The Ancient Catacomb

"Vulgu ab effectu atram mortem vocatibant.” — Pontanus

Verily, I shall not indulge in offering my name—nor does it matter whence I hail, in the end. The only relevant knowledge you must possess is the insidious name of the plague I here disclose, which persistently tormented me like an irrepressible villain spawned from the chasms of hell. Its name, you ask, is The Black Death—the unmerciful reaper of insurmountable souls, the countless deceased victims of its wrath. I know little more of this indomitable pandemic, except that it destroys with a macabre severity yet unmatched.

The year I shall not mention either, for what is of true significance is the tale I share with you—a tale of sheer terror and dire omen. It all began one sober and gloom-ridden day in Paris, during the Late Middle Ages, as the world I had known was drastically altered for the worse within the span of a mere sennight. No one dared imagine the portentous affliction that would consume the city like a raging fire, bringing about the sudden and inconceivable death of millions. There had ever been whispers of death’s impending breath throughout the ill-starred annals of human history.

None, however, was ever as extensive or as lethal in its impression as the implacable scourge of the Black Death. Its path of destruction was cruel and unstoppable, its wrathful vestige of horror lingering through generations who had forgotten the vile extent of its bane and ruin. Everywhere, there lingered the foul stench of utter demise and despair. The Black Death did not discriminate—between innocent peasants or lofty nobility, its victims were anonymous to its apathetic growth and the madness that ensued thereafter, without cease or pity.

I was an alchemist of some renown, lying in a cot within an infirmary, gravely ill and wasting away—afflicted, perhaps, with the very symptoms of the Black Death, which was then swiftly spreading across Europe without surcease. I experienced harrowing lapses of consciousness, gripped by the oppressive plague, languishing in my uncontrollable sufferance. Headaches plagued me, along with aching joints, nausea, vomiting and a prevailing malaise that draped itself upon my feeble form.

At last, when I awoke thereafter from my terrible, terrible nightmare—one that had consumed me with a phantasmagoric chill—I found myself lying in a stupor, temporarily purblind, within the abyss of an immense and vertical pit below the earth. Putrid corpses surrounded me, heaped without ceremony. It was a ghastly image of utter chastisement and interment, one that stirred my sentience and embrangled my very being. Several large rocks, natural inclusions within the soil, jutted into the pit at irregular intervals along the bottom edge.

At first, I was barefoot, until I discovered, half-buried in the earth, a worn pair of turnshoes. I was clad in a white, twilled serge garment, stained and marked with the damning words mortuus est. The rest of the corpses bore similar Latin inscriptions, denoting, perhaps, the divine passage of their souls into the afterworld. I alone had risen. It seemed I was the only one who had survived.

I wandered in a slow, centrifugal manner, hoping to be discovered. The familiar scent of soil pervaded my nostrils, and the whistling birr of the wind stirred profoundly above. Though I could see naught but oppressive darkness and the still bodies surrounding me, my faculties remained alert, every sense on edge, poised to preserve my tenuous grip on consciousness.

Suddenly, I acted. Rousing myself from my dormant stupor, I struggled to free my frail body from the sepulchral pit. At first, it was futile; my stiff, numbed hands allowed me only to grope feebly at the noisome corpses heaped atop me. I could feel the cruel weight of circumstance pressing down. A cold draught reached me through unseen crevices in the pit’s earthen walls, and a wave of intense fright began to suffocate me, but then—a gleam. A faint glimmer of light shone near what I assumed was a cellar wall. In desperation, I called out, beseeching the wandering souls to rid me of this inexorable terror.

Seconds became minutes, and the minutes turned into agonising hours without cease; and the impromptu thought of being alive amongst a supernumerary of cadavers instilled in me such hypochondriacal hysteria and lack of control that I could not hope to mitigate. I perceived this overwhelming dread as a premonitory apprehension, a bitter chagrin.

From the very beginning, I had pondered the confined boundaries of life, and the amorphous core of the soul within the active mind of Homo sapiens—a being clinging to the ephemeral fervour of belief and dogma. Here, in this infernal pit, the spectral breath of the dead coexisted with the breath of the living, forming a surreal paradox that gnawed at my sanity. And so I counted myself amongst those few intrepid souls who durst to pose the irresistible question drawn from inference, which is where does the concealed boundary of life meet death, as the fragile consciousness of the brain teeters upon the brink of a madness we shall never fully comprehend?

