 The first coherent word that came to her mind was “pain”. The back of her head hurt. Her shoulders hurt. Her back hurt. Her hands hurt. Her legs hurt. She heard a groan next to her. She couldn’t make a sound. She hurt too much to do that. Instead she attempted to see if she could move the rest of her body. Reluctantly, she sat up, wincing. “Where the hell are we?” She looked beside her but only saw a shadowed face as Marcus struggled to sit up also. She glanced above and saw a thin hole, the dust and dirt still drifting down onto them, the grass trailing at the edge of the hole, the sunlight simply failing to penetrate the darkness. The flashlight, she thought. Soon, a beam of light attempted to pierce the darkness. The hole was perhaps, fifteen feet above. “Do you suppose one of us could reach the edge if we stood on each other’s shoulders?” said Reine. “Correction, if you stood on my shoulders,” he replied. “I don’t think you could lift me if you tried.” She shrugged. “Well, do you think it could be done?” He looked up and judged the distance. “Probably not unless we had some other help. What is this place anyway?” The flashlight’s beam swung around, sweeping the small cavern. It was mostly dirty and musty, but the walls gleamed slightly in the light. Reine reached out and felt stone. “It’s a cave. Perhaps it’s the same one that the church was supposedly built on top of.” “It doesn’t look that large,” Marcus said. “We’ll probably have to wait until someone notices we’re missing and they launch a search.” “You’ve got to be kidding. Hadrian is the only one who knows we’re still out here. He’ll remember that he left us here two days from now.” She had drawn a stone from within the pouch in her pocket. It was cool to the touch but reassuring. Briefly, she wondered if she was becoming superstitious, but banished the thought when her flashlight encountered a wall built with cubby holes filled with bones. She swallowed, trying to still her racing heart. “I think we got our answer to what this place is.” “A grave under a grave. These look more like catacombs than anything. I wonder if these were the bones of Christians or of Native Americans.” “Probably Christians. Native Americans don’t build catacombs.” She took a deep breath, reminding herself that these people were dead long before she was born. The cubbyholes had a rough-hewn look to them as if the builder of the catacombs were going more for quantity than quality. Each hole contained a skull and some other bones. And there were many holes. As she swept her flashlight over the wall, she counted at least fifty. Upon closer inspection, some of the cubby holes had inscriptions, all of them in Latin. The entire cavern was about the size of a bedroom in Ira’s mansion. There did not appear to be any exit except the hole that they fell through. Crossing her arms in resignation, the beam swung around the cavern once again, but when it finally landed, there was only a spot of darkness. What was this? She walked forward the stone remained cool. Bolder, Reine reached out to touch the corner where the crevasse met the edge of the wall. She steeled herself and stepped through. “Reine!” A hand took hold of hers, attempting to pull her back to the other side. “I think it’s a passageway.” Instead of passively letting him pull her back, she tugged on his hand, guiding him through. The crevasse widened in a few steps and she found herself in another room, also filled with cubbyholes. Along the floor were shallow stone coffins, all of them covered with carvings of crucifixes. “Why doesn’t anyone know about this?” she said, half to herself. “You would have thought that the archaeologists would have discovered this at least. People just don’t build underground graveyards in the Americas.” “You’re right. Catacombs are mainly found in Europe. But what if all of these were people who recently came from Europe?” “It still doesn’t make very much sense.” This room was rather narrow and curved. A crude archway was the entrance to a third room with yet more corpses. “We should have stayed where we were,” said Marcus. “At least someone would have a chance of finding us due to that hole above.” “But we also have nothing to lose if we follow this,” she said. “What if these passages lead back up to the church? Because think about it. You need a way to access the caves down here if you’re going to inter somebody. It makes no sense if all the entrances to above ground are sealed.” “Well, what if they are, after all the bodies were interred?” They finally found themselves in a room that appeared to be a central hub of a network of catacombs. Reine stepped toward the first doorway that she instinctively chose. The stone remained cool. “We’re going to get lost down here,” he told her. “You’re sounding very negative. Just trust me.” “I do. But aren’t we checking out the other paths.” “Because I think this one is the right one.” Marcus shook his head, hoping that he