The Night Villa

by Carol Goodman

  Until the time comes when we have to flee,

  casting off the Night for Day!

  We are a shining circle. We!

  She drew the fibula from her robe, releasing the black cloth so that it fell from her shoulders, slid down her body, and puddled around her ankles. Thus she cast off the mantle of night and stood naked in the torchlight, her skin as whitely iridescent as a freshly shucked oyster. Each of her attendants in turn, after first placing their torches in brackets on the wall, removed the pins holding their robes and stepped out of them as though discarding a shell they had outgrown as certain mollusks are said to do. When they were all naked, they each repeated the line: We are a shining circle. We! And then one by one they dived into the sea and disappeared.

  “Where have they gone? It’s as if they have vanished into the sea,” I observed.

  “There’s an underwater passage that leads to the open sea. They’ll be back soon, so we must hurry.” Iusta was already climbing over the ledge into the grotto and feeling along the wall for the place where Calatoria had replaced the scroll.

  “That poem Calatoria read,” I said, following her, “was definitely from Pythagoras’ Golden Verses, but I don’t understand why she chose that one. I thought these little mysteries were more about Persephone and Demeter and yet the rites as I’ve seen them so far seem to be markedly Dionysian….”

  “It’s a combination of the two,” Iusta said, cutting me off quite brusquely. I suppose she was merely anxious to retrieve the scroll and be gone before Calatoria and the women resurfaced. “I thought you understood that. Here. I think this is your precious Golden Verses.” She withdrew a rolled scroll from the wall and handed it to me. I opened it to the first column of writing and saw that it was indeed the scroll I had brought with me from the Temple of Poseidon—the only extant copy of Pythagoras’s famed Golden Verses, a work that some have even doubted existed, believing that the great philosopher never wrote down his teachings. I had counted on selling it to Gaius Petronius Stephanus for a large sum of money, but instead I would take it to Rome and it would be the making of not only my fortune, but of my fame.

  I looked up to tell Iusta that it was indeed the right scroll and to share with her my joy at rediscovering it, but she was still looking for something in the hole, her arm submerged in the crack in the wall up to the shoulder. Finally she retrieved another scroll: her diary, no doubt. She unfurled it to check that it was what she sought—it was only a short length of papyrus, loosely wrapped in a leather cover—and then, satisfied, she rolled it back up and slipped it into a soft leather pouch that was slung across her chest. I was touched to see that she had also brought with her the little terra-cotta statue I’d given her.

  “We have to hurry,” she said. “Look how rough the water is. Calatoria and her women won’t stay out long in this.”

  I saw what she meant as we made our way back to the ledge. The surface of the water was choppy as if stirred by a strong wind, but there was no wind in the grotto. Iusta had already climbed up onto the ledge, but I knelt by the water, stirred by curiosity, and scooped up a handful of tiny stones that floated on the surface, each light as air, like petrified sea foam.

  “Hurry!” Iusta called.

  I followed her, still holding a handful of the frothy stones, over the ledge and then through the tunnel, only catching up with her at the entrance to the Chamber of the God. She was kneeling in the open doorway, looking for something on the ground.

  “I think this is discharge from the mountain,” I said, showing her the little stones. “I’m afraid that if this material is falling into the sea this far west that it might be wise to remove ourselves farther west, perhaps to Neapolis or even Misenum.”

  “Yes,” Iusta said, getting to her feet. I caught a glimpse of the iron bar she had left for me before. Of course, I thought, if she left it behind, Calatoria would know she had helped me. “I think you’re right. There’s a way to the surface that would take us up outside of the villa not far from the road to Neapolis.” She hesitated while she caught her breath, and stared hard at me as if she were trying to solve some problem or decide a question. “We could both go now.”

