CHAPTER 24

Parks stopped just inside the cave and slipped the long nylon bag off his shoulder. He didn’t speak, didn’t act as if he knew anyone was in there with him.

Thomas could see little more than a silhouette, the only light coming from the tunnel entrance behind the other man, but he knew that as Parks’s eyes adjusted to the dark, his chances of remaining unseen would fade to nothing. The place just wasn’t that big. He could try to bolt past him, trusting to surprise, but there was no way he could slip by unnoticed, and with his sprained knee he could hardly trust to speed. He could confront him, he supposed . . .

Play the action hero? You’re a high school English teacher. Or you were . . .

He had to get out.

He tried to recall everything he had heard about the city, the eruption, the subsequent excavations: anything that might give him an option other than crouching here in the darkness, waiting for Parks to see him. If the other man hadn’t been so focused on whatever he was getting out of his bag, he would already have done so.

Thomas began to move, inching carefully to his right, hugging the cave wall. The Bourbon excavators had moved almost at random around the ancient city, dropping tunnels and trenches, pillaging the place for statuary and other artifacts for their private collections. Maybe there was more than one way into the cave they had hewn out of the tuff once they had found the great cross-shaped structure in the earth. He took another excruciatingly silent step, his fingertips tracing the smooth contours of the rock at his back, groping for an alcove, a recess of some kind in which he could hide. Thomas heard a distinctive metallic swish. Parks was setting up a piece of equipment.

A tripod?

A moment later he heard the faint rising whine of a flash unit charging, and a jolt of panic went through him. He had only seconds of invisibility left.

He moved with reckless haste across the cave wall, still pushing back against the rock, his breath held, sweat beading on his brow despite the chill of the cavern. And suddenly, just as the flash was about to fire, there was empty space behind him.

Thomas shrank into it as the cavern suddenly flared in the camera’s blue-white brilliance, the shadows leaping and vanishing in a second. Had he been seen? He waited through the agonizing clunk of the camera’s shutter, then the drone of its power wind, and then, as Parks shot off another picture, Thomas took a second step back into the darkness of the alcove.

But it wasn’t an alcove at all, as was clear when he turned into it and found he could move still farther in. It was a tunnel, albeit only about waist high, one the excavators had made two hundred fifty years earlier. He would have to crawl, and he would have to be absolutely silent since every sound would echo back into the cave, but he might be able to get out: assuming there was enough air, assuming the walls didn’t close in on him till he felt like screaming.

Of course, if Parks heard, he would have Thomas like a trapped rat . . .

Better make sure he doesn’t hear then, he thought.

With agonizing slowness, Thomas started to crawl.

The flash fired again, and though he knew he wasn’t visible from the tripod, the light bounced alarmingly around the tunnel. If Parks was to vary his positioning by only a few feet, he would see Thomas the moment he depressed the shutter release.

The stone was cold and hard on his knees, but smoother than he had feared. Ten feet farther on the tunnel bent slightly, and the darkness softened. If he could keep his head—and his luck—for a few more seconds, he might see daylight. He might get out.

Just before the bend in the passage the roof lifted and he was able to sit up for a second, take some of the weight off his aching knees, but as he did so he felt something brush against the back of his head. Something soft. He reached up instinctively, and felt the weight of something in his hair. Something that moved as he tried to unsettle it. His fingers passed quickly over fur and a cool, elastic substance like skin, but edged with a tiny hooklike claw.

A bat.

He flinched involuntarily, trying to shrug the thing off, banged his head against the rock in the process, and gave a grunt of pain and revulsion, stifled a second too late. He heard rapid movement in the cavern behind him. Parks was moving to see who was in there with him.

Thomas abandoned caution and scrambled forward, scraping his forehead on the tuff as the rock ceiling lowered again. But then there was light that brightened to an almost unbearable whiteness and in two surges forward that left his right knee bloody, he was out and running clumsily back into the ancient town as if worse things than bats were in pursuit.

 
“What happened to you?” asked Sister Roberta, taking in his scraped and dusty appearance. She said it with surprise and a concern that cut away any coldness she might have felt about the way they had parted.

“Can we just get out of here?” said Thomas. He was red-faced, sweaty, and badly rattled.

“I had no idea you found ancient sites so exciting,” she muttered as they climbed through the streets up to the railway station.

“What’s that, nun humor?” said Thomas.

She grinned. “You can tell me about your adventure on the train,” she said.

He didn’t, of course. He made up some story about falling off one of the elevated sidewalks onto the cobbles, and she made sympathetic noises while his mind wandered back to what he had seen, each image—the ghost line of the crucifix, the underground swimming pool, Parks himself—all feeling like fragments of mosaic, small and hard in his hands, waiting for him to lay them out, to make sense of them. But all he saw was randomness and confusion.