Category : Books-Fiction

Sub Category : Suspense/Mystery

The walk from the living room to the basement feels like a walk to the guillotine, so Lele figures she might as well pass the time with pep talks. You've got this, she tells herself. You're gonna make it. You've got Eva freakin' Gutowski on your side. Unless iJustine suddenly develops Einstein-level intelligence, you'll be fine.

But five seconds after she enters the basement, all of her hard-earned confidence evaporates faster than an ice cube in Hawaii.

"Are you serious?"

The ungodly machine—now she understands why the hell they call it that—is a giant, demonic contraption that takes up half of the dimly-lit basement. There are two large glass chambers, each large enough for a person to fit inside, as well as a rusty-looking engine about the size of a small elephant. Not far from those are two control panels, each with at least twenty-two wires sticking out from under them. Lightbulbs, containers, and weird tool-like things are scattered around the room, and there are enough screws, levers, and buttons to equip every mad scientist in the tri-state area.

"This is like Saw!" Lele shouts, her voice bouncing around the cavernous room.

Next to her, Eva's previously-determined expression has morphed into genuine concern. "Until Dawn..."

Lele feels sick. She's seen this stuff in movies—creepy basements, torture chambers, innocent people trapped in some sicko's twisted game. Nobody ever comes out alive.

She regrets coming here tonight.

 

"Ladies." Arthur faces the girls, his back to the machine, his arms extended. "Welcome to the ungodly machine."

Lights flash. Andrea flinches, but somehow manages to keep a straight face. Calm. Stay calm. It's gonna be okay. Don't think about monsters, don't think about dying, don't...

"Why do you even have this down here?" Lele, unlike Andrea, is not even trying to hide her emotions; fear, anger, confusion, and a dash of hatred dance across her face. She'd probably spit in the face of Death itself if she had the chance.

Arthur ignores Lele's outburst. "Please, read the directions."

Lele makes a grab for the open notebook in the corner, but Eva gets there first.

To free the artifact from the bowels of the machine, it must be forced into malfunction. The machine is started by placing the cog key in the center console.

The two guests selected by vote must be locked in separate glass chambers. Their partners will have thirty minutes to try and disrupt the machine. If either side causes a malfunction, their respective chamber will open. However, the other chamber will fill with a noxious gas, killing the guest whose partner was not quick enough.

If after thirty minutes the machine has not malfunctioned, both guests will be killed by the machine and a monster will emerge.

No. Andrea struggles not to scream. She knew it, she knew it, she knew there was some sort of creature skulking about this God-forsaken house. And now, if Eva and Justine fail to complete whatever awful puzzle lies before them, Andrea's nightmares really will become reality.

And yeah, if that happens, she won't be around to see it, because she and Lele will both be dead by then. But what about Justine? Or Eva? Or the six people waiting upstairs?

The last thing she wants is for her friends to be eaten alive by an ungodly monster.

 

Well. It's happened. Lele's locked in a freakin' glass chamber, watching Eva and Justine fiddle around with their manuals, hoping against hope that this crazy Saw scenario won't go all Jigsaw on her ass.

And Arthur's not helping. Yeah, he locked the girls into their chambers, and yeah, he started the machine, but now that the damn thing's in motion, he's just standing there watching it all go down. He's acting like this is all a goddamn game or something.

What was it he said before he started the machine?

It begins.

"What?" Eva's hunched over her manual, her eyebrows raised in that typical what-the-hell expression. "This is not even in English."

Over at her end of the room, Justine's just as befuddled. "It's just all these weird symbols."

Lele's freaking out. Listen, God, I know I haven't been the greatest person, I've done some things I really shouldn't have, but I swear, if you get me out of this, I'll change, I swear to God I'll change...

Dios te salve, Maria, llena eres de gracia, el Senor es contigo, bendita tu eres entre todas la mujeres...

 

After several minutes of squinting at symbols, Justine finally gets it.

The blueprints have different levers. So that means she and Eva have to lift the levers up and the levers down, and they have to get them in the correct combination. Each lever has a corresponding code that's matched up with the decoder she's been provided. Of course, it's up to her to decode which way the arrows go.

"D-13," she mumbles to herself, pushing the final lever into position. "So you just have to match them up..." She frowns. "Do I gotta push harder? Is something not right?"

Andrea sighs.

Justine tears herself away from the levers to face the girl she's supposed to save. "Girl, I'm trying."

