Chapter 28
A week later, they gathered at Felix’s apartment. With no jobs lined up for the next week, Aida had told Trista she’d be staying
with Yumi, and to her relief, her aide hadn’t seemed to care. They arrived at dawn, then Luciano, Felix, and Aida made their
way down the Appian Way, backpacks stuffed with emergency supplies slung over their shoulders. Felix had insisted on walking
them to the catacomb entrance. After a few blocks, they reached a tall arched gate set into an ancient brick wall.
“We’re close,” Aida said, tapping her earpiece.
“Be careful.” Yumi’s voice crackled in her ear.
They waited until no cars were passing before Felix slid his key into the gate. It swung open with a creak. They entered,
and Felix hastily shut the gate behind them.
“I can’t believe that worked,” he said as they began the trek down the cypress-lined path toward the main entrance to the
catacombs.
At first, Felix didn’t want to tell them how he got the keys to the catacombs, but finally, after some wine a few nights back,
he had loosened up and confessed he stole them from a man he knew worked at the catacombs. He’d seduced him, plied him with
booze, and slipped the keys into his bag at some point in the night.
Aida had been horrified. “Wait, you got him drunk to steal the keys?”
Felix had realized what she was implying.
“No, no! It wasn’t like that. We’ve been flirting for ages.
He was very into it, and he was the one pouring the gin.
I just encouraged extra booze to make sure he wasn’t going to notice I was stealing his keys.
I’m going to bring them back,” he had sworn.
“That is, if we don’t get caught. I rather like the guy. ”
The catacomb grounds were quiet—too cold for the parrots to sing, with temperatures near freezing. Aida and Luciano had bundled
up in anticipation that the catacombs would be especially cold, but Felix had thrown on a lighter coat, and he muttered the
whole way about catching a cold. Finally, Aida smacked him on the arm.
“Stop! I’d give my right arm to trade you places right now.”
Felix gave her a sheepish look, then wrapped an arm around her. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’ll make it up to you with a big
bottle of champagne when this is all said and done.”
“How big?” Luciano asked.
“A jeroboam.”
“That’s only four bottles. I was thinking a Nebuchadnezzar,” Aida said.
Felix laughed. “We’ll need about twenty bottles after all this. Okay, you’re on.”
They were coming up on the little piazza where the main entrance to the catacombs was.
“We’re almost there,” Aida told Yumi.
“Okay, give me a second.”
The second turned out to be several long minutes, but finally Yumi confirmed that she had the cameras off. “You have about
thirty minutes to get into the corridors outside the camera range. I can erase the footage if you don’t make it, but it would
be less problematic if you could just hurry.”
“Okay, here we go.” Felix led them to the door. He unlocked it, then gave each of them a big hug. “A Nebuchadnezzar. I promise.”
Aida and Luciano slipped inside the dark entry. With one last wave at Felix, she locked the door behind them.
“Andiamo. We’ve got a big bottle of wine that needs drinking and we’re not going to get that standing around here,” Luciano joked.
“I’m pretty sure Felix doesn’t have a few thousand dollars to throw at an oversize bottle of wine,” Aida said. “But if we
get out of here, I’m going to splurge on one.”
Aida pulled the caving headlamp out of her pack, an item Yumi had thankfully been able to purchase online. She slipped it
over her head, adjusting her ponytail to keep it out of the way, then hit the switch, and the room lit up.
“Wait, turn that off.”
Aida complied. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t kiss you with that blinding me. And I want one really good kiss before we go down into those tunnels. Who knows if
I’ll get another one.” Luciano pulled her into his arms. His lips were cold, but his tongue warm. He wrapped a hand around
the back of her head, cradling her, and she relaxed into his embrace, pushing all thoughts of what was to come from her mind.
For a moment, she wanted him to be all there was: his warmth, the woody smell of his cologne, the strength in his arms and
hands. She wished the kiss would never end.
But it did. Neither spoke as they fitted their headlamps and fixed their gear to be more easily accessible.
Aida tested her earpiece at the top of the stairs leading down to the Crypt of the Popes. “We’re heading down,” she told Yumi.
“What’s taking you so long? Jeesh! Hurry up, slowpokes.”
Yumi’s urgency pushed them to comply. They began the descent down the long steep staircase, the lights from their cave headlamps
slicing through the darkness. When they reached the landing of the second level down, Aida tried Yumi again. “Can you hear
me?”
