A girl stood alone, felt alone.
And there was laughter. There was ozone. Somewhere far off there was a calliope organ drawling its ouroboros of melodic lunacy, screaming a song of infinite etceteras like shrieking metal. And it was warm.
Feeling alone was the best of it.
And, quite suddenly, the girl became aware of her true purpose in the universe. It hit her upside the head like a cold slap. It was explicit and extensive and very-fucking-horrifying—like a supermarket receipt detailing all of her failings in life, stretching on into the foggy middle distance—and it probably would have traumatized her for life had it not been forgotten in that same instant. Overwritten. Gone. A flick to the forehead.
And something new and important took its place.
From now on, the girl would be called Ampere, but then again, as far as anyone perceptible was concerned, this had always been the case.
There was the feeling of having crossed an invisible boundary.
And Ampere felt the seatbelt dig a little into her shoulder. She readjusted it.
«All I’m saying is that at least back home all the ghosts were tied to cathedrals or fairy rings. Something understandable. In America, there are ghosts everywhere, and especially in the forest. I could point out this window right now and any one of those trees could be haunted. » She gestured to the endless stand of conifers whipping past outside the window.
Her dad drummed fingers on the steering wheel. «I told you not to let your cousins talk you into watching the Blair Witch Project. And this isn’t America, it’s Canada. There’ll be less ghosts, I promise. »
Ampere sat with her legs uncrossed, trying her best to ignore the fact that the front of the U-Haul truck smelled overwhelmingly of wet dog and Dorito dust. The pine tree air freshener that swung behind the mirror was a false prophet.
Canada, America, who cared? They were both disparagingly vast, filled with dirty, snowy cities, and a whole ten hour plane ride away from home.
«They called it the classic movie, » Ampere said. «They kept saying that I was uncultured. »
«The classics are stuff like Casablanca and Citizen Kane and Indiana Jones, » her dad said, snickering. “Do kids these days think they can watch Blair Witch and call themselves cultured? »
Ampere sighed something deep and petty. «Well, if it makes you feel better, I hid behind a pillow the whole time. » She switched briefly to English. “And then they made fun of my accent the rest of the day.”
«There’s nothing wrong with your accent. »
Yeah, nothing wrong with how all her Rs dragged like they weighed five pounds on her tongue, or how long words became strangled ordeals of choppy, mismatched syllables that caught in her throat. It sounded that way in comparison to her cousins, at least. Kids were going to rip the mickey right out of her.
«My accent faded after I spoke enough French, » her dad continued. «You’ll assimilate easily enough. » He poked Ampere in the side with his elbow, and she had to smile.
«Sure, but I’m still going to rent all the Stephen King movies from the library once we get to Magnet Creek. » If she couldn’t help her accent, she could at least help her pop culture ignorance—a stiff life of classic literature and strict bedtimes does that to a person. «Also, Magnet Creek definitely has ghosts. »
«Magnet Creek doesn’t have ghosts, » her dad said. «It’s way out in the boonies, so it’ll have Bigfoot. »
«Just another thing to worry about, » Ampere said, staring down at her plaid skirt.
Truthfully, ethereal distractions were welcome. It was a relief to have something fictional to fear, something with a weakness well-documented by pop culture, that could be melted with a cross or holy water. Something that wasn’t a family-shattering sexual affair.
Ampere sighed, fogging the glass. Life wasn’t fair. A murder ghost would have been so much easier to understand than scandal and divorce—probably would have hurt less, too.
Never mind the fact that the news about the split had been broken over Ampere’s own birthday dinner. Like, “Congratulations, you’re officially a teenager now, time to grow the hell up.” She’d decided then and there not to cry about it. Ever. It wouldn’t have helped anyone.
Vintage photos were scattered across the dash, and she gathered them, held them like playing cards. They showed sepia snapshots of an old manor set against the pines, with a front of Grecian columns and a walk guarded by stone statues. The Hearne Mansion of lore.
Ampere’s father’s plan read as follows (title: The Master Plan; subtitle: what to do if your wife gets tired of her trophy husband and cuts of his funds, the trophy husband being you, the cutting off of the funds being a real big problem for you, the trophy husband):
* Move back overseas to America
* Borrow money from your sister (and also crash on her couch for a few days, with the unintended by-product of your daughter ingesting a heaping helping of horror movies courtesy of her meddling cousins)
* Drive north to the long-abandoned ancestral nesting grounds of Magnet Creek; there’s a mansion
* You live there now
* Gut the interior of furniture and antiques (they’re yours somehow probably)
* Sell them for cash
* Start over
* Somehow
* Start your entire life over on the only legs you have
* Somehow
Somehow, everything would work out.
