The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (2 page)

And so far, so good. My new boss liked the
copy I was turning in, and I liked doing what I was doing. I spent
my nights checking out different bars and clubs, and my days
writing up an opinion of them. There was a lot to do, and the
deadlines were tight, but the work kept me occupied, kept me from
thinking too much about my old friends, family, and most of all,
Bridgette.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I’d gotten
over Bridgette. I hadn’t. In the back of my mind I had a plan.
After a year or so away, I would return to the States, I’d be a
little more worldly, a little more mature, and Bridgette and I
could start things anew.

I winced.
Danièle’s birthday party
.
Christ. How the hell did I get roped into that? Danièle’s
friends—an eclectic mix of bohemians and young professionals—had
been pleasant, the drinks kept coming, and everyone got piss
drunk…and then…then everything blurred together.

When I woke in Danièle’s bed Saturday
morning, I could barely remember how I got there. Filled with
guilt, I did the asshole thing and left without waking her. I spent
the entire weekend at my laptop whipping my latest bar and club
notes into some sort of coherent form. I didn’t answer my phone
when Danièle called Sunday afternoon, and we didn’t communicate
again until earlier today when she texted me to confirm that the
lesson was still on.

I almost cancelled, but I knew how obvious
that would look.

Danièle returned from the café proper with a
cappuccino now. She sat across from me, took off her
sunglasses—Fendis—and smiled hesitantly. I cleared my throat. I had
already decided to act as if this was any other lesson, and I said,
“French or English today?”

A flash of surprise crossed her face before
she turned her attention to the spoon stirring her coffee. “Friday
was French,” she stated. “So today is English, if that is all
right.”

“Good with me,” I said. “So…”

She lifted her eyes. “Yes?”

“I’m thinking of a topic to discuss.”

“How about the weekend?” she suggested
coyly. “You always ask me about my weekend on Mondays.”

“Did you get up to anything on Sunday?”

“On Sunday?” More surprise, maybe some
disappointment. She shrugged. “No, I stayed home all day. What
about you, Will? Were you hung over both Saturday and Sunday? Or
did you do anything special on Sunday?”

“I made chicken
Provençal
. Have you tried it?”

“Of course I have. I am French. What else
did you do?”

“Nothing really. Work. That’s about it.”

“I see.”

I frowned. “You see?”

“You do not want to talk about Friday night.
I see. That is fine with me.”

“I had a fun time.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“
All
night?”

I wondered if I was blushing. “Yeah.”

“You were gone when I woke up. I
thought…”

“I know, I— What time did you get up?”

“You are very good at avoiding this
topic.”

“What topic?”

“Us.”

“I’m not avoiding it.”

She nodded silently.

I lit a Marlboro Light to give myself
something to do. The trio at the table next to us were sharing a
bottle of wine and laughing loudly. This made the silence between
Danièle and me seem all the more protracted and uncomfortable.

I decided it was stupid to try to ignore
what had happened between us, to pretend this was nothing but
another lesson.

We had slept together. We were having coffee
now.

That made this a date, didn’t it?

At least in Danièle’s mind it did.

“I liked your friends,” I said, segueing
back to Friday.

She smiled. “They liked you too.”

“Except for one guy. What was his name?
Patsy…?”

“Pascal?”

“He had a wool cap.”

“Yes, that is Pascal. You do not like
him?”

“He’s fine, I guess. He just didn’t seem
like he wanted to talk to me.”

“Because he has a crush on me,” she stated
matter-of-factly.

“A crush?”

“Yes, for many years. We were in the same
freshman class at school. He was with me during my initiation.”

Danièle was referring to her university
initiation. She had told me all about it on numerous occasions. You
could enter her favorite stomping ground, the catacombs, any number
of ways, including Metro tunnels, utility systems, church crypts,
and the basements of homes, hospitals, lycées, and universities
(apparently there was even an entrance in the bowels of Tour
Montparnasse, one of Paris’ first skyscrapers). Like most of the
other buildings in the old Latin Quarter, L’Ecole des Mines had its
own secret access points, and it was a tradition for seniors to
drop freshmen into the underground maze and have them find their
way out again.

