Act Nineteen: Ghost Lights
For the thousandth time that night, Rubble cursed his invalidity. A whole series of bad decisions led him to sitting helplessly in a chair while someone screamed for help only feet away. Of course, they’d yet to figure out how to open the bloody door, but that was beside the point. He blamed himself for not being able to go in the room in her stead, leaving their new ‘boss’ to do all the work.
His callous and poorly thought-out attack against the Beast had cost him. Not only was his leg a pile of dead weight what with the missing chunk, but he’d lost his job. His uncle had told him it was too much of a safety hazard and liability issue to allow someone with such a major disability to do anything more than directing traffic, and they were up to their elbows in flaggers. The insurance company wouldn’t pay a dime for his bills, because he couldn’t tell them what had caused the injury. Not to mention the look on his mother’s face when she met him at the hospital.
His mother. Rubble’s mom had always been a worrier. Not without reason, as of late, given his extracurricular activities. Even before then, however, when his father was deployed over sees. When he didn’t come home. When the only thing they sent back was an army jacket with a single hole in the back and a hat to match. When he’d started picking fights with anyone who looked like they could take a hit.
Shuffling uncomfortably in the wheelchair while Zap tried, rather cleverly, to use a fire stoker to pry the door open with her free hand, he reached around and scratched the itch on his back where the hole was. Loose, melted threads poked into his back now and then whenever he wore it. It was a size too big, the buttons were frayed and didn’t hold right, and the pocket was so worn out the inside had a hole that led to the lining. Technically the entire thing was one big pocket. Not to mention, in moments like this, it weighed a ton.
A loud click roused him from his thoughts, and he looked up to see the wall slowly opening. Then it all but blasted the rest of the way open as Indigo kicked the door in. “Raven! You alive?!” she bellowed.
There was an uncomfortable silence, followed by some grunting, retching noises, and scurrying across wood floors. Like the soundtrack to a B-movie possession scene. “Yes!” came the reply, eventually, as Inkwell stumbled out of the room. She patted herself down, as if trying to shake off a whole host of spiderwebs, and shivered. “Well, we’ve found the bodies.”
The loud squeaking of the wheelchair set Raven’s teeth on edge as she stepped aside to make room for Rubble, who wheeled himself into the doorway. “Holy FUCK ME that’s a lot of dead kids. That’s just sick, I mean, please.” he quickly reversed and starting searching himself for anything incendiary.
Indigo took one look in the room, and quickly made for the sink. The sight in the wine closet was deplorable: a stack at least half a dozen high and wide of young, leathered bodies, in an array of period clothes. Some almost ancient, others so recent it was almost insulting. Children, killed and kept like trophies, stashed above a pantry and wine closet as if they were little more than kitchen ingredients. She dry heaved a few times, and when nothing came out, she settled for leaning on the stainless steel and groaning self-indulgently. “Can we please start burning these… the kids so we can move on? I mean, I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, but-”
“-we don’t exactly have time for last rites. Yeah, I feel ya,” Rubble finished for her. Having a task at hand helped him set aside his self-pity, at least for now. “I mean, I’m still kind of stuck on how we got the door open, but gift horses and all that.”
Inkwell, having taken a few moments to compose herself, and most likely needing several dozen more when they finally left this god-awful place, worked her way to the back of the kitchen. “Well, let’s get started. I hope this rather boorish-looking wood stove is big enough, because I’m not about to light a bonfire in a room full of pressurized bottles of alcohol.”
“That may be the sanest thing I’ve heard all night, somehow,” Rubble agreed. Taking a gander over his shoulder, he nodded. “Looks like. Maybe three feet wide, probably five deep. Cast iron. Could roast a small hog in there. Probably did, at one point. Check the bottom for an ash pan before we start, I don’t want to clog the works and breathe ash for an hour. Really shitty way to die.”
His employer gave him the latest in a long line of curious looks, to which he just shrugged and answered, “My uncle works construction. I’ve helped install a few in some of the older houses that wanted that touch of authenticity. Also there’s a big one in an abandoned house near our hideout that we use from time to time. No, you don’t want to know what for.”
