Jasmyn

by Alex Bell

  I bought my ticket from the rather surly man behind the desk and then walked down the seemingly never-ending staircase. The deeper I went, the more the air changed - becoming older, cooler, stiller. Finally I reached the bottom, sixty-five feet below the surface, and found myself in a brightly lit room with photographs and tourist information on the walls.

  It seemed sensible to learn all I could about the catacombs before rushing blindly into them so I stayed put and read every word there. It was mostly basic historical background I already knew from the guidebook and technical information about how a network of corridors so deep underground could be stabilised so as to remain safe.

  I left the room and stepped out into the poorly lit passageway. It was long and narrow and seemed to go on forever. Small stones crunched beneath my feet and the walls on either side were damp. I expected the air to be stuffy but it was surprisingly cool, if a little dank.

  There wasn’t a bone in sight. Or any living people either, for that matter. If the corridor hadn’t been the only way out of the first room, I might have thought that I had somehow gone wrong. The silence was a little oppressive and so was the shadowy darkness and the sense of being so far underground. I strained my eyes into the corners, constantly thinking that I’d seen something move there. Every now and then I passed gated doorways in the wall, through which I could see into smaller empty rooms, most of which seemed to be full of crumbling rock. I glanced up at the low ceiling carved out of the ground above me and tried not to think about what would happen if it were to collapse.

  It seemed like I must have walked across half of Paris when I finally came to the entrance to the ossuary. There I was immensely relieved to come across other people for the first time. The fact that they obviously all saw the catacombs as nothing more than a strange and macabre tourist attraction instantly made me feel more relaxed. I tried not to think about what the place would be like later on that night when I had been down here for hours and all the tourists were gone, probably enjoying themselves in restaurants and bars whilst I scrabbled about alone down here amongst the bones. I felt another surge of anger towards Liam in that moment for putting me through all this and that almost made me feel slightly better. Anger was far, far easier to cope with than grief.

  There was better lighting in this area, and I could clearly see the entrance to the ossuary, flanked by two stonework pillars. On the lintel above were inscribed the words:

  ‘Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la mort’ - ‘Halt, for this is the empire of death.’

  Even from outside, I could see beyond the entrance a solid wall of bones stacked from floor to ceiling. I walked in with the other tourists.

  The air smelled of dust and damp and age. I was stunned by the sheer staggering number of bones. Chamber after chamber was full of them leaving only a path through the middle just wide enough to walk along. If I were to stretch out my hands, my fingers would brush two solid walls of yellow, flaking bones. The weirdest thing was the way they had been arranged. I had read in the first room that when they had originally been brought down here, the bones had simply been dumped but, around the year 1810, skulls and long bones had been rearranged into neat walls, behind which the remaining ones were left in a jumble. But someone had decided that neatening the bones was not enough - they must be arranged into patterns as well. The skulls had been put together, often in neat little rows and sometimes in the shape of a cross or even a barrel-shaped display.

  I walked past hundreds and hundreds of skulls, aware that thousands - millions - more lay concealed in the darkness behind the ghoulishly artistic front layer. Most of them were missing their lower jaws, these having been broken off when they were originally moved or else had crumbled away since. There were so many of them that it was hard to believe that each and every one had once been a person like me - walking, talking, living - and now their remains were scattered around down here, mixed with the bones of millions of others.

  Every time a chamber led into another I kept thinking that must be it - I must have seen all the bones by now - there surely couldn’t be still more of them. But there would just be another room full of them and then another and another, stretching on into the dim, greenish light. I felt more and more disheartened with every passing step. How on earth was I ever going to find the swansong in all of this? The catacombs went on for miles. It was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack.

  Finally, they came to an end and all that remained were a couple of bell-shaped subsidence cavities stretching high into the rock above to showcase the type of erosion that limestone quarries often suffer from. I lingered in these, for the high ceilings made me feel less claustrophobic than the low, bone-filled corridors I had come from. Plus, the fact that the staircase leading up to the exit was nearby meant that there was a greater supply of fresh air there.

  I leaned against the cool rock and looked at the map contained in the pamphlet I had been given on admission to the catacombs. I could see from it that the entrance was a considerable distance from the exit as the tunnels stretched on for such a long way underground. I therefore needn’t have worried about the same staff remembering me and realising I hadn’t left.

  I took off my cap, shook out my long hair and shoved the hat in my bag before looking at my watch. It was quarter to five - only fifteen minutes before the catacombs were due to be closed up. I turned my face in the direction of the staircase that would lead to the exit, feeling the fresh air on my skin. This was my last chance to think better of my plan to stay the night. I was sorely tempted. After barely an hour I had already had more than enough of the dark and the dank and the bones. The thought of staying down in the catacombs for another seventeen hours or more made me feel trapped and claustrophobic and a little panic-stricken ...

  Hastily, I grabbed my backpack, turned away from the exit and walked back into the network of tunnels. I could feel myself weakening and I knew that if I allowed myself to dwell on it any further I would surely run up those stairs two at a time and never look back.

