by Jeremy Bates
“Will?” she called. “Is this true?”
“Yeah!”
“I am coming back.”
My helplessness infuriated me. I kicked and jerked. The rock securing me dug into my flesh like teeth.
“Hold on,” Rob told me. “Danny will help you.”
“What’s she going to do?”
“She’ll pull. I’ll push.”
“Will?” It was Danièle. She sounded closer—and also worried.
“What?”
“Do not move too much. Some of these chatiѐres are not very stable.”
Great, I thought. Exactly what I wanted to hear.
The panic that had been escalating inside me swelled to a suffocating force. Suddenly my lungs seemed too large for my chest. My breath clogged in my throat. I was on the verge of losing it and had to resist the impulse to thrash violently.
I closed my eyes. Almost immediately the darkness behind my lids gave way to a long-ago memory. It was spring. I was eight years old. Bulldozers had recently cleared a patch of forest behind our house in the suburbs of Olympia to make room for a new subdivision. Maxine and I were forbidden to play in the tangle of felled trees, but of course we did. What kids wouldn’t? It was a gigantic fort full of nooks and crannies and passageways. We nicknamed it the Beaver Dam.
One afternoon Max and I had been fooling around on top of the dam and she lost her footing and dropped her Kewpie doll. It fell between a crosshatch of sticks and logs too small to climb through. She began balling. She’d gotten the doll less than two weeks ago for her sixth birthday, and it was her prized possession. I told her it was okay, I’d get it, and so I climbed off the dam and made my way to the main entrance we always used, a convergence of felled trunks that formed a small passageway. I crawled inside and tunneled deeper and deeper, easing aside dead branches, worming under and over rotting logs, venturing farther than I ever had before.
I had just broken into a new cavity and could see the doll ahead of me when I struck something of structural importance and the dam collapsed on top of me.
Max heard me yelling and ran for help, while I remained trapped beneath hundreds of pounds of thicket, my face pressed into the mud. It was dark and damp. The only sounds were the croaking of a large bullfrog and my frightened sobs. I couldn’t move any of my limbs, and it had taken my father, our neighbor Mr. Schorn, his two teenage sons, and Max more than an hour to dig me out safely.
“Will?” It was Danièle. “I can see your legs.”
I opened my eyes.
Dark. Muddy. Stuck.
The panic flared dangerously.
“You are at the smallest point in the tunnel,” she told me. “The ceiling is very low, but the ground dips also. You need to slip into the dip and come up again, like going under a fence. Do you understand?”
“I’m not on my stomach. I’m on my side.”
“Can you roll onto your stomach?”
“No.”
“What about your back?”
“No, Danièle, I’m…I’m wedged in here like Winnie the Pooh in his fucking honey hole. I can’t move. At all.”
“Will, I am trying to help—”
“What should I do?”
“You have to relax. When you are tense, your muscles flex, get bigger. You have to relax and breathe deeply.”
“Now’s not the time for fucking yoga!”
“Listen to me, Will. It is true. I will breathe with you. Ready?”
I had nothing to lose. “Yeah.”
“Okay, breathe…”
I followed her lead for a good two minutes, inhaling and exhaling through my nose until I wasn’t thinking of anything anymore…and amazingly I felt the tension seeping out of my fear-locked muscles, the fight or flight response to my situation ebbing.
“Do you feel relaxed, Will?” Danièle said, her voice pacifying, like a hypnotist’s. “Whenever you are ready…”
I tried rolling onto my back—and did so successfully on the first attempt.
I began inching forward.
Chapter 20
Once I had gotten beyond the dip, the rest of the way along the shaft had been much easier. Standing full height in a proper-sized tunnel again, the rush of surviving a close scare buzzed through me. Danièle, however, didn’t share my high. Instead, she gave me a furious lecture on how to follow instructions next time.
“You know what?” Dreadlocks said to me, butting in. “I make mistake. You are touriste still.” Zéro and Goat chuckled obligingly.
Rob’s head popped out of the hole I had just exited. Grinning, he drawled, “Heeeeeeeere’s Johnny!” then somersaulted onto the ground. Pascal came next, extracting himself silently, like a spider. They were both covered in the catacombs’ ubiquitous chalky mud and resembled true spelunkers. In fact, we all did.
I said to Rob, “Remember what you told me this place reminds you of?”
“Vages?”
“Well, you’re right, because it looked like that wall just gave birth to you.”
“And you were almost stillborn, boss. What the fuck happened?”
“I—”
“Okay, enough with your disgusting sex talk,” Danièle said, cutting me off. “We are falling behind.”
Shrugging on her backpack, she started after the scuba guys.
We went straight for a while, passing several branching corridors, made a right, went straight again, passed more corridors, turned left. This zigzagging continued on and on until everything began to look the same to me, and I conceded that I was hopelessly lost. This made me realize how much trust I had placed in Pascal. He was the only one in our foursome who had explored where we were going. If he was so inclined, he could totally screw us over. Lead us the wrong way, sneak off with his map, leave us to go crazy and rot. Of course, he had no reason to do this. He was friends with both Danièle and Rob. Still, the fact he could made me uneasy. Maybe I was just on edge because of the recent scares with the Devil and the tunnel, but my life was literally in his hands.
