<name tag: rook>

Once again Mr. X casts his spell of Halloween magic. Already at dangerbabecentral he has a new short comic up and running for the holiday of orange and black. The hardest part in training a cavalry horse is not to get it to rush into a maelstrom of death and fury, but to get it to stand still when all its brothers around it suddenly rush forward into a field of fire. Much of Ney’s blame at Waterloo and thus Napoleon’s downfall can be attributed to thousands of men having their butts on the back of green horses they had never seen a week or two before. And so Mr. X charges forward in a mad brilliant rush and before you know it I have dashed the kitchen to pieces in a giddy quail flush out the door bursting hinges with boots on the wrong feet and apron flipping over the head in his magnetic wake. Rook.

THIS STORY IS DEDICATED TO THE GREAT ARTIEST BLACKADDER

THE MAGES CLUB  

(A Mac Abre Mystery)

The long pearl white 1950’s car resplendent with tail fins and chrome wheel hubs crunched up the gravel road to bob to a stop upon the small gravel oxbow in front of the large stone house. The doors snapped open and five men got out of the dust covered car and eyed the dark structure before them. Two of the men from the front seat were dressed almost identical in gray suits with gray fedoras clamped to their close cropped heads. They wore Rayban sunglasses and despite this squinted around them in the bright cloudless mid-day sun which reflected off the white gravel and car with shimmers of brilliance. The three men who had climbed out of the back seat wore a different assortment of garments; one was dressed in a rumpled brown tween suit, another in tan dress pants and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and the last was dressed in a tight tunic with a turban swathed around his head. None of these three men wore sunglasses though the man in the brown tweed suit wore eye glasses on his sweaty face with a pair of clipped on flip down sun shades but he did not use them.

The location of the house was surprisingly remote despite being only fifteen minutes off the main highway. The entire area was covered in thick trees and underbrush that crept right up to the gavel roads sides and up against the dark stone sides of the house; sealing all in a waving green verdant wall of shivering plumes. A lone set of six stone steps lead abruptly up to the heavy wooden front door, there was no porch, no veranda, no overhang above the door and not a single first floor window was to be seen. As the men moved slowly stretching their legs and arms one of the men in a gray suit pointed out the half hidden in green brush vine creeper overgrown wooden sign. One could just make out; “THE MAGES CLUB” in faded peeling paint upon its blistered weathered surface.

The man in the brown tweed suit and eye glasses shuffled past the men in gray and up the stone steps to the large front door digging out a ring set of keys in the process. However when he reached for the door to unlock it he found it already partially open and he pushed it fully open while looking back at the other men in surprise. The two men in gray suits pushed past the open mouth man in brown tweed with the mussed-up dark rumpled hair and entered the house with hand guns drawn. The remaining three men outside the house hesitated looking at each other before entering after the two men with the hand guns into the dark and suddenly foreboding house.

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In 1927 one of the foremost stage magicians decided to build himself a magnificent stone mansion in the wilds of the California hills. His skills of prestidigitation were legendary and his work on creating some of the early special effects for the budding film industry had made him very wealthy. Upon completion he decided to turn his house into to a sort of privet club for his many magician friends to visit and talk shop in. in time he turned the downstairs into an elaborate full stage so that his friends could both practice their tricks and perform them for small select audiences. When the great mage died he left the now called, “MAGES CLUB” to his surviving friends and the downstairs kitchen was expanded as was the stage and three nights a week people would troop out in their cars to eat dinner and watch a magic show in a small intimate setting performed by some of the most gifted and brilliant magicians alive. This went on for decades until the close inner circle of the Mages Club, the surviving members of the original friends of the great mage, died off and the club was officially closed and disbanded in the mid-forties. The house was sealed up and the place abandoned for all time.

Now in a blustery warm June of 1957 five men had entered the house and stood in the main foyer where hats and coats had once been taken and looked out into the large open downstairs room full of small round tables and chairs and a great red velvet curtained wooden raised stage at the far end all lost in a murky gloom pierced only by the open doors thin slat of white bright light.

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“There’s no light switch, not that I would think the power would be working anymore.” One of the gray suited men was brushing his hand up and down the wall paper.

“There never was any electricity,” the brown tweed suited man spoke quietly as he walked further into the room peering around in the dusty shadows. “It was always candles here. Candles and shadows… lots of shadows.”

“Chet, go back to the car and get the flash light out of the glove compartment.” One of the gray suited men spoke to the other who nodded and quickly left the house and headed to the car.

The man in the brown tweed suit bumped into a small table and pulled a book of matches out of his coat pocket and picked up the glass covered candle and lit a match and then the candle. It burned smoky from the dust upon the wick but he moved to another table and repeated the process until everyone had a glass shrouded candle plucked from the small round tables to light their way except Chet who was back shinning his flash light around the room. He seemed particularly interested in the wooden railed balcony that lined both sides of the room. His light danced there darting amongst the thick shadows.

“We had better search the place from top to bottom. And it would be best if we broke up into two groups. Chet you go with Mr. Martin and Mr. Zin, and I will take professor Mac Abre with me. That way each group will be armed.” The man in the gray suit and candle held up his snub nosed pistol as he spoke. Chet nodded and he crossed the room to the downstairs door leading off to the right with the man in the brown tween suit and the man in the turban in tow.

The man in the pleated tan dress slacks and white rolled up sleeve dress shirt gave the man in the gray suit a dead pan look. “I want to keep you close professor,” the man in the gray suit said and turned and lead him around past the long wooden bar that ran along the rooms left hand liquor and glasses covered wall to a door which he pushed open. Beyond was the kitchen. White walls and black cast iron wood stoves lined the wall with a sink with a water hand pump; while an island counter top filled the middle of the room with pots and pans hanging from hooks. A door with a pin lock opened into what must have been a walk in ice cooler at one time, it smelled of dank and straw littered the floor and empty shelves. Another door led into a pantry smelling of rot and decay. The two men did little more than pop their heads in each before closing them and moving on. There were two more doors leading out of the room set in its opposite corners and the man in the gray gestured his gun at them, “well?” The professor moved past the man with the gun and opened the door nearest to him and entered into the hallway beyond.

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The door Chet opened revealed a long plush carpeted hallway. Immediately on the left and right doors lead into small toilet rooms with sinks and a small towel closet; ’No bath of any kind, must have been for the patrons?’ The sink faucets did not work and Chet wondered if there was a central boiler and thus possibly a downstairs for each of the small rooms had a radiator along the moldy mirrored wall. Unlit wall scones held small candles, ‘no gas then?’ Chet moved rapidly and efficiently along the hallway opening doors and peeking inside before closing them and moving on. The two men who followed him looked at each other, the man in the turban raised an eyebrow and the man in the brown tweed suit shrugged.

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“I am not sure what Wilson is up to.” The voice had sounded like it was being shouted into a tin box. “But he has sent Pederson of all people to look into the incident. That is the third mutilated body found now in six months and the powers that be are getting anxious. I have read Pederson’s reports and I don’t like it. Wilson has sent a new agent, ah a Chet Barns or Burns, something like that, to assist Pederson. But I want you, Professor Mac Abre, to look into this yourself, there is something queer about all of this and I don’t mean the usual odd things mutilated co-ed bodies tend to dredge up along with them. It’s a small town called, Dansk, just outside of L.A. proper. I will send you the more relevant copies of Pederson’s reports as well as a few newspaper clippings, initial police reports, the usual file blather. But I want you to lay low, at least at first, I know the Bureau is going to figure out you are there, but I want you to watch Pederson from the shadows a bit at first. I don’t know, I think Wilson is up to something, and I have never trusted Pederson. Nothing concrete just a hunch, a lot of loose ends let us say from his previous cases. I know you don’t go in for all this cloak and dagger nonsense and neither do I. But do an old man a favor and take a look into all of this so I can get some sleep at nights. I have a very terrible feeling that this may be right up your alley.”

That phone call and the special messengered packet of photos and papers had sent professor Mac Abre from his university lab upon the shores of the Potomac onto a plane and then a bus and then a cab to the small suburban community of Dansk; and from there straight into the heart of terror.

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“Mr. Chet, sir, I believe more caution is advised. We should not rush so. There are dangerous forces at work here.”

Chet turned around and looked back at the man in the turban who had addressed him and the man in brown tweed suit standing by his side, their faces almost glowing in their candle light, they had stopped just inside the doorway next to the restrooms on either side of them almost twenty feet behind him. Chet tried not to laugh at their worried concerned faces but chuckled despite himself, “look, Zin was it? Why don’t you leave the investigation to the professionals and just try and stay out of my way. Okay?”

Chet was standing at the far end of the inky black hallway where it branched off into a ‘T’-intersection and as he spoke both of the worried men looked at each. In that instant a large shape suddenly appeared in Chet’s flash light beam which was still pointing in front of him. It was large, well over twelve feet tall. A solid mass of a pillar of a shape and its dark brown skinned elongated head was fringed in tentacles. None of the men saw it. The head lurched forward with lightning speed upon its impossible bulk and the tentacles grabbed Chet who had his upper torso twisted back looking at the two men who were looking in turn at each other and in an instant Chet and the monster were silently gone.

“I think you should listen to Mr. Zin. There are strange things about this place. Terrible thin-” the man in the tweed suit broke off for he had turned back to face Chet who had stood at the end of the hallway but he had vanished. Only pitch darkness remained.

“He’s gone!” Mr. Zin exclaimed. As he now returned his gaze back down the same dark hallway.

“No doubt moved on down the branching hallway. Men like that never listen, Mr. Zin. I know for I have spent a lifetime trying to talk to them.” The man in the tweed suit took off his glasses and angrily polished the lenses on his coat sleeve.

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“That is the second turning now where you have shown surprise at some of the more garish decorations affronting these hallways. And once where you opened a closet door obviously expecting a room beyond; and yet in your reports you stated you had searched this place thoroughly not once but twice!” professor Mac Abre stood stock still in the pool of light of both men’s candles his eyes accusing, his face ridged.

“Reports? Now I am certain Wilson did not send you for he would never let anyone outside the bureau see any reports.” The man in the gray suit smiled above his gun.

There was a sudden noise. A creaking tread upon the stair case just to the left of both men. The man in the gray suit spun and professor Mac Abre grabbed his wrist and jerked it upward just as he fired. The bullet struck into the elaborate wallpaper just above the head of a frightened woman who looked at each man in shock.

The man in the gray suit yanked his arm free of the professors iron grip his flash of anger of his wrist being grabbed subsiding at seeing he had almost shot a woman. The professor raced past the man and up the few steps to the woman’s side.

“Are you alright?” the professor asked the obviously startled woman.

“Yes, yes, I think so. That is I don’t think I am shot or anything.” The woman smiled and let the professor help her stand back up from her instinctive backwards crouch of the loud report of the gun and the bullet strike of the wall.

“And what may I ask brings our lovely Janet Holdings out to this secluded dismal place?” the man in the gray suit waved his gun as he went about the process of removing a cigarette from a half crumpled pack in inside breast pocket and lighting it with a match.

