“No, Emma. They’ll never find their way out.” Killian gathered her arms and gently said, “Like I told you before. I know a way out back there, and it isn’t far from your hotel.” He tugged her in the opposite direction.
For the first time in a long while, she felt something like elation after Killian’s last words. Even the frustrating thought of arguing with her mother back at the hotel room, appeared trivial by comparison to Emma’s current situation. “Okay, but I still hate you, ya know.” She held his hand tightly, and in the vast darkness, she cozied her arm intertwined next to his.
They walked through gloomy blackness so horribly immense, it stirred terror only imagined in nightmares and hallucinations.
Emma discovered an abundance of what lurks about the murderous portions of her unstable, fragile mind. Thoughts she never explored crept into her brain. Thoughts only the insane dare cross into reality, while treading carelessly amid the foul portions found between life and isolated horror.
They marched on endlessly, but in reality, it was no more than minutes strung together in bunches. Emma clung to Killian’s shoulder, and rested her wary hand upon it. Her feelings toward him softened. She now worried about random objects jumping out and poking at her face while masked in the darkness.
Emma waved her other hand back and forth, straight-armed in front of her face, yet still, she was unable to view her own fingers. During one sweeping motion, she felt a tactile smooth, semi-rounded part of the wall. Lacking a full mental picture, she ran her fingers down the side of the flat, bumpy, yet raised item. It was smooth on top, with a semi-circular portion. Accompanied below the strange object, Emma felt two large, round inlets, which her fingers easily slipped inside the holes. The unusual object had a much smaller, third hole directly beneath the other two, except this one was shaped like a rigid triangle, with pointed edges replacing the smooth surface of the previous two larger holes above. She pulled her fingers out and ran them farther down the strangely formed surface that protruded from the wall. Underneath the three holes, Emma thought she found treasure, as a double row, top and bottom set of pearls fashioned an image in her mind. Some of the pearls were smooth, while others were chipped, broken, or missing altogether. Baffled, she let go of Killian and reached into her pocket for light. Emma struck one of the five matches Sophie gave her. With all the dampness surrounding the catacombs, the matches were soaked, and so she mumbled a silent prayer in hopes of sparking an extremely insignificant flame just this once.
Killian heard the repetitive scratching of flint with a rubbed grind. “Emma, wait…”
“No…I have to see what this is. I think it’s some kind of jewelry…” She ripped the match, once, twice, three times against the book’s rough, sandy paper strip.
The match hissed, flaring a tiny glow, at first brighter, yet then, like everything else, its light waned among the cloudy darkness of the tunnels.
Emma hastily stepped backward, almost dousing the newly flared match with her damp hair. She attempted to yelp, but Killian’s hand quickly covered her mouth. She was touching one of the million skulls held by the wall in a twisted macabre, graphic work of deviant art.
The dark had become her friend for a while, and unseen, she had forgotten what unpleasant things had surrounded her the entire time. But unlike before, the skulls and bones, so neatly stacked on top of each other along the catacomb walls, hovered over her, and seemed to arch down from atop, bitterly choking out a piece of Emma’s frail sanity.
The long since dead faces stared without eyes. The skulls smiled with yellowish, pearly, broken teeth. Bugs crawled from nasal cavity into eye socket and back again. She had focused so much on getting out of the tunnels, that Emma did not realize she had entered the main crypt of the catacombs.
This massive chamber was a tomb of defamed humanity, with skulls mounted alongside thousands of femurs. There were feet missing toes, hands without fingers, cracked rib cages, and millions of tiny vertebra bone fragments sprinkled throughout every inch along the kingdom of the very undearly departed.
Emma began randomly grabbing and soon pried Killian’s hand from off her mouth. A nauseated, uncontrollable reflex from within the pit of her stomach washed over her face in ghastly harmony of instantaneous vomit. With a slow, disbelieving blink, Emma wiped her stomach’s contents off her bottom lip.
Not long after, a prolonged gaze halted her words. Emma attempted a cleansing gulp, yet a lump crowded her middle throat, requiring numerous swallows before the bitter knob removed itself from her clogged gullet.
