Catacomb

by Madeleine Roux

  He glanced over his shoulder in alarm, directly into Dan’s face.

  And then he was gone.

  Dan stared into the dank bowels of the classroom storage closet. The shelves had been knocked out and scattered into the room, leaving a kind of cave for vagrants. A few pillows and blankets littered the floor, eaten to tatters by rodents and insects. He squeezed his nose shut with his thumb and forefinger, pressing into the closet and kneeling, searching among the disintegrating remnants of a camp. There was no telling how long it had been since the place was last used.

  He toed aside the pillows and blankets. Something moved among the discarded bedding, distorting the fabric before tearing through it. A whip-thin rat darted out at him, shrieking and then scurrying out of the closet. Dan sank back against the gutted shelves, holding his chest and catching his breath from the sudden shock. The hole left by the rat showed a glimpse of faded yellow, and Dan carefully moved the blankets to find a sort of nest, torn pieces of paper piled together. Most of it had been chewed and soiled beyond recognition, but a few half sheets of paper still held visible text.

  Dan gathered what he could, shuddering from the damp, foul smell and clumps of fur and droppings that clung to the pages. He poked around the closet for more, but there was nothing. Behind him, the school echoed with the voices and footsteps of his friends.

  Out in the main hall, he discovered Abby documenting the ruins with her camera. Jordan hugged himself, staring around at the precariously open and broken ceiling.

  “There you are,” he said, breathing through his mouth. “Where the hell did you go?”

  “I saw something,” Dan said. “It might have been . . . I’m not sure. But there was some old junk in a closet. I took it to look at later.”

  “Dan,” Abby said, staring at him over the eye of her camera. “What did you see?”

  “One of those visions,” he admitted. “I think it might have been my dad. Hopefully some of this stuff was theirs.” Grimacing, he held up the stained, old pages.

  “Delightful,” Jordan mumbled, holding his nose and scowling at Dan like he was crazy.

  “We could try and dry them out with my blow dryer,” Abby suggested, unfazed. She returned to her camera, wandering over to a mound of rotting and piled tabletops. Her camera clicked softly as she shot the ceiling, the classrooms, Jordan. She was taking so many pictures that it was a few minutes before Dan noticed it, staring past her to the maintenance door he had entered through.

  A softer, faster click-click-click came from the bushes right outside the door.

  Abby wasn’t the only one taking photos.

  “What the hell,” he whispered, racing toward the door.

  A slim shadow huddled against the shrubs outside, photographing them. When Dan neared the door, the guy swung the camera over his shoulder on a strap and raced out of view. Dan followed, cursing the low-hanging boards nailed over the maintenance hatch.

  The guy was fast, far faster than Dan, nimbly leaping over the landslide of junk in the front yard. Skidding down the embankment, he reached a black motorcycle parked across the street from Abby’s car. Out of breath, Dan stumbled down the hill, watching as the stranger hopped on the bike, slammed one foot down on the gas, and then executed a neat circle before speeding away. A red insignia flashed on the back of the cyclist’s jacket, but Dan was too far away to read it, and he had missed the license plate, too.

  Panting, Dan stared after the motorcycle as it disappeared.

  “What was that?” Jordan was out of breath, too, running back toward him. “Did a cop see us?”

  “I don’t think it was a cop,” Dan said. “Someone was photographing us. Watching us.”

  Dan was tired of losing his appetite just before every meal rolled around.

  “You really think this person was taking pictures of us?” Abby asked, leaning toward him with both elbows propped on the booth table. “Why would anyone bother?”

  Two hours on the road had brought them back to the Montgomery area for a late lunch. They’d stopped in another diner to stretch and use the restroom, but none of them wanted to stay still for very long.

  “I have no idea,” Dan said. The whole drive here, he’d been trying to make sense of the vision in the school and the stranger photographing them. At least Abby and Jordan had heard the motorcycle, so Dan knew the encounter hadn’t all been in his head. And on the bright side, Facebook had been indifferent enough to send a “We’re looking into it” response to Dan’s report of the incident.

