by S. R. Witt
There were two more pictures of men in their late teens or early twenties, dated 1953 and 1952. Four generations of Harrow men were immortalized in that hall, but no more would join their ranks.
Chase had trouble catching her breath as the humming in her skull chased her thoughts in a thousand different directions. There was something about these pictures that terrified her, but she couldn’t understand what she was seeing.
And that transformed her fear into the cold, quiet rage that had always sustained Chase. There were answers here, she just had to find them. Somewhere in the house was what she was looking for, she was sure of it. If she had to tear the old shack apart, one plank at a time, that’s what she’d do.
“Quite a photo gallery, right?” Paxton said as Chase caught up with him. “Too bad there’s no one to take my picture and add it to the ranks of Harrow men, eh?”
The hallway took a left turn and revealed several closed doors regularly spaced along its right wall.
Chase walked down the hall to the first door and tapped her knuckles against its warped face. “Let’s see what’s behind door number one.”
She turned the knob, and the door creaked open to reveal a simple bedroom. There was a comforter on the bed and an window with no shade or shutters that let the sunshine into the room. Like the rest of the house, this sealed chamber held no dust, no trace of bugs or rats. It was as still and silent as an empty tomb.
The next room down the hall was much the same: a narrow bed, the addition of a small student’s desk, and nothing else.
“Why would they take everything but leave the pictures?” Chase wondered aloud.
Paxton wheeled up behind her. “Who knows? The newspaper article made it sound like they were in kind of a hurry to get out of here. Hey, what do you think that is?”
Paxton pointed at an ornate door at the end of the hall. Its surface was decorated with a spiral of strange symbols that made Chase’s head hurt when she looked at them too closely.
A pair of iron brackets sunk into the wall on either side of the door held a thick wooden beam in place across the door.
“That must be where they put Dad when he broke the rules,” Paxton said with a smile.
Rules.
Chase’s stomach lurched at the thought. She wrestled with conflicting thoughts, trying to put them together, to make sense of the events of the past few weeks. But the closer she came to an understanding, the louder the buzzing got and the harder it was to think.
Aggravated, Chase lifted the wooden bar out of the brackets and rested it against the wall. She turned the knob and the door opened without a sound.
The darkness beyond the door ate the sunlight that had found its way into the hall. Chase could see narrow stairs leading down into a pitch-black basement, but that was it. “Your chair’s never going to fit down here,” she said to Paxton.
Her brother glanced past Chase at the dark staircase and gave her a weak smile. “Looks like you’re right. I’ll just stay up here, and give you a shout if I hear anyone come into the house.”
“Good idea,” Chase said, but she didn’t like the idea of going down into the basement alone. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, but she was afraid of Crucible. If there was ever a place where a young woman would meet an unpleasant fate in a basement, this town was that place.
The flashlight option on Chase’s phone shed a cold white light ahead of her. The naked wooden stairs leading down into the basement looked sturdy enough, but Chase wasn’t taking any chances. She tested her weight on the first one, then the second.
She didn’t fall, but she almost wished one of the stairs had given way so she’d have an excuse to get out of the house. The darkness pushed back against Chase’s light, stopping the light just a few feet ahead of her as if it had hit a wall. She glanced over her shoulder, and Paxton shot her a shaky thumbs up. “You can do it,” he whispered.
Chase took another careful step, then another. Finally, her foot landed on the concrete slab of the basement’s floor. The basement air smelled wet and thick with unseen spores. “I’m going to die of black mold,” she mumbled and shone her light around to get a better look at the space beneath the house.
The basement had been used for storage. Pallets stacked in rows across the floor and along the walls, cardboard boxes stacked on top of the wood to protect them from the damp.
For a moment, the buzzing in the back of Chase’s head drowned out all other sound. It obliterated her thoughts like a drill chewing through her molars.
Her hands clutched her head, and Chase moaned. She staggered forward until her feet hit the first pallet. The pain became an all-consuming agony that left Chase blind and deaf.
Paxton shouted, his voice raised in wordless fear. The sound pierced the haze surrounding Chase’s thoughts, and she struggled to turn back to the stairs. “Pax,” she croaked.
The door at the top of the staircase slammed, and Chase heard the heavy beam fall into place across it.
Her cell phone’s light died without warning, plunging her into an impenetrable darkness.
Chase froze, afraid to take a step and crash into a pallet or step into a sump and snap her ankle. She listened for some clue as to what was happening in the house above her.
From somewhere far away, she heard Paxton shout again, protesting. A car door slammed, an engine roared, and then tires crunched on gravel.
Chase clutched her dead phone in her hands and stared into the darkness.
They’d taken her brother.
A quiet sob wracked her frame, and her shoulders shook as she let the first tears fall. She’d only ever wanted to protect her family, and now they were all gone.
Chapter Fourteen
Rules of The Nightmare Game: Jack’s Notes
I’m not supposed to do this, but if I don’t keep notes how am I going to remember all this stuff?
Normal People: Major Spheres of Mind, Body, and Spirit = 1 – 3
Slayers: Major Spheres of Mind, Body, and Spirit = 3 – 5 to start, based on Slayer’s priority.
