Andy immediately switched targets and Kerri ran to pull Tim out of the horde’s reach at the sight of an imprecise number of wheezers staggering in from the staircase.
But to everyone’s surprise, they stopped. The lead one dropped onto four limbs right outside the doorway, its third pair writhing in the air like the forearms of a praying mantis. It hissed at Tim, the dog barking his heart out in hard-learned hate.
“There they are.” Dunia smirked, swaying with her pirate cutlass. She walked idly toward the door as if to greet them, and the first one took a step forward and shrieked at her. Dunia looked on like she would at a yapping poodle.
“Interesting vermin, aren’t they?” she remarked. “They’ll try to eat you, but they don’t actually need to eat. In fact, they don’t even need to breathe. They’ve got these gas bladders or something they can fill with air and waltz in here. You’ll see; they’ll come in in a minute. (To Kerri.) You should write a paper on them.”
Kerri was busy enough holding Tim back, just as Tim was holding the most daring of the creatures at bay.
“The first time I tried the ritual, in nineteen forty-nine,” Dunia once-upon-a-timed, back to her easy-minded ambling, “I was young and reckless. I’d just found the way to the underground city after searching for it for like a hundred years; I had performed the proper steps down there, knocked on the door like the book says; everything was ready to wake up that sleepyhead from his millennial slumber. I knew the ritual called for five officiants, but I reckoned a well-versed expert like myself would be worth five amateurs, so I thought I could pull it off by myself.” She scoffed, inviting some sympathy. “Boy, was I wrong! I failed to wake the big one up, but these pesky little buggers took over the house and nearly smothered me.”
The amphibian section of her audience raised a liquid hiss at the mention.
“I lived, all right, but they’d almost destroyed my house; I would have to face some tough questions and it wasn’t like I had many allies in town. So I decided it was time to change generations again and faked my own death in the fire.”
“But they buried you,” Kerri objected.
“They buried some charred corpse,” Dunia brushed off. “If you nosed about my basement, you’ll have perceived human samples is not something we suffer a scarcity of in this house. I had left the instructions in my will and dug my grave in advance. You’ve been inside; all I did was seal the entrance into the caverns: they dumped the body, threw a marble slab over it, and moved on—hurtfully swiftly, I must say. But whatever; dying is easy. The tricky part was to return as my daughter.”
“You…killed your own daughter?” Andy asked.
Dunia stopped again in front of her and gave a disappointed moue.
“No,” Kerri second-guessed. “You never had a daughter.”
“Thank you,” Dunia approved. “It was all a strategy to solve my image problem in town when I first became Daniel. My wife was a concession, and my daughter was a ruse.”
“But someone must have seen the child,” Nate complained.
“Oh, of course they saw an infant. My wife’s daughter born out of wedlock, her oh-so-shameful scarlet letter. But hey, I had no trouble calling her mine! I pretended to mail her off to a boarding school as if she were my own blood! Luckily she actually died in infancy—those places are expensive.”
“You supplanted a teenager?” Kerri asked, trying to navigate through all the other objections arising.
“Yes. I mean, you’re what? Twenty-five? You could still look twenty-one with the right makeup. Considering my real age, taking thirty years off your skin is basic magic. So, yes: new gender, new age…People still detested the family name, but I needed my claim on my old property. Luckily, my gutless wife/mother had offed herself already. I had to live in the house on Owl Hill and the townsfolk were as friendly as ever, but at least they stayed away from here. And I could come and go as I pleased through the gold mine. So I just had to sit and find a way to circumvent that stupid five-officiant thing. And then in ’seventy-seven, because I’d been such a good girl for so many years, you came along”—she grinned, spreading her arms to kindly embrace them all—“the Blyton Summer Detective Club.”
Andy awkwardly acknowledged the reference as she finally untied Nate, side-eyeing the creatures that were gathering inside the doorway.
“Use the gun,” she told Nate, giving him his rifle and switching to Pierce herself. “Just don’t fire it.”
“?‘Blyton Hills’ heroes’!” Dunia quoted happily. “When you started building a name for yourselves, I knew you’d eventually visit my mansion. All I needed to do was start a rumor in the right circles. Rumors lure gold diggers like Wickley, and Wickley lured you. As soon as you arrived that summer I started arranging things. I got the jock’s tooth from the dental clinic, your pretty red hair from the barbershop. (Re: Andy and Nate.) You two were a little more difficult, until you came to the lake and I swept your campsite while you were away. That was enough to build the isle-wide pentacle. All I had to do now was wait for you all to enter into it, which you did some days later…although I rocked your boat a little to persuade you.”
“And so we became the other four officiants,” Nate summed up, his knuckles white around a rifle gripped like a baseball bat.
“Nobody said that the participants had to be willing,” Dunia argued through a shrug. “I mean, when the rules call for pentacles and incantations, you know they are going to be pretty flexible, don’t you think?”
Andy swung the pickax at a skulking wheezer, making it recoil and sneer at her in a vicious teeth display.
“Wait, so…you were here in the mansion that night?” Kerri asked Dunia.
“Of course. I’ve got my safe room underground; maybe you’ve seen it. Oh, I didn’t mean to harm you, really! It just happens that as soon as you go through the first motions in the ritual, Thtaggoa stirs in his sleep, the ground shakes, and these buffed-up gremlins crawl up and go all Night of the Living Dead on your posterior. So while you lot were yelling and running all over my house, and incidentally causing a hell of a mess, I was down there going through the ritual, and I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that meddling kid Thomas Wickley!”
Andy and Kerri and Nate turned at the name, ignoring the knife-clawed needle-teethed hordes of hell.
“Who?!”