Michael Scott - The Magician

The air was suddenly touched with the rich autumnal scent of burnt leaves, and then the metal bars in Francis’s hands began to glow with a rich red-hot, then white-hot, heat. The metal turned to liquid and melted away, thick blobs disappearing down into the shaft. Saint-Germain wrenched the remainder of the grating out of the hole and tossed it to one side, then swung himself into the opening. “There’s a ladder here.”

“Sophie, you go next,” Nicholas said. “I’ll come after you. Joan, will you take up the rear?”

Joan nodded. She caught the edge of a nearby wooden park bench and dragged it across the grass. “I’ll pull it over the opening before I climb down. We don’t want any unexpected visitors dropping in, do we?” She smiled.

Sophie gingerly climbed into the opening, her feet finding the rungs of the ladder. She carefully lowered herself. She’d been expecting it to be foul and horrible, but it just smelled dry and musty. She started counting the steps but lost count somewhere around seventy-two, though she could tell by the rapidly diminishing square of sky above their heads that they were climbing deep underground. She wasn’t scared-not for herself. Tunnels and narrow spaces held no fears for her, but her brother was terrified of small spaces: how was he feeling now? Butterflies shifted in her stomach; she felt queasy. Her mouth went dry and she knew-instinctively, unquestioningly-that this was how her brother was feeling right at that moment. She knew that Josh was terrified.

“B ones,” Josh said numbly, looking up and down the tunnel.

The wall directly before him was created from hundreds of stained-yellow and bleached-white skulls. Dee strode down the corridor and his sphere of light sent shadows dancing and twitching, making it appear as if the empty eye sockets were moving, following him.

Josh had grown up with bones; he knew they were nothing to be frightened of. His father’s study was full of skeletons. As children, both he and Sophie had played in museum storerooms full of skeletal remains, but they had all been animal and dinosaur bones. Josh had even helped piece together the tailbone of a raptor that had gone on display in the American Museum of Natural History. But these bones…these were…these were…

“Are these all human bones?” he whispered.

“Yes,” Machiavelli said softly, his voice now touched with a trace of his Italian accent. “There are the remains of at least six million bodies down here. Maybe more. The catacombs were originally huge limestone quarries.” He jerked his thumb upward. “The same limestone used to build the city. Paris is built over a warren of tunnels.”

“How did they get down here?” Josh’s voice trembled. He coughed, wrapped his arms tightly around his body and tried to look nonchalant, as if he weren’t completely terrified. “They look ancient; how long have they been here?”

“A couple of hundred years only,” Machiavelli said, surprising him. “By the end of the eighteenth century, the graveyards of Paris were overflowing. I was in the city then,” he added, mouth twisting in disgust. “I’d never seen anything like it. There were so many dead in the city that the graveyards were often just huge mounds of piled earth with bones visible in them. Paris might have been one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but it was also the foulest. Worse than London-and that’s saying something!” He laughed, and the sound echoed and reechoed off the bone walls and was distorted into something hideous. “The stink was indescribable, and there truly were rats as big as dogs. Disease was rife and outbreaks of plague were common. Finally, it was recognized that the overflowing graveyards must have something to do with the contagion. So it was decided to empty the graveyards and move the remains down into the empty quarries.”

Trying not to think about the fact that he was surrounded by the bones of people who had most likely died from some terrible disease, Josh focused on the walls. “Who made the patterns?” he asked, pointing to a particularly ornate sunburst design that had been created using human bones of various length to represent the sunbeams.

Machiavelli shrugged. “Who knows? Someone who wished to honor the dead, perhaps; someone trying to make sense out of what must have been incredible chaos. Humans are always looking to make order out of chaos,” he added softly.

Josh looked at him. “You call them… us, ‘humans.’” He turned to look for Dee, but the Magician had almost reached the end of the corridor and was out of earshot. “Dee calls us humani.”

“Don’t confuse me with Dee,” Machiavelli said with an icy smile.

Josh was confused. Who was the more powerful here-Dee or Machiavelli? He’d thought it was the Magician, but he was beginning to suspect that the Italian was much more in control. “Scathach told us you were more dangerous and more cunning than Dee,” he said, thinking aloud.

Machiavelli’s smile turned to a delighted grin. “That’s the nicest thing she’s ever said about me.”

“Is it true? Are you more dangerous than Dee?”

Machiavelli took a moment to consider. Then he smiled and the faintest hint of serpent filled the tunnel. “Absolutely.”

“Hurry; this way,” Dr. Dee called back, voice flattened by the narrow walls and low ceiling. He turned and headed off down the bone-lined tunnel, taking the light with him. Josh was tempted to run after him, unwilling to be alone in the utter darkness, but then Machiavelli snapped his fingers and an elegant candle-thin flame of gray-white light appeared in the palm of his hand.

“Not all the tunnels are like this,” Machiavelli continued, indicating the neatly set bones in the walls, the regular shapes and patterns. “Some of the small tunnels are simply piled high with assorted bits and pieces.”

They rounded a curve in the tunnel and found Dee waiting for them, tapping his foot impatiently. He turned and marched away without saying a word.

Josh concentrated on Dee’s back and the globe of light bobbing over his shoulder as they wound deeper and deeper into the catacombs; doing that helped him to ignore the walls that seemed to be closing in with every step. He noticed as he walked along that some of the bones lining the tunnel had dates scratched on them, centuries-old graffiti, and he was conscious too that the only footsteps in the thick layer of dust on the floor were the imprints of Dee’s small feet. These tunnels had not been used in a very long time.

“Do people ever come down here?” he asked Machiavelli, making conversation just for the sake of hearing a sound in the oppressive silence.

“Yes. Portions of the catacombs are open to the public,” Machiavelli said, holding his hand high, the thin flame picking out the ornate patterns of bones set in the walls, dancing shadows bringing them to flickering life. “But there are many kilometers of catacombs beneath the city, and vast tracts of it have not been mapped. Exploring those tunnels is dangerous and illegal, of course, but people still do it. Those people are called cataphiles. There’s even a special police unit, the cataflics, that patrols these tunnels.” Machiavelli waved an arm at the surrounding walls, the flame dancing wildly but not extinguishing. “But we’ll run into neither group down here. This area is completely unknown. We are deep below the city now, in one of the very first quarries excavated many centuries ago.”

“Deep below the city,” Josh repeated slowly. He hunched his shoulders, imagining he could actually feel the weight of Paris over his head, the many tons of earth, concrete and steel pressing down on him. Claustrophobia threatened to overwhelm him, and he felt as if the walls were throbbing, pulsing. His throat was dry, his lips cracked, and his tongue felt too big in his mouth. “I think,” he whispered to Machiavelli, “I think I’d like to head back up to the surface now, if that’s OK.”