Summer of Night

THIRTEEN

Duane McBride had convinced his Uncle Art that Wednesday would be a good day to drive in to the university library-Art had spent most of his money over the years on books but still liked to visit a "decent library" now and then-so the two left shortly after eight that morning.

What Uncle Art hadn't spent on books he'd put into his car-a year old Cadillac-and Duane could only marvel at the battleship-sized grandeur of the thing. It had every option known to Detroit technology, including an automatic headlight dimmer with a ray-gun-shaped sensor rising from the dash like something Duane's Old Man would have designed. Uncle Art drove with three fingers on the bottom of the wheel, his heavy body comfortable in the cushions.

Duane liked his uncle. Art had one of those florid, rounded faces that combined with the kind of mouth which always seemed to be on the verge of a smile so as to give people the idea that he was amused by something just said or about to be said. Usually, with Uncle Art, that was true.

Art McBride was an ironist. Where Duane's father had fallen into bitterness and disappointment in his failure to get ahead, Uncle Art had cultivated an ironic resignation which he leavened with humor. Duane's Old Man tended to see conspiracies and cabals-in the government, in the telephone company, in the Veterans Administration, in the more prominent families in Elm Haven-while Uncle Art felt that most individuals and all bureaucracies were too cretinous to manage a conspiracy.

Each brother had failed in his own way. Duane's father had watched his businesses fail due to poor planning, terrible timing, and management techniques which never included efficiency amongst all the manic energy he poured into them. Added to that, the Old Man invariably would insult whatever individual or organization was indispensable to the success of the venture. Uncle Art, on the other hand, had gone into business only a few times-had made and spent his profits on his three wives, all deceased-and had decided that business simply wasn't for him. Art worked at the Caterpillar plant near Peoria when he needed money. Although he had degrees in engineering and business administration, he preferred the assembly line.

Duane had decided that a tendency toward ironic resignation and the ability to handle responsibility didn't necessarily go together too well.

"What bit of esoterica are you seeking in the Bradley library?" asked Uncle Art.

Duane pushed his glasses up on his nose with his middle finger. "Oh, just some stuff I wanted to know and couldn't find in Oak Hill."

"Did you try the Elm Haven library? Finest depository of knowledge since the Library of Alexandria."

Duane smiled. The one-room "library" on Broad Avenue was an old joke between them. It held about four hundred books. Uncle Art's library ran to over three thousand volumes. Duane would have searched there for information on the Borgia Bell, but he knew the library well enough to know that Art had very little on the Borgia era.

"Did I say expository of knowledge?" continued Uncle Art. "I should have said depository. Good thing for you, keed, that I'm currently laid off."

"Yes," said Duane. Uncle Art spent a good part of the year laid off as demand for assembly-line workers waxed and waned. Art didn't seem to mind.

"Seriously, what're you hunting for?" Uncle Art turned off the air conditioning and touched a button to lower the window. Warm, humid air rushed in. Art ran a hand through his short hair; he had lustrous white hair, wavy and full, Duane remembered from the few times Uncle Art allowed it to get long. Usually he wore it in a crew cut as he did now. Duane remembered when he was little, when Art was returning from one of his year-long trips after the death of his third wife, and the four-year-old had confused his then-bearded uncle with Santa Claus.

Duane sighed. "I'm hunting for some stuff on the Borgias."

Uncle Art blinked interest. "Borgias? As in Lucrezia, Ro-drigo, Cesare . . . that bunch?"

"Yeah," said Duane, sitting up taller in the cushions. "You know much about them? Or did you ever hear about some bell they had?"

"Uh-uh. Don't know much about the Borgias. Just the usual stuff about poisoning, incest, what bad popes they made. I'm more interested in the Medicis. Now there's a family worth reading about."

Duane nodded. They'd been heading southeast down the Hard Road-now merely thought of as the state highway-from Elm Haven, and were now descending into the valley of the Spoon River. The cliffs were about a mile apart, the hillsides so thick with trees that they overhung the road here, then opened out into rich bottomland with soil so black from frequent floods that the corn grew a foot higher here than in the fields around Elm Haven. The only structures in sight were a few corncribs and the metal highway bridge crossing the river itself. On the bridge, a narrow catwalk ran out to a corrugated steel, silo-shaped tower-no more than four feet in diameter-which dropped to its own concrete pilings thirty feet below. Duane knew that it held only a cramped spiral stairway down to a highway department storage area down at the river's level.

"Remember when you and Dad used to threaten to leave me in there if I didn't quit asking questions during the ride to Peoria?" said Duane, gesturing toward the corrugated metal tower. "You guys used to say it was a prison tower for blabby kids. You said you'd pick me up on the way home."

Uncle Art nodded and lit a cigarette from the car lighter. His blue eyes squinted toward where mirages rippled on the narrow road ahead. "Still applies, kiddo. One more question and you're gonna spend more time in a prison tower than Thomas More."

"Thomas who?" said Duane. He was feeding Uncle Art the straight line. They were both big Thomas More fans.

"Now there's a man!" began Uncle Art and launched into one of his monologues.

They reached Highway 150 and turned east toward the tiny town of Kickapoo and then Peoria. Duane settled back into the Cadillac's deep cushions and thought about the Borgia Bell.

Dale, Mike, Kevin, and Lawrence had left town just after breakfast that morning, headed east for the wooded hills behind Calvary Cemetery. They drove their bikes through the cemetery itself-Mike glancing toward the padlocked door of the storage shed but saying nothing to the other kids-and left them by the back fence. They crossed the pasture into the thick woods and a quarter of a mile later came to the strip-mined quarry they called Billy Goat Mountains. Here they climbed and shouted and threw dirt clods for an hour, before stripping off their clothes and swimming in the one shallow pool there.

