Chương 41: Chapter 40 - The Basement

Igor, Conrad, Iset, and I were down in the wine cellar, which—believe me—made for a tight fit. I was squished up against the wine racks while Conrad, Igor, and Iset walked in and out of the entry to the hallway that led off from the back wall. I watched, bemused, as they kept stepping forward and then back, staring up and around them, marveling—or, in Igor's case, cursing. He seemed to take it personally that some long-dead magician had hidden an entire hallway right below his kitchen.

You'd think they were tunneling in to steal his cookies.

"How did they miss it?" Igor demanded.

"I don't know," Iset whispered as she reached out a hand to grasp at air.

"There had to have been magicians all over this house— how?"

"I don't know, Igor! It's possible a sorcerer or an alchemist with a low-level talent checked here."

"If I find them…" Igor's threat trailed off into a dark, incoherent grumble.

"They're probably dead," Conrad pointed out. He slowly moved his nose in an arc through the air.

"That won't stop me from digging them up to give them the beating they deserve," Igor said. Funny enough, I believed him.

"Go easy on them, Igor," I said.

"Northrop probably made it as hard to find as he possibly could."" You found it." I grinned.

"Actually, I didn't know it was here either." He stopped to glare at me with his larger eye. The hallway? Sure. I knew about that. Any fool with the Eyes of the Sphinx could see that. But the stone wall they had told me they were walking through? Well, I had to take their word for it. And I was glad there were three witnesses.

"Conrad?" Iset said. Conrad pointed to the right side of the entryway.

"There. I think." He closed his eyes and felt his way over to the wall. Still using his hands to guide him, he knelt and moved his nose closer to the stone.

"I smell metal. But it's faint. I think it's embedded in the wall." Iset sighed.

"A device. That would make sense. It would last infinitely longer and use less energy than a spell."

"So you're saying it's an illusion?" I asked.

"An unusually good one."

"And why didn't you tell us about it?" Igor snapped at me.

"How was I supposed to know that you guys didn't know about your own basement?" I saw a blue light out of the corner of my eye. If it hadn't been so dark down there, I would've missed it. When I looked around, the faint ray at the far edge of the room bloomed brighter, setting part of the wall glowing. Crap. I turned back and told Igor, "You can yell at me later." I took the battery-powered lantern from Iset.

"The magic circle is still closing, and I'd rather get to the basement before it does. Conrad, I'll probably need your help."

"Is the magic circle close?" Conrad asked." Very close."

"Iset," Igor said, "this is probably going to be dangerous. You wait upstairs with Mrs. Park and Kappa."

"Igor, you're injured," she said—quite reasonably, I thought.

"I'm not sending the children in there alone." I raised my voice.

"We're adults." Given how hard Igor scoffed, I was surprised one of his eyes didn't pop out of its socket. He turned back to Iset while grabbing the shotgun from its makeshift holster and holding it out to her. Honestly! It was incredible! The sledge hammer and ax were still strapped to him, and a set of metal pipes made a huge X on his back. The measure of a warrior was not how many people you'd killed, but how good you were at carrying around half-a-dozen over-sized weapons without dropping them.

"Unless the house is collapsing," Igor said, "wait in the butler's pantry. That trapdoor is small. It'll be easy to shoot whatever's coming out." Iset took the shotgun. It looked strange in her thin hands.

"I understand." She turned back to the tight spiral staircase that led up to the pantry. Igor, Conrad, and I walked through the wall that wasn't there. The hallway beyond the cellar was definitely the one from my dream. When the lantern light chased away the first fraction of the shadows, I recognized the stone walls and the short wooden doors fixed into their thick frames. Walking through the hallway only heightened that eerie sense of familiarity.

"Do you know which door we're supposed to be looking for?" Conrad asked. My stomach sank as I gazed down the hallway. There were three doors that I could see, and more beyond them in the darkness.

"No," I said. When Conrad and Igor looked at me, I felt compelled to try to explain.

"It took me a while to—you know—get into the dream. Before that, it was, like…a dream lite?" They continued to look at me.

"A holding pattern?" I tried. More staring. I made airplane noises and flew my index finger around, in case they didn't know what I meant by "holding pattern." Igor turned to Conrad.

"And this is our seer?" Conrad grunted.

