Melanie swore a blue streak as her laces snapped beneath her hands. She’d been yanking them way too hard and way too tight lately—she couldn’t help it—and they were bound to give at some point. Just her luck it was now.
She threw the snapped-off piece to one side and yanked the remaining lace out of her boot, then flung it as far away from herself as possible. It was only after Blynken pounced on it in the hallway and ran off with it like it was the greatest prize in the world that she remembered she didn’t have any spares.
“Jon!” she shouted, kicking her laceless boot in frustration.
“Your pumps are in the hall closet!” Jon shouted back from somewhere else in the house, probably the kitchen.
Melanie kicked her other boot for good measure and slammed her bedroom door behind her as she stomped, well aware that it was less impressive in her stockinged feet—which made her even more irritable—down the hall. “I told you to fucking stop doing that!” she hollered at the kitchen door, yanking open the hall closet.
Jon appeared from entirely the wrong direction, nearly scaring the life out of her—he’d been in the living room, not the kitchen—and scowled. “I didn’t do anything except watch Wynken try to steal your broken boot lace from her brother. And since I don’t wear boots either, I know you weren’t going to ask me if I had any spares.”
“And how the fuck did you know where my pumps were?”
“Because that’s where I put them after you convinced me to borrow them to go to the pub with Martin.” Jon’s voice cracked on the last word, and for just a moment, his scowl flickered into pain.
“Just because you’re right doesn’t mean I’m not annoyed,” Melanie grumbled, but she didn’t slam the closet door shut after retrieving her shoes.
May had always been one of Melanie’s favorite months. It was the prettiest and mildest part of spring, something fun was always happening at school, and nobody she knew had been born or died. Right about now, though, she hated it with a burning passion.
Ghost Hunt UK was officially dead—the seventh anniversary of the premier had come and gone with barely a mention on social media and only one or two desultory comments on the YouTube feed from megafans, and there’d been nothing from any of her former colleagues, either on the show or in the wider ghost-hunting world. She hadn’t been wrong when she’d told Martin she’d burned through almost everything she had by the time she got back from India. She was struggling with the rent on the house, even with Jon helping with expenses, and she was already trying to cope with the knowledge that she was probably going to have to move before the summer was out, maybe even before it arrived. Elias was a rat bastard and it was taking all of Melanie’s self-control not to kill him most days, and it didn’t help that he kept giving her that knowing, condescending smile that practically sang I know what you want to do and you won’t actually do it across the floor whenever he saw her. Gerry looked more like a ghost these days than he had even in the initial weeks after coming back from the literal fucking dead, and the two of them snapped at each other more often when she went over to the bookstore than they had in the entire time she’d known him to date, which had resulted in her visiting as little as possible.
And then there was the little fact of Martin having been fucking kidnapped by the Stranger.
She hadn’t worried at first. Well, she had, of course she had, but Jon had fainted as soon as he realized what had happened and she hadn’t been able to catch him before he hit the sidewalk, so the first forty-eight hours had been spent tending to him and his concussion and reassuring him, over and over, that she didn’t blame him, that it wasn’t his fault, and that they’d be able to get Martin back as soon as he was stronger.
Two out of three wouldn’t have been bad, as long as Martin getting back soon had been one of the two.
Melanie didn’t blame Jon. She didn’t. She snapped at him, but she wasn’t angry with him, just…in general. And God knew he snapped back at her. But that was really just the tension getting to them both as days stretched into weeks and there was no sign of Martin. She hadn’t thrown him out of her house, she didn’t want to kill him as much as she did…pretty much everyone else, and when she heard him crying out in his sleep late at night, she was usually there and wrapping him in a hug before she was consciously aware of having got out of her own bed. It was no different than Martin or Gerry crawling into bed and holding her when she had nightmares. A tiny part of her mind was relieved they’d had that talk about being asexual, so he knew she wasn’t putting any moves on him and vice versa, but still…he was another one of her brothers. Just the one that was most like her, and the one she needed to comfort and protect more than the other way around. And he was hurting just as much as she was—more. She’d known Martin longer, but Jon had fallen for him hard and fast, even if he hadn’t said so out loud, and it was killing him not knowing where he was, what was happening, if he was okay.
