Haunted Echoes

by Cindy Dees

  The driver stopped on the far side of St. Peter’s Square, from where I knew the archives to be. “From here, you must walk,” he announced.

  Robert paid the driver from the obscene stack of euros in his pocket, and we got out. The morning was chilly, and we walked across the giant St. Peter’s Square and the hulking, yet graceful, curving colonnades surrounding the square, which was actually an oval. We headed east a few hundred feet, past the Leonine Wall, built as a defense against Saracens, and through St. Anne’s Gate into Vatican City proper.

  No surprise, we were immediately directed to the left into the Swiss Guard’s headquarters just inside the gate. Fortunately, their computer system was nowhere near as antiquated as their garish mustard-yellow and cobalt-blue striped uniforms, complete with conquistador-cut jackets over starched white shirts with stand-up collars that propped up their cheeks. Their puffy knickers stopped just below their knees, and mustard- and cobalt-striped spats covered their shins and shoes. They’d look like clowns if it weren’t for their stern visages and their honest-to-goodness pikes, which stood taller than they did.

  Also fortunate, they took after their Swiss namesakes and, after verifying my passport and Interpol credentials, issued me a new pass to proceed to the Secret Archives. My old one was at home, lost somewhere in the wreckage. Even if I’d managed to get home last night to retrieve it, I don’t know if I’d have been able to find it. My place was pretty trashed.

  We walked north and east to the beautiful Court of the Belvedere, which houses the Secret Archives. A pair of Swiss Guards stopped us as we entered the main courtyard, and again at the base of the staircase leading up to the Vatican Library and Archives. Each time someone ordered us to halt and produce identification, it was a toss-up whether Robert or I flinched harder. The guilt I felt at having the Black Madonna was even heavier than the statue itself in the bag slung over my shoulder. I guess I’m just a law-and-order kind of gal. How Robert had stolen art for a living and not had a nervous breakdown, I couldn’t fathom.

  But then, finally, we were inside.

  The prefect, Monsignor Perretti, met us just inside the door and welcomed us to the archives. And made sure we weren’t planning to just wander around poking into things, no doubt. “What brings you here to see us, today?” he asked me in perfect English as soon as he ascertained that I was American and Robert was Scottish.

  “I’m here to research ley lines.”

  “An atypical subject for a religious archive of this nature, don’t you think?” he said smoothly.

  “Perhaps. But I have reason to believe that the archives contain pertinent documents. Could a librarian look it up for us?”

  One does not just go to the card catalogue and browse through what this library holds. There was an entire room of indexes and inventories holding giant, handwritten volumes that listed the contents of the archives and their locations. Finding anything in this place was an art form.

  Monsignor Perretti replied, “Your search may be an obscure one. Perhaps if you come back in a few days, we can tell you if the archives contain any documents pertaining to these lines of yours.”

  A few days? Impossible! I had to get the Black Madonna back to Elise right away so she wouldn’t die! Time to cash in on that handy badge of mine again. “I’m sorry, Monsignor. That won’t do. You see, I must get back to Paris right away. Interpol business, you understand. Madame Villecourt was absolutely clear that the archives do contain information on ley lines. I’m confident that if you look, you will find something.”

  “Ah! Madame Villecourt!” The man’s’ face lit up. “Why did you not say so earlier? I will summon Father Romile right away. He always helps her when she is here. He will know which documents she is referring to.”

  Now we were talking. The prefect moved over to one of the many telephones scattered throughout the place and spoke into it quietly.

  A small, bald man who was as wrinkled as a raisin hobbled up to us almost immediately. His accent was heavy and Slavic, but his faded blue eyes lit up, as well, at the mention of Elise.

  “Please, Father. Madame Villecourt sent me here to research ley lines.”

  He nodded right away. “The Papal Registers and the Miscellanea. Which would you like to see first?”

  I had no idea. All I had to go on was Elise’s last whisper before she conked out in the hospital. “If I said ‘into the wind,’ would that mean anything to you?”

