The Night Villa

by Carol Goodman

  But Lyros is handing me the rope. “Perfect. Do you want to do the honors, then?”

  “Sure,” I say, taking the coil from him and securing it around my waist. I slide my canvas bag around against my back so it won’t get in my way. Lyros takes the other end of the line and starts to wrap it around his own waist, but Elgin takes it from him.

  “Why don’t I hold on to this end?” he says. “You can fix a line to a lantern to lower down once she gets to the bottom. I’m sure you’ll be better at that than me.”

  Maria clucks her tongue and says something in Italian I can’t make out—something about men and rivalry, which makes me blush. They’re not fighting over me, I’d like to tell her, this is about the Tetraktys, not jealousy. Elgin smiles at me now, his face lit by the lantern at his side. The effect reminds me of something: of Elgin’s face under the boardroom table at UT lit by his cell phone as Dale Henry made his way toward Agnes. He’d been trying to tell me something, but I’d ignored him, sure that I was doing the right thing and that he was the coward, the one hiding from danger. But if I’d listened to him and stayed put, Dale Henry wouldn’t have fallen as he shot himself, the bullet wouldn’t have gone through the table and through my left lung. I might have wished for a more active sort of heroism, but at least I can count on Elgin to be levelheaded.

  “Okay, I’d better go now before I lose my nerve. You’ve got me?” I ask Elgin.

  He smiles. “Absolutely.”

  I lower myself through the manhole, holding on to the edge until I can feel the rope tighten around my waist, and then I let go and grab the rope instead. My legs dangle free while Elgin slowly lowers me. Maria is leaning over the edge, holding a lantern, but I soon pass out of the circle of its light. What if Phineas was describing a different chamber than this one, I wonder, and I’m dropping into a bottomless pit, one of the traps for disobedient slaves that Iusta described? Or what if the chamber has become a home for snakes in the years since it was abandoned? I hardly know whether I want to reach the ground anymore, but then my feet touch smooth cold stone.

  “Okay,” I shout up. Above me I see only a dimly lit circle with a woman’s head silhouetted against the light. That’s what Phineas would have seen, I think, before the chamber was sealed. “I’m down. Send the lantern.”

  The second lantern appears at the edge of the hole and then floats down, swinging on the rope so that its light arcs over the chamber’s walls. I catch glimpses of painted figures—satyrs chasing naked women, wild beasts ripping apart men. They seem to move under the swaying light. As soon as I can reach it, I grab the lantern and pull it close to me to still the nauseating motion, but even when I’ve got it in my hands the light still quivers because my hands are shaking. It skitters over the rock walls as I turn in a circle, making the room pulsate and turning the rock blood red. I move closer to see if I’m imagining the color, but no, the walls are, in fact, painted red. I take another step closer to make out what the painted figures are doing and trip over something on the floor—a stick of some kind. The floor is littered with them and there’s a little heap of them against the wall. I move closer, holding the light directly above it, trying to make sense of what I’m looking at. At first I think it’s a pyre of firewood, the thickest log lying on top of the smaller sticks and something round perched on top….

  “What is it?” I hear Lyros call from above. “What have you found?”

  Even though I’ve guessed, I still don’t want to believe it. I turn the round object around and look into two vacant eyes. It’s a skull. The thing that looks like a charred log is actually a papyrus roll, but the rest of the heap is made up of bones. And the thing I tripped over is also a bone. The cave is littered with them as if an animal had torn this man apart.

  “Sophie, are you okay?” Elgin calls.

  “Tell us what you’ve found!” Maria calls impatiently. “We can’t see what you’re looking at.”

  “I think I’ve found Phineas,” I call. Looking closer at the skull I add, “It looks like someone bashed his head in.”

  Maria insists on coming down next. She claims that as a representative of the Catholic Church she has a right to examine any significant finds—and human remains certainly constitute a significant find. I haven’t mentioned the papyrus to them yet, but I’m sure she would include that, too, if she knew about it.

  When I hear that she’s winning her argument, I unclip my harness and send it back up with the rope, watching it twitch its way back into the light like a snake slithering up a hole. It gives me an uneasy feeling to be untethered from the upper world.

