His feet touched bottom and he let go. He looked down, couldn’t even see his running shoes.
“You wouldn’t by any chance have—”
“Take this,” said the girl named Kate, in the same moment. She handed him a small red metal flashlight. “I keep one in my pack. For walks at night.”
“Efficient of you. Remind me,” Ned said, “to introduce you to someone named Melanie.” He turned on the beam.
“You going to bother telling me why you are doing this?” she asked, from above.
“Would if I knew,” he said, truthfully.
He shone the beam along the dark grey stones beside and below him. He knelt. The slabs were damp, cold, really big, like for a road—which is what she’d said they’d been.
On his right the foundation wall was close, below the grate. Straight ahead the flashlight lit the short distance to the sunken well, which was dry now, of course. He saw worn steps. The beam picked out a rusted pipe sticking out, attached to nothing. There were spiderwebs entangling it.
No snakes, no rats. Yet.
To his left the space opened into a corridor.
He’d been expecting that, actually. That was the way back towards the main part of the cathedral, where the placard on the wall had said a tomb would be. Ned took a deep breath.
“Remember,” he said, “the iPod’s yours. Don’t delete the Led Zep, or Coldplay.”
He bent low, because he had to. He didn’t get very far, maybe twenty steps. It didn’t go farther. It just hit another wall. He’d be right under the first nave here, he thought. The roof was really low.
His flashlight beam played along the rough, damp surface in front of him. It was sealed, closed off. Nothing that even vaguely resembled a tomb. It looked like there were just the two corridors: from the grate to the well, and this one.
“Where are you?” Kate called.
“I’m okay. It’s closed up. There’s nothing here. Like he said. Maybe this whole opening was just for getting down to fix the pipes. Plumbing. Bet there are other pipes, and more grates around the other side of the well.”
“I’ll go look,” she called. “Does this mean I don’t get the iPod?”
Ned laughed, startling himself as the sound echoed.
And it was then, as he turned to go back, that the bright, narrow beam of Kate’s flashlight, playing along the corridor, illuminated a recessed space, a niche cut in the stone wall, and Ned saw what was resting in it.
CHAPTER II
He didn’t touch it. He wasn’t that brave, or that stupid. The hairs were actually standing up on the back of his neck.
“Another grate,” Kate called cheerfully from above. “Maybe you were right. Maybe after they covered up the Roman street they just needed—”
“I found something,” he said.
His voice sounded strained, unnatural. The flashlight beam wavered. He tried to hold it steady but the movement had illuminated something else and he looked at this now. Another recess. The same thing in it, he thought at first, then he realized it wasn’t. Not quite the same.
“Found? What do you mean?” Kate called.
Her voice, only a few steps away and up, seemed to Ned to be coming from really far off, from a world he’d left behind when he came down here. He couldn’t answer. He was actually unable to speak. He looked, the beam wobbling from one object to the other.
The first one, set in an egg-shaped hollow in the wall and mounted carefully on a clay base, was a human skull.
He was quite certain this wasn’t from any tomb down here, it was too exposed, too obviously set here to be seen. This wasn’t a burial. The base was like the kind his mother used on the mantelpiece or the shelves on either side of the fireplace back home to hold some object she’d found in her travels, an artifact from Sri Lanka, or Rwanda.
This skull had been placed to be found, not laid to some dark eternal rest.
The second object made that even clearer. In a precisely similar hollowed-out recess beside the first, and set on an identical clay rest, was a sculpture of a human head.
It was smooth, worn down, as if with age. The only harsh line was at the bottom, as if it had been decapitated, jaggedly severed at the neck. It looked terrifying, speaking or signalling to him across centuries: a message he really didn’t want to understand. In some ways it frightened him even more than the bones. He’d seen skulls before; you made jokes, like with the one in science lab, “Alas, poor Yorick! Such a terrible name!”
He’d never seen anything like this carving. Someone had gone to great pains to get down here, hollow out a place, fit it to a base beside a real skull in an underground corridor leading nowhere. And the meaning was…what?
“What is it?” Kate called. “Ned, you’re scaring me.”
He still couldn’t answer her. His mouth was too dry, words weren’t coming. Then, forcing himself to look more closely by the light of the flashlight beam, Ned saw that the sculpted head was completely smooth on the top, as if bald. And there was a gash in the stone face—a scarring of it—along one cheek, and up behind the ear.
He got out of there, as fast as he could.
THEY SAT IN THE CLOISTER in morning light, side by side on a wooden bench. Ned hadn’t been sure how much farther he could walk before sitting down.
There was a small tree in front of them, the one on the cover of the brochure. It was bright with springtime flowers in the small, quiet garden. They were close to the door that led back into the cathedral. There was no breeze here. It was a peaceful place.
His hands, holding Kate’s red flashlight, were still trembling.
He must have left Melanie’s brochure in the baptistry, he realized. They’d stayed just long enough to close the grate, dragging it back across the open space, scraping it on the stone floor. He hadn’t even wanted to do that, but something told him it needed to be done, covering over what lay below.
“Tell me,” said Kate.
She was biting her lip again. A habit, obviously. He drew a breath and, looking down at his hands and then at the sunlit tree, but not at the girl, told about the skull and the sculpted head. And the scar.
“Oh, God,” she said.
Which was just about right. Ned leaned back against the rough wall.
“What do we do?” Kate asked. “Tell the…the archaeologists?”
Ned shook his head. “This isn’t an ancient find. Think about it a second.”
“What do you mean? You said…”
“I said it looked old, but those things haven’t been there long. Can’t have been. Kate, people must have been down there dozens of times. More than that. That’s what archaeologists do. They’ll have gone looking at those…Roman street slabs, searching for the tomb, studying the well.”
“The font,” she said. “That’s what it is. Not a well.”
“Whatever. But, point is, that guy and me, we’re not the first people down there. People would have seen and recorded and…and done something with those things if they’d been there a long time. They’d be in a museum by now. There’d be stuff written about them. They’d be on that tourist thing on the wall, Kate.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m pretty sure someone put them there just a little while ago.” He hesitated. “And carved out the spaces for them, too.”
“Oh, God,” she said again.
She looked at him. In the light he could see her eyes were light brown, like her hair. She had freckles across her nose and cheeks.
“You think for…our guy to see?”
Our guy. He didn’t smile, though he would have, another time. His hands had stopped shaking, he was pleased to see.
He nodded. “The head was him, for sure. Bald, the scar. Yeah, it was there for him.”
“Okay. Um, put there by who? I mean, whom?”
He did smile a little this time. “You’re hopeless.”
“I’m thinking out loud, boy detective. Got your cereal box badge?”
“Left it behind.”