Existentially Challenged, page 19
Both orderlies simultaneously directed their disbelieving looks at Jamie’s mother, who in turn looked to Jamie. Who must have become quite accustomed to communicating through eyes alone, as even from across the room, Adam could read the expression: Do whatever he wants. Please don’t screw this up for me.
His mother gave the nod and gathered up an armful of drip stands like a poorly organized golf caddy as the two grumbling orderlies gently took Jamie under the arms and lifted him up, letting his legs dangle.
“Hang on,” said Miracle Dad, looking down. “He’s got shoes on.”
The orderlies stopped, both clearly fighting the urge to throw what they were carrying to the floor in exasperation. “Does El-Yetch have a problem with shoes now?!”
“No, but the carpet might,” said Miracle Dad, unable to stop himself. Jamie’s mother squatted down and smoothly pulled Jamie’s shoes from his unresisting legs before the argument could draw things out any longer.
“All right, time for Jamie to take the Walk of Worship!” said Miracle Dad to the crowd, hesitating only momentarily at the word walk. “Let’s introduce him to Miracle Meg!”
Adam readjusted his sitting position, leaning a little farther forward as he prepared to use his special senses. If nothing else, his first glimpse of Miracle Meg would immediately confirm whether she had any kind of magical infusion, which would go a long way to eliminating possibilities.
Miracle Dad had stepped to one side briefly to toy with a nearby laptop, and generic soothing music began playing over the home sound system as Jamie’s cluster of puppeteers began to escort him along the Walk of Worship. “Oh, I forgot to mention,” said Miracle Dad as he returned to the front of the “auditorium.” “Today’s blessings of El-Yetch are also happening in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.”
He flicked a switch on a nearby cable, and Adam’s vision was flooded with pink.
All the lamps that made up the two sides of the Walk of Worship were pink, as were all of the Christmas lights wrapped around them. Pink gels had been placed on all the ceiling lights. There was a tiny light on the side of Miracle Dad’s laptop to show that its power cable was plugged in, and he’d even put some pink tape over that.
And it wasn’t just any pink—it was the exact shade of pink that indicated the presence of life essence transfer magic to Adam’s senses. Exactly as he usually described it: like the color of Barbie’s car if it was parked outside a strip club.
When Miracle Meg finally made an appearance, emerging from some side room to walk to the bathroom in a vaguely floaty, mysterious manner, Adam’s senses reported that she was, indeed, infused with healing magic. As was the toilet she was sitting on, the U-shaped mat on the floor, Jamie, Miracle Dad, and absolutely everything in Adam’s field of view.
He looked at Rana. She was pink, too, and the pink magic inside her that he already knew about was completely indistinguishable from the light that bathed them all.
She caught his open-mouthed look. “I know,” she whispered. “I had no idea it was Breast Cancer Awareness Month either.”
32
Again, Alison was wishing she had been forewarned about a couple of things before she had set out that afternoon, such as that she was going to be stealthing through the undergrowth, and that later on she would be pursuing a possible suspect in a muddy tunnel, illuminated only by the flashlight on her phone. Had she known all of that, she would have worn something more camouflaging, and waterproof shoes, and charged her phone to the full. Or, perhaps more likely, she would have decided to stay home and spend her evening cleaning out the fridge.
She had been making the effort to step lightly and carefully along the damp ground, but this had only drawn out the excruciating process of cold water seeping into her socks. Her phone was only illuminating the ten or so feet ahead. The point where it ended was an omnipresent wall of darkness, waiting to pounce at any moment. She couldn’t say if it was that or the ever-diminishing battery icon on the phone’s screen that made her most anxious.
She had switched to Airplane Mode to preserve battery life, and that meant she couldn’t call anyone if she ran into trouble, just to add another layer to her continued lack of forethought. At any rate, there was slim chance of getting a signal down here. There was nothing Alison could do but press on and hope to run into Miracle Mum. At which point, she could either make an arrest or ask to borrow her phone.
