It’s Gerry’s idea, and in years to come, he is never going to forgive himself for it.
It seems like a good idea on the surface. December is an unpleasant month for all of them, especially after last year; even knowing his mother’s appearances aren’t necessarily tied to the seasons, it’s still hard to forget that Gerry only avoided a second murder charge because the only witness was a nurse who was herself the subject of an unexpected fight between the Beholder and the Lightless Flame and probably chose to try and put it from her mind rather than deal with the inevitable paperwork reporting it to the proper authorities would entail. Melanie still isn’t over losing Roger—frankly, neither is Martin, or Gerry if it comes to it—and from what she’s saying, or rather not saying, it doesn’t seem like her Ghost Hunt UK compatriots, all of whom still have both their parents, are particularly sympathetic towards her. Getting away from London for a bit, getting away from everything they have to deal with, will probably help all three of them. It makes sense to go somewhere they don’t normally go. And with Martin’s love of the historical, Melanie’s interest in the paranormal, and Gerry’s eye for the picturesque, the town of Rye is the perfect choice.
Gerry actually came down by the earliest train possible and met Melanie and Martin at the station almost three hours later, a departure from their usual patterns but the only way he could truly make this work, and the three of them spent a delightful afternoon exploring the town and being charmed and delighted. They climbed the bell tower of the Church of St. Mary’s to view the so-called “Quarter Boys”, and Gerry got to listen to an excited ramble from Melanie as they climbed about different types of striking clock, followed by Martin standing overlooking the town and reciting the Edgar Allan Poe poem in a rolling, sonorous voice that managed to time perfectly with the clock actually chiming the hour. They ate dinner at a nice little place overlooking the water, and then Gerry brought them here. He did, at least, tell them to be prepared to spend the night, but he knows they expected it to be a budget hotel of some kind, not a historic inn on a tiny little winding street. He definitely knows they weren’t expecting an extended stay, but fuck it, the Institute is closed until after the first of the year and the inn is running a special starting Christmas Eve, so why not extend that a day or two and stay a whole week?
“How long have you been planning this?” Martin asks, a bit distractedly. His eyes shine with wonder and delight as they scan the room. Gerry is pleased to see that; he’s been too worn down, too jaded lately, between his work at the Institute and his insistence on helping Gerry track down books for his mother’s ghost whenever possible. The spark that makes him Martin has been missing, and to see it kindle to life again as he takes in the richly appointed details of the so-called Elizabethan Chamber is truly a sight for sore eyes. “I can’t imagine this is the kind of place you can just walk in off the street and get a room at.”
“Not anymore, no,” Gerry answers. “Especially with the offer they’ve got going on right now. Evan suggested it. Came by the shop after we got back from Uncle Roger’s funeral with an advert he found, said he thought it would be right up your alley. Both of you. Apparently it’s haunted on top of everything else about it.”
“It’s only the most haunted place in Sussex.” Melanie sets her bag on the dresser. “We talked about doing a Ghost Hunt UK episode up here, but…honestly, we don’t really have the budget for it right now, and they don’t need the publicity or whatever, so they’re not going to pay for us to come film here.”
She sounds a bit despondent. Gerry doesn’t want that. He wants both of them to have a good time, a good Christmas. He slings an arm around her shoulder. “Well, aren’t you lucky, then? You get to see it anyway, and you have us with you instead of Pete and Andy.”
“Ugh.” Melanie rolls her eyes and shoves at his shoulder, but she’s smiling, however reluctantly. “Well. I did bring a hand camera, but the quality won’t be as good.”
Gerry steps back and presses a hand theatrically to his chest. “Are you saying we’re low quality?”
Martin laughs, a genuine, unfeigned burble of merriment, and it makes Melanie laugh, too, even as she whacks him with the pillow she always brings with her when she travels because it’s one of those things she’s particular about. Ordinarily Gerry would hit her back, but the pillows on the bed look like they might be real down pillows and since they’re not his, he doesn’t. Instead, he collapses dramatically onto the bed, which bounces in a very satisfying manner, and lets her continue to pommel him, making a token attempt at fighting her off until she gets bored and plops down next to him.
“Thanks, Ger,” she says sincerely. “I think I needed this.”
