Fury m-4

by Rebecca Lim

  Our driver shakes his head. ‘Still not worth it to me, monsieur. If rich young foreigners go missing, there are many unpleasant consequences for men like me.’

  ‘Give me your cell-phone number,’ Ryan says, turning on his own phone. ‘I’ll send you a message from my phone saying where and when we’ll meet you, and if we fail to show, you’re to assume your services are no longer required with no repercussions.’

  ‘Nice,’ I say with admiration.

  Ryan gives me a dark look. ‘It’s called forward planning, and I learnt it from the best in the business. How else do you think Justine Hennessy now has a home to call her own?’

  ‘Lela wasn’t supposed to die,’ I remind him quietly.

  ‘Yeah, well, I have no intention of doing that today either,’ Ryan retorts. ‘So I’ll take care of the cover-his-butt part of the adventure, then it’s over to you to get Selaphiel and the two of us out of there, because I sure as hell can’t see in the dark.’

  ‘You have a torch,’ I point out evenly, trying hard not to smile.

  Both of us start laughing, maybe out of sheer terror.

  The driver watches us narrowly as if we are mad. Finally, he reaches across the seat back with his right hand extended. Ryan grips it and shakes it.

  ‘Henri Séverin,’ he says, returning his hand to the steering wheel. ‘And I must apologise — I misjudged you, I think. You are not —’

  ‘Rich and dumb?’ I interject acidly, remembering his conversation with his handler over the in-car radio.

  Henri gives a self-deprecating shrug, unembarrassed. ‘I have been with this company for seven years. There is a type, you know? You look very much of that type. How was I to know?’

  He starts the car and pulls away from the official entrance to the catacombs, rapidly leaving the snaking line of brightly dressed tourists behind.

  ‘Those tourists are the stupid ones,’ he snorts. ‘Underground it is always fifty-five, maybe fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. In summer, in winter, always the same. The living always overdress to meet with the dead. They fill themselves with food, with drink, only to discover that when they are deep underground, there are no toilets, no exits, no escape. It is not far to la Petite Ceinture,’ he goes on, looking over his shoulder as he overtakes a small lorry. ‘Nearby, there is a grand entrance the cataphiles use — one of Paris’s worst-kept secrets.’

  I lean forward, my fingers twitching as if reaching for the grip of a weapon. ‘Hurry,’ I say. ‘We’ve lost enough time already.’

  Ryan says sardonically, ‘With her, Henri, you made a bad mistake. She fits no “type”.’

  Henri glances at him shrewdly in the driver’s mirror. ‘She may be more machine than human, I think, but you, monsieur, must be —’

  ‘Badly in need of a coffee, some breakfast and a toilet,’ Ryan interrupts ruefully, ‘like the tourist I am.’

  Henri parks on a quiet street on the outskirts of the fourteenth arrondissement and we walk to a bridge that overlooks a set of overgrown train tracks. It’s just past noon, and traffic on the bridge is jarringly loud, incredibly fast. Hard to imagine such a place giving onto a gateway to Hell, but Luc was always imaginative.

  Before we go over the bridge wall, Henri and Ryan bust out their mobiles. Ryan types up his butt-covering text message and hits send.

  Henri types into his phone: I understand, M. Daley. If you and your girlfriend do not return by 3.30 pm, I am to leave. I will inform my company. But please let me know if your situation changes. I am here to help. And please enjoy your explorations of this beautiful and historic region.

  He shows Ryan the message and Ryan nods. Henri presses send, and, like that, he has his alibi and Ryan and I are free to vanish underneath Paris.

  Ryan, being Ryan, automatically offers to give me a boost over the wall. I can’t keep the look of offence from my face, and he throws his head back and laughs before pulling himself up and over.

  Henri moves forward to assist me, but I say to him quickly and quietly so that Ryan will not overhear, ‘If we don’t make it back, Henri, try and ring the number he gave you. Keep trying, even if you’re far from here. He needs to get back to the plane that’s waiting for him at Le Bourget. I’m not important — I truly can take care of myself. But he’s the dearest thing to me in this world, and he has a whole other life without me that he can easily return to. Keep trying. Try until your shift is over, because he needs to get home. Would you do that for me?’

  Mystified, Henri nods. ‘Sure, I will call. There is nothing to lose. It will show that I am a good guy, that I am concerned.’

