Chapter 10 #2
Martine shook her head. “Of course not.” We had to wait another fifteen minutes before he strolled up.
He embraced everyone, and I swung my backpack in front of me so that he couldn’t pull me too close.
He gave me an annoyed look. Then he took a can of WD-40 out of his backpack and sprayed the rollers of the metal security grating that covered the front of the store so they wouldn’t squeak.
He produced a small black case from which he chose two long, thin pieces of metal.
He stuck the L-shaped one into the lock, held it with one hand, and inserted the other piece, scrubbing it in and out until there was a click.
He rolled the grating up slowly and silently.
“Picking locks,” I murmured to myself. “That’s a good skill to have.”
Martine, who was standing next to me, gestured to herself and then Noor. “We can teach you how to do it,” she whispered.
“Really?” I whispered back. “Yeah, I’d love to learn how.”
Le Bec raised the grating halfway, ducked under it, and spent a long five minutes with his picks on the front-door lock.
I kept my eyes on the street, looking for shadowy figures.
Finally, he motioned us in. He rolled the grating down as silently as he’d raised it and followed, directing us to the back room.
Unlike the dim front, where a little light filtered in from the street, it was completely dark.
He flicked on his headlamp. Battered wooden cubbies filled with shoes covered one wall.
A large wood worktable, its top scored and stained, stood in the center, with brown and black leather remnants piled on one end.
The room smelled sharply of leather, mingled with the solvent smell of shoe polish and a whiff of old wood and dust.
“There is our access,” he said, pointing to a tiny wrought iron spiral staircase lurking in the far corner, near an immense vintage sewing machine.
We followed him down the child-sized stairs, whose steps were so narrow my feet barely fit on them.
The boys, with their bigger feet, had to descend sideways.
At the bottom, our headlamps lit up a medieval wooden door set in a vaulted doorway on the far wall.
A heavy iron ring served as its knob. Le Bec grasped it with both hands and, grunting, pulled it open.
Inside, pillars made of roughly cut stones supported the arched vaults.
The stone floor was uneven, worn down into pathways.
Shadows lurked and quivered, and it smelled sour, like clothes left too long in the washer.
He made for the darkest corner, and we followed.
In the beam of his light, I saw a hole in the floor and rungs disappearing into gloom. “We go down here,” he said.
Nick pulled me close. “I’ll go ahead of you,” he said, his lips next to my ear, his breath warm and reassuring on my skin.
“That way I can help if you need it.” I nodded, thinking, Or at least break my fall a little, closing my eyes as he kissed my ear, then my cheek, then my lips.
Le Bec went first, followed by Youssef, Martine, Noor, and Nick.
As the light from everyone’s headlamps drained into darkness, the shadows flowed closer, until there was just my small light keeping them at bay.
The nearer the dark got, the bigger the sounds became.
Boots on metal rungs thudded like heartbeats.
When I couldn’t see Nick’s light any longer, I lowered myself into the shaft, climbing down and down, concentrating on setting each foot firmly onto the metal rungs.
If I slipped and fell, I’d take my friends down with me.
The farther I descended, the more gravity seemed to pull on me—out, away from the rungs, into nothing.
Fortunately, the shaft was only a meter or so in diameter.
When I felt like gravity’s heavy hand would pull me off the ladder, I’d stop and lean back until my pack rested against the wall behind me.
Then, reassured, I’d keep descending. After a while I saw things that couldn’t really be there—halos in the gloom, glowing shapes and moving squiggles of neon lurking at the very edges of my sight.
My ears felt muffled; I could hardly hear Nick when he called up to me, “We’re almost there.
The landing isn’t big, so we’re doing it one at a time.
There’s a tunnel just opposite the ladder; you’ll have to crawl through it for a few meters; then you can stand up.
Take your pack off and push it ahead of you.
If you need me, just call, and I’ll come help you. ”
“Got it,” I called down.
Light washed up from below, and Nick said, “You can stop there. I’ll tell you when to start again.
” I hung, my feet cramping on the thin rungs, until I heard Nick’s “Okay.” The ground surprised me when I felt it, reassuringly firm and flat under my feet.
I turned, and my headlamp illuminated the tunnel opening scooped out of limestone and about half my height.
I took off my pack, got down on my hands and knees, and pushed it in ahead of me.
My headlamp threw jerky shadows on the walls and floor, making me seasick, so I switched it off and crawled forward, feeling for obstacles as I went.
In the dark, I had a sensation of floating that I recognized from the flight to Paris: the feeling of being suspended between worlds.
Finally I saw a pale glow. I emerged into a room hewn out of the rock, about the size of the lobby in our apartment building.
The ceiling hung right above Nick’s head, and drifts of rubble ringed the perimeter, interrupted by five dark passageways.
I smiled at him, then scanned the room, looking for landmarks, starting to build a mental map, like I did with any new trail. “What’s next?”
He frowned and motioned at my headlamp. “Did your batteries die?”
I reached up to turn it on again, shaking my head. “The shadows were making me woozy, so I turned it off.”
“You crawled through in the dark?” I nodded, and he looked impressed.
Le Bec consulted a hand-drawn map, then pointed to one of the passages. “We go this way.”
We followed him, our lamps flashing on pale cut-stone walls supporting an irregular ceiling of raw stone. Nick entered tour-guide mode. “Would mademoiselle like to know more about this fascinating place?”
“Yes, please.”
“These catacombs are the city’s underground twin.
People have been quarrying rock from here to build Paris since at least the Romans,” he explained as Le Bec led us into a tidier corridor with smooth walls and an even floor.
“And Paris has been building on top of its quarries for hundreds of years, which is a really bad idea. When neighborhoods started collapsing into sinkholes because there were big voids underground that everybody’d forgotten about, the city got official, establishing an inspection and maintenance service—the cataflics. They don’t like us coming down here.”
“That is what makes it fun!” Youssef whooped into the darkness, his voice bouncing off the walls before it died away.
We walked on, the muffled crunch of our feet on the sandy gravel the only counterpoint to a silence so large it almost seemed like a new sound.
We passed rooms—Nick called them “squats”—where cataphiles partied and bunked.
Some were just caves hacked into the rock; others had been made of well-fitted stacked blocks.
Some even had stone-block “furniture” and camp stoves and grocery bags of supplies.
In one room, three guys slept, bundled in dusty sleeping bags.
Nick said that they were probably planning to spend several days down here, exploring the more remote tunnels.
Everywhere we saw carvings in the soft limestone, including a pale, sinister face dominated by a bulbous, off-center nose that leered suddenly in my headlamp. I squeaked and jerked away.
“It is okay,” Noor reassured me. “It is just Beno?t. He is not real.” I looked closer, my heart still thumping. “Beno?t” was a carved imp’s head. I exhaled shakily. He had looked alive.
“I know the guy who made him,” Youssef said. “He is a stone carver in his other life. He makes little faces like this that jump out and surprise you.”
“It gave me a heart attack,” I said, my hand on my chest, trying to calm myself.
“I will tell him. It will please him very much.”
“Glad my terror could make his day.”
Youssef laughed. We continued until the corridor emptied us into a large, low-ceilinged room glowing with paintings so vivid the colors throbbed in the light of our headlamps.
A giant black-and-white rat in a suit reading Charlie Hebdo caught my eye, then one of Le Bec’s pigeons, dressed in a vampire cloak, with blood on its fangs.
Nearby, a woman in a scarlet dress with spaghetti for hair appeared unaware that a smirking man behind her was twirling the strands up with his fork.
“What do you think?” Nick asked.