The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (23 page)

Moreover, it wasn’t
him
; it was
them
. Because there had been at least two of them, one
behind us, in the cat hole, and one in front of us—

From the darkness, nearby, came a sob.

Danièle realized someone—or something—shared
the dark with her. She heard movement, scuffling, maybe ten feet
away, maybe twenty, it was impossible to ascertain for certain.
Then a moan followed.

It was Will.

Nevertheless, she didn’t call out to him.
Her body was in too much pain, her throat too sore. Besides, what
would talking to him accomplish? He was a prisoner, like her. Like
Rob and Pascal, if they shared this room also. He couldn’t free any
of them. He couldn’t do anything.

None of them could.

She heard a harsh patter, and it took her a
moment to realize he was peeing. She didn’t need to urinate or
defecate, but when the urge came, she knew she would have no choice
but to soil herself. Then she would have to sit there and sleep
there in her own filth, with no light and no food and no water.

Tears welled in her eyes. Her lower lip
quivered. She bit down hard on it, drawing blood.

Will began to move again. Danièle wondered
what was running through his head. Had he seen the thing that had
struck him? Even if he hadn’t, he knew that something had attacked
them in the cat hole, knew that it had gotten Rob. Knew it had
hunted them like prey.

So why wasn’t he screaming like she had when
she came around, screaming in despair and terror at the unjustness
of this incarceration, screaming until his throat went raw and he
couldn’t scream anymore?

He called her name. His voice was thick,
urgent.

Danièle opened her mouth, closed it.

She was too tired, too injured, too
depleted.

She drifted into semi-consciousness,
floating, spinning, forgetting. Then a single thought: Dev.
Dev
knows about the video camera, the lost woman, the expedition! So
when Rob doesn’t return home today, and she can’t get ahold of me
or Pascal, she’ll conclude that something happened to us. She’ll
contact the police
.

And they would…do nothing.

Danièle’s hope nosedived.

Like she’d told Will earlier, it wasn’t the
police’s job to hunt down cataphiles who got themselves lost in the
catacombs; it was their job to hand out fines and meet quotas. Yes,
they would visit the Beach and Room Z and some of the other popular
areas, they would question the cataphiles they caught. But that
would be all. There would be no extensive manhunt.

If only they knew the truth!
she
thought.
That…that what? What were those things that had
attacked us and brought us here? Zombies?

This sounded so farcical, so bad-TV-movie,
but the thing Danièle had seen had no nose or lips, as if they had
rotted off its face, and after it had knocked Will out, it had
chased her, caught her, pinned her against the wall, rubbed its
hands over her face, sniffed her, licked her, as if it was
possessed of an urge, not sexual in nature, it hadn’t been
interested in her body, not right then, but of something more
primal than sex, a hunger, as if it wanted to tear her apart and
consume her then and there.

But it didn’t. It held back. It reigned in
its impulse, which indicated control. Were zombies capable of
self-control? And then it threw her to the ground and beat her
unconscious instead.

But why?

Sea turtles.

Sea turtles?

Giant sea turtles. They could survive for
months without food or water. Sailors used to store them in the
ship’s hold during long voyages.

A fresh food source
.

Danièle opened her mouth to scream again,
but all that came out was a miserable sob.

“Danièle?” I whispered hoarsely. “Danièle?
It’s me, Will.”

Another wrenching sob, then another. They
sounded as if they were being torn from her body by a barbed
fist.

“Danièle? Are you okay?” I moved toward her
until my chain snapped taut. I grunted. The pain in my head flared.
“Danièle?”

“Yes…”

Her voice was soft, cracked, barely
there.

“Come toward me.”

No reply.

“Danièle?”

“Can’t.”

“You can’t move?”

“Can’t.”

My heart was pounding.

What was wrong with her?

How badly was she hurt?

I said, “Are you bleeding?”

“No.”

“What did they do to you?”

No reply.

I wanted to hold her, touch her, help her. I
yanked at my restraints in frustration.

I said, “We have to get out of here.”

No reply.

“We’re
going
to get out of here.”

I wondered how long we had been here. Hours?
Or days? I didn’t feel hungry. I was thirsty though. God, I wished
I hadn’t thought of that. My tongue suddenly felt twice its normal
size. I moved it around inside my mouth, which was dry and
sticky.

“Will…?”

“Yeah?”

“So…scared.”

“We’ll be okay.”

“What…they do to us?”

“Don’t think about that.”

“I think…”

“It’s going to be okay.”

“I think…they eat us.”

The fear inside me hardened to ice as I
stared into the blackness.

Now it was my turn to fall silent.

I followed the length of the chain attached
to my manacles and discovered it was attached to an iron ring
bolted into the wall at a corner of the room. I worked at the ring,
trying to pry it free from the rock, until my fingernails bled and
I gave up.

I fanned away from the corner, feeling with
my feet for a stone or something I could potentially use as a
hammer. I came across nothing but hard-packed mud.

I slumped to my butt, trying to ignore the
wet denim sucking against my legs and the itchy sensation it
caused.

If I could somehow surprise one of our
captors, I thought, I might find something on him I could use to
free myself. But how would I accomplish this? Play dead when he
approached? Kick him in the face when he stooped to examine me?
Could I perform this cleanly, without an alarm being raised?

