The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) Read online

  My cracker-box studio had a lack of idiosyncrasy so jarring it became an idiosyncrasy all of its own. It was drably furnished with brown wall-to-wall carpet, a swivel-egg armchair older than me, a small wooden desk, and a metal-frame bed so short my feet dangled over the end. A television sat in the corner on a low table. It only got a few channels and I rarely used it. The walls were mustard and pitted with the holes from screws and nails which previous tenants had used to hang pictures. My only additions were an iron and ironing board because the dryers at the Laundromat a block over didn’t work sufficiently, leaving my clothes damp and wrinkled.

  Nevertheless, I was okay with the place. It wasn’t much smaller than the one Bridgette and I had shared off the Bowery. Also, there was an oven, which was great for cooking frozen pizzas when I was too impatient to order one in, and a balcony, which Danièle told me was uncommon in Paris.

  I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, then opened the window that overlooked the small courtyard to let out the foxed-paper smell that permeated the entire building. The air was springtime fresh, and the landlord was edging the garden with a hoe, making some sort of drainage line. I rarely saw any of the tenants down there. In fact, aside from Audrey Gabin, I rarely saw any of the tenants anywhere, anytime.

  I sat in the armchair, flipped open my laptop, and accessed the internet. I typed “paris catacombs missing person” into the search engine. The first page of results mostly referenced the section of catacombs beneath Montparnasse’s Place Denfert-Rochereau. This was the tourist attraction open to the public. For a fee you could descend one hundred thirty steps underground and walk along a dimly lit circuit passing macabre alleys and pillars artfully constructed with tibias and femurs and punctuated with vacuous skulls.

  I tried a number of different keyword combinations, but didn’t come across anything involving a missing woman or a lost video camera. I had been hoping to find the video Danièle had shown me, or at least a reference to it. This would have proved Pascal was full of shit. It was something he’d downloaded, a hoax, that was all. Unfortunately, the fact there was no mention of the video indicated the guy had likely been telling the truth about finding it on his own.

  Still, I kept searching and got sucked into learning about the catacombs’ long and storied history. They began as limestone quarry tunnels dating back two thousand years to the first Roman settlers. They were greatly expanded during the cathedral boom of the late Middle Ages, honeycombing beneath the arrondissements of the Left Bank and the suburbs south of the city proper. In the late eighteenth century, long after the quarrying had stopped, Paris had become a crowded city. It had a burgeoning population clamoring for housing and burial plots. Churches maintained their own graveyards, but they were overcrowded and unsanitary. To free up valuable real estate, and to get rid of the health hazards created by corpses buried ten deep and literally bursting through the walls of people’s cellars, officials ordered the graves dug up—all of them. Over the next several decades the skeletonized remains of six million dead were dumped into the abandoned quarries, forming the largest mass grave on earth.

  For safety reasons access to them had been banned since the fifties, most of the entranceways closed off, though this hasn’t deterred people such as Danièle and Pascal. They called themselves cataphiles, a colloquial name for underground urban explorers—

  My cell phone rang suddenly, breaking the studious trance I had fallen under.

  Danièle?

  I took my phone from my pocket and glanced at the display. A blocked number. I pressed Talk.

  “Hello?”

  No reply.

  “Hello?”

  “Will?”

  My heart skipped. “Bridgette?”

  “Will, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, can you hear me?”

  “I can now. I guess we were lagging.” A pause. “How are you?”

  “I’m good,” I said, getting to my feet for some reason. A warm breeze came through the window, smelling of freshly cut grass. The landlord was now mowing the patch of green lawn with a push mower. I glanced at my wristwatch. It was 7:10 p.m. “What time is it there?” I asked.

  “I’m on my lunch break.”

  Bridgette and I had emailed a few times since I left New York, and I had given her my new phone number, but this was the first time she had called it.

