Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

by Brabazon, James

  ‘OK,’ he conceded, ‘that is good. But they’re … you know …’ He looked down. ‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yup,’ I replied. ‘As doornails. But there’ll be more of them. A lot more. And nearby. Trust me.’ He kept looking at the patch of muddy chalk between his feet. ‘Can you stand? We need to move. The more distance between us and them the better.’ No reply. ‘Do you know the tunnels? Properly, I mean.’ He was zoned out now, unresponsive. I raised my voice. ‘Baaz?’

  ‘Ah, yeah.’ He came to with a jolt, tilted his head back, blinked and looked at me again. ‘Yeah, I know the tunnels.’

  ‘So, let’s go.’

  I pushed up off my haunches, and held out my hand again. We grabbed each other’s wrists, and I hauled him to his feet. I felt the bullet wound in my shoulder, and winced. We stood in front of each other and he sized me up, nervously.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  I’d seen that look before, and given it myself a few times, too. However screwed he was because of me, it was dawning on him that he needed me, too.

  ‘I’m good,’ I nodded. ‘Really.’ I forced a smile over the top of the deep, throbbing pain spreading inside my shoulder. That seemed to relax him and he started to look around the tunnel, getting his bearings.

  I checked that the grenades were secure in my pockets, that the Glock was in my jeans – and that the condom bundle was still intact. Then I remembered with a jolt that I’d forgotten to seal up the hundred-dollar bill with the passport. I slipped my finger into the ticket pocket of my Levi’s, and felt the damp bump with relief. Finally I freed the torch from the Picatinny rail and clamped it between my teeth, examining where the ricochet had hit the M4. I dropped the magazine and worked the charging handle with the rifle turned on its side. A spent cartridge case fell out into my hand – its lead in the guts of the attacker who’d brought the roof down. I looked inside the breech, and examined the upper receiver. Then I saw the problem. The gas return tube had been ruptured forward of the chamber, which meant there was not enough pressure to cycle the bolt. It would still fire – but I’d have to recock it manually after every shot. Effectively, the rifle was as much use as Doc Levy’s old Martini–Henry – which was to say, good enough. I checked the integrity of the barrel and the suppressor, put the magazine on, and chambered a round. I hesitated for a moment, then gave the flashlight to Baaz.

  ‘Thanks.’ He flicked it on. If you need someone on side, show them you have faith in them. It’s reassuring to be trusted. ‘Cool. You don’t need it for your …’ he tailed off and pointed to the M4.

  ‘For the rifle? No. You know your way around. So you’re going to need it. Because you’re going first.’ He smiled. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘if anyone shoots at us, they’ll aim at the torch.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘OK, let’s go.’ We shuffled into the main tunnel. I slung the M4 over my shoulder and drew the Glock.

  ‘No, but seriously.’

  ‘Yes, but seriously. Let’s go.’

  ‘Go fucking where?’

  ‘Montrouge,’ I said. ‘The cemetery.’

  He turned around to face me again, staring in disbelief. ‘No way.’

  ‘Listen.’ My voice was stressed, too forceful. He recoiled. ‘Listen, Baaz,’ I tried again, softening. ‘I need to get out of the city, out of France. I can’t explain more than that. If you can get me west of Place d’Italie, I can get myself out. I’ll find the way.’

  ‘How?’ he asked, incredulous.

  ‘I cut waypoints down here when I was a kid. I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t. No offence, but that must have been, like, years ago?’ I shrugged. ‘Montrouge is messed up,’ he added excitedly. ‘A hundred metres of tunnel came down before Christmas. What didn’t collapse, flooded.’

  ‘There’s no way?’ I asked, thinking, There’s always a way.

  He shook his head emphatically.

  ‘It can’t be done. Trying to get out there would be suicide.’

  ‘Staying down here is suicide. As soon as those two dead guys fail to check in with the rest of their team, a tsunami of shite is going to flood these tunnels.’ I looked around at the passage walls, pointlessly. ‘Fuck!’ I could feel my temper fraying in exasperation. I breathed deeply and composed myself. ‘Can they seal the catacombs? I mean, completely cut them off?’