“I knew you did.” Gerry pokes her in the ribs lightly, making sure to telegraph his movements as obviously as possible so she can dodge if she doesn’t want to be poked today, then tips his head back to see Martin. “You did, too. Do. Whatever. You’ve both had a lot going on this year, you deserve some time to just…be.”
“So do you,” Martin points out.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Gerry rolls onto his side to regard Melanie more fully. “So tell me more about these ghosts. The rooms are haunted, right?”
“Some of them.” Melanie’s eyes get the gleam Gerry is familiar with, and he sits up, kicks off his boots, and gets comfortable for what might uncharitably be termed a lecture but which Gerry always thinks of as a lesson. “There’s a white or grey lady who haunts the James Room—guests who leave their clothes out tend to find them wet in the morning—and another grey lady who wanders the halls. She was the girlfriend of one of the members of the Hawkhurst Gang.”
“Them I’ve heard of. Smugglers, right?”
Martin nods. “Back in the eighteenth century, when Rye was more of a shipping town. I’ve heard one or two of them might have come to sticky ends—I, um, I think they brought in a couple of the older things in Artifact Storage—but, I mean, that was even before the Institute was founded.”
Melanie nods, too. “I think there are supposed to be a couple of them around here, too…anyway, the grey lady in the halls wears a maid’s uniform. Room Seventeen apparently has a rocking chair that will start rocking all on its own. There’s a white lady in Room Five who will just stop at the foot of the bed and a ghost of a man who emerged from the bathroom wall in Room Ten. And this one is the most infamous of all—two men who fought a duel, and one killed the other in here and dropped his body through a trapdoor into the bar below. A couple of years ago the barman said all the bottles were knocked off the shelf at once while he was on the other side of the room, and he quit the next day. And there are others. Lots of others, I think. Honestly, every single ghost hunting show in the United Kingdom could film an episode here and we’d probably all get different ghosts.”
Gerry hums. “Noisy bunch?”
“Not that I’ve heard, why?”
“No reason.” Gerry could swear there’s the low buzz of voices just on the edge of his hearing, but decides it’s either someone in another room—unlikely, as the timbers look thick—or his own imagination. “So a trapdoor, huh? Is it still there?”
“No, they closed them all up,” Martin says. “I read about this place—there used to be all kinds of secret passages, but today the only one left is between Dr. Syn’s room and the bar. There’s a secret panel behind the fireplace. I think they turned all the others into just…ordinary fireplaces.”
“Let’s find out.” Gerry pushes himself to a sitting position.
Melanie bounces out of the bed and dashes for her bag, then triumphantly pulls out a small video camera. She opens it up, taps a couple buttons, then holds it up in front of her, focusing it on Gerry. “Okay! And…we’re live. Welcome to a very special episode of Ghost Hunt UK!”
“You know ‘a very special episode’ is TV code for ‘we’re handling a super serious and maybe dangerous topic’, right?” Martin says from behind her.
“Oh, shut up. This isn’t real anyway.” Melanie puts her “host voice” back on. “We are standing in the Elizabethan Chamber of the historic Mermaid Inn in beautiful Rye, one of the most haunted places in the whole of England. And when I say ‘we’, I’m not talking about the usual crew, either! Everyone say hello to my brothers, Martin—” She pans the camera around to Martin, who waves awkwardly, and then swings it back to Gerry. “And Gerry.”
Gerry makes the devil horns sign and sticks out his tongue, revealing the new silver stud in the center. Melanie rolls her eyes behind the camera. “Anyway! We’re exploring the room to get an idea of what it might have looked like back when the ghosts that haunt it were alive. Martin, you want to tell us about the trapdoor?”
“Sure,” Martin says amiably, although the look in his eye says not really but I will and if the unedited footage gets onto the internet I will make you eat that camera. “So, back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, smuggling was a big industry in Rye. Like, a really big industry. The Hawkhurst Gang, which was a notorious band of smugglers based primarily out of Hawkhurst in Kent, just on the border with East Sussex, used the Mermaid Inn as their secondary base of operations, and there was even a tunnel connecting it to the Olde Bell Inn—they had a revolving cupboard in there where they could get the goods out quickly. Supposedly at one time the Mermaid Inn was full of secret passages and trapdoors and things like that, but they’ve all been bricked up. They’re just false fireplaces now. Like this one.” He puts a hand on the carved stone finial on one end of the fireplace mantle.
