The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel)

by Jeremy Bates

  The pressure around my throat lessoned.

  Katja! I thought, momentarily clearheaded.

  I snagged her wrists with my hands before she could float away and kicked on with my legs. I only managed to continue for another five seconds before my breathing reflex reached the breakpoint and I opened my mouth and took a futile breath. Water gushed into my stomach and lungs. I experienced the briefest moment of relief, followed by the faraway acceptance that I was about to die.

  Chapter 68

  DANIÈLE

  Danièle’s knees and hands brushed rock beneath her as the ground angled upward. A moment later her head cleared the water. She wanted to whoop with relief. Instead she spat the matchbook from her mouth into her hand, took the candle from her pocket, and lit the wick on the second try.

  The pool she stood in was tiny, only a few yards in diameter. The inky water came to her waist. She stared at the rippling surface, praying for Will and Katja to appear. The swim, physically, had not been very hard. It had taken her fifty-five seconds, and now that she knew how long the tunnel was, she could do it again no problem. It was the mental aspect, the doubt, which had been the tough part. At forty-five seconds she had begun to panic, but she’d told herself just a bit longer, a few more seconds. And thank God she had listened to that little voice. But what if Will hadn’t? What if he hadn’t even followed her? No, he would have. He knew as well as she did there was no choice. But he had Katja on his back. She would have slowed him down. Maybe he’d panicked or lost his nerve as she almost had—

  Pale appendages appeared in the dark water in front of her, then Will reared to his feet, crashing through the surface with a sharp intake of air. Danièle caught Katja as she fell off his back and dragged her onto the dry ground. The girl was limp and unresponsive. Danièle felt for a pulse in her neck. She didn’t find one—or was she doing it wrong? She put her ear to Katja’s mouth. Nothing.

  “She is not breathing!” she cried to Will, who was doubled over coughing and wheezing.

  Danièle had taken a first aid course years before, but she couldn’t remember the particulars of CPR. Different number of compressions for children and adults? More or less? How many breaths did you administer? Did it matter?

  She placed the heel of one hand on Katja’s breastbone, between her breasts. She placed the other on top of it, palm-down, and performed ten chest compressions. She covered Katja’s nose holes with her hand, tilted her head back to open her airway, and blew into her lipless mouth. She performed more compressions. On the seventh one Katja coughed and spasmed and heaved water from her lungs. Danièle rolled her onto her side and slapped her back.

  Will waded out of the water and collapsed beside them.

  “Is she okay?” he asked.

  Danièle nodded because she didn’t trust herself to speak yet. Then, “Are you?”

  “Yeah—” He commenced coughing.

  Katja opened her eyes. It took a few moments for them to focus and for her to register their presence.

  Will coughed a final time and gave her a forced smile. “Brave girl.”

  “Did I…fall asleep?” she mumbled.

  “Sort of,” he said.

  “I hate…swimming.”

  “You and me both,” he told her, kissing her affectionately on the forehead. “You and me both.”

  Chapter 69

  We started along the rock wall, searching for an exit from the new cavern, and after a short distance came to several scattered candles on the ground, a discarded torch, and a pair of old boots.

  “Zolan’s?” Danièle said.

  Zolan! I had forgotten Danièle had mentioned him earlier. “Are you serious about Zolan being behind for all this?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “Zolan Zolan?”

  “Yes!”

  I pictured the old guy in my head: the green bandana, the missing teeth, the shark-tooth necklace, the bad BO. He was Katja’s father? He was responsible for Pascal and Rob’s death? Setting these absurdities aside for a later time, I said, “Well, if they’re his boots, then that means he’s been here before. He knows of that underwater passage. He’ll be coming.” I picked up the torch and sniffed the dirty cloth wrapped around the end of the stave. “Still smells of kerosene. Try lighting it with the candle.”

  Danièle obeyed and a flame whooshed into existence, dwarfing the candles. I looked away from the light until my eyes could adjust to the brightness—and found myself staring at an old foot ladder, affixed to the wall, less than ten yards away.

  I ascended the ladder first, climbing with one hand because I held the torch in the other. Thirty feet up the ladder reached the ceiling and continued through a shaft in the rock. I glanced down. Katja was only about five feet or so off the ground and seemed reluctant to go any farther. “Come on, Katja!” I said. “You need to move faster.”

  She looked up. “I’m scared.”

  “You’ll be fine. Just keep coming. I’ll wait for you.”

  Danièle encouraged Katja from below until she began inching upward.

  “Good work, Katja!” I said. “Keep coming—”

  Suddenly Zolan stood behind Danièle. He’d appeared so quickly I didn’t have time to warn her. He bear-hugged her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. She shrieked in surprise and kicked futilely. Then another figure emerged from the gloom next to him, and another, and another, the entire mob.

  A male removed Katja from the ladder and set her on the ground.

  “Will!” Danièle cried.

  Zolan passed her, kicking and screaming, to a different male, who held her firmly against his body.