Gerry Daysinger, Bob McKown, Bill and Barry Pussner, Chuck Sperling, Digger Taylor, and a couple more guys arrived about ten o'clock, just as Dale and the others were getting back into their clothes. The Fussner twins started shouting and the rest of the invaders began throwing dirt clods-Mike, Dale, and the others had been careful to circle around to the east side of the quarry before swimming-and both sides exchanged insults and clods across the water before the newcomers broke into two groups and began running around the weed-choked edges of the cliffs.

"They're trying to flank us," said Mike, zipping up his jeans.

Kevin threw a dirt clod that fell ten yards short of the north cliff. Daysinger screamed something nasty and kept running along the edge, occasionally stopping to pull a rock out of the ground and throw it their way.

Dale hurried Lawrence into his sneakers. He threw a clod . . . not a rock . . . and had the pleasure of watching Chuck Sperling have to duck.

Dirt clods and rocks were raining around them now, splashing in the shallow pool and kicking holes in the dunes of dirt behind them. The invaders had reached the far side of the quarry and were closing in from the north and south. But the woods started twenty feet beyond the quarry and went on for miles.

"Remember," said Mike, "if they get you they've got to actually hold you down before you're captured. You break away, you can keep going."

"Yeah," said Kevin, glancing toward the woods. "Let's go, huh?"

Mike grabbed the other boy's t-shirt. "But if they do get you, you don't tell them where the camps are or what the call signs are. Right?"

Kevin made a disgusted face. Jim Harlen had ratted them out once-they still couldn't use what had been Camp Five because of that-but none of the others had ever talked, even though it'd meant a fistfight once between Dale and Digger Taylor.

The attackers were close enough now to believe that their pincers movement might work. Clods whisked through the air and crashed into underbrush. Lawrence took aim, reared back, and fired a clod that hit Gerry Daysinger hard enough -even at thirty paces-to cause the older boy to sit down hard and let loose with a string of curses.

"Camp ThreeV shouted Mike, telling them where to try to meet up in thirty minutes after they lost the attackers. "Go!"

They went, Dale trying to keep Lawrence with him as they crashed through the underbrush into the dense woods, Kevin and Mike turning south toward Gypsy Lane and the ravine where Corpse Creek ran under the slate cliffs, Dale and his brother running hard toward the creek that ran north of the cemetery and the hidden pond that lay along the southern edge of their Uncle Henry's and Aunt Lena's property.

Behind them, the Fussner twins, McKown, and the others shouted and bayed like fox hounds on a hunt. But the forest had a lot of new growth here, saplings and shrubs and weeds and thickets and batches of poison ivy, and everyone was too busy running and hunting or running and eluding to take time to throw clods.

Running hard, occasionally tugging at Lawrence as they took a sharp turn off some old trail or up a hill, Dale tried to keep ahead of the pursuers while keeping a map in his mind, figuring out how to double back to Camp Three without running right into the band behind them.

The hills echoed to the shouts of capture and aggression.

The library at Bradley University wasn't the best-the school specialized in education, engineering, and business, after all-but Duane knew his way around it and soon found some information on the subject. He moved from card catalog to microfilm and back to stacks while Uncle Art sat in one of the easy chairs in the main lounge and caught up on two months' reading of various journals and papers.

There really wasn't that much prime stuff on the Borgias, and less about any bell. Duane had to skim through all the surface stuff before getting his first clue. It was a minor note in a long passage about the coronation of popes:

It was a shock to the Italians and a surprise to even his Spanish kinsmen when His Excellency Don Alonso y Borja, Archbishop of Valencia, Cardinal of Quattro Coronati, was elected Pope at the age of seventy-seven in the Conclave of 1455. Few disputed that the Cardinal's primary qualifications were his advanced age and obvious illness; the conclave had need for a caretaker pope and no one doubted that Borgia, as the Italians had civilized his rough Spanish name, would be just that.

As Pope Calixtus III, Borgia seemed to find renewed energy in his position and proceeded to consolidate Papal powers and to launch a new Crusade, the last as it turned out, against the Turks holding Constantinople.

To celebrate his papacy and the ascendancy of the House of Borgia, Calixtus commissioned a great bell to be cast from metal mined in the fabled hills of Aragon. The bell was eventually cast. Legend has it that the iron was culled from the famous Coronati Star Stone, possibly a meteorite but certainly a source of the highest quality material for Valencia and Toledo metalsmiths for some generations past. It was displayed in Valencia in 1457 and was sent to Rome in a stately procession which tarried for further exhibition in every major city in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Tarried for too long, as it turned out.

Calixtus's triumphant bell arrived in Rome on August 7,1458. The eighty-year-old Pope did not appreciate it; he had died in his shuttered rooms late the night before.

Duane searched the index and skimmed the rest of this particular book, but there was no further mention of Calixtus's bell. He made a quick trip to the card catalogue and returned with notes to find books that mentioned Pope Calixtus's nephew, Rodrigo.

There was ample information on Rodrigo. Duane scribbled quickly, glad that he'd brought along several of his small notebooks.

The twenty-seven-year-old Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia had been the prime mover in the ensuing Conclave of 1458. Not even remotely a candidate for pope himself, the younger Borgia had cleverly brokered the election of the next pontiff by engineering support for Bishop Aeneas Silvius Picco-lomini, who emerged from the conclave as Pope Pius II. Pius did not forget the young cardinal's help in his time of need, and the former Piccolomini made sure that the next few years were fruitful for young Rodrigo Borgia.

But no mention of a bell. Duane speed-read two books and skimmed a third before he found the next clue.

It was a history written by Piccolomini himself. Pope Pius II appeared to have been a born chronicler, more historian than theologian. His notes of the Conclave of 1458-notes forbidden by rules and tradition-showed in great detail how he had urged Rodrigo Borgia to support him and how important that support had been. Then, in a passage covering Palm Sunday of 1462, four years later, Pius described a magnificent procession given in honor of the arrival of the head of St. Andrew in Rome. Duane smiled at that; a celebration for the arrival of a head.

