Yet someone had been down here recently enough to tear some of the larger cobwebs out of their way, and leave drag marks and some strange powdery residue on the stairs. It made her wonder if she was about to discover a huge stash of heroin or cocaine, or some drug dealer's secret laboratory.
Or maybe this is another disposal site. She stopped on a stair as she remembered the place she'd found outside Marseilles, where the holy freaks had moved into a factory and converted a huge furnace into a crematorium. It had taken her a full night to trash the equipment enough to make it unusable.
This might be worse.
She hated doing this. She didn't owe anyone anything, especially them. And if he was one of them… But she couldn't leave, not until she knew for sure. Fear would have to take a number.
At the base of the stairs was an electrical switch, and absently Nick flipped it on. Two small floodlights illuminated a landing area that opened on one side into a bricked passage.
Electricity. Lights. In an abandoned chapel that was supposed to collapse at any moment. That no one was allowed to walk through. If nothing else shouted, "Be afraid, be very afraid," that did.
"I'm not afraid," Nick muttered under her breath as she followed the smell of evergreen. "There's nothing to be afraid of."
Nick didn't mind lying to herself. The truth never set anything free.
The woodsy scent seemed to be coming from a large tapestry at the far end of the cellar passageway. As soon as Nick trained her flashlight on it, she set down her bag and stepped back to have a proper look. At first it seemed only a threadbare frame for the rat and moth holes eaten through it, and then she picked out what the weaving had once depicted: a pale-haired woman standing beside a tree. The lady had wrapped her arm around the trunk; the tree's branches curled down around her as if the tree were trying to return the embrace.
The Golden Madonna, perhaps?
Even as hope rose, Nick's memory squashed it. She had walked the circular room devoted to the six famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Cluny in Paris. They had the same bloodred background as this one, and in them the maker had woven the same black banners with three crescent moons. No way could this be one of them; it had to be a reproduction or knockoff. Who would leave a national treasure hanging unguarded in the basement of a crumbling ruin to feed the rat population?
When Nick reached up to feel along the upper edge, her touch made the entire tapestry fall. A cloud of dust, dirt, and rotted wool fragments enveloped her. Coughing, she covered her nose and mouth as she examined the wall behind it. New red brick filled in the space of an old entry-way to seal off a room. The mortar used must have been mixed wrong, as the seams between the bricks were riddled with holes, and some of the bricks were loose enough for her to push in with her fingers.
"Hello." Nick crouched down and pulled the pile of tapestry away from the wall. A thick layer of mortar dust obscured the base of the new bricks, caked as if it had been there a while. "Father Claudio, you'll never land a job as a bricklayer."
Come to me.
Falling back onto her ass didn't improve Nick's mood; nor did scraping her palms on the stone floor. She stood and put an ear to the brick before stepping back again. "Is someone in there?"
Silence.
"If you hadn't noticed, this is private property, and I'm trespassing," she told the wall. "The French police aren't very fond of Americans breaking and entering, either." She waited for a response. "If you really want my help, friend, tell me if you're in there."
Silence.
Nick realized something. "Do you speak any English?" She repeated that in her phrase-book French, along with, "Are you stuck in there?" Brilliant question. "Do you want me to get you out?"
Silence, and evergreen.
"We'll call that a yes." Feeling ridiculous, Nick bent down, unzipped her bag, and took out a hammer and chisel. After a glance at the brick, she put them back and removed a small sledgehammer. "If you're near the door, move back. Shit is about to hit the fan."
A hail of mortar dust followed the metal-on-stone slam of the sledgehammer. Bricks shifted, two falling into the space behind them. Grinning, Nick swung the heavy steel head again, and a foot-wide hole appeared.
Seeing that much brick implode made her stop and bend over to peer in the gap. Air rushed around her face as if the pitch-black room on the other side were sucking it in. Invisible branches of evergreen seemed to close around her.
"They didn't even leave you a night-light? Cheapskates." She shoved in a brick, scraping her knuckles, and something dark and wet dripped onto the back of her hand. Blood, and not hers.
Beneath the blood, her scratches disappeared.
"Fuck." She paused long enough to put on her leather gloves before she wrenched at the brick around the edges of the hole, pushing it away and widening the space. A strange urgency hammered inside her head, as if an invisible alarm clock had gone off on the other side of the wall. I have to get him the hell out of here before they come for both of us.