It is a surreptitious and transmundane realm, where necrologies serve no purpose but to mark, posthumously, the fleeting interval of supposed redemption. A thousand times I searched within my purview for some inducement to pursue this thought, one that has forever troubled the involute psyche of mankind—the dreadful obsession to elude death.

Each time I marvelled anew at this bewildering enigma, only to be left with a thirst unquenched. A thirst to soothe the predisposition and personal unrest that lingered in the very core of my soul. My heart began to pound more furiously with each passing minute, until I could feel its veins twisting into some merciless convolution. The rapid throbbing became intolerable.

I screamed. I screamed with the full force of my lungs—yet to no avail!

I began to see visible roaches emerging through the soil of the buried pit, and I could hear the throng of foul rats scurrying from the recesses, as they started to gnaw upon the stiffened corpses that lay above—soon to be cast into the pit as well. The intractable quandary I had found myself in was becoming ever more manifest, each moment passing in quantum fragments of sheer apprehension and vagarious choler.

Suddenly, the wind began to howl—howl with such ferocity that it deafened my ears with a renitent madness that knew no surcease. The temperature within the pit was unknowable to me, but the coldness of the air I breathed grew ever fainter, as each breath seemed to consume what little oxygen remained. I was confronted by the dire truth that I might die in this abominable place where I had mistakenly been interred from the outset.

The rash roaches crawled deeper into the engulfing pit, and the gargantuan rats reached the upper edge, sending cascades of dirt falling onto my gaunt countenance. Had I breathed my last mortal breath, as the ominous caws of ravens echoed in unison with the rising, tempestuous wind? Was I dreaming still, unable to realise that my existence was now insubstantial? Or worse—had I already perished, and simply not yet comprehended the extreme possibility that I now lingered in a state of suspended animation?

My irrational and transient thoughts quickened with each beat of my anxious heart, burdened by overwhelming solicitude and dread. For a brief moment, I closed my eyes and instantly succumbed to the perilous and intuitive conclusion that, one way or another, I would not emerge from this ghastly and injurious pit alive. So many thoughts tormented and oppressed my mind at once, engulfed as I was by a morbific fear I could not quell. The essential answers to my questions would remain beyond reach—unless I could first understand the indefinite nature of the experience I was now enduring.

The insufferable clutch of demise embraced me wholly, as my body quivered and my mind descended into madness, bereft of coherent thought—I began to verbigerate, uttering meaningless repetitions amidst the void. Within this absolute state of abnegation and hazard, more cadavers were suddenly hurled into the mysterious pit by an unknown individual, whose presence was briefly illuminated by a refulgent light.

In that moment, the incontinent roaches scampered wildly across the dirt, and the shrieks of the rats abated, as they too fled the scene in inexplicable terror. Then came a chilling silence—utter and profound. No howling wind, no rustling, no sound at all, save the frantic beating of my own desperate heart. I cried out anew, with a voice cracked by dread, yet the insouciant figure did not harken to my desperate plea.

The andromorphic man—half-seeming man, half-an effigy of cold detachment—avaunted silently, vanishing to whence he came. From below, I could see the bodies he had brought, stacked haphazardly like refuse, a ghastly pile of human wreckage exposed beneath the ashen sky. In futility, I tried once more to escape the inextricable pit—its walls too steep, its earth too unstable. My limbs had grown wearier, my body thewless with strain and starvation. Each attempt proved abortive, a cruel mockery of hope, as pain wracked my feeble form.

My rankled feet, vesicant and blistered, could barely endure the agony of motion, and the calluses that formed from endless pacing offered no solace. Still, I staggered on in desperation.

Time, once a linear thing, had begun to warp. I no longer knew whether minutes or days had passed since I had awoken in this inhospitable chasm of horror. The moment of the stranger’s visitation seemed both recent and impossibly distant. Meanwhile, the putrescent stench of decomposing corpses grew intolerable—an unrelenting miasma that clung to my every breath. My soul reeled as I searched in vain for a path of egress from this gruesome inferno, this living tomb which I now believed had become my eternal prison.

