The Last Days of New Paris

But Mairie des Lilas, the last Métro station on the line, sits a few streets east of the rim of the barrier. Outside, beyond the sealed-off twenty.

Sam descends the stairs at the junction of the nineteenth and twentieth into bad darkness, and Thibaut follows. They walk the tunnels you should never enter. They pass trains that stopped years ago. Through the undercity.

Thibaut breathes shallowly, carefully, his hands trembling. A barrier wells out of the gloom before them. The remains of a checkpoint abandoned back in the first days, when the Germans decided the predators below the pavement were security enough.

Sam has her camera up, and sweeps ahead of them. Behind Thibaut the exquisite corpse follows.

Thibaut watches for monsters. He watches for trains that sit up on their haunches and tell stories.

Something whisks past beyond their torchlight. Sam shouts a command in a terrible resonant voice, in no language Thibaut recognizes, and the thing screams and scurries on, and Thibaut shoots.

It’s a little dying devil, a thing like a shrunken man with a shrunken horse’s head. Sam’s voice and Thibaut’s bullets have torn through its weak hexes.

I came low, it is whirring to itself. To come home. To try to come home, hush, I came low.

That small demonicide is the only one necessary. Thibaut can hardly believe it. They ascend at last, shuddering, into the air beyond old Paris, with the light flooding his eyes.

—

It has been a very long time since he breathed the air beyond the arrondissements. It smells of architecture. Thibaut opens his eyes on the roof of Drancy and waits for Sam’s word.

This zone has long been evacuated, under rains of bombs. It is far less touched by manifestation than the streets he knows, but more shattered and deserted, quotidian ruin.

They have moved fast, with care and silence. Thibaut’s urgency communicates itself, and the exquisite corpse folded space for them a little, so they stalked the miles to Drancy more quickly than they should. Now the sun hauls up. Thibaut and Sam look down at an empty corridor below a cracked skylight.

“You said you saw the brekerman before,” Thibaut says. “When?”

Sam glances at him, and looks back through the glass.

“Why me?” Thibaut says. “Why did you bring me?”

“You came with me,” she says. “And that was good, because of that thing.” She looks at the exquisite corpse standing like a chimney at the roof’s edge. “They’ve never liked me, manifs. It would never let me get close.”

Thibaut looks at the sky. “You’ve been using me to get to a manif? For whatever this is? Were you looking for someone like me?”

“How could I have been? You came to me, in the forest.”

“Still, though. I don’t know how but you tracked me down.”

“Don’t give yourself that out,” she says. She puts her hands on the slats of the roof. Deep in the building, Thibaut hears a faint wind rushing. “You want to know the truth? The truth is if I could’ve tracked someone like you down, I would’ve done. Because yes I wanted someone manif-friendly. Because I wanted a manif. But I was just being chased, and you just came to help.

“You’re the Surrealist. You’re the one who taps objective chance. You wanted to know about Fall Rot. You wanted to know what’s happening. Well, Paris heard you, Thibaut. It was you who found me.”

She grimaces with effort and the wind below increases.

“What are you doing?” Thibaut says.

“Do you think OSS could have got us out of the Rex?” she says through gritted teeth. “Jesus, it’s strong here! You think the Americans could have got us through the Métro?” Her hands are not steady.

Thibaut remembers the wind dispersing smoke ghosts on the bridge. Sam’s camera is round her neck, but it isn’t the camera that’s vibrating now, it’s her, her sinews stretching in her neck, the scleras of her eyes darkening. Whatever is happening in the building is pouring not out of the camera but through her.

“So you wanted me with you because this thing listens to me,” Thibaut says. “Because it could get into the café.”

“It doesn’t like me,” she gasps. “It can smell something on me.” She smiles. “I’m secret service, yes, but not American, OSS. That was you who said that. Come on. Not the Americans or the Brits. Nor the French or Canadians or any of them.” Her hands flatten into the roof so hard they seem to press into its substance. There is a slamming. In the courtyard below, from all over Drancy, soldiers emerge into the daylight.

“I never gave up that occult stuff I told you about,” Sam gasps. “You already know what I’m telling you, Thibaut — you’ve watched me. And there’s nowhere you can go, and nothing you can do. And yes you’re my enemy but the Nazis are my enemies, too, more, and they’re yours, too.