The Chamber of Ten

“Nothing to do with a fucking flood and half of us almost dying,” Ramus muttered. The room fell silent for a few seconds, then Sabrina chuckled and pressed PLAY.

Nico tensed as soon as the first images appeared. Geena felt his thigh harden against hers, and another waft of dirty-water smell stung her nostrils. Doesn’t anyone else smell that? she thought. Perhaps afterward she would ask Domenic. She glanced sidelong at Nico, but his face seemed calm, eyes flickering with the reflected TV picture.

Heads bobbed on the screen as Sabrina and her camera followed them down the curving staircase. They paused at the bottom, then Geena opened the door and stepped into the lower chamber.

I should have held back, Geena thought. I was much too eager to see what was down there, and a lot of that came from Nico. I sensed his excitement. He projected it to me. She glanced at him again but he seemed enrapt with the picture. So why can’t I feel anything from him now?

She rested her hand on his knee—an intimate gesture that she had performed a thousand times before when they’d been sitting beside each other. But this time felt like the first, and he flinched before settling back against her. She gasped softly, confused, and his awkwardness bristled the small hairs at the nape of her neck.

“Get your hair cut!” Domenic said to Ramus. The younger man’s flowing mane filled the screen for a few seconds, and sitting on Geena’s floor he ran both hands through his hair.

“No way,” he said. “Gives me my sexual power.”

Nico shifted a little, but Geena did not move her arm.

On the screen, flashlights were shone around the chamber. She concentrated, trying to see anything they’d missed down there before. In their excitement there might have been obvious features that eluded them, or which the dancing lights had skimmed across too fast to see. She knew that a camera saw things differently.

“Strange columns,” Ramus muttered. “Why have three for support when one would do the job?”

“It’s a hiding place,” Geena said, thinking of how the man had stood within those columns, in his elaborate robes.

“Hiding what?” Sabrina said.

“None of us saw the urn until Nico touched it,” Finch said, and Geena started. It was the first time anyone had called it an urn, and the first she’d thought of it as such.

On screen they circled the room, examining the obelisks and then the granite disk in the stone floor of the chamber. Their voices coming from the TV sounded tinny and distorted.

“What is that?” Nico asked, nodding toward the screen.

Geena frowned. He’d only been twenty feet away while they’d been looking at the granite disk. He must have overheard them. But when she glanced at his face, she realized he had not. His entire focus had been on the stone jar hidden amidst those three columns.

“Some kind of plug, we think,” Domenic offered.

“Plug?” Nico echoed. “Covering what?”

“A drain or a well?” Geena suggested. “Or a subchamber.”

“Is that even possible?” Nico asked.

But no one replied. None of them knew how to answer that, and now the plug was submerged under water in a room whose structural integrity was uncertain. It would have to be a question for another day.

It was strange seeing herself on the television, and stranger still seeing Nico. Geena concentrated on his image, on the way his eyes had widened and he seemed drawn to the shadowy space amongst those columns. She should have noticed something off about him, even then.

“What’s wrong with you?” she whispered, and the screen flickered and blurred.

“Damn it!” Sabrina said, picking up the remote control. The image paused, jerked up and down a little, then started again.

“Dirt on the disc?” Ramus asked.

“No,” Sabrina said, grinning. “I put the right one in.”

On-screen, Nico was standing close to the three columns now, looking into where their shadows met. Geena watched herself approach him, shining her flashlight into his face, then leaning over to see what he was seeing.

Ramus’ head filled the screen, then Sabrina’s hand appeared before the camera, picture shaking, and she pulled him aside. The jar—

—Urn, Geena thought, maybe that is what it was—

—filled the screen, and then Nico’s voice rustled through the speakers, indistinct and yet clear to Geena. She remembered exactly what he’d said before everything changed.

“Do you hear it? Like there’s electricity in the walls.”

Finch appeared on-screen behind Nico, muttering something as Geena’s lover leaned in and grabbed the jar. The picture flickered again. Lines crossed the screen, snow made nonsense of the images. And behind the crackle and hiss, something more definable: a hum of potential.

When the picture resolved again, the jar was already broken on the floor. Nico stood with his head back and his hands fisted at his sides, and Geena saw herself slumping slowly down against the nearest of the three central columns, one hand reaching for the back of her head. She was muttering something.

“What’s that I’m saying?” she asked, leaning forward on the sofa.

“Don’t know,” Sabrina said.

Nico was talking on the screen as well, and his voice seemed louder and more insistent, clearer and yet no easier to understand.

“That’s a very old dialect you’re speaking there, Nico,” Domenic said, his voice level, though his eyes were full of questions and mystery.

Geena could read and translate some of the old Venetian dialects easily enough, and her students all had differing abilities to do the same. But the last time she’d heard anyone actually talking like this was Domenic, and even he had to refer to carefully prepared pages to do so.

On the screen, Nico seemed to be standing straighter, his voice filled with confidence, and he raised one shadowy hand to point around the edges of the room. The old words still tumbled from his mouth, but his voice had deepened. His shadow, thrown against one of the obelisks by the camera light, seemed to grow taller, though Nico himself was not moving. Then he held both hands out in front of him and shouted.

“Huh?” Sabrina said, sitting on the rug before the TV.

“That’s weird,” Ramus said. “Don’t remember that at all.”

Geena did not remember it, either. Those few seconds … they all seemed mystified by the moments unfolding on-screen. They had all been there, but none of them seemed to recall what the camera had captured.

“How do you know that dialect, Nico?” Domenic asked.

Nico said nothing, only stared at the screen, and now it was as if the interference from the TV had transferred into his eyes. They looked different. She held her breath and reached for him, glancing around because no one else seemed to have noticed, and then she hesitated.

Who am I about to touch?

She grabbed his shoulder and shook gently.

As Nico turned, the TV went blank again, and this time the picture seemed to have vanished for good.

“Nico?”

A tear streaked from his right eye and ran down his cheek. He did not speak. His face was Nico, and so were his eyes, but for a beat there seemed to be something else inside him.

“What is it, Nico?” she asked softly.

“That’s it,” Sabrina said. “There’s no more. All the filming I did after that …”

“Maybe it’ll still be on the camera?” Finch asked, standing from the small table.

“Maybe.”

Nico glanced around at everyone, then looked back to Geena. For a moment he seemed to be imploring her to do or see something—eyes widening, leaning toward her as if for an embrace—but he said nothing, and the moment passed. He leaned back in the sofa and closed his eyes.

“I’m so tired,” he said. “I’m going to rest.” He stood slowly and walked from the room, and Geena watched