Resolutely shaking off the mental image her curiosity had conjured, Raven followed his advice and dug around for a handle or lower drawer. Finding both in one, she pulled out a shallow, wide pan with a heavy grate on it, lots of ash, and what looked like an unfortunate pile of bones. “Oh goddammit,” she groaned, more put out by her own blasé response than the actual presence of dead… whatever.
Indigo tromped over, looking into the pan curiously. “Oh, joy. Hold on,” she said, taking a loose bone and knocking it on the counter. “Nah, not human. Sounds too ceramic. Probably a sheep.” When she noticed the look Raven was now directing at her, she answered, “My dad likes hunting and my mom’s a good cook. I thought one time they’d killed the neighbor kid and burned him in a pit in the backyard, but they were cooking lamb. The cop who responded to my poor, 9-year-old 911 call taught me how to tell the difference between human and animal bones.” She took another look in the pan. “Looks like pig, too. The ribcage is really similar, but smaller. See how it looks like an adult’s ribs, but smaller? If it were a person that small there’s be fissures and stuff cause the bones are still fusing.”
Rubble nodded approvingly. “You and Treble would get along well. He has a head for weird, morbid facts, too.”
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“I’m just saying, if we were going to find any corpses down here, either the room would open up, or we’d be going topside,” Treble commented. “You can’t realistically store a body underground like this and expect it to keep like the poor girl upstairs. It’s too dark, damp, and cold. Decomp 101.”
“And I’m just saying I’d like something nicer to talk about while we’re traipsing around in this creepy secret passage,” Twilight requested impatiently. “There’s got to be at least an entire floor’s worth of hidden space between the first floor and the ‘basement.’ There’s no way we’re at basement level right now. This whole underground floorplan makes no sense to me.”
“Yeah,” groaned Dusty, who had grown weary of the bickering behind him. “It’s almost like some self-indulgent billionaire made a big, fancy, impractical house because he could, then had to build a whole bunch of extra shit in after the fact to hide a bunch of family secrets while keeping the additions off the books and out of the hands of the local authorities. I WONDER,” he growled, which reverberated shortly in the narrow passage.
Twilight opened her mouth to respond, then didn’t. “Well, we’ve been walking for a while. Either this comes out on the far side of the house or on the grounds far behind the building.”
“Or maybe the entire hallway has a gentle curve to it to give it the illusion of length when in reality it might not even go past the boundaries of the house,” Bones groaned. Treble raised an eyebrow at him. “You’ve been tugging me slightly to the left the whole time.”
Twilight stopped walking for a second, mentally berating herself for not noticing such a simple trick. “Right. Ok. Even so, we should be coming up on a-”
“Door,” Dusty butted in.
“Right, a door, sometime soon,” she finished.
“No,” Dusty added, then knocked on a nearby wall. It sounded hollow and wooden. “Door.”
“Oh thank god,” Treble groaned. After a moment, he added, “Well? Open it, maybe?”
Dusty looked over his shoulder. “Can’t find a handle.”
Spooks rolled his eyes, and shook himself free of his friend. Nudging past Double D, he ran a hand along the door, then pushed on one side. The door swung open slowly, with a deal of weight behind it. Dusty looked back sheepishly, then added his own weight to the effort, and the door swung open properly. “Welp.”
As the quartet emerged from the passage, they found themselves unearthing beneath a stairwell in the main hall. Spooky immediately flopped into a nearby ornate chair, and no sooner had Dusty closed the door behind them all had he fallen asleep again. Treble gave him a sad look. “Kid’s gonna be worn out for days. I mean, he doesn’t sleep well normally, and that barrier must’ve trashed him.”
Twilight raised a hand out of habit. “Is it really that taxing?”
