Armageddon Outta Here - The World of Skulduggery Pleasant (31 page)

I could feel the unnatural malevolence that hung heavy in the air, but I’d forced myself to come down here because I needed to do it. I needed to do it to prove to myself, and to Chrissy, that I could. That I wasn’t about to let my fear beat me. Pete was probably the same, but Benny and Tyler and Chrissy herself? Why they came down I will never know. They regretted it, though. Later, they regretted it.

We spread out. The basement wasn’t that big, not really, but there were moments when it looked big. There were moments, glimpses out of the corner of my eye, when the walls disappeared and the basement went on forever.

“Found it,” said Chrissy.

Nobody rushed to her side. We all walked like condemned men, each step like wading through treacle. We joined our light to hers. On the floor before us was a circle that had maybe once been red. Time and dust and air and whatever had turned it dark, almost black. It was a wide circle, big enough for a tall man to lie down and die in. There were symbols on the outside. Black magic stuff. Satanic stuff. Not that any of us knew what satanic stuff looked like.

Not back then.

“I didn’t think that part was true,” said Benny. He sounded quiet. He sounded young.

We stood there and looked at this circle. Later, I asked the others if they felt what I felt, that electric tingle of panic beginning to crackle at the back of the neck. They all had. None of us let on, though. It was just an empty circle, after all. There was nothing in there that could hurt us.

“Big bad Bubba Moon,” Pete said in a soft voice.

“Don’t tease him,” said Chrissy.

The softness left Pete’s voice, and he laughed. “Tease him? He’s dead, Chrissy! He’s not around any more!”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Chrissy said, defensive, her face flushing in the light.

“Don’t tease him!” Pete cried, laughing again. “Don’t make fun of the poor dead guy! We’ll hurt his little dead feelings!”

“Pete,” I said, “stop.”

“Don’t tease him, she says!” Pete continued, howling with laughter.

I knew what he was doing. I’d gone into the basement first, I’d gotten her attention, so this was his clumsy way of pulling her pigtails, of getting her to notice him again. That probably made him do what he did next. He was just showing off. He didn’t deserve what happened. He was just showing off.

“Don’t tease the big bad Bubba Moon!” he called, and jumped into the circle.

“Pete!” Tyler cried.

Benny tried to snatch him back, almost toppled, almost stepped over the painted line himself, but Chrissy grabbed him, pulled him to her side. She said later she didn’t know why she did that – she’d had no way of knowing how important that had been – but her hands had moved and they’d probably saved Benny’s life. He’s still alive today because of her.

Pete spun and danced in the circle and he laughed and howled Bubba Moon’s name like a wolf. We stared, horrified. It took me a few seconds to realise how cold it had gotten. At first I thought it was just me, but in the light I could see little puffs of vapour leaving Chrissy’s mouth.

“We should go,” Tyler said.

“Run away!” Pete shouted. “Run away all you like! You’ll never get away from big bad Bubba Moon!”

He stopped singing and dancing and suddenly dropped to the ground, crossed his hands over his chest and said, “Hey, guys, who am I?” He laid his head back and closed his eyes and pretended to be dead.

And then all our flashlights went out.

Chrissy cursed and Tyler cried out and Benny stumbled back and someone stumbled into me and Chrissy was beside me and I grabbed her and she grabbed me and we hit a pile of junk behind us and it all came crashing down, and then we were running for the window. Tyler was first, trying to haul himself out of there. I shoved a chair into him and he got a foot up on that and boosted himself up. I wanted Chrissy to go next, but Benny was shrieking too loud to reason with, so when he was halfway out I pushed Chrissy forward and she didn’t object. Tyler took hold of her left arm and helped her out, and her long legs vanished like spaghetti being sucked into a hungry mouth.

I got one foot on the chair, reached up, looked over my shoulder into the darkness and called Pete’s name, and there was sudden silence.

The world beyond the window was dull. I could hear the others scrambling, their faint voices. There was light now, their flashlights active once again, flooding my little patch of basement. I existed in a cocoon of yellow and white that kept the darkness back.

“Pete!” I said again.

Pete was silent.

I couldn’t go without him. I’d never be able to face him if I ran out on him. The panic was fading. I was starting to think rationally again.

In the shaking light of my cocoon, I saw the tips of Pete’s shoes. Chrissy saw them, too, and shifted her flashlight. I could see Pete’s legs now. He stood on the very edge of the darkness, his hands by his sides, his upper body in shadow. Not moving. Not speaking.

Every last bit of moisture left my mouth. I tried to say his name, but my heart was thudding so loudly that I couldn’t even hear how it sounded. Pete’s arms rose and he stood like that for a moment.

And then he ran at me, teeth bared, face frozen in a mask of hatred.

I screamed and Chrissy screamed and Benny and Tyler probably screamed as well, and Pete had almost reached me when he fell sideways, laughing so hard I thought he was crying.

“Your face!” he gasped. “Oh my God, your face!”

And he collapsed again with laughter.

“You’re such a tool,” I said, turning my back on him and climbing out. Chrissy helped me to my feet, but I shook off her hands and walked away, my whole body trembling. Tyler helped Pete out of the basement, which wasn’t an easy task due to how much Pete was laughing.