remembered the layout of the catacombs so far. He didn’t want to end up running around in circles. As he started walking again, following Reine, he stumbled over something on the ground. He looked down, pointing his own flashlight down at the offending object. It glittered. He picked it up and turned it over. The flat disk in his hand was quite dusty, but it was brass and had odd symbols nicked at the edges. A long slender dial was affixed at the center. As he turned the disk, the arrow moved, or rather the arrow stayed pointing at one direction. A compass. What a lucky find, he thought to himself. They wouldn’t get too lost with a directional instrument of some sort. He began to wonder who had left a compass down in the catacombs, but noticed that Reine had already stepped into the other room. He followed her. The style of the carved cubbyholes were the same in all of the rooms. Some cubbyholes had inscriptions, and occasionally they would see shallow coffins. But all of those would be closed. They wandered down more rooms and passages, awed that there would be something so complex located in the middle of nowhere. On there last room, there were no other doorways leading elsewhere. It was a dead end. “Let’s go back,” said Marcus. “Hm.” The last room was like the first room. Only one wall was covered with the cubbyholes filled with skeletons. The other wall was a mixture of stone and dust. She pointed her light to the ceiling and saw that several tree roots had managed to finagle their way into the cavern. That side was a massive tangle of organic matter. Some moss grew in that area too and brackish water tricked from the corner down to a small hole in the floor that had obviously been worn by the dropping water. The sound of the water echoed deep in the bowels in the earth and she guessed that perhaps there was a level of caves or catacombs below the one they were on. “We’re very close to the surface,” she said as she walked over to the tree roots. “Yes, but there’s only one exit. And that’s back through the network of catacombs over there.” The stone in her hand remained cool though. She stood still, holding her breath for a moment, trying to hear anything over the trickling water. She thought she heard a distant roar, possibly from outside. She placed a hand on a root and pushed. Dirt came away along with a long curling vine. She looked incredulously at her hand. “What is this?” “What do you mean?” Marcus walked over to where she was to see what she was up to. This time she pulled and a few more vines came loose. Did she smell fresh air? She began tugging vines and roots in earnest and soon, a spot of light opened up. With a whoop, she worked harder with Marcus who became as excited at the opportunity of escaping the cave. Soon they opened up a hole large enough for one person to crawl through. Reine squeezed herself through first and found herself near the shore of the lake and underneath a large oak tree. She could see the plateau with Ira’s mansion nearby. “Come on, Marcus, we actually managed to get to a place near the house.” “Really?” Marcus crawled through, only to wince as he tried to push himself out. “Reine. I think I’m stuck.” With both arms, she locked them underneath his own and pulled. He tried to gain traction on the ground with his hands and also tugged. Suddenly, he slid out and ended up pinning Reine to the ground. He stared down at her. “Thanks.” “No problem.” She felt her face grow warm as a smile tugged at the edge of mouth. “I should have trusted you, been more positive that you would find a way out.” “You did. You followed me through that maze.” She pushed at his shoulder. “You’re heavy.” He stood up and held out a hand to help her up. “Sorry about that.” As she tilted her head up to look at him, he could not help but to reach up and brush a smudge of dirt from her cheek. “We’re not particularly clean.” “No.” She was about to dust off his shoulder when he leaned down and touched her lips with his. When Reine opened the kitchen door, her nose was assaulted by the scent of fresh blueberry pie. Her arms were assaulted by an amber colored cat who vaulted onto her as soon as he sensed that she was home. “Time you got back,” Hadrian said between bites of pie. “The Baron is almost done loading everything on the boat. And that cat was busy scratching waiting by the door like a paranoid doorman.” “Perhaps Tuesday was worried,” she said as the cat in question purred and rubbed his head against his favorite human. He then took a dainty sniff and suddenly jerked his head up in surprise, nearly hitting Reine’s chin. “Hey. Maybe you are as paranoid as Hadrian says you are,” she laughed. Tuesday turned, wide-eyed to stare at Marcus. “Mreow!” “What did I do?” Marcus demanded. He stroked the cat’s head. Tuesday appeared to like the attention, but he yowled once more before wrinkling his nose prudishly. He knew what these two had been up to in the woods. © 2002, S. Y. Affolee |