Mindbenders (28 page)

“What the hell
is
this?”

“Rome is built on
top
of ancient Rome,” Kate yelled back. “They just buried the old neighborhoods and used the old buildings for foundations.”

She dashed to the last chamber, the largest, deepest room, where picks and trowels and paint brushes lay among wheelbarrows and two-by-fours in a disorderly pile.

“Lecture later!” Tauber yelled. “We need
outta
here, dammit!”

Kate lit a torch from the pile and threw it at me. Everyone grabbed one and she ran to the farthest corner, kicking over a construction pile with a clattering roar. She poked her torch into the corner, close to the ground, where a small oblong hole appeared just above the base of the wall.

 It wasn’t a place you’d think of going on your own. It looked like the floor had given way. If you
were
going, you’d at least want a wetsuit.

“
That’s
the way out,” Kate said. “But I’m not going first.”

Just at that moment, we heard a groan above us as the door to the apartment building began to give way.

I dropped my torch into the gap. It landed on a nearby floor with a muffled clatter. The walls within shown with an eerie glow. I took a breath as though diving underwater, swung into the hole and let go.

I fell further than expected and landed in a kind of silt that cushioned the impact. But it didn’t feel right from the first second—I got shivers just trying to get my footing. The torch was above me and only a few feet away but the floor was unstable—every time I reached for it, the ground underneath would shift under me.

“You okay?” Tauber called but I kept my mouth shut—I didn’t like it.

When I finally got the torch over my head, I saw…bones. The whole floor was bones, bones in layers, bones several layers deep, bones that turned to dust as soon as I touched them. All I wanted was to jump and run, get the hell away from this place as fast as I could. But with every movement, the ground kept dissolving under my feet.

I probably would have lost it right there except for hearing the door above give way with a crash. That was it—panic was something we couldn’t afford. I remembered what they said in the movies about quicksand—instead of struggling, I slowed down, moving slow and deliberate and suddenly, I was making headway. A solid stone ledge lined the room; I climbed up onto it and took a quick survey. The room was vast, the walls lined with small chambers covered with painted images.

 “C’mon down. Just move slow,” I called and the others started dropping through the hole.

Several passages ran into the black distance. I ventured in that direction, torch in hand, and came face to face with Jesus, an ancient flat-perspective version painted three times life-size, rough-featured, stark, a whole lot edgier than the greeting-card Jesus I grew up with. This guy looked like a carpenter. I could see him losing his temper, tossing the money-lenders bodily out of the Temple. A working-man’s savior, with a wand(!) in hand.

“Catacombs,” Kate said, scrambling up  the ledge. “Common people couldn’t bury in the Holy City, so outside the walls, it’s all catacombs, miles and miles of them.” She leaned her torch into the passages, the light dancing into the distance.

“We should split up,” Max said.

“Bad idea,” Kate answered sharply. “These bones aren’t all ancient. People go into catacombs and don’t come out.” She ran down the center passage and we followed, bunched into the narrow space.

The passage quickly got so tight, we could barely scrape through. Rough-hewn walls ran to several-story-high ceilings, miles of stone wall, every few steps bringing another row of chambers floor-to-ceiling, some wide-open displaying loose bones or skeletons, others marked by stone blocks with handwritten legends in Greek.

Everything was painted chalky white, set off with bright borders, flat-perspective trees, real and mythical animals, charioteers and soldiers, muscular heroes and some rather shapely goddesses. With our torches held high, we still couldn’t see the end.

Behind us, Marat and gang dropped through the gap in the wall and made the same noises we had climbing out of the bone pile.

“How are we getting
out
of here?” Max asked.

Kate shrugged. “I’m depending on
you
for that.”

In minutes, we heard them on our heels. They had split up and were moving down the narrow corridors faster than we could. With us lighting the way, they’d be on us in minutes.

A lightning bolt smashed the wall to our left; it collapsed in a deafening cloud of smoke. Another bolt overhead scattered a chunk of stone into the passage in front of us. We peeled off to the last clear corridor, but with them now right behind.

And then, a minute later, we hit a dead end. A hole halfway up the white-painted wall showed where the ancients had wriggled through to the next chamber, but we had no wriggling time.

