The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (40 page)

Although I had killed Hanns and two of the
women I had attacked, and Danièle had killed Zolan, French
authorities never charged us with any crimes. We cooperated with
them fully, and they concluded the killings were justifiable
homicides. We were released from custody after the statutory limit
of seventy-two hours. I returned to my flat, but when the media
began camping out front of it, I packed up most of my stuff,
slipped out the back, and checked into a low-key motel, where I
remained largely under the radar.

Rob and Pascal’s funerals were held within
two days of one another. Both were closed casket services for
obvious reasons. I exchanged a few words with Danièle at the chapel
where Rob’s memorial was held, but that was all, as she spent the
rest of her time with her sister, Dev, and Rob’s brother and
parents, who had flown to Paris from Quebec City. His two girls
were gorgeous, both with blonde hair and blue eyes and dressed in
frilly black dresses. They didn’t leave their mother’s side the
entire time.

At Pascal’s memorial, his brother broke down
during his eulogy, and his sister and mother were a total mess,
especially during the burial as the casket, covered in a spray of
flowers, was lowered into the ground. I felt like an imposter being
there to witness these intimate emotions, given that Pascal had
never liked me, but Danièle had asked me to go with her, and so I
went.

The city cremated Katja. I didn’t want her
remains to end up in storage somewhere, or a potter’s field, so I
purchased them from the coroner’s office, and Danièle and I
scattered her ashes in
Pere Lachaise’s Garden of
Remembrance
.

I returned to the United States the
following week. It was hard to say goodbye to Danièle, but I
couldn’t remain in France any longer; I needed to get home. Danièle
and I promised we would see each other again, but I don’t think
either of us really believed that. I flew to Seattle and stayed
with my parents. I was immediately bombarded with media requests.
Every national news network and major book publisher wanted the
exclusive rights to my story. I don’t know how people who’ve been
involved in sensational murder sagas give tell-all interviews or
write tell-all books. How could you cheapen what you had been
through like that? How could you allow it to be turned into
entertainment? Rob was dead. Pascal was dead. Katja was dead. I
would never exploit their deaths for profit, not now, and not ten
years from now.

Bridgette emailed me a number of times. I
think she was worried about me, my mental health, though she didn’t
come out and say this. I always replied, though briefly. She wanted
my phone number, wanted to talk. I told her I didn’t have a US
number yet, which was true. I was in no rush to get one either.

Danièle emailed too, almost every day at
first, then a few times a week, then, over the last two months,
hardly at all. I missed speaking with her, but I also believed it
was for the best. She was an ocean away. We both had to move
on.

One person I had been happy to hear from was
my old boss. He emailed me one day to inquire when I would be
returning to work. I thought he was kidding. I had assumed the
travel guide company would have wanted to distance itself from
someone who’d made the type of headlines I’d made. But my boss was
serious. He said I could return whenever I felt up to it. I guess I
shouldn’t have been as surprised as I had been; he’d always been a
friend as much as a boss. Moreover, since I’ve been back at the New
York office, I’ve gotten the feeling he held himself partly
responsible for what happened in Paris, given it was his idea to
send me to France in the first place. That was nonsense, of course,
but that was the type of guy he was.

I finished my coffee, dumped the paper cup
and my half-eaten fries in a bin, and left the restaurant. It was
late November and freezing cold outside. Snow fell in a
kaleidoscope of flakes, leaving a white and bright layer over
everything except for slushy brown tracks on the streets and
sidewalks. Everybody had their heads down, their hoods up, against
the chill. Several people carried umbrellas.

Manhattan’s Chinatown was great for being
anonymous. I was a six-foot-four Caucasian, but none of the Asians
here recognized me, or if they did, they didn’t say anything. This
was not the case in other parts of the city, where I got “Hey,
Moleman!” and “Yo, Walking Dead!” and other stuff of a similar
nature on a regular basis.