  “Come down, Will,” Zolan called to me. He held a hand against his stomach and appeared to be in some sort of pain. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  I couldn’t do as he asked, of course. It would be suicide. But what of Danièle and Katja? What was going to happen to them? I couldn’t leave them—could I?

  “What’s wrong?” Zolan taunted. “You’re not thinking of running away like a cowardly piece of shit, are you?”

  “I’m going for help,” I said, as much for his benefit as Danièle’s. “I’m going to bring the police back here.”

  “You never find your way out.”

  “If I come down, you’ll kill me.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll kill Danièle. If you do, if you act like a man, I’ll let you live. It is your choice.”

  I winced at those words.

  My choice.

  “You’ll let me live?” I said skeptically.

  “We’ll work out an arrangement.”

  “He is lying, Will!” Danièle yelled.

  I knew she was right. Zolan would kill me immediately. But was he also lying about killing her, or was that an empty threat? I believed it was the latter. He was a man, and Danièle was a beautiful young woman. Why would he kill her when he could keep her as a concubine, albeit an unwilling one, with no risk of prosecution? And while that might be a horrible fate for Danièle, at least it wouldn’t be death.

  I tensed in anticipation of what I was about to do. It was despicable, but this wasn’t a movie. I wasn’t some heroic protagonist. I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for someone I’d met only a handful of times. This was real life, I didn’t have a deus ex machina to bail my ass out, and I had to make a rational, calculated decision. One, I go down and get killed, and Danièle gets whatever she gets. Or two, I flee, Danièle still gets whatever she gets, but I potentially escape and bring back help. Really, option two was the best choice for both of us.

  I climbed the ladder

  Chapter 70

  DANIÈLE

  Danièle couldn’t believe Will was leaving her! She didn’t know what she expected him to do instead. If he came down, Zolan would kill him. Still, it was impossible to remain objective. She was overrun with emotions. Resentment. Injustice. Desperation.

  He’s leaving me behind.

  Chapter 71

  KATJA


  Go, Will, Go! Katja urged silently. She knew her father was lying again. He wasn’t going to work out an arrangement. He was going to kill Will just as Hanns killed Rob. And she didn’t want that. Will was her friend.

  She and Danièle would be in big trouble, they’d probably get locked up in the Dungeon for a while, but her father would eventually forgive them, and things would go back to normal—only better though, because she would finally have someone other than her father she could talk to, a big sister. Danièle could tell her all about the surface world, everything she needed to know to prepare her to live there, until Will returned with help to rescue them.

  Chapter 72

  As I scrambled up the ladder, Zolan shouted, “I’ll kill her! Come back! I’ll kill her right now! Come back!”

  I climbed.

  Moments later Danièle screamed: high-pitched, fevered, primitive in mindless agony.

  “You’re killing her!” Zolan said to me. “You are! You’re killing her!”

  I climbed.

  Finally the shaft opened to a lateral hallway. The ladder continued up, through another shaft in the ceiling. I was tempted to keep climbing. Up was good; it was the direction I wanted to go. Nevertheless, I couldn’t climb fast with the torch, and my pursuers were likely already gaining on me. Also, the shaft could lead to a dead end. I would be trapped.

  Danièle screamed again, shrill but plaintive this time. The sound shattered me to the soul.

  Then nothing.

  I leapt from the ladder and began to run.

  Chapter 73

  ZOLAN

  Zolan couldn’t believe Katja had turned against him. He had thought Will and Rob must have coerced her to free them, to help them find Danièle and escape. But there she had been, climbing the ladder of her own freewill. He saw it with his very eyes. The treachery had been heartbreaking to witness.

  He might not be her biological father—that would be Hanns, or had been Hanns—but he had raised her nearly since birth, and for all intents and purposes, she was his daughter.

  She had been somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four months old when Zolan found his way here in 2000. Still, it had not been in time to save her from his father, who had begun performing the mutilations on all infants at as young an age as possible. Over the years it became less a deterrent to escape, he believed, and more a ritual to mark their inclusion into the community.

  Zolan had been disgusted by these defacements, the general lack of hygiene and fetid living conditions, and his intention had been to kill everyone swiftly to free them from their miserable existence. Nevertheless, while he was researching lethal toxins and working up the courage to carry the poisoning out—mass murder was not something you undertook lightly, even if you had the best of intentions—Katja’s innocence endeared her to him. Unlike the others, she was still a baby, not yet corrupted by the limitations of her environment and the primitive behavior of her family, and after exhaustive soul-searching he decided it wasn’t his place to be her judge, jury, and executioner.

  So Zolan left the lot of them to fare for themselves and vowed never to return. His resolve, however, lasted only two weeks. He was unable to stop thinking about Katja. He longed to hold her again, to look into her eyes, to have her fall asleep on his chest, and so he went back, time and time again. Each trip was supposed to be the last, a short visit to make sure Katja was doing okay. But after a few months of this he had fallen in love with her the way a father falls in love with his daughter. He was burping her, changing her, playing with her, watching her…and that he could do for hours on end…simply watch her. When she spoke her first word—“Papa”—he was thrilled. When she took her first step, he was ecstatic.

