by Jody Wallace
Finally she and Harry reached her property. This close to the house they could hear voices. Cars in the gravel drive. No dogs.
If Pete had been on duty this morning, he would make sure the cops didn’t find her cellar. She didn’t think she’d left anything irregular in the stillroom, but cops, in her experience, were skeptical individuals who might question why Sandie—mysteriously missing Sandie—needed professional-grade lab equipment to construct holiday crafts. Granted, some of her tools were specially manufactured by a coven in Georgia and wouldn’t be that recognizable, but not all of them.
If, in searching for Sandie, the cops felt compelled to analyze her computer files, they’d really be in for a shock. Well, maybe this would spur her to install that data-washer program from the coven in San Francisco.
“What can you hear?” she whispered to Harry, clinging to his arm. “Are they still at the house?”
“Yes.” The tiniest of shudders thrummed through him. She wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been stuck to him like a vine. “They’re looking for evidence of theft or violence. Someone is taping up your window. Someone else said he couldn’t find your purse.”
They sat for a moment while Harry listened. June tried to breathe quietly. “Has anyone mentioned the root cellar?”
“Not so far.”
Since Harry already had ideas about who her fellow coven members were, she asked, “Do you hear Pete Bowman, Annette’s husband?”
“He’s the one who said you don’t leave home without your purse.”
Relief flooded through her. “Then we’ve got nothing to worry about. We—”
“Wait a minute.” Harry shushed her. “Somebody mentioned Bert. Why would they connect his burglary with this? It’s not like he’s at large. I need to get closer.”
“I need to get inside.” Oh, she’d hoped to avoid this. The access tunnel had mushed in the center, and it had always been harder to crawl up than down. Scuffed knees and unmentionable sludge were in their immediate future.
That’s what she got for installing her escape route too close to the field line. Civic engineer, she was not.
“Where’s this back exit?” Harry asked.
“Technically it’s a side exit.” They picked their way to the west of the house, where the hill sloped into a scrubby area. She’d tried to cultivate grapes a couple years ago, and the remnants of her unsuccessful terraces remained.
Finally they dropped into a gulley where mountain laurel grew in front of the secret passage. The narrow highway wound past on the other side of a ridge. A drizzle began to fall, the beginning of a gray, nasty day.
“We’re here,” June whispered. She hoped the cops did a good job taping up her picture window or her new couch would be ruined. Surely Pete would take care of it. As one of their elders, he was a good friend and true asset to their coven.
He was as committed as she had been, prior to yesterday.
Harry put his hands on his hips. “Where is the back door?”
She pushed aside the wiry bush with a cedar limb, not her bare skin, and started poking the wall. The door was camouflaged with sod and had been set into the hillside like a hobbit hole. It was also protected by the magic on her house.
As she plumbed the area, rocks detached themselves and plopped to the ground. Glints of metal shone through the dirt.
Harry’s sharp eyes picked out the irregularities, despite the cloaking spell. “That’s the door? It’s barely three feet tall.”
“Easier to hide.” She manipulated the latch and the little door creaked open. A dark hole shored with concrete yawned into the hillside. A few creepy crawlies scuttled away from the inrush of light. “Don’t worry, it’s only a couple hundred feet long.”
“I’m not a fan of tight spaces.”
“I’m not a fan of you being made alpha of the Millington pack or Gavin Householder trying to kill you,” June countered. “Get in there.”
“Is it safe?”
“Far as I know.” She’d tested it in the fall and survived.
“This is nuts.”
“You go first.” If he were in the tunnel, he’d be protected by her house’s spell, however much longer it lasted. She had to be in the root cellar to renew it.
He squatted at the hole, squinting into the darkness, before muttering about Indiana Jones and snakes. Duck-walking the tunnel wasn’t an option for a guy Harry’s size, but at least he wouldn’t have to squirm on his belly.
Probably.
