The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (4 page)

Still, I kept searching
and got sucked into learning about the catacombs’ long and storied
history. They began as limestone
quarry
tunnels dating back two thousand years to the first Roman settlers.
They were greatly expanded during the cathedral boom of the late
Middle Ages,
honeycombing beneath the arrondissements of the
Left Bank and the suburbs south of the city proper.
I
n the late eighteenth century, long after the
quarrying had stopped, Paris had become a crowded city. It had a
burgeoning population clamoring for housing and burial plots.
Churches maintained their own graveyards, but they were overcrowded
and unsanitary. To free up valuable real estate, and to get rid of
the health hazards created by corpses buried ten deep and literally
bursting through the walls of people’s cellars, officials ordered
the graves dug up—all of them. Over the next several decades the
skeletonized remains of six million dead were dumped into the
abandoned quarries, forming the largest mass grave on earth.

For safety reasons access
to them had been banned since the fifties, most of the entranceways
closed off, though this hasn’t deterred people such as Danièle and
Pascal. They called themselves
cataphiles, a colloquial name
for underground urban explorers—

My cell phone rang
suddenly, breaking the studious trance I had fallen
under.

Danièle?

I took my phone from my
pocket and glanced at the display. A blocked number. I pressed
Talk.

“Hello?”

No reply.

“Hello?”

“Will?”

My heart skipped.
“Bridgette?”

“Will, can you hear
me?”

“Yeah, can you hear
me?”

“I can now. I guess we
were lagging.” A pause. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” I said,
getting to my feet for some reason. A warm breeze came through the
window, smelling of freshly cut grass. The landlord was now mowing
the patch of green lawn with a push mower. I glanced at my
wristwatch. It was 7:10 p.m. “What time is it there?” I
asked.

“I’m on my lunch
break.”

Bridgette and I had
emailed a few times since I left New York, and I had given her my
new phone number, but this was the first time she had called
it.

I opened my mouth to
reply, but I realized I had nothing to say. I felt how you do with
a stranger in an elevator.
It jarred me how Bridgette and I
could go from being so close, to sharing everything together, to
becoming less than friends. And that’s what we were, wasn’t it?
Less than friends. Because friends, at least, had things to say to
one another.

“Are you enjoying Paris?” she asked.

“It’s a nice city.”

“It’s been…how long now?”

“Nearly three months.”

“And the guide?”

“It’s coming. It’ll probably take me another
couple months.”

“And then?”

“I think they want me to revise the
Barcelona one.”

“Spain! Very nice. I’m glad you’re
happy.”

I wanted to tell her I wasn’t sure I was
happy, but I didn’t.

“How about you?” I said. “Everything
okay?”

“There’s something I need to tell you,
Will.” She hesitated. It might have only been for a second or two,
but it felt to me like an eternity. In that moment I was positive
she was going to tell me she wanted to get back together. She said,
“I met someone.”

A hot flash zinged through me. I continued
to stare out the window, though I was no longer seeing the
courtyard. Everything but Bridgette’s voice had become ancillary.
“You mean a boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

I still didn’t move. I was numb. Emotionally
numb.

Why the fuck was she telling me this?

“A lawyer?” I asked, surprised at the
normalcy in my voice.

“He’s a police officer.”

“A cop?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. Well—”

“Will, we just got engaged.”

I’d always thought it was melodrama when
people tell you to sit before hearing certain good or bad news. Now
I believed it to be a justifiable forewarning, because my knees
literally gave out and I collapsed into the armchair.

Bridgette said, “I didn’t want you to find
out on Facebook or whatever…”

“I don’t use Facebook.”

“You have an account.”

“How long have you known this guy for?”

“We met in March.”

“Two months? That’s it? And you’re
engaged?”

“We…I’m pregnant,” she said. “It wasn’t
planned,” she added quickly. “But…then…I started feeling sick in
the mornings, and I took a test. And…and we decided it would be
best to get married.”

I was listening but not listening. My
thoughts were a thousand miles away, fast-forwarding through the
years I had spent with her. How good she had been to me. How she
had stuck by me when nobody else had. How much I had loved her. How
I would have done anything for her.

How could she be engaged with someone else
and pregnant with his child?

She was mine. She had always been mine.

I was back on my feet. Anger churned within
me, burning me up from the inside out. My jaw was clenched, my free
fist pumped open, closed, open, closed. I wanted to throw the phone
as far as I could out the window.

Instead I shut my eyes and tilted my head
back. I took a silent breath. What was my problem? Fuck, I had
slept with Danièle just the other night. Bridgette had every right
to do the same with someone else. She hadn’t planned on getting
pregnant. It happened. So what did I want her to do? Have an
abortion? Stop seeing the guy? What would any of that accomplish?
We were done.

But we weren’t. I was going to come back. We
were going to start over…

“Will?” Bridgette said. “Are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I know how all this must sound…”

“I understand. And…congratulations. I’m
happy for you.”

She didn’t say anything. The line hissed
with long-distance static interference.

Then: “Thank you, Will.” Her voice was
croaky, and I thought she might be crying. “That means a lot to
me.”

A chorus of voices sounded in the
background.

“I should go,” she said.

I didn’t protest. There was nothing more to
say.

“Will?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you. I always will.”

“I love you too.”

I didn’t hang up immediately. Apparently she
didn’t either, because the line noise continued for another five
seconds.

Then silence, perfect silence.

She was gone.

Sometime later, as the late dusk settled and
shadows lengthened outside my window, I started packing a bag.