She thinks she's got it right. She thinks. But nothing's happening and it doesn't make sense and everything's insane and now there's only fifteen minutes left and—

"Eva has solved the first step."

What the hell?

"Oh, we're in deep shit," Andrea moans.

"Okay, but..." Justine doesn't get it, how is this not working, what am I doing wrong? "Ahhhhhh!"

 

Okay. Okay. First step done. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Eva smiles. She's cracked the code, and now the power core has been sufficiently overloaded. She's feeling pretty confident (in fact, her confidence is bordering on arrogance at this point), but there's no time to celebrate her accomplishments. Not when Lele Pons has fifteen minutes left to live.

She turns her attention back to the instructions.

Remove bolt...

"I'm gonna die in here," Andrea complains.

Justine, who's still working the levers, throws up her hands. "I'm doing exactly what this is telling me to do!"

The bolt is stuck in a vat of ice water not far from her control panel. Eva strides up to it, braces herself, and plunges her hand into its icy depths.

"Oh!" she exclaims, feeling the water seep into her pores. "It's so cold..."

And it is. It honestly is. It feels like someone took a bucket of ice and left it out in the middle of an Arctic winter. Her hand is already getting numb, and she's only been going at it for approximately two and a half minutes.

A part of her is tempted to give up and head for the nearest fireplace, but one look at Lele's fearful brown eyes is all she needs to keep going.

So she unscrews. And unscrews. And unscrews. And then unscrews some more. She's been unscrewing for the past five minutes, and this damn bolt is still stuck.

If I get hypothermia, I know who to blame.

 

Justine's still fiddling about with the levers, and Andrea's beginning to panic.

Being brave was easy before. She was upstairs, in the safety of the living room, and her name was pulled, so of course she tried to accept her fate with dignity. But now, when she's actually trapped in the tube she very well might die in, keeping her cool is a hell of a lot harder to do.

Perhaps she wouldn't be so scared (Is this it? Am I going to die? Should I start writing my last will and testament while I still have the chance?) if iJustine wasn't being...well...iJustine.

Come on, come on, get it together, now's not the time to fuss and fume.

She's seconds away from snapping when Justine's control panel finally lights up. Andrea's paid enough attention to the proceedings to know what this means—the code has been cracked, and Team Andristine is free to move on to the next step.

"Oh." Andrea clasps her hands together, her faith in her partner halfway restored. "Okay."

After a quick glance at the instructions, Justine turns to the vat of water next to her control panel. She reaches in, gives the bolt a few good twists, then draws her hand back so fast you'd think a scorpion's stung her. She faces Andrea, her arms outstretched, her right glove dripping with water. "Girl, I can't get the bolt."

Andrea frowns. Why is her partner giving up so soon? Especially when Eva's over at the other vat, unscrewing like there's no tomorrow?

Come to think of it, how come Justine didn't take off her glove before she stuck her hand in the vat?

Is she even trying?

To make matters worse, Eva has somehow managed to get her bolt unscrewed. Her hand emerges from the water, clutching the bolt, and Andrea's heart drops several more stories.

"You can do it, Eva!" shrieks Lele from her tube.

Meanwhile, Justine grabs the instructions again. "This is ridiculous!" she shouts, glaring at the symbols before her as if they're personally responsible for Andrea's plight.

This is my fault, Andrea frets, watching Justine glower at the bolt. She was right. I should have picked someone else. Now we're way behind and Eva's almost there and I...I'm going to...

"I'm getting really fussy!" Justine complains, yanking off her gloves as she speaks. "Really, really fussy!"

Andrea bites her lip, her eyes fixed on Justine, trying not to think about the enormous amount of progress Eva's made, trying not to think about dying, trying not to think about leaving her loved ones alone in 2016. "You gotta hurry."

 

As Eva uses the bolt to open up the control panel, Lele's emotional state is bouncing back and forth between confidence and fear. She still has at least twenty prayers left to run through, but it's okay. She's got Eva. Eva's in the lead. Unless Justine makes a miraculous comeback, she won't—she can't—she's not gonna—

"Eva, you got this!"

Almost there. She's almost there. She's gotta do it. She's gotta.

"Girl, you wanna give me a hand?" This from Justine, who's still struggling with the bolt. "Did you actually take this bolt out?"

