“Why do you assume it’s a guy?”
“Figure of speech. You’re not sure of a person’s gender, you tend to use the male singular personal pronoun. Maybe he’s an alien, or a zombie, or a goddamned unicorn.”
She bites down on her bottom lip for a beat while her eyes focus on something down on the floor.
“Whoever he or she is,” she says, “they’re not magical.”
“How’s that?”
“He, or she, simply plans escapes very carefully and very much in advance.”
I follow her eyes, peer down to the floor. At the same time, I discover a trap door that must lead into the murky depths of old Florence.
19
The trap door is accessed by an old metal handle recessed into a thick, heavy wood plank. Now on bended knee, I take hold of the handle and pull up on it. I find cobwebs attached to the bottom of the door. Cobwebs recently disturbed, as in only seconds ago.
“Borrow your Maglite again?”
Andrea hands it to me. Turning it back on, I point the LED flashlight into the tunnel and immediately see death. That is, I see the skull face of a man dead probably five or six hundred years. His dark sockets seem like they’re staring directly up into my face. Warning me. Begging me to go back.
“Hope you’re not squeamish,” I say, swinging my legs around and dropping myself onto the sloping side of the tunnel until my boot heels land on top of a flat, altar-like platform that serves as the final resting place for the skeleton.
“I’m a soldier and a spy,” Andrea says, following me boots first into the tunnel. “I don’t scare so easy.”
We both jump down from the stone bed, onto the solid rock floor. I shine the light against both walls and reveal more crypts full of bones. Some of them containing possibly hundreds of stacked skulls, others just leg bones, and still others … arm bones.
“It’s a catacomb,” I say, the damp, musty air filling my nasal passages. “I’m not aware of any catacombs below Florence.”
“Neither am I,” Andrea says, following close behind. “But then, why would I be?”
We walk, taking it slow, the floor going from dry, to damp, to wet. The cool, foul smelling water comes up to our ankles. The walls, for the most part, are plain, blank stone hewn by hand. Walls built centuries, if not a thousand years, before. Soon, that blank canvas becomes the home to symbols of the medieval era. Coats of arms chiseled into the stone, the Christian cross, and even the crescent moon of Mohammad.
Farther up is another series of carvings that still contain some of the patina from the paints that once gave them color. Like some of the Renaissance paintings I observed with Andrea and Deputy Inspector Millen, there’s a scene of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. Above their heads is a triangular-shaped object, and spewing forth from its tail is what appears to be fire and smoke.
Andrea pauses to study this image, along with a few others that appear to be created by the same hand.
“Chariots of fire, Chase,” she says. “That’s what the ancients thought of these unidentified flying objects. But they are clearly something out of this world.”
“Back to E.T.,” I say.
“How do you attempt to explain away the image of a space ship inside this ancient tunnel?”
She’s got a hell of a point.
“Let’s just keep going and hope we not only find our man, but a way out of this thing.”
We walk for another few minutes. Not talking, but listening, smelling, feeling with our senses at high alert.
“Chase,” Andrea whispers after a while, her voice reverberating off the stone walls, “what’s that sound?”
“What are you talking about?” I say over my shoulder.
“It sounds like chewing.”
I stop in my tracks, listen. I might not have noticed had she not said anything about it, but there is a noise coming from up ahead in the tunnel. Chewing just might be the perfect word for it. It sounds like thousands of little mouths chewing on dead leaves.
“Maybe we should go back,” Andrea says. “This little search could be a fool’s errand. We have our sketch book. Let’s just go.”
“Our man, if he is a man, went this way. And this is more than just finding him to thank him. He appears to know a hell of a lot about da Vinci and where to find precisely what we need to find. Plus, if we go back to the museum, there’s a good chance the cops will be there to greet us. So let’s keep moving.” I smile. “Unless, of course …”
She looks at me with wide eyes. “Unless what, Chase?”
“Unless, of course, you’re afraid.”
She cocks her head, peers not at me but through me with one eye open, the other all but closed.
“I’ll show you how afraid I am, Chase Baker,” she sneers, stealing the Maglite out of my hand, shoving her way past me, taking the lead. “How about you follow me.”
She doesn’t make it four or five steps before falling through the floor.
20
Thrusting my hands out before me, I make a flying leap at her. Trying to grab onto her. But I’m not even close. I go to the opening in the floor and see immediately that she stepped on a wood panel that rotted out long ago. Her fall was no more than nine or ten feet, but that’s enough of a vertical distance to do some serious damage to the human body, especially if she were to fall on her head. In this case, she’s shining the Maglite up at me from where she lies inside a thick wood coffin, directly on top of the remains it contains. The now destroyed wood lid that belonged to the coffin broke her fall, as if she fell directly onto a cushion of balsa wood and air.
“You okay?” I ask. “You must have fallen into a sub-chamber.” I take a further look around the room that measures maybe fifteen by fifteen feet. “By the looks of it, a private burial chamber. Probably owned by someone pretty filthy rich.”
“Well, right now, I’m the one who’s filthy,” she grouses, pulling herself up and out of the coffin, revealing a body that’s clad in full body armor and bearing a shield graced with the Fleur-de-lis of Florence. “Please get down here … now, if not sooner.”
