Chapter Eight

Once the door shut, Nic heard nothing. No footsteps above, no screaming. He considered lifting the trapdoor to take a peek, but thought better of it. Kara was a big girl who could take care of herself. If not, then that was on her. Sure, he felt a little bad about leaving her behind, but after seeing the condition Ray was in, the situation changed. This was about survival now. She could’ve followed him down, but she decided to be slow. The best way to survive when something is chasing you is to be faster than everyone else. Or smarter, in his case.

This could also be some kind of elaborate prank, but he doubted it. This was most likely one of those ‘rich person hunts the trapped people’ scenarios. He didn’t know Ally well, but with all the pissing and moaning Kara did about her, you’d think she was some kind of misery mastermind out to get Kara. Most of it was overreaction; Kara was good at that. God, he hated how she always whined and talked shit. It’s like she got off on begging him to knock her down a peg. Like she knew it was a man’s world but needed to push and push until he had to remind her just how weak and full of shit she was.

It was time they’d broke up, anyway. Whatever happened to her up there, prank or not, was her own fault.

Where he ended up was more like an arched tunnel constructed of brick and wood than a typical basement. The floor was dried dirt. He could probably stick out both arms and touch the walls down the narrow walkway if he wanted. Warm, dry air circulated the brittle, metal and stone scent of a fireplace his way. The only light came from the bright orange glow through the window of the steel door at the end of the tunnel.

Inside, a curvy body dressed in black and using a leather jacket as a blanket lay against the wall at the far end of the room.

Nic turned the handle and pushed the door open. The hinges made barely a noise as he stepped into the room.

He didn’t know what to make of it. The space was an enormous brick dome with a steel and brick worktable in the center. Above it hung a pull chain running up into the ceiling. Large holes bored every couple of feet into the brick made the place look like an upside down colander. A few of the pipes had upturned nozzles at the end that provided a steady stream of firelight. Something about the smell of the place reminded him of the desert—a strange, dry tang in the air.

“Hey,” he said to the woman on the floor. “You awake?”

She skittered away so quickly it startled him, and his muscles seized. A messy pile of ruddy hair framed her ocean blue eyes as she looked at him, terrified. Then, looking past him, she yelled, “The door!”

Nic turned around just as it closed on its own. The inside of the door had no knob, and the steel lips on sides and top hugged the frame too tightly for him to get his fingers inside to pry it away. He nearly tore off a fingernail trying.

“You could help, you know,” he barked at her.

The woman slouched forward, fell into herself, and laid back on the floor. She covered her face with her jacket.

Nic gave up quickly. No way he was getting through the door. “Shit,” he said, slapping the thick steel. “You should’ve said something before I let the door shut.” When she didn’t answer, he walked over and nudged her with his shoe. “Are you just going to sleep? Are you even listening to me?”

He reached down and pulled the jacket away so she couldn’t ignore him. Again, she scrambled away. “Don’t touch me!” she screamed. Her voice echoed wildly in the chamber.

Nic covered his ears. “Jesus! Fine. Just calm down. Damn.” He threw the jacket back to her before she could complain about that, too. “Who are you, and what the hell are you doing here? You one of Ally’s little friends she hired to fuck with us?” He noticed how her milky white skin made the red of her bra strap stick out against her black tank top. She looked like she had nice tits.

She grabbed her jacket and covered up. “I’m not here to fuck with anybody. I’m just trying to get the hell out of here. Who the hell are you?”

“I asked you first.”

“And I don’t give a shit,” she snarled through dry and flaky lips. “You’re stuck in her with me, or you’re whoever it is that’s haunting this fucking place.” She looked him up and down. “Though you don’t look much like a ghost. So, whoever you are, you can tell Dan he can keep his fucking engagement ring. Once I’m out of here, I’m going back to Vegas. He can do his little ghost chaser YouTube channel on his own. Asshole.”

Nic held his hands up and laughed. He liked her. She was hot, snappy. A little fire in a woman was always a good thing. Next to girls with daddy issues, angry chicks were the most fun. They’d let you do almost anything to them in bed. “Alright. Start over,” he said. “I’m Nic.”

