The Phoenix Apostles

by Lynn Sholes

  "I've read about it," Matt said, "but nothing prepared me for this."

  "This way." After a number of bone-filled rooms, the guide led them to another series of crypts, these filled with small-bone heaps piled shoulder-high like autumn leaves.

  Water dripped steadily from the ceiling and echoed around them. "I don't understand something," Seneca said as they entered the next room.

  The man halted to wait for her question.

  "There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to this place. How could anyone possibly know that specific remains were missing? Especially a single individual among millions?"

  "There are a few individuals who have a special resting place. It was only several years ago that Robespierre's was identified." He motioned for them to follow, leading the way through a series of chambers whose thick walls were again constructed of bones and skulls reaching to the roof. "These are the bodies from the riots in the Place de Greve, from the Hotel de Brienne, and from the Rue Meslee. They were placed here in 1788." Finally he stopped. "Here we are.

  Before them, Seneca saw a wall of large bricks, each one bearing a name. Near a far corner, a brick and the surrounding mortar had been removed leaving open a dark, empty cavity.

  The guide pointed. "There is the crypt you seek, the final resting place of Maximilien Robespierre. In 1794, Robespierre was guillotined without trial. His corpse and head were both buried in the common cemetery of Errancis but were later moved here."

  Matt stood in front of the hole in the wall and shined his light beam inside. Seneca joined him as they peered into the blackness. There were a few scraps of cloth and a layer of dust and dirt. Other than that, the small crypt was empty.

  "Were any other crypts disturbed or opened besides this one?" Matt asked.

  The guide shook his head. "This has never happened before. Highly unusual for anyone to want a handful of old bones, don't you think? Why bother to open a crypt?" He made a sweeping angelic gesture with his arms. "There are plenty of others to choose from if all they wanted were bones."

  "Have the authorities determined any suspects?" Seneca asked.

  "No," the guide said. "Nor are they spending a great deal of time on it. There are many other more important crimes to investigate."

  "Then I guess we've seen all we need to see," Matt said.

  "Oh, but you've yet to see the real catacombs. The true underbelly of Paris."

  "What do you mean?" Seneca said, turning to stare at the guide. To her shock, he held a gun aimed at her chest.

  "What's going on?" Matt said, his eyes fixed on the pistol. The man pointed his light beam toward an entrance to another tunnel a few yards away. A jail-like iron gate protected the opening. "That way," he ordered. "Your final tour is about to begin."

  LOST 2012, PARIS

  "WHAT DO YOU WANT?" Seneca was surprised at how shaky and thin her voice sounded. Her heart tripped at the sight of the gun in the guide's hand. "I don't have much money with me, but you can have it. Here, take my credit cards." She reached for the latch on her hip pack.

  "Did you bring us all this way just to rob us?" Matt asked.

  The man laughed. "That would be overly dramatic, wouldn't it?" He waved the gun at Seneca. "I'm not interested in your money." Aiming the beam of his lantern toward the tunnel entrance, he produced a set of keys and unlocked the metal gate. It shrieked from rust and corrosion as he opened it. "Let's go."

  "If you're not going to rob us, what's this all about?" Matt said.

  The explosion of the gun blast was deafening in the confined space. As a reflex, Seneca ducked only to find that the man had fired into the floor beside where she and Matt stood. Shards of gravel sprayed her jeans-covered leg. The surprise effect of the boom worked. She was ready to do whatever he demanded.

  "Okay," Matt said, moving to shield her. "We get the message."

  "Next time I won't aim at the floor. Now move!"

  Entering the new tunnel, Seneca turned to see the guide relocking it from the inside. As he followed, he alternately jabbed the muzzle of the gun into one of their backs if they slowed. When they tried to speak, he demanded they remain silent. Once he stopped them for a moment. Seneca glanced over her shoulder to see him pull a piece of paper from his backpack. Shining his light on it, he studied it carefully.

  "Let's go," he ordered.

  There were no lights overhead like before, making it apparent to Seneca that they were venturing off the approved tourist route. Unlike the tunnels they left behind, the floor became uneven and littered with debris, trash, and chunks of rock. She followed Matt, carefully stepping over what seemed like an endless scattering of old wood and pieces of stone lying in the narrowing path.

  After many hundreds of zigzagging yards, they came to a junction of three tunnels. Someone had painted a white stickman skeleton figure on the wall with an arrow pointing to the right.

  As they paused, Seneca heard the crinkle of paper from behind. A moment later, the man said, "Go left."

  Following his order, Matt led on and soon passed a break in the wall. Illuminated by their three flashlight beams, Seneca saw a large cavity filled with bones and skulls. Different from the areas they had seen earlier, these were not stacked in an orderly fashion, but appeared to have been dumped inside the cavern like heaps of refuse.

  The rock-walled artery rambled on around sharp, jagged corners and down inclines only to start back up again, sometimes in angled slopes and other times as crude stone steps.

