A Drop of Night(79)

I drag myself up onto a stone ledge, gasping.

“Are you insane?” I sputter. I’m shivering violently, wiping my face, trying to catch my breath. It’s so dark I can’t even see my hand in front of my eyes. “What was that? What—”

“Anouk,” Lilly says softly, and I hear her digging around in her sopping wet clothes. “They’re going to come after us. We have to hurry.”

She’s shaking something. By the metallic rattle coming from it, I’m assuming it’s a flashlight. A broken one.

“Oops,” Lilly says. Giggles nervously. “There’s light further down. Come on.”

She charges off into the dark and I follow, stumbling blindly. My nightgown is soaked, sticking to my skin. My feet are bare. The ground is weirdly sharp, full of welts and holes, like volcanic rock. As my eyes adjust, I see the barest outline of where we are: a low stone tunnel, hacked into the bedrock.

The ground becomes metal grating. We’re on a walkway now, suspended high up in the air. Dull-white lightbulbs inside cages blink on as we pass them. The walkway is sloping downward.

“How far did you go?” My teeth are chattering. I can barely talk. The grating of the floor is cutting into my skin.

“Far enough to find them.” She glances at me, and she looks scared suddenly. Exhausted. “Far enough to find a lot of things.”

We’re at the end of the walkway, turning onto a circular stairway. We stagger down, further and further underground. The sound of our descent seems to echo forever. Beyond the lights all I can see is thick, uniform darkness. And now we’re at the bottom, in a huge vaulted space. A clammy, stone-cold copy of the salle d’opéra high above. The floor is covered in shale and huge triangular shards of rock, like this place was blasted out and never properly cleared.

The light is surreal—a dark, chilly green. Fluorescent tubes are bolted at random intervals across the ceiling, like glowing staples closing up a wound.

Lilly leads me along the wall. We’re trying to be quiet, but if someone’s within a hundred feet of us they heard us clambering down those stairs. I look up at the wall. It’s scrawled with dripping words. Names. Numbers. Some of them are huge. Others form tiny, shaky sentences.

L’enfer, I read under my breath as we hurry past the uneven letters. I am Jacques Renaud.

1775—1795—1885?—1912—2004—2016

Aurélie. Aurélie du Bessancourt.

Forgive me. I cannot find you. I am lost.

I brush my hand along the wall as I run. Some of the words are gouged into the rock, deep.

How long is eternity?

She cannot return to me.

Mon nom est perdu.

The words terminate in an angry mass of blots and splatters.

We reach a pocket of light. A huge, shattered chandelier is lying between the rocks, cables snaking away into the dark. It’s been laid at the feet of a crudely hacked sculpture. At first it looks barely human. On second glance, I think it’s supposed to be a girl. Piles of trinkets and ancient paper are heaped around it and tangled through the prongs of the chandelier.

“It’s like a shrine,” I breathe. Lilly looks up at the disfigured stone face. “Come on,” she says, and pulls me onward. “Come on.”

We’re coming up on something. At first it looks like Stonehenge, looming out of the dark, and now like a circle of ancient telephone booths, and now I see that it’s a series of tanks, glass and heavy, bolted frames, standing end up in the center of this enormous space.

They aren’t empty.

Lilly tries to pull me past them. I shrug her off.

“Wait.” The water behind the thick glass is cloudy, yellow-blue. A figure is floating inside. My throat closes.

It’s indistinct, drifting. Closer. Now farther. A finger. A hand––

A face slides forward through the murky fluid.

For a second I think it’s Jules. It’s got his black hair, the same narrow face and pointed chin. But it’s not Jules. It’s someone his age, a kid with a fuller mouth and muscled arms, and he’s wearing a button-down shirt, wide seventies pants. He’s suspended in the water, eyes closed. Definitely, inarguably dead.

“I don’t know what those are,” Lilly mumbles. She’s watching me, not the tanks. She won’t look at the tanks. “We need to go, Anouk.”

I wrap my soaking arms around me. Start walking again, moving past the circle of tanks. I catch glimpses of a boy in knee breeches. A thin, dark-haired girl in a nineteenth-century gown. Her petticoats are floating around her. There’s a black cavity in the back of her neck.

“It’s everyone they’ve killed,” I whisper. “All the people they got rid of to stay alive. It’s their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

Lilly stares at me. One of the bodies floats against the glass with a thunk, wispy hair drifting around its head like spun gold. Eyes closed. Blue lips. It could be Lilly’s twin.

These are our ancestors. I wonder if my biological mom is here, or my dad, whichever one was a Bessancourt. I wonder if they were dragged down here like we were, if they ever got the chance to fight, how long they lasted. Or if they just never woke up.

Lilly grabs my arm. We stumble on.

“Look,” Lilly says, and up ahead I see something. To the left, close to another bubble of light: two slumped shapes solidifying out of the dark.