Cockroaches and snakes crawled in and out of human skulls. The vermin leisurely slithered and crawled through mouth, nose, and eyes of the stacked craniums. The hollow heads appeared cemented into the wall in infinite rows from top to bottom and back to front, as the only wall that seemed to exist in this place.
Emma accidentally crushed bugs and bones, which fused together underfoot. Though she had tried not to do so, the sheer numbers and enclosed space made it impossible to avoid the reviled wall of death.
Emma’s favorite shoes were lathered in mud, guts, bone chips, and other unidentified parts and pieces from the many slimy, clumped, and grubby-looking things.
“Oh, gross!” Emma lifted a foot, sulking, while examining her shoe. “These are brand-new!” An irate tone resounded. “Do you know how much these cost!?”
Killian fumbled, “I, um…”
“Of course you wouldn’t know!” Emma, her stomach now settled, frustrated, hoisted her arms upward. As the match faded, it lit a trail, and her face glowered with angry lines and shadows in wake of the tiny fire’s waning light. “And this was your idea of a date…” The match seared down to her finger. “Ouch!” Emma yelled.
She shook her index finger and thumb, jamming the mud-covered digits into her mouth. Then, realizing where her hands had been, she quickly removed her fingers and hacked up spit on the ground several times. “That stupid match, it burned me!” Emma reached for another from the soggy book.
“No, save them.” Killian put his hand across her forearms.
“What?” Emma nudged away and struck another match against his will. “Why? I thought you said we’re almost out of here.” She turned her frustration toward him.
Killian brought his hands toward his face, slowly curling fingers into a fist before he relaxed them back into five separate digits. “You are the most selfish, spoiled, inconsiderate brat I’ve ever met!”
Emma clenched her teeth. Warm blood rushed up until its heat burned from inside out her cheeks. “Why you…” A raised vocal sound charged.
Yet before Emma could finish her thought, Killian propped against, and gently touched the back of her hand, caressing her messy, angry lips. Mixed with anxiety and bother, fear and concern, the yearning attraction of this unexpected, passionate advance both stunned and excited her with a familiar tingle from head to toe.
If there was one thing Killian knew, it was how to kiss with a gentle stroke that buckled Emma’s knees while snapping her will. He breached even the cold, angry, and seemingly impenetrable barriers within her, while easily piercing the layers of Emma’s hardened shell. He engaged in soft conversation. His tender lips brushed up and down her cheeks, near her earlobes, and with persistent charm, Emma’s doubt melted into confidence, which Killian spun to his favor.
Killian and Emma locked lips in a struggle of friction. Then he tenderly removed his lips from her. Goosebumps upturned tiny hairs, heightening waves of delightful senses throughout her body. Emma’s hot-tempered blood now flowed into her lips, returning a speechless, giddy, slightly less-than-mature woman she’d portrayed just minutes earlier.
“You’re a selfish, spoiled brat, but that’s why I’m crazy about you,” Killian said, maintaining an insistent, serious appearance.
She nearly collapsed under his enchanted pressure. Emma swayed back and forth as if whitecaps upon the high seas.
His spellbound bewitchment lingered, and with half-closed eyes, she dabbed her tongue briefly to her top lip. “No,” she faintly muttered, “I think you’re just plain crazy.” She threw another match on the ground and wrapped her arms around his waist.
In the midst of an adoring, intimate exchange, Killian and Emma intertwined, rapidly kissing while the precious light from the match crackled on the ground. The tiny fire shrunk until it flamed out among the hazy darkness, and soon, even the match, with a puff of wispy smoke, drowned in the thick, muddy dark tunnels like every other lost thing in the catacombs.
With the passing of time, minutes felt like hours in the swimming darkness of the catacombs.
Impenetrable blackness surrounded Emma and Killian, distorting time and space until they seemed as mere figments of the imagination.
Tiny sounds, usually indistinct, were magnified a thousandfold while in the tunnels.
