he decided, for a girl from the Ottawa Valley who absolutely had it made.
“Gregorian chants?” someone asked.
Ned jerked sideways along the bench, turning his head quickly. “What the—”
“Sorry! Did I scare you?”
“Hell, yes!” he snapped. “What do you think?”
He stood up. It was a girl, he saw.
She looked apologetic for a second, then grinned. She clasped her hands in front of her. “What have you to fear in this holy place, my child? What sins lie heavy on your heart?”
“I’ll think of something,” he said.
She laughed.
She looked to be about his own age, dressed in a black T-shirt and blue jeans, Doc Martens, a small green backpack. Tall, thin, freckles, American accent. Light brown hair to her shoulders.
“Murder? T. S. Eliot wrote a play about that,” she said.
Ned made a face. Urk. One of those. “I know, Murder in the Cathedral. We’re supposed to study it next year.”
She grinned again. “I’m geeky that way. What can I say? Isn’t this place amazing?”
“You think? I think it’s a mess.”
“But that’s what’s cool! Walk twenty steps and you go five hundred years. Have you seen the baptistry? This place drips with history.”
Ned held out an open palm and looked up, as if to check for dripping water. “You are a geek, aren’t you?”
“Can’t tease if I admitted it. Cheap shot.”
She was kind of pretty, in a skinny-dancer way.
Ned shrugged. “What’s the baptistry?”
“The round part, by the front doors.”
“Wait a sec.” Something occurred to him. “How’d you get in? The place is closed for two hours.”
“I saw. Someone’s taking photos outside. Probably a brochure.”
“No.” He hesitated. “That’s my dad. For a book.”
“Really? Who is he?”
“You wouldn’t know. Edward Marriner.”
Her jaw actually dropped. Ned felt the familiar mix of pleasure and embarrassment. “You messing with me?” she gasped. “Mountains and Gods? I know that book. We own that book!”
“Well, cool. What will it get me?”
She gave him a suddenly shy look. Ned wasn’t sure why he’d spoken that way. It wasn’t really him. Ken and Barry talked that way to girls, but he didn’t, usually. He cleared his throat.
“Get you a lecture on the baptistry,” she said. “If you can stand it. I’m Kate. Not Katie, not Kathy.”
He nodded his head. “Ned. Not Seymour, not Abdul.”
She hesitated, then laughed again. “All right, fine, I deserved that. But I hate nicknames.”
“Kate is a nickname.”
“Yeah, but I picked it. Makes a difference.”
“I guess. You never answered…how’d you get in?”
“Side door.” She gestured across the way. “No one’s watching the square on that side. Through the cloister. Seen that yet?”
Ned blinked. But he couldn’t say, after, that any premonition had come to him. He was just confused, that’s all.
“The door to the cloister is locked. I was there fifteen minutes ago.”
“Nope. Open. The far one out to the street and the one leading in here. I just came through them. Come look. The cloister is really pretty.”
It began then, because they didn’t get to the cloister. Not yet.
Going across, they heard a sound: metal on metal. A banging, a harsh scrape, another bang.
“What the hell?” Ned murmured, stopping where he was. He wasn’t sure why, but he kept his voice down.
Kate did the same. “That’s the baptistry,” she whispered. “Over there.” She pointed. “Probably one of the priests, maybe a caretaker.”
Another scraping sound.
Ned Marriner said, “I don’t think so.”
It would have been, in every possible way, wiser to ignore that noise, to go see the pretty cloister, walk out that way afterwards, into the morning streets of Aix. Get a croissant and a Coke somewhere with this girl named Kate.
His mother, however, was in the Sudan, having flown far away from them, again, to the heart of an insanely dangerous place. Ned came from courage—and from something else, though he didn’t know that part yet.
He walked quietly towards the baptistry and peered down the three steps leading into that round, pale space. He’d gone right past it when he came in, he realized. He saw eight tall pillars, making a smaller circle inside it, with a dome high above, letting in more light than anywhere else.
“It’s the oldest thing here,” whispered the girl beside him. “By a lot, like 500 a.d.”
He was about to ask her how she knew so many idiotic facts when he saw that a grate had been lifted from over a hole in the stone floor.
Then he saw the head and shoulders of a man appear from whatever opening that grate had covered. And Ned realized that this wasn’t, that this couldn’t be, a priest or a caretaker or anyone who belonged in here.
The man had his back to them. Ned lifted a hand, wordlessly, and pointed. Kate let out a gasp. The man in the pit didn’t move, and then he did.
With an air of complete unreality, as if this were a video game he’d stumbled into, not anything that could be called real life, Ned saw the man reach inside his leather jacket and bring out a knife. Priests didn’t wear leather, or carry knives.
The man laid it on the stone floor beside him—the blade pointing in their direction.
He still didn’t turn around. They couldn’t see his face. Ned saw long—very long—fingers. The man was bald, or had shaved his head. It was impossible to tell his age.
There was a silence; no one moved. This would be a good spot to save the game, Ned thought. Then restart if my character gets killed.
“He isn’t here,” the man said quietly. “I was quite sure…but he is playing with me again. He enjoys doing that.”
Ned Marriner had never heard
