The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (24 page)

This was a stupid way of thinking, of
course, because death didn’t care if you were young or if you had
kids, it didn’t care if you were wealthy or poor, it didn’t care if
you were pretty or disfigured, a king or a queen—it would strike
you down when it wanted to strike you down and there was nothing
you could do about it.

So had it come for Rob and Pascal then? Was
this their time, premature as it may be? Was this her and Will’s
time as well? Were they going to become those people who friends
and acquaintances commented upon with a shake of their head and
something banal like, “I can’t believe they died…it’s so
tragic.”

Danièle didn’t want to think about any of
this; she wanted to sink into sleep so the worrying and the pain
and the fear would all disappear. But as much as she tried, her
mind wouldn’t rest, wouldn’t shut off, and now it moved on to the
girl who had visited them. She couldn’t imagine where the girl came
from, or why she was here in this godforsaken place, wherever this
was, because she wasn’t like the zombie-man. Danièle didn’t mean
her face—she hadn’t seen it clearly enough to know whether it had
rotted off too—she meant the girl’s manner, because while the
zombie-man had been feral, vile, a base animal, she had been, well,
just a girl.

Could she be a prisoner too then, only one
who was allowed to roam freely? Yet if that were the case, wouldn’t
she attempt to flee? And if she made the trouble to visit this
chamber, to reveal herself, why not speak? Did she not understand
French or English? Surely, though, she could have attempted to
communicate in some other manner?

So many unknowns! Danièle’s head felt ready
to explode. But as she continued to play over the “ifs” and “whats”
and “whys,” turning them this way and that, looking for new
possibilities, she uncovered a positive thought among the
overwhelming negatives: whatever the girl’s role in all this, the
fact the zombie-man hadn’t torn her apart and consumed her flesh
confirmed what Danièle had suspected earlier: the zombie-man, or
however many of them existed, weren’t completely mindless, they had
some measure of self-restraint.

As small a relief as this seemed to be, it
was a relief nonetheless, and Danièle held onto it as though it
were a lifeline, afraid to let go.

The man who had attacked me must be the
girl’s father, I thought. He had been maimed in a horrible
accident—a fire, an explosion, perhaps exposure to acid—or he had
leprosy or another flesh-eating disease. Either way, his life was
ruined. He couldn’t go out in public without people pointing and
staring and viewing him as a monster. So he took his daughter, who
loved him unconditionally, and fled to the catacombs. But over time
he grew lonely. He wanted adult companionship. So he returned to
the surface and recruited others with hideous deformities to join
him underground, so that now there was a flourishing community of
Quasimodos…

I touched my head against my knees.

A cult then? A satanic cult that practiced
self-mutilation and sacrificed unwary cataphiles to their dark god?
Druggies who had a bad acid trip and thought their faces were
trying to eat themselves so they cut them off—?

Whoa
, I thought. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Could
I
be under the influence of drugs? Had Rob or Danièle
or even Pascal slipped me something, and I was currently riding out
the mindfuck of all mindfucks? For a moment I hoped against hope
that this was true, but I knew it wasn’t. I might not understand
what was happening right now, but there was no doubt it was
happening, no belief that it was a dream or hallucination; it was
all too real. The memories, the smells, the lucidity of my
thoughts—and the pain, that was real, there was no denying it, and
drugs might make you see things, and hear things, and hell, maybe
even smell things, but they didn’t make you feel as if you’ve been
run over by a Mac truck.

“Will, there!” Danièle said abruptly,
snapping me out of my musings. I blinked dazedly. It was the first
time she had spoken in ages.

After a moment of disorientation I saw the
light. It grew in brightness. Yet this time its arrival was
accompanied by sounds as well. Snorts, hollers. Words? If so, I had
never heard the language before.

I struggled to my feet. I heard Danièle
doing the same.

“What should we do?” she hissed.

“Let me do the talking.”

“Talking? What are you going to say? They
are animals! They do not understand!” She was near hysterics.

