The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (35 page)

Zolan had been disgusted by these
defacements, the general lack of hygiene and fetid living
conditions, and his intention had been to kill everyone swiftly to
free them from their miserable existence. Nevertheless, while he
was researching lethal toxins and working up the courage to carry
the poisoning out—mass murder was not something you undertook
lightly, even if you had the best of intentions—Katja’s innocence
endeared her to him. Unlike the others, she was still a baby, not
yet corrupted by the limitations of her environment and the
primitive behavior of her family, and after exhaustive
soul-searching he decided it wasn’t his place to be her judge,
jury, and executioner.

So Zolan left the lot of them to fare for
themselves and vowed never to return. His resolve, however, lasted
only two weeks. He was unable to stop thinking about Katja. He
longed to hold her again, to look into her eyes, to have her fall
asleep on his chest, and so he went back, time and time again. Each
trip was supposed to be the last, a short visit to make sure Katja
was doing okay. But after a few months of this he had fallen in
love with her the way a father falls in love with his daughter. He
was burping her, changing her, playing with her, watching her…and
that he could do for hours on end…simply watch her. When she spoke
her first word—“Papa”—he was thrilled. When she took her first
step, he was ecstatic.

She became his savior and his curse. His
savior because she taught him about fatherhood and responsibility
and unconditional love—none of which he had experienced, or cared
to experience, before in his life. Yet also his curse because she
bound him to her unholy existence underground. He could not take
her with him to the surface. Her pitiful appearance aside, there
would be too many questions, too much explaining to do. So whenever
he left for a fuck, or to pick up supplies, he made sure the only
person allowed near her was her biological mother, Romy, and he set
up a video camera and told Romy he was watching her every minute
and played back recorded footage as proof.

When Katja turned three or so, Zolan began
home-schooling her with songs and games before graduating to more
formal lessons. And if his first mistake had been not to poison her
when she was an infant, his second mistake had been to educate and
civilize her. Because had he left her to grow up like her parents
and aunts and uncles, had he left her to evolve into a savage
animal (and despite what he’d told Danièle about his kin, they were
little more than base animals, there was no doubt about that), then
her innocence would have faded, he would have been able to distance
himself from her, disown her, return to his old life.

But enlighten her he did, and like any
enlightened child, she became curious about everything—but mostly
about the aboveground world she’d come to know in her storybooks,
the world that was so different than her own. He told her the same
explanation his father had told him: Paris was destroyed in World
War Two and the survivors had fled underground. Yet every question
she asked forced him to build upon this simple premise until God
forbid he could almost believe the elaborate tale himself.

He got lucky with her books. Originally he
chose them carefully, only bringing her those published pre-1945 so
they wouldn’t reference modern history. Then one evening he had
been reading
Swiss Family Robinson
to her and viewed the
publication page. The novel was first published in 1812, but of
course he didn’t have a first edition, and the abridged reprint was
dated 1992. It was a careless oversight, but no harm was done, and
he removed all the publication pages from all her books before she
became any the wiser.

Since then there had been a few other
slipups, and he had begun to fear Katja was getting suspicious of
her world paradigm. He had always known she would, and she would
leave him, just as he had left his father, yet he had
believed—wrongly, it turned out—that he still had a few years left
with her.

Zolan climbed the final rungs of the ladder
and poked his head into the lateral hallway. He aimed the beam of
his flashlight at the chalky ground and spotted wet footprints
disappearing into the dark.

Alighting from the ladder, Zolan grimaced in
pain. He figured Danièle might have broken one or two of his ribs
with that desk stunt of hers. But it didn’t matter. He could still
move. And he had business to conclude.

He stared into the blackness in the
direction Will had gone. His panic and urgency had subsided; there
was no longer any need for haste. Although this section of tunnels
spread for several kilometers, they were linear and led nowhere. If
Will continued straight ahead, he would come to an impassable
jumble of rocks five hundred meters onward. Likewise, if he turned
right at the first and only branching passageway he would
eventually come to another jumble of rocks. Both routes had once
connected to the catacombs at large, but his father had sealed off
each, to secure the perimeter of his domain against potential
backdoor intruders.

Now only three entrances/exits existed that
Zolan knew of, and they were all nearly impossible to uncover. In
fact, since his arrival, he could count on one hand the number of
intrusions there had been. The first was in 2004 when a lone
cataphile stumbled straight into the Great Hall. Zolan was woken by
the ensuing commotion, and by the time he arrived on scene the
cataphile lay on the floor, motionless, one of the silver
candleabras on the ground next to him in a spreading pool of blood.
Hanns had been dancing and hollering like a lunatic under a full
moon. However, the cataphile—a young Frenchman named Michel,
according to his driver’s license—wasn’t dead, so Zolan chained him
up in the Dungeon until he decided what to do with him. It was a
pointless measure, as Michel didn’t regain consciousness. Unwilling
to nurse a vegetable, Zolan slit his throat and he and Hanns
disposed of the remains in a distant chamber.

The second intrusion came a year later.
Hanns and Jörg discovered two Frenchmen sleeping in the statue room
above one of the many mass graves that littered this section of the
catacombs. It wasn’t a coincidence. Hanns and Jörg and sometimes
Karl had taken to patrolling the deep tunnels and galleries,
searching for interlopers. On this occasion it was the three of
them, and they overpowered the two men (who had put up a fair
fight, breaking one of Hanns’ arms). They brought them back to the
Dungeon, the way a cat sometimes brings the prey it catches to its
master as an offering. Zolan would have preferred not to kill the
men; they had professed to be husbands and fathers. But what else
was he to do? He couldn’t let them go. So he and Hanns dispatched
of them as they had Michel.

