Chapter 2

It was Christmas. The Cherbourg Caving Club decided to make a weekend of it.
Thierry had a friend in Paris who knew the catacombs inside out. Which was a lie. He knew a smallish, well-frequented area reasonably well. Like most people he had a map and like most people he got lost. No-one knows the catacombs inside out.
Without a torch, it is unimaginably dark. Nothing above ground can compare with it. There are literally thousands of corridors, each one splitting up into side passages which double back, turn left, turn right, turn left again, slope down past other turnings to another level where you have to wade through endless puddles, crawl through a hole in the wall, slide down a muddy chute to reach another passage that divides into two, or three, or just carries on for mile after monotonous mile. Or leads to a dead-end. And they all look very much the same. You think you’ve been down that way before. You recognise some markings on the wall, know where you are now, and off you go. Then you see them again.

The club was small, four boys and a girl: Thierry, Marc, Antoine, Julot and Odette. Antoine was the white sheep. He liked things to be properly organised, and this wasn’t. He’d been against it right from the start. It was illegal, it wasn’t real caving, it meant staying up all night, and there were other things. They can’t all be rumours.
The reputation of Paris’s subterranean world is grossly exaggerated. The stories you hear of pentangles and satanic rites are utter nonsense, and most visitors are perfectly harmless.
Most visitors also go down through the entrance in the tunnel. The police have bricked it up hundreds of times and the cataphiles open it again. There are other ways of going down, but they’re not very popular and not very practical: man-hole covers. Most of them are locked nowadays, but there are still some that can be opened. Their main inconvenience is their tendency to come up in the middle of the road or right next to a bus-stop. But there’s always the odd one that finds its way to a dark alley or quiet little side street, it’s just a matter of looking. These are the best, and if you cut a hole in the floor of a car, avoiding the fuel tank, transmission and other sensitive bits, then park on top of it, and if you devise a lever system to raise the cover, and do it when it’s dark or no-one’s around, you can come and go and never meet a soul. Not everyone goes to the catacombs for the social life.

Guy was bored. He was standing on a bridge watching the shadows inching along the abandoned railway line below. He heard a soft, crunching noise, looked down and saw a group of people walking down the track.
Two things caught his eye. One of them was the person in front. It was André. He knew him vaguely and didn’t like him. Since he was leading and Guy had never seen the others before, he assumed it was a guided tour. André loved that sort of thing. André was also as predictable as a cuckoo-clock which meant he was taking them to the Round Room. He’d seen him there before, showing off in the complicated labyrinth around it. He thought he knew it well. Guy knew better. He decided to have some fun.
He got into his car and drove off. It would take them at least an hour and by then it would be dark.
There was something he’d been wanting to try for a long time. Six: quite a challenge.

He lay flat in the shadows and waited. At last, they arrived. He felt good, she was very pretty. When the sounds died down, he dropped quietly to the ground and followed them. He came to a side-passage and started running.

Odette, Marc and Julot were trailing behind. Ahead, three lamps vanished round a corner, and a voice called out: “keep to the right”.
“What does he mean: ‘keep to the right’?”
The only possibility was through an arch, but there was an iron gate with a chain and padlock on it. They carried on in the left-hand passage.
“Where the hell have they got to?”
“Thieerrreeeeeey!... eeeeey!... eeeey!”
“Where are you?” came the muffled reply.
“Here!”
“Any chance of a slightly more precise location?” The two choruses of laughter resounded like an up-beat antiphon among the cloisters.
Then they saw a light, it was shining through a hole in the wall.
“What are you doing there? We said ‘right’.”
“There was a gate.”
“Ye ... ees?”
“A locked gate, idiot.”
“’Course it’s not locked, we just went through it. Did you, by any strange chance, think of pushing it open?”
“Very funny!”
“Anyway, doesn’t matter, we meet up again soon. Just keep on, but mind your heads, it gets very cramped further up.”
They started off again. There was a creak. Everybody stopped. Antoine tittered nervously.
“Ssh!”
Straining their ears, they listened. The pool of silence gave not a ripple.

For obvious reasons, André knew the first gate was open. This one wasn’t. Probably some silly bugger playing games. Some people find that sort of thing funny. He didn’t. Any uneasiness he felt, he kept to himself. Besides, there were six of them.
When the other three turned the corner at the end and found them behind bars, they all laughed.
“Keep to the right!” somebody joked.
Then they stopped finding it funny.
“Right! Come along!” said André, all efficiency, “we’re going to sort this out once and for all. Did you see a passageway on your left a little way back?” Heads nodded. “OK, that’s where we’re going, so you three go and wait by the entrance and we’ll meet you there in a couple of minutes.”
“But the door’s locked!” (How many more times do we have to tell you?)
“’Course it’s not.”
“Look, there’s a bloody great chain on it!”
“I know there is and there’ve been chains on it for years, you just didn’t look properly. Come on,” he said to the others, “let’s get going. See you in a minute.”
Three down and two to go.

