I Should Die

SIXTEEN



AS THE PATH DESCENDED, THE TUNNEL GOT smaller, and soon I was hunching over and bending my head to clear the ceiling. The increasingly tight space made me more and more anxious. The farther downward I walked, the heavier the pressure grew inside my chest, until it felt like my lungs were going to implode.

Finally, I couldn’t go any farther. My heart beat so hard that I felt it pounding in my ears. I leaned back against the tunnel wall and slid down into a crouch. Clutching the flashlight in a death grip, I attempted to talk myself out of a full-blown panic attack.

“Close your eyes and imagine being somewhere else,” my mom had said to me, deep inside the mountain at Ruby Falls. Okay, Mom, I thought. Where else can I be? And suddenly, I remembered the roof terrace on top of La Maison, where Vincent had taken me last month. Stretched out around us had been a panoramic view of Paris by night, the city sparkling like it had been decorated with a million strings of Christmas lights.

Vincent had kissed me there—in that most romantic of spots. We had rolled around on a sun bed kissing and laughing and—for a few blissful moments—forgetting that fate conspired against us. For a short while we loved each other without caring about anything else. It was on the rooftop that Vincent told me he loved me. That he couldn’t imagine a life without me.

I felt the cold winter air on my face, and Vincent’s finger brushing my lips, outlining my mouth before he leaned in and touched his lips to mine.

Then, in my fantasy, he disappeared and I was alone on the roof. The delicious warmth was gone—suddenly and violently—and the coldness of the winter night stung my face and hands. And suddenly I remembered our situation in the here and now: Vincent’s body was gone and his spirit was bound to a madwoman. And I was within mere yards of something that might help him.

My eyes snapped open and I stood back up, hunching over into an old-lady shuffle to make my way down the narrowing passageway. There were so many twists now that the flashlight illuminated only the few feet ahead of me. I was so deep that the rock walls were damp against my fingertips.

As I turned a curve, my foot landed against a pile of rubble, sending a stone flying forward. It disappeared around a corner and the echo that returned—of a dozen stones skipping across a vast hollow space—told me that I had finally arrived.

Ducking beneath a low shelf of rock, I suddenly found myself in a cavern the size of an Olympic swimming pool and maybe four times my height. I aimed my flashlight around the walls and located the massive wooden torches lodged in either side of the door. Pulling out the lighter Bran had told me to bring, I lit first one and then the other. I just lit a torch, I thought, immediately storing that nugget in a bizarre-things-I-have-done compartment of my brain that had been rapidly expanding over the last year.

As the flames flared to life, I coughed from the smoke and inhaled a deep gulp of stale cave air. The dark stone surface of the cavernous room danced in the flickering light of the torches, making it appear even more otherworldly.

The walls on either side of me looked like massive honeycombs. These were stacked on top of one another all the way up to the ceiling. I counted a few rows and estimated there were around six hundred in all.

The doors were painted with letters and flowers and organic swirly shapes that looked like tattoos. They all had one thing in common: In the center of each door appeared a hand with little yellow-and-orange-teardrop shapes at the tip of each finger, as if they were shooting out flames.

The doors closest to me on the left-hand wall looked ancient, all crumbling stone with only vestiges of their painted designs. Their condition grew better the farther down the room they were, until at the far end the doors were made of wood instead of stone and the paint looked less decrepit.

The wall facing me at the end of the hall had none of the half-moon-shaped doors, and was instead covered completely in wall paintings. Next to it, at the far end of the wall to my right, the painted doors began again, these looking almost new. There were only a few rows of brightly painted doors and then they stopped, leaving rows and rows of long empty holes stretching toward me.

I ran my fingers against the mouth of the one nearest me and, shining my flashlight inside, knew immediately what it was: a tomb. I had seen the same style of funerary niches in several Roman ruins I had visited around France. The Romans had carved holes horizontally into rock walls and laid their corpses to rest inside.

I shone my flashlight cautiously around the room before stepping farther in, scanning for booby traps. And then I remembered who had sent me: Bran would have warned me of anything I needed to watch out for.