The torchbearer appeared first, followed by
eleven others, seven males and four females. An eclectic mix of
clothing that spanned several decades covered their pale,
cadaver-like bodies: button-down shirts, bell-bottom pants, a
houndstooth jacket, cotton dresses. All of them had piggish holes
for noses and lipless, skeletal grins, and all were barefoot.
Because of their deformities it was hard to gauge their ages, but
they ranged from young adult to ancient. Each carried a long
off-white bone.

The torchbearer stopped where the girl had
stopped earlier, though his torch was much brighter than the girl’s
candle, and the light clearly exposed Danièle and me. The mob fell
silent. Ignoring Danièle, the torchbearer came over to stand
directly before me.

My blood went gravestone cold as I stared
into his eyes—reptilian eyes—for the whites were yellow, the pupils
the size of dimes, eclipsing the irises. His teeth, partially black
with decay, stood in stark contrast to the delicate pink of his
exposed gums. The cavities in the center of his face were lopsided,
the left larger than the right, exposing lumpy red tissue
within.

His freakish eyes held mine, and it was only
with effort that I didn’t look away. He made sniffing noises
through the holes in his face. I tried not to gag on his
stench.

Without warning he swung his bone. It struck
the side of my left knee. I dropped, landing hard on my side. I
pulled my knees to my chest in expectation of another blow, but he
turned away from me and shook his weapon in the air and howled. The
mob responded in a cacophony of celebration. Then he leveled the
bone at Pascal and barked what might have been an order.

Two males went to Pascal and heaved him to
his feet. His limbs dangled lifelessly. His head was lolling from
left to right.

The torchbearer crossed the room and slapped
Pascal hard across the face. He peeled Pascal’s eyelids open with
his thumb. Then he stepped back, lifted Pascal’s shirt, and thrust
the flaming end of the torch into his stomach.

Pascal’s head snapped back and his mouth
went wide in a silent shriek.

The pain! It started in Pascal’s gut and
blazed outward. His eyes bulged, but he couldn’t see anything. He
gasped for breath, felt hands on him, holding him upright. He
looked ahead and saw a flaming ball of fire and smelled singed hair
and burned flesh. Then, next to the fire, a blurry face—the thing
he’d bumped into when he’d turned around, the thing that had…what?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember anything after turning
around.

Pascal realized his arms were pinned behind
his back. His wrists were being handcuffed. No—being
released
, it turned out, because a moment later his arms
flopped free. The thing before him shoved the scrolled end of a
femur at his chest. It said something, though he couldn’t
understand what. Everything was happening in a fog, a dream state.
It shoved the bone at him again and again until he took it.

His vision began to focus, and beyond the
thing he noticed a number of other grotesque horrors. And beyond
them, standing in the shadows, Will.

Pascal screamed his name.

Danièle couldn’t bear to watch, but she
couldn’t turn away either. The zombie-man with the torch, the
leader as far as she could tell, handed Pascal a bone, then
accepted another bone from a female, then the mob formed a loose
circle around Pascal and him.

They were going to fight.

Pascal realized this too. He stopped
shouting for Will to help him and backed away from the leader and
begged to be left alone.

The leader roared and attacked with his
bone. Pascal, usually nimble and athletic, stumbled awkwardly out
of the way, tripped, and fell to his rear.

The leader pressed the attack and swung the
bone in a downward arc. Pascal raised his bone horizontally in both
hands, deflecting the blow. He scrambled to his feet and attempted
to flee. Those gathered in the circle spun him around and shoved
him back into the fray.

Before Pascal could regain his coordination,
the leader slammed the bone across his back, knocking him to his
knees. Choking on tears, Pascal tried to crawl away. The leader
reared up behind him and raised his bone in the air.

“Pascal!” Danièle cried.

He spotted her for the first time. A myriad
of emotions shimmered across his eyes in that brief moment. Fear,
confusion, anger, anguish. And worst of all, what she would never
be able to forget—heartbreak, of the kind when you know you will
never see someone you love again.

The knobby end of the leader’s bone struck
Pascal on the top of the skull with a sharp, liquid crack. His face
went slack. He fell flat to his chest.

Danièle bent over and vomited.

