Catacombs of Terror!

by Stanley Donwood

  Chapter 23

  Then You Will Remove Her Head

  They led me forward. Stonehenge stepped towards me. He was resting a three-foot wide wooden box on both forearms. It didn’t have a lid. My head was forced down to look inside the box. It was lined with black velvet. Inside was a big power saw made of some silvery metal. It was very clean. The teeth on the circular blade looked very sharp. There was a wooden handle. A broad, curved trigger.

  Stonehenge, still holding the box, turned and walked slowly towards the altar. The others were chanting and humming. I was made to follow him. He stopped right in front of Karen, whose eyes were staring wildly at me, at Stonehenge, and at the box. Whimpering sounds were escaping from behind her gag. There was a small set of steps rising to the foot of the altar. I was pushed up them. And I stood there, shaking, looking down at Karen. The bastards around me were chanting, “Oubliette . . . oubliette . . . oubliette . . . .” Someone pushed my head to one side. I looked down, past Karen, past the altar, down at the floor. I could see the side of a circular hole underneath the altar. Someone directed the beam of a light down the hole. I could see . . . something down there . . . bones . . . limbs . . . I tore my eyes away.

  “Oubliette . . . oubliette . . . oubliette . . . by fate ordained . . . .”

  I looked wildly around the chamber. All the hundreds of CCTV monitors were frozen, showing my face. The vats bubbled horribly in the green light that poured up through them. And AFFA stood in a circle around me and Karen and Stonehenge. Filthy water dripped like rain.

  “Oubliette . . . oubliette . . . memvola sintrompo . . . memvola sintrompo . . . .”

  Stonehenge turned to Barry, who had walked forward from the circle. Barry lifted the saw from the box. Stonehenge joined the circle. Barry stood at the head of the altar, staring at me with blank, dead eyes. Then the chanting stopped. Barry spoke in a low monotone.

  “First you will remove her right arm. Then you will remove her left arm. Then you will remove her left leg. Then you will remove her right leg. Then you will make a deep incision from her stomach to her chest. And then . . . then you will remove her head.”

  The chanting and the humming began again. Karen’s eyes were wide with terror. This was worse than any hell I could imagine. I felt paralysed. The chanting filled my mind. The vats bubbled intensely. Barry moved closer, looking directly into my eyes, and held the saw out to me.

  To my utmost horror, my arms lifted involuntarily to take it from him. I looked crazily from one arm to the other. These were my arms! I tried to resist, but somewhere the connections between my mind and my muscles had been broken. My body had been hijacked. My arms had defected. They were nothing to do with me, they had become the arms of a puppet—AFFA’s puppet!

  Screaming with anguish, in a fury against my rebellious body, I raised the saw above my head, and my fingers must have gently squeezed the trigger. The saw purred, then roared into horrible life above me. I stared down at Karen, shaking my head from side to side. No! This couldn’t be happening!

  The chanting grew louder and louder, and I could feel dozens of eyes burning into me. The clean, sweet smell of chloroethylene was palpable. The vibration of the saw ran down my arms and throbbed in my head. The bastards were fucking with my mind! They were controlling my body! They were going to make me saw Karen apart while she was alive, while she could see and feel what was happening to her! First her arms, then her legs, then . . . plunging the roaring, whirling blade into her torso! Then severing her head! No! No one could do this! It was inhuman, barbaric!

  And now my arms were lowering the saw . . . . I could feel the terrible weight of it. The chanting was deafening. My arms were in front of me, both hands squeezing the trigger, holding the gleaming power saw at arm’s length, the sharp teeth of the saw invisible as the blade spun at high speed. Karen was struggling madly against the straps, her head threshing from side to side, a high shrieking noise coming from her gagged mouth.

  With a frantic effort I closed my mind to the chanting, to the screaming saw, to everything. I focused on Barry, on Stonehenge, on Kafka—on AFFA. If AFFA meant nothing, AFFA were nothing! I could beat them.

  And then, with an effort of will I didn’t know I had, I did it—I broke their control over me.

