by Cindy Dees
I don’t know why I threw in the extra stuff. I suppose just because I had the room in the rucksack. But in truth, it was more than that. An intuition, I guess. Something strange was happening to me. Ever since Armande St. Germain called me at the Opera, my world had been turned upside down. It was as if I’d been caught up in some sort of invisible current that was carrying me along, tossing me about like a leaf. And I had the feeling I was rushing toward an unseen cataclysm of Niagara-sized proportions.
“Are you ready to see the underbelly of Paris?” Robert asked me.
And all of a sudden, that cataclysm was close enough to hear. The silent sound grew and grew in my skull until it roared in my ears and made my head ache. And I had no power to stop it, no power to hold back the flood. Whatever it was held me firmly in its grasp and I was just along for the ride. And I didn’t like that sensation one little bit. “Uh, okay.”
Robert’s mouth tightened into a grim line. “Let’s go.”
Gratefully, I closed the door on the chaos of my apartment—of my life, really—and followed him outside.
Chapter 9
R obert spent nearly an hour dragging me all over Paris, ducking in and out of storefronts, and sprinting down alleys I’d never known existed before, all in the name of making sure we weren’t being tailed. I humored him. After all, my right hip was bruised from where I’d slammed it into the stone balustrade of the Pont-Neuf bridge, and my cheek still stung from the two guys who had jumped me earlier. Maybe next time I wouldn’t be so lucky.
We wound up in the Montmartre district, a trendy, artsy neighborhood on the slopes leading up to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, which topped the eighteenth arrondissement like a snow-white crown. I huffed up the steep streets beside Robert, who turned out to be one of those insanely fit people who doesn’t even get winded climbing uphill briskly for nearly a half hour. I was going to be damned if I asked him to slow down—or, heaven forbid, stop—to let me catch my breath.
Thankfully, we arrived at the majestic staircase leading up to Sacré-Coeur itself before I collapsed. But it was a close thing. Robert stopped then and looked inward to his memory. He glanced around as if to get his bearings, and then took off to the right.
“The entrance is this way.”
“To what?” I replied.
“The catacombs.”
Of course. When Sacré-Coeur was built on the spongy limestone mountain top, enormous pilings were sunk hundreds of feet into the hillside to stabilize the entire mountain enough to bear its weight. In and among those gigantic pillars, a series of catacombs were constructed. Rumor had it they connected secretly to the ancient catacombs beneath older sections of Paris. But that was all I could remember about the warren of tunnels and chambers beneath our feet.
I followed Robert into an innocuous-looking building. A small brass placard announced it to be the offices of the Sacré-Coeur Family Counseling Service. More to the point, it had a basement with a low, wide, rusty iron door tucked way back in a dark corner. An oversized, antique padlock held together a shiny new length of chain that locked the door shut. The two looked incongruous together.
Robert pulled out a small flashlight and had a look at some odd shapes scratched on the door itself. They looked almost like runes. They must have been a code of some kind, because after a few seconds of studying them, Robert turned briskly, reached up high to the left of the door, and from a tiny niche I would never have seen on my own, extracted a big, old rusty key.
The padlock opened and the door swung back with a silence out of all proportion to its age and rust. A rush of cool, musty air escaped as I peered at the rough, gently hollowed stone steps leading downward. It smelled like dirt and old age. The walls were rough-hewn stone, damp in the gloom. It looked like a passage into the very womb of the earth. I only hoped we didn’t run into any of the millions of skeletal remains exhumed from ancient graveyards and stored down here under the city. Fortunately, the crypts were over in the Montparnasse area in south central Paris, far from where we were. Just last spring, my friend Catrina and her boyfriend, Rhys, had fallen into an old section of the catacombs and walked around here for days. They’d nearly died. Fortunately, Cat had stumbled across a tour group at the last minute and they’d been rescued.
Robert threw an apprehensive look over his shoulder at me. “This isn’t the best time to mention this, but you probably ought to know. I’m not particularly keen on small, dark spaces.”
“You’re claustrophobic?” I exclaimed under my breath. “How bad? Are you going to faint on me?”
“No, I, uh, tend to sweat and breathe fast. And I get jumpy.”
“Thanks for mentioning it. And I think we’ll be fine. From the pictures I’ve seen, the quarries below Paris tend to be pretty large caverns.”
“Easy for you to say,” I heard him mumble under his breath. “Pull out your flashlight. From here on out, it’ll be dark.”
“How do we lock the door behind us?” I asked.
Robert shrugged. “We don’t. This building’s security guy or janitor will relock it when they find it open.”
Dark didn’t quite capture the utter blackness that pressed in around me. Robert’s tiny beam of light pierced only eight feet or so of the curtain of eternal night that wrapped itself around us the moment I pulled the heavy door shut. Paris might be the City of Lights, but this was its polar opposite.
We descended an interminable staircase that was starting to give me the heebie-jeebies as it went down, down into the earth. It must be making Robert’s skin crawl. Without warning, his flashlight beam was swallowed up by a much larger space that glowed dimly. I looked around an open cavern where I couldn’t feel the walls pressing in on us any longer.