She eyed him cautiously. “Tibby.”

“Tibby.” Dumb name. “How did you get in here?”

“Through the front fucking door.”

Nic clenched his jaw and pressed his buzzing palm against his pant leg. “No shit. How did you get here? Before the front door, I mean. I didn’t see any cars parked at the end of the road.”

“You mean the driveway?” She exhaled sharply out of her nose. “Of course. He just locked me in here and took off like the dickless prick he is.”

“Can you stop bitching for a second? I don’t give a shit about your relationship, your job, or whatever baggage you have here. I don’t care. All I want to know is how you got here.”

“I told you.”

“Don’t tell me ‘the front fucking door’ again!” he yelled. At least she flinched. That meant he had her attention. “How did you get here?”

Tibby pulled the jacket under her chin. “We drove. Two vans and a car. We parked them in the driveway and walked in. Dan got the key from the landlord.”

“From Ally?”

Tibby shrugged. “Sure. I don’t know who that is. Dan did all the talking. It’s his channel, so he’s the face of everything, in front of the camera or the people.” A defiant glare narrowed her eyes. “And how did you get here, Nic? Did you walk? Take the bus?”

“We parked at the end of a logging trail and hiked a hundred miles through the woods.”

Hearing that, Tibby looked curious. “What do you mean, woods?”

“The woods behind the cabin.” When that sparked no recognition, Nic’s stomach tingled and dropped. “What town are we in? Where were you when you parked outside the house?”

“Mankato.”

Nic did the quick math in his head. Mankato was over five hours away from where they drove. “What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

His stomach knotted. It was Saturday. No, this couldn’t be right. Haunted or not, there was no way this house was in Mankato one day, then magically appeared 300 miles north two days later. No possible way. He didn’t get the impression she was lying. If she was, she was a hell of an actress.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” he said. He hopped onto the table and laid on his back to stop the room from spinning.

After several minutes of silence, Nic heard Tibby shuffling on the ground for a more comfortable position, presumably to talk to him or complain about something.

“Were you and your friends here to hunt?”

“Hunt?”

“Yeah. Ghosts. The paranormal.” She wiggled her fingers in front of her, pretending to be scared. “We heard about this place from a friend of Dan’s who said some guy supposedly murdered his whole family and killed himself here in the early 90s.” She gnawed on a thumbnail. “It was supposed to be this ‘big thing’ that made his channel go viral.”

“You guys are online ghost hunters?” Nic rolled his eyes. “Looks like you found the right place. What’s your role? Are you the eye candy?”

Tibby breathed a laugh. “Pretty much. I’m the medium.”

“Medium?”

“I’m the one who speaks to ghosts and”—she took a sharp breath and clutched at her chest—“I feel a dark energy. There’s something in here with us.”

Nic sat up and looked around. “What? Where?”

“Not really.” She scoffed. “That’s just what I do in front of the camera. Dan pays someone to slip me some research—without him knowing, of course. Otherwise, his reaction would seem inauthentic. Then I pretend to feel some kind of energy, hear someone whisper a name, or whatever.” A smug-half smile appeared on her lips. “Audiences tend to react more favorably to an attractive psychic. I mean, if you’re old or British, that works, too. Being pretty just happens to appeal to a younger crowd.”

Finally, something useful. “You’re psychic? Can you like… psychic your friends? Send them a message or something?”

“What?” She looked at him as if he were a child mumbling a string of absurdities. “No. Nobody’s really psychic; it’s either theater or a grift. Love and intimacy in porn are more real than psychics on ghost shows, dude. Believe me, it’s all bullshit.”

“Bullshit? Are you kidding?” She had no perspective, no sense of reality. Didn’t she realize they weren’t in Mankato? “This house—the whole woods—is filled with some weird devil magic bullshit that separates people and makes us hallucinate or something, before making us cut off our arm and legs and eat them.” Nic cocked his head to the sound of something hard against metal, like rats crawling in the ventilation. “What the hell was that?” He started looking into pipes.

“No idea. I hear that every couple of hours. Nobody answers when you scream, so I don’t think it’s people.”

“Sure.” Nic picked a pipe and planted his palms on either side, and he started yelling for help.

