Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Caroline Vermalle

  “Miss, stay where you are. My name is Brian, I’m a police officer, and I’d like to talk to you.”

  He wore a harness, he was short and muscular, with a round face. He had just graduated from the Police Academy and wanted to impress his teammate who was also on the balcony. Other units were coming in.

  “Miss, you can talk to me, I’m here to listen to you.”

  She knew he’d never get to her. One more thing she was convinced of.

  Thaddeus had been her reason for living, he had betrayed her and now he was dead. Seth had killed her. Gigi was dead, and so was her mother.

  It was time to find the green river again.

  “I’ll come closer to you, I’ll reach out to you. All you have to do is take my hand.”

  A tiny part of her hesitated. Pretend she could live without Thaddeus, without the answers. That she had just survived the pyramid and was starting her life over again.

  Like the day Gigi died. She still felt hope then. Thaddeus had kissed her and promised her that everything would be okay, but now these illusions were nothing more than ashes. Like the books in Thaddeus’ library. Like his words.

  “Don’t be afraid, Miss.”

  No, she wasn’t afraid. Soon she would have her answers.

  She stepped forward and jumped.

  III

  23

  Florence opened her eyes slowly and everything was blurry. Her mouth was dry, and pasty. She was lying in a soft bed, but her limbs were ankylosed. She didn’t know where she was, or even how old she was. She was dressed in a white dress, whose loose sleeves contrasted with the tattoos on her arms.

  When she opened her eyes, a figure stood in front of her and a hand moved towards her face.

  “Dad?”

  “It’s me, honey.”

  Florence immediately put her arms around his shoulders.

  “Careful,” Charles whispered.

  Then the memories came rushing back. Cairo. The hotel without the windows. The bloody heart in the hand of man. The five doors. Her mother’s voice.

  The fear had left a bitter taste in its wake and it took her several long seconds to calm down.

  “Oh, my darling. I’m here. It’s okay,” her father whispered.

  “What are we doing here? I saw blood, I swear it was blood.”

  “You had a nightmare, that’s all.”

  “I saw an altar,” Florence continued, running out of breath. “An altar like an Aztec thing, but like Disneyland. Why weren’t there any windows?”

  “Calm down, darling. You’ve had a very difficult few days. Oh, I’ve been so worried. The shock of the tunnels and the pyramid, it was too much for you. I wonder if there were toxic substances in this tunnel, and the trip here didn’t help either. Ah, if I had a choice, I would never have set foot here.”

  Florence was searching her memory, but it was like she wanted to grab invisible things. She remembered the twilight in the garden in Cairo. Had she passed out? But since then, nothing.

  “We’re prisoners, aren’t we? Is that why there are no windows?” she asked, sounding a little delusional.

  “No, what are you talking about,” Charles asked with a confused chuckle. “Of course not, of course not. Here, have a drink, it’ll do you good.”

  Charles walked to a side table where a pitcher of water stood, with lemon slices and ice cubes.

  “I heard voices,” she whispered. “It sounded like Mom’s.”

  Her father stared at her. He poured himself a drink, drank heavily, remembered that it was for his daughter and filled it again. He came back to sit on the edge of the bed and watched her drink. His eyelids were heavy, his skin pale, his resigned look further accentuated by the gray of his nascent beard.

  “That part was not a dream,” he finally said.

  “What?”

  “You have been asking me for a long time why your mother left. That’s why I’m here.”

  In a weary gesture, he swept the luxurious room with his hand.

  “What do you mean?” Florence gasped. “You always told me that she had abandoned us because she wanted her freedom as a woman. You told me she wanted to have a choice and that I couldn’t understand, that it was the seventies and that it was the revolution? What does that have to do with a windowless hotel room that scares the crap out of you?”

  Florence glanced around her angrily, her eyes flashing. “And where the hell are we?”

  Charles sighed and answered, “I didn’t lie to you. It was the seventies, all right. The fucking seventies.”

