The Secret Language of Stones (4 page)

Chapter 4

I sat at my workbench, prepared my tools, and listened to Monsieur, his son, and his friend Vanya descend the steps leading deep beneath the store's basement.

Under the marvelous Palais courtyard and fountains and gardens lay a mysterious world where no light penetrated and the only sounds were made by rats, falling rocks, or men stealing through secret spaces.

At least that was all most people heard. Other sounds, terrible sounds, haunted me.

All of Paris sits atop limestone and gypsum mines, known as the
carrières
, some of which date back as far as the thirteenth century, when the stones that built the city were first excavated. No longer worked, the mines run for miles, a long network of empty tunnels and caves. Some were appropriated for the metro, others as havens for criminal, religious, and occult groups. During the war, the underground had turned into a secret highway for spies as they maneuvered around the city undetected.

Soldiers policed the caves, trying to protect us from enemies who might attack us from underneath, but the labyrinth was too complex for them to safeguard all of it at any one time.

Ironically, while spies hid in some caverns, Parisians used others
as shelters during bombings. There were several beneath the Palais. The small one we used could hold approximately twenty people comfortably. Monsieur Orloff also held his Two-Headed Eagles meetings there.

Close by the shelter, through a door and down an incline, was another cavern that Monsieur had transformed into a vault for his materials and assets. Access to both was gained through the store. Continuing on past the shelter and the vault, one came to a locked door. Through it, a series of secret tunnels eventually led to the other side of the river.

There are no signs, no landmarks aboveground, to advertise the entrances to Paris's subterranean world. I'd heard stories of people who wandered for days, never finding a way out, who were buried alive in an avalanche, or who died taking a wrong turn and falling down a shaft.

It's easy to get lost. Once, after an air raid, I decided to explore, thinking maybe I could discover the source of my unease about going underground. I unlocked the door and ventured into the mine.

Missing a turn, I spent over an hour trying to retrace my steps, my panic building. Suddenly I heard a loud and terrible noise. I took another step and looked into a cavern converted to a tomb. The deafening sound seemed like a nightmare come to life. The catacombs were clearly the source of my torture.

Starting in 1777, in reaction to health problems caused by overcrowding in aboveground cemeteries, the city started to exhume bodies and rebury the dead in some of the empty caves. Over six million were buried in the ossuaries, and I'd stumbled upon one of the chambers.

Standing on the threshold, I stared at the skeletal remains, bones arranged in a macabre design, the source of the thunderous noise, the cacophony of terror and tears. Here resided the last thoughts of so many who had died in pain. Their suffering trapped in their bones.

Similarly to how I was able to hear the dying thoughts of the soldiers via the crystals in the talismans, I heard these poor souls' final moments through the stone-studded earth. En masse, magnified, the storm of cries, curses, and calls terrified me.

And yet, when the sirens rang out or Monsieur sent me down to the vault, my only choice was to steel myself and endure. The same way I endured the voices of the individual soldiers whose loved ones came to me, like my most recent visitor, Madame Alouette.

I placed the box holding the envelope with her son's lock of hair on my worktable, but I didn't open it. Not yet. First I needed to prepare the object that would hopefully allow me to help her find peace.

Sorting through two dozen chunks of rock crystal, I chose an egg-shaped orb about the size of my thumb. Once a month I brought the lapidary a dozen or so crystals, which he cut into eighths, like segments of an orange, and then polished. I did all the engraving myself. And although the work was painstaking, it absorbed me. While I sat at my table, all thoughts disappeared. I connected with my tools, and they became extensions of my hands.

Sometimes, while scratching out the words and numbers and runes, I would crack a crystal, but the night of the tsar's news, the operation went smoothly.

On one segment, I carved Jean Luc's name and the numbers of his birth date:
18/8/1890
. And the date of the battle in which he died:
8/7/1918
.

