Seduction

by Molly Cochran

  A monster.

  I turned around and doubled back to where the tunnel had branched, and plastered myself against the mold-covered wall. It was much darker here. My eyes had gotten used to a small amount of light. Now I was again as blind as I’d been when I first fell through the hole into this place.

  In the silence, I heard the creature loping toward me, invisible in the darkness.

  CHAPTER

  •

  FIFTEEN

  It was close enough that I could hear it breathing.

  Oh, God, I thought. Oh God oh God oh God . . . I didn’t know anything about fighting—especially fighting something big and hairy and grunting louder than my pig ever did.

  The pig! Except for a few euro notes in my pocket, it was all I had in my possession. Pressing myself against the stone wall, I ran my fingers up the little chain that connected the pig to my house key. I supposed I could stab the monster—or whatever the thing was—in the eye. That is, if I had any idea where its eye was. Meanwhile, I mentally scrolled through my inventory of magic to see if I knew anything that would give me an advantage in this situation.

  I did know how to call objects to me, and if I yelled “stick!” or “rock!”, I was sure those items would come flying in my direction. But I’d learned my lesson from calling for the pig: Rocks didn’t come with penlights, and I couldn’t see well enough in this darkness to be able to catch them once I called them to me. They could easily smack me on the side of my head or break my legs. No, I supposed the key would have to do.

  I closed my eyes. I could always think better with my eyes closed, and in this situation, sight wasn’t much of an option, anyway. Then I deliberately slowed my breathing, willing myself into the wall behind me, convincing myself that I was invisible.

  This wasn’t magic. It was something I’d done since I was little, trying to keep my dad from noticing me so I wouldn’t have to spend my evenings or weekends taking sample SAT tests or listening to CDs like Great Thinkers of the Eighteenth Century or Learn Romanian Now! Sometimes it even worked.

  So I was hoping and praying it would work now, as I disappeared into the wall.

  The monster was coming toward me, questing. He moved slowly, his feet shuffling, turning from side to side in the darkness. Then he sniffed deeply, and I knew he was trying to smell me.

  There wasn’t any more time. I jumped out with my key poised like a knife inside my fist. With a scream, I attacked, feeling the key strike flesh.

  The creature shrieked, and I attacked again, but this time I didn’t make contact. Instead, I felt him rolling at my feet, sobbing and whimpering in terror.

  “Hey,” I said, but he just kept crying pitifully.

  I knew it was my chance—probably my only chance—to get away, but I just couldn’t leave him suffering like that.

  “Gosh, I’m sorry,” I said, leaning over him. “Pardonnez-moi.” As if apologizing in his language would make up for stabbing him. Still, I didn’t have much experience with subterranean monsters. I didn’t know what language he spoke, or what I could do to make things better. I didn’t even know where I’d stabbed him. In the eye? God, I hoped not. In the darkness I felt for the wound inside his matted fur. He didn’t object.

  As it turned out, he wasn’t exactly covered with hair. It was really long, but actually, it just grew from his head the way it did with everybody. A stream of blood, from what I could tell by touch, seemed to be coming from his neck. Judging from the amount of it, he needed a bandage. I knew money wasn’t very sanitary, but that was all I had on me, so I slapped a euro note around the spot where it felt like the wound was bleeding the worst, and then I tore the bottom of my T-shirt to wrap it around his neck. I only hoped I got the right spot.

  “We need light,” I said. Then, translating in the hope that he might understand me: “lumière.”

  “Ah,” he said. At least that’s what I thought he said. I jumped backward into a crouch, key at the ready. He shuffled around some more, and I realized how stupid I was acting. I doubted very much that I’d have to fight him again, since I hadn’t fought him in the first place. I’d attacked him, plain and simple. He’d never done a thing except scare the bejezus out of me. For all I knew, he was just another lost soul wandering through the sewers, hoping to find a way out, just like me.