The passage was chatty enough:

All the cardinals who lived along the route had decorated their houses magnificently . . . but all were outstripped in expense and effort and ingenuity by Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor. His huge, towering house, which he had built on the site of the old mint, was covered with rich and wonderful tapestries, and besides this he had raised a lofty canopy from which were suspended many and various marvels. Above the canopy, framed by elaborate and decorative woodwork, hung the great bell commissioned by the vice-chancellor's brother, Our predecessor. Despite its newness, the bell was said to have been the talisman and source of power for the House of Borgia.

The procession stopped before the vice-chancellor's fortress, a place of sweet songs and sounds, or a great palace gleaming with gold such as they say Nero's palace was. Rodrigo had decorated not only his own house for Our celebration but also those nearby, so that the square all about them seemed a kind of park full of the most riotous celebration. We offered to bless Rodrigo's home and grounds and bell, but the vice-chancellor attested that the bell had been consecrated in its own way two years before when the palace had been built. Bemused, we moved on with Our priceless relic through the reverent and celebrating streets.

Duane shook his head, pushed his glasses higher, and smiled. The thought that this bell was sitting, forgotten, in the boarded-up belfry of Old Central was beyond belief.

He checked his notes, wandered the stacks, pulled several more books from the shelves, and returned to his study carrel.

There was more.

Camp Three was on a hillside a quarter of a mile northeast of the cemetery. The woods were thick there, branches coming to within four feet of the ground in many places, and the shrubbery made walking hard going except on the few trails cattle and hunters had cut through the thickets. Camp Three looked like just another solid thicket of shrubs from every angle: a ring of bushes with multiple trunks the thickness of a boy's wrist, a tangle of branches overhead almost joining with the canopy of leaves from the trees. But if one got on one's knees at just the right spot and crawled through the maze of brambles and stems at just the right angle, the entrance to a truly wonderful place appeared.

Dale and Lawrence arrived first, panting and looking over their shoulders, hearing the shouts from McKown and the others only a hundred yards behind them. They made sure no one was in sight, dropped to all fours on the grassy hillside, and crawled into Camp Three.

The interior was as solid and secure as some domed hut, eight feet across in an almost perfect circle, the wall of shrubs allowing a few peepholes but providing complete invisibility from searching eyes outside. Some quirk of the slope settling-perhaps due to the stockadelike ring of shrubs itself-had provided an almost level floor of soil here where the rest of the hillside was rather steep. A low, soft grass grew within this ring, providing a surface as smooth as a putting green.

Dale once had lain in Camp Three during a solid summer rainstorm and had remained as dry as if he were home in his own room. One snowy winter he and Lawrence and Mike had postholed their way through the woods and found Camp Three after some effort-the shrubs and woods here looked quite different without their foliage-and had crawled in to find the interior almost free of snow, the surrounding stockade of wooden stems as concealing as ever.

Now he and his brother lay there gasping as silently as possible, listening to the excited shouts of McKown and the others as they crashed their way through the woods.

"They went this way!" came Chuck Sperling's voice. He was on the old trail that ran within twenty feet of Camp Three. Suddenly there was a rustling and snapping right outside, Dale and Lawrence raised the sticks they'd been carrying like spears, and Mike O'Rourke slid through the low tunnel opening. Mike's face was flushed, his blue eyes were bright, and he'd been scratched by a branch so that a thin line of blood marked his left temple. He was grinning widely. "Where'd they . . ." began Lawrence. Mike covered the smaller boy's mouth with his palm and shook his head. "Right outside," he whispered. All three boys threw themselves flat on the grass, their faces next to the stems of the shrubs.

"Damn it," came Digger Taylor's voice from less than five feet uphill, "I saw O'Rourke come this way."

"Barry!" It was Chuck Sperling's voice screaming from just outside the thicket. "You see 'em down there?"

"Uh-uh," came the fat Fussner twin's shout. "Nobody came down the trail this way."

"Shit," said Digger. "I saw him. And those Stewart dip-shits were running this way, too."

In Camp Three, Lawrence made a fist and started to stand. Dale pulled his brother down, even though one could stand in the circle and still not be seen. Dale motioned for silence, but had to grin at how red Lawrence's face was getting. That deep flush was a sure sign that his brother was ready to put his head down and charge somebody. Dale had seen it often enough.

"Maybe they went back up the hill towards the cemetery or doubled back to the strip-mined place." It was Gerry Daysinger's voice, not fifteen feet from the Camp.

"Hunt around here first," commanded Sperling in that snotty tone he used in Little League because his dad was the coach.

Mike, Dale, and Lawrence held their sticks like rifles as they listened to the crashing and thrashing along the ¦hillside as the other kids literally beat the bushes, hunting behind fallen logs and smashing through shrubs. Somebody actually bashed a stick against the south side of Camp Three, but it was like hitting a solid wall. Unless one knew the zigs and zags on the east side, crawling through the final hole smaller than a sewer pipe, you'd never find your way in.

Or so the three boys in Camp Three fervently hoped.

Shouts came from far up the trail.

"They got Kev," Lawrence whispered. Dale nodded and hushed his brother again.

The sound of boots and sneakers receded up the trail. There were more shouts. Mike sat up and brushed grass and thistles off his striped polo shirt.

"You think Kev'll give us away?" asked Dale.

Mike grinned. "Not Camp Three. He might show 'em Camp Five or the Cave. But not Camp Three."

' They already know where Camp Five is from last summer," said Lawrence, finally whispering now that he no longer had to. "And we're not using the Cave."

Mike just grinned.

They sprawled there for another half hour, tired from the couple of hours of running through the hills and the postadren-aline letdown from the chase. They compared close calls, commiserated over Kevin's demise-he'd be a prisoner if he didn't "join them" to help in the chase-and dug stuff out of their pockets to eat. None had brought a pack of real rations, but Mike.had stuffed an apple in the pocket of his jeans, Dale had an almond Hershey bar that had melted and been sat on repeatedly, and Lawrence had a Pez dispenser with some of the candies left. They ate their lunch with gusto and then lay staring at the tiny fragments of sunlight and sky visible through the almost solid roof of branches.