A road sign whizzed past the truck window, announcing Magnet Creek to be the next turn off on the highway. Ampere craned her neck and stared at the passing canopy, each tree trunk like a star radiating branches and needles. Soft light dappled the road. Moss dripped down trunks, huckleberry bushes sprouted from rotten stumps, and everything was so overwhelmingly green. Green and damp.
Then legs came striding behind the trees.
Ampere jerked her face away from the window. She blinked, hit with the split-second vertigo of a double take, but then pressed back, scanning the side of the road.
And there they were: a troop of stretched men, legs and arms dangling like pulled vanilla taffy, plodding along just behind the curtain of foliage. They were faceless. Their jackets glinted white-gold like lightning. Some carried instruments, tubas and snare drums bigger than the U-Haul. It was a marching band.
The truck pulled off the highway and the troop was snatched from view, disappearing behind the swell of rushing scenery. Ampere smudged her nose to the window, but there was nothing left but placid forest.
«Dad, » she started, but his face was passive, concentrated on the road ahead of him and The Who on the radio.
Ampere clammed up. She folded her hands together, wedging them between her thighs, and set about thinking herself in circles.
She took one last look out the window. Nothing but more green. Then the town came into view, the tunnel of coastal rainforest flying away and sunshine dawning.
Approximately one month previous, if you’re the kind of chump who measures time like that
Magnet Creek was so small it was almost claustrophobic. Among its prestige it counted two drugstores, a Laundromat, a moulding library, a pitiful strip mall, and (the crown jewel, wait for it now) a pizzeria.
Forested mountains loomed from all angles, and some residents would swear they could feel the landscape watching them. It made for a very squashed existence.
Segues being what they are, they had an elementary school, too—one hundred and fifteen students all packed into several rectangular sections of concrete and imposed expectations.
Segues, again, being what they are, have you ever seen what happens when you leave a soda out in a hot car? When you leave a soda can to bake in the sweltering sun? Explosions happen, that’s what. Frothy, syrupy, sugary combustion. It’s unpleasant for absolutely everyone and not a recommended experience.
This summer was queuing up to be the hottest on record, and one hundred and fifteen sticky students—sweating through their last day of classes, bouncing on the verge of freedom—were about as explosive as a Coke can full of nitroglycerin.
So explosive, in fact, that when the doors finally opened and the bodies poured out, not a one of them noticed the lion watching them from across the soccer field.
Actually, let’s redact that. That’s a lie. There were six who noticed.
They stood there as classmates hopped into cars, scrambled down the sidewalk to the corner store, whooped with elation, and they stared. It was impossible not to. Once having been noticed, lions are notorious for demanding audience.
And this lion was blue as the morning sky. Instead of smooth fur, its limbs were made of something coiled, something stretched and malleable, like its skin has been meticulously peeled away to reveal the candy-coloured bands of muscle underneath. It lacked eyes of any sort, but its stare had a power to it. Wispy, cirrus clouds roiled about its neck, waves of the stuff curling in on themselves like they obeyed the tide pull of the moon.
A truck horn blared across the parking lot and the lion slipped away behind the tree line, dissolving amidst the pines.
The six looked at each other.
Circa 436.8 hours post lion (about two weeks and a half [chump])
“Do you ever think about how humans were given joints for a reason?”
Mole (Vietnamese, chubby in a spunky way, think “supermodel scrunched down a few heads”) answered from behind thirteen layers of denim. “Nope. Never.”
“We were given joints so as to assist in creating the ultimate Canadian tuxedo,” said Meter (Mole’s twin, messy crew cut, think “Santa’s elf in the off season”). “You can’t layer jean jackets when your elbows don’t bend. Mole was given joints so that she could understand the experience of having bendability stolen from her. Remember, this is art.”
Kilo (corkscrew hair, soft voice with a slight stutter, think “albino Jesse Eisenburg”) nodded sagely from his seat on the grass. He wore a purple bathrobe with stars painted on in neon yellow. “At its finest. We need to be contemplative. Mole, do you feel contemplative?”
