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© 2014 Richard Roberts
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ary, close the door. You are not going to the party.”
I have no idea how my Mom knew about it. I couldn’t figure out how any mother would know about it, much less mine. “Yeah, Mom, I’m going to the party,” I answered, in a monotone loud enough to carry into the bedroom.
“No, you’re not,” she barked back angrily, “Mary Stuart, I forbid you to take even a step out that door.”
I stepped over the threshold so fast my foot might have moved itself. What was she going to do? Threaten to lock me in my room? Like this time would be different?
She must have heard the door squeak. “Mary, it’s not safe,” she called after me. Her voice was suddenly pained, urgent. “I’m only thinking about you.”
She was going to try that? Seriously? I yanked the door shut behind me and kicked one of the empty cans off the porch. I thought maybe she yelled, “Mary Stuart!” again from the other side, but I couldn’t hear it clearly. Wasn’t someone supposed to come and tell you off if you name your child after a British queen?
The cold October air was refreshing, although my short skirt—not really that short—and stockings were drafty. I wasn’t going trick-or-treating, but at least I could dress up a little. Trick-or-treating would have been more fun than this not-so-secret rave, but I hadn’t been invited, so I was going. And despite my mother’s so-convincing claim of being worried about me, I’d be safe. If I were two years older, maybe not. If I were even an early bloomer, maybe not. Right now, I had nothing even the most desperate jerk of a boy wanted.
That would help. I had a long walk in the dark through increasingly empty neighborhoods. I was headed right out of town and it would be a few miles. The walk didn’t scare me. I liked the cold air and I’d walked across most of the city when I had to. It would be downright boring.
At that thought, I reached up to pull my headphones—
“Damn it!” I yelled out loud. A mother and her little kid in a bumblebee costume gave me a nervous look. I stomped on.
I’d left my music player at home. It would have been useless and stupid looking at the party, but who cared? It would have made the walk much less boring. A night like this begged for Les Miserables. Music with a story and real emotion would be better than whatever latest hot number they’d be playing at the party. I predicted the current hit would be as shallow as a paper plate and either be bragging or whining about how much sex the singer was getting.
Well, you’re not going back to get it, Mary. I’d just have to enjoy the view. A residential neighborhood wasn’t exciting, but I could see a trick-or-treating group up ahead and another down a side street. Some of the older kids in the more elaborately silly costumes might be my classmates.
The four in front of me each had a flashlight in a plastic pumpkin bucket, but had no adult with them. Who let them out like that? Right on cue, a high school boy walked past them from the other side, grabbed one girl’s trick or treating bucket and yanked it out of her hands. She shrieked, and he laughed and ran.
There was the adult, somebody’s mother, stepping out of an open door and shouting, “What’s going on?” She was too late to do anything.
Jerk high schooler didn’t even want the candy. All he wanted was to hear a helpless little girl cry. Like the arrogant bully he was, he ran right past me like I didn’t matter.
I stuck out a foot and tripped him. He hit the sidewalk hard. The basket and the candy went flying.
He weighed twice what I do and was a boy besides. He started to push himself back up to his feet, and a growling, “Little bitch!” didn’t sound encouraging, so I kicked him hard between the legs. Now he yelped like a little girl himself, curling up tight. He looked up, and I stared right back. I’d happily kick him in the balls again, and he was in too much pain to dodge.
He knew it, and like the cowardly bully he was, he scrambled awkwardly up and ran away.
I turned around, and the mother and kids were a lot closer. They’d stopped. They all looked stunned. The girl in the unicorn costume really was my classmate, Chelsea. No surprise, since I was still in my neighborhood. The boy with the bird wings was Patrick Flint, in third grade. I didn’t know the other two.
Bending down, I picked up the bucket and threw it over to Chelsea. “You’re out of luck on the candy,” I almost apologized.
“Thanks,” she answered.
“Should you really be out trick-or-treating by yourself, hon? Wouldn’t you rather join us?” her mother asked, sounding nervous.
“I’ve got a party to go to,” I replied, and started walking. That was one reason.
The other was the relieved look on their faces as I passed them.
My hands twitched for the headphones I hadn’t brought with me. This would have been a fine night for ‘On My Own.’ I knew just how Eponine felt, except I wasn’t in love with anybody to smooth it over. I kept walking. It would be a long, dull walk to the party.
I had to leave all the residential neighborhoods behind, and keep walking right out past the freeway that makes the edge of town. That was one of the reasons I was determined to go. For a secret Halloween party, they’d pulled out the very last stop. It was being held in the Old Moonshiner’s Estate. The house nobody wanted to buy, nobody’d been able to declare a historical treasure, and nobody’d gotten around to tearing down. Oh, and nobody wanted to set foot inside. You know, the house everybody says they tell monster stories about but nobody actually does. I’d never gone in, I guess because no one ever actually did tell me one of those stories.