They were discussing leaving to set up a clod ambush near the quarry when Mike suddenly said, "Shhh!" He pointed uphill.

Dale lay on his stomach and put his face against the stalks of the shrubs, trying to find one of the few angles that would give him a view of the trail.

There were boots out there. A man's boots, brown and large. For a second Dale thought that the guy was wearing muddy bandages and then he realized that those were the leggings that Duane had said soldiers used to wear. What had Duane called those things? Puttees. There was some guy standing six feet from Camp Three, wearing clunky boots and puttees. Dale could just see a hint of brown wool pantleg blousing out above the bandagelike wrappings.

"What ..." whispered Lawrence, straining to see.

Dale turned and put his hand over his brother's mouth. Lawrence struggled free and punched him, but stayed silent for a change.

When Dale looked back the boots were gone. Mike tapped him on the shoulder and jerked his head toward the east wall of the circle.

Footsteps crunched leaves and twigs right outside the secret entrance.

Duane was finding out more about the Borgias than he really wanted to know.

He was skimming and speed-reading in the way he often did when trying to cram an inordinate amount of information into his brain in the shortest possible time. It was a strange sensation; Duane compared it to the effect when one of his home-built crystal radio sets was poorly tuned, pulling in several stations at once. This kind of speed-learning tired Duane out and made him a bit dizzy, but he had little choice. Uncle Art wasn't going to spend all day here in the library.

The first thing Duane learned was that almost everything he knew about the Borgias from "common knowledge" was wrong or badly distorted. He paused a minute, chewing on the stem of his glasses and looking at nothing, recognizing that this initial fact of the unreliability of general knowledge had been consistent with most of the serious learning he'd done on his own over the past few years. Nothing was as simple as stupid people assumed it to be. Duane wondered if this was a basic law of the universe. If so, it made him tired to think of all the years ahead of him trying to unlearn before he could begin learning. He looked around at the basement stacks, thousands of books upon thousands of books, and felt dispirited that he would never read even all these books . . . never encounter all the conflicting opinions, facts, and viewpoints just in this basement. . . . much less everything in the libraries of Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and all the other schools he wanted to visit and absorb.

Duane shook himself out of it, pushed his glasses into place, and reviewed the notes he'd taken.

First, Lucrezia Borgia seemed to be more a victim of bad press than the guilty party in all the legends he'd been aware of: no poison ring wiping out lovers and dinner guests, no banquets with bodies stacked like cordwood by the time dessert was served. No, Lucrezia came across as the victim of spiteful historians. Duane looked at some of the volumes stacked on his study table: Guicciardini's History of Italy, Machiavelli's The Prince and his Discourses and extracts from The History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy, Picco-lomini/Pius's chatty Commentaries, Gregorovius's volume on Lucrezia, Burchard's Liber Notarum with its notes on the day-to-day trivia of the papal court during the period.

But nothing more about the bell.

Then, on a hunch, Duane checked original sources on Benvenuto Cellini, one of the Old Man's favorite historical personages, even though Duane knew that the feisty artist had been born in 1500, eight years after Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI.

At one point, Cellini wrote about his imprisonment in Castel Sant' Angelo, the huge, hulking mass of stone Hadrian had built as a family tomb fourteen hundred years earlier. Pope Alexander-Rodrigo Borgia-had ordered the immense sepulcher fortified and modified as a place of residence. Rooms and shafts in stone which had known only corpses, darkness, and decay for well over a thousand years had become the home and fortress of the Borgia pope.

Cellini had written about it:

I was imprisoned in a gloomy dungeon below the level of a garden which swam with water and was full of spiders and venomous worms. They flung me a wretched mattress of coarse hemp, gave me no supper and locked four doors upon me. . . . For one hour and a half each day I got a little glimmering of light which penetrated that unhappy cavern through a very narrow aperture.

The rest of the day and night I abode in darkness. And this was one of the less terrible of cells. From my fellow unfortunates, I learned of the doomed souls who spent their last days in the foulest of Pits, those deeper dungeons set at the bottom of the airshaft to the infamous Bell of the evil Borgia Pope. The word was spread throughout Rome and the provinces that this bell had been cast of unholy metal, consecrated with foul deeds, and hung even now as a manifest sign of the pact between the former pope and the Devil himself. Each of us in our cells, crouching in rancid water and eating our foul scraps, knew that the tolling of that bell would announce the end of the world. There were, I confess, times that I would have welcomed that knell.

Duane scribbled notes. Curiouser and curiouser. There was no later mention of the bell in Cellini's autobiography or notes, but an earlier passage about the artist Pinturic-chio-evidently a contemporary of the Borgia pope rather than Cellini himself-seemed relevant:

On the command and behest of his Pope . . .

Duane checked to make sure that this was Alexander, aka Rodrigo Borgia. It was.

On the command and behest of his Pope, this deaf and undersized little artist . . .

Duane skimmed to make sure Cellini was talking about Pinturicchio, Borgia's artist. He was.

. . . mean in person and appearance as he was, set about painting the murals which filled the Torre Borgia with such bizarre effect, culminating in the Room of the Seven Mysteries in the dismal Borgia Apartments.

Duane called time-out from Cellini's passage to crosscheck the Torre Borgia. A guide to Vatican structures said that it was the massive tower Pope Alexander VI had ordered added on to the Vatican palace. A previous addition by Pope Sixtus had been a dark and drafty warehouse called the Sistine Chapel. Pope Innocent had opted for a lovely summer house in the far reaches of the Vatican gardens. Borgia built a tower. A note in an 1886 architectural tome mentioned that the Borgia Torre had been designed with a massive belfry at the apex of the columnar fortress, but no one other than the Pope and his illegitimate children were allowed to ascend that high in the tower through the maze of locked doors and passages.

