The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel)

by Jeremy Bates

  He was ogling Danièle in a way I didn’t like. He sensed my eyes on him, turned toward me, and said something.

  When I didn’t reply, he scoffed and reached for my helmet.

  I batted his hand away. “Fuck off.”

  Surprise flashed on his face. Then a toothy, Neanderthal smile.

  Pascal and the old guy stopped talking. Everyone’s attention turned to Dreadlocks and me.

  “You American, huh?” he said, stepping toward me. His size made it feel as though he was crowding my personal space. “You go catacombs?”

  Either he was as dumb as he looked, or that was a rhetorical question. I waited for him to continue.

  “You take many photographs, huh?”

  “I don’t have a camera.”

  “You going to paint your name? Paint a pretty picture?”

  “Why would I paint a picture?”

  “That’s what you touristes do. You come here, you paint pictures.”

  “Not today.”

  He licked his lips. He had either exhausted his English, or he was thinking of something else to say. He nodded at Danièle. “She your girlfriend, huh?”

  “Why do you care?”

  He sneered at her. “You touriste too?”

  She fired off a string of French. He chuckled, though not in a friendly manner, and replied. Their back and forth devolved into a heated argument.

  For a moment I was absurdly proud of Danièle for standing her ground.

  Pascal was keeping his distance. Rob was grinning amusedly, maybe even manically. His hands were balled into tight fists. I had the feeling he was about to throw himself at the big guy.

  I stepped between him and Dreadlocks and said to Danièle, “Let’s go.”

  Dreadlocks gripped my shoulder and spun me around. I stepped on one of his boots and shoved him in the chest, removing my foot so I didn’t break his ankle as he dropped, arms pin-wheeling, to the ground.

  Sitting on his ass, he appeared momentarily dazed. Then his eyes stormed over. Roaring, he lunged at me, thrusting his meaty hands in my face. Everyone in both parties got into it, yelling and pulling us apart.

  Danièle tugged me free. I was panting, not yet done. Dreadlocks continued to hurl curses, towering above his two buddies, who were doing their best to hold him back. Blood smeared his hammered forehead.

  “Will, enough!” Danièle said. “Stop it!”

  It took most of my self-restraint, but I reluctantly turned my back to the fight. I snatched my helmet, which had fallen off my head, and drew the heel of my hand across my lips, which were numb from a blow the fucker had landed.

  Pascal was already walking away into the tunnel.

  Both Danièle and Rob placed a hand on my back, urging me to follow.

  I went.

  Darkness folded around us like great black wings. Ahead Pascal turned on his headlamp. Rob and Danièle and I did the same.

  “What a fucking knob jockey,” Rob said as Dreadlocks’ taunts faded behind us. “Him and his asshat friends too.”

  Danièle looked at me. “Why did you speak English?” she demanded. “We told you not to say anything.”

  “He tried to grab my helmet,” I said. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “You should have ignored him.”

  “What was he saying to you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Talking smack,” Rob offered helpfully.

  “Yes,” Danièle said, “but Will did not have to push him.”

  “He grabbed me,” I reminded her.

  “You cannot do that anymore,” she said, and in the bright LED lights of our helmets I saw she wasn’t angry, only concerned. “If something happens when we are deep underground…”

  She didn’t have to finish. I understood.

  “They had scuba gear,” I said, wanting to change topics. “What was that about?”

  “There are some spots, some shafts, in the catacombs that have filled completely with water. They likely want to see whether they lead anywhere.”

  We walked on, our headlamps shooting zigzags of light around the cavernous arch. Gusty trails of graffiti covered the walls, curving onto the bricks overhead. The ground was chunked with rocks that glowed pale gray, the color of Paris, the buildings.

  A few minutes later Pascal called a halt. He swung his Maglite to the left. Where the graffiti-covered wall met the earth was a hole—or, more accurately, a chiseled craggy break in the rock, no more than two feet wide. Spreading away from it was what I assumed to be cataphile refuse: empty beer cans, juice cartons, candy wrappers, white paste from carbine lanterns. A junked foam chair sat off on its lonesome. I wrinkled my nose; the stench of urine was strong.

