by Jeremy Bates
“She says shit about me all the time,” Rob said, “but it’s just for show. She loves me.”
“I do not!” Danièle said.
“A little bit.”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Bullshit, Danny. If I wanted a sister sandwich, you’d be all over it like a fat kid on a McMuffin.”
“MacGuffin,” she said, and produced one of the joints she had rolled back at the Bunker. She sparked it, then passed it to me.
I was about to decline, but decided what the hell. We deserved a small celebration. “So where’s the other exit Pascal knows about?” I asked, inhaling. The smoke burned the lining of my throat, tickled my lungs. I held it there, then exhaled.
Danièle said, “It is back past that crack in the floor.”
“Past it? You mean we don’t have to crawl over the bones again?”
“No.”
“Thank God. You know how many bones we broke? Rob, you were like a bull in a china shop. You must have smashed five or six skulls.”
“And you didn’t?”
“Skulls? No, none. I avoided touching them.”
“Hey,” Danièle said, a bit spacey. “Beef comes from a cow, right? And a bull is a male cow, right? So is it not funny that I call Rob ‘Rosbif,’ and you call him a bull?”
Rob shook his head. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, Danny, but you’re just not funny. You try too hard.”
“I am too,” she protested, waving at the smoke in front of her face.
“Nope, you’re not. When God was giving out shit, you got the looks, and you got a pretty good brain, but I think you forgot to pick up your sense of humor on the way down to Earth.”
“Maybe you do not think so, but other people do. Will, am I funny?”
“Of course he’s going to say you are. You two are shagging.”
I glanced down the passageway, to check that Pascal wasn’t within earshot. The corridor was empty.
“Anyway, Danny,” Rob went on, “regarding your sense of humor problem—”
“I do not have a problem.”
“How about this: whenever you tell a joke, just say ‘joke’ afterward, so we know it’s a joke.”
“You are a smart guy—joke.”
Pin-dropping silence.
Then Rob exploded in laughter, cackling so hard I thought he might choke. It was contagious and I got going too until my eyes started to water.
“See,” Danièle said proudly. “I am funny.”
Chapter 33
PASCAL
Pascal could hear them laughing. Having one big party. Without him.
Mumbling a curse, he took the roll of toilet paper from his backpack and wiped his ass. He stood, pulled his boxer briefs and pants up, then his waders. He turned and kicked dirt over the small latrine he had dug with the forked end of his hammer. Some cataphiles were not so considerate. They came to the catacombs only to drink and smoke and party, and they left the place a mess. They were slobs—the Painted Devil had been right about that much at least—and they were getting worse year by year. Some of the old-timers Pascal had met, veterans who’d been visiting the catacombs for decades, told him it was a different world pre-nineties. Back then, they said, it was a closer-knit community. They would still have parties, but they weren’t the trashy type that Danièle liked. Mostly they would cook, they would bring cooking pots and food, and they would have cooking contests.
Then the internet came along and changed everything, made it so much easier to find a guide, someone with a map. Now you had the idiots who took pictures and posted them all over social media and left their garbage behind and shit everywhere—all of which cheapened the experience, killed the feeling that you were exploring a forbidden place.
Really, in the main network beneath the 14th arrondissement, there was nothing sacred anymore. If you wanted a real adventure, you had to press farther, deeper, go where no one had been before.
Pascal stomped the ground flat and was about to return to the others when he heard a noise. Some sort of cluck. It wasn’t very loud, but when you were used to hearing nothing, you heard everything.
It came from the far end of the room.
“Rob?” he said. His headlamp revealed nothing but support pillars and, beyond them, shadowed walls.
Rob didn’t answer.
Pascal thought of the video footage, heard in his head the woman’s manic screams.
“Rob?” he repeated.
Nothing.
He was still holding the hammer, which gave him some confidence. He unclipped the MagLite from his belt with his free hand and swept the powerful beam across the room.
Nobody.
He started forward, slowly, peaking around each pillar he passed.
At the far end of the room a door led to a connecting chamber.
He hesitated, considered turning back.
Another cluck. Almost like the sound you make when you click your tongue against the roof of your mouth.
Pascal froze. Everything inside him froze.
Who was making that sound?
What was?
Get out of there! Go! Now!
He whirled to leave.
And screamed.
Chapter 34
Once I got my giggling fit under control, Danièle offered me the spliff. I shook my head. I was already higher than I wanted to be. Rob finished it off while I lit another smoke. I was chain smoking and didn’t care.
“Cool how Rascal knew what that frommager died from based on his bones,” Rob said. He was lying on his side in that recumbent position he favored. His eyes were heavily lidded, and his usual in-your-face energy had been replaced with lazy meditation. “Weak way to go, no doubt, but better than the fate of some of the other sad fucks in that grave, I guess.”
“Have you ever wondered what the worst way to die is?” Danièle said. She was slumped against the wall so low her knees poked up in front of her face.
“Getting lost in an underground maze,” I kidded.
“No, getting torn in half,” Danièle said. “They used to do that, you know. You bend two young trees close together, tie a hand and a foot to each one, then release the trees.”
