The Seventh Sinner - Elizabeth Peters [56]
Jean took three quick running steps and stubbed her toe on a protruding stone. The small yellow candle flame flickered wildly. Gasping with terror, Jean sheltered it with her hand. If that light went out she was done for. “The horror of the darkness…” It was Saint Jerome who had said that. He must have known it himself—not the ordinary lightlessness of night, but the darkness of death and the grave.
Jean knew it would be folly to move. She was completely disoriented, and there were branching corridors every few yards. Sooner or later they would miss her, and Montini, who presumably knew where he had been, as well as where he was going, would retrace the path to look for her. If she stayed where she was, she was safe….
The word suddenly struck her with a new and terrible meaning. Safe from abandonment she certainly would be, unless she panicked; but if her theories were correct, another danger had been haunting her footsteps for many days. Was this episode to be a fourth, and final, “accident?”
When she heard a sound, she started violently. Magnified and distorted, it sounded more like a howl than a name, but as soon as she steadied herself, and her precious candle, she realized that it was a name—hers. The sound demolished what few wits she had remaining. She began to run—whether toward a rescuer or away from a faceless killer she did not know—and plunged headlong into an approaching figure. Her candle went out, which was fortunate, since otherwise it would have ignited the man’s shirt. He saved his own candle by a complicated last-minute stretch, and caught her in his free arm.
“Michael,” Jean whispered.
“Undeniably. What’s with you? Why all the panic?”
“You’re a fine one to ask that.” Jean stepped back, and he let her go at once. “Are you—are you all right?”
“Who, me? Fine.” He smiled. “I’m cured. I’m even getting to like this.”
“I’m not.” There was something else she didn’t like; the look on Michael’s face and the way his eyes shone in the candlelight. They looked solid, the pupils greatly dilated. With his faint, enigmatic smile, it was an unnerving expression.
“Now that you’ve been good enough to rescue me, let’s join the others,” she said.
“Why? It’s nice and quiet here. This is the way it was supposed to be. No wisecracking sightseers, gaping and pretending to be frightened…”
“Michael—”
“I haven’t been to mass since I was thirteen,” Michael went on, in a dreamy voice. “I was so turned off I couldn’t pass by a church without spitting. And the Jesus movement never got to me, I don’t dig that kind of exhibitionism. But in a place like this you begin to see what they were driving at. The meaning behind the symbols; the fact that two opposites don’t clash, but resolve into a synthesis. Death and resurrection; the body back to the dust it came from, and the soul to God.”
“Michael,” Jean repeated. She had to fight an insane instinct to shout, as if she were calling him back from a great distance. “Please. You’re frightening me.”
“What are you frightened of? They’ll find us soon. Unless we move—back that way….”
Jean decided she was going to scream. She didn’t want to; surely she must be imagining the pressure of Michael’s body against hers, forcing her back into one of those dark side corridors. Even so, she was going to scream.
She opened her mouth—and Andy came plunging around a turn in the passage. He was holding his candle high, and the light made his mop of hair glow like a nimbus.
“All right, sorry to break it up,” he said coolly. “But Montini is having fits. He’s been telling us gruesome stories of people who got lost down here and weren’t found for years and years and…So suppose you find a more appropriate place, hmm?”
“Anytime I pick a place like this to make out you can have my head examined,” Michael said, in his normal voice. “We were merely exchanging philosophical comments. Lead on, you louse.”
The others were waiting for them in a tiny rough-walled chapel. Montini burst into agitated speech when they came in. When he had finished