  “This is the entrance?” I said. I had been thinking it would have been more clandestine. This screamed: “Come on in, we’re open!”

  Danièle nodded. “Some cataphiles, they are such slobs.”

  “Don’t the police—the catacops—know about this?”

  “Of course. This is the main entrance nowadays.”

  Rob said, “So why don’t they seal the thing up?”

  “They have before,” she continued, “but cataphiles open it again. Also, it is not an easy situation for them. They are scared they may trap inexperienced cataphiles inside. But, you know, I think it would be a good thing if they somehow closed it for good. Because then the people who make the trouble, the vandals and drug-users and tibia-collectors, they will get bored and find other things to do.”

  “Yeah,” Rob said in an uh-duh way, “but wouldn’t that screw you too?”

  “Me?” Danièle seemed insulted. “I am not an amateur. Pascal and I know ten other entrances.”

  The ever-silent Pascal got to his knees and ventured first into the hole.

  “He doesn’t say much, does he?” I remarked when he was no longer in sight.

  “His English is not so good,” Danièle said.

  “Fuck me,” Rob said, peering into the fissure. “I can’t see shit.”

  “It is okay, Rosbif,” Danièle told him. “You are so small, you will have no problem fitting in there.”

  “Bite me,” he said, then lowered himself into the opening. When only his legs were visible, poking out of the rock mouth like a half-eaten meal, he let rip a fart. His laughter floated back as he crawled forward.

  “Ugh,” Danièle said, waving her hand back and forth in front of her nose even though the smell had yet to reach us and couldn’t be much worse than the stink of urine. “I really hate that guy, you know?”

  “After you,” I said.

  “No, you must go next so I can push you in case you get stuck.”

  I stared at her. “In case I get stuck?”

  She smiled. “You will be fine. Now go. Just watch your hands for glass.”

  I waded through the rubbish and stood in front of the main entrance to the catacombs, which was little more than a crack. Cool air sighed out of it.

  Setting aside my reservations, I slipped off my backpack, pushed it into the shaft ahead of me, and followed it into the blackness.

  Chapter 8

  EXTRACT FROM THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, JULY 29, 2011

  Three British Men Feared Lost in Paris Catacombs

  Paris police headquarters have reported that three Britishnationals went missing in the Paris catacombs late Monday while exploring with friends.

  When they didn’t return to the surface, their friends alerted police, who have spent several days searching for the missing men without success.

  Gaspard Philipe, of the police unit that monitors the ancient quarry tunnels, said on RTL radio Friday that anyone considering entering the tunnels should understand the dangers.

  “It is not only off limits to the public, it is dangerous. You can get lost. There are cave-ins. You don’t know who you might run into. If you want to see the catacombs, there is a section open to the public as a museum for a very reasonable admission fee.”

  The network of tunnels beneath th
e capital is said to extend more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) and reach depths of 30 meters (100 feet), too deep for phone coverage. Some passageways are large enough that ten men can walk abreast and not touch the sides, while others are so small that those who enter them must squirm forward on their bellies.

  Chapter 9

  It was a tight fit, and Christ if I didn’t have to squeeze my shoulders together so I could progress forward. I flashed on those scenes in movies in which you see someone struggling through a ventilation conduit, only here the passage was unpredictable and dirty and potentially deadly.

  Then it twisted and angled downward. At first I was able to control my descent. But the pitch dropped suddenly and steeply, and I found myself skidding on my stomach, the way kids hydroplane on a Slip ’n Slide. I must have gone fifteen or twenty feet before friction slowed me. Ahead I saw light other than mine. I dragged myself out of the small opening, my ribs aching, spitting dust from my mouth.