Duane returned to Cellini's notes:

Pinturicchio, upon his Pontiffs command, descended into the Dead City beneath the City for his inspiration and models for the Borgia Apartment murals. There lay not the Christian Catacombs with their sanctified bones, but the random excavations of Heathen Rome in all its decayed glory.

It was said that Pinturicchio led apprentices and curious colleagues on these subterranean expeditions: imagine then the torchlight through these tunnels filled with the rubble of the Caesars, entry into chambers, corridors, entire dwellings, entire streets of the Roman dead, lying like forgotten arteries beneath the weed-choked lanes of our living but lessened city. . . imagine the exclamations when Pinturicchio, after braving the giant rats and hordes of bats which fed on offal and darkness there, raised his torch to illuminate the pagan decorations set there by men dead fifteen centuries and more.

This little man and ungodly artist brought these designs and heathen images to the apartments of the Borgia Pope in his Tower. Within the most private of the Corrupt Pope's secret chambers, these pagan images prevailed-covering walls, arches, ceilings, and even the massive iron bell which was said to be the Borgia talisman high in the Torre.

To this day, the lost paintings are called, by the ignorant, grotesques, because they were found and copied from the unholy subterranean caverns, or grotte, in the darkness beneath Rome.

Uncle Art leaned over Duane's shoulder and said, "Ready to go yet?" The boy jumped, reset his glasses on his nose, and managed a smile.

"Just about."

While Uncle Art wandered restlessly in the nearby stacks, Duane flipped through the final volumes. He found only one more mention of the bell, and again it related to the art of the wizened muralist named Pinturicchio:

But in the chamber which led from the Room of the Seven Mysteries to the locked staircase ascending to the belltower where only the Borgias might tread, the painter had reproduced the essence of those buried and forgotten murals which he had studied by the light of torches while water dripped from broken stone. Here, in what later would be called the Room of the Saints because of the seven great murals there, Pinturicchio had fulfilled his commission by filling every space between the paintings, every arch, nook, and column, with hundreds-some experts say thousands-of images of bulls.

The mystery is not that bulls should appear in his work or this hidden place; the bull was the emblem of the Borgia family; the benevolent ox had long been the metaphor for the papal procession.

But these bulls, as repeated almost endlessly in the dark hallways and grottos and entrance to the forbidden stairway above the Room of the Seven Mysteries, were neither of these emblems.

These were not the noble Borgia symbol, nor the peaceful ox. Reproduced countless times in these apartments was the stylized but unmistakable figure of the sacrificial bull of Osiris, the Egyptian god who ruled over the kingdom of the dead.

Duane closed the book and took off his glasses.

"Ready yet?" asked Uncle Art.

Duane nodded.

"Let's try that McDonald's drive-in place on War Memorial Drive," said his uncle. "Their hamburgers have gone up to a quarter, but they're pretty good."

Duane nodded, still thinking, and followed Uncle Art out of the basement and into the light.

The footsteps outside of Camp Three had stopped. Not receded, not gone away, merely . . . stopped. Mike, Dale, and Lawrence crouched by the low entrance and waited, barely breathing in their effort not to make noise. The sounds of the woods were quite distinct: a squirrel scolding someone or something far up the hill toward Dale's Uncle Henry's property; an occasional shout from Chuck Sperling's gang, farther away now, probably south of the quarry; the screech of crows in the treetops up the other hill toward Calvary Cemetery. But no sound from where the unseen soldier waited just outside the ring of bushes.

Dale slithered back to his previous vantage point, but there was nothing in view.

Suddenly there came a flurry of noise outside, footsteps pounding on the trail. Leaves rustled and the bushes on the east side of Camp Three shook as someone began forcing his way through the convoluted opening. Dale jumped back to one side of the gap and raised his stick. Mike did the same on the other side of the opening. Lawrence crouched with his club ready.

Branches bent upward, leaves shook, and Kevin Grum-bacher crawled into the grassy circle.

Dale and Mike looked at each other, lowered their sticks, and let out a breath.

Kevin grinned at them. "What were you going to do, brain me?"

"We thought you were them," said Lawrence, lowering his stick with an expression of regret. Lawrence liked scuffles.

Dale blinked and then realized that the others hadn't seen the man's boots with the puttees. Mike and Lawrence probably thought that the noise out there had been Sperling's bunch.

"You alone?" asked Mike, crouching to check in the tunnel of branches.

"Sure I'm alone. I wouldn't come back here unless I was alone."

Lawrence scowled at the older boy. "You didn't tell them about the Camp, did you?"

Kevin gave Dale's brother a disgusted look and spoke to Mike. "They said I could be on their side if I told where the hiding places were. I wouldn't. So that dipstick Fussner tied my arms behind my back with some clothesline and they dragged me around with them like I was a slave or something." Kev held out his arms to show the red welts on his wrists and upper arms.

"How'd you get away?" asked Dale.

Kevin grinned again, his large teeth, bristly crew cut, and bobbing Adam's apple giving an amusing picture of self-satisfaction. "When they started chasing you guys this way, Fussner couldn't keep up while dragging me along. The dope tied me to a tree and ran up the trail to see which way they'd gone. I still had my fingers free so I just backed up to the tree and untied the rope."

"Stay here," whispered Mike and slipped through the opening without touching a branch. The other three sat in silence for several minutes, Kev rubbing his wrists, Lawrence eating some Milk Duds he'd brought along. Dale waited for a shout, a scuffle . . . some signs of the guy he'd seen through the bushes.

Mike slipped back in. "They're gone from around here. I heard their voices way out by County Six. It sounds like Sperling and Digger are going home."

"Yeah," said Kevin. "They were getting bored. Said they had better things to do at home. Day singer wanted them to stay. The Fussners wanted to stick with Sperling."

