The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (14 page)

Zéro and Goat heaved him up onto the lip of
the well.

Danièle gasped, and it took me a moment
before I saw the skull clutched in Dreadlock’s hand. He spat the
regulator from his mouth and jabbered in French. Everyone reacted
with exclamations and outbursts. A rapid-fire discussion ensued.
Eventually Danièle acknowledged my nagging for clarification and
said, “He says there is a complete skeleton at the bottom of the
well.”

I waited for more. When nothing was
forthcoming I said, “So what? This is the catacombs. There are six
million skeletons down here.”

She shook her head. “You do not understand,
Will. This one is new.”

“New?” I frowned. “You mean, from a recently
deceased person?”

“Yes. There were clothes on it. A T-shirt,
blue jeans, rubber boots.”

“Fuck off!”

“Pascal thinks it was a woman.”

I looked at Pascal. He had taken the skull
from Dreadlocks and was pointing to different parts of it.

“What, he’s a forensic anthropologist?” I
said dubiously.

“He is writing his dissertation on the
catacombs. He has studied many bones from here.”

Pascal passed the skull back to Dreadlocks.
They were both nodding.

“What’s he saying?” I asked.

“Citerne is going to replace the skull. Then
he will return aboveground and tell the police the location of the
well. The catacops can investigate what happened.”

“What about us?” I said. “Shouldn’t we go
with him?”

“Go with him?” Danièle seemed surprised by
the question. “No, Will. He does not need us. Have you forgotten—we
have another woman to look for.”

Mummified Man’s Body Found in Paris
Catacombs

A group of urban explorers made a shocking
discovery last week when they entered an illegal section of the
Paris catacombs: the mummified body of a London man who had gone
missing in the maze of underground tunnels two years before.

The body has been identified as Stanley
Dunn, a twenty-three-year-old man from Enfield, London. In 2011,
after friends of Mr. Dunn reported him and two other men missing in
the catacombs, police conducted a three-day search to no avail.

A police source said that Mr. Dunn’s remains
were discovered in the far western reaches of the catacombs, a
remote area that is seldom explored because of the extensive
deterioration of the tunnel system there. The body was fully
clothed and curled in a fetal position. The two other men remain
unaccounted for.

Investigators believe the nearly perfectly
mummified remains are due to the cool, dry environment in which
they were discovered. Dr. Stephen Murphy, with the Department of
Forensic Medicine at Kingston University, explains: “Some parts of
the catacombs of Paris are damp, some are dry. In the latter
situation, the decomposition process is slowed down, while both
drying-up and autolysis of tissues prevail.”

An autopsy is scheduled to determine the
exact cause of death.

Claude Provost, a former police officer with
the special brigade that monitors the catacombs, told Agence
France-Presse that during any given year his unit would discover
multiple bodies not reported by the press, some mummified, some
not. “They go in to commit suicide,” he says. “Others—they simply
get lost and never find their way out again.”

I had an overactive imagination, especially
when it came to death, and as we plodded through the labyrinthine
warrens on our way to God knew where next, my thoughts were fixated
on the remains at the bottom of the well. What had happened to the
person—or the woman, if you believed Pascal’s conclusion? Had she
been sitting on the lip of the well, fallen backward, struck their
head, and sunk like a stone? Then again, that would have
presupposed the fact she was by herself. And who explored these
tunnels by themselves? Hadn’t Danièle said the first or second rule
of the catacombs was never to go anywhere on your own?

Perhaps the woman’s fate was the result of
something more sinister then. Did someone dump her body into the
well to conceal a murder? If so, had she been killed aboveground
and transported to her final resting spot? Or had she been a
cataphile who had the bad luck of running into a meth head or
morphine addict—or the Painted Devil?

This last possibility gave me pause. I
didn’t think the Devil was a cold-blooded murderer. He was carrying
around a flare gun fashioned to look like a pistol after all. He
was nothing but a joker, a cowardly bully. Yet at some point did he
take his harrying too far and cause someone to have a heart attack
and need to get rid of the evidence?

Danièle said Dreadlocks would report the
remains to the police, and the catacops would investigate. But what
would they learn? What
could
they learn? All they had were
teeth and bones to work with. These were helpful when investigators
had dental records to compare them with, or when there were
relatives with comparable DNA. But the woman was a total unknown. I
guess they could determine her height, age, and ethnicity, and run
theses details against recent missing person reports. If they found
a likely match, then they could check dental records and so forth.
On the other hand, maybe the catacops or whoever came to
investigate would get lucky and discover a driver’s license in a
pocket of the jeans, or some other form of identification…something
so they could give the skeleton a name and offer closure to the
next of kin who would have been wondering why their daughter or
mother or wife had not come home one day.

“
Ciel!
” Pascal called out.

“Sky!” Danièle said.

Ahead of me Rob ducked. I did too. The
ceiling dropped sharply, and we were forced to troll-walk again. I
kept close to Rob, taking advantage of the backsplash of his
headlamp.

The next while went past in a blur of
hallways and junctions angling off into black infinity. Some were
finished with neatly mortared stone and well-designed archways,
others were low-ceilinged and half-collapsed and riddled with
sinkholes. We hiked for miles and miles, twisting and ducking,
climbing and crawling, jack-knifing our bodies in ways most people
never did. We went through more cat holes as tight as sphincters
and chambers as large as ballrooms. The entire time Pascal kept up
his brisk pace, stopping only to consult his map or when Danièle
wanted to point out interesting features in the tunnels: the
millennia-old fossils of sea creatures embedded in the limestone;
black streaks on the ceilings from the torches of
seventeenth-century stonecutters; relics of the wooden braces the
quarry inspectors had used to shore up weak spots that could lead
to cave-ins.