  It was relatively easy to remain unnoticed at closing time. I simply slipped into the first gated area I came to. It was rusty and unlocked and seemed to be there more for the look of the thing than anything else. It was a small, empty room carved out of the rock that didn’t lead anywhere. I made sure I was out of sight of the doorway and then sat against the wall and waited.

  Guards came down with torches, doing a search that they had probably done every day for years without incident. It seemed to go on forever and the awful thought occurred to me that perhaps they knew I was down there. After all, I’d had to walk through a turnstile after buying my ticket and presumably there was also one at the exit to keep track of how many people had come out. But I felt sure that they must get little discrepancies all the time with mothers picking small children up and walking through with them or kids messing around with the turnstile.

  I don’t know if the guards were more vigilant than usual that night because the turnstile figures didn’t add up or whether they always spent so long sweeping through the catacombs. Perhaps it just seemed to me as if they were down there a long time because my heart was hammering madly in my chest at the thought of being discovered there, crouched in the dark, having to explain what I was doing to angry French guards.

  At one point the beam of torchlight came rather close to my foot and my heart leapt into my mouth at the thought that one of the guards might actually open the gate and come into the room. But in another moment he had walked by and, soon, all the lights had been turned out and the catacombs were plunged into complete and utter silent darkness that made me realise I had never actually truly experienced either one before.

  I sat there with my fist in my mouth to keep myself from whimpering. I couldn’t see an inch in front of my face. The darkness was complete, pressing all around me in a most suffocating way with no moon or starlight to take the edge off. I had promised myself that I would wait half an hour before turning on my torch - just to b
e absolutely sure that all the staff had gone and I was alone. But it wasn’t so easy to judge the time when I was sitting there in the dark, unable to look at my watch. My ears were straining for any kind of sound, but the only thing I could hear was the steady drip of water landing on rock somewhere to my right.

  The minutes crawled by agonisingly and I tried desperately not to think about where I was, tried not to dwell on the fact that the bones of six million people lay behind me, though truth be told it wasn’t actually the bones that bothered me so much as the fact that I was trapped sixty-five feet underground, unable to get out until the morning even if I wanted to. There could be no changing my mind at this point. It was far too late for that.

  Finally I was sure that at least half an hour must have passed and my fumbling hand found the torch I had packed in my bag. I switched it on, blinking in the sudden light as I swept the beam around the room to ensure that all was as it should be. I then took one of the many candles I had packed out of my bag and lit it before securing it in a candlestick and setting it down on the floor. I did not want to use my torch all night for, even fully wound, it only provided a few minutes of light each time. And I didn’t want to risk wearing it out and finding myself alone down there with no means of light whatsoever. I switched the torch off, glanced at my watch and was shocked to see that it was barely ten past five. What had seemed like half an hour had been a matter of mere minutes.

  I sighed and leaned back against the cold wall, wishing the time away and promising myself that tomorrow night - wherever I happened to be - I would take a moment to relish the luxury of sleeping in a warm, comfortable bed.

  The hours dragged by so unbelievably slowly that, more than once, I wondered whether my watch might actually have stopped and had to check to make sure it was still going. At six o’clock I ate the food I had packed and after that I whiled away the time by playing the violin in my head. I didn’t move my arms because I didn’t want to make the candle flame flicker but in my mind I could clearly feel the fingering and bowing as I steadily went through all the major and minor scales, the chromatics and the arpeggios. This gave me something to focus on and made the time pass much more quickly. After the scales I went on to some pieces and - with my favourite music filling my head - was almost able to forget where I was and what I was doing. The little rocky room I was in almost started to seem cosy to me. There was something comforting about the fact that everyone else was locked out and no one could bother or upset me while I was here. I put on the extra jacket I had brought, leaned back against the wall and nodded off for a little while.

  I woke up just before nine o’clock. My whole body ached and I eased myself stiffly to my feet before bending down to pick up my bag and candle. It was now night-time rather than early evening. If the swansong was going to sing, it could start at any moment and so the sensible thing seemed to be to wander around the tunnels at regular intervals listening out for it. Besides which it would give me something to do and keep me from getting too cold and stiff.

  So I took my things and left the little room to walk through the death-filled chambers once again, the light from my candle flickering over the endless walls of bones. They were creepier by candlelight, but not as much as I’d expected for - like the graves above - they seemed more peaceful than sinister. I was sure that the swansong must be hidden behind one of the neatly organised facades in the unseen jumble behind. It would have been an easy enough thing for Liam to wait until no one was around and then thrust the black rose into the stack, knowing it would not be disturbed even if it were left there for a hundred years. And even if visitors to the catacombs managed to steal bones on occasion, these would only be loose ones on top of the facade, not anything harder to reach from behind it. I lingered longer at the walls that had some sort of plaque to distinguish them from the others, for Liam would have had to have some way of remembering exactly where he had hidden it.

