Ancient Shadows

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Florence, Italy

Michael dashed out of the hospital to the sidewalk then stopped and took a deep breath. The air felt crisp but clean after the rain. Sunshine. Pigeons flew. Car horns honked. Crowds of people bustled through the streets lined with shops and cafes. Here, life was normal.

He wanted to get away from the hospital and quickly reached his Vespa. Clearly, the man who died wasn’t the elderly priest who had visited him. Maybe the two were relatives. He had no idea, but told himself all would become clear once he reached the mortuary.

First, however, he had the problem of the bronze and the pearl. He traveled as if on autopilot to his bank and placed the bronze and pearl in his safe deposit box, then continued to the place he was dreading to go.

At the mortuary, he was directed to a chillingly sterile, small room. Before long a man, older, balding, and wearing a white uniform wheeled a gurney into the room.

Michael steeled himself. He had seen dead bodies before, but a body without the spark of life was a sad thing to behold.

Please don’t let it be Berosus. Please …

The mortuary assistant quietly watched him, waiting. Michael nodded, and the assistant pulled back the sheet covering the face.

Michael drew in his breath. “Well, he does look like the man I met. But according to the hospital, he was in a coma during the time I spoke with him, so ...”

“Sometimes hospitals are off by a few hours,” the assistant said, trying to be helpful. “If he looks like the man you know, I suspect it’s him.”

Michael stared at the body. It was definitely Berosus. “I’m not sure,” he said. “May I see his clothes?”

“No problem.” The assistant put the sheet back in place, wheeled the body from the room, and soon returned with a large, black plastic bag. His mouth wrinkled with disgust as he handed it over. “Be careful. Everything’s filthy.”

Michael opened the bag. It contained the black clothes Berosus had worn and the silver crucifix. He went through the pockets, looking for identification that the hospital might have missed. He found a five euro note, a few coins, several holy medals, and a small photograph of a group of American sailors folded in half. Badly faded, it was the size and shape of a photo taken with an old Polaroid camera. When the assistant looked away, Michael slid the photo into his jacket pocket.

“It’s him,” Michael admitted, handing back the clothes bag.

After signing some papers to positively identify the body as that of Father Yosip Berosus, he left the mortuary, glad to get the scent of chemicals and flowers out of his nose.

He shivered, but not from cold as he walked to his parking place. He had heard more than once that when the body died the soul sometimes remained on earth for several hours to finish its work or to assure loved ones. He had never experienced that phenomenon, and tended to believe it was said only as a means to comfort the bereaved, but it was the best explanation for what had happened.

He couldn’t help but think of how ironic it was that he’d moved to Italy to get away from paranormal weirdness, and now a ghostly spirit may have arrived at his doorstep. But Berosus hadn’t been a ghost. Whatever had come to his apartment was alive and real. He had drunk wine and water, and handed over an object of some weight.

How was it possible? Michael got on his scooter and started it up. It was late afternoon now, and the streets more crowded as they filled with people shopping and going to restaurants.

At the first intersection, a Fiat sedan cut him off. He swerved and nearly ran into a wall. The driver jumped out of the car, followed by another man, and they headed towards Michael.

From their expressions, he knew they were trouble.

The driver swung first. Michael sidestepped the blow, then grabbed the fist that flew by and used the attacker’s own thrust to pull him forward and downward. He then struck a Shaolin blow to the back of the man’s neck. The attacker dropped like a stone.

But the quick, powerful movement caused pain to shoot from Michael’s bad shoulder down his arm to his fingertips. He gasped, unable to move for a moment, and then turned to look for the second man.

He heard a whoosh just before something struck the back of his head and all went black.

Michael opened his eyes to see concerned faces of strangers peering down at him, women’s as well as men’s. He slowly stood, trying to get his bearings and shake the fuzziness from his brain.