“I don’t think you want to be that close.”

“I’ll do whatever the hell I want and what I need to get the hell out of here. I’m not going to just nap on the fucking floor all day.” He went back to screaming.

The pipes filled with the echo of shifting sand rushing toward him, and just as was inhaling for another shout, a cloud of floral-scented dust coughed out of the pipe and into his face, causing him to gasp and choke.

“Told you so. I caught a lungful of that earlier, too.”

He clawed at the bitter coating of dust on his tongue. “You could’ve said something.” He coughed. “You’re just going to sit there and laugh?”

She stood and giggled. “Yeah. You’re kinda cute when you’re all spun up.”

Nic laughed at that, but he wasn’t sure why he found it funny. “It’s one of my charming qualities.”

Tibby smiled and slid herself up and onto the table. “So you think you’re charming?”

Seeing her in a brighter light for the first time, Nic felt a shock at how similar Tibby looked to Ally. Reddish hair, blue eyes, blanketed in a sense of entitlement. Or not. Maybe he just liked chicks with fairer skin. There was something about women like Ally and Kara, too. A stubborn, bitchy quality to them that turned him on. He could tell Tibby was like them: the sort of woman who liked a firm hand to hold her down and dominate her, for a man to put all of his weight on top of her and fuck her silly.

“I bet you look at all the girls like that.” She smiled and hopped onto the table. Nic noticed how she didn’t bother pulling her skirt below the lace top of her stockings to cover the scant inch of skin.

He felt strange. A heavy detachment and giddiness throbbed in his neck, and a haze fell over his vision, clouding his mind with thoughts of how sweet Tibby’s thighs would taste on his tongue. A voice in his head wondered when it was that she took off her shirt, but he ignored it and smiled at her. “How am I looking at you?”

She leaned forward, and her slight breasts curved above the cup in her black bra, teasing him with the promise of a pink nipple. “Like a doggy looking for his dish. Woof, woof.” She winked.

Nic ran the back of his finger along the inside of her foot, feeling the soft nylon stocking tickle the hairs on his hand as he moved up to her ankle. “Maybe I’m a hungry doggy.”

The toes of her right foot slid under his chin, up his jaw, and her leg rested on his shoulder. “If you’re hungry, why don’t you eat me?”

She wasn’t wearing panties.

Glistening flesh in front of him, Nic began kissing the inside of her knee and drawing curved lines up her thigh until he pulled her closer to him and parted her flesh with his tongue. His pants tightened when she leaned her head back and moaned in that quick, high-pitched way he liked.

She didn’t taste like a woman. She was sweet. Candy sweet.

“How long have you been down here?” he asked the question his mind demanded.

Tibby pushed herself back into his face. “Oh god, of all the things you could ask me. A little higher.”

Nic ran his tongue up her labia and gently flicked her clitoris with the tip. Sugary. Like licking caramel. Ignoring the urge to stop, to focus on the ideas swimming just out of his mental reach, Nic hooked his hands under her knees and opened her up more.

Tibby’s thighs trembled as she arched her back, raising her backside off of the table, and belted out a full-throated moan that shook more rotten flower dust out of the pipes.

Nic felt himself pressing painfully against his underwear. Keeping one hand on her flesh, he frantically undid his pants and grunted at the wave of relief throbbing behind his balls.

With surprising strength, Tibby sat up and shoved his shoulder backward while grabbing his erect penis and pulling him forward. He hissed at the sudden pain, but it quickly subsided, replaced by the rhythm of her soft hand. Heat raced along his skin. Beads of sweat coursed down his spine, chilling him.

Tibby smiled when he shook. “Lay down.” She hopped down, turned him, and guided him onto the table.

Nic complied with everything she wanted.

The warm steel felt comfortable under him when Tibby pulled his pants down and around his shoes, and started swirling her tongue up his thigh in moist curlicues that made his brain fizzy and sent black dots dancing in his vision. From this angle, the entire room looked like a giant chocolate chip cookie. He laughed about that until she slid him into her mouth.

“Tell me about your friends,” she said, licking his length like a candy cane.