“Barely.”
Aida sighed. “I think we’re going to lose you soon. Wish us luck.”
“In bocca al lupo,” she said, replying with the Italian words for good luck. In the mouth of the wolf.
“Crepi il lupo,” Aida responded. May the wolf die.
“And only the wolf,” she said to Luciano as she turned off the earpiece and stuffed it in her pack. “Let’s go.”
Rather than descending to the next flight toward the papal crypts, Aida and Luciano veered into one of the catacombs’ deeper
corridors, guided by the logic that Oizys’s shrine would sequester itself far from the mundane curiosity of tourists.
Aida peered down the path and her heart sped up. The galleries were only a few feet wide, narrow enough that Aida couldn’t
put both arms out without touching the hard tufa stone. The walls on both sides were floor-to-ceiling burial niches that looked
like empty shelves in a bookcase. The idea that all these shelves once held dead bodies was a shocking thing to consider.
Her experience with cataloging happiness had never necessitated such a descent into the literal and metaphorical underworld,
leaving her unprepared for just how terrifying the subterranean space would be. Stretching before them indefinitely was the
catacombs’ unyielding reality: the omnipresent chill of the stone, the oppressive cloak of darkness, and the stifling air,
redolent with millennia of seclusion and decay. The corridors constricted around them, and though the floor-to-ceiling niches
were vacant of their long-departed occupants, an intangible presence seemed to linger, giving a horror-movie feeling to it
all.
“How many people were buried here?” Luciano asked.
“Half a million. Felix said that over the years most of the bones were taken as souvenirs by raiders, and then eventually,
the Church moved the rest to various churches in the city. Some bones are still in the walled-up niches, probably much farther
in.”
“This is nothing like the catacombs of Paris. There are skulls everywhere there. I’m not sure which is creepier. This emptiness or all the gaping eye sockets staring out at you.”
Aida shuddered. “I’ll take the emptiness.”
As they ventured deeper, the oppressive silence of the catacombs seemed to swallow even the sound of their own footsteps.
The narrow beam of their headlamps barely penetrated the all-encompassing darkness, the air growing colder, heavier with each
step.
To mark their path, Luciano drew arrows on the rough volcanic walls with a big stick of yellow chalk—the kind kids used on
sidewalks. The corridor stretched on, seemingly endless, with side passages branching off like the fingers of a ghostly hand.
Every few hundred feet, there was an entryway to a little chapel. Occasionally, they stopped to admire the ancient frescoes
of saints and various biblical figures, but they never lingered long.
They mistakenly thought the map Felix found would be useful, but the catacombs laughed at such modern arrogance. Passages
would abruptly end, forcing detours that felt like regressions. While they intended to walk to the farthest part of the catacombs,
Aida knew it was a shot in the dark, quite literally. They had no idea where Effie could be, and there were miles of galleries
to explore. Several galleries they had passed weren’t on the map at all. She tried not to think about the reality of getting
quite lost in this place of the dead.
After more than an hour of walking, Luciano suddenly stopped, his hand shooting out to halt Aida. Ahead, the ground gave way
to a gaping chasm, the floor having collapsed into the darkness below. They shone their lights into the pit, but its depths
yawned back at them, accompanied by the sound of dripping water.
“Damn it,” Aida cursed, her breath forming clouds in the cold air.
“We’ll have to find another way.” She checked the map, which indicated another possibility to reach their desired destination: A section of the catacombs they estimated to be in the area below the Baths of Caracalla or perhaps even as far away as the Circus Maximus.
“I think we can go this way,” she said, tracing the route with her finger.
“Merda. That’s much longer. Why did this have to happen in the only part of the catacombs that isn’t laid out like a city street?”
“Yeah, I know. But it doesn’t look like there’s any other way.” She sighed. “If only we had any clue if this was the best
way to go. For all we know, we should be heading over here.” She indicated a part of the map that was easily a couple of hours
in the other direction.
“I think we’re on the right path,” Luciano said. “The other part of the catacombs is much more well traveled and mapped. And
they would want to keep her as far from people as possible.”
“Andiamo then,” Aida said, folding up the map. She turned around, sending a prayer up to Sophie for courage.
Their detour took them through narrower, more claustrophobic passages, where the weight of the earth above seemed almost tangible,
pressing down on them. The walls were lined with niches, thankfully all empty.