by Amber Benson
“Thank you—” I started to say just as the arms tightened around my middle, the pressure on my internal organs increasing tenfold in an instant.
I grunted as my savior/attacker relaxed his grip—he was too strong and bulky to be a woman—so that my whole body slid down the length of his, maneuvering me into a position where he could now easily apply pressure to my chest. Arms trapped at my sides, I frantically kicked my legs, trying to beat my way out of the painful embrace, but my attacker only squeezed harder, compressing my chest like a vise. As I exhaled the last of the air in my lungs, I found I couldn’t draw another breath and I started to panic, my useless squirming only making my attacker ratchet up the pressure.
There is something truly terrifying about dying in the dark with nothing to anchor yourself to except fear. The darkness caused my other senses to seem heightened, so that I could actually hear the pounding of my heart against my ribs, sluggish at first then picking up speed and energy as it fought to pull the last bit of oxygen from my blood. My toes and fingers started to go numb first, my lungs screaming for the life-giving air it was being denied.
“I want that book,” a cold masculine voice whispered in my ear.
I would’ve told the voice to take a hike, but I was physically speechless from lack of air, so all I could do was kick weakly at his shins.
“Do you understand me?” he said, compressing my rib cage even more tightly.
I nodded my head, weak as a newborn kitten. I understood what he wanted; I just didn’t have it to give. Of course, I couldn’t tell him that—literally and figuratively.
Suddenly, a bone-chilling howl ripped through the air. My attacker tensed, then relaxed his hold on me, and I almost cried because I could breathe again. Inhaling great gulps of fresh air, I relished my ability to expand my lungs past “pancake” position. As much as I wanted to just hang around, drinking in oxygen, I knew this might be my only opportunity for escape, so I took a deep breath and screamed.
Now, I’m not a scream queen, but I have a good set of lungs and I know how to use them. The scream startled my attacker and I used this to my advantage, tilting my head forward then slamming the back of my skull into his vulnerable nose. A gush of hot, viscous liquid poured down my neck and into the back of my pajamas, making me want to gag, but it did the trick. My attacker released me and I fell to the ground, banging my elbow on the floor, but I didn’t hesitate long enough to feel the pain. I was instantly rolling onto my stomach, trying to get as far as possible from his reach.
I heard the man scream as something or someone crashed into him—and then Runt was on top of me, licking my face.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped, wrapping my arms around her soft neck. “I didn’t mean to freak out and be such a bitch.”
“It’s okay, Cal,” Runt said. “But we gotta get out of here and, like, now.”
I nodded even though I knew she couldn’t see me. Gripping the wall, I used it to pull myself to my feet, the sound of scuffling getting closer and closer.
“Get out of here! Now!” Freezay shouted, his words followed by intense grunting and the dull thud of fist connecting with flesh.
“This way, Cal,” Runt said. “Grab my collar.”
Fumbling in the inky blackness, my fingers grasped at fur until they finally stumbled upon the ridged rhinestones of Runt’s collar. I was so thankful that Runt was with me. It was dark, and the lack of oxygen had made me slightly disoriented, so I could never have found my way out on my own.
“Okay, go,” I whispered, letting Runt guide me toward the exit.
Behind us, Freezay’s muffled efforts to take out the nameless attacker became less pronounced until they were barely whispers in the dark. As much as I was glad he and Runt had come to my rescue, now I was worried he was going to get hurt in my place.
Jeez, would this Halloween never end? I thought miserably.
Moving under cover of darkness, Runt led me through the tunnel until, abruptly, we found ourselves standing in front of the stairway that led to the freezer. My heart leapt and I dropped my hold on Runt’s collar in order to grasp the wall so I could keep my balance as we climbed the stairs.
“Thank God,” I whispered, never happier to see a kitchen in my entire life … but my elation was short-lived: Someone had shut the freezer door.
“Crap!” I said, running over to the door and pounding on it with both fists. “Crap, crap, crap!”
Realizing quickly that this full-frontal attack would get me nowhere, I slumped against the door, letting my forehead rest against its cold metal surface.
What the hell were we going to do?
Freezay was probably lying in a pool of his own blood in the middle of the secret passage, a madman might or might not be coming to kill us for a magical book, and Runt and I were trapped in a very chilly walk-in freezer until said madman made his appearance.
Grrr! I thought, wishing, once again, that I wasn’t in my pajamas and that I didn’t have someone else’s blood dribbling down the back of my neck.
I turned around, leaning against the cold metal, then slowly slid down the length of the door until I was on my butt on the floor, pajamas bedamned. I pulled my knees up to my chest, resting my chin between them, exhausted.
“I guess it could be worse,” I said, sighing.