  My muscles grinding, tearing, I held the spinning blade inches from Karen’s right shoulder. AFFA were oblivious; chanting in unison, unseeing—and I moved the saw—I sliced the whirling sawblade through the straps that bound Karen to the altar. I’d done it in an instant. Then I leapt down and held the power saw at the bastards nearest to me, waving it slowly from side to side. Barry was looking around at the others, a crazy expression on his fat face. Stonehenge was looking back at him, shaking his head furiously, his eyes wide.

  “Get the fuck away! Get back!” I screamed. All of my anger was back. It was alive, and it churned into a desire for pure violence. I was getting the hell out of there, and I was going to take Karen with me. Without looking at her, I grabbed her arm and pulled her down from the altar. She tore the gag from her mouth. I held her behind me, scanning the chamber for Kafka. Then I saw him.

  “Kafka! Bastard!” Still holding Karen, I edged towards him. He cowered back.

  “Come here!” I bellowed over the howl of the saw. “Throw me my gun, you lying bastard! Now!”

  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed one of the Murnaus and some of the others moving towards me. I was a metre away from Kafka, the blade aimed at his chest. He threw his gun. Karen snatched it up from the flagstones. She pointed it at a few of them while I turned around and made a lunge at the ones trying to sneak up behind us. I got Murnau’s hand with the saw. One of the versions of Murnau, anyway. Some fingers came away. There was some blood. Some screaming. I didn’t care. Anyway, the slicing seemed to make the rest of the fuckers a little more cautious.

  I waved the saw around some more. Karen swung the gun round the chamber, holding it in both hands. And then she pulled the trigger. And a version of Robinson went down onto his knees, howling with pain. I didn’t look too carefully, but there was blood almost instantly. A belly shot. That particular version of Robinson wouldn’t be much use any more. Shooting the bastard seemed to release something in Karen. She started firing all over the place. She got a little crazy, I guess. She hit a few of them, and she was screaming as loud as the AFFA guys who crumpled to the the floor. Louder, maybe. As far as I could tell, she got the other Robinson, the Murnau who still had all his fingers, and a couple of bastards I didn’t know. I got the impression she was looking for Barry. But he was gone.

  Pretty soon the rest of them were gone, too, running off along one of the tunnels. Karen started following them, still shooting. I yelled at her to stop. And I realised my finger was still curled tight on the trigger of the power saw, so I let go. Karen stopped shooting down the tunnel and turned towards me.

  There was silence, except for the quiet bubbling of the chloroethylene vats. And a subdued whimpering sound, which I couldn’t pinpoint at first. It was coming from behind my lips. Luckily they were clamped shut pretty tight.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” asked Karen. I looked at her in some kind of shock. She was pointing the fucking gun at me.

  “Wait,” I said. “Please don’t point that thing at me.” I was still holding the saw, so I dropped it to the floor. She nodded upwards. I understood. So I raised my hands, very slowly.

  “So?” she asked again. “What are you doing here, Martin? Is this another trick?”

  “It’s not a trick,” I replied as calmly as I could. I tried to keep my voice steady. I don’t remember how successful I was. “The bastards suckered me. I thought . . . ah, hell. I thought a lot of crap. Stonehenge and Kafka . . . .”

  Karen was looking blankly at me, a little crease between her eyebrows. She was as beautiful as ever. If a little distraught.

  “Who is Stonehenge and who’s Kafka? Come on. Convince me that this isn’t a trick and I won’t shoot you. I don’t want t
o shoot you. But I might have to.”

  I sighed. My hands were starting to go a little numb. “I was set up. I was deceived. They told me a lot of lies. They told me I was going to be arrested for murder. They enticed me down here—I didn’t know what was going on, I thought—well, never mind what I thought. It’d take too long to explain. But honestly. This is not a trick. Can I put my hands down now?”

  She thought about it for a second. Then she nodded. She lowered the gun. But it was still aiming roughly in my direction, I noticed.

  “I don’t know what’s true any more,” she groaned. “They told me so many crazy things . . . Barry . . . he told me that they’d used my eggs, my eggs, from my ovaries, for God’s sake, to make clones . . . . They were controlling my mind, or something . . . it was ludicrous, but . . . .” She tailed off, still looking at me.