Minor Spheres prioritized by Slayer after talisman gained. Priority 1 = Major Sphere +2, Priority 2 = Major Sphere +1, Priority 3 = Minor Sphere.
Choose carefully!
Major Spheres of Weapon, Victim, and Mask all based on Major Spheres of Mind, Body, and Spirit, but Minor Spheres priorities in play.
Major Spheres can be improved by investing a number of soul orbs equal to their new rank. Minor spheres can be improved by investing one soul orb for the first increase, two soul orbs for the second increase, three for the third and so on.
I’m never going to remember all this. I hope Eva’s smarter than me, or this plan is never going to work.
Chapter Fifteen
Belly of the Beast
Chase thumbed the power button on her iPhone once, then again, but she couldn’t bring it back to life. She knew there was no way the battery had already run down because it had only been a couple of hours since she’d taken it off the charger, but the phone was dead just the same. “What the hell is happening here?” Chase whispered to the darkness.
She tried to remember the layout of the basement from the brief glimpse she'd gotten of it before the lights went out, but her memories were confused and jumbled from the stress of her predicament and her anxiety over what had happened to her brother. Chase shuffled her left foot forward, and the toe of her boot bumped into something solid and unyielding.
The buzzing at the base of Chase’s skull, made it difficult to concentrate, but she thought she could hear the faint rumble of a distant engine growing fainter by the moment. Paxton’s kidnappers, Chase guessed, winding their way up the driveway to the highway. By the time she found her way out of the pitch-black basement, they’d be long gone.
For a moment, fear threatened to overwhelm Chase. Entombed in the basement of her father's childhood home, she struggled to resist the crushing weight settling on her shoulders. Her parents were missing, someone had just kidnapped her broth
er, and she was locked in a basement.
But fear had never solved any of Chase’s problems. Fear was a paralytic. It made every choice feel wrong and every decision fraught with peril. Fear brought everything to a standstill.
Rage, on the other hand, got shit done.
Someone had taken Chase’s brother. Her parents had abandoned her. An arrogant one-percenter backed up by a pack of masked freaks had threatened her. The whole town of Crucible was filled with assholes who seemed intent on stopping her search at every turn. There was plenty of anger to go around, and Chase focused on it. She let the spark of rage build in her gut until she felt a plan coalescing around its white-hot core.
“First step,” she whispered to herself, “find the stairs.”
Chase shoved her useless phone into the front pocket of her jeans, turned to her right because she knew there was an obstacle directly ahead of her, and stretched her arms out straight. She kept her palms parallel to the floor and extended her fingers. Chase took one shuffling step forward and moved her arms in slow arcs from directly ahead of her out to her sides. The fingers on her left hand brushed against dry and brittle cardboard at the 10 o'clock position. Her right hand met nothing even when she extended it in a full half circle and twisted at the waist to reach behind her.
Something growled, a low and grating rumble that reminded Chase of an idling diesel engine. She froze in place, breath locked in her lungs, and listened. Though the buzzing in her head was still there, it had receded, as if driven back by the darkness.
The growl continued, its echoes thwarting Chase’s attempts to determine its location. One moment it sounded like it was right next to her, the next it was yards away.
What she didn’t hear were footsteps or the padding of an animal’s paws on the concrete. Until she heard those, Chase knew her best shot at getting out of the basement was to continue her search for the stairs.
Chase flattened her palm against the cardboard surface her fingers had found and traced its edges. She’d found an old cardboard box stacked on top of another box. The top of the container was at the same level as Chase’s shoulder and the stack it topped rested on a pallet she found with the toe of her boot.
Though the boxes had stood undisturbed for years, Chase’s touch had shifted their balance. The boxes swayed, and she reached out to steady the top of the stack. But, blind, Chase misjudged its position, and her groping left hand shoved the box from its perch on the top of the stack.
The cardboard container burst on the bare concrete floor, scattering its contents in a spray of broken glass and splintered wood. In contrast to the basement’s quiet, the sound was like an explosion.
The clatter died down, but the growling intensified. The rasping threat’s echoes rebounded from the basement’s walls, surrounding Chase in a web of sound.
“Back off,” she snarled, “I’ve got a knife, and I know how to use it.”
Anger kept her thoughts focused on the task of finding the stairs. She eased forward and moved her arms in slow, controlled arcs until she found the boxes to her left again. She kept her distance, only letting her fingers trail along the cardboard.
As long as the fingers on her left hand remained in contact with the boxes, Chase knew she was heading in the same direction. She’d just keep walking until she found one of the walls, then she could follow it around to the steps. It might take a while, but it was better than fumbling blindly through the basement.
She hoped.
Chase took another shuffling step, then another. She was making progress. The growling was still out there, somewhere, but there was nothing she could do about it. “If you wanna play, we’ll play,” she growled back. “Just come a little closer.”
After five minutes of shuffling forward, Chase’s confidence wavered. Her memory of the basement told her it wasn’t very large. It was no more than 30 feet on a side, and she should have found a wall by now.