Runt came over and licked my hand, then settled down beside me, the warmth from her body a very welcome addition.
“I feel like this whole thing is my fault,” I said, reaching out and stroking her neck. “I’m a snafu magnet. Everywhere I go, something seriously bad happens. I can’t imagine this was what my dad’s life was like. I bet he was amazing at running Death. I bet he never screwed anything up.”
“Or maybe it’s like that movie, The Money Pit,” Runt said, interrupting my pity party. “Maybe you’re Tom Hanks and you bought the really big fixer-upper house, but maybe your dad bought the gigantic Mediterranean mansion fixer-upper and that was even worse.”
I loved that a hellhound was comparing my life and career to The Money Pit—damn, cable was a beautiful thing.
“So, you’re saying my dad could’ve had it even worse than me?”
Runt nodded.
“Maybe he got stuck in Antarctica … while you’re just locked in a freezer.”
When I didn’t respond immediately, Runt added: “Or maybe not.”
I shook my head.
“No, you’re not wrong. I have no idea what my dad had to deal with, so I should stop being a whiny brat and just chill.”
“Like a freezer,” Runt said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, grinning at the absurdity of our conversation. “Make like a freezer and chill.”
“Do you think he’s okay?” Runt asked in a tiny voice—but before I could answer that I bloody hoped so, Freezay burst through the entrance, looking a little worse for wear, but alive and kicking.
“He got away,” Freezay said, pulling a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbing at his lip with it.
“I’m sorry I was such a schmucktard,” I said, rising to my feet.
Freezay didn’t seem bothered by my lapse in maturity.
“Shit happens. But right now, we have to concentrate on getting out of this freezer,” he said, side-stepping me so he could try the handle on the door with no luck.
He pulled a paper-thin LED flashlight from of his pocket, squeezing its middle so that it illuminated a (very small) slice of the darkness. Then he motioned for Runt and me to come back with him into the secret passageway.
“All right, back the other way then.”
“Where does it lead?” I asked as we followed the guiding beam of the flashlight down the stairway, dog flank bumping into my leg as we walked.
“We don’t know. We were almost to the end when we heard scuffling behind us and went back to check on you,” Runt said.
We’d only been down in the passageway for a few minutes, but already the oppressive darkness and cloyingly narrow walls made me feel claustrophobic.
Added to that was the sense of timelessness I felt as we were shunted deeper underground, the passageway seeming to stretch out endlessly before us in the meager glow of the flashlight. And then, without really being consciously aware of it at first, I began to notice that the tunnel was veering ever so slightly to the left, heading away from Casa del Amo and toward the statuary gardens.
“It stops just down here,” Freezay said as we reached the terminus of the passageway: a smooth adobe wall.
“It can’t be a dead end,” I said, running my hands over the sandy beige surface. “There has to be something beyond it—even if it’s just a walled-up skeleton.”
Freezay shot me a funny look.
“The Cask of Amontillado?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Nope, The Goonies.”
Grinning, Freezay shone the flashlight around the space, the light creating eerie shadows on the walls, but otherwise it revealed nothing of any consequence—apparently this really was the end of the line. As Freezay worked the flashlight, I ran my hands over the smooth adobe wall, looking for a hidden latch or release mechanism, while Runt sniffed along the crevice in the floor, her tail between her legs.
“I saw Zinia go into the freezer and disappear,” I said, kicking the wall with my sneaker-shod foot. “She had to be going somewhere.”
Freezay was busy using his fists to knock on the stone walls that butted up against the sides of the adobe wall, listening for the telltale hollowness of a false front.
“I’ve got it!” Runt cried excitedly, raising her nose from the ground and scampering back the way we’d just come.
Caught off guard by Runt’s abrupt departure, Freezay and I chased after her, our pounding footsteps echoing in the darkness, the flashlight beam bouncing crazily along the walls.
“Runt, wait!” I cried, worried whoever had tried to attack me might be lying in wait somewhere in the tunnel, gearing up to finish what he’d started.
“Hurry up!” she called back to us, ignoring the worry in my voice, and we picked up our speed.
When we got to the stairway, she was already sitting there waiting for us, her tail thumping happily against the stone floor.
“What took you guys so long?” she said.
“Ha!” I shot back, leaning forward to catch my breath after the unexpected dog chase.
“What did you find, Runt?” Freezay said, shining the light down on the pup’s face.
“I almost missed it,” she began. “Zinia’s smell is all over the kitchen and on the stairs, but the farther we got down the passageway, the more her scent had faded. At the end, there was no Zinia smell at all.”
“Because she never went beyond the stairwell,” Freezay said, grinning down at Runt.
“Exactly!” Runt replied.
