She could see that Renny was growing impatient.
"We’re not likely to find anyone down here. Even the cataflics rarely come to this remote section. Plus there was a gas leak reported near the tourist area of the catacombs. They’ve been closed for three days." She nodded and checked his tattoo again. They were not far from the freshly inked section of his map.
"If I’m reading this right, your girlfriend’s new discovery opens along that passage." She pointed to a narrow tunnel and checked her wristwatch.
Seventy-two minutes left.
Anxious, Seichan led the way. She hurried along, looking for the branching side passage marked on the tattoo.
"Stop!" Renny called behind her.
She turned and found him kneeling beside a tumble of stones. She had walked past the rockfall without giving it a second thought.
Renny pointed his helmet lamp to a rosy arrow chalked above the rock pile. "This is the entrance.
Jolie always uses pink chalk." She joined him and spotted a low tunnel shadowed by the rocks.
Renny crawled on his hands and knees through the opening first. Seichan followed. Within a few yards and a couple of short drops, the way dumped into another tunnel.
As Seichan stood, she saw more shafts and smaller side passages heading off in several directions.
Renny touched a palm against the sweating dampness of the limestone wall. "This is definitely a very old section of the catacombs. And it looks to be a fousty maze from here." He twisted around and fought to raise his shirt. "Check the map." She did, but the ink of the tattoo stopped at the exact point where they were standing. A cursory exam of the tunnels offered no other chalked clues as to where Jolie might have gone.
From here, it looked like they were on their own.
"What do we do?" Renny asked, fear for his girlfriend frosting his words. "Where do we go?" Seichan picked a tunnel and headed out.
"Why are we going this way?" he asked, hurrying after her.
"Why not?" Actually she had a reason for the decision. She had picked the passage because it was the only one that headed down. By now, it was clear to her that these tunnel crawlers were drawn to nether regions of the world, driven by curiosity about what lay below. Such snooping always kept them digging deeper. Only after reaching the bottom would they begin exploring outward.
She hoped that this was true of Jolienne.
Within a few steps, though, Seichan began to regret her choice. To either side, deep niches had been packed solidly with old human bones, darkened and yellowed to the color of ancient parchment. The skeletons had been disarticulated and separated into their component parts, as if inventoried by some macabre accountant. One niche held only a stack of arms, delicately draped one atop the other; another was full of rib cages. It was the last two niches-one on either side of the passage-that disturbed her the most. Two walls of skulls stared out at the tunnel, seeming to dare them to trespass between their vacant gazes.
Seichan hurried past with a shiver of dread.
The tunnel finally ended at a cavernous chamber.
While the roof was no higher than the passageway, it stretched outward into a vast room the length of a football field. Rows and rows of pillars held up the ceiling, like some stone orchard. Each support was composed of stone blocks, one piled on another.
Several looked crooked and ready to fall.
"This is the ancient handiwork of Charles Guillaumot," Renny said, speaking in a rushed, nervous tone. "Back in 1774, a major section of the catacombs collapsed, swallowing up several streets and killing lots o’ people. After that, King Louis hired himself an architect, Guillaumot, to shore up the catacombs. He became the first true cataphile. He mapped and explored most of the tunnels and had these room pillars put in place. Not that collapses don’t still happen. In 1961, the ground opened up and swallowed an entire Parisian neighborhood, killing a bunch of people. Even today, cave-ins occur every year. It’s a big danger down here." Seichan only half listened to Renny’s story. A glint off one of the pillars had drawn her attention. The reflection was too bright for this dank and dreary place. She approached the pillar and discovered a ring of wires wrapped around the middle of the stack of stones, linking transmitters and blasting caps to fistfuls of yellowish-gray clay.
