Take it easy, I told myself, inhaling deeply through my nose. So you’ve had a few bad dreams, you’re doing okay. You’re doing okay.
“Yeah, why don’t you try the first door?” Maximus said, and it struck me how much he sounded like me when Perry and I were doing the show together. There was a brief time when Perry and I had stopped doing the show and Maximus had gone to Portland—with Jimmy’s blessing I might add—with hopes that he’d be able to convince Perry to do the show with him as the cameraman. It hadn’t worked out, because my poor woman got f**king possessed and Maximus plead allegiance to the nation that is Palomino. But I had to wonder how long he’d been waiting to take over this role.
“Okay,” Perry said uneasily, stepping toward the first door. Now that I wasn’t the one ordering her around, now that I wasn’t the one who was in charge and worried as shit as to whether or not we were going to get a show worth showing, I could see how demanding the job was. I had a glimpse of it when we switched roles up in Canada, but Sasquatch was an entirely different ballgame and now I was even further removed.
Perry placed her hand on the knob and the door swung open, creaking loudly. The room was entirely empty, except for an open window and a woman who stood beside it.
“Shit!” I exclaimed, my heart attempting to leapfrog out of my throat.
“What?” Perry asked, swinging her head toward me. Her eyes were wide and white in the light of my phone and I adjusted my camera so it would pick it up.
“Didn’t you see that?” I said, trying to tame the panic in my voice. “The…the woman?”
Maximus and Perry exchanged a look—fuck I hated that—and then looked back at the room and at their gadgets.
“The temperature didn’t change,” she said, peering at the device. “But I thought I saw that purple glow, just for a bit.”
I didn’t know if she was trying to make me feel better or not. I appreciated it, but it didn’t work. I just nodded and said, “Never mind.”
We went to the next room and the next room and the next, Perry opening them all as if they held some hidden prize we’d won on the spinning wheel. But there was nothing inside, nothing that they saw or that I saw.
“Next floor,” Maximus said in a deadpan voice, as if he was that droopy-faced dog in that cartoon that always said “going down.” I could have smirked over that at any other time, but both Perry and I just nodded, tensing up and preparing for the next level.
Together we walked around the corner and made our way up the next set of stairs. Dust and cobwebs covered the railing, and we all tried not to touch it as we walked up the stairs, each one groaning as we went.
We were halfway up when one of the groans turned into a crack. Perry cried out, her legs falling through the stair, the wood splintering around her. I yelled and made a move to grab her, getting her arm hooked underneath mine as the entire stair disintegrated beneath her feet, sucking her body under until her lower half was dangling into the unknown.
“My Lord,” said Maximus, turning around at the top of the staircase and coming back down toward us to help. He was only two steps away when the stair beneath him broke as well, splitting under his weight. He yelped and fell, holding his camera high in the air. Luckily his chest and arms were too big to slip through, though I was starting to think the whole staircase might collapse beneath us at any minute.
“Fuck shit f**k,” I swore, trying to figure out what to do. Obviously Perry was first, but as much as I hated Maximus, I couldn’t have him get hurt either. I placed one foot on the wainscoted wall and the other on the railing, and pulled Perry straight out of the hole. Once she was able to get her footing on the step I was standing on, I crab crawled up the railing and wall to Maximus.
I looked down at his pale, sweating face and offered my hand.
“Come on, Dickweed. Your day’s not done yet.”
I hoisted him up, my grip wrapping hard around his elbow, my shoulder straining. I didn’t know if old Dex would be able to get him out, but I was new Dex for a reason, if not for this reason. With some strain and effort, Maximus was lifted out of the hole in the stairs and climbed onto the next one which thankfully supported his weight. I then told Perry to take a flying leapfrog onto his back. It took her a few seconds to realize what I was asking, but she did it, jumping clear across the hole that nearly swallowed her and coming to a thud on him.
Before the step had a chance to break under both their weight, I got into a squat and yanked hard under Maximus’s arms, pulling him and Perry forward before anything gave way beneath them. The three of us collapsed onto the floor, taking a few moments to breathe before we got to our feet.
“Thanks, man,” Maximus said, avoiding my eyes and walking away. I gave him the finger behind his back while pulling Perry closer to me. I kissed the top of her head and said, “Third floor’s a charm.”
She couldn’t even muster a smile. I couldn’t blame her. I squeezed her shoulder and told her we were almost done.
The third floor was a lot like the first floor. More or less one giant room instead of a bunch of tiny little ones. There were two rooms at the end and a bathroom, something I assumed either richer boarding guests or the owners would use, but the rest of the area was one big game room with leather couches still covered in plastic, shelves of books and game boards and picture windows. Dust still covered the floor, but everything else looked somewhat fresh and new, as if some ghostly couple had pulled down a game of Monopoly and entertained each other for a few nights.
But as much as this floor held my attention, it was the attic that was calling me. A door at the end of the room must have been the way up. I looked at Perry and Maximus, who were chattering to each other about cold spots and purple waves and this and that, and felt like they were speaking in an alien language. The thing that I was after, the thing that I understood, was upstairs, and upstairs was where I had to go.
I walked to the door and opened it, not at all surprised to find a flight of stairs leading up to the next level. I looked behind me first, but the two of them were paying no attention to me, so I walked up the stairs. They were much more solid than the ones earlier; in fact they felt like pillars of strength, wrought from the earth itself.
Once I got to the top of the stairs, it took me awhile to understand what I was looking at. I mean, it really took me awhile. Instead of a boring, dark attic as I had expected, I was looking down the length of a well-lit room. There were flickering candles in the middle of the wood-slat floor, hundreds of them, some of them red but most of them black, all of them forming this giant oval. In the middle of the floor was something white and moving. It took me awhile for my eyes to focus on it, to pinpoint what it was, but when I did, a small scream got buried in my throat. It was a small white snake with yellow diamonds down its back, pinned to the floor with a knife down its middle, writhing in pain as it was forced to die an immobile death.