From what she could see, the brickwork was ancient. Whatever this tunnel was, it probably hadn’t been in official use for a few hundred years. Maybe a disused sewer or dungeon for some castle or estate that no longer existed. She wondered if it might even have been an ancient Roman underground aqueduct, but she was half certain that wasn’t a thing.
The tunnel forked off into other passages and chambers, but most of them were blocked off by rubble. Some of the blockages were because the ceilings had collapsed, but others consisted of bricks and stones gathered from elsewhere. That meant some passages had been blocked off deliberately. Whoever had repurposed these tunnels apparently had a specific use in mind for them.
Alison had paused to inspect a small, square room off the main tunnel with a gnarled tree root emerging from the broken ceiling when she heard a wet footfall in the tunnel ahead. One that couldn’t have been coming from her, because it sounded like the source was wearing sensible footwear. She glanced ahead and saw light spill across an upcoming turn in the tunnel.
She quickly killed the light on her phone and pressed herself against the nearest wall of the chamber, where she could still see the doorway.
The noise of calm, businesslike footsteps grew in volume until Alison thought, deliriously, that they must have been coming from the inside of her own head. The light coming through the doorway became brighter in time with every step.
Then, as fear surged up Alison’s throat and grabbed her by the tonsils, the light rose to a crescendo and the silhouette of Miracle Mum in baggy coat and undersized Wellington boots drifted across the doorway.
“Greedy,” she muttered as she went, apparently addressing herself. “Greedy, greedy, greedy.”
Alison waited until every trace of Miracle Mum had disappeared from her senses. First the last dregs of Miracle Mum’s light flickered away down the tunnel, then the sound of muttering faded, and finally the last dribbling echoes of wet footsteps.
Alison let all her breath out in a sigh of relief. She was alone again in the silence. In pitch darkness. In a potentially unstable ancient tunnel containing an as-yet-unconfirmed number of murderous vampires. With that thought, she sucked her entire sigh back into her throat.
She carefully poked her head out into the main tunnel again, confirming that it was still pitch black and silent in both directions. Now that Miracle Mum had apparently doubled back, following her suddenly felt less important than investigating where she had just come from and what, if anything, she had been doing there. Maybe Beatrice and Roger were still near the tunnel entrance and could take over tailing Miracle Mum. Assuming they hadn’t hurled themselves off a cliff because a donor told them to.
Alison looked pointlessly up the darkened tunnel to where Miracle Mum had come from. She decided not to turn her light back on for the moment, there being no reason to think a murderous vampire could see her any better than she could see them in the darkness. She pressed on, carefully lifting her feet to avoid the puddles and fallen stones in her path that her eidetic memory had diligently cataloged the last time there had been light.
When she reached the point where the tunnel turned ninety degrees, a new point of light appeared. Another fifty or so yards ahead, something was lit up in flickering red and yellow. Alison immediately hopped back, took cover around the corner, and carefully peered out.
Fortunately the source of the light was not, as she had briefly thought, the yawning gullet of a hideous fire-breathing monster. It was another square chamber like the one she had taken cover in, lit by candlelight.
At first, Alison was inching forward, ready to turn and bolt at the first sign of monster or vampire coven. But as more and more of the candlelit room became clear, all thoughts of fleeing drifted from her mind like leaves in the wind. By the time she finally entered the room, her feet were moving on their own, and her jaw hung open like an unresponsive chat window.
The room was a shrine of worship, lit by a perimeter of candles of varying shapes and sizes running along all four walls. In the center of the room was a low wooden table with more candles covering its entire surface, except for a circle about a foot wide. In the middle of that was a single framed photograph of Miracle Meg in the uniform of some local primary school.