  She became his savior and his curse. His savior because she taught him about fatherhood and responsibility and unconditional love—none of which he had experienced, or cared to experience, before in his life. Yet also his curse because she bound him to her unholy existence underground. He could not take her with him to the surface. Her pitiful appearance aside, there would be too many questions, too much explaining to do. So whenever he left for a fuck, or to pick up supplies, he made sure the only person allowed near her was her biological mother, Romy, and he set up a video camera and told Romy he was watching her every minute and played back recorded footage as proof.

  When Katja turned three or so, Zolan began home-schooling her with songs and games before graduating to more formal lessons. And if his first mistake had been not to poison her when she was an infant, his second mistake had been to educate and civilize her. Because had he left her to grow up like her parents and aunts and uncles, had he left her to evolve into a savage animal (and despite what he’d told Danièle about his kin, they were little more than base animals, there was no doubt about that), then her innocence would have faded, he would have been able to distance himself from her, disown her, return to his old life.

  But enlighten her he did, and like any enlightened child, she became curious about everything—but mostly about the aboveground world she’d come to know in her storybooks, the world that was so different than her own. He told her the same explanation his father had told him: Paris was destroyed in World War Two and the survivors had fled underground. Yet every question she asked forced him to build upon this simple premise until God forbid he could almost believe the elaborate tale himself.

  He got lucky with her books. Originally he chose them carefully, only bringing her those published pre-1945 so they wouldn’t reference modern history. Then one evening he had been reading Swiss Family Robinson to her and viewed the publication page. The novel was first published in 1812, but of course he didn’t have a first edition, and the abridged reprint was dated 1992. It was a careless oversight, but no harm was done, and he removed all the publication pages from all her books before she became any the wiser.

  Since then there had been a few other slipups, and he had begun to fear Katja was getting suspicious of her world paradigm. He had always known she would, and she would leave him, just as he had left his father, yet he had believed—wrongly, it turned out—that he still had a few years left with her.

  Zolan climbed the final rungs of the ladder and poked his head into the lateral hallway. He aimed the beam of his flashlight at the chalky ground and spotted wet footprints disappearing into the dark.

  Alighting from the ladder, Zolan grimaced in pain. He figured Danièle might have broken one or two of his ribs with that desk stunt of hers. But it didn’t matter. He could still move. And he had business to conclude.

  He stared into the blackness in the direction Will had gone. His panic and urgency had subsided; there was no longer any need for haste. Although this section of tunnels spread for several kilometers, they were linear and led nowhere. If Will continued straight ahead, he would come to an impassable jumble of rocks five hundred meters onward. Likewise, if he turned right at the first and only branching passageway he would eventually come to another jumble of rocks. Both routes had once connected to the catacombs at large, but his father had sealed off each, to secure the perimeter of his domain against potential backdoor intruders.

  Now only three entrances/exits existed that Zolan knew of, and they were all nearly impossible to uncover. In fact, since his arrival, he could count on one hand the number of intrusions there had been. The first was in 2004 when a lone cataphile stumbled straight into the Great Hall. Zolan was woken by the ensuing commotion, and by the time he arrived on scene the cataphile lay on the floor, motionless, one of the silver candleabras on the ground next to him in a spreading pool of blood. Hanns had been dancing and hollering like a lunatic under a full moon. However, the cataphile—a young Frenchman named Michel, according to his driver’s license—wasn’t dead, so Zolan chained him up in the Dungeon until he decided what to do with him. It was a pointless measure, as Michel didn’t regain consciousness. Unwilling to nurse a vegetable, Zolan slit his throat and he and Hanns disposed of the remains in a distant chamber.

  The
second intrusion came a year later. Hanns and Jörg discovered two Frenchmen sleeping in the statue room above one of the many mass graves that littered this section of the catacombs. It wasn’t a coincidence. Hanns and Jörg and sometimes Karl had taken to patrolling the deep tunnels and galleries, searching for interlopers. On this occasion it was the three of them, and they overpowered the two men (who had put up a fair fight, breaking one of Hanns’ arms). They brought them back to the Dungeon, the way a cat sometimes brings the prey it catches to its master as an offering. Zolan would have preferred not to kill the men; they had professed to be husbands and fathers. But what else was he to do? He couldn’t let them go. So he and Hanns dispatched of them as they had Michel.

  The third breach in the security, if that was what these intrusions could be called, had been in 2008. Hanns and Karl crossed paths with an attractive couple, killed the female by accident, and brought the male to the Dungeon. Zolan was on the surface in one of the red light districts, and in his absence Hanns organized his first blood match. He won handily, and little remained of the cataphile when Zolan returned. Katja had been seven then, old enough to wonder about who the visitor was, and Zolan ordered her never to talk to any such people if they showed up in the future, because they were dangerous and would try to fill her head with lies.