“I feel hot and sweaty.”
Mole was covered head to toe in jeans of all colours and creeds, from pantaloons to jackets to a pair of starchy, fingerless gloves they’d scrapped out of a forbidden corner of the thrift shop on Main Street. The trio had collectively agreed the gloves were the most repulsive things they’d ever laid eyes on. They’d collectively bought them immediately.
They’d learned long ago that the worse something was objectively, the better the internet responded to it.
And creating the Ultimate Canadian Tuxedo was just what one does when one lives in a town the size of a goddamn cracker box. And also when one has a moderately successful Youtube channel.
The three of them were gathered in the twin’s backyard, documenting the layering process, which was like a very laborious version of paper maché.
Mole’s arms were stuck straight out. She tried to wave them, but to no avail. “I have a contemplation,” she announced. “I’m a video game character trapped in a T pose.”
“You look like the blueberry girl from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Meter said. “What’s her name?”
“Violet Beauregarde,” Kilo answered.
“Ironically not such a beau regard,” Meter said. “It makes for good TV, though. You’re still filming, yeah?”
Kilo leaned over to check the camera. It sat on a fixed tripod, recording the whole scene. It was also their prized possession, having taken several months allowance from all of them and several off-sales from Mole’s shoplifting hauls to purchase. It had all the latest features, like batteries and view screens and lenses. What’s more, it even recorded video. Worth every penny.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“Still filming,” Kilo said. “She’s looking kind of round. Hey, do you think we could roll her around so long as we’re careful about her head?”
Mole tried to look down at herself, but her neck was fixed in place by countless shirt collars. “I don’t think I could stop you guys if I tried. You have my consent, anyways.”
“Oh, sweet!” Meter enthused. “Gimme one sec and I’ll be done, and we can get this denim onion rolling.”
He fluffed out one final jean jacket, but a chittering came from the woods.
See, the twin’s house backed right up into the Magnet Creek forest, and where other suburban backyards would have a white painted fence or perhaps a delightful pruned hedge, they had the endless, shadowy, mulch-smelling woods. It truly made for some of the best adventures.
Meter looked up into the trees, still fluffing, and noticed the balls of pale cotton candy stuck to the branches.
“Guys,” he said, suspicious, (because everything that had happened in the 436.8 hours since the lion had made him paranoid. And rightfully so. There had been many harrowing incidents). “Nobody freak out, but look up at the trees.”
Thankfully, up was one direction in which Mole could indeed look.
The cotton candy fluffs unfurled their arms and legs, wiggling alarmingly dextrous fingers and toes. They were monkeys. Like the lion, they lacked eyes, but their teeth were sharp and more than made up for it. They wore dark blue vests and shot-glass-sized fezzes. Their fur was white as dentist’s linoleum, and they were making a soft, subtle, but gratingly cacophonous chattering noise.
Kilo already had covered his ears in anticipation.
Meter moved towards where one of their props lay on the ground: Kilo’s wizard staff. There wasn’t any particular reason why Kilo was dressed as a wizard, but thank goodness he was.
The monkeys leaped from the trees to perch on the garden shrubs. A pair alighted on the neighbor’s fence and stared at Mole with a dangerous sort of curiosity. She stared back.
“They’re not going to move on, are they?” she asked.
“The lion didn’t attack,” Kilo said. “Neither did the marching band. Maybe they’re peaceful.”
Meter gripped the wizard staff, gave it a few experimental slashes. “The horses weren’t peaceful. I’d rather not get any more bruises, hoof-shaped or otherwise.”
Mole shrieked as one of the monkeys pounced onto her shoulder. She wobbled, trying to shake it off. It didn’t bite or scratch, just chattered and scampered.
The monkeys’ song grew to a roar. They flicked their tails, gnashed their teeth, circling in closer, tighter.
Kilo pressed his hands to his skull, tensing up like the chaos pained him—which of course it did, or it would soon enough. He could feel the itching buzz building up in the back of his skull. He looked to Meter apologetically.
“It’s fine,” Meter said. He readied the staff. “I’ve got you.”
Mole dislodged her monkey, and it scuttled off to join its comrades. The song was overwhelming now, doming, like it had corporeal form and was fencing them in. It sounded like a murmuration of starlets, only cackling and impossibly electric.
