The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (17 page)

“You’re right,” I told Max. “There were too
many of us. We were too loud. I didn’t hear him. Still, he
shouldn’t have been out there without any lights.”

I hit the water facefirst. It felt as though
I’d kissed concrete. I went under and didn’t know up from down.
When I finally burst through the surface, the Chris-Craft was
upside down. The wooden hull side rose from the water a few yards
away from me. The six-cylinder engine gurgled and sputtered.

Three bodies, the only bodies I could see,
floated nearby. They began to sink almost immediately.

“I was closer to you, wasn’t I?” Max
said.

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “You were
there one second, then gone the next.”

“But you chose to save her?”

This was what no one understood. I didn’t
choose
anybody. I didn’t weigh the pros and cons of whom to
rescue, the way you might ponder different brands of the same
product at the supermarket. There was no reasoning, no calculating
happening inside my brain at that moment. Nothing but an
overwhelming need to act, to do something, anything.

And then I was swimming to where Bridgette’s
body had been moments before. I dived. The water was black. I
couldn’t see. But my hand brushed her back. I slipped my arms
around her body and kicked until we surfaced.

The aluminum boat drifted past the stern of
the Chris-Craft. I swam to it, pulling Bridgette with me. I gripped
the gunwale and yelled for help. Liz, who was still on the dock,
heard me. She woke my parents. My father and Bridgette’s father
arrived in one of the lodge’s boats. Bridgette’s father gave
Bridgette CPR, while my father and I dived for Max, but the lake
was too deep.

Police divers recovered all six missing
bodies—including the fisherman’s—the following morning.

“What was I supposed to do?” I said.
“Bridgette was unconscious. If I let go of her…”

“So you let me drown?”

“I’m sorry, Max.”

“And how did she repay you?” Maxine said,
staring at me with those black, haunting eyes. “She left you. I
wouldn’t have left you, Will. I’m your
sister
. I wouldn’t
have left you no matter what anybody said.”

I woke stiff and cold and disorientated,
though the fog cleared quickly. I was beneath Paris, in the
catacombs. Candles glowed softly. I tried to recall the dream I’d
been having. The Bunker that wasn’t the Bunker. The rooms with the
bodies on the gurneys, peeled open like oranges, their insides
exposed—rooms my sleeping mind had no doubt extrapolated from the
real one with the bank-vault door, the one I’d outlandishly
speculated (but didn’t say out loud) to be a torture chamber where
Nazis had performed hideous experiments on the French freedom
fighters they’d caught in the catacombs. And Max—Jesus, Max, in the
dress she’d worn on the night she’d died…

I sat up, shaking my right arm, working
feeling back into it. Rob lay a few feet away from me, folded into
a ball to keep warm, a string of drool stuck to his cheek.

Then—
shft
. The sound was loud in the
empty silence. I snapped my head toward it and started.

Someone stood at the doorway.

He was old, over sixty, and tall, maybe six
feet. Wisps of spider web hair curled out from beneath a mud-caked
green bandana. What I could see of his face in the poor candlelight
was pointed and fierce, his complexion as dusky as damp earth. He
wore an olive fatigue jacket over a black T-shirt, black jeans, and
black Doc Martins, maybe steel-toed. No backpack, no waders, no
helmet. No cataphile gear whatsoever.

“
Zeigen sie ihren ausweist!
” he
barked in a commanding voice.

“Jesus,” I said, stumbling to my feet.

Rob stirred. “Wha…?” He saw the guy and
sprang into a crouch, then lost his balanced and toppled backward
onto his butt. “Who the fuck…?”

Danièle and Pascal sat up in their hammocks,
alarmed.

“
Zeigen sie ihren ausweist!
” the man
repeated.

“And if we do not?” Danièle said loudly, now
standing.

The man seemed momentarily surprised she
understood German.

“What’s he saying?” I asked.

“He wants to see our IDs.”

“IDs…?” The guy couldn’t be a catacop; he
looked like a bum. Another prankster then—?

Was he in cahoots with the Painted
Devil?

The man switched to heavily accented
English. “Don’t you know it is illegal to be here?” he said
sternly. He eyed Danièle’s cask of wine, Rob’s empty beer cans.
“What are you drinking? Mind if I join you?” Before anyone could
reply he plopped down at the table and withdrew a bottle from his
jacket. “Vodka and vitamins,” he announced, offering it to Rob.
“Try—it is good for you.”

Grinning, Rob accepted the bottle—stupidly,
I thought—and took a belt. A moment later he cringed, wooted, and
shook himself like a wet dog, all at the same time. “Motherfucker!”
He passed the bottle back.

Danièle and Pascal began dismantling their
hammocks. I figured they wanted to move on as soon as possible. I
was fine with that plan. The old guy’s BO smelled like onions left
uncovered in the fridge.

I fetched my still-wet socks and shoes and
pulled them on.

“My name is Zolan,” the man said, sipping
the vodka as if it were water. A shark-tooth necklace encircled his
neck. It seemed to be missing as many teeth as he was. Black wool
gloves covered his hands. The tips of the gloves’ fingers and
thumbs were cut off.

“I’m Roast Beef,” Rob said. “That’s Stork
Girl, he’s Chess, and he’s…”

I was at a loss. “Macaroni,” I said.

Rob gave me a look. Zolan passed him the
bottle again, and he took another belt, longer than the first. His
reaction was tempered this time.

“Do you know someone called the Painted
Devil?” I asked.