Rob said, “Have either of you two ever seen anyone die?”
Danièle shook her head. “But I have seen a body. I was very young. My sister and I—”
“Dev was with you?” Rob said, surprised.
“Yes. Devan is Rob’s wife, Will.”
I opened my mouth, to tell her I’d gathered as much, but articulation seemed too difficult right then. I nodded.
Danièle continued: “We were playing in this construction site in our neighborhood. The developer had dug holes for the basements of two dozen houses. Sometimes there were long pieces of wood descending into the pits, so the workers could climb in and out. Dev and I were looking for puddles to splash in because it had just rained, and we found a boy lying facedown in one of the excavated basements. He lived three blocks away from us. I had seen him at school, but I did not know him personally. He hit his head on a cinder block, but that is not how he died. He died from drowning in two inches of rainwater.”
Rob frowned. “Dev never told me this.”
“We were so young. Maybe she forgot.”
I shifted uncomfortably, thinking of a different topic to move onto, when Rob said, “There was this guy in my high school, he was a year or two older, his name was Claude Linder. He was a rich kid, his parents had their own twin propeller plane, which he was learning to fly. One day I was at the field where I played soccer twice a week. We were in the middle of the match when this plane comes swooping over us, smoking and too low and shit. It turned out Claude had hit some geese and they fucked up the engine. The refs stopped the game, and the coaches and parents called everyone to the sidelines. The plane banked, then came back. Claude touched it down safely, used the field as a fucking runway, but the field wasn’t long enough, and he smashed through the chain-link fence at the far en
d.”
“But he was okay?” Danièle said.
“No, Danny, the guy died. Why do you think I’m telling this? When he went through the fence, the propeller knocked one of the metal fence posts back through the windshield. It impaled Claude right here.” Rob tapped his chest above the heart. “When the first of the soccer moms and dads got there to help, he was still alive, but pinned to the seat. He died before the cops and firefighters could cut him free.”
“That is awful,” Danièle said, and squirmed. “He was just stuck there?”
“Saw him up close and personal. Wish I hadn’t. I had nightmares for months after that.” Then, to me: “What about you, boss?”
“What about me?”
“You gotta know somebody who’s croaked.”
I shook my head, wondering if he could tell I was lying—
A scream erupted from farther down the tunnel.
We started, then leapt to our feet. My head spun from the pot.
“That was Pascal!” Danièle exclaimed.
“Fucker’s just horsing around,” Rob said.
“I do not think so.” She cupped her mouth with her hands and called Pascal’s name. When he didn’t reply, she called it again, and again.
I didn’t like this one bit.
“Rascal!” Rob shouted, angry. “Stop screwing around!”
Silence.
“Come on,” Danièle said to us, then started in the direction the scream had come from.
She and Rob continued to call Pascal’s name, while I tried to clear the fog from my thoughts and figure out what the hell was going on. Had Pascal tripped and cracked his head open, like that kid Danny told us about? Was he lying facedown in a puddle of water, dead? Had he fallen down a well?
No—that scream had not been one of pain; it had been fear, fear and surprise, as if all six million catacomb dead had risen from their graves before his eyes.
So was Rob right then? Was this all a joke? Was Pascal hiding somewhere, readying himself to jump out from the dark and yell, “Gotcha!?”
Twenty meters onward a room opened to the right. We stuck our heads inside, glanced around. It was large and filled with a number of support pillars.
A lot of places to hide.
“Rascal!” Rob shouted. “Seriously, bro! This ain’t cool!”
“He never plays these games,” Danièle said, her concern reflected clearly in her face.
“Are you guys having me on?” I said. “Because I’m pretty fucked right now, and it’s not funny—”
“We’re not fucking with you,” Rob said, stone-faced. “Rascal’s fucking with us. There!” He pointed to the corner. “See the dirt?”
We went closer to examine it. There was a faint odor in the air.
“Knew it!” Rob said, and he half chuckled. “Rascal! Get your ass out here! We know you’re here! We can smell your shit!”
No answer.
“Is that a door?” I said, nodding across the room.
“Yes, you are right,” Danièle said. “He must be through there.”
We approached quietly, apprehensively. I don’t know why we bothered with the stealth, but it felt like the right way to proceed.
This new chamber, it turned out, was smaller than the last one. There were no pillars to hide behind, and we could see it was empty.
“Where the fuck is he?” Rob said, frowning.
“Wait—what is that?” Danièle pointed to a dark shadow in the lower portion of one wall.
We went closer and discovered a cat hole.
The three of us crouched before the crevice, peered inside. It was a couple feet high and appeared manmade, perhaps carved with a pickaxe or some other crude tool. It stretched away into blackness.
“Rascal?” Rob called, though not as loudly or confidently as before. “We’re not coming in after you.”
No answer.
“Oh God,” Danièle whispered suddenly, grabbing my wrist so tightly I winced. “Look! There! Look!”
I looked. I had been so focused on the hole I hadn’t paid attention to the rock surrounding it.
“Is that…?” I started.
“Blood,” Rob finished.
