by Jeremy Bates
“Ten minutes.”
I frowned. Did she have no concept of time either? Or was it really equidistance to each location?
I drew a large circle in the dirt with the hammer claw and punched a dot in the middle of it. “If we are here, Katja, and that door there leads this way”—I pointed to the door a few yards away and marked a corresponding arrow in the dirt—“where are your father’s quarters?”
She cocked her head to the side. “They would be…here.” She pointed to a spot that would fall into the two to three o’clock wedge on a clock.
“And where’s the exit?”
She pointed at another spot in the eight to nine o’clock wedge.
“Are there any other exits?”
“No, that’s the only way in or out, and I’ve searched every tunnel.”
“Can you take us to where our friend is being held without running into anybody else?”
“I think so,” Katja said. “Most of my aunts and uncles stay in the Great Hall. They don’t have their own rooms like I do. But we still need to be careful. They wander when they want to.”
“We’ll have to take our chances.” I turned to Rob. “Ready?”
He looked pale but resolved. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter 57
DANIÈLE
Zolan stopped massaging Danièle’s shoulders and slid his hands down over her chest. She clenched her jaw but didn’t protest. He cupped her breasts and drew his thumbs over her nipples in small circles. She wanted to leap to her feet and run, but she forced herself to remain seated and relaxed.
He slid his hands lower over her abdomen, to the top of her groin. He pulled up her shirt. His hands touched her skin.
“You’re cold,” he said.
“A little,” she replied, allowing a hint of throatiness in her voice.
He dug his fingers beneath the waistband of her pants, played them left and right along the top of her panties, pushed them farther, lower, but his hands wouldn’t fit. He withdrew them, unfastened the button on her jeans.
“Stand up,” he told her.
Danièle did so, turning, pressing her rear against the front of his desk. She did nothing to mask the fear and vulnerability she felt—it’s what drove insecure sickos like Zolan; it fed their need for mastery, strength, authority. Marcel had been the same. He had wanted to control Danièle to assert his competency, and the more she resisted that control, the more she fought him, the more he enjoyed it.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” Zolan said, his eyes burning with desire. “I know what I’m doing. I’m good. You’ll enjoy it.”
A tear tripped down her cheek.
He brushed it away with his fingertip. “There’s no need for that. You’re going to like what I’ve got.”
When he looked down, to undo his pants, Danièle reached for the bottle of vodka on the desk behind her. She grabbed the neck in an upside down fist and swung it around like a baton. Zolan glanced up at the last second and leaned backward. The bottle smashed his jaw instead of his temple. Blood flew in a fine spray from his mouth. He stumbled away from her and dropped into the chair she had been seated in.
Danièle swung the bottle again. It smashed into pieces against his forearms, which he had raised to protect his face.
“Fucking bitch!” he spat.
She darted around to the other side of the desk, almost slipping on the limestone floor in her haste. She planted her hands against the front of the desk. Zolan was holding his hand over his mouth, to slow the flowing blood.
Danièle shoved the desk. It was not too large and moved easily on the smooth stone. Zolan tried to push himself out of the chair, out of the way, but the desk caught him in the gut, knocked him back into the seat, and drove him into the wall behind him. There was a loud crack, which she hoped were his ribs fracturing. His breath burst from his mouth in a twisted gasp. He slumped forward, pinned in place.
She ran.
Chapter 58
We had been moving for about five minutes, creeping from one passageway to the next, when Katja whispered, “Someone’s coming! We have to hide!” She turned and hurried back the way we’d come, Rob and I sticking right behind her. We ducked into one of the corridors we’d just passed, and she pinched out the flame of her candle.
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.”
Chapter 59
KATJA
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.
Chapter 60
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 trapp
ed.”
“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.
Chapter 61
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.
His head struck the stone with a brief, snappy sound, like billiard balls scattering on a good break. His body went limp. His disgusting mouth gaped open. His dark eyes dulled to sightless orbs. He was dead, but I wanted him more dead. I slammed his skull against the stone again and again and again.
Chapter 62
DANIÈLE
Danièle tried to save Rob. She tore off her shi
rt and beat it against his body. This did nothing to diminish the flames that consumed him, but she kept at it, not knowing what else to do. All the while she watched in horror as his skin went from blistered to pink to black. Worst were his eyes. They remained open the entire time, and she was sure he could see her doing nothing effective to help him. Then his rolling slowed and eventually stopped altogether. He came to a rest facedown. Thank God it was facedown. The flames continued to devour his body, but somehow they didn’t seem as terrible now that he had gone still.
While Danièle’s attention had been fixed on him, she was only partially aware of Will struggling with the zombie-man. Now she turned to them. They were across the room. Will held the thing around its neck like a ragdoll and was driving its head into the wall repeatedly.
She wobbled over to him and told him to stop, told him it was dead, and tried pulling him away from it. Finally he dropped the lifeless corpse to the ground and turned to look at her. His face was splattered with blood. A madness danced in his eyes and an aura of power radiated off him that she found both frightening and strangely desirable. He glared past her at Rob’s still burning body, then at the thing at his feet.
He raised his shoe and stomped on its broken skull.
Chapter 63
KATJA
This wasn’t what Katja wanted! This was making her sick! She didn’t know Will’s friend Rob well, and she’d never liked Hanns, but seeing them die, the way they died—it was never supposed to happen like this. She wished she could run back to her room and curl up on her bed and close her eyes and forget she had ever tried to help Will. But she couldn’t do that, so she remained in the corner and kept herself as small as possible and waited for what would happen next.
Chapter 64
No time, I thought helplessly as I stared at Rob’s burning body.
