How To Hide A Body

Death And Other Inconveniences

They say that the average human being swallows up to eight spiders in their life. Well, I think I inhaled all of Charlotte and her web.

I sat there in the dark, waiting for the Kray brothers to come and find us. Ancient cobwebs wove themselves into my hair and I kept feeling phantom spiders crawl over me. The skulls... well, the skulls were scary, but pretty cool in a macabre kind of way.

I pulled my legs to my chest and tried to warm myself up by breathing into my hands. The prison jumpsuit was far from insulating. "Alex, if you could hurry the fuck up, that would be nice," I muttered.

"Ladies shouldn't swear," A voice said from a light source further down the tunnel.

"Fuck off," I yelled back. Bart placed a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged violently so that it fell off. I couldn't bear to be around him at the moment. Soon, the Kray brothers arrived, a flashlight in Alex's hands. "Where did you get a flashlight from?" I asked him as I stood up.

"Took it from a guard, earlier," Luis answered as he helped Bart to his feet.

The new amount of light did not put my mind at ease. Now, I could only see more bones and more spiderwebs. The plan had seemed so much more straightforward in the cafeteria, but now that we actually stood in the crumbling tunnels, I realised that we really had not planned anything at all. Where the hell were we?

The caverns were just big enough for Bart to walk upright and not bump his head on the ceiling. Skulls had been pushed into the walls randomly like the centrepieces and ornaments on a Christmas tree, while Femur, Humerus, Radius and other bones I couldn't name were neatly stacked on top of each other. Some skulls were placed in the formation of crosses, but many had tumbled out of place and had been crushed underfoot. I really hoped it was Time that had done the crushing.

"Schatz, welcome to the real world," Alex let his flashlight roam around the skull covered walls as we walked. His platinum blonde hair shimmered in the dim light, which also only made his scar seem more menacing

"If this is your real world, I feel deeply sorry for you," I muttered.

"I mean death. Death is the real world. Everyone dies. Everything comes to an end. And all those things must go somewhere," he rambled on as we walked down the passage. He stopped to tear a skull out of the wall, which came off with surprising ease. It unleashed a dust cloud which made Luis cough. A couple of pebbles scattered to the floor and some spiders ran for cover.

"This," he said, gesturing to the yellowed bone, as if he was acting out that scene from Hamlet, "used to be a person. A living, breathing human being. He or she, or whatever this skull identified as, experienced love, loss, happiness, sadness. They probably had a job, a house. And thousands of stories, that have all been lost in the dusts of time."

"Not really," I interrupted, taking the skull out of Alex's palm. It was dry and smooth, "Technically, they didn't really have a great life. Most of these people died because of the plague. Their remains were moved down here so that the graveyards wouldn't flood over. I don't think they had a long enough life to even be able to call it fun."

I threw the skull up in the air and Alex caught it as if it were a baseball. He turned the skull so that the empty eye-sockets stared into his own, "It's funny, how in life we care so much about our image, our appearances, our behaviour. We care about how much money we have, how many cars we own. We divide ourselves based on the amount of melanin we have in our skin, what gender we are and who we love. However, once our last breath has left our lungs and we are dressed in our favourite clothes and decorated with our favourite flowers and presented back to the earth, we become nothing more than bone. Why bother so much with labelling each other as the 'other', when we end up becoming the same?"

"Who knew the deeper one dives into the world, the deeper the conversations get?" I muttered, as we continued our stroll among the dead.

"He took a philosophy course a few months ago. Worst mistake ever," Luis told Bart, who followed behind us. Sometimes we would come across small bone sculptures that would be placed in the centre of round chambers and other times we wandered into rooms where bones had just been tossed onto the floor.

I wondered if we would ever get out of the Catacombs or if we would just become another skeleton amongst the others. I didn't know where we were walking to or if we would ever meet another (living) person again. Sadly, I didn't have to wonder about it much longer.

Our conversation was interrupted by a loud crash. Nobody moved. It reverberated throughout the caverns for a couple of minutes. While the echo was still making its way down the Catacombs, our quartet remained still, afraid to even breathe. Alex switched off the flashlight. I felt my heart turn into battle drums, declaring war on reason. My brain came up with an overwhelming amount of theories as to what that sound had come from.

When silence had triumphed, I dared myself to exhale. I turned around and saw a faint glow exuding itself from Luis' body. "Luis, you did not get a glow-in-the-dark tattoo," I sighed.

"You like it?" he asked. It was of a moon and stars on his shoulder.

"No." I said at the same time as Bart said "I want one!"

"You need to get your tattoo addiction under control." I muttered.

"Come on, let's go this way," Alex said, switching the flashlight back on and pointing toward the only direction we could go without going back to prison: forward.

We made our way down the tunnel until we came upon a fork in the road. Luis and Alex got into a heated argument into which route we should take. They decided to battle it out through rock-paper-scissors. Luis ended up winning so we went left.

We had only taken a couple of steps, before Alex demanded us to be quiet. I heard the scuffling of footsteps, which seemed to be getting closer and closer by the minute.

Once again, Alex removed our only light source and we were enveloped in cold darkness. "I should've known not to go this way," Alex muttered, "Luis never wins at rock, paper scissors." I elbowed him in the side, forcing him to be quiet.

I tried to rely on my other senses, but my brain kept whispering in the back of my head, "Spooky scary skeletons".

"Can you turn that thing off?" Bart asked Luis' glowing tattoo.

I tried to ignore them as I closed my eyes and strained my ears. The cavern had become silent. Then, I heard the footsteps, again. They started to become louder and more confident. I reached into the pockets of my prison jumpsuit and cursed silently. I realized that we were completely and utterly screwed.

I had forgotten that the prison had taken my gun, my knife in my shoe and my poisonous lipstick. All I had was Bart, who I didn't want with me, anyway. I tried to shove the memory of his words away. You need me more than I need you.

Some stones scattered up ahead and I heard Bart inhale sharply. I tried to tell myself that it was a rat or a very large spider, but the footsteps sounded too heavy to be from anything other than a person.

"Gun?" I whispered to the three behind me, hopefully.

"Nope," Bart responded, crestfallen.

"Nichts," Luis and Alexander said in unison.

I nodded, although I doubt they saw. Suddenly, a beam from a flashlight came swooping in our direction. The footsteps grew louder, then we heard a cough. We were most definitely facing a person.

I plotted our space out in my head: the only way we could escape would be to turn around and go back the way we came from. But, for all we knew, we could be surrounded. The prison had probably found the hole we had left and sent officers down into the Catacombs after us. Besides, if this person had entered the Catacombs another way, they could be our key to escaping this subterranean graveyard.

It seemed like forever, but the bearer of the foreign flashlight finally appeared before us, cutting my scheming short. I cursed. "Now, darling, is that really the way to greet an old friend?" the familiar voice greeted us, his olive eyes their own beaker of light in the darkness.

I took a deep breath, "I might not have managed to kill you the first time, Jean. But, I promise, that this time, I will do the job properly."