Saturnalia

XXIV

The cavorting spectre slowed its roof top dance. 'Hoo! Hoo! Are you alive or dead?' 'I'm bloody well not happy!' I sat up awkwardly in agony. I had twisted my ankle as I slid on the tiled steps. 'Stop jiggling about.' 'Hoo-oo are you?' The faint, papery voice sounded like a bat squeak. 'Name's Falco. Who in Hades are you?' 'In Hades, out of Hades… Flitting bodiless and airy… the unburied dead.' Someone around here had read too much Virgil.

'Suit yourself.' I was in no mood for paranormal crackpots. When in pain, I tend towards the pedantic. 'Tell me, spirit, whose corpse do you represent?' 'I used to be called Zoilus.' I closed my eyes. I was a sensible man. I had an urgent job to do. The Furies must really be bearing a grudge today, if the spiteful ones – sorry, ladies, the kindly ones – had stuck me here, talking to a ghost. Wincing, I forced myself upright. I took a few hops to firm ground, where I tested my ankle. Somehow, the spirit of Zoilus had jumped down from the tomb; he bobbed up in front of me. He was still waiting for me to react in fright, and I still wasn't having it. Twilight had descended. By some trick he could have learned in a theatre, he seemed unearthly, wavering around me, his shifting white robes luminescent; only a pale orb that was almost without features lurked in his hood where his face should be. This ghost was light on his feet. In fact he did not seem to have any feet. He had mastered a smooth glide as if he floated several inches off the ground.

'Hoo! Hoo! Give me the fare for Charon!' So that was his game. I felt better for knowing. His squeaky tone was wheedling now, like any human beggar. 'Help me pay the ferryman, master.'

He had gone to more trouble with his story than most supplicants do, so I fetched out a coin and promised him the fee to cross the Styx if he would tell me whether he had seen a barbarian woman roaming friendless and solitary like him. He let out a shriek. I jumped. 'Death! Death! Bringer of death,' wailed the pallid sprite – rather pointlessly, if Zoilus was already deceased.

Could he know about the decapitation of Gratianus Scaeva? Had the murder at the Quadrumatus villa become the latest hot news among the shades in Hades? Had Scaeva's soul rushed there after his violent death, indignantly protesting? Were the bored spirits now flocking together to hear this news, all twittering with faded voices in Pluto's underworld forum – by Pluto, why was I messing about on a lonely road all day, when I could just ask this spook to help me out: get him to ask Scaeva's ghost, Hoo-oo did you in then?

I offered the coin. He did not take it. Whether unburied dead or simply restless, half-demented human, Zoilus darted away from me, rapidly executing that liquid glide backwards. Then he vanished. He must have jumped behind a tomb, yet it seemed as if he folded himself up and slipped into the very air, becoming bodiless and invisible. I called out. Nobody answered.

He had left me for a reason. As he slithered away into nothing, at last I encountered the runaway slaves. A scatter of them rose from the ground silently around me. I looked frantically for Clemens and Sentius, but they were nowhere. I was alone and unarmed, with dusk closing in. Zoilus had been more of an irritation than a threat; now that he was gone, I yearned for his crazy presence.

I had new companions, and I was even less happy. As the dark figures gathered in number, I remembered Petronius' sombre words of warning. If these beings could scare off a ghost, or a man who believed he was a ghost, I had reason to feel genuinely frightened.