“A taxi,” the professor angrily snarled at the smoking man and then softened his voice as he returned his gaze upon the puzzled woman. “I saw the fresh tire tracks upon the gravel out front when we arrived and I am certain no ‘friend’ would have driven a young woman out to such a god forsaken place and then abandoned her no matter what her orders or prostrations; thus a cab for hire.” The woman smiled and the professor helped her down the few remaining steps.

“That’s all very good and all, but that still doesn’t explain WHY the young lady is out in the middle of nowhere in a deserted house in the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday.” The man talked around his cigarette before taking a long pull and breathing out a cloud up into the dusty air. He was smiling, enjoying himself. Suddenly he frowned, “say how did you get in here anyway?”

The young woman opened her snatch purse in her hands and removed a large key and held it up in front of her in her gloved hands.

“And where may I ask did you manage to get that? And what were you doing sneaking around in the dark like that?” The man jabbed his lit cigarette in the direction of the woman.

“Obviously her candle went out. I noticed one was missing from the downstairs tables. These dinner candles were meant for a pleasant scent of bees wax and a soft atmospheric glow and are only good for an hour or two at best. Ours are already half gone, see? We had better hurry our search or rejoin the others.” The professor held up his glass shrouded candle and eyed it as it burned.

“We can go back. We found who opened the front door and besides I have questions I want answered from the lady before we proceed any further in this business.” The man with the gun turned and led the way back to the main theater room.

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Martin whirled around and Zin sensing his movement turned back to him with a questioning look. “Did you hear that?!” The man in the tweed suit asked the general air about them.

Zin frowned he had been reaching for a door knob along one of the branches of the hallways ‘T’-intersection. “Some kind of muffled thud I believe?”

“Muffled, distant, but a gunshot, I am certain of that,” Martin was looking back down the hallway leading to the main theater room.

“A gun shot?! It must be Mr. Chet then? We must hurry our search for him,” Zin turned slowly holding his flickering candle high.

“No, it came from the other side of the house. The professor is in trouble,” Martin started to proceed down the hallway back the way they had come.

Something in zin’s voice checked him as the turbaned man now rapidly spoke, “it is very well and good to march to the sounds of the guns, but we have to find Mr. Chet first. He is part of our company and we should not abandon him. Besides what good shall we bring to these guns if we leave our own gun here behind?”

“I suppose you are right. We should find Chet first and then all three of us find the others, but we still haven’t the slightest idea where he has headed off to and he is not responding to our calls to him.” Martin knelt down and passed his candle over the carpet runner that covered the center of the hardwood floor of the hallway. “There is thick mold growing at the base boards and a black miter up the walls, the carpet is thick and stiff with rot I can make out some of our tracks but,” he paused. “The light of these candles are simply not sufficient to see well enough in this stygian darkness.”

“I am surprised at the amount of decay in a house so obviously well-built and abandoned only a decade or so ago,” Zin was passing his candle along the wallpaper and noting the strange carving in the woodwork and the fungus growing over it.

“The entire structure is built over an artesian well. A large pool of water or so I was told as a boy. It was one of the reasons it was chosen as a location for the house. But why it should have accelerated such a state of rot is beyond me,” Martin stood up and ran his fingers through the mop of his black disheveled hair.

“These candles will not last us long. The more we move them about the faster they burn,” Zin was now eyeing the tall slim white candle that was splattering the inside of his glass holder with dashes of wax.

“Then it is light we need first and foremost and if my childhood memory serves, there should be some lanterns and lamp oil and kerosene in a storage room not far down this hallway here.” Martin gestured with his own glass encased candle in the direction Zin had been checking doors a few seconds earlier. “The scented lamp oil may have gelled and gone bad but kerosene can last for decades if water hasn’t got into it.”

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A large angular dark green car carefully pulled up alongside the pearl white car and two men got out of it. The driver made a beeline for the pearl white car and began to search through it while the passenger moved to the back car door and opened it. He pulled out his jacket and hat and put them on and then he called over to the other man who raised himself up from the driver side door of the pearl white car and tossed the man a set of keys. The man caught the keys in his left hand as he lit a cigarette with his right hand and then used the keys to open the trunk of the dark green car. He dug around under a tarp and a tire iron and pulled out a suit case. He opened the suit case and began assembling a rifle.

The other man was busy under the dash board and steering column of the pearl white car. The car sputtered to life and the man slid up into the driver’s seat and closed the door. He slowly drove the car back down the gravel road until it disappeared, swallowed up by the bobbing thick leafy green trees.

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“This is the door. The place is even bigger and more of a maze than I remember it, but I am certain this is the door.” Martin stopped in front of a metal covered door and searched his pockets for his key ring and produced them but as he went to unlock the door he found it partially open. He frowned at that and gave the stiff door several pushes until it had opened fully.

The two men entered the storage room and looking about them Martin spied amongst the many metal storage racks that filled the room a shelf full of lanterns and small tin cans of kerosene and lamp oil. He moved forward toward the nearest metal rack and Zin grabbed his arm just as he felt himself falling forward. Zin yanked him back with much effort and both men collapsed backwards slamming into the open metal covered storage room door slamming it closed in the process.

Martin blinked incomprehensibly at Zin with a look mixed with surprise and affront as Zin in turn gestured with his candle now sputtering and threating to go out as it lay precariously in the half fallen off from its metal decorative base glass shroud. There before each half reclining man was a large gap in the wooden floor of the room. “You almost fell into it,” Zin offered as explanation as each man recovered his feet and carefully edged to the inky abyss.

“A section of the floor has fallen away,” Martin peered down into the rough irregular hole in the floor. “And I have lost my candle in the scuffle.” Martin looked around him for the candle and could not see it anywhere.

“Better that than breaking your neck,” Zin offered as he moved his arm and their only light carefully about the room while simultaneously trying to refit the hot glass shroud back into its metal holder and rescue the now broken slim candle from being crushed and put out by its own molten wax.

“Yes, yes, thank you mister Zin. I obviously owe you my life. Now let us see about these lanterns and oil.” And Martin set about cautiously testing the rim of the jagged wooden flooring with singular steps until he reached the shelves with the lanterns and fuel and set to work until both men had now had a loud hissing roaring white mantle lantern burning kerosene and flooding the small room with brilliant white light. “There that is more like it,” Martin finished pumping up a third lantern and lighting its mantle with one of his few remaining matches and set it on the floor to give them a little extra light. “We should take an extra lantern in case Chet’s batteries go. And some more kerosene as these lamps do burn it up rather fast as I remember.” Martin undid his belt and then ran it through the handle of one of the kerosene small metal containers and then redid up his belt so it hung against his hip. It hung heavy and yanked at his belt and pants but it was bearable if awkward. He then opened a cardboard box and shoved a few handfuls of white dinner candles into his jacket side pockets. “What we really need are some more matches. I am about out. And I don’t see any in here.”

Zin shrugged, “I am afraid I do not smoke and thus have none upon my person.”

“Pity. Still we should be alright for an hour or two and these lanterns should let us follow any footprints Chet left in the carpet runner. He must be about. Can’t have gone far. Still I can’t understand why he is not answering our shouts to him?”

Zin was trying the door and it did not open, he looked back over his shoulder at Martin, “it appears to have locked its self when we fell back against it and it shut.”

“Oh, well let me see.” Martin picked up the extra lantern and handed the hissing lamp to Zin as he moved past him and dug out his key ring again. “I have a master key to the house on here and it should… that’s odd. The key seems to be… missing!” Martin looked up at Zin and then both men looked rapidly back at the black inky hole in the floor as a low moan rose from it.

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“So tell me doll-face, where did you get the key?” the man in the gray suit held up the key in his left hand pinched between his forefinger and thumb and twisted it about before pocketing it again and reaching for his cigarette.

“My name is Janet, though you may call Ms. Holdings.” The young dishy blonde angrily folded her arms under her ample bust.

“Look Pederson, I am sure any questions you have for Ms. Holdings can wait until we find the others and leave this accursed place.” Mac Abre scowled at the man, who in turn only blew a cloud of smoke into his face and smiled.

“I will decide what’s what. This is my investigation… professor.” The man in the gray suit jabbed the snout of his gun into the professor’s chest and then spun away and proceeded down the hallway as both the man and woman looked at each other grimly before following him.

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“What was that?!” Mr. Zin pressed his back instinctively against the metal plated door alongside Martin.

“I-I don’t know,” Martin muttered and both men listened intently for several minutes but the sound did not repeat itself. “Of course, it must be Chet. Don’t you see he found the door as we did partially opened and then he poked his head in, saw the lanterns and made for them and-” Martin made a gesture toward the hole. “Only he didn’t have you at his back you yank him back. He must have fallen into that.”

“It did not sound like Mr. Chet to me.” Zin looked from the hole to Martin who was inching up to it now holding his lamp in front of him. “Where dose that thing lead anyway?”

“How should I know? But I suppose it leads down into the basement. There is a large basement under the house but it was blasted out of solid rock so it is more like caves.” Martin was now done inching all the way along the gap in the floor having made a complete circuit of it and the room and was now squatting down and holding his lamp into the abyss peering intently.

“What is in this basement?” Mr. Zin gave Martin’s back an odd look and then cautiously moved up to the hole in the floor. It was a wooden floor but it had been tiled over so both wood and ceramic tiles lay jagged at its crumbling uncertain edge.

Martin looked up at Zin who now knelt at the lip of the rift in the floor with him, “well there it the boiler down there and the coal bin with its outside chute. And a big room under the stage for various effects, you know trap doors that sort of thing, and some storage rooms. There is a kerosene generator to run a pump for the water but also some old fashioned hand pump pipes scattered about the house. The pool of water is open down there, more like a pound or a lake really, but the natural ceiling is low in places so there is only one natural cave that leads to it, to the opening where the underground lake is I mean. Spooky, I never went down there except with the stage hands once or twice. Never liked the place.” Martin set his lantern on the floor away from him and started to make a descent into the hole.

“What are you doing?! You are not thinking of going down in there are you?!” Zin physically recoiled from the hole at the thought.

“Of course, that was Chet calling out. He must have fallen and cracked his head down there.” Martin looked a little nervously as he sat with his legs dangling in the darkness.

“That was not Mr. Chet I am certain of that.” Mr. Zin’s face had become hard.

“Well, look around you. The door is covered in metal as is the walls and the floor is tiled all against possible fire. This would then be our only way out. And who is to say how a man would sound who pitched head first a good twenty feet or more?”

Mr. Zin blew his lips in thought, “we should wait for the others.” But even as he said this he realized the futility of such an argument. Considering the size of the house, the number of the rooms, the thickness of the door, and no key for its lock, “how many rooms are there in this house?”