And it wasn’t like they could just call out of work and go looking for Martin, as badly as they wanted to. Tim had already told them what had happened when he’d been away from the Institute, which didn’t ease their worries about Martin, and while Melanie suspected that a big part of it was that he’d been punished by the Ceaseless Watcher for trying to leave altogether rather than just not being within the four walls of the Institute every day, she also suspected they’d need to be closer to the locus of the Eye’s power in order to have any chance at finding Martin. After all, if he was with the Stranger…it was more or less their opposite. They would need all the help they could get.
Didn’t mean she had to like it, though.
It was raining, go fucking figure. Not hard, but still, Melanie covered Jon’s hand on the handle of the umbrella with her own and made sure to lock step with him like they were running a three-legged race. Jon, for his part, huddled into Martin’s jumper—not the one he’d given Jon after the attack on the Institute, but one he’d left on the back of his chair in the Archives and one, Melanie suspected, that still smelled like him—and concentrated on moving forward. By the time they got to work, it had mostly stopped, but Melanie was under no illusions it wouldn’t start again.
They were early enough that nobody was in but Manal, and probably Elias, and one or two people from other departments who came in early to talk or make tea or work on personal projects without their coworkers butting in with questions and requests and demands. Jon offered a distracted greeting to an elderly black man mopping the floor by the steps and led the way down into the Archives. As usual, they were the first to arrive.
Martin’s desk was neat as a pin, his chair tucked under the desk, his laptop on his desk where he’d left it when he and Jon left for King’s Cross, all the drawers shut and all the stationery tidied away in them. The rest of the desks looked as though they’d each in their own way been hit with a small localized tornado. Basira’s desk, as usual, had several precarious stacks of books unrelated to one another or anything going on. There were a few books on Tim’s desk as well, most of which Melanie thought had to do with circuses in some way, and also an assortment of files and memos scattered haphazardly across the surface. The files on Sasha’s desk were more neatly stacked, but there were still a lot of them, with papers sticking out at all kinds of odd angles. Melanie’s desk was also covered in papers, lists, and maps, some of which strategically covered a book or two that were tied to the Slaughter; in the center of the mess, however, was the log from Breekon and Hope.
“Anything?” Jon asked, a bit hopelessly, as he paused and looked at the log book.
“If there was, I’d have told you last night,” Melanie reminded him. Jon grunted unhappily. “I’m still looking. The biggest repeat delivery so far has been to the Trophy Room, and—we’ve already decided they wouldn’t be stupid enough to take him there, right?”
Jon hesitated. “I—I don’t know anymore. Maybe? They, the statement we had before, it mentioned a basement. Maybe…maybe that is where they’re keeping him?”
“So let’s go look.”
“No,” Jon said, so sharply Melanie actually took a step back. “You’ve already been Marked by the Stranger. You’re not going near that again.”
“Well, you’re not going alone. Martin will kill me if I let you get hurt,” Melanie shot back. “So either we go together, or neither of us goes.”
Jon, whom Melanie had long ago realized wore his heart on his sleeve when he trusted the people around him, could have shouted from the rooftops of the Institute that he was sorely tempted to say we go together then and it would’ve still been more subtle than the look on his face. After a moment, though, he sighed and shook his head. “See—see if you can find something else. Anything else. If you get back to the beginning of the log and don’t find an alternate site, we’ll try it.”
“Fine.” Melanie didn’t bother asking what Jon was going to be doing all day. She just stomped over to her desk and unpacked her laptop.
About ten minutes later, Tim came storming into the Archives, his face black with anger. “Where the fuck is Jon? Did he manage to get himself kidnapped, too?”
"Don’t you fucking say that.” Melanie jerked a thumb over her shoulder without looking up from where she was queuing up her music for the day. “He’s in his office.”