The name of the pub Danièle had written on
the napkin earlier was La Cave. The façade was nondescript, and I
walked straight past the wooden door and small neon sign on my
first pass down rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud.

The interior had all the intimacy, intrigue,
and secrecy of a speakeasy. Red cone lamps suspended from the
barrel-vault ceiling cast butterscotch light over the button-tufted
sofas and armchairs and low wood tables. The bar was tucked into
one corner. Behind the fumed-oak counter a chalkboard listed a
variety of cocktails. In another corner sat a white claw-footed
bathtub, filled with ice and green bottles of what looked to be
home-made beer. Good-natured old-timers schmoozed next to crowds of
younger hipsters, voices and laughter raised in a cacophony of
merriment.

I didn’t see Danièle anywhere and checked my
wristwatch, a six hundred dollar Hamilton that Bridgette had
splurged on for my twenty-fourth birthday.

It was a quarter past eight. Danièle had
said she would be here between eight and nine. Had she changed her
mind and left early?

“Excuse me?” I said to a waiter wiping down
a recently vacated tabled. He was a clean-cut guy with a
back-in-fashion mullet, rolled-up cuffs, and a black apron. “Have
you seen a woman, short black hair, a lot of mascara?”

“Why don’t you use your eyes and look for
her yourself?” he snapped, turning away from me.

I stared at his back, pissed off, but
letting it go. People say the French are rude, but I’ve found that
stereotype mostly applied to the service class, who could act as
hoity-toity as pop stars; they certainly had no regard for the
Anglo-Saxon maxim, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”

I continued searching for Danièle, and after
five minutes without success, I was about to give up and leave when
I spotted a staircase that descended to a basement level. I went
down a set of steep, narrow steps that emerged in an expansive area
styled similar to the first floor, only the walls were brick
instead of paneled wood and there were no windows. I immediately
spotted Danièle and Pascal and a third guy off by themselves, at a
corner table.

“Will!” Danièle said, springing to her feet
when she saw me approach. We did the air kiss thing, then she
turned to the others to make introductions. “You remember
Pascal?”

“Hey,” I said, sticking out my hand.

Pascal shook, but didn’t stand. He was a
handsome guy, dark-complected, with thick eyebrows, brooding eyes,
and long brown hair. He had gone chic-bum with a wrinkled linen
T-shirt and a tweed jacket with brown elbow patches. The tee was
wide-necked and showed off too much hairless chest which a loosely
knotted scarf failed to conceal. It was the kind of overthought
getup you saw aged rock stars don to prove they still had their
thumb on the pulse of the times. He was wearing the same black
wool-knit cap he had on at Danièle’s birthday party.

“And Will,” Danièle said, “this is
Robert.”

“Just Rob, boss,” Rob told me, standing and
shaking. He was a short bulldog-looking guy whose body was not only
compact but tightly muscular, like a college wrestler’s. He had a
spray of freckles that hadn’t faded over time as mothers always
promised would, lively gray eyes, and a balding crown shaved close
to the scalp. I guessed he was the oldest in our motley crew, maybe
thirty.

“You’re American?” I said. Pascal’s silent
greeting had made me feel unwelcome, and it was nice to know I
wasn’t the only outsider.

“Nah, Canadian, but what the fuck,
right?”

“We have just ordered,” Danièle told me.
“But do not worry. There is enough for you.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“You should still eat. You will not get
another chance until morning.”

“I brought some snacks.”

“Okay, Will, do not eat, but sit down.”

I took a seat beside her, across from Rob
and Pascal.

“So Danny says you’re a travel writer or
something?” Rob said. He had a husky voice, as if his throat were
corroded with rust. “How you like the frogs?”

“Why do you say that, Rob?” Danièle
demanded. “We are not frogs. Where did that come from? I never
understand that.”

“You eat frog legs, don’t you?”

“Maybe I should call you ‘rosbif?’”

“Ross what?”

“Roast beef?” I offered.

Danièle nodded. “Yes, because you Canadians
and Americans eat so much red meat—and you are all so fat, like
cows.”

This cracked Rob up. He jumped to his feet
and crouched-walked around the table, carrying in his hands an
invisible belly, which he began thrusting at Danièle from behind.
The action resembled a stubby stripper grinding a pole.

“Get away!” Danièle said, swatting him. “You
are so gross. Stop it!”

Still laughing, Rob sat back down. “Fucking
French,” he said. “Can’t take a joke. Got assholes so tight they
squeak when they fart.”

“Where’re you from?” I asked him.

“Quebec City.”

“The French-speaking part?”

“Quebec’s a province, bro. Quebec City’s a
small city in that province. But, yeah, the French-speaking part.
Moved to Toronto when I was ten. Actually, moved to Mississauga.
But nobody knows where the fuck that is, so I just say
Toronto.”

“What are you doing over here?”

“I’m a translator, sort of. I do the
subtitles for movies.”

“Hollywood stuff?”

“Other way around. I translate French films
to English. You’ve probably never seen any of the ones I’ve
done—because French films suck.”

“They do not suck,” Danièle said.

“If you like pretentious art house
crap.”

“Pascal, why did you invite Rosbif? He is so
annoying sometimes. Did you forget we have to spend nearly ten
hours with him?”

Pascal said something in French, paused,
then added something more, making a curlicue gesture with his hand.
Rob nodded and shot back a reply.

“Do you speak English?” I asked Pascal.

He leveled his gaze at me. “Do you speak
French?”