The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (12 page)

I glanced at Rob, wondering if we should
charge, or wait to see what happened next.

The Devil acted first. He fired the pistol
at the ground.

There was a loud report. I instinctively
dove to one side, half expecting another shot to follow, this one
accompanied by scorching pain.

There was none—only a brilliant red light
burning a few feet away. Billows of smoke wafted from it, quickly
filling the cavern.

A flare! He was holding a goddamn flare
gun
.

I stumbled away from the hissing, fiery
flash, my dark-adjusted eyes temporarily blinded.

“Where’d he go?” Rob shouted from somewhere
nearby.

“Don’t know!” I replied. The heat was
intense, the air acrid with a sulfur/tar stench. I covered my nose
with my arm.

Danièle appeared beside me, carrying her
clothes. “Will, this way!”

Head down, I followed her until we passed
into the next room. Rob and Pascal bowled into us from behind,
almost knocking me over.

“Where is he?” Rob demanded, spinning in a
wild circle.

“Gone,” I said. Spangles of light still
danced before my eyes.

“Fuck!”

The music was loud and tinny now. Flashlight
beams arced through the darkness twenty feet away. They zeroed in
on us.

“
Qui est-ce?
” Pascal called, holding
his arm in front of his face, squinting.

The voice that floated back was not one I
wanted to hear.

Dreadlocks and his two buddies approached us
wearily. A cell phone dangled around Dreadlock’s bullish neck by a
lanyard. He tapped the screen. The music stopped.

Apparently the bad blood between us was
forgotten, at least temporarily, as they seemed only interested in
discovering what all the kafuffle was about. Pascal obliged their
curiosity, talking excitedly and making elaborate gestures. I
caught “Le Diable Peint” several times. The scuba guys hung onto
every word, interrupting with questions or exclamations of
disbelief. Then Pascal made a clapping noise and a vanishing
gesture, apparently describing how the Devil had made his
escape.

Dreadlocks looked at Danièle. She had pulled
her clothes back on and was now stepping into her waders. He said,
“
Tu va bien?
”

She nodded. “
Ça
va
”

He turned to me. “You know what? I think,
after this, you are
touriste
no more.” He grinned broadly,
proud of this generous proclamation. “You know what else? Because I
punch your face, I feel bad, I give you gift.”

I frowned suspiciously.

“What?” he said. “You no want gift?”

“Depends what it is.”

“Batteries!” he announced, whacking me
good-naturedly on the shoulder with a meaty paw. “We have many
extras, and you have none.”

After much consulting and comparing of maps,
Pascal and my new pal Dreadlocks determined that we were all going
in the same direction and would thus travel together—so explained
Danièle, my translator in all the goings-on.

As we refilled our backpacks and installed
the gifted batteries in our headlamps, Danièle went on to tell me
that there was a room with a Norman castle and gargoyles nearby, a
room heaped with silk flowers, a room lined with paintings of film
characters, and even a library—a small alcove littered with books
cataphiles used based on the honor system. “I wanted to show you
all of this, Will,” she said. “But I do not think it is a good idea
anymore with you-know-who around.”

“Voldemort?”

“Do not be silly…Voldemort is English, not
French.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about the
Painted Devil,” I said. “He only had the hand up because he tricked
us. And he’s not going to trick us again.”

“You do not know that for sure. We hurt his
ego. We scared him away. He might want to get revenge somehow.”

I didn’t argue the point—I didn’t care if we
saw the feature rooms or not—and we rejoined the scuba guys and
followed them to one of the Beach’s exits, what turned out to be a
narrow fissure where the floor angled upward and met the
ceiling.

I wasn’t claustrophobic, but an oily
something coated my gut at the sight of it. “We’re supposed to fit
through there?” I said.

“We call it a
chatiѐre
,” Danièle
said. “A cat hole.”

That was an accurate description, I thought,
as it didn’t appear that anything larger than a domesticated feline
could squeeze through it.

The scuba guys went first. They had
introduced themselves to us by their catacombs monikers. The old
guy was Zéro, the skinny kid was Chevre (which, according to
Danièle, meant Goat), and Dreadlocks was Citerne (Tank), though I
preferred “Dreadlocks” and continued to think of him as such.

Dreadlocks climbed the slope that rose to
the ceiling, shoved the oxygen tanks and harness into the hole
ahead of him, then crawled in after it. Zéro went next, then
Goat.

“It is not so bad,” Danièle told me as we
ascended the gradient after them. “You put your arms in first, then
you wiggle your hips to move.” She shook her butt to demonstrate.
“Just follow me.”

When we reached the fissure, she slipped
inside without hesitation, her willowy frame allowing ample leeway
on either side of her body. I peered in after her, but could see
little more than the soles of her boots kicking as she crawled
forward.

“Let’s go, nancy boy!” Rob said from behind
and below me.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I stuck my head and
shoulders into the hole, decided to hell with that, then switched
to a crab-walk, feet first.

“No, no, no,” Pascal said. “That is not the
proper way.”

I scuttled into the narrow space quickly. My
head was aching with faded adrenaline, and I didn’t want to deal
with any of Pascal’s shit right then.

The walls and ceiling pressed tightly around
me. I dug my heels into the ground and pulled myself forward,
dragging my backpack behind me.

