by E. J. Swift
“Five to six million.” A short, possibly disbelieving silence follows this pronouncement before she ushers her group through the stone anomaly.
I linger a few moments, and then I too enter the empire of the dead.
THE SKULLS ARE stacked in lines. They lie upon layers of bones, and more layers of bones lie upon them. The bones were once limbs: femur and fibula, ulna and radius. They had flesh attached, they were joined, they moved. Now they sit in dislocated harmony. Bone against bone, they have transcended the laws of anatomy for a new proximity with their fellow sapiens.
Thousands of pairs of eye holes gape. Some have lost their lower jaws, but their teeth still grin. Others have lost their teeth. Under the dim illumination, they are yellowish in colour, softly burnished. Who was given the task of disassembling these skeletons—hundreds, thousands of them? Who stacked the bones so artfully and systematically, who placed the skulls upon the platters of severed limbs? Did they have to experiment, assessing different formations? Does the stability of the ossuary as a whole depend upon the measurements of each individual?
The logistics of it fascinate and horrify me. There is something eerie about the structured placement of these remains. The dead are here in multitudes.
I remember something I heard from Millie. During the 1870-71 siege of Paris, when the Prussians blockaded the city for over four months, Parisians were forced to slaughter all their animals for food. It was not uncommon to find dogs, cats, rats or horses on a restaurant menu. Even Castor and Pollux, the city’s sole pair of elephants, were not spared. When there were no more animals left, the ossuary was raided to make bonemeal. Unwitting, the Parisians ate their ancestors.
I MOVE THROUGH the caverns. I see hall after hall of meticulously, artfully arranged bones. Skulls embedded in the surrounding tibias form the outline of a heart. Some visitors approach the bones; reaching out a hand as if to touch, then withdraw quickly. This is what death looks like, this is how it is for us all. Our fleeting, packed little lives laid bare. Seeing it up close is a face-off with the inevitable. There are so many of them.
A child tugs at her mother’s arm.
“Are all those dead people?”
“Yes, they’re dead.”
“How did they die?”
“They died because they were old.”
“Where are they now?”
“Somewhere else, love.”
I stand in front of a skull. The forehead is smooth and sloped. Broad cheekbones, prominent teeth. I try to imagine the face. The thoughts ticking away beneath the scalp, the hopes and fears. I find myself thinking about Millie. Who were you? Are you down here, with these people?
Cavern after cavern. The rows of bones do not end, they follow me through the corridors. My mind grows numb. Through barred gates, I catch glimpses of other tunnels, closed off to the public, where yet more bones are stacked. One of the doors is ajar. I glance ahead, behind, confirming I’m on my own, and slip through.
Once again, I feel that pull. A tug, towards the centre of the earth. To go down further, deeper, darker, to burrow through mulch and rock and lava, until my body compresses into pure mineral. This is what I am made of, this is what I will become. Did nobody warn you? It is dangerous to be underground. There was never meant to be light, not here. Only a silent, creeping progress. A cycle we try to ignore.
It is not only that we’re trespassing on a place we were never meant to live. Madness lurks underground. The danger of forgetting, of reverting. Evolution working backwards and forwards at the same time. Stay down here long enough, and the world above will become a delusion, petty and nonsensical. Stay down here long enough, and I will forget myself. I will believe I am one of the calcified ocean dwellers, I will find myself adrift in a vast salt sea. I will turn over and over in a surf too immense to calculate. I will be flung about the waves. I will drown underground.
Drip, drip. Drip, drip.
From the roof of the tunnel, a tiny trickle of water. I put out my tongue to catch it. I taste the components of the earth.
There. The ocean is already unfolding from above. I am sinking.
I HEAR A high pitched noise, a singing. Nausea wrenches my stomach, waves of sickness rushing up and receding. I bend double, digging my fists into my abdomen, breathless with pain. The cavern bleeds in and out of focus.
