by Jeremy Bates
“Holy Zeus!” Rob exclaimed from behind me. “What is this place?”
“Marveilleux,” Danièle said softly, stopping at my side. “Pascal told me about this room, but I never imagined… He thinks it was built by King Charles the tenth.”
“The king?” Rob said.
“When he was still the Comte d’Artois. He often held torch-lit parties—what he called fêtes macabres—in the catacombs.”
“Bullshit!”
“It is well documented, Rosbif. He invited all the ladies in waiting from the court in Versailles. It is rumored he built several grand rooms in which to host these parties. This was likely one of them.”
“Parties?” I said, studying the frieze. “More like orgies.”
Danièle nodded. “You are probably right, Will. The nobility of the Old Regime were a depraved lot. They also loved novelty. The fact they could dance and make love directly above millions of human remains would have been a thrill for them.”
“Directly above?” I said, surprised.
Danièle took my hand. “Yes, you must see this.” She led me to the center of the room. A stone staircase, built into the floor, circled away into darkness. “Pascal?” she called.
“Ici!” His voice floated up from below.
“Come,” she told me, grinning.
My heart was beating fast in my chest as we started down the steps. They spiraled around a center column before terminating in the middle of a small stone island. My breath hitched audibly. Spreading away from us, for as far as the light from our headlamps would allow, was a sea of moldering bones.
“Bienvenue à L’Empire de la Mort,” Danièle whispered.
Chapter 29
EXTRACT FROM THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, DECEMBER 13, 2013
The Mystery of the Missing Skulls
In July, 2011, three British men were reported missing in the Paris catacombs. Two years later, the mummified remains of one of those men was discovered in a remote area of the tunnels. Now, in a final twist to this story, the decomposed remains of the two other men have also been found—and each was missing his skull.
The remains of Roger Hiddleston (24) from Bexley, London, and Craig Formby (25) also from Bexley, were located by French urban explorers—known colloquially as cataphiles—roughly ten miles from the remains of fellow doomed adventurer, Stanley Dunn (23) of Enfield, London.
According to police, DNA tests confirmed the victims’ identities. What authorities have not yet determined is why their skulls were missing.
Although the answer may never be known for certain, police captain Vincent Reno told French radio he believes the skulls were taken by cataphiles as souvenirs. People, he asserts, are fascinated with human bones. He points to the 1.7 kilometer catacombs museum open to the public at Place Denfert-Rochereau as an example, where every day security guards catch dozens of tourists attempting to smuggle bones out of the ossuary in their bags and purses.
“And, yes, I think some cataphiles wouldn’t hesitate to take the skulls of those two London men, who were fully clothed and obviously explorers like themselves. Because they have become desensitized to death. They see so many bones, there is nothing special to them anymore, nothing sacred. A human skull is something that would make a good paperweight, or a candle base. If you ask me, they are sick, they don’t belong down there, nobody does, and they need to face much greater prosecution by the law.”
Currently, specially trained police officers conduct regular patrols of the catacombs and issue a court summons to anyone they catch. Offenders risk fines ranging from sixty to one hundred euros.
Chapter 30
It was a dizzying montage of death on display: rotten femurs and cracked craniums and broken pelvises and nude jawbones and empty eye sockets that seemed to stare jocularly up at you. They were all shapes and sizes, all once part of living, breathing people. Artisans and aristocrats, peasants and children, revolutionaries and soldiers—now anonymous, disarticulated, individually forgotten.
Bones in a mass grave.
“Oh man!” Rob said, coming up behind Danièle and me. “Look at this shit! What do you and Rascal do down here, Danny? Surf the mosh pit of humanity’s dead?”
“I have never been to this ossuary before,” she said. “I have been to the popular one, beneath Montparnasse, and some others. But they are not like this, not this big…”
Pascal, I noticed, was a dozen yards away, kneeling at the edge of the island, his back to us.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Danièle called to him.
He mumbled something.
“What’d you find, bro?” Rob said.
Pascal got to his feet and came over to us. He passed what appeared to be a chunk of spine to Danièle and pointed to different lesions on it. “Malta fever,” he said.
“Fever?” Rob said, shying away. “Better not be contagious.”
“Vous êtes stupide,” Pascal chided. “You cannot catch anything from a bone.”
“How did that sucker catch it?”
“From an infected animal, probably their milk. I think he or she must have been a cheese maker.”
Danièle passed the vertebrae to me. It was slightly spongy, like old wood, and covered in a layer of grime. I passed it on to Rob and thought of hand sanitizer.
Rob turned it over a few times, the way you examine something not particularly interesting, then gave it back to Pascal, who stuck it in his backpack.
I frowned. “You’re taking it?”
“Oui. I need to study it more closely.”
“You can’t steal it.”
“I am not stealing it,” he said acidly, and for a moment I was bizarrely certain he was going to lunge at me. But the manic look in his eyes passed. “I will bring it back.”
“So which way now?” Danièle said quickly, too quickly, and I suspected she’d seen the look in Pascal’s eyes also. “Which way to the video camera?”
