“Nate?” Andy called, walking in his direction while removing her mask. “Nate, what’s up?”
She could see what he was doing now—loading shells into his uncle’s break-action shotgun, his hands trembling like an old eremite’s defending his cabin from an alien raid. Tim was by his side, yapping into the drift they had traversed earlier.
A howling, chuckling, myriaphonic clangor was approaching from the distant end of the 1.6-mile-long tunnel.
“I’ve got twelve rounds,” Nate stammered, closing the action. “How many you got?”
Andy’s fingers ran to her empty back pocket. She wondered whether the pistol would have actually hit the bottom of the shaft by now.
Nate noticed: “You lost the gun?!”
“I ran out of hands!”
Peter stood on Nate’s right, arms crossed, contemplating the incoming horde. “That’s funny, I wonder who could’ve summoned those guys.”
“We need another way out,” Andy realized.
“I mean, it’s almost like someone read a spell or something and they were attracted to it, isn’t it?”
“Shut up,” Nate whispered.
“The vent!” Andy ordered, grabbing the birdcage on her way to where Kerri was finishing throwing up. “There was a utility tunnel here with a vent; maybe we can climb it!”
PETER: Yeah, good idea, try that door over there.
NATE: (Looking in that direction.) What? NO! Andy, not that door!
The call arrived just a tenth of a second after Andy had already executed a triumphant door-opening on the steel gate in the rock wall, covered in black-and-yellow cave-in warning signs.
And every twisted amphibian inside the service tunnel, every four-armed and zero-eyed and reverse-skulled wheezer, shrieked in bloodlusty joy.
Andy bought the next second of her own life by sticking an arm forward in a reflex gesture to block the wave of razor claws and needle teeth with the one thing she happened to be carrying: the birdcage. It turned out to be just big enough to get stuck in the narrow tunnel, and for a whole second it held as the creatures thrashed at it, and the bird literally screamed in terror like birds had never been witnessed to do, and Andy spied through the bars to count the enemies on the other side. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Whatever the Fifth Letter in the Greek Alphabet Is, all quickly maneuvering over and beneath the obstacle, slashing Andy’s aura.
The next second of life she earned at the cost of using whatever hung from her belt as a weapon. The first thing was the two-way radio, which proved a terrible choice; it bounced off a wheezer’s head before another crushed it between its teeth. The second item was the pickax she’d used to seal E-6. It proved useful to stab a couple of heads and hold the barricade for a second longer, while Tim, stripped of his stupid breathing mask and ready to bite, arrived just in time to intercept Beta scuttling under the cage.
Andy pulled the cage out of the way, buried the pickax in Alpha’s temple and kicked its body away, heeled Beta’s skull, and blocked Gamma with the cage again.
“Nate, gun!”
“I don’t have a clear shot!”
Gamma slashed through Alpha’s corpse blocking the way, all four arms somehow managing to dodge the pickax’s thrusts.
ANDY: Nate! Gun!
NATE: You’re in the way!
ANDY: Hand me. The fucking. GUN!
Nate threw the shotgun to Kerri, Kerri to Andy; Andy aimed and tried to prioritize the targets.
And she shot at the ceiling.
The loud, echoing bang managed to appease the wheezers for a moment, the shallow depressions on their faces where eyes should gleam staring at the ghost of the explosion fading off, until they in return shrieked a ten-times-louder, twenty-clawed, million-teethed, cord-ripping warcry of psychotic bloodlust and carnage-announcing hyperadjectivated rage.
And then the tunnel caved on their heads.
All that Kerri saw was a birdcage, and a pickax, and Tim, and Andy fly out of the tunnel like shrapnel expelled out of the booming thundercloud, and the sound had not even been demoted to echo before Andy had barely landed on the ground and rolled back onto her feet, not obliging her body a solitary second of respite before the next move. She stumbled toward Nate and snatched the blueprints from him while his attention returned to the wheezer wave coming through the drift, slowly devouring yellow lamps like a nightmare Pac-Man.
“There’s gotta be a way out!” she shouted at the map. “One of these galleries must lead to the surface!”