“Well, where did she go then?” I asked. “I mean she couldn’t have gone under the stairs—”
“Yes, she could have,” Freezay interrupted me. “If the stairs were actually the real entrance to the secret passage.”
“That makes the tunnel we just went down a dummy secret passage,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Who does that?”
“Someone with something to hide.”
Freezay was right—though the idea of a secret passageway being the entrance to another secret passageway may have seemed ridiculous in theory, in reality it was an example of paranoia taken to the utmost extreme.
“So how do we get inside?” I asked as Freezay ran his flashlight beam across the cut stone staircase.
“Easy-peasy—if you just think about how the secret compartment in the bathroom closet worked,” Runt said, padding over to the bottom step, which Freezay’s flashlight beam was already illuminating. “See how the bottom step is shorter than the others?”
She was right. The last stone step was smaller than its brethren and set into the floor at an odd angle.
“Check this out.”
Placing her nose where the two sides of the step met in a sharp-edged right angle, she used brute strength to pivot the step backward, the whole stairwell rotating with it until a flat plane of stone had replaced the stairs.
“Looks like a wheelchair ramp,” I said.
“Just wait,” Runt said, eager to show us more as she climbed up on the ramp, her nails clicking against the stone as she walked around, sniffing for something.
“Found the trigger!” she called, lifting a paw and setting it down precisely on a small, round depression smack-dab in the middle of the stone plane. There was a click, and then a secret doorway opened up in the stone wall behind Freezay’s back, making us both jump in surprise.
“What the—” I said as Freezay stalked past me, flashlight aloft, its LED light illuminating the confines of a tiny hidden room.
The space was only about four feet by six feet—not much bigger than a walk-in closet—but every inch of wall space was covered with the well-ordered spines of a miniature library. Freezay ran the flashlight over the books, stopping occasionally when a title caught his attention.
“The Vollkommene Geomantia … Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft … The Malleus Maleficarum …” Freezay read out loud, the low vibrato of his voice eerie in the confines of the odd little room.
“Someone’s interested in the dark side of the occult,” I said, each title I saw reconfirming my hypothesis. Whoever curated this library had dark tastes, indeed.
“What’s that?” Runt said as she jumped down off the stone ramp and trotted past me into the room, coming to a stop in front of something shiny and metallic lying on the floor.
Freezay crouched down beside the pup, lifting the shiny object up into the air by its long golden chain.
“That’s the locket we found in the hidden compartment with the book!” I said, taking it from Freezay so I could look inside of it just to be certain. “Yep, same picture and everything.”
I started to hand the locket back to him, but he waved me away.
“You hold on to it for now—we need to get back to the other end of that tunnel,” he said, and without further explanation, he strode out of the tiny library, taking his flashlight with him so that Runt and I were left in darkness.
“Hurry up!” Freezay yelled, the distance between us increasing until he was only a flickering pinprick of light jogging down the length of the tunnel.
Not wanting to find myself in inky blackness all over again, I felt compelled to run. Runt, who was physically much faster than me, stuck close to my heels. She should’ve passed my lumbering gait easily, but instead, she was staying nearby, acting as my protector. As the end of the tunnel came into view, there was a blinding flash of light—the kind of flash no flashlight, especially a little LED one, could boast—and I blinked at the sudden brightness.
A moment later we were out of the tunnel—the mysterious adobe wall that had blocked our progression earlier was turned sideways, so we could climb through it.
“Oh my God,” I said as I realized where we were.
“It’s our room,” Runt said, stating the obvious.
We’d climbed through a secret doorway only to find ourselves standing in the space that used to be the fireplace of our bedroom at Casa de la Luna. In front of us, Coy’s headless body lay at our feet, a grizzly reminder of why we’d begun this wild-goose chase in the first place.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Freezay said from where he was perched on the end of my bed. “The bodyguard outside has no idea we’re even in here.”
Without another word, he pulled a long, serrated carving knife from behind his back, its bloody, metallic body glistening in the lamplight.
“Welcome to the last piece of the puzzle,” he said.
And then he grinned manically up at us.
twenty-five
“I don’t give good head,” I said, “if you’re thinking of using that thing on either of us.”
It took Freezay a moment to understand what I was saying, but when he realized my meaning—and how freaky it looked, him sitting in the middl
e of a grisly murder scene, holding up the murder weapon—he instantly dropped the knife down onto the bed.
“That’s a terrible double entendre,” he said, raising an eyebrow in my direction. “I expected something much cleverer from the likes of you.”
“It was pretty clever, considering the fact I was worried you were gonna behead me,” I replied, eyeing the bloody knife where it lay nestled in the sheets.
“Touché,” he said. “And I had no intention of frightening you, ladies. You were just so slow getting down the tunnel. I got tired and had to sit down.”