Spectacle(75)

She charged down the tunnel, halting a couple of meters from the body.

The burly policeman lay there, eyes open, limp hand resting on his chest. His throat was slit with the blade from his own walking stick. There it rested beside him, in the aftermath of its treachery, surrounded by a pool of blood.

Nathalie turned away. A heavy blanket of sadness draped around her heart. He died because he had to protect me. It’s my fault he’s dead.

First Agnès.

Now him.

I don’t even know his name.

She surveyed the tunnel. Empty. Deceptively still.

Nathalie knelt down and closed the policeman’s eyes, then made her way up those endless stairs as quickly as possible. Once she emerged into daylight, she saw the tourists in a group to the side and two policemen approaching with the tour guide. She ran up to them. “The Dark Artist followed me into the Catacombs and chased me. He’s still there!”

They looked at her askance.

She pointed to the Catacombs entrance. “Your colleague was killed keeping watch over me! I’m Nathalie Baudin, from the morgue. Christophe Gagnon assigned a patrol to me.”

Recognition hit them, thunder after a lightning strike. Her words came out in a torrent, explaining what happened before they had a chance to ask. One of the policemen assured her that she was safe now.

Nathalie didn’t believe him. As long as there was a Dark Artist, Paris would be smothered in danger.

She refused to let it choke her.





34


The next two hours were a flurry of policemen, questions, and answers.

But no Dark Artist.

Christophe was with her for all of it, even holding her hand, which made it both easier and more difficult to handle.

The Catacombs were full of hidden escapes, Christophe later explained, that led to churches and taverns and apartments. By the time she left the police station, investigators were canvassing the city for known secret entrances to the tunnels.

“It doesn’t appear promising,” Christophe informed her at one point. “Unless someone comes forward and admits to seeing something, he likely emerged unnoticed in an abandoned place.”

So close to the Dark Artist. And for nothing.

He outsmarted me. He was going to win. Hurt me. Kill me. Watch me escape. He was going to be able to get away no matter what.

She hated Dr. Henard for endowing the Dark Artist with superhuman hearing.

When she went home that night, she told her mother about the Dark Artist, from the first time she was followed home to the blood jar to the letters to the Catacombs. Maman became frantic, swearing Nathalie would never leave the house alone again until the Dark Artist was caught.

Her mother wasn’t wrong.

Nathalie didn’t fault her for being furious terrified hysterical overwhelmed and every emotion that bridged any of those feelings.

She would have been, too.

In a way she envied Maman for being able to feel anything at all, since she herself did not. Nathalie was numb, in a stupor, practically, by the time it was over.

And it was a good thing she’d told Christophe and Maman everything, because as she got ready for bed that night, she sat down to write in her journal.

The details eluded her.

Something was missing. Many things. She remembered the Dark Artist tipping his hat and saying C’est moi. The next thing she recalled was running down the main tunnel toward the people standing over the policeman’s body.

She hadn’t been spared memory loss after all, and it had been delayed by a few days. But this time she didn’t mind nearly as much. There was something to be said about forgetting.



* * *



Nathalie’s eyes fluttered open. She was inside a room, reclined on something cold and damp.

A concrete slab with water to keep the bodies cool, like they used to do.

She was in the corpse display room.

With a controlled, careful movement, she turned to the right. Odette Roux stared at her through dead eyes. She faced left and saw the nameless second victim doing the very same.

Sisters in death.

She sat up. A cluster of people gaped at her through the viewing pane. Face after face after face. Dozens of Parisians gawked. Pointed. Whispered. They shook their heads in pity and disgust and the secret gladness they got from knowing that they weren’t there, in a chilled room, a prop in the unwitting performance of the dead.

Nathalie’s eyes shifted to the other slabs in the front row. Mirabelle Gregoire and Charlotte Benoit on the left. Agnès to the right, on the other side of Odette. Each one faced her.

Then they blinked.

All of them.

Odette, the anonymous girl, Mirabelle, Charlotte, and Agnès. One by one.

The nameless victim tried to talk. Her tongue, black as pitch, struggled to create a word. Nothing came out.

Nathalie felt more water flow over the slab. It was warmer now. Almost comfortable, like bath water. She looked down at her hands and shrieked as loud as she could, but not a sound escaped.

She was wearing white gloves.

And the water wasn’t water. It was blood.

She jumped off the slab and turned to the back row.

Another soundless cry.

There, on the five slabs in the back row, were five different versions of her own bloated, bloodied, carved-up corpse. Out of the corner of her eye, Nathalie saw movement. She watched as Agnès got up from her slab, walked slowly to the back row, and pulled a sheet over each body, one by one.