If I Should Die (9 page)

“Let me see!” I said, and pulled his hands from his face. “It singed your eyebrows and the front of your hair!” I exclaimed.

Ambrose's face was red from suppressed laughter. He gave up. “Oh, man,” he sputtered, tears leaking from the sides of his eyes. “You should have seen your expression.”

Arthur's cheeks grew as red as Ambrose's, but he wasn't laughing. “You try,” he challenged.

Ambrose patted his short-cropped hair protectively. “The 'do is sacred,” he said, and leaning cautiously back, he reached his arm through the doorway. An orange spark flew from the end of his index finger. “Ow!” he yelled, and stuck the burned finger in his mouth.

“See,” Arthur said, looking mollified.

You can't go in there
, Vincent said.

“I was able to reach in for the flashlight, so it looks like I actually can,” I said. “And I guess I'm
going to
, if you saw that I had disappeared with your future-sight or whatever.”

But, Kate
, he said as I walked unscathed into the mouth of the cave. I was enveloped by a musty wet-chalk odor. It smelled like the tunnel had been recently excavated, although the walls and ceiling were blackened by centuries of torch soot.

I glanced back to Arthur and Ambrose, who watched me from as near the door as they dared. “Should we close the door to the cave?” I said, pointing to the
signum
that was still stuck in the wall.

“No!” they said together.

“We're staying right here. No one can get in,” Ambrose reassured me.

Be careful
, came Vincent's words, sounding as if he was already yards away.

I shined the flashlight into the dark, swallowed hard, and before I could talk myself out of it, set off into the tunnel.

SIXTEEN

AS THE PATH DESCENDED, THE TUNNEL GOT
smaller, and soon I was hunching over and bending my head to clear the ceiling. The increasingly tight space made me more and more anxious. The farther downward I walked, the heavier the pressure grew inside my chest, until it felt like my lungs were going to implode.

Finally, I couldn't go any farther. My heart beat so hard that I felt it pounding in my ears. I leaned back against the tunnel wall and slid down into a crouch. Clutching the flashlight in a death grip, I attempted to talk myself out of a full-blown panic attack.

“Close your eyes and imagine being somewhere else,” my mom had said to me, deep inside the mountain at Ruby Falls.
Okay, Mom
, I thought.
Where else can I be?
And suddenly, I remembered the roof terrace on top of La Maison, where Vincent had taken me last month. Stretched out around us had been a panoramic view of Paris by night, the city sparkling like it had been decorated with a million strings of Christmas lights.

Vincent had kissed me there—in that most romantic of spots. We had rolled around on a sun bed kissing and laughing and—for a few blissful moments—forgetting that fate conspired against us. For a short while we loved each other without caring about anything else. It was on the rooftop that Vincent told me he loved me. That he couldn't imagine a life without me.

I felt the cold winter air on my face, and Vincent's finger brushing my lips, outlining my mouth before he leaned in and touched his lips to mine.

Then, in my fantasy, he disappeared and I was alone on the roof. The delicious warmth was gone—suddenly and violently—and the coldness of the winter night stung my face and hands. And suddenly I remembered our situation in the here and now: Vincent's body was gone and his spirit was bound to a madwoman. And I was within mere yards of something that might help him.

My eyes snapped open and I stood back up, hunching over into an old-lady shuffle to make my way down the narrowing passageway. There were so many twists now that the flashlight illuminated only the few feet ahead of me. I was so deep that the rock walls were damp against my fingertips.

As I turned a curve, my foot landed against a pile of rubble, sending a stone flying forward. It disappeared around a corner and the echo that returned—of a dozen stones skipping across a vast hollow space—told me that I had finally arrived.

Ducking beneath a low shelf of rock, I suddenly found myself in a cavern the size of an Olympic swimming pool and maybe four times my height. I aimed my flashlight around the walls and located the massive wooden torches lodged in either side of the door. Pulling out the lighter Bran had told me to bring, I lit first one and then the other.
I just lit a torch
, I thought, immediately storing that nugget in a bizarre-things-I-have-done compartment of my brain that had been rapidly expanding over the last year.

As the flames flared to life, I coughed from the smoke and inhaled a deep gulp of stale cave air. The dark stone surface of the cavernous room danced in the flickering light of the torches, making it appear even more otherworldly.

The walls on either side of me looked like massive honeycombs. These were stacked on top of one another all the way up to the ceiling. I counted a few rows and estimated there were around six hundred in all.

The doors were painted with letters and flowers and organic swirly shapes that looked like tattoos. They all had one thing in common: In the center of each door appeared a hand with little yellow-and-orange-teardrop shapes at the tip of each finger, as if they were shooting out flames.

The doors closest to me on the left-hand wall looked ancient, all crumbling stone with only vestiges of their painted designs. Their condition grew better the farther down the room they were, until at the far end the doors were made of wood instead of stone and the paint looked less decrepit.

