"Oh god, oh god," Sydney said, squirming in my arms. "Where are we? What happened?"
"Calm down. Are you hurt?" It was nice to be able to focus on her. I already knew I was all right, but this situation definitely wasn't.
"Uh, no... no... I don't think so. I think I'm okay."
"Then just take a deep breath and calm down." Only when I felt her relax did I loosen my hold. "I can't see anything, so we shouldn't let go of each other since we might get separated."
"I'm not going to argue that," she said in a shaky voice.
"Good." I helped her stand, keeping an arm around her.
"Um, Ty?"
"Yeah?"
"Where are we?"
I was afraid she was going to ask me that. "I don't know. I can't see anything. We were in my bedroom. You weren't looking where you were going and you walked into my closet and disappeared. I jumped after you."
"How very gallant of you—saving the damsel in distress and all."
"Yeah, that's me. Always willing to do the stupid."
"So saving me was stupid?"
"No—I just mean, me not thinking. Looking before leaping and all that. Anyway, we're apparently all right, though quite lost." Actually, not looking before leaping was not like me at all. I was By-the-Book Black and I did things methodically and with precision. But this was an emergency situation, so I guessed what I had done was all right. I had to save the girl, after all.
"It sure is dark here," she said.
I kept an arm around her while tentatively reaching out with my hand to see if I could feel anything. I couldn't. I slid a foot forward, hesitantly searching for a clue.
"Do you have your lighter?"
"Oh, yeah, of course." I pulled it out of my pocket. During an adolescent rebellion I'd smoked. Once. The cigarette had felt as if it belonged in my hand, and about ten minutes later I was craving another one.
The experience made me realize how easily addicted I was. It was good to learn that lesson then. Ever after I was careful around drugs—down to the painkillers I was put on for various breaks, sprains, dislocations, concussions and such. But I'd always carried a Zippo. It felt like I ought to. Plus, when some lovely lady needed a light, I could be her prince in black leather.
"How'd you know I carried one?" I asked.
"Aren't you a smoker?"
"No."
"Oh, I just thought you were, I guess."
"Do I smell funny or something?"
"No, silly—you smell great. It's just with the bike, leather jacket and, well, you've got this entire dark, handsome thing going on. It's like you should smoke."
"I don't bow to peer pressure."
"I get that now!"
In the light of my flickering Zippo, I could see we were standing at the end of a long, narrow hallway that seemed to stretch on forever. The walls were so close it was amazing we hadn't scraped them. The dirt floor made me think we were in an underground tunnel.
"Um, Ty?" Sydney asked. "Where did we come from?"
I looked up and saw a solid ceiling of dirt. "There's something not right here."
"I'm with you."
She was afraid, so I had to appear confident in order to keep her as calm as possible. I nodded forward. "Only one way to go."
We walked and I kept my eyes open for anything I could use to create a torch or lantern, since I didn't think my Zippo would last very long. The tunnel went on and on. It was as if we were rats in a maze, looking for cheese.
And then we came to the boarded-up dead end.
Sydney stepped forward and ran her fingers over the boards. "This isn't good. What do we do now?"
"Hold this," I handed her my lighter and kicked the boards. They were tightly together, blocking any view of what they covered, but when I kicked them I could feel a give, so I figured they weren't mounted on a wall. In other words, they were blocking the passage.
I'd been doing karate and kicking things down for most of my life, so it only took a few kicks for the boards to fragment and split, allowing us access to the rest of the tunnel.
"This is not right," Syd said, again grasping my arm like it was her life preserver. The passage gaping in front of us seemed to go for an eternity and beyond. "This is like something out of Harry Potter, all magical... mystical. There's no way all this could fit in your house."
"Yeah, to all of that," I said. I was having serious flashbacks to Tomb Raiders or Buffy or that Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off I'd worked on. One key difference: this was real. I pulled away from her momentarily so I could take off my shirt. I had a sports bra on beneath it. I cut the sleeves off with my keys, then put it back on. I wrapped one sleeve around a chunk of the wooden boards. I took the lighter back from Syd and set the material aflame.