  I wonder if Phineas felt the same when they left him here. Was he killed right away, I wonder, or did the blow come after he had taken his role in the rites? Had he been sacrificed as part of the ceremony or killed because he tried to steal back the scroll Calatoria had stolen from him? Only if that were the case, why was the scroll still here?

  I hold my lantern above the charred scroll and gingerly touch it. Its blackened surface is smooth to the touch, like polished wood. Even here, below yards of rock, the temperature of the volcanic flow that covered Herculaneum had been hot enough to char and carbonize the outside of the scroll. If Phineas had been alive when the surge hit, he would have been killed instantly by the heat and poisonous gases, but judging from the crack in his skull and the condition of his bones I’m guessing he wasn’t alive. The question is, why didn’t Phineas’s killer take the scroll? Surely if it was Pythagoras’s Golden Verses, the killer would have taken it. The only conclusion I can reach is that this scroll is not The Golden Verses. In which case it could be Iusta’s diary. It won’t matter, though; if Lyros gets hold of it he’ll think it’s The Golden Verses and he’ll take it. I might never get a chance to see it, never get to hear Iusta’s voice.

  I look up. The dimly lit circle is empty. I hear the voices of Elgin and Lyros arguing about who should go after Maria, who is swearing in Italian as she tries to figure out how to secure the climbing harness. They aren’t paying any attention to me. I notice that the light from their lanterns only lights the center of the chamber. I’ve had my back to them since I found the skull and the scroll and, as Maria pointed out, they weren’t able to see what I was standing over. No one but me knows the scroll is even here.

  I hear Maria beginning her descent into the chamber. I lift the scroll gingerly, afraid that it will fall apart in my hands as some recovered papyrus scrolls have been known to do, but it doesn’t. I look up once again and I slip the charred scroll into my canvas bag. I take out the bottles of water and move them to outside pockets. It’s bad enough that I’ve just committed theft, I don’t want to add destruction of precious antiquities to my transgressions.

  I’m fastening the buckle on my bag just as Maria begins to descend into the chamber. As soon as she gets down, she sends the harness back for Lyros. When he joins us, I step back so he and Maria can examine the pile of bones and skull, dreading every moment that my theft will be revealed. My hands, I notice, are stained black from the charred scroll. Will Lyros or Maria notice traces of the blackened papyrus and realize I’ve taken it? If they do, neither says anything. In fact, they spend precious little time looking at the bones at all. Instead they’re both examining the wall opposite the pile of bones, searching for the secret door that Iusta had shown to Phineas, the one that led to the tunnels and the Chamber of Persephone.

  “Here it is!” Maria calls out, holding her lantern up to reveal a long crack in the stone. “But there’s no handle on this side of the door and Iusta said it opened into the chamber.”

  “That’s right. Iusta left Phineas an iron rod to pry it open, but I don’t see anything like that here,” John says, sweeping the lantern over the floor. There are plenty of bones, but no iron rod.

  “Of course not,” Maria says, slapping ash and dust from her hands. I’m relieved to see that she’s black with the stuff; no one will notice or remark on the charcoal stains on my hands. “She would have made sure the rod wa
s gone so Calatoria wouldn’t see it.”

  “She?” I ask.

  “Iusta, of course. Who else could it have been? She used Phineas to get the scroll back from her mistress and then either killed him herself or, more likely, left him here to be sacrificed.”

  “It does seem the most likely scenario,” Lyros says. “The question is, did she get out alive with the scroll or did she get trapped somewhere in the tunnels with it?”

  “I bet she got trapped.” The voice comes from above, like the voice of God condemning Iusta to eternal hellfire. “As punishment for her sins.” Elgin delivers his verdict in impressively somber tones. He’s leaning over the opening, dangling a lantern below him so that his face is lit up ghoulishly, like a kid telling ghost stories around the campfire. He seems to be staring at me. I wonder if he saw me take the scroll and it’s me that he’s warning, but then he ruins the solemn effect by laughing and I remind myself that Elgin’s an atheist. He doesn’t believe in hellfire.