Nic spoke, but his mind wandered separately from his body. He knew he babbled on about each of them—Shane, the overbearing, military-posturing pussy; Ray, the lost puppy; Michelle, the stereotypical angry feminist lesbian and her overly sweet ditz, Maddy; Kara, his slut of a girlfriend who was constantly on her rag; and Ally, the pretty princess who could use a cock in her ass to put her in her place—and registered how very interested Tibby was in Ally, but his brain refused to break out of the state of perpetual near-orgasm. Only the waves of pleasure simmering in his lower stomach and thighs existed. He’d tell her whatever she wanted to hear, as long as she kept slipping her lips up and down his shaft.

“Alexandra? Alexandra what?”

Nic moaned. “R-Redding. Oh, fuck.”

A twinge of pain of teeth nipping on his tip made him jerk sideways. When he tried to reach downward and move the red ponytail curtaining his view, his hand wouldn’t move. Thick leather cuffs line with buckskin padding held fast with brass buckles kept him shackled to a pair of steel rings he didn’t know were there.

Tibby flicked her hair back and looked up at him. “Sorry that was too hard,” she said, running a tongue along her teeth and winking. “I have a sweet tooth, so I can’t help myself.”

Panic at being bound bubbled in his middle.

Above him, a black cauldron hanging from a chain in the ceiling rocked slightly, and a pale brown blob of something syrupy plopped onto the table near his left side.

The smell of hot peanuts and sugar filled his nose.

“Hey,” he said, wrists and ankles straining against his bonds while she tugged the rest of him between fear and pleasure. “This is fun and everything, but how about you unhook me and we really get going? What do you think?”

The chain creaked. Out of the overflowing cauldron, a sticky waterfall of brown splashed onto the floor and the side of the table, where it hardened into a steaming, glistening puddle.

Nic winced at the heat tickling the skin of his ribcage. “Let me the fuck out of these before this shit burns me, dumbass,” he screamed.

Sudden pressure on his erection and Tibby’s angry glare caught his breath, but a dribble out of the cauldron landed on his hipbone, forcing the breath from his lungs in a squeal of agony as the super-heated substance liquefied and pulled a sticky blob of melted skin onto the table to cool into a pool of brown and red.

“Why would I do that? I told you I have a sweet tooth.” Tibby looked up at the swinging pot overhead, then to Nic’s half-flaccid penis. “Now I know why Kara’s so uptight.”

Nic tried thrusting his knee into her hip as she walked to the side of the table, but his bonds were too tight. She shook her head at him. “Do you like puns, Nic? Like, you should be sweeter to people?” She snapped off a jagged corner of solidified syrup and blood and sucked on it with a satisfied purr. “Or I shouldn’t let you leave without getting a nut?”

Nic spit and sputtered, locked his teeth and jerked his head back and forth to avoid the chip of sweet peanut and coppery blood she forced into his mouth. “Fuck you!” he yelled.

She flashed him an evil grin, reached up, and grabbed the pull chain. “Sure. Just let me get you hard again, sugar.” She pulled.

The cauldron tipped to the side, pouring a boiling cascade of chunky brown that stretched downward like runny taffy sizzling onto his crotch. Unrelenting pain spread all over his body. His spine arched upward until vertebrae shivered and popped out of place. Nic howled as his skin screamed, bubbled, and sloughed away from tissue and vein like cheese sliding off pizza. Agony spiraled black and gray in his eyes. Sparks of white hot torment exploded across his stomach and chest as Tibby guided the cauldron along, filling his belly button with steaming syrup that stripped the flesh from his ribs until the bones exposed and little chunks of peanut burrowed searing holes through his muscle and into his lungs.

As the syrup filled his mouth and stifled his screams, Nic’s eyes rolled into his head just before they boiled and burst, their juices mixing with the boiling batter.

Tibby watched as Nic’s body convulsed and stiffened as the hot batter mixed with strings of blood thickened and the candy shell began to cure him to the table. Once cooled, she gave him a final, indifferent glance before jerking the chain and dropping the cauldron, shattering the scene and sending plastic pieces of Nic and peanut brittle into the room in a sweet and salty explosion.

Smiling, she nibbled on a tender piece as she opened the door and left the room.