The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel)

by Jeremy Bates

  What if they were dead?

  No—Danièle would not let herself believe this. They couldn’t be dead. Rob was married to her sister. He had two little girls waiting at home for him. Pascal was only twenty-five. He was too young to be dead. They both were.

  This was a stupid way of thinking, of course, because death didn’t care if you were young or if you had kids, it didn’t care if you were wealthy or poor, it didn’t care if you were pretty or disfigured, a king or a queen—it would strike you down when it wanted to strike you down and there was nothing you could do about it.

  So had it come for Rob and Pascal then? Was this their time, premature as it may be? Was this her and Will’s time as well? Were they going to become those people who friends and acquaintances commented upon with a shake of their head and something banal like, “I can’t believe they died…it’s so tragic.”

  Danièle didn’t want to think about any of this; she wanted to sink into sleep so the worrying and the pain and the fear would all disappear. But as much as she tried, her mind wouldn’t rest, wouldn’t shut off, and now it moved on to the girl who had visited them. She couldn’t imagine where the girl came from, or why she was here in this godforsaken place, wherever this was, because she wasn’t like the zombie-man. Danièle didn’t mean her face—she hadn’t seen it clearly enough to know whether it had rotted off too—she meant the girl’s manner, because while the zombie-man had been feral, vile, a base animal, she had been, well, just a girl.

  Could she be a prisoner too then, only one who was allowed to roam freely? Yet if that were the case, wouldn’t she attempt to flee? And if she made the trouble to visit this chamber, to reveal herself, why not speak? Did she not understand French or English? Surely, though, she could have attempted to communicate in some other manner?

  So many unknowns! Danièle’s head felt ready to explode. But as she continued to play over the “ifs” and “whats” and “whys,” turning them this way and that, looking for new possibilities, she uncovered a positive thought among the overwhelming negatives: whatever the girl’s role in all this, the fact the zombie-man hadn’t torn her apart and consumed her flesh confirmed what Danièle had suspected earlier: the zombie-man, or however many of them existed, weren’t completely mindless, they had some measure of self-restraint.

  As small a relief as this seemed to be, it was a relief nonetheless, and Danièle held onto it as though it were a lifeline, afraid to let go.

  Chapter 44

  The man who had attacked me must be the girl’s father, I thought. He had been maimed in a horrible accident—a fire, an explosion, perhaps exposure to acid—or he had leprosy or another flesh-eating disease. Either way, his life was ruined. He couldn’t go out in public without people pointing and staring and viewing him as a monster. So he took his daughter, who loved him unconditionally, and fled to the catacombs. But over time he grew lonely. He wanted adult companionship. So he returned to the surface and recruited others with hideous deformities to join him underground, so that now there was a flourishing community of Quasimodos…

  I touched my head against my knees.

  A cult then? A satanic cult that practiced self-mutilation and sacrificed unwary cataphiles to their dark god? Druggies who had a bad acid trip and thought their faces were trying to eat themselves so they cut them off—?

  Whoa, I thought. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Could I be under the influence of drugs? Had Rob or Danièle or even Pascal slipped me something, and I was currently riding out the mindfuck of all mindfucks? For a moment I hoped against hope that this was true, but I knew it wasn’t. I might not understand what was happening right now, but there was no doubt it was happening, no belief that it was a dream or hallucination; it was all too real. The memories, the smells, the lucidity of my thoughts—and the pain, that was real, there was no denying it, and drugs might make you see things, and hear things, and hell, maybe even smell things, but they didn’t make you feel as if you’ve been run over by a Mac truck.

  “Will, there!” Danièle said abruptly, snapping me out of my musings. I blinked dazedly. It was the first time she had spoken in ages.

  After a moment of disorientation I saw the light. It grew in brightness. Yet this time its arrival was accompanied by sounds as well. Snorts, hollers. Words? If so, I had never heard the language before.

  I struggled to my feet. I heard Danièle doing the same.

  “What should we do?” she hissed.

  “Let me do the talking.”

  “Talking? What are you going to say? They are animals! They do not understand!” She was near hysterics.