The Zippo was hot when I put it back in my pocket. I picked up several more large pieces of wood and shoved them, with the other shirt sleeve, down the back of my jeans.
"Let's go," I said.
Chapter 4
A little farther down the corridor we came to another obstacle: a huge chasm. I looked at this gaping hole and thought of a huge maw, waiting to eat us up whole.
But there was a rope hanging down just over its middle.
"This isn't good," Sydney said once more, but she didn't move, she just stood staring across to the far side.
"We can do this." It was my first stunt ever. I had been so young, I was flat-chested enough to double for the adolescent male lead of the film.
The stakes then hadn't been high in some ways, since there was a cushion just a few feet down, and we did it all in sections which even further decreased the danger. With the safety precautions, it required agility and stamina, but there was no risk.
For me, the real stake was Mom watching. She was there, assessing my work as we did the scene over and over again, moving the cameras around to get different angles at different moments.
I was glad she never looked nervous. In fact, she looked as if she had no question that I'd be able to do the job as many times as it took. I still remembered the purple amethyst she wore that day. I had the random thought that I hadn't found the necklace among her things yet.
That was the first time I ever worked with Michele. She was the girl. They had wanted someone to stand in for her during those scenes, but she'd insisted she could do it. She always was rather spunky. I'd been especially careful with her.
"When I say, jump into my arms," I now told Sydney. "I'll catch you."
"Wait a second," she said, holding up the torch. "Do you think you can throw this to the other side? We don't want to lose it."
"Good thinking." I took it and carefully threw it across. I knew that if it extinguished I could create another with the spare materials I had, but I didn't want to waste anything.
Once it was safely on the far side, giving us even greater perspective on the crossing, I smiled at Sydney and squeezed her hand. "We'll be fine. Trust me."
I ran a few steps and leapt out over the pit, easily grabbing the rope and swinging on it. When I was sixteen I could do a standing long jump of six-and-a-half feet. This was a joke to me now, even though it was a good ten feet out to it.
I did my Tarzan and yelled, "Jump!" just as I was approaching the apex near Sydney.
She was perfect, leaping right into my arms. Of course she was perfect, I thought. She was The One.
"Hard part's done," I said, as we swung back and forth, gaining momentum. "Now I just have to toss you to the other side. On the count of three."
"Ty!"
I held on. "On the count of three. One... two... three..." She seemed ready, so I tossed. She landed and fell to her hands and knees.
I followed on the next upswing, just before the rotten boards holding the rope split.
They crashed right behind me. If I had still been swinging, I would have plunged to my death. Seemed a bit cliché.
"Oh my god, Ty, that was incredible!"
All I could thin
k was that I did that when I was sixteen. It wasn't a challenge. At all. But Sydney hugging me didn't suck.
"Do you have any idea what's going on?" Sydney asked, holding onto my arm as we walked further down the hall.
"This could just be a dream." I was hoping it was, since it was all impossible, but I was sure it wasn't. Bottom line, I was clueless and didn't like it one bit.
"No, it can't. We're both here, together. Plus, we hit the floor pretty hard back there. Something like that would've woken us up for sure."
"Unless we just dreamt we hit the ground and that the other is here. But anyway, what do you propose is going on?"
"I'm not sure but this doesn't look good."
I stared up at the bare wall of dirt. "This is like stunts one-oh-one. When I was driving out here, I was remembering every single stunt I ever did, and it seems like maybe somebody or something was listening, 'cause the Powers that Be certainly ain't trying very hard here. I could do this drunk with a broken leg and a dislocated shoulder." I stepped back and ran up the wall as far as I could, using my own momentum to propel me up it until I could grab the ledge overhead and haul myself up. I glanced around, but didn't see anything to aid me with pulling Syd up, so I pulled my shirt off, lay on the ledge, and stretched down. "Grab hold."