The unfolding and inscrutable madness of the cataleptic deceased was slowly infiltrating the bastion of my rational mind, disintegrating any attempt at logical inference or expressive thought. I was left to ponder—had the God of the heavens above wrought no recourse of action for me, no reprieve for my condemned existence? Manifold doubts began to cascade through my anemic, fallible mind, dissipating into a vast and unbidden fear I could no longer adaunt, no matter the effort.

The influx of corpses—those pitiful tokens of defunction—had begun to fall into the pit like boulders loosed from a forsaken declivity, striking with such unmitigated and heartless force that the air recoiled. Death, in its most calamitous and unvarnished form, stood naked before me, unashamed and unrelenting. I descried the unbounded consecution of terror that surrounded me—each moment more merciless than the last. The voices—oh, those indistinct, echoing voices—rose from the bowels of the pit, spectral and tormented, as if the dead themselves clamoured for but a moment's tarriance from the void.

This darkling place had no room for compassion. It offered no mercy. Instead, it revealed a dispiteous reality—one of cruelty and finality—that pressed upon my soul with unbearable weight. The immutable darkness, more than a mere bodement of doom, had become a cruel certitude, and in its appearance I beheld the token of my defeat. Amidst that Stygian despondency, I noticed something—an embrasure at the rear of the pit, barely perceptible but forming, slowly, as though shaped by invisible hands over the course of hours.

Still, my thoughts grew ever more debile, my cognition obfuscated by the relentless erosion of hope and the spectre of doom that had become my companion. My habitude of action, my very abidance in will, faltered. Escape, once a conceptual recourse, now appeared as a distant, near-impossible feat, enshrouded by dread and uncertainty.

Although I was never a man of rash precipitance, I now knew I must act—intelligently, deliberately and without error. The accumulated vehemence of despair had reached its peak, pressing upon me with empirical immediacy. Then, as if conjured by fate itself, the mysterious man returned, stacking corpses once more at the edge of this daunting abyss, his silhouette illuminated by the flickering, erratic light of unknown origin.

In that decisive instant, I resolved to feign death—to cast myself amidst the rigid cadavers, motionless and still, hoping he would believe I had succumbed like the rest. It was my sole option, drawn not from courage but from instinct, from the desperate tenacity of a will not yet extinguished.

My faint hope and consideration were solely bent on one vital ruse—to convince the stranger of my utter demise, that he might leave me undisturbed, and in that fleeting span, I could make my escape. The plan was perilous, but it was all I possessed. I lay amongst the festering dead, my breath shallow, peering through the narrow slit of one eye, watching as he cast body after body into the Stygian pit. When at last he departed once more into the shadows, I summoned my remaining strength and rose to my aching feet.

With dreadful resolve, I commenced to climb the horrific mound—a grotesque stairway of decayed flesh and broken bone. The dead served now as a bridge for my deliverance, as if in their death they granted me passage. In a tardigrade manner, I clawed and crept upwards, each ascent met with nausea and pain, till at last my taction discerned the edge—the rim of that abominable pit of the Black Death. My body trembled with exhaustion, yet I had made it.

Then, the echoes came—ghastly and spectral, reverberating through the hollow cavern below. They called my name. Again and again, relentless and unmistakable. Was it the pit itself that spoke, or had my senses finally fractured under the weight of so much dread? The voices grew louder, maddened with a fanatical fervor, each repetition like a spike through the tympanum of my ears. I staggered, dizzy with fatigue, yet pressed forth.

Beyond the threshold of corpses, what lay before me was a dim, cavernous mouth—a lone vault hidden in the roots of the earth, vast and tenebrous. I ventured into it, walking slowly, every footstep echoing with uneasy resonance. The recesses of the subterranean galleries seemed eternal, each turn more unfamiliar than the last. As I approached the penultimate step towards the vault, I heard a certain sound—the shuffle of feet.

The stranger had returned.

Fortune—though seldom my companion—had not wholly abandoned me. My instincts surged like an active tempest. There, near the vault’s entrance, I beheld a rusted shovel left behind. Swiftly, I sidled behind a jutting wall, heart pounding with calculated terror carrying the shovel. As he entered, unaware of my revival, I struck him from behind with all the force my trembling body could summon.

He fell—but not for long. Rising from the ground with uncanny poise, he turned to confront me, and then I saw him—if one could call it a him at all. There was no definite physiognomy to behold. No eyes. No mouth. No singular form. He wore a disguise, a semblance of a man—but behind the mask, there was nothing human. What guise this was, I could not fathom. It was a visage of void—one that no earthly brush could ever depict nor any tongue describe without madness.