After about a minute of this, and struggling
the entire way, I halted, contemplating whether to backtrack and
start over again, headfirst, military-crawl style. But Rob had
already entered behind me, blocking my exit. He cackled in that
witchy way of his, as though he thought this cat hole was a trip,
and said, “Get going, smurfdick!”

“I can’t move fast on my back.”

“Why didn’t you listen to Rascal? Headfirst!
This isn’t a fucking waterslide.”

I resumed pulling myself forward with my
legs, but it didn’t get any easier. The shaft seemed to be
narrowing, limiting my maneuverability.

My feet kicked rock.
A dead end?
I
continued kicking, probing, and discovered the shaft had angled to
the right.

My relief didn’t last long, however, because
laying supine wasn’t ideal for turning laterally. I was like a
straw caught in the elbow between two lengths of pipe. I would have
to roll onto my side, so I could bend at the waist.

Problem was, the damn ceiling was now too
low to do that.

“Boss,” Rob said. “What’s the holdup?”

“The shaft bends. I don’t think I can get
around it.”

“Yeah you can. That big oaf did.”

“He went headfirst. I can’t twist the way I
am. I think we have to reverse back out.”

“No fucking way!”

“I don’t have a choice!”

“I’m going to push you.”

He began shoving my backpack.

“Stop it!” I said. “That’s not helping.”

“Then stop dicking around.”

I attempted to roll onto my side, but it was
difficult to generate torque without the use of my arms, one of
which was extended past my head, the other pinned at my side. I
crossed my ankles and bent my knees and corkscrewed my legs to the
right. It took a couple of rocking motions, but I was finally able
to flop onto my right side.

“You good?” Rob asked.

“Yeah…” I said, though I felt like a
pretzel.

I began to inchworm around the bend, my
upper shoulder scraping the ceiling. Everything was going well
until the ceiling lowered even more. I slugged on, squeezing into
the pinching shaft, telling myself the space had to open again. It
didn’t. Soon I could no longer move forward. I tried reversing, but
couldn’t do that either.

I was stuck.

“Dammit,” I said softly.

“What’s wrong?” Rob asked.

“I can’t move.”

“Come on.”

“I’m stuck!”

“You’re not—”

“I am!”

A pause. The silence was bleak. There was
something inherently unnerving about being unable to move your body
how you wanted to move it.

A commotion sounded as Rob shoved my
backpack to one side. He saw me and said, “Fuck, bro, you gotta get
flat on your stomach or back.”

“I can’t.”

“You gotta twist.”

“I’m all twisted up!” I snapped. “I
shouldn’t have kept going.”

“You got in there, you can get out.”

“Give me a sec.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to think!”

“Danny!” Rob shouted.

“What…?” She sounded far away.

“Will’s stuck!”

No reply.

“Danny!”

“Will?” she called. “Is this true?”

“Yeah!”

“I am coming back.”

My helplessness infuriated me. I kicked and
jerked. The rock securing me dug into my flesh like teeth.

“Hold on,” Rob told me. “Danny will help
you.”

“What’s she going to do?”

“She’ll pull. I’ll push.”

“Will?” It was Danièle. She sounded
closer—and also worried.

“What?”

“Do not move too much. Some of these
chatiѐres
are not very stable.”

Great, I thought. Exactly what I wanted to
hear.

The panic that had been escalating inside me
swelled to a suffocating force. Suddenly my lungs seemed too large
for my chest. My breath clogged in my throat. I was on the verge of
losing it and had to resist the impulse to thrash violently.

I closed my eyes. Almost immediately the
darkness behind my lids gave way to a long-ago memory. It was
spring. I was eight years old. Bulldozers had recently cleared a
patch of forest behind our house in the suburbs of Olympia to make
room for a new subdivision. Maxine and I were forbidden to play in
the tangle of felled trees, but of course we did. What kids
wouldn’t? It was a gigantic fort full of nooks and crannies and
passageways. We nicknamed it the Beaver Dam.

One afternoon Max and I had been fooling
around on top of the dam and she lost her footing and dropped her
Kewpie doll. It fell between a crosshatch of sticks and logs too
small to climb through. She began balling. She’d gotten the doll
less than two weeks ago for her sixth birthday, and it was her
prized possession. I told her it was okay, I’d get it, and so I
climbed off the dam and made my way to the main entrance we always
used, a convergence of felled trunks that formed a small
passageway. I crawled inside and tunneled deeper and deeper, easing
aside dead branches, worming under and over rotting logs, venturing
farther than I ever had before.

I had just broken into a new cavity and
could see the doll ahead of me when I struck something of
structural importance and the dam collapsed on top of me.

Max heard me yelling and ran for help, while
I remained trapped beneath hundreds of pounds of thicket, my face
pressed into the mud. It was dark and damp. The only sounds were
the croaking of a large bullfrog and my frightened sobs. I couldn’t
move any of my limbs, and it had taken my father, our neighbor Mr.
Schorn, his two teenage sons, and Max more than an hour to dig me
out safely.

“Will?” It was Danièle. “I can see your
legs.”

I opened my eyes.

Dark. Muddy. Stuck.

The panic flared dangerously.

“You are at the smallest point in the
tunnel,” she told me. “The ceiling is very low, but the ground dips
also. You need to slip into the dip and come up again, like going
under a fence. Do you understand?”