Lucy looked queasy, but she said: "Let’s keep going."
On the other side of the kitchen was a broad staircase made of mahogany. The flashlight showed shadows of the banisters, but nothing else. Together they began to climb the staircase.
From the landing, the darkness at the top of the next flight seemed particularly unnerving.
Nevertheless, Brian led the way to the second floor. The hallway beyond was as empty as an eyeless face, Brian thought. There was a sharp click.
"Do we go up to the next floor to see what’s there, or down that creepy hallway?" he asked Lucy.
He turned.
Lucy was not there.
"Hey!" he shouted, and his voice seemed to moan back at him from the castle’s long hallway. "Not funny! Where’d you run off to?"
There was no response.
"Did you go back the way you came?" he asked. "Lucy! If you’re playing a joke, stop it."
He swung the flashlight around him in a slow circle. He flapped a hand in case Lucy was standing right behind him, hiding. She wasn’t there.
"Please come out," he added.
Nothing.
Suddenly the pitch-dark walls and short switchbacked flights of dark wooden stairs seemed especially close on every side. "Lucy, wait for me!" he shouted as loudly as he could and ran up the staircase to the next floor, and then up again past another dark hallway to the third floor, and then blindly up to the tower.
There was a wall at the top of the stairs. At the bottom of the wall was a tiny door, seemingly made for a baby, so small he had to duck to get in. It was hanging open and made of bolted steel.
He pushed it all the way open, shouting "Lucy, seriously stop playing tricks!"
The room inside was extremely dusty and full of cloth. The minute his fingers let go of the tiny steel door, it shut.
Inside the room were the skeletons of fifteen, perhaps twenty people. People his age. Their clothes ranged from old Victorian dresses, to brown tailored suits with straw porkpie hats, to plaid button-up shirts paired with Fifties slick haircuts. One girl’s skeleton wore pink sneakers and a t-shirt and baseball cap. Her stiff face was still almost intact, except for the eyes, which were shrivelled away.
Brian dug at the tiny door, but there was no handle and no lock or key. At least, no lock with an opening. It seemed to be locked with a hidden mechanism, and the metal door was flush with the wall around it.
Climbing over dead bodies, he found that the window, which had merely seemed narrow on the outside, actually tapered down to an arrow slit on the inside. He could barely fit his hand through, let alone his head.
"Lucy! Get me out!" he screamed, over and over.
Lucy never came.
"Mom! Dad! Anybody! I’m up here!" he screamed through the arrow slit.
Miles from the nearest house, abandoned by the world, the castle did not receive any visitors.
With a creeping sensation snivelling up his back, Brian looked at the decaying, partially preserved faces in the room.
Each of them seemed unusually empty.
The eyes. It was the eyes.
Day after day Brian searched the narrow room for a way out.
Now his eyes are empty, too.
Who’s next?
Megan
Where Megan lived, her family got water from a well. It was all automatic--there wasn’t any need to pump it, not unless the pipes froze in winter. If that happened, and you wanted a bath, you had to bring in buckets from the very old well itself. It wasn’t the fancy kind you see in fairy tales--it was just a cement ring with a manhole cover over it. The cover was also cement, with a rebar handle. After pulling up buckets of water in the freezing cold, you had to take them in, fill the metal bathtub, dip color-changing chemical indicators into it, add a drop of nasty-smelling liquid and then turn on the heaters for, like, an hour.
Having the pipes freeze was the worst.
* * *
Yesterday it started snowing and hadn’t stopped.
Megan’s dad was running around with space heaters, aiming them under the sink and out on the back deck, where the well’s pipes and pumps were.
"Sweetie, boil some water and pour it over those pipes, would you?"
Megan took the big stock pot and filled it with water, then set it on the stove to boil. Her mom was out front, shovelling. Her brother was clearing off the cars. It was her and her dad working on the pipes.
After way too long, the stock pot seemed to have a few bubbles rising, so she lifted it as hard as she could and waddled the heavy pot of hot water out the mudroom door. She began to pour it over the snaking pipes. Steam rose with a sound like screeching fingernails.
