by Greg Taylor
“That is what you would call an understatement, yes? No, we didn’t have a library. The elders wanted our world to be as small as possible. But here … all those books! I think I like them even more than your computers. Holding them, looking through them, the smell of them. It was wonderful.”
“I’m really proud of you, Calanthe. You just … went and did this. What gave you the idea to go to the library, anyway?”
“It was my bedroom in the Killer Pizza basement. Surrounded by all the books there. But they were only about one thing. Monsters. So when I sensed your concern about how long I was staying away from your house, I knew I needed to go somewhere else to get some ideas for my make-believe story.”
“And you came up with the perfect one. Just in time, too. My parents were about to bust me good.”
“Yes, I knew that.”
Annabel looked at Calanthe. Could she really sense all these things?
“Anyway, it’s good that’s out of the way. Now we can go to Killer Pizza for our meeting.”
“Let’s wait until my parents have left. They have some kind of business dinner tonight, so it shouldn’t be too long.”
Calanthe had gotten up from her bed and was walking slowly around the room.
“I’m really happy you’re feeling better, Calanthe. You look great. You really do.”
Calanthe smiled, but something in her expression signaled that she hadn’t really heard what Annabel just said. Her mind was obviously somewhere else. “I wasn’t gone for long, Annabel, but I really missed being here. This is like home to me now.”
Annabel felt a warm glow, hearing Calanthe say that.
“Which is why I will do anything to stay here. Let them come for me. That’s what I say. They will feel my wrath if they do.”
The archaic term for “violent rage and fury” sounded just right, somehow, coming from Calanthe. But as much as Annabel loved that Calanthe was embracing Hidden Hills as her new home, she had deep concerns that the girl’s “wrath” wasn’t going to be enough to deal with the forces that Calanthe claimed were closing in on their suburban community.
Which meant they had to come up with something more than that. Much more, and fast.
3
Calanthe wanted to speak first at the meeting, so an hour later, when everyone had gathered in the KP classroom, she had the floor.
“First, I would like to say to you, Strobe, that I am very sorry for what happened to you, and the others, at my village.”
“We knew the dangers.”
“Just the same … I wanted you to know how sorry I am.”
Strobe nodded.
Calanthe took a moment before moving on to her other topic. It appeared to the trio that she was … praying? Everyone looked at one another. They’d never seen Calanthe do this before. After a moment of silence, Calanthe’s solemn expression was replaced by a more animated one.
“The next thing I wanted to say was … I discovered something important today when I was at the library, besides my make-believe illness.” Calanthe pulled some sheets of paper from her pocket. “The best that I can figure, from studying calendars and maps of the sky, and reading some historical books, is that the Day of Days will be occurring tomorrow night.”
“Halloween,” Toby said. “Perfect.”
“It is perfect,” Calanthe replied, a serious look on her face. “Considering the origins of this holiday you call Halloween. Listen to this…” Looking down at her paper, Calanthe started to read.
“Halloween’s origins date back to an ancient Celtic festival that marked the end of summer and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year often associated with human death. The Celts believed that on the night of the festival, the boundary between the worlds of the living and dead became blurred.”
Calanthe looked up from her notes to emphasize the importance of what she was reading. “It was on this night that the ghosts of the dead were able to return to earth, to cause trouble and damage crops. The Celts believed that the presence of these ghosts made it easier for the Celtic priests to make prophecies about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.”
Calanthe paused. She looked like she was getting to the good part. “To commemorate this yearly festival, known as Samhain, the Celtic priests built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.”
Calanthe looked at everyone, her dark eyes flashing with excitement.
“Is that all they sacrificed?” Toby asked warily. “Animals?”
“That’s what it said in the book. It was amazing to me, reading this, how much the Celts were like my people. The Celtic priests. Our village elders. The festival, celebrated at the same time of year. The crops, of supreme importance in both of our worlds. And the sacrifices, of course.”
“Yours … much more intense,” Toby observed.
“But think about this. The Celts…” Calanthe checked her notes. “They lived over two thousand years ago. My people live now, in the modern world.” Calanthe shook her head in amazement at this.
“History lesson aside,” Strobe said, “The bottom line is you’re pretty sure the Day of Days is tomorrow.”
Calanthe gave Strobe a nod.
“I don’t believe my people will arrive, during the day, however. Even if they did, it is likely they will wait for the cover of darkness to come for me.”
“Okay, so check it out.” Strobe got up gingerly from his chair. Annabel watched with concern.
As he walked slowly around the room. Strobe had obviously taken a beating on his trip to Canada. The fact that he was even up and about was a testament to his strength and stamina. And craziness. “I thought for sure I’d given the dekayi the slip, but clearly Calanthe doesn’t think I did. If a battle is going down sometime tomorrow night, we need to pick the place for it.”
“What do you mean?” Toby asked.
“When we fought the alpha dude? We were scrambling, man, running for our lives. I don’t want to do that again, if we can help it. So what I’m saying is we pick out a place, somewhere nearby, but isolated. When the dekayi arrive, we lure them to this place, which we’ve rigged with, you know, various deadly devices. This way we do battle on our own turf. That should give us an advantage, at least for starters.”
