The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (30 page)

For the first time Danièle wondered whether
Zolan had a job or not. Did he climb out of the catacombs in the
early hours of dawn and get on the Metro like everyone else? Did he
bring clean clothes in a backpack and change in a train station
restroom? Surely he didn’t work at anything that required a suit
and a tie. A construction worker perhaps? Or a McDonald’s employee,
the guy who flipped the burgers? This line of thinking led her to
her job at the florist shop. Flo, the owner, likely had a meltdown
when she discovered Danièle had never arrived for her shift.
Flowers not watered, orders not taken, deliveries not made.
Nevertheless, this was nothing more than a fleeting thought.
Danièle was a prisoner in the catacombs, and Pascal was dead—

No, stop it
. She had not allowed
herself to think about Pascal since he died, and she wouldn’t until
she was free of this place. Then she would grieve. Now she had to
deal with the madman Zolan—who was not only insane but also
delusional. Because did he really think he had her fooled? Did he
really think she believed he was going to let them all go? He would
have to know they would head straight to the police, and the police
would arrest him and his entire zombie family.

So why not kill us and be done with the
problem then?
she wondered.
Why is he stringing us along—or
at least stringing me along? What’s his plan?

He obviously wanted something, and Danièle
could guess what. She saw how he looked at her. Lustful. She was
aware of this even back at the Bunker. Yet if he wanted to fuck
her, why not do it? Why this charade that she was a guest? Was he
trying to romance her? Did he think she would fall in love with him
and live down here with him?

Yes, he really is crazy—as crazy as the rest
of them.

Zolan took a bottle of vodka and two glasses
from his desk. He filled one halfway to the rim, nodded to the
other. “Will you join me?”

“No thank you,” she said stiffly.

He fussed with something on the ground—she
couldn’t see past the desk—then held up her cask of wine. He raised
an eyebrow.

“No thank you,” she repeated.

“I know what you want then.” He fussed
again, and a moment later he produced her Ziploc baggie of
marijuana. He saw the reaction on her face and smiled. “We all have
our vices, don’t we?” He tossed the baggie on the table in front of
her.

Danièle stared at it. No way was she going
to get high with Zolan…but, God, a few tokes would be nice. Just
two, maybe three, just enough to calm her nerves a little.

“Please, indulge,” he said. “It is not for
me.”

Zolan shot a second cigarette from his pack
and lit up. The smell of the burning tobacco, and the fact he
wasn’t getting high too, decided it for her. She opened the baggie,
withdrew the papers and a clump of pot, and crumbled the pot
between her fingers. When she finished rolling the joint, Zolan
passed her a brass Zippo. She accepted it guiltily, like a crack
addict accepting the needle that had just killed her friend.

She lit the joint and inhaled deeply.

Zolan sipped his vodka and said, “Tell me
something about yourself, Danièle.”

She hated it when he used her name, it
presumed a disturbing and artificial familiarity, but she didn’t
say anything. She held the smoke in her lungs for as long as she
could, then exhaled. The act was Zen-like. The tension in her neck
and shoulders seemed to leave her body with the smoke. “Something?”
she said, opening her eyes.

“The past. A story.” Zolan slid her the
ashtray.

Danièle took another long drag. “A story?”
She exhaled again. She should put the joint out. Two tokes was
enough. She only needed a small high, a medicinal high.

She tapped the ash from the end of it into
the ashtray, but she didn’t put it out. “I do not have any
stories.”

“Everyone has a story.”

She took a third drag. She was already quite
high. Her lack of nourishment and sleep likely had to do with this.
Yet she knew she was going to smoke the joint until there was
nothing left of it. She wanted to get fucked. She wanted
oblivion.

Zolan was waiting patiently for her to tell
him a story. A story! Who was this guy? Did he think he was her
friend? She would kill him if she could—she would too, wouldn’t
she? She would commit murder?

Yes, if she had to. If it meant escaping
here.

What about right now?

After all, it was just the two of them.
There were no zombie-things outside. If she killed him, she could
take a candle and flee into one of those dark tunnels. They would
have to lead somewhere. She couldn’t rescue Will and Rob, not by
herself, but if she could find a way to the surface, she could
return with help.

My God, she thought, she could do
this—couldn’t she? Yes! She had to. And look at him. The swine. The
lust was all over his face. She could tell him a story, get him
believing she was cooperating with him, she was accepting him, let
him make an advance, and then, bam, she would kill him.

But with what?

