Read Necropolis for Free Online Page A

burned her fingers as she lifted the cup. She took a sip. The tea tasted herbal and heavily sugared, so sweet that it stuck to her lips. She set it down again.
    "I will tell you my story because it pleases me to do so," Father Gregory said. "Because I sometimes wondered if this day would ever come. That you are sitting here now, in this place, is more than a miracle. My whole life has been leading to this moment. It is perhaps the very reason why I was meant to live."
    Scarlett didn't interrupt him. The more he talked, the more passionate he became. She could see the coal fire reflected in his eyes, but even if the fire hadn't been there, there might still have been the same glow.
    "I was born sixty-two years ago in Moscow, which was then the capital of the Soviet Union. My father was a politician, but from my earliest age, I knew that I wanted to enter the Church. Why? I did not like the world into which I had been born. Even when I was at school, I found the other children spiteful and stupid. I was small for my age and often bullied. I never found it easy to make friends. I did not much like my parents either. They didn't understand me. They didn't even try.
    "I was nineteen when I told my father that I wanted to take holy orders. He was horrified. I was his only son, and he had always assumed that I would go into politics, like him. He tried to talk me out of it. He arranged for me to travel around the world, hoping that if I saw all the riches that the West had to offer, it would change my mind.
    "In fact, it did the exact opposite. Everything I saw in Europe and America disgusted me. Wealthy families with huge homes and expensive cars, living just a mile away from children who were dying because they could not afford medicine. Countries at war, the people killing and maiming each other because of politicians too stupid to find another way. The noise of modern life: the planes and the cars, the concrete smothering the land. The pollution and the garbage. The people, in their millions, scurrying on their way to jobs they hated…"
    Scarlett shrugged. "So you weren't happy," she said. "What's that got to do with me?"
    "It has everything to do with you, and if you interrupt me again, I will have you whipped until the skin peels off your back."
    Father Gregory paused. Scarlett was completely shocked but didn't want to show it. She said nothing.
    "I entered a seminary in England," he continued, "and trained to become a monk. I spent six years there, then another three in Tuscany before finally I came here. That was thirty years ago. This was a very beautiful and very restful place when I first arrived, a refuge from the rest of the world. The weather was harsh and, in the winter, the days were short. But the way of life suited me. Prayer six times a day, simple meals and silence while we ate. We cultivated all our food ourselves. I have spent many hundreds of hours hacking at the barren soil that surrounds us. When I wasn't in the fields, I was helping in the local villages, tending to the poor and the sick.
    "A holy life, Scarlett. And so it might have remained. But then everything changed. And all because of a door in a wall."
    Father Gregory hadn't touched his tea, but suddenly he picked up his glass between his finger and thumb and tipped the scalding liquid back. Scarlett saw his throat bulge. It was like watching a sick man take his medicine.
    "It puzzled me from the start. A door that seemed to belong to a different building with a strange device
    — a five-pointed star — that had nothing to do with this place. A door that went nowhere." He lifted a hand to stop her from interrupting. "It went nowhere, child. Believe me. There was a brief corridor on the other side and then a blank wall.
    "The monastery was then run by an abbot who was much older than me. His name was Father Janek.
    And one day, walking in the cloisters, I asked him about it.
    "He wouldn't tell me. A simple lie might have ended my curiosity, but