“Fifty-seven. I counted them as a boy. I use to wander everywhere when I was here. And I tell you this is the only way out. Look, the floor has rotted away but it has fallen at an angle when it collapsed. There is a drop of six feet and then the floor is in a big piece angling down to the stone floor below. Sort of like a ramp. We drop down here,” Martin lowered himself on his belly and then chest and then to his arms where he dropped to their full length and then let go. There was the crashing sound of broken tile and sliding pieces but Martin spoke up quickly as Zin handed him his lamp. “The footing is a bit wonky lots of broken tile and mold. So now we find Chet he can’t have tumbled far. CHET! CHET! Can you hear me?! No good he must have slipped into unconsciousness. Look I will drop down to the next bit and then you drop down here. There’s just no room for both of us to stand on this thing and it is slick as hell.”

“You are certain that there is a way out of that pit of yours,” Mr. Zin lowered his turbaned head into the hole to peer about beyond the extent of Martin’s lamp but could only see darkness.

“Of course, you don’t think they used this hole to get from the house to the basement do you? Ha. Look there is a main staircase carved right out of rock leading up to a big ass door not far from here,” Martin gestured with his hissing lantern.

“And if it is locked?” Both men looked at each other for a second in grim silence. Then Mr. Zin began to hand his lantern and the extra lantern to Martin who in turn placed those two on some of the half shattered wooden joists and beams that were obviously still half holding the chuck of floor up off the stone floor below.

“Well then there is also a metal spiral staircase that leads up to the stage trap and that can be opened from this side easily and there is another large metal staircase that leads up to the stage wings and that only has a wooden door. Considering how rotted everything is I shouldn’t think that will be of much of a problem to get past.” Martin had moved half stepping half sliding to the irregular edge of the slanted debris and once again repeated his setting down of his lantern and the sliding off the edge of his belly, chest, and arms, but his hands slipped in their grip on the moldy tile and he fell with a brief ‘yelp’ vanishing into the darkness. There was an almost instant splashing sound.

“Are you alright Mr. Martin?!” Zin shouted down into the hole.

“Yes, yes, ugh! Just soaked. There is about four inches of water covering the rock floor and a sort of slimy coating on the surface of the rock. I fell on my ass. Just my pride hurt and well I am guessing the matches are now shot as well!”

“I will be right down,” Mr. Zin hurried to lower himself into the pit and clutching up both lanterns skidded to the edge where Martin’s lamp still sat. he looked down and could just make out the two white reflected surfaces of Martin’s glasses as he thrashed around splashing loudly back to the edge of the slanted debris.

“It’s a bit further down than I thought. Best be careful. Here hand me the lamps,” two ghastly pale white dripping hands floated up out of the darkness but try as he might Zin could not lower the lamps down to their reach. The slab of flooring was just too slippery and there was too much a real threat of a headlong pitch into space.

“I cannot reach them to you and I fear to drop them at you from such a height. Wait I have an idea.” Mr. Zin wiggled back from the slimy surface edge and cramping back up on his knees he began to unravel his turban. Soon he had managed to lower all three lanterns down to Martin by means of tying the long length of cloth to the handle of each one at a time. Martin stood a bit awkwardly with three lanterns in his hand and could do little to assist Zin as he slipped off the edge of flooring and fell into the shin deep water.

The floor was indeed slippery like trying to walk on a thick slab of ball bearings embedded in jelly but Martin managed to catch Mr. Zin by the elbow as he staggered back and save him from a dunking though the splashing of both men in the process was sufficient to drench them almost thoroughly.

“Well, then this appears to be one of the storage rooms. I gather from all the rotted wooden cases and such,” Martin was holding his lantern aloft while Zin now held his two at either side of him as she spun slowly about. In the center of the room the slanted tile coated fallen flooring was held in place by the large stack of wooden crates it had fallen upon and half crushed. Around them the raw rock walls were coated in gray slime and black mold and piles of decayed boxes and undecipherable items lay all about with bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam bobbing around them in the waves they kept making in the foul smelling black water.

“But where is Mr. Chet?!” Zin asked and looked at Martin who could only gap in puzzlement for other than the rotting debris they were alone in the large high ceiling rock carved room.

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“Now look here Pederson, you can’t keep us here like hostages. We should find the others and leave this place and return when we are adequately equipped for dealing with this situation. As is-”

“As is nothing. I am the man running the show here.” The man in the gray suit cut off the professor as he moved slowly across the wooden stage which was littered with piles of magician’s props. He was enjoying picking up this or that and poking a cabinet or table with the snub nose of his revolver.

Professor Mac Abre sighed and looked at Janet Holdings who sat at the same small round table next to the professor’s almost exhausted candle. They both grimaced and returned their gaze back up to the raised wooden stage where the man in the gray suit slowly walked around picking up a top hat and cane and chuckling, “you got to be kidding me. You mean they really use this stuff?” He took off his hat and tossed it onto the table where the two spectators sat impatiently and put the top hat on and walked around twirling the cane awkwardly with his left hand. “The others can take care of themselves and will no doubt return when they have finished searching their side of the house. Now, for my next trick, ladies and gentlemen I shall make Ms. Janet Holdings tell all and reveal all. I mean that is what a big city newspaper reporter does, doesn’t she? So how’s about you start with everything you know about the ole professor here.”

“This is ridiculous! We are wasting time!” Professor Mac Abre rose from his chair in extreme agitation.

“Ah-ah-ah, it is my time to waste, professor. Sit down!” The man in the top hat gestured with his hand pistol and leaned on a collapsible table set up with a velvet cloth and two metal round canisters. “Sorry for the professor’s rudeness Ms. Holdings, please continue.”

“Well,” Janet eyed the red headed freckled thin man with the strong jaw and piercing blue eyes and thin nose and long strong limbs and frowned. “There isn’t much to tell. Professor Mac Abre is a well-known and respected academic who amongst his various degrees in ancient languages and histories is also the leading authority of occult sciences. He has written numerous books on several subjects and is reported to be the White House’s go-to-guy when anything bizarre and weird steps on the toes of national security. He has Pentagon security clearance and a nice little privet lab and house on the Potomac on University property which was apparently bought and paid for by Uncle Sam. What he does there is something of a mystery even to me.”

Janet smiled at the handsome forty year old professor and looked back up on the stage where the man with the gun and cane was ignoring her as he used the cane to poke about in several trunks he had now opened. It hadn’t been a detailed report she had been telling but then she felt that the man really did not care in the slightest what she was saying he only wanted to keep her talking so he could keep tabs on the pair as he searched the stage area without being bothered. And from his ignoring her laps into silence she believed she had guessed right.

She could have gone on for hours about the professor. For she had quiet an extensive file on him back at her home and office, which she had riffled through on several a lonely night. She could have talked about his strange cases which sort of came to light in bits and pieces and of his personal past and the strange hardships thereof; or she could have spoken at great length about his enormous penis. For more than anything that is what fascinated her about the reclusive man. Both fact and rumor she had committed to memory of that impossible appendage. It was legendary, almost mythic, and like many such whispered creatures it was seldom if ever seen. A few blurry photos she had drooled upon and some reliable data that had sent her fingers into her nest of spices to flutter and burrow, but there was no girlfriend, no engaged, no Ms. Mac Abre to tap a shoulder for a heart to heart over a dozen whiskey sours. The man was almost celibate too wrapped up in his works for any kind of social life let alone a woman companion.

Janet looked boldly down at the professor’s lap as he agitatedly huffed his barrel chest at the foolish man on the stage and licked her lips. Even in those lose baggy dress pants he always wore she could expertly make out the enormous horse cock that slept placidly down his inner left thigh laying upon the chair almost doubling his thighs thickness all the way to his knee. She shuddered and licked her wet lips again. For Janet had a secret, a dirty little secret, she was obsessed with big cocks. No, more than obsessed she was uncontrollably addicted to them and she used her considerable investigation skills and newspaper prestige to hunt them out and find them no matter where on the globe they might be. And she kept track of them in her special ‘black file’ at her small house. Hidden in a shoe box next to drawer full of super-sized dildos she had collected from her travels around the world. Everywhere she went she would first see if there was any ‘big guns’ as she liked to call them from her file in the bedroom night stand and when she arrived she would seek those out and pleasure herself with them if she could and she always did as she never took ‘no’ for any kind of an answer. And if there weren’t any in her file she would make it a point to ‘discuss’ the subject matter with the local women just to be sure and sometimes she would just use her infallible ‘hunch’ and take matters into her own ‘hands.’

Janet bit her lower lip and whined and her thighs twitched in her skin tight pencil skirt. The professor had several sheets of empirical data in her black file and she had tried on numerous occasions to meet with him whenever she had heard from the grapevine that he had left his military guarded grounds on the Potomac in answer to some summons from the powers that be. But this was the first time she had actually see the professor face to face in the flesh and she was struggling against the racing thoughts that had him more and more in the flesh as she felt the fire dampen her crotch and soak her thighs for she never wore panties.

“And you professor? What can you tell us about the lovely Janet Holdings?” The man in the gray suit kicked angrily at a chest he had dumped all of the contents out of and was searching around for another box or truck to search through. He looked up at the professor’s silence and waved his handgun, “well? We are waiting, sir.”

The professor looked over at the beautiful face of the woman seated next to him who seemed a bit flushed perhaps with fear or worry and stopped biting her lip as he smiled at her and she smiled hesitantly back as he reached out to pat her shoulder reassuringly and speak. “Winner of several prestigious awards for her reporting and bravery and has been to just about every hotspot this world has to offer and come out of it with a first class article every time.” She grabbed at his wrist and forearm and began to rub them excitedly, “has shaken the hand of presidents and dictators and been thrown in jail in third world countries and hunted through savage jungles by juntas and animals alike.” She lowered her head and rubbed her cheek next to his hand still clasped upon her shoulder. “And with outstanding pluck and resolve she has persevered against almost impossible odds to then with skill and craft produce front page news that has spanned the globe.” She smiled again but suddenly started sucking on his index finger. The professor’s eyes widened and she increased her incredible head bobbing sucking on his digit. He finally had to put his other hand on her forehead to forcibly pull his finger from her vacuum-cleaner like mouth with a loud ‘popping’ sound. He looked at her and then his finger oddly as he whipped his finger off on his white dress shirts front. The young woman only raised an eyebrow and winked and then fished out her compact and lipstick tube from her snatch purse and set to applying lip stick to her wet lips.

The man in the gray suit stood up with an ‘ah-ha’ holding a loop of rope instead of his cane and smiled over at the couple at the table. “Looks like it is time for my second trick of the show! Ha! I call this one the disappearing busybodies! Nothing as garish as sawing anyone in half, but just as effective I imagine. Now may I have a volunteer from the audience?”

“How about me? Will I do?” A man with a riffle in his hand stepped forward out of the dim shadows. The man in the top hat eyes narrowed and then suddenly widened and without hesitation he fired his pistol at the man who also fired his riffle from the hip back at him. The man on the stage staggered back and fired again and again before reeling and falling backwards into the items he had dug out of the trunk.

Mac Abre had thrown himself on top of the girl at the first firearm report and flung them bodily upon the floor of the makeshift theater. The woman grunted under the weight of the impact but then smiled at the feeling of the press of his body against hers. She wiggled to get her hands free from their awkward pinning under her back so she could maneuver them toward the professor’s crotch even as he stared toward the man with the riffle.