  ‘No,’ Baaz replied. ‘Impossible. For a start there could be dozens of cataphiles down here right now, maybe even hundreds.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know, people who come exploring at the weekends, like me. Tourists, students.’ He paused for a moment. ‘All sorts of weirdos.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So, if you sealed the entrances, we’d die. There are always people down here, so the cops always have to leave exits open. They’d be done for murder otherwise.’

  I decided not to press the point that the people after me – after us – weren’t overly concerned about their rap sheet.

  ‘OK. If not Montrouge, where? We can’t use an exit the police know about.’ He thought for a moment, twitching the fingers of his left hand as if tapping an invisible keyboard. ‘Baaz,’ I urged him, ‘we really need to move.’

  I started to pace up and down, hanging on to the coat-tails of my temper.

  ‘Montparnasse,’ he said eventually. ‘There’s an exit there, but, ah …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But it’s going to be mushkul.’

  17

  ‘Mushkul’ sounded OK until Baaz explained, as we kept up a steady jog south-west through the tunnels, that it was Punjabi for ‘about as extreme as it gets’.

  While I tried and failed to imagine what he might think was worse than nearly being drowned, he also explained that more of the tunnels south of the Place d’Italie had been walled off since my teenage excursions, so we couldn’t simply loop around it. We had two options: take a long detour south, or cut straight under the great traffic junction – and risk another confrontation. The men who’d found him, he thought, had most likely entered via the Place d’Italie Métro station.

  Surviving another shootout underground would be not so much a matter of skill and training as chance. As soon as we went up against someone with night vision, we couldn’t hide. If we were caught in a long stretch of tunnel, we’d be mown down before we could turn around. I didn’t even want to think about the damage another grenade strike might do.

  We headed south.

  As the possibility of using my father’s waypoints receded into fantasy, the reality of my reliance on Baaz grew sharper. He twisted around fragile columns, slithered under low passes, directed me left and right – pointing out where flooded tunnels breached at ankle height and where to jump the metal-spiked shafts that yawned wide in the passage floor. He was fit and fast, but, like most people who don’t train for it, had little upper body strength and struggled to pull himself up where there was no foothold to boost him. He was alert, though – stopping constantly, listening, picking out the distant murmur of voices. At one junction he just stood still and sniffed the air. I asked what he was doing.

  ‘You can smell the cops before you can see them,’ he said. ‘Their aftershave.’ Here and there throughout the old quarries police he called the ‘catacops’ patrolled looking for trespassers. All entry to the catacombs was forbidden. And although the consequence of being caught was ordinarily only a small fine, the implications for us of being seen by the patrols were potentially fatal – for everyone. But the cat and mouse game the cataphiles played with the cops, he said, gave us one massive advantage. Although the people who explored that vast random city of the dead didn’t like strangers, they hated the police – and the system they thought they stood for – even more: no one who saw us would ask us who we were, or what we were doing. Anarchists, ravers, students, dreamers, lovers, potholers, cave divers, misfits, thieves and simply the downright curious – anyone and everyone could be found underground. I
llegal bars hosting massive parties, Baaz told me, and even a fully functional cinema had been carved out in the inverted utopia that ran wild deep below the chic boulevards above. Graffiti, sculptures and elaborate shrines marked the waypoints of a world that I’d imagined I could navigate but that would have swallowed me without trace. I considered this, too: my father’s route map might not have led me out of the catacombs, but it had led me to Baaz – which, right then, seemed like the next best thing.

  Several times a light at the end of a cross tunnel saw me raise the Glock in expectation of trouble. But each time Baaz waved my hand down.

  ‘Carbide,’ he explained. ‘They’re explorers. The cops use LEDs like yours. It’s cool.’

  The challenge of getting us to the ancient necropolis of Montparnasse gripped him obsessively. He didn’t ask me about myself; I asked nothing more about him. The fact that our clothes were soaked and steaming, that we were filthy and scuffed and only alive by the thinnest of margins, weren’t things he was ready to talk about, now or maybe ever. If he was in shock, he was still functioning; if he wasn’t in shock, he was, frankly, a freak. I was in shock. But Baaz, he just turned and turned again, until the level of the floor started first to ascend and then climb sharply. We were getting nearer to the surface. We branched away from the main tunnel, clambered through an antechamber furnished with a wax-smeared stone table, and then made a hunched thirty-metre walk to what looked like a dead end.

