John Saul - The Devil's Labyrinth

Ryan and Melody lunged toward the Pope. As his lips formed the final word, they threw themselves on him, toppling him near the end of the altar and onto the floor, all of them falling just as Sofia, still heeding only the instructions Father Sebastian had planted in her mind, pressed the buttons in the cuffs of her cassock.

The concussion of the twin bombs exploding knocked the breath from Ryan, and for an instant he lay paralyzed, certain he was dead. But a moment later he felt the crucifix in his right hand; felt Melody stir beside him. Beneath them, the Pope struggled, and Melody began to pull away from him, trying to free herself from Ryan’s grip so the fallen Pope could recover himself. But if he let go of her hand—

Still holding Melody with his left hand, Ryan released his grip on the silver crucifix and tore her cassock away with his right. Flinging it to the far end of the stage, he ripped off his own and a moment later it fell onto Melody’s, both the cassocks lying in a crumpled heap, the full Mass on the altar itself standing between them and the Pontiff.

“Bombs,” Ryan whispered, his voice nearly failing him. He clutched at the crucifix once more, and again it lent him the energy he needed.

“We were supposed to kill you,” he whispered to the Pope, who was now on his knees, steadying himself against the altar with his right arm as he reached out to Melody with his left. “Father Sebastian—”

His voice broke, and suddenly all he wanted was to see his father again. He turned away from the kneeling Pontiff, but when he tried to search for the man who only a moment ago had been reaching out to him, all he saw was the Plexiglas shield, smeared with the flesh and blood of Sofia Capelli.

Beyond the shield, the crowd was screaming and backing away, crushing against the temporary fencing, but Ryan barely saw any of it. Then there were security men in black suits swarming everywhere, and someone was helping Ryan to his feet and someone else was tending to Melody and a dozen people seemed to be crowded around the Pope and the altar was dripping with blood and bits of Sofia’s flesh and hair and clothing clung to the purple curtain behind the altar and—

Ryan was going to faint.

He knew it; knew it as certainly as he’d ever known anything in his life. He was going to faint, and there was nothing he could do about it.

And then, as the darkness began to close in around him, it happened again.

His father was right there, standing at the end of the stage, watching him.

Making certain he was all right.

And then, as his father looked down on him one last time, the faintness drained away from Ryan, and he nodded to his father.

Everything, he knew, was finally going to be all right.

ROME † SIX MONTHS LATER

RYAN PRESSED HIS back against the cold stone wall of the catacomb and tried to control his rising panic, but the same bitter taste at the back of his tongue, the same hammering heart and the same cold sweat he remembered from being in the tunnels under St. Isaac’s Academy were starting to overwhelm him.

But he wasn’t at St. Isaac’s anymore — all that was over, and half a year had passed, and until an hour ago he’d thought Rome was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. For almost a week he and his mother had been touring the city, seeing not only the fountains and piazzas and ruins everyone else saw, but things no one else ever saw: rooms in the Vatican to which the public was never invited, but which the Pope had led them through, explaining everything they were seeing, taking a whole day simply to show Ryan and his mother the heart of the Eternal City. “And you must see the catacombs,” he’d told them at the end of that day. “No visit to Rome is complete without it. It is only there that you will truly understand what our earliest believers suffered for the true faith.”

So they came to the catacombs today, and now everything that had happened at St. Isaac’s was flooding back to him as he tried to walk with his mother and their guide sixty feet beneath the streets of the ancient city.

Dim light bulbs were strung every twenty feet or so, but they emitted no more light than had their counterparts in the maze of tunnels beneath the school, and he could barely see anything except the next bulb. Between those small beacons, the darkness closed around Ryan with a cold fist.

It was as if he was caught once again in one of the horrible nightmares he’d had at school. Once again he was lost in the dark, trying to navigate dark tunnels, feeling eyes everywhere, watching him from somewhere beyond the reach of his own eyes.

He gulped at the musty air, trying to rid himself of the rising panic, and looked around for his mother and their guide. Faint tendrils of their voices echoed from somewhere in the distance, but they had vanished into the darkness ahead.

He needed to catch up.

But just like in a nightmare, he couldn’t make his feet move; it was as if they were mired in thick mud.

He leaned against the wall for a moment, the cold stone on his back settling his nerves slightly, and he tried again.

Touching both sides of the narrow tunnel, he took one step, and then another, finally making his way through the ancient passage that the early Christians had carved by hand out of the stone beneath the city.

I can do this.

He closed his eyes and wiped the sleeve of his shirt over his sweating face.

And heard footsteps.

He whirled, but saw nothing.

He heard the footsteps again, and once more spun around to gaze into the darkness. The footsteps stopped, and now the tunnel was filled with nothing but a terrible silence that was as suffocating as the musty air.

Settle down! Just walk.

With the sheer force of his will he tamped the rising panic down.

Now he could hear the sound of voices again.

But was it his mother and the guide? Or was it something else, something close behind him, something that would vanish if he turned to look.

He forced the dark thoughts from his mind, concentrating only on putting one foot in front of the other, praying he was going in the right direction, and hadn’t somehow gotten turned around in the dark.

On both sides of the tunnel, small crypts — barely more than shelves — had been carved out of the stone, and each of the shelves still held the bones where the dead had been laid so many centuries ago. Ryan began counting them as he passed, trying to keep his mind on something other than the phantom footsteps he still heard behind him.

And ahead of him.

And all around him.

Footsteps exactly like those he had heard in the tunnels beneath St. Isaac’s the night he had followed the two priests to the dark crypt far below the school.

The crypts here were different, though. Many of them had carvings on their stone walls, and he tried to focus his mind on them and ignore the phantom presence he felt all around.

Then, illuminated by one single lightbulb that seemed to be brighter than the others, he saw a familiar symbol carved into the back of one of the niches.

It was a circular pattern that he recognized in an instant.

The same symbol that had been drawn in chalk on the floor around Jeffrey Holmes’s coffin was etched here in the eternal stone!

The labyrinth.

Ryan’s whole body trembled. This had to be a nightmare — it couldn’t possibly be real. He heard the footsteps behind him again, but they were much closer this time. He steeled himself to spin around and face whatever lurked in the darkness, but before he could turn, something reached out of the blackness.

It was an arm that slipped around his neck and held him utterly immobile.