“It’s okay, Harry. There shouldn’t be many critters.” If you were going to place an enchantment on your house, you might as well include pest control.
“It’s not the critters that worry me. Something stinks.” His denims scraped the floor as he crawled. When his boots disappeared, she purified the evidence of their passing with a tweak of magic through the cedar before pulling the door shut. Darkness blanketed them like a physical sensation.
So it hadn’t been as dark as a cave in the forest earlier this morning. Hoo boy. If that middle section had gotten worse, they were in for it.
The tunnel dipped down and back up, ascending the hill to her cellar. When she exited from the house, she lay on an oversized skateboard and whizzed along like a bobsled. The dip slowed her before she reached the door.
Near the dip, the rustling of Harry’s jeans against the concrete halted. “What the hell?”
Her head bumped into his bottom. “What is it?”
“Some kind of disgusting slime.”
Uh-oh, it was the sludge, and sooner than expected.
“Gosh, there must be a leak,” she said. “It’s mud. Don’t worry about it.”
He squished through and June gritted her teeth, following as quickly as possible. She sank a couple inches into icy muck, soaking her pajama legs. The stench was part earth and part decay.
Emphasis on the decay.
The sludge lasted a couple yards before the tunnel rose. Against the left wall was a drainage channel where the goo had trickled down from a breach in the concrete. Her field line dispersed graywater into the environment, nothing hazardous, but food particles and detergents resulted in a pretty intense slime on this end.
She decided not to tell Harry it was about to get worse.
“How long has this been here?” His voice echoed through the tunnel. Their wet pants slapped the concrete like flippers. Her hands encountered a few bug carcasses that crunched like potato chips. Ugh.
“Since before you came to town.” Lionel had been their master builder, such as he was. He’d agreed to dig the tunnel near her field line, after all. Since he’d been lost to them, upkeep of the secret passages had been a hassle. Pete and Annette’s son—Lionel’s apprentice—was in California, but they had doubts the kid would return to Millington. California’s varied covens were quite the lure for a youngling beginning his first pass-through.
“Do you use the tunnels often?”
“Sometimes.” In the history of Millington, no tunnel had been used for anything besides hijinks and Halloween. That wasn’t the case with other covens, especially in the past. “Aren’t you glad I have one?”
Something skittered and Harry cursed. “Not particularly. That was a stinging centipede. It’s dead now.”
June guesstimated they’d crawled fifty feet. Her bottoms clung to her like glue. In the summer, the tunnel radiated a chill that helped cool the cellar, but right now it was just cold.
Too bad it wasn’t freezing. They could have skated over the sludge.
“Harry,” she warned, “you may encounter an area with a little dirt up ahead.”
“Does that mean we’re there?”
“Halfway.”
After another minute, he stopped again. “June?”
“Yes?” She crouched on her haunches, rubbing her mucky fingers on some dry leaves. She hated being unclean almost as much as she hated improvising spells.
“This is more than a little dirt.”
It had been more than a little
dirt in the fall too, but it had been navigable. The concrete ceiling had cracked. Goo and stuff had trickled through, and reinforcing the passageways was hard. She needed to hire a coven builder to fix it, but she wasn’t made of money. “Is there still a roof?”
“We crawled up here with the chance we’d be roofless?”
She swatted his behind. “Just check, you big baby.”
Harry scuffled and pried, rocks clattering in the darkness. “It doesn’t block the whole passageway. There’s space on top. I think I can move this big rock.”
He grunted, something thunked, and a shaft of light entered the tunnel from above.
“There’s a hole in the ceiling,” June observed. Her tunnel had not fared well this winter. In the fall, it had been a crack. If light could filter down here, there must be one heck of a sinkhole in her grape terraces.
“The tunnel opens up on the other side of the mound of dirt.” His voice floated back to her. “I’ll go first and then you… Oh, good Christ!”
A moist splatter preceded his backward scuttle. He crashed into her, and she flattened herself against the wall.
