by D B Nielsen
He gave me a last penetrating look, silver eyes flashing in the darkness, before turning away. Then, muttering something too low for me to hear, he reached out to touch the symbol above the iron grate. The sudden flare of light stabbed my eyes, making me cry out in surprise. I could faintly see Gabriel backlit by brilliant blue-white light, brighter than day, his wheat coloured hair shining bright gold.
‘Angel light. Starlight,’ Gabriel explained.
Then all was as before – the light fading back to inky blackness but for the little illumination provided by the flame of the lantern – except that the grate had been flung wide open, revealing the staircase beyond. Spots danced before my eyes as they tried to adjust to the darkness again.
Stale, trapped air swept in along with something else; a strange, sickly odour that was sweet yet rancid. Creeping up from the damp brickwork, the waft was distinct, housing a memory of the long dead and forgotten. Maybe it was my imagination but I could have sworn that there was a lingering odour of centuries of vermin, disease, and the ripeness of the oversaturated soil with its decomposing human remains.
I followed Gabriel through the gate and descended the narrow spiralling stone staircase, unconsciously counting the steps as I went. There were one hundred and thirty steps in total and we had now descended some nineteen metres underground.
It was no wonder that a person could get lost down here – we had been slowly making our ascent, moving up the steep slipway, and now we were travelling in the opposite direction. Though I prided myself on my navigational skills, I was completely confused. It was as if we were circling the Île de la Cité like homing pigeons trying to get our bearings.
From Gabriel I learnt that the Catacombs of Paris were housed in the old quarries in the district of Les Halles, on the opposite side of the Seine to the Paris Opera House; the final resting place of more than six million Parisians. The 118,000 square feet of Catacombs open to the public made up only a small fraction of the city’s underground system. Those not used for the Métro and sewer systems had been blocked off, accessible only to tunnel inspectors and workers. But we were travelling through a section of the Catacombs that no step had trodden for centuries, which were probably the cemeteries of the first inhabitants, the original Celtic Parisii.
I couldn’t understand the fascination of the Catacombs for the cataphiles.
Who would want to live down here?
While the French Résistance during the Second World War used the Catacombs to operate right underneath the Germans’ noses, there still existed tunnel crawlers to the present day, the diehard addicts known as the cataphiles, who regularly descended into the Catacombs through the “unknown” entrances which tunnel inspectors had failed to seal up, in order to play elaborate games of hide-and-seek, LARP or Cosplay, or a version of paintball; decorating the tunnel walls with graffiti. Some of the more adventurous cataphiles would even travel the underground system to perform strange, occult initiation ceremonies, or to pull pranks on friends and, if homeless, to live within these tunnels.
But I couldn’t have lived down here. The place gave me the creeps. Even before I had a good look around, I felt the presence of death. We had entered a bone repository. The chilly corridor we were standing in was very long and narrow. Bones artfully stacked upon each other lined each side. The darkness and silence was broken only by the gurgling of a hidden aqueduct channelling stormwater or sewerage away from the area, whilst the ceiling dripped with condensation.
After passing through a long and twisting hallway of mortared stone, we found ourselves before another stone portal which was graced with an inscription; this time in French. It read, “Arrête, c’est ici l’empire de la Mort” which even I, with my limited French could translate. “Stop, this is the empire of Death”. Though it might just as well have said, “Stop, this is the empire of the Dead”, if what Gabriel claimed was correct.
‘I’m surprised that this area of the Catacombs hasn’t been vandalised or entered in centuries,’ I whispered to Gabriel, uncertain whether I was trying not to wake the dead or keeping my voice low simply because the atmosphere in the Catacombs was so disturbing.
Gabriel snorted. ‘Euf, you may well wonder. There have been many times when these tunnels were threatened by the cataphiles and when interest was sparked by writers and conspiracy buffs.’
‘Really?’ I asked intrigued, waiting patiently for Gabriel to move beyond the next portal.