  “Hey, you love taking pictures of old crap, Abby. Maybe this weirdo likes taking pictures of people taking pictures of old crap,” Jordan said, but he looked pale, nervous.

  Dan didn’t like it either.

  “Well, whoever it was is probably still back in Birmingham,” Abby pointed out, “but we should keep our eyes open anyway.”

  “Agreed,” Dan said. He had only managed to order a soda, and was sipping it slowly while nibbling on the complimentary bread. He never liked taking his meds on an empty stomach, and the snacking helped.

  “Once we pass Mobile we’ll be coming up on the Magnolia Cemetery,” Abby said, switching tracks and trying, and failing, to lighten the mood. “If we’re still okay with stopping, I’ve been dying to see this place.”

  “Phrasing?” Jordan said wryly.

  “Okay, excited to see it,” Abby said, sticking out her tongue. “Mr. Blaise wouldn’t shut up about it. I think he did some charcoal sketches of it back when he was our age.”

  Their waitress, Randy, appeared just then, snapping her gum and bringing them the check. She had candy-apple red hair permed out in a frizzy halo that wouldn’t look out of place on Ronald McDonald’s sister. “Magnolia, you said? Y’all really should see it if you’re not in a big hurry. I suppose it ain’t normal to recommend a cemetery to tourists, but this one’s special.”

  “Yes! Have you been?” Abby directed her attention fully to Randy. “I’ve been looking into these rum runners from the time of Prohibition and the history of them is so, so cool. I’m trying to find a way to add them into this photo project I’m working on.”

  Dan twisted to stare out the window at the car, where the damp old pages he had found were drying in the sun on top of the Neon.

  “If you two want to give me money for the check, I’ll be right out,” Abby said shortly, turning back to finish her conversation with Randy. Dan hated that they were fighting already, even a little bit, but he truly was anxious to see what was in those papers.

  “So, you really think you saw your dad?” Jordan asked as they walked to the car. “I mean, your real dad. Wait, is that kosher? Is it weird to say real? Sandy and Paul are great. You know I think they’re totally great.”

  “No offense taken,” Dan assured him truthfully. He didn’t exactly know what the correct nomenclature was himself. “I think it might have been him. I mean, he looked like me. Didn’t sound much like me, but that’s not so strange. I heard him talking to someone—‘Evie,’ he said—but she didn’t appear to me.”

  Jordan nodded, chewing thoughtfully on the bendy straw in his to-go cup. His eyes darkened behind his thick-rimmed glasses. “If you did see him, what do you suppose he was doing in that old school?”

  “Squatting, maybe?” Dan suggested. “It sounded like he was in a hurry, maybe even being chased. I’m hoping in the rush to get out, he and my mom might have left something behind.”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  The pages crinkled and cracked in his hands.

  Abby and Jordan remained silent, but he could feel the combined weight of their anticipation bearing down on him like a concrete block. They didn’t want the smelly, moldy papers in the car any longer than they needed them, so the three of them stood in a semicircle in the parking lot.

  “Okay,” Dan said on an inhalation. “Here goes. What do you have for me, Mom and Dad?”

  Breathing through his mouth, he pulled the top page close and squinted at the fa
ded handwriting. It was a letter addressed to Marc & Evie.

  “‘I hope you two are safe,’” Dan read aloud, making out the writing as best he could. “‘A PO box is smart, but still traceable. Just lay low until this stuff with Trax Corp. blows over. They’re leaning on me hard to give up my sources, but those morons know I won’t budge. Some of their people have come sniffing around the office. Thugs. The animal cruelty was a big find, but the smuggling is even bigger. I’ll try to keep that bloodsucker Tilton off your backs. Just don’t stay in one place for too long, all right? In a few months Trax will have more to worry about than a few trespassers and you can come back to town. Everything is fine at the Whistle. You know me, I can hold down a fort.’” Lowering the pages, Dan let Abby take them to inspect. “It’s signed ‘Maisie.’”

  “It sounds like your parents were whistleblowers or something,” Abby said, reading the page over again. She flipped to the second salvaged sheet. “Another letter from that Maisie person. Sounds like whatever your parents found, it got this Trax Corp. shut down.”