"I understood enough. We're checking every door." We started with the first door on the left. It was locked. Conrad unlocked it with one swing of the sledge hammer while I looked over my shoulder to watch the progress of the magic circle. Its relentless crawl made me feel like I was in a horror movie… This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. I mean, not a zombie horror movie—a different horror movie.

The kind with one of those crazy bad-guys who only ever walks, but they never stop chasing you. And then some zombies sprinkled on top of that. Conrad shoved open the heavy door and moved aside so I could go in with the lantern. I stepped inside and stopped short. My hands started sweating and my heart beat faster. The small room was crowded with human skeletons, lying over each other in a tangle of bones.

From my sad experiences with the zombie crypts, I could tell that Northrop had stacked the bodies on top of each other. Without long-term magic to preserve them, they'd rotted away to this. A drone filled my ears. It was somehow connected to the dull, heavy feeling in my chest, and in only a second and a half, it grew until my ears felt dead and I could hardly breathe because of the weight. How many bodies had Northrop used?

He must have collected them, thoughtlessly, obsessively, paying every desperate man with a shovel—bring me the dead! I need the dead! —emptying graves for miles and miles, hanging over the churchyards like a vulture. Eventually he'd acquired a surplus that he could pile up to be used later. The man had hoarded death. Igor stepped up to my side.

"No danger here at least. Autonomous zombies can't move without muscles. Do we need to collect the skulls?" I shook my head, and when I spoke, my voice came out hushed.

"This is the wrong room." We crossed the hall to get to the next door. The next two rooms were almost identical to the first. Whenever we passed from one room to the next, I would scan the hallway behind us, trying to see if we were still ahead of the magic circle. Then I'd move into the new room, glance around for a second, and move on. In the fourth room, we found an intact body. Iron chains were locking it to the heavy table with its arms and legs stretched out.

By how fresh the body looked, anyone would think the man had died yesterday. Its slightly clouded eyes stared up at the ceiling. Its jaw hung slack. Its leg, forearm, and part of its chest had been cut open. The severed skin and layers of tissue were peeled back to reveal the bones, ligaments, and tendons beneath. Behind me, Conrad said, "You okay, Mera?"

"Fine," I said while shaking like the proverbial leaf. And I was fine. More fine than I had any right to be. Was this how adrenaline junkies were created? I pointed to the corpse.

"There's magic in this one." I could see cords of it laced through the exposed anatomy. Igor stepped forward and pulled out his ax.

"Thank you for the warning."

"Hey!" I held up a hand to stop him "Wait! What are you doing?"

"I'm dismembering it. Think of it as a preemptive strike. Safest option when I'm injured like this." He added almost, but not quite, under his breath, "Best way, really. Injured or not."

"It hasn't done anything!" Igor stopped to give me a look.

"It's not like I'm killing anyone, Emerra." I looked down at the corpse. It would be hard to argue with that point. I glanced at the corner of the room. There was no glowing blue line. Yet. I turned back to Igor.

"Fine. But hurry." The eyebrow over his larger eye rose. He turned to the body on the table and proceeded to…hurry. I left the lantern with him and went into the hall so I wouldn't have to watch. Conrad joined me. When Igor was finished, he came out with the lantern and handed it to me.

"Next room?" Conrad asked. I swallowed and nodded. The next room was filled with animal remains. Horns, antlers, teeth, bones—all the parts that Northrop had used to create the chimeric monstrosities that had attacked us yesterday morning.

"It's a damn good thing Mr. Noctis killed that magician when he did," Igor said as he prodded a box of claws with the bloody ax.

"All those bodies. All these parts. It could've been a lot worse." I nodded in mute agreement. As I was nodding, something happened. An image that wasn't an image flashed across my sight—too temporary and too insubstantial to see. I can't explain it. It was like my eyes blinked for me, and it didn't involve my eyelids. My stomach heaved, then righted itself.

In other circumstances, I might have been able to shake off the curious feeling that I had or hadn't seen something, but as my stomach righted itself, there was the rumble and prolonged crash of the house, far above our heads, collapsing. When the crashing stopped, Conrad muttered, "That sounded big."

"Something rose," Igor said.

"The zombie!" I ran back into the hall. Conrad followed, cursing when he knocked his head on the low doorway. Igor clunked along behind us.