  I opened my mouth to reply, but I realized I had nothing to say. I felt how you do with a stranger in an elevator. It jarred me how Bridgette and I could go from being so close, to sharing everything together, to becoming less than friends. And that’s what we were, wasn’t it? Less than friends. Because friends, at least, had things to say to one another.

  “Are you enjoying Paris?” she asked.

  “It’s a nice city.”

  “It’s been…how long now?”

  “Nearly three months.”

  “And the guide?”

  “It’s coming. It’ll probably take me another couple months.”

  “And then?”

  “I think they want me to revise the Barcelona one.”

  “Spain! Very nice. I’m glad you’re happy.”

  I wanted to tell her I wasn’t sure I was happy, but I didn’t.

  “How about you?” I said. “Everything okay?”

  “There’s something I need to tell you, Will.” She hesitated. It might have only been for a second or two, but it felt to me like an eternity. In that moment I was positive she was going to tell me she wanted to get back together. She said, “I met someone.”

  A hot flash zinged through me. I continued to stare out the window, though I was no longer seeing the courtyard. Everything but Bridgette’s voice had become ancillary. “You mean a boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  I still didn’t move. I was numb. Emotionally numb.

  Why the fuck was she telling me this?

  “A lawyer?” I asked, surprised at the normalcy in my voice.

  “He’s a police officer.”

  “A cop?”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh. Well—”

  “Will, we just got engaged.”

  I’d always thought it was melodrama when people tell you to sit before hearing certain good or bad news. Now I believed it to be a justifiable forewarning, because my knees literally gave out and I collapsed into the armchair.

  Bridgette said, “I didn’t want you to find out on Facebook or whatever…”

  “I don’t use Facebook.”

  “You have an account.”

  “How long have you known this guy for?”

  “We met in March.”

  “Two months? That’s it? And you’re engaged?”

  “We…I’m pregnant,” she said. “It wasn’t planned,” she added quickly. “But…then…I started feeling sick in the mornings, and I took a test. And…and we decided it would be best to get married.”

  I was listening but not listening. My thoughts were a thousand miles away, fast-forwarding through the years I had spent with her. How good she had been to me. How she had stuck by me when nobody else had. How much I had loved her. How I would have done anything for her.

  How could she be engaged with someone else and pregnant with his child?

  She was mine. She had always been mine.

  I was back on my feet. Anger churned within me, burning me up from the inside out. My jaw was clenched, my free fist pumped open, closed, open, closed. I wanted to throw the phone as far as I could out the window.

  Instead I shut my eyes and tilted my head back. I took a silent breath. What was my problem? Fuck, I had slept with Danièle just the other night. Bridgette had every right to do the same with someone else. She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant. It happened. So what did I want her to do? Have an abortion? Stop seeing the guy? What would any of that accomplish? We were done.

  But we weren’t. I was going to come back. We were going to start over…

  “Will?” Bridgette said. “Are you there?”

 
“Yeah, I’m here.”

  “I know how all this must sound…”

  “I understand. And…congratulations. I’m happy for you.”

  She didn’t say anything. The line hissed with long-distance static interference.

  Then: “Thank you, Will.” Her voice was croaky, and I thought she might be crying. “That means a lot to me.”

  A chorus of voices sounded in the background.

  “I should go,” she said.

  I didn’t protest. There was nothing more to say.

  “Will?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you. I always will.”

  “I love you too.”

  I didn’t hang up immediately. Apparently she didn’t either, because the line noise continued for another five seconds.

  Then silence, perfect silence.

  She was gone.

  Sometime later, as the late dusk settled and shadows lengthened outside my window, I started packing a bag.

  Chapter 3

  The name of the pub Danièle had written on the napkin earlier was La Cave. The façade was nondescript, and I walked straight past the wooden door and small neon sign on my first pass down rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud.