His lustreless mask of iron concealed the very contours of his face, and he appeared void of any volition of his own. His garb—a long, dark gaberdine—hung heavily about his form, and his hose were dark and sombre, as though he were a shade, a harbinger of doom. Was he an ambiguous executioner, a figure set to condemn me to oblivion? Was he the grim reaper, come to claim my soul? Or was he merely the spectral guise of a tincture of death, an entity that had mistakenly buried me in the vorago of the pit I had so long endured? He spoke no words, nor did he mutter a single utterance; instead, he exuded an agelastic temperament, a stoic silence that chilled the marrow in my bones.

Despite the overwhelming awe and the sudden surge of panic that his inconspicuous form instilled in me, I did what instinct compelled me to do—I cast him into the pit, that long, yawning chasm of hell. As he fell, he made no sound—no cries, no moans—only an eerie, unbroken silence. I stood for a moment, gazing over the edge of the pit, but saw nothing of him. A brume, thick and insidious, had crept into the cavern, swirling like a living breath, and veiled the hole beneath. It was then that I knew I had to leave. I fled this dreadful and indelible abode of fear at once.

Through the alabaster shape of the mist, I glimpsed a long corridor ahead, and without hesitation, I hurried towards it. The air was damp and murky, laden with a heaviness that seemed to press against my chest. The eldritch echoes of the world beyond reverberated through the hollow walls, a cacophony of whispers and disembodied cries. I was unaware of the labyrinthine nature of the cavern I had stumbled upon, an uncharted maze beneath the earth that had swallowed me up when I thought I had escaped the pit.

Death's quarry had left its grim vestige in the charnier galleries that stretched endlessly before me. The stench of decay and rot clung to the wrought stones, a nauseating reminder of what I had left behind. The dull darkness, impenetrable and suffocating, seemed to engulf me with every step. As I moved further into the unknown, my lungs burned with the dust and grime that filled the air, each breath a labored struggle against the oppressive atmosphere. I coughed—more than before—and the weariness of my journey began to settle into my bones. The unfolding events, the terror and confusion, had set my body to quivering, as if my existential soul were being drained by the uncertainty of the dangers that lay ahead.

It was becoming increasingly apparent that something had to give—either my demise or my extrication from this unending nightmare. The need to uncover the mystery of the cavern pushed me to think rationally, but the madness that had embedded itself deep within me only grew, gnawing away at what remained of my sanity. My thoughts, like the howling wind that began anew, roared within my mind, a tempest of confusion and fear.

I drew a deep breath, preparing myself for whatever came next. As I did, I noticed the ossuaries lining the vault's walls. They were violated, wide open, their graves desecrated. Inside, the macabre remains of the deceased were visible, but the names etched upon them were foreign to me—some vaguely familiar, others entirely unknown.

I had not noticed the curvature of the walls until now. They bowed inwards ever so slightly, like the inner rib of some forgotten behemoth, ossified and buried beneath centuries of sorrow. It was not a pit, I began to realise, but a chamber—deliberately carved, its design neither natural nor entirely human.

The stone was not merely worn—it was etched. Faint symbols, barely perceptible beneath layers of sediment and time, emerged as my eyes adjusted further to the gloom. I traced one with a tentative finger: a spiral folding into itself, recursive, maddening. Its edges prickled beneath my skin, as if the stone rejected my touch.

I staggered back and noticed more of them—dozens, hundreds, arranged in uneven rows that formed no pattern I could decipher. They adorned the entire chamber like inscriptions on a tomb, but they bore no familiar names I had ever seen.

The air had grown thicker. My breath misted faintly in front of me, though no cold wind stirred. As I stepped further, something beneath my foot cracked—not bone, but wood. A splintered plank lay half-buried under detritus, brittle with age. I brushed it aside and uncovered what appeared to be the remains of a stretcher. Leather straps, rusted buckles. Medical. Functional. Recent.

Why would such a thing be here?

My mind rejected the obvious answer.

I turned, scanning the perimeter with heightened urgency. The chamber widened in one direction—a narrow corridor, almost imperceptible, like a wound in the earth. It was cloaked in shadow and utterly still, and yet I felt drawn to it—not by hope, but by compulsion. As though whatever lay beyond had already summoned me, long before I awoke in this pit.