I was in his family’s secret “archives” as he called it. More like mausoleum, I thought, although one could consider it an archive of bodies. Reassured that Bran would never put me in danger, I turned off my flashlight and stuck it in my bag.

In the gleam of the torches, I saw, at the far end of the room, a table holding stacks of books and shining metal objects. That was what I was here for—Bran had told me the books he needed were among them. As I walked farther into the room, I noticed that the final door on the right wall had been decorated with fresh flowers: roses and lilies and white lilac.

As I came closer, the odor of fresh paint mingled with the fragrance of the flowers. This door had recently been decorated. Something strummed painfully in my chest as I neared it. Even before I was close enough to read the letters carefully painted across the bottom of the door, I knew what they would spell.





Gwenhaël Steredenn Tândorn





Bran’s mother. He must have buried her here just a couple of days ago. I knelt down to look more closely at the ground-level tomb and admired the carefully painted hand-with-flames and decorative tattoolike swirls around it. Bran was no artist, but he had obviously spent a lot of time and care creating his mother’s memorial. I spotted a small card tied in with the flowers, and held it between my fingers. In tiny spiderlike script, I read, “This is for you, Mom. I will miss you every day.”

My heart tugged. I brushed away the tear that ran down my cheek. I knew exactly how Bran felt. For me it wasn’t as fresh a wound, but it was one that would always bleed. I missed my parents. And even though I had finally stopped thinking of them every minute of every day, when memories did come the pain returned full force.

“Good-bye, Gwenhaël,” I whispered, and, standing, walked toward the lone table. I spotted the books that Bran had mentioned on the left edge of the tabletop: a stack of red leather-bound tomes. But before I reached them, I paused, my eyes drawn toward the paintings covering the entire surface of the end wall. They reminded me of a place I had visited in Florence with my mom—the Basilica of Santa Croce. Just like the walls of that church’s multiple small chapels, this wall had been divided into strips of separate scenes and placed row on row, like a comic book.

In the basilica the panels had been filled with pictures showing stories from the Bible or of Italian saints, each chapel decorated by a single artist. Here, the panels were all painted by different artists—in different styles, and seemingly from different periods. The peeled and fading paint of the upper levels suggested that they were the oldest, so I began there, reading the images as stories like my mother had taught me.

The first panel reminded me of the amphora I had seen in Papy’s gallery, showing two armies of naked men fighting one another, the soldiers wearing what looked like ancient Greek helmets. One side was led by a man with a golden red halo that flared out from his head like flames. The enemy army’s leader had a halo that looked like a cloudy haze of bright red blood. A couple of figures in the corner of the frame were hovering over dead and mutilated bodies and holding their hands over them, as if they were healing them. Their halos looked like little sparks of fire—five sparks above each head, like the flames above the hands painted on the tomb doors. This must be the symbol for the guérisseurs, I thought.

The next image reminded me of the medieval paintings of saints being martyred. Men dressed like priests, with big popelike hats, stood aside watching as soldiers killed a group of people with swords. Their victims were bound hand and foot to wooden stakes, and had the same gold and red haloes as in the previous image, while others had round yellow haloes—the typical ones you see in religious paintings. Under the gold guy was written “bardia,” the red had “numa,” and the round halo “bayata.”

Behind them, in the distance, a flame-haloed guérisseur stood outside a cave in which huddled a group of the three types of haloed beings. The story was pretty clear: the revenants and the “bayata,” whatever they were, were being persecuted by the Church, and the healers were helping to hide them.

The revenants must have experienced a whole history alongside humankind that we were completely unaware of. I stood there in awe, transfixed by what this meant. Supernatural beings had been living among us since the beginning of time . . . or at least for a long, long time. And scenes from this secret parallel history were depicted clearly before me. The magnitude of this discovery made me feel very small and insignificant . . . but also very lucky.

