Category : Books-Fiction

Sub Category : Suspense/Mystery

Jesus, that was intense. First Shane died, then the car blew up, and now a spirit board just went and talked to them...if she didn't know any better, GloZell would swear she's dreaming.

But oh no, it's not a dream, it's real and true and terrifying.

While everyone else scouts around the library looking for the books they need, she's in the parlor with her old friend Joey Graceffa, scouting 'round in case the demon went and left something in there. To be honest, she's still a wee bit wary of Joey (Shane said the house did it, and she believes him, but Joey, it's your house), so she stays behind him as he searches the lil' tables and stuff.

And lo and behold, there's a book!

"That's gotta be it," says GloZell as Joey picks up the book in question. "What's on the side?"

 

Fortunately for Lele's patience (I mean come on, they can't spend their entire freakin' lives looking for these clues), Matt finds whatever it is they need to find in fifty seconds flat.

"So I'm not sure if I was supposed to open this cabinet," he confesses, standing next to a clearly already-opened cabinet, "but there is a symbol here...on the chest..." He points at the locked chest inside the cabinet and yep, he's right, that's the same freakin' symbol all right. "And there's a lock with a symbol on it."

Lele frowns. "So we need a key."

"No, we need a code!" Sierra exclaims.

Lele takes a closer look at the chest and ugh, she hates these combination lock things. Mainly because she's always too stupid to remember the combination.

Oli, who's holding the one book they did find, absentmindedly skims through its pages. Eva stands next to him, her brown eyes fixed on the symbol glittering on its spine.

"All right, so the code is probably in the book," says Tim, pointing to the book in Oli's hands. He's still got that slick-but-suspicious Mafia vibe to him, and demons or no demons, he's still at the top of Lele's most-likely-to-be-the-murderer list.

"Wait, hold on!" Oli, on the other hand, is not even in her top twenty. Out of all the boys, he's probably the nicest one here. "This has a number on it!"

He holds up the book, and there's a golden 6 glittering on its spine.

Eva points at the study, muttering something about another book, and that's when Lele realizes what they've got to do. "There's another one here," she shouts, pointing at a book someone left next to the potted plant. "Where's the other book?"

"Okay, so get the other book," says Oli.

One or two people dart off to the study, presumably to get that book Eva was muttering about. Lele marches over to the potted plant, but Justine gets there first, and the two blondes huddle over the red-covered book before them.

"What's that?" asks Justine, turning the book over so that its spine is visible. "I mean...that's a symbol."

She's right; it is that freakin' symbol again. Honestly, Lele is getting real tired of seeing that thing everywhere she goes. When she gets home, she's gonna make damn sure she never sees another weird symbol again.

If she gets home...

She will. She will.

 

"This is the first book," Oli remarks, holding up the book in question. He's actually not sure if the book he has is the first one, especially considering the fact that it has the number 6 on it. Anything's possible, really.

As a matter of fact, he doesn't really know much of anything about this strange situation they seem to have gotten themselves into. Spirit boards, exploding cars, demon-infested houses, actual bloody murders...it's the dinner party from hell, and Oli just wants to go home and forget it ever happened.

Stop it, snaps the reasonable part of his brain. Now is not the time to feel sorry for yourself. You've got to figure out these clues, or you'll be stuck here forever. So get on it.

"This is five!" shouts Lele, shoving her way through the group, a red-covered book with the number 5 on it clenched in her hands. "Five!"

Oli takes Lele's book and holds it up against his own. "But look..." He hasn't noticed it until now, but both books have little arrows on their spines as well as the numbers. "They both have arrows. Look."

Next to him, Eva wordlessly hands him another book. At the same time, Joey shouts out, "Wait, I have one! I know where there's one too!" and sprints off to the parlor.

And you couldn't have told us that twenty seconds ago?

"There's one," says Sierra, grabbing a fourth book and handing it to Oli. "We need four."

Oli barely has time to examine the four books further before Joey comes back brandishing yet another one. "Guys, I have a book as well."

"This is some demon stuff," Eva mutters to no one in particular, and Oli's inclined to agree.