Kerri joined her, compass in hand: “We go northwest! Just find me the tunnel labeled ‘Deboën Isle.’ ”
Andy began speed-reading the prints before fully processing the sentence.
“The isle?” Nate cried. “No way!”
“That’s the route we know to be open; Wickley used it in ’seventy-seven!”
NATE: To get to the haunted mansion!
ANDY: On an island, Kerri, we’ll be trapped!
KERRI: (Desperate.) Just—fuck, trust me once! Okay?!
Andy looked around. Again, she’d managed to stand between the two cousins, physically stand between them. She wondered at how the stage movements betrayed her every time.
NATE: Andy, look at me: there is something in that house. I am not fucking hallucinating.
PETER: No, you fucking aren’t!
KERRI: Andy. (Grabs Andy by her collar, effectively freezing time.) I can get us out.
And her orange hair gazed up in awe at its commander.
Andy swallowed. “Right. Help me find the way on the map and I’ll—”
And that was when the power went out.
For a brief, seconds-long dark age, only the bird’s ongoing hysteria eased up the absolute absence of sight or sound. That, and the approaching cacophony of rabid amphibians coming up along the drift.
Suddenly the lamps flashed on for an instant, too brief for the light to even bounce off the walls, and went off again.
Then again, a tad longer, enough to carry a germ of false relief before they went out.
“Did anyone say, ‘Things could be worse’?” Nate polled.
The lights kept hiccuping on and off, Kerri and Andy reading in each other’s eyes the same revelation.
“Morse!”
“What’s he saying?”
“Uh…‘Andy’…” she deciphered. “Then E…Z…”
“Z?”
“No, X, shit, why am I so bad at this?! E…X…I…T…”
“Hurry up!” Nate begged, aiming the shotgun at the blinking drift. In the next burst of light, Peter was standing right in front of the double barrel.
PETER: Hey, Nate, I was just thinking about those pills you’re taking, ironically, to not see me—
NATE: Shut up!
PETER: (Closer.) Didn’t the label mention something about epileptic seizures?
NATE: Shut the fuck up!
PETER: (Closer, dribbling worms.) Didn’t it, Nate?
“N, W, 2!”
“There!” Kerri solved, pointing at an unlit tunnel. “Northwest, second opening; go! Tim, come!”
Tim ran toward Kerri and Andy grabbed Nate by the jacket, and during that split second before she pushed him into the tunnel she was able to see the enemy. It filled up the drift like boiling water up a geyser—a swarm of gray fiends crawling on all fours, or sixes, teeth snapping, claws slashing, stampeding, rolling on top of one another.
She scarpered away, snatching the canary cage on her way, and dove into the tunnel to Deboën Isle.
—
“We’re almost there!” Kerri tried to shout, but barely puffed, holding a flashlight in one hand and the prints in the other, all while sprinting downhill through a roughly carved tunnel barely high enough to stand in. “After that turn, the gallery goes back up through something called ‘Deboën stairs’!”
“Stairs?” Nate panted. “Please tell me it’s not another ladder!”
It wasn’t.
The down-sloping tunnel piped them for a quarter o
f a mile up to a natural cave split by a large crevice, some fifteen feet wide and unfathomably deep. As a reminder of the force of nature that had created it, magma glared red below. The far ledge was some twelve feet higher than the one they’d landed on. A rotten iron structure, corroded into every color iron is not supposed to be, bridged the gap. It consisted of two beams bolted into the rock on either side, with about twenty ascending steps laid across and a single handrail on the left. The right side handrail had probably taken a dip into the lava a century ago.
Before Kerri even had time to screech to a halt and swear at the view, Tim ran past her and climbed up the stairs, and only at the top did he remember to turn and peek down into the chasm.
“Ooh,” Nate judged, as he and Andy stopped two steps short of the fall. “Handrail and everything. Luxury!”
“It will hold,” Kerri vouched, placing a foot on the first step, keeping her weight on the support beams. She capered up as gracefully as she could, trying to make it quick for the sake of steps that complained more than living small mammals would, ignoring the searing red veins of the planet below. Safe on the other end, her suede boots almost kissed the dusty rock again.