The wall facing me at the end of the hall had none of the half-moon-shaped doors, and was instead covered completely in wall paintings. Next to it, at the far end of the wall to my right, the painted doors began again, these looking almost new. There were only a few rows of brightly painted doors and then they stopped, leaving rows and rows of long empty holes stretching toward me.

I ran my fingers against the mouth of the one nearest me and, shining my flashlight inside, knew immediately what it was: a tomb. I had seen the same style of funerary niches in several Roman ruins I had visited around France. The Romans had carved holes horizontally into rock walls and laid their corpses to rest inside.

I shone my flashlight cautiously around the room before stepping farther in, scanning for booby traps. And then I remembered who had sent me: Bran would have warned me of anything I needed to watch out for.

I was in his family's secret “archives” as he called it.
More like mausoleum
, I thought, although one
could
consider it an archive of bodies. Reassured that Bran would never put me in danger, I turned off my flashlight and stuck it in my bag.

In the gleam of the torches, I saw, at the far end of the room, a table holding stacks of books and shining metal objects. That was what I was here for—Bran had told me the books he needed were among them. As I walked farther into the room, I noticed that the final door on the right wall had been decorated with fresh flowers: roses and lilies and white lilac.

As I came closer, the odor of fresh paint mingled with the fragrance of the flowers. This door had recently been decorated. Something strummed painfully in my chest as I neared it. Even before I was close enough to read the letters carefully painted across the bottom of the door, I knew what they would spell.

 

    
Gwenhaël Steredenn Tândorn
    

 

Bran's mother. He must have buried her here just a couple of days ago. I knelt down to look more closely at the ground-level tomb and admired the carefully painted hand-with-flames and decorative tattoolike swirls around it. Bran was no artist, but he had obviously spent a lot of time and care creating his mother's memorial. I spotted a small card tied in with the flowers, and held it between my fingers. In tiny spiderlike script, I read, “This is for you, Mom. I will miss you every day.”

My heart tugged. I brushed away the tear that ran down my cheek. I knew exactly how Bran felt. For me it wasn't as fresh a wound, but it was one that would always bleed. I missed my parents. And even though I had finally stopped thinking of them every minute of every day, when memories did come the pain returned full force.

“Good-bye, Gwenhaël,” I whispered, and, standing, walked toward the lone table. I spotted the books that Bran had mentioned on the left edge of the tabletop: a stack of red leather-bound tomes. But before I reached them, I paused, my eyes drawn toward the paintings covering the entire surface of the end wall. They reminded me of a place I had visited in Florence with my mom—the Basilica of Santa Croce. Just like the walls of that church's multiple small chapels, this wall had been divided into strips of separate scenes and placed row on row, like a comic book.

In the basilica the panels had been filled with pictures showing stories from the Bible or of Italian saints, each chapel decorated by a single artist. Here, the panels were all painted by different artists—in different styles, and seemingly from different periods. The peeled and fading paint of the upper levels suggested that they were the oldest, so I began there, reading the images as stories like my mother had taught me.

The first panel reminded me of the amphora I had seen in Papy's gallery, showing two armies of naked men fighting one another, the soldiers wearing what looked like ancient Greek helmets. One side was led by a man with a golden red halo that flared out from his head like flames. The enemy army's leader had a halo that looked like a cloudy haze of bright red blood. A couple of figures in the corner of the frame were hovering over dead and mutilated bodies and holding their hands over them, as if they were healing them. Their halos looked like little sparks of fire—five sparks above each head, like the flames above the hands painted on the tomb doors.
This must be the symbol for the
guérisseurs, I thought.

The next image reminded me of the medieval paintings of saints being martyred. Men dressed like priests, with big popelike hats, stood aside watching as soldiers killed a group of people with swords. Their victims were bound hand and foot to wooden stakes, and had the same gold and red haloes as in the previous image, while others had round yellow haloes—the typical ones you see in religious paintings. Under the gold guy was written “bardia,” the red had “numa,” and the round halo “bayata.”

Behind them, in the distance, a flame-haloed
guérisseur
stood outside a cave in which huddled a group of the three types of haloed beings. The story was pretty clear: the revenants and the “bayata,” whatever they were, were being persecuted by the Church, and the healers were helping to hide them.

The revenants must have experienced a whole history alongside humankind that we were completely unaware of. I stood there in awe, transfixed by what this meant. Supernatural beings had been living among us since the beginning of time . . . or at least for a long, long time. And scenes from this secret parallel history were depicted clearly before me. The magnitude of this discovery made me feel very small and insignificant . . . but also very lucky.

I eagerly moved to the next panel, which depicted the cave I was standing in. Workers, all with the five flames over their heads, were digging the tombs and painting the walls, while a woman in long white robes held her hands out, shooting beams of silver in all directions. Within the beams were painted stars, moons, suns, flamed hands, and the
signum bardia
. I guessed this was some type of magical
guérisseur
casting a spell on the cave that would allow some to enter, but keep the revenants out, as had been demonstrated so dramatically (and hilariously) outside. I wondered what other magic protected this cave, as there were symbols I didn't recognize floating in the woman's silver starburst.