  “Oh, but then I’d miss the rest of the rites and I have to admit I’m intrigued by this mixture of Eleusinian and Dionysian elements. And of course my absence would alert your mistress to the theft….”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Iusta said, the look of uncertainty fading from her face. She added: “As usual, your logic is infallible. Calatoria would certainly be disappointed to find you gone. You are the main event. You stay and I’ll go ahead with the Golden Verses. I’ll wait for you at the end of the tunnel and we can go on to Neapolis together.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “Aren’t you to be included in my part of the rites? I thought you were to be Persephone to my Hades.”

  Iusta looked away, embarrassed no doubt by the role she would have played in that scenario. “No,” she said, looking back up to me. Her look was almost one of pity. “I really don’t play that important a role in Calatoria’s scheme. My part is over and you…you do get to play a god, but not that one.”

  “Oh,” I said, striving for a light tone, “as long as I get to play one of the gods. I’m not picky.” I’d meant it as a joke, but she didn’t laugh. Instead she lifted a hand as though to touch my cheek, but instead she took the scroll from my hands and began turning away. She opened her pouch and took out her diary. “Here,” she said, “I’ll protect your precious scroll with my own life, so to speak.” She wrapped the layer of papyrus and leather around the Golden Verses and then placed the whole back in her pouch.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked teasingly.

  She turned to me and for a moment her face looked ghastly. Poor girl, the theft of the scroll must be weighing on her. “What?” she asked.

  “You have to tell me the signs to follow to find my way out,” I said.

  “Of course. The way up is not as simple. First you choose the tunnel marked with a lyre—”

  “For Orpheus, no doubt, who made the trip back to the surface.”

  “Yes, but then you will come across several forks, each path marked with a different symbol. I have not seen the paths myself, but I have heard Calatoria say that you must chant as you go, ‘The evil I flee, the better I find.’”

  “Ah, that is a quote from Demosthenes’s account of a Dionysian ritual! So to escape the underworld you must always shun the evil way and choose the better one.”

  “Yes, I can only hope the choices will be clear when I see them. You, I have no doubt, will have no problem choosing as you are so learned in signs and portents.”

  I bowed my gratitude at her compliment and once again she turned to leave, but once more I detained her. “I wish I had a light to write by.” She stopped and felt inside her pouch then and withdrew a small shell filled with wax and lit its wick from her torch.

  “Here,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you left in the dark. I’m sure you have a lot to write down.”

  “Indeed I do. What a marvelous story I’ll have to tell. I don’t doubt but that my story will make me as popular a figure in Rome as will my possession of the Golden Verses. Especially when I add to my account the experiences that I’m about to have.”

  “Yes,” Iusta said, “that would be something to read. Well, then, until we see each other again,” she concluded, “in the other world.”

  I laughed, realizing she meant the upper world as opposed to the underworld we now inhabited. She left through the secret door, closing it behind her, and I made myself comfortable with my back against a wall to write this account.

  Now that I have come to the end I look around me and see in the light of Iusta’s candle that the walls are painted with the story of Dionysus Zagreus. Here is his birth by Persephone and Zeus. (Of course, I realize now, that is why Iusta’s role was done. She was the mother of the god in this rite, not his wife!) And here is jealous Hera tricking t
he titans into devouring the baby. The picture of the Titans tearing the child limb from limb and eating him is quite vivid. So, too, is the picture of Athena carrying the child’s dripping heart to Zeus and Zeus eating the heart so that his son may be reborn as Dionysus—or Dionysus Zagreus, as he is sometimes called. Now I understood why Calatoria had wanted the Golden Verses so badly. It’s all about rebirth—dying and transformation—the road to perfection that comes through transmigration.

  I hold my candle up and see the story repeated on the walls, only in some versions it’s a band of women who hunt down a man who stands in for the god. Here they are ripping him apart and here they are stuffing their mouths with his torn and bleeding limbs…. Ah, I hear them now. Calatoria and her women risen from the sea. They are singing. The ground shakes with their dance. I hear the rasp of stone as the secret door opens. They have come for me. I must blow my candle out and lie down so that they don’t know I am unbound. I must put down my pen now and prepare myself to become a god.

