World's Scariest Places: Volume One (Suspense Horror Thriller & Mystery Novel): Occult & Supernatural Crime Series: Suicide Forest & The Catacombs

by Jeremy Bates

  “What’s wrong?” Zolan taunted. “You’re not thinking of running away like a cowardly piece of shit, are you?”

  “I’m going for help,” I said, as much for his benefit as Danièle’s. “I’m going to bring the police back here.”

  “You never find your way out.”

  “If I come down, you’ll kill me.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll kill Danièle. If you do, if you act like a man, I’ll let you live. It is your choice.”

  I winced at those words.

  My choice.

  “You’ll let me live?” I said skeptically.

  “We’ll work out an arrangement.”

  “He is lying, Will!” Danièle yelled.

  I knew she was right. Zolan would kill me immediately. But was he also lying about killing her, or was that an empty threat? I believed it was the latter. He was a man, and Danièle was a beautiful young woman. Why would he kill her when he could keep her as a concubine, albeit an unwilling one, with no risk of prosecution? And while that might be a horrible fate for Danièle, at least it wouldn’t be death.

  I tensed in anticipation of what I was about to do. It was despicable, but this wasn’t a movie. I wasn’t some heroic protagonist. I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for someone I’d met only a handful of times. This was real life, I didn’t have a deus ex machina to bail my ass out, and I had to make a rational, calculated decision. One, I go down and get killed, and Danièle gets whatever she gets. Or two, I flee, Danièle still gets whatever she gets, but I potentially escape and bring back help. Really, option two was the best choice for both of us.

  I climbed the ladder

  Chapter 70

  DANIÈLE

  Danièle couldn’t believe Will was leaving her! She didn’t know what she expected him to do instead. If he came down, Zolan would kill him. Still, it was impossible to remain objective. She was overrun with emotions. Resentment. Injustice. Desperation.

  He’s leaving me behind.

  Chapter 71

  KATJA

  Go, Will, Go! Katja urged silently. She knew her father was lying again. He wasn’t going to work out an arrangement. He was going to kill Will just as Hanns killed Rob. And she didn’t want that. Will was her friend.

  She and Danièle would be in big trouble, they’d probably get locked up in the Dungeon for a while, but her father would eventually forgive them, and things would go back to normal—only better though, because she would finally have someone other than her father she could talk to, a big sister. Danièle could tell her all about the surface world, everything she needed to know to prepare her to live there, until Will returned with help to rescue them.

  Chapter 72

  As I scrambled up the ladder, Zolan shouted, “I’ll kill her! Come back! I’ll kill her right now! Come back!”

  I climbed.

  Moments later Danièle screamed: high-pitched, fevered, primitive in mindless agony.

  “You’re killing her!” Zolan said to me. “You are! You’re killing her!”

  I climbed.

  Finally the shaft opened to a lateral hallway. The ladder continued up, through another shaft in the ceiling. I was tempted to keep climbing. Up was good; it was the direction I wanted to go. Nevertheless, I couldn’t climb fast with the torch, and my pursuers were likely already gaining on me. Also, the shaft could lead to a dead end. I would be trapped.

  Danièle screamed again, shrill but plaintive this time. The sound shattered me to the soul.

  Then nothing.

  I leapt from the ladder and began to run.

  Chapter 73

  ZOLAN

  Zolan couldn’t believe Katja had turned against him. He had thought Will and Rob must have coerced her to free them, to help them find Danièle and escape. But there she had been, climbing the ladder of her own freewill. He saw it with his very eyes. The treachery had been heartbreaking to witness.

  He might not be her biological father—that would be Hanns, or had been Hanns—but he had raised her nearly since birth, and for all intents and purposes, she was his daughter.

  She had been somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four months old when Zolan found his way here in 2000. Still, it had not been in time to save her from his father, who had begun performing the mutilations on all infants at as young an age as possible. Over the years it became less a deterrent to escape, he believed, and more a ritual to mark their inclusion into the community.

