Eighty Days to Elsewhere Read online

  “Hey!” I yell again, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “Can anyone hear me? Hey!”

  No response. Even the traffic noise sounds distant.

  I spin around. There has to be a way out. Underfoot, the woodchips I tumbled onto earlier quickly give way to packed, grey gravel. Stepping right into the middle of the tracks, I try to take stock. I’m more or less equidistant from a pair of train tunnels which, like the walls, are faced in brick. Two dark semicircles, leading to who-knows-where. Below the ivy, every surface is awash in graffiti as far as the light carries, and in all likelihood, far beyond.

  Above me, the rain begins to fall again, this time in earnest. Reluctantly, I hustle across the gravel to take shelter inside the mouth of one of the tunnels. The sky suddenly opens up, and the wind swirls icy March rain into the tunnel. I take a couple more hesitant steps into the darkness. With the first step, the gravel crunches under my sneakers. With the second?

  A voice shouts “Arrêtez!”

  Jumping backwards, I’m suddenly blinded by a brilliant halogen light.

  Shining from a hole in the ground, right beneath my feet.

  * * *

  —

  It’s lucky I don’t have a heart condition. If I did, and the robbery or the fall hadn’t killed me, having my ankle grabbed by whatever is climbing out of the ground would surely have done it.

  Even so? The next few moments are—complicated.

  Once all the scrambling, kicking, and shouting dies down, and we settle on a language most of us understand, things become a little easier. I stop flailing my broken camera around like a weapon as soon as I recognize that the two filthy creatures emerging from the ground under my feet are not spawning orcs or carnivorous monsters. Instead, I’m faced with my second Parisian couple of the day. This pair are young, and while they are clearly male and female, that’s where all similarities end.

  “We’re cataphiles,” the girl says proudly. She pushes up her headlamp so it points at the ceiling rather than my face. “We explore the tunnels and caves beneath Paris.”

  She pronounces it “Paree,” but I’ve been taken in by a charming accent once already today. I narrow my eyes, and tighten my grip on the strap of my shattered camera.

  “For work?”

  The girl shakes her head. “Pour s’amuser,” she says. “For fun. We post pictures to our Instagram too.”

  She’s tiny—perhaps a shade over five feet tall—and dressed in full-length orange coveralls, over which she’s strapped thigh-high hip waders. The pale skin of her face is mud spattered, and her hair may be brown. Or that might be the mud too. I put her age at somewhere south of twenty.

  “C’est illégal,” adds her companion, swaggering a little. “Trés illégal!”

  He’s maybe an inch taller than I am, and looks about the same age as the girl. His skin is so dark, the mud shows up as lighter smudges on his face. He’s wearing dirty rubber boots and what look like a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves. In spite of the mud and the getup, he’s ridiculously good looking. A younger, muddier Michael B. Jordan.

  All the same, I cross to the other side of the train tunnel, in order to keep a little space between myself and these mole people.

  “Apologies for grabbing your ankle,” the girl says. “But you nearly stepped on my head.”

  She points a mud-caked glove at her companion. “This is Rol. And I’m Emilie, but you can call me Rox.”

  “Cos we ROX AND ROL,” the boy says, shooting finger darts at us both.

  Emilie-known-as-Rox rolls her eyes. “He has almost no English,” she explains. Her own English is not bad, though heavily accented. “His name is Roland, so he goes by Rol, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Tu lui dit que je la trouve belle, non?” Rol says, and waggles his eyebrows suggestively at me.

  I don’t understand a word, but the eyebrows alone send me another two steps back along the tunnel.

  “I’ll tell her no such thing,” she says sternly to him, before turning to me. “It is illegal, what we do,” Rox says. “So we all use nicknames, in case the flics show up and catch us in the caves. Big fines, maybe jail time, eh?”

  “Cataflics,” says Rol, nodding sagely. “Cops.”

  “Okay,” I reply cautiously. It’s becoming clear that these two are only adventuring teenagers, and they look harmless. Still, I’ve had my fill of run-ins with Parisian criminals for the day.