Tim didn’t respond, at least not directly. But a moment or two later, just as Melanie popped her earbuds in, she heard him shouting behind her, and Jon yelling back. She pulled one earbud back out and listened for a moment, then deduced that Jon had forgotten to unlock the secondary door when they came in and Tim was pissed he’d had to walk around the building to come in the main entrance.
Not her problem. Melanie replaced the earbud and hit PLAY.
It was slow going. The last entry in the log had been from March of 2013—around the same time as Gertrude Robinson had burnt Mary Keay out of her Book, if Melanie remembered correctly, and she couldn’t help but note with some dread that it had been exactly one year after the incident at the Mermaid Inn—and four years was a long time in the ordinary scheme of things, but she’d gone back even further than that now. People moved, businesses closed or changed hands, and it was hard to pinpoint which entries had been made by Alfred Breekon and which ones had been made by Breekon and Hope. Jon had told her, when he’d handed over the log, that Martin had been able to tell the entries apart, but Melanie wasn’t Martin and she didn’t have his eyes. It all looked identical to her.
She rubbed her eyes and reached absently for her mug of tea. Her hand grasped at nothing, which is when it occurred to her she hadn’t made any. Three weeks and she still hadn’t broken the habit of expecting it to be there whenever she reached for it because Martin just…got tea for everyone any time he went to make his own. That only served to irritate her further.
Yanking out the earbuds, she slammed the laptop closed with probably unnecessary force and stalked to the breakroom. There were a handful of other people in there, none of whom she knew or cared about, and she had to wait her turn to get at the electric kettle. She took the opportunity to check her phone—for what, she didn’t know. A text from Gerry that Martin had stumbled in safe and sound, maybe.
“Good morning, Melanie!”
The voice was too smooth and too suave and too close, and Melanie practically jumped out of her shoes. She whirled around, arm drawn back to punch if necessary, and found herself staring up at a blond-haired, blue-eyed man with very white teeth in a face made for radio. He knew her name, which meant she was probably supposed to know him…or he was one of those men who learned everything about his potential partners-slash-victims before he ever spoke to them in hopes of either impressing or intimidating them. He clearly thought he was God’s gift to women.
If he was, Melanie sincerely hoped God had left the receipt in the wrapping paper.
“Sorry, have we met?” she asked, because she wasn’t in the mood to play guessing games.
The man’s smile amped up a few notches. “No, not yet, but I am delighted to make your acquaintance at last. I’ve been hearing so much about you—and I was thrilled to find out you were a member of the Institute now.” He stuck out his hand. “Scott Corletto.”
“Hi,” Melanie said. She didn’t accept his hand, instead turning to grab a pair of mugs out of the cupboard.
Scott clucked his tongue when he saw the second mug. “Your boss making you get his tea for him, too? Typical. They always think it’s the woman’s role on the team to be the tea lady.”
Melanie glared at him as she reached for the cocoa powder. “You’re making an awful lot of assumptions. He didn’t ask, and I’m not usually the one that makes it anyway.”
“You must be miserable in…which department are you in, by the way? I’m in Accounting.”
“Archives.” Melanie dumped a packet into each mug and reached for the kettle.
“Oh. I’m so sorry.” Scott pulled an exaggerated grimace. “Who’s worse to work with, Sims or Blackwood?”
Melanie stared at the kettle in her hand, mentally arguing with herself about the pros and cons of pouring it down Scott’s pants. “Why, are you trying to decide which one to pull up to Accounting? Don’t bother.”
“God forbid!” Scott looked equal parts disgusted and affronted. “Honestly, they’re both…Sims is such an arse, seriously. Completely stuck on himself and a know-it-all to boot. And Blackwood’s just pathetic. Really, I don’t know how he got himself assigned to the Archives, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason he’s ‘out’ right now is because someone finally got fed up and murdered him.” He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Did you help? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“Say a word against my brothers again, and the next dead body in this building will be yours,” Melanie snarled. She brought her foot down on Scott’s hard, only remembering after he howled in agony that she was wearing kitten heels and not her combat boots, then pivoted on the other and stormed out of the breakroom with a mug of cocoa in each hand.
