Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [140]
I said goodbye and then I took off. Through the streets of Paris. To the church. Into the crypt and down the long cold tunnel into the catacombs.
I peer at Virgil’s map now until I find a section that contains the Madeleine. His drawings indicate that the tunnel leading down from the church is blocked. I guess it will be a couple hundred years from now, but it’s open today. I’m standing in it. I follow the path with my finger. After the block, the tunnel continues, forks and Ts a few times, goes under the river, and eventually leads to the beach.
I don’t know how all this happened. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why it all feels and looks and tastes and smells real when it can’t possibly be. And I don’t care. All I want is to get back to where I was. To the twenty-first century. To Virgil. So I’m going to try to get back to where this all started, back to the beach.
“Virgil?” I call out now, hopefully. “Hey, Virgil, you there?”
The only answer is my voice echoing back at me. He’s not there. I’m alone. As usual. I wasn’t alone when I was with him. Which sounds stupid. Of course I wasn’t alone if I was with someone, but the thing is, I’m usually the most alone when I’m with someone.
I keep walking, shining my flashlight ahead of me. It’s quiet down here. I hear water dripping, rats squeaking, and the sound of my own feet—that’s it. The ground dips and rises. I have to duck in places, skirt a well, climb over a pile of stone from a wall that caved. After trudging for about half an hour, I find the first exit on Virgil’s map—St-Roch—a church in the center of the St-Honoré district. I remember the name from Alex’s diary. She came and went from the catacombs through St-Roch. I decide to check it out. Maybe I don’t have to walk all the way to the beach. Maybe there’s a quicker way back. I climb a narrow staircase cut into the limestone. There’s a door at the top, an ornate iron grille. I try the handle, but it’s locked. I shine my flashlight through the bars and see from the statues and crosses and cobwebs and dust that it leads to some sort of storage room. I look for lightbulbs in the ceiling, a vacuum cleaner, some sign of modern life—but there’s nothing.
“That’s only because it’s an old room. Nobody comes down here anymore,” I tell myself. And I try to believe it.
I head back into the tunnels and continue eastward. It’s hard to navigate. It’s really, really dark down here. Virgil has more tunnels drawn on his map than I’m seeing. But the main ones are here and I’m following them. I hope. After only another fifteen minutes or so I come up in what I think is a basement room under the Louvre. Which is good. It means I’m still heading east and working my way south, too.
What’s not good, though, is what I find in that room. Meat stored on ice. Milk in jugs, not cartons. Eggs in a basket. Dead chickens hanging from the ceiling. I’m still in the eighteenth century. Voices and footsteps scare me out of there and back into the tunnels.
I walk for a while. Under the river. Cold, murky water comes up to my ankles. Then to my knees. It drips on my head. I go slowly, sliding my feet, feeling for holes in the ground. As I get closer to the left bank, the ground slopes up and the water starts to recede. But it’s still murky, so much so that I don’t see the dead guy lying in it until I trip over him.
I scream and stumble, but manage to catch myself against a wall. After a minute or so, when my heart stops trying to batter its way out of my chest, I look at him. He’s propped up against the wall, half in and half out of the water. He’s not one of Robespierre’s, he can’t be—he still has his head. There’s a lantern in the