The two groups faced off in close quarters. There was a sudden lull, like maybe they’d caught up with us faster than they expected and nobody was quite certain what to do. Each breath sounded lurid, echoing against the high walls full of painted witnesses. A rumbling groan warned that the ruptured corridor nearby was breaking down and not slowly.

Max’s hand swiped the air in front of us and I could feel the shell forming. We held our breath but not for long—it got tight in the corridor all of a sudden, like a belt worn a notch too close. The shooters were eyeing us in no particular hurry. Marat held out several headpieces like an offering.

I felt the rock wall behind me creep upward a quarter-inch and then drop back into place. Even Max couldn’t maintain a shield and rearrange several hundred tons of rock at the same time.

“Come along,” Redbeard said. “Put on the headsets and we’re good. When this is over, you can tell anyone you want about us. Levitate cars on YouTube for all I care. We know your tricks, pal. Nobody’s getting close enough for you to do anything. Take the glasses or we take you down—your choice.”

I felt Max reach behind me, reach for Kate. “This isn’t the time,” she muttered but he pulled her close and whispered, “Remember what you did… at home? To amuse your boyfriends?” He nodded at the chalky walls, the gallery of Orthodox crosses and pagan gods. “Do it now… with all
this
.”

Kate’s eyes opened wide. And, right away, things began to change.

She leaned against us and I heard the rumble inside me like a generator, pulsing through my shoulders and trunk. I got a raging erection—it would be a problem if we had to run real soon. The shooters heads swiveled and I realized they could hear it too. But clearly they had no idea where it was coming from.

A moment later, the deep blackness turned to mist, chalky paint sifting off the walls into the boneyard air. The shooters, being he-man types, tried not to react but it was a real effort—their shoulders rose half a foot pretending nothing was happening.

This was good for about five seconds.

Then the ancient paintings began to dance off the stone walls and out over our heads. Painted chariots began racing up and down the shaft, the drivers lashing each other and the flailing shooters when they wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of the way.

Soldiers marched tight rows in thin air two feet above us and then broke ranks, laying bets on the chariot race, drinking from giant jugs and trying to make time with the shapely goddesses. Centaurs and unicorns dueled just below the ceiling, peacocks drank from fountains guarded by teasing nymphs and huge bushes flowered in every empty space.

None of this was even slightly realistic; these were the piecework no-dimensional paintings that came with your entry-level Roman funeral. But you could feel the air kick up when the chariots roared past and a drizzle hit your hair from the fountains. The fact that it was all totally unconvincing only made the whole thing eerier. All around us, paintings grew, changed shape, mingled, argued, fought and fornicated. Well, I’m not 100% certain about the fornicating but it got difficult to keep track once the shooting started.

The shooting was kind of inevitable, once a couple hundred bones flew out of their burial chambers, arced into the air like somebody was chucking them and tore straight for the blueshirts. They were shooters, after all, so, when attacked in a very narrow space by pagan gods most of them had never heard of, they responded about the way you’d expect. Redbeard kept screaming at them to stop, as each discharge brought more and more of the ceiling down on us.

Crazily, in the midst of the insanity, I detached. I found myself focused on a sandy-haired shooter ducking under a chariot wheel because I saw the wheel close-up, inches from my face, just as it brushed by his.

This is the guy
, I thought,
the guy
from the apartment and the airport, the guy I can read.
 Jesus, he was panicked! Not that you could blame him, attacked by Mars, Hercules, St. Peter and their really hot girlfriends all at the same time.
It’s a trick
, he kept repeating with mounting fervor. In his panic, he never noticed our connection—but I knew I’d remember him.

Max yelled, “Push!” We jumped forward, smacking the air shield into the wall. There was a spongy reaction and we bounced backward. He shouted ‘Again!” and this time, I heard his voice in my head saying
Scream after you push
. We pushed together and the wall teetered, wobbled and finally collapsed, locking Redbeard’s crew on the other side.

I was screaming the whole time but exactly nothing came out. Just as the wall came down, I heard all our voices at once—and then snuffed out just as abruptly. The screams came mixed into the sound of several other sections of wall giving way. Max emerged out of the dust with a finger to his lips and pointed in the other direction—we squeezed around a pile of rubble.

