by Jeremy Bates
“Ugh,” Danièle said, waving her hand back and forth in front of her nose even though the smell had yet to reach us and couldn’t be much worse than the stink of urine. “I really hate that guy, you know?”
“After you,” I said.
“No, you must go next so I can push you in case you get stuck.”
I stared at her. “In case I get stuck?”
She smiled. “You will be fine. Now go. Just watch your hands for glass.”
I waded through the rubbish and stood in front of the main entrance to the catacombs, which was little more than a crack. Cool air sighed out of it.
Setting aside my reservations, I slipped off my backpack, pushed it into the shaft ahead of me, and followed it into the blackness.
Chapter 8
EXTRACT FROM THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, JULY 29, 2011
Three British Men Feared Lost in Paris Catacombs
Paris police headquarters have reported that three Britishnationals went missing in the Paris catacombs late Monday while exploring with friends.
When they didn’t return to the surface, their friends alerted police, who have spent several days searching for the missing men without success.
Gaspard Philipe, of the police unit that monitors the ancient quarry tunnels, said on RTL radio Friday that anyone considering entering the tunnels should understand the dangers.
“It is not only off limits to the public, it is dangerous. You can get lost. There are cave-ins. You don’t know who you might run into. If you want to see the catacombs, there is a section open to the public as a museum for a very reasonable admission fee.”
The network of tunnels beneath the capital is said to extend more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) and reach depths of 30 meters (100 feet), too deep for phone coverage. Some passageways are large enough that ten men can walk abreast and not touch the sides, while others are so small that those who enter them must squirm forward on their bellies.
Chapter 9
It was a tight fit, and Christ if I didn’t have to squeeze my shoulders together so I could progress forward. I flashed on those scenes in movies in which you see someone struggling through a ventilation conduit, only here the passage was unpredictable and dirty and potentially deadly.
Then it twisted and angled downward. At first I was able to control my descent. But the pitch dropped suddenly and steeply, and I found myself skidding on my stomach, the way kids hydroplane on a Slip ’n Slide. I must have gone fifteen or twenty feet before friction slowed me. Ahead I saw light other than mine. I dragged myself out of the small opening, my ribs aching, spitting dust from my mouth.
Rob pulled me to my feet. “Thanks,” I told him, looking around. The inky-black tunnel was maybe four feet wide and equally high. Rob stood stooped over. I had to pretty much squat. The passage had collapsed to the left of us, leaving a jumble of large boulders and smaller rocks, so there was only one direction in which to go. The air smelled of mold and dampness, making me think of waterparks. It was cooler than it had been outside, maybe fifty-five or sixty degrees.
“Rascal went on ahead,” Rob told me.
“Rascal?” I said distractedly, brushing chalky beige dirt from my clothes.
“That’s what I’ve always called him. I never heard of that Chess shit before tonight.”
Danièle’s LED light winked from inside the hole, drawing our attention. A moment later she slipped out more gracefully than I had. I helped her into a crouch. She smiled. “Fun, yes?”
“A hoot,” I said.
“Good. But I am serious when I say we must all stay close. You must not stray. This place, it is not like a labyrinth. It is a labyrinth.”
“Have you told Pascal that?”
“He will be ahead in the rest room. We should join him.”
“In the restroom?” I said.
“What is wrong?”
“Maybe he wants his privacy.”
“Do not be silly.”
She duck-walked ahead. Rob and I exchanged glances and followed.
We found Pascal fifty feet onward. I had misinterpreted Danièle. He wasn’t in a restroom with a toilet and plumbing—of course he wasn’t, I thought; not here, not twenty feet underground—but a room with carved limestone benches where cataphiles apparently rested before they set out on their journey. The walls were smooth and whitewashed a pig-blood pink.
Pascal folded the map he’d been studying into a small square and squeezed past us into the shaft again, leading the way bravely onward.
“After you, Frogster,” Rob said to Danièle.
She poked him in the chest with her index finger. “If you call me Frogster or Froggy or Frog-anything one more time, I will kill you. Can you understand me?” She pivoted on her heels and followed Pascal.
Rob shook his head. “In-laws, eh?”
Walking single file in a troll-crouch wasn’t ideal for conversation, so I set aside the genealogy questions I had for Rob and focused on keeping up with the fast pace Pascal had set. Because of my hunched-over position I didn’t see much of the tunnel except for Rob’s backside and the ground, which was a powdery mix of sand and crushed gravel.
I had been down here all of five minutes and I hated it. My back and neck ached, claustrophobia had set in like a too-small second skin, and I was already looking forward to when this night would be over.
Finally, however, we entered a new shaft. The ceiling was higher here, and for the first time I was able to stand almost to my full height. This made me feel substantially better. I had been worried I would be troll-walking the entire nine or so hours we were supposed to be down here.
Freed from staring at my shoes, I could now pay more attention to the palimpsest of colorful graffiti that had been scribbled and spray painted everywhere on the honey-colored stone walls. Most of it consisted of bright hip hop tags and punk rock anarchy symbols. One English entreaty read: “Lost in the catas! Help!” Given how close we were to the exit, I assumed it had been a joke. I hoped it had been a joke.
