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

“Now what are you doing? Here, those tiles are made of fine limestone, Gordianus! You shouldn’t go chipping away at the corners.”

“Not even to discover this?” I slid the chisel under the edge of one of the stones and lifted it up.

Lucius drew back and gasped, then leaned forward and peered down into the darkness. “A tunnel!” he whispered.

“So it appears.”

“Why, someone must go down it!” Lucius peered at me and raised an eyebrow.

“Not even if Cornelia doubled my fee!”

“I wasn’t suggesting that you go, Gordianus.” He looked up at the young slave who had fetched the chisel. The boy looked slender and supple enough. When he saw what Lucius intended, he started back and looked at me imploringly.

“No, Lucius Claudius,” I said, “no one need be put at risk; not yet. Who knows what the boy might encounter — if not lemures and monsters, then boobytraps or scorpions or a fall to his death. First we should attempt to determine the tunnel’s egress. It may be a simple matter, if it merely follows the logical course of the plumbing.”

Which it did. From the balcony on the western side of the house, it was easy enough to judge where the buried pipes descended the slope into the valley between the Palatine and the Capitoline, where they joined with the Cloaca Maxima underground. At the foot of the hill, directly below the house, in a wild rubbish-strewn region behind some warehouses and granaries, I spied a thicket. Even stripped of their leaves, the bushes grew so thick that I could not see far into them.

Lucius insisted on accompanying me, though his bulky frame and expensive garb were ill-suited for traversing a rough hillside. We reached the foot of the hill and pushed our way into the thicket, ducking beneath branches and snapping twigs out of the way.

At last we came to the heart of the thicket, where our perseverance was rewarded. Hidden behind the dense, shaggy branches of a cypress tree was the tunnel’s other end. The hole was crudely made, lined with rough dabs of cement and broken bricks. It was just large enough for a man to enter, but the foul smell that issued from within was enough to keep vagrants or even curious children out.

At night, hidden behind the storehouses and sheds, such a place would be quite lonely and secluded. A man — or a lemur, for that matter — might come and go completely unobserved.

“Cold,” complained Lucius, “cold and damp and dark. It would have made more sense to stay in the house tonight, where it’s warm and dry. We could lie in wait in the hallway and trap this fiend when he emerges from his secret passage. Why, instead, are we huddling here in the dark and cold, watching for who-knows-what and jumping in fright every time a bit of wind whistles through the thicket?”

“You need not have come, Lucius Claudius. I didn’t ask you to.”

“Cornelia would have thought me a coward if I didn’t,” he pouted.

“And what does Cornelia’s opinion matter?” I snapped, and bit my tongue. The cold and damp had set us both on edge. A light drizzle began to fall, obscuring the moon and casting the thicket into even greater darkness. We had been hiding among the brambles since shortly after nightfall. I had warned Lucius that the watch was likely to be long and uncomfortable and possibly futile, but he had insisted on accompanying me. He had offered to hire some ruffians to escort us, but if my suspicions were correct we would not need them; nor did I want more witnesses to be present than was necessary.

A gust of icy wind whipped beneath my cloak and sent a shiver up my spine. Lucius’s teeth began to chatter. My mood grew dark. What if I was wrong, after all? What if the thing we sought was not human, but something else...

“And as for jumping in fear every time a twig snaps,” I whispered, “speak for yourself—”

I fell silent, for at that moment not one but many twigs began to snap. Something large had entered the thicket and was moving toward us.

“It must be a whole army!” whispered Lucius, clutching at my arm.

“No,” I whispered back. “Only two persons, if my guess is right.”

Two moving shapes, obscured by the tangle of branches and the deep gloom, came very near to us and then turned aside, toward the cypress tree that hid the tunnel’s mouth.

A moment later I heard a man’s voice, cursing: “Someone has blocked the hole!” I recognized the voice of the growling giant who guarded the house on the Caelian Hill.

“Perhaps the tunnel has fallen in.” When Lucius heard the second voice he clutched my arm again, not in fear but surprise.

“No,” I said aloud, “the tunnel was purposely blocked so that you could not use it again.”

There was a moment of silence, followed by the noise of two bodies scrambling in the underbrush.

“Stay where you are!” I said. “For your own good, stay where you are and listen to me!”

The scrambling ceased and there was silence again, except for the sound of heavy breathing and confused whispers.