by JP Delaney
My attacker’s full name was Glen Furman. He was a trainee mortician, the police quickly discovered, which was how he knew enough about makeup to pass himself off as a hair and makeup assistant. He was also obsessed with Les Fleurs du Mal. They found a dozen copies, heavily annotated, in his apartment.
In his makeup case was a digital camera, set to upload images directly to Necropolis.
By the time the police were done with me, it was the next day. Exhausted, I went and joined the rest of the cast in the rehearsal studio, where they were deciding what to do next: whether to try to put the production on somewhere else, or cancel.
Laurence thought we should cancel.
“If you think about the play’s central question,” he argued, “it’s the one the prosecutor puts to Baudelaire at the trial: What if your poems inspire even one person to do evil? What’s your responsibility then?” He looked around at the rest of us. “What if, by staging the play, we help create another psycho like Furman? How could we live with ourselves then?”
“Claire?” Aidan said quietly, turning to me. He too looked tired. “What’s your view? You’re the one who’s been most affected by this.”
I didn’t answer for a moment. For some reason I had a sudden, vivid memory of the day I first arrived at Gary and Julie’s house. I’d been thrown out of my previous foster home after just a few weeks, and everything I owned was in garbage bags. Because, while there was always money for social services to pay for a taxi to get me from one foster family to another, there was never any money for suitcases. Even though traveling—moving on—was what I mostly did, as a kid.
I remember lifting one of the bags and realizing that, if they could, social services would have put me in it too, and thrown the whole lot away. Because that’s all I was to them. Garbage.
“I think we should do it,” I told Aidan. “We’ll never get another opportunity like this. At least, I won’t.”
I could see them all looking at me. As if I was some kind of monster. But the fact is, I was right. Whereas Laurence was just mouthing platitudes he’d probably read on Twitter.
Aidan put it to a vote. I was the only one who wanted to go ahead.
Patrick took me home. And that’s when I finally collapsed, retching and crying, replaying the shooting over and over in my head. Because it turns out that the one thing they never get right in movies is death. Human beings don’t just clutch themselves and lie still so the action can go on around them. The body doesn’t want to die. It won’t give up until long, long after the point where you know it’s going to have to. The body bleeds and twitches and gasps for breath. The body fights, even harder than the paramedics who are rushing to save it. The body refuses to accept the inevitable.
Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? I spoke those words on stage once, when I was sixteen. I had no idea back then what they really meant, even though people said my performance was brilliant.
Of all the images looping in my head, the one I can’t free myself from isn’t the moment I shot Glen Furman the first time, because that barely slowed him down. It’s the second time I pulled the trigger, when he sank to his knees in front of me. His lips moved—he was trying to say something, but my bullet had punctured his lung and his voice had no pressure behind it to speak the words: It was just an empty hiss, like air escaping from a balloon.
That’s what I feel like now—empty, hollowed out, as if there’s nothing left inside.
98
“We’ll go to Europe. I’d like to show you Paris.”
All I want to do is sleep, but I can’t. “You forget, I came from Europe. I went to Paris on a school trip when I was fourteen. Me and another girl bunked off to spot ladyboys in the Bois de Boulogne.”
“This is different.” Patrick strokes my hair tenderly. “I’ll show you where I hung out as a student. When I first discovered Baudelaire. It’ll be good to get away. We can talk properly then. There’s something I want to ask you. But I don’t want to do it here.”
Something about the way he says it makes me think he means more than just idle chitchat. But that’s okay. One consequence of Glen Furman’s death is that Patrick and I are finally free of any suspicion of each other.
Besides, I think I can guess what Patrick wants to ask me in the City of Love.
“Well…That does sound nice.”
His hand continues to smooth my hair. “What did it feel like, Claire?”
I don’t pretend I don’t know what he’s referring to. “Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“I felt proud, first of all—proud I’d reacted so fast. That was because of Paul’s improv games, I think—going with the moment, not stopping to analyze the situation. I thought—” I glance up at Patrick’s face, almost ashamed to say this, but I know now that he loves me for me, that I can trust him with the very worst things inside my head. “I pulled the trigger and I thought, I played that well.”
“And afterward?”
“Afterward, I was horrified—both at what I’d done, and my own reaction. But that didn’t last long. And then I felt…” Again I stop, wondering if I can really tell anyone this.
“Yes?” he prompts gently.
“I felt real,” I say. “After I killed Glen Furman, I felt more real than I’d ever felt before.”
Being truthful, with someone you trust. There’s no feeling like it in the world.
99
Five days later, we fly to Paris.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Patrick says as he drives us to the airport.
Something about his stillness, the way he doesn’t take his eyes off the road, tells me this must be important.
“Yes?” I say, when he doesn’t immediately continue.
“A long time ago, when I was in college, I had a girlfriend. She was beautiful and intelligent and I worshipped the ground she walked on. Or at least, I thought I did.”
He stops, gathering his thoughts.
