Secrets of the Dead

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 Dragovic’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.’