“I like it,” Toby said.
“I do, too.” Annabel had a pensive look on her face. “And I think I might know a place. I heard my dad talking the other day about an abandoned steel mill over on Blake Street. He’s going in with a group of business associates to put together an offer to buy the land.”
“Blake Street…” Strobe frowned, trying to picture it. “That’s not too far away, right? What’s it like around there?”
“Everything’s overgrown. The steel mill, warehouses … they’re just rusting away.”
“There are houses, though, and a few stores right down the road from the place,” Toby pointed out.
“Yeah, there are.”
“That could be a problem. In which case, I have a backup.” Toby went to the front of the classroom, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote “Shock Corridor” on the blackboard.
Strobe leaned up against the wall and gave Toby a “go on” look.
“That was the name of our local haunted house attraction, the kind you have to pay to get in? It was in an old building that used to be a hospital. You can check in—”
“But you can’t check out!” Annabel said with a grin, finishing the Shock Corridor tagline for Toby.
“You went, too, Annabel?”
“Of course. The Deadly Doctor?”
“The Ambulance to Hell?”
Toby and Annabel laughed.
“Okay, that’s enough, you two.”
“Point being, this could be just what we’re looking for. It’s a brick building. Two stories.”
“It is
a bit out there, though,” Annabel said.
“It’s farther than the steel mill, yeah, but if we’re after something more isolated—”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Calanthe interrupted. “What are these … attractions?”
“They’re fun places to go on Halloween,” Toby explained. “The people that put on the attraction hire a bunch of people, make them up to look like zombies, vampires, characters in popular horror movies. Then they put together these really creepy rooms and places that you have to go through? To get to the end of the attraction? The whole idea is to scare everyone who comes to the place out of their wits.”
“And you have to pay money for this?” Calanthe asked.
Annabel laughed. “Sounds even stranger than people getting dressed up in costumes and going trick-or-treating around the neighborhood, huh.”
“It’s confusing more than anything. You said these are fun places to go on Halloween. Why would anyone want to be scared like that? What is the point?”
“You know what?” Strobe said. “I’m sure there are many interesting psychological answers to that question, but now’s not the time to get into it. Tobe, you said this attraction was in the old hospital. As in, no longer?”
“Right. Some people started a newer, bigger one over in Moon Township a few years back. Put Shock Corridor right out of business. Easy to see why. Maniac Maze is awesome, let me tell you. If we weren’t doing this tomorrow, I’d definitely be there.” Toby frowned. Had he actually just said that?
“An old hospital.” Strobe thought about that. “Sounds pretty good, actually. Lots of interesting spaces.”
“You bet,” Toby said. “Hospital rooms. A cafeteria. Basement tunnels. A boiler room.”
“You want to go there just ’cause it used to be a Halloween attraction.”
“There’s that, too.”
“I have to say, a theme is definitely developing here.”
“Theme?” Calanthe asked.
“Yeah, something that … ties everything together. In this case? No matter where we turn, no matter where we look, there it is.”
Calanthe frowned. She didn’t know what Strobe was talking about.
“Halloween, baby. Halloween.”
4
“This feels…”
Toby and Annabel looked at Calanthe, wondering how the former hospital felt to her. To them it felt dank and creepy. Smashed-out windows at the opposite ends of the corridor and a partially caved-in roof let in enough light to illuminate the decrepit hallway, which ran the length of what had been a patient wing. When day turned to night, however, the place would be pitch-black. So if it felt creepy now …
“Like a very good place,” Calanthe concluded. “To make what Strobe called ‘Our Stand.’”
Just then Strobe came up from a nearby stairwell. “You were totally right about this place, Tobe. It’s perfect. And the basement?” Strobe indicated where he’d just been with a thumbs-up. “Might be the best place of all. Plenty of corridors and cul-de-sacs to booby-trap.”
Not for the first time, Toby was amazed at how much Strobe seemed to relish an impending fight with anything that could be labeled “monster.” Even his horrendous trip to Calanthe’s village hadn’t seemed to dampen his enthusiasm.
“Calanthe happens to agree with you, Strobe,” Annabel said.
“Yeah?”
Calanthe gave Strobe a nod.
“So that makes four of us?”
Nods all around.
“Time to get our hands dirty, then.”
* * *
Standing on a stepladder in a dark tunnel, Strobe twisted the rest of a line of wire around an overhead pipe, then tied an extra knot in the wire to make certain it was secure. The wire drooped from the pipe to the concrete floor and off into the darkness of the tunnel.
“Okay. Pull it tight!”
It took a few moments, but then the wire rose toward the ceiling as someone pulled from the opposite end of the passageway.
“Looks good!” Strobe yelled as he jumped from the stepladder to the floor. It was Toby he met halfway down the tunnel, both of them using their high-powered flashlights to see where they were going.
After working nonstop on three booby traps for more than four hours, the two were drenched in sweat. They’d sent Annabel and Calanthe home a short while before. Even though there were just the two of them, they were determined to do as much work on the traps as possible before calling it a night.
