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 thearea 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.”
“Andiamothen,” 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.
Eventually, they came to a rough-hewn staircase to a lower level. They descended into the depths, where the air was colder, and continued walking. And walking. The empty niches turned into niches that were still walled up, some with the marble covering them intact, some which had fallen to the ground in broken shards.
When Aida saw the first skeleton, she thought her heart might stop. They had been walking for so long through the empty cemetery that it was a shock to see the flash of a yellowed skull under the glare of her headlamp. As they continued, it became clear that all the niches still held bodies. She dug out the map.
“We’re still in the mapped area.” She pointed to the spot she thought they were at. “But I wonder if anyone has come this far since Giovanni Battista de Rossi made this map in 1849.”
“You might be right. It’s interesting that the Church left these bodies behind. I thought they had moved them all.”
They continued, and the feeling that they were walking into the depths of a horror film amplified past ten. Aida could hear the uneven rhythm of her own breathing, a stark reminder of life amid so much death. The beams from their headlamps carved pockets of visibility in the pervasive darkness. In this subterranean gloom, shadows played tricks on the eyes, and it was easy to imagine bony fingers reaching out from the walls, yearning for the warmth they had not felt in millennia.
A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature ran up Aida’s spine as they passed a niche where the marble slab lay cracked on the ground, its inscription indecipherable with age. The skeleton inside seemed almost to be straining against the space, the skull tilted at an unnatural angle, as if in its final moments, it had turned to witness some unspeakable event.
The air grew heavier as they delved deeper. Aida couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, of unseen eyes fixed on her from the darkness, witnessing her intrusion into this sanctum of perpetual repose.
“I think we’re heading in the right direction,” Luciano said. “I’ve never been depressed, not truly, but I’m beginning to understand that feeling—that weight upon the body.”
“Miseria,” Aida said, invoking Oizys’s more common name. “Me too. It’s terrible.” It made her want to cry.
Suddenly, Aida smelled it—the familiar nostalgia of childhood. It was faint and fleeting but unmistakable: the scent of a Russian olive tree, pleasantly sweet and floral, like a slightly spiced jasmine flower. Aida paused, and this time, tears formed in the corners of her eyes.
“Tutto bene?”
Aida nodded, her headlamp bobbing. “I thought I could smell Effie. By the gods, you’re right. We must be heading in the right direction.”
Luciano pulled her into a hug, dampening her neck. He was just as terrified as she was. “Finalmente,” he whispered.
The moment gave them new courage and they hastened their pace. The scent wasn’t steady, but when Aida could smell it, she thought perhaps it was growing stronger. Yet the farther they walked, the denser the air grew, tinged with the palpable feeling of grief and depression. Even under Sophie’s aegis, the shrine’s mournful gravity pulled at her spirit, a reminder of the goddess’s pervasive sorrow.
They pushed forward, bolstered by the idea that such sorrow meant they were moving closer and closer toward the shrine. The air grew even damper, and the smell of Effie began to mix with the scent of mold and decay. Rounding a corner, they found the source: A section of the tunnel ahead was flooded, water reflecting their lamplight in a still, dark pool that stretched into the shadows.
“We can’t turn back now,” Luciano said, rolling up his pant legs. “It can’t be that deep.”
Carefully, they edged around the perimeter of the tunnel, trying to avoid the deepest water, their hands grazing the cold walls for balance. Suddenly, Luciano’s footing gave way, and he plunged into the water with a splash, his headlamp flickering out and succumbing to the darkness. Aida, illuminated by the dim glow of her lamp, let out a startled cry and pushed her way through the water toward him.
A skull floated up in the water next to Luciano and Aida screamed, the sound echoing dully off the tufa stone.
“Calma,calma.I’m okay,” Luciano reassured, his voice wavering slightly as he pulled himself up, but the water was deceitfully deep, swallowing his legs up to the knees. “But my pack is soaked through,” he lamented, retrieving the sodden mass. “And my lamp...” His voice trailed off as he fumbled in the inky water, finally retrieving the useless device. The grim realization that they were now enveloped in an even more oppressive darkness settled heavily upon them. “We’ll need to getthrough this water to try to fix it. I don’t want to open the packs and lose anything.”
“You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked, concerned, barely able to conceal her burgeoning panic.
“Sì.The water at least broke some of the fall.Andiamo.We can do this.”
Aida’s heart was pounding so hard she was sure Luciano could hear it. Surrounded by the suffocating silence, punctuated only by the unnerving drip of water from Luciano’s backpack and their labored breathing, a sense of foreboding engulfed her. The reality of their situation settled in—a misstep, a wrong turn, and they could be lost forever in this labyrinthine underworld.