Something clicks, and there’s a surprisingly soft grating sound as the back of the fireplace swings inward, revealing a hidden space beyond.
Martin blinks. “Or…they’re not actually closed off at all.”
Melanie lowers the camera, just slightly. “How did you do that?”
Gerry comes a little closer. The fireplace is huge; he barely has to stoop to fit under the mantlepiece, Melanie can just walk right in, and Martin, well, Martin will have to duck a bit. He ignores the buzz of voices that he’s definitely sure are his imagination, even if they are getting louder and more insistent, and peers into the space. “There’s a flight of steps. Looks like we’re at the top.”
“We’re going to explore it, right?” Melanie’s voice sounds hopeful. “Come on, if they really didn’t want us to they’d have blocked it or roped it off or something. And can you imagine what kind of ghosts might be down there?”
“Do you think spiders have ghosts?” Martin ducks down to squint into the space. “There’s a lot of cobwebs in there.”
At that, Melanie’s excitement dims slightly. “Define ‘a lot’.”
“A normal amount for a creepy abandoned passage, but not so many that I think the Web might be involved,” Martin says absently. “I can Look, if you want.”
“No, I trust you. I don’t feel anything off either.” Melanie looks between Martin and Gerry. “We’re going in, then? Please?”
“Hold on, I think I’ve got a torch.” Gerry turns to his bag and begins rummaging through it.
Gerry, STOP!
At Martin’s desperate, frightened command, Gerry jerks and turns back towards his siblings. The what dies on his lips, and he furrows his brow in confusion as he realizes the voice he just heard…doesn’t match Martin’s expression. He looks intrigued, maybe even a little excited, as he eyeballs the space. He is talking, but it’s a low muttering as he and Melanie toss calculations and logistics back and forth. Neither one of them is even looking in his direction.
There’s no stopping it, a voice says in the back of his mind, and it sounds so sad that Gerry wonders what the fuck is wrong with his mind. Believe me, I’ve tried. Just have to wait it out. You can leave if you need to.
Fuck that, Melanie says, or is that in his head too? We’re staying. You leave.
Gerry shakes his head, ever so slightly. He’s obviously tired from being up all night; he’s hearing things. Resolutely putting the thought out of his mind, he turns back to his bag and gets out the torch.
“Right,” he says, clicking on the torch. “Who’s going first?”
“I am.” Martin takes the torch from him. “I’m the biggest. If it gets too narrow for me, we’ll stop. But like you said, it’s just a single flight of steps going down. Probably this just leads to the cellars. Those date back to the twelfth century, you know.”
“Don’t take all the fun out of the mystery before we get there,” Melanie grumbles.
Gerry laughs. “Fine. Lead on, Macduff.”
“It’s ‘Lay on, Macduff,’” Melanie says. “And that doesn’t mean what you think it means. He used it to goad Macduff into action—a more modern translation would probably be something like ‘bring it, old man’.”
Gerry scoffs at her. “Do I look like the kind of person who reads Macbeth?”
“The Scottish Play,” Melanie scolds him. “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to say the name?”
“Isn’t that only if you’re actually in a theater?”
“‘All the world’s a stage,’” Martin declaims in a theatrical voice, making both Melanie and Gerry snort. “And if you two fucking nerds are done, let’s go into the spooky tunnels and pretend to be smugglers.”
This is probably a bad idea (a whole chorus of voices in Gerry’s head shouts You think so?), but it’s hard to deny his siblings anything right now, and Gerry has to admit he’s curious. So he makes another playful face for the camera and ducks under the mantle after Martin.
The stairway is narrow, but not overtly so; Martin fits quite comfortably, at least for now. The tread is a bit on the steep side, but appears to be in good repair. Martin proves just tall enough to stand at the top of the stairs, and once he’s sure the other two are following, he begins to descend, Gerry on his heels. He hears Melanie’s step behind him and knows they’re all inside.
“How far down do we think this goes?” he asks. Despite everything being stone, his voice doesn’t echo. It seems, in fact, curiously muffled.
“Like I said, probably just to the cellars,” Martin says from up front. “So, like, two floors? As steep as these are, it fits in a much smaller space.”
“But there might be other doors off it,” Melanie says. “Or ghosts!”
“Oh, this place is definitely haunted,” Martin agrees.
