The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (21 page)

No answer.

“Oh God,” Danièle whispered suddenly,
grabbing my wrist so tightly I winced. “Look! There! Look!”

I looked. I had been so focused on the hole
I hadn’t paid attention to the rock surrounding it.

“Is that…?” I started.

“Blood,” Rob finished.

“Maybe he tripped and hit his head and got
disorientated?” I said.

“And crawled into a fucking hole?” Rob said
skeptically.

“Then what happened to him?” Danièle
demanded.

I bent close to examine the blood. “It’s
fresh, and it looks like a handprint.” I turned, scanning the
ground. “There—there’s more blood. And there.” We followed a string
of small black splotches back to the entrance to the room.

“He must have hit his head here—”

“He didn’t hit his fucking head, Danny!” Rob
said. “Someone surprised him, knocked him out cold, and dragged him
off.”

“
Zolan
,” she hissed. “It has to be.
He followed us down here.”

“There was no woman, no body,” I reminded
her. “Why would he follow us? Why would he attack Pascal?”

“Because he is crazy.”

“What about the Painted Devil? He was pissed
we scared him off. He lost face. This could be his revenge.”’

“But how did he get past us?” Rob said.
“Whoever attacked Pascal was ahead of us.”

“Zolan knew we were going to the spot where
the video camera was,” Danièle said. “Maybe he knew a different way
to get here.”

“And arrived here ahead of us and
waited?”

“Maybe…”

“Whatever,” I said, frustrated. “Guessing’s
not helping any. We have to do something.”

Rob nodded. “We gotta go get Rascal—now.
He’s injured.”

I looked at the cat hole. “You want to go in
there?”

“We have to. We can’t just leave.”

“Yes,” Danièle said, swallowing. “We have to
go after him.”

“What if it’s a trap?” I said.

“We don’t have a fucking choice!” Rob
said.

He was right, I knew. We couldn’t abandon
Pascal. Nor could we stand here discussing our options. His
condition could be critical.

We returned to the wall. Rob dropped to his
knees and peered inside the hole. It was large enough to enter with
his backpack on. He glanced up at us, as if for confirmation that
we were really doing this, then crawled inside and disappeared.

This was insane, Rob thought as he snaked
forward deeper into the tunnel. Total fucking insanity. Had someone
really attacked Pascal?

He still wanted to believe it was all some
elaborate joke, but Pascal wasn’t the practical joker type.

So who had gotten him?

What
had gotten him?

Rob almost laughed at that, but didn’t,
because scientists were discovering new species all the time. Just
last week he read about this team of zoologists and filmmakers that
descended into a never-before-explored caldera in Papa New Guinea
and documented all this nature-gone-wrong kind of shit, like frogs
with fangs and kangaroos that lived in trees and woolly rats that
grew as large as dogs.

So what if something even more
crazy—something with lobster-claw horns, or a tail that could shoot
spikes, or three heads and translucent skin—lived down here? What
if—

Rob stopped and sniffed. God, what was that
smell? It had come from nowhere.

“Ugh,” Danièle muttered a moment later.
“What
is
that?”

“Don’t know,” Rob said, peering ahead. The
shaft continued straight for another ten feet before turning
sharply to the left. “It’s coming from ahead though—”

The sentence died on his lips. A steel fist
squeezed the air from his lungs.

“Back up, Danny,” he managed in little more
than a breathless croak. “Back up right now.”

Fear ballooned inside me when Rob began
speaking in the soft, scared-stiff way of someone who’d just
realized they were standing in the middle of a viper pit.

“What is it?” Danièle demanded. “What can
you see?”

“Back…the fuck…up.” Then Rob’s voice rose
several octaves. “Oh no…
Oh shit oh shit—go back!
”

Danièle started kicking me in the face as
she attempted to reverse directions.

“What is it?” I shouted. “What’s
happening?”

“Go, Will!” she shrieked. “Go!”

Rob began yelling now. Low grunts tinged
with higher notes of hysteria. Then he screamed—in pain.

Danièle landed a heavy heel against my nose.
Stars exploded across my vision. I tasted dirt and coppery
blood.

“Will, go!” she wailed.

I elbowed my way backward, battling a
frenzied terror.

What the fuck was happening—?

Something cold gripped my ankle. I tried to
snap my head around to see what it was, but the shaft was too
restrictive to do even that. A second something latched onto my
other ankle.

Hands
.

They tugged. I kicked wildly, freeing
myself.

“Someone’s behind me!” I shouted. “Go
forward!”

“It got Rob!” Danièle screeched feverishly.
“He is gone! It took him! It just took him!”

I still couldn’t see past her, but I didn’t
doubt that someone had indeed taken Rob; he was no longer yelling.
Even so, forward was better than backward for me. I placed my hands
squarely on Danièle’s rear and shoved.

“Go!”