A figure lurches from the gloom, here but not here, more substantial than a projection, but not fully formed. He has a white curled wig, epaulettes, a sash across his red coat. His mouth falls open in a laugh as he raises a bottle to his lips. There are others around him, men and women, drinking and feasting. They wear wigs, some half as tall as them, the white perfumed hairpieces knocking against the cavern ceiling. Wide skirts, rouged cheeks and beauty spots, military dress. Sombrely clad underlings scurry between the revellers, plying them with sweetmeats and wine. The scent is overpowering, fecund with hot powdered bodies, the damp of the caves, thick perfume, roasted meats and foodstuffs.
I see playing cards scattered over the floor, hearts and spades. A group of women gathered around a low table, their faces sharp as witches, their fans tap-tapping in restless fingers. One of them has lost a glove, another a silk stocking. Her calf sticks out from under her skirt, pale and provocative. It’s Marie-Antoinette.
The courtiers whirl about me. Dizziness fills my head. I have to sit down. I cannot feel the floor.
They are all around me but they cannot see me, I cannot touch them. The sound of their laughter is muted.
I understand that something is happening. Time is moving. Time is shifting around me and I am trapped in its mechanics, unable to move with it but caught between one plane and the next. The eighteenth-century revellers grow fainter. There is a rushing in my head. We are moving. I am moving. The cavern becomes a blur of indistinct shapes, time speeding up a hundredfold.
I understand that this is not good. It’s wrong, horribly wrong.
Somewhere in the blur I recognise a figure, disappearing down the corridor in staccato flashes of green.
The chronometrist.
“You tricked me!” I yell, but my voice is ripped from my throat; flung into the abyss. “You wanted me to come here. You knew this was going to happen!”
Her giggle ripples back.
“I’m no one, my dear. I’m no one I’m no one I’m no one…”
Keep moving. Get up, get out. You need to get out.
I stagger to my feet, but I don’t know which way to turn. An imprint of Marie-Antoinette lingers against one wall. Then she is crushed into the wall, she is part of it, her face flattened to paper. It ripples and vanishes. I am half blind.
I screw my eyes shut and abandon vision completely. From a deeper darkness comes an old memory. Theo’s voice. Her arm, an albatross wing. A net of safety. I conjure that albatross now. I imagine its beak closing around the little finger of my left hand; firm but gentle. The tip of a feather brushing my hand.
“Start walking,” says the albatross. “Don’t follow her. Go back. Go back.”
“I can’t see,” I whisper.
It hurts less if I whisper.
The albatross tugs my finger: this way.
Blind, I start walking. One foot in front of the other. Every step is an effort of will. I can sense things—people—colliding against me in different time zones. I’ve become part of a temporal osmosis. I feel liquid, a thing in flux, as if pieces of me could separate and spill across the decades.
“Where are we?” I whisper.
“We’re alongside the anomaly.”
“There’s an anomaly here?”
There must be.
I want to slow. I want to stop, lie down and let the vortex howl around me. The albatross nips my finger. I cannot see, I can barely feel, but I know it has drawn blood.
I put my hands out to the walls to guide me. They slide beneath my palms, slick and wet and cold. The tunnel roof is dripping, like the keg room, as if the weight of the Eocene ocean lies above, waiting to burst throu
gh.
These tunnels are labyrinthine. The shape of the walls change, become smooth and rounded. My fingers hook onto something and I realize I have put them through the eye sockets of a skull.
I scream and jerk back my hand. I hear the skull clatter to the floor. And then a rumbling, a tremor that heeds an avalanche, as the stacks of the skulls and bones collapse to the floor, rattling at my feet, piling up around me until I am shin deep in the dead.
I cannot go any further. My whole body is shaking uncontrollably. I can hear the bones clacking against one another, I can hear them shivering, their long-gone tongues flickering in anticipation of the moment I fall. I’ll be buried here forever, strung out through time in some other dimension that no one will ever find.
“No!” The albatross jumps up and down. “No! Don’t stop here! Here they’ll never let you go!”