  The question was, how long had he been wandering? Maybe he’d been searching for an exit for fifty years. Maybe living in the dark had made him hairy. Maybe that was my fate too.

  Oh God.

  Just then, he lit a match, illuminating a small circle for a moment that showed his trembling hand trying to light a candle, which he held aloft. He was shaking so hard that I thought the match would go out before he finished the job, so I reached out to steady his hand. As the candlewick caught, I finally saw his face.

  The first thing I noticed about him, aside from the fact that he was human—and that was a big relief, let me tell you—was that he was old. Really old, maybe older than anyone I’d ever seen. His eyes were filmy with cataracts, and his skin was as spotted as a fawn’s. The white hair on top of his head was nearly gone, even though what grew on the sides hung down almost to his waist. Ditto his ears and nose. Well, those hairs weren’t down to his waist, but they were long, and there were a lot of them. In the tricky light of the candle, he might have passed for a yeti, or some fairy-tale ogre.

  But really, he was just an old man. He fumbled with the candle, then raised his hand with its swollen, arthritic fingers to touch the makeshift bandage I’d put on his neck.

  “Let me help you,” I said, tucking myself under his arm to help hold him up. “Where do you want to go? Ou voulez vous aller?”

  He gestured with the candle. With every step, I became more aware of his frailty, and of the seriousness of his wound. “I think we ought to go to the hospital,” I said in French, but he only smiled and shook his head.

  “My home is not far,” he said. “Thank you.”

  That made me feel like a total creep. I’d stabbed the poor old soul with a dirty key, and then staunched the wound with the equivalent of a dollar bill—possibly the filthiest thing on earth—and he was thanking me.

  “I’m really sorry,” I whispered. “I can’t tell you how—”

  “No, no. I surprised you.”

  Some excuse.

  “How far . . . ,” I began, but then I saw a glowing light off to the right. “Is that it?”

  Here? I wondered. Was this old man saying he lived beneath the sewer?

  He nodded.

  CHAPTER

  •

  SIXTEEN

  He lived in an alcove in the massive underground tunnel system. At one time, I guessed, it might have been a storage space for machinery or tools, although I couldn’t imagine what sort of construction went on before the sewers were built. As we followed the glowing light of the candle, I watched the centuries-old stone change color from black to sandstone beige. It had been scrubbed, I realized, probably by the old man himself.

  A few feet later, we walked through a short passageway into his living quarters. I was stunned.

  It was a huge space, illuminated by a hundred candles perched on rough stones that jutted out from the walls, lending a golden glow to the area. It was filled with beautiful furniture. There were chairs with carved wooden arms and a fainting couch upholstered in thick green silk, a velvet ottoman with tassels, and a small rosewood writing desk. There were also gorgeous vases made of porcelain so fine you could see light through them, an ornate gold clock, and a variety of boxes made of wood, crystal, silver, and stained glass. On the far wall hung a large portrait of a beautiful woman dressed in the style of the Renaissance.

  “This is . . . fantastic,” I whispered, looking around. There was a huge cherrywood case filled with leather-bound books, some decorated with gold leaf. On the writing desk was a pen made from an actual feather, sticking out of a faceted crystal inkpot.

  “I have lived here a long time,” the old man said, pe
eling off the euro note on his neck and looking at it.

  I ran over to him. “I’m sorry,” I said again. How could I have been so carried away with the man’s house—well, cave—that I’d forgotten he was injured? “Please let me help you.” I looked around for a sink, but there was none. The closest thing I could find was a gilt-edged porcelain basin filled with clean water. “Can I use this?”

  He held up a hand to stop me, but then relented with a sigh and sat down. There was a folded linen cloth near the basin, and I used that, dipped in the water, to clean his wound.

  It wasn’t that bad. I’d missed all the big blood vessels, apparently, because it had already stopped bleeding, but there was still dried blood all over him, not to mention the disgusting euro note and its cooties. “Do you have anything like . . .” I had to think. With Gram as a healer, I didn’t have much need of medicines. “. . . iodine?”

