Chapter Nineteen
OuroborosChapter Nineteen
"Are you sure we want to be here Joy?"
"Of course! There is no way that I would miss such an opportunity as this one to explore the famed catacombs of Paris, let alone miss out on finding out more about the Cult."
"I have a bad feeling about this all," Mina whimpered as they passed another wall length of skull and bone all neatly piled under the streets of Paris. Thousands upon thousands of dead laid to their final rest, their empty eye sockets following every move of the four now creeping through the dark maze like tunnels.
“We’ll be fine,” Joy said turning around to see Mina’s apprehensive face and expression eerily lit up by her flashlight, her eyes darting from wall to wall, from empty eye socket to another. She grabbed hold of her friend’s hand pulling her close to her and holding on giving an encouraging smile. “Don’t worry, I got you and I won’t leave you. Besides, we have Wendy and Tzuyu. I’m sure they are very capable sort considering how long they have lived.”
“Yeah,” Mina whimpered quietly before meeting Joy’s confident gaze, “yeah, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
It was late evening the day after they had discovered the painting. Having left the Louvre and visited the Eiffel tower where Mina got to pose in all the ways she wished and was allowed to experience the romantic city to the fullest extent, they had found a hotel in the Montparnasse district, a place not too far from the Eiffel tower and filled with beautiful tiny streets and little cafes and restaurants.
After a gourmand meal of French cuisine and wine they spent their evening diving into research in their hotel room attempting to divine the location of the mentioned catacombs. Before even beginning the research they had a strong feeling that the location would be the Paris catacombs, but even if their instincts were correct they still needed to find out what location exactly in the catacombs the painting and Leon Frederic, the artist, was referencing to.
What at first appeared a possibly laborious task turned out to be a rather simple one. With a quick search on the life of Leon Frederic they found out that he had lived in Brussels and joined a group of famous and eclectic artists called L’Essor. This group had then split up to form another two famous group for artists called Les XX and Pour l’Art, however some members of the original L’Essor who didn’t join the new groups formed one of their own, a lesser known and secretive group that didn’t reveal its name in the search. The only knowledge of its existence is Frederic in his later years talking about a ‘group’ he belonged to after L’Essor. It was during this secretive groups years that his historical record is spottiest, and he was seen around Europe in many places, but he especially visited Paris.
Their ideals and artistic inspirations spread into the occult and the romanticizing of such ideals, and soon after forming their members began to inexplicably die from sickness. The surviving members quickly disbanded and moved to separate locations away from where they had gathered, Leon Frederic moving to Schaerbeek in Brussels to spend the rest of his life there.
While Wendy and Mina had been diving into the possible location of the catacombs and the interesting history of Leon Frederic, Tzuyu and Joy had spent their time searching for a map of the catacombs, or the best version of its chambers and entrances that they could find. They combined historical maps, both official and unofficial hand drawings as well as some modern map data that were found made by catacomb visitor enthusiasts and amateur mappers.
Layering them over each other Joy and Tzuyu were able to create a composite of a large single map of the place. With this they were pretty confident they had a mostly up to date and accurate map, noting specifically places where the maps differed and didn’t overlap as potential locations of dead ends and cave-ins, and marking routes they felt were almost certainly the safest existing routes.
All of this they managed to find on their first night in Paris, leaving them some time to enjoy the next day in peace and shop for some gear before they dived into the underground. There were significant risks involved in going into old tunnels like these, especially tunnels that were not being actively reinforced by the officials for tourists.
Equipment purchased and with the most recent map of the catacombs in their possession, they had waited for late evening to arrive when the streets and the neighbourhood quieted down and they could sneak into the catacombs without being spotted or hindered. Managing in through a mostly abandoned and hidden catacomb entrance the four had trounced through the more well known sections and were reaching the less travelled and mapped sections of the catacombs. These routes were the sketchier ones and they slowed down to a careful slow pace to avoid stepping onto anything that could trigger a cave-in.
Wendy was in the lead with the map, Tzuyu following close behind with Joy hand holding Mina right behind her. The going slowed down as the tunnels narrowed a little and the ground appeared to be crumblier and less predictable in its composition and sturdiness. It was pitch black underground their flashlights being the only source of any light, and while they were fairly certain they were the only ones in the tunnels they kept their ears open for any foreign noises.
The road to the desired location they had marked on the map winded through a series of increasingly less rocky and stable tunnels, the hard rock of the ground turning closer to sandstone and showing signs of crumble and wear over time. The tunnel floors had a thin layer of fine sand and dust so the group took extra care to not bump or push against the tunnel walls, lest it was in a state ready to collapse.