  Dan went to her side, reading over her shoulder.

  “And there was a warrant out for their arrest,” Dan added, pointing. “Even before the police report I have. I guess the breaking and entering wasn’t an isolated incident.”

  “But your parents must have been right,” Jordan said, going back to his phone. “I mean, Trax Corp. closed, yeah? So they must have been doing something illegal.”

  Dan nodded, but he was elsewhere, imagining how frightening it must have been for his parents to move from place to place, dodging arrest. They must have been squatting in the school, avoiding motels or any places where they might be recognized. He couldn’t believe his own parents were fugitives. Of course, after bouncing around from one foster family to the next throughout his childhood, the revelation felt right, somehow. As much as he loved and appreciated Paul and Sandy, there had always been a noticeable but unmentioned gulf between their all-American goodness and his darker tendencies.

  “There must be more about this company online,” Dan mused. “If they got shut down, there might be articles about it. Although this was in the eighties. If it wasn’t a big company, there might not be much.”

  “Maybe not,” Jordan said, hunched over his phone. “But it looks like the Whistle was definitely a newspaper. Small one, but they’ve got a Wikipedia entry. Maisie Moore was the editor-in-chief until 1995. No mention of your parents, but the paper was based in Metairie. That’s not far from New Orleans. Maybe Maisie still lives in the area.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Abby said. She handed the letters back to Dan carefully, mindful of their delicate state. “She knew your parents, Dan. We can look her up when we get to town.”

  “Don’t get my hopes up.” But they were already up. What if Maisie Moore had contact information on file for his parents? After all these years of not knowing, could finding them be as easy as that?

  “Are you sure it’s okay?”

  “Honestly, Abby, it’s fine. I know how much you’ve been looking forward to seeing this cemetery. I’m not going to ruin it for you.”

  And anyway, they were already parked on a narrow street nearby. Dan could hardly remember the drive. He was functioning in the strictest sense of the word, but even simple things like fastening his seat belt had taken extraordinary effort. When they’d made a quick stop for gas, Jordan had insisted on paying the bill, since Dan couldn’t find his wallet.

  Abby opened his car door, and he tumbled out onto the sidewalk, blinking up at the overcast sky as if he had just woken from a long, restless sleep. The enormous cemetery was protected by a spindly wrought-iron gate. He and Jordan followed Abby down the sidewalk to the entrance, passing below a sloped sign with Magnolia Cemetery worked into the metal.

  Jordan shuddered. “I hate cemeteries. I never feel like I should be in one, you know? Like unless you are literally a dead person or there to bring flowers, you should stay far away.”

  “Yeah, Abby might owe us a round of milk shakes later.”

  She’d been right about the architecture, though—gorgeous, sprawling monuments that could house a person or a small family of pets popped up every few feet along the path. The three of them wandered from the main walkway and onto the short-cropped lawn. Dan was careful not to tread even close to any of the flat gravestones sinking into the ground.

  “Are you sure we’re just browsing? You seem like a woman on a mission,” Jordan called to Abby, who strode ahead confidently.

  “Randy gave me some directions.”

  “Who?” Jordan cried.

  “Randy. Randy, our waitress? Right, you weren’t paying attention. She told me about some monuments to check out. I jotted down the directions. Just follow me.”

  Neither of them protested.

  “So this project of yours,” Dan said, making conversation to fill the heavy, empty air of the cemetery. “Is this something you’re going to show to your new professors or what?”

  She shrugged, chewing on her lower lip as they picked their way around the gravestones. “Actually, it’s . . . I’ve just been thinking. A lot. Maybe too much.” With a sigh, she paused to snap a few pictures of trees towering above them. “There’s been so much pressure to pick a school and do the right thing, the expected thing, and I’m not sure that’s what I want anymore.”

  “I guess your dad was pretty tough on you about applications,” Dan said.

