Chương 35: Chapter 34 - Not a Horror Movie

The lights of our phones glared off the shiny yellow warning tape. It was no longer across the door. The strips were dangling from one side. I glanced at Conrad.

"We weren't worried about the tape," he said. I turned back to the door.

"No one else seems to be worried about it either." When I reached for the door handle, I wasn't surprised to find that my hand was trembling. We found the switch that went to the light in the hall and turned it on. It was a meager comfort, but I was willing to take anything I could get. At the bottom of the stairs, I walked toward the first door on the right. Conrad was a step behind me.

"What are you looking for, Mera?"

"I want to get a better look at the room I was in."

"Why?"

"I didn't really get the chance to last time." I opened the door.

"Watch it. They put a step here to trip the unwary. And everybody else."

"What do you think you might find?" I stopped with my first foot on the raised floor.

"You've been through this room, right?"

"Yeah."

"Aren't you going to tell me that we're wasting time and you didn't find anything?"

"I don't have your eyes."

"Oh." Still, I hesitated. Conrad relaxed into his stance, put the hand that wasn't holding his phone across his chest to rest it on his bicep, and smiled—smiled like a wolfman with all the time in the world.

"Are you sure you don't want to tell me it's useless?" I prompted.

"Whenever you're ready."

"This might be easier if I had something to rebel against."

"No, stop," he droned in perfect monotone.

"Don't do it."

"Thank you. I appreciate that." I turned back, took a deep breath, and dug to the roots of my courage. Then I stepped into the dreaded room. My hands were shaking so bad, I worried I'd drop my phone. I waited, heart-pounding, for the room to start swimming again. For a second, my light-headedness made it sway, but I took a step back, toward Conrad, and it stopped. There are few things in the world more reassuring than a colossal wolfman standing right behind you. Nothing was going to shake him.

"You okay?" Conrad asked.

"I think so," I said.

"Just, stay close by." I walked around the entire room, casting the light from my phone into every corner and across every wall. It was a large, empty room. That was all. No matter where I aimed the light, it revealed plain, beige-white walls or cheap, engineered hardwood flooring. As the boringness sank in, I felt myself getting more and more irritated.

"There's nothing," I said.

"What did you think you would see?" I shrugged.

"I've asked you that twice now," Conrad said.

"Is there a reason you don't want to answer me?" There was. I didn't want him to know I was being stupid. He went on, "It must have been important. I know it wasn't easy for you to come back here." Cool. I guess that meant I was being stupid and brave. Funny how often those two things seemed to go hand-in-hand. But it was five-forty in the morning, and Conrad had come along without complaint. The least I could do was answer his question.

"I was looking for water," I said. He didn't say anything. Already in stupid mode, I interpreted that as a request for more information.

"That nightmare I just had—there was a lot of water. I figured there was only one place in the whole school that made me feel that panicky, so if I was dreaming about the school, then it would have to be this room. But there's no water."

"There's water everywhere," Conrad said. We stared at each other.

"Huh?" He lifted his nose.

"There are old pipes in the wall, stale water that's gone bad—there's water damage everywhere. The mold is choking. I thought that's why this place was condemned." Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I raised my nose and sniffed. Another brilliant moment. Did I think I would be able to out-smell a wolfman? The guy knew what surprise smelled like! There was a mustiness in the room, but I had thought it was because we were in the basement.

Conrad's nostrils flexed. He turned his head toward the center of the room.

"And that god-awful smell," he grumbled. I stepped closer and grabbed onto his shirt sleeve.

"What is it?"

"Putrid." He walked to the center of the room and put one knee on the floor. His hand moved over the fake hardwood.

"It's coming from under here."

"Ohno, ohno, ohgeez." I skip-ran the few steps it took to get to Conrad, squatted down, and cowered by his side, trying to look everywhere in the room at once.

"Did you see something?" His voice was sharp.

"We're in a horror movie, and I'm the stupid one!" Conrad doesn't often laugh out loud unless it's one of his brief chuffs. This time his chuckle went on for a while. It was embarrassing, but I couldn't help feeling a little pleased too.

"It's all right, Mera." He put his arm around my shoulders and scooted me closer.

"You can calm down. I've watched a lot of horror movies. People that look like me are usually the bad guy."

"You have very strange methods of comforting people."

"How often does the bad guy team up with the stupid one?" After a few seconds of silence, he added, "We're not in a movie."

"But there's a dead body under the floor!" Conrad frowned and looked down. I said, "The normal comforting thing to say would be 'no, Emerra, it can't be a dead body.'""Whenever they say that, it is."

"You said we weren't in a movie! Besides, you'd be able to tell, wouldn't you?"

"Not when it's this faint. There are times when a rotting body smells a lot like this." Later I would reflect on that statement and wonder about all the interesting people in my life, and why they knew not only what a rotting body smells like, but what various stages of a rotting body smells like—but at that moment, I couldn't reflect on anything. My whole body was buzzing with nerves.