And abruptly I realized we weren’t alone. Perhaps a hundred people ranged around the room, tucked here and there in clusters or lounging alone. As we advanced across the space, head-banging rock music became audible. I didn’t see a band. Maybe a boom box. The crowd was dressed mostly in vampire chic.
“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” I muttered, my sense of propriety offended by this Saturday night rave scene.
“It’s always night down here,” Robert replied.
“Who are they?”
He shrugged. “The cataphiles. The people who live and play here.”
“People live here?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Of course. An entire order of monks lived down here at the time of the French Revolution, and quarry workers used to stay down here for weeks at a time. The French Resistance had its headquarters here during World War Two, and nowadays this bunch inhabits the joint.”
“Are you going to ask them about René?”
Robert shook his head. “This isn’t the crowd he’d hang out with. Besides, if I were René, I’d be avoiding people right now.”
“Shouldn’t we be avoiding them, too?”
“Yeah, we should. Unfortunately, this is the way he brought me down here. If we entered some other way I’m afraid I wouldn’t find his nest.”
Robert stepped through a beautifully carved gothic arch of limestone into another chamber, this one low and wide. Its walls were covered with bright grafitti that shocked my senses. The violent cartoons looked to have been done by some sort of skinhead artist. A half-dozen candles burned low, lighting the space. Perhaps twenty people sprawled on the floor. They all looked stoned out of their heads.
“Why don’t the police arrest these people?” I asked.
Robert threw me a wry look. “You’re the police. You tell me.”
“I told you, I’m not a cop. I’m an art historian.”
We waded over and around the people sprawled on the floor, who were too busy engaging in every sort of lurid sin to notice us. I turned my gaze away from the drugs, sex and perversion and held my breath as we passed through the smell of feces and vomit. The hollow expressions in the eyes of the denizens of the dark were a hundred times more haunting than any pile of empty-socketed skulls we mi
ght have run into down here.
Robert startled me by stepping right up to one of the graffiti pictures and disappearing. I took another step and saw how he’d done it—a passageway whose shadowed opening was cleverly concealed by the painting around it. He all but ran down the low, dank tunnel, which was soon pitch-black again. The air stank of decay and was moist and cool upon my skin.
“Hurry,” Robert murmured back at me urgently.
That sounded like more than claustrophobia vibrating urgently in his voice. I forced my deprived senses past the wall of darkness and silence now smothering us. And immediately, I was overcome by certainty that we were being followed. Crud. Our jaunt through that orgy hadn’t gone unnoticed.
I thought I heard a footstep scuff behind us, but sound was distorted so weirdly down here it was hard to tell. Robert motioned me to cut off my flashlight and did the same with his. The dark descended upon us, surreal in its completeness. Who in the world could possibly have followed us out of that motley assortment of humanity back there, and why would they?
I bumped into him. He’d stopped in front of me. His hand touched my elbow, then slid down to grasp mine. He moved off gingerly, stepping lightly. I assumed he must be following the wall with his other hand, because he led me forward unerringly. My arm about came out of the socket when he wrenched me off to the side a minute or so later. We jerked to a halt.
“We’re at a major intersection,” he breathed in my ear. “I need to read the runes, but I can’t turn on my flashlight. We’ll wait here in this side tunnel until our tail passes us.”
We crouched there, huddled together, until my legs screamed for release. All I can say is, my compliments to baseball catchers everywhere. But then a faint light pierced the dark. I made out the tunnel around us and the wider chamber beyond us. We were being followed! Another flashlight joined the first. Two pursuers!
And then they walked past our tunnel. They had dark hair, black leather jackets and broad shoulders, but I didn’t see their faces. Not that I needed to. It was our Italian friends again. It was so quiet I could hear them breathing. I froze, not moving a muscle, carefully holding my breath.
One of them murmured in Italian, “Can you see their lights?”
The other one grunted what sounded like a negative.
Go away. Go away. Go away.
Thankfully, after a few seconds their lights moved on and disappeared. I released my breath slowly.
Robert stood up and helped me to my feet. My legs shouted their indignation as blood flow returned to them. I followed him cautiously out into the intersection. In the glow of his flashlight, eight tunnels stretched away in a rough compass rose.
Robert peered from tunnel to tunnel, examining the runes beside each one. “I have no idea which one to take,” he admitted.
Nor did we have any exact idea which tunnel those two men had taken. As Robert moved around the room, peering at the runes, a faint puff of air moved past me. At first I didn’t pay any attention to it. But when it wafted past me a second time, it dawned on me. We were underground. There should be no wind down here! I turned in a circle, trying to ascertain the source of that wisp of a breeze.
“Come,” a voice whispered so lightly my ears barely registered it. “Away.”
“Did you hear that?” I blurted.
“Hear what?”
“That voice.”
We froze, listening for several seconds.
Robert frowned. “I don’t hear anything. We’re alone.”
He was right. It couldn’t have been a voice I heard. “I felt a puff of air moving by. I could swear it sounded like it said, ‘Come away.’”
“No air moves down here. Not unless someone is stirring it up with movement.”
I was not losing my mind. I’d definitely felt that air! “Maybe those two guys made it.”