Mike nodded. "Daysinger and McKown will hang around, wait for us to come out so they can ambush us." He used his stick to draw a map on a patch of bare soil near the entrance. "If I know Gerry, he'll head back to the quarry where there are lots of clods so he can see us if we head back that way from Dale's uncle's pasture or the woods and Gypsy Lane down here. He and Bob will probably hide out in the high ground here. . . ."He had scribbled in the paths, the quarry ponds, and now drew a mound on the west side of the gravel pits. "There's that sort of low place on the top of the biggest hill, remember?"

"We camped there a couple of summers ago," said Dale.

Lawrence shook his head. "I don't remember that."

Dale poked him. "You were too little to go with us on an overnight." He looked back at Mike. "Go on."

Mike poked lines in the dirt, showing a path from Camp Three, over the hill, across the woods and pasture behind the cemetery, and up the back of the gravel-pit mountain where he figured Daysinger and McKown would be waiting. "They'll be looking these three directions," he said, drawing arrows south, east, and west. "But if we use those pine trees on the south slope for cover, we'll be able to climb right up on'em without them seeing us." ¦

Kevin frowned at the map. "The last fifty feet or so will be in the open. That hilltop's just dirt up there."

"Right," said Mike, still grinning. "We have to be extra quiet. But remember, the gaps in their little fort up there look the other way. As long as we don't make noise, we'll be up above them and behind them before they know we're anywhere near."

Dale felt his excitement growing. "And we can pick up clods as we climb. There'll be plenty of ammunition."

Kevin was still frowning. "If they catch us in the open, we're dead. I mean, they've been throwing rocks."

"If it comes to that," said Mike, "we can throw rocks too." He looked at them. "Who's for it?"

"I am!" Lawrence's vote was almost a shout. His face was bright with anticipation.

"Yeah," said Dale, still studying the map and thinking about how Mike had come up with this complicated plan with almost no hesitation. Every foot of the route he'd drawn between Camp Three and the dirt hill used maximum concealment. Dale had hiked these woods for years, but he wouldn't have thought to use the low ditch across the field behind the cemetery for cover. "Yeah," he said again. "Let's do it."

Kevin shrugged. "As long as they don't take me prisoner again."

Mike grinned at them, made a fist, and ducked down through the opening. The others followed as quietly as they could.

"You seem preoccupied, kiddo," Uncle Art said on the way home. They were just descending into the Spoon River valley. The sky was cloudless and the June heat seemed to have intensified after they had spent so many hours in the air-conditioned, dehumidified library. Uncle Art had the windows down with the air rushing in, even though the Caddy's air conditioner was rumbling at the same time. He glanced over at Duane. "Anything I could help with?"

Duane hesitated. It didn't seem right telling Uncle Art somehow. But why not? All he was doing was trying to find some background information On Old Central. They hummed over the Spoon River bridge. Duane glanced at the dark water below, winding away to the north under overhanging branches, and then looked back at his uncle. Why not?

Duane told him about the newspaper articles. About the Borgia Bell. About the Cellini stuff he'd found in the library. When he was finished, he felt oddly tired and embarrassed, almost as if he'd exposed something shameful about himself. But he felt relieved at the same time.

Uncle Art whistled and said nothing for a moment, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. His blue eyes seemed to be focused on something other than the Hard Road. They reached the dirt road running north to County Six and Uncle Art turned right, slowing so the Cadillac didn't throw stones against the undercarriage or bump too fiercely on the ruts. "Do you think that bell could still be there?" he asked at last. "Still be in the school?"

Duane adjusted his glasses. "I don't know. I've never heard of it, have you?"

Uncle Art shook his head. "Not in the years I've lived around here. Of course, that's just been since just after the war. It was your momma's people who had roots here. All the same, I would've heard something if such a bell were general knowledge." They reached the junction of County Six and Jubilee College Road and Uncle Art paused. His home was three miles east on the gravel Jubilee College Road, but he had to bring Duane home. Ahead and to their left, the Black Tree Tavern was just visible under the elms and oaks. A few pickups were there already, although it was just early afternoon. Duane looked away before he could tell if the Old Man's truck was among them.

"I'll tell you what, kiddo," said Uncle Art. "I'll ask around about the bell in town . . . check with some of the other old farts I know . . . and I'll look in my library to see if there's anything on the legend of the damned thing. OK?"

Duane brightened up. "You think you might have something on it?"

Uncle Art shrugged. "The thing sounds like it's more myth than metal. I've always had an interest in the supernatural stuff-I like to debunk it. So I'll check my reference books, Crowley, stuff like that. Fair enough?"

"Great!" said Duane. It was like a weight off his shoulders.

He glanced before they descended the first hill. The Old Man's truck wasn't at the Black Tree! It might be a good day after all. Past the cemetery and Duane caught a glimpse of a stack of bikes near the fence at the rear: it might be Dale and those guys and if he got out now, he might find them in the woods. Duane shook his head. He'd taken enough time out of his chores.

The Old Man was home and sober and working in their vegetable garden that took up three-quarters of an acre. His face was sunburned and his hands looked blistered, but he was in a good mood and Uncle Art stayed for a beer while Duane sipped an RC Cola and listened to the banter. Uncle Art didn't mention the bell.

After his uncle left, Duane rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and went out to weed and hoe and work the rows with the Old Man. They worked in companionable silence for an hour or two and then went in to wash up for supper, the Old Man wandering in to tinker with one of his new machines while Duane cooked the hamburger and rice and boiled the coffee.

They talked about politics during supper, the Old Man describing his work for Adlai Stevenson in the previous elections. "I don't know about Kennedy," he said. "He's sure to get the nomination, but I've never trusted millionaires. It'd be good if a Catholic got elected, though. Break down some of the discrimination in the country." He told Duane about Alfred E. Smith's unsuccessful 1928 campaign.