"Let's do the torch first," Syd said, tying the end of the sleeve around the torch so I could lift it up. I liked how practical she was in such a bizarre situation. When I dropped the shirt back down, Sydney stared at it for a moment before looking up at me. "I... I don't know if you can lift me so easily. I weigh quite a bit more than a torch you know."
"Take the shirt already, Syd."
"You are strong," she said when I'd pulled her up.
"I'm... I was a stunt person," I said, leading us ever onward. "A lot of the job requires knowing how to fake—fake punches and fake getting hit... fake kicks and smunches and all that." At each turn, I peered ahead, ensuring we wouldn't step into anything worse by accident. "But for the work the Blacks do... did... I needed to stay in shape. And keep learning more and more—sword play, martial arts, gymnastics, acrobatics. Bottom line, I can squat you, bench you, hell, I can probably even curl you without breaking a sweat."
"Brag much?"
I had to laugh. "Just a bit. I'm from Hollywood, after all. And I actually worked there, which means I had to learn how to sell myself."
She stopped dead in her tracks. I ran into her back. "Ty? Please tell me you have a clue?" Syd laid a hand on my arm, sending warm tingles through me. When I didn't answer immediately, she continued, obviously finally freaking out about our situation, "God, I don't know how we got here in the first place and now you're off in La-La Land and I can't—"
I grabbed her by her arms. "Syd, I'll go through it, get to the other side, and figure out how to turn it off. 'Else I'll come back through and get you, 'kay?"
"Nobody can get through that!"
"Maybe nobody else, but me... no problema. Just watch." Whoever had been looking through my mind for my worst nightmares had misread this one. This one I had down.
If you've seen many movies in the past decade, you've seen the whirly-blade obstacle—the one where the hero(es) have to leap and twist and time their moves to avoid becoming thin-sliced sandwich fillings because huge circular-saw blades are busy slicing down from the ceiling and cross wise. A seemingly impenetrable barrier. But they never hit each other, so there was a pattern. One merely had to watch to figure it out.
I slowly stretched my body, reaching forward as far as I could with my fingers spread. I rotated my head, feeling the cracking of my spine. I brought each leg up in turn, grasping it and pulling it tight against my chest.
And all the while I watched the blades, learning their pattern, memorizing the timing and making it a part of me.
If you were fighting someone you had to react. In stunt work, you had to react, but know exactly how to do so, when to pull back, and have wicked good reaction time. And you also had to know your blocking and timing—when to jump, when to kick, when to thrust.
This was just like learning my blocking.
Except with fatal consequences if I failed.
Good thing I never failed. At least, almost never.
I took one, quick deep breath and ran into the melee of blades, flipping into the air and twisting to the side to pass above the first cross-wise cutter. I hit the ground and dropped to my back, bending my knees fully so I could lie on the floor while the blade passed just above me.
"Bend, hop, jump, down, run, over, wait," I spoke my actions aloud, repeating my blocking to myself. One fuck up would be my death. "Go!"
I twisted, turned, danced and flipped through it all.
Well, almost all of it. I was flipping over a horizontal blade so I was horizontal with the floor when I noticed a big switch a dozen feet up and back. Quick change in blocking.
"Up, over, jump," I muttered. "Right, right, up, flip and grab!" I grabbed the pole that ran wall-to-wall, and used a basic hand-to-hand to flip the switch and turn off all the blades.
All told, it was fun. Difficult and challenging, but fun nonetheless. Which wasn't surprising, since I enjoyed puzzles and... trials. It was almost as if someone had been systematically testing me, like they wanted to know what I was capable of—or else remind me what I could do.
Now, it was pretty silly that there was an on/off switch, but that was just the nature of predetermined trials. I stood on a blade and looked around the shiny room and suddenly realized there was something I needed to learn—needed to do—and this wasn't the way to it. But I had to get Sydney out of here, wherever here was, safely first.
