The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (9 page)

“Motherfucker!” Rob shouted from ahead.
“Deep here. Over my boots.”

He was right. Soon the water was shin-high,
then knee-high, wetting the tapered folds of my pants. It swirled
around my legs like miso soup.

“How much farther?” Danièle called.

“Almost there,” Rob shouted back. Then:
“Holy shit!”

The panic in his voice made me freeze
mid-step.

“What is it?” I said.

“Something just brushed my leg!”

“Fuck off.”

“Swear to God! It was long and slimy.”

A chill shot down my spine as I thought of
fanged eel-like creatures and poisonous snakes.

Rob was maybe thirty feet in front of us,
little more than a silhouette. I couldn’t see Pascal.

“Arg!” Rob cried. “It touched me again!”

He began running, splashing madly.

“Go!” Danièle said, pushing me forward.

I took her hand and ran, or at least I tried
to; it was more of a pigs-on-ice madcap dash. The water dragged at
my legs, my helmet chafed the ceiling, the knuckles of my free hand
skinned the wall. I kept waiting for a prehistoric monstrosity to
latch onto my calf or snip off a toe.

Then the water was back to shin-level. Rob
and Pascal were shouting, urging us on. My eyes darted between the
frothing water and Danièle, my headlamp jerking every which way,
until we stumbled onto the mushy ground. I keeled over, as if I’d
been poleaxed in the gut. Danièle fell to her knees, a light patina
of sweat on her forehead.

Rob and Pascal tittered like loons.

It clicked for me, then Danièle as well. Her
eyes flared. “
Ta Gueule!
” she shouted, scrambling to her
feet. She smashed into Rob, pounding him on the head with her fist.
Pascal attempted to pull her away unsuccessfully.

I might have laughed at this absurd theater,
but my feet were in too much pain. I’d stubbed my left big toe on a
rock, and it was already swelling and bruising. I’d broken the same
one a few years back in New York, catching it on a door frame,
making me wonder if I’d re-broken it. I’d also sliced the pad of my
right heel. I couldn’t tell how deep the cut was, but it was
bleeding freely and stung like a son of a bitch.

Nevertheless, I hadn’t brought a first-aid
kit, and I didn’t want to ask the others if they had one, so I
pulled on my socks and shoes, then stood, wincing. Danièle had
stopped her assault and was now chewing Rob and Pascal out.

“Loosen up, Danny,” Rob told her. He’d moved
a safe distance away and was dumping water from his boots. “Can’t
you take a joke?”

“You do not think! What if we fell and
cracked our heads open?”

“Gimme a break.”

“It could happen!”

“And so could getting locked in a sauna and
getting lobstered alive. Or rolling your ride-on mower and getting
chewed like summer turf. Or walking past a construction site
and—”

“Oh, shut up!”

“If you think like that—”

“Really, Rosbif. Shut your mouth. I do not
want to hear your talk.”

“My talk?”

She was turning red.

“
Allons-y
,” Pascal said quietly,
putting his arm around Rob’s waist and leading him down the
passageway.

“I will kill him,” Danièle stated when they
were gone.

“He’s not that bad,” I said.

“He is such a loser.”

“He’s sort of funny.”

She glared at me.

I held up my hands. “I said ‘sort of.’”

“Because you only have to see him for a few
hours. You know, he is married to my sister? I have to know him my
entire life.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“He told you?”

“In passing.”

“I will kill him,” she repeated, shaking her
head. She picked up her backpack and shrugged it on. “We should go.
We are almost there.”

I frowned. “Almost where?” We had been in
the catacombs less than an hour. Based on what I’d been told, there
was no way we could be anywhere near the video camera with the
mysterious footage.

Before I could ask for clarification,
however, Danièle started away, leaving me to bring up the rear.

Our destination, it turned out, was called La
Plage—the Beach—a vast series of connecting galleries and caverns
with sand-packed floors, from which I gathered the area had gotten
its name. Almost every inch of available wall space was covered
with the omnipresent graffiti, but also impressive murals. They
depicted everything from Egyptian gods to magic mushrooms to
surrealist Max Ernst-like portraits. One large rectangular support
pillar had been transformed into SpongeBob SquarePants. Some of the
paint smelled fresh.

We wandered from room to room, no one saying
much, our headlamps sweeping the way before us. In the ghostly
silence I saw countless cigarette butts, makeshift chandeliers
sitting on rock-cum-tables, crushed beer cans, and strange metal
rods and hooks protruding from the ceiling. These, I imagined, had
at one time accommodated power cables.

My eyes kept returning to the murals. They
were multigenerational, built up over decades, the new painted over
the old in an ongoing cycle. The sheer amount, the variety, was
incredible.

I stopped in front of an especially striking
painting of a six-foot-tall naked woman that reminded me of the
Statue of Liberty. It was clearly old, one of the few works of art
that had stood the test of time without being vandalized or
replaced.

Rob appeared next to me. “Nice tits,” he
said approvingly.

Danièle joined us and said, “She is famous
for cataphiles because—how should I say this? She represents all of
us. Can you understand, Will?”

“Not really.”

“It is like what I told you before. In the
catacombs, the above world no longer matters. I do not care if you
are a janitor or a company president. Here, there are no bosses, no
masters. We are all free. We are all naked.”

“And cataphiles just like to get naked,” Rob
told me with a nudge and wink. “You should hear about some of the
mad orgies they have. Sick fucks, they are.”

“We are not sick,” Danièle said. “You are
sick.”

“You know, Danny,” Rob said, “I don’t know
if it’s a language thing, but I’ve heard better comebacks from
preschoolers.”

Danièle brushed past him and went to the
next room.

