The secret of commanders.., p.10
The Secret of Commander's Mansion, page 10
This was a real haunting. He wasn’t about to miss out on that.
Shane forced himself between Blake and Marti. “No way. We can’t leave. This place is awesome. We’re fine, I swear. You can’t make us go. Please don’t make me miss out. Please? I want to see what happens next.”
“We can’t leave,” Ellie announced, without even a hint of indecision. Shane admired her backbone. He was pleading with them to let him stay, and instead she flat told them they couldn’t go. But why was she so fixed on staying now? The Lady had been trying to get them out of the house before. What changed? Was the voice telling Ellie they had to stay?
Adjusting his trucker hat, Dom smoothed back the shaggy hair underneath it. “Look, kids, I’m twenty years older than you, and I don’t want any part of this. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re not paranormal experts. We’re basically underpaid actors. And, come on—those fires were trying to get out of the fireplaces. We can’t take the chance something even worse will happen in the next room we go through.”
Turning to Blake, he added, “Marti is right, dude. We have to get the kids out of here. We can come back and finish the shoot tomorrow.”
Blake’s mouth twisted in a frown, his nose pinching up like he’d smelled a wet dog. The look gave new meaning to the word frustrated. Shane knew exactly how he felt. There were few things worse about being a kid than having little or no control over yourself. Sometimes—that is, lots of times—adults got it into their heads that you needed to go somewhere or do something that was the total opposite of what you really wanted. Fighting it was about as effective as doing a snow dance the day before a big test in the pointless hope of school getting called off due to blizzard conditions.
Shane had to hope that the older man would have better luck.
“But we don’t know if any of this will happen again tomorrow,” Blake argued. “Maybe it’s a thing only for tonight. Is it a full moon or the solstice or something? Some obscure Pagan holiday that makes the space between our world and the spirit world like a Seven-Eleven’s automatic doors or something? Who knows? But I don’t think we can take the chance that everything will be as freaky even one day from now.”
“You want to hang around? Fine. You do what you want.” Dom’s mouth tightened. “But I’m getting out of here and taking the kids home.”
“No, we should stay together. Whatever we decide. So, Marti, it’s your call to make.” Blake leveled a pair of pleading eyes at her. “Think about it, though. You signed up for this, right? This paranormal stuff? Here’s your chance.”
She looked from one Tracker to the other. “Blake, I’m sorry, but no. If it was just us, maybe. But we’re responsible for these kids tonight, and that’s more important than saving the show.”
“No!” Shane cried. “That can’t be it! Don’t we get a vote? Ellie and I should get a vote!”
“No,” the three adults barked in unison.
From Ellie’s face, it was clear she, too, was relieved to not have to break the tie.
Like a kid watching his bright-red birthday balloon float away into a clear blue sky, Blake shrank, defeated. An all-too familiar cold stab of disappointment bloomed in Shane’s belly.
It wasn’t fair.
“Okay. I get it.” Blake sighed. “If that’s the decision, we’ll stick together. All for one and whatever. Let’s take a minute and grab whatever we can from the Parlor and get out of here. The kids need their stuff, right?”
Dom hesitated before relenting. “Fine, but quickly. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing straight up. It’s like we’re being watched. I feel like I’m in some kind of dust-filled snow globe, and I want out.”
The group scurried across the entryway and back into the Parlor, which was still lit like midafternoon with all the semi-portable lights.
After ushering Shane and Ellie through the doors with a firm, too-cold hand on each of their shoulders, Dom said, “Grab your stuff. No messing around. Whatever you don’t have in your hands in two minutes is staying here. Got me?”
As sullen as he felt about having to leave, Shane couldn’t help but let a humorless chuckle slip out when he and Ellie reached the spot where their bags sat beside the chairs.
“What?” Ellie asked, peering at him from the corner of her eye.
“I’ve got two minutes to grab whatever I want to keep, and honestly, I couldn’t care less about anything in this bag. I mean, maybe the beef jerky, but nothing else. Bet it takes exactly five seconds to be ready to go.”
Ellie squinted and crossed her arms. “What do you mean, ‘nothing else’? What about your dad’s figurine?”
Shane cringed. He hadn’t told her about it yet, had he? “Oh, yeah… that.”
“That what? Spill it, Brunell.”
Snails. She used his last name in that tone of voice. She saved that tone for times when she was either really worked up about something or about to question his sanity.
“It was sort of crazy. When I came in here to grab it, there was this huge fire in that fireplace. And I don’t remember why, but I got so mad at Dad that I guess I figured I’d teach him a lesson about the things that are really important. So I…”
He trailed off, not wanting to say it out loud.
“You what?” Her eyes grew round, and the color drained from her face. Like she already knew.
He stuttered, still not wanting to say it. But he’d never lied to her before now, no reason to start over this. “I threw it in the fire,” he said with a sheepish smirk, staring at the floor. “It cracked into a bunch of pieces and burned up.”
Ellie lowered her voice. “Holy snails, that’s why she freaked out. That’s why I fainted.”
“The Lady?” he whispered.
“Yeah.” She nodded and then added, “Wait,” before turning away and whispering, “That was it, right?”
