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 allupo,” she said, replying with the Italian words for good luck.In the mouth of the wolf.
“Crepiillupo,” 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 skullseverywhere 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.