  Zolan had been disgusted by these defacements, the general lack of hygiene and fetid living conditions, and his intention had been to kill everyone swiftly to free them from their miserable existence. Nevertheless, while he was researching lethal toxins and working up the courage to carry the poisoning out—mass murder was not something you undertook lightly, even if you had the best of intentions—Katja’s innocence endeared her to him. Unlike the others, she was still a baby, not yet corrupted by the limitations of her environment and the primitive behavior of her family, and after exhaustive soul-searching he decided it wasn’t his place to be her judge, jury, and executioner.

  So Zolan left the lot of them to fare for themselves and vowed never to return. His resolve, however, lasted only two weeks. He was unable to stop thinking about Katja. He longed to hold her again, to look into her eyes, to have her fall asleep on his chest, and so he went back, time and time again. Each trip was supposed to be the last, a short visit to make sure Katja was doing okay. But after a few months of this he had fallen in love with her the way a father falls in love with his daughter. He was burping her, changing her, playing with her, watching her…and that he could do for hours on end…simply watch her. When she spoke her first word—“Papa”—he was thrilled. When she took her first step, he was ecstatic.

  She became his savior and his curse. His savior because she taught him about fatherhood and responsibility and unconditional love—none of which he had experienced, or cared to experience, before in his life. Yet also his curse because she bound him to her unholy existence underground. He could not take her with him to the surface. Her pitiful appearance aside, there would be too many questions, too much explaining to do. So whenever he left for a fuck, or to pick up supplies, he made sure the only person allowed near her was her biological mother, Romy, and he set up a video camera and told Romy he was watching her every minute and played back recorded footage as proof.

  When Katja turned three or so, Zolan began home-schooling her with songs and games before graduating to more formal lessons. And if his first mistake had been not to poison her when she was an infant, his second mistake had been to educate and civilize her. Because had he left her to grow up like her parents and aunts and uncles, had he left her to evolve into a savage animal (and despite what he’d told Danièle about his kin, they were little more than base animals, there was no doubt about that), then her innocence would have faded, he would have been able to distance himself from her, disown her, return to his old life.

  But enlighten her he did, and like any enlightened child, she became curious about everything—but mostly about the aboveground world she’d come to know in her storybooks, the world that was so different than her own. He told her the same explanation his father had told him: Paris was destroyed in World War Two and the survivors had fled underground. Yet every question she asked forced him to build upon this simple premise until God forbid he could almost believe the elaborate tale himself.

  He got lucky with her books. Originally he chose them carefully, only bringing her those published pre-1945 so they wouldn’t reference modern history. Then one evening he had been reading Swiss Family Robinson to her and viewed the publication page. The novel was first published in 1812, but of course he didn’t have a first edition, and the abridged reprint was dated 1992. It was a careless oversight, but no harm was done, and he removed all the publication pages from all her books before she became any the wiser.

  Since then there had been a few other slipups, and he had begun to fear Katja was getting suspicious of her
world paradigm. He had always known she would, and she would leave him, just as he had left his father, yet he had believed—wrongly, it turned out—that he still had a few years left with her.

  Zolan climbed the final rungs of the ladder and poked his head into the lateral hallway. He aimed the beam of his flashlight at the chalky ground and spotted wet footprints disappearing into the dark.

  Alighting from the ladder, Zolan grimaced in pain. He figured Danièle might have broken one or two of his ribs with that desk stunt of hers. But it didn’t matter. He could still move. And he had business to conclude.

  He stared into the blackness in the direction Will had gone. His panic and urgency had subsided; there was no longer any need for haste. Although this section of tunnels spread for several kilometers, they were linear and led nowhere. If Will continued straight ahead, he would come to an impassable jumble of rocks five hundred meters onward. Likewise, if he turned right at the first and only branching passageway he would eventually come to another jumble of rocks. Both routes had once connected to the catacombs at large, but his father had sealed off each, to secure the perimeter of his domain against potential backdoor intruders.

