107
Guilio puts his hand on Tom’s arm. ‘Keep a hold of me. We have a little way to go before I can put a light on.’
Tom grabs a clump of jacket and allows himself to be dragged into the darkness.
‘We’re going down two steps. Watch that leg of yours.’
‘Thanks.’ Tom can’t see his own hands, let alone watch his leg, but he appreciates the concern.
Within a dozen steps, Guilio brings them to a halt. ‘Just stay still while I find something.’
From out of the pitch blackness comes the rough scraping sound of a match being struck. It takes several attempts before there’s a burst of orange flame.
In the tiny halo of light, Tom sees a paraffin lamp and Guilio concentrating on winding up a wick.
As the flickering flame gradually grows in the dusty glass chamber, the room becomes visible.
It’s fashioned out of ancient stone.
There’s no furniture.
Nothing hangs on the bare walls.
The floor is no more than an endless slab of compressed dirt and grit.
Tom can’t see the ceiling, but he’s sure it’s unsafe and given his luck will collapse any minute.
Guilio seems to read his mind. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not going to fall down. This place has existed for more than two thousand years, so it’ll be safe for another twenty minutes.’
‘Where are we?’
Guilio squats beside the lamp and holds his hand near the glass to catch a little heat. ‘It’s an old house. There are two rooms, one to cook and eat in, another for sleeping and breeding.’
‘So it should be part of the excavation out there?’
‘It will be soon enough. The archaeologists are so focused on identifying artefacts that they’ve already recovered they have no current desire to open the dig further.’
Tom gets the feeling that he’s only brushing the surface of Guilio’s knowledge. ‘Do you know lots of places like this – secret hideaways beneath the city?’
Guilio laughs. ‘Most Roman kids do. If you’re brought up here, it’s like living on top of a thousand old building sites covered with boards and sand. Dig a bit and you just find one den after another.’
Tom lowers himself to the floor and rests against the stone wall. His left knee is throbbing. The kick he took has aggravated an old injury.
Guilio watches him feeling the leg. ‘What have you done to it?’
‘It’s been dodgy for years. Every now and again it locks up when I take a knock or a fall. I saw a doc in Paris and he thinks it’s full of gunge, bits of cartilage and gristle.’
Guilio pulls a sympathetic face. ‘You need one of those keyhole ops.’
‘No thanks.’ Tom stretches out his right arm and grimaces. ‘Shoulder might be worse than the knee. I think that guy with the bat has bust something.’
‘Let me feel.’ Guilio kneels in front of him. ‘Say when it hurts.’ He uses his fingers to feel his way from the shoulder to the neck.
Tom flinches. ‘Whoa! You got it.’
Guilio keeps one hand in place and slips the other beneath Tom’s shirt. ‘I can feel a huge bruise. That’s before I even get to the bone.’
‘Then don’t get there,’ urges Tom.
Guilio ignores him. ‘You’ve got a cracked clavicle. There doesn’t seem to be nerve damage, at least not from the way you reacted. When we get out of here, I’ll give you something for the pain and we’ll make a sling. All you can do is rest it. There’s no miracle cure for fixing collar bones.’
‘Impressive diagnosis. You a doctor?’
Guilio smiles. ‘Let’s just say I was taught a lot about the human body.’
Tom stretches out flat.
It feels good to lie down and straighten his spine and shoulders.
He mentally checks off all the aches and pains and realises it’s going to take days for his body to recover from the beating. ‘I need you to tell me something,’ he says into the flickering shadows.
‘What’s that?’
‘Everything. I need you to tell me it all. Let’s start with your relationship with Anna and finish with how come you were at Santa Cecilia at exactly the same time we were.’
108
A black rat runs into the underground cavern and stops.
It’s been drawn by the light, the warmth and the smell of the paraffin lamp.
It takes a beady look at Tom and Guilio, then turns and scrambles away.
Neither of them comments.
More important matters are being discussed
‘It’s difficult to know where to begin,’ says Guilio. ‘Do you or that policewoman friend of yours have any idea what’s going on?’
‘Let’s pretend we don’t – that way I have more chance of understanding.’
Guilio sits cross-legged on the opposite side of the lamp. ‘Anna and I were brought up together, and I don’t mean in the traditional sense.’ He lets out an ironic laugh. ‘I guess you’ve heard about the children in Romania being raised in the Piata Victoriei subways?’
‘I have.’
‘And the slumdog orphans in Mumbai and the homeless street kids in Rio?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘Well, Italy has its own secret child scandal. Anna and myself, along with a number of other kids, were brought up here in conditions like this.’ He gestures to the four walls of the room. ‘We were bred and raised underground in the catacombs and ruins of Rome.’ He picks up the lamp and twists up more of the wick. ‘Only we weren’t free from adult intervention. Just the opposite. They were the reason we were below ground. Only when we were judged to be fully compliant with the demands of the sect were we allowed to live out in the daylight.’
Tom’s not sure he fully understands. ‘You said sect; what are you talking about?’
‘It’s a branch of the cult of Cybele. It has its roots in a pagan movement going back thousands of years.’
‘Phrygian, then Greek and Roman, based around a prophetic goddess and her belief in female powers and male subordination.’
‘You know of Cybele?’
‘Only a little. I never imagined that any of her prophet sects still existed.’
‘That’s how they want it – the less people know about them, the more they get away with.’
‘Does the number ten, or the Roman numeral X, mean anything specific to you?’
Guilio drops his head. ‘It refers to a secret text they call the Tenth Book.’
‘What’s in this tenth book?’
‘I’ve no idea. It is heavily protected. Few people have ever seen it, and I suspect no men. The sect is very female-focused, so I probably only know a part of what goes on.’ He tries to make a joke of it. ‘Boys are of no particular value. They don’t even want us for our sperm, just for their rituals. It is the girls that the Mater values. They are the ones thought to have the power of prophecy and the ability to learn and protect the secrets of the cult.’
‘Mater?’ Tom remembers Anna’s fearful references. ‘That’s the name given to the female leader of the sect. I’ve never seen her without her mask and robes, but from what Anna says, she’s a wrinkly old witch in her late sixties or seventies. She and her trusted circle of crones run everything.’ He picks up a stone and throws it into the darkness, where the rat can be heard squeaking and fighting with something. ‘They believe they’re direct descendants, blessed followers of the goddess Cybele.’
‘I still can’t take all of this in. How and why did the kids end up down here?’
Guilio throws another stone. ‘Every time the sect looks like it may become extinct, new children, often babies, are brought underground into the womb and raised there. The children become adults and the cycle of complicity and abuse is perpetuated.’
‘The womb?’ Tom spits out the word in disbelief.
‘That’s what Mater calls the underground complex where she nurtures the children.’ He uses his finger to draw in the dirt in front of him. ‘Once you go below ground, there is basically a long tunnel with a series of passageways running off it. You drop level by level until it opens up into a large temple. Then there’s another tunnel that runs out from the other side into more passageways and rooms. But there’s only the one main entrance tunnel.’