  “But I was born in eighty-two.”

  “Yes, but the damage was done,” he sighed. “Your mother is here. I brought you here so you could meet her. That’s what I promised her thirty-two years ago.”

  An explosion of emotions paralyzed Florence’s chest and burned her cheeks. Without realizing it, she raked her fingers through her hair.

  In the room, and beyond, there was total silence.

  “All right. You read the notebooks of Vivant. You know, now,” Charles said.

  “Did you know that?”

  “Yes. When you came to see me, I had no choice. I’ve been dreading this moment for so long. I think in the long run, I convinced myself that she would never come. But it was inevitable,” he laughed bitterly. “I even hoped that reading her notebooks would be so soporific that you wouldn’t go through with it.”

  “It’s only because of Max...”

  Her voice trailed and her stomach had become painful and bitter. But Charles didn’t seem to notice, as he kept talking with a resigned look on his face.

  “I had made a promise to your mother that if you ever came to ask me questions about Vivant, I shouldn’t put obstacles in your way, or direct you in another direction. But I wasn’t supposed to help you either, you had to find out all this on your own.”

  Florence’s eyes flickered. “But what does my mother have to do with Vivant’s notebooks?”

  “I’ll explain it to you.” Charles took a deep breath.

  He pulled the Louis XVI armchair closer to the bed. “Everything I told you about me meeting your mother was true. The love at first sight, our magical wedding, the two years of happiness we had. Thirty-two years without it doesn’t change anything, she will always be the love of my life. But when she got pregnant with you, well, things changed.”

  His eyes remained vague, lost somewhere in his memories. His body remained motionless; only his mouth, which twisted as he bit his bottom, betrayed his torment. “No, actually, it’s not that. Nothing has changed. She has always been true to herself. When I met her, she was a very free-spirited person, very stubborn as well. Eccentric. Kind of like you,” he said with a smile. “Eloise was naturally attracted by the spiritual, the beautiful, the metaphysical. Of course, the sexual and intellectual revolution of the 1970s fostered all this. On our honeymoon, we had a long trip. First India, in Varanasi, the Hindu, Buddhist mysticism, the philosophy and poetry of these exotic lands, all these things fascinated her. I remember it as if it were yesterday. She was so beautiful, so alive, in the dirty streets of Benares. Then Italy, it also had a great impact on her. Syria, Greece, she was enthusiastic about everything. When we got back, she got pregnant. I’ve told you a thousand times, you were wanted. She was so happy to have a baby.”

  “Dad, I know this story by heart, your Hindu trip, my hippie mother. But what does that have to do with all this – ”

  “Please, Flo, let me finish,” Charles interrupted. “When you were born, your mother took her responsibilities very seriously. She was interested in our names, our descendants, and in our place.”

  “And hers wasn’t with her daughter?”

  “On earth, in the cosmos, if you will,” Charles answered. “To its purpose, and, yes, yours. That’s when she told me about Vivant.”

  “But wait, Vivant was your ancestor, not hers.”

  “Ernest Devereux, her grandfather, was a member.”

  Charles had spoken these words a
s a shameful but inevitable secret is whispered. He did not dare to lay his eyes on his daughter, while she was desperately trying to read the truth on his face, so as not to have to hear it.

  “No one can understand Eloise without knowing what destiny is,” he muttered in annoyance. “In our individualistic Western culture, the idea of divine determinism, to imagine that everything is written, is absurd, because free will is the very foundation of the pursuit of happiness and self-accomplishment. And yet, some cultures will tell you that free will does not exist. That we’re just following the predetermined order of the cosmos. It is these beliefs that brought Eloise here. It was her destiny. And, apparently, it’s yours too.”

  Florence’s eyes ran through the room without seeing anything, looking for an invisible answer.

  “I must admit that I didn’t believe it completely, but when I saw the series of coincidences that led you to the booklets of Vivant.”

