The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel)

by Jeremy Bates

  “What time is it?” she asked, completely disorientated.

  “Time?” He seemed amused, as if he was about to ask her if she had somewhere to be. Instead he said, “It is time to eat. Come.”

  “I am not hungry.”

  “You haven’t eaten anything but eggs today.”

  “I am not hungry.”

  The simian smile remained on Zolan’s face. “Come anyway,” he said, though he was no longer asking.

  Danièle got up and followed him. The two zombie-men were gone.

  “You said I would be free to do as I wished,” she said.

  “You haven’t been?”

  “Two of your nephews or grandnephews sat outside my room all day.”

  “Jörg and Karl, yes. They were there for your protection. Only a fraction of these hallways are lighted. I did not want you to get lost.”

  “I would not have gotten lost.”

  “Maybe not. But you might have run into some of my other family members who aren’t as…civilized…as Jörg and Karl.”

  Danièle recalled the groan from the room beyond the kitchen. She said, “Are we going to discuss the ‘arrangement’ for my friends and myself now?”

  Zolan shook his head. “Unfortunately your friends have yet to regain consciousness.”

  This was the news she’d feared. “What if they are in comas? What if—”

  “As I told you—”

  “They need help!” She stopped on the spot. “I want to see them.”

  “That’s not a good idea right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “They need their rest.”

  “Are they dead?” Her voice cracked on “dead.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I want to see them,” she repeated stubbornly.

  “They are being cared for, and they will recover. You must be patient. That is all I am willing to say on the matter.”

  Zolan began to walk. Frustrated, feeling helpless, Danièle fell into step behind him. They didn’t speak. The only sound was their footsteps and the spitting of the torches.

  Zolan turned right at the corridor that led to his quarters.

  Danièle stopped again. “Are we not going to the kitchen?”

  “Our food will be brought to us.”

  She hesitated. She didn’t want to be alone with him in his study again—or bedroom, for that matter. Almost immediately, however, she realized how foolish that concern was. If he wanted to do something to her, he would do it, regardless of where they were. Those zombie-things wouldn’t interfere. In fact, they would likely join in.

  They continued on. Zolan’s quarters were located at the end of the corridor. He pushed open the door, and they entered. He saw her glance at the tomes scattered everywhere and said, “I’m a voracious reader, and the catacombs is as good a place as anywhere for such a pastime.”

  Danièle sat in the chair she had sat in earlier, while he took the one across the desk. She said, “What else do you do here?”

  “In the catacombs?” He shrugged. “What you do: I explore. It has turned into an obsession of sorts for me. Also, I enjoy meeting the variety of cataphiles who now occupy the tunnels. It is nice to have fresh conversation sometimes.”

  For the first time Danièle wondered whether Zolan had a job or not. Did he climb out of the catacombs in the early hours of dawn and get on the Metro like everyone else? Did he bring clean clothes in a backpack and change in a train station restroom? Surely he didn’t work at anything that required a suit and a tie. A construction worker perhaps? Or a McDonald’s employee, the guy who flipped the burgers? This line of thinking led her to her job at the florist shop. Flo, the owner, likely had a meltdown when she discovered Danièle had never arrived for her shift. Flowers not watered, orders not taken, deliveries not made. Nevertheless, this was nothing more than a fleeting thought. Danièle was a prisoner in the catacombs, and Pascal was dead—

  No, stop it. She had not allowed herself to think about Pascal since he died, and she wouldn’t until she was free of this place. Then she would grieve. Now she had to deal with the madman Zolan—who was not only insane but also delusional. Because did he really think he had her fooled? Did he really think she believed he was going to let them all go? He would have to know they would head straight to the police, and the police would arrest him and his entire zombie family.

  So why not kill us and be done with the problem then? she wondered. Why is he stringing us along—or at least stringing me along? What’s his plan?