‘Si, si, si. C’est vrai. Umberto Eco was perhaps the most annoying of them all. He claimed in his novel that there was some secret parchment placed down here concerning the Knights Templar. Ridiculous, of course,’ Gabriel replied irritably, unable to see the irony, as his fingers moved searchingly over the stone portal in front of him. ‘Some believe that these Catacombs are the secret meeting place of The Illuminati, whilst others have suggested that a coven of vampires live down here.’
‘Sweet! Like the Volturi?’ I exclaimed excitedly.
‘What is the Volturi?’ Gabriel asked, pausing in his actions to look over his shoulder at me.
‘Not “what”. Who. They’re a coven of vampires living beneath Volterra in Italy,’ I replied knowledgably. ‘You can look it up on the net.’
Gabriel raised one eyebrow in disdain, before turning back to face the stone portal. ‘Pff, vampires? There is no such thing.’
‘Are you certain? After all, you may not be the only immortal beings roaming the earth. Or under it,’ I challenged him, teasingly.
Gabriel stiffened in front of me and I could tell by the way he held himself, he was affronted. ‘Bien sûr. Don’t be absurd. The stories are exaggerated. Of this, I am certain. I have never come across a vampire in all my time on this earth.’
‘What about werewolves? Or Dementors?’ I continued to probe, teasingly, with Gabriel responding negatively each time. ‘What about aliens?’
‘Well, of course.’
My eyes widened at this unexpected response. ‘There are aliens?’
‘Oui, oui, oui. Illegal aliens. We have many of these illegal immigrant workers in Paris; refugees from Africa, the Baltic nations–’
‘That’s not exactly what I meant,’ I interrupted acerbically, ‘I meant aliens, as in extra-terrestrials, not illegal immigrants.’
But Gabriel merely replied. ‘Are not the Grigori, Rephaim and Emim bad enough? Angels and demons? Why must there be vampires and werewolves too?’
Feeling slightly foolish, I conceded the point reluctantly, though not without suggesting he still might be wrong as no one believed that Nephilim were real either.
‘Je m’en fou! Ne perdez pas de temps! Pay attention now!’ Gabriel demanded of me, drawing my attention back to his movements and the stone portal. ‘Make yourself useful, Saffron. Can you see it? The lock?’
I looked, but I couldn’t see any handle, lock or key. Or any hinges, for that matter. The portal itself looked normal enough. Just like any other ancient remnant. The old stone was crenelated, though perfectly preserved from Roman times. Nothing remarkable – until I felt the shimmer of cast wards as if the air particles surrounding us were charged as in a thunderstorm. Looking closer, as Gabriel had bid me, I could see that the stone crawled with markings – symbols were in constant motion, writhing and twisting, sliding and rearranging themselves beneath the surface of the stone, like carp swimming beneath the surface of still water.
‘What’s it supposed to look like?’ I queried, watching Gabriel’s slim fingers search for the right symbol as the markings continued to twist and turn.
‘A bird. A kite, to be more precise,’ he answered.
I had been avoiding looking too closely at the markings, but now I focused my concentration to see if I could spot a symbol that looked like a bird.
‘Why a kite?’ I asked, as my eyes travelled over the stone portal.
‘Kites are carrion birds,’ he explained. ‘On ancient Egyptian monuments, there are many references to their gods such as Isis, Nephthys and Hathor
as kites, cleansing dead bodies before their entrance into the Underworld.’
‘Charming,’ I murmured in disgust, recognising Gabriel’s use of euphemism, ‘I suppose I should be grateful that I’m not looking for the symbol for vermin or maggots or–’
‘Merde! Just keep looking!’ There was urgency in Gabriel’s voice now. ‘We don’t have much time!’
Startled, I was about to question Gabriel what he meant by his statement when an unnatural, icy wind blew down the length of the corridor, guttering the flame in the lantern and plunging us into darkness.
‘What just happened?’ I hissed at Gabriel, reaching out to him in the darkness for reassurance and encountering hard muscle beneath the fine fabric of his tuxedo jacket. I had thought the sulphur and lime flame could not go out, even in water.
‘Shh! Quiet!’
As Gabriel threw out the warning, I could feel him desperately searching for the lock on the stone portal underneath his fingertips. His sense of urgency gripped me. I became aware of the arctic chill creeping forwards as I looked back down the corridor upon the way that we had come.