With a soulful moan she lurched forward—just
as the pair of hands grabbed my ankles again. Sharp
nails—
claws?
—dug into my flesh.

I kicked and twisted and freed myself again
and was right behind Danièle, urging her to move faster in a voice
I scarcely recognized as my own, tearing the skin from my elbows in
my manic flight.

Danièle jackknifed around a corner and put
distance between us. I kept waiting for those terrible hands to
clamp onto me once more, to drag me backward into the dark, but
they never did.

Then, from a little ways ahead, Danièle
cried out—and vanished.

I shot out of the shaft a few seconds after
her, momentarily airborne, dropping several feet to the hard
ground. I sprang to my feet and whirled toward the hole, peering
inside. Nothing.

Then Danièle was beside me.

“Where is it?” she said. Her tone was oddly
nonchalant, as if she was trying to be conversational, only she was
screaming too. “It must have come back out this way. It had Rob,
it…” She buried her face in her hands.

I examined the room we were in. It was made
of stone and resembled all the others we had come across, though
there were no bones here. An open doorway led to another room, and
a doorway there to yet another room still.

“Who took Rob?” I asked her quietly. “Did
you see him?”

“He…it…” She bit her lip to stop it from
quivering. “It…”

“What do you mean ‘it?’ Jesus, Danièle, who
did you see? The Painted Devil?”

“Its face…it was all… It was a monster.”

A ball of dread punched me in the chest.
Then I got ahold of my imagination. “It wasn’t a fucking monster,
Danièle! Who was it? The Painted Devil? Was it the Painted
Devil?”

She shook he head and began to sob.

“Shhh, shhh, shhh,” I told her, pulling her
hands away from her face so I could look her in the eyes. “You have
to be quiet. Danièle? You have to be quiet.”

She nodded but continued to sob.

“Danièle!” I said, shaking her. “They could
be coming back.”

Her breath hitched. Her body went rigid.

She looked at me, pleading. “It took Rob.
Where is he?”

“I don’t know—”

An unholy caterwauling exploded from the
shaft, and for a moment I was numbed with superstitious terror.

“It is coming,” Danièle said monotonously.
She no longer sounded afraid; she sounded accepting, which was
somehow worse.

Run or fight? I thought. What had Danièle
seen? A flesh-and-blood monster? There were no such things. She had
to be confused. She was in shock. She was short-circuiting.

Run or fight?

I flicked off my helmet’s headlamp. Danièle
stared at me blankly.

“Turn yours off too,” I told her quietly.
“We’re easy targets with them on.”

She shook her head, looked like she was
going to flee.

“There’s nowhere to go,” I said. “We have to
take these guys out one by one. You stand on that side of the hole.
I’m going to be right here, on this side. When whoever comes out of
it, we attack him.” She started to shake her head again. I added
steel and urgency to my voice: “Turn off your fucking headlamp,
Danièle.
Now
.”

For a moment I was sure she would refuse.
But she reached up, fumbled with the battery box at the back of her
helmet, and flipped the toggle.

We were plunged into blackness.

My breathing seemed extra loud in the
nothingness, and I tried to quiet it. There was no other noise. The
seconds dragged. The air seemed thick and greasy.

Then I heard faint, careful movement inside
the hole.
Someone coming
. Yet there was still no light. Had
the person turned off his headlamp, expecting an ambush? Had I
broken it when I kicked him?

The sound became louder, stopping, starting,
stopping, starting.

Sniffing us out
, I thought, and hated
myself for thinking that.

My heart was pounding, adrenaline was
burning through my veins like gasoline, but I was ready. I was
going to take this motherfucker out, I was going to knock him up
for answers, find out what was going on, where Pascal and Rob had
gone—

I swallowed, gaging. That cloying stench was
back, come from nowhere. It was almost a physical presence.

From the darkness nearby Danièle made a
retching sound.

No, quiet, don’t
—

She retched again.

A howl erupted from the hole, savage and
close.

Danièle snapped on her headlamp. For a
moment I was blinded by the light. Then I saw her staring at me,
her eyes wide as saucers, as if she were seeing a ghost.

“Will!” she said with the woodsaw rasp of a
crow, pointing a shaking finger at me.

No—
behind me
, I realized.

I started to turn, but something heavy
cracked into the back of my helmet, knocking it off and sending me
to the ground.

Head throbbing, I rolled over and caught a
glimpse of a mutant face and a swinging bone a moment before
everything exploded in excruciating pain and searing whiteness.

Danièle couldn’t breathe, couldn’t make a
sound, couldn’t think. The thing came for her, grinning
hideously.

She ran.

I saw her from across the room. Her blonde
hair was pinned up in a ballerina-like bun on her head,
accentuating her slender neck. I couldn’t tell the color of her
eyes, the room was too dark, but they were large and expressive,
her lashes long. Her nose was small, not much more than a comma.
Her lips were painted bright red, and she was smiling—a quirky
smile. It gave her face depth and personality.