  Now only three entrances/exits existed that Zolan knew of, and they were all nearly impossible to uncover. In fact, since his arrival, he could count on one hand the number of intrusions there had been. The first was in 2004 when a lone cataphile stumbled straight into the Great Hall. Zolan was woken by the ensuing commotion, and by the time he arrived on scene the cataphile lay on the floor, motionless, one of the silver candleabras on the ground next to him in a spreading pool of blood. Hanns had been dancing and hollering like a lunatic under a full moon. However, the cataphile—a young Frenchman named Michel, according to his driver’s license—wasn’t dead, so Zolan chained him up in the Dungeon until he decided what to do with him. It was a pointless measure, as Michel didn’t regain consciousness. Unwilling to nurse a vegetable, Zolan slit his throat and he and Hanns disposed of the remains in a distant chamber.

  The second intrusion came a year later. Hanns and Jörg discovered two Frenchmen sleeping in the statue room above one of the many mass graves that littered this section of the catacombs. It wasn’t a coincidence. Hanns and Jörg and sometimes Karl had taken to patrolling the deep tunnels and galleries, searching for interlopers. On this occasion it was the three of them, and they overpowered the two men (who had put up a fair fight, breaking one of Hanns’ arms). They brought them back to the Dungeon, the way a cat sometimes brings the prey it catches to its master as an offering. Zolan would have preferred not to kill the men; they had professed to be husbands and fathers. But what else was he to do? He couldn’t let them go. So he and Hanns dispatched of them as they had Michel.

  The third breach in the security, if that was what these intrusions could be called, had been in 2008. Hanns and Karl crossed paths with an attractive couple, killed the female by accident, and brought the male to the Dungeon. Zolan was on the surface in one of the red light districts, and in his absence Hanns organized his first blood match. He won handily, and little remained of the cataphile when Zolan returned. Katja had been seven then, old enough to wonder about who the visitor was, and Zolan ordered her never to talk to any such people if they showed up in the future, because they were dangerous and would try to fill her head with lies.

  Then there was the Australian woman named Tami from Perth. Hanns claimed he didn’t touch her. She simply dropped dead when he cornered her. There had been no marks on her corpse, and Zolan supposed she’d suffered a massive heart attack.

  Zolan hadn’t known about any damn video camera then. If I had, he would have retrieved it—and he likely wouldn’t have been in the mess he was in now.

  Jörg emerged from the shaft, stormy-eyed and excited. With Hanns dead it seemed he had usurped the position of alpha male. Karl came next, then Lorenz, Erich, Leo, Franz, and finally Odo, the slowest and stupidest of the bunch, but as resilient as a pit fighter.

  They milled about, shoving each other, making the noises they made, brimming with manic energy.

  Pointing first to the wet footprints, then down the tunnel, Zolan shouted, “Geh! Geh! Geh!”

  They took off like a pack of wild dogs on the hunt.

  Chapter 74

  They were dead. All of them. Pascal, Rob, and now Danièle—dead.

  I tried not to think about this as I fled down the crumbling and rock-strewn hallway. I kept the torch ahead of me and above my head so the smoke didn’t waft back into my face. The flames bounced shadows off the stone walls and filled the air with a sickening tar-like stench. The only sound was my labored breathing and my feet splashing through the puddles that dotted the chalky gray ground.

  A passageway opened to my left, a gaping mouth leading away into blackness. I veered into it, hoping to zigzag ever farther through the underground labyrinth, praying it didn’t lead to a dead end. If it did, I would be trapped. My pursuers would catch me. Smash my skull into bits like they did to Pascal. Set me on fire like they did to Rob. I couldn’t fathom what they did to Danièle, but judging by her screams, I suspect she got it the worse.

  I wanted desperately to believe that this wasn’t the case, that Danièle wasn’t dead, and for a moment I allowed my imagination to run wild with fanciful speculation, because I hadn’t actually seen her die…

  No—I heard her. She was gone, she had to be, and I was next, as doomed as the rest of them.

  Still, I kept running, I kept putting one foot in front of the other. I was too afraid to accept the inevitable and give up and die, too hardwired to survive, even though there was nothing left to live for.