The cold washed over me, biting into flesh and bone. Against the preternatural bleached bone walls, the shadow thickened and solidified. An intensely dark shape stood at the other end of the corridor, as if someone had summoned a ghostly form from the warp and weft of the darkness of the night sky, devoid of star or moonlight. While the corridor was an impenetrable darkness, the figure was darker still.
My horrified gasp broke the silence and stillness of the chamber.
‘Hurry up, Gabriel!’ I urged desperately, prodding him in the back. ‘Get it open!’
A string of expletives in his native tongue met my ears, some of which I was certain would have been unfit for uttering aloud in public, but the sentiment and intensity probably matched my own feelings at this moment.
Shrugging my Prada backpack from my shoulders, I madly dug around inside to find my iPhone. While Gabriel might have had X-ray vision, my own ability to see in the dark was virtually non-existent. Pressing the top button, the small screen lit up ghostly blue-white in the dark, displaying several missed calls and texts from Gabriel, and poor connectivity within the Catacombs as only one bar strength remained. But luckily I wasn’t interested in making a phone call.
Instead, I extended my arm, holding the phone out as if I was back at the 5SOS concert which I’d attended last November after my Finals and waved it before me to get a better view of the shadowy figure at the end of the hallway.
But then I wished I hadn’t.
‘If there are no such things as vampires or werewolves,’ I began querulously, ‘are there such things as zombies?’
But I didn’t give Gabriel a chance to reply as the creature centred its attention upon me and slowly moved; seeming to drag its legs, one after the other, across the floor of the long corridor. An awkward, lumbering motion that made a sickening, shuffling noise on the stone floor.
‘Move!’
Thrusting my iPhone into Gabriel’s hand, I roughly pushed him out of the way of the stone portal. I wasn’t about to wait to have my brains eaten by a zombie or whatever that thing was that was coming towards us.
Concentrating hard upon the markings in front of me as they coiled and slid under the surface of the stone, their movements as intricate and as graceful as ballet, I centred my focus as Finn had taught me and opened up my mind. My fingers travelled over the crenulations in a complicated gesture, blocking out the sound of the creature’s approach as I drew upon the portal’s aura. I listened with my inner ear.
Seconds ticked past as the symbols began to burn brightly, flaring golden then silver-violet in the darkness of the Catacombs. The marks before me glowed like starlight, sparking between the weft of space and time.
I heard it before I saw it.
It made a sound like a flock of carrion birds taking to flight, screeching, piercing the sky with sharp, strident tones; a noise that burst into the air and wove itself into the wind. Birds of prey. The sound gathered force as if readying itself to swoop and attack. Echoing and reverberating from cliff and canyon. Shattering and multiplying into the shrill whistle of a thousand such birds.
‘There!’ I pointed, tracking the symbol of the kite with my finger as Gabriel turned to look.
‘Good work!’ he exclaimed, thrusting my mobile phone back at me.
Gabriel immediately dropped to his haunches and, in a blur of movement, his fingers worked over the symbol, emanating a strange heat in this place of leeching cold and death.
The stone portal shimmered as if insubstantial, the other side visible through a gauzy veil like the entrance to a cave behind a waterfall.
Gabriel pushed me through so forcefully that I landed hard upon my hands and knees, grazing my palms on the rough stone floor. I had one last, quick glance behind me at the unnatural, corrupted flesh of the creature, a misshapen corpse, before Gabriel blocked it from my view as, tossing in my backpack, he followed hard on my heels and the portal closed behind us.
Leaning back upon the cold, hard stone in order to catch my breath, I asked, shaken, ‘What was that thing?’
‘Nothing,’ Gabriel replied shortly.
I shook my head, clenching my fists as I did so, resisting the urge to scream in frustration.
‘I thought you said that there weren’t any such things!’ I snapped at him accusingly, ‘That the Grigori, Rephaim and Emim were bad enough!’
‘T’inquiète, Saffron! Calm down!’ Gabriel’s silver-grey eyes held an unearthly glimmer, almost glowing in the dim light cast by the small screen of my mobile phone before it went blank. ‘It is as I told you, merely a trick of the mind.’
