The Devil's Labyrinth

EPILOGUE

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.

A rough hand groped at his chest, tearing open his shirt, and then he felt a fist close around the crucifix — his father’s crucifix — that had hung around his neck since that morning six months ago when he had been sent by Sebastian Sloane to kill the Pope.

He felt a terrible jerk.

The silver chain broke.

And a soft voice spoke in his ear: “For the salvation of Christ.”

Ryan dropped to the floor of the tunnel as his assailant fled, and a moment later even the footsteps faded away.

The tunnels were silent for a moment, and then a single word floated out of the darkness: “Ryan?”

It was his mother’s voice that made Ryan realize he must have cried out loud as the arm slid around his neck.

Now, emerging from the darkness ahead, he could see his mother and the guide coming back for him.

He touched his chest and felt the empty place where his father’s crucifix had lain heavily since that morning on the Boston Common.

And all he felt was a profound relief.

It was over. The whole thing was finally over.

Wherever that cross had come from, he was certain that it was now going back where it truly belonged.

And wherever it was going, it no longer had anything to do with him, and it had nothing to do with his father’s love for him.

That love, he knew, would always be with him.

“Ryan?” his mother called out again.

Ryan got to his feet and brushed the dust from his pants, and by the time his mother reached him, it was as if nothing had happened at all. “Let’s go home,” he whispered. “I just want to go home.”