Gerry lets them banter, occasionally joining in, but for the most part he’s just enjoying the adventure, lame though it is. Martin’s right, it’s just a flight of stairs that probably leads a couple stories down into an ancient cellar.
Suddenly, Melanie stops and makes an annoyed sound. Gerry turns, just in time to hear a shrill beep. “Low battery. I swear I charged this thing…”
“Hang on, you’ve got a spare, right?” Gerry squeezes past her. “I’ll run up and grab it. You two keep going. It’s straight down—not like I can miss you, right?”
“Yeah, okay.” Melanie waves the camera. “When you inevitably get lost trying to find us, I just want you to remember I have a recording of that.”
Gerry laughs and begins jogging up the stairs again.
It’s…dark, which he should have expected. Even if it is a straight shot, these stairs are steep, and he begins to worry he’s going to miss his footing. He slows and reaches into his pockets, then pulls out his lighter. Burning it for an extended period of time isn’t safe, obviously—more than a minute or two of continuous burning and it’ll catch the whole thing on fire—but it should give him enough light to see until he reaches the top. After all, it’s only two stories down. He can’t be that far from the top.
Can he?
The flame flickers into existence and Gerry takes a moment to examine the walls around him. Strange. He thought they were stone, but these look like…earth. Plain, ordinary packed dirt. But of course, if he’s in the inn proper, they can’t be…
He climbs, and climbs, and climbs, and goddamn this is a long staircase. Seems like it’s getting steeper, too, and it’s a strain. The flame flickers weakly, and worried that there might be a problem, he flips it closed, then opens it and flicks it to get it lit again. It doesn’t light right away, but that happens sometimes, so he tries again. And again. Jesus, it’s cold in here, and the air tastes…stale all of a sudden. A tiny part of him worries that maybe he shouldn’t light a fire and burn up all the oxygen…but that’s silly, the door is open at the top of the stairs—
A shrill scream echoes up from somewhere below, cut off abruptly and almost making him drop the lighter. Gerry turns, flame and room and battery forgotten, and starts running heedlessly down the stairs. Because he knows that voice, knows it almost better than he knows his own, and that’s Melanie down there, something has happened.
“Neenie!” he bellows, and then he misses his footing and skids, and suddenly he’s bumping down the stairs like the world’s worst slide, each riser painfully bumping against his tailbone. He almost doesn’t think about the pain, too focused on finding his sister, and okay, maybe there’s a part of him thinking this is helpful, I’ll get there faster…
Abruptly, or so it seems, the staircase changes from straight to helical, and now he’s tumbling ass over teakettle down a tight corkscrew of dirt and stone, bouncing painfully off walls and steps alike as he tries unsuccessfully to slow his descent, and this isn’t right, this is too far, he should have hit bottom by now…
As the thought crosses his mind, he hits a solid straight stretch and tumbles and skids a few more feet until he slams hard into something softer and more yielding than a wall, something that tangles around him and screams in his face and claws at him.
“Neens, Neenie, it’s me, it’s me!” Gerry grabs out to stop the flailing and manages to catch what he assumes are her wrists. It’s pitch black down here and for all he knows he’s got her ankles. “It’s me! Are you okay?”
“Gerry?” Melanie gasps, then flings herself forward. Gerry grunts as she manages to slot every single part of herself into a bruise, but then, to be fair, Gerry’s pretty sure he is just one big bruise right now. “I-I dropped the camera, I think, I don’t—it, I missed my footing and I fell and I—where are we?”
“Underground,” Gerry says, which he knows isn’t helpful but it’s all he can think of. He hugs Melanie tighter, trying to comfort her, and then suddenly stiffens. “Where’s Martin? Martin!”
A weak groan comes from somewhere up ahead. “Here. I’m—I think I’m stuck.”
“What do you mean, you’re stuck?” Melanie pushes off Gerry; he gasps as she unerringly pushes into the center of his chest and a bruise that temporarily makes it hard to breathe. “Where’s the bloody torch?”
“Dropped it. Must have.” Martin sounds like he’s having trouble breathing himself. “I—I can’t—my arm—”
“Hold on.” Gerry pats down his pockets. The packet of Woodbines is smashed flat, the cigarettes probably ruined, but his lighter is safely back where it belongs—he supposes he stuck it in there on instinct while trying to flee down the steps—somehow still there despite the headlong tumble. He fishes it out; it takes him a couple tries, but he finally manages to coax it back to life and looks around.
