Gadget, 35, whose real name is Bertrand Jannes, is a professional lock-pick, not criminally employed but a legitimate and well-known expert in safecracking. "Having the right key to the right door is everything down here," Gadget tells me. Indeed, the cataphiles literally dream of keys, golden keys that open all doors, and they are constantly committing petty thefts to acquire more of them. They'll hit post offices, construction sites, utility substations, Metro stations, churches. "Go to a psychologist, he'll say, 'Oo la la, you need sex,'" a cataphile named Olrik le Gangster once told me. "No. We just need more keys."

Typically, Peint, Olrik and Gadget might break into the offices of the inspector general of the quarries, the city agency that oversees safety in the catacombs. Or they'll snatch locks off doors, make a mold and replace the lock without anyone knowing. Once they tricked a subway worker, alone at the 1 a.m. closing of the Metro, into believing they were police and lending them his passkey. They thanked him, exited the station and locked the wretch inside. They have keys to some of Paris' greatest monuments -- Notre Dame, l'Opera, le Pantheon -- and passkeys, courtesy of the post office, that open up almost every apartment building across the city.

Which makes for some outré sightseeing: On the first day I went adventuring with the Lizard, we descended into the closed crypt of St. Sulpice cathedral early on a summer night; the Christian Lacroix and Saint Laurent shops were just closing across the street. We entered a wooden double-door into a marble anteroom, and then another door, the air cooling, and then down stairwells and through door after door, and suddenly, magically, a chant arose and around us were shadows of men, shadows on crutches trembling and shadows in pews, bobbing like bouys, and there was a soft distant sound of female sobbing and a woman with her face in her hands. I glimpsed a priest at an altar, hymning, bearded to his chest, but oddly no one remarked us; we passed like ghosts, to an iron grill, Peint flourished a key, and beyond were the chambers where the bones of the saints were rotting yellow.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Gadget and Christophe and I came to yet another rabbit hole, this one 7 feet long, which meant that midway along you were effectively entombed. Gadget was last to come out the other side. You enter with arms extended forward, shoulders squeezed -- and you keep them squeezed, otherwise you will jam up in the passage. Again, there's the undulating and squirming and squiggling and someone has pissed in the hole just to be cruel and the urined soil is an inch from your nose. Now Gadget is emerging covered in filth, the floor drops 3 feet beneath him so his hands are momentarily flapping about like worms and his head hangs over empty space. He makes me think of something being born from an anus. He looks at me, pauses, his head hanging from the hole. "You see, Christopher, you see why this catacomb thing tires me? Ah, but no. Not true. The earth is my mother." He pats the wet stone and drops out like a turd.

But that got me thinking. The average Parisian assigns to the cataphile empire every possible terror and perversion: stories, say, of sex orgies in piled bones or black-massing witches percolate to the surface in isolated bubbles, pop along the airwaves and quickly become hard stone reality. If you believe the fat jolly boulanger, the flower store maman or the fey brunet in the scarf shop, the caves are inhabited by the devil as well.

The media loves these nefarious images, repeats them ad nauseam in the umpteen sensationalist catacomb "exposés" that have aired on French television over the years. "Eighty-five percent of cataphiles have sexual problems," one cataphile told a major network interviewer -- cut to a "dramatic reenactment" of 10 guys fondling a girl with femurs. The punch line, however, gets nixed. "Yes, eighty-five percent!" the cataphile laughed. "That's fifteen percent less than people who don't do the catacombs."

So here's the petite brunet selling silk scarves in a posh shop on the Right Bank, lovely in her red sweater, ignorant that she herself may have "sexual problems" too: "Bring a knife with you. I've heard, well, I've heard that you can get lost and never be found. Ever. A knife and some mace and good luck. I don't know why people go down there."

Why do a hundred thousand tourists line up every year at the Musee des Catacombes? Why do hundreds of thousands more flock to see Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the stalagmites of Carlsbad Caverns? Caves are homey. This is where man first made his hearth out of the rain.

Or maybe that's pretentious crap. Maybe this delicate Parisienne's fear and trembling consisted of nothing more than that vital difference between girls and boys when it comes to how to approach basements. Because boys everywhere -- and, let's face it, the cataphiles are simply overgrown boys with a very big playground -- adore basements. Girls couldn't care less. The basement is entrance to dungeons and secret doors and hidden byways where Strange Things creep. These Things, if we keep our imaginings lively into young adulthood, can also be found in abandoned buildings, junkyards, empty wharves, rusted factories, those waste places where you trespass on the unknown and get happily dirty doing it, where you'll always find boys bashing out windows, playing hide-and-seek, transforming into heroes and villains of fantasy with the added frisson of the very real possibility that they will get lost, fall down some pit or into a silo, and never be found.

Distantly, we can recall monster myths from the Paris catacombs, like that of the Green Man who stalks and eats vagrants, or that of the Little Devil of the Quarries, who has bleeding eyes and wild hair and like a mole undermines the foundations of buildings, toppling the inhabitants into the earth. I like to think of the Painted Lizard as a modern-day Little Devil -- or an inventor, in his Nazi outfits and psycho-terrorism, of many Little Devils and Green Men thronging the unconscious of the city.

But the cataphiles roll their eyes at this; they don't ponder much on the esoteric meaning of their travels -- if indeed there is any. "The old myth of the cave is that it's a woman's vagina," Olrik le Gangster told me with a yawn. "Frankly, that's --[here he gave a vigorous pumping motion over his crotch]. Look, I go down not to get inside my mom's belly. I go for amusement, to discover my city."

Or as another cataphile put it: "The quarries are testaments of the past that ruthlessly addict us to their strange underground beauty."

So we trek on and on: two dozen winding passages, water spilling over into our boots, feet getting soaked, we've walked at least 15 miles, maybe more. Ahead, I am told, is another hole, one that will take us back to the telecom tunnels and out into night and air, and I'm hungry for it. I'm sick of the catacombs, the growing claustrophobia, the humidity. I want out.

But when I haul up the rear, Christophe and Gadget are tugging at what looks like a thick iron sheet placed over the hole from the other side. Someone has interred us.

"He would do this," Christophe mutters, nodding fatefully. "He would."

"Who?" I ask.

Gadget turns to me, no longer laughing. "Who do you think!!? The bastard himself. Lezard! The bastard!"

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