“Vas-y,” Pascal grunted, starting off.
“Whoa, wait up, boss,” Rob said. “I’m not walking over dead people.”
“It is okay,” Danièle told him.
“Okay? How would you like it, Danny, if a bunch of people went stomping around on your skeleton one hundred fifty years from now?”
“Whoever they once were, Rosbif, they are dead now. They do not mind if we step on them.”
“I’m with Rob,” I said. “It’s, I don’t know, disrespectful.”
Danièle waved vaguely. “Does any of this look respectful to you, Will? These people have been dug up from their original resting ground, their skeletons broken apart to make them easier to transport, and dumped into these rooms like garbage. They have already suffered much more indignation than us walking on them would cause.”
Apparently the discussion was over, because Pascal and Danièle set out across the bone field.
“Guess we don’t have a choice, bro,” Rob said, and followed.
I stepped where Rob stepped, to mitigate damage. Nevertheless, femurs cracked and splintered beneath my weight, and I wondered how deep the bones went. Five feet? Ten? More? I was having a hard time getting my head around the sheer number of dead. It made me feel not only mortal but insignificant. The ego liked to trick you into thinking you were the center of the universe, but in truth you were nothing but a dust mote in a never-ending shaft of dimming light. Really, I thought, how was my life, or Rob’s, or Pascal’s, or Danièle’s any different, any more meaningful, than the lives of all the lost souls beneath our feet? Like us, each of them once had dreams, fears, beliefs, agendas, a sense of self-worth…and look at them now.
Bones in a mass grave.
This train of thought wasn’t very cheerful, so I stopped with the introspection and concentrated on placing one foot carefully in front of the next. When we reached the far wall, we followed it left to a window that looked into another room filled with more bones. These were piled so high there were only a few feet between the uppermost ones and the ceiling. Pascal and Danièle clim
bed through the window eagerly, Rob and I less so. We crawled forward on our hands and knees, the carpet of brittle bones crunching beneath us, until we came to a crack in the ceiling.
I was the last to pull myself up and through it, relieved to discover that it opened into a regular stone hallway.
Everyone was several yards away, huddled close, discussing something of apparent importance. Danièle stepped aside as I approached, her eyes shining excitedly, and I was able to see what all the fuss was about.
On the floor at their feet, a bone-arrow pointed ahead into the darkness.
Chapter 31
“That was in the video!” I exclaimed, bending close to examine it.
“Yes,” Danièle said. “These are the hallways where the woman shot the last of her footage.”
Rob said, “Where she thought someone was following her…”
“Where Zolan was following her,” Danièle stated.
Pascal spoke in French and started off.
“He says we must hurry,” Danièle told me. “We are behind schedule. He has been late for class too many times before, and he cannot be late anymore.”
I succumbed to my curiosity, tugged up the left sleeve of my pullover, and checked my wristwatch. It was 4:17 a.m. This surprised me not because it was almost dawn, but because I’d had no idea of the time whatsoever. For all I knew it could have been 1 a.m. or 8 a.m.
A short trek later we came to the first and only graffiti in this hallway. It was the painting of the stickman that the woman had paused to study in her video. The lines were quick, frantic, and there was little detail, not even a face. The arms and legs were spread wide, resembling someone making a snow angel.
“Spray paint,” Rob observed, scraping the paint with a fingernail.
“Who do you think made it?” I asked.
“Probably whoever made the bone-arrows.”
“Zolan,” Danièle said again.
“Give the guy a break, Danny,” Rob said.
“Why should I? He admitted he was here.”
“I’m sure a lot of people have been here.”
“Does it look like that to you? Where is the graffiti, the garbage? Where are the beer cans? There is nothing—nothing except some bone-arrows and this.” She waved at the stickman.
Rob shrugged. “That doesn’t mean anything. We’re not going around spray painting the place, are we?”
Danièle folded her arms across her chest. “Why are you protecting him, Rosbif? Did his vodka poison your brain?”
“You frogs have to get over your prejudices and not judge people based on how they look.”
She scowled. “I told you not to call us that.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s not fair to amphibians, I forgot.”
“Vous êtes une pomme de terre avec le visage d’un cochon d’inde!” Danièle fumed.
Pascal continued on. Rob, laughing, went with him.
“What did you say that was so funny?” I asked her.
She seemed put out. “It was not supposed to be a joke. It was an insult.”
“What did you call him?”
“A potato with the face of a guinea pig. My mother used to say it to my father…before he left her.”
“When you were seven,” I said, recalling what she’d told me during one of our lessons.
“Yes…”
“You mom never told you where he went?”
“She never talked about him. She erased him from her life. A couple years later, when I had the flu and was allowed to stay home from school, I went searching for the family photo albums. I found them in a box under her bed. There were no photos of my father.”
“She threw them all out?”
“She cut him out of all of them. Actually, she did not cut him out. That would have left obvious gaps in the photos. Instead she cut everyone else out and pasted them back together again.”
“So you don’t know what your dad even looks like?”