When she got back to the Archives, she took a moment to scan the room, just in case Martin had miraculously returned while she’d been gone. Basira sat in her usual spot, head buried in what looked like one of William Hays’ books; Tim was rocked back on two legs of his chair, reading one of the circus books. Sasha was bent over her laptop, intent on something, a file spread open beside her. Jon’s door was open, but his office was silent, and Martin was nowhere to be seen.
She stomped into Jon’s office and plunked a mug on his desk, careful not to slosh it on the papers there. “If your paycheck is short this month, tell me and my shoe goes up his ass.”
“Corletto?” Jon looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he seemed grateful for the interruption.
“How’d you fucking guess?”
“He hates me. We started out in Research together…we got into an argument about his sloppy research, and since he had some kind of financial degree as well as whatever degree he used to get into Research, he transferred a couple months later. I figured if anyone from Accounting was giving you hell about me, it would be him. He tried it with every new Researcher we got, and Martin—” Jon’s voice cracked again “—told me he did the same thing after he transferred to the Archives.”
Melanie snorted, perching on the corner of Jon’s desk. “And I take it Martin didn’t answer the way he wanted, considering the way the bastard spoke about him.”
Jon’s eyes flashed. “What did he say?”
Melanie repeated Scott’s words exactly, inflection and all. Jon’s hands tightened around his mug. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Pick a date. I’ll help.” Melanie took a sip of her own cocoa. “Bet Elias won’t even care as long as we keep doing whatever he wants us to do about the Unknowing.”
“Probably.” Jon stared vacantly at something on the corner of his desk. “Want to do it now? I’m avoiding recording that file.”
Melanie followed his gaze to a seemingly innocuous file on the corner. “Why, what is it?”
“I’m…I’m not sure, actually. It was in the stack I grabbed to record, I haven’t opened it, but I just…it’s real, but I don’t feel…drawn to record it. And that has me curious, but at the same time, I’m more tempted to find another real statement, and…I can’t. I don’t even want to look at it.”
Melanie picked up the folder. She needed no more than a glance to recognize it. “That’s because it’s already been recorded.”
Jon looked up, startled. “What?”
“I remember this file number. I was supposed to be the one recording it, but Martin traded me at the last minute. He didn’t explain why. It would’ve been the one he recorded…uh, the week you got back.” Melanie scowled at it. “Isn’t there somewhere we put completed files?”
“Back on the shelves, in the correct order.”
“Is there a way to tell which ones have been recorded and which ones haven’t?”
“I—I don’t know. We should, but—i-it’s never come up before.” Jon looked a bit shaken.
Melanie sighed and slid off the desk. “Hold on. I’m not doing anything other than going through the log.” Before Jon could protest, she stalked out of his office.
She did, at least, know where the recordings were kept. There were several cabinets in the climate-controlled document storage room full of those long, flat drawers meant for storing maps or blueprints or that kind of thing, or so Martin had said—they were kind of a staple of archives the world over. Only a couple of the drawers were used for that purpose. Someone, probably Martin, had designated the rest of them for storing recordings in. One drawer had a number of carefully-labeled flash drives for the statements that didn’t touch on the Fourteen, and the rest had the tapes in them, labeled and lined up in neat rows. In theory, anyway.
In practice, while some of the tapes were neatly organized, others had been haphazardly thrown into the drawer, and everything was jumbled up. Some of the labels were upside-down in relation to Melanie; others weren’t labeled at all. There weren’t a lot of them in each drawer, but there were enough that it would prove difficult for Melanie to find the one she was looking for without some kind of guide, or at least some attempt at organization.
She slammed the drawer shut and stuck her head out of the room. “Who put these fucking tapes in here?” she demanded.
“That’s where they go, apparently,” Tim snapped, throwing his book on the desk in front of him and rocking his chair back further. “For whatever fucking reason.”
