The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (22 page)

She wore an effervescent green dress,
strapless, revealing delicate shoulders and toned biceps. It
tapered down her sides and clung to her curvy hips and ended above
her knees.

I must have been watching her for only a few
seconds when she glanced over at me. Maybe she felt my eyes on her,
maybe it was coincidental. I looked away and went to get another
drink. I mingled with some friends on the way, but the entire time
I was thinking about the girl in the green dress. She had to be
with Delta Kappa Delta; it was the only sorority we’d invited to
the party tonight. But if she was, why hadn’t I seen her before?
Rush had been in September, and we’d had several events with DKD
since then.

I moved on to the kitchen. A few girls were
crowded around the two-gallon Rubbermaid cooler filled with
Kool-Aid and vodka. Some more of my friends were hanging out by the
keg. I joined them, filled my red plastic cup with beer, and
bantered a bit. Duane Davis, the chapter’s treasurer, was
complaining about how DKD were becoming the ugly sorority, and I
wasn’t sure the DKD girls at the Rubbermaid cooler couldn’t hear
him.

I returned to the room where I had seen the
girl in the green dress. She was no longer there. I went to
basement and wandered the busy rooms. She wasn’t there either. On
the porch outside, I described her to my friends smoking cigarettes
and asked if they had seen her. No one had.

I was pissed off. I should have gone
straight over and talked to her. Why had I decided to get a
drink?

As a last resort I stepped over the police
tape strung from newel post to newel post across the bottom of the
staircase and climbed the steps. I didn’t believe she would be on
the second floor. It was off limits to anyone who didn’t live in
the townhouse.

I heard voices down the hall, coming from
the last room on the left. I knocked and opened the door. Five of
my friends sat on chairs arranged in a circle around a low glass
table, which was littered with baggies of blow and rolled bills and
credit cards. I asked them if they had seen the girl in the green
dress. They hadn’t.

Halfway back down the hall, the bathroom
door opened and there she was. I was so surprised all I could
manage was, “Oh.”

“Hi,” she said, smiling. “Sorry. I know. I’m
not supposed to be up here. But the bathroom downstairs was
occupied.”

“Yeah, no problem,” I said. “I was actually
looking for you.”

“For me?”

“I saw you in the living room. I wanted to
talk.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“No, I mean, just talk, talk.”

“Well, I like to talk talk.”

I cleared my throat. “I haven’t seen you
around before.”

“I’m not with the sorority. My friend
Suzy—Suzy Taylor?—she invited me. I’m not into the whole Greek
thing. I don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it. You’re a
Pike?”

I nodded.

“How is it? Frat life?”

“Nothing special really.”

“I’ve never been in a frat house
before.”

“This isn’t a frat house, not officially. We
rent it.”

“But you guys live here?”

“Some of us do. My room’s right down
there.”

“Can I see it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I unlocked the door to my room with my key
and followed her inside. The room was pretty bland. Some oak
furniture that came with it. A life-size cardboard cutout of Mr.
Bean I’d stolen from a fast-food chain during my initiation.
Curling posters of AC/DC and Led Zepplin and other old school rock
bands that I’d picked up at the poster sale on campus. A purple
lava lamp I’d been meaning to toss out.

My laptop sat on my messy desk, the
screensaver displaying a slideshow of scantily-clad women. I went
to it and closed the lid.

“By the way,” I said, offering my hand, “I’m
Will.”

“I’m Bridgette,” she said, squeezing.

“I like that name.”

“My parents were big bridge fans.”

“Huh?”

“Bridgette,” she said. “It’s a two-player
bridge game. It also means ‘exalted one.’ Yes, I checked. I was
bummed out when I learned I was named after a card game. What’s in
there?” She indicated the door to the closet.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Can I see?”

“There’s nothing in there.”

“Why won’t you let me see?” Her voice had
turned petulant, and it wasn’t Bridgette anymore. It was Danièle.
She was naked.

“There’s nothing in there.”

“Why are you never honest with me,
Will?”

“I am.”

“I want to see.”

I had no idea what was in the closet, only
that it was something that made me uneasy.

“No,” I told her.

“Will, stop it.” She pushed past me.

I seized her by the upper arms. “Danièle,
don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Just don’t.”

She shook free and yanked the closet door
open. Relief flooded me. There was nothing inside but my clothes
neatly arranged on their hangers.

“See?” I said.

But she wasn’t listening. She stepped into
the closet, slipped between the clothes, and disappeared.

“Danièle!” I shoved the clothes aside. She
was gone. “Danièle! Come back!”

Her voice was different, scared. It came
from beyond the wall.

“Will, where am I?”

I banged the plaster. “Danièle!”

“Will, help!”

“Danièle, come back!”

“I cannot!”

“Come back!”

“Will, look behind you—”

I was strapped to a gurney of some sort. My
eyes were open, but I couldn’t see. It wasn’t too dark; it was too
bright. Then, gradually, the ceiling resolved into detail: chiseled
stone affixed with a series of fluorescent lights. I turned my head
to the right. Chipped wooden counters and cupboards, painted white.
The cupboard doors featured glass windows through which I could see
a variety of bottles and beakers like those found in a science
classroom.

I tried to move. My arms were secured in
leather cuffs.