Jesus Christ, there was nothing left of
Pascal’s head.
There was nothing left of his head
. That
fucking torchbearer had bashed it over and over again until it
dissolved into a messy puddle of gunk. Nevertheless, I didn’t have
long to reflect on this, because the torchbearer—Jaundice, I
thought of him as after seeing those yellow eyes—pointed the
bloody, brain-speckled femur at me and barked an order. An elderly
male moved behind me, sprung the shackles from around my wrists,
and pushed me into the circle.

Jaundice kicked Pascal’s bone-weapon toward
me with his bare foot. I didn’t want to pick it up. If I did, I
would be accepting his challenge. Then again, if I didn’t, he would
likely kill me anyway.

I retrieved the femur and choked it like a
baseball bat. I considered using it to bash my way through the
circle and make a run for it. But I had no headlamp, no flashlight,
no torch. I wouldn’t make it twenty feet in the blackness before I
was caught again.

Still, what chance of survival did I have if
I held my ground and fought? I was bigger and stronger than
Jaundice, but he seemed to be experienced at this bone fighting or
whatever it was. The blows he landed against Pascal had been swift
and sure. Also, even if I defeated him, what then? There were
another eleven of them. No way I could take them all out.

Jaundice approached me warily, his bloodied
femur in one hand, the torch in the other. The flame spit and
licked. The ring of spectators were shaking their bones in the air
and hooting and hollering like a troop of monkeys. This was
obviously prime entertainment for them.

Jaundice roared and lunged, feigning with
the femur while jabbing the torch at me. I dodged right, felt the
heat of the whooshing flame on my face, and chopped Jaundice’s
extended forearm with my bone. He barked and dropped the torch. I
was already swinging the bone again, this time at his head, but he
parried, countered, and whacked me in the side.

I swung wildly. He jumped backward. He swung
just as wildly. I jumped backward.

Then someone shoved me from behind. I
stumbled forward. Instinct told me to veer right to avoid crashing
into Jaundice. That’s what Pascal did—and got the bone across his
back that knocked him to his knees. So instead I careened straight
into Jaundice. He swung his bone, but I had closed the distance
between us too quickly, and there was no power behind the blow. The
femur bounced off my shoulder. I threw my arms around him and
dragged him to the ground, landing on top of him.

I released the bone-weapon, and with my left
hand I grabbed Jaundice around the throat, pressing down with all
of my weight, trying to crush his windpipe. With my other hand I
formed a fist and hammered him in the face again and again and
again. I was yelling and crazed and trying to smash his skull open
like he had done to Pascal.

I would have done this too had I not been
pulled off him. I struggled against the hands grappling me, but
there were too many. Nails raked my flesh as they dragged me away
and pinned me to the ground.

Then, amazingly, Jaundice rose to his feet.
Blood painted most of his face red, and his mouth hung open and
askew with several teeth now missing. He probed his unhinged jaw
tentatively, tried pushing it closed. It fell dumbly open
again.

He issued a strangled wail, picked up his
bone-weapon, and lurched over to stand above me. His yellow eyes
blazed.

I bucked and squirmed and got a leg free. I
kicked one of the fuckers holding me, a female, in the face, and
another in the ear. But as soon as they fell away, others replaced
them and secured my leg again.

Jaundice placed a foot on my chest, and even
though his mouth hung open in an obtuse oval, I was sure he was
smiling.

He raised the femur.

When Zolan had first begun trolling the red
light districts of Paris, he’d known nothing about how they
operated. The first night he strolled into a brothel that seemed
fair enough. He bought a cocktail for the girl he was sitting with,
a friendly twenty-five year old from Cambodia, and told her he
wanted to hire her services. When she told him four hundred for
everything, he knew he was in a tourist scam and said no thanks.
Before he could leave, however, a gorilla of a bouncer handed him
the bill: four hundred fifty euros for a beer and a cocktail. He
asked the hooker if her offer was still good, which it was. So four
hundred fifty for two drinks, or fifty bucks less for two drinks
and a fuck—it wasn’t a hard decision.