Romancing the Dark in the City of Light

by Ann Jacobus

  He smiles. “Waste not want not. It’s time.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Kurt takes Summer by the hand and leads her from the crowded restaurant into the night. “It’s not too far if you’re up for a stroll,” he says as they pass the Hollywood-lit pyramid.

  They head toward the nearby Seine.

  “Okay,” she says, although she’s already been strolling so long she has blisters.

  He is a sweet, kind guy, she thinks. Maybe she should have called him sooner. It’s exactly as she pictured it. She’s holding hands with a hot guy, strolling by Parisian landmarks. But his hand is cold, more like gripping a frozen chicken breast.

  They walk in silence until they reach the Pont des Arts, a wooden pedestrian bridge. Should she warn this guy that she’s … not in a great place for a relationship? Don’t be absurd, she thinks.

  And don’t think about the Goth guy.

  A little voice in her head repeats Goth guy about three more times before it crackles into diamond dust and floats away.

  Floodlights on each bank illuminate the bridge and to a lesser extent the river. On the other side, crowded, old stone buildings perch atop the steep wall above the quay. They pause midway and look upriver at the lights of the Île de la Cité. Summer zips her jacket. It’s colder over the water.

  “Cigarette?” asks Kurt.

  “Thanks.”

  The Seine is high and fast moving from all the recent rain. It swirls and eddies beneath them, black and oily.

  “Spectacular,” Kurt says. “Flowing like time. Cold. Patient. Romantic.” He squeezes her hand. “Easy to slip into.”

  Summer wonders how it would feel and look from ten feet below the surface: floating along in the icy current, arms outstretched, wavy streetlights faintly visible through the darkness above. All quiet. It’s not a frightening thought, rather somehow a soothing one. They watch the river for several minutes, as her giddiness from the café subsides. She thinks of sitting with Moony on his egg yolk–yellow rain poncho.

  She cranes her head back for stars. Slabs of darkness, high clouds, move across the sky. The faint light of one lone star struggles to pierce the haze of city lights. If she could just reach out for that sucker, and then vaporize from the heat of it, she would go happily. Right now, she thinks.

  “What are you thinking?” Kurt asks. He flicks his cigarette butt into the water and pulls her close.

  “How I would like to touch a star. Become a star.”

  “Awesome. Free at last.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “No more pain or despair. The stars go waltzing out in blue and red / And arbitrary blackness gallops in.”

  “Right,” she says softly. “My life would flash in front of my eyes. I’ve always wondered how that works.”

  “Would you miss much about it?”

  She thinks a moment. “I guess not.” Moony’s warm hand in hers at Sacré-Coeur, pulsing with connection and caring. She squeezes her eyes shut against the image.

  Kurt takes her by the shoulders and she shivers. He leans in close. “The world is overwhelmingly difficult for you, isn’t it?”

  She doesn’t answer. It’s a dumb question. Her pulse is racing. She loses herself in his dark eyes that pull her to his exquisite face.

  They kiss. On the lips, one time.

  It’s hardly electric. It vacuums away energy, into the void of which rushes deep sadness and longing for … she doesn’t know what. Not sex.

  A hollowness expands within. Like deep space. Cold and dark and movement-less.

  Absolute zero.

  Her whole body, and beyond. It’s so quiet it’s almost peaceful.

  But not quite. A few cosmic rays from some distant, collapsed star still register.

  She steps back. “Uh, thanks for meeting up with me,” she murmurs. “I was having a low moment. I think I’m better now.” She doesn’t want to kiss him again.

  “Everything is going to be fine.” He pulls her back to hug her and she smells his garlic-sulfer muskiness. Then he gently intertwines his fingers with hers.

  Our first kiss, she thinks. Not what she expected.

  He fishes something from his pocket and shows it to her. A padlock. Then he turns it over. Written in black marker is “Kurt ♥ Summer.”

  “For my locker?” she asks, not caring whether he knows she has one or not. “Gosh, very thoughtful, but I don’t even use it.”