  “The only way to find out is to explore these tunnels,” Lyros says, trying and failing to pry open the door with his fingers.

  “But remember what Iusta told Phineas?” Maria asks. “There are dozens of false passages that lead to drops where a person could be trapped.”

  “Yes, but we can go in teams, with ropes and flashlights—we can even take oxygen. I’ve explored caves far more dangerous than this. Of course, I’m happy to be the one who goes.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Elgin shouts from above. “But we’ll have to come back tomorrow with something to get that door open. Besides, I can’t raise Agnes on the walkie-talkie and she’s probably worried by now. We’ve been down here for over an hour. I think we need to go back.”

  I can see by the way that Lyros is eyeing the sealed door that he wants to go now, but he agrees with uncharacteristic humility. He takes off the harness he’s still wearing and hands it to Maria. “Ladies first,” he says. Maria narrows her eyes suspiciously but puts the harness on and accepts a boost from Lyros up toward the surface. It’s harder going up than coming down, of course, and it suddenly occurs to me that it’s going to be difficult for the last person to get out. I point this out to John when the rope descends a second time, but he only winks at me and says, “Don’t worry. I’ve gotten myself out of trickier spots.”

  I put on the harness, being careful not to crush my pack and the delicate scroll inside. Then I put my foot in Lyros’s cupped hands and both hands on his shoulders. For a moment before Elgin gives the signal for me to hoist myself up I feel Lyros’s face pressed against my breast and become uncomfortably conscious of his breath tickling the inside of my arm. My eyes fix on one of the leering satyrs on the wall and I feel a queasy mixture of arousal and fear. I realize it’s exactly the mixture of emotions on the face of the nymph caught in the octopus’s embrace. I can feel its tentacles wrapping around me…but it’s only the rope. I step hard into Lyros’s hands and scramble up the rope, not waiting to be pulled up, but climbing as fast as I can to get out of the underground pit.

  When we get back to the island, everybody is hot and tired. Agnes has been IM-ing on the laptop all the way back on the boat and appears agitated. Elgin keeps staring at me as if he knew what was in my bag. Lyros, Maria, and I are covered with black soot from the Chamber of the God—a soot that I have begun to associate with the incinerated flesh of Phineas. I want to shower more than anything, but first I take my canvas bag with the scroll inside it and lock it inside my suitcase. Then I get in the shower and stay in there for a long time to scour every trace of the soot off of me—and also because I’m revolving a conundrum around in my head. How can I find out what’s inside the scroll and, once I know, what will I do with it? Should I tell Ely that I’ve found it? But if it’s not The Golden Verses he won’t care about it, and if it’s Iusta’s diary I want first crack at it.

  When I notice that my skin is pink and puckered, I get out of the shower. I still haven’t decided what to do, but I have decided to enlist a confidante. I towel myself dry, rubbing my skin hard. When I look at my hands I see specks of black under my fingernails. I scrape at them with my toothbrush—and then throw away the brush. I dress quickly in light slacks and a loose gauze top and then go downstairs to find Agnes.

  She’s in her room staring at her laptop and crying. Things must not be going well with Sam.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I suggest, “and go into town for a drink. I need to stop at a farmacia for a new toothbrush anyway.”

  The farmacia is closed by the time we get to town, but Agnes tells me I can have one of her spare toothbrushes. “My dad packed three. Like he didn’t think they sold toothbrushes in Italy.”

  We go to the Gran’Caffe. Ely had told me to order a lemonade if I’d found The Golden Verses. Instead I order a Campari and soda with a lemon twist. Let him figure out what that means, I think; he’s the one who’s so good with symbols.

  Agnes orders a coffee gelato and a cappuccino.

  “Won’t that keep you up all night?” I ask.

  Agnes shrugs. “I don’t expect to sleep much anyway,” she says gloomily. “I might as well be alert.”

  “Boy trouble?” I ask.

  She widens her glassy eyes, holding back tears, and flutters her hands in front of her as if her emotions were a flock of unruly geese she was trying to shoo away. “I think maybe I’m too late. I think he’s fallen for someone else.”

