Quite Contrary (2 page)

I had no intention of getting hooked on either. Still, five different booming songs had my heart thumping and stuttering. The place smelled of dust and people and sweat, and color flashed everywhere. Just standing around this was a crazy night. I might as well find out what the fuss was about.

I wasn’t stupid. I’d seen two boys and a girl who might be old enough to be in college, and a lot of older high school boys. Getting drunk here would be the dumbest thing a girl could do. I was counting on two things to protect me. First, I was the youngest looking girl here and the absolute bottom of the list anybody wanted to take advantage of. Second, well, that worked out pretty much the way I expected. I poured a sip’s worth of beer into a cup, drank it down, and spat half of it onto the rug. Ha! Surprise, surprise. It tasted as bad as it smelled.

“If you’re too young for beer, why are you even here?” Felicia demanded as she caught up with me.

“Too young for cheap beer,” I sniped back, “Only you would spend this much money and buy beer with the word ‘Lite’ on the bottle.”

I was actually being completely unfair. There was a bottle of twenty-one year old scotch on that table. I didn’t even recognize the wines, but they weren’t crap from boxes. Every beer bottle had a different label, and they were all from micro-breweries. But hell if I’d admit I’d noticed any of that.

“Felicia, is that a grade schooler?” asked some drunk thirteen-year-old girl in a witch costume that she’d look tarty in when she turned eighteen. I wasn’t a grade schooler, but it was an easy mistake to make. I’d also seen the party and there was nothing I wanted to do here, but the disdain in that voice nailed my sneakers to the floor. I wasn’t going anywhere.

“What, you don’t know Mary Stuart?” Felicia sneered arrogantly. “Sandy, there are two girls every kid in the county’s supposed to have heard about. Me, and Princess Mary the Bitch here.”

And the funny thing was, Felicia was sticking up for me. I couldn’t hate a girl more who would get her own friends drunk and throw them to the wolves, but maybe she thought the freak shows had to stick together. The meaner I was, the more she liked it. Maybe it was because both of us were smart enough to be sober.

“Five bucks says the party gets so boring Felicia starts telling ghost stories,” I muttered.

Felicia’s face lit up. “Oh, I’ve got something better than a ghost story,” she drawled. She walked off, drawing people after her, which meant I should head for the door. But then she did something actually interesting. She pushed a stereo out of the way, unfastened a latch, and pulled open a little door under the stairs. And by ‘little’, I mean it was half the height it ought to have been.

“That is creepy,” the drunk Sandy declared. I doubted her standards were high, but I wandered over and bent to the side a little and peeked.

On the other side was some kind of crawlspace, but I had to admit—not out loud, mind you—that this one was something special. I’d expected the dusty wooden tunnel, and the spider webs, but not the glow. The lights from the rest of the house seeped into it through the cracks, mixing into a dull, threatening orange. Oh, and the floor wasn’t wood, it was rough concrete.

“It gets better,” Felicia explained, her voice light and giddy at the chance to give people another story to tell about her party. “I dug up the floor plans while I was planning the party. This tunnel isn’t on them. I have no idea where it goes, or why it’s there.”

“Looks like it goes straight to hell,” I observed dryly. I had to grin as a couple of the tipsier kids shuddered. The orange light really made the view something special, and was just dim enough that you couldn’t see the other end.

“I’m not going to go look,” Felicia announced, effortlessly staking out her position before anyone could suggest it was cowardly.

I stepped up and crouched down in front of the door. It would be more comfortable to crawl, but I was short enough that I could walk bent over in there.

Behind me one of the older boys declared, “Felicia, I don’t know if this is some kind of set-up, but you can’t let a little kid go in there.”

“Try and stop me,” I shot back, leaning forward and crawling through the door. The feathery touches of invisible spider webs were annoying, but my stockings protected my knees from the concrete.

“Come on, Felicia, get her to come back!” the boy argued, so I started crawling deeper down into the passage. To my absolute and complete lack of surprise, the door thumped shut behind me. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of screaming or complaining about it. This tunnel had to come out somewhere.

