by Jeremy Bates
“What?” he said. “You no want gift?”
“Depends what it is.”
“Batteries!” he announced, whacking me good-naturedly on the shoulder with a meaty paw. “We have many extras, and you have none.”
After much consulting and comparing of maps, Pascal and my new pal Dreadlocks determined that we were all going in the same direction and would thus travel together—so explained Danièle, my translator in all the goings-on.
As we refilled our backpacks and installed the gifted batteries in our headlamps, Danièle went on to tell me that there was a room with a Norman castle and gargoyles nearby, a room heaped with silk flowers, a room lined with paintings of film characters, and even a library—a small alcove littered with books cataphiles used based on the honor system. “I wanted to show you all of this, Will,” she said. “But I do not think it is a good idea anymore with you-know-who around.”
“Voldemort?”
“Do not be silly…Voldemort is English, not French.”
“I don’t think we have to worry about the Painted Devil,” I said. “He only had the hand up because he tricked us. And he’s not going to trick us again.”
“You do not know that for sure. We hurt his ego. We scared him away. He might want to get revenge somehow.”
I didn’t argue the point—I didn’t care if we saw the feature rooms or not—and we rejoined the scuba guys and followed them to one of the Beach’s exits, what turned out to be a narrow fissure where the floor angled upward and met the ceiling.
I wasn’t claustrophobic, but an oily something coated my gut at the sight of it. “We’re supposed to fit through there?” I said.
“We call it a chatiѐre,” Danièle said. “A cat hole.”
That was an accurate description, I thought, as it didn’t appear that anything larger than a domesticated feline could squeeze through it.
The scuba guys went first. They had introduced themselves to us by their catacombs monikers. The old guy was Zéro, the skinny kid was Chevre (which, according to Danièle, meant Goat), and Dreadlocks was Citerne (Tank), though I preferred “Dreadlocks” and continued to think of him as such.
Dreadlocks climbed the slope that rose to the ceiling, shoved the oxygen tanks and harness into the hole ahead of him, then crawled in after it. Zéro went next, then Goat.
“It is not so bad,” Danièle told me as we ascended the gradient after them. “You put your arms in first, then you wiggle your hips to move.” She shook her butt to demonstrate. “Just follow me.”
When we reached the fissure, she slipped inside without hesitation, her willowy frame allowing ample leeway on either side of her body. I peered in after her, but could see little more than the soles of her boots kicking as she crawled forward.
“Let’s go, nancy boy!” Rob said from behind and below me.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I stuck my head and shoulders into the hole, decided to hell with that, then switched to a crab-walk, feet first.
“No, no, no,” Pascal said. “That is not the proper way.”
I scuttled into the narrow space quickly. My head was aching with faded adrenaline, and I didn’t want to deal with any of Pascal’s shit right then.
The walls and ceiling pressed tightly around me. I dug my heels into the ground and pulled myself forward, dragging my backpack behind me.
After about a minute of this, and struggling the entire way, I halted, contemplating whether to backtrack and start over again, headfirst, military-crawl style. But Rob had already entered behind me, blocking my exit. He cackled in that witchy way of his, as though he thought this cat hole was a trip, and said, “Get going, smurfdick!”
“I can’t move fast on my back.”
“Why didn’t you listen to Rascal? Headfirst! This isn’t a fucking waterslide.”
I resumed pulling myself forward with my legs, but it didn’t get any easier. The shaft seemed to be narrowing, limiting my maneuverability.
My feet kicked rock. A dead end? I continued kicking, probing, and discovered the shaft had angled to the right.
My relief didn’t last long, however, because laying supine wasn’t ideal for turning laterally. I was like a straw caught in the elbow between two lengths of pipe. I would have to roll onto my side, so I could bend at the waist.
Problem was, the damn ceiling was now too low to do that.
“Boss,” Rob said. “What’s the holdup?”
“The shaft bends. I don’t think I can get around it.”
“Yeah you can. That big oaf did.”
“He went headfirst. I can’t twist the way I am. I think we have to reverse back out.”
“No fucking way!”
“I don’t have a choice!”
“I’m going to push you.”
He began shoving my backpack.
“Stop it!” I said. “That’s not helping.”
“Then stop dicking around.”
I attempted to roll onto my side, but it was difficult to generate torque without the use of my arms, one of which was extended past my head, the other pinned at my side. I crossed my ankles and bent my knees and corkscrewed my legs to the right. It took a couple of rocking motions, but I was finally able to flop onto my right side.
“You good?” Rob asked.
“Yeah…” I said, though I felt like a pretzel.
I began to inchworm around the bend, my upper shoulder scraping the ceiling. Everything was going well until the ceiling lowered even more. I slugged on, squeezing into the pinching shaft, telling myself the space had to open again. It didn’t. Soon I could no longer move forward. I tried reversing, but couldn’t do that either.
I was stuck.
“Dammit,” I said softly.
“What’s wrong?” Rob asked.
“I can’t move.”
“Come on.”
“I’m stuck!”
“You’re not—”
“I am!”
A pause. The silence was bleak. There was something inherently unnerving about being unable to move your body how you wanted to move it.
A commotion sounded as Rob shoved my backpack to one side. He saw me and said, “Fuck, bro, you gotta get flat on your stomach or back.”
“I can’t.”
“You gotta twist.”
“I’m all twisted up!” I snapped. “I shouldn’t have kept going.”
“You got in there, you can get out.”
“Give me a sec.”
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to think!”
“Danny!” Rob shouted.
“What…?” She sounded far away.
“Will’s stuck!”
No reply.
“Danny!”
“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 nickna
med 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.”
“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.”
