Chapel Noir (50 page)

It sounded like nothing so much as a Roman High Mass.

This sound paralyzed us all, perhaps for different reasons.

Whatever we had expected, it was not ceremony, although Irene, perhaps, was the least surprised of us all.

Nor had we expected the scent that wafted along on the warm air: candle wax.

Yet again, this was not truly surprising. We had seen candle stumps and candle droppings on other sites, but had thought them necessary for light. Now we had to wonder.

Of course we could not consult, bowed over as we were in the narrow tunnel, so we simply crept forward one by one, lost in our own speculations and worries.

I wondered what the Indian warrior thought, if these sounds and mission were reminiscent of conflict-filled life on the frontier . . . if Buffalo Bill relished this return to his early scouting days . . . if the Rothschild men, city dwellers all who no doubt knew mob violence and secret cabals, could countenance the pursuit of people who retreated to caves for whatever Godless purposes they might have.

Our path led upward and finally leveled out. Here the tunnel grew higher if not much wider, and we were able to walk upright, all but Buffalo Bill.

A light was visible ahead: a bright yellow-white light. No one in our party by now could resist the pull of that unearthly vision so deep under the exposition grounds. Now the path led downward again, as if to Hell, and we walked until the light swelled to loom before us like an insubstantial door.

Beyond it the chanting had stopped to be replaced by wild screams and cries, by the sound of people contending madly.

Red Tomahawk assumed a crouch deep enough to follow dog markings and crept into the light, dodging quickly to the right of the opening. A moment later his left arm appeared, beckoning.

Buffalo Bill replicated his beastlike posture and crept after him.

Again a fringed arm appeared, also beckoning.

Irene dropped to hands and knees and crawled after them, then Elizabeth.

I hesitated. The cries and moans had reached a hellish pitch. I suspected that people so forgetful of all civilization would hardly notice our stealthy approach, especially if they were all murdering each other, as I suspected.

No arms beckoned further. I glanced back at the Rothschild agents. One stepped up beside me.

“What next?” he asked me in French.

I didn’t know what to answer, and realized I shouldn’t know until I followed the others. I told him to wait.
“Arrêtez
,” I said in desperation, but he understood my meaning and held back.

I dropped to my knees, pretending I was in the nursery and playing bear with the youngest children. Then I shambled into the light and heat awaiting beyond the opening.

At first my dark-accustomed eyes could only water and blink. Noise filled the cavern and echoed back and forth until it sounded like all the souls of the damned were confined in this one space.

I saw the others, still crouched, peering over a natural barrier of rocks into the scene below.

I crawled near to Elizabeth and cautiously leaned over to view the cavern floor.

Candles sat everywhere, the floor, on scattered rocks, in niches in the walls, spangling the dark stone with light. A blazing fire in the center provided the fiery furnace that lit even the cavern roof.

Beside it stood a single robed figure, babbling in some foreign language, perhaps even a language not of this earth, hands and head lifted to . . . I hesitate to say Heaven . . . lifted to the ceiling of that devil’s cave.

Around it danced and screamed a dozen naked figures, trampling their dark cast-off robes, more than half of them women, I am ashamed to say, the light cast by the flames licking at their writhing, glistening bodies.

One naked man stood on the fringe with a whip, lashing anyone who lagged in the wild dance. Rivulets of blood as well as sweat streaked the quivering flesh, but some dancers collapsed to the cavern floor despite the lash. Then others fell atop them and they writhed and screamed until the vision of Hell was even more vivid than any Renaissance master could paint.

The only ones untouched by the madness were a trio in monks’ robes who stood watching by the far cavern wall like an Inquisition panel of judges.

The frantic motion, heat, noise made it hard to absorb the scene, what was happening besides utter madness.

The leader had ripped open his shirt and trousers and hurled himself onto the writhing figures on the ground, a bed of naked abandoned women. One woman screamed as if being murdered at the bottom of a pile of three men, then two pulled her by her arms from the ground and laid her over a large rock. The third man drew a knife from the tangle of discarded clothes and bent over her.

I couldn’t believe what I saw. Even as I write this now, many days later in my own desperate circumstances, my pen stops and fails to follow the will of my mind and my hand, my resolve to record all that I saw, however awful.

The man took the knife and cut off her breast.

