“Yes!” she said, feeling her indignation supported. “Can you believe it? That sad old jerk-off finally found the way to my treasury and walked right into the ritual while I was in the middle of the aklo—the most glorious moment! Of course he got scared—I’ve been told before I’m on the theatrical side when I summon. So he ran away upstairs and fell right into that Wile E. Coyote contraption you call a trap, but by then he had led the vermin to my safe room, and I had to escape through the mine, thus stepping out of the pentacle, and…Basically that asshole ruined everything!”
A wheezer chose that exact moment to step forward and hiss in a particularly nasty way at the hostess, to which Dunia responded by swinging her sword at the provoker and decapitating it as cleanly as such a thing can be done. The severed head rolled to Kerri’s feet, who instinctively kicked it away.
The headless body was still writhing on the floor as Dunia continued, now pointing the black-stained blade at the kids. “You’d think I could just start again, but noooo! Turns out once the ritual has started, it can only be finished or undone by the same five officiants! (Falsetto.) ‘Ooh, look at me, I’m the Necronomicon, you must follow my rules!’?” she mocked. “And by the time the creatures wormed back into their holes, your army friend and the sheriff were poking around on the isle, reporters were knocking on my door in Owl Hill, and soon after that summer was over. You kids left and didn’t come back.”
The next line she delivered in a serious, almost sympathetic smirk—the closest thing to respect the kids would get from her.
“Oh, but I knew you would come back. You’d seen too much to just turn your back on it. You couldn’t just smile it off and pretend forever. You were broken. You had to come back.”
Her eyes strayed for a moment to the dead human body on the floor.
“Of course I began to worry when this one killed himself, so I went to California and got him. I pulled him out of the grave. Did my best to make him pass for living. Fortunately, his death was the triggering event that set the rest of you in motion. Now, you are all here. I had him posing as the villain just to keep you off my back. He wrote the messages; I dictated them. Maybe I misjudged you there; you would have obeyed the messages like idiots thirteen years ago; not now. But whatever. You’re here now. All four of you.”
She saber-pointed at Nate, a wicked smile on her white face. “You scampered off a little too early.” Then, at the girls: “Oh, but don’t be hard on him. He came back. He tampered a little with my pentacle too, so I had Dead Pete apprehend him and fix the damage. All systems are go!”
Kerri, munching through the lengthy villain monologue, was only left to ask: “But…why? Why do you want some alien god to rise and end the world?”
Dunia paused, surprised, and carefully observed the question.
“Oh. Well, I don’t know. Same reason you want to open a frog or split an atom. I just…(Shrugging.) Fuck, I just want to see it!”
She paced around them once more, intimately proud of the unskimped attention.
“There’s not that many things I’ve got left to see in this world, you know? Shit, when you’re writing fantasy erotica for a living, you’re really scraping the bottom of the bucket list!”
“Well,” Andy intervened, stepping forward, “let me help you put an end to your boredom.”
In a lightning-fast movement she drove the pickax right at Dunia’s neck, stopping it just short of puncturing the jugular. Dunia stood still, the cold steel point perched on her shoulder like a skeleton sparrow.
“For thirteen years I’ve been hiding from this,” Andy uttered through gritted teeth, an opportune slash of hair darkening her face. “For thirteen years you haunted me. You ruined the better half of my life. But that’s over. I’m going to beat you. I’m going to feed you to these goddamn things. And I’m going to see you dead once and for all before you have time to complete the fucking ritual.”
Even the bad guys fell silent.
Dunia stayed in position, head held high, neck tendons inching away from the sharp instrument pointed at them, mouth closed tight, struggling to placate a mischievous smile.
ANDY: (Understanding.) You finished it already, didn’t you?
DUNIA: (Giving up, chuckling.) Please! Why would I even be telling you all this otherwise?
A wheezer ruled that enough time had been wasted on uneventful dialogue and charged at Andy from behind. A shout from Kerri warned her to spin and duck, dodging an eviscerating slash, and then she blocked the other claw with her left as she dug her knee on the floor and struck upward with the pickax, nailing the point through the creature’s chin and into the palate.
Two more jumped into the ring, Tim immediately catching one in midair and pounding it to the floor, Nate delaying the second’s attack by batting its head with a Browning nine iron while Kerri jumped to the forefront to fend off the hissing peanut gallery still sitting it out and Andy rolled back onto her feet, struggled to yank the pickax out of the dead creature, finally pried it out, along with its head, just in time to swing at a fourth one coming out of nowhere.
The wheezer took the hit, staggered for a second, unharmed from the torn-off head corking the point of the tool, then shrieked into Andy’s face. It was its last action before Kerri and Nate clubbed it at the same time, Tim going for its legs a second later to keep it occupied while Andy stepped on its shoulders, gripped the edges of its lower upper jaw, and twisted its neck.
“Whoa, look at that!” Dunia cheered, along with the rest of the wheezers still waiting by the door. “See? I told you they would get used to the atmosphere in no time! They can hold their breath long enough to disembowel you!”
“We need to get out of here!” Kerri urgently suggested.
“Good luck with that,” Dunia intervened, inviting the kids to peer through the circular windows.
The night had dissolved into white. An Endeish Nothing had erased the lake and the firs and the sky.
“How long can you hold your breath?” Dunia challenged them. “Long enough to reach your car from here?”
“But you will die here too,” Andy told her spitefully.
“Me? I already survived this situation once.”
“I wasn’t talking about the situation, bitch!” she retorted, as she swung the uncapped pickax at her face and Dunia leaped back, amused by the surprise attack. She raised her saber to block the pickax’s comeback, tried to yank it from Andy’s hand, failed, and then took advantage of her rival’s weapon’s unwieldy shortness to hack at her arm. Andy pulled back an inch shy of amputation, the pirate blade missing the bone and slashing cleanly through skin and muscle.
Andy threw out a cry of pain, and in the next breath she retaliated by jumping forward, swinging back vertically then horizontally one, two, three times, forcing Dunia to bend backward and spread her legs for balance, and then, suddenly channeling all of her pain-born energy into her right foot, Andy launched the Tsar Bomba of nutkicks into Dunia’s leather-wrapped groin.
The hit lifted Dunia two feet off the ground.
She landed on all fours, saber still in hand, eyes wide open at the shock, then wider once the pain hit her neuroreceptors.
The room held its breath for a long while, all through that unconfirmed knockout, even after Dunia coughed out her surprise.