Fact was, this was fun for Strobe and Toby. Constructing elaborate, deadly snares for their enemy in a creepy, old deserted hospital? It was like a video game, for real.
Calanthe had been fascinated by the work. The planning of the traps, what they were for, the construction of them. She’d been a great help, too, especially with some of the heavy lifting, seeing as she was even stronger physically now than when the trio had first met her, thanks to the Altering.
But when Strobe had suggested that he take her and Annabel back to the Oshiro residence in the truck he’d borrowed from a nameless, shady-sounding “contact,” Annabel had instantly taken him up on his offer. She didn’t think it was a good idea for her and Calanthe to stay out too late. The last thing she wanted was to make her parents even more suspicious than they already were. Which meant that Annabel and Calanthe were going to school in the morning. It had been decided that it was important for the two girls to continue to pretend that all was well in Hidden Hills-land. At least until all hell broke loose.
“Excellent work, man,” Strobe said as he and Toby leaned up against the wall, then slid down into a sitting position on the cool concrete floor.
“Yeah, we’re doin’ okay. I wish we were going a little faster, but better to have a few less traps that we’re positive actually work than throwing up a bunch more and crossing our fingers.”
“Agreed.” Strobe held out a clenched fist. Toby tapped it with his own clenched fist, then pulled a couple of sodas from a padded cooler he was carrying with him, gave one to Strobe, and kept one for himself. The two popped open their cans and took long, thirsty gulps.
“I can’t believe how good you are at planning and putting these traps together,” Strobe said. “This is some pretty elaborate stuff we’re building here.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve had practice.”
“You have?”
“In miniature. I used to build these really intricate mazes in my bedroom when I was a kid. This was during my Star Wars phase. It was always the same setup. Luke and Leia being chased by the rancor, the Gorax, the krayt dragon. I built the traps in the mazes. Or rather, Luke and Leia built them. Guess who won, every time?”
“Wow, you really were a geek, weren’t you?”
“Always and forever.”
“At least all that playtime is paying off.”
“Yeah. Who knew?” After a couple of monster-size carbonated burps, Toby leaned his head up against the wall and closed his eyes. “I’m thinking I should head home around midnight. Get scolded, maybe grounded for being out too late on a school night. Then I’m up bright and early, get ready for school, and I’ll come here instead for some more trap making.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“How ’bout you? Calling it quits when you take me home tonight?”
“Nope. Stayin’ here.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, my mom’s not expecting me back until the weekend. No sense going home till then. So this place is gonna be my hotel for the night.”
“Lovely.”
Toby and Strobe fell silent as they drank their sodas and chomped on a bag of chips Toby had pulled out of his backpack.
“So…”
Strobe glanced over at Toby, who was staring at his soda can as if there was something wrong with it. “So … what?”
Toby looked hesitant to follow up his one-syllable conversation starter. “It was pretty bad up there, huh?”
Strobe looked like he didn’t want to deal with Tob
y’s question. He’d already gone over all that with Annabel when they talked on the phone, and she had relayed everything to Toby and Calanthe. But then Strobe exhaled a small sigh and nodded, a rare display of vulnerability for the guy.
“Yeah, it was bad.”
“I’m really glad you made it out of there, man.”
“Well, I would hope so.”
A slight smile from Toby, then he was serious again. “So what do you think? Are the other MCOs dead?” The way Toby asked the question, it sounded like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know the answer.
“I don’t know. Last I heard from Harvey, the troops he sent up there reported that the village is totally deserted. No sign of Holt, Dixon, or Harris.”
“Everyone just cleared out?”
“Yeah. A hundred, hundred-fifty people, gone. No tracks. The best Harvey can figure, they went underground.”
“Maybe Calanthe…” Toby stopped, didn’t finish his thought.
“That’s what Harvey’s thinking. Once we get done with whatever we have to deal with here, maybe Calanthe can help locate her former clan. But first things first, right?”
Strobe finished off his soda, grabbed one last handful of chips, and hopped up with an ease that suggested he was feeling better, physically. “Did you see that room around the corner? With the padlock on it?”
Toby shook his head no.
“Well, the suspense is killing me.”
Strobe walked back down the tunnel to where he had left the ladder. A large canvas sack resembling a baseball equipment bag was propped up against the wall. Strobe rummaged around inside the bag and pulled out a heavy-duty industrial-size metal cutter. The cutter, along with some of the other tools the group had been using to construct the traps, had been supplied by Strobe’s mysterious contact. Between the contact Strobe wouldn’t say who the guy was, which concerned Toby and Annabel—KP headquarters, and the local dump, they had managed to find just about everything they’d needed for their booby-trapping work.
“This should do the trick, don’t you think?” Strobe said, holding up the cutter.
Toby followed Strobe down the tunnel and around the corner. At the end of a cul-de-sac was the door with the padlock. It took Strobe a couple of tries to cut through the lock, but he finally did it, the sweat dripping from his face from the strain of the effort and the airless, musty atmosphere of the tunnel.