  “I still don’t know what my mother is doing in Vivant’s secret society,” Florence muttered angrily.

  “She modernized it,” Charles exclaimed as he stood up, pacing around the room. “She was inspired by it – well, without the murders, of course – but all their spiritual things, the happiness after death, the preservation of the ancient heritage, all that. She is a priestess guide. I am not sure. It is all very much lost on me.”

  Obviously on Florence as well, because she followed her father with wide eyes.

  “Look, it’s better if she explains it to you, it goes a little over my head. I promised her that the day you stepped onto the same path, I would bring you here. It was our deal, I did my duty. Now it’s up to you two to decide.” Charles sighed and rubbed his forehead.

  “Okay, so my mom’s in a cult, and I should be grateful to you for sparing my childhood. Now that I’m grown up, and that fate, or the gods, or a GPS error has put me on her way, she wants to meet me and see if I want to be part of her happy gang that is having fun in the graves, with or without an orphan. At least it’ll be an opportunity to get her to talk about the pyramid murder. All right. But one last thing, Dad.”

  “Hmm?”

  “We agree, I can get out of here whenever I want, right?”

  “Of course you can. Eloise invited you to spend three days with her. I’ll pick you up at the exit. I mean, unless you decide to stay.”

  “I don’t think so. Is it far from Cairo?” asked Florence.

  24

  He had barely crossed the waterfall when Max stepped into a hole.

  Luckily, it was not deep, a few feet at most, but his headlamp had broken, and he found himself in complete darkness. Once his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, he detected a thin beam of light near his feet. He tried to get up, but his hands touched unexpected materials and shapes. The floor seemed to be made of cement, from which came out a structure made of metal bars that twisted its feet. Finally, he found a flat place to get up, and his hands palpated enough to grasp it.

  He squinted his eyes: the beam of light formed a square. And before he could figure out what it was, the ground shook. A noisy breath filled the air around him as much as his rib cage, and the earth began to move.

  The panic caused him to fall flat on his backside on the floor. He could do nothing but observe an undeniable and terrifying fact: the rocks around him were growing. The square of light became more intense and cast moving shadows along the walls. After a few seconds of anguish, he finally realized he was sitting on the roof of an elevator. He looked up above him and thanked the sky. His fall could have been fatal. At first glance, he was sixty feet underground.

  The light suddenly became brighter: the elevator had reached the bottom of its shaft and entered a large room. When he stopped, Max didn’t think and rushed down.

  It was only once on land that he realized where he was.

  A massive cave.

  On the sides, carved in the rock, were two gilded pagodas of several floors, illuminated by red and gold lanterns, and two stone lions guarded their entrance. In the middle ran an esplanade that seemed to continue indefinitely, and hundreds of candles formed a sublime corridor.

  In his life, Max had rarely seen such a sumptuous place.

  “Max! Max!”

  In the shadow of the pagoda on his right, he recognized Bian, looking very pale.

  “Are you all right?”

  She lowered her head, he followed her gaze to her ankle. A deep wound tore the swollen skin.

  “Did you fall into the shaft?”

  “Are you kidding? I would have killed myself. No, I went down the cable, and I jumped. I was so mesmerized by what I saw that I didn’t notice the metal bar.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Yes, but I won’t be able to climb. How did you get off?”

  “On the roof of the elevator.”

  They looked at each other.

  “I heard a noise, so I hid.”

  “What noise?” Max whispered.

  Bian put a finger against her lips. Max hid further into the shadows of the pagoda. The echo of a monotonous female voice reached them.

  They remained lurking several minutes after the voice faded into silence.

  “We should go back up,” Max whispered. “You’ll be able to find the bike, won’t you?”

  “No way.”

  “I heard that in the caves, there were all kinds of flesh-eating bacteria. Are you gonna tell me that’s not true?”

  “No, it’s true,” said Bian, in a calm tone. “Except they don’t eat the flesh.”

  “No?”

