Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy (3 page)

“I know,” Marty said, laying his hand on his cousin’s forearm. “But I think it’s true anyway.”

Chapter Three

T
hey walked slowly back the
way they’d come like they were walking the plank. As they rounded the curve, they saw the light still ahead; it was now stationary.

“Whatever happens, I won’t forget this vacation,” Marty said.

Neahle squeezed his hand.

When they were twenty feet from the light, they made out the silhouettes of two people standing at the place they had entered the tunnel. Apparently they had stuffed their torch into the sconce and were waiting.

“Hello?” Clay called, stopping.

“Hey!” one of the figures called back. “Welcome! Everybody always goes left… Don’t know why. You can come back; we won’t hurt you.”

Frowning at the others, Neahle started forward. Clay grabbed her arm and held her back.

“Who are you?” he yelled.

“Friends. Really! Trust me. It’s a long story, though, and best told somewhere else.” This was a girl’s voice, a distinct Southern accent carrying down the passage to them.

“Like we have a choice,” Marty grumbled. “Might as well go. What else are we going to do, stand here?”

When the two circles of light joined, they found that the pair waiting for them was only slightly older than they. The woman, about twenty-five and slender, had dark hair pulled back into a long ponytail, a pert nose, and eyes the color of the sky they’d left behind in Beaufort. The young man, also mid-twenties, was six feet tall, stocky, with buzz cut blonde hair. He smiled at them, a wide grin that creased his brown eyes almost into oblivion.

“Don’t know why everyone always goes left,” he said again. “Every time. I did it myself.”

“You came through the pipe?” Neahle asked, astonished.

“Yeah, we all did.” He nodded, then hooked a thumb at his companion. “She got in from Charleston, with her boyfriend…”

“Ex,” the woman said quickly, a look of disgust on her face.

“
Ex
-boyfriend,” the young man corrected. “Me, I’m from a farm in Ohio. Name’s Riley. This is Hannah.” He held out his hand.

Scowling, Clay shook it. “Wait a second.
Ohio?
But we’re in North Carolina.”

“Yeah, mind bender, huh?” Riley laughed. “Trust me, it’ll take awhile to get used to it. We’re from all over, never the same place twice. But you followed some ducks down a pipe or a tunnel, right?”

Neahle’s mouth fell open. “How did you know?”

“We’ve all followed those stupid ducks,” Hannah said with a trace of bitterness. She held out her hand and shook with the others.

“All?” Marty repeated. “Who’s all?”

“Everybody here. All of us who’ve come through the tunnel.” Riley said as he took the torch out of the sconce.

“How many is that? And where’s here?”

Hannah frowned slightly, thinking. “Probably over three hundred now. We’re not all here at one time, though. And Paris. We’re in Paris.”

“Paris, Virginia?
”
Marty asked without much hope.

Riley turned to lead them down the passage. “Paris, France. Kicker, ain’t it?” He laughed. “And trust me, that’s the most normal thing you’ll hear in the next couple of days.”

“I still don’t understand,” Clay said for the tenth time. He had been asking questions and complaining for fifteen minutes. “How did we get to Paris? And last I checked on the travel channel, Paris was a lot more scenic than this.”

“I don’t know how it works exactly,” Hannah said, walking beside Neahle. “We all followed those ducks, and we all ended up here. Paris has almost two hundred miles of tunnels underneath it, really old ones, and super complicated…” Riley looked over his shoulder at her and shook his head.

“What?” Neahle asked. She felt shell-shocked and didn’t understand why they wouldn’t answer her brother’s questions.

“We’ll let someone else explain that part,” he said, also for the tenth time. “It’s complicated. The whole thing is
really
complicated. Not even Abacus knows the whole story, but he’s the best one to tell you what we do know.”

“Abacus? Who’s that?” Marty asked.

“He’s the head honcho. He and his brother figured most of it out for themselves. When they got here they were the only ones. That was a long time ago.”

Marty shuddered. It was unfortunate enough to be in ancient, dark, dank, moldy tunnels with torches and strangers and even stranger tales. He couldn’t image what it would have been like to arrive in the dark, with no light, no meet-and-greet, no nothing.

“But you said it was Paris,” Neahle said. “Why doesn’t everyone just call their parents or go to the embassy and go home?”

Riley laughed. “Yeah, that would be an excellent plan if we were in
our
Paris. But we’re not.”

“What do you mean, it’s not our Paris? How many Parises are there?” Clay demanded.

“Seven years ago, I’d’a said one…” Hannah said.

“Wait, seven years? You’ve been here for seven years?” Clay asked.

“Yep,” Hannah sighed. “Seven years. I got here when I was eighteen. Everybody here was between fifteen and nineteen when they came. How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” Neahle whispered.

“Ditto,” Marty said.

“Nineteen. Just barely.” Clay said. “My birthday is next month.”

“See? That’s how it goes. Not sure why. Landon knows, I guess, but he won’t be sharing, I’m sure.” Hannah shook her head, looking up at the ceiling.

“Landon?” Marty asked.

“Another long story,” Riley said. “It’s complicated.”