The third breach in the security, if that
was what these intrusions could be called, had been in 2008. Hanns
and Karl crossed paths with an attractive couple, killed the female
by accident, and brought the male to the Dungeon. Zolan was on the
surface in one of the red light districts, and in his absence Hanns
organized his first blood match. He won handily, and little
remained of the cataphile when Zolan returned. Katja had been seven
then, old enough to wonder about who the visitor was, and Zolan
ordered her never to talk to any such people if they showed up in
the future, because they were dangerous and would try to fill her
head with lies.

Then there was the Australian woman named
Tami from Perth. Hanns claimed he didn’t touch her. She simply
dropped dead when he cornered her. There had been no marks on her
corpse, and Zolan supposed she’d suffered a massive heart
attack.

Zolan hadn’t known about any damn video
camera then. If I had, he would have retrieved it—and he likely
wouldn’t have been in the mess he was in now.

Jörg emerged from the shaft, stormy-eyed and
excited. With Hanns dead it seemed he had usurped the position of
alpha male. Karl came next, then Lorenz, Erich, Leo, Franz, and
finally Odo, the slowest and stupidest of the bunch, but as
resilient as a pit fighter.

They milled about, shoving each other,
making the noises they made, brimming with manic energy.

Pointing first to the wet footprints, then
down the tunnel, Zolan shouted, “
Geh! Geh! Geh!
”

They took off like a pack of wild dogs on
the hunt.

They were dead. All of
them. Pascal, Rob, and now Danièle—dead.

I tried not to think about
this as I fled down the crumbling and rock-strewn hallway. I kept
the torch ahead of me and above my head so the smoke didn’t waft
back into my face. The flames bounced shadows off the stone walls
and filled the air with a sickening tar-like stench. The only sound
was my labored breathing and my feet splashing through the puddles
that dotted the chalky gray ground.

A passageway opened to my
left, a gaping mouth leading away into blackness. I veered into it,
hoping to zigzag ever farther through the underground labyrinth,
praying it didn’t lead to a dead end. If it did, I would be
trapped. My pursuers would catch me. Smash my skull into bits like
they did to Pascal. Set me on fire like they did to Rob. I couldn’t
fathom what they did to Danièle, but judging by her screams, I
suspect she got it the worse.

I wanted desperately to
believe that this wasn’t the case, that Danièle wasn’t dead, and
for a moment I allowed my imagination to run wild with fanciful
speculation, because I hadn’t actually seen her die…

No—I
heard
her. She
was gone, she had to be, and I was next, as doomed as the rest of
them.

Still, I kept running, I
kept putting one foot in front of the other. I was too afraid to
accept the inevitable and give up and die, too hardwired to
survive, even though there was nothing left to live for.

I opened my mouth and
yelled. I hated the sound of it. It was shrill and broken and full
of pain, what might come from a mongrel dog beaten to within inches
of its life. My disgust with myself lasted only a moment, however,
because seconds after the wretched moan tapered off, a riot of
savage cries erupted from behind me.

So goddamn
close!

The cries rose in a
crescendo of frenzied bloodlust. Terror blasted through me, but I
couldn’t make my legs move any faster. They were cement blocks. I
felt as if I were running in the opposite direction on a moving
walkway.

Suddenly the ceiling and
walls disappeared and a vast darkness opened around me. While
looking up to gauge the size of this new chamber, I stumbled over
unreliable ground, lost my footing, and fell upon a mound of
rubble. The torch flew from my grip and landed a few feet ahead of
me. I stared at the polished rocks illuminated in the smoking flame
until I realized they were not rocks but bones. Human bones. Skulls
and femurs and tibias and others. I grabbed the torch by the handle
and thrust it into the air.

Bones and bones and more
bones, for as far as I could see.

I shoved myself to my
feet, took several lurching steps, as if wading through molasses,
then sagged to my knees. A centuries-old femur splintered beneath
my weight with a snap like deadwood.

The sounds of my pursuers
grew louder. I refused to look back over my shoulder. Instead I
clutched at the bones before me, my fingers curling around their
brittle lengths, pulling myself forward, my legs no longer
responding at all.

Finally, beyond
exhaustion, I flopped onto my chest and lay panting among the
thousands of skeletonized remains as a sleepy darkness rose inside
me.

They don’t smell, I
thought, bones don’t smell, funny, always imagined they
would.

And then, absently, in a
back-of-the-mind way:
I don’t want to
die like this, not here, not like this, not in a mass grave, I
don’t want to be just another pile of nameless bones, forgotten by
the world.

That video
camera.

That fucking video
camera.

Jörg and Karl and the others were waiting
impatiently for Zolan at the entrance to the mass grave. Will had
dried sufficiently and no longer left any footprints for them to
follow, especially not over the pell-mell bone repository. They
didn’t know there was only one direction in which to proceed,
because he had never allowed them to venture to this side of the
pool before.

Zolan passed through their ranks and entered
the vast chamber first, sweeping the flashlight from wall to
wall.