  His face creased even more into an oversized, denture-filled smile. “The Tower of the Winds. The Papal Registers, then. Come with me.”

  He led us down a corridor lined with steel bookshelves two stories tall with impossibly narrow staircases built into the second level. It was windowless and nearly dark, and we made our way down the first floor gallery past the treasure trove of documents.

  “Would you like to see a rare document or two?” he offered. “They’re really quite extraordinary.”

  “Sure,” I answered. “What have you got?”

  Father Romile chuckled. “You would be amazed at the variety. Name a great personage out of history, and I will show you something from him.”

  Without hesitating, I said, “Queen Elizabeth the First.”

  Father Romile’s ceramic grin grew even wider. “Trying to trip me up by naming a Protestant, are you? Hah. Come with me.” He detoured into a small passageway that wound back into the steel rows of shelves. “This section contains all correspondence with the popes in the sixteenth century.”

  On a hunch, I said, “How about something from—” I calculated fast. Elizabeth was born in 1533 and crowned queen at age twenty-six. In my dreams, I would place her at around age thirty if I had to guess “—1563 or so?”

  Father Romile nodded and dived into the stacks of leather books with almost childlike enthusiasm. He emerged a few minutes later, covered with dust that laid in the creases of his skin like day-old makeup. “Let’s have a look.”

  It took him several minutes of browsing the volume he’d retrieved, but then he gave a satisfied, “Aha!” Then, “My eyes are too old to read in here. What does it say?”

  I leaned over the tome in the dim light and skimmed the letter, my gut churning more and more with every word. It looked authentic all right, written in the impeccable secretary-Italic hand Elizabeth was known for. I translated the Latin in my head.

  …I entreat you most humbly to consider my offer. Immunity from insult or prosecution within my Realm to all who practice the faith of Catholicism. I ask only that you recognize the legitimacy of my reign and that of any child who should issue from my loins and whom I should name as my heir…

  I was reading the very letter I’d watched Elizabeth pen in her own hand in my dream. To say that it spooked me was an understatement. I looked up from the document. “Do you, by any chance, keep copies of the replies the popes sent to these missives in the archives somewhere?”

  “Often, a draft or a copy of the final reply is the next document in the register. Turn the page, child, and see what comes after your letter.”

  And there it was. A short, succinct note from Pope Pius IV to Queen Elizabeth.

  Neither my predecessors nor I see fit to recognize you as anything other than a bastard born out of wedlock to your adulterous father and his mistress, the sorceress Anne Boleyn. We do not now, nor shall we ever, accede to your request. We do, however, insist that you extend full protection of the law and God to those practitioners of the true and Catholic faith living within your domain…

  Yikes. Not long on diplomacy, was ol’ Pius. I could just imagine Elizabeth’s reaction to such a letter. I wouldn’t want to have been anything breakable in the same room with her! I hoped poor, long suffering Jane hadn’t been around when Liz read this particular note.

  Father Romile replaced the volume on the shelf and led us onward through miles of shelves—he told us that, stretched end-to-end, there were nearly thirty miles of bookshelves in the archives—to a small, twisting, circular stair that led upward
into the Tower of the Winds.

  As we climbed the difficult steps, Father Romile told us a bit of its history. The tower was built as an observatory, and on its top floor, the Gregorian calendar had been worked out in 1582.

  I frowned. 1582? “Wasn’t the Catholic Church still espousing the theory that the sun revolved around the earth at that time? What were they doing with fancy observatories like this?”

  Father Romile chuckled. “Many of the greatest astronomers of the ages were devout men—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, to name a few. Contrary to popular perception, the Church has always embraced mathematics and the sciences, seeing their elegance as a manifestation of God’s perfection.”

  I blinked as I took all that in. “Then why did the Church reject the theory of Earth circling the sun for nearly two hundred years after it was proposed and proven?”

  “Ah. Now we come to the heart of the matter,” the priest announced. “This is the Room of the Meridian.”