  “Can I trust you?”

  I nodded. “You can trust me. You might not find it easy, but it’s true. I’m the only fucker you can trust. And we’ve got to get the fuck out of here. But first . . . .”

  I picked the silver power saw up from the floor and walked over to the altar. Without looking down, I dropped the thing down into the oubliette. I turned back to Karen.

  “I don’t know about my mind, but those bastards were controlling my body. No idea how. But I came . . . close . . . to using that fucking saw on you. I’m so sorry.”

  “I thought that was the end. I thought you were with them, that you were one of them . . . I couldn’t believe it. When I saw you here, it was—the worst part.”

  I looked at her. She was still in her work clothes. But they were muddy now, and torn. I could see red weals on her wrists where she’d been strapped to the altar. I walked up to her and we embraced, but clumsily. It was—awkward.

  “We’ve got to get out of here . . . ” I muttered, breaking away. I couldn’t escape the thought that I had betrayed Karen. I had believed the lies that AFFA had told me. And I had put something inside the space between us. Something like broken glass. Or terrible thorns. Karen didn’t know what it was, or why it was there, but she could feel it, too. Something vital that had worked for both of us was broken, and I had no idea if it could be mended.

  “Do you know the way out?” she asked. I shook my head.

  “I have no idea. But I got in. So we . . . can get out.” I spoke with a confidence I didn’t feel. Karen passed me the gun.

  “You’d better take this, Martin,” she said. “I think I’ve used it enough for now. I probably wasted a lot of bullets.”

  I looked around the chamber and tried to remember which tunnel I’d been led in through. I was pretty sure I chose right. I wasn’t too bothered though. At least, we weren’t going to be heading down the one the surviving members of AFFA had escaped along. Right. For sure. I walked over to one of the corpses on the floor. I rolled it over with my foot, rummaged around, and found a flashlight in a pocket.

  “Come on,” I said. “I think this is the right one.” I passed the flashlight to Karen. I took a last glance around the chamber. There were five bodies twisted on the cold flagstones. Pity it wasn’t more.

  “Any idea how many of them there are?” asked Karen.

  “There were twenty-three. Minus five, now.” I pointed at the bodies on the bloodied flagstones. “Eighteen left. And two of us. Not very good odds,” I muttered.

  I wondered if I’d done the right thing by getting rid of the power saw. I guessed that I had. After all, I’d nearly butchered Karen with it. I never wanted to see it again. Anyway, I wasn’t about to clamber down into a fucking oubliette full of decomposed corpses to get it. I started thinking about what weapons AFFA might have at their disposal. But I stopped thinking about that pretty quickly. It wasn’t a cheerful line of thought.

  We didn’t talk much, back in the catacombs. We were listening. Listening for anything that wasn’t water dripping or our own feet on the flagstones. Or our own breathing. Our hearts beating. Some time passed. Then some more of it did the same. A rogue thought found its way into my head.

  “Do you know anything about the pigs?” I asked Karen quietly.

  “What pigs?”

  “Oh, um, nothing . . . .”

  Eighteen of AFFA left. Two of us. One gun. And flesh-eating pigs. I wished I’d searched all the bodies in the chamber. Located some more guns. Whatever. I wasn’t about to go back. Then I remembered something. I fished around in my pocket until I found something damp and papery. I pulled out Stonehenge’s map.

  “Hang on,” I said. “Shine the flashlight on this.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A map of these tunnels,” I said. “Probably no use. Probably designed to confuse. Probably wildly, deliberately inaccurate. But still—it’s a map.” I turned it around until I thought I had it the right way up.

  “Okay . . . ” I said slowly. I slid the gun into my pocket. I pointed at the map. “I think this is the chamber we just left. And I think that . . . this . . . is the chamber under Charlcombe, which is where I came in. It’s the only way out that I know. There was another one, but it’s got a very heavy coffin blocking it.”

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get to Charlcombe. Probably it’s about a mile and a half away. If we’re going in the right direction. And that’s a pretty big if. But look. If we keep going along here . . . have you noticed any side tunnels from this one, so far?”

