I reached up to turn it on again, shaking my head. “The shadows were making me woozy, so I turned it off.”
“You crawled through in the dark?” I nodded, and he looked impressed.
Le Bec consulted a hand-drawn map, then pointed to one of the passages. “We go this way.”
We followed him, our lamps flashing on pale cut-stone walls supporting an irregular ceiling of raw stone. Nick entered tour-guide mode. “Would mademoiselle like to know more about this fascinating place?”
“Yes, please.”
“These catacombs are the city’s underground twin. People have been quarrying rock from here to build Paris since at least the Romans,” he explained as Le Bec led us into a tidier corridor with smooth walls and an even floor. “And Paris has been building on top of its quarries for hundreds of years, which is a really bad idea. When neighborhoods started collapsing into sinkholes because there were big voids underground that everybody’d forgotten about, the city got official, establishing an inspection and maintenance service—the cataflics. They don’t like us coming down here.”
“That is what makes it fun!” Youssef whooped into the darkness, his voice bouncing off the walls before it died away. We walked on, the muffled crunch of our feet on the sandy gravel the only counterpoint to a silence so large it almost seemed like a new sound. We passed rooms—Nick called them “squats”—where cataphiles partied and bunked. Some were just caves hacked into the rock; others had been made of well-fitted stacked blocks. Some even had stone-block “furniture” and camp stoves and grocery bags of supplies. In one room, three guys slept, bundled in dusty sleeping bags. Nick said that they were probably planning to spend several days down here, exploring the more remote tunnels.
Everywhere we saw carvings in the soft limestone, including a pale, sinister face dominated by a bulbous, off-center nose that leered suddenly in my headlamp. I squeaked and jerked away.
“It is okay,” Noor reassured me. “It is just Benoît. He is not real.” I looked closer, my heart still thumping. “Benoît” was a carved imp’s head. I exhaled shakily. He had looked alive.
“I know the guy who made him,” Youssef said. “He is a stone carver in his other life. He makes little faces like this that jump out and surprise you.”
“It gave me a heart attack,” I said, my hand on my chest, trying to calm myself.
“I will tell him. It will please him very much.”
“Glad my terror could make his day.”
Youssef laughed. We continued until the corridor emptied us into a large, low-ceilinged room glowing with paintings so vivid the colors throbbed in the light of our headlamps. A giant black-and-white rat in a suit readingCharlie Hebdocaught my eye, then one of Le Bec’s pigeons, dressed in a vampire cloak, with blood on its fangs. Nearby, a woman in a scarlet dress with spaghetti for hair appeared unaware that a smirking man behind her was twirling the strands up with his fork.
“What do you think?” Nick asked.
“Wow. Incredible.” Stone blocks the size of benches were scattered around the room, and we found a group of three set close together. Everyone except Le Bec pulled food out of their packs. He sat just outside our group, looking bored. Martine opened jars of rillettes and tiny adorable cornichonpickles and set them out. Nick produced a cured beef sausage and sliced it with his pocketknife. “It’s the halal one that you like,” he told Noor. She smiled, pleased, and unwrapped three small white packages whose distinctive odor had already told me they were cheese. Youssef put a couple of baguettes next to the cheese and stacked five chocolate bars beside them. Nick reached into his pack again and pulled out bottles of 1664 beer and lemonade. “Did everybody bring a cup?” We all rooted around in our packs and produced camp cups. Nick poured them all half full of beer except Noor’s. He opened the lemonade and poured her cup full before adding it to the beer in the rest of our cups. I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t like beer that much, and I couldn’t see how adding lemonade to it would increase its allure. “Santé,” he said, raising his cup.
We raised ours. “Santé.”
I took a tiny, I’m-doing-this-only-to-be-polite sip, prepared to be disgusted, but it was delicious: fizzy, citrusy, slightly bitter, just barely sweet, and entirely refreshing.
“This is wonderful,” I said. “What is it?”
“Panaché,” he said. “Welcome to the catacombs, mademoiselle.” We attacked the food like we hadn’t eaten in a week. I tried everything. The duck rillettes, which were melt-in-your-mouth meat shreds of deliciousness; the sausage topped with a couple of crunchy, vinegary cornichons; the rich, gooey Brie; the hard, supple Morbier cheese with a thin layer of ash in the middle. It tasted of mushrooms and nuts, not last night’s firepit, and I thought it would be amazing in grilled cheese sandwiches.
Le Bec didn’t eat any of this marvelous food, not even thechocolate. He just watched as we did, an unreadable expression on his face.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I said, when his staring started to seem weird.
“He never eats anything,” Youssef explained.
“That is not true,” Le Bec said. “I simply prefer other food.”
His tone implied that the feast in front of us failed to meet his standards. Nobody seemed to know how to reply to that. Finally, Noor cleared her throat and pointed at one of the walls. “The vampire pigeon is new since the last time, yes?” she said.
“You have not heard? Paris has its very own vampire.” He smiled. “The catas needed one, too.”
She shook her head. “No. It is a terrible thing, even as a joke. People are dying.”
Le Bec flicked her words away like you’d brush away a swarm of gnats. “You should be proud that Paris has a vampire.”
“Proud that there’s somebody out there attacking women? Why?” I said. “It’s appalling.”
“Because a vampire has the power to confer immortality.”