  We stepped into a beautifully frescoed room, surprisingly not crammed with books as every other corner of this place had been so far. On the floor was a zodiacal diagram oriented to the sun’s rays, which streamed into the room through a slit high in the walls.

  While we looked around in wonder, Father Romile looked over his shoulder furtively, as if he was about to reveal a great secret that he shouldn’t. His voice dropped into an old man’s papery whisper. “That which the Church declares publicly and that which it knows to be true have not always been one and the same.”

  My jaw dropped. “Are you saying that the Catholic Church believed Copernicus when he proposed that the earth circled the sun?”

  The old man scoffed, “Of course it did. We were not stupid. The greatest mathematicians and scholars of the day were priests. We grasped right away that he was correct. If you have time, I can show you the letters wherein our scholars informed the pope that it was so. And let me tell you, young lady, they are dated within a few weeks of the publication of Copernicus’s great treatise.”

  “Then why was Galileo tried by the Inquisition? Why the rejection of the truth?”

  The priest nodded sagely. “Why indeed? Why would the existence of powerful and potentially dangerous knowledge be suppressed, and suppressed brutally in some cases?”

  And suddenly, I had the feeling we weren’t talking about Copernican theory anymore. Father Romile stared at me intently, silently demanding that I answer his question. Except I didn’t know how to answer it.

  I’d almost forgotten his presence in the intensity of my conversation with the priest, but Robert said from behind me, “The Church has always done what it thought best for its followers. I imagine the Church decided that this new, scientific knowledge of the universe would weaken the faith of its believers.”

  As soon as Robert spoke the words, the answer was so obvious it had to be correct.

  The priest nodded and said, his voice barely above a whisper, “The Church was willing to go to any lengths to suppress information it believed to be damaging to the Faith. It still is.”

  And then something strange happened. A question came out of my mouth that I didn’t ask. I mean, I said the words aloud, but I swear, I didn’t think up the question or form the words in my mind. It just came out.

  “What other great knowledge has the Church suppressed in the name of protecting the Faith?”

  Father Romile clapped his hands together in glee. “You are a sharp one, you are!” he crowed. “I see why Madame Elise sent you to read about the leys.”

  And that strange, unconscious part of my mind that I was not in control of suddenly made another connection. “The Church has suppressed knowledge of ley lines, too, hasn’t it?”

  “Of course!” he exclaimed. “And magic and witchcraft and old cults, and any other number of mysteries that contradict Church dogma.”

  Excuse me. Magic? This guy was telling me the Catholic Church believed in magic at some point? And witchcraft? What about witchcraft? My already out of kilter world tilted even more on its axis. Either this guy was a little bit heretical or a whole lot batty.

  A heavy thump startled me, and Father Romile dropped a huge, leather-bound tome on the room’s lone table and opened it. A faded parchment, its ink faded to a warm yellow, lay before us. Thankfully, the priest translated the Latin for us. “Look here. This letter, from 1158, suggests the site for a great cathedral to be built in Paris over—” he ran his finger across a line of text “—an intersection of ley lines of exceptional power. It has the additional benefit of lying on an island in the Seine River, which will aid in making the citadel safe against sackers and marauders.”

  “Who is this letter to?” I asked.

  “The pope, of course. From the chief architect. His Holiness approved the site selection—” the priest flipped to a page of text later in the volume “—here. ‘I am pleased that the confluence of so many great energy lines has provided us with such a fortuitous site upon which to build. You are ordered to proceed with construction with all due haste’…” He closed the volume. “Construction on Notre Dame Cathedral was started in 1163 on the exact spot the architect recommended.”

  “Did ancient Church scholars ever study ley lines in a scientific manner?”

  “Of course. Those documents are in the next register. It’s heavy, though. Perhaps you would help me lift it down, my son?”

  Robert stepped forward and lent a hand to the elderly man. This volume was even larger than the last, taking up almost the whole table when it was opened. And then I saw why. Its contents were entirely made up of maps.