“I know that’s where they go, but they’re just…thrown in here. How am I supposed to find anything?”
“Why do you need to find anything? Use the fucking paper statements. Not like we have students coming down here to pull the recordings anymore.”
“Why not, did you scare them off?”
“I’m not the one pulling spooky bullshit all the time.”
The argument escalated. After a while, Melanie wasn’t even sure what they were actually arguing about, but she also didn’t care; she and Tim stood practically face to face, screaming at one another about something that had absolutely no relation to the tapes. It ended in Tim slamming the door of the Archives on his way to the bathroom and/or the breakroom and Melanie storming back into Jon’s office to see him hovering anxiously, like he wanted to intervene in the fight but also wanted to see how it played out.
“Fuck it,” she announced. “Let’s go save Martin from the eldritch taxidermy shop.”
Jon exhaled heavily and set his mug down on the desk. “I thought you’d never ask.”
They hit every station exactly right and made it to Barnet in near-record time. Melanie had rarely been this far up the end of the Northern line, but it was about what she would have expected from the area. The Trophy Room wasn’t hard to find, either, a run-down building with faded paint and a tattered awning. Jon’s steps slowed as they approached, and he gripped her arm. “The cat’s gone.”
“The what?”
“In the original statement that mentioned the Trophy Room, he described a very old taxidermy of a big cat in the front window. We should be able to see it from here. It’s not there. It’s gone.”
“Jon, it’s a shop,” Melanie reminded him. “Didn’t the statement also say they were having their taxes audited? That means they actually sell things. Even if it’s niche stuff. Someone might have bought it.” She pulled a knife out of her jacket and added, “And if you didn’t want to do a frontal assault on the place, you’d have told me to wait until after dark. Let’s go.”
She charged forward, Jon rushing alongside of her, wrapped her hand around the handle of the shop’s door, and yanked hard, intending to fling the door open and pull herself into the shop in the same fluid movement.
Since the door didn’t actually open, and she couldn’t stop her forward momentum in time, she slammed face-first into the frame, hard enough that she dropped the knife.
“Melanie!” Jon reached for her chin. He stopped himself just before making contact. “Uh—are you all right?”
“Think so.” Melanie turned of her own accord to face Jon and tilted her head slightly, letting him study to make sure her nose wasn’t broken. He nodded, evidently understanding and reassuring her. “Shit. Didn’t expect the door to be locked…do they have the hours posted?”
Jon glanced over his shoulder, probably to make sure the coast was clear, then peered in the window. After a moment, he drew back and shook his head. “It’s—it’s empty.”
Before Melanie could react to that, though, a gleam came into Jon’s eye, and he straightened up. “Which means this is it. They—they must have closed down the shop, cleared out all the taxidermy—they probably got Breekon and Hope to carry it off—so that they didn’t have customers coming in. That must mean they’re using it as the site of the Unknowing.”
The tiny, tiny part of Melanie’s mind hanging on to rational thought, which had been shouting that this was a stupid idea regardless of whether Jon was right or not since she first made the suggestion they come out here and was being consistently ignored or talked over by the desire to hurt and/or kill something, apparently took temporary possession of her tongue before the anger could stop it. “Are we sure they’re keeping Martin in the same place they’re going to do the ritual?”
“Yes,” Jon said without hesitation. “That’s why they wanted—well, why they wanted me. For the Dance. They’re using Martin instead—” His voice cracked once again, but he rallied and continued. “—so if they don’t expect us to be able to find him, or him to be able to escape…”
“They’ll want him close to where it’ll be.” Melanie considered that for a moment, then bent to retrieve her knife. “Let’s see if we can break in around the back.”