“I’ve been slimed,” he said with a groan. “This is really fucking gross.”
“Language.”
“Can’t help it. Fucking gross is the most accurate description.”
A vile reek filled the air with choking swiftness. Harry’s arms and stomach appeared to be coated with a dark sludge that oozed in rivulets to the tunnel’s floor.
June squinted, looking for alternatives, but it didn’t help. The same vague hole in the ceiling, the same anonymous mound in the path, the same muddy werewolf. “How bad is it?”
“Bad enough,” he said through gritted teeth. “We can get past it if you don’t mind visiting the fourth level of hell.”
“And here we are without a handbasket.” She wrinkled her nose. If she had to, she could leave him hidden in the tunnel, walk to the house and have Pete convince the cops to leave. Was there any way she could do that without confirming she was neck deep in Harry’s business?
Probably not. The coven suspected her and she was a terrible liar. Lying was too much like adlibbing.
Harry elaborated. “Once you get past the top of the hump, it’s coated with this cold, revolting sh—stuff. God, this odor is going to kill me.”
“I can do something about the smell.” June dragged her purse into her lap and searched through it until she found the last wet wipe. First she de-slimed her hands, and then she unscrewed her menthol rub, which she smeared under her nose. The medicinal odor cut through the reek.
She held a bedaubed finger to his face. “Want some?”
“Seriously?” He stifled a cough, accidentally smearing sludge on his lip. “Oh, fuck me, it’s on my mouth.” He gagged and spat.
Poor, foul-mouthed Harry. As Sandie, she’d threatened to wash his mouth out with soap more than once. Maybe this would teach him a lesson. “Parts of my shirt are clean. Try the shoulder.”
He scooted around and scrubbed his mouth on her pajamas. In the near dark, she poked her finger toward his face, missing his nose and hitting his cheek. But once she coated his upper lip with menthol, he breathed a sigh of relief. “That helps.”
“I vote we go through the puddle.” She daubed more menthol on her lips and, for good measure, her cheeks and chin. It would function as a moisture barrier if goo dripped in her face.
“You aren’t going to like it,” he warned. “We’re going to have to wiggle through it.”
“It’ll wash off.”
“Okay, but no fair getting mad at me when it makes you want to puke.”
“It has to be done.” Once they got past this area, the tunnel rose steeply. When they reached the top, she’d cast the protection spell and add an element of scram. Then everyone would leave, freeing her shower for immediate use.
“No time like the present,” she continued. “I’ll go first so I can open the door at the top. And we’ll need to start being quiet.”
“You’re sure there won’t be anybody in your root cellar?”
Relatively. Shifters could find it, but the other cops were human. Pete would check it for clues when he was alone.
“If there is someone there,” she suggested, “we’ll say we were hiding from the bad guys. I’ll be the granddaughter house-sitting while Sandie’s at…Virginia Beach on a vacation.”
“Hiding in a secret tunnel none of them knew about before today.”
“This is Millington. Do you really think anyone will find it strange that I’m eccentric?” June approached the mound and peered over, her head scraping the crumbling ceiling. Beyond the circle of weak light was sludge and darkness. Hoo-boy.
“Go fast,” Harry advised. “Maybe less will soak into your pores.”
She took a deep breath. There was enough space on top of the dirt mound to belly over it. Water and goo had started to dribble from above at a faster pace. The weight of the dirt above the damaged concrete might cause another cave-in.
“Here goes nothing.” She held her purse as high as she could and dove like a penguin into slick, disgusting slime.
Sludge spattered her face and enveloped her body. June floundered on one arm in the muck, supporting her handbag. The bag was waterproof, heatproof, coldproof and probably gooproof, but it was extremely expensive, as were many components inside it.
Her teeth chattered. She clamped her lips shut. The menthol quickly failed her as the frigid sludge stole her warmth and breath. Boy howdy, this was the most repulsive situation she’d ever been in, and she’d gone to great lengths to harvest certain herbs and fungi. June pushed forward, the sludge filling half the tunnel. Was it packed with worms, bugs and creepy crawlies?