Up ahead Pascal and Danièle had stopped. When Rob and I reached them, Danièle pointed to the left wall. An inscription was etched in carbon black onto a cornerstone. She said, “That is the street address directly above us.”
“Who made it?” I asked.
“Les Inspection Générale des Carrieres. It was their job to make sure Paris did not sink.”
“Paris was sinking?” Rob said dubiously.
“That is what I said, Rosbif. Most of these tunnels were made in the Middle Ages. At that time they were outside the city limits. But as the population grew, the city expanded south over the tunnels. No one realized how bad the foundation was until one of the chambers down here collapsed. It swallowed the entire neighborhood above it. The main street was called rue D’Enfer. It is funny because that means—”
“Hell Street,” Rob said.
“Yes. So the king at the time, the one who would get his head cut off in the revolution, he created what I told you, Les Inspection Générale des Carrieres, to strengthen the tunnels. If the inspectors saw a crack or a falling roof, they prepared a reinforcing wall or something like that.” She pointed to the inscribed street address. “They also mapped everything. The result was a mirror reflection of the streets above, a Renaissance Paris frozen in time.”
“So that street still exists?” I said.
“It is there, yes, but wider now. It has become a boulevard, I think. And this is interesting.” She pointed to the fleur-de-lis carved above the street name. “That is the symbol of the French monarchy. Here it is intact. At other locations it has been scratched out by revolutionaries.”
“Revolutionaries?” I said, surprised. “They used these tunnels?”
“Yes, both in 1789 and the student protests in 1968. You know, even the Nazis built a bunker down here in World War Two. It is on our way. It is where we will rest for one hour.”
From somewhere overhead came a faint, continuous rumble, like the sonorous drone of the ocean. We paused to
listen. It lasted for about ten seconds before silence returned once more.
“That is the Metro,” Danièle explained. “There are tracks nearby.”
Late-night workers returning to their homes and families, younger men and women heading out to meet friends. In other words, life going on as usual. These mundane images made burrowing beneath Paris in the dark and dirt seem all the more surreal.
Pascal, who seemed anxious to keep moving, said, “Monter la garde,” and continued on.
“Yes, be careful,” Danièle told us. “The ceiling height varies. You must watch your head. And watch your feet. You do not want to step into a crevice or a well. Some can be very deep.”
“How deep?” Rob asked.
“I do not know, Rosbif,” she called over her shoulder. “I have never seen the bottoms.”
Chapter 10
DANIÈLE
The trick was to remain close behind the person in front of you, so you could see in their backsplash of light, and Danièle remained so close to Pascal she could reach out and touch him if she were so inclined. She was not kidding when she told Will and Rob to watch where they stepped. Last December a couple of cataphiles reportedly broke through a wall in the remote western portion of the tunnels and discovered never-before-seen galleries, one of which featured a series of life-size statues carved from the limestone. While on an excursion to see the statues for themselves, Danièle and Pascal came across a man sitting by himself in a small chamber. He was weak and delusional due to dehydration. A single candle burned next to him. It was his last one. After it went out, he would have been plunged into total blackness. They gave him food and water, and when he was lucid enough, he showed them his ankle, which he explained he’d broken when he’d stepped in a two-foot-deep crevice. The ankle had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe and was marred with splotchy purple spots. His friend had left to get help but never returned. The man didn’t know when that had been, he could barely remember what day he’d entered the catacombs, but given his deteriorated condition, it was likely it had been several days before. It was also likely his friend had not been an experienced cataphile and hadn’t been able to find his way back again.
So, yes, the dangers were real down here, she thought. But if you were smart, if you had a guide as experienced as herself, or Pascal, chances were you would be fine.
Chapter 11
For the next fifteen or twenty minutes I forgot about the graffiti and returned my attention to the ground, watching for the apparently bottomless crevices and wells Danièle had spoken of. I didn’t see any, but I did spot discarded water bottles, candy wrappers, and other sundry items. At some point the monotonous crunching of our footsteps was joined by the dripping of water.
Pascal kept up his fast pace, and the rest of us followed close as he turned one corner after another, passing numerous branching hallways, each surely leading to others, and those to others still, hinting at the enormity of this underground realm. Danièle had not been exaggerating when she called it a labyrinth. It was a chaotic maze of more than—what had I read—two or three hundred miles in aggregate? If you stitched the tunnels together into one long Frankenstein worm, they would surpass the width of the state of New York. This got me wondering about their construction. Who were the men who had dug them, likely with nothing more than pickaxes and shovels and wheelbarrows? Convicts who couldn’t get employed elsewhere? Destitute farmers looking for regular work that didn’t rely on the seasons or the climate? Whoever they were, they likely would have toiled away underground in the dust, humidity, and sometimes pitch dark for their entire lives—if they weren’t first crushed to death, buried alive, or knocked off by infections and disease.
From ahead Pascal hollered “Ciel!” While I was trying to figure out what that meant—wham. I came to a standstill, dizzy, my ears ringing.
“You okay, boss?” Rob said. He’d turned back to look at me, his headlamp shining in my eyes.
