by Jeremy Bates
“What if assholes like those scuba guys show up to one of these parties?”
She shrugged. “Usually everyone is friendly. The people you have to be careful about are the meth heads and drug dealers. But you do not see them very often. And if you do, there are more normal people than weirdos. So if you stay together, you are okay. Do not go anywhere on your own. That is the second rule of the catacombs.”
“What’s the first?”
“Bring backup batteries.”
“No, no, no,” Pascal said, shaking his head. “The first rule is to get out again. The second is to come back. And the third is to do whatever you like.”
“You know what would be awesome?” Rob said. “A stripper pole, right over there, in the center of the room.” He had moved off the bench and was stretched out in a recumbent position on the sand, his head in one hand, his beer in the other. He would have been right at home with a couple palm frond-fanning, grape-dangling servants hovering over him.
“At one of the parties,” Danièle said, “a woman gave everyone who wanted one a lap dance. I do not know if she was a stripper, but if she behaves like that, probably.”
I said, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen down here?”
“Oh, so much!” She made a thinking face. “There used to be a group of women called the catachicks. They walked around in their bikinis and nothing else.”
Pascal said something.
Danièle replied, shaking her head.
He persisted.
She shrugged and looked at me. “Pascal wants me to tell you one of our stories,” she said. “I can do this. But I have to warn you it is very scary. Maybe you do not want to hear it.”
I set aside my beer, bumped a Marlboro from my pack, and lit up. “Go for it,” I told her, exhaling a jet of smoke away from her.
“Okay…but do not say I did not warn you.” She cleared her throat. “So, it happened a few weeks after Pascal and I were sent into the catacombs for our initiation at Les Mines. We wanted to visit the tunnels again on our own, but we knew nothing then, we had no maps, so we found a guide online. His name was Henri. He charged us two hundred euros.” She confirmed this with Pascal, who nodded. “Yes, two hundred,” she went on. “When we met him, he was with another couple, a guy and girl our age, Etienne and Mari. They were very sweet. So it was the five of us. We explored for maybe ten hours. Then suddenly—and this is crazy—all our lights went.”
“At the same time?” Rob said.
“It is true, Rosbif. We do not know why, but it happened. And no one had matches or lighters. You do not know what it is like down here without any light. The darkness, it is so incredible. Wait—you must experience this. Pascal, put out the candles.”
I stiffened, then berated myself. There was no reason to be afraid of the dark. If we couldn’t relight the tealights for whatever reason, we had our headlamps right next to us.
I took a final drag and stubbed out my cigarette while Pascal went around the cavern, snuffing the candles one by one. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but when Pascal extinguished the final flame, a darkness like I had never experienced enveloped us. Only it wasn’t a darkness; it was a blackness. Black-hole black. I blinked, but that changed nothing. It was like being in some sort of sensory deprivation chamber. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t smell anything aside from the omnipresent dank musk, like time stored in a bottle.
And Danièle had said her lights—everyone’s lights—had failed them? She had been plunged into this nothingness without the reassuring knowledge she could leave it anytime she wanted? That would be a psychological nightmare. Obviously she had escaped. But what if she hadn’t? I tried to imagine what it would be like to walk alone in utter blackness, with only your hand on the wall to guide you, your mouth dry from dehydration, your throat and lungs burning from the rank air and the countless hours of screaming for help, your feet weeping with blisters, your legs jellied with exhaustion, nothing around you but tunnels and more tunnels, ad infinitum.
At some point it would hit you that you weren’t getting out of there alive. And then what? Did you give in to your despair and slump to the cold hard ground? Or did you keep pressing on, driven by the naïve hope of salvation, the sheer will to survive? Would you eventually turn on the others with you? Would you begin knocking them off one by one, either out of primal hunger or insanity? Or would the insanity not come until later, when you were little more than skin and bones, when the rats grew bold enough to sample your living flesh, when you were counting down the hours and minutes until the end?
“Amazing, yes?” Danièle said softly.
I started at the abrupt sound of her voice.
“Yeah, great,” Rob said. “Now I know what it’s like to be dead. Thanks, Danny. I’ve always wondered.”
“Will?” she said.
I found it strange to be speaking in complete darkness. It was sort of like speaking on the phone to someone, even though they were next to you.
“Freaky,” I said.
“I am going to finish my story in the dark. Is that okay?”
“Seriously?” Rob said.
“It will not take long.” She cleared her throat. “So—Pascal and me were down here with our guide and those other two people and our lights went out. It was just like this—only for real. At first we tried to get our lights to turn back on. When they did not, Henri told us he knew a manhole exit close by. He said he could lead us there, even in the dark. We walked for ten minutes, and it was the longest ten minutes of my life. I thought we were going to die, I really did. But then we saw light, a pinhole coming through the manhole cover twenty meters up. We climbed the ladder. The cover was not sealed, and we pushed it open. We were right in the middle of a street, but it was late, and there were no cars, so we climbed out.”
There was a long pause.
“That’s it?” Rob said.