In fact, I felt pretty good. The faint tingle of adrenaline from this horrible little hallway was better than the drumming of the music, which was muffled down to a background hum. Felicia might have trapped me down here, but she wasn’t in here with me. I was alone, and there was a mystery ahead, and Halloween was the perfect night for one. This was the best mood I’d been in all day.

There was no sense in sitting around. I crawled down the tunnel, looking around. There wasn’t much to look at. The walls were so rotten that the termites had come and gone, but there were no cracks big enough I could see anything through. All they let in was that dull orange light, which faded into gloom ahead and behind. Yes, behind me, too. How long was this tunnel? Sure it was a big house, but how big?

Something moved ahead of me. I bit down on my yelp, choking it so it wouldn’t come out. I was supposed to panic down here, and I refused to. Between the crumbling wood and there having to be a door at either end of this tunnel, I’d get out somehow. It was just a bug or a mouse.

Or a rat. A big, homely brown rat that crawled down the tunnel towards me. It didn’t seem at all afraid of me, and now that I could see it clearly, I wasn’t afraid of it. Fur brushed against my leg as it waddled past.

I started crawling again, and when I set my knee down the first time, someone with a squeakier voice than me said, “Take my advice, mistress. Stop now. Turn around and go back. You’re already lost, but maybe you can still find your way back from here.”

My heart knocked against my ribs, but I forced that down, too. Okay, which was more unlikely? Felicia had rigged some incredibly elaborate gag that could have gone wrong a thousand ways, or someone I couldn’t see was talking to me down here? I could disprove the first one. I kept crawling. If it was a speaker, I’d leave it behind.

“I’ve been looking for a young man or woman who wants to make their fortune, but this isn’t the place to start,” the voice insisted, following me. “At least stop and let’s talk about this.”

I crawled faster. “This tunnel goes somewhere,” I told the voice. Going back would be giving Felicia and her friends what they wanted. That wasn’t going to happen. I was too stubborn.

Speaking of stubborn, why hadn’t I looked back to try and spot this voice? Was there some rule against it? Was I scared? I looked back over my shoulder. The rat was following along, right by my foot, and looked right into my eyes and asked, “Where do you think it goes?”

“Hell, if I had to guess,” I snarked.

“Is that the story you want to be in, mistress?” the rat asked calmly. No, not calm. It didn’t sound detached. It sounded worried.

The talking rat thought this tunnel went to hell. My fingers gripped painfully at the concrete and panic rose up I couldn’t just swallow, because I’d just noticed the music was gone. I’d left it behind. I’d left it way behind.

I kept crawling anyway, and the rat went on, “You’re locked in a crawlspace under a deserted house, mistress. What kind of things do you find in a story like that?”

I was coming up on an intersection. The tunnel kept going, but another branched off to the right. It looked identical to this one. As I shuffled past, I decided there was no way I’d be too afraid to play this rat’s game back at him, so I answered, “The hate filled corpses of the wrongfully murdered. Rats, of the people eating kind rather than the unwanted advice kind. Lots and lots of spiders. Treasure. Cursed treasure, with booby traps.” This wasn’t working. I could hear my voice quiver, because the rat had been right about one thing already. I was as lost as it gets, and none of those things seemed unlikely.

“Or that,” I added, my voice rasping and my throat dry. Someone was crawling up the tunnel the other way. If it weren’t for the circumstances, she wouldn’t look very threatening. Curly red hair, wild colored makeup with stripes on her face for Halloween, mismatched neon blouse and skirt, striped stockings. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. She looked a lot like me.

She looked exactly like me.

“It’s your fetch!” screeched the rat, little claws digging in as it leaped up onto my back. “Run! Down the other way, run! Don’t argue, and don’t let it touch you!”

The hallway that branched off to the side looked exactly the same as this one, although it had the major advantage that a clone of me wasn’t crawling awkwardly up it with her head down and her face hidden. But you know what? Forget that. I turned and kicked the other wall. The wood was as rotten as I thought it had been. I didn’t know where we were, but we were somewhere. I kicked again, and again, and desperation gave me strength because with every kick the copy crawled a couple of feet closer. Then, a really hard kick broke down the wall. When it gave way, I fell forward into the hole. Rather than try to stop myself, I pushed myself along. When I hit the ground, I splashed.