“Then, one evening, I saw a girl. Standing there, beside the road. A prostitute. Something made me call out to her…It was a revelation. Suddenly I was free to do all the things crammed inside my head. And she matched me. Anything I dreamed up, she pushed me to go further. I was obsessed by her.”
We’re passing through a tunnel now, the sodium lights overhead strobing his face. He doesn’t appear to notice them, his eyes fixed on something far back in the past.
“Go on,” I say quietly.
“One night it went too far. An accident. She knew the risks we were taking. She just got—unlucky.”
His hands on the wheel are rock-steady, his speed unwavering. But I can see the tension knotting his shoulders.
“She died,” he says.
I can’t speak. Get in touch with your feelings, Paul used to say. But what if you don’t know what you feel? What if it’s all too much?
“I’m telling you now,” Patrick adds, “because I don’t want there to be any more secrets between us. And because you have a choice. In my bag, along with two tickets to Paris, there’s a one-way ticket to London. If you want, you can fly straight back to your old life. Or you can stay with me. It’s up to you, Claire. But before you decide, know that I love you.”
We exit the tunnel. For a long time I stare out of the window, at the endless urban sprawl as it flickers past.
ME
I want to stay with you.
And I smile at him, happy. Because it turns out the only thing better than sharing your own worst secrets is when the person you love shares his with you.
100
Patrick’s booked us into a tiny hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, a quiet haven of eighteenth-century elegance. I unpack, then relax in the vast white bath while he goes out.
When he comes back, he refuses to tell me where he’s been. “Making arrangements,” he says cry
ptically when I try to press him. I think I glimpse the square outline of a ring-box in his pocket, and don’t ask again.
The next day he takes me on a tour, his own personal itinerary of Baudelaire’s life. The Hôtel de Lauzun, where Jeanne and the poet lived together. Clésinger’s nude statue of Apollonie at the Musée d’Orsay. Les Deux Magots, the famous bar where Baudelaire and the other bohemians gathered to drink and argue.
In the afternoon we visit Patrick’s haunts from his student days—the Left Bank, the Café de Flore, and, best of all, the tiny cobbled streets of Little Africa, where we eat couscous and drink rough red wine from unmarked carafes. There are hookahs in the café windows, their mouthpieces tipped with silver foil, and in one he shows me how to pull the hot tobacco through a bubbling bath of arrack, leaving me dizzy and light-headed.
“Wait here,” he orders, and goes to the back. When he returns, it’s with an unmarked bottle.
“Absinthe,” he explains, pouring two shots of lurid green liquid. “Just to complete the experience. It contains a mild hallucinogen.” He takes a spoonful of sugar from the bowl, dips it into the liquid, then holds it over the candle. It starts to bubble, and he stirs it into the absinthe.
“Will it give us a hangover?”
“Of course. But, unlike Baudelaire, we have access to ibuprofen. Salut!”
“Salut,” I echo. The rest of the afternoon is a blur; a vague recollection of pulsing colors, roller-coaster vertigo, Patrick reciting the poetry he loves while my heart expands seamlessly, like helium.
* * *
—
That night, he tells me to dress warm.
“Why?” It’s a sunny evening, much warmer than the chilly fall we’ve left behind.
“We’re going somewhere cold.” He picks up a backpack.
He tells the taxi driver to take us to the cemetery at Montparnasse. After the cab drops us off, we walk through a pair of massive stone gates into a park, neatly laid out with roads and avenues of trees. But the graves between the avenues—more than thirty-five thousand of them, Patrick tells me—are a riot of different styles, from gothic to art nouveau.
Patrick leads the way to a quiet spot near the center. “Baudelaire has both a grave here and a cenotaph—a burial monument,” he explains. “This is the cenotaph.”
It’s a white marble sculpture, eight feet high. An ambiguous figure, half angel and half devil, stares down at an effigy of the poet on his deathbed. Scattered across the stone are a dozen or so Métro tickets, each one weighed down by a pebble.
“This is how people here pay their respects. To show they’ve made a special trip.” Patrick slips our boarding passes from his pocket and stoops to add them to the pile.
Next we visit the simple grave where the poet’s remains are buried beside his mother’s, then leave the cemetery and continue along the Rue Froidevaux, stopping at a small gate of rusty iron bars set into a wall. Beyond it are steps that look as if they lead down into some kind of cellar.
Patrick produces a key and opens it.
“We’re in luck. I was worried they might have changed the locks.” He takes two flashlights from his backpack.
“Where are we going?” I ask as we step inside.
“Into the catacombs.” Carefully, he relocks the gate behind us, then clicks his flashlight on and gestures for me to go ahead. “There are dozens of entrances like this. They’re kept locked, but keys are available on the black market. Students sometimes hold parties down here.”
I descend the steps. A faint cool breeze wafts from the darkness, bringing with it a smell of dry, musty decay. And an absolute, whispering silence. “I can’t hear any parties.”
“You’re unlikely to. These tunnels stretch for over two hundred kilometers.”
By the light of the torch I see a rock ceiling overhead. There’s a kind of gray, chalky gravel underfoot. The only sounds are the crunch of our footsteps and the dripping of water.