This is…not a cellar. Or at least not a historic one. It’s a cave dug out of dirt and clay. Martin, thank God, is only a few feet further on, but it looks like in tumbling forward his momentum drove him into the wall, causing part of it to collapse, and his arm is partially buried. His eyes are tightly shut, and Gerry thinks at first it’s to protect them from the sudden flare of light until he realizes his glasses are missing.
“Martin!” Melanie scrambles forward, not bothering to get up, and grabs Martin’s trapped arm just below the shoulder. Gerry scuttles closer as well, flips the lighter closed, and manages to intersperse his hands with Melanie’s.
“We’ve got you,” he promises. “On three, okay, Neens? One…two…three!”
They haul in unison and manage to free his arm. There’s a whumph and a rattle as the rubble rushes to fill the space left behind, and then Gerry hears the familiar rustle of fabric as Melanie hugs Martin tightly. “Jesus, are you okay?”
“Arm hurts, but…’m okay.” Martin doesn’t sound terribly sure. “Let’s get out of here. This is worse than the closet.”
Gerry is about to make a crack about Martin never having been closeted in his life when he suddenly and abruptly recalls a conversation from almost seventeen years ago. Martin’s never brought it up again and Gerry has never asked, but he blurts out, “Did your mum really lock you in the hall closet when you were little?”
“What?” Melanie says, her voice low and dangerous.
Martin doesn’t answer for a long moment, then finally sighs. “She stopped when she and Roger got married and we all moved in together, but…yeah, all the time. N-never knew what would…set her off.”
“Jesus fucking Christ on a goddamned pogo stick.” Gerry shoves to his feet with the intention of storming up to the surface, getting to Devon as fast as possible, and strangling Liliana Blackwood with his bare hands. At least, he tries to, but he doesn’t actually even manage to unbend his legs all the way before he slams his head painfully into the ceiling of the little cavern they’re in. He drops back to his knees, wrapping his arms over his head and cursing a blue streak.
“Low clearance?” Martin says dryly.
“Shut up.” Gerry rubs his head. It hurts like a bitch. “Screw it. Let’s get out of here.”
“I’m in complete agreement,” Melanie says. “Um, which way is out?”
“Hang on.” Gerry reaches out and finds someone’s hand—it’s skinny and bony, so it must be Melanie’s. “Grab my ankle. Martin, you grab Melanie’s ankle. That way we can stay together while we crawl out of here. Follow me.”
He waits until he feels Melanie’s hand clamp securely around his ankle, then flicks his lighter on long enough to get his bearings before he starts crawling forward.
There’s a rumbling, and a creaking, and a groaning, and it’s getting warmer and warmer. He can hear Melanie and Martin gasping for breath behind him and feels the tightness in his own chest and knows they’re running out of air, but they have to keep going, they have to get out of here.
“Breathe lightly,” he calls back hoarsely. “The steps have to be close.”
Or do they? Surely they’ve been crawling far enough, surely they should have found the stairs by now. Gerry grits his teeth and keeps dragging himself forward, inch by inch, his sister clinging to his ankle and Martin shoving from behind and—
The ceiling is getting lower. It can’t be doing that, he would have noticed during his tumble and sprawl if the ceiling was that low, it would have stopped him sooner. He must have gone the wrong way…but there were no turn-offs, were there? What the fuck is going on? Did the cellar collapse on top of them? Has there been an earthquake? The tectonic plates don’t cut through here, surely they wouldn’t get an earthquake, but what else could have shaken the building on top of them?
He’s starting to panic a little, and that’s making it harder to breathe, but everything already feels so close and oppressive, and where the fuck are the goddamned stairs? He can’t hyperventilate, he’ll use up all the oxygen, and Melanie and Martin need it just as much as he does, maybe more, he’s already poisoned his lungs enough, oh, God, he should have quit smoking years ago when Martin asked, his lungs won’t be able to compensate for this and—
“There isn’t an out,” Melanie says from behind him, her voice small and shaking and weak, even as her hand tightens around his ankle. “There isn’t even an up…”
“There is! There is! Remember the sun!” Gerry tries not to panic. He tries to take his own advice, tries to remember anything other than the crushing weight of dirt and the choking, oppressive mud, anything that will remind him of up and out and safe and…
Something is crackling, and at first he thinks it’s the blood swishing through his ears, but then he realizes it sounds like static. The static gets louder and louder, and there’s something comforting about it, but he can’t remember what or why, but it means something, it means—
“Go! Fast!” Martin gasps out from behind him, and the static dies even as the creaking and rumbling gets louder. “Twenty feet ahead and st-straight up—go—” He gives a small, agonized cry.