Danièle stubbed the joint out in the
ashtray—she would need her wits about her after all—and said, “When
I was six years old, my father picked me up from school on a Monday
afternoon. This was strange because it was always my mother who
picked me up. He took me to the cinema to watch
The Last
Unicorn
. It was a child’s movie, but it scared me so badly we
had to leave early. Afterward we got ice cream, then we returned
home.” She swallowed. She never talked about this. Even now, even
in the predicament she was in, the memories were like razor blades
inside her heart, and with each breath, with each word, they cut a
little deeper. “My father led me to the basement. My mother was
there. She was tied up in a chair, which had toppled onto its side,
so her face was pressed against the floor. My older sister was tied
up in a chair too. They both had gags in their mouths, stifling
their screams. My father told me to sit in a third chair, though he
didn’t tie me up. I guess he didn’t think I was a threat. Or maybe
he was going to kill me first. I don’t know. He explained to my
sister and I that he had been fired from his job the week before,
and that he would not be able to provide for us any longer. He told
us that our mother no longer loved him. She had no faith in him.
She thought he was a failure. He told us she wanted to leave him
and take us with her. He told us he couldn’t let that happen. He
told us he had a better solution, one in which we would remain
together, forever. He walked past us and retrieved a carving knife
from where he had stashed it atop the old oil furnace. At that same
moment our doorbell rang. This gave me courage and I jumped from
the chair and ran. My father chased me up the stairs. He caught me
in the foyer before I could reach the front door handle. He covered
my mouth with his hand. I bit him. He let go and I screamed. My
father had not locked the door—I guess that was not something you
bothered to do when you were planning on murdering your family and
yourself—and it burst open. My neighbor, Monsieur Rochefort,
appeared with his daughter, my best friend. He drove us to Guides
every Monday evening. My father attacked him with the knife, but
Monsieur Rochefort was able to wrestle the knife away and subdue
him while his daughter and I ran next door and got her mother to
call the police. My father was charged with three counts of
attempted murder and hanged himself while awaiting trial. We moved
to France the following year.”

An uncomfortable silence stretched between
them. Zolan finished his vodka. Then he got up and came around the
desk, came up behind her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and
massaged her back with strong thumbs. “It seems, Danièle,” he said,
“that you and I have something in common.”

Danièle never took her eyes off the vodka
bottle on his desk. “And what is that?”

“Both our fathers are rotting in hell.”

Someone was calling my name, it came from the
edges of the darkness, I heard it and knew I was asleep, knew I
needed to wake up, but the darkness was too thick, too black, and I
couldn’t claw through it, and I wondered if maybe my injuries had
caught up to me after all, and I wasn’t asleep but unconscious, in
a coma, and this terrified me because maybe I would remain in such
a state forever, aware of the darkness, and the voices that called
to me from the margins, but unable to do anything to reach those
voices or a higher awareness, fated to live like a snail in the
void—

I opened my eyes and found myself in a new
darkness. But that was okay. Because this was real, I was awake, I
wasn’t brain dead—

“Will! Wake up, bro! Wake the fuck up!”

I rolled onto my side. The chains clinked.
Everything from my shoulders down was pins and needles. “Rob?” I
groaned.

“Will!” he barked, his voice hoarse,
nasally. “Where the fuck are we?”

“The cata…” My throat was parched again.
“Catacombs.”

“I know that! But what
happened
? Some
fucking guy attacked me. Drove a bone into my face. Broke my
fucking nose. And now I’m chained up. What the hell?
What the
fuck’s going on?
”

So I told him.

Katja spent the day reminiscing,
scrutinizing, doubting, despairing. So many lies! Lies she had
believed unconditionally. Lies like that photograph she had found
in her father’s study, the photograph he insisted was of her
grandfather and grandmother before the war, even though her
“grandfather” appeared identical to him, and her “grandmother”
didn’t appear to be much older than her. Lies like when he drank
too much beer and mumbled in a stupor of a living, breathing Paris,
mumbles he would dismiss the next day as “dream words.” Lies like
his explanation that their food came from a warehouse that hadn’t
been destroyed by the nuclear bombs—food that somehow remained
fresh after all that time even when some of the bread and fruit and
vegetables in their kitchen went moldy after only a few days.

A dozen other lies, two dozen, all so clear
now, all leaving her feeling shaken and scared and thrilled and
most of all angry.

What had she been denied all these
years?

Rob was full of questions while I explained
to him what had transpired over the last day or so, but he went
quiet when I finished. His silence lasted for several minutes. Then
I heard a couple sharp intakes of breath and louder exhales,
shuddering, gritty—a man trying to keep his emotions in check. It
was the most depressing and lonely sound I had ever heard. “You
know the last thing I said to the wife?” he said finally in a gruff
voice. “I told her…” He began to chuckle. “Told her to go fuck
herself.”

“You tell everyone to go fuck
themselves.”

“This was different. I meant it. She knew I
meant it. I think it was the end.”

“The end?”

“The end! The marriage. The fucking end. I
think it was over.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We’d stopped talking a while ago,” he went
on. “Meaningful talking. Now we’re like bitter old fucks on TV
sitcoms, only it’s not funny. We don’t talk about the news at
breakfast, don’t talk about our days, she tells me I’m making a
mess while I’m cooking, and I tell her to get out of the fucking
kitchen if it bothers her so much. You wanna guess why we’re still
together?”

“Your girls?”

“Yeah, my girls. They’re the world to me.
Bella’s five, Mary’s three. Bella’s just started kindergarten. It’s
turned her into a diva. She’s suddenly decided she doesn’t like
vegetables and only wants pasta and butter and cheese—for every
meal, every day. She also thinks she’s too old for naps. I’m good
with that because by bedtime she’s so tired she zonks off
immediately. It’s amazing how fast they grow up. I know people
always say that, but it blows my mind. Mary can barely draw a
circle and still has imaginary friends, while Bella can jump rope,
skate, walk on a balance beam…”