Syd made me hold her hand while we walked through the maze of stilled blades, just in case they reanimated.
At the far side there was a door.
I almost hated to see what was on the other side of it. But I couldn't let Sydney see me filled with trepidation and fear, so I boldly opened the door, stepped through and conked my head against my shoe rack, knocking my combat boots to the floor as Sydney fell onto me.
... Sydney was moaning and thrusting upward against... Him.
He came inside of her, even as she screamed, "Tom!" and looked at her wristwatch.
He collapsed on her and I knew this was the current Sydney and her current boyfriend and it was just last night.
"Ty, Ty—what's the matter?"
"Huh?" I shook my head, pulling myself out of the vision thing and back into reality.
Sydney reached a hesitant hand out to touch me.
Here she was, worried about me, touching me, after she spent last night with Tom. I wanted to call her on it, point out how she was acting—flirting with me after she had sex with Tom just last night and now she was sitting here, caressing my cheek.
What was she? Some sort of common whore?
Where the hell'd that come from? This was a woman I’d loved for centuries, what the hell was I thinking?
I released her hand and lowered my face so she couldn't see my expression. "I'm fine. Now. I just phased out briefly. Conked out." Somehow I knew the dreams I'd been having were real, and so were these visions. It was all the truth and it made no sense.
"Ty, why do I feel like you're not exactly telling me everything?" She was now petting my hair, running her fingers through the strands.
God, that felt good. Calming. "Uh, we just fell out of a black hole in my closet. And now you're questioning my veracity?" I entwined my fingers with hers, pulling our hands down to her thigh and effectively changing the subject. Or so I figured.
"So what are you gonna do next?" she asked.
"Dunno. I'm thinking shower, eat—"
She pulled her hand away to smack my thigh. "I meant about all the mysteries of this house."
"All the mysteries? We've found one. As in singular."
"Well what are you gonna do about it?"
"You seem stable and understanding about all of this. This is jus
t freaky shit. And it's my house." I scrambled to my feet to gain the relative safety of my bedroom.
"And so it's your freaky shit, again—what are you gonna do about it?" She followed me out of the closet and flitted restlessly around the room.
She had a really nice ass. And why the hell was I noticing such a thing? "I'm gonna eat and shower. Then maybe search the house for any other freaky shit, secret passages, black holes et cetera."
"But what are you going to do about your closet?" She closed my closet door and then opened it. It was still just my closet.
"Move my clothes? In case that happens again? Or else maybe build a brick wall to effectively close it off and could that get any more metaphorical?" I put a hand on her waist. It was like I couldn't help but touch her.
"Glad to see the prioritization. You don't want to lose your shoes, after all." She stepped so close to me I could feel her breath on my cheek.
"Hey, there's some jeans hanging in there that I've finally got broken in right."
"I've been dreaming about this house." Her eyes grew intense. "I didn't want to tell you that because it's freaky shit, as you say. But after what we just went through, I think I should at least be honest."
"So, what did you dream?" My own murky nightmares were starting to solidify in my brain. Secret rooms and endless terrifying tests were a big part of them.
"It was mostly about a secret room, hidden behind a stone wall, and there was something important about that room. But I was terrified to go near it, and knew everything bad that could happen would happen if I did," she finished, pretty much whispering as we grew closer and closer.
A hidden room? This was beyond freaky shit, this was freak-out time. "You maybe might wanna go home now." I was thinking that if I remembered enough of my dreams, I would know how to find the secret room, and now I believed it existed. This house had secrets. Maybe mom's secrets. The room was down there, somewhere. I just couldn't find it with an audience, in case I failed.
"You want me to leave just when it's getting interesting?" Her chest was heaving and I could tell she wanted me to notice. And notice I did—as well as that an extra button or two had come undone on her blouse during our adventure. I remembered how good her nubile body felt in my arms as we swung over the pit of peril.
Bell, Book and Dyke - New Exploits of Magical Lesbians Page 11
