The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (7 page)

We walked on, our headlamps shooting zigzags
of light around the cavernous arch. Gusty trails of graffiti
covered the walls, curving onto the bricks overhead. The ground was
chunked with rocks that glowed pale gray, the color of Paris, the
buildings.

A few minutes later Pascal called a halt. He
swung his Maglite to the left. Where the graffiti-covered wall met
the earth was a hole—or, more accurately, a chiseled craggy break
in the rock, no more than two feet wide. Spreading away from it was
what I assumed to be cataphile refuse: empty beer cans, juice
cartons, candy wrappers, white paste from carbine lanterns. A
junked foam chair sat off on its lonesome. I wrinkled my nose; the
stench of urine was strong.

“This is the entrance?” I said. I had been
thinking it would have been more clandestine. This screamed: “Come
on in, we’re open!”

Danièle nodded. “Some cataphiles, they are
such slobs.”

“Don’t the police—the catacops—know about
this?”

“Of course. This is the main entrance
nowadays.”

Rob said, “So why don’t they seal the thing
up?”

“They have before,” she continued, “but
cataphiles open it again. Also, it is not an easy situation for
them. They are scared they may trap inexperienced cataphiles
inside. But, you know, I think it would be a good thing if they
somehow closed it for good. Because then the people who make the
trouble, the vandals and drug-users and tibia-collectors, they will
get bored and find other things to do.”

“Yeah,” Rob said in an
uh-duh
way,
“but wouldn’t that screw you too?”

“Me?” Danièle seemed insulted. “I am not an
amateur. Pascal and I know ten other entrances.”

The ever-silent Pascal got to his knees and
ventured first into the hole.

“He doesn’t say much, does he?” I remarked
when he was no longer in sight.

“His English is not so good,” Danièle
said.

“Fuck me,” Rob said, peering into the
fissure. “I can’t see shit.”

“It is okay, Rosbif,” Danièle told him. “You
are so small, you will have no problem fitting in there.”

“Bite me,” he said, then lowered himself
into the opening. When only his legs were visible, poking out of
the rock mouth like a half-eaten meal, he let rip a fart. His
laughter floated back as he crawled forward.

“Ugh,” Danièle said, waving her hand back
and forth in front of her nose even though the smell had yet to
reach us and couldn’t be much worse than the stink of urine. “I
really hate that guy, you know?”

“After you,” I said.

“No, you must go next so I can push you in
case you get stuck.”

I stared at her. “In case I get stuck?”

She smiled. “You will be fine. Now go. Just
watch your hands for glass.”

I waded through the rubbish and stood in
front of the main entrance to the catacombs, which was little more
than a crack. Cool air sighed out of it.

Setting aside my reservations, I slipped off
my backpack, pushed it into the shaft ahead of me, and followed it
into the blackness.

Three British Men Feared Lost in Paris
Catacombs

Paris police headquarters have reported that
three Britishnationals went missing in the Paris catacombs late
Monday while exploring with friends.

When they didn’t return to the surface,
their friends alerted police, who have spent several days searching
for the missing men without success.

Gaspard Philipe, of the police unit that
monitors the ancient quarry tunnels, said on RTL radio Friday that
anyone considering entering the tunnels should understand the
dangers.

“It is not only off limits to the public, it
is dangerous. You can get lost. There are cave-ins. You don’t know
who you might run into. If you want to see the catacombs, there is
a section open to the public as a museum for a very reasonable
admission fee.”

The network of tunnels beneath the capital
is said to extend more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) and reach
depths of 30 meters (100 feet), too deep for phone coverage. Some
passageways are large enough that ten men can walk abreast and not
touch the sides, while others are so small that those who enter
them must squirm forward on their bellies.

It was a tight fit, and Christ if I didn’t
have to squeeze my shoulders together so I could progress forward.
I flashed on those scenes in movies in which you see someone
struggling through a ventilation conduit, only here the passage was
unpredictable and dirty and potentially deadly.

Then it twisted and angled downward. At
first I was able to control my descent. But the pitch dropped
suddenly and steeply, and I found myself skidding on my stomach,
the way kids hydroplane on a Slip ’n Slide. I must have gone
fifteen or twenty feet before friction slowed me. Ahead I saw light
other than mine. I dragged myself out of the small opening, my ribs
aching, spitting dust from my mouth.

Rob pulled me to my feet. “Thanks,” I told
him, looking around. The inky-black tunnel was maybe four feet wide
and equally high. Rob stood stooped over. I had to pretty much
squat. The passage had collapsed to the left of us, leaving a
jumble of large boulders and smaller rocks, so there was only one
direction in which to go. The air smelled of mold and dampness,
making me think of waterparks. It was cooler than it had been
outside, maybe fifty-five or sixty degrees.

“Rascal went on ahead,” Rob told me.

“Rascal?” I said distractedly, brushing
chalky beige dirt from my clothes.

“That’s what I’ve always called him. I never
heard of that Chess shit before tonight.”

Danièle’s LED light winked from inside the
hole, drawing our attention. A moment later she slipped out more
gracefully than I had. I helped her into a crouch. She smiled.
“Fun, yes?”

“A hoot,” I said.

“Good. But I am serious when I say we must
all stay close. You must not stray. This place, it is not like a
labyrinth. It
is
a labyrinth.”

“Have you told Pascal that?”

“He will be ahead in the rest room. We
should join him.”

“In the restroom?” I said.

“What is wrong?”

“Maybe he wants his privacy.”

“Do not be silly.”