From behind me a metal table on wheels
rattled into my field of view. The surface was neatly lined with a
dozen crude tools that would look equally at home in a dentist’s
office or a fifteen-century torture chamber.

I jerked at the restraints. They held
firm.

The person pushing the table appeared. It
was Maxine. Her hair was wet and plastered to her skull, her cream
dress soaked through.

After a brief glance at me, she turned her
attention to the tools before her. “They did this to me too, Will,”
she said.

“Did what?”

“An autopsy. You’d think they’d know what
killed me. I’d been at the bottom of the lake all night. But they
still had to open me up and look inside. The good thing about being
dead is that nothing hurts.”

“I’m not dead!”

Max picked up a pair of scissors and cut
open my shirt. She exchanged the scissors for a scalpel.

“Max! Stop it!”

She made a Y-shaped incision into my flesh,
extending from my armpits to the bottom of my sternum, then down to
my lower abdomen.

Blood pooled out from it, black and thick as
syrup.

“Look, Max! I’m bleeding. I’m not dead.”

She frowned. “They told me you were.”

“Who?”

“Them.”

“I need to get out of here.”

“You can’t.”

The restraints, however, had vanished, and I
was able to sit up. My head and bladder throbbed dully. I pressed a
hand to my stomach to prevent my guts from spilling out.

“Where am I, Max? Where are my friends?”

“You shouldn’t have come down here.”

“Where, Max?”

“You shouldn’t have come down here.”

“Stop saying that.”

“You shouldn’t have come down here.”

“Stop it, Max!” I was suddenly incensed at
her. Not for her I-told-you-so advice. But for dying on me. For
leaving me. For blaming me for her death.

“You shouldn’t—”

I leapt at her, squeezing her throat. She
plunged the scalpel into my left ear. I screamed and fell to the
floor, where I rocked back and forth, back and forth, rocking,
rocking, rocking…

I jerked awake. I was curled in a fetal
position, perspiring, short of breath. Relief flooded me as I
realized I had been dreaming. Then everything else came crashing
back in a whirlwind of images—the tunnel, Rob yelling, the mutant
swinging the bone—and for a bewildered moment I thought this all
must be a dream too. But when the all-encompassing blackness didn’t
relent—in fact, it only became more oppressive—I understood it was
real.

I tried to sit up. My hands, I discovered,
were cuffed behind my back, and I toppled to my side. The abrupt
movement shot a lightning bolt of pain through the left side of my
skull where I had been struck by the bone. The throbbing escalated,
an alternating current of fire and ice. I squeezed my eyes shut. My
mouth gaped open against the cold dirt floor. Moaning, waiting for
the excruciating pain to subside, I became aware of my protesting
bladder. It felt as if it might burst.

I shoved myself to my knees, wobbling but
keeping my balance, then to my feet. I swayed but didn’t fall.

My bladder.

Fuck. Oh fuck.

I couldn’t hold out any longer. Hot urine
splashed down my inner thighs and calves. The first second was
orgasmic, the relief so great. I pissed myself for what must have
been a full minute.

“Ugh,” I grunted when I’d finished, partly
in disgust, but mostly because of the pain still stampeding inside
my head like a herd of elephants.

I stumbled forward, not knowing where I was
going in the dark, only wanting to get clear of the acrid puddle
pooled around me.

I took one step, then another—then metal
clacked and the cuffs dug into the skin around my wrists.

I was not only bound; I was anchored to
something, like a dog leashed to a pole.

The primal alarm of imprisonment thudded in
my chest, and I jerked my arms in frustration. The cuffs bit
deeper.

“Fuck,” I said.

I glanced about me.

Blackness.

I blinked.

Blackness.

“Fuck,” I said.

Where was Danièle? Where was Rob? Pascal?
Was I alone? Or were they right next to me?

“Danièle?”

No answer.

“Rob?”

No reply.

“Fuck,” I said.

I squashed the fear running wild inside me
and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. I closed my
eyes to concentrate, though this changed nothing, the blackness was
the same, it was simple habit, and visualized my attacker. A flash
of white skin. Two piggish air holes for a nose. A permanently
grinning set of gums and teeth for a mouth.

Had this…abomination...been real? Or had it
been a person wearing a mask? The Painted Devil? I kept coming back
to him, but for good reason. He was a showman—a sick, reckless
showman who had a proclivity for theater and got a thrill out of
terrorizing cataphiles. So was it a stretch to conclude he swapped
the SS uniform for a Halloween mask, knocked us all unconscious,
and tied us up as prisoners?

No, maybe not.
Except what I saw wasn’t a
mask
.

I was reasonably sure of that. I might have
only seen the face for a moment, but it had been a heated moment,
and my mind had been exceptionally clear, my perception sharp.

And then there was that nauseating stench.
The only time I had ever smelled something so foul had been when,
as a kid, I’d discovered our family cat in the back of the our
little-used garage, where it had gone to die, and where it had been
half consumed by a blanket of squiggling white maggots. And
although it was conceivable the Painted Devil might swap costumes,
it was absurd to suggest he would go so far as to alter his
scent.

Which meant whoever had attacked me was
indeed gruesomely deformed. But who had disfigured him, and why?
And what did he want with us? And how had he snuck up on me? There
was no way he could have seen Danièle and me in the blackness. Not
even with a pair of night vision goggles; there wasn’t a sliver of
ambient light in the catacombs.