The man with the riffle lay collapsed upon the floor and Mac Abre, much to the woman’s frustration, bolted away with a low, “stay there” as he half crawled to the prone figure. The man was dead that was obvious from the vicious wound in his forehead and throat and Mac Abre rolled over the wide staring dead man’s body to get at the bolt action riffle lying half under a table just beyond.

A bullet tore into the mold stiff plus carpet just inches from his outstretched hand followed by a loud, “DON’T!”

Mac Abre froze the rifle just a few inches from his tantalizing grasp. But it was a bolt action with a spent round in the chamber and there was no way he could work the mechanism in time before anther pistol round could be fired. He looked slowly up at the stage where the man in the gray suit was staggering up from his knees. He had lost his top hat and his right upper arm was bleeding though his jacket sleeve.

“I wouldn’t. I really wouldn’t.” The man was sweating and grimacing from the pain of his wound but though his face had already gone an ashen pale his eyes maintained a snake like unblinking resolve that foretold danger, destruction, and death. “Sugar, why don’t you get off that floor and bring me a new candle up here.” Mac Abre looked over to where the young woman had half pulled herself up to the table top and was looking back and forth between Mac Abre and the man on the stage. The man with the shaking handgun had knocked over his own candle and it now lay off to one side sputtering and flickering and threatening to go out at any second. The woman looked again at Mac Abre, hesitating.

“He still has two rounds in it. Better do as he says, for now.” Mac Abre gave the sweating man who clutched at his right upper arm a hard look and the man ignored him and staggered a few steps toward her as she carefully picked up the glass mantle candle off the table and started toward him in return.

Just then the trap door in the wooden floor of the stage squeaked open and fell flat with a loud bang behind the man. He spun around, “What the hell?!”

Mac Abre pounced at the riffle and ran to the stage. The man made a motion of raising his pistol in the direction of the inky black trap where Martin suddenly poked up his quizzical head but then suddenly seemed to remember Mac Abre and the riffle and twisted his upper body back in that direction. Just in time for his face to greet the full force of the gun butt as the red headed Welsh man swung the riffle by its barrel and smashed the butt and stock against the man’s head and neck. The stock splintered and cracked and a golf swing follow up to the right arm sent both riffle and hand gun clattering off into the dark. Mac Abre laid-in with a roundhouse and a straight jab but the man was already down and his eyes rolling back in his head.

“What on Earth?!” Martin queered from his trap door in the stage.

As a muffled voice of Zin shouted from the depths, “what is it?!”

*************************************************************************************

“Well, that should hold him but we need to get him to a doctor soon as that field dressing won’t keep him alive for long.” Mac Abre stood up from the now rope tied unconscious man in the gray suit. “Any luck figuring out who our dead guest is?”

Mr. Zin was kneeling next to the body with a lantern at his side and a wallet in his hands, “you won’t believe it but according to his drivers license this is one, Mr. Robert Sullivan Pederson.” Zin looked up at Mac Abre who whistled and then looked down at the man tied to the chair next to him.

“Well, well, will the real Mister Pederson please stand up? Hmm, any luck Martin?”

Martin came back from the wings of the stage flats with both his lantern and his arms full as he dodged and weaved through the cluttered stage and dropped down to the tables alongside Mac Abre who stood next to the table with the third lamp upon it and the girl standing across from him. He picked up the lantern at Martin’s approach even though just one lantern was enough to flood the immediate ten feet around it with brilliant white light.

“I found the pistol,” he handed that to Mac Abre who looked it over and pocketed it into his trousers large front baggy pockets. “It has two unspent rounds remaining in it. The riffle though is shot. It still has four more live rounds in it but the butt is splintered and the stock cracked and the barrel is bent. It’s one of those screw on barrels and metal clip butt and stock. Made to fit in a suitcase not for hand to hand combat. Afraid it is done for.” Martin set the riffle on the table where it made a loud clunking rattling sound.

Zin walked up to the group and tossed the wallet upon the table next to the riffle. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t like the idea of Chet lost in this maze of a place and waltzing about armed, but we have to get this man to a hospital and fast.” Mac Abre held his lamp closer to the unconscious man as he eyed his own handy work on the bandages. His jacket had been removed and his dress shirt so all he wore now was his undershirt and a wad of bloody cloth around his upper right arm.

“If that is Mr. Chet?” Zin muttered. Mac Abre grunted.

“I wonder who they really are?” Janet looked from man to man and then down at the professors pants and wondered how on Earth he could fit anything, let alone a hand gun, in his front pant pockets considering what a ‘big gun’ he already had down there?!

“Well we knew ‘others’ would be interested in the item. I suppose it was foolish upon our parts to not suspect they may have beat us to the punch and gotten here sooner than us?” Mr. Zin turned and looked back at the dead man lying on his back on the floor.

“Right then, there are still a lot of questions needing answers, but first let’s get these two into the car and get back to Dansk. There is at least a doctor there with proper medical facilities and then an ambulance can take our, um, companions to the hospital and morgue of L.A.” Mac Abre stood up and set his lantern down upon the table next to the broken riffle and looked around at the faces intently staring back at him.

“If we take these men back to Dansk then there is surely no way they are going to let us come merrily tripping back here. I mean, a man shot, a man missing, a man dead. I think there might be a few official questions that will require us to set our butts down in some hard back chairs under some bright lights for a few days there.” Janet half smiled and snorted at the confused faces of the men, ghastly pale in the lantern light.

“She’s right if we go back now it is impossible for us to say when or if we will be allowed to come back or how many others will have been here in the meantime? If we are to find this thing then we must do it now or risk someone else finding it first.” Martin chewed on his lip as he mulled over what he had just said.

“Are you sure it is even here. Mr. Mac Abre?” Zin looked around him and then back at the professor.

“I couldn’t be absolutely certain until I entered this building and now I am. At first it was just a wild hunch but now I am convinced the item is here.” Mac Abre looked up at the blind candles chandlers that hung above them.

“What hunch? I know a thing or two about hunches in my line of work,” Janet smiled.

“Well, it may not seem like much. But every translation of Ulm-ma-thal’s name is either proceeded by or before by the appendage, ‘trickster’. It is always, Ulm-ma-thal the Trickster god, or the Trickster god Ulm-a-thal. And I thought if I were a trickster, a person prone to pranks, where would I hide a real coin? In a bank perhaps, or a casino, but it would be more of a prank if I hide it in a child’s board game full of fake coins. And if I were to hide a real magical item?”

“In a place full of fake magical items! Nice.” Janet looked around at all the props on the cluttered stage and the walls covered in glass frames full of faded posters of this or that famous magician. “But where exactly would you hide a dimensional doorway? As one of these hundreds of doors in this place? Do we just go around opening doors? That could take years!”

“Martin do tell me all you remember about this place from your childhood,” Mac Abre pulled out a chair and offered it to the man but instead of sitting in it he placed his lamp upon the stiff cushioned seat and took out his pocket square and rubbed his face the back of his neck.

“Well… let’s see. You have to understand that I didn’t grow-up here. I only joined my Uncle Albert, that’s him, The Great Presto,” Martin pointed at one of the faded play bills on the wall. “Oh, for maybe three or four summers? Just a few weeks at that really. It was when my mom and dad were fighting like crazy and then the divorce. Anyway as soon as school was out my mom would pack me away to uncle Albert’s and he would then take me out here to the Mage’s Club and introduce me to everyone. He had an apartment in L.A. so it was quiet the drive, so we would stay for a few weeks and then head back.”

“He was one of the inner circle. One of the original ones who came out here and joined the guy who built all of this and formed the club. Ha! It was fun really. Uncle Albert was a great magician and owned a shop in L.A. mostly got by on selling novelties but also magic equipment. He had a wood and metal shop in his basement and would build stuff for other magicians. He was really well liked. His specialty was playing cards. He would wander amongst the table doing card tricks, very great stuff. He also had this large deck of cards which he would use on the stage, incredible, it was the large deck of cards that blew the other magicians away. They could never figure out how he did it. He showed me a few things, but I never really got the hang of it. I mean I could do it but never had the right touch, you know what I mean?”

“Anyway, enough of that. Let’s see… nothing really to say about the Mages Club or the house really. The club died out as soon as the head guy snuffed it. They couldn’t get any new members for the inner circle, just old geezers like my uncle lingering on, none of the new guys wanted to join. So they shut the place down. My uncle was the last of the inner circle and when he died they called me up, some law firm, and had me come out with them and shut up the place and then gave me the keys and then promptly took them back?! Said it was like that in the will. I was to be able to get the keys from them from their safe if I needed them but the house was not to be lived in or used. That was that.”

“Odd. Why was recruitment so difficult I wonder?” Mac Abre pawed at his strong chin and puzzled.

“It wasn’t because of the books. I can tell you that. The shows the club put on three nights a week were very profitable and the old man left all his money to the club when he died. In fact, the money still sits unused except for property tax and such for the place. Millions of dollars just lying there.” Janet crossed her arms under her large bust and nodded.

“It was the toilets,” Martin said and then laughed. “No seriously, it was. Well sort of, you see when you joined the Mages Club you had to scrub out the toilets and work the kitchen and bus tables and tidy up the place and you had to spend several weeks a year in the house doing that. No one wanted to cancel a European tour to rush back to scrub toilets! Ha!”

“What an odd club?!” Zin blew his lips.

I use to help my uncle clean out the toilets when we were here and we had to help be stage hands for other magicians when they performed. Only the inner circle had to do all of that so there were plenty of young and old magicians who wanted and did join the Mages Club but none of them then wanted to join the inner circle. And the will read that when the last of the circle passes away the club would have to be shut down and locked up. And that happened when my uncle died. He was the last of the inner circle. Man, the fuss all those other members made! I mean the whole club was packed on show night but none of them wanted to bus tables, so there you are.”

“Martin this inner circle?” Mac Aber gave the young man a serious stern look.

“No, no secret cult sacrifices. No virgins being offed. No goat heads and capes. No black masses. Just a bunch of old guys who use to pall around on the variety circuit hanging out together and talking shop.” Martin put away his handkerchief and picked back up his lantern.

“You sure of that,” Mr. Zin asked firmly.

“Look I wasn’t here all the time and when I was I was a kid. But yeah I think I would have noticed if there were any kind of demonic rituals present or going on around me. I mean, this place looks creepy now and hell it was creepy back then but it was ‘new’ back then and not so well ruined and such. And it was full of all these guys doing cool stuff. So sure I have some nightmares about this place now and then but there are some good memories as well.”

“Nightmares?” Mac Abre looked at Zin and then back at Martin.

“Well, yeah, but just because the place was so dark and spooky. I mean it is like a maze of hallways and rooms and it is filled with all these weird well magical stuff. You know masks and books and all those candles we had to replace every day. I use to wander around the hallways and rooms just exploring and a couple of times I got lost and scared myself pretty good. A lot of dark places in here, but it was the scares of a child and not anything supernatural. Still some nasty scary dreams were the result.”