  ‘Hel-lo?’ Ryan yells impatiently from the other side of the wall.

  I feel Henri’s eyes on me as I pull myself up and over easily, landing silently on my feet in the tall grass on the other side. Ryan looks at me enquiringly, but before he can say a word, Henri’s flushed face appears above the wall, and he drops down, landing badly.

  ‘A moment,’ he puffs, embarrassed, from where he’s fallen amongst the weeds. He rises, brushes himself off, the corners of his mouth turned down in distaste, then gestures for us to follow him down the slope towards the railway line.

  When we reach the tracks, Ryan looks both ways with a worried frown.

  Henri laughs. ‘It is abandoned. Only ghost trains use it now.’

  We walk, and walk. And the further we go, the more my fear and tension climb, like vines grappling towards a distant sun.

  Finally, a vast train tunnel appears up ahead and we slip from a wan kind of daylight into a darkness that must feel absolute to Ryan and to Henri. They slip and stumble gracelessly behind me, until one runs into the other with an ouf, and they stop.

  ‘Merde,’ Henri says gloomily, fumbling for his mobile phone.

  He lights it up and holds it forward, but it’s almost useless in here. The air ahead of us is inexplicably foggy. It has an acid-sweet smell, like exploded sugar.

  ‘Smoke bombs,’ Henri says. ‘Cataphiles use them to conceal their way. It is illegal to be underground, you understand.’

  ‘Great,’ Ryan sighs.

  I hear him rummaging around in the pack and, moments later, the bright white beam of his silver torch plays across the railway sleepers, the stones beneath and around them. The light barely makes headway into the surrounding darkness, the foggy air.

  ‘To the right,’ Henri directs gruffly, uncertainly.

  We move forward slowly, Ryan playing his light ahead of us and across the right wall. There are still only weeds and stones all around us, that strange and foggy darkness. Then the edge of the flashlight picks up a flattened juice carton, a candy wrapper, a scattering of stomped-down beer cans, a broken plastic torch. I see it first — a gap in the rock, a breach between the tunnel wall and the earth beneath it. Two, maybe three feet across at most. For a moment, we three ring the opening, quietly appalled.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Ryan says incredulously. ‘This is the “grand entrance”?’

  Henri’s voice seems muffled. ‘There are many other ways in and out, they say. But this is the only one I know of. I came here once, for a party. We ate crêpes, danced, listened to music. It was like a dream. Hundreds of people underground. I’ve never forgotten it.’

  I grasp his hand briefly and he returns the pressure to show that he understands.

  Aloud, he says in his gravelly voice, ‘And now I leave you two lovers to your gentle explorations of this beautiful and historic region.’ He glares into our faces. ‘I am a selfish man. Give them no reason to come after me with their questions, I beg of you.’

  In his own way, he’s telling us to be careful. He doesn’t say goodbye, just drops out of our circle of light and stumbles back the way we came, his mobile phone held out before him, complaining under his breath all the way. I watch until the dim light of his phone merges with the distant, faint glow of the yawning tunnel mouth we first entered.

  Ryan approaches the gap in the rock more closely, and we both crouch down, looking into
it.

  ‘Being with you,’ Ryan says, turning to look at me with wide eyes, his pupils like pinpoints, the flashlight wavering a little in his hand, ‘I am always scared. Scared of what you’ll do next; scared of saying the wrong thing; scared you don’t feel the same way I feel about you. But this? This is a whole other level of scared.’

  ‘Shit scared, the Australians call it,’ I reply, feeling fear take wing through me like a live, trapped thing. I swing one booted foot into the hole. ‘It used to make me laugh whenever I heard someone say it. I didn’t understand it at all, until Justine explained.’

  ‘I get it,’ Ryan mutters. ‘I get it completely.’ Then he puts a hand on my arm to stop me going in. ‘I’ll go first,’ he insists gallantly, though he’s literally sweating with fear. ‘I’ve got the torch.’

  I lay one hand against his clammy cheek. ‘It’s not a contest about who’s bigger, who’s badder,’ I murmur. ‘I appreciate the sentiment more than you could ever know, but I don’t need the torch. Let me go first.’

  He backs down reluctantly, loosening his grip. Before I can give in entirely to the fear, I’m scrambling through the crevice in the rock, and feel my feet hit the floor of a tunnel.

