Audrey’s glance traveled to Hannah and stayed there. And as she stared, her expression went from one of worry to one of utter apathy.
“You know what?” she said. “Never mind.”
Audrey spun on the wide rubber heel of her athletic sneaker and marched back to Brynn. She said something in a low voice, and Brynn’s face scrunched up in disgust.
“I’m telling you, it’s for the best,” Hannah said to me. “People like us don’t have time for people like that.”
I didn’t answer. Audrey always seemed to have time for me, when I needed her.
Hannah draped her arm around my shoulder. “Don’t look so tragic. We’re about to explore some dusty old French place — that’s like your favorite pastime.”
When we arrived at the Catacombs, we walked into the small building and Madame Mitchell herded us all into an even smaller room. I didn’t really see what was happening until we were right on top of the next phase of the attraction — a spiral staircase.
A tiny one.
That went straight down into the ground.
I came to a full stop.
“Um,” I said.
Madame Mitchell was already out of earshot.
“What?” Hannah said. “Go on.”
“I can’t.”
Pilar went around me and started down the steps.
“Colette, go.” Hannah’s voice was insistent.
“What exactly is this place?” I looked around for some sort of poster or sign.
“It’s the Catacombs.”
“What’s a catacomb?”
She wrinkled her nose with displeasure. “It’s a place where we’re about to go. What is your problem?”
“I don’t … I don’t like enclosed spaces.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well … I’m pretty sure once you get down there, it’s like a big cave or something.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “The Basilique was like a catacomb, I think.”
I glanced at the stairs, uncertain.
“You’re really scared, Colette,” Hannah said, her voice rising in surprise. “I had no idea. Is this why you won’t take the elevator?”
I nodded, and then the most extraordinary thing happened: Hannah hugged me.
“It’s going to be fine,” she said. “I’ll help you. We’ll do it together.”
I could hardly refuse now. Besides, the people lined up behind us were getting pretty grumbly. Hannah gestured for me to start down the steps, so I did. One at a time.
When I say these were tiny stairs, I mean they were minuscule. And they went around and around and around in an endless downward spiral. About thirty seconds into our descent, my fingers started to feel numb.
Hannah put her hand on my shoulder. “Breathe,” she said. “You’re fine. It’s not much farther.”
I took a deep breath. It did seem to help. And the fact that she was being so insanely nice to me was a terrific distraction.
So I kept going. Hannah cheered me on and made jokes and sang little songs, and before I knew it, we’d reached the bottom.
I expected the next doorway we went through to be the wide-open space — the underground cavern Hannah had promised me — but it wasn’t.
It was a tunnel.
A very small, very dark tunnel.
In a slight panic, I turned to the nearest person — who didn’t happen to be Hannah. It was an older woman holding a tour book.
“Is this the Catacombs?” I asked.
“No, this gets you there,” she said. “It’s just a little walk.”
Hannah watched me quizzically. “Okay? Come on. You can do it.”
I wasn’t so sure. Now my whole body was buzzing. “I don’t think I can, actually.”
For a moment, I saw a sliver of impatience beneath Hannah’s sweet exterior, but it was gone as quickly as it came on.
“You heard the lady — it’s just a short walk.” She gave my arm a gentle tug. “Let’s go.”
“It’s so small,” I said.
“Don’t think about that. Think about something that makes you happy.”
Something that makes me happy …
Jules’s face popped into my head.
We made our way through the tunnel, and I survived by pretending to be somewhere else. My feet carried my body along, but my mind was at the Martins’ apartment, having dinner and laughing and hanging out.
“You’re doing great,” Hannah said. “Now, look, here we go …”
I blinked back to the present. We turned a corner, and I waited for the relief of soaring ceilings and far-off walls.
“Oh,” Hannah said.
“What …” I couldn’t form words. “What …”
In point of fact, the Catacombs weren’t like the Basilique at all. They weren’t cavernous.
They were basically dark, dripping, cold tunnels, much like the one we’d just come through …
Except the walls were lined with bones.
Millions and millions of bones.
“Well, this isn’t what I expected at all,” Hannah said.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I could only stare at the walls of bones stacked like logs in an endless woodpile. Arranged among them in decorative ways — stripes, crosses, even hearts — were skulls. Thousands of skulls. Brown with age, chipped and cracked, with gaping, eyeless sockets and sharp, hollow spaces where people’s noses had been. They seemed to sneer with the jagged lines of their missing teeth.
“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 pa
th. 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.