  He nodded and gestured toward an ornate gilded cabinet. From the looks of the rest of the room, I’d have thought the old guy’s medical supplies might have stopped at eye of newt, but to my surprise he was well stocked with first aid necessities, ointments, bandages, and tape, and even a bottle of wound wash. I guessed he must bang himself up against those exposed stones fairly often.

  He sat quietly as I applied the wound wash and then some Neosporin under a gauze bandage. “There,” I said, admiring my work. He smiled and patted my hand. It was such a kind, forgiving thing to do, considering what a jerk I’d been. I kneeled in front of his chair so I wouldn’t be looking down at him, and held his hand in both of my own.

  “I know it doesn’t do any good for me to keep apologizing, but . . . well, I’ll never forgive myself for hurting you like that—”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “You were frightened. It was natural. You thought I was a monster.”

  I swallowed. That was exactly what I’d thought. “No,” I lied. “You’re nothing like—”

  He laughed. “Of course I am. Who else would live underground, in a forgotten section of the carrières?”

  “The whats?”

  “Old limestone quarries, from the time of the Romans,” he said. “These tunnels were here long before the sewers were built. No one even knew they existed until 1774, when a cave-in swallowed up a number of houses in the middle of the city.”

  “Were there . . . er, a lot of people in those houses?” I asked.

  “I beg your pardon?” He frowned, his brows knitted.

  I told him about the bones I’d crashed into.

  “Oh, those!” He laughed, wheezing. “Yes, I’ll bet you were scared silly! Still, they’re less horrifying than when they were first placed there.”

  It seems that during the reign of Louis the Sixteenth, the city’s cemeteries had grown so populous that the ground, overloaded with corpses, had begun to fester and stink. In the interests of hygiene, the remains of the cemeteries’ residents were dug up under cover of night and “relocated”—that is, dumped—into one of a handful of street-level sewer openings.

  “It was used during the Revolution, too,” he said. “So many headless bodies, you know.” He drew a finger along his neck. “Guillotined.”

  I swallowed, remembering the skull I’d held in my hand.

  He laughed. “They’re quite sanitary now, I believe,” he said reassuringly. “Someone even organized a few thousand of them. Stacked them neatly and called them ‘catacombs’ for tourists to visit.”

  Ewww, I thought. I’d read about the catacombs, but I’d never thought of that ossuary as being filled with actual people. Dead people.

  “But that area is fairly distant. Where you were, one finds only random bones, the undignified remains of the dead who cannot complain of their ill treatment.”

  “Er . . . right,” I said. I cleared my throat. “So this place is beneath the sewers?”

  “Far beneath,” he said. “Although there are passageways into the sewers, and passageways to the street as well. One just has to know where to turn.”

  No kidding. “Do a lot of people come down here?”

  “Alas, the carrières have become popular with some of the youth. They come down here to be daring, to have parties. Fortunately, none has ventured as far as here.” He lowered his head and looked at me. “Unless you plan to tell them.”

  “Who, me?” That was a laugh. “I’d never have come down here in the first place if I hadn’t been tricked into it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Someone in the house where I live said she was taking me to see the sights of Paris, and then dumped me here. Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s all right. I know this may not seem like an ideal habitation to many,” he said, gesturing around the beautiful room. “Please, go on with your story.”

  I told him all about being double-crossed by Joelle and her stupid friends, hardly realizing that we’d been speaking French the whole time. There was just something about the old man—his easy acceptance of me, maybe, or the slowness of his speech, as if he had all the time in the world to listen to my tale of woe—that made me want to talk to him.

  “So,” he said, when I’d finished griping about Joelle. “What do you do in Paris, aside from wandering through the sewers?”

  I blushed. “I’m taking a summer course at the Clef d’Or,” I said.

  “The cooking school? Formidable! And how did you come to be interested in haute cuisine?”

