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

  If Rob were Pascal, he probably would have popped Will one right in the kisser by now. But Pascal was a lover, a romantic, whatever you called dudes with more heart than testosterone. He didn’t have it in him to hurt a fly.

  When Pascal rang Rob two days ago, and explained the pathetic situation, he had been trying to act blasé about the whole deal, but it was obvious he was crushed. Initially Rob declined his invitation to come along; he knew Pascal was only asking because he didn’t want to be the third wheel at his own party; also, the wife had some work thing, and Rob had promised to watch the girls.

  Nevertheless, the little bugger wouldn’t let up, even offered to pay for a babysitter, and Rob finally relented. Why not? he’d thought. Pascal and Danny had been going on about the catacombs for years now, and he figured it was about time to find out what all the fuss was about.

  Chapter 5

  PASCAL

  Pascal Gayet slurped an oyster from the wide end of the shell, doing his best to ignore Danièle and the American Will. He still couldn’t believe he’d missed out on his chance to hook up with Danièle yet again. He’d wanted to ask her out ever since they’d first met years earlier at Le Mines. However, he’d been in a relationship then, and by the time he got out of it, she was in one. Ever since, it’d been the same thing: whenever she was single, he wasn’t, and vice versa. Eventually she’d gotten serious with a tattoo artist named Marcel, and for the next three years he had to listen to Danièle complain about what an asshole the guy was to her. Pascal told her repeatedly to dump him, but she never listened. Then, a few months ago, he dumped her for a TV actress who had a part in some kid’s show about a family trying to run a Bed and Breakfast. Pascal figured this was finally his chance. He and Danièle were both single. He’d give her a couple weeks to get over Marcel, then he’d tell her how he felt about her.

  Before he could do this, however, she began going on about this American she was doing language exchange lessons with. She obviously liked him. She didn’t shut up about him: Why doesn’t he like me? Do you think he’s gay? Do you think he has a girlfriend? Should I ask him out? Do American women do that? By the time of her birthday party Friday evening Pascal had expected some Fabio-type to stroll through the door with her. To his satisfaction, Will was no Fabio. He had short scruffy black hair, seemed to be in good shape, girls probably found him attractive. But Fabio? Not a chance.

  Still, that didn’t stop Danièle from fawning over him. At one point she hopped right onto his lap, her arms hooked around his neck, throwing her head back, laughing. Eventually Pascal couldn’t stand it anymore and left the pub with Danièle’s friend Fanny. She wasn’t attractive, he didn’t have sex with her, he didn’t want to. He just wanted company—that, and he wanted Danièle to find out, though if she did, she never mentioned it.

  Across the table Danièle was sitting ramrod straight, her hand out before her, fingers splayed, as she told of the time she had met the Russian ambassador to France at Place de la Bastille. She was up to the point when she had pretended to be Russian to gain access to the VIP room, where all the diplomats were knocking back free champagne during the ballet’s intermission. Obviously she was trying to impress Will, who was listening stoically beside her, staring into the beer he’d ordered.

  Pascal slurped a second oyster from the shell and entertained himself for a bit with all the different ways the American could meet a grisly demise in the catacombs tonight.

  Chapter 6

  Outside the restaurant, rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud was alive with lights and bustle and noise. We walked two blocks, turned down a side street, and walked another half block before arriving at Pascal’s ride: an old, beat-up Volkswagen campervan. Pascal and Rob got in the front while Daniel and I climbed in the back through the sliding side door. We sat next to one another on a bench seat that I suspected folded down into a bed.

  Was this Pascal’s Lovemobile? I wondered. Did he drive girls to the top of Montmartre, booze them up, then shag them back here?

  To my left was a long counter with knobs protruding vertically from the surface. I lifted one, which raised a section of countertop, and discovered a sink beneath.

  As Pascal pulled onto the street and made a tight U-turn, Rob swiveled the front passenger seat around so he was facing us and opened a cupboard below the counter, revealing a mini fridge. He snagged three Belgium beers and tossed one to Danièle and one to me. “To the catacombs fuckers!” he rasped.

