by Tess Lake
“You guys could come personal training with me,” I said.
“In this weather? Are you crazy?” Molly said, stepping away from me as if I was about to force her to do push-ups or run laps.
“Stay home with me on the sofa where it’s warm,” Adams murmured and snuggled into my neck again.
“That cat has the right idea,” Molly said.
“Oh, come on, please! It’s me and Aunt Cass, and you know what she’s like,” I begged.
Molly considered it for a moment and then nodded.
“Okay, I’ll make you a deal. If you uncover a clue to help us find the coffee machine or the catapult, then we’ll come personal training with you,” she said.
“I don’t want to go personal training!” Luce protested from behind me.
“Why not, pork chop?” Aunt Cass said, peering at us from the top of the ladder.
Luce jumped to her feet in time for Aunt Cass to poke her in the ribs.
“Ow, that hurt!”
“My finger nearly sank right in to the knuckle,” Aunt Cass said. She turned to look Molly up and down. “I know it’s winter, but you’re not a polar bear—perhaps you could lose some of that fat,” she said.
“I’m curvy and beautiful, which is more than I can say for you,” Molly snapped back at her.
“Did you come up here to insult us?” Luce asked.
“They weren’t insults. If I was trying to be insulting, I would say that the four of you shouldn’t stand too close together—otherwise you’re going to break right through the roof.”
“I’m not fat!” Adams called out.
Evidently, my not doing what Aunt Cass had wanted had put her in a very bad mood. Normally she was crotchety, but usually she was quite witty about it. Right now she was just being mean.
Aunt Cass turned to me. “I was speaking to a source of mine. That ambulance was going to pick up a man who’d died from seeing a ghost, they said. A shape that jumped out of the wall and scared him to death. It also stole his medication. You don’t want in?”
“Nope,” I said, shaking my head. I went to cross my arms but then realized I was still holding Adams. I kind of pulled him up in front of me a bit higher like a shield.
“Fine, I’ll get someone else, then,” Aunt Cass said. Within a moment she was back down the ladder and stomping her way back up to the main part of the mansion.
“Are you still working on that plan to get back at her?” Luce asked Molly.
“I wasn’t. I’d decided to take the high road, but now I’m seriously considering taking the low road,” Molly said, glaring at Aunt Cass as she walked away.
“You don’t think I’m fat, do you?” Adams asked me.
Given that my arms were starting to ache from holding him up in front of me, I decided to skirt around that question.
“You’re adorable,” I told him.
While Molly and Luce were angry, maybe I could get them to help me.
You know how I said I was on holiday? Well, I was—from getting pulled into strange random murders and dangerous situations. But after Grandma April woke up for a few seconds and Aunt Cass had refused to talk about it afterwards, I had been working on a plan for a number of weeks to break into Aunt Cass’s underground lair and find out what she was up to. The last time I’d been there, I’d seen an entire wall of maps covered with bits of string and notes everywhere before Aunt Cass had waved her arm at them and made them vanish. I’d planned to do it alone and sneak in under the mansion by myself, but if I took Molly and Luce along with me, perhaps together the three of us could find out more than I could alone.
“Aunt Cass has a secret room under the house,” I said and raised my eyebrows at my cousins in a very significant way.
It didn’t get the response I’d thought it would.
“We know that already. You told us she has a lab down there, and so far all she’s done with it is brew a magical balm that ended up saving our lives,” Molly said.
“Yeah, we’re going to need more than a lab and some illegal fireworks,” Luce added.
“No, she has another hidden room down there. She took me and Kira into it back when all those fires were going on around Harlot Bay.”
I told them about everything I’d seen down there—the wall covered in maps and pieces of string looking like some crazed serial killer’s lair. By the time I’d finished describing it, I could see from the looks on my cousins’ faces that they were on board.
“Let’s do it. Let’s find out what she’s up to and then somehow use it against her,” Molly said with a little bit of a mad gleam in her eye.
“She’s going to be going to work soon. I say we do it then,” Luce said.
“Can I have some cheese?” Adams asked, apparently forgetting he’d been worried about his weight a few moments ago.
“Let’s go inside and work out a plan,” I said, heading for the ladder.
Chapter 3
“Let’s be slow and let’s be safe,” I said as I handed out the flashlights.
“We know, Harlow,” Luce said and then unwisely scratched her nose. A moment later she scrunched it up as it began to burn from the remnants of chili on her fingers.
“You really need to wash your hands,” I said.
“I have! I washed them like a billion times!” Luce said, rubbing her nose on her sleeve.
“Is this slow and sneaky?” Molly muttered to herself.
It seemed the goddess of sneaking around and breaking into places had smiled upon us all. Since Big Pie Bakery had burned down, the moms had been cooking out of the home kitchen and doing delivery runs all around town. That meant there was almost always someone home. But today they were taking the morning off to look into two possible new sites for the reopening of the bakery.
