by Jon Sauve
Before I was able to join the search, Mary had an audible eureka moment. When I came over, I immediately saw what she had found; a little spring-loaded handle built into the wall, covered in the same wallpaper as the rest. The area around the handle, in a rectangle that was about five feet by two, was clearly an imitation. From a distance, and in the dark, the imitation was good, but up close it broke down very quickly. It had a different texture and sheen to it, and it wasn't even flush with the wall around it.
Mary pulled the latch and the little hidden door popped open. We now gazed into what seemed like an infinite abyss. We could see three steps angling downward, and nothing more after that. Then Mary thrust out her arm, holding the lantern over the stairs, and we saw that the abyss was nothing more than a claustrophobic, cobwebby tunnel. Eight steps led down into it, and the tunnel itself angled down even further. It was obvious that the thing had been excavated recently. The dirt was moist and fresh-smelling. Some plywood had been lain across the floor; the edges were still jagged and covered in sawdust.
"Sneaky motherfuckers," Mary whispered.
So, the mystery person had been either Jeremy or Elden. It seemed very likely that they had left the empty room via this tunnel rather than the door to the common area. So they were ahead of us somewhere in the darkness, or perhaps in another part of the hotel. I had flashbacks to playing Clue with my family, and using the secret passages to move between rooms.
The first word that popped into my head was "cheaters," and I felt suitably outraged that Jeremy and Elden would bend the rules to the very game that they created. Then I remembered that this was not a game at all, and felt more scared than ever before.
I looked back over my shoulder. No one there. But they could be anywhere, now. All bets were off.
"What now?" Mary asked.
She also seemed to sense that things had changed. I was unable to provide an answer to her question, which probably lost me points and made it less likely that she would want to bang me.
P.S., just kidding. While all of this was happening, getting laid was the last thing on my mind. But to be fair, there were only about four or five things on my mind in total. One, don't fucking die. Two, where the fuck am I? Three, how the fuck do I get out of here? Four, where the fuck is everyone else? Five, I wonder if Mary will-
You get the point. I hate to think that my efforts to protect Mary were motivated by lust, but who knows? Humans are animals, after all. And in the end, results matter more than intentions.
"Can I have the multitool?" Mary asked.
I wiped it off on my pants and let her have it. Should have given it to her already. Now we both had a weapon. Good fucking deal.
But who should go in first? We had to face the facts. We were going into the tunnel, for better or worse. Should I lead the way with the ax, to protect against danger from ahead? Or should I take the rear, in case someone came sneaking up on us? Say Jeremy or Elden or whoever it was came back to the room and found their lantern missing. They would probably figure out what the deal was. And they had probably left the lantern for a reason, right? They very well might come back for it soon.
"You first," I said.
Mary was still trying to get a solid grip on the multitool. "Me? Why?"
I told her my thinking. She agreed. I went to grab my jacket, and came back. Mary stepped down into the tunnel, lantern wavering in her out-thrust hand. I waited until she reached the third step, took one step down, and shut the door behind us. I realized too late that there seemed to be no way to open it from this side, short of kicking it down. We were committed.
"Watch your head," Mary advised.
I turned to see what she was talking about, and smacked my head into the roof of the tunnel. It was made of two-by-sixes, holding up the floor of the hotel above us. Mary looked back to see what had made a sound like a pumpkin falling from a cliff. What she probably saw was me with a dumb grin on my face and tears in my eyes. I saved my head-rubbing for when she turned back around. We proceeded.
I am not very tall, five-ten on a good day, and I had to duck my head at first. The Jeremy gang hadn't wasted much time on this tunnel. I'm surprised they even cut the plywood for the floor, but I guess that was to prevent them from tracking dirt around inside the hotel, thus betraying their cunning cheat.
