Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [130]
I know the French like their funk. I know they like stinky cheese and truffles. I know that Napoléon wrote Josephine from the front to tell her not to wash because he was coming home in a few days. I know all that. But this defies all logic. I truly believe that I will die if I don’t get out of these tunnels very shortly, and these guys are acting as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary. I start humming to myself. I hum the Ramones. Because right now, I really do want to be sedated.
Finally, we start climbing. The stone floor slopes sharply upward, and then becomes a set of spiraling iron steps. We go through an iron door like the one I came through earlier, then a passageway. The hot guy opens another door, small and wooden, and I find myself inside a crypt—a real crypt, dusty and musty. Fortunately, the dead people who reside here are all neatly sealed away. His friend—whose name, I’ve gathered is Henri—pushes open the crypt’s front door and we emerge inside a big, dark church. He closes the crypt’s door, then leads us outside, into a cobbled street.
“I’m hungry,” the hot guy says.
I feel like I will never eat anything again. Ever. “Can I have my flashlight back?” I say. I’m so out of here. I’m going home. And then I’m going to call the police and tell them about the big fat crime scene I just walked through.
He hands it to me, shining it in my face as he does, and says, “Your head. It’s bleeding.” He touches his fingers to my forehead and they come away red. While I dig in my bag for tissues, he asks Henri if he wants to come with him to eat.
“I can’t. I’ve got to get home. My wife will kill me as it is.”
Wife? He looks like he’s eighteen. At the most.
The other two goths say they have to get home, too. He asks me but before I can tell him no, Henri pulls him away from me but not far enough away. I can hear them whispering.
“Leave him here. It’s too dangerous,” Henri says angrily.
“I cannot leave him helpless on the streets. Haven’t we lost enough of our kind already?”
“Look, guys, I’m not helpless,” I say, really fed up with the him thing. “I can get myself home. I just have to find a taxi stand. Or a Métro station. I’m cool. Really.”
I look around hoping to spot Virgil. Jules. Someone I recognize. The hot guy kisses his friends goodbye, then takes the tissue from my hand and dabs at my head.
“You must attend to this before it becomes septic.”
“Do you think you could maybe drop the act for a minute and tell me where the nearest Métro is?” I say.
He looks at me, a worried expression on his face. “I think you should eat something. I believe the fall you took addled your senses,” he says. “Come, the Café Chartres isn’t far. I know the chef there. He’ll cook something good for us.”
“Thanks, really, but I’m not hungry and I have to get home.”
“Let me at least walk part of the way with you.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
“Wait,” he says. Before I can stop him, he takes my red ribbon and key and drops them inside my shirt. He takes his own ribbon off, then wipes the powder and rouge off his face with a handkerchief. “One cannot be too careful.”
We walk east. I’m glad to be out of the catacombs. Glad this night is almost over. I want to get out of the bell jar. Most of all, I want to find Virgil.
“I’m Andi, by the way,” I say.
“A pleasure,” he says, bowing to me slightly. “My name is Amadé.”
“Amadé,” I echo. “Weird. I’m studying an Amadé. He’s a musician, too, but he’s from the eighteenth century, and he …”
At that moment, we turn off the side street we were walking down onto the Rue de Rivoli and my words trail away. Because at that moment, things get really strange.
68
The men all have ponytails. All of them. They’re all wearing short pants and long, fitted jackets. The women, the few that I can see, are tattered-looking, and I wonder if maybe I’m walking through another late-night rave. One woman approaches us. She’s wearing a long, old-fashioned dress.