The Skeleton Key: A Short Story Exclusive (3 page)

He set off through the dark labyrinth, winding through tunnels and across small rooms and past flooded pits. The walls were raw limestone, sweating and dripping with water. Fossils dotted the surfaces, some polished by previous
cataphiles
to make them stand out, as if the prehistoric past were trying to crawl out of the rock.

The way grew rapidly cooler. Soon Seichan could see her breath. The echoes of their footsteps made it sound as if they were constantly being followed. She stopped frequently, checking warily behind her.

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.

C4 explosive.

This
was not the handiwork of that eighteenth-century French architect.

She examined the bomb, careful not to disturb it. A small red LED light glowed from the transmitter, awaiting a signal. She cupped a hand over her flashlight and motioned for Renny to do the same with his helmet lamp.

The room plunged into darkness. As her eyes adjusted, she picked out the telltale pinpoints glowing across the room, hundreds of them, coming from pillars throughout the chamber. The entire room had been mined to explode.

“What is all of this?” Renny whispered beside her.

“Vennard’s purge,” Seichan surmised, picturing the bustling city above.

She wondered how many other chambers across this necropolis were similarly set with explosives. She remembered Renny mentioning a reported gas leak. Such a ruse would be a good way to evacuate the catacombs, leaving the cult free to plant charges throughout this subterranean world.

Renny must have feared the same. His voice grew somber with the implication. “They could bring half of Paris crashing down.”

Claude Beaupré had said Vennard wanted human sacrifice, to herald the birth of a new sun-king in fire and blood. Here was that plan about to come to fruition.

As she kept her hand cupped over her flashlight, her eyes acclimated themselves enough to note a wan glow from across the room, marking the entrance to a tunnel on the far side.

She continued across the chamber, heading for that light. She slipped out her pistol and pointed it forward. Keeping her flashlight muffled in her other hand, she allowed just enough illumination to avoid obstacles. Renny kept behind her with his helmet’s lamp switched off.

The far tunnel was a mirror to the first one. Bones filled niches; the skeletons again broken down and separated into body parts. Only these bones were bright
white
. There was no patina of age. With growing horror, she realized that what she was looking at were not ancient remains—they were the remains of fresh kills.

One niche, a yard deep, was half full of skulls.

A work in progress.

From their tiny sizes, she could tell that some of the skulls had belonged to children, even infants.

Before Claude had finished his instructions over the phone, he had spoken of a heinous act committed by the former head of the
Ordre du Temple Solaire
in Quebec. The man had sacrificed his own son, stabbing him with wooden stakes, believing the child was the Antichrist. Apparently the order’s taste for infanticide was not limited to that single instance.

The tunnel ended after another bend. Voices echoed from there, sounding like they were coming from another cavernous space. Seichan motioned for Renny to hang back. She edged forward, hugging a wall, and peered around the corner.

Another room—smaller, but similarly dotted with pillars—opened ahead. Only the pillars in this room were natural limestone columns, left behind as the miners dug out this chamber, making the space feel more ancient. But like the others, these pillars were similarly decorated with explosive charges.

In the center of the room, Seichan could make out twenty people gathered in a circle, all on their knees—but they were not adorned in ceremonial robes. They wore ordinary street clothes. One couple, arm in arm, had come in formal attire for the momentous occasion. A handful looked drugged, weaving dully where they knelt or with their foreheads lowered to the floor. Three bodies lay sprawled closer to the tunnel where Seichan was hiding: facedown, in pools of blood, as dark as oil against the rock. It looked as if they’d been shot in the back as they tried to flee the coming destruction, likely having had second thoughts about giving up their lives in a suicidal orgy.

A pair of guards, with assault rifles and wearing Kevlar body armor, stood to either side of the gathering, shadowed by pillars, watching the group, ready to discourage any other deserters.

Seichan ignored them for the moment and focused on the two figures standing in the center of the circle. One, with silver hair and Gallic features, wore a cloaked white robe, shining in a spotlight thrown by a nearby sodium lamp. Seichan could hear the soft chug of a generator powering the room. The man smiled beatifically upon his flock, arms raised.

That must be Luc Vennard.

“The time is at hand,” he intoned in French. “As the sun reaches its zenith, the destruction wrought here will start. The screams of the dying, the rising souls of the dead, will carry you all upward to the next exultant stage of existence. You will become my dark angels as I claim my solar throne. I promise you: this is not the end, but only the beginning for us all. I must leave you now, but my chosen spiritual right hand will take my place and lead you out of the darkness and into the dawn of a new era.”

The man stepped aside, clearly planning to abandon his flock. From the way Vennard cast a glance toward the two armed guards, it seemed he wasn’t sticking around for the festivities and had arranged for escorts to guide him out of the catacombs—just in case any of the flock objected to his departure. She suspected the bank accounts of those gathered had been emptied into Vennard’s vaults, ready to finance his next venture, to spread more widely the Order of the Solar Temple—or perhaps to buy that new yacht he’s had his eye on.

Was he a cultist, a con artist, or merely a glorified serial killer?

From the vacuous sockets of the dead staring out at her from the nearby niche, she suspected the answer was
all of the above
.

Vennard waved the second man forward. In his midthirties, he wore street clothes, his face shining with a sheen of sweat, his eyes glassy from what appeared to be both drugs and adoration. Even without the photo that Claude had left in the hotel room, Seichan would have recognized the historian’s son—both from his patrician features and the aristocratic air he shared with his father. Seichan pictured Claude plying his son with tales of past noble titles and lost heritages, instilling in the boy the same sense of bitter entitlement that motivated himself. But while the father had sought solace in the embrace of history, it seemed his son had looked to the future, seeking his own path to that former glory.

And he’d found it here.

“Gabriel—like the angel that is your namesake—you will be transformed by blood and sacrifice into my warrior angel, the most exultant of my new heavenly legion. And your weapon will be a sword of fire.” Vennard parted his cloak to reveal a steel short sword. It looked like an antique, a museum piece. “Like you, this steel will soon burn with the energies of the sun’s furnace. But first that weapon must be forged, made ready for its transformation. It must be bloodied like all of you. This last death by your hand, this singular sacrifice, will herald the others to come. This honor I give to you, my warrior angel, my Gabriel.”

Vennard held up the sword and offered it to the young man.

Gabriel took it and lifted it high—then the two men stepped aside, revealing a low altar behind them. It had its own spotlight, too.

A dark-haired woman was chained naked to the stone, legs spread wide, arms outstretched. A second sacrifice—blond-haired and pale—knelt nearby, shaking in a thin white shift.

On the altar, the woman’s head was lolling in a drugged daze. But she must have sensed what was to come and struggled against the chains as Gabriel turned to her with his sword. He stepped far enough aside to reveal the woman’s face—but the tattoos across her body were already enough to identify her.

At least for one of them.

“Jolienne!”

Renny’s cry shot out of the tunnel like a crossbow’s bolt.

All eyes turned in their direction.

Before Seichan could move, a large figure stepped across the mouth of the tunnel—a
third
guard. He’d been hidden to the side, ensuring no one left. She silently cursed Renny. With no time to devise a strategy, she simply had to improvise.

As the guard raised his rifle, Seichan shot him in the knee. The pop of her pistol was explosive in the confined space. The .357 round at such close range blew out his kneecap in a mist of blood and bone.