Guest post written by kc dyer
kc dyer resides in the wilds of British Columbia where she likes to walk in the woods and write books for teens and adults. Before Eight Days to Elsewhere, her most recent novel for adults is Finding Fraser, a romantic comedy published by Berkley Books. For teens, kc’s most recent work is FACING FIRE, a sequel to the acclaimed novel, A Walk Through a Window, published by Doubleday.
When I first started writing EIGHTY DAYS TO ELSEWHERE, I knew there was going to be research involved. What I didn’t know was that research would take me all the way around the world on the biggest adventure of my life. I’d written a draft of the story before I set out, but my experiences were so astonishing that most of them made it into the story, in one form or another.
I rode boats and trains and buses and gondolas and streetcars and airplanes. I hopped on subways and taxis and streetcars from Singapore to Liverpool. From soaring over the Alps, to battling hail as big a golf balls in Milan, to climbing through a North Korean spy ship salvaged from the bottom of the ocean, every day brought not only an incredible adventure for me, but added detail to the story I was writing. I was pick-pocketed in France, toured India through a killer heatwave, rode out an earthquake in Japan, and left Hong Kong the day before protests began rocking the city. But perhaps the craziest adventure of all came in the form of an unexpected invitation to crawl backwards into a hole in the ground, and explore an endless maze of limestone caves, deep under the streets of Paris.
Before leaving home, I’d written a scene for Romy – the main character in my story – that required her to race across Paris. To help make sure I got the details right, I managed to secure a tour of a now-defunct rail line around Paris with a man named Gilles Thomas. I knew Thomas as an historian and author. What I didn’t know was that he is the King of the Paris Underworld.
We met in Paris, near la Petite Ceinture, once a thriving rail line completely encircling Paris. But by 1934, it had been replaced by the Paris Metro, and had stopped carrying passengers. For me, though, this would be a perfect route for a panicked young traveller to take, and I was delighted to have a guided tour. After handing me a headlamp, Gilles walked me along the length of one of the disused tunnels, stepping carefully along the old tracks. As we stopped to discuss some of the amazing graffiti on the tunnel wall, a pair of lights suddenly appeared, from literally right under our feet.
And I met my first two cataphiles.
Cataphiles are the explorers of the caverns deep below the city — far beneath the sewer, the Metro, and the train lines. The mining of these limestone and plaster quarries began officially sometime in the thirteenth century, though there is evidence of work done long before that. And when the graveyards of Paris began to overflow in the eighteenth century leading a few houses to collapse into charnel pits of rotting flesh and bone, parts of these old tunnels were put to a new use. The contents of the Saints-Innocents cemetery [and a few others] were dug up and dumped into the abandoned quarries. Later, some of these bones were rearranged to make the ossuary known today as the Paris Catacombs.
The rest of the bones? Still down there — somewhere. I say ‘somewhere’ because there are more than 200 kilometers of these mining tunnels deep below Paris. Many of the tunnels are flooded, more have collapsed. It’s way too easy to get lost down there, or get into trouble in a million other ways. It’s highly dangerous, and completely illegal, and is regularly patrolled by the Parisian police.
But judging from the hole at my feet, deep inside this abandoned train tunnel, these cataphiles had found a way. And after the mud-spattered boys had hurried away, the man who literally wrote the book on this subterranean world invited me to take a closer look.
How could I say no?
Pretending I was not scared out of my mind, I took a deep breath, and backed my way down into the hole. It was cool, contrasting with the brutal heatwave Paris was enduring above ground. Inside, after a few seconds of wriggling, the tunnel opened up enough to allow us to stand almost upright. My guide was tall, but had mastered the art of loping through these darkened tunnels without braining himself on the roof. I scurried along behind, trying to keep up without tripping in the murky, knee-deep groundwater.
The tunnels were lined with graffiti as we entered, which was reassuring to the extent that it proved others had at least been down here before. In places, the street names far above us were carved into the rock, but these were centuries old, and some of the street name have changed. It was horrifyingly apparent how easy it would be to get lost.
“You’re not in Paris anymore,” said Thomas, and then had me turn off my headlamp, to get a taste of absolute darkness.
I’ve been in absolute darkness once before, inside a lava tube in Iceland. [Don’t ever let anyone tell you the life of a writer is dull!] This time, in the darkness, the only sounds were of dripping water, and the tremor of the earth caused by trains passing far above us. Since all I could think of was tunnel collapse, and my blood supply had been replaced with adrenaline, I only lasted about two seconds before I had to turn my light on again.
As we ran through the tunnels, passages opened up on either side; each twisting off into darkness, filled with crystal clear groundwater and perhaps a femur or two.
Some impossible time later, when we spotted bobbing headlamps in the distance, my heart nearly stopped. What if they belonged to nefarious people? Who would ever find us again? While my guide, unfazed and completely at home in this environment, was ready to stop and chat with fellow cataphiles, they turned and fled. Perhaps they feared the police? Rightly so, as it turned out.
Soon a tiny pin-prick of light appeared in the distance, followed by several others. It was a group of cataflics; police and a couple of firemen for good measure, led by a tiny but tough policewoman. They were fully geared up in hard-hats and ropes, overalls and waders, and they had a few questions for us.
Luckily, I was with the King of the Underworld, and so, after a protracted discussion and quite a few headlamps beamed into my face, they moved off.
We explored a bit more, including tunnels loaded with stalactites accessible only on hands and knees, or worse – via the belly-crawl. By the time we scrabbled out of the hole an hour later, I was soaked to the skin, muddy, and with a case of post-tunnel euphoria that lasted for days.
As for the story? You’ll have to read EIGHTY DAYS TO ELSEWHERE, and let me know if I got the details right.