"All the way to the well, if you can make it," her dad said. Judiciously she doled out hot water along the pipes to the machine beside the well, then poured around the cement manhole. Even in her parka and snowpants she was freezing, and the wind pushed her around.
The lid rose.
Long slimy fingers.
The words bring me warmth came from within.
Megan shrieked, threw the rest of the hot water into the gap and ran away.
She heard: good girl.
As she went through the rest of the day--school was cancelled preemptively for two days, but homework was still due, so she got a page of it done and left the rest for later--she tried to forget those slimy fingers.
The next day, in the morning, the pipes had frozen.
"Drat," her dad said, "I thought maybe we’d got it right this time. Well, I’ll get the buckets and the tub out of the garj." That’s what he always called the garage. Her dad was funny.
It was Megan’s job to fetch the water. Her brother got to brominate it. She thought that was the easier job, even though the well wasn’t really that far from the back deck.
With a bucket in each hand, she tugged open the mudroom door, took a deep breath and went out to the well.
The lid rose as she approached and two frog eyes peered out.
She dropped the buckets, feeling like she wanted to cry.
"Hello?" she murmured.
my feet are cold, the frog creature said.
"What--what do you--"
socks now, the frog creature said.
She ran back inside and grabbed a pair of socks from her room, tracking snow everywhere.
Rushing back out, she poked the socks into the gap in the well. Long fingers wrapped around them. After a shuffling sound, the frog creature said thank you. i should give you something too.
"That’s okay. I just need to fill my--"
tell your future, the frog creature said.
There was a minute of low humming.
bad news. you’re going to die tonight.
"I’m going to die of what?" Megan said.
The low humming started again.
Then: a shalabas.
"What? What’s a--a shalabas?" Megan said.
don’t ask me
The frog creature blinked once and retreated into the well.
"Nate, I want you to get the water this time!" she shouted.
A reluctant " ’kay!" came from the house. Nate got his boots on and she handed him the buckets.
Megan went up to her room. There had to be some way to find out what this shalabas was and how to stop it.
The Internet didn’t have anything about it, although there were a few people from Algeria and from World of Warcraft who had profiles with that name. It was probably a coincidence, she figured.
After dinner, she went back out to the well and hissed, "Hey! Tell me what a shalabas is! I’m serious."
The lid did not open. Had she dreamed the whole thing?
After several minutes kneeling in the snow, lifting the manhole cover and asking the same thing a variety of ways, she gave up and headed back through the snow toward the deck.
"I hear you’ve been asking about the shalabas," a voice said.
Megan turned and saw that the snow had been pushed up into a lean-to. Set i
n the lean-to was an open door. Standing in the doorway was a man with enlarged facial features and a black line down the middle of his face.
"Yeah. Do you know what it is? I heard it was going to kill me," she said, feeling small.
"Very dangerous, your average shalabas," the man said through wide, engorged lips. "They come in three different styles: special, charm and quarky. The worst kind is the charm shalabas. Their teeth are exceptional, their eyes are focused into points, and with their pointed eyes, they can find you anywhere. There’s no safe place, if a shalabas is looking for you."
Megan looked into the extra-large, round eyes of this man. "What can I do? Nobody else seems to know they even exist," she asked.
"A charm shalabas only hunts victims who choose to be killed," the man said, not quite answering the question. "The way it works is this: You first have to give yourself up to a quarky shalabas. They’ll tell your future, and they always predict you’ll be killed by a shalabas. But they don’t tell you which kind. You’re going to have to choose. It sounds to me like you’ve given in to a quarky shalabas already."
"I didn’t give in to anybody!" Megan exclaimed. "I threw water over the frog guy, that’s all."
"But you didn’t throw it out of kindness," the man in the doorway said, scratching the side of his enormous nose. His nose seemed to split in half under his fingers along the black line. "He told you to. You gave in to his demand. Didn’t you?"