  She looks at me with those wet eyes and pink nose and I can’t help but feel I’ve just adopted a puppy at the pound—a puppy who’s going to grow too big and have housebreaking issues. Who am I to give this girl relationship advice?

  “Maybe he’s just trying to make you jealous,” I suggest, remembering how worried Sam had looked when he talked about Agnes coming to Italy, “perhaps because he’s jealous himself. I think he might be jealous of Dr. Lawrence.”

  Agnes lets out an exasperated gasp. “Well, that’s just nuts,” she says, “when it’s clear as day that it’s you Dr. Lawrence likes.”

  I brush this remark aside. “We’re just colleagues, Agnes. But I am glad to hear you’re not involved with him. He can be…a tad unconventional with his students.”

  Agnes tilts her head to one side and furrows her brow. “I know he has that reputation, but honest, he’s never been anything but professional and generous with me. And although I’ve seen a couple of grad students flirting with him I’ve never heard that they got anywhere. The rumor around the department is that he had an affair with a grad student a few years ago and she broke his heart and he’s never gotten over it.”

  I nearly spit out my drink at this fanciful theory. Instead I make a snorting sound that makes the waiter lift his eyebrow at me. “Un’altra, signora?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, “uno espresso, per favore.” After all, I plan to stay up late. “Con limone,” I add, making a gesture with my fingertips to indicate a twist.

  “I sincerely doubt that Elgin Lawrence has ever had his heart broken,” I tell Agnes when the waiter has gone.

  “Really?” Agnes asks. “So you weren’t the grad student who broke his heart?”

  “Where did you hear that?” I ask, twisting the lemon peel from my drink into a knot.

  Agnes tilts her head and smiles: the first smile I’ve seen from her all evening. “I didn’t. I guessed from the way Dr. Lawrence looks at you, and I can tell from how you’re blushing that it’s true. Is that why you broke up with your ex-boyfriend? Because you fell in love with Dr. Lawrence?”

  “I didn’t fall in love with Dr. Lawrence,” I snap, a bit too shrilly, I’m afraid. Agnes is staring at me as if I’ve come unhinged. “But yes,” I admit, “I did have an affair with him. It was a huge mistake, which is why I’ve been worried about you getting involved with him.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Agnes assures me. “Dr. Lawrence isn’t interested in me. Maybe you should give him another chance. Like you said, everyone deserves a second chance.”

>   As uncomfortable as I was giving advice to Agnes, I like her turning it back on me even less. It’s time to turn back the tables. “Don’t worry about me, Agnes. You should just tell Sam how you feel and let him know that if he wants you, he has to let go of that other girl.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I told him. I even called him. I’m afraid I used Mr. Lyros’s cell phone; I hope he won’t be mad about it. I left a message on Sam’s voice mail and texted him twice. Then…nothing. Nada. Zip. I haven’t heard from him now in”—she looks at her watch—“five hours. I think he’s really mad.”

  “Maybe he lost his Internet connection,” I say, patting Agnes’s hand, “and is out of cell phone range.” It strikes me that this is the curse of Agnes’s generation; they’re so wired that there’s never a good excuse for not calling back and no down time to cool off.

  Agnes nods, looking absurdly hopeful, and I decide it’s as good a time as any to change the topic. “The thing to do with boy trouble,” I say, “is take your mind off the boy. I’ve got just the project for you, if you don’t mind doing something a little”—I search for the right word: illegal, unethical, dangerous, and stupid all come to mind, but instead I finish with something that sounds a little more romantic—“clandestine.”

  When I tell Agnes I have a scroll I want to scan that no one else knows about, her eyes get so wide I’m afraid she may call a carabiniere over to the table right away and turn me in to the authorities. But instead she leans across the table and whispers, “It could be that book by Pythagoras that Phineas took. We’d be the first people to see it in almost two thousand years.”

  “It could be that. Or Iusta’s diaries.”

  “Yeah, either way it would be cool to be the ones to see it first. Besides, I’m tired of George hogging all the glory. He never lets me see the scans until he’s done with them. And if this is really Iusta’s diary, well, then who better to see it first than two women?”