  I opened my mouth and yelled. I hated the sound of it. It was shrill and broken and full of pain, what might come from a mongrel dog beaten to within inches of its life. My disgust with myself lasted only a moment, however, because seconds after the wretched moan tapered off, a riot of savage cries erupted from behind me.

  So goddamn close!

  The cries rose in a crescendo of frenzied bloodlust. Terror blasted through me, but I couldn’t make my legs move any faster. They were cement blocks. I felt as if I were running in the opposite direction on a moving walkway.

  Suddenly the ceiling and walls disappeared and a vast darkness opened around me. While looking up to gauge the size of this new chamber, I stumbled over unreliable ground, lost my footing, and fell upon a mound of rubble. The torch flew from my grip and landed a few feet ahead of me. I stared at the polished rocks illuminated in the smoking flame until I realized they were not rocks but bones. Human bones. Skulls and femurs and tibias and others. I grabbed the torch by the handle and thrust it into the air.

  Bones and bones and more bones, for as far as I could see.

  I shoved myself to my feet, took several lurching steps, as if wading through molasses, then sagged to my knees. A centuries-old femur splintered beneath my weight with a snap like deadwood.

  The sounds of my pursuers grew louder. I refused to look back over my shoulder. Instead I clutched at the bones before me, my fingers curling around their brittle lengths, pulling myself forward, my legs no longer responding at all.

  Finally, beyond exhaustion, I flopped onto my chest and lay panting among the thousands of skeletonized remains as a sleepy darkness rose inside me.

  They don’t smell, I thought, bones don’t smell, funny, always imagined they would.

  And then, absently, in a back-of-the-mind way: I don’t want to die like this, not here, not like this, not in a mass grave, I don’t want to be just another pile of nameless bones, forgotten by the world.

  That video camera.

  That fucking video camera.

  Chapter 75

  ZOLAN

  Jörg and Karl and the others were waiting impatiently for Zolan at the entrance to the mass grave. Will had dried sufficiently and no longer left any footprints for them to follow, especially not over the pell-mell bone repository. They didn’t know there was only one direction in which t
o proceed, because he had never allowed them to venture to this side of the pool before.

  Zolan passed through their ranks and entered the vast chamber first, sweeping the flashlight from wall to wall.

  Empty.

  He started forward slowly.

  Chapter 76

  I lay perfectly still and listened. I heard my pursuers not far away. They sounded like feral animals. But what were they doing? Why had they stopped?

  Suddenly a white light cut through the darkness. Footsteps followed, bones splintering. I held my breath.

  Were they coming toward me?

  Had they noticed where I’d dug?

  I was a sitting duck.

  I tensed, waited for one of them to cry out.

  None did.

  The footsteps passed close by, one set after the other, continuing in succession for what seemed like far too long. But then they began to fade.

  I waited a full minute before shoving the layer of bones off me. I sat up and used Danièle’s matches to relight the torch I had snuffed out. The room was deserted. I tried to stand, toppled over, tried again, and succeeded. I lurched through the bone field back the way I had come. As soon as I reached solid ground I stumbled on legs that felt like slats of splintery wood. I pinballed from wall to wall, believing the next step would be my last, or the one after that.

  Abruptly a childhood memory appeared in my mind’s eye. I was running along one of my favorite bike trails, carrying Maxine on my back, ducking overhanging branches, jumping roots, skipping over tire ruts.

  I often biked there with my best friend, Stevie, but that Sunday afternoon in mid-August of 1997 Stevie bailed on me, so I invited Max along for the first time. Although the trail was in Ravenna Park, in the middle of U-District, it felt like it was in a sprawling, isolated forest, for conifers and old-growth trees towered above us, the canopy blocking out the sky, creating a premature twilight. With me leading the way, we weaved down into the ravine, spraying through foot-deep brooks and crunching over rotting deadfall. Some of the hills were a pain, and I was always puffing for breath when I reached the top. But, surprisingly, Max never walked her bike up them; she likely wanted to prove to me she could keep up, so she would be allowed to come back.