Twenty minutes of silent shuffling in the dark, the tunnels walls feeling oppressive and caving in on them Wendy finally slowed down to a stop allowing the rest of the group to come next to her.
“We’re…. here.” Wendy said as her hand slumped to her side.
They had arrived into a clear central room like hub that connected various different tunnels to it. Across from them was another tunnel leading out as well as two more leading diagonally away on the left side of the room. The large space was made up of a few larger room-like spaces all grouped into a single larger one with natural rock pillars supporting the roof at almost equal spans of width. What really struck them however was the sight of what was waiting for them in the room. And then there was the smell.
There were ruined individual pieces of sofa cushioning scattered about, bottles, boxes, and paper trash littered throughout the room and everything felt like it was coated with an extra layer of filth; something other than the natural dustiness of the catacombs. More ominously, there were discarded pieces of aluminium foil, spoons, lighters, chords and syringes in a corner of the space. The whole place reeked and stank horribly and everyone soon realized what this place probably was; a drug den.
Joy turned to look at Wendy with disappointed questioning eyes. “We’re here?”
“This just looks like a drug den though,” Tzuyu carefully moved some items with a pen, scared to contract something horrible from the dirty items littered into the room.
“But the map and clues definitely pointed to this place. Did we go wrong somewhere?” Wendy said disheartened and engrossed in looking through the map to see where they had taken a misstep. No matter how she retraced their route however she reached this same place. Maybe they had been mistaken about its location.
“It could be that this is the place, but it's been repurposed by this group of people, removing the previous signs of residence along with them,” Joy said. She was equally disappointed in the outcome of their search. She had hoped for some more secret Cult writings, some symbols and sacred texts to discover, some hidden clues about their true nature or their weaknesses. Instead they found dirty bottles and rags, some used syringes, tin foil and lighters and smudges of dark brown burnt material. It was disgusting and the smell of this little space was amplified with the still unmoving air.
“So our options are; we took the wrong turn and haven’t found it yet, we have found it and it's a disappointment, or we found the location marked on our map but it wasn’t the place we were looking for,” Tzuyu chimed. “Do you think we got it wrong?”
“It feels like it…” Mina said as she poked another piece of garbage on the side.
“We definitely are in the right place following the map. The only options really are that it either never existed here or it’s been removed,” Wendy looked up disappointed. “Sorry everyone, this was a wasted trip.”
“Don’t be so quick to give up,” Joy chimed, trying to lift their spirits and she put on the gloves they had bought earlier that day to carefully look under and behind stacks of things to see if there were any signs of a time before this place became a nest of antisocial behaviour. “Maybe a clue is hidden under something here.”
Everyone put their gloves on tighter, adjusted their facemasks they had bought for dust cover and picked up some stick like implement that wasn’t too dirty to begin shifting through the materials in the room. The moving of the trash and other dodgy substances stirred whatever smells and stenches had been waiting idle in the room and it kicked up an inhumane gross smell that had all of them almost doubling over.
Air barely moved in this place and it took awhile for the worst of the smells to die down as they looked behind boxes, trash piles, bottles, sofas and other small implements that had been brought in. There even was a TV and a movable gas stove, although they doubted any signal could reach all the way down here; their phones were out of signal reach already.
The clattering and shifting caused by their searching also picked up some of the dust into the air and the more they searched the poorer the visibility became. Eventually the room was getting so dusty that they took a break from the searching to allow the dust to settle a little.
“Nothing yet I presume?” Tzuyu asked as she searched for a safe spot to sit.
“No clues or signs of any previous residence here, let alone anything as old as Leon Frederic or the previous Cycle. Just old mining tunnels repurposed for… this.”
“So what now then? Do we search further into the tunnels or go back?” Mina asked, relieved a little that they had managed to traverse safely through the old burrows but also a little disappointed that it had been a wasted trip.
“I think so. Probably best if we…” Wendy stopped talking and perked up, her head turned to the direction they had originally come from. Lending her ear to the wind she thought she heard something and quietly shushed everyone and used her hand to signal the group to stop what they were doing and listen.
At first it was hard to hear, but there was some shuffling and crackling of stone very faintly coming from the tunnels they had used. This sound grew a little louder and louder before they finally heard some talking and shouting, slurred and aggressive sounding voices.
“Is that…?” Joy asked before she was shushed by Wendy.
“Run.”
Scrambling up from their positions Wendy darted to the opposite direction of where the sounds were coming from. Tzuyu and Joy right after her with Mina pulling the rear as she had been closest to the entrance of the room observing the opened caskets there.