  “They are streptococci that release toxins that kill any living cell.”

  “That’s comforting,” Max muttered. “So you’re going up.”

  “No.”

  Max raised an eyebrow.

  Bian pouted and said, “Between here and the bike, there’s a royal cobra. I’m taking my chances with flesh-eating bacteria.”

  “Sensible. So there’s two of us with a busted leg. How great is that?”

  He offered her his arm to help her up, and they came out of the shadows. The lanterns almost blinded them. It was impossible to see where this illuminated path ended, but it was at least two hundred feet long.

  “Damn it, I got blood on the beautiful mosaic,” Bian cringed.

  Max looked down. “As long as it’s yours,” he began, before stopping suddenly.

  Then he took a step back.

  “Oh, my God.”

  The floor of the cave was entirely made of marble mosaic. And in the middle, immense, as big as a pagoda, was drawn the cross with the two ends. Like on Sixtine’s belly and Livia’s neck.

  “What is it?”

  “The motif of the mosaic,” he gasped.

  “It’s the museum logo,” Bian frowned.

  “The museum?”

  “You know, the museum they were supposed to build here. They put up a sign, we drove past it on a motorcycle yesterday. On it, I remember, there were these two H’s.

  Max tilted his head. Indeed, the cross could be interpreted as two H glued together.

  ‘Do you remember the name?’

  ‘Humanitas something,’ Bian frowned.

  Humanitas. Yes, Max remembered now. The museum in Vietnam. The press article came back into his mind with surprising clarity.

  An art and antiques lover, Seth Pryce is also a notorious philanthropist, who recently announced that, upon his death, he would bequeath the majority of his fortune to good works in the field of art and conservation. He recently donated a large site in Vietnam to the HUMANITAS Foundation for the establishment of an Asian Art Museum.

  These lands belonged to Seth Pryce. The image of Sixtine in the pyramid replaced the article in his consciousness, and anger spun his blood. He was in the right place. This was where they took Livia.

  And she wouldn’t end up like Sixtine, Max would make sure of that.

  More determined than ever, he stepped forward into the midst of the lamps, listening for the slightest
noise, his chest swollen with courage and justice. He was ready to fight.

  The lights led them to a square, in the center of which stood a huge black stalagmite. On one side was a bridge over a river. On the other side, a multi-story building dug into the rock. Its perfectly smooth black granite façade was in contrast to the textured relief of the surrounding rock. Max noticed a door on the side, he motioned to Bian to follow him.

  The noises escaping from the door reminded Max of the sounds of friction.

  They then saw a slow procession of silent men moving away from the building. There must have been about twenty of them, but Max couldn’t be sure, because they were melting into the shadows of the cave.

  In their black robes, with their heads down, they looked like bats dragging their misery.

  25

  The nausea tightened Florence’s throat. Behind the door in front of her was her mother, followed closely by a terrible feeling.

  She was about to realize a twenty-five-year-old dream. But her courage was slipping away.

  She closed her eyes. How much would she have given to return home to London in her ordinary life? Go back to the blessed time of ignorance, before this sinister hotel, before Cairo, before the pyramid? Before Max?

  The memory sprang from her stomach. Max’s eyes, his fingers caressing her face, the kiss with the scent of dates and honey.

  No, not before Max. Even if she had ruined everything, she still had her heart broken.

  She suddenly felt inspired, and pushed the doors open.

  She could not quite distinguish the silhouette that awaited her, about fifty meters from her. She did not see it because it took her several seconds to understand the unreal scenery before her eyes.

  She stood in the middle of a large cave. A world of marbled walls, stalactites, arabesque rocks, ocher and green and black. She moved towards a small bridge connecting two cliffs. The ground on which its white rock lay, drawn in mosaic, was the same cross as on the stomachs of the Pryce couple. The space beyond shone with a greenish glow; it came from a river whose bed was about a hundred feet wide. She tried to probe the bottom of it, hypnotized by the emerald eddies.