  The interior had all the intimacy, intrigue, and secrecy of a speakeasy. Red cone lamps suspended from the barrel-vault ceiling cast butterscotch light over the button-tufted sofas and armchairs and low wood tables. The bar was tucked into one corner. Behind the fumed-oak counter a chalkboard listed a variety of cocktails. In another corner sat a white claw-footed bathtub, filled with ice and green bottles of what looked to be home-made beer. Good-natured old-timers schmoozed next to crowds of younger hipsters, voices and laughter raised in a cacophony of merriment.

  I didn’t see Danièle anywhere and checked my wristwatch, a six hundred dollar Hamilton that Bridgette had splurged on for my twenty-fourth birthday.

  It was a quarter past eight. Danièle had said she would be here between eight and nine. Had she changed her mind and left early?

  “Excuse me?” I said to a waiter wiping down a recently vacated tabled. He was a clean-cut guy with a back-in-fashion mullet, rolled-up cuffs, and a black apron. “Have you seen a woman, short black hair, a lot of mascara?”

  “Why don’t you use your eyes and look for her yourself?” he snapped, turning away from me.

  I stared at his back, pissed off, but letting it go. People say the French are rude, but I’ve found that stereotype mostly applied to the service class, who could act as hoity-toity as pop stars; they certainly had no regard for the Anglo-Saxon maxim, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”

  I continued searching for Danièle, and after five minutes without success, I was about to give up and leave when I spotted a staircase that descended to a basement level. I went down a set of steep, narrow steps that emerged in an expansive area styled similar to the first floor, only the walls were brick instead of paneled wood and there were no windows. I immediately spotted Danièle and Pascal and a third guy off by themselves, at a corner table.

  “Will!” Danièle said, springing to her feet when she saw me approach. We did the air kiss thing, then she turned to the others to make introductions. “You remember Pascal?”

  “Hey,” I said, sticking out my hand.

  Pascal shook, but didn’t stand. He was a handsome guy, dark-complected, with thick eyebrows, brooding eyes, and long brown hair. He had gone chic-bum with a wrinkled linen T-shirt and a tweed jacket with brown elbow patches. The tee was wide-necked and showed off too much hairless chest which a loosely knotted scarf failed to conceal. It was the kind of overthought getup you saw aged rock stars don to prove they still had their thumb on the pulse of the times. He was wearing the same black wool-knit cap he had on at Danièle’s birthday party.

  “And Will,” Danièle said, “this is Robert.”

  “Just Rob, boss,” Rob told me, standing and shaking. He was a short bulldog-looking guy whose body was not only compact but tightly muscular, like a college wrestler’s. He had a spray of freckles that hadn’t faded over time as mothers always promised would, lively gray eyes, and a balding crown shaved close to the scalp. I guessed he was the oldest in our motley crew, maybe thirty.

  “You’re American?” I said. Pascal’s silent greeting had made me feel unwelcome, and it was nice to know I wasn’t the only outsider.

  “Nah, Canadian, but what the fuck, right?”

  “We have just ordered,” Danièle told me. “But do not worry. There is enough for you.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “You should still eat. You will not get another chance until morning.”

  “I brought some snacks.”

  “Okay, Will, do not eat, but sit down.”

  I took a seat beside her, across from Rob and Pascal.

  “So Danny says you’re a travel writer or something?” Rob said. He had a husky voice, as if his throat were corroded with rust. “How you like the frogs?”

  “Why do you say that, Rob?” Danièle demanded. “We are not frogs. Where did that come from? I never understand that.”

  “You eat frog legs, don’t you?”

  “Maybe I should call you ‘rosbif?’”

  “Ross what?”

  “Roast beef?” I offered.

  Danièle nodded. “Yes, because you Canadians and Americans eat so much red meat—and you are all so fat, like cows.”

  This cracked Rob up. He jumped to his feet and crouched-walked around the table, carrying in his hands an invisible belly, which he began thrusting at Danièle from behind. The action resembled a stubby stripper grinding a pole.

  “Get away!” Danièle said, swatting him. “You are so gross. Stop it!”