She only had the half-rusted antique tools Martin had picked up as a teenager, not the good ones he owned now—he’d had those on him when he and Jon went to Newcastle—but she was decent enough with them, and in a pinch, she supposed she could break a window. It turned out not to be necessary, though. One window hung slightly open, swinging on a damaged hinge. After five rounds of scissors-paper-stone where both of them threw paper and a sixth where they both tried to outsmart the other and threw scissors, she gave up and pulled a coin out of her pocket; Jon won, so she boosted him through the window first, then followed. Jon was already stood in the doorway of the small room, peering cautiously out through the doorway. The second Melanie came up behind him, though, he moved into the shop proper, Melanie hot on his heels.
He hadn’t been kidding. The place was empty. You could see where things had been, maybe, if you squinted, but Jesus, even Pinhole Books hadn’t looked this bare after Melanie and Martin packed everything up in anticipation of the new proprietors moving in. The building that had once housed the Trophy Room had been stripped right down to the woodwork. Their footsteps echoed in a way that shouldn’t have been possible in as relatively small a space as the shop was.
“This building,” she said, standing in the center of what had once been the shop and looking around suspiciously, “seems like it was designed by an amateur horror film maker who’s banking on the viewers being too accustomed to staples of the genre to question why they’re happening here.”
“More like an amateur horror writer banking on the fact that they haven’t described the building in enough detail for readers to call them out on it not making sense,” Jon said distractedly. He looked around, something gripped tightly in his right hand. It took Melanie longer than she would have liked to admit to realize it was the fucking tape recorder. “There should be a basement…somewhere.”
“Right, you mentioned that. That’s likely where they’re keeping him.” Melanie shifted her grip on the knife to be sure it was secure. “Where did the statement say it was?”
“It—Scaplehorn mentioned a, a-a ring pull in the floor. In the office.”
“Which was the room we came into in the first place.” Melanie sneered at the slightly sheepish look on Jon’s face. “Right. Let’s go find it.”
She didn't think it would take long to find. After all, all the furniture, along with anything that had remotely made the place a taxidermy shop, had been removed, so it would make sense that the door would be extremely goddamn fucking obvious when they looked. Honestly, she was just surprised they hadn’t literally tripped over it when they left the room in the first place.
Upon entering the room and looking around, however, there was…nothing. No sign of a ring set in the floor, no obvious doors, no nothing. It was just an empty, barren room.
“You’re sure the basement is in here?” she said, trying not to sound skeptical.
“Positive,” Jon said, and there was just a hint of a desperate note in his voice. “It…t-they must have taken the ring out.”
“Why the fuck would they take the ring out?”
“So nobody could find it? I don’t know, Melanie, I don’t follow the Stranger,” Jon snapped. “I can’t just fathom its every whim and motivation like it's nothing. Even if I was…i-it’s not something I can do. Just…let’s just look.”
Melanie grunted, but she joined Jon in scouring the room carefully. Both of them took opposite corners and dropped to their hands and knees, crawling slowly over the floor and testing every joint and board. Finally, Jon hissed for Melanie’s attention, and she scrabbled over to find him pressing on a board. The one next to it rose up slightly.
“Help me pry it up,” he said urgently. “My nails aren’t long enough.”
“Hang on.” Melanie pulled out her knife and gently leveraged it into the crack, then slid it a bit deeper. After a moment, the section of floor lifted away, very slightly. She kept at it until there was enough space for her to toss the knife aside and slide her fingers into the gap. Jon joined her then, and together they pushed the door up enough that they could see beneath it. A flight of stairs led downward into the darkness.
Jon exhaled slowly, staring down the stairs. “No face. That’s good,” he said, more to himself than to Melanie.
Melanie was the one who responded, though. “I’m sorry, no what?”
“The original statement—didn’t I tell you about that? Scaplehorn described a face in the basement, swaying back and forth and repeating the same stock phrase over and over again. I’m fairly certain it was the Anglerfish that was the subject of our first real statement, o-or something similar. But…it’s not here. Which makes sense, if—” Jon broke off. “We’ve got to be careful.”
“And quiet,” Melanie agreed. “Come on. I’ll go first.”
