by Jeremy Bates
I sat up, shaking my right arm, working feeling back into it. Rob lay a few feet away from me, folded into a ball to keep warm, a string of drool stuck to his cheek.
Then—shft. The sound was loud in the empty silence. I snapped my head toward it and started.
Someone stood at the doorway.
Chapter 26
He was old, over sixty, and tall, maybe six feet. Wisps of spider web hair curled out from beneath a mud-caked green bandana. What I could see of his face in the poor candlelight was pointed and fierce, his complexion as dusky as damp earth. He wore an olive fatigue jacket over a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black Doc Martins, maybe steel-toed. No backpack, no waders, no helmet. No cataphile gear whatsoever.
“Zeigen sie ihren ausweist!” he barked in a commanding voice.
“Jesus,” I said, stumbling to my feet.
Rob stirred. “Wha…?” He saw the guy and sprang into a crouch, then lost his balanced and toppled backward onto his butt. “Who the fuck…?”
Danièle and Pascal sat up in their hammocks, alarmed.
“Zeigen sie ihren ausweist!” the man repeated.
“And if we do not?” Danièle said loudly, now standing.
The man seemed momentarily surprised she understood German.
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
“He wants to see our IDs.”
“IDs…?” The guy couldn’t be a catacop; he looked like a bum. Another prankster then—?
Was he in cahoots with the Painted Devil?
The man switched to heavily accented English. “Don’t you know it is illegal to be here?” he said sternly. He eyed Danièle’s cask of wine, Rob’s empty beer cans. “What are you drinking? Mind if I join you?” Before anyone could reply he plopped down at the table and withdrew a bottle from his jacket. “Vodka and vitamins,” he announced, offering it to Rob. “Try—it is good for you.”
Grinning, Rob accepted the bottle—stupidly, I thought—and took a belt. A moment later he cringed, wooted, and shook himself like a wet dog, all at the same time. “Motherfucker!” He passed the bottle back.
Danièle and Pascal began dismantling their hammocks. I figured they wanted to move on as soon as possible. I was fine with that plan. The old guy’s BO smelled like onions left uncovered in the fridge.
I fetched my still-wet socks and shoes and pulled them on.
“My name is Zolan,” the man said, sipping the vodka as if it were water. A shark-tooth necklace encircled his neck. It seemed to be missing as many teeth as he was. Black wool gloves covered his hands. The tips of the gloves’ fingers and thumbs were cut off.
“I’m Roast Beef,” Rob said. “That’s Stork Girl, he’s Chess, and he’s…”
I was at a loss. “Macaroni,” I said.
Rob gave me a look. Zolan passed him the bottle again, and he took another belt, longer than the first. His reaction was tempered this time.
“Do you know someone called the Painted Devil?” I asked.
Zolan fixed me with dark and feral eyes. “Le Diable Peint is a stupid shit.”
I blinked in surprise. Rob hooted in delight. Danièle and Pascal paused their packing and watched us.
“How do you know him?” I asked.
“I have come across him many times. He thinks he owns these tunnels. He knows nothing.”
“He speaks German, like you.”
Zolan spat. “He pretends to be German to scare people. He is a fake.”
I was about to remind Zolan that he’d tried to scare us too, but Rob said, “How long you been coming down here, boss?” He was clearly enjoying the old guy’s company—that, and the free vodka.
“A long time,” Zolan said simply. “Do you have anything to eat? I’m hungry.”
“Danny,” Rob said, “where’re your cookies?”
“I have packed them already.”
“Break them out. Zolan’s hungry.”
Danièle had been buckling her backpack closed. She reopened the main pocket, searched through it, and withdrew the package of biscuits. She offered them to Zolan. He shoved one biscuit into his mouth, then another, crumbs spilling onto his chest.
“Okay, everyone ready?” Danièle said. “We must continue now.”
“So soon?” Zolan said, appearing disappointed by our abrupt departure. “Where are you going?”