They had been stuck in a loop that could have been solved with more money, but the fact was that none of us had more money, so we couldn’t break out of it. They owned the land the Big Pie Bakery had stood on, which was now an empty plot with grass starting to grow on it, sitting amongst the row of shops. Prime real estate and a perfect place for a bakery, but because of the debt they had taken on to renovate Torrent Mansion, they couldn’t borrow any more money to rebuild on the site. Eventually they had realized, though, that they might be able to rent a new shop, reopen the bakery and hopefully make enough money to eventually rebuild the original. Today they were going to go see two new sites and assess whether they could be quickly converted.
That got the moms out of the way, and then the goddess had smiled on us because Aunt Cass had gone with them. Normally she traveled into town with Molly and Luce, given they were all working in the chili distribution business now. But perhaps because she was still annoyed at me, and possibly at them for some other reason, she went with the moms, and we found we had the mansion to ourselves.
We made sure our flashlights were fully charged and then opened the door that led under the mansion. As always, Grandma was standing behind us with her hands out in front of her, smiling slightly and looking like she was holding an invisible ball. The entire family had found out incredibly quickly that she had moved and spoken before returning to her frozen state. Aunt Cass had claimed she didn’t know why she had unfrozen or why she had frozen again. We’d talked it over with the moms, but they were magically out of their depth as well. The truth is that with magic there is a lot that we don’t really know. You can be taught spells from other witches, but some you teach yourself. It wasn’t like there was some journal that we could look up to discover what exactly our grandma had been doing when she’d been frozen or how we could unfreeze her.
“Who’s going first?” Luce asked. That question was quickly answered when Molly pushed Luce through the door.
“You are!”
“Hey, quit it!”
We turned on our flashlights and walked carefully into the passageway under the house. Thanks to the age of the mansion and some flooding that had occurred in the past, many of the floors were simply not safe
to walk on. A very long time ago, Aunt Cass had been taking a tourist group through the mansion on a ghost tour and one of them had fallen through the floor and landed in a bedroom below. When we were kids, we used to play under the mansion, running around and jumping over holes, but I guess that was back when we weighed far less than we currently did. Back then, we knew Aunt Cass had a room down here somewhere but we’d never been able to find it, most likely because she had cast a spell on it.
A while ago, I’d discovered that Aunt Cass had what was effectively a mad scientist laboratory under the mansion. It was filled with beakers and glass bottles and Bunsen burners and all manner of what were sure to be illegal herbs, powders and other chemicals. It wasn’t long after that that Aunt Cass had taken me and Kira, the teenage queen of sarcasm, to another room that looked like something out of a serial killer’s fantasy. As far as I knew the lab was go forward, turn left, head in that direction, and the serial killer room was go forward and turn right. We crept through the darkness, turning right and heading down another long corridor.
“What if she has some trap or something waiting for people who snoop on her?” Molly worried.
“Quit being a chicken. No risk, no reward,” Luce said.
Her flashlight went out and she squealed a little in the dark.
“Who’s the chicken now?” Molly said.
The other two flashlights went out, leaving us standing in pitch darkness.
We had agreed that we weren’t going to use any magic down here in case Aunt Cass had something going that could detect it, but that plan quickly flew out the window as soon as the darkness closed in around us and then something creaked in the distance. All three of us immediately summoned balls of light that drifted up to the ceiling and lit the corridor in a warm glow. At the far end of the corridor, a pair of green eyes slowly blinked at us about three feet off the ground.
“Oh my goddess, it’s a monster!” Luce gasped.
“No, I’m not,” Adams said in the distance. We all breathed a sigh of relief and carefully walked in his direction, testing the floor as we went. There were multiple doors leading off the corridor and some of them led to other corridors and sometimes rooms. We all suspected that Aunt Cass had a concealment spell of some type running, but we figured if we opened enough rooms, eventually we might be able to find her secret lair. All three of us were working on detecting any magic as well. If we came across a spell that was trying to misdirect us, perhaps we could counter it.
We reached Adams and found he was sitting atop a short rusted metal filing cabinet that looked very out of place. We opened it up but it was empty.
A thought struck me: Adams was a magical cat, and perhaps that meant he would be unaffected by any spell that Aunt Cass had cast.
“Adams, do you know where Aunt Cass’s secret lair is?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Adams said, licking a paw and wiping it over his ear.
I had to admit he was getting far better at demanding bribes. He’d managed to keep that crafty look off his face this time.
“There’s a can of tuna in it for you,” Luce said.
“A can of tuna? I’m not sure it’s enough to jog my memory,” Adams said, seeming quite unconcerned.
“A can of tuna and five slices of cheese,” I offered.
“A can of tuna every week until I die, and five slices of cheese,” Adams countered.
“You’re gonna die real soon if you don’t help us, cat,” Molly said.
“Molly! We’re not going to do anything to him!” Luce protested.
Molly turned to Luce and let out a sigh of frustration. “I know that! I was doing that good witch, bad witch thing. Of course we’re not going to hurt him, and now you’ve ruined it,” Molly said.
“Oh. Well… you better watch out, Adams, she’s crazy. I don’t think I can stop her,” Luce said, trying to get the good witch, bad witch thing running again.