“See? No problem,” she said, patting the handrail, which gave way after two taps. Andy and Nate and Tim joined in a perfectly synchronized heartbeatskip as Kerri regained her balance, then they watched the iron bar tumbling down the cliff, clanging painfully all the long way down.
“Okay,” Andy evaluated, shaking off Nate’s backpack, which she’d been carrying. “Throw the backpack first, then the bird, then you go,” she said, standing guard by the tunnel mouth.
Still panting from the previous run, or from the current vertigo, Nate leaned one foot on the first step, then the other foot on the second, took the backpack from Andy and flung it across the chasm. It landed on the tenth step, from which Kerri swiftly retrieved it.
Then Nate halted to check on the caged bird. It was hiding under its water tank as if to stop from bouncing around; Nate could see its little feathered chest heaving at terminal speed, its pea-sized heart about to explode. The whole cage couldn’t be more than ten pounds. He decided to spare the bird another jolt and carry it upstairs.
The penultimate step considered that a poor decision and penalized it by snapping under Nate’s foot.
He fell facefirst on the ground, half his body dangling off the cliff; the cage flew out of his hands and rolled straight into Tim’s care while Kerri dove to grab Nate’s arm.
Andy’s first gunshot reverberated all over the cavern. She abandoned her post and galloped up the stairs, skipping two of every three rotten plates, grabbing Nate and yanking him up on the way, then turning at the top to face the wheezing ovation.
A staggering swarm of misshapen silhouettes clogged up the mouth of the tunnel. Twisted necks and overelbowed arms bashed at one another before receding at the second gunshot, while Tim viciously dared the wheezers to cross. Nate crawled to his bag and grabbed a stick of dynamite and a lighter.
ANDY: Nate, shells!
NATE: Fuck that! (Throwing the lit dynamite across the cliff.)
KERRI: NO!
A rock-shattering explosion flashed the cavern for a split second, pounding at their eardrums, blowing up pieces of stone and broken bodies.
Then, after the eternity it took for the sound to fade, there was silence.
And then the ovation returned, twice as loud, twice as angry, from the smoking cave mouth.
KERRI: TNT explosions create enormous volumes of CO2.
NATE: Shit.
ANDY: Run.
NATE: I didn’t know that!
ANDY: RUN!
A tumult grew inside the cloud of smoke and a second wave of creatures emerged, almost in an orderly fashion, and leaped up the bridgeway while Andy beat her own record time for reloading. She butted the jaw off the first wheezer and fired at the second, blowing its ribcage open in midair, while a third one skipped the stairs and super-jumped across the chasm and grabbed the opposite ledge and managed to bore its two-inch claws into the rock. Its eyeless face lurked above the ledge just long enough to see Kerri slicing a knife through its arm, severing every connective thread within, and then it fell into the abyss.
“Go!” Andy cried, aiming for the exit tunnel. “Any way that leads up!”
The final sprint took place in almost pitch darkness, flashlight beams too nervous to linger anywhere, and when they found the roots of a spiral staircase, they climbed up at maximum speed, quelling any attempt of rebellion from their muscles, and as they did, their frantic heartbeats and burning lungs overshadowed everything else: the exhaustion, the fear, the blindness, the survival instinct. They did not even stop to assess how far the wheezers had fallen back when they reached a landing, and they kept running up a new, shorter set of stairs and burst through a hatch and into a room—an actual room, a basement—and then slammed the hatch closed behind them and Andy pulled down two bookcases to block it.
Nate was in the middle of falling to his knees when Kerri grabbed his arm and headed for the exit.
“Upstairs! We need to find a window!”
The darkness was somehow comforting, Kerri thought; it didn’t allow them to process that they were inside Deboën Mansion, where reminders of a terrifying night lay in wait to trigger bad memories. She focused on keeping those at bay while finding the stairs, kicking a door open, and discovering a hint of natural light, the first in what felt like the duration of the Dark Ages. She didn’t pause and led the way up the main stairs, U-turning onto the second floor, focusing on Andy’s and Nate’s footsteps right behind her as they sped on autopilot along the second-floor hallway—blocking out the furniture and blurry wallpaper and watchful paintings that stared at them, murmuring, What’s the hurry, kids?—up to the final twelve steps to the door to the attic, and right up until the moment her hand wrenched that ultimate doorknob, she could claim that she had not, in thirteen years, touched Deboën Mansion.