The Fiat and its passengers were gone. One person had picked up his motor scooter, another handed him his wallet, while others tossed a barrage of Italian at him. He didn’t understand the words or the situation, and kept repeating “grazie” and smiling like some doofus, while inside he was furious. What the hell was going on?

He felt in his pockets and found everything, including his passport, except his keys. He searched the ground, but they were gone. A sinking feeling hit, especially when his wallet still had money and credit cards.

This was no typical mugging. He gingerly touched the back of his head and felt a lump forming. Last night, he’d passed out for no reason, and now some strangers knocked him out. If Florence was trying to tell him he was no longer welcome here, he was getting the message. All he wanted to do, now, was get back to his apartment.

An English speaker offered to help him report the attack to the police or go to a hospital to be checked for a concussion. Sure, and spend hours trying to explain the inexplicable while his apartment was being cleaned out. He thanked the man, but declined, wanting no part of cops, hospitals, doctors or anything else disrupting what had been, until midnight last night, a quiet life.

Without his keys, he couldn’t even drive his scooter. A couple of men pushed it to a parking space. Michael caught a taxi home. Anxiety over what he might find there, along with the bump on his head, made him slightly nauseous.

Luckily, his landlady, Mrs. Silvestri, was home. She was in her fifties, rotund, usually jolly, but looked horrified when he told her what had happened, and that his apartment key had been stolen. He once overheard her calling him her “quiet, lonely tenant,” and she had even introduced him to a couple of women who immediately became overly shy, and couldn’t say much more than hello. Those experiences had been even more painful to him than the whack on the head. Now, Mrs. Silvestri’s brown eyes showed her worry as they walked to his apartment and she tried to persuade him to see a doctor. He refused and said he’d be fine. She shook her head as she unlocked his door.

Stepping inside, he saw he’d been right to worry. The apartment had been ransacked, everything overturned and scattered, including his books and papers. Whoever had done this had worked fast, but still managed to open up the back of his computer. It meant whatever was being sought was small. Perhaps the size of a bronze vessel. Or a red pearl.

The landlady entered behind him. He had a spare key, but asked her to have his lock changed as soon as possible, adding he would pay. She soon left, glad to be of some help.

He walked into the living room and sat on the sofa, his head throbbing. If this had been a normal mugging and robbery, they would have taken his watch and cell phone, and once inside the apartment, his laptop, tablet, TV, and cameras. But they took nothing of that, which left him assuming the attack had to be related to the dead priest’s strange gift. The attackers probably watched him go to the hospital or the mortuary and when they didn’t find the bronze and pearl on him, they’d come to his apartment. His driver’s license gave them the address.

Three ibuprofens later, Michael straightened up his apartment, re-shelved books and papers, and put his computer back together. He wanted everything the way it had been. An inner voice laughed at him—ain’t gonna happen, fella. Any normal person would have dismissed the priest’s conjecture of demonic forces at work. But “normal” wasn’t in his lexicon.

Because of his ancestors, he had studied quite a bit about alchemy. Modern man dismissed it as a sham, but for over five thousand years, people from China to Europe had practiced it. Men who weren’t exactly stupid or gullible, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton, believed in alchemy and its spiritual tenets, including its path to immortality.

And, if alchemy could deal with spirituality and immortality, it could also deal with demons.

Maybe the blow to his head was worse than he first thought? He took his spare motor scooter key to retrieve his Vespa.

By the time he returned, despite his head and shoulder vying for attention as to which ached worse, he took out the photo of the American sailors he had found among Berosus’ clothes. Seven young men wearing Navy whites and caps smiled into the camera. He saw no medals or badges to indicate they were anything more than young seamen, probably second or third class. Directly behind them loomed the Great Pyramid of Egypt—Egypt, the birthplace of Western and Arabian alchemy.

He assumed one of the men in the photo must have been the padre’s close friend or relative. He found a magnifying glass and used it to study the features of each man. He didn’t know why, but as he studied it, he felt a presence. He put down the glass.

