The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (13 page)

“I’m not on my stomach. I’m on my side.”

“Can you roll onto your stomach?”

“No.”

“What about your back?”

“No, Danièle, I’m…I’m wedged in here like
Winnie the Pooh in his fucking honey hole. I can’t move. At
all.”

“Will, I am trying to help—”

“What should I do?”

“You have to relax. When you are tense, your
muscles flex, get bigger. You have to relax and breathe
deeply.”

“Now’s not the time for fucking yoga!”

“Listen to me, Will. It is true. I will
breathe with you. Ready?”

I had nothing to lose. “Yeah.”

“Okay, breathe…”

I followed her lead for a good two minutes,
inhaling and exhaling through my nose until I wasn’t thinking of
anything anymore…and amazingly I felt the tension seeping out of my
fear-locked muscles, the fight or flight response to my situation
ebbing.

“Do you feel relaxed, Will?” Danièle said,
her voice pacifying, like a hypnotist’s. “Whenever you are
ready…”

I tried rolling onto my back—and did so
successfully on the first attempt.

I began inching forward.

Once I had gotten beyond the dip, the rest of
the way along the shaft had been much easier. Standing full height
in a proper-sized tunnel again, the rush of surviving a close scare
buzzed through me. Danièle, however, didn’t share my high. Instead,
she gave me a furious lecture on how to follow instructions next
time.

“You know what?” Dreadlocks said to me,
butting in. “I make mistake. You are
touriste
still.” Zéro
and Goat chuckled obligingly.

Rob’s head popped out of the hole I had just
exited. Grinning, he drawled, “Heeeeeeeere’s Johnny!” then
somersaulted onto the ground. Pascal came next, extracting himself
silently, like a spider. They were both covered in the catacombs’
ubiquitous chalky mud and resembled true spelunkers. In fact, we
all did.

I said to Rob, “Remember what you told me
this place reminds you of?”

“Vages?”

“Well, you’re right, because it looked like
that wall just gave birth to you.”

“And you were almost stillborn, boss. What
the fuck happened?”

“I—”

“Okay, enough with your disgusting sex
talk,” Danièle said, cutting me off. “We are falling behind.”

Shrugging on her backpack, she started after
the scuba guys.

We went straight for a while, passing several
branching corridors, made a right, went straight again, passed more
corridors, turned left. This zigzagging continued on and on until
everything began to look the same to me, and I conceded that I was
hopelessly lost. This made me realize how much trust I had placed
in Pascal. He was the only one in our foursome who had explored
where we were going. If he was so inclined, he could totally screw
us over. Lead us the wrong way, sneak off with his map, leave us to
go crazy and rot. Of course, he had no reason to do this. He was
friends with both Danièle and Rob. Still, the fact he
could
made me uneasy. Maybe I was just on edge because of the recent
scares with the Devil and the tunnel, but my life was literally in
his hands.

When the passage we were now traversing
opened wide, I caught up to Danièle and said, “What’s up,
Froggy?”

She made a face. “Are you trying to tease
me? Because it does not bother me when you call me that.” She
cocked an eye at me. “You know, I have been thinking of a cataphile
name for you.”

“Cool,” I said. “Any good ones?”

“I cannot decide between two. The first is
Macaroni.”

I was nonplussed. “As in the pasta?”

“No, it has meaning. It is from that
song.”

I frowned. “‘The Macarena?’”

“No, you know…” She began to hum.

“‘Yankee Doodle?’”

“Yes!”

“Are you teasing me now?”

“No, why? Americans are called Yankees. That
is the name of one of your baseball teams. It is not
derogatory.”

“I don’t want to be called Yankee or Yankee
Doodle or Macaroni, thanks. What’s the other nickname?”

“Honeybear.”

“Even better.”

“You made me think of it when you said you
were stuck like Winnie the Pooh in his honey hole. I found that
cute. I think it is a good nickname.”

“I can’t wait until Rob and Pascal start
calling me it.”

“Oh—you are right.” She frowned. “Maybe it
can be my private nickname for you?”

I shrugged. “If you want. But I’m going to
think of a better one.”

“You cannot give yourself a nickname. That
is not how it works.”

“Speaking of Pascal,” I said, changing
course, “I was wondering about something.” The ceiling lowered. I
ducked accordingly. “What if he gets lost later on? You know, when
we get closer to the video camera? He’s only been that far once,
right? So what if he makes a wrong turn and gets totally lost? It
wouldn’t be that hard to do.”

“He won’t,” Danièle said confidently. “He
knows the way. He has marked it on his map. We are perfectly
safe.”

“What if he loses the map, or something
happens to it? The Devil could have taken it back at the
Beach.”

“That is the Beach. We know the way out from
there—”

“I mean, what if the Devil had jumped us
later, deeper, and took the lighters and map then? Would you or
Pascal have been able to find the way out?”

