THE NEW GAS LAMPS AROUND THE PLAZA DE MAYOR were being lit as he made his escape. He did not trust Sofia Salazar, he realised. Did not know what her true intentions were. He trusted no one in this town: certainly not Moens, and none of the Godos, or the other Europeans all jostling each other to get in on the guano fortune. Didn’t trust the Peruvians, either, of course. Them least of all. Were they really going to default on their loans? The thought was unthinkable.
The problem, the way he saw it, was that there was too much money. The Peruvians were spending it like there was no tomorrow. Spending Feebes money, on their palaces and, and… gas lamps? They cast a gloomy glow in the murky half-light. He mopped his face. The humidity. Talk of putting in tram rails next. Modernising. But what happened if the money ran out? If the birds stopped shitting? There was no prudence here. Lima was rich – for now. But if the money stopped flowing… then the Peruvians would be in the shit. No money, no salaries, no progress, and before you could say ‘by your leave’, you had an economy in ruins and a country with a bunch of half-completed civic palaces and a lot of hungry – angry – people.
Which wasn’t his problem, but it was a problem for the House of Feebes, one to carefully consider. One way or another he’d have to find the truth of it for himself, Edward decided. He’d have to do as Moens suggested, and go to the islands. He would also like to track down this lady scientist who counted nests.
He looked around him. It was dusk and the sun had all but set. He was walking along the Rimac, a river that smelled unpleasant, though nothing like the Thames. Its water was greenish-grey. There were no gas lamps here and the bank was muddy and grass grew thick.
There were people milling about, of the lower classes, mostly, natives and so on, though the atmosphere was not unfriendly. All manner of furtive business was conducted near the bridge and couples strolled off, with the approach of darkness, into the bushes. Edward could smell open fires, cooking meat, tobacco smoke, cheap perfume. He turned his back on the river and watched the city as it rose ahead of him, its grand mansions, the president’s palace, the enormous basilica of San Francisco de Jesús. Smoke rose over the city, too, and its lights glowed in the dark, making it seem truly a City of the Kings, as though it were shrouded in mist and gold.
He wanted it all, at that moment. The gold, that obdurate Miss Salazar, the power. Edward could see it now, if only he could plot the right course, make the right decision. His uncle retiring and he ascending to the top chair on the top floor, to command the House of Feebes for the next generation. Shipping, banking, trade, munitions! A global firm, for a new, global world. So rich they could print their own money. This was what he wanted, craved, when he watched Lima, thinking how small it really was, and how he could devour it.
‘Excuse me, mister, do you have the time?’
‘The time?’ Edward said. He reached for his pocket. He’d picked up a cheap silver watch in Liverpool to replace the one he’d thoughtlessly dispensed with in Covent Garden. ‘Why, yes, it is around s—’
He didn’t quite get the chance to finish. His interlocutors, he noticed with some surprise, were three monks, Franciscan, clad in blackish-grey habits and with somewhat roguish faces. This was not unusual – Lima crawled with monks, and many of them were ruffians in nature – and he had assumed they had come to the river bank to hire a cheap prostitute or get drunk in peace, away from their superiors.
What was unusual, however, was that one of the brothers, with rather a nasty, determined – one may even go so far as to say an ugly expression – grabbed Edward roughly by the arm and twisted, rather painfully; and the other monk, holding a burlap sack, raised it and expertly, as though landing a fish, dropped it onto Edward’s head and tightened the string like a noose.
As Edward tried to struggle, the third monk landed a hard fist in his stomach and Edward doubled over in pain. The monks caught him swiftly, one on either side, and carried him away, as though escorting a drunk, perhaps one of their own, back to the safety of the cloisters. Edward tasted blood and smelled rotting fish. The blood was his, the fish, perhaps, the previous occupants of the burlap sack. He gagged.
The monks hissed between themselves; sibilant words Edward could not make out. He could not escape their grip; it was like iron. Mud underfoot turned back to stone. He heard people, carts, horses. He kept hoping, surely, someone would notice, someone would raise the alarm. The watch! he thought. The night watch! Were they not paid for and maintained by credit extended by Feebes & Co.? And yet nothing, and the sounds grew dim, the land sloped, he heard a frog croaking, or perhaps only imagined it, and then the monks speaking again, in low voices, and the sound of a grate removed, metal creaking, and he was pulled, pulled through a narrow entrance and down, down.
Hell awaited him below, he knew it then, with shocking certainty. Something wet fell on his back. Things scuttled underfoot. The monks spoke in low voices. The walls were close, the ceiling low. He crouched as they walked him to his doom.
Why? he thought. For what possible reason? He had done no one any harm. He was but a lowly clerk, of a good reputation, he had not even yet started a family. Did they want to rob him? But if so they could have done it on the bank of the Rimac.
He tried to run. He turned, caught one of them unawares, pushed forward, and tripped on an extended foot. One monk laughed and another cursed. They pulled him up.
‘No more of this, please,’ one of them said.
They led him on. Through deep underground tunnels and caverns, the air dry, and here and there he heard the rustling of ancient bones. He knew where he was. He had not been long in Lima but he had heard of the catacombs beneath.
At last they stopped, and shoved him to his knees.
‘No, please,’ he told them. ‘Please, don’t.’
Silence. There was no more speaking. He heard them shuffling, rearranging around him. Ready to strike.
He closed his eyes.
‘O God, who knows us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers,’ he prayed. His lips moved almost soundlessly. He heard metal whisper against metal as one monk drew a blade. ‘That by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright.’ He wanted to weep. Weep for all he’d done, weep for all he hadn’t yet achieved. He began to cry. ‘Grant us such strength and protection, as may support us in all dangers and carry us through all temptations! Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.’