The hole was finally large enough for Nick to squeeze through. "Here we go." She poked her head and then her shoulders inside. The evergreen scent on the other side of the wall didn't cover the other, awful smell—as if someone had emptied a couple of trash cans in the hidden room—but she'd smelled worse. She climbed in, groping for a handhold, but her fingers found nothing but floor. More brick collapsed under her weight, and she fell on her face. Something long and hard bruised her thigh.
Flashlight. She pulled it out and switched it on.
The tiny room still held the empty racks where some long-dead aristocrat had kept his best bottles of wine and brandy. From all the tangled, dusty cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, it appeared as if no one had entered the space for years. Nick stood up and swept the flashlight slowly around her. A rickety-looking table and two scarred old chairs waited empty in front of a dead fireplace overflowing with ancient ash.
No sign of life, however. "Where are you?"
Chains rattled behind her.
She turned around and pointed the flashlight toward the sound, and saw him. The light wavered before she controlled her hand. "Bastards."
They'd crucified this one.
Nick saw she was partially wrong—chains had been wrapped around his neck, arms, waist, and legs—but two huge copper bolts had been hammered through his wrists.
He'd worked at one, apparently, and could move it enough to rattle the chains around that arm. A black rag had been tied over his eyes, and a wide band of welded copper covered the lower half of his face. Dark green tattoos mottled his naked body, along with dried blood, open wounds, and filth.
Despite his sad condition, he still looked beautiful, the way they all did. This one resembled a green god, carved from dark jade.
Nailed to a cross.
The holy freaks had done this to him. Nick had never seen one this bad, but the deliberate, mocking crucifixion had the same feel as the others she had found. The question was, why? If they wanted them dead, why not just kill them? Why the torture and humiliation?
The prisoner turned his head slightly and moved his hand, disturbing the chains again.
Nick lowered the flashlight as she walked to him. "Sorry." She didn't know why she was apologizing. None of this was her doing, and if she had an ounce of brains left she'd run out of here before the old man found her screwing with this thing. Lucky for this one she was an idiot. "How do I get you off this without tearing you to shreds?"
The chains rattled a third time as he gestured toward the wall beside him.
Nick reached out through the hole and groped until she grabbed her bag and pulled it inside. Once she had retrieved her bolt cutters, she looked around the crude wooden cross. The chains had been threaded through rusted iron rings driven into the wall around him. She started there, cutting the rings open and tugging the loops of chain away. The weighty copper links felt icy and sticky, and wherever they had touched him, they left dark impressions of their links on his skin.
This close Nick could smell nothing else but the evergreen scent he radiated. How long had he been sealed in this room? Weeks? Months? His matted brown hair shifted and his head moved back, as if he were trying to see under the edge of his blindfold.
"Want to have a look at me?" She stopped cutting long enough to remove the black rag from his eyes. His closed eyelids didn't open, and he sagged a little. "I'm Nick," she told him as she went back to work on the chains. "And you're a mess."
She freed his neck and arms, and examined the copper band gagging him. It had been welded together at the ends, but it was thin, and her tin snips cut through it nicely. The raw skin under it began to heal at once, and she flung the copper to the floor in disgust.
"I've got to pry these bolts out." His mouth matched the perfection of his body; she saw that right away. Were any of these things ever ugly, or even a little plain? "It's going to hurt, maybe as much as when they went in."
Nick heard a jerking, tearing sound.
"Ce n'est pas nécessaire." The voice sounded as dry and shredded as the feel of the trembling hand that pushed her back. "I can do the rest. Leave me, girl."
Like an animal in a trap, he'd ripped his wrists free of the bolts. Maybe that was all they were: gorgeous two-legged animals.
Not very grateful ones, either. "You want me to leave now! Before you thank me, and say good-bye, and tell me to have a wonderful life? Tell me, is that what Jesus would do?"
He leaned forward, his eyes still closed. "If you remain, and if I look upon you," he murmured, "I will kill us both."
He sounded like the genie that'd been kept too long in the bottle: enraged and wanting some payback. Of course, he needed blood, and she was the only source present. In his state he'd lose control and try to drain her dry.
"I'm not leaving until I cut through enough of these so that you can get out on your own." She went back to work on the chains.
Bugs found their way into the room and began flying at her head. Absently she swatted at them until she remembered all the bugs were upstairs in the chapel.