  Father Romile turned the pages carefully until he arrived at the one he sought. “Here it is. A map of all the great ley lines of Europe.”

  I gaped down at the spiderweb of crisscrossing lines. I’d seen that pattern before. I frowned, casting back in my memory for where it could have been. As an art historian, I tend to have excellent visual recall, particularly for details. It took me a minute, but then I had it. The globe in Elise’s library. It was covered with an inlaid networking of crisscrossing lines that exactly matched this map. Then another salient detail clobbered me between the eyes. The globe stood right next to the pedestal where the Black Madonna usually was displayed. Surely that was no coincidence. I decided to take a flyer.

  I lifted my rucksack to the edge of the table and unzipped it. I reached inside and pulled out the Black Madonna. “Do you know anything about this?” I held it out toward Father Romile.

  He gasped and went white as a sheet before my very eyes. “How dare you bring that blasphemy into the House of God!” he rasped. He backed away, frantically making the sign of the cross over and over in the air in front of him. He reached the stairs, turned and ran, his robes flapping behind him like crow’s wings.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Robert demanded.

  I looked at my companion, my eyes as big as saucers. “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

  “Well, I know one thing for sure. That old geezer is going to yell for help. If we’re lucky we’ll just get thrown out of here. And if we’re not…”

  Right.

  I jumped as Robert grabbed the edge of the ley line map, still lying on the table in front of us. He gave a yank and ripped the centuries-old document out of the book.

  “Robert!”

  “Yell at me about it later. Right now, we’ve got to go.”

  He took me by the arm.

  And we ran.

  Chapter 13

  R obert raced downward with the agility of a mountain lion and I was hard-pressed to keep up with him. Around and around we went, down out of the Tower of the Winds. Instead of turning right, back toward the main archives, he turned the other way. We ran down yet another long, windowless corridor-stuffed floor to second-story ceiling with books. I couldn’t believe I was fleeing like a common criminal from the scene of a crime. Me. Miss Law-and-Order. I didn’t even speed when I drove. And here I was.

  We raced down a narrow hall
of tall stacks, fear making my feet fast. And then I happened to glance over at Robert. I swear to God he was smiling. He was actually enjoying this! A sick feeling overcame my terror. I’d just helped a known felon gain entrance to one of the world’s greatest treasure troves. And on my watch, he’d stolen a priceless map. I began to slow down, to tug against his hand. I couldn’t do this. I had to turn him in. Give back the map. Hell, resign from Interpol—assuming I didn’t end up in jail alongside Robert.

  Robert had just looked over at me, a questioning look on his face as he registered my resistance to him, when the lights went out. All of them.

  Good grief! It was just like being back in the catacombs! Robert tugged on my hand, and I really had no choice. He was stronger than me and showed no sign of letting go of me. And short of letting him pull me off my feet and onto my face, I had to keep going.

  Once I had resigned myself to continuing on, we actually had a pretty good system worked out for running in the dark. I guess twelve hours spent in the Paris catacombs can do that for a soul. The fear was the same, too. The pounding heart, the pulse throbbing in my head, the second-to-second certainty that someone was going to reach out of the dark and grab me. I was beyond skittish. Beyond scared. This raw terror was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

  And then I ran smack-dab into something warm and solid and resilient, slamming blindly into what I realized was Robert’s solid back. “Oof. Sorry,” I muttered.

  “No prob.”

  “What’s the hold up?”

  “Door. Locked.”

  Locked? We were trapped? Oh, God. I was capable of dumping more adrenaline into my bloodstream, after all. My body shook from head to toe. I was hot and cold at once and my stomach felt so light it could float out of my throat if I opened my mouth. Something hard and tubular was thrust into my hands, which were so clumsy I could barely grasp the object.

  “Hold this for me,” Robert ordered.

  I recognized the cold, steel cylinder of a flashlight.

  “And while you’re at it, take the map, will you? Stuff it in your rucksack so my hands will be free to open this lock.”