I took off the helmet and touched a fiery spot high on my forehead. No blood, not yet. A tender bump throbbed.
“Will, what happened?” Danièle asked, slipping past Rob and stopping before me.
“I hit my head.”
She parted my hair. “There is no cut.”
“I’m okay.”
“I told you to watch out. Remember, I said the ceiling height—”
“I didn’t see Rob duck, so I didn’t either.”
“Yes, but he is much shorter than you.”
“I realize that now, Danièle, thanks.”
“I am sorry. I should have explained. Ciel means ‘sky’. We call it out when the ceiling juts down.”
“Got it,” I said.
After once more reassuring her that I was fine, that I didn’t need to rest, we continued on. When the tunnel widened enough to walk two abreast, I moved up beside Rob. He glanced sidelong at me and said, “You know what this place reminds me of?”
“What?”
“Vaginas.”
I smiled, sort of. What had I expected him to reference? Tom Sawyer’s spirit of adventure? Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth? Jonah and the Whale?
“I’m serious,” he added. “Everywhere I look I see one. This is vag land, nature porn. Tell me you don’t see it.”
“You have a point,” I said as I thought about all the metaphorical psychobabble regarding caves and wombs and Mama Nature and fertility. Also, I had to admit it wasn’t a stretch to imagine, if you were so inclined, the entrance to the catacombs that we’d passed through as vulvaesque, Pascal’s rest room as a uterus, and these tunnels as fallopian tubes.
Rob said, “Now I understand why Rascal spends all his time down here. What a perv.”
Ahead Pascal reached into a little gully in the wall, felt around, then kept going.
“What’s he looking for?” I asked.
“Dunno.” Rob called out in French. Pascal answered back. Rob laughed. “He said someone once had a stag party down here. They left a calling card in the wall with the date and directions. You find it, you’re invited. He wanted to see if there was anything new.”
“A stag party?” I said.
“Apparently all sorts of crazy stuff goes on down here. Cops found a movie theater once. Yeah, I shit you not—lights, sound system, projector, fully stocked bar. It was right under the Trocadéro, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, one of the most famous fucking landmarks in the world. There was a whole security setup too that included a motion detector that set off a recording of barking dogs to scare people away.”
I wasn’t sure if Rob was having me on or not, but I asked, “How was all this stuff powered? With batteries?”
“Electricity, boss. They siphoned it from underground power lines. And get this. A few days after the police discovered the place they came back with guys from Électricité de France, to shut it down. But they were too late. Someone had already unwired everything. Disappeared with all the electronics and booze. What used to be a cinema was a plain old rock chamber. The only thing left behind was a note that said, ‘Ne cherchez pas.’ Don’t search.”
“Don’t search for who? Cataphiles?”
“That’s what I figured. That’s what most people in the media figured. It was big news for a while. But Rascal says cataphiles don’t do stuff like that. They’re misfits mostly. They just go underground to hang out, party, explore.”
“So who made the cinema?”
He shrugged. “Nobody knows. Rascal talks about this big group with a hundred members or so, supposedly organized and wealthy, sort of like an old boys’ club. They use the catacombs, but only to get around Paris undetected. They have keys to everywhere in the city. They’ll hold poetry readings in the basement of the Paris Opera, or booze it up on the roof of the Parthenon, or whatever.”
I didn’t reply as I contemplated this. It sounded neat. It also sounded completely farfetched.
“You mentioned Danièle’s your in-law?” I said. “What, sister-in-law?”
“Yup. Dev and Danny Laurent. The Double Ds.”
“Why don’t you guys get along?”
“Me and Danny? You mean ’cause of the French jabs?” He shrugged. “It began with me and the wife. Dev makes fun of me all the time because I’m French Canadian. Calls me Queeb, Beaver Beater, Poutine. She’s actually the one who started the whole frog thing, calling me Frozen Frog. I call her shit back. That’s just us, our relationship. I found it funny how insulted Danny always got when she was around, so I started calling her Frenchy shit too. I don’t think she cares as much as she lets on. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You and Danny. What’s your deal?”
I glanced ahead at Danièle. She was speaking with Pascal, her voice flat and muted. Sound didn’t carry well down here. The soft silence was like being in an old library or root cellar or attic.
“We’re just friends,” I said.
“Come on, bro. She invited you to the catas. It’s always just her and Rascal. She even put up a stink about me coming tonight, and I’m fucking family. So what’s the word? You shagging her?”
The question caught me off guard, and invoked memories of Saturday morning. Waking in Danièle’s poverty-posh bedroom to the half-light creeping beneath the fuchsia blinds, the smell of the Kashmir Rose incense she’d burned the night before, the sensuous curve of her spine, from the nape of her neck to where her tailbone disappeared beneath the sheets…
Rob, I realized, was watching me closely.
He snorted. “Just friends, my ass.”
Chapter 12
ROB
So they really were fucking, Rob thought. Couldn’t say he was surprised. Like he’d told Will, Danny didn’t invite just anyone to the catas. Not only that, Danny’s been all over him since he arrived at the pub.