  The guide stopped often to check the paper, and the farther they traveled, the more Seneca believed that this was not going to end well. There was a good chance she and Matt might be the next residents of the catacombs among the millions of human remains scattered along the miles of tunnels and countless chambers. Her research had told her that there were almost as many miles of passages in the catacombs as there were streets above ground in Paris. No one knew for sure how many entrances there were to the tunnels. Over the years, most had been found and sealed. Some tunnels extended to a depth of more than three hundred feet. Few remained accessible.

  Why was the guide doing this? Was there a connection between the tomb robbery and their kidnapper? If he wasn't the real guide arranged by her magazine, then who was he? Why did he need what was probably a map?

  "Which way?" Matt asked as they came upon another juncture.

  "Straight," the guide said after checking the paper.

  Seneca aimed her flashlight ahead. The ceiling dropped down to form a crawlspace barely three feet high. And the floor was covered in human bones. "You can't be serious?"

  "Dead serious." He jabbed her again with the gun barrel. "Give me your flashlights." He took the lights, turned them off, and placed both into his backpack. "Now, start crawling."

  Matt crouched, then got on all fours and started forward.

  Seneca gingerly lowered herself and touched her palms to the brittle bones, hearing some splinter and crack as she put weight on her hands. Below her knees, the crunching sounded to her like the snapping of dry branches in a forest. Revulsion paired with fear reared up inside her.

  The guide switched off his lantern. "Go until I tell you to stop."

  After navigating the passage and moving across the blanket of bones for over half an hour, Seneca's hands and knees were torn and bruised. She now understood why the man was gloved and realized the reason for the knee padding beneath his trousers. She whimpered when the heel of her hand came down on a sliver of bone that pierced her skin.

  Finally the guide turned on his lantern. Ahead was a tunnel high enough for them to stand.

  Seneca recoiled. The tunnel was alive with rats, some nearly the size of a cat.

  "Keep going!"

  "Can we have our flashlights back?" Seneca asked, crawling behind Matt into the larger chamber. When she stood, her stiff and aching back slowly uncurled.

  "They're of no more use to you." The man emerged behind them from the crawlspace.

  "Come on, be reasonable;"
Matt said. "Take away our lights and we're as good as dead."

  "Now you're catching on. Start walking." He aimed his light down the tunnel so they could see where they were headed, then again plunged them into darkness.

  In the blackness, their pace was slow. Seneca could hear the scurrying of the rats all around. The guide directed them through more passageways, twisting and turning, walking over dry bones or slogging through knee-deep water or slippery mud. As if to quickly check their location, he flashed on his lantern and looked at his map. But in the next instant he extinguished it, leaving them in total darkness, compounding their confusion and disorientation.

  After what seemed like another half hour had passed, feeling along the wall in order to keep trekking forward or to navigate a corner, Seneca reached ahead and grabbed the back of Matt's jacket. She tugged on it, causing him to stop.

  Turning around, she faced the darkness behind her and listened. "You aren't there any more, are you?"

  No response.

  "He left us," she said. "The guide, or whoever he was, is gone."

  Seneca took Matt's hand, hearing nothing but her own breathing, the pounding of blood in her ears, the scuttle of the rats, and the distant drip on water. They were alone, engulfed in the eternal blackness of the catacombs.

  HALLOWEEN 2012, PARIS

  SENECA CLENCHED MATT'S HAND. It was a small comfort but she was grateful. "Should we try to follow him?"

  "Quiet," he whispered.

  They waited in silence for five, maybe ten minutes-no way for her to be certain.

  "I wanted to make sure he wasn't just waiting in the distance or coming back," Matt said.

  "I don't understand. Shouldn't we have tried to go after him?"

  "No. Even if we had, he knows the way and would have quickly out-distanced us. Remember, he's got a map. We don't even know how long he was gone. We made dozens of turns through so many different tunnels, we'd never catch up or even know if we were headed in the right direction."

  "How could he have known so many details when we first started out, then needed a map later."

  "He could have taken the regular tour for the tourists. It wouldn't be hard to learn a few facts to sound authentic."

  Seneca felt helpless and a bit uneasy talking to blackness. And it was blackness beyond anything she had ever experienced. There was no point of reference other than Matt's voice. The total lack of sight had already eroded her courage. "Why did he do this to us?"

  "It has to be connected to the tomb robbery. After all, he knew exactly why we came here. And I find it impossible to believe that he was the real contact arranged by your magazine. This guy didn't want our money. He wanted us..."

  "Dead?"

  "I was going to say lost, but down here that's the equivalent of dead." Matt sank to the floor and guided her down beside him. They sat on the sandy floor with their backs to the wall. "Here's what worries me. Did you notice all the graffiti on the walls and the trash covering the floor once we first left the tourist areas?"

  "Yeah, tons of it."

