The meadow crumbled around them, but they made it back through the exit just fine, stumbling into the basement with static clinging to them, still trying to catch their breath. Jeremy leaned against the railing of the steps and hunched over, rubbing away the phantom pain from the induced panic. He watched the entrance closely to see if anything changed in its overlay.
Not even thirty seconds after they stepped through, the swirling blue energy collapsed in on itself and went out. Just like that. The basement plunged into darkness, only a small amount of grainy light filtering through two dusty windows. He and Zanie’s eyes met.
“Is it gone?” She asked.
There was not even an overlay left in the corner. Jeremy nodded, “Yep.”
“Wonder what would have happened if we were still in there,” Zanie mused. Jeremy made a face because he’d rather not wonder that. Or maybe the dungeon would not have disappeared until they left. It seemed only to collapse once all the creatures it had created were gone, so maybe there couldn’t be a living being inside for it to cease to exist like this one just had. Seemed like a stretch when he knew literally nothing about how these things operated.
He stood up and stretched his arms wide to crack his back and stick his chest out, hoping to work out the last little bit of tightness from whatever the strange nightmare cat creature did to them. That was probably what a heart attack felt like. Or maybe it was a heart attack. They clomped up the steps and found Mrs. Jennings in the recliner again with Atticus on her lap and Caleb beside her, knitting.
“Mrs. Jennings taught me how to knit!” He proclaimed proudly, holding up the needles and a few rows of soft gray yarn. “Watch this.”
He took his hands off the needles, which remained in place, clacking together as the yarn looped around them. Jeremy made an impressed face and peered into the kitchen to look at the time on the stove. A little over an hour had passed since they went into the dungeon.
“That’s pretty cool,” Zanie told Caleb, propping her hip against the back of the couch so she could lean over and look closer. Mrs. Jennings narrowed her eyes at the needles like she wasn’t quite certain she felt comfortable with them knitting all by themselves.
“Gives me the heebie jeebies,” she muttered a moment later, then looked at Jeremy. “Well?”
“We cleared out a couple of the monsters that I assume are the same as the one that came out and has been bothering you,” Jeremy told her. “The dungeon entrance disappeared, which is good. Although I don’t know why one appeared in your house in the first place. Might be random. Might come back. I’d check your basement regularly.”
Mrs. Jennings nodded. “I only go down there for laundry, so I’ll try to make a habit of checking more.
“There’s still the one in your house, though,” Jeremy told her. “In the dungeon, they looked like black cats.”
Everyone stared at Atticus for a moment. She did not even open her eyes.
“But not like real cats. Their fur was like…a shadow?” Jeremy frowned and tried to think of a way to describe the creatures. “They just looked like silhouettes and were very difficult to see. Have you noticed anything like that? Strange shadows or anything?”
The corners of Mrs. Jennings's lips tightened, and her eyes got just a bit wider. The thought of something being in her house the whole time when she thought it had been outside in the woods gives her the heebie-jeebies worse than Caleb’s spatial magic. “No, I haven’t noticed anything like that.”
Jeremy figured she had not. They could search every single inch of the house with a flashlight. But that was assuming the creature was inside during the day. And who knows if it might be able to slip from shadow to shadow so quickly they would never catch it or change its form or something. Their other option was to wait until nightfall and try to catch it while it gave Mrs. Jennings a nightmare.
She seemed deeply disturbed by the whole thing but agreed this was the best way. Now that she had a vague idea of what was actually going on, the desperation they’d seen yesterday settled into discomfort. Her only real response was to say, “Thank you so much for helping me dears. Would you like some sandwiches for lunch?”
Over their sandwiches, they got into a conversation about the looming food shortages. Mrs. Jennings mused about poking around to find her old box of seeds to see if any of them were viable so she could start them over the winter and re-build her old vegetable garden next summer.
“There’s still a patch of garlic somewhere out there that my husband kept going until he died a few years ago.” She looked wistfully out the window.
“It’s a good idea to think about the future,” Caleb popped a potato chip in his mouth and crunched on it. “Things aren’t going to go back to normal. There is going to be a new normal. I think that a garden is a great idea.”
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“I got the idea from a program on the Television, actually,” Mrs. Jennings turned away from the window. “It was something they obviously filmed before a week ago but was coincidentally very relevant. They were going into the civilian efforts to support the war effort in World War II. One of the things they talked about was Victory Gardens to help ease the strain of rationing and all that.”
“Do you think it would even be possible for the government to ration food in this day and age?” Zanie asked. That began a long conversation about the logistics and socio-economic implications of rationing and drafts and if the government even had the leverage to do anything like that when society was currently fracturing around them instead of coming together for a united war effort. Mrs. Jennings remained optimistic that society wasn’t actually fracturing, and people would come together to deal with these problems, while Caleb and Zanie shook their heads and referenced all the ways this could alienate people from one another further. Jeremy remained firmly seated on the fence because he thought they were not mutually exclusive, and both were probably likely.