The air stood still for a tick, ozone caking their lungs and tickling their skin.
The murmuration of monkeys sprang. Wisps of white flew through the air. They swirled around the trio’s feet—a living, livid hurricane.
Meter swung, but the creatures danced out of the way. They grinned. They scampered over his feet, toying with him, slipping in and around like smoke.
Mole couldn’t keep her balance and toppled over. The murmuration parted around her when she hit the ground, then swarmed back over. She screamed, flailing. The tiny claws stung.
Kilo waded over to her, hands still clamped over his ears, wizard robe flapping in the primate-powered gale. He kicked, chipping away at the violent white flurry.
Non-partisan monkeys watched from the fences, jeering.
Grabby hands yanked at Meter’s staff. He pulled away, but everything was too fast. It was like trying to fight a river. Or a hail storm.
Kilo shut his eyes, his fingers driving into this skull. And the gale slowed.
The monkeys shrieked in confusion, no longer bound to the earth. Their forms turned blob-like and mushy as their movement stuttered.
Meter knew an opportunity when he saw one. He lined up a shot and swung with all the gusto of a middle-aged golf enthusiast. He caught a monkey square in the stomach.
And:
It cracked. It cracked in the most unnatural, fucking sickening way and not at all in the squishy, organ-filled way stomachs were supposed to.
The rest of the murmuration stopped dead. The residue sound of the crack hung in the air. The unfortunate monkey flew, a perfect shot across the green, and disappeared into the woods. There was no sound to tell where it had landed.
And the murmuration vanished like a mist. A figurative mist. They didn’t dissolve, however possible that might have been for them; they ran away, scattering like rats. Figurative rats. They were monkeys.
An unease descended over the backyard like a mist.
Then:
“Yeah!” Mole shouted from the ground. “You better run!”
Kilo stood over her—floated, actually; his feet were a foot and a half off the ground—watching the monkeys retreat, and when she nudged his leg and he flinched.
Meter dropped the staff. “You two alright? Kilo?”
Kilo lowered his hands, but he didn’t say anything. His homemade wizard’s robe was torn. He swayed in the breeze, like even gravity was too nervous to reach out and steady him just then.
Meter, too, was not without shellshock. The crack had lodged itself between his ear and his skull, reverberating stubbornly, but he still managed to get words out.
“Kilo?” he repeated, and they looked at each other. There was an implied smile. “Thanks.”
And that left Mole, who looked like she’d been dragged five miles through rough gravel. The denim cocoon had protected her, but her face still bore scratch marks. Her hands may have been worse off had the fingerless gloves not protected them.
Meter, too, was not without shellshock.
Kilo pointed at the ground. His face portrayed, with impossible perfection, the pure, unfiltered essence of “Oh, fuck.” Meter’s eyes followed.
The yard was torn to shreds, the grass uprooted and bushes ragged. The tripod where the camera had been fixed lay toppled and decapitated among the wreckage.
“They took the camera,” Meter breathed. “Shoot.”
“THE WHAT.” Mole heaved her arms in an enormous effort to sit upright. Bupkis. “Hello? Those monkeys stole our camera?”
“Yeah.”
Mole rolled about in an incapacitated tantrum. “Are you kidding—?! Someone flip me over! Someone disrobe me! I’m going after them.”
Kilo only shook his head. He wiped his eyes, and after several deep breaths descended.
Each boy took hold of one of Mole’s arms and stood her back up.
“Let’s get inside,” Meter said, “just in case they come back.” One last look at the forest rendered neither hide nor wispy hair of the monkeys, but the breeze carried the scent of dry woodchips and musty canvas. “I’m going to text the others.”
7.2×103 minutes later (five days, significant figures taken into consideration and rounded down)
“Are you sure you saw them out here? This side of the field, I mean? The field’s pretty big.”
Seconds (olive green windbreaker, buzz cut, black as midnight and freckles like stars) slashed aside the grass with his walking stick. “I told you, I’m getting better at parsing details.”
“It’s been almost an hour,” Kelvin (Brazilian mix, wavy hair down to his shoulders, tall as a redwood) said. “Give it a few more minutes and he’ll show up. He always does.”
The Field—as it was colloquially known—sprouted to the north of Magnet Creek and was an ocean of sharp, knee-high grass, lupines, and clover. Crusty mountainsides rose to the west and the forest stretched on to the east. There were peanut shells scattered on the ground.