  “Back to the caves you mentioned,” I say, flashing on a sudden memory from my Paris research. “Are you talking about the Catacombs? Where they store all the old bones?”

  He nods but Rox shrugs.

  “The Paris Catacombs are only a small part of a very large network,” she says. “And they are really for tourists, eh? Anyone can get in. What we do? Is special.”

  She points at my camera. “This? Is no place for tourists. You are unprepared for the dangers below.”

  “Look,” I say, trying not to sound impatient. “I’m not a tourist—not really. This is the last place I want to be. I was robbed, and I’ve no idea how to get out of here. I need to get back to the Gare du Nord to catch a train in, like, an hour. And my money’s been stolen, so I have to walk.”

  Rox’s face falls.

  “Ach—je suis désolée,” she says to me, before pausing to explain to Rol.

  “It’s too bad about les voleurs,” she adds. “You should know all Parisians are not this way.”

  “Connards,” spits Rol, shaking his fist at the universe.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Can you point the way out of here? I need to get going.”

  Rox scratches her nose with a gloved hand, which leaves a fresh smear of muck across it, and points deeper into the train tunnel.

  “D’accord. If you follow the tracks here, maybe two kilometers? Just stay to the left, to the end. When the tunnel opens up, you’ll find a spot where there is a hole cut in the fence. Climb through, then up the bank, and voila! You will be one street only from the RER yellow line.”

  She turns to Rol, who has neglected to flip his headlamp off, so his light bounces painfully off the dark walls. “RER jaune, oui?”

  “Mais, oui,” he replies. His smile is a white slash in the darkness beneath the bobbing headlamp. It’s the sort of smile that’s destined to break hearts in a few years.

  “Two kilometers? Is that more or less than miles?” I mutter, hoping it’s less.

  “Less,” she says, lifting my spirits for a millisecond. “But not much less. And is all the way in the old tunnel, so you must take care where you step. Running is not a good idea.”

  I can’t suppress a sigh. If I miss this train, it will throw off my schedule by a minimum of two days, and all the lovely gains I’ve made will be gone. “I have to at least try. I’ll walk along the rail ties.”

  “In an hour?” says Rox doubtfully. “You’ll never make it. Is twenty minutes to catch the RER, then almost the same for the ride to la Gare du Nord. And didn’t you say the thieves take your money?”

  “Shit,” I mutter under my breath. I step carefully onto the next rail tie. “I still have to give it a shot.”

  “Wait!” shouts Rol, proving he has at least one other English word. He starts to undo a zip on his jumpsuit. “J’ai une autre idée!”

  He pulls something from an inside pocket and they share a brief, incomprehensible exchange. When Rox turns back to me, she has a small plastic folder in her hand. Her expression reflects a mix of hopeful skepticism.

  “How confortable are you in—ah—tight places?”

  I’m starting to get a very bad feeling about this. Outside the tunnel, rain is pelting down onto the tracks. She points past my feet into the black hole in the floor.

  “It looks bad, I know,” she says. Removing her headlamp, she shines it into the muddy gap in the rock. “But once you go through, it opens right up
. Inside, we stand upright, I promise you. The passage lasts maybe one hundred, one hundred fifty meters. Then we climb a little ladder and voila!”

  I swallow hard, and drag my eyes away from the cave entrance. “Voila what?”

  “La Metro. Tour Eiffel station. Maybe five minutes’ walk from there, no more.”

  I look from her serious expression to his cheerful one. “Is there no way to make it above ground?”

  Both heads shake in unison. “Not from here, unless you have ropes,” she says, and holds up the plastic folder. “Rol’s Metro pass. I have no cash, but he can tap you through.”

  I look over at him. He’s finally remembered to flip off his headlamp, but my eyes have adjusted and I can see the glint of his broadening smile. “Why would you do that?”

  He shrugs, and points at the cave entrance. “Down ’ere? We ’elp each ozzer,” he says.

  My eyes are drawn back to what is essentially a crumbling crack in the tunnel floor. It looks big enough for maybe a Pekinese. “I’ll never fit through there,” I mutter.