  “Oh my God,” Agnes says when we’ve both come to the end of the scroll. “Those women are going to eat him, aren’t they, Dr. Chase?”

  I think of the scattered bones in the chamber and the shattered skull and the paintings on the wall. Zeus swallowing his son’s heart, raving women taking down a running man as though he were a deer.

  “I guess it’s possible.” I stare at the characters on the screen as if they might rearrange themselves and tell a different story.

  “Iusta knew and she still left him there. She could have saved him.”

  I glance back over Iusta’s parting lines to Phineas. “She gave him a chance. She offered to lead him back to the surface, but Phineas refused. He was too enamored of the part he was going to play in the rites.”

  “Still, she could have told him—” Agnes breaks off. I realize that she’s crying. When I put my arm around her, she crumples against me, her body racked with sobs. Is she really crying for a betrayal that occurred almost two thousand years ago? Or is it the more recent tragedy that’s caught up with her?

  “We shouldn’t judge Iusta too harshly,” I say, aware that I, too, am disappointed in the girl. She’d been my “lost voice” speaking for enslaved ancient women, and now I find she was a thief and a betrayer. Sure, Phineas was a bit of an ass, but he didn’t deserve to be torn apart and eaten by a bunch of crazy maenads. I suppress these thoughts, though, because I realize that Agnes has been identifying with Iusta all along—just as I had—and now she’s transferred her own guilt over the Dale Henry shooting onto Iusta. “After all,” I say, “she was a slave. She had no freedom to make her own choices. Maybe she saw this as her only shot at liberty. We can’t blame her for trying to save herself.” I pause and then add, “Just like you can’t blame yourself for what Dale Henry did or feel guilty for surviving when Odette and Barry didn’t.”

  She goes still, caught in mid-sob, then she glances up at me, a tentative smile on her lips. “How’d you know I felt that way?”

  “Because it’s also how I feel,” I say. “Don’t you think I go over and over in my head what I could have done differently that morning? I should have paid more attention to how worried and scared you were when you came to my office. If I’d encouraged you to talk about Dale we could have alerted campus security. And then, when he burst into the room, well, I could have done something other than hiding under the table! Someone could have had the courage to tackle him—”

  “Dr. Lawrence did.”

  I laugh before I can stop myself—a mean-spirited bark that surprises me as much as it does Agnes, who stares at me with her wide open china blue eyes. “What are you talking about? Elgin was under the table with me.”

  Agnes shakes her head, her long blond hair whisking over her shoulders. “He was at first, but when Dale started toward me, Dr. Lawrence got back up. He was grabbing for Dale when he put the gun in his mouth and killed himself. I was screaming ‘No’ because I didn’t want Dr. Lawrence to get himself killed.”

  I distractedly pat her shoulder. In my head, I’m replaying those moments under the table. I had tried to let Elgin know that I was going to grab Dale’s feet to stop him from shooting Agnes, but I’d thought that he didn’t understand me. Then I had looked away, concentrating on those bloodstained high tops as they made their way toward Agnes’s navy pumps with those red and white bows that had somehow infuriated me with their innocence. I hadn’t seen what was happening above the table: Elgin had gotten up when he saw me crawling toward Dale. I say, “I’m surprised…I mean…none of the newspaper accounts mentioned that Elgin tried to stop Dale.”

  “I think I was the only one who saw what he did. Everyone else was down on the floor trying not to get shot, and Dr. Lawrence told me afterward that it wasn’t necessary to tell anyone, that he hadn’t made a difference anyway.”

  “Huh,” I say. “I guess if he couldn’t be a hero—” I stop myself. Agnes doesn’t need to listen to another bitter tirade against her beloved professor from me. No wonder she idolizes him! Besides, I’m beginning to sound mean-spirited even to myself. At least Elgin tried to do something. “Think of it this way,” I say instead, “we hardly understand what happened less than two months ago. How can we judge what happened nearly two thousand years ago? Maybe Iusta changed her mind and went back for Phineas.” I don’t really believe it, but Agnes is ready to grasp at any straw.