I said, “Do you guys still go into the
catacombs together?”

“Many times. As a matter of fact—” Her phone
rang. “Just a moment, Will,” she said, and answered it. The voice
on the other end was male. My French was still piss poor, and I was
only able to gather that she was meeting this person later in the
evening.

“Big date tonight?” I asked when she hung
up.

“Would you be jealous if it were?”

“Immensely.”

“I do not believe you.”

“I would be.”

“You know, Will, I thought we had a good
time on Friday.”

“We did.”

“Then why…I have the feeling you…regret
it.”

I looked at my cigarette. “I don’t regret
it.”

“Then why are you acting so strange?”

I was about to tell her I wasn’t acting
strange, but I held my tongue. I suppose I was.

I took a final drag on the smoke and stubbed
it out in the ashtray. “Look, Danièle. I like you. But we have been
friends for a while now. And then…you know, just like that. Boom.
I—it’s a bit overwhelming.”

She considered that, nodded. “Okay, Will. I
understand. You just tell me when you are ready.”

I studied her. The delivery was so
pokerfaced I couldn’t discern if she was being sincere or
sarcastic.

“Anyway,” she said, “that was Pascal.”

“Speak of the devil,” I said, happy to
change topics. “What did he want?”

“He is confirming our plans tonight.”

“What are you guys doing?”

“We are going into the catacombs.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Seriously?”

“Why is that surprising?”

“Only the two of you?”

“No, someone else is coming as well. You
see, tonight, it is very special. I have something I want to show
you.”

She moved her chair around the table, so she
was sitting beside me, our knees brushing. I could smell her
perfume, a light citrus scent. She extracted her laptop from her
handbag and set it on the table before us. She opened the lid and
pressed the power button.

While we waited for it to boot up I said,
“In what world do people use the semi-colon more than the
full-stop?”

She frowned. “Huh?”

I nodded at her keyboard. “Don’t you find it
a pain you have to press the Shift key every time you want a
period?”

“Hmm. I never thought of that. Perhaps you
should have brought a computer from your country, Will.”

“It was stolen, remember.”

“Yes, you left it on the table when you went
to use the restroom. That was very foolish of you.”

The computer finished loading. Danièle used
the trackpad and navigated to a folder filled with thumbnail-sized
videos. She opened the last one in a media player and resized it to
fill the screen.

A point of view shot appeared: a video
camera light illuminating a grainy corridor the color of slag iron.
The ceiling was low, the walls smooth stone. The crunch of
footsteps was the only sound.

“That’s the catacombs,” I stated,
surprised.

Danièle nodded. “This woman is very far in,
very deep.”

“How do you know it’s a woman?”

“You can hear her in the other video clips.
She mumbles a few times.”

The woman stopped at a side passage and
looked inside. It was a small room. She played the camera over the
floor. It was scattered with a half dozen different sized
bones.

A shiver prickled the back of my neck.

“Those are all human bones,” Danièle told
me. “There are rooms everywhere like this one. She has already
passed several others.”

The woman continued along the corridor, but
stopped again to film an arrow on the ground. It had been formed
using three bones. Ten feet later she came to another
bone-arrow.

“Who made those?” I asked. “Other
explorers?”

“Yes, maybe.” But she didn’t sound
convinced.

The woman pressed on. More grainy gray walls
and crunching footsteps. She arrived at a T-junction and
paused.

“She is confused,” Danièle told me. “She
obviously does not know this part of the catacombs well.”

“Why would she go down there by
herself?”

“We do not know she went by herself. Perhaps
she went with others and became separated and lost.”

The woman chose left and followed a winding
passageway. She stopped for several seconds to examine a wall
painting of some sort of stickman. It was at least six feet tall,
painted quickly, almost frantically, the limbs spread eagle.