  “You will,” says Rox firmly. “Rol’s bigger, and he has no problem. We go in arse first, eh?”

  “Dis-donc ça, c’est un joli cul,” Rol adds appreciatively, and hands me his yellow gloves.

  I swallow hard, try not to think about all the bones I read about in the Catacombs, and climb backwards into the hole.

  chapter eighteen

  IMAGE: Cave Entrance Under Paris

  IG: Romy_K [Paris, France, March 27]

  #CrevicetoHell #CrazyCataphiles

  97

  Things I learn under the ground in Paris:

  1. Ancient miners, toiling under what would one day become the city of Paris, and using only hand tools, dug up something called Lutetian limestone, leaving behind more than two hundred miles of winding quarries, hundreds of feet below the ground.

  2. Below the sewers. Below the electricity tunnels. Below the subways.

  3. The first official quarries were documented in thirteenth-century Paris, but may have been going for centuries before that in what has to have been among the worst work environments ever. This place makes Jonah’s call center look like a day at the spa.

  4. When the overcrowded cemeteries of Paris began to collapse into people’s basements, hundreds of thousands of bones were dug up and dumped into the tunnels. The Catacombs were established later as a tourist attraction, and represent only a fraction of all the bones that were originally dumped. They’ve somehow lost track of exactly where the rest of the bones are.

  5. The sewers are high above, but the tunnels are conduits for not-quite-icy, often knee-deep ground water.

  6. Regardless of the weather outside, the temperature underground stays at a steady 57 degrees Fahrenheit all year round. Related fact: 57 degrees is damn chilly when wading through not-quite-icy knee-deep ground water.

  7. 150 meters translates to 160 yards, or approximately the length of a hundred thousand football fields. Underground football fields. Dark as pitch.

  8. Stalactites are the ones that hang from the top and smack you on the head when you don’t duck quickly enough. Stalagmites are the ones you trip over.

  9. Graffiti artists have no fear.

  10. Never listen to a short person when she says you can stand upright underground.

  Rox cheerfully shares facts, oblivious to my horror at these new surroundings. Since I dressed this morning for a day of sightseeing in Paris—and not in head-to-toe protective gear—I’m immediately soaked to the skin, my leggings mud-caked. And just when I think squeezing backwards down through a hole in the ground is the hardest thing I’ve ever faced, a maze of low, rocky tunnels opens up in the bobbing light of her headlamp. Rox leads us onward, illuminating the way while we shuffle, splash, and stoop our way through any rational person’s worst nightmare.

  Suddenly, the stone walls of the tunnel around us begin to shake. I clutch the back of Rox’s muddy coveralls in a vise grip, convinced I’m going to die.

  “Just the RER,” she whispers. “It is a deeper rumble than when the Metro passes above.”

  A tiny cascade of dust showers down onto my face as she resumes walking.

  All the blood in my body has been replaced with pure adrenaline. I push my free hand against my chest, sure that any moment my heart will collapse under the strain. And yet somehow, over the sound of my thundering heartbeat, I hear Rol humming quietly to himself as he splashes along behind me. He’s bent over at the waist, the light from his headlamp bouncing off the walls and the water around our feet.

  It’s strangely reassuring.

  Rox starts to speed up, though the muddy water we’re running through is knee deep and filled with invisible tripping hazards. I follow behind, in a hunched half crouch, with my free hand held out front in case I fall.

  “This water’s from the ground, not the sewers,” she says as I wade through a puddle that reaches well above my knees. “So it won’t make you sick.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I gasp. It feels like we’ve been down here an eternity. When she stops suddenly, I nearly crash into her. And behind me, I feel a hand on my butt.

  “Ah, pardon, pardon,” says Rol. “Tu as arrêté trop vite!”

  Even in French, I’m pretty sure it’s a lame excuse, but I have larger worries at the moment. I remove my posterior from his vicinity and peer into the darkness.

