by Jeremy Bates
Pascal called a break to study his map, and Danièle went on to tell me that from here on in the passageways became increasingly dense and complicated, and if we weren’t careful, we could easily become lost and wander aimlessly forever—which, apparently, was exactly what happened to one of the first ever cataphiles.
His name, Danièle said, was Philibert Aspairt. He was the doorkeeper of the Val-de-Grâce hospital. He entered the quarries via a staircase located in the hospital’s court. No one knew why for sure. Some suspected he was hunting for treasure. Others believed he was searching for the cellars of the Carthusian convent, under the Jardin du Luxembourg, to steal bottles of their famous Chartreuse. Whatever the reason, he was never seen alive again. Eleven years later, however, his remains were discovered in one of the quarry galleries. He was identified by the hospital key ring hanging from his belt. “You can visit his grave,” Danièle concluded. “He was buried where his remains were found, and a tombstone marks the spot. Many cataphiles made a pilgrimage there every year, where they light a candle to pay respect to his memory.”
“Have you been to the grave?” I asked.
She nodded. “Several times.”
“Are we going to pass it tonight?”
“Unfortunately, we are not going in that direction.”
A moment later Pascal stuffed his map away, said, “Vas-y,” and ventured into the small tunnel.
I gestured for Danièle to proceed next. “Ladies first,” I said.
I had no idea how long we walked for, but it felt like a very long time. This section of the catacombs was honeycombed not only with the traditional horizontal hallways, but shafts angling through the stone at zany angles. It was as if we were wandering an Escher drawing where the rules of physics no longer applied.
Moreover, the farther we went, the less graffitied and more desolate the tunnels became, so soon they all looked the same. Pascal had taken a piece of chalk from his backpack and was marking the walls with arrows, to make sure we could find our way out again. But getting hopelessly lost wasn’t my only concern. The ceilings and chambers here were crumbling and in shockingly bad shape, raising the concern of a potential collapse and cave-in.
Despite all of this, however, I had faith in Pascal’s navigating abilities to see us through safely. He threaded the maze with an uncanny confidence, seeming to rely as much on experience and features in the rock he recognized as he did on his trusty map. A few times, though, he made wrong turns, and we were forced to backtrack and try different routes.
It was hard to gauge how deep you were when you were underground, as there was no sky to reference. When I asked Danièle to guestimate our depth, she only shrugged and told me we were very deep.
Then, from ahead of us, Pascal issued an excited cry. We joined him a moment later at a dead end. He was already fussing over a jumble of stones and timber in one corner, moving them aside piece by piece. We joined the effort and soon cleared al the debris to reveal a symmetrical hole in the ground. A rusted foot ladder descended into bottomless blackness.
“Jesus, Rascal,” Rob said, whistling softly. “You went down there alone?”
“Yes, of course,” he said proudly.
“How much farther is it to the fucking video camera?”
“Not far. Just down the ladder, then a short walk.” He grinned. “And there is a surprise on the way.”
Pascal went first, and I volunteered to go next. I sat at the rim of the hole so my legs dangled into the abyss. Then with Rob and Danièle supporting me, I attached myself to the iron foot ladder. The rungs were cool to the touch, and rust sloughed off beneath my grip. I started down. The shaft was only a little wider than the width of my shoulders, which meant I had to keep my elbows tucked awkwardly into my sides. I felt as snug as a cigar in a tube case, and I tried not to think what would happen if one of the rungs broke free.
I guessed I must have descended a good thirty feet before the shaft opened around me. From there it was another ten or so feet until I reached the ground. My legs, I found, were rubbery from the stress of the descent.
I glanced up and saw a distant light: Danièle or Rob.
Pascal stood nearby, watching me.
“What?” I said.
“So you and Danièle—you like her, yes?”
Shit, I thought. Really? “Like her?” I said, playing dumb.
“You fucked her in the Bunker?”
“Listen,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “I don’t know what’s gone on between you and her in the past. But to my knowledge she’s single now. And what she and I do is none of your business. Okay?”
“She’s using you, you know? She just broke up with her longtime boyfriend. She is lonely. You’re convenient.”
“Thanks for the tip. I’ll keep that in mind.”
He glowered at me a beat longer, then stalked off into the darkness.
I stared after him. Fucking guy! You fucked her in the Bunker. Who said shit like that?
I should have told him, Yeah, I did, and it was fan-fucking-tastic.
When Danièle reached me a minute later, I was still fuming over Pascal’s gull to confront me like he did. “Wanna know what your buddy asked me?” I said.
She frowned. “What?”
“He asked me if I fucked you in the Bunker.”
“He asked you? What did you say?”
“What does it matter what I said?”
“Did you tell him it was true?”
“I told him it was none of his business.”
“What’s none of my business?” Rob asked. He was coming out of the hole in the ceiling.
“How ugly you are,” Danièle said.
Rob slid down the remaining distance, fireman-style. “Seriously, you talking about me?”
“No, Pascal,” I said.
“He heard Will and me making love earlier—”
“All right, Danièle, enough,” I said, cutting her off.