And just like that, the panic is back, swimming like blood through Lele's veins. "Don't—don't—don't!" she screams, pounding her hands against the glass. "Don't tell her anything!" Eva, don't, just keep going, please, save me, get me out of here...

I don't want to die I don't want to die I don't want to!

 

Of course Eva's not going to help Justine. She doesn't want Andrea to die, but the fact remains: there's no way on earth that both Andrea and Lele are getting out of this alive. And since Eva's job is to save Lele, that's what she's going to do.

Besides, Justine's being a bit sketchy. Not taking off her gloves...barely even trying to get at the bolt...spending far more time complaining than actually attempting to solve the puzzle...honestly, Eva doesn't think she's giving it much effort at all.

She doesn't want Andrea dead...does she?

Eva's next task is to take the screw and use it to bust open the control center. She does so, revealing a maze of wires, each one a different color of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple...it's like Joseph's coat of many colors up in here.

She consults her manual. Each wire goes with a certain jack (for instance, the green wire goes in the jack that has the little arrow symbol above it), and she must re-wire the control center so that all of the wires are in the correct jack.

Then, and only then, will Lele be released from her chamber. And Andrea...

She's not going to think about Andrea.

 

At this point, Justine never wants to see another bolt ever again for as long as she lives. She hates bolts, she hates levers, she never even asked for this job, she's too dumb, why the hell did Andrea even pick her?

She grabs a skinny-looking piece of metal (don't ask her what it's called, because every freakin' thing in this place looks the same to her) and lowers it into the vat. No way is she sticking her hand in there again. She's already gone and ruined a pair of perfectly good gloves; she's not in the mood to freeze her fingernails off too.

After a few good thrusts, the bolt is off.

"Oh, God." Justine snatches the bolt from the water so fast it almost gives her whiplash. "I did it!"

Andrea pumps both her fists in the air. "Oh, yeah!"

"Hallelujah!" shrieks Justine, holding the bolt triumphantly above her head. "The bolt has been removed!" I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna save her. I've just got to connect a few wires or whatever, and then—

She opens her control center and omigod I've changed my mind, look at all these freakin' wires, what the hell, this isn't fair, how am I supposed to sort this mess out? And Eva's got a good head start...oh God...

"Come on!" shouts Andrea from her tube. "You're almost there!"

And then, Eva puts her final wire in place, and all hell breaks loose.

 

It happens so fast. One minute, Andrea's in her tube, watching the craziness go down, and the next...there's gas. Everywhere. A cloud of black smoke, stinging her eyes, piercing her nose...she can't see, she can't move, she can't speak...

...she can't breathe...

...it hurts...help...

...Mom, Dad, Brittany, Tony...

...Teala...Lauren...

...Timothy...

...I don't want...

And then the world goes black.

 

"Eva's done it."

Lele's chamber swings open. She steps out, open-mouthed, not sure what the hell just happened.

Eva yanks herself to her feet. Justine's got her head in her hands. And Andrea...she's leaning against the wall of her now-murky chamber. Eyes closed. Not moving. Not...omigod, she's...she's...

"Justine, I'm sorry," says Arthur, not sounding very sorry at all. "Andrea did not survive."

"Omigod!"

Lele throws her arms around Eva, laughing and crying at the same time. Her soul is a jumble of thoughts and emotions—a dash of omigod Andrea poor thing she didn't deserve it mixed with a healthy dose of I survived I'm still alive thank you thank you thank you.

Eva buries her face into Lele's shoulder and sobs. As for Justine, she stands there, staring at Andrea's corpse with the strangest look on her face.

"You've caused the machine to malfunction," Arthur explains, "and it will now produce—"

As he speaks, a compartment opens, and out pops the weirdest object Lele has ever seen in her life. It's grey, triangle-shaped, and glowing, with all sorts of weird symbols etched into its surface.

"—the artifact."

Eva, who's somehow managed to regain her composure, picks up the artifact (as well as a few bits of paper next to it) and tucks it under her arm. The brunette still seems a bit down, but Lele grabs her arm and grins at her anyway. She considers getting down on her knees and kissing her feet in gratitude, but decides against it.

Andrea Brooks is dead. And Lele's sad, of course she is, but it's kind of hard to grieve when it very well could've been her dead in that tube. Someone had to go, and all things considered, she's glad she got out of this alive.

Besides, she's in a better place than I am right now, she thinks to herself as she, Eva, and Justine follow Arthur out of the basement. This house is the devil's house.