  Rox points her headlamp down an opening in the wall. The ceiling inside drops down to half the height below where we’re standing. “We went that way once,” she says. “But the roof is coming down, you see? And Rol found a femur. So, we don’t go back.”

  “He found a what . . . ?” I say, but suddenly, the space in front of me is completely dark.

  “Just here,” calls Rox, and I realize she’s not vanished into thin air, but has instead taken a sharp right turn. I hurry around the corner, with Rol literally on my tail.

  The air inside the tunnels has a strange, muffled quality to it. I always thought caves were echoey places, but that is really not the case here. So when I spot a tiny flickering light in the distance, I don’t hear the accompanying shout for at least a full second or two. And suddenly, more lights join the first—many more lights, all bobbing in our direction.

  “Merde,” spits Rol, and grabs my arm. “Cataflics!”

  He pushes me right into Rox, who is standing in a sort of hollowed-out area, surrounded by what looks like concrete, rather than rock. I clutch her sleeve, and she pulls me close, pointing her headlamp up.

  “Good news,” she whispers. “Our way out.”

  Water is raining down freely here, but when I follow the light from her lamp, I see a series of iron rungs implanted into the side of a round, concrete tube. The rusted rungs are green with algae and the air smells so metallic, I can taste copper on my tongue. About twelve or fifteen feet up, a corrugated metal panel blocks the passage. In it, a small square hole is cut through to allow progress up the rungs.

  “Allez, allez,” hisses Rol, pushing past me.

  “You see that panel?” Rox whispers. “That’s one story up. We get past that, they can’t see us from down here.”

  I’ve already grabbed the bottom rung.

  “Not so fast,” she says.

  I’m sure I can hear splashing footsteps in the distance, and I convulsively clutch her sleeve, as her whisper continues. “Rol goes first. There’s a manhole cover at the top, eh? Too heavy for you.”

  It is a measure of my raw fear in this situation that I neither object to this sexist assumption, nor go anywhere near a manhole joke. Instead, I obediently follow Rol’s muddy butt up the slippery, endless series of rungs. I have no feeling in my feet as we start the climb, but by the time we squeeze past the metal panel, the effort of hauling myself upwards warms me right up.

  The bad news comes out as
I pull myself through the tiny square hole.

  “We can stand here, for a rest,” pants Rox, as she pulls herself through behind me.

  In the light of Rol’s torch, the tunnel carries on above us, complete with a second corrugated panel, twelve or fifteen feet up.

  “You mean there’s another one?” I whisper, once my breath returns.

  Rox nods and the light from her headlamp bounces around inside the little shaft. “Only three or four more,” she says. “Oh, and keep one foot on the rungs, eh? Sometimes these panels, they pop out.”

  “L’effondrement!” says Rol, mimicking a swift collapse with one hand.

  Below us, I hear a sudden babble of voices. I catch a glimpse of the whites of Rol’s eyes, widened in fear, and then we are immersed in darkness as they extinguish their headlamps simultaneously.

  I can’t suppress a squeak of sheer terror.

  The darkness? Is absolute.

  There’s no need to wave a hand in front of my face, and seeing as both of mine are currently clutching rusty ladder rungs, I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. For the first time in my life, I literally cannot tell if my eyelids are open or closed.

  Just as I think I’m about to go mad from sensory deprivation, a sudden beam of light shoots up through the square hole cut in the corrugated metal we’ve just climbed through. Above my head, Rol’s feet turn sideways on the rung, and a shower of rusty particles rain down onto my face. Beneath me, Rox thrusts herself flat against the concrete wall, and instinctively, I do the same.

  “Bonjour?” calls a deep voice, so startlingly loud I’m sure its owner is right beneath my feet. Which he likely is.

  In the ray of light, I can see Rox push an imploring finger to her lips. After a long moment, in which the only sound is dripping water, the light flicks out. I feel Rox reach up and put a cautious hand on my foot. After a moment, a low scrape and another gentle shower of rust tells me that Rol is on the move. I clutch the nearest iron rung convulsively, and we start up again, this time in total darkness.