For a few long, painful seconds, Shane hung over a cliff to a thousand-foot fall, waiting to hear what the Lady was saying to Ellie.
Then Ellie tsked. “Yeah, that was it. She said she felt a heavy darkness fall over the house while you were in here supposedly getting the soldier. That’s what made her—and me—lose it for a few seconds. She says… oh, Shane. She says destroying it released him.”
Shane glanced over his shoulder to make sure none of the Trackers team was close enough to hear. Blake hadn’t packed up a thing but was instead working the laptop with the video recordings with a full, toothy smile plastered to his face. Dom stood next to him, his mouth wide open. Whatever they were watching on the screen, it was a big deal.
He fought the urge to run over there and sneak a peek at the video. “But I thought she wanted us to destroy it?”
“She did. After we got home. Not here. She wanted it out of here before anything happened to it.”
“Oh snails. Sorry.”
“We have to get out of here, Shane. Now. We’re in trouble. Real danger.”
He nearly laughed, sure Ellie was joking. But the sharp, desperate note in her voice that somehow matched her now-colorless face struck him. She wasn’t kidding around.
Hoisting her pack, she grabbed his arm and shot for the doors, dragging him behind. “We have to go outside,” she shouted to the others. “It can’t wait! Now! Before it’s too late!”
Halfway to the foyer, Marti came alongside, joining their mad sprint. “What? What’s going on?”
Before Ellie could answer, the doors to the entryway slammed shut in front of them.
The trio slid to a stop before ramming against them. Marti signaled for the kids to take a step back and put a hand on the doors, although what she might be feeling for was a mystery. There wasn’t a fire out there in the foyer.
“What’s going on?” Blake demanded, a hint of shaky uncertainty in this voice.
Marti shushed him. Then, putting both hands on the door handle, she tugged, hard. The doors rattled but held firm. “They won’t open. That’s impossible.”
“This is bad,” Ellie muttered beside him. “Holy snails, this is so bad. She said there’s a way out, though. We need to—”
The rest was cut short as Marti shrieked and pointed at the fireplace. Another fire, this one as large and loud as the ones in the Library, now raged in the hearth beneath that pair of portraits. Flickering as it burned, it cast a sinister glow over the sneering man, making him look almost alive. The fire threw shadows all over the room, too, somehow. Shapeless and shifting, the dark, immaterial blobs danced over the walls and furniture like some kind of faerie creatures. They didn’t look right; they weren’t mere shadows.
“What are those?” Shane asked, somehow sounding calmer than he felt.
If anyone heard him, they didn’t answer. “There’s got to be a way to open the doors,” Dom howled, barreling across the room.
“They’re stuck. Like they’ve been barred from the outside,” Marti cried, several octaves higher than usual.
“What are those?” Shane repeated, this time pointing at the hazy gray shapes cavorting around them. “Ellie, do you see them? Shadows don’t move like that.”
Dom crashed into the doors, throwing one shoulder with all his weight against the hard, paneled wooden surface. The doors shuddered but held. He bounced back from them and tumbled to the floor with an angry curse.
“We’re trapped. Everyone together,” Blake ordered, helping his partner up as he joined them.
The group huddled against one another, shoulder to shoulder, speechless as the shadows lined up, one after another, and raced around the perimeter of the room. Picking up speed, they whipped along the walls faster and faster as the fire crackled and roared.
A hot wind rose in the room, at first like the warm breeze of a late-spring afternoon. As the shadows raced, though, accelerating until they were a string of streaking blurs along the walls, the wind grew stronger as well. Soon, they were buffeted by what felt like gusts from a late-summer thunderstorm, with hollow screams echoing in their ears.
After that, a pounding, thunderous gale seemed to threaten to tear the house apart, to snatch them from the ground and fling them around the room like rag dolls. Hunched against one another, the kids in the middle, they all clung to one another with white knuckles and fingers burning from the effort.
Reaching some kind of crescendo, the shadows dove into the fireplace, joining with each other and the roaring blaze, giving it strength and power. It grew beyond the confines of the hearth, stretching out into the room, engulfing the chairs where moments before Shane and Ellie had talked. In little more than ten seconds, the wingback chairs were all but destroyed, leaving only a charred pair of wooden frames.
Shane fought the panic tightening his throat, threatening to choke him. The fun of seeing a real haunting was lost. His whole body shook in terror, and he heard himself screaming. They had to run, to get away before this beastly, living flame grew large enough to devour the entire room. There had to be somewhere they could go, some way out of this trap.
Then, to his horror, the fire stopped growing. It bulged and twitched, flashing out before shrinking down, fusing into an unthinkable shape. A ghastly, familiar form came together from the flickering blaze, first a man’s head, chest, and waist, then a pair of arms and legs. All of it was enveloped in flame still, burning but somehow not consuming the man-shape kneeling in front of them.
It stood up, leaving smoldering scorch marks on the floor, and spread its arm wide as it threw back an eerie, faceless head, giving the impression of someone stretching out after climbing from bed first thing in the morning. Then the thing issued a blood-chilling roar, like the thunder of a freight train rocketing away at top speed.