  The torchbearer appeared first, followed by eleven others, seven males and four females. An eclectic mix of clothing that spanned several decades covered their pale, cadaver-like bodies: button-down shirts, bell-bottom pants, a houndstooth jacket, cotton dresses. All of them had piggish holes for noses and lipless, skeletal grins, and all were barefoot. Because of their deformities it was hard to gauge their ages, but they ranged from young adult to ancient. Each carried a long off-white bone.

  The torchbearer stopped where the girl had stopped earlier, though his torch was much brighter than the girl’s candle, and the light clearly exposed Danièle and me. The mob fell silent. Ignoring Danièle, the torchbearer came over to stand directly before me.

  My blood went gravestone cold as I stared into his eyes—reptilian eyes—for the whites were yellow, the pupils the size of dimes, eclipsing the irises. His teeth, partially black with decay, stood in stark contrast to the delicate pink of his exposed gums. The cavities in the center of his face were lopsided, the left larger than the right, exposing lumpy red tissue within.

  His freakish eyes held mine, and it was only with effort that I didn’t look away. He made sniffing noises through the holes in his face. I tried not to gag on his stench.

  Without warning he swung his bone. It struck the side of my left knee. I dropped, landing hard on my side. I pulled my knees to my chest in expectation of another blow, but he turned away from me and shook his weapon in the air and howled. The mob responded in a cacophony of celebration. Then he leveled the bone at Pascal and barked what might have been an order.

  Two males went to Pascal and heaved him to his feet. His limbs dangled lifelessly. His head was lolling from left to right.

  The torchbearer crossed the room and slapped Pascal hard across the face. He peeled Pascal’s eyelids open with his thumb. Then he stepped back, lifted Pascal’s shirt, and thrust the flaming end of the torch into his stomach.

  Pascal’s head snapped back and his mouth went wide in a silent shriek.

  Chapter 45

  PASCAL

  The pain! It started in Pascal’s gut and blazed outward. His eyes bulged, but he couldn’t see anything. He gasped for breath, felt hands on him, holding him upright. He looked ahead and saw a flaming ball of fire and smelled singed hair and burned flesh. Then, next to the fire, a blurry face—the thing he’d bumped into when he’d turned around, the thing that had…what? He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember anything after turning around.

  Pascal realized his arms were pinned behind his back. His wrists were being handcuffed. No—being released, it turned out, because a moment later his arms flopped free. The thing before him shoved the scrolled end of a femur at his chest. It said something, though he couldn’t understand what. Everything was happening in a fog, a dream state. It shoved the bone at him again and again until he took it.

  His vision began to focus, and beyond the thing he noticed a number of other grotesque horrors. And beyond them, standing in the shadows, Will.

  Pascal screamed his name.

  Chapter 46

  DANIÈLE

  Danièle couldn’t bear to watch, but she couldn’t turn away either. The zombie-man with the torch, the leader as far as she could tell, handed Pascal a bone, then accepted another bone from a female, then the mob formed a loose circle around Pascal and him.

  They were going to fight.

  Pascal
realized this too. He stopped shouting for Will to help him and backed away from the leader and begged to be left alone.

  The leader roared and attacked with his bone. Pascal, usually nimble and athletic, stumbled awkwardly out of the way, tripped, and fell to his rear.

  The leader pressed the attack and swung the bone in a downward arc. Pascal raised his bone horizontally in both hands, deflecting the blow. He scrambled to his feet and attempted to flee. Those gathered in the circle spun him around and shoved him back into the fray.

  Before Pascal could regain his coordination, the leader slammed the bone across his back, knocking him to his knees. Choking on tears, Pascal tried to crawl away. The leader reared up behind him and raised his bone in the air.

  “Pascal!” Danièle cried.

  He spotted her for the first time. A myriad of emotions shimmered across his eyes in that brief moment. Fear, confusion, anger, anguish. And worst of all, what she would never be able to forget—heartbreak, of the kind when you know you will never see someone you love again.

  The knobby end of the leader’s bone struck Pascal on the top of the skull with a sharp, liquid crack. His face went slack. He fell flat to his chest.