She gave the door a hefty shove. It flopped back and rested at an angle against the far wall. Gripping her knife in one hand, she started down the steps, Jon close behind her. She reached back without looking and took his hand in her free one.
The stairs creaked slightly underfoot, and they went down further than Melanie would have expected. There wasn’t a great deal of light coming from above anyway, but after they’d gone down fourteen steps, she realized she couldn’t see any further. She turned her head over her shoulder, opening her mouth to ask if he’d brought a torch with him. In that moment, she stepped forward, met no resistance below her foot, and tumbled headlong into the darkness before she could stop herself. From the yelp behind her, Jon did the same.
She didn’t fall down the stairs. It quickly became obvious there were no stairs to fall down. She did at least have the presence of mind to let go of the knife rather than stab herself somewhere vital by falling on it. It clattered to the ground a split second before she herself did, and she only just managed to roll to one side before Jon landed on top of her. Something crunched unpleasantly, and she just hoped it wasn’t a bone.
A hand grabbed hers, and she almost lashed out in panic before registering the ashy ridges of Jon’s worm-scarred hands. Instead, she laced her fingers through his. “Jon? You okay?” she hissed.
“Y-yes.” Jon didn’t sound terribly sure. “Are you…?”
“I’ll live. Come on. Do you have a torch? We might have passed the point of stealth here.”
There was a soft click, and a slightly crazed beam of light cut across the floor between them. It illuminated just enough of Jon’s face that Melanie could see his worried expression. “I think I landed on it, but it works.” He pushed to his feet and reached for Melanie’s hand; she let him assist her in getting up as well.
Much like the shop upstairs, the basement was far more echo-y and spooky than it had any right to be. Melanie also couldn’t help but think that it was…off in terms of size. “This is way bigger than the property.”
“I doubt the Stranger cares that much about building regulations.” Jon swept the torch around the space. It didn’t reach far enough to touch the walls, which was disconcerting. The space was also completely empty and unfinished. “Which way do we go?”
“Left,” Melanie said unhesitatingly. In response to the inquiring look Jon gave her, she added, “Sinister and dexter, left and right. The creepiest part is always to the left.”
“If you say so.” Jon kept his grip on Melanie’s hand and set off for the left.
Despite Melanie’s words, they did move carefully, cautiously, trying to make as little noise as possible lest they be discovered. When they reached a solid wall, they turned, as if in unspoken agreement, to the left again and kept walking, searching for a door or a corridor or something. After a few minutes, though, Jon slowed and tugged her hand. “Listen.”
Melanie listened, straining her ears, but all she could catch was the faint whirring of the tape recorder dangling from a strap on Jon’s wrist. “I don’t hear anything,” she began, and then realization hit her like a ton of bricks. “Which is the point. This basement’s empty, too. He’s not down here.”
“Martin!” Jon suddenly shouted, his voice cracking. It echoed off the walls in a way it absolutely shouldn’t have. Melanie was suddenly, vividly, for the second time that day, thrown back to an October night in Oxford almost twenty years previously and tightened her grip on Jon’s hand, not caring if it hurt. She was not going to lose him, not here, not now.
There was a loud and ominous thud that made both of them jump, and Jon swept the beam of light around frantically. There was nothing. No sign of another being, no hint at what had made the noise.
Something…prickled. That was the only way Melanie could describe it. She felt an odd sensation along her shoulders and back, like a thousand ants in stiletto heels were marching up and down, there and gone in a second. She also felt an almost oppressive weight on her chest, and there was a change in the smell of the air, almost as if…
Oh. Oh, no.
“The door! Someone closed the fucking door!” Melanie hissed, trying not to panic. The fact that she knew what was going on and was trying not to lose it only made her angrier. “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here.”
“But—”
“No buts! If we stay trapped down here too long, something you don’t want is going to get in down here and we are in enough shit as it is.” Melanie started back the way they had come, dragging Jon along behind her. “Hurry up!”
Jon stumbled along in her wake for a moment before finding his feet and hurrying alongside her, the beam of light bobbing crazily around them. It glinted off the blade of the knife ahead, and Melanie swooped down to scoop it up and stow it in her jacket before looking around and up. “There!”