  “She could have…and then gotten trapped on her way back. The tunnels could have collapsed. She may be there still, and then she’d have the scroll, both scrolls together! Her diary and The Golden Verses.”

  “My thought exactly. So if we take the tunnel marked with the lyre, and then follow the signs Iusta told Phineas about, we could be the ones to find Iusta and the scroll. We might also find her diary.”

  Agnes rewards me with a smile. “We’ll be partners,” she says, holding out her hand to seal our pact with a handshake. “We’ll find her together.”

  I take her hand. What I don’t say is that I suspect that if Iusta is somewhere in the tunnels it’s more likely she was trapped on her way out than on her way back to rescue Phineas.

  It’s after four a.m. when I leave Agnes. I tell her we’d both better get some sleep, but instead of going back to my room I cross the lower courtyard and take the stairs down to the grotto. When I step inside, I think for a moment that I’ve crossed the bay, and the centuries, and that I’m in the Sirens’ Grotto as Phineas described it in his last account. A dozen flickering flames ring the blue pool of water, their reflections dancing over the water’s surface and rock ceiling like a swarm of crazed fireflies.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Ely is sitting cross-legged on the ledge between two of the votive candles. “I remembered how you lit candles in the house when we came back from our walks.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say. I don’t say how it reminds me of Calatoria’s attendants’ torches. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. We had to scan the scroll—”

  “We?”

  “Agnes and I.”

  He nods. “She was the only one you told about the scroll?”

  “Yes. I’m sure we can trust her. But I’m afraid it’s not The Golden Verses. I’m sorry.” I see a flicker of disappointment cross his face.

  He pats the rock by his side and I crouch down beside him. “Did you at least find Iusta’s diary?”

  “No, it was just another of Phineas’s accounts—his last, I’m afraid. It looks like Iusta took The Golden Verses and left Phineas in the Chamber, left him to be sacrificed in some horrible rite practiced by Calatoria and her women. Anyway, there’s a chance that Iusta didn’t make it out of the tunnels. Phineas said he felt the ground shaking as the women approached. He was so wrapped up in the ritual he thought it was their dancing that caused it, but clearly it was an earthquake. Iusta might have gotten trapped underground.”

  “In which case The Golden Verses and her diary might still be with her.”

  “Yes. Fortunately, she tells Phine
as that the path to the surface is marked with signs. At each turning you’re supposed to choose the ‘better’ sign over an evil sign.”

  “The evil I flee, the better I find.”

  “Exactly,” I say, startled that Ely knows the words to the Dionysian chant that Iusta quoted. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to figure out which symbol is for evil and which one is for the better.”

  “You shouldn’t go alone,” he says, taking my hand. “Perhaps you shouldn’t go at all. I’ve already exposed you to enough danger.”

  I’m about to disagree, but then, because I’ve been reliving that morning, I think about Ely making those silent phone calls, about him not leaving a message. I now have the uncharitable thought about Ely that at least Elgin tried to do something.

  As if he can read my mind Ely hangs his head. “I want to be with you tomorrow,” he says.

  “But you can’t. The site is gated and Lyros would never let you into the excavation—”

  Ely, smiling, holds a key up.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “From Elgin, but he doesn’t know I plan to be there. Just make sure that he and Lyros don’t go in the same direction as you once you’re down in the tunnels.”

  “I’ll suggest we go in pairs and make sure Agnes and I are teamed up.”

  Ely smiles. He slides his arm around my shoulders and pulls me toward him. I feel stiff, unable to let myself relax. Maybe it’s because this place reminds me of the scene in Phineas’s account, or because I’m nervous about tomorrow. Ely senses my tension and lets me go. “You should probably get some rest.” He kisses me lightly on the forehead. “You have a long journey tomorrow, all the way to the underworld and back again.”

  I go back to my room and try to sleep, but I don’t get any real rest because my dreams are visited by Odette. She’s wearing the orange dress and head scarf she wore on the last day of her life and looks as regal as a priestess.