“Why did the keys come to you and not your father?” Mac Abre asked.

“My father and mother died in a car accident some years before my uncle passed away. I guess I was his only living relative and as he was the last of the inner circle the keys came to me. Well sort of, you see the law firm is the official caretakers but I guess I am there to make sure they don’t take the place down and make it into like a parking ramp or something. I can go and request the keys from them but I can’t live here or stay here or repair anything. I can just visit I guess. Of course this is the first time I have been out to the place since we closed it. And one of the keys seems to be missing. The master key.”

Mac Abre gave Janet a firm look and scooped up the bloody gray jacket from off the table and dug around in the side pocket of the garment and then stopped and frowned at Janet who stared back at him and then sighed and pulled out a key from her clutch purse and gave it to Mac Abre who held it up to Martin. “I believe this may prove to be the missing key.”

Martin took the key and added it back to the key ring, “I don’t understand.”

“There are many things here which lack understanding,” Mr. Zin looked at the woman and then around him. “But all that concerns us for the moment is do we press on or fall back?”

“We were all, except for Ms. Holdings our intrepid reporter, shuttled over here at the bequest of our friend in the gray suit’s gun. We are not properly prepared for what we might meet and do not have the proper tools for an exacting search. I believe this place is dangerous and we should refit ourselves before venturing any further.” Mac Abre nodded his head once firmly.

“I most heartedly agree.” Mr. Zin looked over at the dead man lying on the floor staring up at the mold covered ceiling. “And we have an injured man and a lost man that need to be considered.”

“It is all very good for you gentlemen to go on about police and hospitals. Your standing with the government will protect you and perhaps let you continue to return and investigate this place. But I am certain Martin and I will not be on the guest list for any future parties held here at Mansion chi Mage.” Janet put her hands on her narrow waist above her full round hips and scowled at the Mac Abre.

“The point is moot.” Everyone turned it was Martin returning from the main door in the dim dark his lantern still blazing away on the chair.

“What the devil! How did you?” Mac Abre turned from the approaching figure to where he had last seen the man standing just a few feet from him and looked at both Zin and Janet who returned his questioning stunned gaze.

“Our car is gone,” Martin stopped and looked down at the dead body on the floor. “I wonder how he got here?”

First Zin and then Mac Abre and then Janet with Martin following behind in step made their hurried way to the front door and out and down the stone steps. It was night outside and dark but a full moon rustled above the shambling tree line and one could see in an instant that the oxbow turnaround of gravel in front of the house contained no vehicles!

“Where is Mr. Pederson’s car?!” Mr. Zin exclaimed.

“Yes, either of them?” Mac Abre looked back over his shoulder where the lamp he had placed down on the table sat a lonely small distant circle joined at a short distance by Martin’s lantern on the chair seat. Then suddenly both lanterns went out?! Only complete darkness issued from the house. Mac Abre recoiled, “Good lord!”

“What is it?” Zin asked as Mac Abre had been the only one to see the two lanterns extinguish themselves.

“The lamps have just gone out,” Mac Abre nodded back into the inky darkness as Zin who now held their only light moved up beside him.

“It’s just the oil,” Martin’s voice rang out in the blackness of the house and his shuffling footsteps could be heard as he suddenly appeared tired looking in at the rim of Zin’s lamp. “I had the foresight to bring along an extra tin of oil.” He smiled and patted the tin canister his belt held to his left hip.

Just then a very pale and strange looking Chet sprang up behind Martin and threw his arm up brought it down viciously clubbing him across the back of the head with his pistol. Martin fell backwards out of sight into the darkness. Chet then raised the hand gun at Mac Abre who had just the instinctual wherewithal to shove both Janet and Zin backwards behind him giving him room to yank the door shut! A bullet report ran out and a distinct thud sound occurred upon the other side of the thick wooden door. Another muffled report and another thud. Mac Abre yanked firm on the decorative handle as suddenly the door began to wrench its self open inch by inch. Zin dropped his lantern and joined the professor but he could only get one hand upon the iron swoop bar door handle. Still the man’s bull-like strength was enough to turn the tide and the door slowly closed again. A few more muffled thuds and then silence.

The two men warily held their white knuckled grip on the iron door handle while a recovering Janet made her way over to the dropped lantern. The glass shroud had shattered and the fragments had punctured the gauze bag wick so that it had cindered and burned. The light was out and the lamp worthless.

*************************************************************************************

“It was about out of oil anyway. A few more minutes more and it would have gone out regardless.” Zin shook the lantern and then tossed it aside.

“There that should do it,” Mac Abre stepped back from the front door which now had a few branches wedged through the iron handle and across the jamb thus sealing it shut from any inside attempt to open it.

“Well at least we have a full moon to see by, but poor Martin!” Janet rubbed her upper arms with her hands and shuddered.

Mac Abre pulled her close to him and hugged her to his side. “Don’t worry we shall not leave him. In your explorations did you happen to find any other egresses into the house?” The professor looked at Zin who was looking around the heavy brush and tree lined gravel oxbow to see if he could make out if the car had been simply pushed into the overgrown ditch.

Zin returned from the trees and brush tossing his branch back into the wood which he had been using to push branches and weeds aside. “There appear to be no other doors or windows or openings of any sort on the ground floor.” Both men looked up at the second and third and fourth floors and their strange narrow dark foreboding windows. “Perhaps we should draw closer to the house lest Mr. Chet should think to use one of those windows to snipe at us.” The three made their way into the shadow of the stone house and Zin continued as Janet continued to cling to Mac Abre. “I did however discover from Martin that there is a coal chute that leads down to the basement. If we can locate it and if it is not paddle locked then we may be able to use it to descend down into the cellar of the house. There we could use the spiral staircase that leads up to the underside supports and platforms under the stage as I and Martin did before. Still we will need some kind of light in that place and it is indeed a most foul smelling swamp. I cringe to think of traversing it again. But I fear it is our only way back in. if that indeed is your wish?”

“We can’t leave Martin. I feel responsible for dragging him into all of this,” Mac Abre looked from Zin back down at Janet nestled in the crook of his arm and shook her lightly as she smiled up at him. “Still you are right we will need some light. I have a lighter but I am not sure how much fluid is left in it or how much good it will do the lot of us once inside the basement.”

“We could fashion torches!” Janet beamed and began to rapidly unbutton her blouse as she gave a sweet smile to Mac Abre and several long greedy looks at his trousers.

“I am not in fancy to take a lighted flame into a place possibly filled with suspended coal dust,” Zin muttered as he began to unwind his turban. “But it is so full of water down there that we may perchance risk it.”

“Flooded you say?” Mac Abre had removed his shirt which Janet quickly took from him and began winding it tightly around a dead branch. His upper body was well muscled and lightly covered in blondish red hair and dozens of nasty scars.

“Aye,” Zin had removed his tight jacket and his dress shirt revealing a swarthy hairy lean wall of muscle. “It would seem that one of the principle reasons the proprietor of the house built here was because of an artesian well, or at least a large natural body of water being located in the rocks. He in fact, built his house right over the top of the water and it has an opening into the basement its self. That water seems to have over-flowed its banks and has sunk most of the basement rooms in anywhere from a few inches to a few feet of water. In fact I would hardly call it a basement at all. It is more like a series of natural and carved passage ways through the bedrock upon which the house was set.”

“Extraordinary!” Mac Abre breathed in exclamation and then turned as Janet suddenly returned.

“Here we are,” she had three torches in her hands and she gave one to each man holding her own in her left hand. Mac Abre gave each a measured dousing of fluid from his lighter and then ignited them one by one.

With the torches lit the two men were astonished to see Janet was holding her right arm draped over her naked breasts so as to demurely cover the nipples as best she could.

“Your-your bra?!” Mac Abre stuttered.

“I never wear such a silly thing,” the girl tossed up a haughty chin and then beamed a smile at the professor. “Now shall we go save Martin or are you two GENTLEMEN going to stare at my boobies all night?!” And with that the young woman pranced her way with wide hip shakes past both men who obligingly followed her. She blushed and smiled to herself, if only she could find some bottles of beer and a few beer glasses she would show the good well-hung professor that little college trick of hers where she would lean back and balance two glasses of full beer on her breasts and walk them over to the table and let the boys serve themselves while she winked and smiled. She had paid off most of her student loans working in a bar part time as a waitress with that little trick!

The coal chute was easy to find. It was a large metal box looking like cellar doors set on wooden sills in turn set upon a brief brick and mortal angled attachment to the side of the house. Though the sides of the house were choked with brush and weeds and trees all growing in around it. it sat upon a rocky outcropping and this in turn made a breaker against this over growth and a sort of canopied path that one could squat over and hunch their way along. The coal bin doors were near the front of the house just around the corner and there was some evidence that a gravel niche had once blistered off here to allow the coal truck access. This was just as well as not being entirely found of the idea of taking lighted torches into a coal hamper the group had searched around the large structures base floor in hopes of finding another entry. This was not to be for not only were their not any other openings leading into the house on the ground floor but they all three found to their astonishment that the entire back of the house was in fact partially suspended over a great sheer drop of several hundred feet to a rocky ravine floor distant bellow.

None had suspected this facet, that the house had been built upon the very lip of a rock jutting out over a cliff but there it was and it sent the party back around to search the ground level in a ‘U’-shape pattern first one way and then doubling back as they could not traverse the back side of the house at all so sudden and complete was the falling away of earth to the valley below.

The coal chute had indeed been formable locked. Its two iron handles wrapped in chain and fastened with a heavy paddle lock. It would take a blow torch a day to cut through it all despite its thick hory rust pitting its surfaces. But the wood to which the door was hinged and set was so rotted that the entire mass of the rusted doors came away from the stone seat in both man’s hands as if they had been clearing away folding chairs after a church picnic.

The descent down the shoot was carved in the sheer bedrock as an angular passage, but there were stairs leading down on both sides of the otherwise bare incline and though these stairs were covered in bits of oily chunks of coal the way down could be sort of side stepped kicked and inched thankfully easily. The only real difficulty lay in traversing the sizable pile of coal that lay at the foot of the chute. There was no coal bin to speak of, instead the coal simply was dumped down into a large cave of a room and then dragged around by the numerous shovels and coal rakes that cluttered the piles. A bare steel rust pitted corroded door without any kind of lock screeched open to reveal several wheel barrows and a short stone passageway that in turn opened onto a large room containing a mammoth central boiler. The boiler was so rusted by the knee deep water in this room that parts of it had actually collapsed. Pipes of all sizes hung about the walls and rock ceiling disappearing into roughhewn holes at apparent random junctures.

An adjoining hallway had a large open niche where a large generator sat. it was up on a raised metal grid plate so it was as of yet only superficially rusted by the dank air and not by any direct touch of the black slimy water. “Good lord! A kerosene generator? But I don’t understand why all the candles then? This could easily have lighted up half the house.” Mac Abre pounded upon the enormous upright tank nearby and a loud banging sound issued from it along with a dull echo. “Seems nearly half full.”

