Chapter 24
In The Depths
They slowly discover that the part of the Prefecture they’d already explored all those years and which had seemed endless to them was only the tip of their gloomy passage-riddled iceberg.
What had been coastal navigation turns into perilous voyages on dark uncharted seas in search of a passage to a perhaps mythical continent. Their lines of communication are much longer than before. Access is fiendishly difficult with that long and perilous spiral down the well shaft, sometimes in the teeth of a howling gale. It’s even worse having to pull themselves back up, utterly exhausted, fifty-odd flights, even when the wind gives them a goosing lift in that direction.
They take salvaged food to last three estimated days in the handy form of big tightly compressed balls of hash that Max calls “elephant balls,” seasoned with rotten banana and apple and chunks of the moldy chocolate the girl Seymour used to call Gentille continues smuggling through to him.
They venture down broken stairways into dark regions surely deeper than the telephone-lines, the pneumatique tubes, the sewer, the metro, the catacombs, the limestone-quarries that riddle the foundations of Paris. They learn to stuff their pockets with spare batteries and bulbs. In the maze of unlit corridors failure of light would be tragic. Their questing circle of feeble light aggravates the darkness. They’re thankful for the rare oasis of overhead light, survivor bulbs trembling with old age and illuminating a few yards of rubble-strewn passages.
The scrape of their soles on the floor and the thud of their hearts are unbearably amplified by the darkness. Often they call out the names of the others. They have little hope of reply for they’ve scattered in opposite directions and must be miles apart. They do it for the sake of the echo. They avoid calling out for Helen, though, because of what the echo of her name gives them.
They open tens of thousands of doors and find more old files and administrative volumes. They knock methodically on the walls, hoping for a hollow sound. It never comes. They rummage in search of concealed dirt indicating a nearby tunnel. They find dust. Helen searches for Balzac. She finds more import statistics. She knows them by heart. As on the upper floors, certain of the doors are metal with tamper-proof locks. They often suspect that if there is a tunnel it lies behind one of these inviolable metal doors.
Hunger cramps are their only clock. They sleep, when they’re able to sleep, by dropping to the floor of a corridor, a lighted corridor when possible.
Exploration is perilous. The foundations of the building-universe are in a state of advanced and advancing ruin. Sometimes they halt at the sound of a rumble and they realize that a distant (they hope it’s distant) floor has collapsed. Once Max is thrown to the ground by the concussion and in the feeble circle of light of his flashlight sees a big crack slowly zigzagging in the wall. It’s a mystery – still another one – how the building can go on standing on these crumbling foundations.
The ruins complicate their explorations. They constantly stumble over rubble. Sometimes their weak light outlines chaos ahead, the ceiling and the floor caved in, floors below too. They are forced to a halt at the crumbling brink of a chasm. Their beam can’t define a bottom to it. Some ten yards on the other side of the chasm the corridor continues with all those doors that have to be opened in search of dirt and a telltale hollow sound.
Louis equips himself to negotiate the chasms. He hammers a saucepan into a crude helmet to protect himself against falling rubble. He wires a flashlight to his helmet in rough imitation of a miner’s headgear. He carries a coil of rope on one shoulder and Max’s pickaxe over the other. But the chasms are usually unbridgeable even for Louis. Like the others he has to backtrack for hours past hundreds of already explored rooms. They never succeed in circumnavigating the zones of destruction.
Often sudden fatigue hits them. They’re totally drained of energy and collapse into a squat or a sprawl and wonder if they haven’t been savaged again, if the sandstone block hasn’t clobbered them into another wasted fifteen years. But they have no mirror here to check and they want none.
The third day, they stagger back to their rooms, too exhausted to wash off the mask of filth and blood. Anyhow it conceals the age of their faces. They collapse on their beds and dream that they are still below, blundering and stumbling forward in an endless unlighted corridor.
Before they return to the depths they spend a few hours slouched in their armchairs staring at the goal of all those efforts and observe the garrulous repetition of seasons on the other side of the glass.
Helen and Margaret go into the depths less and less often.
Max gives up on the idea that they’ll ever be able to find a tunnel. His palms are itching to dig one as fast as possible, anywhere, any old wall. More of the same. Louis and Seymour make sure he doesn’t go down into the depths with a pickaxe or a sledgehammer. They try to reason with him. They remind him of what had happened decades ago when he’d already assaulted any old wall, the place it had landed him in. They try to laugh at the image of Max with his head through the wall and protruding into the toilets. It used to be good for a laugh. But they can’t manage even a smile now.
Helen and Margaret stop going into the depths altogether. Exploration is an all-male enterprise now. When the men come back the women always tell them that, with the usual exception, none of the functionaries had appeared. They haven’t seen Sadie or Turnkey for years it must be. They don’t even mention Advocate. When they think of him at all they’re sure he’s a myth.
Once, Seymour discovers a wall covered with white fuzz. He takes it for lichen or albino moss. He’s elated at encountering life at last, even a primitive form of life. He carefully notes the spot. The next time down, Louis tastes it and says it’s saltpeter. That’s not organic. That’s mineral like the walls it crystallizes on. Seymour dismisses the idea of making gunpowder to blow their way out. You need sulfur and charcoal as well as saltpeter to make gunpowder. Even so, he’s careful not to talk to Max about it and give him ideas.
Once, Louis sees a pinpoint of light a mile or so off at the end of a dark corridor. He imagines that somehow it’s Paris daylight. He runs toward it. It turns out to be Max with his flashlight who’s running toward Louis’ flashlight that he’d taken for, somehow, Paris daylight. They pass by, panting, without exchanging a word.
In the faint circle of light begrudged by their flashlight they see that their predecessors have been here and have left their marks with the number of their passages (discouragingly high) on all the corners they themselves encounter. They add their own mark. Corner after corner is covered with Helen’s H, Louis’ linked circles, Seymour’s childish face, Max’s doughnut and Margaret’s heart, and in them the number of times they’ve gone past. Conscientiously, they efface the number of their previous passage and inscribe the number of their latest passage, at first single digits.
The leaves outside had been falling when Louis discovered the way down.
The last of them fall.
They open more doors, knock on more walls, all of them solid, and inscribe new digits in their corner signs, double digits now.
The trees in the window are green.
They explore more corridors, negotiate more ruined staircases, knock on more walls.
Snow fills the window like static on a TV screen.
Bastille Day rockets decorate the night sky.
The trees rust.
They open more doors, knock on more walls, all of them solid, and inscribe new digits in their corner signs, triple digits now.
Christmas tinsel fills the shop windows.
Forsythia yellow announces spring.
The trees are green.
Candelabras of chestnut blossoms light up May.
Knock knock.
Knock knock knock.
Knock knock knock knock.