by Jeremy Bates
A lot of my adolescent friends went to Seattle University or U Dub or one of the smaller colleges in the state. They wanted to stay close to home so they could live with their parents to save cash. Where’s the adventure in that? I’d thought, and relocated across the country in New York City to study journalism at NYU. I wanted the college experience, and for this you had to get away from home. I remember my grade twelve English lit teacher telling the class one day how college was going to be the best three or four years of your life, so you better make the most out of it. In my case he had been right. It wasn’t that college had been ridiculously fun—though it did have its moments—it was that things had been pretty shitty for me ever since my younger sister, Maxine, died two years after I graduated.
As I braved a sip of my cooling coffee, I decided the 3rd arrondissement reminded me of Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. It had a young vibe, with all the pubs and designer boutiques and vintage shops and brasseries-turned-hipster hangouts. The main difference, I’d say, was that here nobody seemed in any real hurry to get anywhere.
The tables around me had filled up with the after-work crowd, the men in dark suits, some without neckties or blazers, the women in institutional skirts and plain blouses. As seemed to be the fashion in this city, everyone sat facing the street, nonchalantly judging the people walking by.
I returned the white mug to the saucer with a delicate clank of porcelain and judged too. A woman dressed in lipstick colors and high heels held my attention. She was willowy with sharp cheekbones and a hooked nose, not the type of lady you’d approach for directions. A pair of big sunglasses covered much of her face. That was something else here. Everyone had great eyewear. No cheap prescription Lenscrafters, or pharmacy-rack shades with colored lenses and fluorescent frames. Only high-end designer stuff. I bought myself a pair of Ray Ban Aviators a while back. I also started wearing a lot of neutral tones. Nowadays I stuck mostly to black, and I guessed I looked about as French as you could get.
Just then I spotted Danièle halfway down the block. She was riding toward me on a pink bicycle with fenders the color of pearl and a wicker basket mounted on the front handlebars.
I stood and waved. She pulled next to the table, scissor-stepped off the bike’s seat, propped the kickstand, then bent close for a double air kiss—social protocol for both hello and goodbye. I haven’t gotten used to this yet, it wasn’t me, but whatever. When in Rome, right?
“Sorry I am late, Will,” she said in her French-accented English. “Do you want anything to eat?”
“I’m good,” I said, and retook my seat while she entered the café. I watched her through the large bay window. With her jet-black shag, pixie face, dark mascara, sooty lashes, and pale lips, Danièle reminded me of Joan Jett in the “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” days. She wore a butterfly-print summer dress that clung to her thin body as she moved, a silk scarf looped chicly around her neck, and knee-high green suede boots.
How long had I known her now? I wondered. Two months? Two-and-a-half? Something like that. I’d been in Paris for at least a couple weeks then, got tired of pantomiming my way around the city, so decided to give learning French a shot. I placed an ad for a language exchange partner on the France version of Craigslist. The site was used mostly by American expats. Apparently the French haven’t taken to it because of their difficulty pronouncing “Craigslist.” Even so, I received several replies. I chose to partner with Danièle because she came across as open and friendly in her initial emails.
We’ve gotten to know each other fairly well since then. She was born in Germany to a German father and French mother. They divorced when she was six, and she moved to France with her mother and older sister. She graduated from L’Ecole des Mines two years before. It was a prestigious engineering school, the MIT of France. She could have interned at any company she wanted. But, according to her, she wanted to take it easy for a while, so now she spent her days working in a florist shop and her nights exploring the network of catacombs that snaked beneath the city.
We got together twice a week, usually on Mondays and Fridays. She would teach me French one day, I would teach her English the other. Actually, I didn’t really “teach” her anything. She was pretty much fluent. English had been a prerequisite for admission into Les Mines, and she’d studied it extensively as an adolescent. She told me she just wanted someone she could speak the language with so it didn’t get rusty on her.
She liked me—romantically, I mean. She was fairly obvious about it too. I should have been flattered. She was good looking. I’d thought that the first time I saw her. But I hadn’t come to Paris searching for a relationship; I’d come to get away from one—at least the aftermath of one. My ex’s name was Bridgette Pottinger. We’d met at NYU. In our senior year we moved into a tiny flat together off the Bowery near Chinatown. I got a job as a copy editor for the Brooklyn Eagle. She was accepted to the law program at Columbia. I popped the question a year later at the top of the Statue of Liberty. I know, cheesy, but at the time I’d thought it was romantic. The wedding was planned for the following July at a lodge on Lake Placid.
The night before the ceremony my younger sister, Maxine, and my best friend, Brian, died in a boating accident. The wedding, of course, was cancelled. My life was thrown into chaos. My parents blamed me for the death of Max. My friends blamed me for the death of Brian. Bridgette and I began to unravel too, and we decided it would be best to take a break. I had moved on from the paper to a travel writing gig, assisting with the guides for the Mid-Atlantic states. I was close with my boss, both professionally and personally. He knew what I was going through, knew I needed a fresh start. He told me head office was looking for someone to revamp a few of the European editions, and he put my name forward. A month later I was in London, getting the lowdown for a revised Paris guide. The other correspondents in Paris were covering the cafés and restaurants and hotels. My brief was to cover the nightlife scene. They wanted to jazz up the guide to appeal more to the younger crowd.