When the passage we were now traversing opened wide, I caught up to Danièle and said, “What’s up, Froggy?”
She made a face. “Are you trying to tease me? Because it does not bother me when you call me that.” She cocked an eye at me. “You know, I have been thinking of a cataphile name for you.”
“Cool,” I said. “Any good ones?”
“I cannot decide between two. The first is Macaroni.”
I was nonplussed. “As in the pasta?”
“No, it has meaning. It is from that song.”
I frowned. “‘The Macarena?’”
“No, you know…” She began to hum.
“‘Yankee Doodle?’”
“Yes!”
“Are you teasing me now?”
“No, why? Americans are called Yankees. That is the name of one of your baseball teams. It is not derogatory.”
“I don’t want to be called Yankee or Yankee Doodle or Macaroni, thanks. What’s the other nickname?”
“Honeybear.”
“Even better.”
“You made me think of it when you said you were stuck like Winnie the Pooh in his honey hole. I found that cute. I think it is a good nickname.”
“I can’t wait until Rob and Pascal start calling me it.”
“Oh—you are right.” She frowned. “Maybe it can be my private nickname for you?”
I shrugged. “If you want. But I’m going to think of a better one.”
“You cannot give yourself a nickname. That is not how it works.”
“Speaking of Pascal,” I said, changing course, “I was wondering about something.” The ceiling lowered. I ducked accordingly. “What if he gets lost later on? You know, when we get closer to the video camera? He’s only been that far once, right? So what if he makes a wrong turn and gets totally lost? It wouldn’t be that hard to do.”
“He won’t,” Danièle said confidently. “He knows the way. He has marked it on his map. We are perfectly safe.”
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“What if he loses the map, or something happens to it? The Devil could have taken it back at the Beach.”
“That is the Beach. We know the way out from there—”
“I mean, what if the Devil had jumped us later, deeper, and took the lighters and map then? Would you or Pascal have been able to find the way out?”
“The Painted Devil would not do that. He would only take our stuff at the Beach because it is a popular spot, and he knows someone would come along again and find us.”
“Come on, Danièle, you don’t know that. The guy’s a lunatic.” I paused, remembering something. “What did he mean by ‘Raviolis?’ When he was speaking to Pascal, he said he hated Raviolis like us.”
“I do not know for sure, but I imagine that is what he calls all cataphiles because many eat boxed dumplings—and leave the boxes around.”
“He was acting as if he owned the catacombs. He called it his home. Do you think he actually lives down here?”
She shook her head. “He meant his…I do not know the word. Like a gang has.”
“Turf?”
“Yes, like that. If he lived here, he would not have a job. He would not have anything to eat. He would have taken our money.”
She was right, I thought. Besides, the uniforms he and his cohorts wore weren’t ragtag; they were museum quality, which meant they would have been expensive.
“So what do you think he does for work?” I asked.
“If he has money, maybe he is a doctor or something.”
“A doctor?” I said, surprised.
“Why not? One cataphile I met told me he worked for the president’s office.”
“You said catahpiles don’t speak of that stuff.”
“As a general rule. But some people, they like to talk. They tell you everything about themselves.”
“Do you tell people you’re a florist?”
“I am not a florist, Will.”
The hardness in her voice made me glance at her. Her features had tightened.
I said, “I didn’t mean that you’re a florist, like as a profession…forever… I just meant…”
“I have a degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the country. I could get an important office job anytime I want. But I have no desire at this point in my life. I thought you understood that.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“No you do not. You think I am some poor gypsy girl with no plans for the future.”
“I—”
“Because I do have plans.”
“I believe you.”
“I hope so.”
I did—she was a smart girl—and I also understood where she was coming from. I sometimes didn’t like telling people I was a travel writer. People never took writers of any ilk seriously. You could have a weekly column in a posh magazine, or be a bestselling novelist, and to anyone you introduced yourself to as a writer, their first impression would be of a struggling, eccentric loner that needed a regular nine-to-five job to straighten them out.
“What about them?” I nodded ahead to the scuba guys, feeling as though I should say something to temper the awkwardness that had bubbled between Danièle and me. “Did they tell you what they do?”
“No, they did not. But Citerne mentioned he is an accomplished diver.”
“Dreadlocks?”
“Yes, the one with dreadlocks.”
“Accomplished douchebag’s more like it. What’s he expecting to find down here anyway? Sunken treasure?”
“I do not know, Will,” she said. “But look. They have all stopped. Maybe we will find out.”
Dreadlocks pointed down a gaping black hallway to our left and announced that was where the well was. The floor was cobblestone, covered with a sheen of crystalline water, unlike the murky stuff we had passed through earlier. Pascal got all excited. Danièle explained to me that he had never been this way before. It was marked as a dead end on his map.
“How far is the well?” I asked.
“Only ten minutes,” Pascal told me. He glanced at Rob and Danièle. “It is okay?”
“I’m game, boss,” Rob said.