“Your face!” was all he could say. I left him there, left all of them, and I got on my bike and cycled home.

didn’t see any of them the next day, but the day after that school started again and we were back together, all of us except Chrissy, who I passed a few times in the hall, but didn’t say anything to. What happened at Bubba Moon’s house was quickly forgotten about amid the hustle of a new school year. Pete didn’t come in the next day, though, or the day after that, and on the third day in a row when he didn’t come in Chrissy Brennan tracked me down at my locker.

“Have you heard from Pete?” she asked, without even saying hello first. Her hair, a rich brown that always shone so healthily, was tied back off her face. I may have only been a kid, but I knew enough to know that she probably wasn’t as beautiful as I thought she was. My brother had once talked about a girl he’d liked, the prettiest girl he’d ever known, and then I met her and she was OK, but nothing special. She had a nice smile, but her eyes were too close together. My brother couldn’t see it, though. He was blinded by his own infatuation, and I reckoned I was, too.

What I saw when I looked at Chrissy Brennan was pretty blue eyes and an amazing smile and a face I could gaze at for hours. She was lean and athletic and she wore ripped jeans and T-shirts, and even though her friends thought we were dorks she still hung out with us whenever she felt like it. I knew she liked
Moonlighting
and
Knight Rider
and I thought she was beautiful, but I was fully aware that I probably couldn’t trust my own judgement.

It was only years later when I was looking back through old photographs that I realised that yeah, Chrissy Brennan really was as beautiful as I’d always thought, and that realisation made me smile a little.

“He hasn’t been in for a few days,” I said, but of course she already knew that. That’s why she was asking.

“I was going to call by his place after school,” she said, “to see if he’s OK. Do you want to come?”

She probably didn’t want to go there alone, that was all, and yet there was a small flicker of hope that lit inside me that maybe, perhaps, she wanted to spend some time with me without the other guys getting in the way.

“Sure,” I said. “Straight after?”

“Yeah. Were you doing anything?”

I shook my head and kept my mouth shut so I wouldn’t ask any more questions. Pressing for insignificant details was something I did when I was excited, and it was a dead giveaway. We arranged to meet at the school gates and then Chrissy walked off, her books under her arm, and I went to double history and served my time until the bell rang. I grabbed my bag, hurried to the gates, waited there for Chrissy. She walked up and we went off together in full view of everyone on the bus. It was a good moment for me.

“What do you know about Bubba Moon?” she asked, breaking the silence that followed immediately after.

I suddenly suspected that this time together was going to be all business. “When he was alive? He was a Satanist. He had a black magic cult that met at his house. My brother says you used to be able to hear chanting if you passed late at night and the wind was coming from the right direction, and sometimes screams. He says.”

“Did you know the police were investigating him?”

I didn’t know that. “What for?”

Chrissy looked at me. “Murder. Kids were going missing and they thought Bubba Moon and his cult were doing it.”

“I didn’t hear anything about any kids going missing.”

“Not here, not in this town. Not even in this state. But in areas where his cult members lived, a kid would go missing before each one of his meetings. It started years ago, way back in the sixties. Why do you think they dug up his yard after he died?”

“I didn’t know they had.”

“Well, they did,” said Chrissy. “Dug it all up, looking for the bodies. They never found any.”

“Jeez,” I said. “Where did you hear all this?”

“My housekeeper. She says everyone knows, but they don’t like to talk about it.”

“That’s creepy,” I said. “Someone like that, living in our town… Any one of us could have disappeared.”

“My housekeeper says Bubba Moon was an evil man. Like real, actual evil. Not just bad. You know?”

I nodded.

“Did you feel it?” she asked. “You did, right? In the basement? You felt how evil he was, didn’t you?”

That feeling, that dreadful feeling of malevolence that had made the hairs on my neck stand up. “I guess.”

Chrissy’s eyes flashed. “You
guess
? That’s it? You
guess
you felt something?”

“No,” I said quickly, “I mean I did. I felt it.”

Satisfied by my answer, Chrissy nodded. “I think he was so evil he infected his house, that’s what I think. That’s why the place felt like that. The basement especially. It’s probably strongest in the basement because that’s where he died. And that circle, the circle Pete lay down in…”

She was scared. She was actually scared as we walked along on that beautiful warm afternoon.

“You think that’s why he hasn’t been in?” I asked, not sure I wanted an answer.

Chrissy blushed, and didn’t look at me. “I don’t know. Maybe. If Bubba Moon’s evil can infect a house, why not a person?”

“Because he was living in that house for years,” I said, as if it was a scientific principle. “It’s like a bad smell that’s been around for ages. It doesn’t just go when you take the rotten thing out the room. It takes a while. You have to open windows and stuff. If it’s been there for long enough, the smell lingers. Pete was only in that circle for a few seconds. He was lying down for less than that.”

“Did you see how sick he looked on the first day back, though? He was all pale, and he had bags under his eyes.”

I hadn’t noticed that. But I did notice that Chrissy had led the way to Pete’s neighbourhood without once having to ask me for directions.

Pete’s house stood on a quiet street, and like all the other houses it had a sectioned-off front lawn and a back yard closed off by a wooden fence. We passed a man waiting for a bus and crossed to the other side of the road where a woman stood leaning against a lamp post, reading a paper. There were a few other people standing around, everyone doing their best to mind their own business. Chrissy glanced at me, frowning slightly.

We walked up the path and I knocked on Pete’s front door.

“They’re looking at us,” Chrissy whispered.