“We’re looking for a woman,” Rob told him, oblivious to the smoldering look Danièle shot him. “Rascal—Chess found her video camera about a week ago. Someone was chasing her. She dropped the camera and started screaming and—”
Danièle kicked him in the side. “Get your stuff, Rosbif. We are leaving.”
“Ow, Danny, fuck.” But Rob seemed to get the message. He got his stuff together and stood. “Guess we’re off, boss. Thanks for the drink.”
The rest of us said goodbye, and we were at the exit to the grotto when Zolan said, “Val-de-Grâce.”
We stopped, turned.
“Excuse me?” Danièle said.
“The video camera,” Zolan said, his back to us. “It was beneath Val-de-Grâce.”
Pascal and Danièle exchanged glances.
Then Pascal spoke for the first time: “How do you know that?”
“I met the woman you talk about,” he said. “I saved her life.”
Chapter 27
Zolan’s revelation caused temporary pandemonium. Everyone began talking at once, raising voices, no one making an effort to mask their skepticism. Zolan grinned, as if he had expected this reaction. He withdrew a folded square from his jacket pocket, opened it, and spread a map onto the table. We went over to examine it. Pascal gasped audibly, obviously impressed. Indeed, it made Pascal’s beloved map look barebones in comparison, and I guessed it must have detailed almost every nook and cranny beneath Paris. It was hand drawn in black ink. The torn, aged parchment had at some point been laminated, and the plastic was covered with burn marks and stains and additional annotations scribbled in permanent marker.
Zolan pointed with a chipped and dirty fingernail to a spot in the upper right corner. “Val-de-Grâce hospital is here.” He indicated another spot several inches away. Had there been a legend, the distance likely would have measured a few hundred meters or so. “The woman was here, fifty meters deep, in the lowest level of the catacombs.”
Pascal bent close to study the squiggle of lines.
“Is this correct, Pascal?” Danièle asked him. “Is he right? Is that where you found the video camera?”
Pascal nodded slowly, clearly devastated, and I actually felt sorry for the guy. This had been his show, his little Goonies adventure, he’d been convinced he was going to find that woman’s body. Now it turned out it was all for naught.
“So what happened to the woman?” I asked Zolan.
“I guided her to the surface,” he said simply.
“I mean, why’d she scream? How’d you save her life?”
“Ah.” He nodded. “There had been a cave in. She was separated from her friends. She wandered for two days by herself. Then she stumbled upon a nest of rats.”
“Rats?” Danièle said, surprised.
“Large ones. The size of cats. They sensed she was weak, they sensed a meal, and they attacked her. I heard her screaming. That is how I found her. I scared them off. She had many bites. Here, here, here.” He touched different parts of his body. “But she was okay. She could walk.”
“You never took her back to get her camera?” I said.
“She never mentioned a video camera to me.” He shrugged. “Given what she had been through, and the condition she was in, I suspect it had been the last thing on her mind.”
Danièle and Pascal moved away from the rest of us to converse with themselves. When they returned, they explained that the expedition was over and we would return the way we had come. It was an anticlimactic outcome, surely, but with the woman safe on the surface, there was little reason for us to continue farther. So we kitted up, turned our headlamps on, said goodbye t
o Zolan for a second time, then backtracked through the maze of World War Two era rooms. I was the last one to enter the cat hole that led back to the tunnel system at large, and when I climbed out the other side I was surprised to find Danièle and Pascal speaking to Rob in hushed, conspiratorial tones. “What’s going on?” I said, going over to them.
“He was lying,” Danièle told me in a harsh whisper. Her eyes were wide, luminous, concerned.
“Who?” I said, confused. “Zolan?”
“He told us the woman was attacked by rats,” she said. “But there are no rats in the catacombs, Will. There is nothing for them to eat here. He made that up because he does not want us to know the real reason why the woman screamed.”
