The Seventh Sacrament nc-5

by David Hewson

  “Alessio,” he complained, half ordering, half pleading. “We have to go. Now.”

  “Why?”

  What did it matter if you were late? School went on forever. What were a few lost minutes when you were peering through a knights’ keyhole searching for the dome of St. Peter’s, trying to work out who was right, the humans or the flies?

  “Because today’s not an ordinary day!”

  Alessio took his eyes away from the keyhole, then, carefully, unwound the flimsy glasses from his face, and stuffed them into the pocket of his trousers.

  “It isn’t?”

  His father snatched a glance at his watch, which seemed unnecessary. Giorgio Bramante always knew the time. The minutes and seconds seemed to tick by in his head, always making their mark.

  “There’s a meeting at the school. You can’t go in until ten thirty…”

  “But…”

  He could have stayed home and read and dreamed.

  “But nothing!”

  His father sounded a little tense and uncomfortable, with himself, not his son.

  “So what are we going to do?”

  Giorgio Bramante smiled. “Something new,” he said, smiling at a thought he had yet to share. “Something fun.”

  Alessio was quiet, waiting.

  “You do keep asking,” his father continued. “About the place I found.”

  The boy’s breathing stopped for a moment. This was a secret. Bigger than anything glimpsed through a keyhole. He’d heard his father speaking in a whispered voice on the phone, noticed how many visitors kept coming to the house, and the way he was sent from the room the moment the grown-up talk began.

  “Yes.” He paused, wondering what this all meant. “Please.”

  “Well.” Giorgio Bramante hesitated, with a casual shrug, laughing at him in the way they both knew and recognised. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Please!”

  “No.” He shook his head firmly. “It’s too… important to tell. You have to see!”

  Giorgio leaned down, grinning, tousling Alessio’s hair.

  “Really?” the boy asked, when he could get a word out of his mouth.

  “Really. And…” — he tapped his superfluous watch — “…now.”

  “Oh,” Alessio whispered. All thoughts of Piranesi and his undiscovered tricks fled.

  Giorgio Bramante leaned down farther and kissed him on the head, an unusual, unexpected gesture.

  “Is it still there?” he asked idly, not really looking for an answer, taking Alessio’s small, strong arm, a man in a hurry, his son could see that straightaway.

  “No,” he answered, not that his father was really listening anymore.

  It simply didn’t exist, not in any of the hundreds of tiny, changing worlds Alessio had seen that morning. Michelangelo’s dome was hiding, lost somewhere in the mist across the river.

  * * *

  They were fifty metres beneath the red earth of the Aventino hill, slowly making their way along a narrow, meandering passageway cut into the soft rock almost twenty centuries before. The air was stale and noxious, heavy with damp and mould and the feral stink of unseen animals or birds. Even with their flashlights and the extra shoulder lanterns stolen from the storeroom, it was hard to see much ahead.

  Ludo Torchia trembled a little. That was, he knew, simply because it was cold, a good ten degrees or more chillier below the surface, where, on that same warm June day, unknown to him, Alessio Bramante and his father now stood at the gate of the mansion of the Cavalieri di Malta, not half a kilometre away through the rock and soil above them.

  Ludo should have expected the change in temperature. Dino Abati had. The young student from Turin wore the right clothes — a thick, waterproof, bright red industrial jumpsuit that clashed with his full head of curly ginger hair, heavy boots, ropes and equipment attached to his jacket — and now looked entirely at home in this man-made vein tunnelled by hand, every last, tortuous metre. The rest of them were beginners, in jeans and jackets, a couple even wearing sneakers. Aboveground Abati had scowled at them before they started work on the locks of the flimsy iron entrance gates.

  Now, just twenty minutes in, their eyes still trying to acclimatise to the dark, Toni LaMarca was already starting to moan, whining in his high-pitched voice, its trilling notes rebounding off the roughly hacked stone walls just visible in their lights.

  “Be quiet, Toni,” Torchia snapped at him.