“Two cans of tuna, five slices of cheese, final offer. If we walk away, zero tuna, zero cheese,” I said. Adams stopped washing himself and looked me over as though assessing whether I was serious or not. I had my most serious face on, which must’ve fooled him. The truth is I was quite willing to go up to at least five cans of tuna.
“Deal,” he said and then jumped off the filing cabinet. “Follow me.” We carefully followed behind Adams, hearing the floor creak alarmingly beneath us. We eventually got to a point where there was a giant hole in the ground, which Adams nimbly jumped over and landed on the other side. Looking down into the hole, we could see it continued straight down into the next floor, and then into the one below. If you fell down it, you’d probably break both your legs. We very carefully edged our way around it and continued down the passage following Adams. It seemed like we’d been walking for ten minutes, which is what commonly happens under the mansion. Generations of witches have built under there and I swear there are still some spells running. Despite all the times we had been under the mansion, we still frequently found new rooms and new corridors leading off into the distance. I definitely felt the area under the mansion was far larger than it appeared.
Eventually Adams led us to a corridor that ended in an ornate oak door. Everything under the mansion was aged and had been flood damaged at some point, except this oak door, which looked as new as the day it was made.
“Are they nymphs?” Molly asked, stepping closer and pulling her light across to examine the carvings on the door.
“They are definitely nymphs and they are definitely satyrs, and they are definitely having a very good time,” Luce said.
I stepped closer to examine the door and saw that it had been carved with a giant woodland scene featuring a lot of naked tree nymphs and satyrs who were obviously having a good time.
“I don’t think this is the underground lair,” I said.
“I think it is,” Adams said and stepped off into the darkness. He was gone within an instant, vanishing in a way that only magical cats can.
“So, are we going to go in?” Molly asked.
Luce turned the doorknob and pushed it open. Her light drifted inside, revealing a room that looked like it had been preserved against the ravages of time. There was a desk against one wall, covered in papers and books and writing implements. Against the other wall was a single bed with the sheets turned down. There was a closet with the door hanging slightly ajar. It even smelled clean and new. We walked in and I noticed that the floor underneath our feet consisted of highly polished floorboards. The contrast was stark. Polished on one side of the door, and then a line where it became decrepit old broken-down wood that you could easily put your foot through.
All three of us could feel the magic thrumming in the room. There was a spell—or spells—operating here right now.
“Do you think there’s a curse here? I don’t want to get cursed,” Luce asked.
“A Torrent witch wouldn’t do that to another Torrent witch,” I replied. It wasn’t entirely true. Torrent witches cursed each other all the time. But I was betting that whoever had cast a spell in the room wouldn’t have set up anything that would hurt other family members. I walked over to the desk and found a small black book that had “Diary” emblazoned on the front in gilt lettering.
I picked it up and opened it as Luce and Molly crowded around me. For a moment we saw neat handwriting, filling every page, before the diary suddenly aged in my hands. The pages turned to dust and the cover cracked, looking like the bottom of an old dried-out riverbed. I dropped it in shock and a cloud of dust plumed up around us, making us all cough and sneeze.
“Whose diary was that?” Luce said, sneezing again. Then she made the mistake of wiping her nose with her chili fingers. “Ouch!”
“I think I saw Grandma April’s name,” Molly said.
“Me too,” I said. It had only been a glimpse and I didn’t know the context, but maybe whoever had been writing in the diary had been writing about Grandma April. I walked back to the desk and looked across it, careful not to touch a
nything.
“Um, have a look down,” Luce said.
Our footsteps had turned the polished wood floor into old and aged wood.
“We’re breaking the antiaging spell?” I said.
“Okay, I’m going to test it,” Molly said and reached out to touch the neatly made bed. Before she could even pull her hand away, the ravages of age spread out from where she had touched it. The bedsprings let go, the mattress sank down, and the sheet rotted away. Within a moment the bed was an ancient wreck, looking like all the beds in the other rooms under the mansion.
“I think this is a map,” I said, pointing to a piece of leather sitting atop the desk. It was half-folded over so I couldn’t see it entirely, but to me it looked like Truer Island.
“Maybe take a photo of it with your phone?” Luce said, standing perfectly still.
I took out my phone and took a photo of what I could see, but it wasn’t enough to really make out what the map was supposed to show. So, holding my breath, I used the phone to nudge the map over. Thankfully it fell in the right direction and opened up.
“Wow, X really does mark the spot,” Luce said, noting the giant black mark right in the center of the map.
It was definitely Truer Island. There were a few landmarks drawn in, such as the old military fort and the dock where the ferry traveled back and forth. Somewhere in the center of the island there was a large black X and also some notes on how to find it, such as “Find the tree of love and then walk four hundred paces,” and “Follow the birds.” I quickly took a lot of photos.
I was about to suggest we find a way to open the drawers of the desk, perhaps using Molly’s car keys or something like that, when the floor gave an alarming groan. All three of us looked down and saw that the spots we had been standing on had begun to spread. The patches of beautiful new wood were disappearing as age crept across the floor.
“We need to get out of here,” Luce said and took a step toward the door. The boards under her feet cracked and she put a foot straight through the floor. She managed to stop herself from falling.