Megan looked at her shoes and felt scared.
"Now you have to choose. You’ve chosen to give yourself to the shalabas. You’ve chosen to be killed. Which of us will you choose?"
"Us?" said Megan. She looked at the man.
His face split open. Inside were wheels of blurred spinning teeth and an enormous, engorged red throat.
Megan ran up the deck and into the mudroom. As she shut the door and pressed herself against it, she looked over her shoulder at the backyard.
The lean-to gradually shut.
Breathing easier, she went inside and told herself it was just the cold, getting to her head. It was bedtime anyway, so she went straight to bed without a bath.
As she lay in the darkness of her room, she heard a creak, like an old door opening. Looking up at the ceiling, she noticed a new shadow. A shadow she’d never seen in her room before.
The touch-lamp glimmered on as she pressed a finger to it. A door in the ceiling had opened. Standing upside-down on the ceiling was the man in the door.
"Your eyes aren’t pointed," Megan said with a strange clarity.
"Oh, I’m not the charm shalabas," the man in the door said. "I’m special."
"I choose the charm shalabas!" Megan shouted as the man opened up his jaws, revealing sawblades made of teeth.
"Bad choice," the special shalabas whispered, and exited through the door in the ceiling, which shut and vanished.
All through the night Megan couldn’t sleep. She waited for the arrival of some unknown monster. The snow continued to fall in a steady blizzard out the window.
About dawn, the wind began to pick up. The snow battered the dormer windows, rattled the shutters, and the room got colder and colder despite the roaring furnace. Megan got out of bed, wrapping herself in all her blankets.
"Sure is howling," her dad remarked as she came downstairs. He was setting up breakfast early.
Her brother Nate stayed in bed. So did their mom.
"I need yogurt at the grocery store," her dad said. "Blueberry yogurt. Remind me when the storm is over, would you?"
"Mmhm," said Megan, blinking. What a strange dream.
"Do you mind grabbing some water for the dishes?" her dad said.
Megan pulled her snow pants on nervously, then her parka and finally her big purple boots.
Looking in every direction, she saw only howling snow outside the window.
Door, open. Step by step. Step. By step, she pushed through the snowstorm. Over her shoulder, the house faded completely, replaced by whiteout snow, freezing her to the core.
Beside the well was a black shape, like a slender giant. From the shoulders down, it was a man. But the neck stretched up, and up, and silhouetted at the top were rows of teeth of all different shapes: fishhooks and serrated knives and cactus spines and doctor’s syringes.
The well’s lid was open, and a green froglike creature rested slimy fingers on the edge. To the other side of the well, the lean-to revealed the shape of the man in the doorway, with his fat facial features.
The three shalabases stood watching her.
The slender giant’s long neck spun like a snake and broke through the blindness of the snowstorm to come face to face with her.
give your life to me, the face said. let me cut you and kill you.
Yellowed eyes stuck out from the long white face. The eyes were pointed. Each tooth seemed to have a mind of its own, twisting and cutting and stabbing. The charm shalabas’ man-shaped body didn’t move, but stood like a security guard with its arms folded. But the neck stretched and stretched, coming around behind her. She stayed very still but couldn’t manage to shut her eyes.
The elongated white face touched her shoulder and hissed in her ear, coat too slippery. take it off.
Crying, Megan unzipped the jacket. She was too scared to move. The jacket was whipped away by the screaming wind.
boots, the shalabas hissed.
She untied her purple boots and kicked them off.
slippery trousers.
She unclipped the snowpants and slipped them off over her socks. She was so cold.
good victim, the shalabas said. Its jaws opened, revealing a mass of teeth shaped not like teeth, but like . . . other things. Painful things.
now. very slowly.
As a dozen fishhooks touched her mostly-bare shoulder, Megan decided something. "I’M NOT A VICTIM. I CHOOSE THE QUARKY SHALABAS," she shouted as loud as she could, and with perfectly numb feet and shivers up and down her back, she dove into the open well.