  “No. As a symbol of my commitment to you.” He jams it between the metal links of the fence spanning the bridge. Others already hang there. He locks it with the little key, then tosses the key into the air. Arcing, and tumbling, it catches a glint of floodlight before it’s swallowed by the darkness. A faint plonk sounds from below.

  “Whoa.” Summer likes the idea of the gesture, but it unsettles her. She is attracted to him but doesn’t exactly like him. Does he like her? For real? He’s moved things forward a little fast. What if she isn’t ready? Is there no going back?

  Or forward?

  “Does this mean we’re, like, together? Going out?”

  “Yes,” he says, still observing the river. “It does.”

  “How about that.” It feels anticlimactic. Meaningless.

  He pulls her by the arm. “Come on.”

  On the Left Bank, they turn down narrow side rues until she is completely confused. Finally they stop on a dark, quiet street in front of a high wall and door.

  A French guy walks up, dressed in dark jeans and a fleece jacket with a small backpack slung over his shoulder. He has on a knit ski cap, with long curly hair jutting out from beneath. Even in the dark, his face is pale and sharp. He looks at Summer questioningly.

  “Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” he says.

  “Bonsoir, monsieur,” she says, like she knows who he is. He embraces Kurt in a kind of strange French un-ghetto clutch and clasp, then punches in the door code. No one introduces themselves. “Follow me,” he says with an accent, as he opens the heavy door and motions them in behind him, finger to his lips.

  Summer whispers to Kurt, “You go first.” They cross a stone courtyard. Straight ahead, through large double doors, half glass, they see a marbled lobby. But they veer right to a smaller wooden door. The guy punches in a number on a second code pad. It opens to narrow steps going down to the caves, or basement storage rooms. Summer takes Kurt’s gloved hand as the guy pulls out a flashlight and turns it on.

  They descend. On the basement level another big metal door blocks the way, and for this, the guy has an old-fashioned skeleton key. “Tiens,” he says, handing Summer the light while he fits the key into the lock. The door swings open. They step into a dirt-floored corridor that winds back past many locked storage caves. It’s dank, musty, and black as the inside of a tomb. Wisps of cobwebs brush Summer’s face.

  At the very end of the couloir they stop before yet another locked door and the guy opens it, too, with a key. They follow him into a small storage room, past an empty, floor-to-ceiling iron wine rack and some dust-coated cane chairs. At the back wall, the flashlight beam reveals a narrow, downward-sloping opening behind an iron grate.

  “No way!” she says. Meaning that she has no intention of going in there. Kurt’s face is illuminated enough to see his disapproval.

  “Shhhh,” says the guy. He pulls the grate back and lowers it to the dirt floor.

  He and Kurt crouch down and slip in. There’s no light and she has no choice but to follow them. Inside the tunnel, which is about five feet by four feet, their breathing and steps echo. Her back aches from crouching over. Something scurries by.

  After what seems like forever, they come to an even smaller opening and Summer must climb down metal ladder steps in the side of a slimy, dripping wall. Then they drop to their hands and knees and slide through an even lower tunnel, which is wet and smells like fertilized mud. “Oh crap, oh crap,” she mutters. She’s afraid she’s going to lose it and start screaming.

  Finally they emerge, one by one, into a concrete-walled �
�gallery” where they can stand. Her knees are weak and she can still hear the beat of her pulse in her ears. They go left and now make good time, occasionally passing under a shaft through which flows cool air. There are about two or three inches of water and Summer’s leather boots and jeans are soaked up to her knees. The whole front of her is. Fortunately, the temperature is actually a little warmer down here than outside.

  Finally, voices, sound and light appear ahead. They come into a wide limestone-walled space where about thirty people lounge. Most of them have a light of some sort, or a hard hat, a flashlight, some candles. Summer notes many wine and liquor bottles, and of course, cigarette smoke.

  To her left, a small chamber opens and through it, she can see what looks like a four-foot-high wall made of small, round, loose stones. The guy shines the flashlight on them. Hardly stones, it’s a neat stack of hundreds of human thigh bones, the round, bulbous ends facing out. Several jawless skulls are arranged artistically in the piles at intervals.

