The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (8 page)

So, yes, the dangers were real down here,
she thought. But if you were smart, if you had a guide as
experienced as herself, or Pascal, chances were you would be
fine.

For the next fifteen or twenty minutes I
forgot about the graffiti and returned my attention to the ground,
watching for the apparently bottomless crevices and wells Danièle
had spoken of. I didn’t see any, but I did spot discarded water
bottles, candy wrappers, and other sundry items. At some point the
monotonous crunching of our footsteps was joined by the dripping of
water.

Pascal kept up his fast pace, and the rest
of us followed close as he turned one corner after another, passing
numerous branching hallways, each surely leading to others, and
those to others still, hinting at the enormity of this underground
realm. Danièle had not been exaggerating when she called it a
labyrinth. It was a chaotic maze of more than—what had I read—two
or three hundred miles in aggregate? If you stitched the tunnels
together into one long Frankenstein worm, they would surpass the
width of the state of New York. This got me wondering about their
construction. Who were the men who had dug them, likely with
nothing more than pickaxes and shovels and wheelbarrows? Convicts
who couldn’t get employed elsewhere? Destitute farmers looking for
regular work that didn’t rely on the seasons or the climate?
Whoever they were, they likely would have toiled away underground
in the dust, humidity, and sometimes pitch dark for their entire
lives—if they weren’t first crushed to death, buried alive, or
knocked off by infections and disease.

From ahead Pascal hollered “
Ciel!
”
While I was trying to figure out what that meant—
wham
. I
came to a standstill, dizzy, my ears ringing.

“You okay, boss?” Rob said. He’d turned back
to look at me, his headlamp shining in my eyes.

I took off the helmet and touched a fiery
spot high on my forehead. No blood, not yet. A tender bump
throbbed.

“Will, what happened?” Danièle asked,
slipping past Rob and stopping before me.

“I hit my head.”

She parted my hair. “There is no cut.”

“I’m okay.”

“I told you to watch out. Remember, I said
the ceiling height—”

“I didn’t see Rob duck, so I didn’t
either.”

“Yes, but he is much shorter than you.”

“I realize that now, Danièle, thanks.”

“I am sorry. I should have explained.
Ciel
means ‘sky’. We call it out when the ceiling juts
down.”

“Got it,” I said.

After once more reassuring her that I was
fine, that I didn’t need to rest, we continued on. When the tunnel
widened enough to walk two abreast, I moved up beside Rob. He
glanced sidelong at me and said, “You know what this place reminds
me of?”

“What?”

“Vaginas.”

I smiled, sort of. What had I expected him
to reference? Tom Sawyer’s spirit of adventure? Verne’s
Journey
to the Center of the Earth
? Jonah and the Whale?

“I’m serious,” he added. “Everywhere I look
I see one. This is vag land, nature porn. Tell me you don’t see
it.”

“You have a point,” I said as I thought
about all the metaphorical psychobabble regarding caves and wombs
and Mama Nature and fertility. Also, I had to admit it wasn’t a
stretch to imagine, if you were so inclined, the entrance to the
catacombs that we’d passed through as vulvaesque, Pascal’s rest
room as a uterus, and these tunnels as fallopian tubes
.

Rob said, “Now I understand why Rascal
spends all his time down here. What a perv.”

Ahead Pascal reached into a little gully in
the wall, felt around, then kept going.

“What’s he looking for?” I asked.

“Dunno.” Rob called out in French. Pascal
answered back. Rob laughed. “He said someone once had a stag party
down here. They left a calling card in the wall with the date and
directions. You find it, you’re invited. He wanted to see if there
was anything new.”

“A stag party?” I said.

“Apparently all sorts of crazy stuff goes on
down here. Cops found a movie theater once. Yeah, I shit you
not—lights, sound system, projector, fully stocked bar. It was
right under the
Trocadéro
, a stone’s throw
from the Eiffel Tower, one of the most famous fucking landmarks in
the world. There was a whole security setup too that included a
motion detector that set off a recording of barking dogs to scare
people away.”

I wasn’t sure if Rob was having me on or
not, but I asked, “How was all this stuff powered? With
batteries?”