“I can’t. I can’t go any further.”
“You have to. You can’t stop here!”
The bones rock deliciously.
“I’m trying...” I sob, my tears falling on the feathers of the albatross, “but it’s so hard.”
When I move my feet the bones roll, locking and interlocking, making gates to trip me up. Grimly, I plough on. I hear cartilage crunch beneath me. I keep walking.
I walk for hours.
I walk for days.
Cart bearers come towards us down the tunnels. They have torches. The men pushing them wear cloths wrapped around their noses and mouths. The carts are full of freshly dug bones, clods of earth and dirt clinging to limbs and skulls. They complain about the long walk from Les Halles. They pass us, the carts’ wooden wheels rolling deep down into the labyrinth.
I glimpse the face of one of the cart bearers and beneath the dirt it looks like Léon. But that cannot be possible.
The tunnel begins to turn upward. I have lost all sensation now. I cannot see a thing. If the albatross is still with me, I cannot hear or feel it. I feel myself being swallowed, whittled until I am nothing but the tiniest of specks, a piece of grit in a vast ocean.
Chapter Thirty-One
WHAT THE FUCK were you thinking? She could have died down there! Or worse—
Oh my dear, do stop—fussing. It’s your anomaly, not hers. She couldn’t have gone anywhere.
You know it’s unstable. I told you how bad it was coming through—it felt like I was going to be ripped to pieces, I thought that was it, over—
And what other—options did I have, hm? You weren’t doing anything, so I had to. She’s not acting fast enough! You know how this process works. It’s not enough for the anomaly to unlock. The incumbent has to respond. She has to want it, or the flares won’t come.
What difference does it make when she does it?
Well, it’s your friends out there… If you aren’t bothered about saving them… Perhaps I should hop back and have a word with my dearest Inga?
No! No. We need to finish this.
I’m glad we’re in agreement. Because you have hardly been playing straight either. Have you? My dear. Oh, walk away. That’s right. Easy for you! Easy for... I’m sorry. Do I know you?
BLUE SKY. AN assault of light.
I screw up my eyes, open them more slowly. A residue of green, disappearing into the edge of my frame of vision.
“She’s coming round—”
“Give her some water—”
“Hallie, it’s okay, don’t be alarmed, just take it easy.”
Anxious faces, looming over me. Léon. Why is Léon—?
He looks worried. Someone lowers a water bottle. Groggily, I try to sit up. I’m on the pavement, a couple of hundred yards from the exit to the catacombs. Léon supports me.
“What happened?” I ask.
“A woman told me she saw you staggering out of there, you looked like you’d been drugged or something. Then you collapsed. You were unconscious.”
“Shall I call an ambulance?” someone says.
“No, no. I’m fine. I must have... I must have fainted. It’s claustrophobic down there.”
“It’s okay,” Léon tells the crowd. “I’ve got it from here.”
I nod. “Please, I’m fine.”
Gradually they melt away, leaving Léon and I alone on the kerb. I stare at him, confused.
“What are you doing here?”
“Angel told me you were going to the catacombs—I was going to surprise you, but you weren’t in the queue, I figured you’d already gone in—so I waited. And then—”
Léon waves his hand. And then. I watch his face, aware again of that uncertainty I can’t pin down, a sense that there is something I have missed. My mind is thick with fog. He tears open a bar of chocolate and breaks off piece by piece. I eat it slowly. The sugar helps.
He helps me to my feet. It’s a warm, sunny afternoon. I can hear the sounds of traffic from the main road.
“You fainted?” says Léon.
“I must have. Or—”
“Or?”
I hesitate.
“I used to get... panic attacks,” I say reluctantly. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I know, it’s just... I thought they’d stopped. Léon, this might sound mad, but... I thought I saw you down there.”
He stares at me.
“Hallie, you know that’s impossible.”
