The Chamber of Ten

III

I’M NOT used to being away from you,” she said. “Being so out of touch. I didn’t like it one bit.” And it scared me, she wanted to say. But now was not the time, because being scared was connected to whatever had happened down there. Maybe later they would talk about that, but not now. Nico looked so tired, so drained, yet unprepared for sleep.

“Neither did I,” he said. “I didn’t do it on purpose, Geena. It wasn’t my …” Had he been about to say fault? If not his, then whose? “Wasn’t my intention,” he finished.

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “I’m just glad to have you back.”

They were sitting at the small tile-topped table in front of the open French doors of her living room, daylight washing over them. The balcony was so small that it housed only a couple of plant pots containing herbs— rosemary, coriander, some garlic bulbs—but she had the table placed so that it gave the impression of sitting outside. At this time of the morning, sunlight streamed over the rooftops of the facing buildings, splashing the table and warming the room, offsetting the refreshing coolness of the retreating night.

Sometimes blinds clattered open across the narrow street from her, and she would always wave a polite greeting to anyone who glanced over instead of pretending to ignore them. She knew that was appreciated. There was the old man who lived with a dozen cats, the young professional couple with two delightful kids and a live-in nanny not much older than her charges, and the young single man who always made sure he looked her way. She indulged in an innocent flirtation with him, but not this morning. She saw his curtains drawn back and his own doors opening onto his tiny balcony, but she kept her eyes on Nico. He had so much to tell her, but she did not want to scare him off.

That was how he seemed this morning—scared. There was a fragility to him that she had never seen before, and he would not meet her gaze.

“Where did you go?” she asked. She wanted to say, What happened down there, why did you pick up the stone jar, why did you scream, what did you see, why did you run? But there was still a rawness to things, as if the previous day’s events involved blood and death rather than water and worry.

The knives, the dripping blood …

“I wandered for a while,” he said, picking at a plate of dried meats. He had not actually eaten anything yet, though he’d drunk three cups of coffee and was working on his fourth. “After I finished running, that is.”

“But what were you running from?”

He dropped his gaze, unable or unwilling to respond.

She tried again. “Where did you go?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “No destination, I mean. Through alleys and courtyards. Into places I didn’t think I’d been before, but which I found myself remembering. And even the streets I travel every day had a familiarity about them …” He shook his head, draining the coffee and checking to see if there was more left in the pot. “But it was a strange feeling.”

“Strange how?”

Nico thought for a moment before replying, and when he did, he gazed into the middle distance as if he were trying to remember the answer to a riddle he’d first heard years before.

“You know how sometimes when something is removed from a familiar landscape—a line of trees, or a building, a fence of some sort—and at first you don’t recognize exactly what is missing, but you know something is different? Absent?”

Geena nodded, buttering some bread.

“Like that, except all the way through the city. Every time I turned a corner into a place I knew, there was something not quite right. I still knew it, but not how it was.”

He began to shake with growing frustration, gaze darting about the room as if searching for answers that would never be found within those walls.

“So what do you think—”

“Enough! I don’t know,” Nico said, standing abruptly and spilling coffee over the tablecloth.

A chill went through her. Christ, what had happened to him? “Nico?”

“Forget it,” he said. “I’m fine, really. Just a bad day. My mind … I’m always picking up traces and echoes of this and that, and sometimes things … seep in.”

“You never told me that,” Geena said.

He stalked back into her bedroom, drawing the shades to block out the sunlight and hiding in the gloom. Geena followed and stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. He still stank of that rancid water; strange that she should only notice that now.

“You really need a shower,” she said, and was delighted when he smiled.

“I just …” He stood, already unbuttoning his dirty shirt. “A scare. Panic. Excitement at what we’d found.”

“I understand that,” she said, and she did. But that did not account for the way he’d acted, nor for what she’d seen and sensed through him. Does he even remember? She still had the butter knife in one hand and she touched it to the other palm, casually, stroking it across the skin and feeling a slick of butter left behind.

Nico glanced at her hand—

—the splash of blood, light darkening from pink to red, a collective groan that echoed—

—and then turned quickly away, shaking as he unbuttoned his pants.

Geena gasped and held on to the door frame. She blinked away the flash of vision. Not even an image. Just a sensation. Then she looked down at her palm, certain that she’d cut herself. But there was only butter, already melting from the warmth of her skin.

Nico pulled down his trousers and boxers and stepped into the bathroom. Moments later she heard the water turn on, then the sound changing as he stepped beneath the spray. He sighed, groaned, and she heard the soft thud as he rested his head against the tiled wall.

Geena went back and cleared the breakfast table, trying to fill her mind with inanities rather than let it dwell on the image of blood. She scooped up the plates, piling them on top of each other, then carried the empty cups through to the small kitchen. Filling the coffee machine with water and fresh coffee, she leaned against the counter and smelled the gorgeous aroma of brewing coffee filling her flat once again.

For a moment I thought I’d lost him.

She and Nico had met two years before at a lecture she was giving, and the attraction had been instant and mutual. He’d persisted in asking her on a date, and it had taken three days for her faltering professional concerns to be cast aside. She knew that fraternizing with students was frowned upon, yet there had been something about him that drew her from that first moment. His good looks and youthful fitness didn’t hurt, but his was also a mind that she perceived as an equal to hers. His eyes betrayed an intelligence and quirkiness that matched her own, and more than anything she’d sensed a passion in him about the past. For many, history was simply times gone by, but for Geena it was a more rounded, real, whole place than the present. The past was set and immutable; it had walls and boundaries, rules and certainty. The present was unreliable.

On their first date he had taken her to the Museo Archeologico, and that night they had made love in his small apartment, windows open, moonlight silvering their sweat-sheened skin, cool air flooding the bedroom. The next morning she had wandered naked into the bathroom, only to be startled by Nico emerging from the shower. His laughter at her shriek of surprise had melted her heart, just a little, and through the embarrassment she had found a smile.

He was twelve years her junior, and she loved him because he did not make her feel younger than her age.

The coffee machine was grumbling as the last of the coffee dribbled into the pot. She focused, trying to see if she could sense his mind reaching out to her, and felt only a warm, gentle satisfaction. She wished there were something more.

Geena pulled off her shirt and slid down her sweatpants. She crossed the small living room, glancing out the window but not caring if cat-man or the young flirter were looking. Steam billowed from the bathroom—he must