  He obviously wanted something, and Danièle could guess what. She saw how he looked at her. Lustful. She was aware of this even back at the Bunker. Yet if he wanted to fuck her, why not do it? Why this charade that she was a guest? Was he trying to romance her? Did he think she would fall in love with him and live down here with him?

  Yes, he really is crazy—as crazy as the rest of them.

  Zolan took a bottle of vodka and two glasses from his desk. He filled one halfway to the rim, nodded to the other. “Will you join me?”

  “No thank you,” she said stiffly.

  He fussed with something on the ground—she couldn’t see past the desk—then held up her cask of wine. He raised an eyebrow.

  “No thank you,” she repeated.

  “I know what you want then.” He fussed again, and a moment later he produced her Ziploc baggie of marijuana. He saw the reaction on her face and smiled. “We all have our vices, don’t we?” He tossed the baggie on the table in front of her.

  Danièle stared at it. No way was she going to get high with Zolan…but, God, a few tokes would be nice. Just two, maybe three, just enough to calm her nerves a little.

  “Please, indulge,” he said. “It is not for me.”

  Zolan shot a second cigarette from his pack and lit up. The smell of the burning tobacco, and the fact he wasn’t getting high too, decided it for her. She opened the baggie, withdrew the papers and a clump of pot, and crumbled the pot between her fingers. When she finished rolling the joint, Zolan passed her a brass Zippo. She accepted it guiltily, like a crack addict accepting the needle that had just killed her friend.

  She lit the joint and inhaled deeply.

  Zolan sipped his vodka and said, “Tell me something about yourself, Danièle.”

  She hated it when he used her name, it presumed a disturbing and artificial familiarity, but she didn’t say anything. She held the smoke in her lungs for as long as she could, then exhaled. The act was Zen-like. The tension in her neck and shoulders seemed to leave her body with the smoke. “Something?” she said, opening her eyes.

  “The past. A story.” Zolan slid her the ashtray.

  Danièle took another long drag. “A story?” She exhaled again. She should put the joint out. Two tokes was enough. She only needed a small high, a medicinal high.

  She tapped the ash from the end of it into the ashtray, but she didn’t put it out. “I do not have any stories.”

  “Everyone has a story.”

  She took a third drag. She was already quite high. Her lack of nourishment and sleep likely had to do with this. Yet she knew she was going to smoke the joint until there was nothing left of it. She wanted to get fucked. She wanted oblivion.

  Zolan was waiting patiently for her to tell him a story. A story! Who was this guy? Did he think he was her friend? She would kill him if she could—she would too, wouldn’t she? She would commit murder?

  Yes, if she had to. If it meant escaping here.

  What about right now?

  After all, it was just the two of them. There were no zombie-things outside. If she killed him, she could take a candle and flee into one of those dark tunnels. They would have to lead somewhere. She couldn’t rescue Will and Rob, not by herself, but if she could find a way to the surface, she could return with help.

  My God, she thought, she could do this—couldn’t she? Yes! She had to. And look at him. The swine. The lust was all over his face. She could tell him a story, get him believing she
was cooperating with him, she was accepting him, let him make an advance, and then, bam, she would kill him.

  But with what?