Then her left hand lost contact with the boxes that had guided her to that point. Chase swung her arm back, but her fingertips found nothing on her left side. It was as if the boxes she’d been following all this time had vanished.
With mounting anxiety, she stretched out her right hand and found nothing on that side either.
The growling intensified, bringing with it a pungent, feral stink. Soft, padding steps approached from behind Chase.
She took a shuffling step forward, wincing as her heavy motorcycle boots scraped across the bare concrete. The noise was so loud Chase was sure whatever was behind her would have no trouble tracking down her location.
A moment later, another set of footsteps approached from her left.
Chase's breath froze in her throat, and her left hand found the knife she kept in her pocket. She drew the weapon and flicked it open, locking the curved blade in place. “Get any closer, you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”
The footsteps stopped, but Chase kept moving. She held the knife out in front of her, using it to feel for obstructions, and kept it ready to strike if a threat presented itself. She knew it was a risky move because anyone who could see in the dark would have no trouble stepping away from the blade and disarming her, or avoiding it and biting her hand.
Something caught the tip of her knife’s blade, and Chase stopped moving. She reached out with her right hand to see what she’d hit, fully expecting to find another set of cardboard boxes.
Instead, her fingers found a heavy strap, a few inches wide, dangling from the ceiling. The strap was covered with small bristles that scraped against Chase’s fingertips. She grabbed hold of it to move it aside and felt a strange raised pattern against her palm.
More of the straps tumbled down around Chase, slapping against her chest and back, rolling off her arms and smacking against the concrete floor. The bristles scraped against her cheeks, and the thick, coarse material threatened to tangle around her arms.
Chase bolted forward, slapping the dangling material aside in a desperate attempt to get it away. The growling drew closer, and she felt something glide past her legs, just shy of touching her.
She took another step, aching to find the wall. Even if she couldn’t reach the stairs before whatever the thing was got to her, a wall would at least give her something to protect her back.
The heavy sole of Chase’s motorcycle boot landed on something slimy, and her leg shot out in front of her. Chase flailed her arms out to either side, searching for something to grab onto as her balance shifted away from the vertical. She landed hard on her tailbone, and sparklers of pain burst across her vision.
Something lunged through the darkness and latched its powerful jaws on the right arm of Chase’s jacket. The thick leather and rows of metal studs offered her some protection, but she could still feel the pressure of the fangs crushing down on her forearm.
Years of training came back to Chase in a flash. She swung her left hand down, visualizing her target just beyond her body. The curved extractor tip plunged into something hot and muscular, and the serrated cutting edge sawed through flesh as Chase raked it down with as much strength as she could muster from her awkward position.
The creature released Chase with a pained yelp, and its steps padded away from her. Blood, hot and sticky, had splattered over Chase’s arm. She flicked her arm out to the side to shake off as much of the stinking gore as she could, and pulled herself to her feet before she could be attacked again.
Chase was no longer sure which direction she was facing. Her fall had disoriented her, and she could have easily turned either left or right when standing. Or she could be facing the stairs and not even know it.
“Find a wall,” she told herself. “Keep moving.”
She took another shuffling step, her knife hand held close to her side as she groped through the darkness with her right hand. Now that she knew there were hostiles in the basement with her, Chase wanted the blade close to her body. That would deprive her of a searching hand on her left side, but it would make it much more difficult for o
ne of the dogs, or whatever the hell they were.
“Chase,” a dry, feathery voice called from ahead of her. At first, Chase had mistaken it for the buzzing she’d been struggling with since entering the house. Then more words drifted to her, and she knew it wasn’t just an echo inside her skull. “You shouldn't have come.”
“Who’s there?” Chase called. She didn’t recognize the hoarse, strained voice, but the speaker certainly knew who she was.
“Find the stairs,” the voice said again. “Get out of here. Before it’s too late.”
Chase took another step, and then another. Her fingers found nothing but darkness, the cool, moist air of the basement clinging to them like slick oil.
“Who are you?” Chase called out as she continued shuffling forward.
Jaws clamped down hard on Chase’s left forearm. The biting creature whipped its head from side to side, trying to yank Chase off her feet so it could bury its fangs in her throat or guts. A smell, rich and feral like a zoo cage left too long between cleanings, clogged Chase’s nostrils.
Chase planted both feet to keep from falling. She lashed out with her right hand, thumb and forefinger hooked into claws. The webbing of her right hand landed on the creature’s snout, scraping upward along skin that felt scaly, not bristly or hairy. She’d thought it was an attack dog, but what she felt reminded her more of a lizard than a canine.
Chase couldn’t afford to worry about what kind of beast was trying to shred her arm. She had to attack, and keep attacking until only one of them was still alive. The instant she felt the creature’s bulging eyes, she dug her thumb and finger beneath the gelatinous orbs.
Blood coursed over her hand as her thumb and index finger burrowed under the creature’s eyes. She pulled her left arm toward her body, forcing her thumb and forefinger ever deeper into the beast’s skull.
Chase’s attacker screamed through its clenched jaws, but it refused to let go. It shook its head in a violent attempt to dislodge Chase’s fingers and bring her to the ground.