I point at myself. “You mean me?”
“No, the other idiot standing behind you … Yes, you!”
I feel the breath escaping my lungs. This is most definitely not how I wanted the search for the man who keeps helping us to go. Assuming a seated position on the wet floor, I drop my legs into the hole, and slide myself down into the chamber, my feet landing not inside the coffin, but to the side onto the stone coffin altar.
Jumping down onto the dirt floor beside the altar, I take a quick look into the coffin, use my gloved hands to dust off the shield.
“The French loaned Renaissance Florence the fleur-de-lis while proudly naming it Paris’ sister city,” I say. “Whoever was buried here must have been a great diplomat or a perhaps even a member of the Medici clan, judging by the method and placement of the coffin.”
The suit of armor is rusted in spots and sporting holes and cracks from the ravages of time. But it is, otherwise, remarkably preserved for a something so ancient. In fact, pushing back the gloves that still cover his hands, I reveal skin. Parched, severely aged skin. But skin all the same. Skin that the temperate conditions inside the chamber has more or less mummified.
“I wonder what his face looked like?” she says.
“Only one way to find out,” I say, reaching into the casket with both my hands, taking hold of the helmet, and pulling it off.
Andrea shrieks.
I feel my heart jump into my mouth, my throat constricts.
The face isn’t a human face at all. Rather, it might indeed be human, but it’s so disfigured and even grotesque, that it makes my stomach turn to look at it, even in death.
“Is that a human being?” Andrea asks, the expression on her face soured and troubled.
“The body certainly seems human. But the face looks more like an animal.”
For brief moment, I’m reminded of experiments biologists have p
roposed about growing human organs inside the embryos of pigs and other animals. The problem being, of course, that the animal could actually take on human qualities, or vice-versa. It’s exactly how I put it to Andrea.
“You believe it’s conceivable Renaissance period physicians could have been working on a genetic level?” she says. “That’s impossible.”
“You’re right,” I say. “What I’m describing are twenty-first century experiments. Not fifteen or sixteenth century tests combining human genes with animals. They are still only being theorized.”
She bites down on her lip for a beat. Until she says, “Da Vinci. There’s more to his having just entered into the cave all those years ago. Some say that, as a young adult, he entered the cave, not to be seen again for more than two years.”
“How can that be? He wouldn’t have been able to survive inside a cave for that long without having to come out now and again for food and water.”
She shakes her head. “That’s just it. It’s an unsolved mystery. All we know is there’s a gap in his timeline and it corresponds to a one of the few biographical notes he made about himself, listing a date and day he entered the cave. The next we hear of him is two years later. For all we know, he wrote about his experiences in the Book of Truths.”
“We don’t exactly have time to read it right now, so give me the Cliff Notes.”
“It’s like I explained to you in the headquarter’s interview room, some have speculated that when he went into the cave he was abducted by extraterrestrials who took him into space and taught him not only the wonders of our modern world but showed him precisely what the future would look like.”
“E.T. again,” I say, under my breath.
“Call it E.T. if you want, Chase, but when he returned to Florence from that two-year absence, he started inventing machines that couldn’t possibly be constructed using the technology of that time. He also started obsessively drawing what would come to be known as the grotesque heads.” She points to the man, or beast, laid out in the coffin. “I think we’ve just discovered our first real grotesque man. Proof they really existed. Proof da Vinci wasn’t just sketching from imagination, but, instead, recording history. Or, the history to come. Proof he’d witnessed the modern day genetic experiments between humans and animals.”
I pull the Book of Truths out of the satchel, open it.
“Maybe there’s a history of this man/animal inside the book,” I say, carefully, but rapidly, rummaging through the pages until I come to a sketching of someone laid out in a coffin. It matches our man, the head grotesque, pig-like, and not of this world.
“Dear God, that’s him, or it,” Andrea says looking over my shoulder.
There’s another sketch accompanying the man. It’s Vitruvian Man.
“There’s our V-man again,” I say. I feel my built-in shit detector speak to me. I turn, and there on the wall is the very faded, but still visible, carving of Vitruvian Man.
“Da Vinci has been down here,” I say. “He made pains to sketch this poor creature and to carve the Vitruvian Man on the wall, following with a sketch in the Book of Truths.”
“Question is, why?” Andrea says. “Why go to the trouble to record this man’s burial chamber?”
I’m rattling my brain for an answer when I hear the sound of chewing once more. Only this time, the chewing noise is growing louder and louder with each passing second.
“What the hell is that?” Andrea says, drawing her weapon.
“I don’t know.” I swallow. “But I don’t like the sound of it.”
We both stand stone stiff, enough fire power in both our hands to take down a small army. But, somehow, I feel like bullets are not going to work against whatever is coming our way. Then, out the corner of my eye, I see it emerging, if not oozing from a small hole in the stone wall.
A centipede.
But not the kind of small, two or three-inch long centipede I might have uncovered in my damp garage back in upstate New York when I was growing up. This sucker must be a foot long if it’s an inch, and maybe an inch and a half in diameter.