I couldn’t help myself. I stood and screamed, my sound lost in the shriek from the mutilated woman. The entire world seemed to be screaming as everyone around me stood.

An ungodly whoop beside me, a blood-chillingly long, savage howl overcame even the din below.

The man below with the knife lifted his bloody trophy, then stood paralyzed as a hatchet blade bloomed in the middle of his back. He fell, but the writhing, moaning, gabbling masses on the cavern floor were lost to everything around them, even when Buffalo Bill hurled a lantern into the middle of the fire, sending wood shards and sparks flying like fireworks.

A pistol discharged, Irene’s, shot into the air. The Rothschild men pounded into the cavern, then stopped in horror.

I noticed that the observers along the wall had vanished.

Red Tomahawk, still howling, leaped over the barrier of rocks to the floor some fifteen feet below. Buffalo Bill followed him, and the Rothschild agents finally gathered their wits and ran down the ramp leading below, pistols pointed but yet unfired.

The leader pushed himself free of the twining limbs of three wild-eyed women and started upright, looking like the only one who would give fight.

“We must help that woman,” Irene muttered, starting after the men.

Another wild man was charging from the fray, pupils lost in the rolling whites you see on a terrified horse, running toward us.

Despite the half-clothed form and wild eyes and hair, I recognized James Kelly!

And he seemed to recognize me!

I saw the child in the wood, cringing away from the blade. I saw the woman on the street, screaming into the curtain of her own blood that fell red and heavy from her throat like a glittering garnet cascade
.

And always I saw the gaunt dark figure at the corner of my eye, the crow flying, the raven croaking, the ghost moaning, the monster laughing
.

He had always been there, and I had always chosen not to see him
.

Now he was looking right at me
.

Now he was judging me worthy of notice
.

Now I must see him in return to let him know that I am not afraid. Now it is he, or I
.

Irene saw Kelly, saw our converging paths, the danger.

She seized and spun me to face the tunnel. “Run, Nell! Run out and do not look back, do not come back until we emerge safely. And we will. Don’t question me!” She thrust a stick, probably Elizabeth’s, into my hand. “Warn the authorities if you can. It is far worse than even I thought. For the love of God, go now!”

She shoved me so hard down the tunnel that I stumbled and nearly fell.

“Go! As you love me, go! Run!”

I cannot describe the imperative in her words, the utter conviction, the utter command.

I scrambled forward, still stumbling, my hands scraping along the rough stone ground until I could get my balance and run half-upright. I stumbled into first one side of the tunnel wall, then the other, only

darkness ahead of me, shouts and confusion and occasional pistol shots behind me.

I must warn. Get out. Not look back. Not like Lot’s wife. Not a pillar of salt. Not me. Run. Go. Not look back. Not think. Not decipher what I had seen. Run. Run.

47.
Paranoia

We are entering panoramania. . . .
—
THE VOLTAIRE, 1881

The longer I obeyed and ran, the less I could bear to leave Irene to the fray and condemn myself to learning the outcome later from a safe distance.

I let my pounding steps slow, even as my heartbeat accelerated. I paused in the darkness still lit by flashes from the conflagration behind me. I had the stick. Who knows if one blow might not make all the difference?

None of us had expected to encounter devil-worshipers at their evil rituals. The implications of this scene straight from an illustration of Hell on the history and identity of Jack the Ripper were too massive to contemplate. What I had glimpsed was branded on my brain, but without the clarity of meaning that would let the full horror penetrate.

All I knew is that our party had uncovered a nest of vipers far too numerous and venomous to handle and that my presence was a hindrance. I only could pray that Elizabeth, too, would heed Irene’s directive, but I doubted it. I could only pray, as my feet pounded the packed dirt, that Irene would escape the carnage herself.

I could only take comfort in the brave way Buffalo Bill and Red Tomahawk had waded into the maddened creatures, unabashed by blood and frenzy, themselves figures of a fearsome and exotic force. A gathering of such prime evil required a foe that had practiced primitive warfare far from the rank and file of European battlefields.

The Rothschild agents on the cavern’s fringes, even with their pistols drawn, seemed like lapdogs at a bear-baiting match. Irene, too, had been reduced to armed observer. I prayed she stayed that way, but suspected that James Kelly would not pass her to pursue me.

