The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (32 page)

Darkness enveloped us.

“What if he comes down this way—”

She pressed her hand against my mouth,
silencing me.

We didn’t wait long. A few moments later I
heard labored breathing and footsteps—fast footsteps.

We’ve been discovered missing
.

The blackness at the mouth of the passageway
lightened to gray. Then a shape darted past so fast I almost missed
it.

“
Danièle!
” I hissed.

“Will?” Terrified.

“Danny!” Rob said.

She stood in the hallway, staring in our
direction like a doe caught in headlamps, and I realized that was
because she couldn’t see us.

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s me and Rob.
Katja—light the candle.”

A match scratched. Katja touched the tip of
it to the candle’s wick.

Danièle cried out, shying away.

“It’s okay!” I said, rushing forward. “She’s
helping us.”

Danièle and I embraced, her body sinking
against mine, as if suddenly emptied of all strength.

“Will…” she mumbled into my shoulder.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “We’re getting out
of here.”

Katja didn’t like the way Will put his arms
around his friend. It made her feel squishy inside, and she glared
at the woman angrily. But the woman wouldn’t look at her so she
gave it up and started off into the tunnels.

She couldn’t remain angry for long anyway,
because she was too excited. She was going to the surface! This was
the most adventure she’d ever had. She felt like Dorothy in The
Land of Oz on her way to the Emerald City. Dorothy had three
friends to help her along the way, and Katja had three friends too.
But Katja had it much easier. Dorothy had to battle wolves, crows,
bees, Winkie soldiers, and winged monkeys. Katja only had to get
past Hanns and the others.

And she had a plan for that.

When Katja stopped abruptly, I thought she’d
heard something again with her insanely acute hearing, and I
whispered, “What is it?”

“We are almost there.”

“Where?”

“The Great Hall.”

She’d mentioned that before. “What’s the
Great Hall?”

“It’s the room that leads to the exit. It’s
also where most of my aunts and uncles live, so we’re going to have
to trick them.”

Trick them? I glanced at Rob and Danièle.
They seemed equally skeptical.

I said, “How do we trick them?”

“Have you read
The Wind in the
Willows
?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I have,” Danièle said. “Something about a
frog getting into trouble?”

“Not a frog!” Katja said. “A toad. At one
point Toad gets arrested—that means he can’t leave Toad Hall—but
eventually he gets bored and wants to leave. So do you know what he
does? He tricks the Water Rat who is on guard at the time.”

“How does he trick him?” I asked.

“He pretends to be sick!” Katja said
proudly. “The Water Rat lets him go outside, and he runs away.”

“I don’t think pretending to be sick is
going to get us past your uncles.”

“No, you don’t understand. You’re going to
hide. I’m going to tell them
my father
is sick, they have to
go help him. That’s when we will escape.”

I thought this over. It was better than
anything else that came to mind.

Rob said, “Where we gonna hide?”

“There.” Katja pointed down a branching
corridor.

“How far does it go?” I asked.

“Not far.”

“What if someone comes down it? We’ll be
trapped.”

“No one will come down it,” she said.

We huddled together in the darkness,
listening. An icy mist swirled in my gut, and my heart thumped so
loudly in my chest I wondered if the others could hear it.

“I hope you can trust her,” Danièle
whispered to me.

“She’s brought us this far,” I said.

“Why is she helping us?”

“She wants to go to the surface.”

“Hey, Danny,” Rob said. “How’d you get
free?”

“Shh!” I said. “I hear them.”

In the distance came what might have been
Katja’s voice, followed by several others, which were deeper,
back-of-the-throat, masculine.

Danièle gripped my hand tightly.

A moment later someone holding a torch in
one hand and a bone in the other passed the end of our corridor,
less than fifty feet from us. Eleven people followed in a
procession of broken-bodied gaits, three carrying torches, and all
of them carrying bones.

After they had passed, and their guttural
mutterings faded, a small light appeared and seemed to float toward
us.

Katja stopped when she could see us and,
with a delicate index finger, indicated for us to follow.

The Great Hall was appropriately named, as it
reminded me of a great hall you might find in a medieval castle.
Torches set in gilded sconces lined the walls at evenly spaced
intervals. A solid-looking table, perhaps sixteen feet in length,
dominated the center of the yawning space. Three silver candelabras
stood on its chipped and stained surface, their gleaming spaghetti
arms holding blood-red candles. Only a few chairs encircled the
table, though they were high-backed, sturdy, and featured intricate
woodworking and some sort of lion motif. My first thought was
nobility, and I recalled what Danièle had told me about King
Charles X and his morbid parties. Could this furniture have been
scavenged from those party rooms?

Nevertheless, amidst the grandeur was smelly
squalor. Grungy mattresses, either bare or topped with a mess of
dirty sheets, lay haphazardly around the floor. Each was surrounded
by a collection of boxes and baskets overflowing with the kind of
stuff you saw bums pushing around in their shopping carts: soda
cans, plastic bags, tin cans, plastic bottles, articles of
clothing, other junk.