‘Epic fail, Gabriel! No way! No, I saw it! It was real!’ I was adamant.
Gabriel gave a long sigh, a gesture that seemed to contain the very essence of weariness and scorn.
‘Bah, you saw only what you think you saw. It did not exist. It was – how do you say? – a hallucination? An illusion? It is meant to deter trespassers.’
‘An illusion,’ I corrected automatically, genuinely surprised. ‘So it was a trick? A booby trap?’
‘Euf, not exactly. It is not a creation of the Anakim. There is no need for such an elaborate deception. It is the mind. Fear is the mind-killer. The mind conjures up its own horrors. Nightmares. Especially in this place. It is this place, this atmosphere, tu vois?’
I thought I understood. The Catacombs of Paris weren’t a suitable place to be if you had a nervous disposition. It was the kind of place that could easily convert the sceptical and disbelieving.
Slowly unclenching my fists, I tried to relax.
I replaced my mobile phone in my backpack as Gabriel relit the lantern. Yet, even though I believed him, I couldn’t help but ask, ‘But it seemed so real. Are you certain that there are no such things as the Undead?’
He seemed to hesitate momentarily, considering the possibility.
Then, giving a shrug, he replied, ‘Je sais pas. Peut-être. Perhaps you should have taken my advice and worn the blindfold.’
I shot him a dirty look. ‘Suck it, Gabriel ... Maybe you should have. After all, I wasn’t the one moaning like a baby because I couldn’t get the portal open in time.’
‘Bah! I was not moaning like a baby!’ Gabriel said, with careful emphasis. He was offended, but at least that was an improvement over his scorn. ‘I was merely frustrated. These old locks are quite tricky to open.’
‘Yeah, right, my bad,’ I scoffed.
He uttered a sharp obscenity, continuing, ‘Oui, oui, oui. C’est vrai. And what I meant earlier by not having much time was that we are running very much behind schedule. I did not anticipate that it would take this long to travel through the underground system.’
I sighed. ‘I suppose you’re going to say that it’s my fault?’
‘Do not be silly, mon petit chou,’ Gabriel said, as he offered me a hand up, ‘but if we are to view the Seed tonight, we must hurry –
especially as we have yet to call the dead! Are you ready for our next adventure, Saffron? Allons-y!’
THE BLACK STONE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Let’s go!” Gabriel had said what now seemed like hours ago. We had been wandering the Catacombs till I felt sore-footed and frozen to the bone, but still we trudged on. The chill of death pervaded the air like a scent carried downwind. Or maybe it was just my imagination; I could no longer tell. Moving through the bone repository with death all around, hemming me in, felt completely surreal; the going made tougher by the dense, frigid atmosphere.
If this was the short route, I hated to see what the long route was like!
My attempts at chirpy conversation had given way to faint grumblings then to echoing silence. Within the claustrophobic space of the Catacombs, Gabriel marched on like a trooper while I followed up the rear; cursing, reeling with fatigue, stumbling half-asleep, morose and miserable. Finally, there was light up ahead and my hopes soared at the thought that we would be leaving this bleak place, only to plummet to new depths.
The tunnel widened onto an underwater tomb which might once have been a fountain, but the water table had risen and fallen dramatically over the centuries leading to the flooding of the entire chamber. Steps disappeared into the crystal clear groundwater, tantalisingly revealed by the fluorescent organisms floating beneath the surface.
We pulled up at its edge.
Gabriel stooped and, reaching into the pool, made ripples with his hand.
‘Feel it,’ he said, ‘It is surprisingly warm.’
He was right. Placing my hand into the clear water of the pool, I was amazed at the pleasant sensation.
‘I suppose there’s no gondola this time?’
‘No gondola. But look,’ he replied, pointing across the lake, ‘Do you see how the far wall is curved? There is a turnstile mounted on a stone platform in front of that wall, now below the water level. It opens the sluice gates in the wall which drains the water under the floor of the chamber.’
I moved my gaze away from the far wall to look across at him.