They walked the next half hour in silence, unwilling to ask any more questions for which “it’s complicated” was the answer. And they were all mulling over the crazy idea that they were in Paris, France, only not their Paris, France, with people who said they’d followed ducks to another world or dimension years before. They would write these two strangers off as crazy except that here they were, walking down a convoluted succession of tunnels, striding through open rooms with graffiti-painted walls, scooting around reservoirs full of dark water, being led by those strangers who were carrying torches and who seemed to know exactly where they were going.

“You think this is some kind of prank? Maybe a reality TV thing?” Clay asked his cousin quietly.

Marty shook his head. He sure as heck didn’t know how they’d gotten here, but he knew that wherever “here” was, they were actually there. “It’s not a stage set; not even the best movie set looks like this. And look at these tunnels. No way they’ve been manufactured for TV. The stuff in here is old
,
man. Not made to look old; it’s seriously freaking old.”

As they were talking, they turned into a large room and Neahle’s hand flew to her mouth.

“Oh my gosh!” she whispered. “Those can’t be real…”

On all sides, the walls were lined with bones. Starting from the floor and going all the way to the ceiling, the bones were stacked in a pattern: three layers of femur bones, lying end out; a layer of skulls; nine layers of tibia bones, again lying end out; a layer of skulls; nine layers of femurs; a row of skulls; and four layers of tibia, bumping the ceiling. The walls went on as far as they could see in the torchlight.

“Yep,” said Riley, holding the torch close to the wall on his right. “They’re real. Back in the eighteenth century they cleaned out a cemetery up top. I guess they ran out of space. This was a quarry then. They just dumped all the bones in. Sometime later, someone did this. I guess they thought it was art. All the rest of the bones are just piled up behind there.”

“That’s seriously messed up,” Marty said.

“
Ossements du Cimetiere des Ynnocents, Deposes en Avril 1786,”
Hannah said in French. “The bones from the Cemetery of the Innocents, deposited in April 1786. There’s an inscription down there on the wall. You’ll see it eventually, it’s on the way to a lot of other tunnels.”

“But there aren’t any recent bones in here, right?” Neahle asked, keeping her arms crossed over her chest. Clay put his arm around her shoulders, walking with her, his eyes roving over the bone walls. There were thousands, hundreds of thousands, of bones stacked up.

“Not that we know of,” Hannah confirmed. “We’re almost there.”

“There where? And is ‘there’ close to this bone field?” Neahle shuddered and looked down at the ground, keeping her eyes averted from the gruesome geometric pattern.

“You get used to it. It’s the least of our problems, trust me,” Riley said, torch aloft once again as they hurried down the tunnel.

After five minutes of brisk walking, they’d left the bones behind. They had passed many side tunnels, some with clean smelling air wafting from them, and some that smelled dank, musty, and dead.

“Is Paris really up there?” Clay asked.

Riley shrugged. “About two hundred feet over our heads.”

“Two hundred…” muttered Marty, suddenly feeling the weight of all the stone and dirt and buildings above him. “Are there ever any cave-ins?”

“Just don’t mess with any of the stacked stone columns. Before the…” Riley stopped and cleared his throat. “Fifty years ago the IGC, the inspectors of the tunnels, kept the limestone pillars intact. They were originally built by the quarrymen, a long time ago, to keep the mine safe. Now it’s just us down here, and we pretty much don’t touch the, although Abacus sometimes has us check them for cracks.”

“So all of Paris is up there on top of us, and all that’s keeping it from coming down here are some stone pillars built a couple hundred years ago?” Clay asked nervously.

“Yeah, but we haven’t had a cave-in in awhile. At least ten years, and even then, it was just a small one over towards Atlanta. No biggie.” Riley kept trudging forward.

“Atlanta?” Neahle whispered to Clay.

Chapter Four

I
t occurred to Neahle that
she could see something ahead besides darkness. As they hurried forward, there was, unmistakably, light at the end of the tunnel.

“What’s up there?” she asked.

“That’s where we’re headed. Home.” Riley picked up the pace and the others scrambled to keep up.

As they approached the light, a figure stepped into their tunnel and held up a torch, extending his light to meet theirs.

“You got some?” a deep male voice asked.

“Yep, three,” Riley answered.

“Cool. Always a good day when you bring ‘em back,” the man said.

The McClellands and Marty slowed, unsure of the new stranger. He was uncommonly tall and broad, clothed in jeans and a dark button down shirt. As they reached him, his features emerged in the light. At least six feet four, he was shaped like a linebacker. His skin was the color of black coffee, and his hair was cropped close to his head. He had a ready smile and friendly eyes and held his free hand out to them as soon as they were close.

“Samson,” he said. Seeing how they were sizing him up, he laughed. “Yeah, like Samson in the Bible. Not the name my Mama gave me, that was Leon. But since I been here, I been Samson. Lot of us get nicknames around here.” He grinned at them, shaking hands. “Come on, Abacus’ll be glad the trip paid off today. We send someone every day at this time—those ducks are like clockwork. If they bring people, it’ll always be right at the same time.”