  I told him about Hattie’s Kitchen and Whitfield—minus the magic, of course—and Gram and Agnes and my friends at school. And Peter. “He’s one of the main reasons I came here,” I confessed. “He said I was acting like his mother.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “Well . . . yes,” I said, and he laughed. I told him more about myself, about my dad and Chef Durant at the school, and about the strange people I’d ended up living with.

  “They’re all beautiful,” I said.

  He shrugged. “They are Parisiennes.”

  “Maybe, but I think it’s more than that. That is, looking good seems to be the only thing they’re interested in.” I told him how Sophie had made her daughter Fabienne drop out of school at fifteen. “They’re like some club or something,” I went on. “They don’t seem to do very much, but they’re mysterious. Even the servants don’t know anything about them, since they hire new staff every six months. It’s hard to figure them out.”

  “A puzzle indeed,” he said, hoisting himself out of his chair with difficulty. “May I offer you a cup of tea?”

  “Oh. Sure,” I said, catching up with him as he walked a few steps to a charcoal brazier that had coals burning in it. Even though it was June, it was cool in this place. He put a teakettle on top of the grate and, with great effort, shook out some loose tea into a pretty teapot. “Is this the only heat you have here?” I asked baldly.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” he said.

  “But what about winter?”

  He smiled. “I manage,” he said.

  He seemed to be busy concentrating on making the tea, so I wandered around the room, taking in the titles of the beautiful books that filled a wooden case.

  “Jules Verne,” I said.

  “A first edition. Oh, dear, we need lemons. Pardon.” He left the cave.

  One of the books looked particularly interesting. It was bound in pebbled leather, with a design of leaves in gold along the spine. I took it out and opened it to the first page. There was no title, no author, and no publishing information. It wasn’t even printed, but was handwritten in a beautiful script.

  He was born Jean-Loup de Villeneuve, third son of the Duc du Capet, in the year 1155 under the rule of Louis VII, it began in French.

  A handwritten novel? But who wrote it, the old man himself? Wouldn’t that be—

  Just then the binding of the book snapped in my hands. Oh. My. God, I thought as the book slipped from my fingers onto the floor, its pages fluttering like leaves around my feet.

  “No,” I moaned, picking up the pages a
s fast as I could. “Oh, nonononono . . .” I looked around wildly. I couldn’t give it back to the old man in this condition. I knew I could fix it—somehow—but I’d need a little time. Just a day or two, just—

  I heard his footfalls. I didn’t know what to do. What to do, what to do . . .

  Taking a deep breath, I stashed the book inside the back of my jeans and covered it with my T-shirt.

  “Here we go. Lemons,” he said, holding up two yellow fruits. “I keep perishable foods in a separate cave. You see, I have all the room in the world!” He laughed. I laughed harder. I laughed like a hyena, trying to cover up my shame and discomfort.

  With palsied hands he passed me an exquisite porcelain cup filled with hot, clear tea. “Forgive me. I have no sugar or cream to offer you.”

  “No problem,” I said, laughing some more. God, what a geek.

  We strolled slowly back to his favorite chair and placed our teacups on a tiny table of filigreed wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl doves. I pulled up the ottoman beside him and swigged down my tea in one gulp.

  “My, you must have been thirsty,” he said. “Would you care for another?”

  “Oh, no,” I said, waving away the possibility of staying any longer than I had to. I’d loved being here before I’d ruined the old man’s book, but now I just wanted to get away before I got caught.

  “Er . . . how’s the family?” I asked breezily.

  “Long dead,” he said.

  Definitely the wrong question. “Sorry.”

  “No need. I enjoy my own company, my books.”

  I felt my stomach churn.

  “I write, on occasion, the foolish thoughts of an old man.”

  He patted the arm of his chair. “I have the gift of time. That is something the young of the world do not understand. They want always to do, to act, to connect. But the old . . . we are content just to be. In that way we are like dogs, I suppose, living for the moment, salivating over an old bone that has no interest for anyone else.” He smiled sweetly.