  We popped the tabs, toasted.

  Rob swiveled forward again and turned up Bob Dylan on the stereo.

  “So this is fun, right?” Danièle said to me, leaning close to be heard.

  “Sure,” I said.

  I peeled back the tatty chintz curtain and looked out the window. I had never traveled Paris by car, and as we rattled down a wide avenue lined with chestnuts, I watched the stream of closed shops float past.

  Nearly everyone had a similar idealized image of Paris in their heads. A mecca of culture and history populated by beautiful architecture, stylish women clad in Gautier or Givenchy, and mustachioed mimes carrying easels under one arm and baguettes under the other. I guess this was sort of true—aside from the mustachioed mimes—but already the gloss had begun to wear off for me, and it had become just another steel-skied, rambling city.

  “What are you looking at?” Danièle asked me.

  I dropped the curtain. “I’ve never been this way before.”

  “You have not seen much of Paris, have you?”

  “Just the bars and clubs, mostly,” I said.

  “Why not sightsee more?”

  “I haven’t gotten around to it.”

  “You know, Will, you are a hermit crab.”

  “A hermit crab?”

  “You like to be by yourself.”

  I thought about tweaking her analogy, but didn’t.

  A hermit crab. Fuck. I sort of liked it.

  I said, “What’s wrong with being a hermit crab?”

  “What made you change your mind tonight?”

  “About coming out?”

  “Yes, you were so against this idea.”

  “I still am.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Because the alternative was sitting around my apartment all night thinking about Bridgette and her cop boyfriend and their yet-to-be child…

  “I wanted to hang out with you,” I said—and this was true. I hadn’t wanted to be alone, and I’d always felt comfortable around Danièle.

  She stared at me for a long moment. I waited for a sarcastic zinger. In the front Rob and Pascal were joking back and forth in French. Dylan was warbling about how the times were a-changin’.

  Then, suddenly: “Oh, Will, look!” Danièle pointed out my window.

  Far in the distance, visible between a break in the buildings, the iron lady rose into the sky, lit up in a twinkling light show.

  “You must come to the Trocadéro with me,” she added. “We will go early in the morning, before the tourists come. It feels like you have the Eiffel Tower all to yourself. What do you think?”

  “Sure.”

  I caught Pascal watching us via the rearview mirror. His eyes met mine, then he looked away.

  Rob swiveled his chair around again, opened the mini fridge, and grabbed a second beer. “Anyone?” he said.

  Mine was still half full. “No, thanks.”

  “I will,” Danièle said cheerfully, and she caught the one he tossed her.

  Tabs popped again. Carbonation hissed. Cans foamed over.

  “I take it you saw the video?” Rob said to me.

  I nodded.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s something.”

  “What do you think got her?”

  I had considered this a fair bit since I decided to come on the excursion. My revised conclusion was not as ominous as the one I had initially jumped to. I said, “I think she snapped.”

  “Went crazy?”

  I nodded. “If you a
ssume she was lost down there for days without food or water, she would have been weak and dehydrated. She would have been exhausted, mentally and physically. So she snapped.”

  “Why’d she start running?”

  I shrugged. “When you go crazy, you go crazy. Maybe she was hearing voices and stuff in her head.”

  “And the scream?”

  “She dropped the camera. She no longer had light to see by. She was lost in absolute blackness. That was the last straw.”

  “You know, Will,” Danièle said, touching my knee, “that is a good deduction. Maybe you are right. See—you had nothing to be scared of to begin with.”

  Pascal chortled from up front.

  “I was never scared,” I said. “I was concerned—for you.”

  “Is that not the same thing?”

  “What do you think?” I asked Rob.

  “Sounds like you were scared, boss.”

  I ignored that. “I mean, what do you think happened to her?”

  “What you said makes sense,” he agreed. Then, with a campfire grin, he added, “But on the other hand, maybe there is something down there. A mop-wielding Toxic Avenger mutant that stripped her, fucked her, ate her, then tossed her bones to one of those rooms with all the other bones.”