“Me too,” Daniel added.
Pascal looked at me expectantly.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Let’s fill in that map of yours.”
The well was made from carved stone blocks and rose three feet from the ground. The mouth was circular, twice the circumference of a manhole. There was no graffiti here, no litter anywhere, indicating not many cataphiles had been this way before.
While Pascal lit some tealights, Dreadlocks changed into a drysuit. He strapped the twin cylinder rig onto his back, then pulled on short, stiff fins and a compact mask with an opaque skirt. Sucking on the regulator that dangled from the manifold outlet, he lowered himself into the well, a bulky primary light in one hand, a reel of nylon guideline in the other. Everyone gathered close, watching as he sank beneath the surface of the water, though there was little to see. The water was cloudy. The lights from our lamps shattered into emerald oblivion.
The ripples on the surface finally smoothed, then disappeared altogether. The guideline remained taut. I said, “How deep is he going?”
Danièle translated my question. Zéro mumbled something back.
“Probably between five and fifteen meters,” she told me. “That is how deep the others wells they explored have been.”
The wait was tense. One minute inched into two. I glanced at Zéro and Goat, who were staring intensely at the water. They didn’t speak, but I knew what they were thinking.
This was taking longer than expected.
I caught Rob’s eye. He stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and drew a finger across his neck. Danièle jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.
Zéro glared at them, annoyed.
Finally bubbles materialized on the surface of the water, at first just a few, then an eruption. Dreadlock’s head appeared next, his red helmet glistening.
Zéro and Goat heaved him up onto the lip of the well.
Danièle gasped, and it took me a moment before I saw the skull clutched in Dreadlock’s hand. He spat the regulator from his mouth and jabbered in French. Everyone reacted with exclamations and outbursts. A rapid-fire discussion ensued. Eventually Danièle acknowledged my nagging for clarification and said, “He says there is a complete skeleton at the bottom of the well.”
I waited for more. When nothing was forthcoming I said, “So what? This is the catacombs. There are six million skeletons down here.”
She shook her head. “You do not understand, Will. This one is new.”
“New?” I frowned. “You mean, from a recently deceased person?”
“Yes. There were clothes on it. A T-shirt, blue jeans, rubber boots.”
“Fuck off!”
“Pascal thinks it was a woman.”
I looked at Pascal. He had taken the skull from Dreadlocks and was pointing to different parts of it.
“What, he’s a forensic anthropologist?” I said dubiously.
“He is writing his dissertation on the catacombs. He has studied many bones from here.”
Pascal passed the skull back to Dreadlocks. They were both nodding.
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
“Citerne is going to replace the skull. Then he will return aboveground and tell the police the location of the well. The catacops can investigate what happened.”
“What about us?” I said. “Shouldn’t we go with him?”
“Go with him?” Danièle seemed surprised by the question. “No, Will. He does not need us. Have you forgotten—we have another woman to look for.”
Chapter 21
EXTRACT FROM THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, OCTOBER 13, 2013
Mummified Man’s Body Found in Paris Catacombs
A group of urban explorers made a shocking discovery last week when they entered an illegal section of the Paris catacombs: the mummified body of a London man who had gone missing in the maze of underground tunne
ls two years before.
The body has been identified as Stanley Dunn, a twenty-three-year-old man from Enfield, London. In 2011, after friends of Mr. Dunn reported him and two other men missing in the catacombs, police conducted a three-day search to no avail.
A police source said that Mr. Dunn’s remains were discovered in the far western reaches of the catacombs, a remote area that is seldom explored because of the extensive deterioration of the tunnel system there. The body was fully clothed and curled in a fetal position. The two other men remain unaccounted for.
Investigators believe the nearly perfectly mummified remains are due to the cool, dry environment in which they were discovered. Dr. Stephen Murphy, with the Department of Forensic Medicine at Kingston University, explains: “Some parts of the catacombs of Paris are damp, some are dry. In the latter situation, the decomposition process is slowed down, while both drying-up and autolysis of tissues prevail.”
An autopsy is scheduled to determine the exact cause of death.
Claude Provost, a former police officer with the special brigade that monitors the catacombs, told Agence France-Presse that during any given year his unit would discover multiple bodies not reported by the press, some mummified, some not. “They go in to commit suicide,” he says. “Others—they simply get lost and never find their way out again.”
Chapter 22
I had an overactive imagination, especially when it came to death, and as we plodded through the labyrinthine warrens on our way to God knew where next, my thoughts were fixated on the remains at the bottom of the well. What had happened to the person—or the woman, if you believed Pascal’s conclusion? Had she been sitting on the lip of the well, fallen backward, struck their head, and sunk like a stone? Then again, that would have presupposed the fact she was by herself. And who explored these tunnels by themselves? Hadn’t Danièle said the first or second rule of the catacombs was never to go anywhere on your own?
Perhaps the woman’s fate was the result of something more sinister then. Did someone dump her body into the well to conceal a murder? If so, had she been killed aboveground and transported to her final resting spot? Or had she been a cataphile who had the bad luck of running into a meth head or morphine addict—or the Painted Devil?