  “Remind me. Why exactly are we doing this?” LaMarca complained. “I’m freezing my nuts off already. What if we get caught? What about that, huh?”

  “I told you! We won’t get caught,” Torchia replied. “I checked the rosters. No one’s coming down here today. Not today. Not tomorrow.”

  “So why?”

  “So we can leave you down here to rot, you moron,” someone said from the back, Andrea Guerino, judging by the gruff, northern voice, and he was only half joking.

  Ludo Torchia stopped. So did they. That much of his superiority, his leadership, he’d established already.

  “What did we say last night?” he demanded.

  “Search me. I was drunk out of my mind,” LaMarca replied, looking at each of them in turn, searching for confirmation. “Weren’t we all?”

  From dope and drink came dreams. It had been a long night in the bar in the Viale Aventino. They’d all spent too much money. They all, Dino Abati excepted, had smoked themselves stupid when they got back to the dingy house they shared near the old Testaccio slaughterhouse, the one with the statue Torchia couldn’t help but stare at each day he passed on the way to the tram and college. The abattoir was surmounted by the struggling figure of a winged man fighting to wrestle a bull to the ground, amid a sea of bones, animal and human. Mithras lived, Torchia thought. He was simply invisible to the masses.

  “We said we would finish this,” Torchia insisted.

  He held out his wrist, showed them the small wound each of them shared, made with the blunt razor blade he’d found in the bathroom, late that night.

  “We said we would do this together. In secret. As brothers.”

  They were all drones really. Torchia didn’t like a single one of them. Didn’t like anyone in Giorgio Bramante’s archaeology class if he was being honest. Except Bramante himself. That man had class and knowledge and imagination, three qualities Torchia judged to be supremely important. The rest were mere marionettes, ready to be manipulated by anyone who wanted to, though these five he’d picked with care and reason.

  LaMarca, the skinny offspring of some minor hood from Naples, dark-skinned, with an untrustworthy face that never looked anyone in the eye, was quick and crooked and could surely help if things went wrong. Guerino, a none-too-bright farmer’s son from Abruzzo, was big enough and tough enough to keep everyone in line. Sandro Vignola, the sick-looking kid from Bologna, short and geeky behind thick glasses, knew Latin so well he could hold rapid, fluent conversations with Isabella Amato, the plain, bright, fat girl Vignola adored so much he blushed whenever they spoke, and still didn’t dare ask her out. Raul Bellucci, always on the edge of terror, had a lawyer for a father, one who’d recently won himself a seat in the Senate, the kind of man who would always turn out to help his son, should the sort of influence LaMarca possessed fail to do the trick. And Dino Abati, the class cave-freak, fit, knowing, shorter than Guerino but just as powerfully built, was there to keep them all alive. Abati seemed to have spent half his life underground, and cast a greedy eye at every manhole, cave, and underground working he walked past in Rome, where there were many, most of them awaiting investigation.

  Abati didn’t say much. Torchia half suspected Dino didn’t believe in what they were doing at all, and was just looking to extend his knowledge, to pierce yet another mystery in the vast, unknown territory that was subterranean Rome. But he knew more of this strange and dangerous landscape than any of them. Abati had even led the team that found the trapdoor in an ancient pavement, close to Trajan’s Markets, which had re
vealed an underground cavern housing a hidden room and tomb dating from the second century, rich with paintings and inscriptions. His idea of weekend leisure was to spend long hours in a wet suit, waist-high in water and worse, walking the length of the Cloaca Maxima, the ancient sewer that still ran through the city, beneath the Forum, on to the Tiber and, as Torchia had discovered the one time he went down there, continued to take foul matter from unknown pipes and flush it towards anything that sought to penetrate its secrets.

  Most important of all, though, and the reason Torchia had entangled him in this scheme, Dino Abati knew caves, was comfortable with ropes and lights, knots and pulleys. He understood, too, how to respond in an emergency: a broken leg, a sudden flood, the collapse of a corridor or roof.