  Danièle bent over and vomited.

  Chapter 47

  Jesus Christ, there was nothing left of Pascal’s head. There was nothing left of his head. That fucking torchbearer had bashed it over and over again until it dissolved into a messy puddle of gunk. Nevertheless, I didn’t have long to reflect on this, because the torchbearer—Jaundice, I thought of him as after seeing those yellow eyes—pointed the bloody, brain-speckled femur at me and barked an order. An elderly male moved behind me, sprung the shackles from around my wrists, and pushed me into the circle.

  Jaundice kicked Pascal’s bone-weapon toward me with his bare foot. I didn’t want to pick it up. If I did, I would be accepting his challenge. Then again, if I didn’t, he would likely kill me anyway.

  I retrieved the femur and choked it like a baseball bat. I considered using it to bash my way through the circle and make a run for it. But I had no headlamp, no flashlight, no torch. I wouldn’t make it twenty feet in the blackness before I was caught again.

  Still, what chance of survival did I have if I held my ground and fought? I was bigger and stronger than Jaundice, but he seemed to be experienced at this bone fighting or whatever it was. The blows he landed against Pascal had been swift and sure. Also, even if I defeated him, what then? There were another eleven of them. No way I could take them all out.

  Jaundice approached me warily, his bloodied femur in one hand, the torch in the other. The flame spit and licked. The ring of spectators were shaking their bones in the air and hooting and hollering like a troop of monkeys. This was obviously prime entertainment for them.

  Jaundice roared and lunged, feigning with the femur while jabbing the torch at me. I dodged right, felt the heat of the whooshing flame on my face, and chopped Jaundice’s extended forearm with my bone. He barked and dropped the torch. I was already swinging the bone again, this time at his head, but he parried, countered, and whacked me in the side.

  I swung wildly. He jumped backward. He swung just as wildly. I jumped backward.

  Then someone shoved me from behind. I stumbled forward. Instinct told me to veer right to avoid crashing into Jaundice. That’s what Pascal did—and got the bone across his back that knocked him to his knees. So instead I careened straight into Jaundice. He swung his bone, but I had closed the distance between us too quickly, and there was no power behind the blow. The femur bounced off my shoulder. I threw my arms around him and dragged him to the ground, landing on top of him.

  I released the bone-weapon, and with my left hand I grabbed Jaundice around the throat, pressing down with all of my weight, trying to crush his windpipe. With my other hand I formed a fist and hammered him in the face again and again and again. I was yelling and crazed and trying to smash his skull open like he had done to Pascal.

  I would have done this too had I not been pulled off him. I struggled against the hands grappling me, but there were too many. Nails raked my flesh as they dragged me away and pinned me to the ground.

  Then, amazingly, Jaundice rose to his feet. Blood painted most of his face red, and his mouth hung open and askew with several teeth now missing. He probed his unhinged jaw tentatively, tried pushing it closed. It fell dumbly open again.

  He issued a strangled wail, picked up his bone-weapon, and lurched over to stand above me. His yellow eyes blazed.

  I bucked and squirmed and got a leg free. I kicked one of the fuckers holding me, a female, in the face, and another in the ear. But as soon as they fell away, others replaced them and secured my leg again.

  Jaundice placed a foot on my chest, and even though his mouth hung open in an obtuse oval, I was sure he was smiling.

  He raised the femur.

  Chapter 48

  ZOLAN

  When Zolan had first begun trolling the red light districts of Paris, he’d known nothing about how they operated. The first night he strolled into a brothel that seemed fair enough. He bought a cocktail for the girl he was sitting with, a friendly twenty-five year old from Cambodia, and told her he wanted to hire her services. When she told him four hundred for everything, he knew he was in a tourist scam and said no thanks. Before he could leave, however, a gorilla of a bouncer handed him the bill: four hundred fifty euros for a beer and a cocktail. He asked the hooker if her offer was still good, which it was. So four hundred fifty for two drinks, or fifty bucks less for two drinks and a fuck—it wasn’t a hard decision.