  Rob pulled me to my feet. “Thanks,” I told him, looking around. The inky-black tunnel was maybe four feet wide and equally high. Rob stood stooped over. I had to pretty much squat. The passage had collapsed to the left of us, leaving a jumble of large boulders and smaller rocks, so there was only one direction in which to go. The air smelled of mold and dampness, making me think of waterparks. It was cooler than it had been outside, maybe fifty-five or sixty degrees.

  “Rascal went on ahead,” Rob told me.

  “Rascal?” I said distractedly, brushing chalky beige dirt from my clothes.

  “That’s what I’ve always called him. I never heard of that Chess shit before tonight.”

  Danièle’s LED light winked from inside the hole, drawing our attention. A moment later she slipped out more gracefully than I had. I helped her into a crouch. She smiled. “Fun, yes?”

  “A hoot,” I said.

  “Good. But I am serious when I say we must all stay close. You must not stray. This place, it is not like a labyrinth. It is a labyrinth.”

  “Have you told Pascal that?”

  “He will be ahead in the rest room. We should join him.”

  “In the restroom?” I said.

  “What is wrong?”

  “Maybe he wants his privacy.”

  “Do not be silly.”

  She duck-walked ahead. Rob and I exchanged glances and followed.

  We found Pascal fifty feet onward. I had misinterpreted Danièle. He wasn’t in a restroom with a toilet and plumbing—of course he wasn’t, I thought; not here, not twenty feet underground—but a room with carved limestone benches where cataphiles apparently rested before they set out on their journey. The walls were smooth and whitewashed a pig-blood pink.

  Pascal folded the map he’d been studying into a small square and squeezed past us into the shaft again, leading the way bravely onward.

  “After you, Frogster,” Rob said to Danièle.

  She poked him in the chest with her index finger. “If you call me Frogster or Froggy or Frog-anything one more time, I will kill you. Can you understand me?” She pivoted on her heels and followed Pascal.

  Rob shook his head. “In-laws, eh?”

  Walking single file in a troll-crouch wasn’t ideal for conversation, so I set aside the genealogy questions I had for Rob and focused on keeping up with the fast pace Pascal had set. Because of my hunched-over position I didn’t see much of the tunnel except for Rob’s backside and the ground, which was a powdery mix of sand and crushed gravel.

  I had been down here all of five minutes and I hated it. My back and neck ached, claustrophobia had set in like a too-small second skin, and I was already looking forward to when this night would be over.

  Finally, however, we entered a new shaft. The ceiling was higher here, and for the first time I was able to stand almost to my full height. This made me feel substantially better. I had been worried I would be troll-walking the entire nine or so hours we were supposed to be down here.

  Freed from staring at my shoes, I could now pay more attention to the palimpsest of colorful graffiti that had been scribbled and spray painted everywhere on the honey-colored stone walls. Most of it consisted of bright hip hop tags and punk rock anarchy symbols. One English entreaty read: “Lost in the catas! Help!” Given how close we were to the exit, I assumed it had been a joke. I hoped it had been a joke.

  Up ahead Pascal and Danièle had stopped. When Rob and I reached them, Danièle pointed to the left wall. An inscription was etched in carbon black onto a cornerstone. She said, “That is the street address directly above us.”

  “Who made it?” I asked.

  “Les Inspection Générale des Carrieres. It was their job to make sure Paris did not sink.”

  “Paris was sinking?” Rob said dubiously.

  “That is what I said, Rosbif. Most of these tunnels were made in the Middle Ages. At that time they were outside the city limits. But as the population grew, the city expanded south over the tunnels. No one realized how bad the foundation was until one of the chambers down here collapsed. It swallowed the entire neighborhood above it. The main street was called rue D’Enfer. It is funny because that means—”

  “Hell Street,” Rob said.

  “Yes. So the king at the time, the one who would get his head cut off in the revolution, he created what I told you, Les Inspection Générale des Carrieres, to strengthen the tunnels. If the inspectors saw a crack or a falling roof, they prepared a reinforcing wall or something like that.” She pointed to the inscribed street address. “They also mapped everything. The result was a mirror reflection of the streets above, a Renaissance Paris frozen in time.”

