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“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Mattie stared at the paper that was handed to him. He looked back at his best friend. Owen was frozen in shock as Ms. Giovanni stood over him. There was one reason Mattie could think of that would cause Owen’s reaction.
“An F?” Owen whispered as his eyes turned glassy with unshed tears.
So we got the same grade, Mattie thought, feeling worse for Owen than he did for himself. That makes sense, we worked on this together. Mattie turned his freckled face to his teacher. “Is there anything at all we can do? The end of the semester is next week!”
Ms. Giovanni smiled at the two boys. “There’s an end of the semester project. The two of you can start it this weekend to make sure you do well. This will count as a grade no matter what. There will be no do overs, am I clear?"
Now Ms. Giovanni was a very nice person, but something about the way she can have every eye in the classroom on her without saying a word was one of the things Mattie liked about having her as his teacher. "Yes, ma'am," Mattie and Owen agreed. Their eyes shone with excitement as their teacher explained the project.
"You will be given two weeks to do this project while everyone else will have one. Keep this in mind while working. You will be documenting your family history by talking to family members and going through any old photos and journals you may have," Ms. Giovanni explained, giving them both a rubric. If there's one thing that Owen and Mattie both enjoyed, it was history of any kind. Mattie was surprised at himself, to say the least. This was the only time he could remember that he felt good about doing extra schoolwork.
The rest of the school day passed pretty uneventfully, save for a few pop quizzes over topics that were probably covered in class, but Mattie didn’t notice or care enough about them to even try for a decent grade. Mattie and Owen walked from their bus stop to their favorite park to think about the plan for the project.
“So we already know our families are somehow related, right?” Owen asked, pulling out a notebook and pen. “We know we are both born and raised Italians, going back to before Rome. We know I’m related to a weird jester dude who was apparently wealthy and you’re related to his friend.”
“There’s the Montresor Catacombs by my house,” Mattie suggested. “We could go take a look down there and see if we can find anything useful?”
Owen nodded at Mattie and together they walked the short distance from the park to the storm drain that covered the entrance to the first of many tunnels. It was nearing three in the afternoon, so they had about two hours to explore before they were due home for dinner.
Owen had never been brave enough to venture down into the catacombs, but Mattie was his polar opposite in every way. Mattie took the lead, not for the first time and grabbed the flashlight he had stored underneath a pile of moss the last time he was there. When Mattie saw Owen still standing at the entrance when he turned around, he half expected the other boy to make a reference to some Greek myth that he had already heard countless times before. Something about a guy named Orion and some girl named Eudokia? Mattie should have paid more attention to his best friend’s ramblings because of times like these. He turned around, marched backwards to latch onto Owen’s hand, and all but dragged him down the ten or so steps into the dimly lit cavern.
Step by careful step, Mattie and Owen made their way through one tunnel which turned into two, then three, and then four. Once well into the catacombs, the two began to split up as far as possible to cover as much as they could. Mattie went off to the farthest, darkest corner of the room they were in while Owen stayed close to the flashlight’s glow.
“Mattie?” A voice called out to him in the dark.
“Did you say something, Owen?” Mattie asked. While the voice sounded nothing like his best friend, Mattie decided to check just to be sure he wasn’t hearing things.
Owen turned from his spot, a few feet farther from the entrance than he started. “I didn’t say anything,” he shrugged. Bending down, the teen picked up an empty wine bottle. “Amontillado? Do you know what this is, Matt?”
“No, I’ve never heard of it before,” Mattie said, walking over to the bottle Owen was holding out to him. “Isn’t it your family who’s the wine experts? Why don’t we ask them what this Amontillado thing is?”
Mattie felt a faint breeze at his ankles. That’s not right, he thought. There’s nowhere for any wind to come from. He shared a glance with Owen. Was he going crazy? A white fog surrounded the two of them. The bottle of Amontillado seemed to shake. In his surprise, Owen dropped the bottle. He flinched as the bottle hit the cold stone floor, expecting to hear the glass shatter on impact. The sound never came. Instead, the bottle rolled away, unharmed, into the murky cloud.
Whether it was music or the ringing in Mattie’s ears, he really didn’t know. There was some sort of noise, difficult to describe in Mattie’s less than professional opinion, coming from where the bottle had gone. Owen would probably have described it as the music one would expect to hear if they were a fairy. Or something like that at least.
Mattie didn’t know what he expected to happen when the smoke cleared, but a semitransparent man in sweatpants and a Bon Jovi New Jersey Syndicate Tour t-shirt probably came dead last on that list.
“Whew!” the man said, his voice sounding very old fashioned. “I haven’t been out of that bottle since 1989.”
For someone who was scared of his own shadow, Owen was handling seeing a ghost for the first time incredibly well. “Who exactly are you?” he asked.
“Well that’s an easy answer. I’m Montresor.”