Amen.
But no help was coming, and one monk held his shoulders as the other placed a blade upon his neck. It would be over quickly, Edward thought. At least there would be that.
‘Well, finish him!’ he heard one of the monks whisper.
‘What’s that?’ one of the other two monks said.
Edward listened.
An ethereal moan filled the catacombs.
A shiver went down Edward’s spine. The blade on his neck moved away.
‘What is it?’
He heard a monk mumble a prayer in Latin. The sound of moaning, terrible and ghostly, came again, closer this time. Edward clenched his teeth, trying to stop himself from voiding his bowels in fright. Everyone knew, he thought. Everyone knew the catacombs were haunted.
‘It is El Torturador!’ one of Edward’s captors cried.
The blade clattered to the floor. The moan came again, the eerie voice echoing from the walls.
‘Santa Madre de Dios!’ another of the monks cried. Edward heard his captors turn tail and run. Their sandalled feet slapped against the stone floor, the sound growing weaker as they vanished back the way they came.
Edward was left alone.
Alone with the ghost.
He didn’t dare move. The moan came again, low and loud, more like a growl.
Then Edward realised his hands were free.
He reached up very slowly and removed the burlap sack from his head.
*
An elderly monk, in the same Franciscan habit as Edward’s would-be executioners, stood in the open entrance to what proved to be a small subterranean alcove filled with human skulls. He had not seemed to have noticed Edward at all. One possible reason for this, Edward saw, was that the monk’s habit was pulled over his waist, exposing his genitalia, which the ancient monk was very busy fondling, all the while emitting blood-curdling moans. No doubt he came down to the catacombs for some privacy. As Edward watched, the monk emitted the most terrifying cry of all, and then went limp. He wiped his hand on his habit and pulled the cloth down modestly around himself, then blinked and looked about as though awakening from a pleasant dream.
‘Please,’ Edward said. ‘Help me.’
The monk turned in fright and saw Edward. He gave a shrill cry of alarm, and vanished with alacrity back the way he came.
Edward slumped, his back to the wall.
His mouth tasted of bile, his head bloomed with remembered pain. The burlap sack lay on the floor. A lantern lay on the ground by the entrance, still mercifully burning, where one of the kidnappers must have dropped it in his flight.
The horror of his situation hit Edward then and he whimpered.
But he was still alive.
He craved water then. Water, and light and air. He looked around him. He was in a small alcove and all around him lay the dead.
He was too numb now to fear them. Skeletons lay in stacks. A shelf full of skulls overhead, the dead staring at him mutely. They didn’t care for the troubles of a Feebes, they seemed to say. To them the profit and the loss had been concluded long ago, the numbers added into sums which lost their meaning. No one remembered who they were, what they had done. Had they loved, had they hated? Did they fight in the War of Independence? The catacombs had been closed since 1826. Were these all heretics, natives or Jews, put to the screw and the rack by the Inquisition? So many of those unfortunates were buried down here. Unlabelled bones, that’s all they were. Edward was a modern man. He believed in sums, not ghosts. Still. He thought – he’d better get out of there before his abductors came back to finish the job they’d started.
Never trust a monk, he thought. He pulled himself up. He realised he was not seriously harmed, just shaken from the ordeal. He wobbled on his feet, reached out to steady himself, and found himself gripping a skull.
The skull was yellowed and old; its teeth were bad. Whoever it was had been down there a while, and was too late to try out modern dentistry. Edward let it fall. The skull rolled on the floor and came to a stop against the wall. Edward picked up the lantern, glad it had not gone out. Its flame wobbled and the smell it gave out was rank. He went out of the alcove the way the old monk went. He found a narrow corridor, with more skeletons laid in hollows in the walls. He followed it and came to a hall where piles of bones simply lay on the ground, skulls and femurs, rib cages and spines, and hands without measure. What had they held, these dead? Did they pick up a pen and write a confession? Paint blasphemy on the walls of a public commode? Did they hold sword or gun, did they hold a loved one, tilled a field, picked coca, chopped garlic for supper? He couldn’t know, and all he knew was that he had to get out of that silent mausoleum before he became one of them too. He crossed the hall and went down another corridor, searching for stairs, but all he could find were two turnings, one leading left and one right.
He went left, and along another corridor, and more skeletons and skulls, and through a hall of bones and on, and on, and the torch spluttered, and he thought it would go out. The thought of being trapped there underground terrified him.
‘Stop right there!’
Edward froze. He was afraid the kidnappers had come back for him. Then he saw the approaching light and a Franciscan monk again, this one heavy-set, with sunken eyes, who hailed him.
‘How did you get in here!’ he said. ‘The catacombs are closed!’
‘You have to help me,’ Edward said. ‘I was taken here against my will and now I’m lost.’
The Franciscan frowned, then came closer. He shone his light on Edward’s face.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They do that, from time to time.’ He shook his head at this apparent folly. ‘Come along, then,’ he said.
Edward followed the Franciscan. Along corridors and up hewn-stone stairs. Until at last they reached a door, which the Franciscan unlocked with a large key, and through it, to the outside.
Air! Fresh air! Edward drew in a shuddering breath, and looked up at a sky filled with stars. For once it wasn’t too cloudy. All the constellations seemed polished anew. He wanted to hug the Franciscan. The monk relocked the door.
‘Don’t go wandering in there again,’ he said. Then he set off and vanished into the dark of the basilica.