And it was then I heard the faintest sound.

Not voices, no—movement. A quiet shift, like fabric dragged along stone. I spun round. Nothing.

Yet something had changed.

The symbols on the wall... one had glowed for a moment. Not brightly, but enough to register in the peripheral dark. I stepped closer, heart pounding, and found nothing unusual—just the same eroded spiral. My eyes must have played tricks.

But they had not.

As I looked again, it was no longer the same symbol. It had changed. No, it had moved.

I reeled backward. A laugh rose in my throat, sharp and brittle. Perhaps it was mine. Perhaps not. I could no longer tell whether I was the intruder or the discovered.

Everything I thought I knew about the pit—its finality, its confinement—was false. This was no grave. This was a mechanism. A chamber of becoming.

What it was turning me into, I dared not yet understand.

I passed one ossuary after another, each bringing me no closer to resolution, my steps heavy with indecision. That is, until I came across a fresh grave. The sight of it brought a sudden, icy chill that ran down my spine, and I found myself scrambling down the corridor that led towards the world outside of the cavern. I paused for a moment, my heart racing, my mind conflicting with the weight of what I had just witnessed.

I wandered further into the corridor, drawn forth not by intent but by the slow, grinding pull of inevitability. The tunnel narrowed as though the earth itself sought to close around me, swallowing my passage. My hand brushed against the wall for balance, and a fine powder clung to my fingertips—soft, almost silken. I brought it to my nose.

Dust.

No—not dust. Ash.

It coated the stone in a film no rain had ever touched. And beneath it, the walls had grown smoother, polished in a way that felt... deliberate. My footsteps began to echo now, bouncing back with an unnatural clarity, as though the tunnel itself had begun to mimic my movements.

And then came the incredible smell.

It was not the rot I had grown accustomed to—not the sourness of bodies in ruin—but something sweeter, cloying, like lavender left too long in a damp drawer. A scent too familiar. I halted.

I had smelled this before. Years ago.

In my workshop.

It was the scent of preservation—a tincture I used on botanical specimens. Rare, expensive. I had kept it locked away.

What was it doing here?

A low hum began to permeate the walls. Not sound exactly, but pressure. It crawled through the bones of the stone like a whisper sealed in resin. My ears began to ache.

I stumbled forward, half-hoping the corridor would end, or better yet collapse.

And then—I saw it.

A small alcove, recessed into the wall. Inside, resting upon a crude stone ledge, was an object. I knelt. My breath caught.

It was an hourglass.

A small, delicate thing—made not of glass, but of bone. The frame was constructed from thin, jointed segments—phalanges, vertebrae, perhaps even a jaw—bound together with gold wire. And within it, rather than sand, the substance flowed like ground ivory. Bone dust.

It ticked with slow finality.

And worst of all—it was daunting.

This was no trinket. This was a reminder of death. It was left there, in a fit of aesthetic reverie, a memento mori for the manifold death.

It was left in the alcove.

Buried with the others.

How had it come here?

I reached out, trembling. My fingers had scarcely grazed its surface when a sharp, crackling sensation ran up my arm.

The hourglass... was breaking.

My mouth was dry. My limbs refused coherence. And then I saw—etched into the wall behind the alcove, nearly obscured by the filth of the centuries—my name.

Carved in haste. Deep. As though with a knife.

Twice.

Once in Latin. I was presumed dead!

I staggered backwards. The corridor pulsed, the walls inhaling, exhaling. I pressed my back against the stone, but it no longer felt solid. The chamber began to breathe, its rhythm out of synchronicity with mine.

Time, it seemed, was not merely passing here.

It was looping.

Not by chance. Not by mistake.

By design.

And then, standing before the narrow postern arch that marked the way out, I was confronted with an even more gruesome and peculiar sight.

What was this image, you may ask, that had the power to unsettle even the coldest heart? It was a sight too horrifying, too intimately tied to the core of human dread—an image of a dying man. His body, contorted in agony, was covered with the unmistakable marks of the Black Death. His skin was pallid, the telltale swellings of the common marks of the shade of the pandemic of the Black Death, visible in the hollow of his throat and under his arms. He lay upon the ground, near the entrance to the cavern, as if the very earth had rejected him.