Mattie blinked twice before the ghost’s answer registered. “So what you’re saying is you and I are related?”
Montresor studied Mattie closely. “Huh,” he said. “ You don’t seem like someone I would normally associate with.”
“Thanks, I think?”
Montresor shook his head and made a gesture that Mattie took to mean ‘disregard that statement’. “I mean to say that you’re more laid back than some of your relatives, they only want to know what happened between me and that idiot Fortunato.” Mattie and Owen shared a look. Montresor saw them and sighed heavily. “That’s exactly what you’re going to use me for, isn’t it?”
“I mean this literally couldn’t be a more perfect opportunity to understand what happened between our families,” Mattie said.
“So you’re a Fortunato, huh? I thought he didn’t have children.” Montresor was getting kind of close to Owen so Mattie stepped in between the two. “You don’t look at all like him. I applaud you.”
“What even happened between you guys?” Owen asked the ghost.
“We fell apart like many friendships do. He started talking about me behind my back, insulting me and my family name. I was so sad when he disappeared, though I have no idea what happened to him.”
“That wouldn’t hold up in court, sir.” Mattie observed the ghost in front of him warily, keeping in mind the weird way he spoke about his so-called friend. “We didn’t even know Fortunato went missing. Your response?”
Montresor decided to venture farther into the catacombs. Owen glanced at Mattie and shrugged in an uncharacteristic attempt to convince Mattie to rush after the ghost. Usually it was the other way around, with Mattie trying to convince Owen to do whatever scary thing they thought of that day. The three of them wandered through countless tunnels until they got to a wide opening where there was a small room that had collapsed sometime since it was built.
“This is as far as I’m taking you. This is the last place I saw Fortunato, God rest his soul,” Montresor wiped an obviously fake tear from his eye. “I will not say anything more. That would be self incrimination.”
“You do know you’re a ghost right? Like you can’t really get in any more trouble than you’re already in?” Owen pointed out. People always say to respect your elders, Mattie thought with a roll of his eyes, but they seriously have never met this guy.
“That’s not what is important at the moment.”
Mattie and Owen split up, moving for opposite corners of the room. Mattie went directly for the collapsed room in the center of the room. As he approached the room, he saw a plaque that had faded with age laying to the side. It was written in Latin, so Mattie couldn’t read it. Moving closer to the room, Mattie saw a white round object near the back. He picked it up and turned it around to see the front, wiping years worth of dust and dirt off of it as he did so. Mattie dropped it in surprise when he saw what he had been holding. Owen looked up at the thud that sounded throughout the room.
“There’s a skull,” Mattie whispered to himself. “There’s a skull! I’m going to take a wild guess and say this is Fortunato.”
“Huh,” Montresor said. “Weird.”
Mattie and Owen took a few steps away from the ghost as he said this. Mattie gulped as Owen opened his mouth to speak. “You killed him, didn’t you?”
“That’s neither here nor there, what matters is that I loved the guy,” the newly revealed murderer shrugged. “I’m a changed man. Well ghost, I guess, now.”
“So you did kill him,” Owen challenged.
“Such an ambiguous question. If you're asking if I chained him to a wall and let him slowly suffocate while I built a room around him, then the answer is yes. I did those things.”
“You’re insane,” Mattie breathed. “You killed an innocent person.”
“That’s not very nice. You’re supposed to be on my side here, relative,” Montresor pouted.
“You killed someone. I will never be on your side for anything.” Mattie was fuming. How dare Montresor play this off like it didn’t matter. This was someone’s life they were talking about, and Montresor had no right to take that away from him.
Mattie told him as much, defending both Fortunato and his best friend. Neither of them deserve what Montresor put their family through. Even if Mattie is centuries younger than Fortunato and barely related to him, that didn’t seem to deter Montresor from hating anyone and anything even remotely associated with the Fortunatos.
“If you’re going to be like that, then I guess my work here is done. I could have sworn you of all people would have supported my decision. He insulted my family. That includes you,” Montresor tried to reason with Mattie.
“That doesn’t mean you kill someone!” Owen yelled, his voice rising above normal Owen level for the first time since Mattie had ever known him. “That means you work it out with them and tell them about what you’re feeling. You don’t resort to murder unless you’re insane or there really is no way out, and you, sir, fall into the first category.”
Mattie took pity on his friend, Owen’s energy depleting after his outburst. “He’s right. You may feel like you’ve escaped punishment for your actions, and maybe you have this time, but I know you still feel guilty about killing Fortunato. You won’t ever be able to leave the past in the past. And that’s on you.”
Mattie and Owen both felt confident that Montresor had gotten the talking to he deserved. “Race you to the entrance?” Owen asked. Mattie nodded and smiled at him. The two boys were going to be late to dinner, but they couldn’t care less. Together they sprinted through the catacombs, not sparing a glance back towards Montresor the entire time.