“Excellent point,” Seconds said. “Counter point: my premonitions never take more than forty-five minutes before they come to pass. If it’s going to happen, it’ll happen soon. So give it another minute.”
Kelvin glanced at the clouds overhead, a felted grey. The weather had taken a steep plunge ever since the beginning of the summer, following a gradual gradient into the dark and stormy end of the colour spectrum.
“Are you sure—“
“This is important,” Seconds snapped. “I remember being here, and I remember it being important. Imperative. Paramount.”
“Crucial?” Kelvin asked.
“Vital.”
“Weighty?”
“That’s stretching it,” Seconds said, peering at the tree line, “but yes. And maybe my premonitions are just seeing further now. After all, I started anticipating events only minutes in advance in June, and my anticipations have only been advancing since.”
“Yeah sure, but for it to jump from forty five minutes to over an hour in the two days since the last one? That’s way too far off our previous data.”
“I know that. Everything else took time.”
Kelvin had to laugh. Seconds was doing his thinking thing where he chewed his thumb—not the nail, the thumb. It looked like he was teething.
“Time?” he asked.
“Yes, time,” Seconds said, serious, and then, “Oh, ha ha. You’re hilarious.”
“Comical?”
Seconds spat out his thumb. “Amusing, very much so. Maybe I got the location wrong. I think I remember the band being over this way, near the boulders.”
They followed a pre-stamped path through the grass, kicking aside rocks and squashed caramel taffies. Something moved in the brush and they stopped to poke at it, but it was only a shrew.
“Psychic powers aren’t logical to begin with,” Kelvin said. “Divination isn’t a science. Maybe it’s just luck that your premonitions have followed a trend.”
“You know very well that’s not how science works. If anything, this—“ Seconds checked the stopwatch app he had running on his phone. “—eight minute leap forwards in my premonitions is the anomaly, the lucky bit. And I thought we agreed not to use the term psychic.”
“Psychic just has the right ring to it. What else am I supposed to call you anyways? An anticipator? Particularly premonition prone? A seer, I guess?”
“That sounds archaic. I’ll take psychic over seer.”
Kelvin sighed. They’d reached the edge of the forest, and there was still no sign of the marching band. He was starting to think that they weren’t there at all.
Not that he didn’t trust Seconds. Well, most of the time he did. When it really counted, he did.
They’d been friends ever since Kelvin had moved to Magnet Creek in third grade, and they’d bonded over their mutual love for chemistry—chemistry, at the time, had meant baking soda, antifreeze, and whatever was under the kitchen sink. They’d read books at the library preaching the marvels of stuff like cesium in water and liquid mercury, but alas, their parents’ kitchen cupboards were bare of such forbidden fruits.
(Later on, they’d cause several explosions through dubious means. Seconds would move on to biology while Kelvin developed an interest in psychology, but otherwise things stayed much as they were. They kept busy.)
Then Seconds’s newfound psychic talents along with the arrival of the mysterious creatures had launched them headfirst into the world of pseudo-paranormal investigation.
“Heard anything from Candela lately?” Kelvin asked.
“Nothing polite, but you know her. She’s still hyper-focused on our bet. Maybe she’ll end up being useful eventually, but I have my warranted doubts.”
“What about Meter?”
“Not since the monkeys,” Seconds said. “Apparently the attack inspired a new comedy bit for them—another one of their vintage parody monster movies—so they’ve been busy writing the script, bemoaning the loss of their camera, screwing around. I don’t understand how they can be like that.”
“You mean, not like you?”
Seconds would have stuck out his tongue, had he been that kind of guy. “I mean, not concerned about the important things, so yes.”
“It’s not like we’re nose to the grindstone, all day every day,” Kelvin pointed out. “We play Super Smash Bros or something almost every night, and even then can we really say that all this intense investigation during the day has been paying off? We only ever find the creatures by luck or through your psychic visions, so I can’t blame them for trying not to be all stressed about it. ”
“But the sightings have been getting more and more frequent,” Seconds said. “The creatures are getting more violent, my visions are stretching further ahead. Everything’s escalating! It’s like the universe is queuing up for something big. And if you’re bored of Smash Bros you can just say so.”
“If you’d just let us turn items on…”
Kelvin looked out over The Field, at the grass swaying with the gathering winds and the backs of suburban houses obscured by a thin stand of birch trees. A figure stood by the birch, his coat fluttering.