“Yeah, I heard you fuck bunnies too,” Rob said. “I was with Rascal. Couldn’t you have turned down the volume a bit, Danny?”
“It was impossible,” she said. “Will was too good—”
“Jesus,” I said, and started off in the direction my arch nemesis had gone. Danièle was crazy. She really was. Bragging about the sex we had to her brother-in-law?
I passed through a doorway into a cavernous chamber and came to an abrupt halt. Giant, soaring pillars, carved to resemble naked men and women, lined the four walls. The capitals supported a bas-relief frieze depicting more naked figures, these masked and dancing alongside winged, mythological creatures. Perched atop the cornice were dozens of ornamental gargoyles, their grotesque faces staring down at us.
“Holy Zeus!” Rob exclaimed from behind me. “What is this place?”
“Marveilleux,” Danièle said softly, stopping at my side. “Pascal told me about this room, but I never imagined… He thinks it was built by King Charles the tenth.”
“The king?” Rob said.
“When he was still the Comte d’Artois. He often held torch-lit parties—what he called fêtes macabres—in the catacombs.”
“Bullshit!”
“It is well documented, Rosbif. He invited all the ladies in waiting from the court in Versailles. It is rumored he built several grand rooms in which to host these parties. This was likely one of them.”
“Parties?” I said, studying the frieze. “More like orgies.”
Danièle nodded. “You are probably right, Will. The nobility of the Old Regime were a depraved lot. They also loved novelty. The fact they could dance and make love directly above millions of human remains would have been a thrill for them.”
“Directly above?” I said, surprised.
Danièle took my hand. “Yes, you must see this.” She led me to the center of the room. A stone staircase, built into the floor, circled away into darkness. “Pascal?” she called.
“Ici!” His voice floated up from below.
“Come,” she told me,
grinning.
My heart was beating fast in my chest as we started down the steps. They spiraled around a center column before terminating in the middle of a small stone island. My breath hitched audibly. Spreading away from us, for as far as the light from our headlamps would allow, was a sea of moldering bones.
“Bienvenue à L’Empire de la Mort,” Danièle whispered.
Chapter 29
EXTRACT FROM THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, DECEMBER 13, 2013
The Mystery of the Missing Skulls
In July, 2011, three British men were reported missing in the Paris catacombs. Two years later, the mummified remains of one of those men was discovered in a remote area of the tunnels. Now, in a final twist to this story, the decomposed remains of the two other men have also been found—and each was missing his skull.
The remains of Roger Hiddleston (24) from Bexley, London, and Craig Formby (25) also from Bexley, were located by French urban explorers—known colloquially as cataphiles—roughly ten miles from the remains of fellow doomed adventurer, Stanley Dunn (23) of Enfield, London.
According to police, DNA tests confirmed the victims’ identities. What authorities have not yet determined is why their skulls were missing.
Although the answer may never be known for certain, police captain Vincent Reno told French radio he believes the skulls were taken by cataphiles as souvenirs. People, he asserts, are fascinated with human bones. He points to the 1.7 kilometer catacombs museum open to the public at Place Denfert-Rochereau as an example, where every day security guards catch dozens of tourists attempting to smuggle bones out of the ossuary in their bags and purses.
“And, yes, I think some cataphiles wouldn’t hesitate to take the skulls of those two London men, who were fully clothed and obviously explorers like themselves. Because they have become desensitized to death. They see so many bones, there is nothing special to them anymore, nothing sacred. A human skull is something that would make a good paperweight, or a candle base. If you ask me, they are sick, they don’t belong down there, nobody does, and they need to face much greater prosecution by the law.”
Currently, specially trained police officers conduct regular patrols of the catacombs and issue a court summons to anyone they catch. Offenders risk fines ranging from sixty to one hundred euros.
Chapter 30
It was a dizzying montage of death on display: rotten femurs and cracked craniums and broken pelvises and nude jawbones and empty eye sockets that seemed to stare jocularly up at you. They were all shapes and sizes, all once part of living, breathing people. Artisans and aristocrats, peasants and children, revolutionaries and soldiers—now anonymous, disarticulated, individually forgotten.
Bones in a mass grave.
“Oh man!” Rob said, coming up behind Danièle and me. “Look at this shit! What do you and Rascal do down here, Danny? Surf the mosh pit of humanity’s dead?”
“I have never been to this ossuary before,” she said. “I have been to the popular one, beneath Montparnasse, and some others. But they are not like this, not this big…”
Pascal, I noticed, was a dozen yards away, kneeling at the edge of the island, his back to us.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Danièle called to him.
He mumbled something.
“What’d you find, bro?” Rob said.
Pascal got to his feet and came over to us. He passed what appeared to be a chunk of spine to Danièle and pointed to different lesions on it. “Malta fever,” he said.
“Fever?” Rob said, shying away. “Better not be contagious.”
“Vous êtes stupide,” Pascal chided. “You cannot catch anything from a bone.”
“How did that sucker catch it?”
“From an infected animal, probably their milk. I think he or she must have been a cheese maker.”