 

The group spends the next forty seconds gathering up the books (they all have that same Society Against Evil symbol on them) and putting them all together on the table. Once that's done, Joey can't help but notice that the arrows on each book point in different directions. Not only that, but each has a different number: one has a 6, another a 5, another a 3, another a 4, and the last one has an 8.

"Wait." Joey points at the container that still holds that disgusting hand. "Maybe it has something to do with this?" He counts up all of the dials on the side of the container. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight...There's five here. We need three more."

"Hold on," Matt calls out. "I've got one more."

So he does, and it's the one with the 7 on it. "Okay." Joey takes a deep breath and watches Matt place the book with the others. "We need book one and two." Hurry up, hurry up, who knows how much time we have?

Oli, who left the room momentarily to go look for books, comes barreling back in with (you guessed it) another one. "Guys, I found the other book!"

Joey smiles. We're getting there. We're getting there. We're almost freakin' there, thank God. "So we need one more!"

But where could it be...?

 

Andrea wanders through the house, keeping her eyes peeled for the one book they haven't found yet. So far, this has gone okay; nothing truly terrible has happened since Shane died. The exploding car was shocking, but in hindsight, she should've known that the house wouldn't let them get away that easily. And even the hand really wasn't that scary, especially after the head.

No, all that was really par for the course. What truly terrifies her is what comes after...the unknown, with all its promises of pain and death...and worst of all, that lingering chance of being trapped in this nightmare forever...

First things first. Find the book now. Freak out about this mess you're stuck in later.

After a bit more wandering, she finds herself standing in front of this giant grandfather clock. It's brown, shiny, relatively new-looking...and it has cabinets. Large, roomy cabinets that could easily be used to hide something.

No one else in the group is even acknowledging its existence.

Andrea, of course, puts two and two together and opens the cabinet door. Sure enough, there's a green-covered book, and it's got the symbol on its spine just like the rest of them.

"Found it!" she shouts triumphantly, sending the rest of the group running in her direction. "It was in the clock!"

As her friends gather around her, clamoring to see the final piece in this literary puzzle, Andrea's feeling extremely proud of herself. I found it. I found the last book. I'm not completely useless after all.

Maybe I can make it. Maybe...maybe I can live.

 

Well, GloZell is sure glad that's over. She's had enough of this game (I mean, a clock? Really? What is this, hide-and-go-seek or somethin'?), so now that they've got all the books, she's more than happy to help her friends lug the whole lot of 'em back to the table.

Oli, who's been going all genius on them lately, points at the books and launches into yet another explanation. "Look, they all have different arrows. And the box has dials...I think these books are telling us where these dials have to be."

"You're right," Eva murmurs, getting on her knees and reaching for the first dial. "You've got to be."

So she gets to work (she's clearly the other genius in the bunch; GloZell won't be surprised if her and Oli run off together and start geniusing out in the corner while everyone else gets murdered), turning each of the dials every which way as Oli reads off the direction each arrow is pointing in.

After a minute of this, the last dial jolts into place, and the candle things around the hand light up. GloZell somehow holds in her shouts and prayers this time around, but dammit, this "demon stuff" (as Eva put it) still gives her the willies every single time.

Everyone else starts cheering, only for their cheers to be cut short by some creepy demon whisper. (And flickering lights. Of course the lights are flickering. Why not?) "Three...four...five...seven..."

"What the..." Justine backs away, fear illuminating her baby blues. "Guys..."

"Three...five...four...seven..."

The lights come back on. GloZell glances over at Justine, and of course the poor girl looks about ready to have a heart attack. "Five four seven!" she practically squeals, clutching the table like a drowning swimmer clinging to a life preserver.

But GloZell knows what she heard. "It said three five four seven."

Sierra makes a grab for that locked box Matt found earlier, snatching it up with her little gloved hands. She's a tiny lil' thing, so how she's able to hold up that heavy-looking box GloZell doesn't know, but somehow she manages to carry it from the cabinet to the table.

"Bring it over here!" shouts Joey.

Sierra does so, and the box lands on the table with a satisfying plunk. Once that's done, she bends over and gets to work on the combination. "Three..." How in the hell is this chick so calm? Even our two wunderkids over here are obviously freaking out internally, but here's Sierra going at it like it's just a normal Saturday. "...five...four...seven..."