Yet I heard no more shots as I reached the level section of the tunnel and began the descent to the entrance. I did hear the feeble beat of running footsteps behind me. Irene and Elizabeth come to join me in retreat, like sensible women? Yes!

I turned as the pulsing steps pounded nearer. No! The footsteps rang too loud for women’s shoes. They were boots. I spun to run forward again, pressing ahead harder, and finally went gasping out into the night air, hearing the distant roar of the fairground crowd as a tiny buzz on the glittering horizon of lights that now seemed as far away as any sunset.

Onward the running footsteps came, in escape or pursuit, neither one boding well for me, alone and undefended as I was.

The Seine sparkled like a ribbon of spangled velvet. Some barrier darkened the view ahead of me, but rows of electric lights traced its outline.

The waterborne panorama building! I was on the level below the gangway that brought sightseers aboard. Heavy footsteps behind me impelled me forward into the dark passage and through a door-size opening. Dim light from above sprinkled an assemblage of bulky mechanisms. I felt as if I were in the lumber room beneath the stage of a theater, where
deus ex machina
gears lay momentarily idle and stage furnishings stood jumbled in piles.

I felt my way among the alien shapes, thinking that a panorama was a sort of stage in round form, hoping for some means to reach the main floor of the attraction. What had Irene called the trapdoor in the stage floor designed for the appearance and disappearance of ghosts and monsters . . . ? Ah, the vampire box. I had to hope there was a vampire box here that would allow me to enter the panorama’s main floor and then exit into the peaceful night.

I still did not hear the report of shots, and the running footsteps had gone silent.

Nevertheless, I trod as softly as I could in the narrow aisles between wood-and-metal barriers and finally banged my toe on something sharp and metal on the floor.

I swallowed cries of fierce pain. Rejoicing outweighed momentary agony as my patting hands traced the shape of metal steps coiling upward.

I could hear the Seine lapping gently at the ship’s exterior. Nothing moved here but the water, for this ship was a building.

I began to climb the tight steep staircase, trying to keep my stick on the curving handrail.

At last I came onto level wooden flooring . . . no vampire box to break free of, just the shadowy environs of the panorama display boxing me into a huge room shaped like the interior of a drum.

Faint electric lights cast fitful light on the painted scenes and figures filling the walls all around. These were not the bright lights of display, but night-lights left on to secure the premises while closed.

My heart beat faster at the notion that a guard might visit this echoing space from time to time. Was I more in danger of being taken for an intruder than seen as a lost soul in need of rescue?

The panoramas I had heard of since my arrival in Paris had been like the main salon wax tableaux at the Musée Grévin: scenes of real-life pomp like the Czar’s coronation or the French President’s visit to the Russian fleet. These were huge paintings done in the round and populated with famous figures of the day as well as mobs of nobodies, yet reconstructions in front of the painting, like the exhibits on the exposition grounds, used waxen figures.

So I was not startled to glimpse standing and sitting figures posted all around the room, and even to vaguely recognize a few silhouettes.

A new site honoring the French Revolution’s hundredth year on the site of the former Bastille featured a panorama of the storming of the famous prison and a re-creation of the building itself, an eighteenth-century Breton village, and a Historical and Patriotic Museum with a panorama of the life of Joan of Arc! She whose bloody feast day this was. The
Histoire du siècle
panorama continued the theme by presenting the celebrities of each era.

Granted, these many displays repeated themselves, but the French are not a people to blow their own horn only once or twice, and certainly there were patrons enough for each new lavish and self-congratulatory display.

Why I had especially wished to see, that is, “board” this particular panorama on the exposition grounds is because it was the first actually to simulate motion, and very convincingly, too, to hear tell. The clever part is that motion is only of the painted views and not of the so-called ship, so there is none of the lurching that leads to sickness for the passengers.

I could indeed testify now to the admirable stability of the good ship Panorama.

I began walking across the “deck,” wincing at every creak of the planking beneath my feet. I had no reason to suspect that my unseen pursuers had followed me into the attraction, but no reason to assume they hadn’t either.

I could not help noticing the agreeable representation of Le Havre harbor filled with painted ships on a painted sea, nor the feeling of security I felt with waxen ship’s officers dressed in the smart uniforms of the steamship company that sponsored the attraction.