Kelvin tapped Seconds’s shoulder. “He’s here.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Don’t talk about your father that way,” Kelvin said, but the joke was flat, worn out.
The figure was tall and motionless. True to his mocking moniker, he bore a disturbing resemblance to Seconds’s own father, and thus, to Seconds himself. His eyes were clouded and white, rotted over blind, and his dark skin was washed out.
“Every time,” Seconds muttered, “Every damn time I see something, he’s here. You think he sees it, too?”
“It’s possible.”
Seconds gripped his walking stick, like he had half a mind to march over there and thump his not-father on the head. (This violent action had already proven impossible, as the moment anyone so much as contemplated approaching the figure, he vanished. Seconds called it a thought crime.)
They could yell all they wanted though, which was very therapeutic in some cases. Seconds demonstrated:
“What’s new, you fuck?!”
Kelvin joined in, cupping hands over his mouth: “Doth thou bringest news from the Other Side? I charge thee spirit, speak!”
“You’re just going to stand there, huh, you spectral doppelwanger!?”
“What’s that? I should murder my step-father? Will do, ghost, will do!”
“Isn’t it a little pedophilic to be stalking a bunch of kids? Get a job you—“
Kelvin startled, grabbing onto Second’s arm. “Wait, stop. Holy shit. I think he’s actually saying something. Look at his face.”
He was right, of course. The figure was mouthing words, large and exaggerated like a goldfish held for ransom. They couldn’t get closer, so the two of them fell silent, squinting at him—the distance and gusts of wind made it impossible to hear, even if audio accompaniment was included. The stare-down lasted all of five, exhausting, eye-straining minutes.
“I can’t tell,” Kelvin said finally, withdrawing. “Can you understand him?”
Seconds took a step forward, and the figure backed into the trees, gone. There was no point in running after him; they never found anything.
The birches waved and Seconds frowned. “He said we aren’t supposed to be here yet.”
1/3 of a fortnight, give or take (essentially a handful of days, assuming small hands and large days)
Candela counted herself lucky; she was probably the only eighth-grader on the planet with such liberal access to swords.
She appreciated how Pirates of the Caribbean looting the old Hearne manor felt. The basement was dark in an aged, adventurous way as opposed to a dank and mouldy way, and the crates and linen-draped furniture made for a deliciously tricky maze. It was every aspiring tomb raider’s wet dream.
The swords themselves were piled near the back. They were packed into long, splintery crates and nailed shut. Candela had to crack them open on the end with a hatchet and slide them out like Toblerone bars. Wood shavings littered the floor in carnage.
Hold this will you? she told one of the suits of armour—but not out loud, because that would have been really fucking weird. She balanced the hatchet in his stiff arms. Why thank you. Such a gentleman!
She inched her arm into the belly of a freshly-sliced crate, careful in case she encountered the sharp end of the blade first. Instead, she struck hilt and pulled free the scimitar in a mighty swing.
The Hearnes must have been world-renowned explorers in their time, what with the global treasure trove that decked the manor halls.
She tossed the scimitar in with the rest of the freed swords. It clanged and jostled its brethren, the sound echoing through the basement.
Candela looked over her haul. Sure, they were sharp and pointy as all get out, but they lost out on style points. Nothing clicked with her. Whatever happened to that old trope where the man finds the perfect weapon, the weapon that makes the man a hero? Candela had some creatures to hunt down, and she wasn’t going to go about slicing and dicing with just any old steak knife.
She went for the hatchet again, resigned to searching through the crates for as long as it took.
The ceiling creaked. She froze.
The creaks continued on: footsteps. They weren’t hooves, and they weren’t lemur-like scurrying, but all the same. Who knew what else the woods of Magnet Creek were going to cough up next?
Besides, nobody ever visited the Hearne Manor. Half the time it was like everyone forgot it existed at all.
Candela seized the hatchet. She spared a glance at the pile of unacceptable swords, but no, it was the perfect blade or no blade at all.
Hatchet held tight, she inched towards where the stairs stood against the wall.
The footsteps stopped at the top of the steps.
The light that poked into the basement through high slit windows eclipsed, the space creeping darker and darker. The stairs groaned.
Wielding the element of surprise, Candela rushed forward, and Ampere lost her footing and fell down the stairs.