Rushed: All Fun and Games

by Brian Harmon

  At some point, the forest had vanished, too. They were back in the records room, just as it was before it became a clearing in a forest.

  “Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on?” begged Melodi.

  “Even I don’t know what that was about,” replied Helena.

  “Are you ready, Eric?” asked Moira. Although the room was back the way it was, she was still in that ghostly mist form.

  No, was the honest answer. But then again, he’d never be ready for this. “What about them?” he asked, pointing at Helena and Melodi.

  “I owe them both an explanation and an apology. I thought my business was mine alone, that I didn’t need to explain myself to any mortal. But I realize now that I’ve made things more difficult than they needed to be. I don’t plan to make that mistake again.” She turned and floated toward Melodi, who took a step back, surprised. “I understand that you are the heir to this estate.”

  She glanced at Helena, uncertain. “Something like that… I think…”

  “I want to make up for my mistakes,” explained Moira. “I want to offer you my service. In return for allowing me to stay, I will protect this property and all who set foot on it. And I will work to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again.”

  Melodi stared at the talking mist, her mouth half-open, one eye sort of squinted, as if this whole ordeal were taxing her brain just a little too much. “Um… Sure… I guess… I mean, I didn’t…didn’t know anything was…happening anyway… I mean… What…? What’s happening now?”

  “I should’ve told you everything before now,” said Helena. “I just didn’t think you’d believe me.”

  “No. I get it. I mean, I wouldn’t have. I don’t think I could have… But some of this stuff… I’ve always had these dreams. I saw that forest we were in a minute ago.” She looked at the face floating in the mist before her. “I feel like I’ve seen her before, too.”

  “We’ve met many times in your dreams,” said Moira. “It was always meant that we would meet in the waking world, too.”

  “Oh…” was all Melodi could think to say.

  Moira turned back to Eric again. “But none of this means anything if we can’t stop the demon from breaking free.”

  He nodded and turned to face the doorway. Although the forest had vanished, it remained. It was now built into the back wall of the doll room, an imposing structure surrounded by shelves of nightmare fuel. He liked it better before.

  He pulled out his phone and glanced down at it.

  DON’T THINK LIKE THAT, scolded Isabelle. YOU’LL GET THROUGH THIS AND TELL HER YOURSELF

  “But if I don’t…”

  YOU KNOW I WOULD, BUT I WON’T HAVE TO. YOU’RE TOO AWESOME TO DIE TODAY

  Eric slipped the phone back into his pocket. Sometimes he wondered if their psychic connection didn’t work both ways sometimes, because he was sure he could hear the fear in her words, even in those text messages. She had no idea if he could survive this or not, but she knew as well as he did that he didn’t have a choice.

  He never had a choice. Not really.

  But at least he knew that if something ever happened to him, Isabelle would let Karen know that he loved her. That alone made it easier to take those first steps.

  The door slowly creaked open as he walked up to it.

  Pausing, he looked back at Helena and Melodi again. “By the way, I sort of trashed your holiday decorations.”

  “What?” said Melodi.

  “Sorry about that.”

  But Helena just waved it away. “Stuff,” she said. “Not lives. Don’t worry about it. Just be careful in there. Come back to us.”

  He nodded and faced forward again. This was it.

  He stepped through the doorway.

  “Good luck,” said Moira. “No matter what happens in there, I swear I’ll never forget you. I’ll remember you until the end of time.”

  As the doors swung closed and the darkness closed in around him, Eric tried to decide if those words were more comforting or chilling.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Eric held up his phone and shined its light into the darkness ahead of him. He was standing at the top of a muddy, stone stairway that descended into utter blackness.

  “What are you feeling?” he asked, turning the phone so he could see the screen.

  ONLY DARKNESS, replied Isabelle. I CAN’T FEEL ANYTHING ELSE IN THAT PLACE. EVEN THE SPIRITUAL ENERGY IS GONE

  Only darkness. This was a demon’s realm.