I had entered by the back and from below. I need only find the front entrance to debark, then seek help. Meanwhile, I prowled the captain’s deck in the “open air,” the sole moving person among the wax effigies.

A sudden clang from below ended my luxurious solo tour of the scene. Hard boots hit the metal steps in quick succession, more than one pair to judge by the rat-a-tat-tat of oncoming footsteps.

Desperate, I looked around. I had not yet discovered the entrance area and was therefore trapped, with only moments to act. . . .

My mind and heart galloped, but in different directions. What would Irene do? What would she do! She would . . . act.

In two of the longest and quietest strides I had ever managed I stepped next to the wax figure of the ship’s captain pointing out sights to a female passenger.

I planted my walking stick on the deck so that I had some support and tucked my hand into the crook of the waxen woman’s elbow for further stability. Then I tilted my head politely to gaze with rapt attention at the captain’s wax face.

The boots bounded onto the wooden deck behind me and stopped.

I dared not look anywhere but at the bland waxen features so near my own, on which my nearsighted eyes could focus perfectly. His cheeks were as rosy as ripening pears, and there was even a fleck of tobacco from the pipe in his gesticulating hand on his lip!

Behind me the boots began taking long, deliberately noisy steps around the scene.

I was thankful that my wool-check coat-dress not only had the look of a deckside garment, but that the sturdy material had no generous folds to be still settling from my last, hasty motion.

The boots, perhaps two pair, continued their lordly, leisurely stroll around the scene.

A sudden crack! Wood on wood. My startled heart nearly leaped out of my chest and undid the pin of my lapel watch. But my desperate caution had made me visibly immune to such a trick. I moved not a muscle.

The steps circled to my right now and then in front of me. I sensed motion between me and the panoramic painting, but my nearsightedness protected me from clear view of the man entering my line of sight. He was just a vague blur, like the people in the painting, and I had no trouble keeping my gaze frozen upon the captain.

My performance may have been “wooden” in theatrical terms, but that was just what the situation called for.

I heard one set of boots clattering down the rear circular staircase. The other prowler had paused somewhere before me. Then he moved toward me, pausing behind the captain’s shoulder. I forced myself not to blink, and suspended breathing.

A hand reached out. I resisted the urge to avoid it. It dusted off the captain’s shoulder. Then it struck the pipe from his hand.

The sound of the piece clattering across the floor could have taken place on another planet for all the attention I paid it.

Keep utterly still, I ordered myself. You are a statue. You cannot move.

Another vaguely seen blow, and the walking stick sailed from under my hand to go spinning across the wooden deck.

My hand remained clutched on empty air. I forced all the will in my body to keep each finger motionless.

The strain was intense.

The man sighed, and I could feel his warm breath on my eyelashes.

Then he spun on his heel and suddenly approached a couple in deck chairs, spinning the woman around. The waxen figure slumped, then slowly fell to the floor.

He made a sound like an inarticulate curse, then was stalking away. Again the metal stairs reverberated with descending steps.

I slowly let my breath depress, then inflate, my bosom.

Still I did not move.

Why were they bothering with me? I wondered. I was of no threat to them. Didn’t their vile companions below need their defense? Yet the man I could not quite see had been looking for a woman among the mannequins. Did they think I was Irene?

I waited a long time, wishing I dared disturb the chatelaine in my pocket to get out my pince-nez. But I had been warned by the Master that it was too noisy on certain occasions. I wished I still wore Irene’s borrowed satin slippers of several days ago, for I could have slipped surreptitiously out of them and stolen away over the wooden floor, but I wore high-button boots too complicated to shed without wasting time or making a betraying sound.

The entrance had to lie ahead, and it had to involve stairs down to the level of the quai.

After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only ten minutes by the faithful watch affixed to my bosom, I eased my position and took a soft step forward, then another.

A third. A fourth. The building remained silent. Another. In between steps, I breathed.

And then the walls began moving. Just a blurred sense of the painted ships bobbling in the breeze. I blinked like mad, but the impression only intensified. I heard the creak and thrum of underlying equipment in motion. I could see just enough to feel dizzy, and began running, my steps tapping like one of the wild Congo drums in the street parade.

I seemed to see an aperture, a curtained opening of the kind that blocks light from the seating area of a theater.

I reached it, felt the heavy velvet in my hands, rushed through.