Knowing his birthstone was a peridot, I looked through the assortment of stones I kept for the talismans. None of these were of the best quality. Because of what I do to them, occlusions don't matter. I found a lovely rounded light lime-colored stone with a crack running through it, which made it ideal for my purposes.

Hawaiians believed peridots were the tears of the goddess Pele, quite apropos for a mourning jewel. Placing the stone in a metal bowl, I pounded it with a small iron hammer, shattering it into fragments and then into powder.

Next, I chased a chasm in the crystal, like a small stream, and filled it with the glittering green residue.

Placing that section aside, I picked up another slice of the crystal and began to carve the Egyptian hieroglyphs for immortality, youth, and victory.

I'd worked for two hours and was tired. Beneath my feet, Monsieur Orloff, Grigori, and Vanya were still meeting with their fellow Russians, trying to absorb and make sense of the fact that their beloved Nicholas had been shot dead. Did they find solace knowing he'd died honorably for his country? Did women like Madame Alouette find any solace knowing their sons had died for theirs?

I finished all the engravings. I knew I should stop, but something propelled me to keep going. I was eager to see how this talisman would turn out. I knew of this soldier. I had read his work. I felt a kinship to him, and I'd never experienced that before.

The next step was to add the personal memento. One by one, I placed four segments of the rock crystal egg into a vise to hold them steady. Removing Jean Luc's dark brown lock of hair, I smoothed it out, separated the strands, then laid them down in the core. Then I added the rest of the segments one by one until I'd rebuilt the whole egg again.

Those last steps often took more than one attempt. I wanted the hair or other personal items to become part of the design—in this case, to lie symmetrically, forming a core, not just looking like hair encased in crystal. If the strands separated in the building process, I'd need to start all over. But that night everything turned out perfectly on the first try.

Taking a length of gold thread, I began to wrap the egg. Sometimes I left more crystal showing, other times less. With Jean Luc's egg, I left more because the look of his hair against the rivers of peridot was so pleasing I wanted it to be visible.

Once all the threads encircled the orb like curving, twisting vines, tight and determined, sealing the treasure within, I picked up my sol
dering gun and went to work attaching the gold at several junctures, creating a tight meld. I loved how the hot metal fused the disparate threads, like lovers separated for too long finally coming together and not wanting to let go.

Finished, I cupped the orb and inspected it. As I'd expected, quiet prevailed. Although I could hear cries in the catacombs, without a living conduit, I'd never received specific communications from my charms. In order for me to hear the actual words the talisman carried, a mother, wife, lover, or daughter needed to put the locket around her neck. It was simply a piece of jewelry to me. An artifact until its owner's love made it come alive and I heard the message it was meant to pass on.

But something quite different occurred that night. As I sat cradling Jean Luc's crystal egg in my palm, I experienced a fluttering in my chest. A tremor of exertion. As if I were a cage and some creature with wings were making a herculean effort to break free.

My body began to shake, and one of my terrible headaches blossomed. I smelled apples, which didn't surprise me, and something else that did . . . graphite and wood . . . I smelled the scent of paper.

Then, as if it were blowing in on a great wind from a distant place, I heard a grumbling noise. Dozens of distant voices? Birds screaming? I couldn't be sure. Listening harder, I tried but failed to pull any one sound out of the mélange. Yet I sensed a force trying to impart information.

Impossible. I needed some headache powder and water. Or wine. The soldiers' talismans had never before spoken to me alone. I had to be imagining these sounds in anticipation of the terrible words I would hear when I gave Madame Alouette the talisman and she put her own hands around it. Often the soldier's last thoughts frightened or shocked me and left me disturbed for days. I told myself I must have been dreading that.

I mixed the headache powder in a tall glass of water and drank it. My equilibrium restored, I returned to my worktable and stared down
at the crystal. All was quiet in the workshop and in my mind. But as soon as I picked up the talisman, the noises started again. I heard that same howling wind. Distant shouts. Or maybe a rush of water against rocks. None of it made any sense. All of it was deeply disturbing.