“Chase, what the hell is that?!” Andrea barks.
Coming up from out of the floor, centipedes. Dozens … hundreds of them, creeping out of small, coin-sized holes in the floor and walls. Holes I never noticed in the dark room until now.
“The place is infested,” I say. “Stomp your feet.”
“There’s too many of them, Chase.”
I’m stomping my feet, feeling the crush of the insect’s shell-like bodies, their guts splattering under my soles. But Andrea is right. There’s too damn many of them. I feel multi- legged bugs dropping on my head. I swat them away as fast as they drop onto my scalp.
Andrea screams as a long centipede crawls into her hair, runs its never-still legs around her neck.
“Oh, Christ,” she shrieks, “get us out of here, Chase.” Then, “Ouch! The bitch bit me.”
“They’ve got pinchers,” I say, swatting more of them from my legs and arms.
Shining light on the walls, I’m not seeing an opening. Only the life-like Vitruvian Man carved into the far wall.
“We need to leave the way we came,” I say.
“How?” she shouts. “We don’t exactly have a ladder at our disposal.”
The crunching noise is almost deafening, the floor and walls nearly covered entirely in centipedes. We stay down here another minute, they will overtake us and sting us until we’re paralyzed with toxic shock. Then they’ll suck the life from us. Literally.
I focus my eyes on the wood coffin.
That’s the ticket …
“I’ve got an idea,” I say.
Climbing onto the altar that bears the coffin, I shove my hands under it and heave. It takes almost all my strength, but the dead body inside it spills onto the floor.
“My apologies, old boy,” I say. Then, “Give me a hand.”
Andrea is slapping away at the centipedes, ripping them away from her neck, pulling them from her hair. Her eyes are wide and wet. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she was crying. Still, she manages to climb up onto the altar.
“Help me tip this thing up.” She bends at the knees and shoves her hands under the heavy casket while I lift it a few inches off the platform. “Okay,” I say. “When I say go, give it all you got and heave.” A dozen centipedes drop from the ceiling onto her head, disappearing into her hair. Another couple drop onto my head, one of them attempting to crawl into my ear. I scream, “Go! Go! Go!”
We pull upwards with all our strength, lifting the casket so it stands on end.
Slapping the long insect from my ear, I join my fingers at the knuckles, invert the hand, make like a footrest.
“Put your foot in here,” I command, “then grab hold of the casket top and pull yourself up and out of the hole.”
“Brilliant!” she barks. “What about you?”
“I’ll be right behind you. Just go. Now. Go!”
Stepping into my finger-locked hands, she reaches for the top end of the rectangular casket, then heaves herself up like she would with a chin-up bar. There’s so much adrenalin shooting through her system, she practically tosses herself head-over-heels over the casket and out the chamber floor opening directly above our heads. Lying herself out flat on the floor, she extends her hand to me.
“Come on,” she says. “You’re next.”
The centipedes have taken over the floor. There’s no sign of the stone walls, only thousands of insects crawling over one another, seeking out precious food in the form of human flesh. My flesh.
Bending at the knees, I jump up, and manage to grab hold of the casket. Then, using my arm strength, I pull myself up and seize hold of her hand. Between her pulling on my arm and my pushing myself off the casket, first with my free hand and then both my legs, I manage to make a hasty exit from the chamber through the opening.
“Centipede check,” I say, running my hands through her hair, then patting her back and her legs.
She does the same for me.
“I think we’re clean,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to itch for the rest of my life or not have nightmares.”
“Are you stung or bit badly?”
She shakes her head. “Mostly just creeped the hell out is all.”
“Me too,” I say. “Those insects have probably been nesting there for centuries. When Florence eradicated most of the plague ridden rats, I think it’s safe to say they thrived.”
“Survival of the fittest,” she announces. Then, looking me in the eye. “What’s next?”
“We follow this tunnel out,” I say. “Maybe we still have a shot at running into our mysterious benefactor.”
“Doubtful,” she says.
“Well, we have the Book of Truths. Let’s get out of here, get back to my place, and figure out where the hell that cave is located.”
“That’s why we hired you.”
“So far, so good, girlfriend.”
“Don’t push your luck, boyfriend.”
The Maglite cuts through the eternal darkness of the tunnel.
We walk, strangers in a strange and unforgiving underground land.
21
We walk the catacombs for another fifteen minutes until we come upon a vertical tunnel that appears to access the outside world. Precisely where that outside world is, however, is anyone’s guess. Standing at the bottom of the vertical shaft, looking up at what seems to be a metal cover, much like a manhole in a road. A metal ladder, that looks older than time itself, is bolted into the stone wall. What other choice do we have but to climb it?
“You first,” Andrea says.
“Oh, thanks,” I say. “Why is it always brawn before brains?”
“Why didn’t you say brawn before beauty?”
“A woman is running for President. She wouldn’t like my objectifying you.”
Gripping the old, rusted rungs, I start climbing. The ladder seems solid and in decent shape. Whoever constructed it meant for it to last a good long time.
Chase Baker and the Da Vinci Divinity (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book 6) Page 8