Oracle of the Dead(65)

There is a certain dream that I have repeatedly, and sometimes remember. It has a number of variations. It always involves my trying to get somewhere, or trying to find someone, and always being frustrated. I recall one dream in which I wanted to go to the second floor of the Tabularium in Rome to look up something. I would climb the usual outside stair, but in some fashion it would not take me to the second floor, but instead I found myself on the third. I then took the internal stairway, but it bypassed the second floor and deposited me on the ground floor again. I stepped outside the building and I could see the second floor, but somehow I just could not get there.

Likewise, in another variation of the same dream, I sometimes found myself in the Forum, seeking some person I knew to be there, but always being frustrated in my goal. Some petitioner would always demand my attention just as I was about to find the person I sought. Or a procession of Vestals would come between me and my goal.

These are commonplace dreams, like the one in which you are a schoolboy again and the master has scheduled an examination in Greek, or Homer’s poetry or the like, and you have not studied or prepared in any way and are in a panic. Everyone has these dreams, and they have nothing to do with the gods but are only a reflection of your own inner concerns. Such was my dream that night.

It had no coherent narrative or progression. It was just a repeated series of scenes in which I was in the tunnel of the Oracle, walking about tapping on the walls, trying to find hinges or hidden trapdoors or anything else that would help me solve the murder of Eugaeon and the others. In this dream, Hermes and the other men were not with me. I wandered alone in my bafflement.

In the dream, from time to time I would look up and see those vent slots. They loomed much larger that they had in real life. Somehow, they were trying to tell me something. In some fashion, they seemed to be important, even crucial. I heard sounds coming from them, not words but vague, inchoate sounds, like those I had heard on my first venture down the tunnel, when certain sounds had seemed to form words, if I could only hear them clearly enough.

In time I awoke and I knew where I should be looking. Julia noted my altered expression as we sat on a terrace outside our bedroom for a breakfast of the inevitable cherries, sliced fruit, bread, and honey.

“You look transformed,” she said. “Did a god visit you in the night?”

“I don’t believe so. I’ve had that sort of night vision, and in those cases it was pretty clear which god appeared to me, and what he or she wanted me to do. This was different. It told me something I had been overlooking, but there was no divine person communicating with me. It may merely have been that my own mind, unable to make sense of things in the waking state, sorted them out somehow in the dreamworld.”

“What an interesting concept,” she said. “And what did this vision tell you?”

“That the vent slots in the ceiling of the tunnel and the shrine are the key to what has been happening here.”

“In what fashion?” she asked.

“That I don’t know, but I intend to look into it.” I sent for Hermes. He appeared within moments.

“Hermes, go fetch that master stonemason—what’s his name?”

“Ansidius Perna.”

“That’s the one. Go find him and bring him to me at once.”

“What is this about?” he asked.

“Why should I explain myself to you?” I demanded. “Go do as I bid you.”

“Well,” Julia said, “aren’t we grand this morning. Why don’t you tell him why you want to question the man?”

“Are you now taking sides against me with my freedman?” I demanded.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Julia said. “Hermes, he’s had some sort of insight concerning the ventilation holes in the tunnel of the Oracle. You know what he’s like in times like this, he’s not entirely sane or responsible.”

This was the sort of respect I got in my own home. In any case, Hermes left to find the master mason. I chewed on my breakfast and mused. “That air is coming in from somewhere,” I said. “But where?” Julia looked at me as if I were insane. Then I compounded her doubts. “So if air is coming in, what else might be?”

“What else could come through tiny little slits in the rock?” she demanded.

“Sounds,” I told her. “Voices.”

“But,” she pounced, triumphantly, “you said that you found none of those vent slits in the chamber of the Oracle.”

“They weren’t needed there, if my thoughts are on track,” I said. “I’m pretty sure now what they were used for, I just need to know where they came from.”