An overweight woman sat on one of those
mattresses. She wore no clothes. Her large breasts drooped to her
waist. Her belly folded over her waist onto her lap like an apron.
Scabs covered her skin, some streaked with dried blood, some
bleeding freely. She stared at us but didn’t seem to see us.

Two others were curled up on the floor,
apparently sleeping, while an old man with wild wheat hair and a
craggy face and a puckered mouth shuffled toward us, arms
outstretched, saying something I couldn’t understand.

Katja didn’t pay him any attention, which
suggested he was not a threat, and led us quickly across the room
to an arched doorway encrusted with human skulls. Then we were
hurrying down a long stone tunnel, and even though we were still
deep underground in a labyrinth from hell, right then I felt as
free as if we were running across an open field with a spill of
stars overhead.

We had escaped.

When we reached the first T-junction I said,
“Which way, Katja?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Rob’s jaw dropped. “You don’t know?”

“I have never been this far before.”

We chose left at random, and Katja took the
lead, holding her candle before her, one hand cupped around the
flame so it wouldn’t blow out.

A hundred yards on we stopped before a cat
hole in the left-side wall.

I peered into it. “It’s been carved out by
hand,” I said, “or at least the original fissure’s been expanded.
Either way, it was done for a purpose, so it must lead
somewhere.”

Rob nodded. “Maybe back the way we
came—”

A high-pitched shriek cut him off. It
warbled between sorrow and rage. Another joined it, and another,
and more, all as shrill and degenerate as the first.

“They found Zolan,” Danièle stated.

“Zolan?” I said, bewildered.

“My father,” Katja said. “They will know we
tricked them. They will come for us now.”

“
Zolan?
” I repeated.

“What the fuck are you talking about,
Danny?” Rob demanded.

A new, chilling howl reverberated through
the tunnels. It was close, not originating from behind us, but from
in front of us, the direction we had been heading.

“Go!” I said, pushing Katja into the cat
hole.

Danièle scrambled into the fissure after
Katja, and I was about to go next when I noticed a light down the
hallway. It was approaching fast.

Rob saw it too. “Hurry the fuck up!” He
shoved me forward. “Motherfucker, go!”

I ducked into the hole and scrambled ahead.
My hands and knees slapped the stone ground, my back scraped the
ceiling, my shoulders bounced off the rough walls, yet I didn’t
feel as if I was moving fast enough.

A wail erupted from behind us.

Rob cried out. Then: “Fucker’s got me! Won’t
let go!”

“Kick him!” I shouted.

He crashed into my backside. “Go!”

I clambered onward.

Danièle tumbled out of the hole ahead of me.
I flopped out behind her, somersaulting onto the ground, then
whirling around to help Rob, my mind racing, thinking we were going
to have to make our stand here, they would be bottlenecked, they
couldn’t overwhelm us, we’d take them out one by one—

“Fucker!” Rob yelled. He was on his back,
kicking at whoever was behind him. “Let…me…go!”

I stuck my upper body into the shaft,
grabbed Rob under the arms, pulled.

“Ow!” Shock, then squally, soprano anguish.
“
Owwwww!
”

For a moment I thought I’d caused the pain
and let go of Rob. He flailed like a skewered fish. I couldn’t
fathom what was wrong until I saw that his legs were on fire. A
moment later the flames leapt to his T-shirt, the stench of burning
pitch joined by burning flesh.

Screaming, Rob seemed to be attempting to
brush the flames off him. I tried grabbing him again, but he was
thrashing too violently.

Finally one of his arms snapped past his
head. I snatched it—his skin was hot and mushy; raw meat, I thought
darkly—and yanked him as hard as I could. He came out of the shaft
all too easily, and for a horrible second I was convinced I’d torn
free his arm from the socket.

That wasn’t the case, of course; he’d simply
been released by whoever had been holding him.

I tripped and landed on my ass. Rob hit the
ground next to me. He immediately began rolling back and forth. It
was a futile action. He’d already become one big ball of fire. His
face and neck and arms were pink and blistered and melting in
places. His screams had stopped as well. I ceased thinking of how
to save him and hoped he would die quickly.

A gleeful shriek pulled my eyes from Rob
back to the hole. Through the reddish glow of fire and smoke I
glimpsed Hanns. His was squirming out of the shaft like some
ghastly gremlin, torch in one hand, bone-weapon in the other.

I shot to my feet just as Hanns extracted
himself fully. I charged the bastard. He jabbed the torch toward my
face. I batted it away with my arm, but I didn’t see the bone that
followed. It smashed my right knee. The pain was furious, though I
didn’t go down; he could have broken both my legs and I wouldn’t
have gone down right then. Instead I collided into him, bowling him
into the wall. My hands locked around his corded neck. I heaved him
off his feet with adrenaline-fuelled strength, pivoted, and ran him
across the small room into the adjacent wall.