  Danièle stubbed the joint out in the ashtray—she would need her wits about her after all—and said, “When I was six years old, my father picked me up from school on a Monday afternoon. This was strange because it was always my mother who picked me up. He took me to the cinema to watch The Last Unicorn. It was a child’s movie, but it scared me so badly we had to leave early. Afterward we got ice cream, then we returned home.” She swallowed. She never talked about this. Even now, even in the predicament she was in, the memories were like razor blades inside her heart, and with each breath, with each word, they cut a little deeper. “My father led me to the basement. My mother was there. She was tied up in a chair, which had toppled onto its side, so her face was pressed against the floor. My older sister was tied up in a chair too. They both had gags in their mouths, stifling their screams. My father told me to sit in a third chair, though he didn’t tie me up. I guess he didn’t think I was a threat. Or maybe he was going to kill me first. I don’t know. He explained to my sister and I that he had been fired from his job the week before, and that he would not be able to provide for us any longer. He told us that our mother no longer loved him. She had no faith in him. She thought he was a failure. He told us she wanted to leave him and take us with her. He told us he couldn’t let that happen. He told us he had a better solution, one in which we would remain together, forever. He walked past us and retrieved a carving knife from where he had stashed it atop the old oil furnace. At that same moment our doorbell rang. This gave me courage and I jumped from the chair and ran. My father chased me up the stairs. He caught me in the foyer before I could reach the front door handle. He covered my mouth with his hand. I bit him. He let go and I screamed. My father had not locked the door—I guess that was not something you bothered to do when you were planning on murdering your family and yourself—and it burst open. My neighbor, Monsieur Rochefort, appeared with his daughter, my best friend. He drove us to Guides every Monday evening. My father attacked him with the knife, but Monsieur Rochefort was able to wrestle the knife away and subdue him while his daughter and I ran next door and got her mother to call the police. My father was charged with three counts of attempted murder and hanged himself while awaiting trial. We moved to France the following year.”

  An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. Zolan finished his vodka. Then he got up and came around the desk, came up behind her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and massaged her back with strong thumbs. “It seems, Danièle,” he said, “that you and I have something in common.”

  Danièle never took her eyes off the vodka bottle on his desk. “And what is that?”

  “Both our fathers are rotting in hell.”

  Chapter 54

  Someone was calling my name, it came from the edges of the darkness, I heard it and knew I was asleep, knew I needed to wake up, but the darkness was too thick, too black, and I couldn’t claw through it, and I wondered if maybe my injuries had caught up to me after all, and I wasn’t asleep but unconscious, in a coma, and this terrified me because maybe I would remain in such a state forever, aware of the darkness, and the voices that called to me from the margins, but unable to do anything to reach those voices or a higher awareness, fated to live like a snail in the void—

  I opened my eyes and found myself in a new darkness. But that was okay. Because this was real, I was awake, I wasn’t brain dead—

  “Will! Wake up, bro! Wake the fuck up!”

  I rolled onto my side. The chains clinked. Everything from my shoulders down was pins and needles. “Rob?” I groaned.

  “Will!” he barked, his voice hoarse, nasally. “Where the fuck are we?”

  “The cata…” My throat was parched again. “Catacombs.”

  “I know that! But what happened? Some fucking guy attacked me. Drove a bone into my face. Broke my fucking nose. And now I’m chained up. What the hell? What the fuck’s going on?”

  So I told him.

  Katja spent the day reminiscing, scrutinizing, doubting, despairing. So many lies! Lies she had believed unconditionally. Lies like that photograph she had found in her father’s study, the photograph he insisted was of her grandfather and grandmother before the war, even though her “grandfather” appeared identical to him, and her “grandmother” didn’t appear to be much older than her. Lies like when he drank too much beer and mumbled in a stupor of a living, breathing Paris, mumbles he would dismiss the next day as “dream words.” Lies like his explanation that their food came from a warehouse that hadn’t been destroyed by the nuclear bombs—food that somehow remained fresh after all that time even when some of the bread and fruit and vegetables in their kitchen went moldy after only a few days.

  A dozen other lies, two dozen, all so clear now, all leaving her feeling shaken and scared and thrilled and most of all angry.

  What had she been denied all these years?

  Rob was full of questions while I explained to him what had transpired over the last day or so, but he went quiet when I finished. His silence lasted for several minutes. Then I heard a couple sharp intakes of breath and louder exhales, shuddering, gritty—a man trying to keep his emotions in check. It was the most depressing and lonely sound I had ever heard. “You know the last thing I said to the wife?” he said finally in a gruff voice. “I told her…” He began to chuckle. “Told her to go fuck herself.”

  “You tell everyone to go fuck themselves.”

  “This was different. I meant it. She knew I meant it. I think it was the end.”