I made my way to my apartment building. It
was on a warehouse street that even in the pit of winter smelled of
dead fish. I greeted Jimmy, who acted as both doorman and
concierge, then took the stairs to the fifth floor of the walkup. I
stopped as soon as I entered the hallway. Someone was sitting with
their back against my door, their knees pulled to their chest.

Another “fan?” Aside from the idiots who
called me Moleman, there were others, both men and women, who would
come up to me and start a conversation. It didn’t matter where I
was—a park, a bar, a restaurant—they simply strolled over and
started yacking it up. Most of them, I suspect, thought it was neat
to be talking to someone of infamy. A few, however, were urban
explorers who invited me to join them in the abandoned subway
tunnels beneath New York City. I was blunt with the lot, telling
them I wanted to be left alone. Their responses varied from polite
and apologetic to indignant and offended, as if I was the one being
rude for wanting to mind my own business. Nevertheless, they all
eventually let me be—and no one had yet shown up on my
doorstep.

I considered turning around, coming back
later, but that was stupid. This was my apartment. I wasn’t getting
run away from my own home.

I walked down the hallway. The person
stirred in response to my footsteps and lifted their face in my
direction. It was a woman. For a moment—not longer than a
heartbeat—I didn’t recognize her. Then I said, “Danièle?”

She shot to her feet. “Will!”

We embraced, and I breathed in an unfamiliar
jasmine-scented perfume. I stepped apart and grinned and said,
“Wow.”

She grinned back. Her hair was longer, but
other than that she looked just as good as I remembered. “Are you
surprised to see me?”

“Obviously. What are you doing here?”

“I was in New York…and I decided to drop
by.”

“You were in New York?” I said
skeptically.

“Do not worry, Will, I did not come all the
way from Paris just to see you. I am not a psycho stalker. I am
here for other reasons that I will tell you about if you decide to
invite me inside.”

“Yeah, sure, right.” I unlocked and opened
the door.

She stepped inside, and I followed behind
her. The unit had high ceilings, an exposed brick wall, a renovated
kitchen, and newly refinished cherry wood floors. The rent was a
bit more than I wanted to pay, but it was a block from the F train,
which was what I took to work, and it had large corner windows that
let in a lot of sunlight, which sealed the deal.

“I like it,” Danièle said, moving to the
brick wall, on which hung several oil-on-canvas paintings. “Hey!”
she exclaimed. “That is my bicycle!”

I went to stand beside her. The painting
depicted a woman riding a pink bicycle with white fenders and a
wicker basket along a cobbled street. “Looks like it, doesn’t
it?”

“Yes, and even
she
looks like
me.”

The woman’s face was turned away from the
viewer, but she was thin and had short-cropped black hair.

“Where did you get this—?” She glanced at
me, her eyes widening in understanding. “You painted it?”

I nodded.

“I did not know you painted.”

“I took it up.”

Danièle walked down the wall, studying the
other paintings: a section of the Jardin des Plants I had
particularly enjoyed, the tire swing hanging from the old maple at
my parents’ house, the view of neon and slummy anarchy outside my
window.

“They are very good,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“And you painted me.” She smiled. “That
means you missed me.”

“A little bit.”

“Good. Because I do not know about you,
Will. You stopped emailing…”

“You stopped.”

“Because I always wrote first. You simply
replied. So I stopped to see if you would write first. You never
did.”

“I’m sure I did.”

“I am sure you did not.”

“You were so far away…”

“Yes, I know, I know. You do not need to
tell me one of your famous excuses.” She looked around the flat.
“Do you have any other paintings?”

“A few.”

I led her to my bedroom and pointed to
several canvases stacked against each other in the corner.

She flicked through them. “Oh, I like these
too…” She studied one for longer than the others. “Is that…? It
is.”