The man was a reminder of the inexorable truth—death, in all its forms, awaited every soul and here it was, more real and immediate than ever before.

It was an infallible token of the impending death that had swiftly overwhelmed the populace, claiming lives with terrifying expedience. The man gasped his last earthly breath, his body wracked with agony and depravation, before succumbing to the inevitable. I had briefly contemplated aiding him, but as I witnessed the horrific state of his condition, a deep, paralysing dread overtook me. I could not bring myself to touch him, fearing that the contagious disease, if I had not already borne it, would quickly seize me as well.

I recognised the symptoms immediately—the telltale signs of the Black Death, a disease I had come to loathe. The image of his suffering, his death so raw and violent, haunted me, yet I could not erase it from my mind. He was nothing more than a stranger to me, but in his last moments, he had become a chilling symbol of the fate that awaited so many others. My thoughts drifted to the streets of Paris, once familiar and beloved, now a wasteland of horror.

I had climbed the spiral stairway leading me to the world above, and there, before me, was a scene of unimaginable despair. The streets were filled with endless rows of malodorous corpses, their bodies in a phosphoric radiance of decay, laid bare by the sheer pestilence of the Black Death.

The victims’ fingers were swollen with acral gangrene, turning an inky black. Their eyes, vacant and covered with a thanatoid whiteness, were consumed by maggots. Swollen lymph glands marred their necks, tumors formed grotesque shapes and deadly gavocciolos—pus-filled growths—spread in every direction. The unmistakable marks of the disease, the Black Death, were all around me.

The deafening madness of the scene began to encroach rapidly, as though a lurid shadow was creeping closer, born from the very darkness that had overtaken the world. I heard the shrieking caws of an unkindness of ravens, their beaks tearing flesh from the decaying corpses scattered about. The heavy moaning and querking of the dead reverberated, echoing beyond the desolate streets and the looming belfries. The foul stench of the Black Death clung to the air, suffocating the very life from the cobblestones, now littered with the bodies of those lost to the plague.

I ran and ran, the relentless madness trailing me into the Parisian streets. Chaos erupted around me, plain to see as I stood frozen for a moment, unable to grasp the scene. The vast medieval city had lost all semblance of order or refuge.

Bats and rats, emboldened by the upheaval, swarmed the streets from their hidden crevices like greedy, recalcitrant scavengers. Blood poured from the fallen, spilling into the gutters and the Seine River, which had overflowed, flooding the homes and towering structures of Paris.

The Black Death spared neither the rich nor the poor, the strong nor the frail. The grim visage of delirium and death was evident everywhere. The pestilence reeked with an overpowering stench of decay, a pungent odour that filled the air and became almost unbearable. The horrific images I couldn’t escape had left me shaken, filled with a dreadful premonition of the finality awaiting me in my wanderings.

It was a finality that had come swiftly, offering no mercy. I approached a solid wall that seemed to mark the edge of this accursed dead-end, desperate for shelter. Upon it, a vivid inscription was plainly visible, written in Latin: "Hic est terminus in quo conveniant atque vitae" (This is the boundary, where death and life meet.) The inescapable madness and terror of the Black Death I had witnessed began to close in further, a lurid shadow creeping in from the darkness behind.

The madness—the relentless madness that had been mentioned earlier—began with a dreadful nightmare, accompanied by a chilling sweat, as I drew my last, shuddering spectral breath. An odd figure seemed to be standing behind me, wearing a long gabardine and an iron mask, much like the stranger in the pit. Was he my destined executioner?

He proceeded to ask me a question: 'Qui êtes-vous, monsieur?' (Who are you, sir?)

I then responded, 'Je suis un alchimiste!' (I am an alchemist!)

'La peste noire est ici, et vous êtes condamnés à mort!'(The Black Death is here, and you are condemned to death!) he replied.

'Je suis vivant, mais j'ai été enterré par erreur dans une fosse funéraire avec les cadavres de la peste noire. Tu ne peux pas me voir? Je suis vivant!' I exclaimed. (I am alive, but was mistakenly buried in a burial pit with the corpses of the Black Death. Can't you see me? I am alive!)

'Vous serez mort, monsieur! Vous ne pouvez pas échapper au cours de votre destin'. (You will be dead, sir! You cannot escape the course of your fate.)

