Undead and Undermined

Chapter FORTY-TWO



We rushed into the basement. Our dank, gross, creepy, you’ve-seen-this-in-every-horror-movie basement. There had been corpses down there, good guys and bad guys, and don’t get me started on the tunnel system. Yeah. Tunnel system. I’d told Sinclair I felt like I was in a Roadrunner cartoon, but sometimes it was more like an episode of Scooby Doo. “And I would have gotten away with stealing the Book of the Dead if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.”

The basement stretched the length and width of the house, which was amazing any way you looked at it. The mansion, as the word implies, was not small.

We charged down the stairs, down a couple of hallways, past the kitchen (I could see someone in there but we were in too much of a hurry to slow down), down more stairs, and then we were in the gloom and stink of our ancient, dank, yucky basement.

I figured they must have been keeping him in one of the old wine cellars. Yeah, “one of,” implying we had more than one, and we did. But I could honestly say I didn’t know all that much about it . . . I disliked the basement almost as much as I disliked the attic (nothing good ever comes from the attic!). I was able to count on one hand the number of times I’d ventured down there, and that was the way I hoped to keep it.

Anyway, the wine cellars were solidly built, cool (but not damp or chilly), and best of all, they had enormous heavy wooden doors with old-fashioned bolts. Bolts! Like it was a medieval dungeon! Three of them (two more than anyone ever needed for anything, ever), each as thick as my wrist. What the previous owners needed bolts on the outside for I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

It was a pretty good place to keep an insane, and insanely strong, vampire. Even if he wriggled or tore through eight rolls of duct tape, he had the bolts (three!) to contend with. It likely wouldn’t keep him forever, but long enough for someone to realize what the Marc Thing was up to and cough up the old standby: “Look out! He’s getting away!”

And I knew he was. I knew it. We hadn’t come far enough into the basement to see the wine cellar door, but I knew it would be hanging half off its hinges. I knew the door would be smashed and battered, and maybe a friend or relative lying nearby, unconscious or dead, and when we ventured into the room itself, we’d see splinters of chair and shreds of duct tape. We’d stare at each other in dismay and wonder how we could have been so stupid.

It would be like every movie that ever had a villain trussed in a corner (“Nobody puts Villain in the corner.”), except that unlike poor unsuspecting fictional characters, I should have known better. The villain would wait until there was sufficient distraction (like the heroine roaring off to see her mom and then falling abruptly out of touch with the home base because she ran into a streetlight and then went to hell), then escape just long enough to f*ck things up all the way around. Then, recapture. Then defeat. But all too late to undo whatever it was the bad guy did while he was unfettered.

So, as we rushed around a corner, I already knew what to expect, was already pissed at myself for being such a movie cliché dumbass.

In fact, I was so sure of what we’d find, I ran into the closed and bolted door so hard I gave myself a nosebleed and actually grayed out for a minute.

It took a long, long time to fall down. Long enough for me to think about what a pleasant surprise it was, about how the movies didn’t necessarily get everything right, that I should have had more faith in my roommates, that . . .

. . . that . . .

(Ow.)