Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [141]
And I realize something: it could happen to me. If I trip and drop my flashlight and it rolls away from me. If my batteries die. If I fall into a well.
The thought almost makes me turn around. But I don’t. I’m getting closer to the beach with every step. If I turn back now I’ll only have to try again later with weaker batteries. I keep walking and after a few minutes the ceiling finally stops dripping. I check the map. I’m on the other side of the river. Halfway there.
I walk on. I’ve got to get to the church of St-Germain. According to the map, the tunnel I’m in splits into three there. One path leads west, into the seventh arrondissement. One leads east, deeper into the sixth. The middle one, the one I want, continues south toward the fourteenth.
About forty-five minutes later, I’m there. I know because there’s a sign over a gated doorway that says Saint-Germain. I’m psyched. I’m actually doing it. I’m getting myself to the beach. I stop to rest for a few minutes, nibble a bit of bread that I brought with me, then get going again. The map says the tunnel should split soon. I pick up my pace, expecting to see the three-way fork any second, but instead I see a big fat wall.
“This is unexpected,” I say.
I shine my light over it. Panthéon is scrawled on it, with an arrow pointing east. Next to it Invalides is written, with an arrow pointing west. I’m standing at a T, with tunnels to either side of me.
“I must’ve read the map wrong,” I say, confused.
I peer at the map again, and as I’m following the path to St-Germain with my finger, I remember how the entrance to the tunnel, back at the Madeleine, was shown as being blocked, but really wasn’t. And I realize, with a sick feeling, that I didn’t read the map wrong. It is wrong. It was drawn in the twenty-first century and I’m in the eighteenth century and some of the tunnels it shows—including the one I very much need—have not been dug yet.
And suddenly, I lose it. I start crying and yelling and kicking the wall. “Why?” I scream at it. “Why?”
Why am I here? Why did this happen to me? Why can’t I make this whole bad trip stop? It can’t still be a drug reaction. The effects of the Qwellify would’ve worn off by now. It can’t be a vision quest thing. I mean, how long do those things last? Half an hour? I can’t be crazy. I just can’t be. I’ve survived so far. I’ve figured out how to get money. Buy food. Find shelter. I’ve figured out how to get back into the catacombs. Navigated my way through miles of tunnels in the pitch black with a flashlight and a homemade map. Could a crazy person do all that?
“So then why?” I shout. “Tell me why!”
But the walls and the dead people and the rats and the bugs are all silent. I sink down and sit on the ground. Back to the wall, arms wrapped around my knees.
I want to go to the Rue St-Jean. To Lili and G’s. Right now. I miss Virgil. And Rémy’s café. I miss Brooklyn, too. And my house. And Mabruk’s Falafel. I miss the smell of the city buses. Good coffee. The bridge all lit up at night. I miss my mother. And Nathan. And Vijay. And Jimmy Shoes.
But I don’t miss Arden. Or Beezie. Or St. Anselm’s. Or my father. That’s something. It means I’m not totally desperate. Not yet.
Maybe I’m in a coma. I fell running in the tunnels and hit my head, didn’t I? Maybe I hit it so hard I knocked myself out and the police found me and took me to a hospital and I’m lying in intensive care right now with a million tubes in me and all this is just my brain trying to amuse itself while I lie immobilized in a vegetative state.
Oddly enough, the coma idea cheers me up. It explains a lot—like why I haven’t snapped out of this yet. I pick up my head and wipe my nose on my sleeve. The beam of my flashlight is lighting a patch of ground and the black spider crawling across it. As I watch the spider, the beam dims. Just slightly.
Time