"It's in pieces!" Since we couldn't relock the doors after Conrad had busted the latches, all the doors to the rooms we'd already inspected were hanging open. Four portals yawned into the hallway. My eyes scanned the area in a panic, hoping to spot whatever was coming for us before it jumped out of the darkness. There was nothing. The only movement was the curve of the magic circle, creeping along the hallway floor, casting up a blue halo of light. It hadn't reached the room with the zombie yet.

Igor limped to my side.

"I told you I've dealt with it." My mind buzzed, trying to make sense of everything but only making noise." Something was raised! The circle is right there." I pointed.

"If something was raised, then it has to be down here with us!" There was a long, uncomfortable silence while we all listened.

"How…big…did it sound to you, Conrad?" Igor asked.

"At least as big as last time," Conrad said. I licked my lips and tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry to manage it. Could we handle another wave of twenty zombie-beasts? Or was it something worse? We listened some more. Forget the zombies—that silence was going to kill me first!

"What about Iset and Mrs. Park?" I whispered.

"They got out," Conrad told me.

"I heard them leaving during the crash." I nodded. They got out. Good. And they would probably be safe because the zombies were trapped down here with us. How comforting.

"Conrad," Igor said, "is the washroom that way?" He pointed behind us, into the room we'd just left.

"Yes." Igor lowered his finger.

"The circle is collapsing in that direction." Iset had figured that out ages ago. We'd searched the whole washroom and found nothing. I wondered how big the basement actually was. Igor went on, "If anything was raised, it's probably over there." He nodded toward the west side of the hall. We all stared at the unopened door across from us.

"Smell anything?" Igor whispered.

"No," Conrad whispered back.

"Hear anything?"

"Nothing."

"Maybe nothing got raised," I said.

"Maybe the barrier is just collapsing because we're running out of magic." The smaller of Igor's eyes rolled over to look at me while the larger one stayed fixed on the door.

"How optimistic of you."

"If that's true," Conrad said, "then we can't afford to wait around to find out." He walked across the hall, sniffed around the wooden door, then laid his ear against it. He tried the latch. This one was unlocked.

"Mera," he said. I came over, held the lantern up between us, and nodded for him to open the door. It was an ancient wooden door in a dark basement that was filled with skeletons. It knew its job, and it creaked ominously as Conrad pushed it back. I gasped. This was it! This was the room! I walked forward. Conrad tried to call me back, but I wasn't listening. I gazed around the room, trying to absorb it all. My dream echoed out to me from a hundred years in the past.

Time had touched everything, but the key was right where I'd laid it in my dream. The matches were there. Every lamp was still in place. The blackboard still had chalk marks on it. So did the walls. I wandered toward the large wooden table in the center of the room and rested the tips of my fingers on it. The journal was there—closed, this time.

The rest of the table was empty, but I studied the surface, as if I was trying to understand the emptiness—iron links resting against each other, the grain of the wooden beams, the narrow cracks between them, the scuffed edges of the table where bits of wood had been knocked away, and the air above it all, swirling with displaced dust that I could see in the lantern light. Someone touched my shoulder. I jumped and screamed.

"It's me!" Conrad cried. In a quieter voice, he repeated, "It's only me." I took a deep breath. My shoulders relaxed. Igor lowered his ax.

"Conrad," I said through grit teeth, "would you please make some noise when you walk?" He watched me for one of those ten-year seconds, then said, "I don't think you would've heard me. Why were you staring at the table? Did you see something?" I looked back at the empty tabletop.

"No. Just the journal." Why did I feel like there should've been something else there?

"Is this the room from your dream?" Igor asked. His question jolted me back to reality. I did not have time to be staring at nothing.

"Yes," I said. I put the lantern down on the edge of the table and walked toward the bookshelf where the skull was. Each step made me feel like someone was screwing my excitement and anxiety into my sternum. When I saw the skull, I let out a cry that was a half-gasp, half-laugh. The skull had rolled to its side, but I knew it immediately. I lunged forward and grabbed it with a trembling hand.

The person with the screwdriver gave another wrench, driving my galaxy-sized emotions into a spot no larger than the tip of a pin. The pressure of it could've warped the cells of my body. This was it! We were going home! We were going to live! Supporting the skull with my other hand, I turned it over and looked at the bottom. The hole was empty.