“If so, they’re too damned close for our good,” Robert mumbled. We turned off our flashlights and stood in the middle of the round chamber, continuing to listen.
“Come.” A pause and then the disembodied whisper sighed again. “Away.”
Robert turned on his flashlight, his eyes wide. Thank God. He’d heard it, too. Insanity loves company, apparently, because I was profoundly relieved by his startled expression.
But then I noticed something else over Robert’s shoulder. The faintest fog hovered at the opening to one of the tunnels. The fog roiled slowly upon itself, but was stationary in that spot.
“Do you see that?” I gasped.
Robert whipped around, staring hard at where I pointed. “I don’t see anything.”
Before my eyes, the fog resolved itself into a vaguely human shape about my height and slender. It had the curves of a female body and long wisps that flowed around its head like hair, but no face. A tendril of the fog detached itself from its side and reached forward about chest high. The tendril folded, like an arm gesturing me to come.
“You see that, don’t you?” I said indignantly.
“Honey, I don’t see anything but rock where you’re pointing.”
I closed my eyes. Squeezed them tightly shut. Opened them again. The lady was still there. And I could swear she was nodding encouragement at me. I so don’t do ghosts. But there was no denying what was right before my eyes. Merciful God. I was seeing a ghost.
The apparition breathed, “Come.” And then, “Runnn. They come.”
I lurched in surprise. “Okay, Robert, I don’t mean to sound like a whacko, but I definitely see a ghost, and it’s gesturing me to go that way. It just said to run. They’re coming.”
Maybe he was so distracted by his claustrophobia that it didn’t really register on him that I was claiming to see and hear a ghost. But he merely shrugged. “It’s as good a reason to head down that tunnel as any other.”
We headed toward the lady, and as I drew closer I made out a face. It looked faintly familiar…I put the thought aside. No time to think about it now. The poltergeist continued to hover there in front of us. We were going to have to walk right through her to get into the tunnel.
I reached out, grasping Robert’s hand as we stepped forward into the white mist.
It was as if time stopped and reality fell away from us. The solid warmth of Robert’s strong fingers entwined with mine, his warm palm pressed to mine, were all that remained. His head turned very slowly toward me, and he blinked so gradually I could see every individual lash as his eyelids slowly shuttered the storm-tossed gray of his eyes and then lifted once more. His gaze pierced my soul, seeing all I was, all my secret dreams, all my hidden thoughts of him.
Through our joined hands, I felt Robert’s heart beat once, his pulse throbbing with life as my pulse rose to meet his. Heat built between our palms, and it was as if our entire bodies melded together, mine a part of him and his a part of me.
Another heartbeat.
And then something else surged from Robert into me. It was a driving sexual need, so powerful and overwhelming that it nearly drove me to my knees with wanting. My breath caught. Held. Then released on an infinitely slow sigh that parted my lips. His gaze shifted down to my mouth, and my eyes widened. I swayed toward him, and he toward me. And the fog was all around us, in us and on us. Alive. Carnal.
Something very close to an orgasm shuddered through me, making my whole body tingle from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes. Robert shuddered, as well, his beautiful eyes glazing over for a moment.
And then the fog was gone.
Robert shook himself slightly. He cocked his head, listening for a moment, and swore under his breath. “Your ghost is right. I hear someone coming.”
The spell the ghost had cast upon us shattered, leaving behind only stark, cold fear. My nerves were raw and I felt naked as I raced down the tunnel behind Robert. What the hell had just happened?
And more to the point, how did I get it to happen again—when we weren’t buried beneath untold tons of rock and running for our lives?
First things first. We had to l
ose our tails. And it wasn’t as if we had a whole lot of choices. The tunnel the ghost had guided us to was arrow-straight, running gently downhill, and went on forever. Speed was our only ally. We ran headlong into the eight-foot circles of light cast in front of us by our flashlights. If a cliff had opened up under our feet we wouldn’t have stood any chance of seeing it in time to stop before we plunged off it.
I don’t know how long we ran, but after an eternity, we began to see signs of humanity again. Splashes of graffiti began to decorate the walls. The occasional puddle of melted candle wax littered a niche. And finally, side tunnels began to open off the main tunnel. Robert slowed, examining the openings and their chicken scratch markings.
He ducked down one of them, and I didn’t break the silence to ask why. I was completely lost down here and wouldn’t have a chance in hell of finding my way out on my own. In a few minutes, we came upon a group of people sitting around in a living-room-sized chamber, complete with sofas, armchairs and coffee tables straight out of the 1950s. It reminded me of a strangely twisted version of Ozzie and Harriet’s home. The people lounging around drinking weren’t so far gone that they weren’t startled by our popping out among them.
“Sorry,” Robert announced cheerfully. “We’re just looking for a friend. The Mouse. Any of you seen him?”
Negative head shakes all around. One of them pointed across the room and murmured that we should try the Coffin Bar. Robert nodded as if he knew what the heck that was. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to find out.
We walked quickly toward the tunnel the drinker had pointed at. “Who’s the Mouse?” I whispered.
Robert muttered back, “It’s an old nickname of René’s.”