Sure enough, the box is unlocked. Sierra opens it up to reveal a note and...

"Chess pieces!" exclaims Justine.

"Chess pieces?" questions GloZell.

Tim shrugs. Joey bites his lip. Sierra frowns into the box. And GloZell has no idea what in the heck is going on.

"Chess board," says Matt, pointing across the room. "Over there."

It's a chess board all right, and everyone starts talking at once. Tim, though, quickly puts an end to that nonsense by being all "Let him read, let him read!" and then everyone quiets down and lets Joey read the note.

Thirty men and only two women, but they hold the most power. Dressed in black and white, they could fight for hours.

Chess. Really. Of all the things this house had to throw at them, it goes with chess. GloZell never thought much of that game in the first place, but now all this intellectual nonsense is beginning to hurt her head.

She wishes they had a dumber ghost. They'd probably be out of the house by now.

 

The ladies need to find a perfect pair...a handsome knight on their right with a flair.

The game's all set up, the ladies (Sierra and Justine) are sitting at the chess board ready to play, and Tim's standing with the others, glad he's not the one playing. He's never been much of a chess kind of guy—great game, yeah, but not for him. He's more into Yahtzee. Or Guess Who.

Guess Who. Yeah. That's my shit!

Justine's sitting on the left side of the table, maneuvering the white chess pieces, while Sierra's taking care of the black ones on the other side. It's almost poetic; a blonde-haired girl with white chess pieces, a dark-haired girl with black chess pieces...He knows it wasn't intentional, but it's still kinda funny.

Once the knights are in place, Tim reads the next part of the note aloud.

Yet one of these ladies is in deep sorrow; her white-bearded husband will not have his home tomorrow.

Because a vicious bishop..

"Bishop!" Joey's getting way too overexcited over there. "Bishop is gonna get the king."

"That's these," Tim informs Justine and Sierra, pointing to the bishops. Chess might not be his game, but at least he knows which pieces are which. The girls, on the other hand, are staring at the board as if it's an alien artifact or something.

Eva (now there's a girl who could win a game of chess) gestures to one of Sierra's black bishops. "So you need to move the bishop over..."

Tim continues reading.

...took his house, a beautiful medieval castle.

"So would these be considered the castles?" Matt asks, pointing to the white rook in the corner of the board.

Tim nods, glad someone's finally getting it. "Yeah."

"And then the bishop just goes and takes his spot." Matt reaches over, grabs Sierra's bishop, and moves it to the spot currently occupied by Justine's rook. "So push that off."

Seconds after Justine whisks the rook off the board, a compartment flies open beneath the table. Seriously, what the hell is with all these compartments? Whoever's running maintenance 'round here really needs to get those things checked.

Everyone gasps—except for Joey, whose face busts out into the biggest grin Tim's ever seen in his life. "We did it!"

"Omigod." Sierra's panicked voice is almost a whisper. "What?"

"That scared me so bad," Justine admits.

Inside the compartment is (of course) another note. Before Tim has time to make a snarky remark about the number of notes they've encountered, Oli picks up the note and begins to read it aloud.

Today's experiment was a success. The machine was able to consume the life force of two college students and produce an ungodly monster.

However, the machine's demand for power is endless. I'm using an ancient artifact with an...

Oli stops reading for a few seconds to stare pointedly at the group. "Artifact." He couldn't have made it more obvious if he started jumping up and down screaming "clue, clue, clue right here!"

...with an origin I do not wish to know as a source, but it has come with a price. My mind can no longer distinguish between reality and nightmare.

I've locked the key to the machine inside the green cabinet in the ballroom, but my scattered mind cannot recall where I left the combination on the first floor. All the thoughts I can hold are the four elements of triangles I learned as a boy: fire, water, air and earth.

Fire, water, air, and earth. Okay. So we're going all Last Airbender up in here. That's fine. Tim can play that way. He's gonna find these elements and get himself and his friends out of this creepy-ass house before anybody gets hurt.

But if the Fire Nation starts attacking, I'm out.