“Martin said they only used that to pump water from the well to various rooms of the house.” Zin passed his hand over the pitted and semi-corroded controls of the large generator.

“That’s odd.” Both men instinctively turned back to Ms. Holding until they remembered she only had her right arm and palm of her hand covering her massive breasts and their large puffy areolas and then turned back away with blushing faces. “I saw several hand pumps scattered about the house in sinks and wouldn’t you rather have lights than a tap of water? And where is the pump then for the water? I see a device to take kerosene and turn it into electricity but there is no pump in this room.”

“She’s right. There is no hydraulic apparatus here about. I wonder…” Mac Abre grabbed his large jaw and squeezed at it.

“Presumably the pump housing would be nearer the source. Which I believe would be, er, in that direction.” Zin had walked a little ways further down the hallway to where it split and now gestured with his torch. “I say that as I am certain that just a little further in this other direction lays the storage room we dropped down out of. We had a few missteps and stumbled across this generator when Martin remembered we were heading thus in the wrong direction of the stage and so we double backed. From an offhand comment I understood that this hallway leads eventually to the room with the well or source of the water. A sort of underground pool of some sort.”

“Fascinating, but I am not sure we have time for any explorations just now if we want to help Martin before Chet can do him any further mischief.” Mac Abre let go of his chin and proceeded down the tunnel in the direction of the storage room and the theater beyond.

“It occurs to me that this ‘pool’ might very well be the dimensional doorway,” Janet had to almost shout above the loud splashing sloshing sound their footsteps made and compounded by the narrowness of the carved tunnels and rooms.

“I agree it is most apt,” Mr. Zin chimed in and nodded vigorously.

“Hmmmm,” Mac Abre only raised an eyebrow and pressed on further and further away from the hallway leading back toward the room with the pool.

The drew across from the opening leading into the storage room and Mac Abre paused and entered it to look up at the opening in the ceiling of the high roofed room. “You say you found the lanterns and kerosene up there in a sealed room? Was there any more lanterns and kerosene after you took yours away?”

Zin strode up next to him, “yes there were several shelves of them and some boxes of candles as well. No matches if I remember correctly or at least Martin didn’t see any. We left rather quickly before we could have a real look around as we had heard something down here and Martin became convinced that it was Chet who had preceded us and injured himself by falling through the hole in the floor.”

“And had he?” Mac Abre looked over his shoulder at Zin who was shining his torch at the piles of boxes.

“We had lost sight of Mr. Chet in the hallways and never saw him again until he just pistol whipped Mr. Martin and took a few pot shots at us. But I don’t think it was him. It was a sort of low moan and not one of pain to my mind’s way of thinking, but Martin was convinced and so there was the long and short of it.”

“A moan,” Janet looked about her uncertainly and drew up close to the professor dropping her covering arm to grab his forearm and press up against his tall lean body.

“There, there,” the professor patted her arm only to realize in shock that he was in fact slapping her naked breast and jerked his hand back and swallowed hard as his face went crimson. “I was only thinking that our torches won’t last long and in fact are starting to fail in this heavy damp air. A few lanterns and some fuel might be just the ticket!”

“Aye, but it is quite a leap up to that lip. I am not sure we can climb up there even with all these boxes about. Most of them are rotten to the touch and the only ones still in any shape for standing on seem to be currently employed holding up the flooring and keeping it from toppling the rest of the way into this room.” Mr. Zin walked away from the boxes along the wall whipping their oily muck of putrid ooze on his breaches.

“I was thinking that you and I might be able to give Ms. Holdings a lift up onto our shoulders and see if she can manage to pull herself up-”

A terrible low moan came out from the dark echoing disembodied behind them.

“Good lord! What was that?!” The two men raced back to the opening of the room to the hallway and cast glances down both avenues. But there was nothing to be seen but the roils of the foul water in the ever dwindling reach of their torch light.

“The torches are going,” Zin noted.

“And so are we, come on!” Mac Abre led them out of the room and rapidly along the hallway. “You say the iron staircase to the stage housings are just up ahead? We have no time to dawdle for the lanterns now. I don’t know what that thing is making those sounds but it is definitely not our Mister Chet Anderson!”

The three raced through the narrow winding hallway their splashing steps echoing loudly slapping against the walls but through it all they could still make out the odd low bellowing moan which seemed to come from both behind them and in front of them in equal confusing measure.

“There just ahead!” Mr. Zin held his torch in front of him. “Ignore the storage room openings on both sides and keep following the turning of the tunnel we are just one more small room filled with junk and then the next opening on its other side is the large room or cave if you will under the stage. There is a spiral staircase in its center that leads up to the supports of the stage and platforms there and a number of trap doors. To the far side of the room is a large wide stone staircase leading up to a wooden door to the backstage area. Since we don’t have any keys and I do not wish to test our host’s patients I suggest we just make our way up the spiral staircase as soon as possible.”

Even as he spoke they passed first one and then another door-less aperture of pitch darkness and twisted their way into a narrow blockish hallway of a room mazed with stacks of half collapsed crates and cardboard boxes turned to mush. They weaved through it and through the open portal set in its far wall and in a heartbeat where splashing their way into an enormous cavern. Water gurgled and whirled here and there upon the dark flooded floor and the natural crest of the dome rocked roof was breaches at its exact center with several iron I-beams and metal plates with hoists and cables and a large spiral staircase leading up to the overhead conjunction of natural rock and manmade iron supports.

They were breathless now as the water and its uncertain ozzy slime covered floor footing had exhausted them in their mad rush but continuing peals of the low toneless moan droze a whip of apprenshion and dread across their collective backs and they staggered on. Mac Abre half dragging half carrying the panting Janet and Zin pressing on his lanky shoulder from behind as he kept shooting glances behind him into the inky blackness of the well of a hallway they had just vacated. He noted the water they sent rippling backwards in their wake was meeting a new water prowling forward to join it and the two smacked into each other with the forward water overcoming the backward wake so that whatever was coming was striding with a power greater than the surge of their three bodies. Zin’s eyes widened at this thought and he pushed harder on Mac Abre’s back.

“Hurry, hurry, it is gaining on us and whatever it is… it’s big.” Zin gasped as they now ran full out as fast as they dared on the slippery sliding surface of the floor as the water now knee deep and getting steadily deeper seemed to clamp about their legs and try to hold them fast or trip them up.

Zin’s torch sputtered out and he tossed it aside. The girl’s torch went out but she mechanically clinged to it as Mac Abre continued to haul the petite woman along in his arms. They reached the base of the iron stairs the first steps already gone in rust with the next few well on their way. And Mac Abre pushed the girl into Zin’s chest, “Go! Go! The staircase is not wide enough for all three of us as one body! Climb! Climb! I am right behind you!”

Zin paused for but a second and then saw Mac Abre digging out the pistol from his pants pocket and he grabbed the girl and pushed her in front of him up the corroded and treacherous first few steps and then he climbed up after her.

Mac Abre spun around torch extended before him, hand gun raising, half expecting some creature to be leaping upon him so close did the moans sound. But all in an instant was silence and the fading ring of his torch light showed nothing moving but lapping crazed small waves of foul black water.

Mac Abre blinked against the water dripping down his face that their mad rush had soaked him with and listened to the sound of Zin and Janet laboring up the creaking metal stairs. He stood frozen trying to make out any shapes in the dark but there was only the smoke from his sputtering torch and the odd echoing slap of sound rebounding off the walls.

“Come on, Mac Abre! Don’t tempt fate!” Zin was shouting from a few feet above him. There was the clatter of Janet stumbling and dropping her spent torch which fell into the lapping water next to him with a loud splash.

“How big?” He wondered as Mac Abre took a tentative step backwards and then another. It was taking an awful lot of steps for those two to get anywhere. All that climbing and he could make out of the corner of his eye that they were only a dozen or so feet above him. Zin was almost half carrying the girl she seemed exhausted. Something seemed to move slightly directly in front of him. He turned his head fully to it, “How big?”

A shadow coiled raised unraveled as his torch sparked suddenly in a burst of nasty popping as some last bit of cloth caught fire before the whole thing sputtered out and he dropped it hissing and smoking into the water. “Big… very big.” He muttered to himself as something the size of a bus turned up on its end lashed out a coil of steel at him. Luckily the blow knocked him sideways for had he flown back the impact against the steel supports of the staircase and stage would have surely killed him instantly.

As it was he came up rolling from the water coughing and sputtering with only a few broken ribs. The pain in his side howled and he told it to shut up as he fired off both rounds into the mass of slithering blackness just visible in the darkness before him. Then he dropped the hand gun and forced himself toward the metal staircase.

The bullets had impacted. He had heard both rounds make a squelching sound as they had hit the body of mass. He clutched at his side and clenched his teeth and sloshed his way to the base of the stairs. The staircase was surrounded by the iron I-beams that ran up vertically to the horizontal I-beams that in turn held up the underwork of the stage. A tentacle came out of the silent darkness and slammed into an iron I-beam somewhere inches above his head and the impact twisted the metal sport pillar like a green twig under a horses hoof.

“Abre?!” It was Janet shouting and if she was shouting she wasn’t climbing. He didn’t want to answer as he knew it would hurt like hell, but he sucked in a furnace of wind and shouted, out came a small peeping voice, “I’m fine coming up behind you don’t stop!” Each word a searing drop of lead upon his lungs and chest. He hoped that would be enough. Another tentacle came out of nowhere and slammed into the stairs right below him and thankfully they were so rusted away that they vanished with the swipe without ripping down the entire staircase or twisting it into such as to ring them all in a web of steel.

Another tentacle, this time smacking into a horizontal support beam and plate riveted corner pieces, right in front of him. The iron beam buckled and sagged and then another wet whisper of movement and another support column of iron and all the lower stairs under him were plucked away like so much blades of grass.

“It’s a race now! Up to the top before the whole damn thing collapses!” Mac Abre shouted again as he forced himself on wincing at the pain in his lungs and side form the words and almost feeling dizzy and nauseas. More clanging and banging and now the whole staircase and the support structure of the stage shuddered and sagged.

He felt his nose fill with blood and his forehead hit something hard and then he was spinning, spinning, in space. The blackest coldest emptiest space ever and then it was Zin clutching him to his side and yanking dragging him along and then shoving him up through the wooden trap door where Janet was yanking on his wrists her breasts slapping him across the face with each tug and he was rolling free on his searing side and Zin again and then a mad howl and the entire world went black again.

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Zin was looking intently at him and fussing over a thick swath of bandages over his chest and ribs. They were real bandages not cloth and he could smell real antiseptic and for a second he thought they had been rescued and he forced himself up to a sitting position against Zin’s fevered protests so that he might look about him and test this hypothesis. But He saw he was still in the theater of the Mage’s Club and that over Zin’s shoulder he could see the entire stage was missing. Collapsed down what appeared to be a rather dark and dank hole. He looked confusedly down at his bandages and at a syringe lying nearby.