  “Feral, I think, is the better word.” She laughed, bitterly. “This is what I like,” she said, gesturing to the camera and then the open air. “I’m just not sure spending a whole crapload of money to get an art degree is the smartest choice. Plenty of artists do fine without it. And I’m guaranteed to be poor right after graduating anyway, so why make myself even poorer? It’s not like I want to get a degree to teach art, I want to be living it.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I at least want to take a year off.” She might have started hesitantly, but now she spoke with conviction. “At first, my parents said they wouldn’t support me if I didn’t go to college, but then finally they said if I could show them how I would use the year, they’d consider it. And who knows, maybe if this project is good enough, I can get it in a gallery back home or something.”

  Dan nodded dumbly. After everything, she still hadn’t felt comfortable telling him something as big as this?

  “Anyway, so what if my parents don’t support me? Jordan’s parents aren’t supporting him and he’s surviving.”

  “And thriving,” Jordan said, but it sounded sarcastic to Dan’s ears.

  Dan just tried to keep up, watching the names of the dead roll past him. A high-pitched wind whined through the open field, cutting through the warmth of the day like a knife. It sounded like a shriek. Jordan had been right before; they didn’t belong there. It didn’t matter how many colorful bouquets were heaped on the tombs and the steps of the grand mausoleums—it took only one rotting lump of flowers by his feet to remind Dan of the thousands of dead under and around them.

  “Jesus, nobody does spirits like the South,” Jordan whispered. “You go to a cemetery back home and it’s like, eh, whatever—creepy, I guess, but not like this. It just feels like the dead are angrier here.”

  Dan nodded. “I’m just crossing my fingers that I don’t have any visions in this place.”

  “Yikes.” Jordan blanched. “I didn’t even think of that.”

  Abby led them to a far corner of the cemetery, where the graves were less impressive. Most were simply rough-hewn rocks wedged into the dirt and scratched with initials and years. But beyond that smattering of markers rose a single monument, a stepped limestone monstrosity that seemed to lord over the lesser stones. A snarling face had been chiseled into the monument, grotesque and exaggerated, as if a demon were caught inside and had pressed and pressed against the stone until it stretched tight over its face like ivory fabric.

  A single tree, half-withered and racing the m
onument toward the overcast sky, grew from the very corner of the fenced property. It hung over them, oddly still in the wind.

  “This is it!” Abby said excitedly, getting out her camera and snapping photos.

  JAMES CONLEN ORSINI 1894–1935

  ‘Ambition’s debt is paid.’

  Je ne te quitterai point que je ne t’aie vu pendu

  “I will not leave until I have seen you hanged,” Jordan read. Abby and Dan turned in unison to glance at him. “What? I took three years of French, might as well use it.”

  “This guy sounds like a real riot,” Dan muttered.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Abby teased from behind her camera. He listened to the soft rush of the shutter as it clicked in between her words. “He was a criminal, a gangster, not exactly the kind of guy to go quietly in his sleep. He died in a shootout after a bunch of his buddies sprang him out of lockup to avoid execution.”

  “And you’re sure you want to photograph his grave? You’re not afraid of catching his spirit or something?” Jordan asked, poking nervously at the stud in his lip with his tongue.

  “Stop fiddling with that thing, it’s going to get infected.”

  “You’re going to get infected.”

  “Very original, Jordan.”

  Dan couldn’t look at that hideous face on the monument anymore. He wandered around to the back of the statue, kicking at the overgrown grass. The groundskeepers apparently didn’t care so much about this corner of the cemetery, letting clumps of weeds and dry leaves gather. Nobody had come to leave flowers recently. Dan kept circling the statue, coming to a halt just before he fell face-first into a hole.

  One of the gravestones had been overturned and pushed aside, and a messy hole had been dug in front of it. There didn’t seem to be anything inside except for a few worms and chunks of fallen sod.

  “Hey, guys,” Dan called, peering over the edge and down into the hole. He was going to invite them over to see the weird, open grave, but then he stopped, noticing a smudge of white in the dirt. Kneeling down, he carefully brushed aside the loose dirt and pebbles, revealing what he first thought might be the jaw of a dog or small animal. His fingers hovered over its faded surface, a sudden desire to pick it up, hold it, never let it go taking hold of him and squeezing. He swayed a little, then caught himself and backed away. Dan stared at the odd little curved bone. It wasn’t from a dog, he realized with a lurch in his stomach, but from a human child.