Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer (15 page)

“Okay, I’m going to die now,” I said.

Hannah’s saintly expression was gone, replaced by one of distinct irritation. “It’s not my fault, Colette. How was I supposed to know?”

I didn’t blame her. I blamed myself for being so clueless that I’d allowed myself to be led down into this horrible place.

Not that my mind was working well enough to focus on hating myself. Or on reassuring Hannah that I didn’t consider this catastrophic, sanity-ending situation to be her fault.

“You’re making a scene.” Hannah pushed me farther into the maze of bones.

The light fell in dim orange pools on the floors, leaving the edges of the passage shrouded in dingy darkness. People around us stopped to pose for pictures, smiling and laughing and joking.

How could you joke or laugh in a place like this? How could you do anything but expect to have a heart attack and die?

I stood ramrod straight, my eyes focused on the floor, stepping along in time to the drumming of my heart. My hands were slick with sweat, but the rest of me was freezing.

“Where did our class go? Pilar should have waited for us.” Hannah was apparently bored with her humanitarian efforts. At one point my foot slipped on the wet ground, and I managed to catch myself, but not before noticing the dirty look she cast in my direction.

I kept walking, because the only other option would have been to drop to the ground and curl into a ball and hyperventilate until I passed out, then hope someone came along and dragged me back up to the street.

Every so often there would be a piece of flat stone with a quote carved into it — and the word
MORT
seemed to feature in every single one of them.

My French might not be great, but I knew the word
mort
. It meant
dead
.

So just in case being down there didn’t make me feel enough like I was dying, I was surrounded by quotes about dying and death … all spoken or written by people who were themselves now dead.

The only pinhole of light at the end of the tunnel (metaphorically, of course … this tunnel didn’t seem to have an end) was that I knew, in some deep pocket of my mind, that it couldn’t last forever. It might seem like forever, but it would end eventually.

I couldn’t say this to Hannah, of course, because I could hardly feel my mouth. Forming an intelligent sentence was far beyond my capabilities.

“Wait, Colette,” Hannah said.

I stopped and turned to her.

She was looking to our right, at a little grotto off the side of the main path. Two large concrete pillars ran from the floor to the ceiling, and between them was a shorter pillar, with a stone bowl balanced on it.

“I think this is it,” she said. “It looks like the place he described….”

“What?” I managed to ask. “The place who described?”

“Armand was supposed to be here,” she said. “He said to go to the Crypt of the Sepulchral Lamp. That’s what this is, right?”

“You’re having a secret romantic interlude here?” My appalledness cut through the fear like a hot knife through an ice cream cake. “
Here?
In this tomb? Surrounded by
dead people
?”

She scowled. “I didn’t know it was this dark … or dirty … but that doesn’t matter. If he wanted to talk to us —”

“Wait,” I said. “Us?”

If Hannah was ever sheepish about anything in her entire life, I would eat my eighteen-dollar faux-leather ankle boot. But in that moment, she came pretty close.

“He wanted to talk to me about being a duke,” she said, “and he said I might as well have you here, too … but where is he?”

So that was why she’d been so supportive. She knew Armand was expecting me to be there, and she didn’t want to risk his displeasure by showing up without me.

“I’m sure he’ll be here in a minute.” She reached up and twisted a section of her hair, glancing down the path behind us.

“Well, I won’t be,” I said. “I can’t stop now. I have to keep going.”

“Are you serious?” Her lower lip pooched out in a pout. “But I stayed with you….”

Why should she care? She was getting her chance to meet Armand, with or without me. I actually figured she’d prefer that it be the latter.

“I’m serious, Hannah….” I shifted uncomfortably and hugged myself.

Her green eyes fixed on me in the darkness. “I can’t
believe
you, Colette! I hung back with you out of the total goodness of my heart. Is it too much to ask that you do something for me?”

That’s not how the goodness of your heart is supposed to work
, I wanted to say, but some grabby little feeling nagged at me, like a memory. And then I thought of what my brother had said when he came down to help me with the suitcase:
You just do nice things to be nice.

I looked around helplessly. It was almost surreal, to be trapped underground in such an awful place and to have a person who was supposedly one of my closest friends urging me to stick around even though it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.