The boisterous, uncensored daylight in the attic surprised them all. Kerri ran to one of the big round windows, opened it, pulled out the flare gun from her backpack, and fired a round outside.
—
The old, narcissist firs around the mirror waters of Sleepy Lake heard a soft bang, saw the trail of smoke rising from the house and then a bright, painfully off-palette strontium-red burst of sparks.
—
Kerri slid down the wall, her legs finally taking the grandstand of her brain’s congress and planning a lengthy filibuster to protest the barbaric conditions they’d suffered for the last six hours.
A soothing breeze from the lake caressed her face. Her fingers scratched the floorboards, dirty with dust and leaves and twigs from outside—healthy, sunlit dirt.
“Catch your breath. We’ll climb out in a few minutes.”
“We don’t have a boat,” Andy complained, sitting or falling down next to her. “Are you planning for us to swim back?”
“Let’s take five. Nate?”
Nate was standing at center stage, taking in the scene. Daylight, and a silence of a good kind, made of mountains and insects, filled the attic.
He waited for his skin to react. It didn’t. Sun-riding dust motes floated around him, dodging his movements, outlining the bookshelves and the workbench, sculpting the books and the myriad bottles and jars and flasks in the laboratory. Everything as innocuous as wood and clay and glass.
The place didn’t feel haunted, or ominous, or spooky. Not after the mines, not after the bowels of the earth. It looked diaphanous in comparison.
He could have attributed this change of perception to rediscovery shrinkage. But something else, some elusive aesthetic tinge, kept this abandoned alchemy lab from uncanniness.
And then he realized: the attic didn’t feel abandoned at all.
Tim, who had inspected the room upon arrival as though he felt he had fallen unforgivably behind in his sniffing duties, was now standing by the door they’d closed behind them, staring u
p, his right front paw raised like a private detective’s pipe-holding hand.
Nate approached the workbench, floorboards acknowledging his weight, and checked a dust-covered open book on the table.
“Nate,” Andy said, “if you read aloud a single word, I swear to you I will staple your lips shut.”
“Doesn’t this room feel…oddly fresh to you?” he asked.
A breeze whistled audibly this time, carrying the smell of fir wood and a gentle marimba cue.
“What’s that?” Andy wondered.
Kerri opened her eyes. Workbench, books, vases. Then she pointed her flashlight at the ceiling.
“Oh, God.”
Birdcages. Every size, every metal—dozens of birdcages hanging from the high roof beams.
Andy didn’t have to see all the birds. She spotted the first skeletal wing poking out from one of the cages and extrapolated. Kerri looked back at the floorboards and saw what she’d first mistaken for twigs were bird bones.
Her eyes and Andy’s turned at laser speed toward the cage they had been carrying all this way.
The canary tweeted once, resentfully, perched on its bar and licking its wounds.
“It’s fine,” Andy puffed.
Tim barked at the door.
“Were those cages up there the last time?” Kerri asked.
“I don’t know,” Nate said, without looking. The open book on the workbench had caught his attention. It was a large, rigid volume whose pages had the colors, and possibly texture, of very thin slices of human bone.
“Nate, I warn you—” Andy began.
“I can’t read it,” he cut her off. “No one can. Except for the side notes. Deboën’s translation.”
Tim insisted once more, adding some growls for the door.
“Last time, this was the book on the lectern.” He examined the floor: traces of red chalk pieced together the memory of a drawing on the boards, extending beneath the workbench and his feet. “Here it is, see? This is the circle. I was standing right here! And listen to this.”
“Nate…”
“Tim!”
“It’s okay, listen,” he said, reading: “ ‘Thus the Avatar shall exist only within the Circle of Light, and shall try to pour into a living Vessel, for only in a Vessel can it exist beyond the Circle, and shall only be revealed under the Spell of Zur…’ ”
Meddling Kids Page 21
