were overflowing. There had been mass graves dug all around the suburbs of the city and in the large parks. It became quite a health problem what with the global warming and constant flooding. All of the bio and chem warheads, you know. The subways had ceased to run anyway, so the powers-that-be authorized a removal of the remains and their reinterment in the old metro systems.”
This time when the match burned out, we were in a section where the bones were stacked five layers high, each layer marked by a row of skulls, their white brows reflecting the light but the sightless sockets indifferent to our passing. The neat walls of bones went back for at least six meters on either side and rose to the vaulted ceiling ten meters above us. In a few places, there had been a small avalanche of bones and skulls and we had to pick our way over them carefully. Still there was the crunching underfoot. We did not move during the interludes of darkness between matches, but waited quietly. There was no other noise … not the scurry of rats nor the drip of water. Only our breathing and soft words disturbed the silence here.
“Oddly enough,” said Father de Soya after we had gone another two hundred meters, “they did not get the idea from Rome’s ancient catacombs, which lie all about us here, but from the so-called catacombs of Paris … old quarry tunnels deep under that city. The Parisians had to move bones from their overflowing cemeteries to those tunnels between the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. They found that they could easily accommodate six million dead in just a few kilometers of corridors. Ahh … here we are …”
To our left, through an even narrower corridor of bones, was a path with a few boot marks in the dust, leading to another steel door, this one unlocked. It took all three of us to leverage the door open. The priest led the way down another set of rusting spiral stairs to a depth I estimated at being at least thirty-five meters beneath the street above. The match went out just as we stepped into another tunnel—much older than the subway vault, its edges and ceiling unfinished and tumbledown. I had caught a glimpse of side passages running off, of bones spilled haphazardly everywhere in these passages, of skulls upside down, of bits of rotted garments.
“According to Father Baggio,” whispered the priest, “this is where the real catacombs begin. The Christian catacombs which go back to the first century A.D.” A new match flared. I heard a rattle in the matchbox that sounded like very few matches indeed. “This way, I would guess,” said Father de Soya and led us to his right.
“We’re under the Vatican now?” whispered Aenea a few minutes later. I could feel her impatience. The match flared and died.
“Soon, soon,” said de Soya in the darkness. He lit another one. I heard no rattle in the box.
After another 150 meters or so, the corridor simply ended. There were no tumbled bones here, no skulls, only rough stone walls and a hint of masonry where the tunnel ended. The match went out. Aenea touched my hand as we waited in the darkness.
“I am sorry,” said the priest. “There are no more matches.”
I fought back the rise of panic in my chest. I was sure that I heard noises now … distant rat feet scurrying at the least, boots on stairs at the worst. “Do we backtrack?” I said, my whisper sounding far too loud in the absolute darkness.
“I was sure that Father Baggio said that these catacombs to the north had once connected to the older ones under the Vatican,” whispered Father de Soya. “Under St. Peter’s Basilica, to be precise.”
“Well, it
doesn’t seem to …” I began and stopped. In the few seconds of light before the match had gone out, I had glimpsed the relative newness of the brick wall between stones … a few centuries old as opposed to the millennia since the stone had been cut away. I crawled forward, feeling ahead of me until my fingers found stone, brick, loose mortar.
“This was hastily done,” I said, speaking with only the authority I had gained as an assistant landscape worker on the Beak estates years and years before. “The mortar’s cracked and some of the bricks have crumbled,” I said, my fingers moving quickly. “Give me something to dig with. Damn, I wish I hadn’t thrown away my knife …”
Aenea handed me a sharp-edged stick or branch in the dark and I was digging away for several minutes before I realized that I was working with a thigh bone broken at one end. The two of them joined me, digging with bones, scrabbling at the cold brick with our fingernails until the nails broke and our fingers bled. After some time at this, we paused to pant and catch our breath. Our eyes had not adapted to the darkness. There was no light here.
“The Mass will be over,” whispered Aenea. The tone in her voice made it sound like a tragic event.
“It is a High Mass,” whispered the priest. “A long ceremony.”
“Wait!” I said. My fingers had remembered a slight movement in the bricks—not in one or a few of them, but in the entire casement.
“Get back,” I said aloud. “Crawl to the side of the tunnel.” I backed up myself, but straight back, raised my left shoulder, lowered my head, and charged forward in a crouch, half expecting to bash my head on the stone and knock myself out.
I hit the bricks with a mighty grunt and a shower of dust and small debris. The bricks had not fallen away. But I had felt them sag away from me.
Aenea and de Soya joined me and in another minute we had pushed loose the center bricks, tumbled the entire mass away from us.
There was the faintest glimmer of light on the other side of the passage, but enough to show us a ramp of debris leading to an even deeper tunnel. We crawled down on our hands and knees, found room to stand, and moved through the earth-smelling corridor. Two more turns and we came into a catacomb as roughly hewn as the one above but illuminated by a narrow strip of glowtape running along the right wall at belt height. Another fifty meters of twisting and turning, always following the main passage illuminated by glowtape, and we came into a wider tunnel with modern glowglobes set every five meters. These globes were not lit, but the ancient glowtape continued on.
“We’re under St. Peter’s,” whispered Father de Soya. “This area was first rediscovered in 1939, after they buried Pope Pius XI in a nearby grotto. The excavations were carried on for another twenty years or so before being abandoned. They have not been reopened to archaeologists.”
We came into an even wider corridor—wide enough for the three of us to walk side by side for the first, time. Here the ancient rock and plastered walls with the occasional marble inset were covered with frescoes, early Christian mosaics, and broken statues set above grottoes. in which bones and skulls were clearly visible. Someone had once placed plastic across many of these grottoes and the material had yellowed and opaqued to make the mortal remains within almost unviewable, but by bending and peering we could see empty eye sockets and pelvic ovals peering back at us.
