Finn and Hilts headed down the stairway. The temperature began to drop almost immediately, the summer heat turning to a clammy, naturally air-conditioned coolness that made Finn shiver. They kept on moving down the narrow, shallow steps, deeper and deeper. Small bulbs hanging from a frayed cable wrapped around the stone core of the staircase lit their way. Finn began to count the steps to take her mind off the steadily increasing sense of claustrophobia. They hit bottom at 234. She could hear footsteps echoing behind them but she had no idea if it was their pursuers or just a bunch of tourists who’d paid their ten euros. A marker on the wall informed them that they were seventy meters below ground-230 feet. A line of dim bulbs ran away into the distance. There was no other way to go except back up the stairs and into the clutches of the men chasing after them. The floor beneath their feet crunched wetly. Damp gravel. The walls and ceiling of the stone-lined tunnel were dripping. A hell of a place to die, Finn thought.
A hundred yards farther on the tunnel began to widen and she felt her claustrophobia lessen slightly. Suddenly the tunnel emptied out into a broad and well-lit vestibule. The ceiling, sweating coldly, was still no more than a yard above their heads. The vestibule was oblong, with a pair of Egyptian-style obelisks carved into the rock on either side of a gaping doorway. The obelisks were white with rectangular inserts of black. Above the doorway, carved into the stone, was a message and a warning, written in Latin. Finn translated the words aloud:
“Stop! You are about to enter the Empire of the Dead.”
“Lovely,” muttered Hilts. They stepped between the obelisks and went through the dark doorway into a vision from the depths of a cave-cool hell.
Stretching away in all directions, lit only by the pale clear bulbs that hung from the ceiling, stacked like cordwood and piled head-high in ornate rows twenty feet thick, were piles of human bones. Yellow, damp, old-it was layer upon layer of thighbones, pelvic bones, arms, legs, collar-bones and spinal vertebra, tens of thousands of skulls, eye sockets leering blindly jaws and teeth locked together into perpetual smiles by the dripping lime from above, all sense of humanity fled like the inner workings of a mass murderer’s most passionate dreams of bony carnage, an enormous mass of bone that was slowly, as secretions fell, becoming a single, monumental and monstrous fossil. The damp air was filled with a sweet-sick musty odor of old age, and the only sound was the muffled whispers of their rasping breaths.
“My God,” said Finn, awe-stricken. She took Hilts’s hand and squeezed it hard.
“There’s probably other people up ahead. Come on,” he said. Together they moved down the corridor of bones, peering ahead through the deadly gloom. Every fifty feet or so along the loose-floored passage they could see side tunnels blocked by wrought-iron barriers. It was clear that major sections had been blocked off to keep people from wandering through the entire place, becoming lost forever. They passed a wheelbarrow with a shovel laid across a load of assorted bones; clearly the gigantic ossuary was still in use.
Hilts stopped. “Wait,” he said. He turned and listened. At first there was only silence, and then they both heard it: a soft, rodentlike scuffle, like rats on a barn floor. Running feet on gravel. “They’re coming!” He looked around wildly, then picked up the shovel on the wheelbarrow. He hefted it. No match for a gun, that was sure enough. Finn spotted a side passage on the opposite side of the main corridor. The wrought-iron gate was hanging off its simple hinge.
“In there!” she said. Hilts nodded. They moved across to the other side of the passage and squeezed through the opening. The sounds of their pursuers were getting dangerously close. Hilts turned and lifted the narrow gate, dropping the rusty pins back into their sockets with a loud scraping sound that made him wince.
“No!” Finn exclaimed with a groan.
“What?”
“Look!” She pointed through the grating. There on the floor of the tunnel, ten feet away, was a brand-new passport, the gold-stamped Canadian crest gleaming proudly in the sullen light from the dim bulbs overhead.
“Which one is it?” Hilts said. Finn reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out the passport she’d picked up no more than an hour before.
“Idiot!” groaned Hilts, chiding himself.
“What do we do?” asked Finn.
“Hope they don’t notice,” said Hilts. He pulled Finn back into the shadows. The sound of footsteps was very clear now. Finn was suddenly aware of the impenetrable darkness behind them, and her imagination was more than capable of visualizing what that ghastly blackness held. Miles of corridors, millions of skulls, twice as many sightless eyes staring into eternity.
The footsteps slowed. Finn saw shadows cast off their pursuer by the thin light overhead. The footsteps stopped dead. One person. He’d seen the passport and was trying to figure out what it meant. The figure stepped forward into his own shadow. It was the bearded man from the car; he’d managed to switch back and meet with his companion from the opposite platform at Denfert-Rochereau. He had a gun in his hand, a very modern-looking automatic made from some sort of flat black composite polymer. There was a fat sausage-shaped thing attached to the barrel. A silencer, she guessed. He wasn’t going to draw any attention to himself. As he bent to pick up the passport, the gate pin settled into its socket with a small clanking sound and the moldy old bones finally proved too much for Hilts. He sneezed.
The man whirled, gun arm extended. A cold green light leapt out from the top of the weapon like a sinister ghoulish thread-not only a silencer, but a laser sight. Finn felt Hilts’s hand on her shoulder, pulling her back even farther into the darkness. She held her breath and stepped back as quietly as possible. She reached up with one free hand to guide herself back through the dark, her fingers trailing over the stacks of bones. The bearded man shoved the passport into his jacket pocket, then stepped up to the gate and started manhandling it out of its sockets. Hilts’s hand squeezed her shoulder again, and silently she kept moving back. Her free hand suddenly reached out and touched empty air. Hilts guided her around into a second side passage, this one running away at a right angle from the first. Finn’s fingers touched a skull in the wall to her left. She slid her fingers into the eye sockets, hooking them around the nasal sinus. She eased the skull from its place in the wall. It slid into her hand with a faint wet scraping sound. She gritted her teeth and hefted the skull. About two and a half pounds. It suddenly occurred to her that she was ahead of Hilts. If the bearded man turned and fired she’d be the one to get shot. She froze. Directly ahead of her she could see the line of green light from the laser sight. She felt her muscles tightening. If he continued along the side passage there was a chance they could get in behind him and escape. She held her breath again, listening for the sounds of the man’s footsteps. Instead she heard a small scurrying noise behind her and then a squeak. Hilts swore and the line of green light turned down the second side passage and blazed into Finn’s eyes. She didn’t even pause to think. She took one step forward, totally blinded, and straight-armed the skull at a point two feet above the searching beam of the laser, holding the bulbous cranium like a boxing glove on the end of her hand. There was a hard cracking sound as the skull connected, then fell apart on her fist. She heard a sighing hiss like air going out of a tire and the laser light wavered, then spun down as the bearded man dropped to the floor of the passage. The beam illuminated the mess Finn had made of his face. He was unconscious, his nose broken and his lip gashed. The left side of his chin also seemed a little out of place.
“Glass jaw,” commented Hilts. He bent down and retrieved his passport from the man’s pocket. He picked up the gun, slid out the clip, then threw the weapon into the deeper darkness behind him.