Sarah
Sarah’s dad was really mean. He liked to play practical jokes and scare her. At pretty random times, once every couple of weeks, she’d open up her closet in the morning and there’d be a corpse looking at her. Then her dad would peel back the rubber corpse mask and laugh really, really hard, then hug her back and forth and tell her everything was okay.
Or she’d be in the shower when the bathroom mirror would steam up and read YOU’RE GOING TO DIE. She’d scream and run out wrapped in a towel, and her dad would be right outside the door, laughing his head off.
Another time he hid an mp3 player under her bed, loaded with Halloween sound effects, and turned it on full blast just when she was falling asleep.
It was time to get him back.
For a week Sarah plotted how to scare him. What were dads scared of, anyway?
She called up Mom and asked her what scares a dad worst of anything. Mom laughed and said that if she wanted to scare her dad, she should pretend to be dead. "Pretend suicide or pretend murder?" Sarah asked. It took her mom a long time to decide, but in the end she said neither, she should pretend to be kidnapped.
So Sarah cut up magazines into a pretend ransom note, she asked her friend Steven to help her out, and together they set it all up. There was a treefort in the woods that somebody had built and then forgotten, and she started making the props. A burlap sack with some firewood arranged to look vaguely like her. Some black fabric draped over some hat racks. Steven’s toy gun, with the orange part cut off with scissors.
"IF YOU WANT TO EVER SEE YOUR DAUGHTER AGAIN COME TO THE CHILDREN’S FORT IN THE WOODS AT MIDNIGHT WITH $500 IN UNMARKED BILLS." She didn’t know why the bills were supposed to be unmarked, but that’s what they always said in movies.
She came home from school, put the ransom note on the front door, rang the bell and ran down the street. She and Steven played Wii until about 10pm, then they went to the fort.
They waited.
Sarah’s dad showed up right on time, carrying
an orange envelope. Steven pulled on the string that raised the pretend arm of the pretend cloaked bad guy, and Sarah played a sound of a gunshot on her laptop. She gave the burlap sack a tug, screamed, then waited for her dad to freak out.
Instead she watched him nod once, say "Good," and walk away with the envelope.
What? Did her dad actually believe she was killed by kidnappers, and he was happy about it? Or was he playing some kind of prank on her, turning the tables? Either way she felt sick. The practical joke didn’t work.
Saying goodbye to Steven, she went home, opened the door to her house, and called to her dad. She half-expected him to jump out and say "boo" to her, to get her back for pranking him, but he was just in the kitchen, microwaving himself some dinner.
"Hey dad. Good prank, right?" she said.
Her dad didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn around.
"Ha ha, funny, dad. So I got killed by kidnappers. Ah ha ha." She folded her arms.
Her dad took the plastic wrap off the TV dinner and walked right through her.
Whoosh.
Like she was a ghost.
What had just happened? A minute ago she’d been playing a prank on her dad, and then . . . poof. He walked through her like she wasn’t there.
Had she died? When?
Running up to her dad, who was on the big white recliner, she grabbed his arm. Her hand passed through him like she was made of air.
Sitting on the carpet, she curled up in a ball and cried. She was dead now. Something terrible had happened and she had died and turned into a ghost. But how?
Pinch. Not dreaming.
"HEY DAD!"
Nothing.
Had she misremembered the prank? Had she--had she actually gotten abducted and shot, and just created fake memories that it had all been a funny prank? Was her body still in the burlap sack?
Her hands could no longer grip the doorhandle, so she walked through the door and walked the long way back to the old treefort.
No, the black cloaks were still on their hat racks. The burlap sack clearly had bundles of logs in it. That wasn’t it.
Back home. Her feet seemed to be floating an inch above the ground. She tried to pick up the phone to call Mom, but her hands passed through the phone.
Steven. She went to his house and tried to knock on his door, but wound up just walking into his house.
His parents apparently couldn’t see or hear her either, and Steven wasn’t in his room. She waited, but he didn’t show up.