Trying to hurriedly run stealthily, they did their best to make as little noise as they could shuffling through the narrow tunnels that winded like a meandering snake, all of them all but losing their sense of direction in the run. Wendy did her best to keep track of what turns they were taking so they wouldn’t be completely lost and could backtrack once they were out of harm's way.
At a steep turning section the tunnel wall seemed to be giving way and Wendy hurried them forward, not wanting to get caught under a collapsed tunnel as the dusty and sandy walls slid more. Their steps, even if extremely light in their stealthy escape was shifting the loose sand and rubble on the walls. The tunnel wound behind a corner where there was a worrying amount of loose sand, their feet almost sinking into the ground and Wendy guided them past this section carefully.
There was a low muffled rumble behind them before a loud rumble of sand and rock falling echoed through the tunnels, it sounded like it had collapsed. Wendy stopped to look back around at the way they had just come through and saw a lot of loose sand and some stone filling the hallway almost completely up.
“Well there goes our way out,” Tzuyu whispered as they all caught their breath and began to listen after the terrifying stealthy romp out of the smelly lair they had discovered.
“Everyone alright?” Wendy asked as she looked around at their group. Her brows scrunched into a confused shape as she mentally counted, only counting the two that she could see right behind her. Her eyes spread wide with fear.
“Where’s Mina?!”
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Opening her eyes Mina found herself in complete darkness, her flashlight faintly glowing in dust on her side betraying its location. Dusting herself off and unfurling from the twisted position she had fallen into, Mina stretched out and moved around as much as she could. It appeared she hadn’t been hurt except for a few bruises.
During their stealthy escape from the smelly hidden lair that they suspected as a junkies home Mina had all of a sudden felt her foot sink all the way to her hips and in her shock she hadn’t even managed to let out a cry for help as she disappeared into a pile of dirt and a dark hole, finding herself down in her current predicament.
Mina picked up the flashlight buried in the dirt shaking it to get the dust off and looked around. There were piles of sand and rubble and even the roof of the tunnel she was in looked weak. She couldn’t identify where she had fallen from, and even if she could it looked like climbing back up the same way was impossible; it was too steep and was at risk of collapsing further.
“Hello? Joy, Wendy, Tzuyu? Anyone there?” Mina called out carefully, scared that whoever it was that they had been running away from earlier would hear her or that the roof of the tunnel would collapse from the echoes of her voice. Waiting in silence for a minute she heard no response.
To her right the tunnel had collapsed. She wasn’t certain if this was recent or an old collapse but either way her road was blocked. To her left however it continued on, with rubble and dirt littering the pass making it difficult to track through. Her flashlight only managed to illuminate a few metres forward as the tunnel soon turned to the right and angled further down. It was clearly going to take her deeper in.
Mina was unsure what she should do. She had always been told to stay put in situations when she got lost. However, with the collapsed passage as well as the fragile looking tunnel roof over her, she felt more scared to stay put and wait for someone than to go further out. Even if any of her friends found the exact location she had disappeared in and decided to dig her out, Mina was pretty certain it might cause the rest of the tunnel to collapse. Either way, staying here seemed like a bad choice.
Fishing out her phone from her pocket she checked in a vain moment of hope that maybe there was some signal outside but she had no connection. She was too deep underground for any signal to reach her at the moment. She would have to try and get closer to the surface somehow to call her friends.
Carefully getting herself in a crouched position without touching the sides of the tunnel, Mina began shifting herself through the narrow tunnel to the left which almost immediately sloped downwards. Thankfully as it did slope down it also opened up a little and Mina didn’t have to struggle as much to move forwards, she could almost straighten her legs if she kept her torso down at a bow.
Her legs slowly dragging forward was the only sound that she heard besides her laboured breaths and the rapid beating of her heart. It was pitch black in this tunnel except for the light cast by her flashlight. She was glad that before their dive into the catacombs they had come fully prepared for this exact scenario. Each one of them carried some dry food provisions and water, extra batteries for their flashlights and Mina had a fully charged power bank. She would at least have a good three to four full charges of her phone before that ran out.
After an unbearably long stretch of walking crouched the tunnels finally opened up enough that she could all but straighten herself completely. She had been sloping down the whole time but now the tunnel levelled out and the rough unworked walls changed into more uniform and completely straight wall sections.
Passing her fingers gently across the surface of the walls Mina felt ordered lines in the wall one after another. Upon closer inspection using her flashlight she saw that although very faded and worn there were clear seams in the wall going both vertically and horizontally. This had to mean that the tunnel walls in this section had been built using bricks and that this was a constructed tunnel.