“No, that is not. Etienne was missing. Mari said she had been holding his hand the entire time. Then, at the ladder, she said he told her to go up, he would be behind her. But he never came.”
“You’re full of it,” Rob said.
“I am not, Rosbif. Ask Pascal.”
“C’est vraiement,” Pascal said.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“We called down to him. There was no answer. Henri bought new batteries from a nearby store and put them in his flashlight. It worked and he and Mari went back down.”
“You and Pascal didn’t go?”
“Are you listening to me, Will? I was so scared. We waited at the top for them to return. They did, with Etienne. But he was all…messed up. He was like a zombie and would not say anything at all. We took him to a café, we gave him food and water. He finally spoke a little. It was in a flat tone, like he was not aware he was speaking. He told us he remembered walking in the dark, then all of a sudden he became very cold. He did not recall anything after that. Nothing. Not until Henri and Mari found him again, curled up in a ball on the ground.”
I frowned. “But you said he was holding his girlfriend’s hand all the way to the manhole.”
“Yes,” Danièle agreed. “And he told her he would climb up behind her. That is the thing, we have no idea if she was lying, or if…”
“Or what?” Rob said.
“Or…” I could almost sense Danièle shrugging. “I cannot answer that.”
“Bullshit!”
“It is true, Rosbif. We exchanged contact information with the couple, in case they needed to get in touch again. They did not. But I did. I needed to know if they had been playing a joke on us. So I sent an email to them about one month later. Only Mari replied. She told me she was no longer with Etienne. Apparently after that day in the catacombs his mental condition got worse and worse until his parents could not care for him and were forced to admit him to a psychiatric hospital. To this day, Pascal and I have no idea what really happened to him.”
Another long pause. The
silence that ensued was deep and ominous. I wanted to turn on my headlamp. Danièle’s story might have been laughable had she told it aboveground. But hearing it here in the catacombs where it happened, in the unprecedented blackness, was borderline terrifying.
A quick snick. A flame appeared.
Pascal went around the cavern, relighting the candles.
I looked at Rob, then Danièle. In the candlelight Rob seemed half confused, half amused, like he’d shit his pants and didn’t know what to do. Danièle’s eyes were bright and intense—and not a hint of deception in them.
“Fuck me blue,” Rob said, chugging the last of his beer, crushing the can, and opening another. “That’s something, Danny.”
I said, “This Etienne guy must have had some sort of nervous breakdown.”
“Obviously, boss. Why do you think he got locked up in a mental asylum.”
“I mean while he was in the catacombs. He didn’t think he was getting out. His mind snapped.”
“But who was holding the girl’s hand all the way to the manhole?”
“He must have been.”
“Then he wanders back into the tunnel and curls up in a ball?”
“Rosbif is right,” Danièle said. “That makes no sense.”
I said, “So we’re talking about ghosts now?”
She shook her head, shrugged. “Anyway—you wanted to know the craziest thing that happened to me. That is it.”
“But you still come down here all the time?”
“I did not come again for maybe six months. But eventually I did, yes. I cannot stay away. This place…it is magical for me.”
Pascal returned to us and withdrew three objects from his backpack. At first I thought they were really old flashlights before realizing they were juggling torches. The handles appeared to be made of spiral-wound plastic. The upper portion of the dowels were shrouded in aluminum.
He set a bottle of kerosene on the ground and held a torch for me to take.
“It is easy,” he said in that French way of his with equal stress on each syllable. “You try.”
I looked at him, but couldn’t tell whether he was being friendly or not.
I said, “I can’t juggle.”
“Just one. Like this.” He flicked the torch into the air, then caught it again. “See, easy.” He smiled at me—his smug GQ smirk.
No, not friendly, I decided. “I told you—”
“Okay, okay, I know, you cannot do it, no problem.”
He doused all three wicks in kerosene and lit them with his lighter. Orange flames whooshed to life. Still grinning—now like a showman—he began to freestyle, tossing the fiery torches from one hand to the other in a jaunty, cascading fashion.
Danièle clapped to an inaudible beat. Rob joined her. I didn’t. Pascal was really beginning to get on my nerves. I’ve been trying to cut him some slack. I knew the attitude he was giving me stemmed from the fact I was with Danièle. To be fair, I didn’t blame the guy for that. He had apparently liked her for several years, couldn’t find the balls to do anything about it, then some American rolls into town and hooks up with her, and he gets delegated to yesterday’s news. If I were in his position, I wouldn’t like me either.
But he wasn’t giving it a rest; it was one snub after another. And now this: offering to let me juggle only to prove to everyone he could do it better. He reminded me of a reporter at the Brooklyn Eagle who always caught me in the kitchenette while I was making coffee. He was a nerdy, know-it-all sort, and he would ask trivialities like, “Do you know how the Greek Thales measured the height of the pyramids?” And after you gave him an inane answer or passed, he would tell you in an offhand way, like he was an unsung genius, that Thales measured the shadow the pyramid cast on the ground at noon. He was a phony and an attention-seeker, and so was Pascal—or Chess—in his own subtle way.
