up on the back of his neck.
“Another grate,” Kate called cheerfully from above. “Maybe you were right. Maybe after they covered up the Roman street they just needed—”
“I found something,” he said.
His voice sounded strained, unnatural. The flashlight beam wavered. He tried to hold it steady but the movement had illuminated something else and he looked at this now. Another recess. The same thing in it, he thought at first, then he realized it wasn’t. Not quite the same.
“Found? What do you mean?” Kate called.
Her voice, only a few steps away and up, seemed to Ned to be coming from really far off, from a world he’d left behind when he came down here. He couldn’t answer. He was actually unable to speak. He looked, the beam wobbling from one object to the other.
The first one, set in an egg-shaped hollow in the wall and mounted carefully on a clay base, was a human skull.
He was quite certain this wasn’t from any tomb down here, it was too exposed, too obviously set here to be seen. This wasn’t a burial. The base was like the kind his mother used on the mantelpiece or the shelves on either side of the fireplace back home to hold some object she’d found in her travels, an artifact from Sri Lanka, or Rwanda.
This skull had been placed to be found, not laid to some dark eternal rest.
The second object made that even clearer. In a precisely similar hollowed-out recess beside the first, and set on an identical clay rest, was a sculpture of a human head.
It was smooth, worn down, as if with age. The only harsh line was at the bottom, as if it had been decapitated, jaggedly severed at the neck. It looked terrifying, speaking or signalling to him across centuries: a message he really didn’t want to understand. In some ways it frightened him even more than the bones. He’d seen skulls before; you made jokes, like with the one in science lab, “Alas, poor Yorick! Such a terrible name!”
He’d never seen anything like this carving. Someone had gone to great pains to get down here, hollow out a place, fit it to a base beside a real skull in an underground corridor leading nowhere. And the meaning was…what?
“What is it?” Kate called. “Ned, you’re scaring me.”
He still couldn’t answer her. His mouth was too dry, words weren’t coming. Then, forcing himself to look more closely by the light of the flashlight beam, Ned saw that the sculpted head was completely smooth on the top, as if bald. And there was a gash in the stone face—a scarring of it—along one cheek, and up behind the ear.
He got out of there, as fast as he could.
they sat in the cloister in morning light, side by side on a wooden bench. Ned hadn’t been sure how much farther he could walk before sitting down.
There was a small tree in front of them, the one on the cover of the brochure. It was bright with springtime flowers in the small, quiet garden. They were close to the door that led back into the cathedral. There was no breeze here. It was a peaceful place.
His hands, holding Kate’s red flashlight, were still trembling.
He must have left Melanie’s brochure in the baptistry, he realized. They’d stayed just long enough to close the grate, dragging it back across the open space, scraping it on the stone floor. He hadn’t even wanted to do that, but something told him it needed to be done, covering over what lay below.
“Tell me,” said Kate.
She was biting her lip again. A habit, obviously. He drew a breath and, looking down at his hands and then at the sunlit tree, but not at the girl, told about the skull and the sculpted head. And the scar.
“Oh, God,” she said.
Which was just about right. Ned leaned back against the rough wall.
“What do we do?” Kate asked. “Tell the…the archaeologists?”
Ned shook his head. “This isn’t an ancient find. Think about it a second.”
“What do you mean? You said…”
“I said it looked old, but those things haven’t been there long. Can’t have been. Kate, people must have been down there dozens of times. More than that. That’s what archaeologists do. They’ll have gone looking at those…Roman street slabs, searching for the tomb, studying the well.”
“The font,” she said. “That’s what it is. Not a well.”
“Whatever. But, point is, that guy and me, we’re not the first people down there. People would have seen and recorded and…and done something with those things if they’d been there a long time. They’d be in a museum by now. There’d be stuff written about them. They’d be on that tourist thing on the wall, Kate.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m pretty sure someone put them there just a little while ago.” He hesitated. “And carved out the spaces for them, too.”
“Oh, God,” she said again.
She looked at him. In the light he could see her eyes were light brown, like her hair. She had freckles across her nose and cheeks. “You think for…our guy to see?”
Our guy. He didn’t smile, though he would have, another time. His hands had stopped shaking, he was pleased to see.
He nodded. “The head was him, for sure. Bald, the scar. Yeah, it was there for him.”
“Okay. Um, put there by who? I mean, whom?”
He did smile a little this time. “You’re hopeless.”
“I’m thinking out loud, boy detective. Got your cereal box badge?”
“Left it behind.”
“Yeah, you left this, too.” She fished his brochure out of her pack.
He took it from her. “You gotta meet Melanie,” he said again.
He looked at the guide. The picture on the cover had been taken this same time of year; the flowers on the tree were identical. He showed her.
“Nice,” she said. “It’s a Judas tree. Who’s Melanie?”
Figured, that she’d know the tree. “My dad’s assistant. He has three people with him, and someone from the publisher coming, and me.”
“And what do you do?”
He shrugged. “Hang out. Crawl into tunnels.” He looked around. “Anything here?”
“Fresh air. I was getting sick inside.”
“Me too, down there. I shouldn’t have gone.”
“Probably not.”
They were silent a moment. Then Kate said, in a bright, fake tour-guide voice, “The columns show Bible tales, mostly. David and Goliath is over there.”
