His mother would have turned and asked the same thing, in fact, out of sheer stubbornness, a refusal to be dismissed, though Ned didn’t actually know that.
The man in the baptistry looked up at him again and said, softly, after a moment, “No. Not that. I thought I was…here soon enough. I was wrong. I think the world will end before I ever find him in time. Or the sky will fall, as he would say.”
Ned shook his head, the way a dog does, shaking water off when it comes in out of the rain. The words made so little sense it wasn’t even funny. Kate was tugging at him again, harder this time.
He turned and walked away with her, back to where they’d been before. By Saint-Catherine’s chapel.
They sat down on the same bench. Neither of them spoke. Across the echoing, empty space of the dark cathedral they heard a clang and scrape, then a bang again. Then nothing. He’d be leaving now.
Ned looked down at the iPod on his belt. It seemed, just then, to be the strangest object imaginable. A small rectangle that offered music. Any kind of music you wanted. Hundreds of hours of it. With little white buds you could put in your ears and block out the sounds of the world.
The world will end before I ever find him in time.
He looked over at the girl. She was biting her lower lip, staring straight ahead. Ned cleared his throat. It sounded loud. “Well, if Kate is for Katherine,” he said brightly, “we’re in the right place. You can do the praying.”
“What the…?” She looked at him.
He showed her the map, pointing to the name of the chapel. His bad joke.
“I’m not Catholic,” she said.
He shrugged. “I doubt that matters.”
“What…what do you think he was doing?” She’d seemed pretty confident, assertive, when she’d first come over to him. She didn’t seem that way now. She looked scared, which was reasonable.
Ned swore. He didn’t swear as much as some of the guys did, but this particular moment seemed to call for something. “I have no idea. What’s down there?”
“I think they’re just grates to let you look down and see the old Roman street. The tourist stuff on the wall also said there was a tomb, going back to the sixth century. But that’s something I…” She stopped.
He stared at her.
“What?”
Kate sighed. “This is gonna sound geeky again, but I just like this stuff, okay? Don’t laugh at me?”
“I’m nowhere close to laughing.”
She said, “They didn’t bury people inside city walls back then. It was forbidden. That’s why there are catacombs and cemeteries in Rome and Paris and Arles and other places—outside the walls. They buried the dead outside.”
“What are you saying?”
“Well, the info thing posted over there shows a tomb here from the sixth century. A little over from where…he was. So how did…well, how did someone get buried in here? Back then?”
“Shovels?” Ned said, more out of reflex than anything else.
She didn’t smile.
“You think that’s what that guy was? A tomb robber?” he asked.
“I don’t think anything. Really. He said he wasn’t. But he also said…” She shook her head. “Can we go?”
Ned nodded. “Not through the front, we might step into a shot and my dad would kill himself, and then me. He gets intense when he’s working.”
“We can leave the way I came in, through the cloister.”
A penny dropped for Ned. “Right. That’ll be how he got in, I bet. Between my seeing it locked and your finding the two doors open.”
“You think he’s gone out that way?”
“Long gone by now.” He hesitated. “Show me that baptistry first.”
“Are you crazy?”
“He’s gone, Kate.”
“But why do you…?”
Ned looked at her. “History lesson? You promised.”
She didn’t smile. “Why are you playing boy detective?”
He didn’t have a really good answer. “This is a bit too weird. I want to try to understand.”
“Ned, he said he’d killed children.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think…that means what we think it means.”
“And that sounds like a line from a bad movie.”
“Maybe. But come on.”
“This where the creepy music starts?”
“Come on, Kate.”
He got up and she followed. She could have left by herself, he thought later, sitting on the terrace of the villa that evening. They didn’t know each other at all that first morning. She could have gone out the way she’d come in, saying goodbye, or not, as she pleased.
They walked together down the three steps into the baptistry and stood above the grate, beside that inner ring of pillars. The light was beautiful after the dimness of the cathedral, streaming down through windows in the dome above the shallow well in the centre.
Ned knelt and peered through the bars of the grate. If it was supposed to be a viewing point, it wasn’t much of one. It was too dark down there to see where the sunken space might go.
“Here’s the bit about the tomb,” Kate said. She was at the west wall, in front of some tourist information, a typed, laminated sheet, framed in wood. Ned walked over. Basically, it was just another map-key to this part of the interior. Kate pointed at a letter on the map, and then the text keyed to it. As she’d said, it seemed someone was buried there, “a citizen of Aix,” in the sixth century.
“And look at this,” she said.
She was pointing to an alcove on their left. Ned saw a really old wall painting of a bull or a cow and below it an almost obliterated mosaic fragment. He could make out a small bird, part of some much larger work. The rest of it was worn away.
“These are even older,” Kate said.
“What was this place, before? Where we are?”
“The forum was here. Centre of town. The Roman city was founded about a hundred and something years B.C. by a guy named Sextius when the Romans first started to take over Provence from the Celts. He named it after himself, Aquae Sextiae. Aquae, because of the waters. There were hot springs until recently. That’s why there are so many fountains. Have you seen them?”
“We just got here. The cathedral was built on top of the forum?”
“Uh-huh. There’s a sketch of it on the wall. Where your dad is now was like the major intersection of the Roman town. That’s why…that’s why I still don’t understand someone being buried here, back then.”
“Well, it was hundreds of years after, wasn’t it? It says sixth century.”
She looked dubious. “It was still taboo, I’m almost sure.”
“Google it later, or I will.”
“Boy detective?” Kate sounded as if she was trying to tease but didn’t actually feel like it. Ned could relate.
He shook his head again. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, or why. He looked at that faded bull on the wall. It sure didn’t look like any church art he knew. This place was really old. He shivered. And perhaps because of that, because he felt scared, he walked quickly back, knelt again by the grate, put both hands on it, and pulled.
It was heavier than he’d expected. He managed to shift it a bit, making the scraping sound they’d heard before. The man had broken some clasp or catch, Ned saw. He just had to lift and slide, but…
“Help me, this sucker’s heavy!”
“Are you insane?”
“No…but my fingers’ll be crushed if you don’t…”
She moved, to the part he’d levered up and, on her knees beside him, helped slide it over. There was an opening now, large enough for a small man, or a teenaged boy, to get through.
“You are not going down there,” Kate said. “I am not staying to watch—”
“I bequeath you my iPod,” Ned replied, handing it to her. And then, before he had time to think about it and get really frightened, he put his feet over the edge of the pit, turned so he was facing the side, and lowered himself. Just as he did he started thinking about snakes or scorpions or rats skittering through the dark, ancient space below. Insane wasn’t a bad word to use, he decided.