As it fixed its attention on the huddled group by the doors, Shane’s face burned like a fever, sure that it was looking at him, into him, searching for something, some secret buried for generations.
Shane screamed and noticed the screams of the four other people clinging together in the desperate hope of surviving whatever this was. Then he screamed louder.
The flame monster, the burning man, answered in kind. He, or it, opened its previously unseen mouth to reveal a dark, empty void, a tunnel to nowhere. Then it roared back at them, the angry sound of a lion and a dragon and a tornado all wrapped together. It cut through Shane. How small and weak he was in comparison.
His bones rattled in his skin, and an icy chill filled him from toes to temples, fingertips to fingertips.
How could any of them possibly survive this?
Chapter Fourteen
Ellie
Ellie fought back against the tears threatening to gush from her eyes in the face of the flame-enveloped monster, this fiery ghost that reminded her of an evil version of the Human Torch. But she didn’t cry. She’d never been the kid who became a blubbering mess around others, and she wasn’t about to become one now. If nothing else, she’d do her father proud in that sense.
“We have to get out of here,” she whispered to the Lady. “Show me a way out.” In the din caused by the Torch Ghost’s roaring blaze, surely no one but the Lady could have heard her. If she was still listening at all.
She held tight to someone, clutching a ball of T-shirt material in front of her. Marti, maybe? Yes, Marti. That was some small measure of comfort. The young woman with the shock of blueberry hair was the most sensible of the three Trackers. Probably best to be holding onto her at a time like this.
As if aware Ellie was thinking of her, Marti turned her head toward the girl, her eyes and mouth set in a mask of determination peppered with concern. Ellie wished she felt the calm Marti projected. “What did you say?”
“Nothing. We need another way out of here!”
The trapdoor. Quickly, find the trapdoor!
At the same time, Marti’s eyes lit up. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of it before?”
The burning man started in their direction, leaving smoking footprints with every step.
Marti smacked Blake in the back of the head. “Remember the blueprints? There’s a trapdoor in the floor over there, under that rug.” She pointed to the back of the room on their left. A portable light and the generator were placed over one end of a huge rug that ran the entire width of the room.
Without waiting for a reply, Marti took off for that corner. Ellie, still clinging to her shirt, trailed behind. Shane came along with them, gripping Ellie’s hand as if his life depended on staying in contact with her. Even in all the noise and with her own heart racing, she could feel the violent tremors shaking him.
As soon as they reached the generator, Marti crouched beside it, giving it a massive shove. It slid forward only a few inches, not even a fraction of the distance needed to get it off the rug. She swore under her breath and leaned down to try again.
As she did, Dom knelt beside her, adding his own mass and strength to the effort. The piece of equipment shot forward two feet, clearing the floor covering.
The roar of fire and the growing heat on the back of Ellie’s neck signaled that the thing was closing fast behind them.
Blake grabbed the bright stand-up light and, without pausing for a second thought, jabbed it at the advancing figure, like an old-time knight with a lance. It smashed the burning man in the chest, driving it back half a foot and earning them a few precious seconds. The stand erupted in flames, though, searing a white flash into their vision. Blake dropped it with a yelp as the light exploded under the intense heat with a loud pop, pitching their corner of the room into darkness.
Half a second later, a buzzing surge of energy shot up the power cord from the now-smoking light back to the generator. A louder pop followed, and all the lights winked out. The generator was dead.
The flames roiling across the fiery form cast a bright orange glow in the sudden darkness. It wasn’t much light, but since no one had taken the time to turn on their headlamps, it was at least enough to see by.
In one fluid motion, Marti grabbed and wrenched up the rug, throwing the tasseled edge of it several feet in front of her, in the direction of the Torch Ghost. With luck, having to climb over that would slow him down at least a little. They needed every last second they could get.
On the ground, Ellie could make out the dark edge of a square outlined in the floorboards. Dom’s and Marti’s fingers flew along the shape, searching for something.
“Got it!” Marti yelped as her fingers disappeared into a seam. Then the square popped up and swung open on a hidden hinge.
“You go!” Dom shouted to Marti, holding the trapdoor open.
She slipped into the hole in the floor. Hip-deep in the opening, she gave Ellie and Shane a frantic wave. “Come on, come on!”
They didn’t need a second invitation.
Marti disappeared, and the kids barreled after her. Without slowing down to question where the strange trapdoor led, Ellie jumped into the square portal, hoping for the best.
Her Nikes slammed against something wooden, something with an edge. Too much of an edge. No sooner had she landed than she pitched forward, careening downward. She screamed, drifting toward empty darkness, until she saw a familiar face, and a pair of hands caught her, breaking her fall.
“Easy, girl, I got you,” Marti said. “You’re on a straight staircase with no railing. There’s a wall to your right. Flick on your lamp and get to the bottom. I’ll be right behind you.”
The hands released her as someone else yelped in surprise behind them. Ellie, thinking fast, ducked under the woman’s arms and scampered down a step. Confident she wasn’t about to get run over by Shane, who had no doubt thrown himself into the dark square with more enthusiasm than she had, she clicked on her light. Its sterile white shine lit the bottom half of the staircase.