“They’re taking their time.”
“Stupid bloody idea coming here in the first place!” Antoine had mongered well.
“Scared?”
“Oh shut up!”
They did. Around them, the silence tingled. The buzzing of nerves, a sleeve brushing against a rough surface, stifled breath, pins dropping, then a low laugh and something metal being scraped along a wall. They froze. It was coming from the corridor at the end. It got louder.
Holding onto each other, they retreated into the passageway. They could hear footsteps and faint, whispered obscenities creeping slowly towards them. They moved deeper into the passageway, turning their lamps off. The footsteps went past the entrance and dissolved into the distance.
Standing in the dark, they huddled and mumbled together, trying to find a reasonable explanation for it all. Whatever they found was neither reasonable nor reassuring.
Everything went quiet again.
“I think they’ve gone.”
“Sh! Listen!” But nothing more was heard except the far-off echoes of a chain being rattled on a wrought-iron gate.
“What’s going on?” The voice was seriously frightened now.
Clinging onto each other, they edged their way back towards the corridor, then slammed against the wall as a vicious laugh bounced along the passage.
Again, the silence. The unbelievable suspicion that something was going terribly wrong started leaking into their minds. The gate was locked. That meant somebody had locked it between them and the others? That meant... but they didn’t know what it meant, they didn’t want to know.
Like a knife slashing through the nightmare - eyes burnt white by the dazzling intensity of a powerful torch - a scream of madness kicked them into quivering masses of imbecile fear. Then a voice, cold as hate: “There she is!”
They turned and fled. Each to his own. Terror biting at their backs, they scrambled in blind panic. The passageway led to a round, high-ceilinged room with passages fanning out in all directions. The only light they had was coming from behind them. It was shining on an open door. They took it.
Odette and Marc did. Maybe it was the bottleneck, maybe it was because there was another right next to it, but Julot took that one.
If anyone were to ask him whether he was a coward or not, under normal circumstances (if they exist in this context), he would have said ‘no’. Before this Christmas at least. Afterwards, with the words “There she is!” banging in his ears, he would feel a sickening, loathsome shame in his heart. He lived with it for the rest of his life.
Four down, one to go.

Two people running in the dark. Narrow corridors, low ceilings, sudden turns, steps, rocks and hollows on the ground. Guy gave them just the right amount of light. He kept them going until they reached the fork and took the right. Guy took the left.
Hooded in fathomless black, minds and legs screaming down the animal stampede of survival, they ran. They ran, forcing themselves through the stumbling mire of exhaustion. The running was slower and clumsier, drained by the thudding, pounding desperation. Mouths open, they panted for breath as they lurched painfully along. All around was silence and dark. Not a sound could be heard. They were alone.
Alone! They’d lost them! They’d escaped! The relief was pure adrenaline. They almost cried with laughter from the tension. They stopped and Marc put fresh batteries in his head-torch. Odette’s had fallen off somewhere. He turned the beam up to full and shone it back down the passageway. Nobody. But nobody to ask for help.
There are some areas of the catacombs where people tend to congregate. A half a mile to the south, people sat around drinking beer and listening to music, or wandered about, bumping into each other, laughing and joking at the playful labyrinth. Other parts are deserted.
Marc’s torch went out. Something had smashed the glass.

Odette burst into tears. The blackness engulfed them once more. Not a light, not a sound, not a movement, just the last screw slowly turning in their coffin.
The blood pulsed in their ears, the relentless slamming of the slaughterhouse turnstile. Glued together, they waited. The feeling of fear swelled to the roof and flooded the world. It was unbelievable. These things don’t happen. They can’t happen.
The silence was louder now. Shoes peeled slowly out of footprints. Closer, inch by inch. They heard nothing. Odette was sobbing. Marc did not even dare comfort her. It was getting nearer. He could feel it all around him. The garrotte tightened. He could sense something approaching. His heart was thudding, the palms of his hands were dripping with sweat, he was shaking.
Fingertips skimmed the wall, silent as a slug on a glass.
The air was still. They could hear a thin trickle of water dribbling down a wall.
She clenched him and their two hands locked together in a ball of white knuckles. Waiting. Marc felt warm breath on the nape of his neck.
He crumpled to the floor.
A light was shining into her eyes.
“Do as I say and you won’t get hurt.” The voice was different, almost polite.
He turned her round and pushed her gently forward.
Turning his lamp down to minimum, he guided her on for about ten minutes. They climbed up some stairs and down the other side. On the opposite wall, a trail of rungs led up a shaft.
“Up you go.” He spoke quietly. This was not the moment for hysterics. She was in exactly the right state.
At the top, she did not even feel him next to her. Her whole mind was numbed with an inexorable desire for death, for sleep, unconsciousness, for everything to be over.
It was not.
“Climb through the hole and sit in the back.”
A couple walked past and neither of them noticed her sitting pale-faced, hands clasped between her thighs. She could have screamed. She should have screamed, but she didn’t. She knew what was going to happen.
Guy pulled himself in, folded the seat back, leaned over and put back the cover.
He drove south for about an hour. Neither of them spoke. Ashen, eyes seeing nothing, hands still clasped between her thighs, Odette just sat. She knew what was going to happen. She knew what was going to happen.
She didn’t. ¶ 2:29 AM