She pulled it out and showed it to me,
though of course I knew which one she was referring to. Katja’s
portrait stared back at me. Initially I had planned to paint only
her eyes. I had wanted to capture them, their intensity and
innocence, so I would never forget them. But then I found myself
unable to stop there. I wanted to know what she might have looked
like had she not been disfigured, and I ended up painting her
entire face, unblemished, perfect.

I said, “I was thinking about her one
day…”

“She is beautiful.”

I nodded, but I didn’t want to talk about
Katja. “So where about are you staying?” I asked.

Danièle set the canvas back on the floor,
stared at it for another couple seconds, then turned to me. “The
Belvedere.”

“In Hell’s Kitchen.”

“What a stupid name for a neighborhood, yes?
Why would tourists ever stay in a neighborhood called that?”

“You did.”

“Because it reminded me of you.”

“Me?”

“Remember in the catacombs, when I showed
you that inscription of the street name in the wall, and explained
how an entire neighborhood had collapsed into a tunnel…?”

“Hell Street,” I said.

“Yes. So when I saw a hotel located in
Hell’s Kitchen, I thought of you, and I decided it would be a good
story to tell you when I arrived here.”

I nodded. It made sense in a wacky
Danièle-logic sort of way. “So what are you doing here?” I asked
her.

“I am studying.”

“Studying?”

“I was accepted to MIT’s School of
Engineering.”

“Shit! Congratulations, Danièle!”

She beamed. “I told you I was not going to
be a florist forever.”

I shook my head. “So you’re living, where,
in Cambridge?”

“Yes, I have been there for about a month
now. I wanted to come sooner to New York to visit you, but there
was so much I had to do.”

“Yeah, no problem, whatever, I—I just can’t
believe you’re so close now. It’s like, what, a three-hour
drive?”

“The bus took me four hours.”

“How did you know where I lived?”

“I called your work. Someone named Scott
Swiercz-something gave me your address.”

“He’s my boss. Bastard never told me
anything.”

“I told him not to. I told him it was a
surprise.”

“Well…fuck, Danièle! I’m blown away. Do you
want a drink? We should celebrate.”

“How about dinner? I worked up an appetite
sitting outside your door.”

“Did Jimmy just let you up?”

“The doorman? Yes—I told him not to say
anything either.”

“Great security, huh? Let me get my jacket.
There’s a good—”

“I thought we could eat in,” she said. “You
promised to make me a French dinner. Remember—you, me, and your hot
twenty-year-old neighbor.”

“Madame Gabin, right.” I shrugged. “Okay,
French home cooking it is. Um—do you know any recipes?”

We inventoried my refrigerator and
cupboards, Danièle decided I had the ingredients to attempt a beef
bourguignon, and we spent the next two hours preparing and cooking
it, polishing off two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon in the
process.

I didn’t have a dining table—I usually ate
at my computer—so we spread out a picnic on the thick-pile rug in
the middle of the living room. It was the most fun I’d had
since…since I could remember.

At some point we ended up leaning against
the sofa, folk music playing from the stereo system, Danièle’s head
resting on my shoulder. Outside the windows dusk turned to night,
and the room filled with shadows. When those shadows threatened to
blend into a unified blackness, the nightlights switched themselves
on.

“You have nightlights?” Danièle said, her
voice startling me. I had been half asleep and had thought she’d
been too.

“Yeah…a few…” I said.

“Me too.”

“Really?”

“I’m afraid of the dark.”

“Get a place with big windows.”

A chuckle. “Will?”

“Yeah?”

“I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

“Did you really?”

“Yeah.”

“You do not have to fake it—”

“I’m not faking anything.”

“Will you visit me in Cambridge?”

“Of course.”

“Good…” She snuggled closer.

Just as I was drifting off once more, she
said, “Will?”

“Yeah?”

“Hold me.”

I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and
held her.

Jeremy Bates is the author of the number #1
Amazon bestseller
White Lies
, which was shortlisted for the
2012 Foreword Book of the Year Award. He is a graduate of the
University of Western Ontario with a degree in English literature
and philosophy.