Kate still had her torch—she re-lit it and the dust in the air scrambled the light like a Seurat. You couldn’t see three inches in front of you. I could feel myself coughing but somehow didn’t make a sound doing it.

We were in some kind of huge high-ceilinged room. When we finally reached the staircase at the far end, Kate turned to Max and he held his arms out to her. She punched him hard in the shoulder.

“Ow! That’s the thanks I get.”

“For what? Almost getting us killed?”

“Hopefully for
getting
us killed—as far as they’re concerned. They had us cornered but we were crushed under a wall trying to escape.”

“They’ll buy that?” Tauber, ever the skeptic.

“Marat knows better—he’s probing and I’m blocking. But, for some reason, he’s not the boss—they don’t trust him. The leader, the guy with the beard, knows they’ll all be heroes—as long as they stick to their story. The other choice is to spend the next week digging through every corridor and passageway around here on the off-chance we escaped. So we’re dead. By the time they get back to headquarters, they’ll probably have decided there were fifty of us and we fell into a volcano.” He turned back to Kate. “Which gives us one more chance to surprise them when the time comes. Okay?”

“You could have told me,” she griped.

“If I’d thought of it a second earlier, I would have. Really. I’m just making this up as I go.” It was a pretty good Harrison Ford imitation, actually. She nodded grudgingly.

The mist finally began to dissipate. It turned out we were in a wine cellar and a beautiful one at that: floor-to-ceiling darkwood shelving, bottles organized by brand and years, the rows all aligned toward a grand modern staircase.

Tauber crept up and back in seconds. “Where are we?” Max asked.

“Guessing through the door slit, a fuckin’ palace.”

“Are we company?”

“After that bang? If they’re not down here already, six’ll get you ten we’ve got the run of the place.”

“Let’s have a look.”

~~~~

Fourteen

The villa was a place out of time, one that had long since abandoned history and found its own solitary track. Frescoes danced on the ceilings, twenty-foot glass double doors opened onto deep iron-railed balconies, every piece of furniture in the place seemed to come off the millennium version of Antiques Roadshow. Max and Tauber fell to prowling out of habit, throwing doors open and fretting over security, but after twenty yawning-huge unoccupied drawing rooms, the whole idea got comical.

We stepped into an open central courtyard wrapped in three stories of block-shaped stucco, locust trees towering over a garden gone natural (one step short of gone to seed).  White flowers crawled up the walls and the light poured through vines and bushes that probably dated to Garibaldi. After drifting through four more ornate rooms—one holding a grand piano and a bronze harp taller than any of us—we found the renovation project, a stainless-steel kitchen with the inevitable granite-topped center island (Iron Chef, season two).

“No cameras,” Tauber announced, returning from his sweep of the place. “No security wiring either. There’s an Alfa parked out back—doors unlocked.”

“Light magnetic field,” Max said—apparently this was agreement. “I feel the fridge and the air conditioners—there’s a home theatre with big speakers on the second floor. But nobody home and no signs of a hasty retreat.”

Kate returned from the office, which boasted a spectacular view of the fountain (if you have a villa, you’ve gotta have a fountain) and a birdhouse the size of a Mini-Cooper, carrying a day planner scrawled with notes.

“Sardinia,” she said. “They’re in Sardinia for the week.”

“Why hassle that nasty G8 traffic?” Tauber smirked.

“Especially when you can be in Sardinia,” Kate sighed. “Why come home? Ever?”

Tauber, all at once, was full of energy, a DT’s second wind. Surviving the catacombs seemed to have galvanized him and he insisted on leading a security tour.

“The front gate’s got a proper lock; the back’s just a padlock on a chain. So if they’re comin’, they’ll clip the chain; keep yer ears tuned that way. It’s about a minute’s run, gate to house and up the stairs. We all sleep here, the east corner. See that gazebo below? Locked gates on both sides; I just jammed ‘em. So we keep ropes or sheets on the balcony; things get tight, we drop off and have a shot at the river before they nail us.”