The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (19 page)

“And, yes, I think some cataphiles wouldn’t
hesitate to take the skulls of those two London men, who were fully
clothed and obviously explorers like themselves. Because they have
become desensitized to death. They see so many bones, there is
nothing special to them anymore, nothing sacred. A human skull is
something that would make a good paperweight, or a candle base. If
you ask me, they are sick, they don’t belong down there, nobody
does, and they need to face much greater prosecution by the
law.”

Currently, specially trained police officers
conduct regular patrols of the catacombs and issue a court summons
to anyone they catch. Offenders risk fines ranging from sixty to
one hundred euros.

It was a dizzying montage of death on
display: rotten femurs and cracked craniums and broken pelvises and
nude jawbones and empty eye sockets that seemed to stare jocularly
up at you. They were all shapes and sizes, all once part of living,
breathing people. Artisans and aristocrats, peasants and children,
revolutionaries and soldiers—now anonymous, disarticulated,
individually forgotten.

Bones in a mass grave.

“Oh man!” Rob said, coming up behind Danièle
and me. “Look at this shit! What do you and Rascal do down here,
Danny? Surf the mosh pit of humanity’s dead?”

“I have never been to this ossuary before,”
she said. “I have been to the popular one, beneath Montparnasse,
and some others. But they are not like this, not this big…”

Pascal, I noticed, was a dozen yards away,
kneeling at the edge of the island, his back to us.

“
Qu’est-ce que
c’est?
” Danièle called to
him.

He mumbled
something.

“What’d you find, bro?”
Rob said.

Pascal got to his feet and
came over to us. He passed what appeared to be a chunk of spine to
Danièle and pointed to different lesions on it. “Malta fever,” he
said.

“Fever?” Rob said, shying
away. “Better not be contagious.”

“
Vous êtes stupide
,” Pascal chided. “You cannot catch anything from a
bone.”

“How did that sucker catch
it?”

“F
rom an infected
animal, probably their milk. I think he or she must have been a
cheese maker.”

Danièle passed the vertebrae to me. It was
slightly spongy, like old wood, and covered in a layer of grime. I
passed it on to Rob and thought of hand sanitizer.

Rob turned it over a few times, the way you
examine something not particularly interesting, then gave it back
to Pascal, who stuck it in his backpack.

I frowned. “You’re taking it?”

“
Oui
. I need to study it more
closely.”

“You can’t steal it.”

“I am not
stealing
it,” he said
acidly, and for a moment I was bizarrely certain he was going to
lunge at me. But the manic look in his eyes passed. “I will bring
it back.”

“So which way now?” Danièle said quickly,
too quickly, and I suspected she’d seen the look in Pascal’s eyes
also. “Which way to the video camera?”

“
Vas-y
,” Pascal grunted, starting
off.

“Whoa, wait up, boss,” Rob said. “I’m not
walking over dead people.”

“It is okay,” Danièle told him.

“Okay? How would you like it, Danny, if a
bunch of people went stomping around on your skeleton one hundred
fifty years from now?”

“Whoever they once were, Rosbif, they are
dead now. They do not mind if we step on them.”

“I’m with Rob,” I said. “It’s, I don’t know,
disrespectful.”

Danièle waved vaguely. “Does any of this
look respectful to you, Will? These people have been dug up from
their original resting ground, their skeletons broken apart to make
them easier to transport, and dumped into these rooms like garbage.
They have already suffered much more indignation than us walking on
them would cause.”

Apparently the discussion was over, because
Pascal and Danièle set out across the bone field.

“Guess we don’t have a choice, bro,” Rob
said, and followed.

I stepped where Rob stepped, to mitigate
damage. Nevertheless, femurs cracked and splintered beneath my
weight, and I wondered how deep the bones went. Five feet? Ten?
More? I was having a hard time getting my head around the sheer
number of dead. It made me feel not only mortal but insignificant.
The ego liked to trick you into thinking you were the center of the
universe, but in truth you were nothing but a dust mote in a
never-ending shaft of dimming light. Really, I thought, how was my
life, or Rob’s, or Pascal’s, or Danièle’s any different, any more
meaningful, than the lives of all the lost souls beneath our feet?
Like us, each of them once had dreams, fears, beliefs, agendas, a
sense of self-worth…and look at them now.

Bones in a mass grave
.

This train of thought wasn’t very cheerful,
so I stopped with the introspection and concentrated on placing one
foot carefully in front of the next. When we reached the far wall,
we followed it left to a window that looked into another room
filled with more bones. These were piled so high there were only a
few feet between the uppermost ones and the ceiling. Pascal and
Danièle climbed through the window eagerly, Rob and I less so. We
crawled forward on our hands and knees, the carpet of brittle bones
crunching beneath us, until we came to a crack in the ceiling.

I was the last to pull myself up and through
it, relieved to discover that it opened into a regular stone
hallway.

Everyone was several yards away, huddled
close, discussing something of apparent importance. Danièle stepped
aside as I approached, her eyes shining excitedly, and I was able
to see what all the fuss was about.

On the floor at their feet, a bone-arrow
pointed ahead into the darkness.

“That was in the video!” I exclaimed, bending
close to examine it.

“Yes,” Danièle said. “These are the hallways
where the woman shot the last of her footage.”

Rob said, “Where she thought someone was
following her…”

“Where
Zolan
was following her,”
Danièle stated.

Pascal spoke in French and started off.

“He says we must hurry,” Danièle told me.
“We are behind schedule. He has been late for class too many times
before, and he cannot be late anymore.”