“I have a vague memory, but that is all.”
I contemplated what it would be like to grow up without a father. It seemed a pretty brutal thing for a kid to go through. “How’s your mom now?” I asked.
“She is well. She has several boyfriends.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Several?”
Danièle nodded. “She meets them on some online dating website. She is only forty-eight. And she is still pretty.”
“Like you.” The words were out of my mouth before I realized what I’d said.
Danièle’s eyes sparkled. “You know, Will, that is the first time you have told me something like that.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And you can tell me that I am pretty more often. I will not be offended.”
I didn’t say anything.
She sighed. “Why are you so mysterious?”
“Mysterious?” I shrugged lamely.
She tiptoed and kissed me on the lips, pressing her body against mine.
“Want to come over tonight?” she asked playfully.
“I think I’m going to need to catch up on my sleep.”
“You can sleep all day. Even better—you can sleep at my place in the afternoon, then cook me dinner in the evening.”
“Oh shit,” I said.
Danièle frowned. “You have another excuse?”
“What do you mean ‘another?’”
“Are you going to be hung over again?”
“No…but I already have dinner plans.”
“With who?”
“My neighbor.”
Danièle glared at me dangerously. “Are you dating her?”
“No!” I said. “She’s like ninety. Her husband died a long time ago. She’s lonely. She’s always catching me in my hallway and giving me desserts and stuff. So earlier today—yesterday—I told her I was studying French cooking and wanted some feedback.”
“You study French cooking? You have never told me this.”
“I don’t. I made it up so she wouldn’t feel like she was intruding.”
“How do I know you are not making up that this woman is ninety? Maybe she is twenty and beautiful?”
I hesitated. “Come then.”
“You really want me to?”
“I’m sure Madame Gabin won’t mind.”
“Madame Gabin, hmm?” Danièle studied me. “Yes, okay. I think I will join you and this Madame Gabin for dinner. And, Will, she better be as old as you say she is, or you are dead meat.”
We caught up to Rob and Pascal at a T-junction. The woman in the video had gone left, so we went left also. A little ways on Pascal stopped and announced, “This is where I found the video camera. It was there, next to that puddle. See, I marked the wall.” He pointed to a chalk asterisk.
Rob peered ahead into the dark. “Did you go any farther, boss?”
Pascal shook his head. I was tempted to make a scared barb, to get even with him for the ones he’d sent my way, but I didn’t because I didn’t blame the guy for turning tail. Watching that video down here, alone, right where whatever happened had happened…I wouldn’t have stuck around either. I asked, “How much time on the video passed from the point she dropped the camera to when she screamed?”
“Forty-one seconds,” Danièle told me. “Which means her body should be right up ahead somewhere.”
Chapter 32
It wasn’t. We searched for more than twenty minutes, checking every crumbling and bone-riddled room we passed, continuing along the hallway for much farther than should have been necessary. When we stopped for a rest, I said, “Looks like Zolan was telling the truth. He found her and showed her back to the surface.”
“I still cannot believe his story about the rats,” Danièle said, shaking her head. “I am sure he was trying to persuade us not to come down here. Why would he do that if he had nothing to hide?”
Pascal took off, mumbling something in French.
“He needs to drop a deuce,” Rob translated for me, flopping down on the ground. “You have to go?”
I didn’t, and neither did Danièle. We sat as well.
“He seems upset,” I said. I fumbled in my pocket for my pack of Marlboro Lights and lit one up.
Danièle nodded. “He really wanted to find the body.”
“It was his MacGuffin,” Rob said.
“His what?” Danièle said.
“Movie talk,” I said. “The object of a quest.”
“Ah, yes.” She nodded again. “The body would have been his McMuffin.”
“MacGuffin,” I said.
“Right. McMuffin,” she repeated, smiling, and I realized she was having me on.
Rob noticed the flirting too. “You guys want a room or something? There are plenty down here.”
I exhaled a stream of smoke and decided I was in a good mood. Part of the reason for this was the fact the expedition was coming to a close. As much as the catacombs had grown on me, I was filthy and wet and tired and more than ready to leave. Also, I was looking forward to the dinner with Madame Gabin and Danièle later this evening. I had no idea what I was going to cook, but I figured I could find some French recipe on the internet. And afterward…well, Danièle would stay over, wouldn’t she? That seemed like a big step for me: having a woman sleep in my bed. True, I’d already slept in her bed, but her sleeping in my bed, that felt significant, intimate, like a relationship. “Hey, Rob,” I said. “You got any of those beers left?”
“Hell yeah.” He unzipped his backpack, took two out, and lobbed me one.
We cracked the tabs and foam spurted festively.
“You know,” Rob said, “this has been surprisingly fun. Thanks for the invite, Danny.”
“I did not invite you,” she told him sternly. “Pascal did.”
“But you okayed it.”
She shrugged. “Yes, well…I like sharing the catacombs with people. I guess I am happy you had a good time.”
“Wow,” I said. “Are you two having a moment? Is this a breakthrough?”
