The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (34 page)

Without oxygen reaching my brain, my body
would shut down and I would lose consciousness. My breathing would
stop. I’d go into respiratory arrest and sink. Then I would enter
the hypoxic convulsion stage. My skin would turn blue, notably in
the lips and fingernail beds, and my body would go rigid. Finally
my heart would stop pumping blood, and I would be clinically
dead.

That’s what happened to Max anyhow; it had
all been in the coroner’s report.

I could see Max and everyone else killed on
Lake Placid gliding alongside me, phosphorescent shapes darting in
and out of my peripheral vision. I could hear them too, their
voices ghostlike echoes inside my head, telling me of all the
things they would never able to do. Karen would never become a
dentist and meet Mr. Right. Brian would never earn his MBA and
prove himself at his father’s investment management firm on Wall
Street. Gina would never visit her older sister in Italy. Tommy
would never bike through Central America. Eddy would never finish
restoring the 1998 Porsche 911 Carrera he’d bought from a police
auction, while Joseph, the sixty-three-year-old retired accountant
who’d lived year round on the lake, would never catch the monster
largemouth bass that had snapped his line and gotten away the
summer before, and that, according to his wife, he had been hunting
the night he died. And Max, of course, would never graduate the
Manhattan School of Music, never play in Carnegie Hall, never
achieve her dream of becoming a New York Philharmonic cellist—

The pressure around my throat lessoned.

Katja!
I thought, momentarily
clearheaded.

I snagged her wrists with my hands before
she could float away and kicked on with my legs. I only managed to
continue for another five seconds before my breathing reflex
reached the breakpoint and I opened my mouth and took a futile
breath. Water gushed into my stomach and lungs. I experienced the
briefest moment of relief, followed by the faraway acceptance that
I was about to die.

Danièle’s knees and hands brushed rock
beneath her as the ground angled upward. A moment later her head
cleared the water. She wanted to whoop with relief. Instead she
spat the matchbook from her mouth into her hand, took the candle
from her pocket, and lit the wick on the second try.

The pool she stood in was tiny, only a few
yards in diameter. The inky water came to her waist. She stared at
the rippling surface, praying for Will and Katja to appear. The
swim, physically, had not been very hard. It had taken her
fifty-five seconds, and now that she knew how long the tunnel was,
she could do it again no problem. It was the mental aspect, the
doubt, which had been the tough part. At forty-five seconds she had
begun to panic, but she’d told herself just a bit longer, a few
more seconds. And thank God she had listened to that little voice.
But what if Will hadn’t? What if he hadn’t even followed her? No,
he would have. He knew as well as she did there was no choice. But
he had Katja on his back. She would have slowed him down. Maybe
he’d panicked or lost his nerve as she almost had—

Pale appendages appeared in the dark water
in front of her, then Will reared to his feet, crashing through the
surface with a sharp intake of air. Danièle caught Katja as she
fell off his back and dragged her onto the dry ground. The girl was
limp and unresponsive. Danièle felt for a pulse in her neck. She
didn’t find one—or was she doing it wrong? She put her ear to
Katja’s mouth. Nothing.

“She is not breathing!” she cried to Will,
who was doubled over coughing and wheezing.

Danièle had taken a first aid course years
before, but she couldn’t remember the particulars of CPR. Different
number of compressions for children and adults? More or less? How
many breaths did you administer? Did it matter?

She placed the heel of one hand on Katja’s
breastbone, between her breasts. She placed the other on top of it,
palm-down, and performed ten chest compressions. She covered
Katja’s nose holes with her hand, tilted her head back to open her
airway, and blew into her lipless mouth. She performed more
compressions. On the seventh one Katja coughed and spasmed and
heaved water from her lungs. Danièle rolled her onto her side and
slapped her back.

Will waded out of the water and collapsed
beside them.

“Is she okay?” he asked.

Danièle nodded because she didn’t trust
herself to speak yet. Then, “Are you?”

“Yeah—” He commenced coughing.

Katja opened her eyes. It took a few moments
for them to focus and for her to register their presence.

Will coughed a final time and gave her a
forced smile. “Brave girl.”

“Did I…fall asleep?” she mumbled.

“Sort of,” he said.

“I hate…swimming.”

“You and me both,” he told her, kissing her
affectionately on the forehead. “You and me both.”

We started along the rock wall, searching for
an exit from the new cavern, and after a short distance came to
several scattered candles on the ground, a discarded torch, and a
pair of old boots.

“Zolan’s?” Danièle said.

Zolan! I had forgotten Danièle had mentioned
him earlier. “Are you serious about Zolan being behind for all
this?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said simply.

“
Zolan
Zolan?”

“Yes!”

I pictured the old guy in my head: the green
bandana, the missing teeth, the shark-tooth necklace, the bad BO.
He was Katja’s father? He was responsible for Pascal and Rob’s
death? Setting these absurdities aside for a later time, I said,
“Well, if they’re his boots, then that means he’s been here before.
He knows of that underwater passage. He’ll be coming.” I picked up
the torch and sniffed the dirty cloth wrapped around the end of the
stave. “Still smells of kerosene. Try lighting it with the
candle.”