  Danièle rolled her eyes at this. Rob winked at us and chugged his beer. The van tooled on through the night with Dylan singing in his campy, folky voice.

  Later, somewhere in the southern suburb of Port D’Orléans, Pascal pulled up to the curb twenty feet shy of a dark street corner and killed the engine.

  Danièle said, “We are here.”

  Chapter 7

  On the sidewalk outside the campervan Pascal and Danièle pulled on hip waders. Rob was on his butt, swapping his shoes for a pair of Wellingtons.

  “I didn’t know I needed any of this stuff,” I said, feeling suddenly foolish standing there in a black pullover, black jeans, and powder-blue Converse All-Stars.

  “There is water in some places,” Danièle told me. “But do not worry, you will be fine. Most important is a helmet.”

  “I don’t have that either.”

  “Pascal and I have extras. You and Rob choose.”

  Rob opened the large navy canvas bag before him, which reminded me of my equipment bag when I played prep football. He withdrew two safety helmets, one red and one white, both with LED headlamps strapped to them. “Red or white, boss?” he said.

  “Either.”

  He tossed me the red one. I caught it and turned it in my hands. It was well-used and scuffed. On the back was a fading sticker of a grim reaper flicking off the world with his bony middle finger. Along the brim, written in black marker, was: CHESS. “Who’s Chess?” I asked.

  “That is Pascal,” Danièle said. “It is his catacombs name.”

  I would rather have used Danièle’s spare helmet than Pascal’s—I didn’t want to feel indebted to the guy—but if I asked Rob to trade I’d probably have to explain the reason for my request. “Catacombs name?” I said.

  “Every cataphile has an aboveground name and a catacombs name.”

  “Dorks!” Rob said as he plunked on his helmet and rapped it with his knuckles to check its integrity.

  “Why the aliases?” I asked.

  Danièle shrugged. “In the catacombs, the above world does not exist. We do not speak of it. You are free of your old life, free to reinvent yourself any way you like. With that new identity comes a new name.”

  I had to admit, after all the shit I’d been through over the couple years, this sounded rather appealing. “So what’s your catacombs name?” I asked.

  “In English it translates to Stork Girl.”

  Rob howled.

  “What?” Danièle demanded, planting her fists on her hips.

  “Danny, that’s the stupidest name I’ve ever heard.”

  “You are the stupidest person I have ever met,” she declared. “And, if you must know, I did not make up the name. Pascal did.”

  Rob said something in French to Pascal. Pascal said something back, pantomiming a big head.

  “He thinks when I wear a helmet,” Danièle explained to me, “it makes my head look big. This makes my neck appear small and long, like a Stork’s.”

  “I like Stork Girl,” I said.

  “Thank you, Will.”

  And I did. It was cute. Definitely a better moniker than Chess. I imagined Pascal came up with that one on his own too. It was pretentious while masking the pretentiousness. Sort of like saying, “I’m a master manipulator, a strategist, a genius in my own right, checkmate asshole” while at the same time, if asked about its meaning, allowing him to humbly confess he was just a simple guy who enjoyed a game of chess.

  “So what’s my dork name?” Rob asked.

  “Rosbif,” Danièle said immediately. “And you, Will, I do not know yours. I will think about it.”

  A middle-aged man turned the corner at the end of the street and approached us. He was walking a brown dachshund on a leash. Pascal clipped a ragged utility belt around his waist from which dangled a 6D Maglite flashlight and Leatherman hand tools. He retrieved the last two helmets from the bag, handed one to Danièle, then tossed the bag back inside the campervan and locked the door.

  Everyone stepped aside so the man and his dog could pass. I expected him to stop and ask us what we were doing. He only nodded politely and continued on his way, tugging the sausage dog along to keep up.

  “He doesn’t find us strange?” I said when he was out of earshot. “We look like sewer workers or something.”

  Danièle shrugged. “He is aware of what we are doing. Many people dressed like us come and go this way.”

  I spotted a covered manhole in the center of the road. “Is that the entrance?”

  “No, it is this way. Follow me.”