  I had gone all the way around once and was about to sit down again for a while against a wall somewhere when I heard a noise - like the skittering of a bone being knocked from the top of a pile to land on the floor. I froze, paralysed to the spot, wondering if there could be anyone else down here in the catacombs with me. But I heard nothing more and so decided it had probably been a rat.

  But still, as I continued to wander about, I couldn’t shake the sudden sense that I was not alone. Although I walked back around all the chambers, I didn’t see a single disturbed bone. I could believe that a rat might have knocked one off but it would hardly have been able to pick it up again and put it back. If someone else was down there, it was possible that we might never run into each other: even if we were both walking around the whole time, the catacombs were so large and branched off in so many different directions that there was no set route to follow, and so we could easily keep missing each other all night.

  I was just trying to convince myself that the noise I had heard must have been a rat running over the bones when I heard voices. Panic-stricken, I blew out my candle and pressed my back against the wall, hoping smoke from the extinguished wick would go undetected. There were men - two of them - and the light from their torches cast a faint glow around me even though they were several chambers away. Their voices were muffled so I couldn’t make out what they were saying. But they sounded horribly familiar nonetheless and for a moment I hesitated, wondering whether I should stay put or whether I should creep quietly closer and try to overhear them without being spotted myself. I knew the sensible thing would probably be to stay where I was and do nothing but I was consumed with the urge to know who they were and what they were doing down here. So, stepping as silently as possible, I crept into the next chamber, careful to move slowly in the dim light lest I should crash into something and give myself away. I passed through into the room beyond and crept as close to the doorway as possible, pressing my back against the stone. From the sounds of it, the two men were standing just around the corner and now I was left in no doubt whatsoever as to who they were.

  ‘—need me to tell you where she went anyway?’ Jaxon was saying. ‘Isn’t she keeping you informed herself? You are working together now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not any more,’ Ben replied shortly.

  Dimly, I realised that Jaxon must have followed me when I’d left the cemetery the night before. I thought he’d already gone and had been too preoccupied with following the swansong to notice anyway. Trapped down here with them now, I could have kicked myself for being so stupid.

  ‘Why’s that?’ Jaxon asked, a little too eagerly. ‘What did you do to her?’

  ‘I broke her violin,’ Ben grunted.

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ Jaxon replied, sounding disappointed. ‘That hardly seems like anything very much.’

  ‘You don’t know how much she loved it,’ Ben said shortly.

  Hot anger rose up in my chest and my hands bunched into fists, my nails digging into my palms as I remembered the sight of my Violectra shattering beneath Ben’s boot. A monstrous act of petty spite and nastiness. How I hated him for it.

  ‘I thought perhaps you’d told her the truth after all,’ Jaxon said. Then, when Ben said nothing, he went on, ‘Weren’t you even tempted to? I know I would have been.’

  ‘Of course I was tempted to!’ Ben snapped. ‘But she would never have believed me.’

  ‘So you told her you had a sick fiancée instead.’ Jaxon laughed, the sound strangely out of place down here amongst the bones. ‘Did she believe it, do you think?’

  ‘She had no reason not to,’ Ben replied calmly.

  My hatred for him increased even further as I remembered how he had sat on the bed in the guest house in Germany, holding me in that tight embrace, a single crocodile tear trailing down my shoulder. Now I shuddered to think that he had laid so much as a finger on me, and anger tightened into a painful knot in my stomach when I thought back to how I had felt sorry for him and tried to comfort him. I should never have believed a word that bastard said.

  �
�I don’t think she knew you were the one who attacked Liam on their honeymoon,’ Jaxon remarked cheerfully. I could plainly hear the goading intent in his voice.

  ‘Did you tell her?’ Ben demanded angrily.

  ‘I’m afraid I did. I didn’t realise it was a secret, you see.’

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Ben snapped.

  ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’ Jaxon replied, mocking laughter in his voice. ‘You would have beaten the crap out of your poor little brother - and on his honeymoon too - if you thought you could have found the swansong on your own.’

  ‘I would have killed him on his honeymoon if I’d thought I could find the swansong on my own!’ Ben said in a low, harsh voice.

  I just about managed to suppress a gasp but my blood ran cold at his words. He meant it. I could hear it in his voice. My anger ebbed away to be replaced with fear. I’d hoped he hadn’t meant what he’d said to me in Germany about hating Liam. I’d tried to believe it was something he’d blurted out in the heat of the argument. But now he was calm and composed and talking quite coldly of murder.

  ‘I’m impressed by your self-restraint,’ Jaxon said. ‘I can’t say I would have done the same.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have got me what I wanted,’ Ben muttered.

  ‘Brought you one step closer to it, though,’ Jaxon replied. ‘With Liam out of the way there’d be nothing to stop you from getting to Jasmyn. If I were you I would have killed him on his honeymoon and had done with it.’

  ‘Well, I’m not you!’ Ben snarled. Then he added, in a quieter voice, ‘But if I could do it over again I’m not sure that I’d let him go a second time. He was going to die anyway. Perhaps I just have ... should have ...’ He stumbled over his words and trailed off, then I heard the clatter of a torch being dropped and there was a flicker as it went out.