  “So that street still exists?” I said.

  “It is there, yes, but wider now. It has become a boulevard, I think. And this is interesting.” She pointed to the fleur-de-lis carved above the street name. “That is the symbol of the French monarchy. Here it is intact. At other locations it has been scratched out by revolutionaries.”

  “Revolutionaries?” I said, surprised. “They used these tunnels?”

  “Yes, both in 1789 and the student protests in 1968. You know, even the Nazis built a bunker down here in World War Two. It is on our way. It is where we will rest for one hour.”

  From somewhere overhead came a faint, continuous rumble, like the sonorous drone of the ocean. We paused to listen. It lasted for about ten seconds before silence returned once more.

  “That is the Metro,” Danièle explained. “There are tracks nearby.”

  Late-night workers returning to their homes and families, younger men and women heading out to meet friends. In other words, life going on as usual. These mundane images made burrowing beneath Paris in the dark and dirt seem all the more surreal.

  Pascal, who seemed anxious to keep moving, said, “Monter la garde,” and continued on.

  “Yes, be careful,” Danièle told us. “The ceiling height varies. You must watch your head. And watch your feet. You do not want to step into a crevice or a well. Some can be very deep.”

  “How deep?” Rob asked.

  “I do not know, Rosbif,” she called over her shoulder. “I have never seen the bottoms.”

  Chapter 10

  DANIÈLE

  The trick was to remain close behind the person in front of you, so you could see in their backsplash of light, and Danièle remained so close to Pascal she could reach out and touch him if she were so inclined. She was not kidding when she told Will and Rob to watch where they stepped. Last December a couple of cataphiles reportedly broke through a wall in the remote western portion of the tunnels and discovered never-before-seen galleries, one of which featured a series of life-size statues carved from the limestone. While on an excursion to see the statues for themselves, Danièle and Pascal came across a man sitting by himself in a small chamber. He was weak and delusional due to dehydration. A single candle burned next to him. It was his last one. After it went out, he would have been plunged into total blackness. They gave him food and water, and when he wa
s lucid enough, he showed them his ankle, which he explained he’d broken when he’d stepped in a two-foot-deep crevice. The ankle had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe and was marred with splotchy purple spots. His friend had left to get help but never returned. The man didn’t know when that had been, he could barely remember what day he’d entered the catacombs, but given his deteriorated condition, it was likely it had been several days before. It was also likely his friend had not been an experienced cataphile and hadn’t been able to find his way back again.

  So, yes, the dangers were real down here, she thought. But if you were smart, if you had a guide as experienced as herself, or Pascal, chances were you would be fine.

  Chapter 11

  For the next fifteen or twenty minutes I forgot about the graffiti and returned my attention to the ground, watching for the apparently bottomless crevices and wells Danièle had spoken of. I didn’t see any, but I did spot discarded water bottles, candy wrappers, and other sundry items. At some point the monotonous crunching of our footsteps was joined by the dripping of water.

  Pascal kept up his fast pace, and the rest of us followed close as he turned one corner after another, passing numerous branching hallways, each surely leading to others, and those to others still, hinting at the enormity of this underground realm. Danièle had not been exaggerating when she called it a labyrinth. It was a chaotic maze of more than—what had I read—two or three hundred miles in aggregate? If you stitched the tunnels together into one long Frankenstein worm, they would surpass the width of the state of New York. This got me wondering about their construction. Who were the men who had dug them, likely with nothing more than pickaxes and shovels and wheelbarrows? Convicts who couldn’t get employed elsewhere? Destitute farmers looking for regular work that didn’t rely on the seasons or the climate? Whoever they were, they likely would have toiled away underground in the dust, humidity, and sometimes pitch dark for their entire lives—if they weren’t first crushed to death, buried alive, or knocked off by infections and disease.