When he was young, he managed to ignore the peculiar sensations that afflicted him. And afflicted was the right word. Unwanted, they washed over him like an illness. In fact, he had become quite adept at discounting feelings of any kind until the situation in Idaho forced him to listen to them.

Going to the hospital to find the priest had been a mistake. He should have known better. The last thing he wanted was that sort of trouble in his life again.

He couldn’t stop studying the photo. None of the men seemed to have features similar to Berosus, but the priest was old, the men were young, and the photo was grainy. If he could find out who those men were, that might lead to knowing who should inherit the bronze Berosus entrusted to him. And move it from his life to theirs. Lucky devils!

He scanned the photo at high resolution, and emailed it to his assistant, Li Jianjun.

Jianjun had been born thirty-six years earlier in Beijing, China, and left at the age of eight when his family moved to Hong Kong. At fourteen, the family immigrated to Vancouver. He landed a good job with Microsoft in Seattle and married the woman his parents chose for him.

Michael met him after Jianjun discovered he enjoyed recreational hacking far more than his programming job with Microsoft in Seattle. For some reason, they clicked, and Michael offered him a new kind of job and a life of constant change. Michael didn’t do typical, university-supported archeological digs where masses of students were sent out with tiny brushes to clean the dust off of pottery shards from some ancient civilization. Instead, he followed legends. Using a combination of history, migration patterns, ancient tales, and Jianjun’s clever computer skills, he had found buried treasure, hidden tombs and, once, a sunken galleon.

Someday, Michael hoped to return to such archeological adventures. But for now—or at least until last night—he had found peace in Florence and had sent Jianjun home with a generous stipend. After Idaho, Michael was hesitant to plunge into a new endeavor. Fear of the unknown filled him—exactly the sort of fear that was anathema to someone whose career was built on excavations and venturing into dark and mysterious areas.

He hated the idea of delving into Father Berosus’ life and the people in this photo, but at the same time, he felt obligated to return a potentially valuable old bronze to its true owner.

He phoned Jianjun.

The time difference was nine hours, with Florence being nine hours ahead of Vancouver. Although it was 11:00 a.m. there, Jianjun was still sleeping. Like Michael, he preferred to stay up late into the night, and to sleep in the morning. Michael’s call woke him up.

Michael told him about the photo he had emailed and asked him to find out who the sailors in it were.

“You’re asking me to hack into old U.S. Navy records?” Jianjun asked, his voice thick with grogginess.

“Why else would I be bothering you at this ungodly hour?” Michael quipped. Jianjun could be nervous, whining, and at times a royal pain, but he was also extremely smart, and as true and loyal a friend as anyone could hope for.

“Good question, boss. But what you want is easy. Anyone can do it. You don’t need someone with my skills.”

“In that case do it for fun. And, by the way, good morning.” Michael hung up and poured himself two fingers of single malt Scotch. He usually drank wine, but the day he’d had called for something a lot stronger. He stepped out his back door and sat on the stoop.

A few steps led down to the garden he shared with four neighbors. It sat barren now, but in summer it thrived with herbs and vegetables.

He listened to the night sounds of Florence: cars, scooters, buses, people calling to each other, arguing, singing, children playing, babies crying, and nearly constant peals of laughter. He had come to love Florence and yet felt as if his time here was coming to an end. Berosus and his accursed pearl threatened to take him away. He took a sip of Scotch as he continued to listen to the cacophony all around him. He found it strange that after traveling and living alone in some of the most remote corners of the world, it was here in this crowded city, filled with people entwined in each other’s lives, that he felt the most alone.

His drink finished, he headed back into his apartment, but then stopped in the doorway. The night had gone stone silent, as if all of Florence had simply vanished.

A flicker of a shadow overhead caught his attention.

On the moonlit roof of his building he glimpsed the silhouette of a dog or a jackal. He viewed it only for a second before it disappeared into the night.

Somehow, he knew it was evil.