Read Online The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) by Jeremy Bates - Free Book Online

I was trying to figure out what that meant— wham . I
came to a standstill, dizzy, my ears ringing.
    “You okay, boss?” Rob said. He’d turned back
to look at me, his headlamp shining in my eyes.
    I took off the helmet and touched a fiery
spot high on my forehead. No blood, not yet. A tender bump
throbbed.
    “Will, what happened?” Danièle asked,
slipping past Rob and stopping before me.
    “I hit my head.”
    She parted my hair. “There is no cut.”
    “I’m okay.”
    “I told you to watch out. Remember, I said
the ceiling height—”
    “I didn’t see Rob duck, so I didn’t
either.”
    “Yes, but he is much shorter than you.”
    “I realize that now, Danièle, thanks.”
    “I am sorry. I should have explained. Ciel means ‘sky’. We call it out when the ceiling juts
down.”
    “Got it,” I said.
    After once more reassuring her that I was
fine, that I didn’t need to rest, we continued on. When the tunnel
widened enough to walk two abreast, I moved up beside Rob. He
glanced sidelong at me and said, “You know what this place reminds
me of?”
    “What?”
    “Vaginas.”
    I smiled, sort of. What had I expected him
to reference? Tom Sawyer’s spirit of adventure? Verne’s Journey
to the Center of the Earth ? Jonah and the Whale?
    “I’m serious,” he added. “Everywhere I look
I see one. This is vag land, nature porn. Tell me you don’t see
it.”
    “You have a point,” I said as I thought
about all the metaphorical psychobabble regarding caves and wombs
and Mama Nature and fertility. Also, I had to admit it wasn’t a
stretch to imagine, if you were so inclined, the entrance to the
catacombs that we’d passed through as vulvaesque, Pascal’s rest
room as a uterus, and these tunnels as fallopian tubes .
    Rob said, “Now I understand why Rascal
spends all his time down here. What a perv.”
    Ahead Pascal reached into a little gully in
the wall, felt around, then kept going.
    “What’s he looking for?” I asked.
    “Dunno.” Rob called out in French. Pascal
answered back. Rob laughed. “He said someone once had a stag party
down here. They left a calling card in the wall with the date and
directions. You find it, you’re invited. He wanted to see if there
was anything new.”
    “A stag party?” I said.
    “Apparently all sorts of crazy stuff goes on
down here. Cops found a movie theater once. Yeah, I shit you
not—lights, sound system, projector, fully stocked bar. It was
right under the Trocadéro , a stone’s throw
from the Eiffel Tower, one of the most famous fucking landmarks in
the world. There was a whole security setup too that included a
motion detector that set off a recording of barking dogs to scare
people away.”
    I wasn’t sure if Rob was having me on or
not, but I asked, “How was all this stuff powered? With
batteries?”
    “Electricity, boss. They siphoned it from
underground power lines. And get this. A few days after the police
discovered the place they came back with guys from Électricité de
France, to shut it down. But they were too late. Someone had
already unwired everything. Disappeared with all the electronics
and booze. What used to be a cinema was a plain old rock chamber.
The only thing left behind was a note that said, ‘ Ne cherchez
pas .’ Don’t search.”
    “Don’t search for who? Cataphiles?”
    “That’s what I figured. That’s what most
people in the media figured. It was big news for a while. But
Rascal says cataphiles don’t do stuff like that. They’re misfits
mostly. They just go underground to hang out, party, explore.”
    “So who made the cinema?”
    He shrugged. “Nobody knows. Rascal talks
about this big group with a hundred members or so, supposedly
organized and wealthy, sort of like an old boys’ club. They use the
catacombs, but only to get around Paris undetected. They have keys
to everywhere in the city. They’ll hold poetry readings in the
basement of the Paris Opera, or booze it up on the roof of the
Parthenon,