Zolan fixed me with dark and feral eyes. “Le
Diable Peint is a stupid shit.”

I blinked in surprise. Rob hooted in
delight. Danièle and Pascal paused their packing and watched
us.

“How do you know him?” I asked.

“I have come across him many times. He
thinks he owns these tunnels. He knows nothing.”

“He speaks German, like you.”

Zolan spat. “He
pretends
to be German
to scare people. He is a fake.”

I was about to remind Zolan that he’d tried
to scare us too, but Rob said, “How long you been coming down here,
boss?” He was clearly enjoying the old guy’s company—that, and the
free vodka.

“A long time,” Zolan said simply. “Do you
have anything to eat? I’m hungry.”

“Danny,” Rob said, “where’re your
cookies?”

“I have packed them already.”

“Break them out. Zolan’s hungry.”

Danièle had been buckling her backpack
closed. She reopened the main pocket, searched through it, and
withdrew the package of biscuits. She offered them to Zolan. He
shoved one biscuit into his mouth, then another, crumbs spilling
onto his chest.

“Okay, everyone ready?” Danièle said. “We
must continue now.”

“So soon?” Zolan said, appearing
disappointed by our abrupt departure. “Where are you going?”

“We’re looking for a woman,” Rob told him,
oblivious to the smoldering look Danièle shot him. “Rascal—Chess
found her video camera about a week ago. Someone was chasing her.
She dropped the camera and started screaming and—”

Danièle kicked him in the side. “Get your
stuff, Rosbif. We are leaving.”

“Ow, Danny, fuck.” But Rob seemed to get the
message. He got his stuff together and stood. “Guess we’re off,
boss. Thanks for the drink.”

The rest of us said goodbye, and we were at
the exit to the grotto when Zolan said, “Val-de-Grâce.”

We stopped, turned.

“Excuse me?” Danièle said.

“The video camera,” Zolan said, his back to
us. “It was beneath Val-de-Grâce.”

Pascal and Danièle exchanged glances.

Then Pascal spoke for the first time: “How
do you know that?”

“I met the woman you talk about,” he said.
“I saved her life.”

Zolan’s revelation caused temporary
pandemonium. Everyone began talking at once, raising voices, no one
making an effort to mask their skepticism. Zolan grinned, as if he
had expected this reaction. He withdrew a folded square from his
jacket pocket, opened it, and spread a map onto the table. We went
over to examine it. Pascal gasped audibly, obviously impressed.
Indeed, it made Pascal’s beloved map look barebones in comparison,
and I guessed it must have detailed almost every nook and cranny
beneath Paris. It was hand drawn in black ink. The torn, aged
parchment had at some point been laminated, and the plastic was
covered with burn marks and stains and additional annotations
scribbled in permanent marker.

Zolan pointed with a chipped and dirty
fingernail to a spot in the upper right corner. “Val-de-Grâce
hospital is here.” He indicated another spot several inches away.
Had there been a legend, the distance likely would have measured a
few hundred meters or so. “The woman was here, fifty meters deep,
in the lowest level of the catacombs.”

Pascal bent close to study the squiggle of
lines.

“Is this correct, Pascal?” Danièle asked
him. “Is he right? Is that where you found the video camera?”

Pascal nodded slowly, clearly devastated,
and I actually felt sorry for the guy. This had been his show, his
little
Goonies
adventure, he’d been convinced he was going
to find that woman’s body. Now it turned out it was all for
naught.

“So what happened to the woman?” I asked
Zolan.

“I guided her to the surface,” he said
simply.

“I mean, why’d she scream? How’d you save
her life?”

“Ah.” He nodded. “There had been a cave in.
She was separated from her friends. She wandered for two days by
herself. Then she stumbled upon a nest of rats.”
“Rats?” Danièle said, surprised.

“Large ones. The size of cats. They sensed
she was weak, they sensed a meal, and they attacked her. I heard
her screaming. That is how I found her. I scared them off. She had
many bites. Here, here, here.” He touched different parts of his
body. “But she was okay. She could walk.”

“You never took her back to get her camera?”
I said.

“She never mentioned a video camera to me.”
He shrugged. “Given what she had been through, and the condition
she was in, I suspect it had been the last thing on her mind.”

Danièle and Pascal moved away from the rest
of us to converse with themselves. When they returned, they
explained that the expedition was over and we would return the way
we had come. It was an anticlimactic outcome, surely, but with the
woman safe on the surface, there was little reason for us to
continue farther. So we kitted up, turned our headlamps on, said
goodbye to Zolan for a second time, then backtracked through the
maze of World War Two era rooms. I was the last one to enter the
cat hole that led back to the tunnel system at large, and when I
climbed out the other side I was surprised to find Danièle and
Pascal speaking to Rob in hushed, conspiratorial tones. “What’s
going on?” I said, going over to them.

“He was lying,” Danièle told me in a harsh
whisper. Her eyes were wide, luminous, concerned.

“Who?” I said, confused. “Zolan?”

“He told us the woman was attacked by rats,”
she said. “But there are no rats in the catacombs, Will. There is
nothing for them to eat here. He made that up because he does not
want us to know the real reason why the woman screamed.”

“And why’s that, Danny?” Rob asked.

“Because he killed her,” Pascal stated.

I looked at him, then at Danièle. They both
seemed serious—and frightened?

“You two are bat shit crazy!” Rob
blurted.

“You are!” Danièle said. “You drank with
him. Like he was your best friend. You drank with a killer!”