At one point we came across a rocky cavity
filled with the skins of dozens and dozens of dead cats. Pascal
said it was the lair of a minotaur-like beast that fed upon
felines. When Rob told him to go fuck himself, Danièle shined her
light above us, illuminating a vertical shaft that vanished into
darkness. She explained we were standing at the bottom of a well
that connected with the surface. Rumor was, a nearby Chinese
restaurant was responsible for the discarded skins.

Despite my back hurting from all the bending
over and my feet squishing inside my wet shoes and the run-in with
the Painted Devil and the close call in the first cat hole and the
discovery of human remains, I found the catacombs were growing on
me. There was something quietly comforting about them. Prehistoric
man’s evolution, after all, had occurred within the confined spaces
of caves and underground tunnels and alcoves such as these. They
were where our ancient ancestors built their fires and cooked their
meals, sheltered from ice- and thunderstorms, created their first
works of art, raised their families. They were, in a sense,
home.

I became so absorbed in my Paleolithic
recreation I wasn’t aware we had stopped until I ran smack into
Rob’s back.

“Sorry,” I said, straightening my helmet. I
looked around. “What’s going on?”

“We have reached the Bunker,” Danièle said.
“The one the Nazis used.”

I spotted another cat hole in the wall. “And
I guess that’s the entrance?”

She nodded. “Yes. But you are getting good
at them, no?”

Pascal crawled inside first. I went second.
Wiggling forward army-style, I’d found, was much easier than
humping along on your back. I tumbled out the exit ass-over-tits
and pushed myself to my feet. Pascal and I stood in awkward silence
for a moment. I didn’t want to wait there with him until the others
arrived, so I wandered off to explore.

The walls here were constructed from red
brick. Black wires snaked along some of them, beginning and ending
at rusted electrical boxes. Decrepit oil drums sat here or there,
remnants of a long-ago time. Spray painted flourescent arrows
pointed in conflicting directions. Hand-painted signs read:
“
Rauchen Veroten
” and “
Ruhe
.” I was familiar with
these words, I had seen them around Paris, and they meant “No
Smoking” and “Quiet” respectively.

The Bunker was a mini-maze in itself,
consisting of numerous small rooms often separated by rusty iron
gates and iron doors with round handles that resembled steering
wheels, the sort you might find on big walk-in bank vaults.

I stepped past one door and peered into the
dark beyond. I couldn’t see much besides rubble and some
rubbish.

I was about to head back when I heard the
others approaching.

“Over here!” I called.

Danièle, Rob, and Pascal arrived a few
moments later.

I hooked my thumb at the door. “What the
hell were these used for?”

“Guess the Germans wanted to keep the frogs
out of their hideout,” Rob said.

I shook my head. “There’s only the one
entrance. They were meant to keep people
in
.”

“In?” Rob squeezed past me for a look.
“Shit, you’re right. But why would they need doors like this to
hold some poor shmuck? A bit overboard, don’t you think?”

I did, and another possibility came to mind,
though I decided it was too outlandish to mention.

Pascal led us to a small grotto complete with
an iron door for a table and stone slabs for seats. Several empty
beer cans had been left on the table. Danièle slit the belly of one
with a Swiss Army knife. She peeled the tin back and placed a red
candle inside the hollow, transforming the contraption into a
lantern. If she had string, she could have strung it up by the pop
tab.

“
Voil
à
!
” she said, clearly pleased with
herself.

“Nice work, MacGyver,” Rob said.

She cast him a sharp look. “I do not care
what you call me, Rosbif. It does not bother me anymore.”

“MacGyver!” he barked amusedly. “It’s not an
insult, Danny. It’s a compliment. He’s like James Bond.”

She eyed him suspiciously.

“It’s true,” I said. “A compliment.”

“Thank you then.”

We unloaded the food we’d brought onto the
table to share. Danièle had a package of French biscuits with
chocolate centers. Rob had beef jerky and Twizzlers and other junk
food. I contributed a bag of trail mix, three apples, and a couple
hard-boiled eggs.

“Eggs, boss?” Rob said.

I shrugged. “I didn’t have much in the
kitchen.”

“Here.” He tossed me a demon beer.

“No, Will,” Danièle said, slapping my hand
away from the can. “Do not touch that hobo drink.” She withdrew the
cardboard cask of wine from her backpack. “This is a nice
Merlot.”

“And I’m the hobo?” Rob said. “You’re
drinking out of a box, Danny.”

“I do not litter, and bottles are almost as
heavy to carry empty as they are full.”

She poured two plastic cups and passed me
one.

“
A votre santé
,” she said.

“
Santé!
” Rob said.

“Cheers,” I said.

We tapped drinks. A dollop of wine sloshed
over the rim of mine.

I turned, looking for Pascal. He was at the
far end of the room. He began hammering some sort of spike into the
wall.

“China’s down, Rascal!” Rob said.

“That is for his hammock,” Danièle
explained. “You might be warm now, because you have been moving.
But the floor is so cold to sleep on. You will freeze if you lay on
it.”

Rob harrumphed. “Fuck you very much for the
heads up, Danny. What are Will and me going to do?”

“Will can sleep in my hammock with me. Only
you will freeze on the floor.”

I nearly choked on the wine in my mouth. I
glanced at Pascal again. Had he heard? He was hammering away, and
it didn’t appear so. Still—what was Danièle thinking? She was well
aware that Pascal liked her. His disdain for me was written in
flashing neon. Did she really believe we were going to be lying up
together in a hammock?