As a haunted house, it was pretty great. Straight out of the Addams Family. Dead trees, a hill, boards fallen off the windows. Normally they were dark and spooky, but rainbow lights peeked out of every hole tonight, and the building was mostly holes. One of those holes had a front door blocking it the last time I’d looked. Now it had Felicia Innsmouth blocking it. Eesh.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she groused as I stomped up the stairs, “I’m not letting The Littlest Bitch into my party. What are you, nine? Go away, Mary.”
“Screw you, Felicia. On second thought, the line’s too long,” I snapped back. There, the social amenities had been observed.
She still reached her leg across and blocked the doorway. “You’re not getting in, Mary,” she repeated sourly.
So I glared at her, stomped back down the stairs, walked down the side of the building, and climbed in heavily through the empty hole that used to be a window. While Felicia watched, I might add. I was inside now. What was she going to do, make a scene and ruin her own party?
That girl had more money than god. She’d almost made this collapsing hulk of a building livable. The rugs alone must have cost a fortune, and while there weren’t many lights, every one was a different color
. The stereos all played different music too, and this room thumped manically with dubstep. I started to grin. A high school boy glanced down at me and wandered off, uninterested. I grinned a lot more.
There was a big room in the middle of the first floor. That was the dance pit now, and a couple of dozen middle and high schoolers were trying to pretend they had rhythm. A lot of them were drunk, so I followed the smell to a table draped in orange and black and crowded with booze. Right next to it was a table draped in orange and black and crowded with candy. I thought that was pretty funny. As far as I’m concerned, candy and alcohol are the same thing. At a certain age, people went from one to the other.
I had no intention of getting hooked on either. Still, five different booming songs had my heart thumping and stuttering. The place smelled of dust and people and sweat, and color flashed everywhere. Just standing around this was a crazy night. I might as well find out what the fuss was about.
I wasn’t stupid. I’d seen two boys and a girl who might be old enough to be in college, and a lot of older high school boys. Getting drunk here would be the dumbest thing a girl could do. I was counting on two things to protect me. First, I was the youngest looking girl here and the absolute bottom of the list anybody wanted to take advantage of. Second, well, that worked out pretty much the way I expected. I poured a sip’s worth of beer into a cup, drank it down, and spat half of it onto the rug. Ha! Surprise, surprise. It tasted as bad as it smelled.
“If you’re too young for beer, why are you even here?” Felicia demanded as she caught up with me.
“Too young for cheap beer,” I sniped back, “Only you would spend this much money and buy beer with the word ‘Lite’ on the bottle.”
I was actually being completely unfair. There was a bottle of twenty-one year old scotch on that table. I didn’t even recognize the wines, but they weren’t crap from boxes. Every beer bottle had a different label, and they were all from micro-breweries. But hell if I’d admit I’d noticed any of that.
“Felicia, is that a grade schooler?” asked some drunk thirteen-year-old girl in a witch costume that she’d look tarty in when she turned eighteen. I wasn’t a grade schooler, but it was an easy mistake to make. I’d also seen the party and there was nothing I wanted to do here, but the disdain in that voice nailed my sneakers to the floor. I wasn’t going anywhere.
“What, you don’t know Mary Stuart?” Felicia sneered arrogantly. “Sandy, there are two girls every kid in the county’s supposed to have heard about. Me, and Princess Mary the Bitch here.”
And the funny thing was, Felicia was sticking up for me. I couldn’t hate a girl more who would get her own friends drunk and throw them to the wolves, but maybe she thought the freak shows had to stick together. The meaner I was, the more she liked it. Maybe it was because both of us were smart enough to be sober.
“Five bucks says the party gets so boring Felicia starts telling ghost stories,” I muttered.
Felicia’s face lit up. “Oh, I’ve got something better than a ghost story,” she drawled. She walked off, drawing people after her, which meant I should head for the door. But then she did something actually interesting. She pushed a stereo out of the way, unfastened a latch, and pulled open a little door under the stairs. And by ‘little’, I mean it was half the height it ought to have been.
“That is creepy,” the drunk Sandy declared. I doubted her standards were high, but I wandered over and bent to the side a little and peeked.
On the other side was some kind of crawlspace, but I had to admit—not out loud, mind you—that this one was something special. I’d expected the dusty wooden tunnel, and the spider webs, but not the glow. The lights from the rest of the house seeped into it through the cracks, mixing into a dull, threatening orange. Oh, and the floor wasn’t wood, it was rough concrete.
“It gets better,” Felicia explained, her voice light and giddy at the chance to give people another story to tell about her party. “I dug up the floor plans while I was planning the party. This tunnel isn’t on them. I have no idea where it goes, or why it’s there.”
“Looks like it goes straight to hell,” I observed dryly. I had to grin as a couple of the tipsier kids shuddered. The orange light really made the view something special, and was just dim enough that you couldn’t see the other end.
“I’m not going to go look,” Felicia announced, effortlessly staking out her position before anyone could suggest it was cowardly.
