The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (25 page)

Zolan was no longer so naïve. Now he knew
the red light districts in and out. He knew every corner of every
boulevard, every speakeasy brothel, what they charged, who worked
where, and who worked on the side.

Last night he had been with Sonia, a pretty
Czech girl with the face of a sixteen year old and the body of a
lingerie model. She was from a top shelf brothel hidden in plain
sight in the middle of Pigalle. She’d been slutty and fearless with
soft hands and a willing tongue, just how he liked them.

He’d been thinking about Sonia and the hall
of fame fuck all the way back from the surface, but stopped as soon
as he entered the Great Hall.

Something had happened in his absence.

Usually Odo would be lying on his
piss-stained mattress, staring at nothing in that stupid way of
his. Franz would be fussing over his Hot Wheels collection,
organizing the cars into neat piles only to reorganize them into
different ones. If Hanns and Jörg and Karl weren’t out patrolling
the tunnels, they would be lurking here somewhere, pissing the hell
out of all the others. In contrast, only Nora was present,
wandering aimlessly at the far end of the room, picking at the
scabs on her breasts. Zolan didn’t bother asking her where everyone
else was; she had the mental aptitude of a two year old.

Then, distantly, he heard shouting. It came
from the Dungeon.

Fucking Hanns, he thought immediately. Had
to be Hanns. He was always acting up, causing mischief. The other
day he hid several of Franz’s Hot Wheels. The two of them nearly
killed each other in the ensuing fight, and it took hours to get
everyone to settle down again.

So what had he done this time?

As Zolan moved through the tunnel system,
the shouting crystalized, and there was a frenzied mania to it the
likes of which he had never heard.

What the fuck was going on?

When he arrived at the entrance to the
Dungeon, Zolan saw everything at once. That cataphile he had run
into earlier—Macaroni—pinned to the ground by Jörg and Karl and all
the others. The quiet cataphile, Chess, lying a few feet away, his
head a pulpy mess. Beyond them, the beautiful cataphile, Stork
Girl, screaming hysterically. Zolan didn’t immediately see the
chatty cataphile, Roast Beef, but he didn’t have time to wonder
about this because Hanns, standing tall above Macaroni, raised his
bone in the air.

“
Hanns!
” Zolan commanded.
“
Halt!
”

Hanns spun around, his eyes wide with
surprise.

“
Tut das nicht!
” Zolan said.
“
Schlecht!
”

Hanns threw his head back and howled in
fury. He glared at Macaroni, then at Zolan, then at Macaroni again,
and Zolan knew he wasn’t going to obey him.

He rushed forward as Hanns swung the bone.
Macaroni jerked his head at the last moment, and the blow careened
off his skull. Zolan shoved Hanns clear before he could attempt a
second blow, shouting at him to leave the room, disbanding the
crowd. He glanced again at Chess’s lifeless body, then turned his
attention to Stork Girl. Her face was streaked with tears, and she
held a knuckled fist to her mouth. She seemed too emotional to
speak, so Zolan said in French, “I warned you not to go searching
for that video camera.”

Her eyes rolled to the whites, and she
fainted.

The room could have been mistaken for a
prince’s study—a very perverse prince—for despite the abundance of
crimson drapery and silk pillows and turn-of-the-century
furnishings and aged tomes scattered about, the walls were
constructed—no,
decorated
—with bones. Tibias and femurs and
humeri and others were affixed to every inch of available space,
the geometrical handiwork punctuated here and there by staring
skulls. The macabre display was lit by red candles burning in a
half dozen different wrought-iron candelabras.

Danièle knew she must have fainted earlier,
because when she’d opened her eyes a minute ago, she had been in
this seat, Zolan crouched before her, patting her cheek.

Zolan the bum.

Zolan the drunk.

Zolan, Zolan, Zolan
.

How could he possibly be behind all
this—whatever
this
was?

A swath of fabric moved to her right, and
Zolan emerged from a connecting room. He was dressed exactly as he
had been in the Bunker, with the green bandana, olive fatigue
jacket, and black T-shirt. He offered her the glass of water he had
gone to fetch and sat nonchalantly on one corner of the adjacent
desk, smiling hesitantly at her.