Danièle passed the vertebrae to me. It was slightly spongy, like old wood, and covered in a layer of grime. I passed it on to Rob and thought of hand sanitizer.
Rob turned it over a few times, the way you examine something not particularly interesting, then gave it back to Pascal, who stuck it in his backpack.
I frowned. “You’re taking it?”
“Oui. I need to study it more closely.”
“You can’t steal it.”
“I am not stealing it,” he said acidly, and for a moment I was bizarrely certain he was going to lunge at me. But the manic look in his eyes passed. “I will bring it back.”
“So which way now?” Danièle said quickly, too quickly, and I suspected she’d seen the look in Pascal’s eyes also. “Which way to the video camera?”
“Vas-y,” Pascal grunted, starting off.
“Whoa, wait up, boss,” Rob said. “I’m not walking over dead people.”
“It is okay,” Danièle told him.
“Okay? How would you like it, Danny, if a bunch of people went stomping around on your skeleton one hundred fifty years from now?”
“Whoever they once were, Rosbif, they are dead now. They do not mind if we step on them.”
“I’m with Rob,” I said. “It’s, I don’t know, disrespectful.”
Danièle waved vaguely. “Does any of this look respectful to you, Will? These people have been dug up from their original resting ground, their skeletons broken apart to make them easier to transport, and dumped into these rooms like garbage. They have already suffered much more indignation than us walking on them would cause.”
Apparently the discussion was over, because Pascal and Danièle set out across the bone field.
“Guess we don’t have a choice, bro,” Rob said, and followed.
I stepped where Rob stepped, to mitigate damage. Nevertheless, femurs cracked and splintered beneath my weight, and I wondered how deep the bones went. Five feet? Ten? More? I was having a hard time getting my head around the sheer number of dead. It made me feel not only mortal but insignificant. The ego liked to trick you into thinking you were the center of the universe, but in truth you were nothing but a dust mote in a never-ending shaft of dimming light. Really, I thought, how was my life, or Rob’s, or Pascal’s, or Danièle’s any different, any more meaningful, than the lives of all the lost souls beneath our feet? Like us, each of them once had dreams, fears, beliefs, agendas, a sense of self-worth…and look at them now.
Bones in a mass grave.
This train of thought wasn’t very cheerful, so I stopped with the introspection and concentrated on placing one foot carefully in front of the next. When we reached the far wall, we followed it left to a window that looked into another room filled with more bones. These were piled so high there were only a few feet between the uppermost ones and the ceiling. Pascal and Danièle climbed through the window eagerly, Rob and I less so. We crawled forward on our hands and knees, the carpet of brittle bones crunching beneath us, until we came to a crack in the ceiling.
I was the last to pull myself up and through it, relieved to discover that it opened into a regular stone hallway.
Everyone was several yards away, huddled close, discussing something of apparent importance. Danièle stepped aside as I approached, her eyes shining excitedly, and I was able to see what all the fuss was about.
On the floor at their feet, a bone-arrow pointed ahead into the darkness.
Chapter 31
“That was in the video!” I exclaimed, bending close to examine it.
“Yes,” Danièle said. “These are the hallways where the woman shot the last of her footage.”
Rob said, “Where she thought someone was following her…”
“Where Zolan was following her,” Danièle stated.
Pascal spoke in French and started off.
“He says we must hurry,” Danièle told me. “We are behind schedule. He has been late for class too many times before, and he cannot be late anymore.”
I succumbed to my curiosity, tugged up the left sleeve of my pullover, and checked my wristwatch. It was 4:17 a.m. This surprised me not because it was almost dawn, but beca
use I’d had no idea of the time whatsoever. For all I knew it could have been 1 a.m. or 8 a.m.
A short trek later we came to the first and only graffiti in this hallway. It was the painting of the stickman that the woman had paused to study in her video. The lines were quick, frantic, and there was little detail, not even a face. The arms and legs were spread wide, resembling someone making a snow angel.
“Spray paint,” Rob observed, scraping the paint with a fingernail.
“Who do you think made it?” I asked.
“Probably whoever made the bone-arrows.”
“Zolan,” Danièle said again.
“Give the guy a break, Danny,” Rob said.
“Why should I? He admitted he was here.”
“I’m sure a lot of people have been here.”
“Does it look like that to you? Where is the graffiti, the garbage? Where are the beer cans? There is nothing—nothing except some bone-arrows and this.” She waved at the stickman.
Rob shrugged. “That doesn’t mean anything. We’re not going around spray painting the place, are we?”
Danièle folded her arms across her chest. “Why are you protecting him, Rosbif? Did his vodka poison your brain?”
“You frogs have to get over your prejudices and not judge people based on how they look.”
She scowled. “I told you not to call us that.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s not fair to amphibians, I forgot.”
“Vous êtes une pomme de terre avec le visage d’un cochon d’inde!” Danièle fumed.
Pascal continued on. Rob, laughing, went with him.
“What did you say that was so funny?” I asked her.
She seemed put out. “It was not supposed to be a joke. It was an insult.”
“What did you call him?”
“A potato with the face of a guinea pig. My mother used to say it to my father…before he left her.”