  I CAN’T BELIEVE WE’RE REALLY DEALING WITH A DEMON

  JEEZ, YOU’D THINK I’D BE USED TO STUFF LIKE THIS BY NOW

  He turned the light out into the darkness again, lighting the steps before him. “I know what you mean,” he said.

  With a resigned sigh, he began to descend into the darkness.

  His battery was critically low now. He wasn’t sure how much longer it would stay on, even with only the display illuminating his path. And there was no other source of light in this place. It was little more than a huge, earthen tunnel.

  He should’ve thought to take Paul’s light. That would’ve been smart.

  Poppy said something about a tunnel, too, he recalled. Like the teardrop and the cross, it was showing him the way, rapidly guiding him toward whatever fate was in store for him. But Poppy said there was something wrong with the tunnel in her vision. There was something wrong with the floor. And as he approached the bottom of the stairs, he found that something was indeed wrong with the floor. It was churning, moving, like the surface of a stream. But that wasn’t the sound of babbling water he was hearing. As he drew closer it became clear what he was really looking at. The floor was covered in a writhing carpet of squirming rats.

  He stopped five steps short of the vermin-covered floor and cursed.

  Now what?

  Surely he wasn’t expected to walk out into that. Those things would probably eat him alive. Again.

  And yet, what other choice did he have?

  He turned and looked back up the stairs. It wouldn’t matter if the door would open for him again or not. Back wasn’t an option, no matter what was waiting for him at the bottom.

  When he turned back again, the bloody-eyed woman was standing on the step in front of him, staring up at him and blocking the way.

  He jumped, startled. “Hi!” he gasped.

  She smiled back at him.

  “I’m sorry, but it might take me a little while to get used to you appearing out of nowhere like that.”

  She gave him an apologetic tilt of her head.

  Eric stared at her for a moment. He had mixed feelings about this. He was grateful that she was here to be his key. He had no idea how he would have made it this far without her. But she deserved to move on and be at peace. “Are you sure you want to stick with me?” he said. “Isn’t there anywhere you can go to be happy?”

  Another smile. This one seemed to tell him he was being cute, but silly. (She communicated surprisingly well for someone who rarely spoke.) Then she lifted her hand and made a “come closer” gesture.

  He leaned forward, expecting her to whisper something to him. Instead, she stood up on her toes and kissed him on his cheek.

  It didn’t feel like a kiss, though. It felt like an icy, electric jolt. And it sent a series of images flashing through his brain like a high-speed slide show. A man and a woman fighting. A bunch of young girls taunting and bullying. A strict-looking middle aged woman shouting. A sneering brute of a man threatening. And on and on like this. Cruel and angry faces. Hateful and hurtful words.

  These were the images of her life, he realized. An unhappy life, surrounded by mean and uncaring people. He saw her abused in every possible way. He saw her neglected. He saw her ridiculed and hated. He saw her cold and hungry, alone and afraid. He saw her terrified for her very life, not just once, but over and over again.

  He even saw the face of the man who killed her. It was unnervingly surreal. He’d never seen the fat man in the
gray suit before. He’d only read about him in old letters. He’d only imagined his face before now. It was doughier than he’d imagined. Smoother. Softer. He looked more like…well…more like an ordinary man than like the monster he really was.

  Then he saw something that chilled him to the bone. He saw death. He saw confusion and fear. He saw hopelessness. He saw an eternal prison with no hope of escape, an oblivion of darkness, an utter void of sense and feeling. Dizzying weightlessness. Disorienting loneliness. Madness defined with sound and silence, color and blindness. Everything and nothing all at once. And he saw time. Endless, emotionless, unrelenting time. Seconds stretching into years and years compressing into seconds. It made no sense… And yet, in a strange way that he could not begin to explain, it made perfect sense.

  And then he saw something else. There was a voice. (Reveal.) And a blossoming of light and warmth. And then he saw two people standing before him. It was himself and Holly, as they must’ve looked when they first found her, when Holly cast her spell to show them what was hiding in that awful basement.