Duane had read about it, but he listened and nodded, happy just to be listening to the Old Man when he was sober and not angry at somebody.

"So the chances of a Catholic getting elected are pretty slim," the Old Man concluded. He sat a moment, nodded as if concluding that there were no weaknesses in his analysis, and stood to clear the table, rinsing the dishes under the tap and setting them aside for washing.

Duane glanced outside. It was after five, still early, but the shade of the poplar behind the house was moving across the window. He asked the question he'd been dreading all afternoon, trying to keep his voice light and casual. "You going out tonight?"

The Old Man paused in the act of filling the sink. The steam had fogged his glasses. He took them off and wiped them on a shirttail, as if contemplating the question. "Guess not," he said at last. "I've got some things to do in the workroom and I thought we might finish that game of chess we've let gather dust."

Duane nodded. "I'd better get to my chores," he said, finishing his coffee and setting the cup on the counter. He was out in the barn, feed bucket in his hand, before he allowed himself to smile.

The surprise attack was a complete success.

Although the last thirty feet or so had been pretty hairy-crawling up the dirt slope on their bellies with absolutely no cover if McKown or Daysinger looked over their ramparts-Mike and Kev and Lawrence and Dale had made it, despite a muffled case of nervous giggles on Lawrence's part, and when they came over the top, they caught Gerry and Bob staring the other way with the ammo dump of dirt clods piled six feet behind them.

Mike threw first and caught Bob McKown in the back, just above the beltline. Then the six boys were in close combat, pelting each other with clods, trying to shield their faces while throwing, then grappling and wrestling around the lip of the cone-shaped hill. Kevin and Daysinger and Dale had tumbled over first, sliding down thirty feet of crumbling slope. Kevin got up first and ran for the ramparts and the ammo, but McKown pelted him with clods until Mike tackled the shorter boy from behind and it was their turn to roll down the slope in a cloud of dust.

For fifteen minutes or so it was King of the Hill, with the holders of the high ground being wrestled down the hill and then scrambling to reclaim it, usually in a hail of clods. After being deposed, Daysinger and McKown retreated to the edge of the quarry pond, throwing from long distance, but the King of the Hill fever caused internecine warfare to break out among Mike's troop, and pretty soon it was every man for himself.

Dale took a clod hit in the solar plexus that had him sitting and gasping for three minutes, the action whirling obliviously around him. Then Mike hit a half-buried rock during a tumble down the slope and cut his brow; the cut wasn't deep, but the amount of blood was impressive. Daysinger poked his head over the summit just long enough to catch a clod in the mouth at short range. He retreated, cursing loudly, to the bottom of the hill and walked around with both hands over his mouth for a minute or two until he was sure he hadn't lost any teeth. Then he brushed dirt off his cut lower lip and charged again, his chin mottled with mud and blood. Kevin was right behind his former leader when Mike wound up to throw a clod, and Kev got a fist right in the forehead. Action paused for a moment as the other boys on the summit watched curiously, but Grumbacher used the event to comic effect as he crossed his eyes, staggered in ever-smaller circles until his legs buckled, and slid backwards down the slope, legs as stiff as a corpse's. The other kids laughed and applauded by pelting him with clods.

It was Lawrence who refined the game to its essence.

For one blazing, ascendant minute, he was the only one on the summit as the wrestling clumps of older boys all found themselves deposed. Lawrence stood on the mounded rampart, held his arms high over his head, and shouted, "I'm King!"

There was a moment of respectful silence followed by three salvos of clods. At least six or seven hit home. Lawrence had turned his face away at the last second, but his grimy clothes actually puffed dust as he was hit, the impact stitching across his back and legs like machine-gun rounds, knocking the eight-year-old's baseball cap flying.

"Hey!" shouted Dale, waving the others to a cease-fire. Lawrence was frozen in the posture he'd been hit in, and Dale knew that if he started crying he was really hurt.

Lawrence pirouetted slowly, gracefully, dust still rising on him and around him from the impact of clods, and then he fell forward.

Actually he didn't fall forward; he threw himself into the air with the dying-swan grace of a cowboy stuntman, completed a full loop in the air before hitting the slope, and then jackknifed upward again in another dying tumble. His limbs were flung wide, boneless, limp with death. The other kids stepped back as the flying, tumbling body bounced by them, rolled out onto the flat by the edge of the pond, and came to a stop with one arm draped over the water.

"Wow," said Kevin. The others shouted their approval. Lawrence got up, brushed dust from his clothes and crew cut, and gave a low bow.

From that point on and for the next couple of hours, as afternoon softened into evening in the woods, the boys died. They took turns standing on the summit while the others threw clods. After being hit, the dying commenced.

Kevin's was undeniably comic, if stiffly so. He was like a geriatric actor who had to lie down after being shot. Usually he held his cap in place as he slid down. Day singer and McKown were the best screamers, tumbling to their doom with a maximum of groans, shouts, and grunts. Mike was oddly graceful as he fell, and held the pose the longest at the bottom. Even a second flurry of clods couldn't make him stir until he wanted to. Dale won approval by performing the first facefirst death dive, losing skin off his nose as he plowed a path with his head down the steep slope.

But it was Lawrence who retained the crown. His final coup de grace consisted of staggering backwards out of sight for half a minute-the other five began grumbling, wondering where the brat was-until suddenly he came over the summit not running, but leaping at full speed. Dale actually gasped, feeling his heart leap into his throat as his little brother jumped straight out into space thirty feet above him. His first thought was, Jesus, he's gonna die. His immediate second thought was, Mom's going to kill me.

Lawrence didn't die. Not quite. The leap was wild end strong and far enough to carry him into the quarry pond-he missed the hard-packed ledge by three inches-and the resulting splash threw water on McKown and Kevin.

This end of the pond was the shallowest-barely five feet at this point-and Dale had images of his kid brother drowning with his pointy little head stuck in the mud at the bottom. Dale tugged off his t-shirt with some thought of leaping in to save him, part of his mind already gagging at the thought of giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the little creep, when Lawrence bobbed to the surface, showing his overbite in a wide grin.