Gerry realizes what Martin did—he Looked, he used his ability from the Eye to See the powers around them—which means this isn’t normal, which he really fucking should have realized sooner. But if Martin says twenty feet, then they can get there, they can do it.
“Come on!” he cries, and begins dragging himself as fast as he can. Melanie’s vice-like grip around his ankle is the only thing keeping him grounded, keeping him sane. His siblings need him, he can’t lose them, and if he gets them to the steps he—
“Martin!” Melanie screams, and Gerry’s brain short-circuits because he can’t, he can’t do this again, he—
It’s okay, it’s okay, just keep going, you can do it, a voice whispers urgently in the back of his mind, and that makes him panic worse, because it’s definitely whatever—no, not whatever, this is a definite, it’s the Buried and it’s trying to get them and it’s fucking taunting him and trying to give him false hope—
“Go! Run!” Martin’s voice is strained and terrified and getting fainter by the second. “It—it’ll take me and—”
“No!” Gerry shouts, and somehow he leapfrogs over Melanie in the narrow space, reaches out, and grabs Martin’s arms. Martin is…stuck. He can feel that. The Buried has him in its grip and it is not letting go, it’s going to draw Martin in and keep him there forever, but fuck that because Gerry isn’t leaving him here.
“Gerry.” Martin isn’t making any real effort to help him. “Go. Please. Take Melanie and get out.”
“I’m not leaving you again!” Melanie cries. Gerry yelps in surprise as she wedges herself next to him, and her arm brushes over his hand as she—he assumes—grabs to pull Martin out, too. “Not for good, not like this.”
“Please,” Martin says again, and his voice cracks, he’s definitely crying. “Please, I—d-don’t let this be for nothing. I’ll, it’s worth it if you get out…”
Gerry knows Martin will gladly sacrifice himself for them. It’s all he’s done since they met him—take all the blame for their transgressions, draw the attention of the things that stalk them, insist on the smallest portion or the most damaged thing or go without if there’s not enough. Drop out of school and bind himself to an eldritch power body and soul to take care of their parents so Melanie can have her dream job. And it will probably work; if he and Melanie run right now, they’ll probably make it out, knowing for the rest of their lives they sacrificed their brother to save their own skin. But Melanie won’t, Gerry will have to drag her out kicking and screaming, and she’ll probably let go of him…
No, Gerry realizes. Calm comes over him suddenly. The Buried doesn’t want Martin to sacrifice himself for them. It just wants him to think he has. If he tries to run now, Melanie will pull away and he’ll lose her too, and they’ll all be trapped and alone. If he stays, at least they’ll be trapped together.
“We’re not leaving you,” he says, and he lies down alongside Melanie.
There’s not much of Martin sticking out, just his arms and head—most of his shoulders are trapped now—but Gerry winds one arm around Martin’s, then wraps the other around Melanie and pulls her close. Her heart is beating rapidly, and she clings to him desperately and tucks in close. Martin’s breath is coming in stuttering gasps and sobs, and Gerry scoots a bit closer, pressing their heads together as best he can.
Quietly, almost desperately, he starts singing “Let the Bulgine Run”, which is the song they usually sing when burning a Buried Leitner. If they can’t escape, they can at least give it one last fuck you. Melanie joins in, her voice shaky and uncertain, but when it gets to the third voice and it should be Martin’s turn, all that comes out is a faint croak and a gasp, and then he falls utterly silent.
“Martin? Martin, stay with us,” he urges, panic rising. “O we’re outward bound for New York Town—”
Melanie sings the group part, her voice a little louder than usual, but Martin doesn’t join in, he’s not singing, he’s barely breathing. Gerry tightens his hand around Martin’s arm, tries again to pull him out so that if they all are going to die, at least they’ll all die together—
—and then, suddenly, he sits bolt upright with a gasp, gulping air greedily like a starving man.