“And why’s that, Danny?” Rob asked.
“Because he killed her,” Pascal stated.
I looked at him, then at Danièle. They both seemed serious—and frightened?
“You two are bat shit crazy!” Rob blurted.
“You are!” Danièle said. “You drank with him. Like he was your best friend. You drank with a killer!”
“He’s not a killer,” I said.
She whirled on me. “Why not?”
“He’s just some bum.”
“Bums do not kill people?”
“I’ve never heard of any killing people, no.”
“He sees a woman, lost, alone. He knows he will never be caught…”
A chill touched my spine as I pictured Zolan straddling the Australian woman, his dirty hands locked around her throat, squeezing, cutting off the screams that nobody could hear.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Okay, Will,” Danièle said. “Why did he lie about the rats?”
“We don’t know he did.”
“There are no rats in the catacombs! None! Pascal and I have never seen one. Not one.”
“Maybe not here, maybe deeper—”
“No,” Pascal said, shaking his head adamantly.
“Think about it,” Rob said. “If that old fuck Zolan killed this woman, why tell us he met her at all? Why incriminate himself?”
“Because thanks to you, Rosbif,” Danièle said, “he knew that we knew where she was, and that we were going looking for her. He did not want us to discover her body. That is why he told us he guided her to the surface—so we would not go looking for her anymore.”
“Man oh man,” Rob said, chuckling. “You buying this, Will?”
Danièle and Pascal glared at me. They had become openly hostile.
“No, not really,” I said.
Danièle huffed and started away from us down the corridor.
“Hey—where you going?” I called after her. “I thought we were going back? That’s the wrong way.”
She stopped, turned. Her face beneath her red helmet was set in a mask of determination. “No, Will, that is only what we told Zolan. We are still going to look for the woman, and we are going to find her.”
Chapter 28
Twenty minutes or so after setting out from the Bunker we arrived at a low crawl that looked no different than the dozens of others we had passed through. However, this one, Danièle explained, was special. It was the entrance to the tunnel system beneath Val-de-Grâce.
Pascal called a break to study his map, and Danièle went on to tell me that from here on in the passageways became increasingly dense and complicated, and if we weren’t careful, we could easily become lost and wander aimlessly forever—which, apparently, was exactly what happened to one of the first ever cataphiles.
His name, Danièle said, was Philibert Aspairt. He was the doorkeeper of the Val-de-Grâce hospital. He entered the quarries via a staircase located in the hospital’s court. No one knew why for sure. Some suspected he was hunting for treasure. Others believed he was searching for the cellars of the Carthusian convent, under the Jardin du Luxembourg, to steal bottles of their famous Chartreuse. Whatever the reason, he was never seen alive again. Eleven years later, however, his remains were discovered in one of the quarry galleries. He was identified by the hospital key ring hanging from his belt. “You can visit his grave,” Danièle concluded. “He was buried where his remains were found, and a tombstone marks the spot. Many cataphiles made a pilgrimage there every year, where they light a candle to pay respect to his memory.”
“Have you been to the grave?” I asked.
She nodded. “Several times.”
“Are we going to pass it tonight?”
“Unfortunately, we are not going in that direction.”
A moment later Pascal stuffed his map away, said, “Vas-y,” and ventured into the small tunnel.
I gestured for Danièle to proceed next. “Ladies first,” I said.
I had no idea how long we walked for, but it felt like a very long time. This section of the catacombs was honeycombed not only with the traditional horizontal hallways, but shafts angling through the stone at zany angles. It was as if we were wandering an Escher drawing where the rules of physics no longer applied.
Moreover, the farther we went, the less graffitied and more desolate the tunnels became, so soon they all looked the same. Pascal had taken a piece of chalk from his backpack and was marking the walls with arrows, to make sure we could find our way out again. But getting hopelessly lost wasn’t my only concern. The ceilings and chambers here were crumbling and in shockingly bad shape, raising the concern of a potential collapse and cave-in.
