Free Father Panic's Opera Macabre by Thomas Tessier Page B

even looked at them in the last fifty years, yet this is how they are. The temperature and moisture in the air here must be just right. And wax is a remarkable substance in the right conditions. It doesn't change."
     
    "Fifty years; God. It does feel a little oily."
     
    "Yes," she agreed quickly. "I think they were conditioned or rubbed with some kind of plant oil to help preserve them this way."
     
    Marisa laid the mask back in the wooden box and arranged the cover sheet over it. She closed the lid and fastened the hasp, and then looked up at Neil with a quizzical expression on her face.
     
    "I was a history student at university," she said. "You write about history. But do you have any idea how much history is here, in this cellar? I mean real history? What they saw, what they lived through?"
     
    "Look at them," Neil said, his voice suddenly loud. "Your parents and grandparents, all still alive. All that history. You should get them to tell you about it, everything they can remember. Write it down, or better yet, get it on tape. Marisa, you can still do this."
     
    "Ah, they won't talk," she said with a shrug of resignation. Then she smiled again. "Come on, we're not there yet."
     
    Between Sleep and Death
     
    They only had to go a short distance farther. Neil noticed that they were nearing one of the outer walls of the cellar. The dark expanse of rock loomed above them, and it was laced with alkaline encrustations, which in certain places appeared to glow with a faint greenish phosphorescence. Neil could only wonder at the age of the house and the labor that must have been involved in the construction of the cellar walls alone.
     
    They stepped out of the shadows and stood beneath a lightbulb in a small clear area in front of what looked exactly like a miniature house. There were two wooden steps up to the narrow door, on either side of which was a tiny square window. The house was only about eight feet wide and not quite twice that in length. The back end stood flush against the cellar wall.
     
    "This was one of the wagons they used a hundred years ago," Marisa told him. "Probably long before that too. Who knows."
     
    "A wagon?" Neil was surprised, but then he could see that it made perfect sense. He saw where the wheels had been, and that the front steps, as he first thought of them, were in fact where the driver would sit when they were travelling. The house was painted in blue and gold and the curved roof was red-at one time it must have been very bright and eye-catching, Neil thought. There was even a small but ornate overhang above the door. It was a relic of history, as Marisa had said. Neil could easily imagine a train of these wagons making their way over the unpaved roads of a Europe that had long since vanished.
     
    Marisa seemed to sense what he was thinking, and said nothing for a moment. Neil was still taking in details, like the small wooden box fastened beneath each window, to hold a flower pot.
     
    "It's astonishing how much they brought over," he remarked. "I don't know how they ever managed it."
     
    "They were lucky to get out," Marisa replied. "They told me it was the end of the war, but I believe they must have started long before that. They probably began sending the wagons overland at least a year before. And how they managed it, that's simple. They bribed their way."
     
    "Oh, of course."
     
    "Gold, jewels."
     
    "You must try to get them to tell you more," Neil said. "The details, what it was like every day and night for them. Real history is not just in the big events, but in what ordinary people lived through. You should do it, not necessarily because you want to do anything with it, like turn it into a book, but for yourself. For you to know."
     
    "Yes, I should." Marisa turned to a small table nearby. She took a wooden match and lit a candle. No electricity inside.
     
    Neil followed her up the two steps. She opened the door and went in. She put the candle on a shelf and then