I crouched and peered. I saw three little statues, standing in a row. They looked like grumpy old women wearing duffel coats. The statues were poorly made, lumpy and with grotesque faces; they weren’t even identical. But they were very ancient, I saw, worn by much handling.
Rosa said, “The Romans used to believe that each household had its own gods. And these were Regina’s family gods — our gods. She preserved them through the fall of Britain, and her own extraordinary troubles, and brought them all the way to Rome. And here the matres have stayed ever since, as have Regina’s descendants. So you see, this is our home, mine and yours. Not Manchester, not even Britain. This is why we belong here, because this is where our deepest roots go down into the earth. This is where our family gods are …”
All part of the sales pitch, I told myself. And yet I was impressed, even touched. Rosa made a kind of genuflection before moving on.
A way farther on, we came to a doorway.
It was a big room — I strained to see — but it had the atmosphere of an old people’s rest home. A series of large chairs had been set out in the musty dark. The chairs looked elaborate, as if packed with medical equipment. Figures reclined in the chairs. Attendants moved silently back and forth, nurses perhaps, but wearing the bland smock uniforms of the Order. Most of the “patients” wore blankets over their legs, or over their whole bodies, and drips had been set up beside two of them. The faces of the women in the chairs looked caved in, old. But I could see bulges over the bellies of several of them, bulges that looked like nothing so much as pregnancy.
In one of the chairs, far from the door, a woman was sitting up. She looked younger, and her hair looked blond, not gray. Something about the shape of her face reminded me of Lucia. But she was too far away for me to see clearly, and an attendant came to her and pressed something to her neck, and the woman subsided back into silence.
“A hundred years old, and still fertile …” Rosa murmured.
It was all just as Peter and I had put together from the garbled accounts of Lucia and Daniel. But even so, standing here, confronted by the almost absurd reality of it, it was all but impossible to believe.
She squeezed my hand, hard enough to hurt. She led me farther on; her fingers were strong and dry.
We approached another doorway, cut into the rock. Light poured out, comparatively bright, and I heard a noise, chattering, high-pitched, and continuous, like seagulls on a rock.
There were babies in here. They were all very young, no more than a few months old. The walls were painted bright primary colors, and the rock floor was covered by a soft rubber matting, on which lay the babies — all pale, all wispy-haired, all with blank gray eyes — so many I couldn’t even count them. The air in the room was hot, dense, moist, laden with sweet infant smells of milk and baby shit. As I gazed in at this the women of the Order pressed around me as they always did, warm and oddly sweet-scented themselves; a part of me wanted to struggle, as if I were drowning.
“From our oldest inhabitants,” said Rosa dryly, “to our youngest.”
“It’s all true, isn’t it, Rosa?” I asked her with cold dread. “Just as Lucia said. You turn young girls into old witches and keep them alive, keep them pumping out clutches of kids every year, until they’re a hundred …”
She just ignored me. “You never had children, George. Well, neither did I. We have our nephews, I suppose, out in Miami Beach. I’ve never even seen them …” Her hand tightened on mine, and her voice was insistent, compelling. It was almost as if I were talking to myself. “You never meant to be childless, did you? But you never found the right woman — not even the girl you married — never managed to create the right environment around yourself, never found a place you felt comfortable. And the years went by … No kids. How does that make you feel? Our little lives are brief and futile. Nothing we build lasts — not in the long run — not stone temples or statues, not even empires. But our genes endure — our genes are a billion years old already — and they will live forever, if we pass them on.”
“It’s too late for you,” I said brutally.
She flinched. But she said, “No, it isn’t. It’s never too late for any of us — not here.
“Look at these children, George. None of them are my own. But they are all — cousins. Nieces, nephews. And that’s the reason I will always stay here. Because this is my family. My way of beating death.” Her face seemed to float before me in the gloom, intense, like a distorted reflection of my own in smoky glass. “And it can be yours.”
At first I didn’t understand. “Through nieces and nephews?”
She smiled. “For you, there might be more than that. George, every child needs a father — even here. But you want the father of your nieces to be strong, smart, capable: you want the best blood you can find. It’s best if the fathers come from the family, as long as they are remote enough genetically — and the family is so big now that’s no problem …”
She was finally getting to the point, I realized uneasily.
“George, you’re one of us. And you’ve shown yourself to be smart — resilient — decent, too, in your impulse to find me — even in your attempt to help Lucia, misguided though it was.”
I tried to think through what she was saying. “What are you offering me? Sex?”
Rosa laughed. “Well, yes. But more. Family, George. That’s what I’m offering you. Immortality. You came looking for me, looking for family. Well, you found both. A true family — not that flawed, sad little bunch we were in Manchester.”
I could stay here, that was what Rosa was telling me. I could become part of this. Like Lucia’s Giuliano, I thought. And by submitting myself as a stud — it seems laughable, but what else could you call it? — I would find a way for my heritage to live on.
For a moment I didn’t trust myself to speak. But none of this seemed strange or disturbing. On the contrary, it seemed the most attractive offer in the world.
My cell phone trilled. It was a bright, clean, modern sound that seemed to cut through the murk of blood and milk that filled the air.
I pulled my hand away from Rosa. I dug out the phone, and raised it to my face. The screen was a tiny scrap of plastic, backlit with green, that glowed bright as a star in that enclosing gloom. A text showed: GRT DNGER GET ARSE OUT PTR I turned off the phone. The screen went blank.
Rosa was watching me. Around her the steady stream of white-robed women pushed past her, as they always did.
“Get arse out,” I said.
“What?”
“He’s right.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “I need to get out of here.”
Rosa’s eyes narrowed.
The others, the women nearest me, reacted, too. Some of them turned to me, even breaking their stride, looking at me in a kind of mild dismay. Their reaction spread out farther, as each woman responded to what her neighbor was doing. It was as if I had detonated an invisible bomb down there, and ripples of dismay were spreading out around me.
At the focus of all that, I felt ashamed. “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.