  All of this passed through his brain in the space of a single kiss.

  The bloody-eyed woman smiled up at him.

  Just like that, he understood. She led a very unhappy and unfortunate life, surrounded by people who never loved her and only ever hurt her. But in death, she found people who were different. She found Eric. She found Holly. And she found the kind of happy place she never had in life.

  That was why she was still here. And that was why she would stay near him, wherever he went, for as long as he might need her.

  “Tessa…” he whispered.

  It was her name.

  Still smiling, Tessa turned and walked down the steps ahead of him. As she approached the bottom, she held her hands out to her sides, palms up…and they ignited. Red flames billowed from her fingers, casting a bright, crimson light around her and making the rats scatter.

  Her bare body long and lean in the light and shadow of her blood-colored flames, she walked ahead of him, carving a path for him through the terrified rats, parting them like a strange and perverse imitation of Moses and the red sea.

  Eric followed her, careful not to stray so far behind that the rats closed in around him again.

  He glanced down at his phone, an eyebrow raised.

  SHE COULD AT LEAST PUT SOME CLOTHES ON, was all Isabelle had to say about the matter.

  He didn’t disagree. Karen was not going to approve of this new traveling companion, even if she was decidedly more creepy than sexy with her tangled hair and bloody eyes.

  She walked on and he followed. He didn’t take his eyes off the floor and the sea of rats that writhed and squirmed just out of reach. He didn’t dare risk one of them growing bold and making a run for his ankle.

  Eric estimated that the tunnel went on for about a hundred yards before another set of steps appeared from the gloom, waiting to carry them deeper down into the hellish darkness.

  Tessa descended the steps without pausing. She seemed to know precisely where she was going and what she was doing. Was it some kind of supernatural intuition, he wondered, or a ghostly sixth sense? Or was she just winging it?

  There didn’t seem to be any rats past the steps, which was a significant improvement, but the tunnel walls were closing in on them now, shrinking down as they descended deeper and deeper into whatever corner of hell this place was.

  Claustrophobia began to creep its way up from whatever deep, dark place inside him it liked to hide when all was open and well. This was the sort of thing that made him question the choices he’d been making up until this point, wondering if maybe this whole thing might be freaking insane?

  From a logical standpoint, nothing about this situation made any sense. He was here because a nymph told him to come here. She told him he might die. She told him he might lose his very soul. And still he walked through that big, scary doorway to hell with barely any hesitation.

  But logic had never had much to do with anything where the weird was concerned.

  Things worked differently in these situations. He’d learned long ago that it was important to go with the flow of things as much as possible. Simply walking away wasn’t an option. There was always something binding him to the task at hand.

  The most important thing he’d learned, however, was to trust his gut. And his gut had told him to trust Moira.

  Unfortunately, that brought him back to the part where Moira said he might never leave this awful place…

  DELPHINIUM TOLD YOU THAT IF YOU STAYED TRUE TO YOURSELF, YOU’D ALWAYS MAKE IT HOME, Isabelle reminded him.

  That was true. She saw it in her divinations. But it was also true that the future was always in motion, always subject to change at any given moment. Even if he stayed true to himself, as she said, there was no guarantee that something outside his control wouldn’t suddenly change everything.

  AND MOIRA SAID THAT SHE DIDN’T BRING YOU HERE. FATE BROUGHT YOU HERE

  She did say that.

  IF FATE WAS REALLY WHAT BROUGHT YOU HERE, THEN NOTHING HAS CHANGED. FATE SENT YOU TO ME. FATE SENT YOU TO DELPHINIUM AND FATE SENT YOU TO MOIRA. IT’S ALL THE SAME PATH. IF FATE EXISTS, THEN YOU CAN’T DIE HERE TODAY

  That was quite an optimistic theory. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”

  Finally, Tessa reached the bottom of the steps and set out across the rocky path that waited at the bottom. Eric stayed close behind her.