The tunnel angled down for about ten feet. The slope was shallow; by the end of it, we had probably gone down only a foot. The drop gave me room to stand straight, but the going was still quite unpleasant. A lot of spider webs. Strings of fiberglass insulation hung down everywhere, clotted with tiny mouse turds. There were other random things too. Plastic bags, foil candy wrappers. I even saw a yellow-striped tube sock straight out of the 80's. The worst thing was, the whole ragged mess was unstable as hell. Every time the top of my head scraped a shred of insulation, a whole tidal wave of dust came down. After the third time this happened, I bowed my head again and kept it that way.
We had gone maybe twenty feet when Mary stopped and aimed the lantern at the floor.
"Look," she said.
I looked. There was a gap here, between two pieces of plywood. In the moist dirt, just before the plywood further from us, was the imprint of a heel. The person who had made it had realized their mistake and scraped their shoe off on the edge of the plywood.
We moved on. Other than a thin trail of dirt leading a short ways from the heel-print, we saw nothing more.
The end of the tunnel appeared abruptly in front of us. There was a ladder here. Mary stepped up onto its third rung and shined the light upward. A trapdoor of corrugated metal blocked our view of whatever stood above us. We had gone a long way, but the hotel was pretty big. We could be anywhere.
"I'd better go first," I said.
She stepped down and handed me the lantern. I slotted my hand through the handle, and let it dangle from my forearm. Then I climbed the ladder, slowly.
At the top, I lifted my ax hand to shove the trapdoor open a few inches. Then I put my head under it and looked out. Dirt and yellow grass everywhere. Crickets singing. Stars above.
We were outside. Out-fucking-side.
I dropped down as soon as I realized it, fearing snipers. I looked down. Mary was staring up at me, hands clutching the ladder.
"We're out," I told her.
"What?"
"We're outside."
"What! Holy shit!"
"Sh." I looked back at the trapdoor, thinking. "Okay, I'm going to take another look."
Mary said nothing. I turned off the lantern. In the dark, deprived of sensory input, I could feel the ladder shaking. The combined shivers of Mary and I.
I opened the trapdoor again, wider this time, so that I could stick my head out. A quick look back in the direction we came told me everything. The hotel was far away. Distance is hard to tell in the dark, when all you can see is a square of deeper blackness against the sky, but I estimated that we were removed from the hotel by half the length of a football field.
I looked in a circle around the trapdoor. I saw no one.
Even before I ducked back into the tunnel, I was considering our next move. We could make a run for it, but maybe the snipers would eventually spot us and take us down. The terrain around the hotel was flat, with only a few stunted trees here and there. We would be easy targets.
Obviously, we couldn't just head back to the parking lot and jump in a car.
For a second I imagined finding a sniper, sneaking up on him, clubbing him with a rock and stealing his gun. Then I remembered I’m not Chuck Norris, and let that dream go.
The thought of going back down the tunnel and returning to the hotel sounded unbelievably wretched.
I sat there on the ladder for a good two or three minutes, lantern off, just thinking.
In the end, I decided we ought to just enact the safest of the plans that still involved getting away from the hotel. We would run for it. There was a road not too far away. Even in the middle of the night, there would probably be a car ev
ery fifteen minutes or so. There are always cars around here.
So, that was settled. It would be risky, but seemingly no riskier than anything else we had already done. And now that my mind was made up I felt surprisingly good. The climb back down the ladder felt smooth, maybe even enjoyable, especially in the dark with the sound of crickets and wind nearby.
My feet met dirt at the bottom, with no Mary in the way. That should have been my first clue that something was wrong. But no, I turned around with a smile on my face and spoke out loud: "We can get out of here."
Even the fact that Mary didn't answer barely fazed me. I could already picture the relief on her face as I reached for the lantern button very awkwardly with my ax hand.
My knuckle hit the button, the light flicked on, and I saw that I was alone.
Up ahead, the light glinted off of something for a moment. Then it was gone.
"Mary?" I said. The sound echoed down the tunnel and came back to me, unbroken, uninterrupted.