And so far, so good. My new boss liked the copy I was turning in, and I liked doing what I was doing. I spent my nights checking out different bars and clubs, and my days writing up an opinion of them. There was a lot to do, and the deadlines were tight, but the work kept me occupied, kept me from thinking too much about my old friends, family, and most of all, Bridgette.
Still, I’d be lying if I said I’d gotten over Bridgette. I hadn’t. In the back of my mind I had a plan. After a year or so away, I would return to the States, I’d be a little more worldly, a little more mature, and Bridgette and I could start things anew.
I winced. Danièle’s birthday party. Christ. How the hell did I get roped into that? Danièle’s friends—an eclectic mix of bohemians and young professionals—had been pleasant, the drinks kept coming, and everyone got piss drunk…and then…then everything blurred together.
When I woke in Danièle’s bed Saturday morning, I could barely remember how I got there. Filled with guilt, I did the asshole thing and left without waking her. I spent the entire weekend at my laptop whipping my latest bar and club notes into some sort of coherent form. I didn’t answer my phone when Danièle called Sunday afternoon, and we didn’t communicate again until earlier today when she texted me to confirm that the lesson was still on.
I almost cancelled, but I knew how obvious that would look.
Danièle returned from the café proper with a cappuccino now. She sat across from me, took off her sunglasses—Fendis—and smiled hesitantly. I cleared my throat. I had already decided to act as if this was any other lesson, and I said, “French or English today?”
A flash of surprise crossed her face before she turned her attention to the spoon stirring her coffee. “Friday was French,” she stated. “So today is English, if that is all right.”
“Good with me,” I said. “So…”
She lifted her eyes. “Yes?”
“I’m thinking of a topic to discuss.”
“How about the weeke
nd?” she suggested coyly. “You always ask me about my weekend on Mondays.”
“Did you get up to anything on Sunday?”
“On Sunday?” More surprise, maybe some disappointment. She shrugged. “No, I stayed home all day. What about you, Will? Were you hung over both Saturday and Sunday? Or did you do anything special on Sunday?”
“I made chicken Provençal. Have you tried it?”
“Of course I have. I am French. What else did you do?”
“Nothing really. Work. That’s about it.”
“I see.”
I frowned. “You see?”
“You do not want to talk about Friday night. I see. That is fine with me.”
“I had a fun time.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“All night?”
I wondered if I was blushing. “Yeah.”
“You were gone when I woke up. I thought…”
“I know, I— What time did you get up?”
“You are very good at avoiding this topic.”
“What topic?”
“Us.”
“I’m not avoiding it.”
She nodded silently.
I lit a Marlboro Light to give myself something to do. The trio at the table next to us were sharing a bottle of wine and laughing loudly. This made the silence between Danièle and me seem all the more protracted and uncomfortable.
I decided it was stupid to try to ignore what had happened between us, to pretend this was nothing but another lesson.
We had slept together. We were having coffee now.
That made this a date, didn’t it?
At least in Danièle’s mind it did.
“I liked your friends,” I said, segueing back to Friday.
She smiled. “They liked you too.”
“Except for one guy. What was his name? Patsy…?”
“Pascal?”
“He had a wool cap.”
“Yes, that is Pascal. You do not like him?”
“He’s fine, I guess. He just didn’t seem like he wanted to talk to me.”
“Because he has a crush on me,” she stated matter-of-factly.
“A crush?”
“Yes, for many years. We were in the same freshman class at school. He was with me during my initiation.”
Danièle was referring to her university initiation. She had told me all about it on numerous occasions. You could enter her favorite stomping ground, the catacombs, any number of ways, including Metro tunnels, utility systems, church crypts, and the basements of homes, hospitals, lycées, and universities (apparently there was even an entrance in the bowels of Tour Montparnasse, one of Paris’ first skyscrapers). Like most of the other buildings in the old Latin Quarter, L’Ecole des Mines had its own secret access points, and it was a tradition for seniors to drop freshmen into the underground maze and have them find their way out again.
I said, “Do you guys still go into the catacombs together?”
“Many times. As a matter of fact—” Her phone rang. “Just a moment, Will,” she said, and answered it. The voice on the other end was male. My French was still piss poor, and I was only able to gather that she was meeting this person later in the evening.
“Big date tonight?” I asked when she hung up.
“Would you be jealous if it were?”
“Immensely.”
“I do not believe you.”
“I would be.”
“You know, Will, I thought we had a good time on Friday.”
“We did.”
“Then why…I have the feeling you…regret it.”
I looked at my cigarette. “I don’t regret it.”
“Then why are you acting so strange?”
I was about to tell her I wasn’t acting strange, but I held my tongue. I suppose I was.