  “Ohmigod,” she says.

  The catacombs. They’re in the freaking catacombs underneath the city: 186 mazelike miles of quarries mined in the Middle Ages for rock to build Paris. In the late 1700s as the cemeteries were filling up, they began storing bones down here. Or so her mini-guidebook says.

  She looks at Kurt, ever grinning. “You and your subterranean outings. What is it with underground spots?”

  Kurt doesn’t answer. Summer sits down and someone passes her a bottle of vodka.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Almost everyone is French. Or at least speaking French. There is one guy who appears to be about fifteen, but other than that, the underworld is peopled with twenty- and thirty-somethings. Cataphiles, ha. People who love the catacombs.

  “Come here often?” she says to the bearded guy next to her.

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you”—she points at him—“come here”—she points to the bones—“often?” She throws up her hands.

  “Je m’excuse mais je ne comprends pas,” he says. He doesn’t understand English.

  “Est-ce que … tu viens ici … souvent?” she tries.

  “Non.” His girlfriend pulls his attention back to her.

  “Fine. Cheers,” she says, and drinks.

  Summer wishes Moony were here. He would get a kick out of this. Maybe. Even if he hated it, she still wishes he were here. Fat chance of him ever doing anything with her again, though.

  To not be a total mooch, she passes her flask around but keeps an eye on it. Kurt has wandered off to talk to someone on the other side of the large space, which both annoys and relieves her.

  She studies the skulls and the patterns they make in the stacked bones, breathing in the dampness and cigarette and candle smoke, eavesdropping but hearing very little that’s comprehensible, and wondering what she’s doing here. This is a date. Right? And being out in this secret—romantic place?—in Paris with Kurt, this is fun, right?

  The guy who brought them walks by, his thin jaw set. He doesn’t notice her and heads out the way they came in. There appear to be several corridors off this area. The catacombs are supposedly labyrinthine.

  “Bye,” she says. Now where’s he going? And what’s his story in the first place? He’s a druggie, for sure.

  She wants to find a way out of here, too. The dampness makes her shiver. If she went back the way they came—and that thought stops her cold—those doors might be locked from the other side. Then what? She takes a deep breath to tamp down the panic that just got lit.

  Kurt catches her eye, then resumes talking to some lady.

  But why panic? She’s right where she needs to be. No one would ever find her if she crawled into one of these alcoves and curled up next to some bones and went to sleep. And didn’t wake up.

  But she would. And she would be hungry.

  She smiles. She could gnaw on some bones.

  She could chug enough alcohol to poison herself if all the cataphiles chipped in. Summer sighs. With her mighty tolerance, there might not be enough down here. She needs something sure.

  It’s a shame that guns are so hard to get in France.

  “No way,” she says to no one, hearing the opening notes of a track. “Kentucky Morris. ‘Why R U Here.’ From The Pain Circumference Tour.” She needs to turn Moony on to Kentucky because she’s caught him listening to some weird goofy Euro stuff.

  A Brit with the boombox nearby announces, “Followed his Sweet Darkness Tour.”

  “Outstanding,” says Summer. “Any friend of Kentucky’s is a friend of mine.”

  Just then, a stampede sounds down distant corridors. Everyone freezes. Followed by a loud pop and a hiss. The chamber floods with thick smoke made puke yellow by the lights. Yelling and the sound of heavy running bounce off the walls. A big guy in camouflage and a black ski mask materializes right before Summer. He bellows something. She can make out another masked guy floating in and out of the fog near him.

  The first one shakes his fist at her, sputtering in French.

  “Too many freaks,” she mutters. “Not enough circuses.”

  “Lie down!” yells her neighbor, already prone. “Bloody Skins.”

  Coughing, she does as she’s told. It’s all so surreal; she’s had enough to drink, plus she’s already emerged unscathed from the cramped bowels of Paris. She’s not that frightened.

  The predators work efficiently, going through every bag and pocket down there. It seems like there are more of them than partiers.

  A guy with an olive-green ski mask on his face goes through her backpack, right at her head. He roughly pats her down. The guy takes the rest of the cash in her jacket, her Swiss Army knife, and her dad’s silver flask.

