Secrets of the Dead (47 page)

In the chamber beneath Constantine’s mausoleum, the
darkness
is absolute. My captors have pushed me down on to a stone bench against the wall – not so as to hurt me, but not gently either. They’ve let go my hands, though I can sense them hovering just out of reach, ready to pounce if I try to escape.

Where would I go? What would I say?

The only sense I have in that room is my ears. I listen to Porfyrius’s story.

‘Thirty years ago, during the persecutions, Symmachus sent me on a mission to Caesarea Palaestina. For a zealot like me, it was a career-making assignment: the heartland of the Christian religion.

‘I knew what to do. I commandeered a basement, not unlike this, and turned it into a dungeon. I was scrupulous in chasing down every rumour of a magistrate who refused to sacrifice, or a wife who didn’t emerge from her house on a Sunday.

‘One day, in winter, my agents heard rumours of a Christian hiding in a certain merchant’s house. They searched it and found nothing; then they noticed he didn’t have the heating on. They stoked up the fire and waited. Soon enough, they heard noises from the
hippocaust
under the floor where the Christian was hiding. What they hadn’t realised was that he had no intention of coming out. When they opened the hatch, they found him trying to burn a manuscript on the very fire they’d set. Naturally, they were curious. They seized the man and the manuscript and brought them both to me.

‘The man told me nothing. I tried every tool in my arsenal and just played into his hands. All he wanted was martyrdom. But the manuscript …’ Porfyrius sighs, the sound of a great weight settling. ‘The manuscript told an extraordinary tale.
You
know that the Christian god Jesus Christ was crucified during the reign of Tiberius Augustus?’

I do. One of Constantine’s early reforms was to outlaw crucifixion as a punishment, because it offended him.

‘When Christ came down from the Cross, his followers kept the wood, because they couldn’t bear to let him go. When he rose again from the dead, they realised it had a power beyond any man – the weapon that killed a god. They kept it in a secret place that only a tiny circle knew, down eleven generations. The manuscript listed them all. Read carefully, it was easy to guess where they’d hidden it.’

‘You found it?’

‘Not then. My efforts hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Symmachus brought me back to Nicomedia. With Christians purged from every imperial office, there were plenty of opportunities for promotion. But I never forgot. Years later, in exile, I wondered if it might be true – if I could use it to negotiate my return to Rome. I sent a batch of poems to Constantine, hoping to impress him, but he rebuffed me. Then I heard what had happened to Crispus.’

Out in the darkness something stirs, like a monster from the old world chained up in its cave.

‘The manuscript told a legend that the early Christians attached to the Cross – that on the day when Christ was crucified the blood he shed seeped into the wood and transformed it. From then on, they said, it had the power to raise men from the dead.’

It’s such an absurd thing to say I actually burst out laughing. A stony silence reproaches me from the shadows. Porfyrius is deadly serious.

‘I guessed that the Dowager Empress Helena would have taken the death of her grandson badly. I wrote to her, hinting
at
what I knew. She was a pious woman, shattered by grief: she was ready enough to believe. She recalled me, heard what I had to say and set out at once for Palestine.’

This bit I know. The streets of Rome had barely been swept clean from the
vicennalia
celebrations before Helena took her trip to Jerusalem. At the time, we all assumed she was undertaking some sort of ritual purification for what had happened to Crispus, or that she wanted to get as far away from Constantine as possible. She returned a year later and died soon after.

‘She found it,’ Porfyrius says abruptly. ‘She followed the clues I gave her, and she found the old Cross. She brought it back to Rome. By then, thanks to her patronage, I was a
praetor
of the city – soon to be Prefect. I oversaw the estate at Duas Lauros.’ A touch of his old, crooked humour surfaces in his voice. ‘I think you might have been there, once.’

