Henning Koch - The Maggot People

Within an hour at most, hundreds of security men were swarming all over the depots, warehouses, blast-proof air locks, caverns, catacombs, bone-houses and lift shafts.

Michael and Ariel were gone without a trace.

The presence of two rogue maggots in the high security areas of the catacombs was unprecedented and considered highly dangerous.

Giacomo set up his operational HQ in the da Vinci Chambers — he even had his desk brought down from his office on the surface — complete with newly installed hotlines and TV monitors and CAD drawings of the one hundred and twenty-eight known levels of the Gnostic catacombs.

But, as he observed to Paolo, the place was just too enormous to search efficiently — over a mile and a half deep in places. It was even possible that the catacombs merged with natural cave systems that went deeper still to places that could only be plumbed by professional cavers.

At the end of that first day, Giacomo was debriefed by the head of security who had nothing much to say except that no one had been found and nothing discovered. The fugitives had disappeared . That word again.

Paolo had had the foresight to have a cooker installed, and an extractor fan. He was quietly boiling up some pasta in the background, too canny to open his mouth unless spoken to.

Giacomo let slip a long racking sigh and said, quietly. “Oh dear.”

Paolo put down his wooden spoon and turned round. “Have they not found anything? A cigarette end? A splash of urine?”

“We’re not looking for their DNA! This is not a police investigation!” snapped Giacomo. “No, we have nothing on them. We can’t even say how big this place is — for all we know there’s an enormous cave at the bottom with a dragon sleeping in it.”

“Of course, all mysteries are bottomless,” Paolo agreed with a sigh. “Consider this, my old friend: all this time we’ve been taking the living out of circulation and storing the best of them down here. But what if our day never comes? What if we never inherit our bright new world? If we end up as dust instead, buried under millions of tons of rubble?”

“As long as they don’t get out of the Catacombs we’ll be fine,” said Giacomo. “I’ve posted guards at all the exits.” He rubbed his face. “I just wish I knew why they’ve done this. I don’t trust them; they’re up to something and it’s worrying me, I can feel an itch, Paolo, right here.” He punched his chest.

“You don’t think they’d talk to journalists, do you?”

“No, no,” cried Giacomo. “Just concentrate on your pasta, Paolo. You don’t understand. They don’t need us; they don’t want us. They can find themselves a farm to live on, grow their damned vegetables, breed their own maggots, and live without us… also without God. It sets a terrible precedent and it damages our plans. Everyone will know they made fools of us; people will laugh at us.”

Paolo nodded soberly, not quite managing to suppress a satisfied grin as he took out his pièce de resistance from the fridge, a tub of Bolognese sauce that in his view rivaled anything available in Rome’s best restaurants.

Giacomo was still on the rack of his worst imaginings. “They could also stir up a lot of trouble at the Vatican. They could talk to the Liaison Officer. And he’d have a good excuse to say we were incompetent. They could close us down; Lord knows we have enough enemies.”

Paolo placed a bowl of spaghetti in front of Giacomo with a glass of sumptuous Barolo. Then he watched as Giacomo’s expression of anguish slowly melted into a transported smile.

“Bless the bread,” said Giacomo with a grateful nod, then, after a slurp, added, “and the wine.”

The two friends ate in silence, while both thinking to themselves that if all failed, if they were hunted out of Rome like fugitives, then at least they would spend their lives munching their way through all the regions of Italy.

Their bliss was short-lived. Soon there was a commotion outside as a group of guards delivered Cardinal O’Hara — in handcuffs. He’d spent the last few hours being jostled from one cave to another by stressed-out security personnel, unsure in the general pandemonium about what to do with him.

“Leave him there,” said Giacomo, who was now more or less restored. He pointed to an uncomfortable plastic chair in the corner, into which O’Hara was unceremoniously shoved.

For the next few hours, Giacomo and Paolo dealt with a stream of visitors — security personnel, geologists, Vatican officials.

Giacomo stood at his desk like some field marshal — or better still, Winston Churchill — poring over maps, pointing, giving orders, and occasionally downing a shot of Armagnac or hurriedly puffing on his cigar.

O’Hara envied him his power, his freedom to express himself; above all, his utter disregard for notions such as sin.

When all the briefings were over and done with, Giacomo turned to O’Hara and realized that his malingering presence had added a further note of sourness to the night — his constant chuckling from the corner.

Giacomo turned to a guard. “Would you be kind enough to remove this sack of shit, take him downstairs, and keep him under arrest? He’s not to go anywhere until further notice.” He looked at O’Hara. “I’m seriously considering letting you expire… keeping you out of our vaults so you can enjoy your precious mortality.”

As O’Hara was brusquely removed from the room, he threw Giacomo a final lingering gaze, and thought to himself, “If there’s any way I can give this man a painful death, I will.”

This venal thought was a great comfort to him.

When Michael and Ariel reached the ancient catacombs deep under the north transept of St. Peter’s, they found no modern technology or forklift trucks, only dank, dripping passages and compacted silence, in a world where nothing ever moved. The catacombs were so vast that at times one wondered if they had even been made by humans. Yet it seemed safe to assume they had, for there were carvings everywhere, on every lintel and passage, with names and dates in Romanic numerals and occasionally birds, trees, or fish.

The windings of the various chambers were mostly by a sort of design, not intestinal in their shape but logical.

The first day they just wandered without purpose, descending another level whenever they chanced on cramped stairs winding down like a screw thread.

“Lucky we’re not claustrophobic,” said Ariel. “We’d scream the place down.”

“I am claustrophobic,” said Michael. “Every step I take I’m fighting panic.”

Occasionally they were disturbed by search parties with powerful torches. Whenever they saw or heard anything, they stepped into the nearest side passage, of which there were hundreds, each immediately bifurcating, and then bifurcating again.

If by any chance their pursuers got too close, it was easy to clamber behind a stone sarcophagus and lie very still until they had passed. There were sepulchral niches cut into the rock on either side up to ceiling, and nicely proportioned spaces between the wall and the sarcophagi for hiding or getting a bit of sleep.

“There’s nothing to bloody do down here, is there?” Ariel said after a few days of traipsing about. “Do we actually know why we’re here? Otherwise we could end up walking around for years. And if we ever have the crazy notion of trying to get out of here, we’ll meet plenty of helpful people at the top who’d like nothing more than to stuff our throats with embalming cloth.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted? To sleep?”

She looked at him. He’d grown so sharp and grim; his comments often hit their mark with an edge of cruelty. She swallowed her guilt, knowing that she had made him what he was.