“You’re fine right now, aren’t you?” she asked pointedly.

“No,” I said, and frustration grated on my nerves like sandpaper. “I’m not fine, Hannah — I’m about to lose my mind! I need to keep going before I freak out.”

An edge crept into my voice, and I saw in her eyes that she was beginning to believe me.

“Fine,” she said, crossing her arms. “Go. See if I care.”

I looked nervously at the path ahead.

“Just leave, Colette. Enjoy the walk. Alone.”

Part of me — a big part of me — wanted to stay. I’d made it that far, and to leave Hannah now might be the undoing of so much work I’d done over the school year, trying to cement myself in her inner circle.

But the comforting numbness was starting to wear off, and without the mechanics of moving ahead to keep me calm, I was beginning to feel shaky and weak. My chest was growing tight, and my feet seemed heavier. If I tried to stay much longer, I would melt down, and Hannah would be furious anyway.

So I said, “I have to, Hannah.” I almost added
I’m sorry
, but something stopped me. Maybe it was my last sliver of self-respect.

I started walking.

I ignored the bones and the skulls and looked at the floor — a slippery, uneven surface. I walked doggedly past tourists who had paused to admire some new horrible death quote or gruesome arrangement of femurs.

Go, go, go
, said the voice in my head. And I went, went, went.

At one point, the path forked off in two directions. I stopped for a moment to consider which one was shorter.

Then something caught my attention, at the corner of my eye — movement. A flash of pale colors moving in the shadows.

I spun around.

There was no one there.

But then another flash, almost behind me, made me turn again —

And again, nothing.

Off to my right, this time — but instead of turning, I stayed perfectly still, moving only my eyes.

She was there. The ghost. The width of her skirt blocked the path in front of me completely. In the low light, it was obvious that she gave off a faint silvery-blue glow of her own, a light that seemed to undulate through her.

Without thinking, I spun around to go back, toward Hannah —

But when I turned, the ghost was in my way.

“Go away!” I said, as if she were a stray cat. “Go! Leave me alone!”

A ripple seemed to move through her form, causing her glow to sputter and spark. I got the distinct impression that I’d made her angry.

“Please,” I said. “Please move. Let me go.”

Finally, she moved —

Toward
me.

I tried to back away, but she kept coming, closer and closer. Finally, I was backed into a corner, where two walls of bones met.

And she kept coming.

I couldn’t believe what I was about to do — but I took a deep breath and plunged forward. She was a ghost, right? So I should be able to go right through her.

Wrong.
A shock wave passed through me as if I’d run headlong into an electrified brick wall, and I bounced back, slamming into the wall of bones behind me. I felt some of them crunch under the impact of my weight, and heard the dry smattering of dust and broken bits of skull hitting the ground around my feet.

My vision was filled with what looked like bright-blue flashes of lightning. I yelped and curled forward, away from the wall, trying to make out the ghost through my momentary blindness. She stood above me, cold and imperious, looking down.

She opened her mouth to speak. Her voice was like the hiss of a snake.
“Véronique …”

I felt something in my throat give way, and everything went black.

“COLETTE,” SAID a soft voice.

Gentle fingertips rubbed my cheek, and I opened my eyes to see Jules kneeling over me. Behind him were about fifteen tourists. One guy lifted his camera and took a picture, which made Jules turn around and snap at him in French.

When Jules turned back to me, his eyes were bright with concern. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I scanned the gathering of people, but the ghost was nowhere in sight. That didn’t mean she wasn’t lurking around some corner, of course, but the relief of her absence was overwhelming.

I realized I was lying on the ground and tried to push myself up.

“Hold on,” Jules said. “You fainted. Do you want some water?”

“No, I’m okay.”

He helped me to my feet. “You’re shivering.”

“Really, I’m fine —” But he had already draped his red hoodie over my shoulders, and the warmth radiating from it — his warmth — sank into my whole body. It felt so nice that I stopped protesting.

As we moved, I couldn’t stop glancing from side to side like a hunted animal. But with Jules’s hoodie around my shoulders and his hand on my arm, I could put one foot in front of the other and plod forward.

“What happened?” he asked.