I eagerly moved to the next panel, which depicted the cave I was standing in. Workers, all with the five flames over their heads, were digging the tombs and painting the walls, while a woman in long white robes held her hands out, shooting beams of silver in all directions. Within the beams were painted stars, moons, suns, flamed hands, and the signum bardia. I guessed this was some type of magical guérisseur casting a spell on the cave that would allow some to enter, but keep the revenants out, as had been demonstrated so dramatically (and hilariously) outside. I wondered what other magic protected this cave, as there were symbols I didn’t recognize floating in the woman’s silver starburst.

I suddenly thought of Vincent, Ambrose, and Arthur waiting outside the cave for me. The longer I stayed the more worried they would get. I checked my cell phone. I had left them forty-five minutes ago. And of course there was no signal, so I couldn’t call to let them know I was fine. I knew it was time to go, but couldn’t resist looking at a couple more pictures before leaving.

My eyes skipped back up to one of the ancient scenes; this one from the Roman period, judging on the characters’ togalike robes. In the center there was a figure curled up in a fetal position inside a big round tub. It was life-size, but had no hair or facial features and looked more like a rough sculpture of a woman before the details were carved in.

Around the figure stood several people, both bardia and guérisseur judging by their auras, each taking part in a different activity. One had cut his arm and was bleeding into the tub, another was bending over the curled-up figure’s head, a third seemed to be casting a spell over it, and a fourth stood to the side holding a torch and a vase. They were obviously performing some sort of magical ritual, but I couldn’t imagine its purpose.

Underneath the image was an inscription in Latin, and I was thrilled to discover that I could decipher a couple of the words. Argilla must mean “clay,” since the word was argile in French. And I knew that pulpa meant “flesh,” close to the French word for “octopus”—an animal made of flesh with no bones. Unable to translate the rest, I looked around for another scene to study. Just one more, I thought, starting to feel anxious about getting back to Vincent and the others before they went apoplectic with worry.

My gaze fell upon a picture near the middle, probably because it was the most beautifully painted. Some guérisseur artists were obviously more talented than others. With most, the objective seemed to be getting the message across instead of demonstrating the artist’s skill. But this one could have been painted by Raphael or Michelangelo, the sumptuous beauty of the characters being this painter’s goal.

In it, a group of numa with red auras stood across a small stream from another group of golden-aura bardia. One of the numa was wading through the clear flowing water as he crossed over to the bardia’s side. A female bardia stretched her hand out to him. The numa in the water had a bloodred halo, but unlike those of his kindred, his aura was laced with veins of gold. Is he some kind of crossbreed revenant? I wondered. Or maybe like the bayata, was he another supernatural being altogether? I had so much to learn—an idea that simultaneously thrilled and scared me. I couldn’t wait to find out more about Vincent’s kind, but was leery of what type of creepy things were waiting to be discovered along the way.

As I hurried to scoop up the stack of books Bran had indicated and stow them carefully in my bag, I wondered about the things I had witnessed. How many other humans knew of this cave? Besides the actual guérisseurs, not many, I was sure. I felt awed—overwhelmed—by my inclusion in this group. Just a normal girl from Brooklyn standing in a magical cave underneath the bustling activity of one of the world’s major cities. A girl who is anxiously awaited by three undead guys outside the door of the cave, I remembered and, staring longingly back at the paintings I hadn’t had time to look at, I made a split-second decision. Grabbing my phone again, I lifted it to take a photo of the wall.

I can study them back in the safety of my own room, I thought. But it wasn’t until I pressed the camera icon that I remembered, in a flash of panic, the magic protecting the cave. Would it incinerate my phone? Would it incinerate me? When nothing happened, I breathed a sigh of relief and headed quickly toward the door.

Picking up a tool that looked like a giant candle snuffer hanging by the door, I used it to extinguish one of the torches. As I moved toward the other, I noticed that this wall was painted in comic-strip style like the wall facing it. But, judging from the characters’ clothes, these paintings were the most recent; all from the last couple of centuries.

I flicked on my flashlight before snuffing out the second torch. And as the flame began to die, I noticed the painting located just above the door. It was of a group of men in uniforms decorated with swastikas, standing in front of a giant map. In the middle of the group was a mustached man with slicked-down hair, who I recognized immediately. And just as the torch extinguished, I saw that the men around him—Hitler’s advisors—all had red haloes.