  What I notice immediately? There’s no light. And the air reeks of limestone, of bone dust.

  13

  We walk for an hour through a maze of tunnels that fork and branch and turn suddenly into chambers and openings and junctions. Sometimes, there’s ankle-deep water underfoot. More often, the passages are dry, and thick with dust. Occasionally, we are forced to duck our heads or crawl on all fours, and weird things leap out at us from the walls — graffiti tags rendered in brilliant colour, life-sized portraits of men or women, monstrous sculptures chiselled straight out of the stone itself as if caught mid-leap, mid-snarl. And all I hear from Ryan is ‘Shit!’ repeated over and over like a protective mantra, the laboured sound of his breathing.

  In a vast, cool, eerily silent chamber we find a finely carved stone dining table rising straight out of the stone floor, and Ryan breaks out a chocolate bar and some water. He salutes me with Gia’s travel-sized bottle of whisky, offers me a sip. I shake my head, remembering the vodka laced liberally with liquid meth that had caused Irina’s heart almost to stop while I was in her body.

  ‘That stuff is poison,’ I say quietly.

  ‘I know,’ Ryan replies, coughing a little as he replaces the cap on the bottle and tucks it back into the bag. ‘But it feels as if I’ll never be warm again. Plus, being with you would drive any guy to drink.’

  We grin at each other before he indicates I should lead the way again.

  We start moving steadily downwards and begin to see large deposits of bones, tossed into dead-end passages like refuse or driftwood. There are broken skulls among them, vertebrae, pelvic bones and mandibles, the teeth still lodged inside.

  Ryan pulls his hood up over his head, hunching his shoulders against the cold, against the weight of the stone above us, the human remains that keep appearing like a warning from God. He starts to cough from all the dust in his throat. Whenever I turn and look into his face, he seems strung out with fear, as if he’s fighting himself just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  All the while, I desperately search for signs that Selaphiel has passed this way. But it’s been over a year now since he was taken, and I see nothing; hear nothing but the distant rumble of a subway train passing somewhere overhead, the play of water through some subterranean aqueduct, the squeak and scuff of Ryan’s boots on the dusty, rocky floor, the sound of his breathing, and of his coughing.

  These passages must go for miles underground. When we come to a tunnel with an arrow painted on the wall, then a rough, life-sized cartoon of a man rendered in scarlet paint, I follow the markings with my eyes and discern a small opening, almost concealed by the uneven stone walls. There are rusty metal rungs set into the walls inside that dark space, a basic kind of ladder that extends upwards into darkness.

  I grab Ryan’s right wrist and duck inside, forcing him to follow, to crowd in with me. The sound of his breathing is very loud. I point his hand, the flashlight in it, upwards.

  ‘I think that’s a manhole cover way up there,’ I say casually, letting go of him.

  He lifts the torch higher, struggling to make out anything with his human eyes.

  ‘I could get you out if you feel like bailing,’ I offer.

  He peers upward, still not seeing what I see. He shakes his head numbly and says, ‘But then who would get you out?’

  I’m so overwhelmed by his words — so brave, so foolish, so certain — that I move straight into his arms, and they lock around me, tightly.

  ‘I’m holding you back, aren’t I?’ he murmurs against my hair. ‘This has to be the most frightening place on earth. I’ve never felt so … paralysed. It’s like I’m moving through quicksand, like there’s a giant block of stone on my chest and I can’t breathe. But I can’t leave you down here on your own. You’d never do that to me.’

  I nod, because it’s true. He’s got me there.

  He places his left hand against my face and runs his thumb down my cheek. ‘None of this seems to touch you. Why do you seem less afraid now, when before you were a mess?’

  I turn my face into the palm of his hand and my lips meet it briefly. ‘Because I think I’m beginning to realise that this is just … scenery. The place I went to die, it doesn’t exist any more, so it no longer has the power to hurt me. When I was Carmen, and I woke to find myself in chains, with Lauren and Jennifer chained in the darkness nearby, that was real evil, living evil. So far, nothing in here even comes close to that.’

  We re-enter the passageway, coming to a fork that seems a little different from the ones we’ve come across so far. I look back at Ryan for a cue, but he stumbles to a halt, saying wearily, ‘I don’t know, Merce, I don’t have a feel for any of it. You choose.’