Jon pointed the torch upwards. The stairs were solidly built enough, but ended rather suddenly a foot or so above their heads, as if the basement had been lowered by a story but without continuing the staircase. A new smell hit Melanie’s nostrils—something harsh and wrong—at the same time as the beam of light flickered and died.
She heard Jon shake it a couple times, then curse and cast it aside. “Can you reach the bottom step? I’ll give you a boost, but you’ll need to pull me up.”
“Just like the scrap yard.” Melanie reached up and just brushed the bottom of the step. Gritting her teeth, she crouched, then leaped into the air and managed to snag the step. Her pumps fell off before she could stop them, but she didn’t care, she had the step and that was what mattered. “Give me a push!”
Something—presumably Jon’s hands—caught the soles of her feet and pushed upwards. She hauled with all her might and managed to roll onto the step, then turned and reached down. “Come on! Hurry up!”
The smell was getting worse, and it was starting to get hard to breathe—not just because the door was closed, but because of something equally sinister. Melanie gripped Jon’s arms as tightly as she could and hauled him, with his assistance, onto the bottom step. They didn’t take a second to recover, merely scrambled up the steps, still clinging to one another’s hands. By the time they reached the top, they were both coughing as thick, acrid smoke wreathed the air around them.
There was no longer any denying it. The shop above them was on fire.
Martin would probably have insisted they test the wood above them with the back of their hands. Melanie didn’t bother. There was no other way in or out of this basement, and if they stayed down here, they would suffocate. Instead, she looked over to where she could just make Jon out in the faint light coming from the cracks.
“On three?” she choked out.
Jon nodded, hooking the jumper over his mouth. Both of them placed their hands on the wood—it wasn’t too hot, which was good—and Melanie counted to three before they both shoved upwards with all of their might. For a moment, it didn’t budge. Then something above them clattered, and the door flew open, which let a lot more smoke down in with them. This time, Jon was the one to grab Melanie’s hand and drag her forward.
Sure enough, the shop was on fire. It seemed to have multiple points of origin, and it was all around them. Melanie stayed on her knees, frantically looking around, but the smoke was filling the space and she couldn’t see, she couldn’t—
“There!” Jon shouted, his voice slightly muffled.
Melanie still didn’t fucking see where he was pointing, but she let him drag her forward and then to her feet. Then she saw it. The wall where the window was located was burning, but the window still hung open, so if they jumped…
They ran. They jumped together. They tumbled ass over teakettle and landed on the grass outside, and they scrambled away from the building as fast as they could, both of them still coughing.
By some goddamned miracle, they managed to make it to the street and the Tube station without being caught, or noticed. Melanie heard the wail of the fire engine coming down the block as they disappeared into the station, but there was nobody else there and nobody on the train, and they collapsed into seats without comment.
It wasn’t until they were almost to the point where they would have to change trains that Jon spoke, a single word laden with all kinds of emotions. “Fuck.”
“That’s my line,” Melanie grumbled. She tucked her feet back as far as she could so she didn’t have to look at the socks, which she’d only just realized didn’t match. “Do you think someone knew we were down there?”
“Yes,” Jon said without hesitation. “But I don’t think they knew it was us. I think—and I-I think it was Jude Perry, I’m pretty sure I saw someone matching the description Martin gave me—I think she just saw the door open, deduced it was someone from the Institute looking for Martin, and tried to trap us in there to, to feed her god.”
“The Trophy Room must have meant something to someone then,” Melanie muttered. “But…Jesus.” She looked away.
Jon hesitantly put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. Melanie tried to stay stiff, but something in her broke. She’d been scared—not for herself, for Jon—and she couldn’t help being both angry and devastated that they’d been wrong. Martin hadn’t been there. He was…wherever he was, it wasn’t somewhere they could find.
She hugged Jon back, leaned her head against his, and cried.
Jon cried with her.