  In fact, we’d reached a low arch in the tunnel wall. He killed the light. I tensed. We stood next to each other in deep, impenetrable darkness.

  ‘What is it?’ I whispered, pushing the pistol up and out with both hands into the pitch black. ‘Where?’

  ‘Forward,’ he replied, voice tense with expectation. ‘Crouch. Slowly.’

  We inched onwards. I felt the stone of the arch brush the length of my spine. I kept the Glock’s barrel half an arm’s length in front of me and felt above my head with my left hand. Stone. And then void. I swept the same hand down and left, making contact with Baaz’s right arm. I held it fast and took another step.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, almost inaudibly.

  But I could hear nothing. It was the most profound silence I’d ever experienced. Quieter than the jungle before dawn; quieter than the caves in Sierra Leone; quieter than the lake water that lapped at the edges of my dreams. We stood for a few seconds like that, me clutching his arm, engulfed in nothingness.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ he said at last. ‘Just look.’ And with that he flicked on the torch. I lurched forward, finger tensed on the trigger. But no shot sounded. We were completely surrounded – encircled by hundreds, thousands of people. But Baaz was right: there was no one to shoot at.

  Skeletons piled up around us. Femurs and tibias; humeri and ribs; and row upon row of uncounted skulls stacked high. The chamber must have been twenty metres across, but so densely packed with bones that the circle clear enough to stand in was less than five metres wide. Baaz looked at me, for my reaction, and then played the LED slowly across the ancient faces staring at us.

  Here we were, fighting for our lives, standing in the centre of a mass grave. For an instant I thought of the dead I’d left behind me, the piles of bodies that marked the waypoints in my journey from orphan to assassin. How much space would they take up? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wasn’t ready to join them. Not yet.

  ‘Just for kicks,’ he said. ‘If you come in with the light on, it’s not the same.’

  I said nothing. The shadows cast by the blue-white beam had the curious effect of making the mandibles of the skulls appear to work, grinding jaws which had not tasted meat for centuries. Coated with fur and mould and cavern slime, long bones stuck through smashed pelves. Finger joints crunched underfoot like pea gravel on the Devil’s driveway. Cave-slime ringed the eye sockets – glistening emerald irises winking back in the torchlight.

  I spun around the illuminated epicentre of that empire of the dead, avoiding their gaze, searching for the exit Baaz had promised.

  ‘Here it is,’ he said, lighting up the far corner. ‘I told you. It’s crazy, isn’t it?’ He’d lit the tiniest of apertures, a one-foot by two-foot opening where the sweep of decaying bones curved up to meet the ceiling. ‘No one has ever been up it,’ he said.

  And I could see why.

  It was the chute down which the cemetery above had been emptied into the limestone cavern below. Like a macabre calcified waterfall, the remnants of the long dead spewed out from its mouth, engulfing the room with the mortal remains of generation upon generation of Parisians. At first the bones had been sorted and stacked, filling the charnel house with concentric rings of partial skeletons. At the end, though, it looked like the last deposits of upwards of a thousand bodies must have just been tipped into the gallery below.

  I unslung the M4, stuck the pistol back into my waistband and then scrambled up the bone scree to investigate. Skulls click-clacked like castanets. I squirmed around on to my back and found myself taking a deep breath as I pushed my head up into the hole. I could see nothing.

  ‘Baaz, are you sure this goes through? It’s pitch black. Not even a speck of sunshine.’

  ‘Look at your watch,’ he replied. I wriggled out and did a double take. It was seven o’clock in the evening. We’d been walking for more than five hours. ‘Everyone loses track of time down here,’ he said with a smile. ‘It’s unreal.’

  I was still on my back, suspended by that massive bed of bones, staring at the ceiling.

  ‘How do you do it?’ I asked him. ‘Navigate, I mean. No maps. No waypoints.’ I pushed myself up on to my elbows and looked down at him. ‘It’s not normal,’ I said. The Glock pressed into my spine. It’s not possible, I thought.