My fingers began to shake so badly I had to put the talisman down and clasp my hands together. Cold washed over me. And the wind that I'd only been hearing before seemed to actually be blowing past me.

What was happening? Had I been working too many nights? Hearing too many stories about dead soldiers? Or was I spending too many hours studying stones? My great-grandmother had warned me of this. Madness had descended upon some of the descendants of La Lune when they welcomed and embraced the talents she passed down.

The remedy I'd taken wasn't helping. With my head pounding I wasn't thinking clearly. The echoes and hums and crashes kept building. I'd never been in a hurricane, but I'd read about them. This must be what a storm of that magnitude sounded like. Wind that tore through trees and flowers. Upending objects, sending them flying. Destroying property, doing terrible damage.

Where .
 . .

One word flew out of the cacophony. I'd heard a word. But I was alone. Unless Monsieur had returned and was just outside?

“Hello?” I shouted out into the dark workshop.

No answer.

The storm continued to rage on inside my head. There must be an explanation for the word. Could it have been one of the Russians from Orloff's meeting, lost on his way out? That had happened before. Was some anomaly making a word spoken in the outer hallway reverberate strangely?

“Is someone there?” I called out.

No answer. I needed to clean up and leave. Sleep would help. I would just put away my tools and then I could—

Where am I?

I heard it more clearly. A deep and dark raspy voice asking me for help.

“Hello?” I shouted. “Is anyone there?”

Where am I?

I heard pain accenting the distant words. Was he standing outside the store? Or was his voice traveling up from the underground chambers? Could he be hurt? Or was it a ploy? It might be one of the Russians, but just as likely a German spy pretending to be a lost Frenchman. Or it might be a thief, making sure the shop was empty before he stole from us.

From the table, I grabbed one of the long metal files with a point sharp enough to be a weapon. Creeping out of the workshop into the darkened hallway, ready to pounce or help depending on what I saw, I peered into the shadows, searching for a figure. But the hallway was empty. I checked the door to the staircase down to the basement below, but it was shut tight. The showroom was empty too.

Skulking down the hall and over to the entrance, I kept my back to the wall so no one hiding could attack me from behind.

The locked front door exhibited no evidence of an attempt to pry it open. Neither of the large windows on either side was broken.

Where am I?

Like the sound inside of a shell, the voice reverberated. I turned. My eyes, now totally adjusted to the dark, searched every corner. This had to be some strange echo coming up from a shaft in the mines I'd never been aware of before.

Where am I?

“I don't know, I don't see you,” I whispered into the darkness.

Where am I?

Listening harder, I realized the shadowy blue-green voice echoed inside of me. The sad and desperate words weren't coming from outside. I was manufacturing them. Overtired, my imagination was playing tricks on me. I needed to leave, to go to bed, to sleep.

Please, tell me.

I put my hands up to my ears and pressed as firmly as I could to block out the voice, the wind, the words.

“No,” I heard my voice groan. “No.”

Please.

“Go away.”

Please, tell me where I am.

This time I screamed: “Go away. Go away. Go away.” I needed to shut down the voice. To prove to myself I wasn't losing my mind the way so many women in my family who had succumbed to the darkness and been its victim had lost theirs.

I knew all their names and the dates they were born and died—all tragically. Some accidentally, some by their own hand. Only one living past thirty-three.

EUGENIE 1664–1694

MARGUERITE 1705–1728

SIMONE 1734–1777

CAMILLE 1782–1814

CLOTHILDE 1800–1832

My great-grandmother had escaped by not believing in the legend. My mother by embracing it and willingly inviting a fate that the others had thought was worse than death. But I wasn't my mother.

I'd succeeded in quieting the voice. The wind slowed and softened to a breeze. The workshop was silent once again, save for the sound of my own heart beating, still a bit too fast. My back dripped with sweat. My hands continued to tremble. But the worst of it was over. I knew if I just rested for a few more minutes, I'd be all right again. And then I'd go downstairs and go to bed and in the morning this would all be a—