  Still laughing, Rob sat back down. “Fucking French,” he said. “Can’t take a joke. Got assholes so tight they squeak when they fart.”

  “Where’re you from?” I asked him.

  “Quebec City.”

  “The French-speaking part?”

  “Quebec’s a province, bro. Quebec City’s a small city in that province. But, yeah, the French-speaking part. Moved to Toronto when I was ten. Actually, moved to Mississauga. But nobody knows where the fuck that is, so I just say Toronto.”

  “What are you doing over here?”

  “I’m a translator, sort of. I do the subtitles for movies.”

  “Hollywood stuff?”

  “Other way around. I translate French films to English. You’ve probably never seen any of the ones I’ve done—because French films suck.”

  “They do not suck,” Danièle said.

  “If you like pretentious art house crap.”

  “Pascal, why did you invite Rosbif? He is so annoying sometimes. Did you forget we have to spend nearly ten hours with him?”

  Pascal said something in French, paused, then added something more, making a curlicue gesture with his hand. Rob nodded and shot back a reply.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked Pascal.

  He leveled his gaze at me. “Do you speak French?”

  Mr. Mullet appeared with a huge tray of food. We had to clear the condiments from the center of the table so everything could fit: oysters, soufflé, pork belly, garlic sausage, and a platter of cheese.

  While everyone ate, and I nibbled, Danièle said, “So this is the plan, Will. We will arrive at the entrance to the catacombs around ten o’clock. We will continued for four hours, then rest for one. Then it is another two hours or so to the spot where the camera was found.” She consulted Pascal. “Is that right?”

  He nodded without looking up from his food.

  “Which means we finish around 7 a.m.,” she added. “Still enough time to get to work.”

  I was surprised. “Work?”

  “You must work tomorrow, yes?”

  “I figured I’d write the day off.”

  “Then you do not need to worry.”

  “You’re working tomorrow?”

  “Of course. But I do not start until nine.”<
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  “Lucky you,” Rob said, sawing a piece of pork. “I start at eight.”

  I did Danièle’s math in my head. “If we start at ten, walk for four hours, rest for one, walk for another two, that’s seven hours in total. That will take us to five in the morning. Seven hours back, it won’t be noon until we resurface.”

  “No, Will,” Danièle said. “Pascal knows a different exit close to where we will rest. We will leave that way.”

  I looked at her, wondering if I had to state the obvious. Apparently I did, and said, “Why don’t we just enter through that exit?”

  “Because that is not what we do,” she stated. “The catacombs, it is an experience, every time, even for Pascal and me. It is not something to rush through. You and Robert will see. You will understand.”

  Chapter 4

  ROB

  Rob Stratton cast another passing glance across the table at Danièle’s friend Will, trying to get a read on him. He wasn’t your typical American expat, not loud, not wanting to be the center of attention. Not all American expats were like that, of course; they ran the spectrum like expats from any nationality did. But Yanks could be loud. Yanks, then Aussies, then Spaniards—especially the senoritas. That’s how he’d rank them all on the loud meter. The worst of the lot weren’t only loud but didn’t adapt. They brought their native country with them wherever they went.

  Rob was thinking about a friend of a friend in particular, a Texan in the import-export business who’d made a fortune selling Chinese junk to the French bourgeoisie. He didn’t wear a cowboy hat around, that would have made him the laughing-stock of Paris, but he did wear these fancy-ass pointed-toe cowhide boots. You could hear the Cuban heels click-clack across the cobblestone streets from a block away. And if this fashion faux pas wasn’t bad enough, the sad fuck shouted everything he said. “Y’all” this and “I’m fixin’ tuh” that. It made you want to smack him one.

  Anyway, generalizations aside, Rob wanted to like Will, he was trying to, but it was tough, knowing how much angst—albeit unintentional—his presence was causing poor Pascal, who’d held a flame for Danny for as long as Rob had known him.