I told him the truth — part of it, anyway. “I couldn’t figure out which way to go. I got disoriented.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t notice you had fallen behind until Audrey pointed out that you were not with us. I turned around and came looking for you.”

“It’s fine,” I said. Of course, it wasn’t fine — there was a terrifying ghost following me — but none of that was Jules’s problem.

As a remote semblance of normalcy returned, I finally had time to ask myself the question …

Who was Véronique?

I wouldn’t say our trek to the end of the Catacombs was the happiest fifteen minutes of my life or anything, but it could have been worse. Jules’s presence made me feel safe, and the question of Véronique distracted me from the sight of all the bones.

Finally, we stopped in a small, square room with stairs leading upward.

“Will you be okay?” Jules asked. “It’s a lot of steps.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked. “These stairs are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

He cleared his throat. “I’ll be behind you, if you start to feel weak or need anything.”

I took a deep breath and looked back at the doorway through which we’d just passed. Then I looked at Jules.

“This has been horrible,” I said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“And I never want to do it again,” I said. “Let’s be clear about that. But … I did it. I can’t believe I did it.”

“Yes, you did.” The outside corners of his lips turned up in a smile. “And you fainted only one time.”

“Ha ha.” I stepped onto the first stair. “That wasn’t because of the claustrophobia.”

And then we were both going up — not too fast, because the stairs were small and steep and I had to pause to catch my breath.

“What was it, then?” he asked.

Feeling reckless from the craziness of the past hour, I looked back at him. “I saw a ghost.”

I paused, and he paused, and we both panted for a moment.

I kept a close eye on his expression. Finally, he squinted. “You are a funny girl.”

Right. I turned and started climbing again.

When we reached the top, Pilar came running over to give me a hug. “I had no idea! Why didn’t you say something? I feel so bad for leaving you behind! Where’s Hannah?”

I didn’t want to get Hannah in trouble.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “We got separated.”

“Well, there’s only one way out,” Madame Mitchell said, not sounding particularly worried.

Fifteen minutes later, Hannah appeared at the top of the stairs. Her cheeks were drawn in like she’d sucked on a lemon, and her brow was lowered.

Armand had stood her up.

No one could nurse a funk like Hannah. She stayed off by herself for the rest of the day, pouting through the Musée Rodin and all the way back to the hotel. When we stopped in the lobby, Hannah lurked on the fringes with her arms crossed in front of her.

I was about to start up the stairs when I felt a hand on my arm.

“Colette,” Jules said, looking a little awkward.

“Hi,” I said.

“I still feel very guilty about what happened earlier,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’d like to make it up to you.” He spoke in a rush, words pouring out of his mouth. “Let me take you to dinner. Madame Mitchell said it is all right … if you would like to go.”

I stared at him in surprise. And then, to my even greater surprise, I heard myself saying, “I’d love to.”

“What are your friends doing tonight?” Jules asked as we walked through Saint-Germain. The sidewalk was so narrow that whenever we passed someone going the opposite way, Jules had to jump down and walk in the street. The smells drifting from the small pâtisseries, warm and sweet, filled my nose.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But maybe we don’t have to talk about them.”

“That works for me,” he said. He glanced at my outfit — the white dress/black blazer/cowboy boot combo I’d wanted to wear the medallion with. “You look really nice this evening.”

“Thanks,” I said, looking at his blue shirt, which brought out the soft blue of his eyes. “So do you.” I felt myself blushing, so I tried to change the subject. “So … what do people in Paris talk about?”

“Anything,” he said. “Everything.”

“Okay.” A pair of old ladies were approaching, so I followed Jules into the street, then hopped back up to the sidewalk. “Tell me something no one else knows about you.”

He rubbed his neck with his hand. “No one? At all?”

“Yeah,” I said. “No one. It doesn’t have to be a horrible secret, but it has to be interesting. Or, no. It just has to be true.”

He smiled, showing a dimple in his right cheek. “Good, because I’m not very interesting.”

“How can you say that?” I asked. “You know so much about everything.”

“Ah, but that’s not me. That’s France. Perhaps that’s why I want to be a historian — so that I can become more interesting by knowing things about the past.”