I took a final drag on the smoke and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “Look, Danièle. I like you. But we have been friends for a while now. And then…you know, just like that. Boom. I—it’s a bit overwhelming.”
She considered that, nodded. “Okay, Will. I understand. You just tell me when you are ready.”
I studied her. The delivery was so pokerfaced I couldn’t discern if she was being sincere or sarcastic.
“Anyway,” she said, “that was Pascal.”
“Speak of the devil,” I said, happy to change topics. “What did he want?”
“He is confirming our plans tonight.”
“What are you guys doing?”
“We are going into the catacombs.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“Why is that surprising?”
“Only the two of you?”
“No, someone else is coming as well. You see, tonight, it is very special. I have something I want to show you.”
She moved her chair around the table, so she was sitting beside me, our knees brushing. I could smell her perfume, a light citrus scent. She extracted her laptop from her handbag and set it on the table before us. She opened the lid and pressed the power button.
While we waited for it to boot up I said, “In what world do people use the semi-colon more than the full-stop?”
She frowned. “Huh?”
I nodded at her keyboard. “Don’t you find it a pain you have to press the Shift key every time you want a period?”
“Hmm. I never thought of that. Perhaps you should have brought a computer from your country, Will.”
“It was stolen, remember.”
“Yes, you left it on the table when you went to use the restroom. That was very foolish of you.”
The computer finished loading. Danièle used the trackpad and navigated to a folder filled with thumbnail-sized videos. She opened the last one in a media player and resized it to fill the screen.
A point of view shot appeared: a video camera light illuminating a grainy corridor the color of slag iron. The ceiling was low, the walls smooth stone. The crunch of footsteps was the only sound.
“That’s the catacombs,” I stated, surprised.
Danièle nodded. “This woman is very far in, very deep.”
“How do you know it’s a woman?”
“You can hear her in the other video clips. She mumbles a few times.”
The woman stopped at a side passage and looked inside. It was a small room. She played the camera over the floor. It was scattered with a half dozen different sized bones.
A shiver prickled the back of my neck.
“Those are all human bones,” Danièle told me. “There are rooms everywhere like this one. She has already passed several others.”
The woman continued along the corridor, but stopped again to film an arrow on the ground. It had been formed using three bones. Ten feet later she came to another bone-arrow.
“Who made those?” I asked. “Other explorers?”
“Yes, maybe.” But she didn’t sound convinced.
The woman pressed on. More grainy gray walls and crunching footsteps. She arrived at a T-junction and paused.
“She is confused,” Danièle told me. “She obviously does not know this part of the catacombs well.”
“Why would she go down there by herself?”
“We do not know she went by herself. Perhaps she went with others and became separated and lost.”
The woman chose left and followed a winding passageway. She stopped for several seconds to examine a wall painting of some sort of stickman. It was at least six feet tall, painted quickly, almost frantically, the limbs spread eagle.
Danièle said, “Watch closely now. She becomes very scared. Maybe it is this painting that scared her. Or maybe she heard something. But, look, she has begun to walk faster.”
Indeed, the woman was now moving at a trot. The footage became jumpy. Her breathing was loud and fast.
Not from exertion, I thought, but fear.
Twice she whirled around, as if to see if anyone was behind her, the camera moving with her.
“She keeps goin
g, faster and faster,” Danièle said in a soft voice, “deeper and deeper, and then…”
All of a sudden the woman dropped the camera. It landed with a bang and kept filming.
“…she just drops it. See! She does not stop to pick it up. You can see her feet disappearing, splashing in the puddles. And then—nothing.”
The footage continued to roll, filming a close-up of pebbles and the ripples in the nearby puddle.
“What happens next?” I asked.
Danièle held up a finger: wait. She used the trackpad to skip a slice of footage and pressed Play. The image was exactly the same.
“What—?”
“Listen.”
A harrowing scream erupted from the tinny speakers. It sounded distant, coming from deep within the black tunnels. It escalated to a banshee-like fever—
The screen went blank.
“What happened?” I demanded.
Danièle looked at me. “The camera went dead. That is it.”
Chapter 2
“What do you mean, ‘That’s it?’” I said, frowning.
“You saw,” Danièle said. “The battery died.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“You don’t know what happened to her?”
“How could I? Nobody has ever seen her again.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, I do not,” she admitted. “But she left the camera there. She never came back to retrieve it. And you heard her.”
I sat back. My stomach felt unsettled, as if I had just downed a shot of paint thinner. “Is this for real?”
“Of course, Will.”
“How did you get the camera?”
“Pascal found it.”
“Why was he so deep in the catacombs?”
“That is what he does. He explores, even more than me. He has visited the catacombs hundreds of times before.”
I looked at Danièle, then the laptop, then Danièle again.
“So you weren’t with him?” I said.
“No, I was not.”
“Where’s the actual camera?”
“Pascal has it. I copied the files to my computer.”
“Maybe he’s playing a joke on you?”