Dusty took his own seat on the floor next to Bones, and shrugged. “It depends. Just putting it up? Kind of. Holding a barrier like that burns your natural batteries twice as fast. Most people are awake what, fourteen, fifteen hours a day? More? Holding that barrier up from wake to set you’d get maybe seven or eight hours. And that’s without anything pushing on it. With all that extra stress, and the fact that he’s been awake since like, 8 A.M.? It’s like sleep deprivation. These power naps are all that’s keeping him on his feet. So to speak,” he chuckled, closing his eyes.
“And how are you two not passing out?” she demanded, giving them both curious looks.
Treble groaned and stretched in response. “Adrenaline, mostly. I’ve been crashing for the last twenty minutes. Which is like, eighty percent of the reason I was so annoyingly chatty back there. Gotta keep myself awake somehow.”
“Yeah, and the other twenty was keeping me on my toes,” Dusty groaned, not opening his eyes. “Idle chatter is a great way to stay awake. But he’s right. If we don’t get some voluntary sleep soon we’re going to pass out where we stand.”
Her next question was cut off as a wave of exhaustion passed over her, and Twilight slumped against the wall opposite. “That, uh… that sounds about right.” As her butt reached the floor, and her vision dimmed, she felt Treble take a seat next to her.
Then Spooky’s bad habit of saying horrible things at horrible times popped up. “Does anyone else smell smoke?”
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The trio looked grimly on as the first body burned in the stove. It had been an adventure getting it in there, but they’d managed. Lighting it was easier; there’s been fuel and flint nearby, left over from the previous tenants. Although, given the flint, it could have come with the house. The body was so dry and brittle, and the clothes so threadbare and dusty, that the lot had caught flame almost laughably easy.
The problem was making room for all the other bodies, and managing to keep themselves alive in the meantime. If the scream from the first body they’d burnt was any indication, they were about to meet some heavy resistance. A thought that almost scared them all out of their skin as the door to the kitchen flung open.
“What?!” Indigo yelped, grabbing a nearby pan and facing the entryway. Rubble had almost fallen out of his chair in the excitement, and Raven had opted to hid behind both of them.
Which all proved unnecessary as Treble marched into the room with an air of over-confidence, undermined by the obvious exhaustion he was feeling, and came to a halt at the counter. “Oh, good, you’re all alive. Now, why are you burning…. WHAT are you burning?!” he redirected, when the thought occurred to him.
Dusty and Twilight traipsed in behind him, carrying a nearly unconscious Bones who fell into a booth and returned to sleep with his arms and head on the counter. He looked much like he’d fallen asleep in class. His two escorts threw themselves wordlessly into the booths on either side, letting Treble handle all the talking they were far too tired to do.
Rubble finally got himself turned around, and looked worriedly at Spooks. “The hell happened to him?”
Treble settled for slumping against the counter and sliding to the floor again. “Barrier spell,” he explained, then detailed their grand adventure through the library, the secret room, and the passage that led them to the lobby. “Now, again, WHAT are you burning?”
Rubble offered his own detailed report of burning the first body, hearing the mighty roar throughout the house, and the logic and blind luck that led them to the repository of dead bodies above the wine closet. “So we decided to burn them all. Even if it’s not what gave him the willies in the first place, I’d be satisfied knowing we don’t have to deal with another puppet show like that again.”
Dusty looked up from his slumped pose on the counter. “Oh. See, and here I thought that big rumble was because we found this book thing here,” he offered, digging in his bag and pulling out the strange tome they’d found in the secret collection.
As if on cue, there came a rumble from the wine closet. The group turned in a mixture of morbid curiosity, fear, and exasperation as the door swung open again. The sound of dull thudding echoed through the opening, followed by another, and another, in a slowly increasing staccato. Then the first arm reached out of the dark, and drug with it the rest of the body it was attached to. Another arm reached around the door frame, and it’s owner lurched forward into the room. One by one, the rest of the bodies shuffled and shook their way into the kitchen, as the living in attendance all scurried to the other side of the room. Except Spooks, who was still asleep.
Rubble glared ad Dusty. “I’m gonna fucking kill you one of these days.”