Pascal reversed the direction of the torches, now cycling the lead one over as opposed to under the others. He carried on juggling for another full minute, accelerating his speed, performing different tricks, at one point balancing one torch on his chin while flourishing the other two with his fingers.
For his finale he tossed the three torches so high they almost touched the twelve-foot ceiling, pirouetted one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, caught them in descending order, and bowed—all in one fluid motion.
“Trѐs bien!” Danièle cheered. “C’est épatant!” She cupped my knee with her hand. “Unbelievable, Will, right?”
“Maybe he should join the cir—”
A distant shout cut me off.
Chapter 15
We listened. The only sound was the flickering of Pascal’s torches.
“Put those out,” I told him quietly.
He did so. I thought I could hear some sort of chanting.
“Who the fuck’s that?” Rob said.
“It must be other cataphiles,” Danièle said. “They are goofing around.”
“They’re coming closer.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. The chant was getting louder.
“Guys, it is no big deal,” Danièle said. “We always see other cataphiles. There is no need to worry—” She frowned.
“What?” I said.
“It sounds like German.”
She was right, I realized. “Are they sieg heiling?”
Danièle and Pascal began conversing with what seemed liked great seriousness.
“Nazis?” Rob said. “Really? You’re shitting me.”
“Whoever they are, they’re going to be here soon.” I interrupted Danièle. “Is this going to be a problem?”
“It depends on who they are,” she said with a shrug, but her expression revealed a quiet trepidation. “Pascal thinks it might be Le Diable Peint.”
“Who?”
“The Painted Devil,” she said. “There are many stories about him… I thought they were only stories.”
“You’ve never met him before?”
“No, never. Not once. You are very bad luck, Will.”
Pascal was shoving the torches into his backpack.
“Yes, hurry,” Danièle said. “We should leave.”
“And go where?” I said. “They’re going to be here any second.”
Pascal stuffed his folded map down the front of his pants. He passed Danièle his lighter. She tucked it down south too. There was no time to ask them what the hell they were doing, for a moment later three men marched into the room, chanting and saluting in rhythm.
Chapter 16
DANIÈLE
The men halted at parade rest: chins up, chests out, legs apart, arms behind their backs. They were in their mid-forties and dressed identically in high leather boots, military-style peaked caps, trousers, and tunics. Everything was black except the red arm bands emblazoned with the swastika and the white runic insignias patched onto their collars. They each carried 6D flashlights.
Pascal was right! Danièle thought. It’s them—the Painted Devil and his henchmen. It has to be. Who else dresses up in SS uniforms?
Fear shot down her spine like a bullet as she wondered what they had planned, and they surely had something planned, because this meeting was no coincidence. They had not been surprised to see her and Will and the others when they entered the room, which meant they had heard them and had come specifically for them.
Pascal, she was sure, would not say or do anything stupid. He knew how dangerous these men were. Not Rob and Will though. Rob was a brawler by nature. Back when he and Dev were still courting, he used to get into bar fights on a regular basis. He was like a ferret, fearless. He would antagonize men twice his size for no other reason than to pick a fight. But becoming a husband and father seemed to have put some sense into him. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost his temper. She prayed he could keep it in check now too.
And Will?
Danièle didn’t know. He had always been so laid-back, soft-spoken. That’s why she was so surprised when he got into that full-out fistfight with that over-mus
cled rhinoceros on the train tracks. He had been swearing and swinging and so intense—yes, that was the word, intense—that he had scared her a little.
She glanced at him now, trying to catch his eye, but he was focused fully on the Painted Devil.
And he was smiling.
As I studied the three men in the Nazi uniforms before us I couldn’t help but think of my Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity initiation at NYU. All the pledges, which had included myself, had been blindfolded and taken to a hotel ballroom. When the blindfolds came off, we found ourselves surrounded by candles, robed, chanting frat members, and various alumni. I kept things together well enough until I had to kneel in front of the frat president while he read the secret oath from a large embossed book. That’s when I broke out in giggles; I couldn’t help it. The guy was a good friend of mine. I hung out with him all the time under more ordinary circumstances. Seeing him in his getup, reciting Latin, which I knew he didn’t understand, was a gag.
It was one of those times when something that was supposed to be serious came across as ridiculous.
Like now.
I mean, these three geezers from equally mediocre gene pools went around the catacombs trying to scare harmless cataphiles?
Fuck them.
The one in the middle had birdish features and resembled the actor Ed Harris. His blue eyes locked on me and narrowed. He barked something that had the inflection of an order.
“I don’t speak German,” I told him.
“Ah!” He raised his plucked eyebrows in surprise. “American, am I right?”
He might be outfitted as a Nazi, but his French accent was clear as day.
“You guys like playing dress up?”
“Will,” Danièle cautioned me.
I looked at her, wondering what she was worried about. There were four of us. Douchebags like these three were all bark and no bite. I doubted they would start anything unless the odds were squarely in their favor, which they were not.
“I asked you a question,” Ed Harris said to me.
“Yeah, I’m American. He’s Canadian. These two are French.”