The Seventh Sinner - Elizabeth Peters [23]
She went out into the corridor, passing a fat lady and her balding husband, in order to investigate some of the rooms on that side. If the area had a plan, it eluded her completely. Rooms and corridors succeeded one another in a mazelike muddle. And all of it was empty. The neat tiled floors were dusty, and the walls had been stripped down to the naked brick. The emptiness was not just the absence of any accouterment of living, it was a positive force that pressed down on any creature daring enough to penetrate those chambers. Now and again Jean met other visitors, and passed them without speech; they all had the same blank, awed stare she felt on her own face.
Eventually she passed through a narrow doorway and found herself treading a path through a corridor walled in by rough, unexcavated heaps of rubble. She heard approaching footsteps long before she could identify the person who made them. Then she recognized Michael.
“Hey,” Michael said. “It’s you…. A few more minutes and I’d have started seeing ancient Roman ghosts. What a place!”
“What is it about the place? I’ve been in ruined buildings before…. Pompeii, the Acropolis, various digs…The only other place that oppressed me in this way was the catacombs.”
“It’s a dead place,” Michael said. His eyes were so wide she fancied she could see a rim of white all the way around the iris. “It’s inimical to life.”
“Getting psychic?” Jean asked jokingly.
Michael shrugged—or shivered, she wasn’t sure which.
“Oh, crap,” he said, in a more normal voice. “It’s all calculated effect. The light, just dim enough to make your vision uncertain; the chilly dampness; the…listen.”
In the silence Jean heard the sound to which he referred—a distant, rippling murmur that rose and fell like the voices of a far-off crowd.
“It’s water,” she ventured.
“An underground spring or stream. They had to dig a tunnel out to the main sewer to keep these rooms from being flooded. There’s one room, back over on the other side of the palazzo, where water rushes through the wall and the overflow trickles out through holes into a channel. It’s a small trickle. But if you stare at it too long, the sound of the water gets louder and louder, and you start thinking maybe it will burst out, through the wall, and you wonder whether you’d have time to make your way through all these corridors and get to the stairs before the flood caught you….”
“My God, you’re in a morbid mood.” Jean peered at him through the gloom, and saw, with a stir of alarm, that he was perspiring, even in the chill air. “Michael, are you sick?”
“Sick in the head,” said Michael, with an odd choked laugh. “They call it claustrophobia. Such a nice sterile name for a feeling that turns your guts inside out and makes your brain clang around in your skull like a bell in a belltower….”
Jean reached out and caught his hands, which were groping for something to hang on to. He fell back against the wall, his eyes closed, breathing heavily. Jean didn’t know what to do, except maintain the clasp that was numbing her fingers. After a few seconds Michael opened his eyes.
“That’s better,” he mumbled. “Company helps. But I think I’d better get out of here.”
There was barely room for them to walk side by side. Jean kept pace with him; she sensed that he was exerting all his self-control to keep from breaking into a headlong panicky run.
“Is this new?” she asked.
“No. I spent two years in analysis, some time back.”
“But we do this underground bit all the time! I remember now, when we went to the Callixtus catacomb you didn’t say a word the whole time; we were kidding you about it…. And when Ted showed us the Jewish catacombs you acted funny, and you said you had the emperor of all hangovers…. Why didn’t you tell us about your phobia?”
“It sounds so stupid,” Michael said. His voice had a childish petulance that made Jean want to laugh, but she knew better than to do so. There might be a degree of masochism in Michael’s behavior, but there was also a considerable