The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (33 page)

His head struck the stone with a brief,
snappy sound, like billiard balls scattering on a good break. His
body went limp. His disgusting mouth gaped open. His dark eyes
dulled to sightless orbs. He was dead, but I wanted him
more
dead. I slammed his skull against the stone again and again and
again.

Danièle tried to save Rob. She tore off her
shirt and beat it against his body. This did nothing to diminish
the flames that consumed him, but she kept at it, not knowing what
else to do. All the while she watched in horror as his skin went
from blistered to pink to black. Worst were his eyes. They remained
open the entire time, and she was sure he could see her doing
nothing effective to help him. Then his rolling slowed and
eventually stopped altogether. He came to a rest facedown. Thank
God it was facedown. The flames continued to devour his body, but
somehow they didn’t seem as terrible now that he had gone
still.

While Danièle’s attention had been fixed on
him, she was only partially aware of Will struggling with the
zombie-man. Now she turned to them. They were across the room. Will
held the thing around its neck like a ragdoll and was driving its
head into the wall repeatedly.

She wobbled over to him and told him to
stop, told him it was dead, and tried pulling him away from it.
Finally he dropped the lifeless corpse to the ground and turned to
look at her. His face was splattered with blood. A madness danced
in his eyes and an aura of power radiated off him that she found
both frightening and strangely desirable. He glared past her at
Rob’s still burning body, then at the thing at his feet.

He raised his shoe and stomped on its broken
skull.

This wasn’t what Katja wanted! This was
making her sick! She didn’t know Will’s friend Rob well, and she’d
never liked Hanns, but seeing them die, the way they died—it was
never supposed to happen like this. She wished she could run back
to her room and curl up on her bed and close her eyes and forget
she had ever tried to help Will. But she couldn’t do that, so she
remained in the corner and kept herself as small as possible and
waited for what would happen next.

No time
, I thought helplessly as I
stared at Rob’s burning body.

No time to put the flames out.

No time to bury him.

Hanns, it seemed, had been alone, wandering
the tunnels and doing whatever he did down here by himself. But the
others were coming. They would find us soon.

Once again I considered making a stand here
and attacking each of our pursuers one by one as they wiggled out
of the hole. But this, I decided, was not a good option. They
wouldn’t come through like lemmings. We might kill one, maybe two.
But they would adapt. They would likely try to wait us out. How
long could the three of us remain vigilant? We would have to sleep
at some point. Also, that hole wasn’t the only way into the room. A
hallway extended from the opposite wall. They might know a dozen
other ways to reach that hallway—and, consequently, us.

I picked up Hanns’ torch and bone-weapon and
turned to Danièle. She finished pulling her T-shirt back over her
head and blinked at me with the eyes of someone who had just
watched a tornado wipe out their home and all their earthly
possessions. “We have to leave him,” I told her. Then, to Katja:
“Are you coming?”

She nodded mutely.

The hallway ran straight. We passed several
small rooms on alternating sides of us. They were bare and led
nowhere. This discouraged me, as I had hoped to find branching
passageways, which we could take at random, losing ourselves, and
our pursuers, in the maze.

Seventy-five or so yards on the tunnel ended
at a cavernous grotto. The ceiling must have cleared thirty feet. I
couldn’t be certain, because even with Hann’s bright torch, it
remained layered in thick shadows. The rocks walls were bulging and
irregular, as you found in nature, leading me to believe this was
some naturally forming underground pocket.

“Is that water?” Danièle asked me, her voice
tight.

I had entered the grotto looking up, not
down, and I hadn’t noticed the ground before now. I took a few
steps forward, sweeping the torch low. Danièle was right.
Stretching ahead of us was a mirror-smooth pool of black water. It
covered the entire ground save a narrow ribbon of land that
followed the wall to the right of us.

“Must be some sort of reservoir,” I
said.

I was already moving along the ribbon,
praying it linked to a connecting hallway. It climbed gradually,
melding into the far wall, which rose in staggered sheets. I could
continue left, jumping from one cleft to the next, like a mountain
goat. But what was the point? It couldn’t lead anywhere.

Cursing, I returned the way I’d come,
running over our dwindling options in my head. We had to head back
down the hallway, back through the cat hole. If we could get there
before our pursuers, we could continue the way we’d been going, the
way Hanns had come from. When I reached Danièle and Katja, I said,
“We have to go back—”

An enraged shriek shattered the hushed
silence. A handful of others joined it.

“They found Hanns,” Katja said softly.

“Shit!” I said, going cold with panic. It
was too late. There was nothing we could do now, nowhere to go, we
were as good as dead.

For a brief moment I wondered if I could
take them all out. I was bigger and stronger than them, and I would
be fighting for my life.

Nevertheless, this hope was extinguished
almost immediately.

There were too many. They would overwhelm
me.

I wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Shit!” I repeated.

“What is that?” Danièle said. She was
pointing across the water.

I didn’t see anything. “What?”

“That! Look! The darkness!”

The darkness? But then I saw what she had
indicated. A patch of black, where the far wall met the waterline.
The torchlight didn’t penetrate it.

A deep shadow? Another fissure? Perhaps if
it extended far enough into the rock, it would conceal us. But that
meant we had to cross the water…

Danièle searched her pockets and produced a
book of matches. “Do not make any ripples,” she told me. She popped
the matches in her mouth, then waded carefully into the water.
After three steps the water reached her waist. Another two it was
to her neck. She swam silently forward.