But behind that, a colorful mural of what Alison assumed was supposed to be El-Yetch dominated the far wall of the chamber and a good portion of the ceiling. It was a chaotic collage of patterns with the vague sense of a female figure emerging from it, with curving rainbows for hips and spirals for breasts. The bulk of the “head” was on the ceiling—a mass of leaf-shaped prints for the face, blue spirals for eyes, and a perfectly round, pouting black mouth.
Alison was still slowly drifting into the room, fixated on the artwork. It took a few moments for her to notice that she no longer had to stoop; the ceiling was a fair bit higher here. A foot or so of brickwork and soil had fallen or been carved away before the painter had gotten to work.
Alison might not have had much faith in her own deductive skills, but her gut was telling her that she was not looking at the product of a sound mind. The finger painting alone had been performed with the careful, determined precision of someone who thought they were doing something far beyond interior design.
Her foot nudged something soft as she took another step closer to the painting, and she froze. Her gut began telling her something new and unpleasant. She lingered for one last moment on the calming blue spirals of El-Yetch’s eyes, relishing the last few moments of her life with its current number of complications, then looked down.
The corpse was female, lying full length across the ground with their skinny arms wrapped around their torso. They were wearing a Modern Miracle T-shirt and a dark green skirt, and Alison conservatively estimated that they had the body of a ninety-eight-year-old.
The difference between the corpse of someone elderly and someone who had been prematurely aged by vampire magic was one piece of esoterica Alison could have done without, for all her eagerness to learn. And yet, having found her second vampire victim, she was picking up on the signs. Their skin, while deathly pale and clinging to their bones, lacked the spots and laughter lines of skin that had been naturally weathered over time. There was a sheen of sweat on them that hadn’t fully dried.
Which meant they had died extremely recently.
Which meant the vampire was probably still close by.
Alison had been doing an excellent job of focusing on the fine details in order to drown out the part of her that wanted to indiscriminately run around the room waving her arms and screaming. But those last two deductions cut through to that part of her like a scythe to the skull.
She jumped away, suddenly conscious of the big, empty tunnel directly behind her and its currently unknown quantity of murderers, and pinned herself against the wall beside the door. She took some deep breaths and tried to think. Miracle Mum had to be the vampire. She’d just come from here. But there was no reason she’d return, as by some miracle of good fortune, she hadn’t spotted Alison. Had she?
Alison strained her hearing for any sound besides the terror ringing in her ears, but all remained silent. Safe to assume that Miracle Mum wasn’t coming back. But that brought a fresh wave of guilt and horror, because she’d last seen Miracle Mum heading back toward the place where Alison had last seen Beatrice and Roger.
Alison broke into a run, heading back down the pitch-black tunnel and relying solely on her eidetic memory to keep her from running headlong into walls and fallen bricks. She wondered for a moment if she was running to Beatrice or running away from the corpse, but since neither option felt like a worse idea than standing still, she focused on the running.
The tunnel had seemed quite long when being navigated at a stealthy creep but rushed past in less than a minute at a full sprint. Soon, Alison could see the exit, a ragged rectangle of dark blue mottled with what specks of moonlight could penetrate the trees. She rolled under the lip of the cave without slowing, remembered at the last moment the possibility of spiders, and emerged into the open air waving her arms madly above her head like a semaphore operator speaking in tongues.
A cold breeze blew upon her face as she stopped, bringing a moment of perspective, along with a strong smell of something burning. She looked around, blinking, as if having just been shaken awake from a traumatic dream.
With her eyes still adjusted to the darkness, she spotted Beatrice almost immediately. She was crouched behind a mossy rise with her hands over her head.
“Beatrice?” asked Alison.
“Oh!” said Beatrice, looking up. “Have they gone?”
“Who? Miracle Mum?”
“No . . .” Beatrice frowned. “The fire person?”
“What fire person?”
Alison noticed the fire person just in time. They had been slowly approaching their position from the forest ahead, silhouetted against a blurry shaft of moonlight. They were clearly a person, but the “fire” part only made sense a moment later, when they held out a hand and sent a pyrokinetic blast roaring through the trees.