  He looked up at me and cocked his head to one side.

  ‘My brain,’ he said. ‘It’s different. It works differently.’

  ‘Different how? To what?’

  ‘To yours. To everyone’s.’ He smiled again. ‘Chust chalak, my mother says. He put on a strong Punjabi accent, mimicking her pronunciation. ‘Clever clogs. I remember things. Patterns. Numbers. Once I’ve seen them, I can’t forget them.’ He tapped his right temple. ‘It’s bloody crowded in there.’

  I looked back into the hole.

  ‘Well, it’s going to be bloody crowded up there, too.’ I waved my right hand. ‘Pass me the torch, will you?’

  He did. I wanted to stay dark during the climb, for when we emerged. But I needed to see what I was getting into first. I took the black barrel of the LED from Baaz’s fingers and angled the beam into the shaft so that as little glare as possible would leak out. Immediately above my face the outline of a skull leapt out, mouth grimacing in the slanting torchlight. I swept the beam out at first by a foot, and then another. As the light climbed higher, I understood more clearly the true horror ahead. No wonder no one used this exit. Even if the cops did know about it, no one would ever be stupid – or desperate – enough to try it.

  Bodies had caught down the sides of the chute, so that the length of it was lined with the detritus of the dead. There were no footholds except upturned skulls; no handholds except the unreliable levers of femurs. A ribcage jutted out here; a scapula there. Looking up and seeing the bones cascading down in frozen motion was like seeing a freeze-frame of being sucked into hell.

  ‘I’ll have to remind Grumpy Jock to add this to selection,’ I said under my breath. And then aloud, as I worked my way out again, ‘There was one thing you did forget, Baaz.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m nearly twice your size.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, at first dumbfounded and then dejected. ‘Oh no. Can we do it?’

  ‘No idea,’ I said truthfully. ‘Can’t see the top. It curves around after four metres or so. Maybe I’ll get through, maybe not. You’re going first, anyway.’ He looked at me, nervous, left hand drumming away at the air again. ‘You have to. I can get through what
I’ve seen, but I’ll bring everything I brush past crashing down as I go.’ He reached for the torch. I held it back. ‘It’s better you don’t see what you’re holding on to.’ He wriggled his way into the hole, coughing and swearing in Punjabi as he went. I held on to his ankle to slow him down, and bent round so he could hear me better. ‘Baaz?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two things. First – if we get separated, don’t go straight home, and definitely don’t go to the cops.’

  ‘OK. And what’s the second thing?’

  ‘This was your idea.’

  I let go of his ankle and slapped his calf through his wellingtons and he vanished up the chute – the fine shower of bone splinters that fell back into the cavern the only trace anyone was up there at all. I turned around to do a final sweep of the chamber. I slung the M4 tight to my chest and killed the torch. I waited for Baaz to get a couple of metres ahead of me, and then forced my weight up behind him, pulling myself up the rungs of the bone ladder one femur at a time, snaking my way through the shaft.

  Everything I touched, snapped. In the pitch black it was impossible to tell the bones apart. My shoulders scraped the sides clean, sending a shower of osseous matter down into the cavern below. I wedged my back against the wall and pushed up with my feet, bracing, scrabbling, pulling with my fingertips where I could. Unknown lumps of skeleton fell from Baaz’s own scramble out, hitting my head, shoulders. I was at the bend now. The chimney constricted. My eyes clogged with dirt and dust. My nails bled; my face was scratched red raw. I paused to catch my breath, and tasted for the first time in hours the cool sweetness of fresh air.

  I was nearly there.

  ‘OK, I’ve done it. Bloody hell.’ It was Baaz calling from above. By the sound of it he was out. ‘It’s tight, but I think you can make it.’

  ‘Good,’ I yelled up. ‘Run. You hear me? Run, and don’t look back.’

  If he got busted, he’d be screwed. If he got busted with me, he’d be dead. I rested my right hand on the pistol grip of the M4 and cursed the stupidity of carrying it up with me. But as I looked down and braced myself for the last push up and out, the air filled with the pulsating boom-roar of a grenade blast. I looked down. A rifle-mounted torch probed the bone-pipe. The chute flooded with light.