The frescoes showed Christian images—doves carrying olive branches, women drawing water, the ubiquitous fish—but were next to older grottoes, cremation urns, and graves offering pre-Christian images of Isis and Apollo, Bacchus welcoming the dead to the afterlife with great, overflowing flagons of wine, a scene of oxen and rams cavorting, another with satyrs dancing—I immediately noticed the likeness to Martin Silenus and turned just in time to catch Aenea’s knowing glance—and still more with beings Father de Soya described as maenads, some rural scenes, partridges all in a row, a preening peacock with feathers of lapis chips that still caught the light in bright blue.
Peering through the ancient, mottled plastic and plastiglass at these things made me think that we were passing through some terrestrial aquarium of death. Finally we came to a red wall at right angles to a lower wall of faded, mottled blue with the remnants of graffiti in Latin still visible. Here the sheet of plastic was newer, fresher, and the small container of bones within quite visible. The skull had been set atop the neat pile of bones and seemed to be regarding us with some interest.
Father de Soya went to his knees in the dust, crossed himself, and bent his head in prayer. Aenea and I stood back and watched with the quiet embarrassment common to the unbeliever in the presence of any true faith.
When the priest arose, his eyes were moist. “According to Church history and Father Baggio, the workers uncovered these poor bones in 1949 A.D. Later analysis showed that they belong to a robust man who died sometime in his sixties. We are directly under the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, which was built here because of the legend that St. Peter had been interred secretly at just this spot. In 1968 A.D., Pope Paul VI announced that the Vatican was convinced that these were indeed the bones of the fisherman, the same Peter who walked with Jesus and was the Rock upon which Christ built his Church.”
We looked at the silent heap of bones and then back at the priest.
“Federico, you know that I am not trying to bring down the Church,” Aenea said. “Only this current aberration of it.”
“Yes,” said Father de Soya, wiping his eyes roughly, leaving muddy streaks there. “I know that, Aenea.” He looked around, went to a door, opened it. A metal staircase led upward.
“There will be guards,” I whispered.
“I think not,” said Aenea. “The Vatican has spent eight hundred years fearing attack from space … from above. I do not believe they give much thought to their catacombs.” She stepped in front of the priest and started quickly but quietly up the metal steps. I hurried to follow her. I saw Father de Soya glance back toward the dim grotto, cross himself a final time, and follow us up toward St. Peter’s Basilica.
THE LIGHT IN THE MAIN BASILICA, ALTHOUGH SOFTENED by evening, stained glass, and candlelight, was all but blinding after the catacombs.
We had climbed up through the subterranean shrine, up past a memorial basilica marked in stone as the Trophy of Gaius, through side corridors and service entrances, through the anteroom to the sacristy, past standing priests and craning altar boys, and out into the echoing expanse at the rear of the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica. Here were scores of dignitaries not important enough to have been awarded a place in the pews but still honored by being allowed to stand in the rear of the Basilica to witness this important celebration. It took only a glance to see that there were Swiss Guard and security people at all the entrances to the Basilica and in all the outer rooms with exits. Here at the back of the congregation, we were inconspicuous for the moment, just another priest and two somewhat under-dressed parishioners allowed to crane their necks to see the Holy Father on Holy Thursday.
Mass was still being celebrated. The air smelled of incense and candlewax. Hundreds of brightly robed bishops and VIPs lined the gleaming rows of pews. At the marble altar rail before the baroque splendor canopy of the Throne of St. Peter, the Holy Father himself knelt to finish his menial work of washing the feet of twelve seated priests—eight men and four women. An unseen but large choir was singing—
“O Holy Ghost, through Thee alone
Know we the Father and the Son;
Be this our firm unchanging creed.
That Thou dost from them both proceed.
That Thou dost from them both proceed.
“Praise be the Lord, Father and Son
And Holy Spirit with them one;
And may the Son on us bestow.
All gifts that from the Spirit flow.
All gifts that from the Spirit flow.”
I hesitated then, wondering what we were doing here, why this endless battle of Aenea’s had brought us to the center of these people’s faith. I believed everythin
g she had taught us, valued everything she had shared with us, but three thousand years of tradition and faith had formed the words of this beautiful song and had built the walls of this mighty cathedral. I could not help but remember the simple wooden platforms, the firm but inelegant bridges and stairways of Aenea’s rebuilt Temple Hanging in Air. What was it … what were we … compared to this splendor and humility? Aenea was an architect, largely self-trained except for her adolescent years with the cybrid Mr. Wright, building stone walls out of desert rock and mixing concrete by hand. Michelangelo had helped to design this Basilica.
The Mass was almost over. Some of the standing crowd in the rear of the longitudinal nave were beginning to leave, walking lightly so as not to interrupt the end of the service with their footfalls, whispering only when they reached the stairs to the piazza outside. I saw that Aenea was whispering in Father de Soya’s ear and I leaned against them to hear, afraid that I might miss some vital instruction.
“Will you do me one final great service, Father?” she asked.
“Anything,” whispered the sad-eyed priest.
“Please leave the Basilica now,” Aenea whispered in his ear. “Please go now, quietly, with these others. Leave now and lose yourself in Rome until the day comes to cease being lost.”
Father de Soya pulled his head back in shock, looking at Aenea from half a meter away with an expression of someone who has been abandoned. He leaned close to her ear. “Ask anything else of me, Teacher.”
“This is all I ask, Father. And I ask it with love and respect.”
The choir began singing another hymn. Above the heads in front of me, I could see the Holy Father completing the washing of the priests’ feet and moving back to the altar under the gilded canopy. Everyone in the pews stood in anticipation of the closing litanies and final benediction.