And bacteria. Ack, ack, ack!
It was hard to gain purchase on the slippery concrete. She pressed against a wall, wedging her fingers in a groove to pull herself forward. She inched upward until the sludge level sank to her elbows.
“Okay,” she called to Harry, her voice weak as she tried not to throw up. There were worse things than the mud created by her nice, soapy, sort of harmless graywater. Like adding vomit to the mix.
Harry splashed through it, cursing. He quickly caught up, bumping her rear.
“Think of this as a spa treatment,” he said, his teeth clenched. “Our skin is going to glow when we get out of here.”
“Don’t make me laugh.” The essence of the sludge entered her mouth and sinuses no matter how she tried to fight it. Suddenly June couldn’t resist any longer and retched.
“I was afraid of that. You okay?”
“Suuuuuuuure,” she moaned. She forced herself forward, inch at a time. They lost what little light they’d had, but soon the sludge was behind them.
Not that it felt like it. Muck had invaded every part of her. Her shirt, her hair, her ears. She had no idea how her stupid clogs had remained on her feet, but they were full, as well. Her toes squelched. She kept crawling up the slanted tunnel until they reached the door.
“Do you hear anybody?” she whispered to Harry. The only sound June could detect was the droplets of sludge falling off them. No light bled around the door’s edges.
“No,” he said. “Not sure about the house, though.”
She fumbled the latch. The door creaked, another sign of her neglect. They clambered into the lightless safe room, shivering. Harry latched the door while she inched around the wall to the switch.
When she flicked it, a welcome sight greeted her—her utility sink in the front corner, complete with towels, antibacterial wipes, hand sanitizer and dish detergent. Her stash of emergency water underneath was down to two gallons after the power outage this winter. She couldn’t crank the faucets because it would echo through the pipes, but she could scrub her hands clean enough to renew the protections on the house.
“What is this room?” Harry whispered.
“My safe room. The cellar is through there.” She indicated a steel door between an industrial cabinet and
a deep freeze. The skateboards for quick escape lay atop a cabinet. The low hum of the freezer added a mundane element to the scene. “Can you hear anyone?”
Harry paused by the door. She held her breath.
“A couple men upstairs. Somebody’s running a vacuum cleaner. This room seems fairly soundproof,” he answered.
“They can’t hear us if they aren’t shifters. I bet one is Pete. He wouldn’t let them search the house without him.”
Harry glanced toward the ceiling. “Can Pete hear us?”
“Our senses aren’t as sharp as yours.” June kicked off her clogs, which spattered muck all over the concrete floor, and plonked her purse on the sink counter. She grabbed enough wipes to clean the muck off the leather exterior. Otherwise when she opened it, the contents could become contaminated. “What time do you think it is?”
Harry reached into his back pocket gingerly and dragged out his cell phone. “Wow, it’s still working. 7:00 a.m.”
Perfect, she had thirty minutes to spare before standard renewal time. The root cellar stood at the central point of the spell’s boundaries. Her body acclimated to the temperature of the room as the sludge dried on her skin.
And then she began to itch.
Harry gestured with his phone. “Want me to preserve the memory? We look amazing.”
She rubbed her nose and instantly regretted it. “We smell even better.”
Blackish green sludge coated Harry’s jeans and torso. Two featureless blobs masquerading as his boots tracked goo on the floor. Except for one smear near his mouth, he’d kept his face and hair relatively clean. With a smirk, he held his phone at arm’s length and snapped an image of himself.
June couldn’t imagine how much worse she looked. She could feel muck spattered over her face, pasting her hair to her neck. Her favorite pajamas were ruined. But they’d made it into the house, increasing their chances of surviving this fiasco tenfold.
Harry aimed his phone at her and clicked.
“You big goomer. Delete that,” she ordered.