“Electricity, boss. They siphoned it from
underground power lines. And get this. A few days after the police
discovered the place they came back with guys from Électricité de
France, to shut it down. But they were too late. Someone had
already unwired everything. Disappeared with all the electronics
and booze. What used to be a cinema was a plain old rock chamber.
The only thing left behind was a note that said, ‘
Ne cherchez
pas
.’ Don’t search.”

“Don’t search for who? Cataphiles?”

“That’s what I figured. That’s what most
people in the media figured. It was big news for a while. But
Rascal says cataphiles don’t do stuff like that. They’re misfits
mostly. They just go underground to hang out, party, explore.”

“So who made the cinema?”

He shrugged. “Nobody knows. Rascal talks
about this big group with a hundred members or so, supposedly
organized and wealthy, sort of like an old boys’ club. They use the
catacombs, but only to get around Paris undetected. They have keys
to everywhere in the city. They’ll hold poetry readings in the
basement of the Paris Opera, or booze it up on the roof of the
Parthenon, or whatever.”

I didn’t reply as I contemplated this. It
sounded neat. It also sounded completely farfetched.

“You mentioned Danièle’s your in-law?” I
said. “What, sister-in-law?”

“Yup. Dev and Danny Laurent. The Double
Ds.”

“Why don’t you guys get along?”

“Me and Danny? You mean ’cause of the French
jabs?” He shrugged. “It began with me and the wife. Dev makes fun
of me all the time because I’m French Canadian. Calls me Queeb,
Beaver Beater, Poutine. She’s actually the one who started the
whole frog thing, calling me Frozen Frog. I call her shit back.
That’s just us, our relationship. I found it funny how insulted
Danny always got when she was around, so I started calling her
Frenchy shit too. I don’t think she cares as much as she lets on.
What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You and Danny. What’s your deal?”

I glanced ahead at Danièle. She was speaking
with Pascal, her voice flat and muted. Sound didn’t carry well down
here. The soft silence was like being in an old library or root
cellar or attic.

“We’re just friends,” I said.

“Come on, bro. She invited you to the catas.
It’s always just her and Rascal. She even put up a stink about
me
coming tonight, and I’m fucking family. So what’s the
word? You shagging her?”

The question caught me off guard, and
invoked memories of Saturday morning. Waking in Danièle’s
poverty-posh bedroom to the half-light creeping beneath the fuchsia
blinds, the smell of the Kashmir Rose incense she’d burned the
night before, the sensuous curve of her spine, from the nape of her
neck to where her tailbone disappeared beneath the sheets…

Rob, I realized, was watching me
closely.

He snorted. “Just friends, my ass.”

So they really were fucking, Rob thought.
Couldn’t say he was surprised. Like he’d told Will, Danny didn’t
invite just anyone to the catas. Not only that, Danny’s been all
over him since he arrived at the pub.

Once again Rob felt bad for Pascal. He could
tell her flirting was eating the sad fuck up inside. At the same
time, however, he was happy for Danny. After that prick Marcel, she
deserved to be happy again.

Marcel.

His name alone pissed the fuck out of Rob.
It wasn’t just his cheating. That was almost the norm over here.
Men cheated. Women cheated. A coworker of Rob’s thought her
long-term boyfriend was cheating on her, or at least thinking about
doing it, so she cheated first, to beat him to the punch. And look
at the guy running the country. He began an affair with a woman
twenty years his junior during the presidential race. A few weeks
after the story broke, he divorced his wife, the First Lady, and
carried on with the sex kitten. You ask the average Parisian what
they thought about it, you’ll probably get a shrug and a “
C’est
la vie
.”

So it wasn’t the cheating. It was the way
Marcel had treated Danny, bossing her around, keeping tabs on
everything she did. Often when she went out he’d call her every ten
minutes demanding to know what she was doing. But when he went out,
he’d be off the radar until he returned at two or three in the
morning. Danny would call Dev on these nights, balling her eyes
out. Rob would usually be nearby with the girls, listening to Dev’s
end of the conversation. He couldn’t get his head around why Danny
stuck with the fucker. She was usually so strong, so independent.
It was like she became a different person when she was around him.
Yet no matter what Dev told Danny, she wouldn’t ditch him.