Looking back the way she had come from she noticed that where the small erratic tunnel she had come out from connected to this one there was a cave in just next to it on the right; the original passage here had been blocked off and the tunnel that Mina had used to get down was an old excavated tunnel to get access to this place.
The historian in Mina got excited and the horror and terror of being lost in the catacombs was surprisingly quickly superseded by feverous curiosity and passion for historic discovery. She had the opportunity to excavate and rediscover some old structure that had been lost to time and the surface dwellers above.
The tunnel continued straight onwards towards the left and slowly declined in a shallow slope. Mina couldn’t see the end of the tunnel from here but she hoped that maybe there was an exit in that direction. There really were only two possibilities here; either the caved in portion of this tunnel was the exit or it was in the direction she was walking in.
Heading down the constructed old tunnel she felt a little more comforted and secure with the situation. The prospect of finding ancient discoveries also alleviated her immediate worries as her mind raced with all the possibilities of who could have constructed this and how old it was. In all honesty it could be from almost any timeline, but by the erosion on the brick seams and the corners of the bricks, she could assume that it had at least been quite a few hundred years since this was constructed.
If it was some secret hideout of royalty her primary options were one of the renaissance or medieval French kings. In her mind she even hoped maybe it could be some secret base of Charlemagne, but during his reign Paris wasn’t the capital of the Carolingian Empire so it was unlikely. It could be the Roman’s although she wasn’t certain why they would need to build something like this underneath. Maybe it was an outlawed Cult that built it.
Whoever it was, they were able to employ lots of people, very capable craftsmen and would have had to have lots of resources. With the catacombs at an average depth of twenty metres it meant that this tunnel had to be at least a few metres lower, possibly between a depth of twenty five to thirty metres. All of this added to the amazing accomplishment and feat of having built this.
A few amazed and measured minutes of walking later Mina saw a very faint reflection and shine ahead of her and she noticed that the tunnel was changing form, the tunnel walls forming corners turning out. She stopped walking and stretched her arm with the flashlight out a little further to enlighten the section just a little more. To either side of what appeared to be a room ahead she saw faint glinting from some smooth structures on the ground. Inching her way closer the light revealed a room, with a slightly higher ceiling and about double the width of the tunnel.
There were small pillars flanking either side of the path through the room and on some of the pillars there were little hooks for braziers. A few of these were broken and fallen off the pillars; the flashing of smooth metal that she had noticed earlier. On the plinths and lining the top edge of the colonnade there were extremely faded carvings barely visible to the eye. At the end of the room there was what once had been a door but now was a rotten visibly broken piece of wood that seemed to only half hang off its hinges while mostly having been damaged beyond use and repair.
Mina fished her phone out and began recording a video of the symbols doing her best to get a visual of the symbols by angling the light in a way that the carved forms on the wall faintly cast little shadows and made them pop out of the stone. At a crawling pace she circled the room and recorded all the symbols she could eventually finding herself in front of the half broken door. It was impossible to tell if there had been anything written on the door itself, but she could see a little into the space beyond. The room was massive.
Touching the wrecked door gently it immediately creaked and collapsed off its hinges. Mina fell back with a little squeak as the door crumbled down into the room ahead and raised a pile of dust into the air obscuring her vision. She coughed and shut her eyes, protecting them with her sleeve as she waited for the dust to settle before she eventually could have a look at the room ahead.
Her flashlight was unable to light up the whole room at once. From the doorway she was in there were steps leading down at an angle for a good ten metres. On each sides of the steps there were seat like protrusions that lined the edge of the room all around to the other side which she could barely see. The walls were lined with columns as was each corner of the flat stage-like space at the bottom of the steps. A little too far out of her flashlights reach the flat stage at the bottom of the steps had another more elaborate walkway up to an altar or statue of sorts, also lined on the sides with plinths and columns.
What stopped Mina from immediately walking in however was what was lying on the floor and seats of this room, everywhere all across the space. Human skeletal remains.
At equal distances from each other on the seats surrounding the centre stage as well as on the stage itself and by the main altar, there were skeletal remains all in similar positions. For them to have fully decomposed in this dry sealed off area it must have been hundreds of years since whatever happened here. From this far out she couldn’t see why there were so many and how they had died, but from the uniformity of their positions they had either willingly stayed here or they could have been drugged and dragged into position. No matter how you looked at this it appeared like some horrible ritual human sacrifice.
Taking her first tentative steps in Mina did her best to try and avoid stepping on any of the skeletons as she walked down the stairs towards the centre stage. Her flashlight beamed across the room in all directions, the eerie silence unnerving her. She knew that these people had long died and they were just skeletons, but with all that had happened her mind now could even see the dead rising. It was terrifying.