“The Painted Devil would not do that. He
would only take our stuff at the Beach because it is a popular
spot, and he knows someone would come along again and find us.”

“Come on, Danièle, you don’t know that. The
guy’s a lunatic.” I paused, remembering something. “What did he
mean by ‘Raviolis?’ When he was speaking to Pascal, he said he
hated Raviolis like us.”

“I do not know for sure, but I imagine that
is what he calls all cataphiles because many eat boxed
dumplings—and leave the boxes around.”

“He was acting as if he owned the catacombs.
He called it his home. Do you think he actually lives down
here?”

She shook her head. “He meant his…I do not
know the word. Like a gang has.”

“Turf?”

“Yes, like that. If he lived here, he would
not have a job. He would not have anything to eat. He would have
taken our money.”

She was right, I thought. Besides, the
uniforms he and his cohorts wore weren’t ragtag; they were museum
quality, which meant they would have been expensive.

“So what do you think he does for work?” I
asked.

“If he has money, maybe he is a doctor or
something.”

“A doctor?” I said, surprised.

“Why not? One cataphile I met told me he
worked for the president’s office.”

“You said catahpiles don’t speak of that
stuff.”

“As a general rule. But some people, they
like to talk. They tell you everything about themselves.”

“Do you tell people you’re a florist?”

“I am not a
florist
, Will.”

The hardness in her voice made me glance at
her. Her features had tightened.

I said, “I didn’t mean that you’re a
florist, like as a profession…forever… I just meant…”

“I have a degree from one of the most
prestigious universities in the country. I could get an important
office job anytime I want. But I have no desire at this point in my
life. I thought you understood that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“No you do not. You think I am some poor
gypsy girl with no plans for the future.”

“I—”

“Because I do have plans.”

“I believe you.”

“I hope so.”

I did—she was a smart girl—and I also
understood where she was coming from. I sometimes didn’t like
telling people I was a travel writer. People never took writers of
any ilk seriously. You could have a weekly column in a posh
magazine, or be a bestselling novelist, and to anyone you
introduced yourself to as a writer, their first impression would be
of a struggling, eccentric loner that needed a regular nine-to-five
job to straighten them out.

“What about them?” I nodded ahead to the
scuba guys, feeling as though I should say something to temper the
awkwardness that had bubbled between Danièle and me. “Did they tell
you what they do?”

“No, they did not. But Citerne mentioned he
is an accomplished diver.”

“Dreadlocks?”

“Yes, the one with dreadlocks.”

“Accomplished douchebag’s more like it.
What’s he expecting to find down here anyway? Sunken treasure?”

“I do not know, Will,” she said. “But look.
They have all stopped. Maybe we will find out.”

Dreadlocks pointed down a gaping black
hallway to our left and announced that was where the well was. The
floor was cobblestone, covered with a sheen of crystalline water,
unlike the murky stuff we had passed through earlier. Pascal got
all excited. Danièle explained to me that he had never been this
way before. It was marked as a dead end on his map.

“How far is the well?” I asked.

“Only ten minutes,” Pascal told me. He
glanced at Rob and Danièle. “It is okay?”

“I’m game, boss,” Rob said.

“Me too,” Daniel added.

Pascal looked at me expectantly.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Let’s fill in that
map of yours.”

The well was made from carved stone blocks
and rose three feet from the ground. The mouth was circular, twice
the circumference of a manhole. There was no graffiti here, no
litter anywhere, indicating not many cataphiles had been this way
before.

While Pascal lit some tealights, Dreadlocks
changed into a drysuit. He strapped the twin cylinder rig onto his
back, then pulled on short, stiff fins and a compact mask with an
opaque skirt. Sucking on the regulator that dangled from the
manifold outlet, he lowered himself into the well, a bulky primary
light in one hand, a reel of nylon guideline in the other. Everyone
gathered close, watching as he sank beneath the surface of the
water, though there was little to see. The water was cloudy. The
lights from our lamps shattered into emerald oblivion.

The ripples on the surface finally smoothed,
then disappeared altogether. The guideline remained taut. I said,
“How deep is he going?”

Danièle translated my question. Zéro mumbled
something back.

“Probably between five and fifteen meters,”
she told me. “That is how deep the others wells they explored have
been.”

The wait was tense. One minute inched into
two. I glanced at Zéro and Goat, who were staring intensely at the
water. They didn’t speak, but I knew what they were thinking.

This was taking longer than expected.

I caught Rob’s eye. He stuck his tongue out
the side of his mouth and drew a finger across his neck. Danièle
jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.

Zéro glared at them, annoyed.

Finally bubbles materialized on the surface
of the water, at first just a few, then an eruption. Dreadlock’s
head appeared next, his red helmet glistening.