Once
. June, that doomed
vicennalia
year. Constantine going through the motions of the
vicennalia
ritual like a statue, while a hundred thousand blank-faced Romans watched and cheered and pretended they’d never heard of Crispus. And late one night, when Constantine was drunk, I remember riding three miles out of Rome down the Via Casilina, to the old cemetery where Constantine had built his mausoleum. With me came two trusted guards from the Schola, and a long coffin we’d carried all the way from Pula. I remember the shadow of that vast rotunda over the old gravestones; the squeak of the lock and the slap of our feet as we went down the stairs. I remember the lamps like eyes in the walls, the deep shadows they cast down the endless tunnels. I remember the slam of the lid as we closed the sarcophagus in the deepest, furthest part of the catacomb; the noise echoing around the small chamber, knocking loose grit off the ceiling, and the flash of terror that
I
would be buried alive with the man I murdered. I remember the tears, wet on my face as I kissed his coffin and murmured my final farewell.

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ The memories are throttling me. My voice barely comes out as a croak.

‘So you’ll understand.’

A light flares in the darkness. One of the men around me has touched a glow-worm to a lamp. For a moment, my eyes can’t see anything. As they adapt, I see brick vaults above my head; a circle of men standing around me. And a little distance away, hanging back as if ashamed of something, the face that’s haunted my nightmares for ten years.

I stare. My heart shatters at the impossibility of it.

I’m looking at a dead man.

Rome – Present Day

She’d never been claustrophobic, but this was something else. All Abby could think of was being surrounded by the dead. The passage was so narrow her shoulders almost rubbed the walls – a waxy grey rock that still carried the scars of the chisels that had carved it. Abby tried to imagine the gravediggers who’d quarried out the catacombs by hand, trapped below ground without light or air. How did they survive?

Dr Lusetti put a hand on the wall. ‘You know this rock? It is called
tufa
. In a natural state, it is soft and easy to quarry, but when you expose it to the air, it becomes hard like concrete. It is why the catacombs were so easy to dig – and why they have survived so well.’

The walls weren’t solid. From floor to ceiling, with minimal gaps in between, shelves had been cut into them. Some lay open; others were walled up with pieces of tile or marble. The whole effect was to make the walls seem like giant filing cabinets.

‘
Cubicula
,’ Lusetti said. ‘This is where they buried the people.’

He pointed his head torch at a marble plaque. Scratched into the striated surface was a crude X-P Christogram. ‘They decorated the tombs so they knew where to find their ancestors.’

It made Abby think of something. ‘Do you know a symbol called the staurogram?’

‘Of course.’

‘Are there any instances of it down here?’

Lusetti frowned. ‘This catacomb has been closed for many years – it is a long time ago I have been down myself. And most of the inscribed pieces have been stolen by the thieves.’

For the first few hundred yards, a string of electric bulbs lit their way. Then they gave out. The lamps on their helmets were the only light now, four narrow beams nodding and swivelling as they advanced deeper into the tunnel.

‘How did people find their way down here?’ Mark asked. Abby thought he only said it to hear the sound of a human voice.

Lusetti’s torch beam moved to a small niche, about waist high. ‘This shelf is for an oil lamp. We find them everywhere we dig in the catacombs. In Roman times, you saw hundreds, maybe thousands of lamps lighting the way.’

They carried on, past countless rows of
cubiculae
. After another twenty yards, the tunnel split into three. They halted.

‘Which way now?’ Barry asked.

‘There’s no sign of Dragovi
ć
’s people.’ Mark’s torch beam inscribed an arc across the walls as he looked around, back the way they’d come. ‘If he’s coming, he hasn’t arrived yet. We should get back upstairs and set up the surveillance.’

He hates this even more than me
, Abby thought. She
wondered
if the catacomb had tapped some dark terror – or if it was just the discomfort of youth suddenly faced with the bare bones of mortality. She forced herself to breathe slowly.
It’s not an evil place
, she told herself. On the wall, her torch beam settled on a small piece of marble lodged in the opening of a cubicula.
IN PACE
, said the inscription, and even Abby knew what it meant.
In Peace
. Next to it was a Christogram, and above it a crudely drawn dove with an olive branch in its mouth.

Peace and hope
. For a moment, Abby glimpsed the humanity of the people who’d been buried here, row upon row of them patiently waiting. The tombs no longer seemed so macabre. They felt almost companionable.