Oh, yuck. I was standing in a basement, some kind of industrial basement with lots of generators or boilers or something. It had been flooded, and ‘water’ was too generous a word for the bad smelling slime I’d landed in and now had all over me. The basement was huge, and a single electrical light shone dimly by a door at the far end, up a set of stone steps. I ran. Whatever a fetch was, I didn’t want it climbing in here after me. Then, I let out a little whine and ran faster, because something moved.

It wasn’t just the splashing of the slime. As I passed, things lurched clumsily up out of the water. This was exactly where you found man-eating zombies, and as foul as my sneakers felt filled with this stuff, they kept me from slipping as I charged down the row towards that distant door. It was getting closer too slowly. How fast were the things behind me?

The rat might have heard my thoughts. He crawled up onto my shoulder and squeaked, “Don’t look back, mistress. Keep running, and whatever you do, don’t look back!” Then, as my head turned, the little bastard threw himself over my eyes. I couldn’t see anything but rat belly, and pain spiked through me as my foot hit the first stair, and my shin hit the second. I crawled up the stairway blind. I could either pull the rat off my face or find the door handle, and I chose to do the latter. Wonderfully, it came open the moment I pulled on it, and I launched myself out into fresh night air and slammed the door behind me. Even better, I felt a bolt and I shoved that home. I didn’t have to pull the rat off my face, because he slid back down onto my shoulder on his own, panting as if he’d done all the running himself.

“You seem to know what’s going on. Where are we, is it safe, and where can I wash off all this gunk?” I wheezed.

Recovering from his unearned stupor, the rat jumped off my shoulder, latching onto the cement block wall and sliding down it with his claws. Gee, he didn’t want to climb through the goo splattering my clothes. What a surprise. He hopped up the steps to ground level, and I trudged up after him with much heavier legs.

“Abandoned industrial park, I’d say,” he concluded, “We should be safe. Nothing from down there will want to chase you up here, and if anything horrible happens in old factory yards, I can’t think of an example.”

“Wash,” I insisted as my shoes squished under my feet and left rainbow colored puddles on the concrete. The last step left me in a huge courtyard of gravel and asphalt, with looming buildings made mostly out of rusty pipes.

“I don’t know offhand.” The Rat sniffed the air, but all I could smell was me. “I will find it for you, mistress, trust me. Crossing running water wouldn’t be a bad idea right now anyway.”

So many questions. Screw them, I didn’t want to sound ignorant. Besides, there was something I had to say. I didn’t want to, but it was more important than all the complaining I really felt like doing.

“You tried to save my life back there, rat. Maybe you did save my life. Thanks,” I grumbled reluctantly.

“You are my responsibility, and I am yours, mistress. I hope to give much more than I take,” the furry little beast replied. He sounded smug.

“Don’t call me that,” I snapped at him. Every time he said it, it nagged at me. “I get it, you’ve decided you’re my pet or whatever, but nobody uses that word anymore. For anything. Call me Mary, or ‘Miss’ if you really have to be formal about it. And tell me your name.”

“I am Rat-In-Boots, Mary,” he answered. He stood up on his hind legs, which rats are good at anyway, and tried to bow, which rats aren’t good at.

He was going to say more, but I had to object. “It’s Puss-In-Boots, and you aren’t wearing boots.”

“I’m smarter than any cat, and I’ll take better care of you,” Rat-In-Boots sniffed proudly. I would have smiled if I weren’t covered in what I was afraid was zombie filth. “But you must give me the boots yourself. That should be our first priority. Find me some boots, and I’ll prove to you I’m better than a cat.”

“Our first priority is getting me clean,” I corrected him firmly. I felt like I’d just been through exactly what I’d just been through, and rust was the least unpleasant thing caked onto my clothes.

To my surprise, he didn’t argue. He took this stuff seriously. His pointy face craned around as he studied the dark buildings, and he mumbled, “Water, water; anything near a factory would be contaminated. We need to get out of here anyway. Modern stories are all lost kidneys and poison and the undead. That greenhouse might be just what we need.”

He took off, his little clawed feet rattling over the gravel. The temptation hit me to turn around and walk the other way, but he was doing what I told him. I squelched after him, sounding as nasty as I felt.