I wanted to tell myself that this was all a
big mistake, that we would soon be released, but that was bullshit.
The iron ring installed in the wall and the handy chains and
manacles suggested our captors had kidnapped others before. They
had an agenda.

So what was that? To use us as slave labor?
To play out sick torture fantasies on us? Or, as Danièle suggested,
to fucking eat us?

I shoved myself to my feet decisively,
breathed deeply. I wasn’t going to go down that path. I wasn’t
going to give in to despair.

I started to pace. I wanted to channel my
frustration and fear onto Danièle and Pascal; I wanted to blame
them for the predicament we were in. But that wouldn’t be fair.
They’d had no idea what awaited us down here.

No, the only person I could blame was
myself. I had accepted Danièle’s invitation to search for the lost
woman. Nobody put a gun to my head.

And now I was going to pay for that
stupidity.

No, not just me, I realized. Everybody close
to me. My parents especially—for when their emails and phone calls
to me went unanswered, they would suspect something was amiss and
get the French authorities to investigate. When I didn’t turn up in
a hospital somewhere, or a jail cell, or wherever else…they would
conclude what? The last person I had spoken to had been Bridgette.
She had told me she had gotten married and was pregnant…

Shit, I didn’t want them to think that.

Not fucking suicide.

Would they be able to cope with the loss of
both Maxine and me? My father probably. He was like my grandfather
had been, as hard as the knocks life threw at him. If you didn’t
know better, you would have said he had been none the different
after Max died—but I did know better. I saw the chinks in his
armor. The weariness that crept into his voice. The cynicism not so
much in his eyes but in the crow’s feet around them. The stoop in
his walk that had never been there before. Yeah, the chinks were
there, but I think he still could hold it together even if
something happened to me too. My mother, no way. There was little
left to hold together anyway. At my wedding reception she had been
a healthy fifty-two-year-old woman with full chestnut hair and
glowing skin and an easy smile. At the airport when I left for
London, her hair was gray with streaks of white, she was twenty
pounds underweight, and worst of all, the light inside her had been
switched off. She never went back to her job at the library, and I
wasn’t sure what she did around the house all day. I had a horrible
picture of her sitting on the settee on the front porch for hours
on end, a book open in her lap, staring at the page but not seeing
the words.

I jerked at my restraints for the hundredth
time. The cuffs seared my already abraded skin. I jerked again and
again, grunting each time.

“Will…?” It was Danièle, groggy, still out
of it.

I kept yanking at the restraints. Slimy
blood lubricated my wrists.

“Will?” Panicked now. “What are you doing?
Stop it.”

I wasn’t listening. I tugged and tugged,
unable to control myself. Danièle was shouting at me, though she
seemed distant, unimportant.

Then abruptly, jarringly, a noise cut
through my bubbling madness.

A rooster crow.

Danièle thought she must be dreaming, or
hallucinating. A rooster in the catacombs? But then it
cock-a-doodle-dooed again.

She tried pushing herself to her knees and
failed. Her right arm was useless, maybe fractured. She had raised
it to protect her head when the zombie-man had rained blows down on
her with his bone-weapon.

She moved her left arm under her chest and
propped herself onto her elbow. Rotating onto her hip, she was able
to sit up.

The movement, however, caused dagger-sharp
pain to lance through her skull. She remained still, praying for
the agony to subside.

Then: “Danièle! Look!” It was Will.

Look? she thought. Look where? It was
permanent night, black everywhere…only it wasn’t, not anymore. From
an indeterminable distance away, a faint light appeared.

Someone was coming.

It was a girl, or a woman, I couldn’t tell
from this distance. She wore charcoal tights and a too-big sweater
that went nearly to her knees. Her hair was long, dark, flowing
around her head. In her left hand she held a candle with a small
flame.

She stopped at the entrance to our room, and
in the fluttering light I could see the surroundings for the first
time—

“Rob!” Danièle cried huskily. “Pascal!”

To the left of the girl, in the corner, lay
Rob. He was on his stomach, unmoving. His hands were cuffed behind
his back, a chain snaking from the manacles to an iron ring in the
wall. To the right, in the adjacent corner, lay Pascal, unconscious
and bound as well.

I glanced in Danièle’s direction. The light
didn’t reach this side of the room, and I could see little but her
silhouette against an almost equally black background. She seemed
to be propped up with one arm while the other one dangled
lamely.

I returned my attention to the girl.

Was there something wrong with her face? Or
was that the play of shadows?

“
Comment allez-vous?
” Danièle said.
“
Est-ce que vous
parlez
français
?
”

The girl didn’t speak.

“
Quel âge avez-vous?
Pouvez-vous m’aider… S’il vous plaît?
”

No reply.

“Do you speak English?” I
tried, though I couldn’t fathom why she would.

Nothing.

“Why are we here?” I said.
“What’s going to happen to us?”

She turned to
leave.

“Wait!”

Danièle and I yelled after
her to stop, to come back, but then she was gone from sight and the
blackness returned and
we were blind once more.

Hours passed. Maybe two, maybe five, Danièle
couldn’t tell. However many, it felt like an eternity. She and Will
said little to one another. Occasionally they would call Rob’s
name, or Pascal’s. There was never an answer. She tried not to
think about them. She and Will were lucky in the sense that they
had both regained consciousness, but what if Rob and Pascal never
did?

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.