  For some reason — jealousy, Torchia guessed, since Abati was clearly going to be a professional archaeologist one day — Professor Bramante had kept him out of this last part of the dig. Torchia himself had only found out about the discovery by accident, overhearing Bramante and the American postgrad student, Judith Turnhouse, discussing it quietly in the corridor of the school after classes. After that he’d stolen a set of keys from the department office, copied every last one, tried his versions until they worked, letting him get further and further into the labyrinthine warren Giorgio Bramante was progressively penetrating, with Turnhouse and a coterie of other trusted members of the department. It was easy to keep secret too. From the surface, nothing was visible except the kind of iron gate most Roman subterranean workings possessed, principally for reasons of security, to keep out kids and vandals and partygoers. Nothing on the outside hinted at what lay in the soft rock beneath the red earth just a little way along from the archaeology department office, beside the church of Santa Sabina, beneath the little park, with its lovers and old men led by dogs, which the locals insisted on calling, to Torchia’s annoyance, the Orange Garden.

  The park’s real name, as he and Bramante knew well, was the Parco Savello, from the ancient Roman street, the Clivo di Rocca Savella, which led up from the choking modern road by the Tiber below, still a narrow cobbled path cut into the rock, now strewn with rubbish, the occasional burned-out Lambretta, spent syringes, and used condoms.

  There’d been a garrison at the summit of this hill once. Battalions of men had marched down that road, one of the first to be paved in Rome, defending the empire or expanding it, whatever their masters demanded. Beneath their barracks they’d created a magical legacy. Torchia was unsure of its precise date. Mithraism had come from Persia to Rome in the first century AD, the favoured religion of the military. Two thousand years ago, those soldiers must have started digging secretly beneath their barracks, creating a labyrinth with one purpose: to bring them closer to their God, then, through a series of trials and ceremonies, to bind each of them together in a fierce, unbreakable bond, a chain of command and obedience they would take to the grave.

  He’d only appreciated a part of this before. When he stole the keys and discovered, with a growing amazement, what lay in the warren of underground corridors and caverns, he began, finally, to understand. As they would surely too. In the final hall, the holiest of holies, desecrated, stomped on by some brutish, all-conquering might, came the revelation, an epiphany that had left him breathless and giddy, clinging to the damp stone walls for support.

  This was one of those rare occasions when history left a timestamp on something so old that, by normal thinking, it was incapable of being dated with any precision. He’d looked at the contents of that final room, once so glorious, once the very heart of those battalions’ Mithraic aspirations, and knew he could now name the very day it all came to an end: October the 28th, AD 312. The date of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, when a victorious renegade called Constantine destroyed centuries of history and turned the Roman Empire away from a multiplicity of faiths and put one, Christianity, in their place.

  This date was also, Vignola had pointed out, during one of their early discussions about the beliefs and practices of Mithraism, Bill Gates’s birthday. The relevance escaped Ludo Torchia but he had learned something. He was a mature student of twenty-two, who’d spent the previous couple of years travelling Asia and South America before settling down to university. The rest had come straight from school. They were just nineteen, no more than kids, at a mutable age, a time for being easily led.

  The passageway was so low here they had to crouch, bumping into one another, getting closer and closer. He wished he’d managed to find Giorgio Bramante’s cavern map, for one surely existed. They had to be almost there. He’d passed several of the anterooms without showing them in. There wasn’t enough time. He needed to maintain their attention.

  Then, without warning, Toni LaMarca was screaming, sounding more than ever like a girl, his falsetto yells bouncing up and down the corridor, forwards, backwards, like a virus trapped in some empty stone artery, looking for a way out.

  “What is it?” Torchia demanded, running the big flashlight’s beam over the idiot, who seemed frozen to the craggy, rough wall.

  LaMarca was staring in horror at his right hand, which he’d just lifted off the stone. It had made contact with something there, something living. It was about fifteen centimetres long, as fat as a finger and about the same colour too. As they watched, it moved a little, wriggling its smooth, lean body as if it hated the touch of Toni LaMarca as much as he loathed it in return.

  Dino Abati cast his own beam on the creature.