  Zolan was no longer so naïve. Now he knew the red light districts in and out. He knew every corner of every boulevard, every speakeasy brothel, what they charged, who worked where, and who worked on the side.

  Last night he had been with Sonia, a pretty Czech girl with the face of a sixteen year old and the body of a lingerie model. She was from a top shelf brothel hidden in plain sight in the middle of Pigalle. She’d been slutty and fearless with soft hands and a willing tongue, just how he liked them.

  He’d been thinking about Sonia and the hall of fame fuck all the way back from the surface, but stopped as soon as he entered the Great Hall.

  Something had happened in his absence.

  Usually Odo would be lying on his piss-stained mattress, staring at nothing in that stupid way of his. Franz would be fussing over his Hot Wheels collection, organizing the cars into neat piles only to reorganize them into different ones. If Hanns and Jörg and Karl weren’t out patrolling the tunnels, they would be lurking here somewhere, pissing the hell out of all the others. In contrast, only Nora was present, wandering aimlessly at the far end of the room, picking at the scabs on her breasts. Zolan didn’t bother asking her where everyone else was; she had the mental aptitude of a two year old.

  Then, distantly, he heard shouting. It came from the Dungeon.

  Fucking Hanns, he thought immediately. Had to be Hanns. He was always acting up, causing mischief. The other day he hid several of Franz’s Hot Wheels. The two of them nearly killed each other in the ensuing fight, and it took hours to get everyone to settle down again.

  So what had he done this time?

  As Zolan moved through the tunnel system, the shouting crystalized, and there was a frenzied mania to it the likes of which he had never heard.

  What the fuck was going on?

  When he arrived at the entrance to the Dungeon, Zolan saw everything at once. That cataphile he had run into earlier—Macaroni—pinned to the ground by Jörg and Karl and all the others. The quiet cataphile, Chess, lying a few feet away, his head a pulpy mess. Beyond them, the beautiful cataphile, Stork Girl, screaming hysterically. Zolan didn’t immediately see the chatty cataphile, Roast Beef, but he didn’t have time to wonder about this because Hanns, standing tall above Macaroni, raised his bone in the air.

  “Hanns!” Zolan commanded. “Halt!”

  Hanns spun around, his eyes wide with surprise.

&nb
sp; “Tut das nicht!” Zolan said. “Schlecht!”

  Hanns threw his head back and howled in fury. He glared at Macaroni, then at Zolan, then at Macaroni again, and Zolan knew he wasn’t going to obey him.

  He rushed forward as Hanns swung the bone. Macaroni jerked his head at the last moment, and the blow careened off his skull. Zolan shoved Hanns clear before he could attempt a second blow, shouting at him to leave the room, disbanding the crowd. He glanced again at Chess’s lifeless body, then turned his attention to Stork Girl. Her face was streaked with tears, and she held a knuckled fist to her mouth. She seemed too emotional to speak, so Zolan said in French, “I warned you not to go searching for that video camera.”

  Her eyes rolled to the whites, and she fainted.

  Chapter 49

  DANIÈLE

  The room could have been mistaken for a prince’s study—a very perverse prince—for despite the abundance of crimson drapery and silk pillows and turn-of-the-century furnishings and aged tomes scattered about, the walls were constructed—no, decorated—with bones. Tibias and femurs and humeri and others were affixed to every inch of available space, the geometrical handiwork punctuated here and there by staring skulls. The macabre display was lit by red candles burning in a half dozen different wrought-iron candelabras.

  Danièle knew she must have fainted earlier, because when she’d opened her eyes a minute ago, she had been in this seat, Zolan crouched before her, patting her cheek.

  Zolan the bum.

  Zolan the drunk.

  Zolan, Zolan, Zolan.

  How could he possibly be behind all this—whatever this was?

  A swath of fabric moved to her right, and Zolan emerged from a connecting room. He was dressed exactly as he had been in the Bunker, with the green bandana, olive fatigue jacket, and black T-shirt. He offered her the glass of water he had gone to fetch and sat nonchalantly on one corner of the adjacent desk, smiling hesitantly at her.