I waded into the water reluctantly. The
temperature was close to freezing, but that wasn’t why my body was
locking up, my stomach churning with dread.

A couple months after the boat accident on
Lake Placid, I’d been with Bridgette on the ferry crossing New York
Bay to Staten Island, to visit the zoo, and I’d gotten violently
seasick, something that had never happened to me before. After that
day, the mere sight of water, in any volume larger than what a
bathtub held, made me nauseous until I looked away from it. I had
not been on another boat, or swimming, since.

I glanced over my shoulder. “Follow me,
Katja, we’re going to hide.”

She stood board-stiff. “I can’t swim!”

I hesitated. We couldn’t leave her behind.
She’d give away that we came this way. Moreover, Zolan would grill
her until she told him where we were hiding. “Climb on my back
then,” I said. “I’ll carry you.”

“I’ll sink!”

“Not if you hold onto me. Hurry!”

She stepped slowly into the water and
wrapped her arms around my neck. I disposed of both the torch and
bone-weapon under the water. The flame went out with a hiss, and
blackness swallowed us.

“I’m scared,” Katja said, her breath warm on
my ear.

“You’ll be okay.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes,” I said, slipping deeper into the
water, trying not to think how far down the bottom was. “Now hold
on.” She tightened her grip around my neck, and I began to
swim.

The pool was roughly twenty-five feet in
diameter. I crossed it quickly. When I touched the far rock I
whispered Danièle’s name.

“Here,” she replied.

I followed the wall to the right. It curved
into what I guessed was the fissure. Maybe ten feet farther on the
ceiling pressed down until it was mere inches above my head.
“Danièle?”

No answer.

“
Danièle?
”

No answer.

“Where is she?” Katja asked in a small
voice.

“I don’t know!” I said. “Danièle?
Danièle!”

Something brushed my leg. I cried out,
spinning, kicking. Katja tightened her hold around my neck, choking
me. I struggled to stay afloat.

Then Danièle’s voice: “Will! Quiet! Stop
it!”

I pried Katja’s arms from my throat enough
so I could breathe again, but I continued to splash and pant, my
eyes bulging. The water suddenly felt mawkish, like quicksand, and
I knew I was going to drown.

“Will!” Danièle said. “Quiet!”

“
Can’t!
”

“
Will!
”

Somehow I managed to calm myself enough to
resume treading water—though it was a fragile calm that could still
abandon me again at any moment. “Where were you?” I whispered,
tilting my chin to keep my mouth above the surface.

“It continues underwater.”

“What…the fissure? How far?”

“I do not know,” she said awkwardly, and I
realized she was speaking around the matchbook in her mouth. “I
didn’t go to the end. Are you ready?”

“For what?” I said, knowing exactly
what.

“We have to follow it.”

“No!”

“It might lead out of here!”

“Forget it!”

“You think Zolan and the others have not
been here before? Of course they have! They will know about this
fissure. They will search it.”

She was right, I knew, and the dread in my
stomach bloomed to fill me completely, suffocating me from the
inside out. I was nauseous with it. I couldn’t dive beneath the
water, beneath the rock, with no guarantee of surfacing again. I
couldn’t. I simply couldn’t.

“Katja can’t swim,” I said.

“She does not have to. She only has to hold
her breath.”

“Danièle—I can’t do this.”

Faint light appeared, blacks edging to
grays.

Someone had entered the grotto.

Danièle took a deep breath and sank below the
surface of the water. She kept her eyes open, but everything was
black as an eclipse. She swam forward with a breaststroke, her legs
frog kicking. This made her think of Rob for the briefest moment
before she blinked him out of her mind. The passage she followed
was narrow. At the peak of her outswept arms her fingertips brushed
the rocks walls.

She knew she could hold her breath for
roughly two minutes—she and Dev used to time each other when they
went to the Aquaboulevard on their birthdays as kids—which meant
she had some sixty seconds to see where this passage led before
reaching the point of no return.

She began to count.

The light grew brighter. The grays bled into
yellows. Still, our pursuers weren’t making any sound. Did they
know they had us trapped? Were they expecting an ambush? And where
was Danièle? Had she emerged on the other side of the rock?

If I hesitated any longer I knew I would
never be able to make myself follow her lead, so I whispered, “Take
a deep breath, Katja—”

“No!”

“Yes!” She either came with me, or she’d
have to let go: it was her choice. “One, two—three.” I filled my
lungs and sank below the surface just as Danièle had done.

The water slipped over my head and droned in
my ears and immediately disorientated me. I didn’t know up from
down, left from right, couldn’t recall which way I was supposed to
go. I might have chickened out, crashed back through the surface,
if I could find the surface, had it not been for Katja. She had not
let go. Her thin arms remained wrapped around my neck. She was
putting her complete trust in me, and I wasn’t going to fail
her.

I stretched my arms wide, touched the sides
of the fissure, and began to kick. After a few yards I felt for the
ceiling. It was submerged, confirming I had gone in the right
direction.

A pressure began building in my lungs
quickly—too quickly—so that soon my lungs felt as if they were
about to burst.

I was going to have to turn back…but turn
back to what? To Zolan and his mob? They would kill me. That was a
given. The only question was how they would do it.

Likely slowly and excruciatingly, revenge
for Hann’s death.

Drowning, on the other hand, would be
relatively painless. The TV depictions of swimmers flailing around
in panic and agony underwater were wrong. That only happened to
those who had not yet gone under (like me a minute before); it was
their body’s last-ditch effort to obtain air. The actual act of
drowning was more often quick and unspectacular and silent.