  She started away, her helmet tucked under one arm. I shrugged my backpack over my shoulder and followed. We crossed a vacant lot and came to a crumbling dry-stone fence. It was as high as my chest and thick. I gave Danièle a boost, then heaved myself up, so I was sitting on the capstone next to her. We shoved off together, landed on spongy dead leaves, and scrambled down the slope of a steep, forested ravine. When we burst free of the vegetation, we were standing among a pair of abandoned railway tracks.

  “Where are we?” I asked, turning in a circle, seeing only shadowed foliage surrounding us on all sides. The earth was carpeted with more dead leaves and lichen. Everything smelled lush and fresh.

  “The Petite Ceinture,” Danièle said. “It was a railway track that used to circle Paris, sort of like a defense, yes? The trains moved the soldiers from one point to the next quickly. It has not been used for a very long time.”

  I flicked on my headlamp.

  “No, not yet,” Danièle said. “We do not want to attract attention.”

  I frowned. “Who’s going to see us here?”

  “Not yet,” she repeated.

  I turned off the light just as Rob and Pascal joined us. Rob was cupping his left eye with his hand, cursing inventively. “Pissing branch,” he complained.

  Danièle smiled. “You must be more careful, Rosbif.”

  “Fuck off, Stork the Dork.”

  Still smiling triumphantly, as if she had been the one to poke Rob in the eye, Danièle headed off along the tracks. The rest of us fell into line behind her, single file. The rusted rails and rotted wooden ties were nearly overgrown with weeds. I began playing a game in which I was only allowed to step on the ties. If I missed one, and my foot touched the crushed stone that formed the track ballast, I had to start my count from the beginning. On my third go I was up to one hundred sixteen when Danièle stopped suddenly. I bumped into her from behind and saw several flashlight beams maybe a hundred feet in the distance.

  Pascal brushed past me and conversed with Danièle in serious tones.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Other cataphiles,” Danièle said.

  “Oh.” I had though
t they were the police. “So what’s the problem?”

  “There is no problem. Most cataphiles are friendly, but some…” She shrugged. “What you are on the surface, you are underground.”

  “So a tool’s a tool,” Rob said. “Who gives a shit? What are they going to do? Looks like there’s only three of them.”

  Danièle said, “I think we should let them enter the catacombs first, then we will follow afterward.”

  Rob snorted disapproval. “And what if they don’t move for an hour? We’re on a schedule, right?”

  Danièle looked at Pascal. He nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. “We will go. But Rosbif, Will, do not speak English.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Even friendly cataphiles, they do not like foreigners coming and going. The catacombs is their world. They want it to remain secret, as much as it can. If they hear you speak English, they will know you are a foreigner.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And nothing. But it is better to be safe.”

  “Do not be scared,” Pascal told me.

  I leveled my gaze at him. He turned promptly, and we continued toward the cataphiles, four abreast. Rob had been right. I counted three flashlight beams, three guys. They stood at the mouth of what appeared to be a train tunnel, speaking loudly and laughing.

  When they noticed us they went quiet.

  Pascal said, “Salut!” and began conversing with one of them.

  They were all dressed in boots, blue coveralls, and white gloves. Their ages ranged from twenty-five to forty, give or take. Two oxygen tanks, fins, and an assortment of other diving gear rested beside them.

  The guy Pascal was speaking to was the oldest. He had beady eyes and a hangdog face with the loose jowls of an aristocratic banker. Greasy black hair, parted down the center, gave him a Dickensian air. His voice was gruff, atonal, sort of pissed off.

  The other two complimented each other only in that they were opposites. One was short, Rob’s height, but much skinnier. He had a bad case of acne, and he seemed nervous, staring fixedly at a spot on the ground in front of him. His buddy, on the other hand, cleared six feet. I couldn’t tell if he was as tall as me because he wore his hair in a volcano of dreadlocks, but he would have been a good thirty or forty pounds heavier. Judging by his barrel chest and knotty neck and broad shoulders, he subsisted on a diet of eggs, meat, and protein shakes. His face had that young Arnie look, all thick slabs and bony protrusions. His coveralls were stained with clay, no doubt from previous descents into the catacombs.