“Maybe he tripped and hit his head and got disorientated?” I said.
“And crawled into a fucking hole?” Rob said skeptically.
“Then what happened to him?” Danièle demanded.
I bent close to examine the blood. “It’s fresh, and it looks like a handprint.” I turned, scanning the ground. “There—there’s more blood. And there.” We followed a string of small black splotches back to the entrance to the room.
“He must have hit his head here—”
“He didn’t hit his fucking head, Danny!” Rob said. “Someone surprised him, knocked him out cold, and dragged him off.”
“Zolan,” she hissed. “It has to be. He followed us down here.”
“There was no woman, no body,” I reminded her. “Why would he follow us? Why would he attack Pascal?”
“Because he is crazy.”
“What about the Painted Devil? He was pissed we scared him off. He lost face. This could be his revenge.”’
“But how did he get past us?” Rob said. “Whoever attacked Pascal was ahead of us.”
“Zolan knew we were going to the spot where the video camera was,” Danièle said. “Maybe he knew a different way to get here.”
“And arrived here ahead of us and waited?”
“Maybe…”
“Whatever,” I said, frustrated. “Guessing’s not helping any. We have to do something.”
Rob nodded. “We gotta go get Rascal—now. He’s injured.”
I looked at the cat hole. “You want to go in there?”
“We have to. We can’t just leave.”
“Yes,” Danièle said, swallowing. “We have to go after him.”
“What if it’s a trap?” I said.
“We don’t have a fucking choice!” Rob said.
He was right, I knew. We couldn’t abandon Pascal. Nor could we stand here discussing our options. His condition could be critical.
We returned to the wall. Rob dropped to his knees and peered inside the hole. It was large enough to enter with his backpack on. He glanced up at us, as if for confirmation that we were really doing this, then crawled inside and disappeared.
Chapter 35
ROB
This was insane, Rob thought as he snaked forward deeper into the tunnel. Total fucking insanity. Had someone really attacked Pascal?
He still wanted to believe it was all some elaborate joke, but Pascal wasn’t the practical joker type.
So who had gotten him?
What had gotten him?
Rob almost laughed at that, but didn’t, because scientists were discovering new species all the time. Just last week he read about this team of zoologists and filmmakers that descended into a never-before-explored caldera in Papa New Guinea and documented all this nature-gone-wrong kind of shit, like frogs with fangs and kangaroos that lived in trees and woolly rats that grew as large as dogs.
So what if something even more crazy—something with lobster-claw horns, or a tail that could shoot spikes, or three heads and translucent skin—lived down here? What if—
Rob stopped and sniffed. God, what was that smell? It had come from nowhere.
“Ugh,” Danièle muttered a moment later. “What is that?”
“Don’t know,” Rob said, peering ahead. The shaft continued straight for another ten feet before turning sharply to the left. “It’s coming from ahead though—”
The sentence died on his lips. A steel fist squeezed the air from his lungs.
“Back up, Danny,” he managed in little more than a breathless croak. “Back up right now.”
Chapter 36
Fear ballooned inside me when Rob began speaking in the soft, scared-stiff way of someone who’d just realized they were standing in the middle of a viper pit.
“What is it?” Danièle dema
nded. “What can you see?”
“Back…the fuck…up.” Then Rob’s voice rose several octaves. “Oh no… Oh shit oh shit—go back!”
Danièle started kicking me in the face as she attempted to reverse directions.
“What is it?” I shouted. “What’s happening?”
“Go, Will!” she shrieked. “Go!”
Rob began yelling now. Low grunts tinged with higher notes of hysteria. Then he screamed—in pain.
Danièle landed a heavy heel against my nose. Stars exploded across my vision. I tasted dirt and coppery blood.
“Will, go!” she wailed.
I elbowed my way backward, battling a frenzied terror.
What the fuck was happening—?
Something cold gripped my ankle. I tried to snap my head around to see what it was, but the shaft was too restrictive to do even that. A second something latched onto my other ankle.
Hands.
They tugged. I kicked wildly, freeing myself.
“Someone’s behind me!” I shouted. “Go forward!”
“It got Rob!” Danièle screeched feverishly. “He is gone! It took him! It just took him!”
I still couldn’t see past her, but I didn’t doubt that someone had indeed taken Rob; he was no longer yelling. Even so, forward was better than backward for me. I placed my hands squarely on Danièle’s rear and shoved.
“Go!”
With a soulful moan she lurched forward—just as the pair of hands grabbed my ankles again. Sharp nails—claws?—dug into my flesh.
I kicked and twisted and freed myself again and was right behind Danièle, urging her to move faster in a voice I scarcely recognized as my own, tearing the skin from my elbows in my manic flight.
Danièle jackknifed around a corner and put distance between us. I kept waiting for those terrible hands to clamp onto me once more, to drag me backward into the dark, but they never did.
Then, from a little ways ahead, Danièle cried out—and vanished.
I shot out of the shaft a few seconds after her, momentarily airborne, dropping several feet to the hard ground. I sprang to my feet and whirled toward the hole, peering inside. Nothing.