I could not forget the intimidating mask that covered his concealed countenance, nor the haunting words he spoke with such boldness. The implication that I was condemned to death induced a profound panic within me. I felt a sudden loss of energy and fortitude, as the dominance of the Black Death manifested over the frail constitution of my weakening vitality.

There, in the impenetrable cul-de-sac of the noxious brimstone of the accursed in Paris, my voice faded into the menace of the horrific plague and the shrieking caws of the unkindness of ravens. I harked for the imminent shadow of darkness that had enclosed the lengthy day, with the tainted gloom that enveloped the night, in the Cimmerian shade of an overpowering death of emptiness. The capricious streets, once alive with the mirth and boutade of vivacious revelers, were now silenced by the Mephistophelian havoc and the callous progression of the Black Death.

The labyrinth of cobbled streets, their corners corrupted by the rot of the pestilence, had given way to something worse, something far deeper. I wandered in the bowels of that forsaken city, feet dragging through the stagnant air. No longer could I taste the air of freedom—only the fetid stench of disease and the palpable weight of some unseen force that sought to crush the remnants of my soul.

And then, without warning, the ground beneath my feet had shifted, and I found myself plunging into the depths of that accursed inferno. The walls of the streets were not just built of stone; they were etched with the suffering of untold souls, their pain still lingering in the silence. There was no escape from their voices, which I could no longer distinguish from my own thoughts. The dampness in the air seemed to seep into my bones, as though the walls were not simply sheltering me—they were consuming me, like the rotting flesh of the diseased.

I tried to scream, but the sound was stolen from me by the oppressive silence. It was as though I had been swallowed by this place, this tomb, this forgotten world of shadows. My mind, once sharp and full of light, now teetered on the brink of delirium. The sickly pale light that barely filtered through the cracks of the walls felt like the last cruel joke of fate—a reminder of my hopeless state. It was the light of my condemnation, a mockery of freedom, too weak to illuminate anything but the bleak reality of my pending doom.

There was no comfort in the darkness now. Only the hollow echo of my own breath—laborious, shallow—filling the stagnant air. The walls seemed to close in with each exhalation, constricting, suffocating. And then, the spots began to appear. Small, sickly blotches that crawled over my skin like the dark hands of death itself. It was the Plague. I had long known it was coming. But to see it on my own flesh… it was the final mark, the final seal of my damnation.

I was no longer merely a prisoner of the Black Death. I was becoming one with it, melding with its horrors—lost in its twisted reality. The inevitable march of death, once a distant fear, was now an intimate, crawling presence.

I could feel it moving within me, whispering its promises of release from the pain. But I knew better than to listen. Death was no escape from this place, for this misery, this catacomb of souls, would claim me long before I could ever die. It was not the end I feared, but the endless descent into that suffocating void, where time no longer existed, and neither did I.

The old stones seemed to mock me, their surfaces smooth as if polished by the years of despair that soaked into them. They offered no respite. No mercy. Only the unyielding weight of eternal entrapment.

Thereafter, I found myself in a lonely, dull dungeon that had no recesses, save for the dark recesses of my silent soul, doomed. The faint gleam of light shone through the oubliette, a lingering token of a cruel vestige of my sempiternal condemnation. There was no doubt then that I had been contaminated with the Black Death, as the familiar spots of the plague appeared on my body, and I was left to die in that wretched place of desolation.

The deleterious disease began to destroy me from within even more, as I struggled constantly to retain my sanity and my bodily functions, which were gradually dissipating with every passing minute. The miserable nausea grew stronger, and the thirst was unquenchable. The pestiferous rats gnawed at my garments as they gathered for the feast of human decay.

The shouting voices, which had increased tenfold with the dying in the maze of horror to which I listened, were deafening and unrelenting. The interminable madness seen in the Parisian streets, alongside the tragic vestige of deceased corpses, had overtaken the placid nature of the medieval city of Europe. The unpropitious pestilence of the Black Death, hidden in the underground cavern, had been concealed by the ancient catacombs, which stood as the avatar and seal of my irredeemable and irreversible demise.

For four hundred years, the myriad of bones and skulls of the pit had accumulated. The dungeon and catacombs of Paris had remained silent and forgotten, untouched by time, until the adamantine walls of the pit were finally breached by the soldiers of the French Revolution.

‘Mortuis habitat in pace!’ — In peace dwell the dead!

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