Danièle obeyed and a flame whooshed into
existence, dwarfing the candles. I looked away from the light until
my eyes could adjust to the brightness—and found myself staring at
an old foot ladder, affixed to the wall, less than ten yards
away.

I ascended the ladder first, climbing with
one hand because I held the torch in the other. Thirty feet up the
ladder reached the ceiling and continued through a shaft in the
rock. I glanced down. Katja was only about five feet or so off the
ground and seemed reluctant to go any farther. “Come on, Katja!” I
said. “You need to move faster.”

She looked up. “I’m scared.”

“You’ll be fine. Just keep coming. I’ll wait
for you.”

Danièle encouraged Katja from below until
she began inching upward.

“Good work, Katja!” I said. “Keep
coming—”

Suddenly Zolan stood behind Danièle. He’d
appeared so quickly I didn’t have time to warn her. He bear-hugged
her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. She shrieked in
surprise and kicked futilely. Then another figure emerged from the
gloom next to him, and another, and another, the entire mob.

A male removed Katja from the ladder and set
her on the ground.

“Will!” Danièle cried.

Zolan passed her, kicking and screaming, to
a different male, who held her firmly against his body.

“Come down, Will,” Zolan called to me. He
held a hand against his stomach and appeared to be in some sort of
pain. “There’s nowhere to go.”

I couldn’t do as he asked, of course. It
would be suicide. But what of Danièle and Katja? What was going to
happen to them? I couldn’t leave them—could I?

“What’s wrong?” Zolan taunted. “You’re not
thinking of running away like a cowardly piece of shit, are
you?”

“I’m going for help,” I said, as much for
his benefit as Danièle’s. “I’m going to bring the police back
here.”

“You never find your way out.”

“If I come down, you’ll kill me.”

“If you don’t, I’ll kill Danièle. If you do,
if you act like a man, I’ll let you live. It is your choice.”

I winced at those words.

My choice.

“You’ll let me live?” I said
skeptically.

“We’ll work out an arrangement.”

“He is lying, Will!” Danièle yelled.

I knew she was right. Zolan would kill me
immediately. But was he also lying about killing
her
, or was
that an empty threat? I believed it was the latter. He was a man,
and Danièle was a beautiful young woman. Why would he kill her when
he could keep her as a concubine, albeit an unwilling one, with no
risk of prosecution? And while that might be a horrible fate for
Danièle, at least it wouldn’t be death.

I tensed in anticipation of what I was about
to do. It was despicable, but this wasn’t a movie. I wasn’t some
heroic protagonist. I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for someone
I’d met only a handful of times. This was real life, I didn’t have
a deus ex machina to bail my ass out, and I had to make a rational,
calculated decision. One, I go down and get killed, and Danièle
gets whatever she gets. Or two, I flee, Danièle still gets whatever
she gets, but I potentially escape and bring back help. Really,
option two was the best choice for both of us.

I climbed the ladder

Danièle couldn’t believe Will was leaving
her! She didn’t know what she expected him to do instead. If he
came down, Zolan would kill him. Still, it was impossible to remain
objective. She was overrun with emotions. Resentment. Injustice.
Desperation.

He’s leaving me behind
.

Go, Will, Go! Katja urged silently. She knew
her father was lying again. He wasn’t going to work out an
arrangement. He was going to kill Will just as Hanns killed Rob.
And she didn’t want that. Will was her friend.

She and Danièle would be in big trouble,
they’d probably get locked up in the Dungeon for a while, but her
father would eventually forgive them, and things would go back to
normal—only better though, because she would finally have someone
other than her father she could talk to, a big sister. Danièle
could tell her all about the surface world, everything she needed
to know to prepare her to live there, until Will returned with help
to rescue them.

As I scrambled up the ladder, Zolan shouted,
“I’ll kill her! Come back! I’ll kill her right now! Come back!”

I climbed.

Moments later Danièle screamed:
high-pitched, fevered, primitive in mindless agony
.

“You’re killing her!” Zolan said to me. “You
are! You’re killing her!”

I climbed.

Finally the shaft opened to a lateral
hallway. The ladder continued up, through another shaft in the
ceiling. I was tempted to keep climbing. Up was good; it was the
direction I wanted to go. Nevertheless, I couldn’t climb fast with
the torch, and my pursuers were likely already gaining on me. Also,
the shaft could lead to a dead end. I would be trapped.

Danièle screamed again, shrill but plaintive
this time. The sound shattered me to the soul.

Then nothing.

I leapt from the ladder and began to
run.

Zolan couldn’t believe Katja had turned
against him. He had thought Will and Rob must have coerced her to
free them, to help them find Danièle and escape. But there she had
been, climbing the ladder of her own freewill. He saw it with his
very eyes. The treachery had been heartbreaking to witness.

He might not be her biological father—that
would be Hanns, or
had been
Hanns—but he had raised her
nearly since birth, and for all intents and purposes, she was his
daughter.

She had been somewhere between eighteen and
twenty-four months old when Zolan found his way here in 2000.
Still, it had not been in time to save her from his father, who had
begun performing the mutilations on all infants at as young an age
as possible. Over the years it became less a deterrent to escape,
he believed, and more a ritual to mark their inclusion into the
community.