Valerio Manfredi - The Ancient Curse

‘Careful with that thing! This whole place might have burned down!’ he said.

Francesca held out her hand for the torch and shone it at the scorched coat to see how bad the damage was. She looked astonished at what she was seeing. ‘Will you look at that…’

‘Look at what?’ asked Fabrizio.

‘It’s fake.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘Look for yourself’ She tapped her knuckles against the animal’s side. ‘It’s wood. It’s not an animal at all. It’s an extremely realistic sculpture. As if Ghirardini, or whoever it was, had wanted to reproduce something that he’d seen but couldn’t have in his collection. If we had the time to search through here, I’ll bet we’d find sketches, drawings, notes. I’m sure of it.’

‘So Ghirardini saw it too,’ he said, raising his eyes to Francesca’s. ‘The animal has to be somehow connected to this place.’

‘Do you want to scare me to death? Come on. Let’s get out now. The little boy’s not here, Fabrizio.’

She hadn’t finished saying that when they heard a noise, in the distance, followed by a louder, sharper one.

‘What was that?’ asked Francesca.

‘I don’t know. It sounded strange.’

‘Is it coming from outside?’

‘No, it’s coming from inside. From upstairs, maybe…’

‘Fabrizio, it’s definitely coming from outside. I can tell. Let’s get out of here.’

‘No, I was wrong. It’s coming from downstairs. Hear that?’

‘But there is no one downstairs – you saw that for yourself.’

‘Maybe we didn’t look closely enough.’

‘Yes, we did. I want to leave, now.’

‘To leave we have to go back downstairs, don’t we? We can’t just walk out of the front door.’

Francesca gave in. ‘All right, then. Let’s go downstairs to see. At least I won’t have to look at these revolting animals anymore.’

They descended the stairs to the first floor and then went down the narrow steps leading from the corner of the main hall to the floor below. The sound was becoming sharper and more distinct. Hammering, against something hard: the ground, perhaps, or a wall.

‘See! I told you it was coming from down here,’ said Fabrizio.

‘I really am scared now.’

‘Come on. Nothing’s going to happen. Maybe someone else fell through the hole, ended up somewhere down below and is just trying to get out.’

‘Fabrizio, there’s nothing but an empty, doorless room down there, cut into the tufa,’ said Francesca, grabbing on to his arm as he continued to descend slowly.

‘So that’s all we’ll see,’ replied Fabrizio, setting his foot on the last step.

A slight luminescence shone from the room below, like the light of a candle. Fabrizio put his head around the corner as the noise stopped abruptly and directed the torch beam at the middle of the room. He stood gaping open-mouthed at what he saw.

It was Angelo, covered in mud from head to toe, and he was holding the missing bronze fragment in his hand. A candle stub at his feet let off a tiny glow.

The child smiled as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

‘See?’ he said. ‘I know how to be an archaeologist. So, can I stay with you now?’

FABRIZIO DREW CLOSER carefully, slowly, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, as if that vision might vanish from one moment to the next. Angelo was standing hunched over in front of him, bowed under the weight of what for him was a very heavy bronze slab. He didn’t seem frightened or upset, or even uncomfortable, in that dark underground chamber. He looked like he had been biding his time, waiting for this very encounter.

‘Do you want to… give it to me?’ asked Fabrizio, holding out his arms.

The boy nodded and handed over the slab.

Fabrizio took it as he nodded to Francesca. ‘This is Angelo.’

‘It’s a pleasure, Angelo. I’m Francesca,’ she said, extending her hand.

Fabrizio noticed a pickaxe at the corner of the room, along with a pile of freshly dug earth, and asked, ‘How did you know where it was? Do you know who put it here?’

But the child seemed suddenly alarmed, as he strained to hear sounds that the others were unaware of. ‘We have to get out of here before she finds us. Hurry. This way, fast… She’s coming.’

He was frightened now. He had taken Francesca’s hand and was tugging her towards the staircase. She gave Fabrizio a look and all three of them started up the steps. They reached the main hall and moved towards the front entrance. Angelo stood on tiptoe to push back the latch of the secondary door and Francesca immediately went forward to give him a hand, but it was stuck and would not move. Fabrizio had no better luck: the door had been bolted from the outside.

Angelo seemed paralysed for an instant, then looked up at his companions and said, ‘This way. Come on – follow me.’

He turned back and retraced his steps until he was halfway down the hall, then opened a side door and started to run down a long, dusty corridor filled with cobwebs.

Fabrizio was weighed down by the slab and was having trouble keeping up, but Angelo kept turning to say, ‘Hurry! We have to get out.’

He moved easily through that sinister place, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms leading into each other like a strange set of dominoes. Rats and beetles, the denizens of those abandoned halls, would start at the sudden intrusion and the wildly aimed torch beam, racing for shelter under rickety, worm-eaten furniture and behind old picture frames leaning up against the walls. All at once, while running through a larger room, the boy stopped for a moment to glance at a big canvas that depicted a man who appeared to be the master of the house standing alongside a large desk bearing a marble bust of Dante Alighieri. Jacopo Ghirardini, perhaps?

‘Do you know who that is?’ asked Fabrizio, panting.

The boy didn’t answer, hurriedly taking off down a very narrow final corridor, more of a passageway between two solid stone walls, at the end of which a milky light appeared to be filtering through from the outside. A thick iron grating covered an aperture of about fifty centimetres by one metre, secured by a bolt. Angelo slid the bolt open and pushed but nothing happened.

‘You push,’ he said to Fabrizio. ‘You’re stronger. Maybe there’s something outside blocking it.’

Fabrizio set the bronze slab down and applied all his strength, but the grating did not budge. He stuck his hand through and his fingers curled around a chain closed with a heavy padlock.

‘Damn. There’s a chain. Didn’t you know it was there?’ he asked Angelo.

The little boy shook his head with a baffled expression. That curious air of confidence had completely vanished.

‘The cellar,’ said Fabrizio to Francesca. ‘We’ll go back down to where we got in and I’ll push you up on my shoulders. Once you’re out, you can help Angelo out too and I’ll get out somehow as well. We have to hurry. I’m afraid the torch batteries are running down and we won’t get anywhere if we can’t see.’

Their haste and the child’s bewilderment had made them frantic, as if the building itself were about to collapse around them from one moment to the next. They descended underground and stumbled back along the path they’d taken, but when they got to the air vent they saw that the grating had been returned to its original position.

‘Damn! That’s all we need,’ swore Fabrizio. ‘We’re trapped.’

‘Wait! Maybe not,’ said Francesca. ‘Maybe a policeman or night watchman came by and pushed the grating back in place so that no one would fall in. Help me get up there. I’ll bet you it’s still loose.’

Angelo was becoming more and more nervous. He kept checking behind him and begging, ‘Hurry, please. We have to get out of here.’