Free The Devil Will Come by Glenn Cooper

They’re anxious for a report.’
    She tapped on her copy of Astronomica . ‘I’m thinking about the symbols. I want to try to understand their meaning, the significance they may have had to these … beings. And I need to understand the phenomenon better – the tails.’
    De Stefano nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, this is critical. We need to solve this mystery quickly. Who were these people? How did they come to be in this place? How did they die? By fire? Were they murdered? If so, who was responsible? Was it mass suicide? If so, why did they do it? What do their tails and their symbology tell us about who they were? Were they Romans? Were they pagans? Is there even the remotest possibility that they could have been Christians? It’s going to be impossible to prevent the public from finding out about this forever. These things always leak. I only hope that we have some credible explanations to offer if it comes out before the Conclave starts or while it’s in session. I’ll leave you to it. But let me know as soon as you’ve made progress.’ His voice had a pleading tone.
    She opened the small volume to a bookmark. Marcus Manilius was a Roman astrologer whose life straddled the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, a figure who would have been lost to the sands of time were it not for his epic poem Astronomica , intended to teach the art of the zodiac to his contemporaries.
    Nor did man’s reason set bound or limit to its activities until it scaled the skies, grasped the innermost secrets of the world by its understanding of their causes, and beheld all that anywhere exists. It perceived why clouds were shaken and shattered by so loud a crash; why winter’s snowflakes were softer than summer’s hail; why volcanoes blazed with fire and the solid earth quaked; why rain poured down and what cause set the winds in motion. After reason had referred these several happenings to their true causes, it ventured beyond the atmosphere to seek knowledge of the neighboring vastness of heaven and comprehend the sky as a whole; it determined the shapes and names of the signs, and discovered what cycles they experienced according to fixed law, and that all things moved to the will and disposition of heaven, as the constellations by their varied array assign different destinies .
    This much Elisabetta recalled: the ancient Romans had been astrology mad, passionately convinced that the heavens ruled their fate. Some Emperors, those who were cocksure like Tiberius, encouraged the practice. Others, like Augustus, convinced that the populace was actively trying to predict his demise, banned astrological consultation outright.
    But despite the pervasiveness of the zodiac in everyday Roman life she knew that astrological symbols were rarely found on the frescoes of homes or tombs. The symbology splashed across this columbarium was unique and given its context, disturbing.
    Elisabetta compared her old notes on the original, now disintegrated wall with her new jottings. The pattern of symbols was identical, the twelve astrological signs simply but beautifully rendered in a large circle in their traditional longitudinal order from Aries to Pisces, followed by seven planetary signs in a peculiar order: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. And in each circle Pisces was always upright, like a standing man.
    And what of the mummified and skeletal remains? She’d need to study De Stefano’s photos carefully but, more importantly, she needed to get back into the catacombs with a trowel and brush and spend some time with the remains. She started to write a reminder to ask the professor about arranging another visit but she became distracted by a sticky note with an exclamation mark on it that she’d left protruding from a page of Astronomica years ago. She opened the book to the mark.
    A superior power often intermingles the bodies of wild beasts with the limbs of human beings: that is no natural birth … the stars create these