It was dark, as dark as dark gets. The catacombs distorted all sense and direction. Drips of water clashed like brass symbols in a marching band. Multilegged critters scuttled around in the dark. Their creepy, crawly feet tapped in harmony one after the other, like a military battalion of soldiers in procession, trudging from every minuscule direction imaginable. Moreover, even Killian and Emma’s breaths wheezed noisily with forced air, rushing in and out, resonating of labored respirations.
A shrieked cry broke open the hushed, dark noise. Emma jumped. Yet Killian remained constant. His lips charted a landing onto her soft skin. He honed in for another sweet kiss, all the while remaining unfazed, ignoring what he too had heard.
Emma instantly turned her head toward the scream, pushing at his chest with considerable resistance. Her head on a swivel, she whipped it back and forth. The shriek, the bloodcurdling cry, echoed, while traveling through her. The catacombs made it nearly impossible to know from which direction the scream came.
“Did you hear that?” Emma panted short and heavy. “It sounded like Sophie.”
“Who cares,” Killian dismissively said. “They robbed us and then left us down here to basically die.” He closed his eyes, put his hands on the wall alongside her head, and leaned in for another grazing pass. “Besides, she probably just saw a rat or something.”
It had happened quickly, and only once, so Emma doubted she had even heard what she thought she heard in the first place. Slowly, she trusted his casual explanation, letting down her guard. But before long, again, up from the tunnels, a shrill, jarring scream roared with ghastly desperation. Vocal cords strained, and bellowed forth a throaty, last sinking cry.
After the screams faded, words followed. Heavy words, fraught with panic boomed from all parts of the tunnels. “No! Maurice! No!” Then a patch of cold silence was followed by, “Someone please help us! PLEASE!” A female’s voice rang shrill cries in the darkness. “Oh, my god! OH, MY GOD! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
This time, Emma did not doubt what her ears had heard, and so, without hesitation, pulled far away from Killian’s calm, romantic hold. “That was Sophie.” Emma pinpointed the sound, and walked back toward where the screams had appeared to come. She cringed while groping many weird, sharply pointed objects along the walls in the dark. Some were jagged, and pricked her searching fingertips. Others were slimy, while more than a few moved when she passed her hand over top for a grip.
The startling fright of both knowing the open graves all around her in the darkness, along with piercing screams and moving swarms, nearly cost Emma her balance. “Maurice is in trouble,” Emma said, determined to find her way back toward the last set of high-pitched cries. “I hope he gets what he…they deserve.”
Emma walked, not really sure of where she was going. She tripped on the uneven ground, stumbling forward. Splosh. She loudly splashed through many grimy puddles. Killian’s footsteps became lighter as he more leisurely ensued. Emma, assuming the lead, hid her lost and disoriented state from him. She waved her hands frantically ahead of her moving position, but only empty, dark, and heavy air filled her path. Occasionally, she bumped into the walls and staggered over unknown items on the ground, yet still, she caught herself from tumbling the rest of the way down. With her rapid pace, the air clung with a familiar heaviness of choking humidity, dragging upon her lungs. But unlike the moldy smell from before, the air had a new odor. It was pungent, like the rotting of ten thousand years. However, a fresh but strong whiff of iron intermingled with a rancid stench. Together, the odor overwhelmed Emma’s nostrils in a torrent of offensive waves, each one stronger and more vile than the last.
“Killian?” Emma searched backward for his hand, yet he did not answer, and she did not find a warm, soft hand to hold hers. “Killian?” she repeated urgently as she struck one of her three remaining matches.
The match flared with a brief hiss. Emma spun a full circle, but Killian had disappeared. She was now all alone.
For the first time, she felt the walls truly close in on her. Short, shallow panting recoiled her chest in and out until Emma felt woozy.
The screams she had followed disappeared. The silence was deafening, and in combination with the absolute dark, a recipe for crushed soul was served up with sides of dread and hopelessness, both dished out and splattered upon her emotional plate like mashed-up, slopped gruel.