“Seriously,” Rob said to Pascal and me. “You
guys don’t agree? I keep waiting for her to bust out, ‘I don’t shut
up I grow up and when I look at you I throw up!’”

“And your mother, she lick it up,” Pascal
said.

Rob grinned. “Right on, bro! But it sounds
sort of gay with your accent.”

Pascal shoved him. “
Ta mere suce des
queues devant le prisu
.”

“And yours sucks bears in the forest.”

Leaving them to swap mother barbs, I went
looking for Danièle. At first I had no idea which way she went,
then I spotted the afterglow of her light around a corner.

I joined her in the largest room yet—and
came to an abrupt halt. Three of the four walls were covered by a
massive, continuous mural, a reproduction of
The Great Wave
,
one of the most famous works of Japanese art in the world. It
depicted an enormous white-capped wave roaring against a pink sky,
seemingly about to swallow Mt. Fuji whole.

Bridgette and I used to have a print of it.
She had picked it up at a garage sale, along with a number of old
black-and-white Hawaii photos: a surfer standing next to a redwood
board in the 1890s, the luxury ocean liner
Mariposa
at
Honolulu Harbor, six-year-old Shirley Temple singing “The Good Ship
Lollipop” on Waikiki Beach, the
China Clipper
landing at
Pearl Harbor. We had framed all of these and hung them in a
horizontal line above the sofa in the living room.

Danièle interpreted my stunned reaction as
awe and said, “It is amazing, right?”

I nodded, but I wasn’t really listening.
Bridgette was inside my head, and I couldn’t get her out. She’d
been wearing a yellow cotton dress with a fat black belt that day
of the garage sale. I remember because I’d teased her by calling
her “Bumblebee.” Along with the print and the photos, she had two
bags of groceries from the Asian supermarket down the street, and
we ended up making a green Thai curry for dinner, which we ate with
a bottle of relatively expensive wine. I’d just gotten the job with
the travel book company a few days earlier, and we had been
celebrating all week.

After dinner we’d been goofing around on the
bed and she had said to me, “Should I go off the pill?”

“The pill?”

“Do we want a baby, Will?”

I was thrilled. “Really?”

“We’re getting married in three weeks. If we
start trying now…”

“We’ll have been married for about a year by
the time he’s born.”

“He?”

“He, she, whatever.”

She beamed. “So?”

“Yeah, I want to… I mean, if you want
to.”

“Of course I want to!”

And we had rolled around and play wrestled,
our clothes coming off piece by piece…

Pascal and Rob had entered the room behind
me, causing me to start. Pascal started chatting with Danièle,
while Rob slumped onto the chiseled limestone bench that lined the
walls. He dug through his backpack, produced a couple beers, and
asked me if I wanted one.

I turned my back to the mural, and the
past.

“Sure,” I said.

Danièle and Pascal produced some tealights
from their backpacks and placed the small candles around the
cavern. Then they took off their helmets and turned off the
headlamps, presumably to save batteries. They instructed Rob and me
to do the same.

When everyone was settled on the limestone
bench, I studied the can of beer Rob had given me suspiciously. The
label read: “
Bière du Démon
.”

“Strongest blonde beer in the world, boss,”
he told me.

I didn’t doubt him; it boasted a
twelve-percent alcohol content.

“You drink this often?” I asked.

“Never tried it. But thought it would be
appropriate for tonight. And they were only a buck a can at the
Super U near my place.”

I popped the tab, brushed the froth off the
top, and sniffed. It smelled of fusel alcohols and bitter yeast.
The taste, a skunky sweetness, wasn’t much better—and then the
burning of cheap vodka kicked in.

Rob made a disgusted face—I imagine I was
making a similar one—but said, “It’s not that bad.” To prove he
meant this, he took another sip.

I smacked my lips. The aftertaste was an
unwanted gift that kept on giving. I thought I could detect a
hollow fishiness, and not in the delicate sashimi type of way.

Nevertheless, the demon grog was drinkable,
and drink it I would. I wanted to forget that damn mural and forget
Bridgette—Bridgette who was now married and pregnant.

I took another, longer sip.

“You like it?” Danièle asked me,
surprised.

“I’ve had worse.”

“It is for hobos.”

“I probably look like a hobo right now with
all this muck on me,” I said. “By the way, where’s all the sand
from?”

“The ocean,” Danièle replied. “Millions of
years ago Paris used to be under a tropical sea. And I should tell
you,” she added, “that this is one of the most famous places in the
catacombs for parties. If you come on a weekend, Friday or
Saturday, you will likely see many cataphiles. Everybody drinks,
smokes. It can be a lot of fun. Do you smoke, Will?”

“Pot?”

She nodded.

“I don’t buy it.” I shrugged. “But if it’s
around…”

“Good. I will get you high later.”

I didn’t know if I wanted to get high down
here, but I didn’t say anything.

“Any chicks at these ragers?” Rob asked. “Or
is it one big sausage fest?”

Danièle scowled at him. “You are married to
my sister, Rosbif. You should not care if there are ‘chicks’
present or not.”

“I’m asking for Rascal’s sake.”

“Pascal does not need woman help from you,
do not worry.”

Rob and Pascal began bantering back and
forth in French.

“Do you know most of the other cataphiles
you run into?” I asked Danièle.

“Some. But there are always new people.”

“What if assholes like those scuba guys show
up to one of these parties?”

She shrugged. “Usually everyone is friendly.
The people you have to be careful about are the meth heads and drug
dealers. But you do not see them very often. And if you do, there
are more normal people than weirdos. So if you stay together, you
are okay. Do not go anywhere on your own. That is the second rule
of the catacombs.”

“What’s the first?”

“Bring backup batteries.”

“No, no, no,” Pascal said, shaking his head.
“The first rule is to get out again. The second is to come back.
And the third is to do whatever you like.”