It wasn’t the first time she had seen skeletons by a long shot. As a professor of history she had been to a few archaeological dig sites and had seen skeletons before, but being alone here in this situation with so many dead was a whole different game; if souls could reincarnate for thousands of years then why couldn’t the dead sacrificed in some ancient temple be able to rise as well.
She reached the bottom of the stairs arriving on the centre stage. While all the skeletons on the benches that surrounded the arena faced straight forwards, there were a few skeletons on the stage that instead clearly faced directly into the other end of the stage where the altar like statue sat, in front of it a bowl like structure with grooves at its sides all converging into the space. Now down here she had a clearer look at the sculpture they were facing.
The figure ahead of her caused her heart to sink and she swallowed hard at the sight. Twisted and mangled, her legs faced in unnatural directions while her arms were out in an embrace, although they appeared to be broken at places and the wrists twisted around in a way that would surely break it in a person. The fingers equally mangled unnaturally the finger nails were either freakishly long or were missing altogether. Her chest was exposed and open, her lungs pulled out like wings and where her heart would have been there was a gaping hole. Long spindly and unkempt hair flowed down from its head reaching up to the hip and covered its face in shadow; a sigh of relief escaping from Mina. With how terrifying the visage of this statue was overall she didn’t even want to imagine its face.
At the foot of the statue crushed under her twisted veiny feet there were carved tiny skeletal figures, childlike in size. There were seven of them. Eyes shot wide and nose flaring Mina realized what this was and where she was. She took a few steps back and stepped onto a bone, the sudden crack of it causing her to stumble in her surprise and shock. Her flashlight fell out of her hand and rolled to the side a few metres out and pointed at a seat, the hall immediately falling into almost complete darkness once more.
That horrifying statue creature was the Void Mother, the one that the Cult of the Children of the Void worshipped. The little childlike skeletal carvings at her feet had to be her Daughters, the Eternal Ladies. The carved skeletal remains were a representation of them being sacrificed by their Mother; two of those little figures represented Wendy and Tzuyu.
In the darkness the only sound was of Mina taking deep long breaths to calm her racing heart and mind, sweat on her brow as the air in the room felt thicker and harder to breath, constricting . Still sitting as the dust settled around her she picked up her flashlight from where it had rolled and with a few deep breaths once again turned it up to scan the room.
She hadn’t noticed it at first as the dust and heaped bodies and bones were enough to divert her attention and reflect the light, but in the chest cavity of every skeleton around her she found a metallic object inside; a dagger. From the way that the bones were laid out it appeared that each one had keeled over forward in prostration after they had a knife stabbed into their chest. She cleared some of the dust off the ground in front of one of the skeletons and noticed that it was leaning above a small hole upon which a groove then split off towards the statue. Mina cleared the front of another skeleton and noticed the same thing.
There were grooves all leading towards the statue and converged at the basin in front of the statue were upon all the grooves on the stone floor and the sides of the steps appeared to lead. She then noticed that the whole temple was a little slanted; only a few degrees that it was hard to notice at first but it was clearly all slanting towards the statue, to lead all the blood towards the altar.
This place had to have been used for some blood ritual of the Cult, and these skeletons appeared to be willing sacrifices killing themselves for the ritual as none of their feet or arms were bound by anything. Even if they had been bound with rope that would have rotten away, the way their arms were heaped suggested they had not.
This location felt like the one they had been searching for, the catacomb location reference in the painting. In her accidental blunder she had found the place they had failed to find higher up in the tunnels when they had found a drug den instead. They had clearly been in the right place and on the right track; the path to this temple had just been shut and caved in.
Gathering herself once again she walked over to the statue and saw some carvings on the two plinths upon which a brazier rested on each. She dusted them off a little before taking her phone and filmed the text all around the plinth. As she rounded around the first one she could see a tight space behind the horrifying statue. There was a door opening.
Quickly circling around the other plinth to film the text on its side, Mina put her phone away and carefully squeezed her way behind the statue to the opening. She took a peek inside and with her flashlight only saw an endless tunnel perfectly smoothed out into a rectangle. It was angling upwards. She couldn’t see the end of it, but as she couldn’t get out back the way she came from she might as well go forward.
Before going anywhere however, she fished out her notebook from her bag, wrote a little note which she left in front of the statue to tell whoever found their way here, whether it was her friends or stranger, that she had moved on through the way behind the tunnel. She wrote down the date and time as well.
The tunnel was just a little too low for her to stand straight in it. Crouching into a partial hunch Mina slowly shuffled up the slow inclined straight tunnel into the darkness hoping for a way out.
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