“I know, I know it is—”
I look away, aware that his face is troubled, and mine must be equally so. But what can I say? I’ve been travelling through time? I got stuck in a temporal anomaly? I don’t even consider it. Léon and I have something, and I won’t endanger that, I won’t have him pity me for a fantasist. Better that he thinks this is about anxiety.
No one can know about the anomaly. I’m beginning to regret having told Gabriela. The truth is dangerous, a thing alive—the truth is impossible. The only thing I can say for sure is this: the anomaly—my anomaly—is awake. And as the fog fades away, for the first time I can hear its song clearly. The melody loops in my ears, the way the noise of a gig reverberates for hours after the event. The sound is taut and beautiful and rich with joy. It’s the sound of Paris in springtime; Paris rejoicing. I don’t need the chronometrist to tell me this is not going to stop, and despite everything that’s happened this afternoon, there’s only one way I can respond.
I get to my feet.
“I have to go. I have to go right now.”
Part Six
The Cello
Chapter Thirty-Two
SOMETHING IS CHALKED on the floor of the keg room. A date: day, month, year. I stare at it, the digits looming larger and larger as the temperature climbs. Then the transportation happens. This time it is instantaneous. One moment I’m standing by a stack of Corona, cold electric light overhead, drip, drip on the concrete; the next there’s a bright flash and I’m on my back in a dark space. My feet are wedged at an awkward angle, my heart pounding and a taste of blood in my mouth. I run my tongue around my gums and the taste intensifies.
The residues of light fade from the backs of my eyelids, leaving me in darkness.
I know at once that this is a full corporeal transportation. It’s more akin to the 1875 incident than the ghostly flickering of New Year’s Eve, or even the apparitions of the catacombs. I’m ravenous, for a start. But the sawdust smell I remember from the cellar of 1875 is absent. This is something new.
I push my feet out experimentally and meet a wall in front of me. I reach behind and find another wall at my back. Shit. What if I’ve landed somewhere there’s no way out? I extend a hand to the left and find another wall and a tingle of fear creeps into my skin.
I force myself to think rationally. You haven’t tried the fourth wall, yet. You haven’t tried the ceiling, for that matter.
Wincing at the throbbing in my head, I raise myself slowly to a sitting position.
I hear an intake of breath.
Not mine.
There’s someone else down here.
; I freeze, listening intently, but my heart is beating so fast I can’t hear anything. Who hides in the dark? Not anyone who wants to be found. Another traveller? Someone with a more sinister purpose? Sweat prickles at my back and I can’t draw in the deep noisy breaths I usually take to calm myself without drawing attention—although that’s ludicrous, as clearly I’ve been detected already.
Then another thought occurs to me. What if it isn’t human at all?
I extend my arm to the right and encounter something soft and pliable. Something fleshy.
I yelp and scrabble backwards, feet kicking against the narrow walls to either side in my desperation to escape. The thing is on top of me, flapping at my arms, my face, making hissing noises. I push back, terrified, and then it gets a hand over my mouth and it’s still hissing and at last I understand the sound.
“Shhh. Shhhh!”
I collapse, spent, breathing harshly.
“Shhhh!”
The thing backs off. Slowly, I manage to calm myself.
“Who’s down here?” I say shakily.
Another “Shhh!” Almost a whimper. I make a decision: it’s completely idiotic, and it’s the only thing I can do to assuage my terror. I squeeze my bottle opener in one hand, my phone in the other (six-twenty pm), and I switch on the torch function of my phone.
The light illuminates the pale, anguished face of a girl about my age, huddled two metres away at the far end of a narrow compartment. I see scuffed lace-up boots, sheer tights, the hem of a skirt beneath a buttoned-up coat. The coat looks smart but worn, a patch at the right breast where the fabric has bobbled. On the floor to one side of her there’s a blanket, a bag, a glass bottle of water and bread wrapped in a cloth, a torch, paper and pencil, and a bucket.
The girl inches backwards and meets the fourth wall. She looks frantically about her. Of the two of us, she is the more frightened.
“Turn it out,” she whispers. “Turn it out.”