Zin must have noticed his confusion and spoke. “We are still in the house. You have been out for about twenty minutes. I found a first aid kit in the kitchen and matches for the candles.” He gestured at about a dozen lit candles in their glass shrouds scattered about the table and floor around them. “Whatever that thing was it has been quiet since it yanked the stage and its supports down upon its self. I would like to think it is dead, but I doubt it.”

“Janet?” At least he could talk without it feeling like someone was ramming a fire poker in his side every time he did so. He looked at the syringe some kind of painkiller he thought.

“She is fine. A bit frightened and tired but aren’t we all? She is in the kitchen seeing if she can find anything useful for us. She found these.” Zin held up a butcher’s knife and then put it back down on the floor. “She has been gone for a few minutes I should check on her.”

“The others?” The professor looked over at the empty chair where lose loops of rope hung limply.

Zin paused and shook his head. “When we came up through the trap everyone was gone. Martin, Chet, the wounded man tied to the chair, even the dead man on the floor. No sign of them anywhere. Well, I had better check on the girl. After all there is still a mad man running around with a pistol somewhere in this house. And to think that may be the least of our worries?! Ha!”

“Ah, one last thing. My pants?” Mac Abre looked down at his lower body where he found himself wearing what seemed to be a plaid skirt.

Zin cleared his throat. “Your pants were torn to shreds there was very little left to grant one modesty. Apparently in one of the nearby hallways that Ms. Holdings explored earlier there are mannequin displays of armor and such. Well there was this highland black watch fellow and Ms. Holdings insisted, well, it is not a skirt. It is a kilt and that pouch is called a sporran. She said what with your Scottish ancestry-”

“Welsh. Not Scottish, Welsh. And of course thank you to you and Ms. Holdings for patching me up and, er, my clothes.” Mac Abre sighed and Zin stood up to leave.

Mac Abre nodded at Zin and twisted around to watch him pick up a candle off the table and proceed around the bar and back to the door leading to the kitchen through which he promptly disappeared. Mac Abre thought about the fact he was lying upon such an utterly filthy floor and against better judgment forced himself up to his shaky feet and then into a chair. It was the chair the wounded man had been tied to and the ropes were uncomfortable against his buttocks and back of his thighs but he ignored it and sat there for several deep jagged breaths. And then he realized he was sitting with his back to the gaping hole and he thought of all those tentacles in the dark and he lurched up to his feet with a cold sweat beading his brow. But of course there was nothing slithering out of the pit other than his overworked imagination and he wiped a shaky hand through his damp hair and smiled a grim smile. Still he shudder stepped away from the lip of the stage and chose a new chair at a table farther away from the rented hole and the wet damp mist that rose up out of it and sat down facing it this time to watch it with narrowed eyes.

He almost fell asleep?! He caught himself nodding off. ‘Perhaps the drug Zin had used on him, but no that had to have been a topical/local pain killer.’ He looked about him, ‘no it was simply exhaustion.’ He did not know the time or exactly the day but he was certain that he had passed at least a full day and most of if not all the night in the house, ‘which would mean considering his and Zin and Martin’s kidnapping at the hands of the man who called himself Pederson and the man who may or may not really be Chet, he had not slept for three nights and two days. So he was just tired. Very tired, but then so must be Zin and that girl, Janet. What was keeping them? Had they found food? Were they cooking in the kitchen? He was very hungry for he had not eaten for almost as long as he had not slept but he was unsure if eating anything found in this house would be wise even if it came from a sealed can?’

The professor struggled up to his feet and using the tables as a crutch and then some chairs and then the bar he staggered around to the kitchen door. He pushed it open and was not entirely surprised to find it empty of Zin and the girl. He looked around the long rectangular room. The place had been ramshackle. The drawers all pulled out past their stops and their contents poured out upon the counters. Mostly silverware from the looks of it; some plates lay in disorderly stacks, some broken in pieces where they had been knocked aside, but no signs of any struggle on the tiled floor. All the broken pieces lay on the counters.

He looked around the room again. There was the door leading to the pantry and the door to the ice locker. And the door to the corner on the right led to a series of hallways and rooms and to the place where he and the possibly fake Pederson had stumbled upon Janet Holdings. The door in the opposite corner he had never been through before. In fact they had come across the girl rather soon in their search and had thus explored almost nothing of the house at all. He moved along the steel counter tops and plucked up a candle in its glass holder as there were several set about the room and made for the door he had never been through before. For some reason he was certain the girl had gone through that door but he could not fathom why he believed that, but still he believed it and believed it emphatically. Mac Abre staggered over to the pantry door. There was something he had seen in there on his first visit and it might be helpful now. He opened the door and saw again the lone half moldy paper bag on the shelf and removing his sporran pouch carefully shoveled the granular substance into the pouch and reattached it the front of his kilt. He then staggered out of the pantry and shut the door and shambled across the room. At the last possible second as he reached the door he pulled a large meat clever off the counter and set it firmly in his right hand and then shouldered the door open.

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The police squad car stopped suddenly its tires crunching on the gravel as its brakes and shocks gave off a high pitched metal squelch. The car paused for a second and then the police officer got out of the patrol car and walked around to the front of the vehicle. There in his patrol cars headlights sideways in the road was a dark green car. He looked at the front of his car. He had just narrowly missed hitting the side of the car by inches. Luckily the deer were so plentiful up here that he was use to driving the gravel side roads at a slow pace otherwise turning that last corner would have wrecked him for sure. He pondered that as he played his large chrome flash light over the cars plates or tried to as they were buried in brush. It was almost as if the car had been intentionally placed there to be run into by someone driving around the blind turn. And it had taken some doing too! To get the car horsed around like that, for the road was very narrow barely a car width in breadth at that point in the road and the green car its self sat with both bumpers well over the edge of the road and buried in brush and tree limbs. In fact the patrol man gave up trying to read the plates as the brush was too thick and he nearly took a nasty spill into the heavily overgrown steep ditches that lined the road on his last vane try. He moved to the side of the passenger door which was the side of the car he had almost hit and realized he would have to back up to open the door. He maneuvered again clinging to the side of his own car to avoid pitching backwards into the ditch and growth the branches jabbing him in the back of the head and almost confiscating his hat in the bargain. But he managed to get the door wrenched open and himself inside and reversed the car back around the bend where the road seemed a little wider and exited the car leaving his hat behind him on the passenger side seat.

He re-approached the green car and made to open the passenger door when his flashlight illuminated the inside of the car and showed him a body lying across the front seat. He had been sitting in the passenger seat when he had collapsed across the front bench seat. The patrol man tried the door handle it was locked. He looked down and could see the head of the door lock buried even with the vinyl of the inside of the door top. He rapped his flashlight hard against the glass and called out. The figure in the car did not move. “Drunk… I hope.” But there was something in the air that night and the patrol man had dreaded driving out to his once a week patrol to the old spooky house that sat out here all alone and deserted. The trustees of the law firm in L.A. paid him thirty dollars a week to drive out and check the place and his small parish paid him so little that he could scarce afford to say no to the money. It was just once a week to make sure that the front door was secure and no vagrants or squatters had set in. He had already visited the house a few days ago during the happy bright midday sun when the place was almost peaceful and nice. But he had received a phone call form the law firm late this afternoon. Apparently one of their ‘caretakers’ had stopped by and picked up the keys to the place almost a week ago and had not been heard of since. And they asked if he could stop by and see if the man was at the house.

The idea of some kind of ‘caretaker’ had seemed queer to the patrol man as the place seemed to be far from being taken care of, in fact it looked like it was rapidly falling apart! Somehow every time he visited the place it looked more careworn, more decayed, more decadent than the last and yet only a week had gone by each time!

The police man looked past the body. There was the registration on the steering column. The driver’s window was down and the door lock was pulled up so the door was unlocked. He looked over the front of the car it looked even steeper of an incline than the rear had offered with brambles shoved into the grill work. He sighed and then hitching up his pants leapt up and placed his butt on the hood of the car. In a few scrambles and a panicked moment where he thought he had torn his slacks the officer was over the hood and on the driver’s side of the car. He knew almost instantly the man was dead. No man could be so drunk as to fall asleep with his torso twisted like that. He looked at the gravel road leading to the house not more than a turn or two further on and his flash light could pick out no skid marks of any kind. “How on Earth did you manage to get this car sideways like this? You didn’t slam on the brake and slide it in like this. There are no marks of it being driven back and forth and angled in either. It looks like it was just… placed here.” He reached for the door handle and yanked back his hand. It was covered in a slimy gray mold.

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Mac Abre found Mr. Zin in a rather elegant dining room. He had found the room after passing down a hallway and ignoring several turnings and shut doors his instinct, his hunch, and then he realized the trail of glimmering gray slime on the carpet, having lead him on to the double wooden doors of the dining room. The doors were open wide and Mr. Zin sat at the head of the table at the far end of the room. He was dead. A small round hole in his forehead, which Mac Abre noted was exactly at the point where he liked to wear his turban diadem fastener, had given way above the wide staring eyes to a fist sized hole in the back of the head which had splattered and soaked the high back seat cushion of his elaborate diner chair.

“The greatest mind of Far East Occult Science; turned to mush.” Mac Abre sighed he was too numb for tears or horror and only wished he had a turban to put on his friends balding head or a head to put the turban under as he tried to carefully place the head back against the red potage of the seat cushion which he had moved forward to see the exit wound. But the head once disturbed refused to return to its former ridged upright position and insisted on lolling disgustingly on to the shoulders and drip its gore upon the bare chested man’s pants.

Mac Abre shuddered and left the dining room closing the large double doors behind him. The trail of gray slime had not bothered to enter the room. He was tracking someone who was tracking someone else. He hurried on. He had no doubt that the man calling himself Chet had sat Zin down at gun point in that room and then shot him in the forehead and he had reason to believe since he had lead him so far afield and left the professor in his theater room untouched that he must have Janet with him. “He did not want me to hear the shot. He has plans for the girl that he does not want interrupted.”

But it was the idea of something leaving behind a gray trail of moldy slime that was following both Janet and the mad man Chet that alarmed him more so than the mad man alone with the girl. All he could do was kill the poor woman, he shuddered to think what the creature leaving that trail might be able to do?!

They kept taking the staircases up. He would have thought they would be steadily descending downward toward that ominous eldritch black pool, but no they kept moving upward at every possible landing. Till soon he ignored even looking at the floor for the glistens of slime in the candle light and simply raced forward looking for staircases leading always, up.

He found Martin horribly mangled and impaled upon a chandelier his limbs looked as if they had been run through a laundry ring dryer as if all the bones had been turned to crushed powder so he hung like an octopus his head sickeningly bent back and wrenched around so he looked directly at Mac Abre who froze at the sight of him dangled over the hall. He had been eviscerated. His entire intestines removed. There was a bloody hand saw laying upon the ground and two wooden boxes sawed in two dripping congealed and half dried pools of blood on the damaged sideboard.