They passed the day like that. Watching the news and talking about what they were showing. They helped Mrs. Jennings make dinner and then returned to the TV to watch Jeopardy and some routine cop drama. Some channels were still showing their regular programming, apparently.
Then Mrs. Jennings went to sleep. Jeremy, Caleb, and Zanie decided to keep the same schedule they’d used last night to watch over her. So, Jeremy and Caleb went to sleep in the guest bedroom while Zanie curled up in the armchair in Mrs. Jenning’s bedroom. The mattress in the guest bedroom was absolutely terrible. Some of the springs were broken. He could feel other springs poking him. It squeaked terribly every time he even took too deep of a breath. At one point, he considered joining Caleb on the floor but surprisingly fell asleep before he could actually execute that plan.
Then Caleb’s phone buzzed on the nightstand and he made a horrible amount of noise rolling over to grab it. Caleb groaned and rolled around in protest down on the floor.
“Hey,” Jeremy croaked into the phone.
“Hey,” Zanie whispered. “Time for you to come take over.”
He rubbed the crust from the corners of his eyes. “Okay.”
When he switched with Caleb, he would not be sleeping on that bed again. His back twinged when he stood up, and the hip he’d been sleeping on felt numb.
Zanie stood in the doorway to Mrs. Jenning’s bedroom. She handed him her phone, gave him a shrug, and whispered ‘nothing’ before heading into the guest bedroom. Jeremy slipped through the cracked open door and settled in the armchair. There was a table beside the chair with a picture frame on it. Jeremy picked it up and looked down at the family – Mrs. Jennings, her late husband, and three kids in their gangly, awkward, braces teen years. He set the picture frame down and shifted to a more comfortable position.
Nothing happened.
When he called Caleb’s phone to wake him up, he wondered if being in the room somehow made the nightmare not want to come. He hoped that wasn’t the case because then they would have to devise a more elaborate way of catching it. He was already planning it out in his mind when he met Caleb in the hallway and gave him the same shrug and ‘nothing’ he’d gotten from Zanie.
Then Caleb’s eyes widened as he glanced over Jeremy’s shoulder.
Jeremy looked back through the crack in the door to see a single jet-black feather floating down from the ceiling. It landed softly on Mrs. Jenning’s chest. In the moonlight cutting across the room, they could see her eyes begin to move beneath her eyelids. She had begun to dream, or rather, to have a nightmare.
“Is that it?” Caleb whispered.
“Well,” Jeremy shrugged and slipped back into the room. Caleb followed on soft feet, both trying not to make a noise on the old hardwood floors. They stood at the side of Mrs. Jennings's bed and looked down at that single feather sitting on her chest. Jeremy looked at Caleb, and Caleb looked back. Then he reached out and pinched the feather between two fingers to pluck it off the blankets.
It was as light as…well, a feather. Somehow, he’d expected it to be as heavy as an anvil or something. Instead of physical weight, once he touched it, he felt the same horrific psychological weight that had crushed his heart and lungs with panic when he met the creature’s eyes in the dungeon. He gasped and dropped the feather as if it had burned him.
It floated down to the floor in long, sweeping arcs. Then, before it could slip into the shadows or turn into a cat and pin him with that heart-attack stare, he visualized the rune for fire on it, and the feather burst into flames. It crumbled into a small pile of pure white ashes. A tension Jeremy had not even realized threaded through the room like a rubber band about to snap eased. The sharp moonlight dimmed as a cloud blocked it, softening the shadows.
“Is that it?” Caleb whispered.
Jeremy glanced over at Mrs. Jennings. Her eyes were now still, and she seemed to be resting easily. “I guess.”
“Well, I’ll just keep watch anyway,” Caleb decided. He went over to the armchair while Jeremy crouched beside the little pile of ash and tilted his head. It did not look like anything special, but who honestly knew? If there was magic, there could be potion-making, and the ashes of a nightmare might be a vital ingredient. He reached out a finger to poke it and maybe see how it felt on his finger. It felt just like ordinary ash or perhaps a little more finely powdered.
“What are you doing?” Caleb peered at him from over the bed.
Jeremy held up his finger to show Caleb the little smear of white. “Do you think we should keep this stuff?”
“Jer, you can’t keep picking up everything we come across. We’re already carrying so much stuff.”
Jeremy brushed his finger off on the thigh of his pants. He glanced around the room. The tables were laden with old, patterned porcelain lamps and jewelry boxes. There were stacks of books. A half-burnt candle rested on the dresser.
“I’ll be right back.”
Caleb rolled his eyes like whatever, and Jeremy ignored him in favor of running downstairs to grab a piece of paper from the notepad hanging on the fridge and a sandwich baggie from one of the kitchen drawers. Then he went back up and scraped the ash into the baggie.
“See.” He held it up for Caleb to look at. “It doesn’t take up any space and weighs literally nothing.”