“Drink,” he said in French. “It will make
you feel better, and we have a lot to talk about.”

Danièle didn’t want to accept the water. She
didn’t want anything from Zolan, but her throat was parched, and
she couldn’t resist.

Her wrists, she realized belatedly, were no
longer manacled behind her back. They were wrapped in white cotton
gauze, tinged red with blood from the abrasions beneath. Smears of
petroleum jelly covered the nicks and cuts on her hands. Her right
arm was sore to move, the skin bruised purple along the forearm,
but she no longer believed it was fractured.

She took the glass and sipped. The water was
divine! She gulped the rest back and wiped her mouth with her
hand.

“Would you like more?” Zolan asked her.

Danièle set the glass on the desk and shook
her head.

“I want to begin with an apology,” he said.
“Your friend, I’m sorry about what happened.”

Pascal! Poor Pascal. She wanted to feel
anger, but she only felt empty—empty and frightened and hopelessly
confused. “He is dead,” she stated monotonously.

“If I were here earlier, it would not have
happened—”

“Where is Will?”

“Macaroni?”

Tears sprung to Danièle’s eyes. Had she only
recently nicknamed him that? How could their fortunes have changed
so dramatically in such a short amount of time? “Yes…him,” she
managed. “Where is he? Is he alive—?”

“He is fine. He is resting.”

Relief washed through her. “And Rob?”

“Roast Beef, yes. He is resting also.”

“You keep saying ‘resting.’” She frowned.
“What do you mean by that?”

“They are breathing fine.”

“But they are unconscious?”

“Yes.”

“They need medical attention.”

“They’ll come around.”

“You are not a doctor!”

“I know you’re upset… What’s your name—your
real name?”

Danièle considered not telling Zolan, but
that would accomplish nothing. Her best chance of getting out of
here alive, getting Will and Rob out alive too, was through
cooperation, throwing herself at his mercy.

“Danièle,” she muttered. “My name is
Danièle.” Hearing her voice so weak, so subservient, plunged her
into despair. Her entire body began shaking.

“It’s okay,” Zolan told her. “You’re okay
now. Your friends are okay—”

“Pascal is dead!” she said shrilly, and
buried her face in her hands. She squeezed her eyes shut and
succumbed to wracking sobs.

Gradually, however, the tightness in her
chest lessened, and she got her breathing under control. She rubbed
the tears from her cheek and saw that Zolan had lit a cigarette.
Smoke swirled around his head in a bluish membrane. He was studying
her in a way she didn’t like.

“Are you German?” she asked him.

“I am a French citizen,” he said.

“You spoke German to those…”

“My parents were German,” he said, nodding.
“They taught the language to me. It is the only language my
brothers and sisters understand.”

It took a moment for Danièle to clue in to
his meaning. “Those
things
are your
siblings
?”

“Some, yes. Others are nieces and nephews.
Others still, grandnephews and grandnieces.”

She shook her head and thought she might
burst into sobs again. Instead she blurted, “What happened to them?
Their lips and noses—did you do that?”

“Of course I didn’t.”

“Then who…?”

“My father,” Zolan said, shifting his weight
on the desk as if to get comfortable.

“Your father?”

Zolan nodded. “He was a Waffen-SS
Sturmbannführer
in World War Two. He
served as a senior intelligence officer in Paris, helped that
lunatic Alois Brunner ship one hundred forty thousand Jews to the
gas chambers, and had a hand in the execution of thirty SAS
prisoners of war captured during Operation…Bulbasket, I believe
they called it.” He tapped ash from the cigarette into the silver
ashtray next to him. “Needless to say, after the Allied Forces
liberated Paris, he had a high price on his head. Instead of trying
to flee the city, as many SS personnel did, he and a handful of
others went underground—literally. They gathered their families and
whatever supplies they could carry, and they fled into the
catacombs. The men surfaced every few nights to pilfer more
supplies. Back then there were hundreds of different ways to
enter—and exit—the catacombs. They could pop up in any part of the
city they wanted and be gone again before anyone knew they were
there.”