  Karen shook her head, muttered, “No . . . .”

  “Okay then. We follow this tunnel until we get to a turning to the right. We take that. Then we take the first left that we come to. Then, then we go straight on until we come to the third right-hand turning. Then we come to a crossroads. We take the left. Then straight on to Charlcombe. Looks like a hell of a long way. So. Right, left, third right, left.”

  Karen nodded again. Then she sighed. A deep, long sigh.

  “And do you think we can make it?” Her voice was small. And doubtful.

  “We can make it,” I said. My voice sounded the same. Small, doubtful, coming from an exhausted human far below the surface of the earth, soaking wet, very cold. Very small. Very doubtful. “Let’s get a move on. Right, left, third right, left, up and out.”

  I took the gun out of my pocket. Put the map in. We carried on. Nothing happened. We walked quickly, sometimes jogged. We found a turning to the right. Took it. Took the next left. Nothing happened. I had a terrible feeling that we could be taking turnings in this dripping nightmare of a maze forever, map or no map.

  Maybe we were already dead. After all the horrors that had happened to us, this was maybe a reasonable conclusion. That we were going round and round, exhausted, maybe pursued, on and on for all eternity. In hell. Fuelled only by a glimmer of hope that we could escape. But in reality there was no chance. No chance of escape. By fate ordained . . . .

  I kept the feeling to myself. It was bad enough in my head. I didn’t want it getting out. Some more nothing happened. More turnings. I counted them. Fuck, it was a long way. It felt like we’d been walking for days. Weeks. And then we reached a third turning.

  “Everything’s been right, according to the map,” I said. My voice was a harsh croak. I cleared my throat. “We can’t be more than half a mile from Charlcombe. But something’s been bothering me.”

  Karen didn’t say anything. She left enough space to have asked me what the fuck was bothering me. So I told her.

  “I came down here with two of those AFFA fuckers. Stonehenge and Kafka. One of them—Kafka—was even an old acquaintance of mine. Bastard. Wish you’d killed him. Anyway, I thought they were kosher. But they know that the only way out I know is the one we’re headed for. Charlcombe. And I’m thinking that maybe, when we get there, they’ll be waiting for us.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Karen was staring at me, a yellowish glint in her eyes from the flashlight.

  I let a long breath out through my teeth.

  “Don’t know. Not a fucking idea. Kill as many of
them as we can?”

  “You . . . idiot! Why didn’t you say this before? Give me that map.”

  I leant back against the wet mud of the wall while Karen inspected the map with the flashlight. Fuck it, I’d done enough already. For the first time in a while I remembered that I wanted a cigarette very badly. And a drink. But neither of them were as important to me as getting out of this place. I guess that’s what being trapped in hell will do for you. Give you a sense of perspective. Put things in proportion. But I still had a good think about cigarettes.

  “These markings . . . ” said Karen after a few minutes had passed. Or a few hours. I didn’t know.

  “ . . . they look like they could be exits. Have a look.”

  I had a look. She was right. They could have been exits. They could have been anything else, too. Three dots in red could mean a lot of things. But I liked the idea that the dots marked places we could get out. There was one that seemed to be close to where we stood. If we were where we thought we were. Karen wanted to check it out. So did I. And that’s what we did.

  And it was a mistake.

  Chapter 24

  Rope

  Anything else would have been a mistake. Everything else would have been a mistake. We followed the map. There were a few turnings we took, and the tunnels got a little narrower. Darker. I’d got used to the occasional clouds of sulphurous fog, but even they seemed to be denser. And then we came to the place marked with the three dots on the map.

  It was a small round chamber, much smaller than the one under Charlcombe. But I remembered the size of that one being different each time I’d descended into it. What was that all about? More mind control? Or did the tunnels really change size and shape? Whatever. It wasn’t relevant.

  The chamber we’d come to was probably big enough for about five people. Very high ceiling, though. Too high to see. There were no other tunnels from it, just the one we’d entered from. It didn’t go anywhere. But there was a rope hanging down, slick and wet, running with water, suspended exactly in the centre of the circular chamber.