  He doesn’t say: How much longer? How much farther? And the sudden surge of love I feel for him is like a wave breaking through me. I may not need food or water, air or sunlight or rest to keep me alive, but Ryan? Ryan is necessary. I wasn’t lying when I said it before.

  One of the forking tunnels is organic looking, in the sense that it’s hewn from the stone and stretches onwards into darkness. The other is sealed by concrete — and sealed recently — but there’s a man-sized hole drilled through the base of the concrete plug. The entryway is littered all around with empty spray-paint cans.

  I start moving towards the drill hole and Ryan groans.

  ‘If it’s too easy,’ I say cajolingly, ‘it ain’t fun. It’s something I used to tell myself when I was Lucy, to help me survive. It helped me keep her and her baby alive when I didn’t know the first thing about her, or about me.’

  I crouch down, preparing to go through, but as I stretch my hand towards the breach in the concrete, I feel a shift in the air and hear footfalls, drawing closer, fast.

  I bump into Ryan as I back away and he tenses instantly, saying, ‘What? What?’

  ‘Shhhh, listen. Can’t you hear it?’

  He’s still shaking his head when I grab him by the front of his jacket and push him hard against the wall behind him, just as a pack comes at us through the drill hole. Then a pair of hands comes shooting through the gap, then a head, and a kid covered in white bone dust slithers out and falls on the floor, like he’s just been born.

  He’s fourteen, maybe fifteen at most, just starting to really grow, and he’s already snatched up his pack, is already sprinting, before we can call out to him to stop. I feel the surge of his energy as he passes us, his body a psychic scream of fear, eyes wide. He turns his head briefly, taking us in, his mouth a round O of shock, before he disappears out of sight up the tunnel we just came down, his sneakered feet seeming not to touch the ground.

  Another boy shoots out of the hole — also wearing a thick dusting of white — in the same urban uniform of hoodie, canvas sneakers, distressed jeans. He
reaches back in for his pack, tugging at the strap, unable to yank it through, his fear carving a sizzling arc through the air around me. Then he spies us watching him, and gives a long, unearthly scream and runs, arms around his head, abandoning everything.

  Five minutes we give ourselves, before we move. Nobody else comes through, physical or otherwise.

  Ryan exhales in a rush when he sees me crouch down to look through the hole again. Cool, quiet darkness beyond. But there’s something inhabiting that darkness that made a teenage boy abandon his precious swag and run, shrieking, like he’d lost the power of speech.

  ‘It’s the first sign of anything alive down here,’ I say apologetically. ‘You know we have to take a look.’

  Ryan’s still standing, frozen, up against the wall. ‘It has to mean something,’ I insist. ‘What it means,’ he says through gritted teeth, ‘is that I’ve passed shit scared and gone into orbit on the fear-o-meter. You’re amazing, you know that? Most people would be falling apart right now.’

  ‘Of course I’m afraid,’ I say softly. ‘But placed in the balance against hope — which is what those two kids represent — hope is winning out. You, of all people, understand what it feels like to have someone you love imprisoned in darkness. Selaphiel may be the closest thing to family someone like me will ever have. He is the gentlest, the most unworldly of the Eight; so kind, so absent-minded, so intent upon the workings of the universal, that he is blind to all else, including personal danger. And I owe him my life.’

  I add quietly, ‘Something is alive down here, I can feel it. And I understand if you want to turn back now. If you head up through that manhole back there, you should make it back to Henri in time. You’ve got his number. Call him — he’ll have to pick you up. If I can, I’ll catch up with you, I promise. But I have to do this. I have to keep going.’

  Ryan hesitates, clearly torn, and I say fiercely, ‘It’s not about fate, Ryan. No one owns anyone else. I am the last creature on earth to want to trap you, to keep you here against your will. It’s about gut instinct and reaction and choice. It’s about what you can handle. If this feels bad to you, I release you. I won’t hold it against you. You are already peerless in my eyes. I have … trouble saying the words you want to hear because I’ve been burnt so badly, so literally, I shouldn’t even be here. But you know what I feel about you, and you have to know that it’s real. One day, maybe, we’ll have that time for ourselves, just to be and be with each other. But not now. You’ve seen things no human being should ever have to see. If you love me the way you say you do, you’ll go.’