Then, a few months ago, Dev ran into Danny
at Les Quatre Temps, a shopping mall at La Defense metro station.
Danny had a dark bruise along the left side of her face. The makeup
job would have fooled a stranger, but not Dev, and Dev got the
entire lowdown from her.

Marcel did it. They got in a fight while she
was cooking dinner the evening before. She didn’t want him to go
out. He punched her and went anyway. And this wasn’t the first time
this had happened. Once Danny got talking, she spilled the beans.
He’d been beating her for almost as long as he’d known her. He
usually hit her on the body, so she could cover up the evidence,
and when he struck her face, he did it in such a way he rarely left
a mark. Danny tried to tell Dev that Marcel only hit her when he
was drinking. Her denial was mind-numbing. The guy smacked her up
on a regular basis, and she was trying to protect him?

Rob got home from work late that day. The
girls were sleeping in their bunk bed, and Danny was sleeping in
the guest bedroom, surrounded by all her stuff she and Dev had
collected from Marcel’s flat, where Danny had been living for the
last year. Dev told him what happened and wanted to call the cops.
That probably would have been the best thing to do, but in the
moment he was seeing red and wouldn’t listen to reason.

Rob drove to Marcel’s apartment building in
the 12
^th
arrondissement and waited across the street in
his car for two hours until the fucker returned sometime past
midnight. Then he pushed his way into the lobby behind Marcel
before the door locked and beat the Frenchman with a steel pipe to
a whimpering, bloody pulp. He wasn’t proud of this, but he didn’t
regret it either.

Danny stayed at the flat for a month until
she found the studio she was in now. To Rob’s knowledge, she hadn’t
seen anyone else since Marcel. Will was the first. And,
fortunately, Will was proving to be an all right sort. Rob just
hoped he treated Danny well.

For her sake.

And his own.

While Rob and I had been talking, clear,
still puddles had begun to appear on the ground here and there.
Pascal, Danièle, and Rob stomped through any in their way, while I
sidestepped or hopped over them the best I could. Gradually, after
numerous twists and turns, the entire passageway became a mushy
gray paste that sucked at the soles of my shoes.

Pascal and Danièle stopped again. I came to
halt behind them and peered over their shoulders. The tunnel was
flooded with glassy smooth water that stretched away far beyond the
reach of our probing lights.

Pascal said something and shrugged. Danièle
translated for me: “He says sometimes the water is here and
sometimes it is not. It depends on the weather conditions
aboveground. He thought it would be dry today. He is sorry.”

I looked at him. He didn’t appear sorry at
all. He appeared indifferent and smug.

“When was the last time you were here?” I
asked him.

He barely looked at me. “Last week.”

“And it was dry then?”

“No, it was like it is now.”

“And you thought it would be dry today?”

He shrugged. “It is difficult to know for
certain.”

“We will backtrack,” Danièle stated. “There
are many ways to go—”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s just water.”
I dropped to my butt and took off my shoes, one after the other,
then my socks.

Danièle frowned. “That is not a good idea,
Will. What if there is glass in there? We do not know.”

“We’re not backtracking.”

I stuffed my shoes and socks into my
backpack, rolled the cuffs of my pants up as far as they would go,
Huck Finn style, and stood.

Pascal smirked at my bare legs and feet.
Then he and Rob strolled breezily into the water, splashing and
chatting. Danièle and I went next.

The water was ankle-deep and not as cold as
I would have thought, maybe fifty degrees. This surprised me. I
thought it would be colder, given it had never been touched by
sunlight. Unlike the puddles we had passed earlier, it was an
opaque gray. I couldn’t see the bottom.

At first I felt tentatively with my lead
foot before exerting my full weight. But after a number of steps
and no encounters with razor-sharp glass or daggered rocks, I
gained confidence and proceeded more naturally.

“It is okay?” Danièle asked.

“No problem.”

“Make sure you do not trip.”

“I won’t.”