Her beam moved along – and as it moved, it caught something. A shadow in the stone, a pattern flitting into the light like a moth. She turned her head back slowly, trying to pin it down.

There
. The design was thin and shallow, angled slightly so that lit from below it cast almost no shadow. It was only because the lamp was mounted on her helmet that she’d caught it. Even then, she had to keep the beam slightly oblique: if she pointed it straight, the incisions melted back into the rock. The shape that had governed her life since Michael gave her a jewellery box in Pristina two months ago. The staurogram. It sat above the door of the left-hand passage, inviting her on.

She squeezed past Lusetti and padded down the passage. She heard a plaintive ‘Hey’ from Mark behind her, but ignored him. Ten yards further along, the passage ended at a T-junction. She looked left and right, and there it was again: the same symbol carved above the left doorway.

The saving sign that lights the path ahead
.

Lusetti led the way, with Barry and Mark behind him. Abby brought up the rear. Sometimes she imagined she could hear soft footsteps behind her, though each time she pointed her torch back down the tunnel she saw nothing but the graves.

It was like walking through fog – timeless and placeless. The rows of tombs, sometimes interrupted by doorways that led into small chambers where richer or grander families had been buried; the dark passages that forked and crossed, weaving a web deep underground. If the staurograms had led them in a circle, they might have followed it round and round for ever.

They went down a staircase, then another. The air grew colder. The ground underfoot was damp and clammy, like wet sand. The ceiling got lower, pressed down by the weight of the world above them. Abby lost count of the number of turns they’d made. Without the staurograms, she was pretty certain they’d never find their way out.

They stopped – so abruptly she bumped into Mark. The tunnel had reached a T-junction. Lusetti, in the lead, shone his torch right and left, and right again.

‘There is no mark here.’

‘There must be,’ said Mark. Tension told in his voice. ‘They can’t have brought us all this way to drop us now.’

‘
They
?’ echoed Lusetti. ‘You think
they
are leading you where you want to go?’

Four torch beams crisscrossed the grainy rock. All they illuminated was the scrapes and gouges of the hand tools that had cut the passage. And, ahead, a dirty brick wall filling a niche in the rock from floor to ceiling.

‘Is this recent?’ Mark asked. Lusetti shook his head.

‘This is Roman brickwork.’

‘Maybe we’re supposed to go straight on,’ Abby said. She
edged
past Mark and Barry and tapped the brickwork. Even after so many centuries, it felt solid.

‘I think maybe –’

The bullet caught Mark clean in the chest. The gunshot roared down the catacomb. Barry dropped to one knee, turned and squeezed off three shots of his own. Abby hurled herself to the floor of the passage and started to crawl.

More shots echoed behind her; lights flashed. In the tight space, it sounded like an artillery battle. She picked herself up and ran down the tunnel, looking for a side passage that might help lose her in the labyrinth.

The tunnel ended in a rough-finished wall. No bricks, no turnings – just a piece of rock where the diggers’ patience or will had run out, where they’d shouldered their tools and turned for the surface.

The sound of gunfire settled in the tunnel like dust. The silence was even more unnerving, though it didn’t last long. From behind – not far – Abby heard slow footsteps coming after her.

Metal snapped on metal as the slide of a gun slid back.

Constantinople – June 337

SOMEONE MUST HAVE
died. At this moment, I don’t know if it’s him or me. The man I’m looking at died on a beach eleven years ago. I put the knife in his back myself; I carried his corpse halfway across the empire and buried it in the deepest hole I could find.

And now he’s standing in front of me – living, breathing, dark eyes watching me.

I close my eyes, squeezing them until all I see is spots. When I reopen them, he’s still there.

It’s all I can do to stop my stomach emptying itself on the floor. My head feels as if it’s about to break open. This isn’t possible.

I concentrate on the eyes. Are they really his? They’ve lost their clarity, as though a veil’s been drawn over them. They don’t seem to focus. He looks bewildered, as though he doesn’t know what he’s doing here.

I don’t either.

‘Crispus?’ I stammer.

Something like terror creases his face. He steps away, sinking into the shadows. I’m glad. Having to look at him is like staring at the sun: too stark, too painful to endure.