I succumbed to my curiosity, tugged up the
left sleeve of my pullover, and checked my wristwatch. It was 4:17
a.m. This surprised me not because it was almost dawn, but because
I’d had no idea of the time whatsoever. For all I knew it could
have been 1 a.m. or 8 a.m.

A short trek later we came to the first and
only graffiti in this hallway. It was the painting of the stickman
that the woman had paused to study in her video. The lines were
quick, frantic, and there was little detail, not even a face. The
arms and legs were spread wide, resembling someone making a snow
angel.

“Spray paint,” Rob observed, scraping the
paint with a fingernail.

“Who do you think made it?” I asked.

“Probably whoever made the bone-arrows.”

“Zolan,” Danièle said again.

“Give the guy a break, Danny,” Rob said.

“Why should I? He admitted he was here.”

“I’m sure a lot of people have been
here.”

“Does it look like that to you? Where is the
graffiti, the garbage? Where are the beer cans? There is
nothing—nothing except some bone-arrows and
this
.” She waved
at the stickman.

Rob shrugged. “That doesn’t mean anything.
We’re not going around spray painting the place, are we?”

Danièle folded her arms across her chest.
“Why are you protecting him, Rosbif? Did his vodka poison your
brain?”

“You frogs have to get over your prejudices
and not judge people based on how they look.”

She scowled. “I told you not to call us
that.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s not fair to amphibians, I
forgot.”

“
Vous êtes une pomme de terre avec le
visage d’un cochon d’inde!
” Danièle fumed.

Pascal continued on. Rob, laughing, went
with him.

“What did you say that was so funny?” I
asked her.

She seemed put out. “It was not supposed to
be a joke. It was an insult.”

“What did you call him?”

“A potato with the face of a guinea pig. My
mother used to say it to my father…before he left her.”

“When you were seven,” I said, recalling
what she’d told me during one of our lessons.

“Yes…”

“You mom never told you where he went?”

“She never talked about him. She erased him
from her life. A couple years later, when I had the flu and was
allowed to stay home from school, I went searching for the family
photo albums. I found them in a box under her bed. There were no
photos of my father.”

“She threw them all out?”

“She cut him out of all of them. Actually,
she did not cut
him
out. That would have left obvious gaps
in the photos. Instead she cut everyone else out and pasted them
back together again.”

“So you don’t know what your dad even looks
like?”

“I have a vague memory, but that is
all.”

I contemplated what it would be like to grow
up without a father. It seemed a pretty brutal thing for a kid to
go through. “How’s your mom now?” I asked.

“She is well. She has several
boyfriends.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Several?”

Danièle nodded. “She meets them on some
online dating website. She is only forty-eight. And she is still
pretty.”

“Like you.” The words were out of my mouth
before I realized what I’d said.

Danièle’s eyes sparkled. “You know, Will,
that is the first time you have told me something like that.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And you can tell me that I am pretty
more often. I will not be offended.”

I didn’t say anything.

She sighed. “Why are you so mysterious?”

“Mysterious?” I shrugged lamely.

She tiptoed and kissed me on the lips,
pressing her body against mine.

“Want to come over tonight?” she asked
playfully.

“I think I’m going to need to catch up on my
sleep.”

“You can sleep all day. Even better—you can
sleep at my place in the afternoon, then cook me dinner in the
evening.”

“Oh shit,” I said.

Danièle frowned. “You have another
excuse?”

“What do you mean ‘another?’”

“Are you going to be hung over again?”

“No…but I already have dinner plans.”

“With who?”

“My neighbor.”

Danièle glared at me dangerously. “Are you
dating her?”

“No!” I said. “She’s like ninety. Her
husband died a long time ago. She’s lonely. She’s always catching
me in my hallway and giving me desserts and stuff. So earlier
today—yesterday—I told her I was studying French cooking and wanted
some feedback.”

“You study French cooking? You have never
told me this.”

“I don’t. I made it up so she wouldn’t feel
like she was intruding.”

“How do I know you are not making up that
this woman is ninety? Maybe she is twenty and beautiful?”

I hesitated. “Come then.”

“You really want me to?”

“I’m sure Madame Gabin won’t mind.”

“Madame Gabin, hmm?” Danièle studied me.
“Yes, okay. I think I will join you and this Madame Gabin for
dinner. And, Will, she better be as old as you say she is, or you
are dead meat.”

We caught up to Rob and Pascal at a
T-junction. The woman in the video had gone left, so we went left
also. A little ways on Pascal stopped and announced, “This is where
I found the video camera. It was there, next to that puddle. See, I
marked the wall.” He pointed to a chalk asterisk.

Rob peered ahead into the dark. “Did you go
any farther, boss?”

Pascal shook his head. I was tempted to make
a scared barb, to get even with him for the ones he’d sent my way,
but I didn’t because I didn’t blame the guy for turning tail.
Watching that video down here, alone, right where whatever happened
had happened…I wouldn’t have stuck around either. I asked, “How
much time on the video passed from the point she dropped the camera
to when she screamed?”

“Forty-one seconds,” Danièle told me. “Which
means her body should be right up ahead somewhere.”

It wasn’t. We searched for more than twenty
minutes, checking every crumbling and bone-riddled room we passed,
continuing along the hallway for much farther than should have been
necessary. When we stopped for a rest, I said, “Looks like Zolan
was telling the truth. He found her and showed her back to the
surface.”

“I still cannot believe his story about the
rats,” Danièle said, shaking her head. “I am sure he was trying to
persuade us not to come down here. Why would he do that if he had
nothing to hide?”