Remi clicked off her LED. Hand in hand, they started down the passage.
When they’d gone twenty paces, Sam clicked on his LED, looked around, shut it off again. He’d seen no end to the passage. They kept going. After another twenty paces, he felt Remi’s hand squeeze on his.
“I heard an echo,” she whispered. “To the left.”
Sam clicked on the LED, revealing a tunnel containing a dozen cells, six to a wall. For safety purposes the barred steel doors had been removed. They stepped into the nearest cell and looked around.
While these tunnels were gloomy in their own right, Sam and Remi found the tiny coalpit-dark cells a nightmare. The château’s guides reportedly divided tour groups into threes and fours, then shut off the lights and had everyone stand in silence for thirty seconds. Though Sam and Remi had found themselves in similar situations before—most recently in Rum Cay—Château d’If’s cells evoked a unique sense of dread, as though they were sharing the space with still-imprisoned ghosts.
“Enough of this,” Sam said, and stepped back into the main passage.
They found the next tunnel farther down the passageway on their right. This one was slightly longer and contained twenty cells. Moving more quickly now, they repeated the process, passing cell tunnel after cell tunnel until they reached the end of the passageway, where they found a wooden door. It was closed but had neither latch nor lock. Beside the door a placard said in French, DO NOT ENTER. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Why no lock?” Remi wondered aloud.
“Probably removed so wayward tourists can’t accidentally lock themselves in places they shouldn’t be.”
He stuck his finger through the latch hole and gently pulled. The door swung open an inch. The hinges creaked. He stopped, took a breath, then pulled the door the rest of the way open.
Remi squeezed through the gap, then he followed, easing the door shut behind them. They stood still for a few moments, listening, then Remi cupped her hands around her LED and clicked it on. They were standing on a narrow, four-by-four-foot landing. To the right of the door was a ledge; at their backs, another cylindrical stairwell, this one leading only downward. Together they peeked over the ledge.
The LED’s beam didn’t penetrate any deeper than ten steps.
CHAPTER 32
Following the blue-white beams of their LEDs, they picked their way down the steps to the next landing. As above, they found a wooden door set into the wall, and beside it another Do Not Enter placard. Expecting the shriek of ancient hinges, Sam was surprised when the door swung noiselessly open. They stepped through.
Another tunnel, this one barely four feet wide and five feet tall, forcing Sam and Remi to duck. Spaced at four-foot intervals along each wall was a rectangular cell door, but unlike their counterparts on the upper level, these were equipped with what Sam and Remi assumed were the original vertically barred doors, each one standing open and tethered to an eyelet in the stone with a length of twine. Sam examined the nearest door under the glow of the LED and found the lock and latch were still present.
“Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more depressing,” Remi whispered.
Scanning the walls as they went, they started down the tunnel. After sixty or seventy feet they found a ten-foot-deep side tunnel set into the left-hand wall. At the end was a waist-high rectangular opening. They knelt down and Sam leaned into the opening. A few feet inside, a hatch was set into the floor; Sam shined his light into it. “Another ladder,” he whispered. “It goes down about six feet. I think we’ve found the place.”
“I’ll go first,” Remi said, then slipped feet first into the hatch and started down. “Okay,” she called. “The ladder seems sturdy.”
Sam climbed down and crouched beside her. This tunnel was narrower stilclass="underline" three feet wide and four feet tall. Stretching down the centerline was hatch after hatch after hatch, each one a steel-barred black square that seemed to swallow their flashlight beams.
“God almighty,” Sam whispered.
“How many, do you think?” Remi asked.
“If this tunnel is as long as the ones above . . . Forty or fifty.”
Remi was silent for a long ten seconds. “I wonder how long it took for someone to go insane down here.”
“Depends on the person, but after a day or two your mind would start feeding on itself. No sense of time, no points of reference, no outside stimulus. . . . Come on, let’s get this over with. What was the last line of the riddle . . . ?”
“ ‘From the third realm of the forgotten . . .’ ”
Careful of their footing, they walked down the wall to the third hatch. Under the beam of Remi’s LED, Sam examined the grate. The hinges and latch had been removed and the bars were scabrous with corrosion. He touched one; flakes sloughed off and floated down into the oubliette. He gripped the bars, lifted the grate free, and set it aside.
The oubliette lay at the bottom of a narrow six-foot long shaft, while the cell itself was four feet to a side and three feet deep—neither wide enough for a prisoner to lie fully prone, nor tall enough to stand without being bent at the waist. “I better go,” Remi said. “I’m smaller and I couldn’t pull you back up.”
Sam frowned, but nodded. “Okay.” From his waistband he pulled the miniature crowbar. She took off her coat and laid it aside, then tucked the crowbar into her belt and let Sam lower her into the shaft, dropping the last couple feet on her own. On hands and knees she clicked on her light, stuck it between her teeth, and began examining the stone walls and floor. After two minutes of crawling around she suddenly murmured, “There you are. . . .”
“Spittlebug?”
“Yep, in all its glory. It’s carved into the corner of this block. There’s a good-sized gap here. . . . Hang on.”
Remi worked the pry bar first into one gap, then the other, inching the block away from the wall. With a grunt, she pulled it free and shoved it aside, then dropped to her belly and shined the light into the hollow. “It goes back a couple feet. . . . Damn.”
“What?”
Remi got to her knees and looked up the shaft at him. “It’s bedrock. There are no other openings, no gaps. . . . There’s nothing here, Sam.”
Remi took another two minutes to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, then pushed the block back into place. Sam reached down and lifted her up. She pursed her lips and puffed a strand of hair from her eyebrow. “I was afraid of that. Karl Müller found three bottles here. Something told me we weren’t going to find the rest.”
Sam nodded. “Whatever Laurent was up to, it doesn’t seem likely he’d stash them all together.”
“Well, it was worth a try. We know one thing for sure: Laurent did in fact use his cicada stamp.”
“Come on, time to leave the party and find a way out.”
They replaced the grate and walked down the tunnel away from the door, Remi pressed against one wall, Sam the other. Ten feet from the end, Sam suddenly stumbled backward into an alcove and landed on his butt with an umph.
“Sam?” Remi called.
“Looks like I found something.”
He looked around. Only three feet deep, the rear half of the alcove’s floor was taken up by a hatch, this one unbarred.
Remi walked around the oubliette between them and ducked into the alcove with Sam, who shined his light into the hatch, then dropped through, followed by Remi. Sam clicked on his LED for a moment. Running perpendicular to the tunnel above, a crawl space stretched into the darkness.
On hands and knees they started crawling, Remi in the lead and Sam bringing up the rear. Not wanting to miss any side branches, every few feet they reached out and touched each wall.