I stepped up and crouched down in front of the door. It would be more comfortable to crawl, but I was short enough that I could walk bent over in there.
Behind me one of the older boys declared, “Felicia, I don’t know if this is some kind of set-up, but you can’t let a little kid go in there.”
“Try and stop me,” I shot back, leaning forward and crawling through the door. The feathery touches of invisible spider webs were annoying, but my stockings protected my knees from the concrete.
“Come on, Felicia, get her to come back!” the boy argued, so I started crawling deeper down into the passage. To my absolute and complete lack of surprise, the door thumped shut behind me. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of screaming or complaining about it. This tunnel had to come out somewhere.
In fact, I felt pretty good. The faint tingle of adrenaline from this horrible little hallway was better than the drumming of the music, which was muffled down to a background hum. Felicia might have trapped me down here, but she wasn’t in here with me. I was alone, and there was a mystery ahead, and Halloween was the perfect night for one. This was the best mood I’d been in all day.
There was no sense in sitting around. I crawled down the tunnel, looking around. There wasn’t much to look at. The walls were so rotten that the termites had come and gone, but there were no cracks big enough I could see anything through. All they let in was that dull orange light, which faded into gloom ahead and behind. Yes, behind me, too. How long was this tunnel? Sure it was a big house, but how big?
Something moved ahead of me. I bit down on my yelp, choking it so it wouldn’t come out. I was supposed to panic down here, and I refused to. Between the crumbling wood and there having to be a door at either end of this tunnel, I’d get out somehow. It was just a bug or a mouse.
Or a rat. A big, homely brown rat that crawled down the tunnel towards me. It didn’t seem at all afraid of me, and now that I could see it clearly, I wasn’t afraid of it. Fur brushed against my leg as it waddled past.
I started crawling again, and when I set my knee down the first time, someone with a squeakier voice than me said, “Take my advice, mistress. Stop now. Turn around and go back. You’re already lost, but maybe you can still find your way back from here.”
My heart knocked against my ribs, but I forced that down, too. Okay, which was more unlikely? Felicia had rigged some incredibly elaborate gag that could have gone wrong a thousand ways, or someone I couldn’t see was talking to me down here? I could disprove the first one. I kept crawling. If it was a speaker, I’d leave it behind.
“I’ve been looking for a young man or woman who wants to make their fortune, but this isn’t the place to start,” the voice insisted, following me. “At least stop and let’s talk about this.”
I crawled faster. “This tunnel goes somewhere,” I told the voice. Going back would be giving Felicia and her friends what they wanted. That wasn’t going to happen. I was too stubborn.
Speaking of stubborn, why hadn’t I looked back to try and spot this voice? Was there some rule against it? Was I scared? I looked back over my shoulder. The rat was following along, right by my foot, and looked right into my eyes and asked, “Where do you think it goes?”
“Hell, if I had to guess,” I snarked.
“Is that the story you want to be in, mistress?” the rat asked calmly. No, not calm. It didn’t sound detached. It sounded worried.
The talking rat thought this tunnel went to hell. My fingers gripped painfully at the concrete and panic rose up I cou
ldn’t just swallow, because I’d just noticed the music was gone. I’d left it behind. I’d left it way behind.
I kept crawling anyway, and the rat went on, “You’re locked in a crawlspace under a deserted house, mistress. What kind of things do you find in a story like that?”
I was coming up on an intersection. The tunnel kept going, but another branched off to the right. It looked identical to this one. As I shuffled past, I decided there was no way I’d be too afraid to play this rat’s game back at him, so I answered, “The hate filled corpses of the wrongfully murdered. Rats, of the people eating kind rather than the unwanted advice kind. Lots and lots of spiders. Treasure. Cursed treasure, with booby traps.” This wasn’t working. I could hear my voice quiver, because the rat had been right about one thing already. I was as lost as it gets, and none of those things seemed unlikely.
“Or that,” I added, my voice rasping and my throat dry. Someone was crawling up the tunnel the other way. If it weren’t for the circumstances, she wouldn’t look very threatening. Curly red hair, wild colored makeup with stripes on her face for Halloween, mismatched neon blouse and skirt, striped stockings. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. She looked a lot like me.
She looked exactly like me.
“It’s your fetch!” screeched the rat, little claws digging in as it leaped up onto my back. “Run! Down the other way, run! Don’t argue, and don’t let it touch you!”
The hallway that branched off to the side looked exactly the same as this one, although it had the major advantage that a clone of me wasn’t crawling awkwardly up it with her head down and her face hidden. But you know what? Forget that. I turned and kicked the other wall. The wood was as rotten as I thought it had been. I didn’t know where we were, but we were somewhere. I kicked again, and again, and desperation gave me strength because with every kick the copy crawled a couple of feet closer. Then, a really hard kick broke down the wall. When it gave way, I fell forward into the hole. Rather than try to stop myself, I pushed myself along. When I hit the ground, I splashed.
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