  “NO!” she screams and scrambles to get up. He kicks her hard in the ribs with his steel-toed boots. An explosion of red fills her body and she curls up in the dust.

  Groaning softly, she opens her eyes, and the guy stretched out next to her warns, “Shhh.”

  Another girl cries out, and Summer closes her eyes and curls her body up tighter, as her side throbs purple pain.

  Then … from down past the pile of bones, three screeching whistles echo off the stone floors and walls. Footsteps run out. No one on the ground moves.

  “Halte, police! Arrêtez là!”

  “Les cataflics, à l’heure,” someone mumbles nearby. Flics are cops. “À l’heure” is “on time.” Thank goodness.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Hazy flashlight beams bounce around the space, and foot stomps echo down the catacomb corridors after the Skins. Summer pulls herself up and brushes off. Through the smoke, white helmets and dark uniforms appear. She coughs and wipes her face. Others do, too. Where’s Kurt?

  Someone pulls her by the upper arm. “Come on!” says her British friend quietly. “Best to avoid these wankers.”

  Blood pounds in Summer’s head and the pain in her ribs makes her nauseous. Yeah, all she needs is to get dragged to the city jail. It’s against the law to be down here. Seriously, where the hell is Kurt?

  She ducks behind the guy as they scurry past the stacked leg bones down a corridor. Darkness quickly envelops them, as the lights, smoke, and commotion of the party scene recede. She whispers, “Know where you’re going?” She could be making a big mistake, but it doesn’t really matter. She hears at least two other footsteps crunching on gravel behind them and she doubts they’re cops.

  “Yeah, vaguely. Name’s Richard. I’ve got a torch here somewhere.” He pulls a small flashlight from his jacket and illuminates their way. “It’s not too far. If we don’t get lost.”

  “Whatever,” says Summer, clutching her middle. “I’m Summer.”

  “Lead me out of the dark, up that path past the mark…” He recites Kentucky lyrics.

  “I know, right?”

  Very soon, they enter another dimly lit gallery. They pass a stooped, stick-legged old man in a red fuzzy coat walking his long-haired Dachshund. Richard warns him in French that les flics, not to
mention the Skins, are ahead, so he turns around. Two other guys catch up with them.

  After hiking in single file for what feels like hours, they come to an open door and several flights of concrete steps lit with fluorescent lights. Climbing makes Summer’s lungs and ribs burn and her head spin. They emerge from the side of a building onto a dark street, in god knows what part of Paris. It’s so late, it’s early. The two guys and the old man disperse. Summer and Richard wait at a taxi stand across from a run-down Vietnamese restaurant.

  Summer pushes the call button and sits down on the curb. Maybe Kurt got arrested.

  “Are you all right?” Richard asks.

  “I’m fine,” she says, strangely grateful for the throbbing in her side that’s been keeping her out of her tortured brain.

  “What were you doing down there by yourself?” he asks.

  “A guy led us down there, but he left,” says Summer. “I came with a friend.”

  “Where is she?”

  “He. No idea. Might have been injured.” Then she mutters, “Or he’s a massive jerk.” They’re all involved now, and he ditched her? Again?

  She has two twenty-euro bills in an inside zippered pocket in her backpack that the shitheads didn’t find. And amazingly her phone is there, too. She gives one of the twenties to her new friend since all his money was “nicked.” He sends her off in the first cab that comes.

  * * *

  The next day Summer doesn’t get up. Doesn’t go to school. Her hangover is crushing and she’s exhausted and hardly slept thanks to her injury. When she finally pulls herself from bed, it’s almost dark outside. She winces from the pain under her arm and to the left of her left boob. It’s red and violet. A rib or two may be cracked. And they got Dad’s beautiful flask! Her eyes tear up.

  She wants to leave here. Go back to the US. Stay with Aunt Liz or maybe even rent her own apartment. Something small and cozy, with solar panels. She would totally miss Moony, but she could invite him to visit.

  She hates Paris. Why is she even here? Whose incredibly stupid idea was this?