  The tunnel walls widened again. The ceiling withdrew. Soon he looked around and realized that he was no longer in a tunnel at all. He was in a vast, naked forest, beneath a black and churning sky.

  The forest at night. The last of Poppy’s visions had come to pass. The end was near, one way or another.

  As if summoned by that very thought, the ground trembled beneath his feet and lightning flashed overhead.

  It was here that Tessa stopped and turned to face him. She gave him an uncertain smile and then abruptly vanished.

  All at once, he was alone.

  But without her flames to light the way, Eric realized that it wasn’t completely dark here. There was an eerie, yellow glow to the sky. He could see the shadows of the skeletal, towering trees overhead. He could see the outline of a hill laid out before him.

  Not unlike the one Poppy described at the center of the flood.

  It was funny how all that divination nonsense always came together in the end.

  There was something at the top of the hill. He couldn’t see it in the deep gloom, but it was there. He could feel it. It pulled at him. The end of this nightmare day was waiting for him there. But what end was in store for him when he reached it?

  That was the question.

  As he began to walk, he looked down at his phone again.

  I’M NOT GOING TO LIE. I’M A LITTLE SCARED

  He was scared, too. But she already knew that, of course.

  It was comforting to know he wasn’t really alone at times like these. He’d grown used to having Isabelle around these past couple years. It was going to take a little while longer, he thought, to get used to having Tessa around, too.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t be that hard, considering that she’d apparently been with him for three months now and he only just realized it today.

  Or maybe he was being overly-optimistic all around, given there was a good chance he wouldn’t live to see the sun set.

  THINK POSITIVELY, rebuked Isabelle.

  Right. Positive thoughts. Maybe he’d only be horribly maimed and driven mad by terror.

  The ground trembled beneath him again. Overhead, the churning clouds flickered with sour, yellow lightning. The wind whipped through his hair. It smelled like smoke and death.

  Cold, fat raindrops began to fall around him.

  Eric stopped and looked back the way he came. How long had he been walking? He was already halfway up the hill, but he couldn’t seem to recall covering that much ground.

  And yet when he looked back up the hill, he saw that
he wasn’t halfway to the top of the hill, but closer to three quarters of the way up.

  He had to remind himself that places like this never made sense. Logic failed where other worlds infringed. Constant things in our universe, like time and distance, lost their meaning when you strayed from the familiar. He’d seen it before.

  He turned his gaze to the top of the hill again.

  Something was waiting for him there. Something awful. Something evil.

  Almost without realizing it, he began walking again. It was as intriguing as it was terrifying. He wanted to see it with his own eyes.

  The ground shuddered beneath his feet again. The rain fell harder. The wind smelled like death.

  And the thing on top of the hill moved.

  No… Not something on top of the hill. It was the hill.

  His heart stuttered to a stop in his chest as he realized that the very ground he walked on was alive. The rocks, the earth, the trees… Even the sky in this place was alive.

  Yellow lightning flashed bright overhead, revealing the nightmare landscape around him. Twisted, gnarled trees. Jagged rocks. Muddy earth.

  And rats.

  The hillside was alive with squirming vermin. They were closing around him…rising like a flood.

  There was no turning back. The only thing to do was go higher, to the top of the hill. To the very mouth of the beast.

  He ran.

  The ground rumbled. The mud and earth began to break apart around him. Rocks shook loose and rolled down the hill. Trees began to lean as their roots pulled free of the deteriorating soil. Lightning flashed more urgently overhead.

  The top of the hill was just ahead of him. But it was getting hard to run. The ground was turning to silt. He slipped and fell. He struggled to regain his feet, but there was nothing to hold onto. He was sliding backward.

  Then the entire hillside let go and he was swallowed by mud and rock.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  It was hard to tell yourself that something wasn’t real when you were drowning in it. Mud enveloped him. It filled his mouth, his nose and his ears. It choked him. It stung his eyes. The world around him was reduced to black nothingness.