“These were quarries originally, some dating back to Roman times,” Patrick’s voice says behind me. There’s no echo, the sound somehow absorbed by our surroundings. “It was only in the eighteenth century that they had the bright idea of moving the cemeteries down here.”
He shines his torch at the space we’re passing through. At first it seems quite narrow. Then I jump. What I’d taken for walls are actually piles of human skulls, blackened with age.
“There are the bones of six million Parisians in this part of the tunnels,” he adds. “It was one of Baudelaire’s favorite places.”
We walk through cavernous stone chambers as high and broad as churches. Gradually we leave the boneyard behind. At last Patrick stops.
“This way,” he says, gesturing.
We’re near some more steps, carved out of the rock. Below us is a pool of crystal-clear water, perfectly still. Patrick leads the way down, then scoops up a handful, letting it dribble through his fingers.
“When the quarrymen needed to clean themselves, they simply dug down to the water table. It’s purer than Evian. And twice as old.” He takes a small silver candelabra, a towel, and a bottle of champagne from the backpack.
“Are we going to bathe?” I ask as he lights the candles.
“Yes. But not yet. There’s something else I want to show you first.”
I pick up on the tension in his voice. This is more than a sightseeing trip, I realize. It’s a kind of performance, and I’m the audience. I allow myself to go along with it, to empty my mind of everything but the unfolding of his ritual.
Leaving our things, we walk down increasingly narrow passageways before coming to more steps. Again we descend. We’re in a kind of cul-de-sac now, a cavern the size of a chapel, hewn out of the rock, with several smaller chambers leading off it. It’s utterly silent. By the light of the torch I see two more backpacks, propped against the wall
“Are those for us?” I ask.
He nods. “Provisions.”
“Is that what you were arranging last night?”
“In a manner of speaking.” He shines his torch around the vaulted rocky ceiling. “We’re directly under his grave now. I’m glad you’re here, Claire. This is a very special place to me.”
He goes into a side chamber. It fills with warm yellow light as he lights a gas lamp.
“Well, I think it’s great,” I say, looking at the bare walls. “Very hygge.”
There’s no reply. Then I hear a noise. It sounds weirdly like a sob.
“Patrick?”
There’s no reply. I walk through to the far chamber.
“Hello?” I say cautiously. “Hello?”
Suddenly, without warning, two hands scuttle from the darkness toward my feet. I leap back, gasping. The hands are gone, back into the shadows. But not before I saw they were bound together with a strip of cloth.
Patrick appears noiselessly behind me, holding the gas lamp.
“Patrick, what’s going on?”
He lifts the lamp. It illuminates a woman, young and dark-skinned, crouching on the floor. Her legs are tethered, the end of the tether attached to an iron bracket in the wall. Another strip of cloth is tied across her mouth.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. I feel dizzy. There’s only one possible explanation for what’s happening here, but my brain’s refusing to process it, to accept that everything I thought I knew was wrong.
“It wasn’t only Glen Furman who met like-minded people on Necropolis,” Patrick says calmly. “It’s a surprisingly thriving community. Our interests may be niche, but the Internet has allowed us to find one another. And, sometimes, to help one another. I have friends in Paris who were only too pleased to make this arrangement for me.”
“Who is she?” I say, horrified.
Patrick doesn’t even look at the shaking girl. “Her name’s Rose, I believe. She’s nobody important. Exc
ept to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’ll be your first,” he says simply. “Just as that girl beside the road was mine.”
“Oh no,” I say, horrified. “You can’t possibly think—”
“It was a similar test that Stella failed. I loved her so much, you see. But she couldn’t accept me once she found out. She wasn’t as strong as you are.”
“You killed her,” I whisper. “You killed her because of what she knew.”
“Yes, I killed her. But not because of that—I knew she was too frightened to go to the police. I killed her because of someone I met that night. A girl, in a bar. She read with me, one of the poems. And her voice…It was a perfect moment, so full of promise, of possibility. That was when I knew Stella had to die.” He takes a step toward me, his pale eyes fixed on mine. “I knew as soon as we met that you were someone extraordinary, Claire. The one I might share everything with. But now you have to prove it. To show me you can do this.”
“I can’t. Patrick, I can’t—”
“But you already did,” he says reasonably. “You killed that poor, deluded boy. You said yourself, it made you feel real. I’m offering you that feeling again. But you can’t imagine how much more intense it will be this time.”
“Patrick, please…”
“So now we have to play the ultimate trust game,” he continues as if I haven’t spoken. “You have to kill her. And if you don’t…Can you see the risk I’m taking, Claire? That I might have to lose you. Just as I had to lose Stella.”
101
I feel sick. I’ve been so stupid. I’d thought Patrick was bringing me here to propose. But all this time, he was bringing me here to kill.
“Patrick, I can’t,” I repeat.
But already a small, terrible part of me is thinking, Can I?
“You can, my love. You can. I know what you’re capable of.” His voice is low and calm, hypnotic. “I’ve watched you. Tested you.”