Despite all of this, however, I had faith in Pascal’s navigating abilities to see us through safely. He threaded the maze with an uncanny confidence, seeming to rely as much on experience and features in the rock he recognized as he did on his trusty map. A few times, though, he made wrong turns, and we were forced to backtrack and try different routes.
It was hard to gauge how deep you were when you were underground, as there was no sky to reference. When I asked Danièle to guestimate our depth, she only shrugged and told me we were very deep.
Then, from ahead of us, Pascal issued an excited cry. We joined him a moment later at a dead end. He was already fussing over a jumble of stones and timber in one corner, moving them aside piece by piece. We joined the effort and soon cleared al the debris to reveal a symmetrical hole in the ground. A rusted foot ladder descended into bottomless blackness.
“Jesus, Rascal,” Rob said, whistling softly. “You went down there alone?”
“Yes, of course,” he said proudly.
“How much farther is it to the fucking video camera?”
“Not far. Just down the ladder, then a short walk.” He grinned. “And there is a surprise on the way.”
Pascal went first, and I volunteered to go next. I sat at the rim of the hole so my legs dangled into the abyss. Then with Rob and Danièle supporting me, I attached myself to the iron foot ladder. The rungs were cool to the touch, and rust sloughed off beneath my grip. I started down. The shaft was only a little wider than the width of my shoulders, which meant I had to keep my elbows tucked awkwardly into my sides. I felt as snug as a cigar in a tube case, and I tried not to think what would happen if one of the rungs broke free.
I guessed I must have descended a good thirty feet before the shaft opened around me. From there it was another ten or so feet until I reached the ground. My legs, I found, were rubbery from the stress of the descent.
I glanced up and saw a distant light: Danièle or Rob.
Pascal stood nearby, watching me.
“What?” I said.
“So you and Danièle—you like her, yes?”
Shit, I thought. Really? “Like her?” I said, playing dumb.
“You fucked her in the Bunker?”
“Listen,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “I don’t know what’s gone on between you and her in the past. But to my knowledge she’s single now. And what she and I do is none of your business. Okay?”
“She’s using you, you know? She just broke up with her longtime boyfriend. She is lonely. You’re convenient.”
“Thanks for the ti
p. I’ll keep that in mind.”
He glowered at me a beat longer, then stalked off into the darkness.
I stared after him. Fucking guy! You fucked her in the Bunker. Who said shit like that?
I should have told him, Yeah, I did, and it was fan-fucking-tastic.
When Danièle reached me a minute later, I was still fuming over Pascal’s gull to confront me like he did. “Wanna know what your buddy asked me?” I said.
She frowned. “What?”
“He asked me if I fucked you in the Bunker.”
“He asked you? What did you say?”
“What does it matter what I said?”
“Did you tell him it was true?”
“I told him it was none of his business.”
“What’s none of my business?” Rob asked. He was coming out of the hole in the ceiling.
“How ugly you are,” Danièle said.
Rob slid down the remaining distance, fireman-style. “Seriously, you talking about me?”
“No, Pascal,” I said.
“He heard Will and me making love earlier—”
“All right, Danièle, enough,” I said, cutting her off.
“Yeah, I heard you fuck bunnies too,” Rob said. “I was with Rascal. Couldn’t you have turned down the volume a bit, Danny?”
“It was impossible,” she said. “Will was too good—”
“Jesus,” I said, and started off in the direction my arch nemesis had gone. Danièle was crazy. She really was. Bragging about the sex we had to her brother-in-law?
I passed through a doorway into a cavernous chamber and came to an abrupt halt. Giant, soaring pillars, carved to resemble naked men and women, lined the four walls. The capitals supported a bas-relief frieze depicting more naked figures, these masked and dancing alongside winged, mythological creatures. Perched atop the cornice were dozens of ornamental gargoyles, their grotesque faces staring down at us.