Zolan took a final drag of the cigarette and
stubbed it out in the ashtray. “Initially they planned to remain
hidden for a few months,” he said. “By then, they thought, the
Allies would be out of France, people would begin rebuilding their
lives and the city, and fugitive Germans would be all but forgotten
about. This, of course, was not the case, and by the time the
Nuremberg Trials finished, they had been underground for roughly
two years. Everyone but my father wanted to take a chance on
escaping to Syria, or South America. When he realized he couldn’t
convince the others to stay, he slit their throats while they
slept, my mother’s too, sparing only the children, who he raised
alongside myself. It was a precautionary measure. He had feared
they would be captured and give up the location of the
hideout.”

Danièle was listening to all this with a
mixture of rapt attention and relief—the latter because the fact
Zolan was sharing such information with her meant he likely wasn’t
going to kill her. What was the point in educating only to
execute?

“So you are telling me,” she said, with
gathering composure, “that these people who attacked us, who killed
Pascal, they are the descendants of Nazi war criminals?”

Zolan nodded.

“But surely your father could have left with
the children at some point?”

“I agree. If he had wanted to.”

“Why wouldn’t he want to?”

“Because he had already begun to lose his
mind. He didn’t tell me this, naturally. I was still a child then.
But he kept a daily journal, which I have read many times. After
the massacre, his entries devolved into a stream of consciousness.
He would switch from topic to topic erratically, chronicle his day
in one paragraph, go on a religious or political rant in the next.
Soon the entries were nothing but illegible scribbles. Living
underground in constant fear of discovery, isolated from society,
lacking intellectual companionship, never seeing the sun…” Zolan
shrugged. “I am not surprised he went crazy. I’m not surprised any
of them went crazy.”

“Except you.”

“Except me.”

“Why?”

“Where did you grow up, Danièle?”

She blinked. “Me? Halle. In
Saxony-Anhalt
,
Germany.”

“Did you have a good childhood?”

“Yes,” she lied.

“I did too,” he said. “Are you surprised by
that? Life in the catacombs, you see, was the only life the other
children and myself knew. We had none of the baggage my father had.
No friends or family to miss. No memories of the atrocities he had
committed. No fears of capture and execution. In contrast we played
games. We explored the tunnels. We had the weekly Franco-Belgium
magazines like
Spirou
and
Tintin
that my father
brought back from his supply runs.

“For a child, it was acceptable. But the
mind grows; the world becomes smaller. Despite being indoctrinated
to the dangers of leaving the safety of the catacombs, my siblings
and I—or my adopted siblings, I should say—began talking in secret
about visiting the streets above us. Nevertheless, before we acted
on this, I lost my nerve and confessed our plans to my father. He
beat my two brothers and two sisters to within inches of their
lives. Then, in our former playroom, what we began to refer to as
the Dungeon, he installed four chains, one in each corner—”

“The same chains…?” she said.

“Yes—the same ones that held you and your
friends. My brothers and sisters remained imprisoned there for what
might have been months. I took care of them the best I could,
though my oldest brother, Albert, became sick and passed away. This
convinced my father to release them, though to make sure they never
tried to escape again, he performed his fait accompli.”

“He cut off their noses and lips.”

“Turning them into monsters that would never
be accepted by society.” Zolan shook his head. “They had no
medicine for the pain. They couldn’t eat or drink properly. They
moaned all day and all night. They were regressing before my eyes,
losing their humanity. The guilt born from the fact that I had
caused this had been too much to bear—it had all been too much—and
I had to leave or I would go crazy myself. So that’s what I did. I
left.”

“And…?” she said.

“And what?”

“What happened next?”

He shrugged. “Life happened.”

It had taken Zolan several days to find a way
out of the catacombs on his own, but he eventually discovered a
drainage culvert that led to a blinding white light. He had never
forgotten taking those first steps into that light and being
overwhelmed with unfamiliar sensations: the breeze on his face, the
heat of the afternoon summer sun on his pale skin, the smell of
grasses and wildflowers, the sound of birds and crickets chirping.
He must have stared at the sky, the sun, the drifting clouds, for a
full hour without moving.