Base Metal

Livy slipped past the thin, blue, plastic rope. The sweaty attendant turned to eye a group of women in low cut tank tops snapping pictures and talking animatedly in French. In two steps she was around a column staring at a set of stairs pitted with age and acid rain. Another length of cheap twine cordoned off the descent. She looked behind her. No one was there, but the scrape of footsteps on sand strewn stone and a sharp word in Turkish sent her dipping under. A few steps down, she slipped on the smooth stone. Her hands raked against the sharp rocks on either side of her. Desperate not to roll down the rest of the way, she dug her fingers into the crevices. The grind of her shoes on the gritty stairs echoed into the depths of the cavern beneath her. She steadied herself and listened. Nothing. She huffed her relief. She pressed herself away from the walls slowly and tried a few more steps, cautiously this time.

Soon she passed out of the mid-day light streaming through the doorway and into pitch blackness. She stepped carefully, her hand passing over the rough corridor. When she hit a twist in the stairs, she flipped on her cellphone’s flashlight app. The stairs went down for what seemed like forever before hitting another bend. Her chest tightened as she looked up, considering the significant flight of stairs she had already traversed. She shook her head, took a deep breath, and pushed herself forward. She had said it would be here, and she needed it. They all did.

Thirty minutes, a few stumbles, one significant fall and a sharp curse later, Livy hit the main floor of the cavern. Finally. The light from her phone illuminated hollows cut into the stone. She took a step closer. Then she saw the bones. Catacombs. Holy shit.

Livy took that step back. Three, six, back right corner, look for the mark, she reassured herself. First things first. She moved slowly through the vaulted chamber, her light catching colorful paintings on the ceiling and piles of debris on the ground in front of her. She stepped gingerly around a skull that seemed to have been separated from the rest of its skeleton. One, she counted to herself passing a chamber on her left. She flashed her light into it briefly, revealing a long tunnel lined with more alcoves. She kept going, resisting the urge to stop and take a closer look at an ornate carving between galleries, a bas relief of a woman draped in fabric, a bow in her hand and a dog at her heels.

Two, she counted. The light from her phone revealed a vast cavern this time. It was wrecked. Chunks of pillars and carvings covered the floor. She paused to see a stone alter, an entire corner shorn away. Mosaics covered the wall behind it. Many of the tiles still glittered, except for those directly behind the stone platform. These were figures of all shapes and sizes. Their forms curvaceous, lithe, strong, and feminine. She gasped when she tilted the light a little higher. The faces of the women had been chipped away. When she looked closer, she could tell their white robes had been burned. Livy dropped the light and walked a little more quickly. This place…she thought but stopped. Three, six, back right corner, look for the mark, she told herself instead.

Three she counted slowly, turning only because she saw the arch of the next cavern high overhead. Boulders almost blocked the entrance entirely. She exhaled deeply her eyes flying over the collapsed entrance. There. Grabbing the ridge of a larger block, she heaved herself up and over the head of a Doric column. She placed her hand on the next stone for balance and tested it for stability. It held. She pulled herself up. The hole she had spotted was only a few feet above her. She searched for her next foot hold and stopped. Shit, she needed two hands. Livy looked uncertainly at her phone and back up at the hole then shoved the phone in her sports bra. The flashlight still gave off a faint glow through her shirt. She ripped off her shirt and shoved it into the back of her shorts. She gave her shoulders a quick shimmy. The phone barely shifted. With another quick sigh, Livy reached for the nearest crevice, wedged her foot into a hole two feet up, and heaved. In three more moves she crested the edge of the hole to the other side. Dragging herself over the lip, she scooted until she looked into the rubble strewn corridor beyond. Doorways lined it, and Livy had to shake off a strange sense of familiarity.

Sixth door on the right she told herself, eying the edge of the rockfall to see if any doors may have been blocked. Two, or maybe just one. She pushed forward and planted her feet on what she could only assume was marble. Thankfully the fallen rubble on this side was more step like than the one she had come from. Even so, she felt a rush of relief when her feet touched the ground.

Livy counted again. Two, three, four, five, six. She looked inside. No mosaics or paintings graced this room. The small space was a sparse rectangle with a square cut near the top of the far wall. A window? Down here? Livy went straight to the far right corner but didn’t see the telltale engraving on the floor stone there. She frowned, walked out of the room, and turned back toward the wall of rubble. What had she thought? One or Two. She entered the next room she came to. This one was different. Her light flashed off elaborate frescos she did not pause to admire. She walked to the prescribed corner and knelt. The dust was thicker here. She brushed away layers of sand and pebbles from the stone that lay beneath.

She almost cried out when she saw it. He had drawn her that symbol once on a slow night over coffee. A triangle on top of a plus sign, almost like a tree, alchemical. She frowned. What had he said it represented? Livy shook her head and began to pull tools out of her pockets. She dug around the corners and pried and grunted and suppressed curses for what must have been an hour until the block finally pulled free. A small box lay inside a hidden cubby, covered in dust. She reached inside and pulled it out, knocking dirt free. The cool feel of metal met her fingertips as she gripped it. The temptation to open it was strong, but she needed to leave as soon as she could. Nothing good would happen if someone found her down here, and she could not lose this.

Livy looked at the mess in front of her and made a quick decision. Setting aside the box, she replaced the stone and packed as much dirt as she could between the ridges. She whipped her shirt out of her shorts and swept dirt back over the stone. She kicked more dirt over her tracks, smoothing it out with the fabric. She did the same with her trail into the other room and back out to where she had entered.

Box gripped tightly in her left hand, she began to climb out. The way back wasn’t easy, but after a few extra bruises and scrapes she was switching off her flashlight and stepping back into sunlight. She had thrown her dusty shirt back on and stuffed the box in the back of her shorts, but she still felt like she had grave robber written in flashing neon above her head. She meandered through the park, attempting to look half interested in fallen pillars, shards of tile, and drainage ditches when a trove of history lay far below her feet.

She wasn’t sure if it was fate or dumb luck that the bus was waiting for her when she wandered out. She wasn’t sure if it was providence or odds when no one was at the hotel desk when she walked into the lobby and headed upstairs. All she knew was that what lay inside that box when she sat down at her desk and removed the lid was a miracle. It was a miracle wrapped in layer upon layer of waxed fabric, a miracle whose pages still turned and whose cover still gleamed a deep black that she felt she would fall into and never find her way back.

Carefully she turned the pages until she found it. Symbols and lines and numbers lay in neat rows across two pages near the back of the book. She barely understood a quarter of them, but at the end was a little circle with a single black dot in the middle. This one she knew.

The sun. Gold.