  “The end?”

  “The end! The marriage. The fucking end. I think it was over.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “We’d stopped talking a while ago,” he went on. “Meaningful talking. Now we’re like bitter old fucks on TV sitcoms, only it’s not funny. We don’t talk about the news at breakfast, don’t talk about our days, she tells me I’m making a mess while I’m cooking, and I tell her to get out of the fucking kitchen if it bothers her so much. You wanna guess why we’re still together?”

  “Your girls?”

  “Yeah, my girls. They’re the world to me. Bella’s five, Mary’s three. Bella’s just started kindergarten. It’s turned her into a diva. She’s suddenly decided she doesn’t like vegetables and only wants pasta and butter and cheese—for every meal, every day. She also thinks she’s too old for naps. I’m good with that because by bedtime she’s so tired she zonks off immediately. It’s amazing how fast they grow up. I know people always say that, but it blows my mind. Mary can barely draw a circle and still has imaginary friends, while Bella can jump rope, skate, walk on a balance beam…”

  “You’re going to see them again, Rob—”

  “Pascal’s dead!” he snapped. “Danièle’s gone! You think we’re walking out of here? You and me—we’re next. Dead. I’m not seeing my girls again. They’re going to grow up with some knob jockey stepdad and forget what I ever fucking looked like.”

  Chapter 55

  ROB

  Rob flopped onto his back and rapped the back of his head on the hard-packed floor, overwhelmed with memories and emotions. He plucked a good memory, a pleasant one, out of the whirlwind. His wedding day—when everything in his life had been working, when everything had been right. Dev, so beautiful in her dress, stunning, unreal, entering the chapel, walking down the aisle slowly the way all brides do, her father beside her, proud to the point of bursting, Dev stopping at the altar, eyes so bright, filled with excitement for what their future together held. Later, searching for an apartment, one with a spare room that they could convert to a nursery, Dev stumbling out of the bathroom, her pants and knickers down around her ankles, shrieking that she was pregnant. Her water breaking during an episode of Friends, rushing her to the hospital, seeing Bella for the first time, a tiny dusky blue thing covered in ropes of blood and vernix, watching her take her first breath, he
r color turning to a rosy pink. Her first birthday, the flat filled with foil balloons; her second birthday, the flat filled with other toddlers. A couple weeks after that, having dinner in a nice restaurant, Dev saying she was pregnant again, celebrating with a bottle of wine, chatting like they were the only two in the place, in love…

  Rob rapped the back of his head on the ground again, harder.

  Into the darkness he said, “You’re right, boss. We’re going to get out of here. I’m going to see my girls again. We’re…” He squeezed his eyes tight. “Who’s Max?”

  Will sounded startled. “How do you know that name?”

  “You were mumbling it in your sleep.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Don’t know. Just heard Max a bunch of times.”

  A long pause. “She was my younger sister.”

  “Was?”

  “I killed her.”

  Rob pushed himself to his elbows, staring, unseeing. “You what?”

  “I crashed a boat.” Another pause. “Six people died. I could have saved Max, I saw her in the water, floating there, but I chose to save my girlfriend instead.”

  “You chose?”

  “I always told myself it wasn’t a choice, I acted on instinct, but that’s only what I wanted to believe.”

  “Did the girlfriend make it?”

  “Survive? Yeah.”

  “So—you split up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit, I mean… Did you do time?”

  “I wasn’t drinking, if that’s what you mean. The guy I hit wasn’t following maritime safety rules. He was under oars, didn’t need navigation lights, but he should have had a flashlight or a lantern.”

  “So it was an accident.”

  “An accident…yeah. I chose my girlfriend’s life over my sister’s. I let my sister drown. An accident.”

  “That’s not what I meant…”

  Will didn’t reply. Seconds slipped away, then minutes. The comfort that speaking had provided quickly faded, and the misery inside Rob returned. He summoned the faces of Dev and the girls, praying for a miracle.