-This time the applause was real.

Everyone had to try what Kev called The Death Leap. When Dale executed it he did so after three false starts and only because there was no turning back with the others watching from below. The pond was so far away. Even with a sixth grader's long legs, it took a hell of a fast run up the back slope and across the summit and just the right push off the rampart to have a chance of clearing the hard bank below. Dale would never have tried it-none of the other older kids would have-if they hadn't seen it was possible. Dale found a grudging admiration for his kid brother growing in the back of his mind even as he surprised himself by actually leaping on the fourth try.

For a few seconds Dale Stewart was flying, seeming to hover twenty-five feet above his friends' heads, still even with the summit of their little mountain, the pond an impossible distance away across muddy flats baked brick-hard by the sun. Then gravity remembered him and he was falling, arms and legs flailing as if he were trying to pedal air ... sure that he would make it. ... then absolutely positive that he would not make it ... and then he had made it, by inches, and the green and tepid water of the quarry pond was around him and over him and filling his nose; he used bent legs to push himself off the weedy bottom, and then he was in air and light again, screaming from sheer exhilaration while the other kids shouted and applauded.

Kevin was the last to go-keeping the others waiting for ten minutes while he hemmed and hawed and tested the wind, tied his laces over and over, and built up the ramp a bit before finally shooting off the summit like a cannonball, his jump the farthest of them all, hitting the water four feet from the bank with his legs together and his fingers clamped over his nostrils. Kev had been the only one with sense enough to take off his jeans and t-shirt, wearing only his Jockey shorts and tennis shoes for the plunge.

He bobbed to the surface grinning. The others applauded and shouted and tossed his jeans and shirt and socks into the pond. Kevin emerged grumbling in German and barely watched as Lawrence made his sixth leap, doing a full somersault this time before hitting the water.

Already wet, the kids hiked around the quarry on squishy tennis shoes and went swimming in earnest, diving into the deeper side of the pond from the eight-foot cliffs there. This wasn't their usual swimming area-the presence of too many water moccasins and parental concerns about the "bottomless quarry" usually made them wait for someone to drive them to Hartley's Pond up Oak Hill Road-so the early-evening dip was just that much more delicious.

Afterwards, they dried out on the bank for an hour or so-Dale actually dozing off and waking with a start-and then they shuffled teams to play hide-and-seek in the woods again. Mike smiled at the pack of kids with their clothes dried into strange wrinkles. "Who's with me?"

It turned out Lawrence and McKown were with him. Dale and Gerry and Kev gave them a five-minute head start-timed by counting to three-hundred Boy Scout-before heading into the woods to find them. Dale knew by silent assent that Mike or Lawrence wouldn't use one of their secret camps.

They chased each other through the trees and pastures for another hour and a half or so, changing teams as the mood suited them, pausing to drink from the water bottle McKown had brought along and refilled from the pond-although the greenish color didn't appeal to Kevin-and ending by just hiking together, wandering back on the south side of the quarry on the first half mile of Gypsy Lane.

Their bikes were where they'd left them by the back fence. The sun was a bulbous red orb hanging just above Old Man Johnson's cornfields to the west. The air was thick with evening haze, pollen, dust, and humidity, but somehow the sky looked endless and translucent as the blue prepared to deepen toward twilight.

"Last one past the Black Tree's a homo," said Gerry Daysinger and got a head start, pedaling on the hard-packed rut of the gravel road as it dipped into the shaded dimness at the bottom of the hill.

The others shouted and tried to catch up, roaring down the hill and through the darkness there at high speed, feeling the cooler air above the creek as it whipped through their crew cuts, then standing and pedaling hard to get up the slope. If a car had come over the rise by the Black Tree Tavern, the boys would have had to steer into the deeper gravel outside the ruts, making skinned knees and torn clothing a near certainty. They didn't care. They drove hard, their shouts dying as they saved their breath for the final twenty yards, all of them panting and gasping as they reached the flat near the tavern driveway.

Mike won. He glanced back and grinned before he put his head down and continued the race toward Jubilee College Road several hundred yards ahead.

They relaxed as they turned west toward Elm Haven, the six riding abreast in two groups of three, Lawrence being the first to take his hands off the handlebars and lean back with arms folded, still pedaling. Then all six of them rode with arms folded, gliding along between the rising walls of corn.

Dale didn't even glance sideways as he passed the place where the fence had been repaired after Duane McBride's near-accident. Wheel tracks still tore up the ditch there and the corn was smashed for yards beyond the fence, but Dale didn't look-he was looking west toward where the sun now crowned the low line of trees that was Elm Haven.

Dale was tired, achey from about a dozen bruises and strained muscles, scratched on his arms and legs, itchy from his now-stiff jeans, dehydrated to the point of cracked lips and a headache, and starved because he hadn't eaten any real food since breakfast thirteen hours earlier. He felt wonderful.

The whole sense of bad dreams, and encroaching darkness he'd felt since school had let out had seemed to lift today. The terror of C.J. and the rifle had faded. Dale was glad that he and Mike and the others had silently decided to drop all this Tubby and Old Central business.

Summer felt the way it should.

The six kids grabbed the handlebars as they came off the gravel onto the cooling but still-soft asphalt at the head of First Avenue. Dale could see the trees in front of Mike's house at the intersection way down the road, could glimpse the back of his own house across the wide fields and ballfield of City Park.

McKown and Daysinger waved and pedaled ahead, eager to get to wherever they were going. Dale and Kev and Mike and Lawrence coasted the last fifty yards to the relative darkness under the first of Elm Haven's tall old trees.

Dale felt happy as they waved good-bye to Mike and pedaled easily down Depot Street for home. This was the way summer should be. This was the way it was going to be.

Dale had never been so wrong.