She duck-walked ahead. Rob and I exchanged
glances and followed.

We found Pascal fifty feet onward. I had
misinterpreted Danièle. He wasn’t in a restroom with a toilet and
plumbing—of course he wasn’t, I thought; not here, not twenty feet
underground—but a room with carved limestone benches where
cataphiles apparently rested before they set out on their journey.
The walls were smooth and whitewashed a pig-blood pink.

Pascal folded the map he’d been studying
into a small square and squeezed past us into the shaft again,
leading the way bravely onward.

“After you, Frogster,” Rob said to
Danièle.

She poked him in the chest with her index
finger. “If you call me Frogster or Froggy or Frog-anything one
more time, I will kill you. Can you understand me?” She pivoted on
her heels and followed Pascal.

Rob shook his head. “In-laws, eh?”

Walking single file in a troll-crouch wasn’t
ideal for conversation, so I set aside the genealogy questions I
had for Rob and focused on keeping up with the fast pace Pascal had
set. Because of my hunched-over position I didn’t see much of the
tunnel except for Rob’s backside and the ground, which was a
powdery mix of sand and crushed gravel.

I had been down here all of five minutes and
I hated it. My back and neck ached, claustrophobia had set in like
a too-small second skin, and I was already looking forward to when
this night would be over.

Finally, however, we entered a new shaft.
The ceiling was higher here, and for the first time I was able to
stand almost to my full height. This made me feel substantially
better. I had been worried I would be troll-walking the entire nine
or so hours we were supposed to be down here.

Freed from staring at my shoes, I could now
pay more attention to the palimpsest of colorful graffiti that had
been scribbled and spray painted everywhere on the honey-colored
stone walls. Most of it consisted of bright hip hop tags and punk
rock anarchy symbols. One English entreaty read: “Lost in the
catas! Help!” Given how close we were to the exit, I assumed it had
been a joke. I
hoped
it had been a joke.

Up ahead Pascal and Danièle had stopped.
When Rob and I reached them, Danièle pointed to the left wall. An
inscription was etched in carbon black onto a cornerstone. She
said, “That is the street address directly above us.”

“Who made it?” I asked.

“Les Inspection Générale des Carrieres. It
was their job to make sure Paris did not sink.”

“Paris was sinking?” Rob said dubiously.

“That is what I said, Rosbif. Most of these
tunnels were made in the Middle Ages. At that time they were
outside the city limits. But as the population grew, the city
expanded south over the tunnels. No one realized how bad the
foundation was until one of the chambers down here collapsed. It
swallowed the entire neighborhood above it. The main street was
called rue D’Enfer. It is funny because that means—”

“Hell Street,” Rob said.

“Yes. So the king at the time, the one who
would get his head cut off in the revolution, he created what I
told you, Les Inspection Générale des Carrieres, to strengthen the
tunnels. If the inspectors saw a crack or a falling roof, they
prepared a reinforcing wall or something like that.” She pointed to
the inscribed street address. “They also mapped everything. The
result was a mirror reflection of the streets above, a Renaissance
Paris frozen in time.”

“So that street still exists?” I said.

“It is there, yes, but wider now. It has
become a boulevard, I think. And this is interesting.” She pointed
to the fleur-de-lis carved above the street name. “That is the
symbol of the French monarchy. Here it is intact. At other
locations it has been scratched out by revolutionaries.”

“Revolutionaries?” I said, surprised. “They
used these tunnels?”

“Yes, both in 1789 and the student protests
in 1968. You know, even the Nazis built a bunker down here in World
War Two. It is on our way. It is where we will rest for one
hour.”

From somewhere overhead came a faint,
continuous rumble, like the sonorous drone of the ocean. We paused
to listen. It lasted for about ten seconds before silence returned
once more.

“That is the Metro,” Danièle explained.
“There are tracks nearby.”

Late-night workers returning to their homes
and families, younger men and women heading out to meet friends. In
other words, life going on as usual. These mundane images made
burrowing beneath Paris in the dark and dirt seem all the more
surreal.

Pascal, who seemed anxious to keep moving,
said, “
Monter la garde
,” and continued on.

“Yes, be careful,” Danièle told us. “The
ceiling height varies. You must watch your head. And watch your
feet. You do not want to step into a crevice or a well. Some can be
very deep.”

“How deep?” Rob asked.

“I do not know, Rosbif,” she called over her
shoulder. “I have never seen the bottoms.”

The trick was to remain close behind the
person in front of you, so you could see in their backsplash of
light, and Danièle remained so close to Pascal she could reach out
and touch him if she were so inclined. She was not kidding when she
told Will and Rob to watch where they stepped. Last December a
couple of cataphiles reportedly broke through a wall in the remote
western portion of the tunnels and discovered never-before-seen
galleries, one of which featured a series of life-size statues
carved from the limestone. While on an excursion to see the statues
for themselves, Danièle and Pascal came across a man sitting by
himself in a small chamber. He was weak and delusional due to
dehydration. A single candle burned next to him. It was his last
one. After it went out, he would have been plunged into total
blackness. They gave him food and water, and when he was lucid
enough, he showed them his ankle, which he explained he’d broken
when he’d stepped in a two-foot-deep crevice. The ankle had swollen
to the size of a cantaloupe and was marred with splotchy purple
spots. His friend had left to get help but never returned. The man
didn’t know when that had been, he could barely remember what day
he’d entered the catacombs, but given his deteriorated condition,
it was likely it had been several days before. It was also likely
his friend had not been an experienced cataphile and hadn’t been
able to find his way back again.