  "The last few times the guy turned on his light and I could see our surroundings, the amount of graffiti had diminished. Only a scattering here and there. And very little trash. We kept going on for quite a ways after that. After the crawlspace I didn't feel much litter at my feet-the beer cans and bags of trash like from before. That means the cataphiles may not come into this area often, if at all."

  "Cataphiles?"

  "Despite the catacombs being off limits except for the tourist section, the tunnels are a popular attraction for underground urban explorers. At night they descend into the underground through manholes, abandoned railway tunnels, basements of derelict buildings, deserted metro stations, wherever they can find an opening. Most are teens or college age. It's an obsession for them. The locals call them cataphiles-literally lovers of the catacombs. Cataphiles play a constant game of cat and mouse with a team of underground police who patrol large portions of the tunnels looking for them. The kids get fined a few Euros and just show up again the next night or following weekend."

  "But isn't that good news?" Seneca said. "Doesn't that mean that we could be found by the cataphiles or even the police?"

  "It would be good news except for two things, and that's what's bothering me. The lack of the graffiti I last noticed and the absence of litter tells me we're in an area not frequented by anyone for some reason. And to add to that, it's the beginning of the week, the night with the least amount of underground explorers. Our friend knew exactly what he was doing. He brought us to a secluded section on a night with the fewest visitors."

  "Now I understand why he didn't just shoot us. If our bodies were discovered with bullet wounds, it would obviously be murder and result in a police investigation. But if we die of an injury or simply become lost until we starve to death, it would be chalked up to a couple of stupid American tourists who wandered off into the Paris underground and never came out."

  "Listen," Matt said as a distant rumble shook the ground around them.

  "What was that?"

  "Might be a nearby metro tunnel. The problem is, low frequency sounds are omni-directional. There's no way to know for sure where they originate. We could think we were headed toward the source only to find it was from the opposite direction."

  She heard it again, this time more distant. Then there was only the faraway dripping of water.

  Matt said, "In my research, I read about a guy who worked at the Val-de-Grace hospital. One night he left his post and descended into the quarries on a mission to steal from the wine caves of the monks of Chartreux. It was 1793 when he went missing and they didn't find his body until 1804. Apparently, he was discovered holding a large ring of keys and was lying a few yards from an exit. Presumably, his candle went out, and he wandered for days before dying of thirst."

  Seneca felt a chill colder than the constant fifty-two degrees of the tunnels claimed in the tourist brochures. She started to tremble, and as she did, Matt responded by slipping his arm around her shoulders and pulling her closer. "What should we do?" she asked.

  "I think our best bet is to try to work our way back in the direction we came. If we can find the crawlspace, maybe it'll lead to the area that has more traffic."

  "But we must have passed dozens of other tunnels and bonefilled rooms and holes in the walls. He had a friggin' map. We've got nothing. We could think we're going in the right direction while we're headed off to an even worse place."

  Matt gave out a nervous laugh. "I'm not sure we could find a worse place. The guidebook calls the catacombs the Empire of the Dead."

  "Thanks for that cheerful thought." She felt tears forming. "Maybe one of us is a bad luck charm." There was a long pause. Then she said, "It's the second time someone has tried to kill us."

  "You're right. I never believed it when they said the incident on my boat was an accident. And the helicopter manufacturer's attorney was way too quick to agree to settle out of court."

  "Now that this has happened, I think it's what we're investigating that's gotten us into trouble."

  "The tomb robberies."

  "Right. That's the common thread. After all, there's no connection prior to us meeting in the Keys. And don't forget the bombing in Mexico while I was covering what's looking more like a tomb robbery." The chilling fingers of panic were starting to work their way up her spine. "Three attempts on my life. I think that makes me the bad talisman."

  Matt snuggled her closer. "It might have been just you in Mexico, but now it's us. Someone is stealing the remains of mass murderers for a specific purpose and they don't want us finding out what it is. That's why there was the explosion in Mexico, why they shot up my boat, and that's why we're sitting here in the dark with little chance of finding our way out. I think we're starting to get too close to the truth, and they want us out of the way."

  "If you're right, they've done a good job of getting the message across to

  "Think you've got enough for a
story now?"

  Seneca chuckled, appreciating his attempt to lighten up the moment. "I hope I get a chance to write it."

  The distant rumble shook the ground again.

  "You ready to try and find a way out?"

  "Yes," Seneca said, and started to get to her feet, but Matt held her arm, pulling her back.

  "Can I ask you a question?"

  "Of course," she said.

  "Do you like Halloween?"

  "Well, sure, at least I did when I was a kid. It was one of my favorite holidays. But I'm not feeling the love right now. I've got all I can take of being spooked."

  "Halloween is still my favorite holiday. I go all out decorating my house every year. In addition to handing out candy, I always have a big bag of glow sticks, and I give one to every trick-ortreater so they'll have a safe night collecting their candy."