“You’re not answering the question,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment as we veered onto a narrow, one-way street. Every so often, a car drove by, but they were few and far between. So we, like everyone else, walked right down the center of the road.

“Something about me that no one knows,” he said. “Okay. When I was fourteen, I wrote a poem and emailed it to my favorite singer.”

“A love poem?” I asked.

He shrugged. “The words were not a love poem, but I think that was why I wrote it. From love.”

And now for the million-euro question. “So who was it? Who’s your favorite singer?”

“Ah, I can’t tell you. But I can tell you that she replied and said thank you and that I should write more poetry.”

“So did you? Write more poetry?”

He laughed. “Not a single line since then. I felt quite stupid, in fact. I regretted it, even though she was very nice.”

“You shouldn’t regret that,” I said. “I’ll bet she thought it was really great.”

“She probably gets a thousand emails like mine every day.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Not poems. Not written from the heart.”

He shrugged.

“What made you decide to write it?” I asked.

“I think … I wanted to thank her, in a way? For saying in her songs what I kept thinking and feeling but couldn’t say. It was just a few dumb lines about, I don’t know, darkness and pieces of light and … something about a cat, I think. But of course that was only a symbol.”

“Of course,” I agreed. I pictured fourteen-year-old Jules sitting in his tiny room, at his tiny desk, composing poetry.

Seriously adorable.

“That’s amazing,” I said.

He blushed and tilted his head. “Oh, it’s no great story. But it’s true, and no one else knows about it.”

“And it’s interesting,” I said. “Ten points.”

“How about you?” he asked.

I laughed. “You already know all my secrets.”

“Those are things about your family. What about you?”

Headlights approached up ahead, and Jules gently wrapped his hand around my elbow and guided me to the edge of the street to let the car pass.

“I don’t have secrets of my own, I guess.” Except for the latest revelation that I was possibly a duchess. But somehow I sensed that wouldn’t impress Jules — especially since it had so much to do with Armand.

I could mention the ghost again …

Or you could get a marker and write
JE SUIS TRÈS CRAZEBALLS
on your forehead.

“What about …” Jules spoke more slowly. “Perhaps this is too personal.”

“What?” I asked.

“You don’t have to say. But I wonder … why you’re claustrophobic. Did some specific incident cause it?”

I walked along for a while without responding. Jules didn’t press.

“Please don’t answer if you don’t want to,” he finally said.

“No, I — I want to. It’s just that it sounds so stupid. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m faking it or something.”

He came to a complete stop and turned toward me, shaking his head. “You are not stupid, Colette.”

Had I done anything to make him think otherwise? But something about Jules was disarming. So I began to speak.

“When I was seven, during the summer, I spent a week with my grandmother — Grandma Lucille; she was born in France. My dad came to pick me up, and I told him I didn’t want to go. So I hid in the storm cellar. Except Grandma thought I went home with my dad, and my dad thought Grandma said it was okay for me to stay. And they both left. And the door latch got stuck.”

I could remember the sudden, shocking feeling of the trapdoor overhead not lifting when I pressed on it.

Jules held my gaze. “That must have been very scary.”

“Pretty much,” I said. “I know it doesn’t sound that bad, but …”

I could still smell the scent of the raw dirt, feel the humidity on my skin. The sick “they forgot about me” sensation that started in my stomach and then wrapped around my heart like a snake, squeezing until I thought I would stop breathing and die.

Eventually, tired of banging on the door, I retreated to the corner of the room. I found a flashlight, but its beam died after about three minutes. In a way, the light made things worse, because now I knew exactly how tiny and closed-in my surroundings were.

Hours later, I was covered in sweat, so thirsty my throat felt raw, and had to pee so badly I could hardly move. I had no idea where my grandmother might have gone, but I knew vaguely in the back of my head that she had a friend named Patricia who lived in Cleveland and that sometimes she went there to visit for days at a time.

I thought there was a very real possibility that I would starve to death or die of thirst before anyone could find me.

Which is a really, really sucky thing to think about when you’re seven years old.

So I cried. And I peed my pants. And then I cried some more.

I kept thinking of all the creepy-crawlies that might be hiding around me and imagined them inching across my skin, up the wet legs of my shorts, through my hair …