The Watchtower

briny gust of air rose from the dark passage behind the plaque as if it truly led to Venus’s ocean grotto. I followed Madame La Pieuvre into the dark passage, which became even darker when she swung the door shut behind us. The blackness closed in on me like a hand at my throat—then I snapped my fingers. The tiny flame that sprang out of my thumb lit up a flight of stone steps descending into a pit of darkness that my puny light couldn’t penetrate. Madame La Pieuvre’s moon-shaped face bobbed beside me. She smiled—a trifle condescendingly, I thought—at my thumb-light and then uncoiled her arms from her cloak. At a flick of her many wrists blue-glowing lights appeared up and down her arms. They cast a blue-green light that lit up the staircase down to the bottom, where it ended in a pool of water.
    “Come,” she said, “these passages flood when it rains. We must be quick.”
    I followed her, keeping an eye on her glowing limbs, which floated around her like seaweed. With the salt smell and the sound of water lapping against stone, I felt as though I were sinking in a bathysphere to the ocean floor, but the water at the bottom of the stairs turned out to be only a few inches deep. We had to hold our cloaks and dresses up, which meant I had to extinguish my thumb-light, but I didn’t need it anymore. Madame La Pieuvre’s bioluminescence, reflected in the shallow water, lit up a level tunnel in a turquoise blaze of light, illumining a lovely mosaic pattern of shells and sea creatures on the walls and ceilings.
    “This is pretty,” I said. “What did Catherine de Médicis use the underground chambers for?”
    “A means of escape should her palace be besieged by enemies, a secret entranceway for the sorcerers and witches she employed, and when someone displeased her—”
    A scream cut her off. She stopped so suddenly I bumped into her; she wrapped two arms around me to keep me from falling. “And for torture,” Madame La Pieuvre whispered. “Only I had thought those days were over.”
    A second scream punctuated her sentence. In the hollow confines of the underground chamber I couldn’t tell how close the sound was, or when the scream ended and its echoes began. The echoes seemed to surround us like the voices of all who had ever suffered in this dark, dank place.
    A third scream rang out—and was abruptly cut off in a strangled gurgle that was even more awful and seemed to be echoed in the moving water at our feet. Tucking all her glowing arms but two in her cloak and pressing one finger to her lips, she pulled me forward. Her footsteps made no sound in the water, but mine sloshed and slapped. When we reached a flight of steps that brought us up onto a dry landing, I was grateful … until I saw what lay beyond the landing.
    The vaulted room was lit by torches set in iron sconces. Long, pendulous shapes hung from iron hooks in the ceiling. They looked like huge caterpillar cocoons hanging from a tree branch after a rain, water dripping off them into buckets set beneath them.… I blinked, refocused, and opened my mouth to scream. A wet tentacle slapped over my mouth before any sound could come out. I stared at Madame La Pieuvre, whose face had gone inky black, her eyes wide with horror and rage, and then I looked back into the torture room.
    The “cocoons” were human beings hanging upside down from the ceiling, some of them with blood dripping from cut throats into tin pails. Two men first wrangled one of the bodies onto a hook. When the body had been suspended, one of the men took a long knife from a scabbard at his waist and, while his companion held the body still, drew it across the neck.
    Only when the blood gushed out did I realize that the body had been alive and I understood that we’d just stood helplessly by while a man was murdered. I moaned beneath Madame La Pieuvre’s hand and she pulled me back away from the door and against the wall.
    “What was that sound?” a man’s voice asked in guttural French.
    “A rat,” his comrade answered. “Or one of the queen’s crocodiles. Did you know the queen kept crocodiles down here to discourage her prisoners from escaping? Why don’t you go have a look, Gaston?” The man laughed cruelly. I hoped that Gaston would be dissuaded from looking by his comrade’s mockery—or by the threat of crocodiles. Did every city in every time period have that urban legend? I wondered. The sound of footsteps approaching put an end to that line of