"Stand back," Conrad said. I scooted a few inches away.

"Further." His voice was low and menacing. I gave his voice a few more feet of space. He turned off his phone, put it in his pocket, then put his left hand and other knee down on the floor. His right elbow rose into the air and his hand curled into a fist that, for all the world, reminded me of a sledgehammer. When it hit the floor, there was an almighty crack. Boards split, their ends jumped into the air, splinters scattered.

Conrad grabbed raised board after raised board, tore them free, and tossed them to the edge of the room. The sounds of them landing on the floor was mundane enough to release me from my awed stupor.

"You can come over," Conrad said.

"Bring your light."

"No dead body?"

"No dead body." He gazed into the jagged hole he'd made.

"I should have guessed." I crept over. For the first few steps, the hole seemed to swallow my light, but then the angle changed, and I saw the first shine of tile. Conrad was talking: "It's an old drain. This must have been a washroom or something. If the water ever evaporates or leaks out from the U-bend, the sewage smell comes back up the pipe. Whoever put in the false floor must have been trying to hide all the water damage for a quick sale." He suddenly looked up.

"Mera?" It probably took a few seconds for my mounting horror to become powerful enough to smell through the sewage stench, but I wasn't surprised that it got there. I was standing two feet away from the hole, staring down at the black drain. Around it were tiny, goldenrod yellow tiles set in a sunburst pattern. There were teal tiles around them.

"This is it," I whispered. I don't know why I whispered. If Conrad breaking the floor hadn't woken everybody up, my talking certainly wouldn't. But whispering felt right. Maybe the room wouldn't hear me if I was quiet enough.

"This is the room from my dream," I said.

"That's the drain, those are the tiles."

"Mera—""Are you going to tell me I must have seen this too? It was covered, Conrad. I couldn't have seen this room, but I dreamed about it! The dreams are real." The wolfman sat back and thought. I used the time to take a few deep breaths. Conrad broke the silence.

"It was covered, and it's been covered for years. If your dreams are real, they aren't showing you anything recent."

"You think I'm dreaming about the past?" Conrad nodded.

"Okay," I said.

"That's…" I bounced my weight between my feet.

"That's something. That is definitely a…something. Good to know. We're wiser for our adventure. Right?" Conrad was too busy standing up to answer. I did it for him.

"Right. Glad we came. When does Darius get back?"

"In a few hours."

"Good. Can we get out of here?"

"You can wait outside. I'm going to cover this drain so it doesn't stink up the whole wing." Despite Conrad's assurance that we weren't living in a horror movie, I didn't feel like splitting up. I brought him the wood pieces while he tried to fit them back together as best he could. It looked terrible, but it did cut down on the smell. We went out to the first room and over to the stairs. Conrad froze with his hand on the rail.

"Turn off your light," he whispered. That idea did not appeal to me. His phone was still in his pocket. I was holding the only light source, but the way he'd said it didn't leave much room for arguing. I fumbled with my phone.

"Hurry," he said. I shoved the whole thing in my pocket. The room went dark except for a tiny glowing patch of denim about as high as my butt.

"Don't bother," a voice said from the top of the stairs. It sounded like Wuller. He went on, "You might as well come up, gentlemen. We know you're there, and there's only one exit." I stood in an agony of indecision until Conrad reached back and put a hand on my shoulder. The headmaster was right. We didn't have a lot of choices, and staying down there only meant I was burning through my phone's battery. I pulled out my phone and led the way upstairs.

Since Wuller was standing in the hall light, I could see him long before he could see me. He had on one of those fancy bathrobes that look like they're made from expensive curtains. I knew the moment he saw me because his face turned a reddish-plum color and his mustache started trembling.

"Miss Cole?" a higher voice said. Behind Wuller was Alex Miller. He stared at me with raw astonishment. The headmaster finally found his voice.

"Miss Cole! What are you doing here? I would have expected something like this from one of our boys—b-but from you?" Conrad stepped up behind me. Both men took a half step back.

"Good morning, Miller," Conrad said.

"That explains it."

"Explains! Explains what?" Wuller demanded.

"He stays in the staff hall." To Miller, Conrad said, "You must be a light sleeper."

"I didn't need to be a light sleeper, sir." Miller's voice hardly quivered at all.

"It was quite a loud crash."

"Crash!" Wuller turned from his assistant to the wolfman.

"What have you been doing to my school? No! No, I'll see for myself." He started tromping down the stairs.

"Do you have your phone with you?" I called.

"The lights down there don't work." The headmaster stopped and gave me a mean look.

"Would you like to borrow mine?" I asked. He stomped back up the stairs. As he passed me, he growled.

"I will get a torch. Miller, please escort them up to my office. Make sure they don't feel the need to go exploring again. They can wait in the hall until I'm ready to see them." He marched by us and out to the main hall. I sighed and shook my head.

"You try to be helpful."