  “Flatworm,” he announced. “You get them down here. Though…” — he took a closer look — “I’ve never seen one quite like that in my life.”

  “Make the most of it…” LaMarca grumbled, then flipped the worm off the wall with one quick finger and ground his right sneaker into the thing until it was just mush on the floor.

  “Oh my,” Abati said with heavy sarcasm, when LaMarca was done. “You’ve stomped a worm. That was so impressive.”

  “To hell with it!” LaMarca yelled back. “I’ve had enough. I’m out of here. Now.”

  “Even for a babbo like you,” Abati replied, as cool as could be, “premature withdrawal seems excessively stupid in the circumstances. Remember your geology, Toni. This is tufa we’re in. Valuable rock. These corridors aren’t natural, formed by water or anything. They were dug. Part of a quarry sometime probably. Or…” — Abati’s confidence dropped for a moment — “or something else I don’t know,” he concluded.

  “So?” LaMarca demanded, with a dumb, petulant aggression.

  “So man-made tunnels come to an end,” Abati answered wearily. “It can’t be much further either. I’ve never seen an offshoot of a tufa quarry this big in my life.”

  Torchia nodded into the deep velvet blackness ahead of them.

  “You haven’t seen anything. Not yet.”

  * * *

  After a minute or so — it was difficult for Ludo Torchia to judge time in this shadowy world where the dimensions seemed unnatural, impossible to gauge — a low opening emerged to his left. It looked familiar. This had to be the place.

  To Torchia’s amazement, LaMarca was starting to moan again.

  “You said…” he mumbled.

  “I said what?”

  “You said there had to be seven.”

  “There would have been seven. If that shit Vincenzo hadn’t turned chicken.”

  “You said there had to be seven. Otherwise it didn’t work. You—”

  Furious, Torchia turned and grabbed LaMarca’s jacket, took hold of him hard, swung him past his shoulder, sent him headfirst down the rough steps, into the cavern that now opened to their left, as he expected.

  Then he took all the big lamps off the others, who stood mute, a little scared, and placed them in a line on the floor, shining inwards.

  As their eyes adjusted, the room in front of them emerged from the gloom. A shocked silence fell on everyone for a few moments. Even Torchia couldn’t believe his eyes. With better illumination, the place was more wonderful than he could ever
have hoped.

  “What the hell is this, Ludo?” There was now a note of grateful amazement in Abati’s voice.

  With more light he could appreciate the detail: the paintings on the seven walls, still with the distinct shades of their original colours, ochre, red, and blue, little muted by the years. The two rows of low stone benches in front of each of the chamber’s facings. And at their focus, in the wall facing the main entrance door, the altar, with its dominating statue of Mithras slaying the sacrificial bull, an image so characteristic of the cult it could have come from a textbook. Torchia had spent an hour staring at the statue when he first sneaked in here, touching the ghostly white marble, feeling the precise, human contours of its players. He felt now as he did then: that he was born to be part of this place somehow, created in order to belong to what it represented.

  He picked up two flashlights and approached the flat white slab set before the statue. The figures seemed alive: the human Mithras, taut and powerful, standing, legs apart, over the crouched, terrified bull in its death agony. The god wore a winged, high-peaked Phrygian cap and held the beast’s head with his right hand, thrusting a short sword into its throat with his left. A scorpion rose from the carved grass below to feed greedily from the tip of the bull’s sagging, extended penis. A muscular, excited dog and a writhing snake clung to the dying animal’s shoulder, sipping the blood from its wound.

  “At a guess,” Torchia said, answering Abati’s question, “I’d suggest we’re in what could be the largest and most important Temple of Mithras anyone’s ever seen. In Rome anyway.”

  He walked up to the altar table then ran a finger across the surface, noticing the way it cut through both the dust and the colour. He’d been right the first time. The stains there, like old rust, weren’t marks of the stone at all.

  “Until the butchers came and put an end to it all. Am I wrong?”

  “What happened here, Ludo?” Abati asked, gazing wide-eyed around the chamber.