Danièle said, “Watch closely now. She
becomes very scared. Maybe it is this painting that scared her. Or
maybe she heard something. But, look, she has begun to walk
faster.”

Indeed, the woman was now moving at a trot.
The footage became jumpy. Her breathing was loud and fast.

Not from exertion, I thought, but fear.

Twice she whirled around, as if to see if
anyone was behind her, the camera moving with her.

“She keeps going, faster and faster,”
Danièle said in a soft voice, “deeper and deeper, and then…”

All of a sudden the woman dropped the
camera. It landed with a bang and kept filming.

“…she just drops it. See! She does not stop
to pick it up. You can see her feet disappearing, splashing in the
puddles. And then—nothing.”

The footage continued to roll, filming a
close-up of pebbles and the ripples in the nearby puddle.

“What happens next?” I asked.

Danièle held up a finger: wait. She used the
trackpad to skip a slice of footage and pressed Play. The image was
exactly the same.

“What—?”

“Listen.”

A harrowing scream erupted from the tinny
speakers. It sounded distant, coming from deep within the black
tunnels. It escalated to a banshee-like fever—

The screen went blank.

“What happened?” I demanded.

Danièle looked at me. “The camera went dead.
That is it.”

“What do you mean, ‘That’s it?’” I said,
frowning.

“You saw,” Danièle said. “The battery
died.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

“You don’t know what happened to her?”

“How could I? Nobody has ever seen her
again.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, I do not,” she admitted. “But she
left the camera there. She never came back to retrieve it. And you
heard her.”

I sat back. My stomach felt unsettled, as if
I had just downed a shot of paint thinner. “Is this for real?”

“Of course, Will.”

“How did you get the camera?”

“Pascal found it.”

“Why was he so deep in the catacombs?”

“That is what he does. He explores, even
more than me. He has visited the catacombs hundreds of times
before.”

I looked at Danièle, then the laptop, then
Danièle again.

“So you weren’t with him?” I said.

“No, I was not.”

“Where’s the actual camera?”

“Pascal has it. I copied the files to my
computer.”

“Maybe he’s playing a joke on you?”

“Why are you so skeptical, Will?”

“Why? Because this seems like something out
of
The Blair Witch Project
.”

“Pascal did not make this up.”

“Then maybe the woman did.”

“Why would she do that? The catacombs are
very large. As I told you, the camera was in very deep. The chances
of someone finding it were small. Also, there is no footage of her.
Not on any of the video clips. Just her voice. The camera could
never be traced back to her. She would never have any idea who
found it, if someone did. Why would she make a joke like that?”

“She was running, right?” I said. “At the
end she was running. She was scared. She thought something was
coming after her. But she keeps filming? Would you do that? They
only do that, keep the tape rolling, in those found-footage
movies.”

“No, Will. She was not filming. She was
using the video camera’s LED light to see ahead of her. If she
turned the camera off—it is perfectly dark down there.”

I chewed on that. “So what do you think
happened? She believed someone was behind her. Did someone run past
the camera in pursuit?”

“No.”

“So who made her scream?”

“I have no answer for that.”

I knew Danièle well enough to discern
whether she was pulling my leg or not. Looking at her now, I didn’t
think she was. Right or wrong, in her mind she was convinced this
was genuine footage. A woman had gotten lost in the catacombs, and
she had the unfortunate luck to run into someone who had done
something terrible to her.

And why not? I thought. Why was I so adamant
this wasn’t the case? Bad shit went on in the world every day. A
lot of bad shit. Some truly horrible shit. You could pretend it
didn’t, but you would only be fooling yourself.

“Have you given a copy to the police?” I
asked.

“The police?” Danièle’s eyes widened in
surprise. “Of course not.”

“But if this is real, then something
happened to that woman. You need to tell the police.”

“And what do you suppose they would do,
Will?”

“I thought you told me once that there are
police who patrol the catacombs?”