Terror was so abundant that the simple act of swallowing knotted her throat. A single step became an impossible task. Her chest constricted. Her stomach twisted. And for the first time in Emma’s life, she considered dying, yet not just dying, but dying down here in the dark, scary, and most of all, lonely tunnels among the remains of the already dead.
Her dry mouth parched, yet it overflowed regret from the tip of her tongue to the well of her soul. Though water resided in abundance down in the tunnels, Emma hated its bitter sound and sight, for it taunted her in ways she had never noted before.
Her empty belly grumbled, and for the first time, she felt deep pains of real hunger.
Emma worried that her mother would never know what happened to her. She feared becoming one of the forgotten people in the catacombs around her. Suddenly, Emma realized how a person could vanish without notice from the world, never to be seen or heard from again.
Hysterically, she stumbled through the tunnels. Her nice shoes were soaked, heavy as wooden clogs, while squishing out water with every step. Her eyes were sore and strained, and her senses dampened in agreement with her extreme, draining sorrow.
The prospect Emma wished for, of never seeing her mother again, now, as irony would have it, seemed a cruel joke. A recent turn of fate, coupled with her own distorted recollections, haunted her consciousness.
The insight of isolation in the absolute dark kept her mother constantly upon her distorted mind, and for some reason, that hated dress in the boutique from earlier in the day, flashed a searing image, which her fleeting thoughts would not allow a moment’s peace.
Emma struggled to free a positive thought, but failed, and soon, her worries grew until fear expanded beyond what she could endure. Clarity took its place, a place she never knew existed, and now, finally, she saw the terror of an ugly thing she detested inside herself.
No longer walking with purpose, Emma slid her back up against and down the nearest wall. Dirty hands covered her face with resentful shame as she whimpered. Emma hooked her hands around her shins and pulled her knees in tight to her chest. She crowded into a misshapen ball. Her head weighed down like a brick between her legs. No longer did Emma resemble the woman she appeared above ground, but rather, she was now just a scared young girl, sitting all alone in a silent, dark sewer, noisily weeping with a paralyzed burden of uncontrollable doubt.
“Why is everyone so mean to me?” she mumbled to herself in a moment of her own uncertain clarity. “I’m sick of everyone. I hate them all!” she continued.
Emma, content to sit there and die, considered her escape from the murky tunnels and catacombs as a futile i
mpossibility now.
Bleakness draped over her in waves of gloom, flooding all reason as it drowned her understanding, leaving only the unreasonable to take hold of her conscious mind.
A sound, hardly audible, scantly vibrated in her eardrums. Emma wiped a few tears and lifted her head. There was something new, and anything new had to be good.
Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub. A faint beating sound, fashioned in rhythm like
that of a heart, weakly thumped off in the distant air of the catacombs.
Everything in the black tunnels disoriented and confused Emma’s senses. She stood. It took her a few minutes, but she willed her unmovable body up, preparing it to walk again, motivating her discouraged self to follow the sound of hope, while hoping she could find her way in the pitch darkness.
Surmising that Killian had seduced and then abandoned her for his own escape, or worse yet, was in on it with Sophie and Maurice, Emma discovered a new reason to live—the power of resentful anger and hate.
Emma figured they had had one last tormenting laugh at her expense by pranking those screams earlier, but since then, there had been silence, and nothing more.
At any rate, Emma surmised that Killian, Sophie, and Maurice were all long gone by this point, and probably having a good time in some nightclub above ground.
Begrudgingly, she walked toward the new, strange sound. The pulsing beat maintained a pattern, with consistent intervals between thumps, gradually becoming louder as she neared its source. Emma began to imagine that maybe this new sound could free her from the heaps of death in the catacombs, releasing her instead to where she belonged, up above, in the world of the living once again.
The thumping grew louder, crushing the silence. The previous faint noise now painfully drummed a beat inside her ears.
Emma was getting closer, if not by sight, then by sound. She reached down and struck a match to flint, two, three, four times before it hissed lit, but the tunnels, it seemed, were empty.