He’s…in bed. The comfiest bed he’s ever been in in his life, and he realizes after a moment that it’s the four-poster bed in the Elizabethan Chamber. The room is silent and utterly still, and the sheets smell of lavender and the bed smells of lemon furniture polish, and it’s warm enough to be cosy but not cold enough to be miserable.
A dream, then? A nightmare?
There’s a soft groan from next to him, and Melanie sits up, rubbing at her temples. Gerry is about to ask if she’s okay when he sees a thin trickle of dirt fall from her hair and onto the sheets.
Not a dream. It happened.
“Melanie?” he asks tentatively, and Melanie doesn’t hesitate, she gasps and lunges for him and hugs him. He strokes her hair and feels more dirt trickle out, and part of him wonders if housekeeping is going to bitch at them, but most of it is too preoccupied with the fact that they’re alive, they’re alive, they made it out…
Oh, God, Martin.
Gerry turns to his other side, almost afraid to look, but there’s Martin, face pinched and pale, but lying next to him in the bed. He starts to relax until he realizes he can’t see if he’s breathing.
“Martin? Martin!” Suddenly panicking again, Gerry frees one arm from Melanie and shakes Martin, hard. “Martin, wake up!”
For a long moment, there’s no response, and Gerry is about to bark for Melanie to call 999 when Martin’s eyes snap open, and if you ask Gerry what his favorite color is right now he’ll tell you green in a heartbeat because those eyes are the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He sighs heavily with relief, closing his eyes momentarily. “Martin, thank God. Are—are you okay?”
“I—I don’t know.” Martin sits up slowly.
Gerry hisses in pain, opening his eyes involuntarily as Melanie crawls over his lap. Her knee digs into a bruise—so, yep, that definitely happened—but she ignores it and throws her arms around both her brothers’ necks.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, her voice muffled. “I shouldn’t have—”
“I did as much as you did,” Martin says, his voice still shaking, but he’s hugging both Gerry and Melanie tightly as he does so. “I shouldn’t have Looked, I think that made it worse—”
“Fucking hell, you two, this was my idea,” Gerry says. He clasps both of them to complete the circle. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought I was—”
Martin gives a shaky chuckle. “I mean…you saved us. Me.”
“We saved each other.”
Melanie doesn’t exactly let go of them, but she doesn’t exactly cling as hard as she wiggles her way between them and under the covers. “What day is it?”
“‘Why, sir, ‘tis Christmas Day!’” Martin quips. It’s not his best Dickens impersonation, but it does at least break the tension as both Melanie and Gerry start laughing.
Gerry turns and reaches for the nightstand out of habit—and yes, his phone is there, actually. He thumbs it and does a double take. “Actually…fuck, it is. We lost a whole day down there.”
Melanie stops laughing instantly. Martin shivers. “It wanted us bad.”
“Well. Hmmph.” Melanie sticks her tongue out at the fireplace, which is closed and sits quietly and innocuously in the corner. “Never got us that time, did you? We beat you.”
“I don’t think we did,” Martin says softly. He pushes his glasses, which Gerry has only just realized he’s wearing—didn’t he lose those?—back up his nose with one finger. “I think it just…let us go. For some reason. It didn’t claim us forever.”
“But it might,” Gerry says. It’s not a question. He gathers Martin and Melanie close again. “That’s it. I’m not letting you two near it ever again.”
“Likewise. I’m not losing either one of you, and certainly not to Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe.” Melanie doesn’t exactly let go of them, but she’s not holding on tight as she wriggles and maneuvers herself until she’s nestled under the covers between them. “Can we just…stay here for the day? I don’t need anything else for Christmas. I have you two, and we’re all alive, if Marked. And I am not going back in that passage.”
“No,” Gerry agrees. “We can stay here. I don’t mind.”
“Me, either.” Martin rubs at his forehead. “That hurt.”
“Tell me about it.” Gerry rubs at the kinks and knots he can feel at the back of his neck. “We’ve probably got whiplash from falling down those stairs. Let’s just take it easy, and we can decide to do stuff tomorrow, maybe. We don’t check out until the twenty-eighth.”
“There’s time.” Melanie sighs and flops down onto the bed, tugging her brothers down with her. “Love you both. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” Martin echoes.
“Merry Christmas,” Gerry says softly. I won’t ever let this happen again. I swear on my life.