For a second I felt depressed and deserted. She had ditched me. She had realized that I was a loser, that she would be better off alone, or maybe with Ben. A gout of emotions I hadn't felt since high school came rushing back, all of the familiar nobody-likes-me-especially-not-girls variety.
But sometimes reason prevails. This was one of those times. Mary hadn't followed me because she thought I was cool; she had followed me because I wasn't trying to kill her. No way she would have left me.
Someone had taken her.
I experienced a strong sense that someone had fired a cannonball of ice straight into my gut. It almost doubled me over. I fell against the ladder, telling myself it was impossible. I had only been up on the ladder a couple minutes.
It meant that someone had been in the tunnel with us almost the entire time, following, sneaking. It also meant that both of them were still in the tunnel. I had a chance of catching up.
As shitty as the thought of going back into the hotel from hell seemed, the thought of leaving Mary behind was far worse. I couldn't do it. And this is how I learned a good lesson about courage. It’s not something you summon; it's a choice made for you.
I looked up at the trap door one more time, giving myself a final opportunity to take the "easy" way out. And, looking up at it, I suddenly thought of my mom. Imagine her disappointment, when she learned that I could have saved myself but opted to embark on a heroic journey instead, some hopeless quest to save a girl I barely knew. Imagine how worried she would be when she woke up for work a few hours from now, and found that I hadn't come back, and imagine the police showing up at the apartment, giving her the bad news. "Ma'am, we regret to inform you that your son was a suicidal idiot."
I could still go. I could climb the ladder, escape into the night, flee toward the road. In a way, it seemed like my solemn duty to do so.
But I immediately realized it was the same old bullshit. Self preservation. My mom raised me better than that.
So I gritted my teeth, shoved off the ladder, and let myself go hurtling back down the tunnel. I barely remember the journey, but I do remember that I was stomping and spitting with anger by the time I reached the end. Amping myself up. Building a defense against fear.
The door at the top of the stairs was wide open. I climbed through, slowly and warily. The fear was coming back. Can't keep it away for long.
At some point during my trip down the tunnel, don't know when, I had flicked the lantern off. I turned it back on now, taken by a sudden boldness. The room was empty, but the door into the common area was also wide open. I went over, stood on the threshold, and surveyed the room. No one moved on the stairs, on the upper landing, or in the hall leading to the front door. The door into the ballroom was open, but it had probably been left that way by Jacob and Mary and I.
I listened, hoping to catch even the slightest shuffling of feet that might tell me where Mary had gone. Nothing. Either her kidnapper was being very sneaky, or they were standing dead still the same as I was. Waiting to see what I would do. They could even be watching me.
I looked left and right along the wall. Nothing and no one.
Decision time. If I was a filthy, homicidal turd who had just kidnapped a girl and was trying to lure in my greatest threat, where would I have gone?
The answer that immediately came to me was "upstairs." I had no reason to believe it was the right one, but I had a keen sense that time was already running out, and a better answer was not likely to appear. So I decided to go with my gut.
I climbed the stairs, not making any overt or purposeful noise, but not taking any special care either. There was enough creaking and popping to alert anyone in the vicinity to my presence. I didn't really expect anyone to show themselves, and they didn't, but it was worth a shot.
The ax was starting to slide out of my hands. They were getting sweaty. I had to wipe them on my shirt. All the dust and dirt from the tunnel came in handy now; it came off my clothing and stuck to my hands like climbing chalk, allowing me to grip the ax tighter.
I stopped on the landing for a second, considered my options, and crossed over to the laundry room. We certainly had not shut this door on our way out, for fear of noise, and it was still about halfway open. No one inside.
Left or right?
To the left, nothing. To the right, almost nothing. I could just barely see a hump of something, laying on the floor. It took me a moment to realize it was Shaun's corpse. By the looks of it, he hadn't made it much further after I ran into him.
My gut was speaking to me again, and it was telling me to go left. I got a sense of emptiness when I looked the other way, and sometimes instincts pay off. So I went left.
