Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

The tales of ghosts and witches associated with Halloween in the U.S. and the British Isles have their origin in Celtic lore, but superstitions about the spirits of the dead, or “lemures,” as the ancient Romans called them, were also prevalent at the time of Steven Saylor’s story. To exorcise these troublesome spirits, the Romans held rites each spring (the Lemuria) — to no avail in the case of the soldier in the following tale, for each autumn the lemures of those he killed in battle return to haunt him, until he wisely consults Gordianus...

* * *

The slave pressed a scrap of parchment into my hand:

From Lucius Claudius to his friend Gordianus, greetings. If you will accompany this messenger on his return, I will be grateful. I am at the house of a friend on the Palatine Hill; there is a problem which requires your attention. Come alone — do not bring the boy — the circumstances might frighten him.

Lucius need not have warned me against bringing Eco, for at that moment the boy was busy with his tutor. From the garden, where they had found a patch of morning sunlight to ward off the October chill, I could hear the old man declaiming while Eco wrote the day’s Latin lesson on his wax tablet.

“Bethesda!” I called out, but she was already behind me, holding open my woolen cloak. As she slipped it over my shoulders, she glanced down at the note in my hand. She wrinkled her nose. Unable to read, Bethesda regards the written word with suspicion and disdain.

“From Lucius Claudius?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Why, yes, but how—?” Then I realized she must have recognized his messenger. Slaves often take more notice of one another than do their masters.

“I suppose he wants you to go gaming with him, or to taste the new vintage from one of his vineyards.” She tossed back her mane of jet-black hair and pouted her luscious lips.

“I suppose not; he has work for me.”

A smile flickered at the corner of her mouth.

“Not that it should be any concern of yours,” I added quickly. Since I had taken Eco in from the streets and legally adopted him, Bethesda had begun to behave less and less like a concubine and more and more like a wife and mother. I wasn’t sure I liked the change; I was even less sure I had any control over it.

“Frightening work,” I added. “Probably dangerous.” But she was already busy adding to the household accounts in her head. As I stepped out the door I heard her humming a happy Egyptian tune from her childhood.

The day was bright and crisp. Drifts of leaves lined either side of the narrow winding pathway that led from my house down the slope of the Esquiline Hill to the Subura below. The tang of smoke was on the air, rising from kitchens and braziers. The messenger drew his dark green cloak more tightly about his shoulders to ward off the chill.

“Neighbor! Citizen!” a voice hissed at me from the wall to my right. I looked up and saw two eyes peering down at me, surmounted by the dome of a bald, knobby head. “Neighbor — yes, you! Gordianus, they call you; am I right?”

I looked up at him warily. “Yes, Gordianus is my name.”

“And Detectus, they call you — ‘the Finder,’ yes?”

“Yes.”

“You solve puzzles. Plumb mysteries. Answer riddles.”

“Sometimes.”

“Then you must help me!”

“Perhaps, Citizen. But not now. A friend summons me—”

“This will take only a moment.”

“Even so, I grow cold standing here—”

“Then come inside! I’ll open the little door in the wall and let you in.”

“No — perhaps tomorrow.”

“No! Now! They will come tonight, I know it — or even this afternoon, when the shadows lengthen. See, the clouds are coming up. If the sun grows dim, they may come out at midday beneath the dark, brooding sky.”

“They? Whom do you mean, Citizen?”

His eyes grew large, yet his voice became quite tiny, like the voice of a mouse. “The lemures...” he squeaked.

The messenger clutched at his cloak. I felt the sudden chill myself, but it was only a cold, dry wind gusting down the pathway that made me shiver; or so I told myself.

“Lemures,” the man repeated. “The unquiet dead.”

Leaves scattered and danced about my feet. A thin finger of cloud obscured the sun, dimming its bright, cold light to a hazy grey.