Suddenly Mac Abre’s mind was thrown back to the car ride with Martin. When Zin and him had convinced the reluctant man over the phone to go to the lawyers in L.A. and get the key so they three could search the house together. They had met him at the bus stop in Dansk and with Mac Abre at the wheel of the rented car they had chatted excitedly like school boys about their daring great adventure. Martin had been telling them bits and pieces about his stays at the Mages Club as a boy. They had pulled into the motel parking lot and gone to the room to get their gear and Pederson had opened the door before they could reach it. And Chet had walked up behind them, both men armed and waving their guns as they smiled.

Suddenly Mac Ambre remembered a snippet of something Martin had said in the car from the backseat as he had drove to the motel. What was it? “I never saw the guy who owned the place when I was there. He was always locked up stairs in his suite. I don’t think anyone but the inner circle ever saw him. It was odd because he couldn’t have been that old, and yet there where whispers of his fastly decaying health.”

“Well, you saw him tonight didn’t you, Martin?” Mac Abre recoiled even as he spoke those words and his eyes shot wide as he looked at the bloody saw and the wooden box cut in two. “A subconscious observation, but one perhaps not entirely without merit!” Mac Abre once again moved briskly past the pools of blood and the gray mold dripping corpse of Martin.

The professor continued through the maze of hallways and rooms they were on the top landing of the house now the fourth floor an attic might be above but he was certain this was as high as they would go. With the spiral staircase being destroyed and the wooden door leading down to the cave under the theater Chet was looking for the next available means to convey Janet down to the black pool and that would of course be… Mac Abre stopped at the heavily wroth iron doors. They sat closed but their surfaces of glisten gray slime seemed to suggest they would open to his touch. The doors were etched and embossed with glyphs and sigils and seals of various natures. But it had not been good enough. Darkness had already found its way in and taken seed inside the old mage. The professor pushed upon the large iron doors and they slowly opened.

Beyond them lay wide open rooms with magical wards laid in mosaics and tile and etched in glass on floor on ceiling on walls. Mac Abre moved rapidly past them. The thin slim windows were casting in a dull moonlight glow and he used this to run faster than his candle plume warranted. It had to be close and he found it in the bed room of all places. He would never have found it if those before him had not left the secret entrance wide open. Even the gray trail of slime would have been impossible to track as all the floor in the house owner’s suite was covered in glutinous inches thick years of gray ooze.

The secret passage led down. Straight down. A zigzagging stair carved into the stone at an almost breakneck angle of descent. It opened out eventually into the room with the pool just as he knew it would. There was Chet holding down the arms of Janet Holdings as the twelve foot mass of tentacles and elongated head writhed and pulsed its lower body between her outstretched legs. She was screaming and moaning and apparently orgasming as the gray moldy creature forced its self upon her naked body.

Mac Abre moved out of the circle of Chet’s flash light and slipped innocuously as possible out of the room of the black pool. He could have been riding on the back of steam locomotive for as much possible attention Chet or the creature that used to be the home owner paid him so rapt where they in their savage water splashing rape of the young girl. A few meters down the hallway leading into the black pool and had to feel his way along the slimy surface of the wall as all was pitch dark. He continued creeping his way along until he found himself back at the Hallway niche containing the generator machinery. He could see little to nothing but he felt along the machine until he found the tank containing the kerosene. He found the emergency release spout and after several minutes of wrenching he managed to have the kerosene splashing down into the black water. Waiting only to make sure the emergency drain of the large tank was steadily pouring out its contents he forced himself on down the dark corridors until he found himself standing in the doorway leading into the room under the theater. The caved in floor let the candle light above dimly light the immediate wreckage bellow it. There moving slowly around the pile of debris was the enormous creature that had attacked him earlier. It was almost identical to the one now raping Janet but several times its size.

“No doubt that is the creature that first showed itself to the mage and convinced him to build this house here. It was not the god Ulm-ma-thal that was for sure. Most likely a gate keeper, a guard for the portal. Which would be... the creature kept slowly shuffling back and forth in front of the pile of destroyed wreckage the professor moved along the wall trying to get a better look.

“Hello! Is anyone down there?” A flash light beam shone down the hole with a police man attached to it at its lip. The beam skittered across the wreckage and glinted upon the only item unscathed, untouched, unblemished in the slightest. A disappearing cabinet! “Of course! Trickster god indeed!”

Mac Abre gave the cop a glance as the tentacle beast lashed about above its head unable to reach him and his flashlight unable to pick it out from the dark shadows the pile of rubble kept it pushed back into; and then he was gone. Back down the blind dark tunnel already filling with the stench of the kerosene to mix with the foul stench of the water, to where he could hear the moans of sexual lust but no longer the screams of the young woman. He found them in the room pretty much as he had left them and removing the worn decayed bag from his sporran which he had picked up from the pantry in the kitchen. He sunk the butchers clever into the elongated head and poured the contents of the moldy bag into the gapping foul smelling wound. The creature bellowed like a pricked bull calf and far away a low moan answered it from the cavern under the theater. Mac Abre lashed out a few more times with the clever and now his removed sporran dumping the contents of the sporran upon the mass of withering tentacles but then leapt back as the howling creature plunged into the black pool.

Chet looked at the professor wide eyed and mad and confused. Mac Abre held the sporran in front of the drooling idiots face and said one word; “Salt.” Before casting the last bits of it into the mad man’s eyes and sending him howling down the dark tunnel straight into the flailing tentacles of the gate keeper who tore him to shreds.

Mac Abre used that moment to help the girl, a bit glassy eyed and drooling herself, to her feet and rushed them past the preoccupied gatekeeper and back to the cave under the theater. They had to destroy the gate disguised as a cheap magician’s prop there could be no thought of escape at least not just yet. Too many people had died and it would be unlikely there would be another chance like this one. The gate keeper would simply take the cabinet with it back down into that pool and resurface God only knows where?!

When they reached the cave there was the cabinet just sitting there. There was no time for a proper ward or seal. A simple glyph and spell would have to work. It would at least seal it from happen chance openings of some passerby and make it a bit harder for the magically inclined to open it without some study and effort and personal risk. Mac Abre helped the girl up onto the pile of wreckage and pulling a bit of sharp metal shard from the pile of rubble set to work on the cabinet door and sides. Above him the police man called down to him spotlighting him with his flashlight. Mac Abre ignored him and kept at his work.

He had just finished the task and sealed it with his blood when both gate keeper and the house owner came crawling back into the room. Mac Abre clutched the mostly recovered girl next to him and waited for the inevitable. It did not come. Instead a piece of rope smacked him soundly on the top of the head and whipped about his face and shoulders. The police man had taken the rope they had tied up the possibly fake Pederson with and securing it to the wreckage of what was left of the stage up above had tossed the remaining end of the rope down for them to use to climb up.

Mac Abre realized the girl was still too weak and dazed to climb up the rope unaided. Her only hope was for him to climb up and help the police officer to then together pull the woman up to safety. He quickly fastened the end of the rope around her naked waist and helping her up to the highest point of the rubble pile and hopefully out of reach of both approaching beasts he maneuvered to begin his assent.

Suddenly the smaller and the more agile of the two tentacle beasts reached the base of the pile of rubble and smacked it with its appendages. The pile shifted and both Mac Abre and Janet Holdings were pitched from the shifting ruins. Mac Abre hold fast to the rope and a screaming Janet blindly clutched at the rope as well. But it wasn’t the rope and Mac Abre’s eyes bulged as he looked down. Below him Janet was still screaming and kicking her feet into space just inches above the smaller monsters reach while the larger gate keeper monster steadily approached. Her arms were fully extended above her head which was turned down fixed on the creature trying to get at her and her hands were well up the professors kilt!

“Ja-Janet! That is not the rope! UGH!” but the girl was deaf to his gurgled purple faced shouts and there was nothing for it but an agonizing fast as possible climb up the rope as Janet dangled from a two handed nail sinking in clutch of his stretched manhood! They were still well within the reach of the slower larger creature and he had to get them up out of its powerful reach before it was too late.

“BLAM!” “BLAM!” “BLAM!” The police officer could see the former house owner creature and was firing shots into its body of whipping tentacles. Mac Abre continued to climb wheezing and eyes full of tears as Janet kept slipping her grip on his penis and then reaching back up her alternating hand to only side down again so that she was in fact milking his cock!

Janet screamed. The larger creature had reached the pile of rubble and a swipe of its powerful tentacles had just missed the legs of the recoiling girl. “Can’t you pull me up?!” The young woman screamed her eyes wide in fear as the creature took another missed blow at her lower body. In her fear she was desperately scrambling her slipping grasp so her sliding milking strokes were vastly increased in tempo and in tightness.

Purple faced Mac Abre whined, “I should be able to raise you a good twenty plus inches in but a moment at this rate!” And with tears running down his face and his body shuddering he kept up his steady slow climb up the swaying rope.

True to his word and her expert if unwitting strokes the good professor was rapidly able to raise the terrified girl up the promised twenty plus inches and instead of hanging from a vertical appendage she now found herself dangling from one more of a horizontal nature so that her grip was much more assured.

Now out of reach of both beasts who moaned and thrashed below the young woman looked up and saw what she was holding on to and smiled.

They were not out of the woods yet. For the smaller monster began picking up pieces of rubble in its tentacles and throwing the pieces at the retreating figures. The chucks of debris struck the rock dome ceiling and crashed back down below. Now the larger creature was picking up these deadly missiles and tossing them where they thundered and exploded upon deadly impact. The last few minutes of the climb were harrowing as an erupted almost steady flow of wayward refuse rained around both the professor the reporter and the cop who helped them the last few feet as best he could by trying to pull them up on the rope as they climbed.

“What the blazes!” The wide eyed patrol man was shouting at them as all three fell back from the shuddering lip of the hole where chunks continued to hammer away at the underside foundation of the house.

“No time for that!” Mac Abre gasped as he clung to the naked woman at his side. “We have to get out of this place. The smaller one can leave the caverns and caves and into the upper house. I released some kerosene into the water. They won’t like that. They will try and avoid it if possible that should slow them down. But it will only be a matter of time. We must escape while there is still a chance! Is your patrol car just outside?”

“No, it is about a quarter of a mile down the road. The road is blocked there by a car with a dead man in it. The car is registered to one Chet Polson. The driver’s license on the body matched that ID. My radio won’t work in these hills until we get up on the road a bit further, a mile or two should do it.”
“I suggest we run as fast as we can to your car and then drive as fast as we can until we reach Dansk!” Mac Abre shouted.

“Look here I want to know-” the police man broke off as there was a sudden crashing noise on the other side of the pit where the stage used to be.

“I had forgotten about the stone steps leading up to the wooden door at the back of the stage! Run!” Mac Abre grabbed the girl and raced toward the open door of the front of the house where the first glimmers of daylight streaked the sky with the police officer in a full sprint behind them. Outside the trees rustled with the dawn wind and even a few birds chirped and sang and down in the valley below something large, something big, gurgled under the sluggish surface of the splashing stagnate river that wound its way to Dansk.

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