I made it to the corner unmolested, turned, and immediately knew that something was off. Call it prescience if you want, but more likely it was just my subconscious and my finer senses picking up on something.
The bad vibes were rolling off a door just ahead, on the left side of the hall. I took a step toward it, stopped, and just about laughed when I realized what room it was. How very fitting. But maybe the bad vibes were only because I had killed Max in this room. Maybe there was no one in there at all.
I set the lantern down so that I could get both hands on the ax. Then I went against the wall to the right and slid along, keeping my eyes on the door to Max's own personal cemetery. About halfway along, I stopped.
"Hello?" I called.
There was no reply, vocal or otherwise, so after a moment of hoping and fearing I started strafing along again. I stopped a second time when I reached the edge of the door across from the one I was staring at. This was the one I had been hiding in, the one I had left to come to Luke's rescue. Before I had killed anyone.
My shoulder bumped against the door. It was shut, a state I certainly hadn't left it in, but that troubling fact did not occur to me at the time. I was focused totally on the open door across the hall, hoping against all reason to see a glimpse of Mary.
The door at my back opened. I sagged inward, tensed my muscles, fell out to my left. Something made a thick, pulpy sound against the door frame, close enough to my head to make my hair move.
I put all my energy and strength into the dodge. It paid off in that I wasn't decapitated, but it threw me off balance, made me sprawl on the floor and lose my grip on the ax. It was pinned under me, pinching the skin on my chest.
I looked up. Oogie was there in the doorway, gritting his teeth and struggling to free his machete from the wall. It came loose, sending up a cloud of mold spores and dust, and then he came after me.
I started to crawl, feeling almost paralyzed. It was like I was in a nightmare, powerless and without hope. I regained my strength in a goddamn hurry though, and I scrambled to my feet, scooping the ax up in my left hand.
When I turned, Oogie was lunging toward me. I swung the ax blindly, with no time to aim. If luck had been on my side, it would have buried itself in his throat like the multitool in his expired companion, but it didn't work out that way. The sharp p
art didn't even hit him at all. The flat side of the head did, smacking right into the knuckles of his machete wielding hand.
There was a moment there where I could have ended it. Oogie stumbled to his right, thrown off balance, his machete swing deflected. He was totally open to attack. His neck was right there, bright red, the tendons standing out and the arteries bulging.
But I didn't take the chance. Didn't have the heart for it I guess. Couldn't bring myself to do it. It should have meant my death, but luck hadn't completely abandoned me.
Oogie was driven by rage. He wasn't thinking clearly. He had been insane before, but now he had totally lost any semblance of humanity. He regained his balance quickly and rushed at me again, this time screaming like a banshee.
All untamed momentum. I stepped around him without a lot of trouble, dodging toward the room where I had hoped Mary would be. Though I wasn't facing Oogie, I could sense him changing directions for another attack. When it came, I threw myself through the doorway. It wasn't a very graceful move. My right shoulder slammed against the frame, spinning me around.
I turned in time to see the machete coming, just a few inches from my chest.
The tip of it struck the door frame, which caused it to lose most of its speed. When it hit me, there wasn't enough force for it to do much more than scratch my jacket.
The universe had, very graciously, given me a second chance to defend myself. This time I took it, swinging the ax up toward Oogie's crotch like Arnie in Commando when he comes out of that tool shed. There wasn't much room for anything else. The move was awkward, causing my wrist to twist in a painful way, and there wasn't much power behind it. Oogie slammed his forearm down on the handle, pushing it toward the floor. The deflection almost made me lose my grip on the ax; I drew it backward, retreating into the room.
Oogie followed without a second's hesitation.
I stumbled over Max, caught myself on the bed where Luke had almost met his end, and kept going. Oogie walked around the big dead guy on the floor, staring at me. Even in the dark I could see his mirthless grin, huge and full of teeth.
