Death Mask. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ managed to negotiate the obstacle course without sending the precarious piles of chemicals and cleaning fluids sprawling. The door opened—mercifully, it wasn’t locked—to reveal a heavily carpeted hallway. The carpet was one of those old red faux-Chinese patterns that cinemas and theaters around the world loved so much in the seventies. She wasn’t going to find anything ancient on this floor, so her first job was to locate the stairs. She followed a sign for the emergency exit, figuring it would offer the most direct route down. The stairwell was undecorated, showing the weeping brickwork of the old theater. It opened up onto the front of the auditorium, stage left.

      The auditorium was in near-absolute darkness; only a strip of low-level security lights was on, giving enough of a glow for Annja to approach the stage without falling over.

      She was certain there would be a space beneath the stage, and with luck, that would lead into the bowels of the theater, where she’d find the remains of the previous building...if they even existed. The curtain was down, so thick it gave no hint of the burlesque backdrop it hid.

      A door with a glowing sign displaying the word Salida took her in the right direction.

      Another door led her to the backstage area, where a flight of wooden stairs led down into the darkness below.

      No one challenged her as she moved through the old theater.

      She’d been reluctant to turn on additional lights in case they alerted anyone connected to the theater, inside or out, but once she started descending she had no such reservations about turning on the first light she found.

      Annja detected the faintest odor of damp as she reached the bottom of the staircase.

      The glow of the strip lighting failed to illuminate much beyond the stairs, but she saw a flashlight standing upright on a small desk close by. It didn’t take long to sweep the entire area with the beam. She made her way back among the scenery boards, playing the flashlight beam between them, searching for a sign, anything, that hinted at another way down, deeper. Cobwebs clawed at her face as she made her way into the gloom. Annja peered behind stacked boards, moving them so she could see behind them properly.

      The shadows gathered around her feet masked the step. Her heel caught, but she stopped herself before she went sprawling to the ground. She took more care as she moved on. There was another step only a few feet away. And another beyond that, turning slightly. She followed the spiraling steps, descending into a space below the theater’s storeroom.

      Her heart raced as she realized this space was much older than the Zorrilla itself—which had to be a good thing. Surely that meant the theater had been built on top of the old convent, didn’t it? The room before her extended far beyond the walls of the theater. Annja tried to orient herself with the world above. As best she could tell, the vast chamber seemed to lead away from the plaza, running beneath other buildings that now occupied the land where the convent had once stood. Meaning she was standing in whatever remained of the ancient building.

      Playing the light around the room, she spotted a passage. It was the only one. She followed it, but before she had moved too far along it, her way was blocked by a stone wall with a stout iron-banded wooden door set into it. A heavy iron ring hung as a handle.

      She pushed against the door. It didn’t give.

      Locked, or bolted from the other side? She put her shoulder against it and pushed again, harder this time. The door gave a little, the creak echoing through the low-ceilinged passage to the cavernous room behind her.

      Annja held her breath, sure the noise would summon someone, and counted to ten before she pushed again. No one came. She put all of her strength behind the next push. This time the rotten wood splintered and the rusted metal snapped, the entire frame giving way under the force. The door scraped open into the room beyond, releasing a rush of air that hadn’t been breathed for probably two hundred years or more.

      Annja paused on the threshold, shining the flashlight inside.

      The beam illuminated dust-and-cobweb-covered shapes that made no sense at first.

      Then Annja realized she was looking at bones covering every inch of wall from floor to ceiling. On and on, as far as the light shone, bones. Annja had visited the catacombs beneath Rome and other ossuaries in and around Vienna and Prague, but they never ceased to take her breath away.

      She paused while the dust of centuries—which she’d shaken up simply by breaking the seal of the door—settled again before she entered. It was an unconscious act of reverence. She lived for places like this and had no desire to disturb the dead if she could help it.

      She took a deep breath before she entered the chamber of bones.

      The long, narrow passage stretched deep inside this new—or rather, much older—section of building, reaching at least thirty feet ahead of her before another corridor crossed it. The walls of this second corridor were shored up with bones, as well. It was as if the entire catacombs had been constructed from bones, but of course there must have been stones somewhere beneath the skeletal remains, now yellowed and calcified with age.

      Annja’s footsteps echoed back to her as she advanced slowly through the passageway. She kept one hand held out in front of her face, brushing away the strands of cobweb before they smothered her face. So many bones, so many bodies piled atop one another, all of them becoming one in death, abandoned and long forgotten. She was sure no one even knew that they were still down there.

      The tunnel stretched far beyond the flashlight’s beam. She continued on, one step at a time, checking every inch of the damned place for a clue, for something that would link to the mask and give her a chance to save Garin. That was all she wanted. She’d already done the impossible and found the Convent of San Francisco, a building that hadn’t existed for the best part of two hundred years, but that wasn’t enough. She needed to find the mask. And if not the mask itself, something that would lead her to it. She was wasting her time. There was nothing here.

      She walked on, her boots grinding dust and grit into the stone floor with each step.

      She passed another intersection and another and she began to grasp the sheer scale of what lay down here.

      She was tempted to try one of the many passages branching off the main corridor, but knew that if she ventured off the central path, she risked walking into a labyrinth of bone and becoming disoriented. So she continued going forward, trying not to think about how many thousands of people must have died to make these walls.

      A few minutes later, Annja was grateful she hadn’t deviated from the main passageway.

      Bones gave way to rows of stone coffins set in alcoves in the walls.

      Coffins meant a more important kind of dead. She walked down the line, fingers lingering on the crosses and tracing the inscriptions that told the briefest stories of the lives they contained. The coffins held the remains of women who had held office within the convent. But the farther along the line she went, the more male names she encountered, until she realized she was standing before the tombs of men who had served the Inquisition.

      One coffin stood out because it didn’t bear the cross or any Christian blessing meant to serve the deceased in the next life.

      It bore only a single word: Morisco.

      That was the word the curator had used at the monastery in Ávila, the term for the Moors who’d converted to Christianity rather than fleeing the country from the Inquisition.

      But СКАЧАТЬ