Alison ducked out of its way, then lost balance and fell onto her posterior. A streaming yellow funnel of magical flame was cast brilliantly against the night sky, passing by harmlessly above her, then abruptly vanished, taking all her night vision with it.
“Victor?” she mouthed to herself, it being a level of pyrokinetic power she had only seen once before. She blinked rapidly to dispel the blue smudge in front of her eyes and peered out from behind her smoking cover.
The silhouetted figure was looking around, apparently just as blinded by their own fire as everyone else, trying to determine if their targets were still there or atomized into grease stains. Alison could get a longer look at them but still couldn’t tell if they had the build of a man or a woman. They either had a massively misshapen head or were wearing a motorcycle helmet.
“Where’s Roger?” whispered Alison, covered by the hiss of cooling scenery.
“He made a run for the van,” replied Beatrice, still clutching the back of her head. “I-I think he made it. I think I’d like to make a run for the van too.”
“Don’t run for the van!” suggested Alison.
The fire person took a step toward their cover, blackened vegetation crunching beneath their feet.
“Okay, I’m making a run for the van,” said Beatrice, before hopping up in a shower of leaves and beginning to sprint away, waving her arms and screaming just to remove whatever atoms of a chance remained that she might go unnoticed.
“Hey!” said Alison, instinctively leaping to her feet as the fire person leisurely extended their hand toward Beatrice’s retreating back. “Um. Hello. Do you know Victor Casin? Because if you don’t, erm . . . you’d . . . probably get on.”
The fire person stared at her, hand still outstretched. Then their torso slowly rotated around like the wheel of a torture device until their hand was pointing at Alison instead.
Alison’s instincts hadn’t been producing the best results lately but now had the chance to redeem themselves. She ducked and dived back into the cave, returning to the cool darkness just as the next fireball splattered against the cave mouth’s shaggy upper lip. She was back on her feet and running down the tunnel within seconds, barely even registering the spectacular new range of mud stains her work trousers acquired.
She glanced back after a few yards and faltered to a stop when she noticed that the fire person wasn’t chasing her. They had stopped at the cave entrance, bending down to peer curiously into the dark.
Realization seized Alison as she saw them extend that terrible hand again. They didn’t need to pursue. Not when Alison had just voluntarily stepped into an impromptu pressure cooker.
Alison opted to sprint even further down the tunnel, pushing herself until her breath was rasping in and out of her like a serrated knife through stale bread. She had no idea if distance was even a factor. If the tunnels had no big vents or outlets, then surely the fire person could just keep pouring power into them until every square foot of air was superheated. Couldn’t they? Alison had once seen Victor bring a section of ocean the size of a tennis court to a boil within a matter of seconds. That amount of energy could probably make all these stuffy tunnels hot enough to at least give Alison a new appreciation for the plight of a potato in a microwave.
She was pushing her thinking to the limit, raking through her eidetic memory for anything about heat and science that might help. In her panic, the only mildly relevant fact that she could summon was that shepherd’s pie should be baked for about twenty minutes, then put under the broiler for another three or four minutes to get a nice crispy top.
Something made a hissing sound behind her, and she stopped and turned just in time to see the fireball burst into life. The far end of the tunnel became a rectangle of churning yellow-orange light that was roaring toward her like the headlights of an express train.
Alison froze. At the pace it was coming, the fire was going to hit her in seconds and was showing no signs of dissipating. Time slowed down as her brain went into survival mode and cataloged every detail in her field of vision, searching for a way to live on. The tunnel was ninety centimeters wide and one hundred and eighty centimeters tall. There were two thousand two hundred and fourteen bricks currently in sight. She was four feet away from a tunnel that led to a small side chamber with no exit. There were now one thousand nine hundred and eighty-five bricks in sight because the fire had advanced farther . . .
