Chapter Fifty-One

The past…

Marcus followed the sound of a woman crying into the depths of the Mad King’s castle. The air was growing colder and fresher. He felt the breeze on his cheek. He reached a junction that seemed to descend into the monstrous property’s lower levels. He could still hear her crying, but the closer he came the more he realized that it wasn’t merely a sad sobbing but a wailing of agony.

In the little over a decade that Marcus had been alive, he had never felt fear like this. He was trapped, unable to find his way back out, and some creature was obviously down here sharpening its claws on a living subject. If he followed the sound, he could be the next victim. The fear made his legs want to run. He stared into the depths of the home. The shaft was perhaps four feet by four feet wide with metal rungs anchored to the wall every couple of feet.

Within the totality of darkness, Marcus couldn’t see the bottom of the shaft before him. This could be the entrance to hell.

A memory floated to the surface of his terrified thoughts. Something his father had said. Detective John Williams had leaned over to him at the dinner table, and in relation to a story he had been telling, he said, “Sometimes, you gotta do what’s right. Even when it’s stupid.”

Steeling his heart, he thought about his father’s words. Even if this was hell, that was a person in need of help, and he couldn’t walk away even if he had the option.

He reached out, grabbed the first rung of the ladder, and descended to the lowest level. Once on the bottom floor, he saw a vague light ahead, and it called to him like a flame to the moth. After a moment of nearly blind stumbling, he found himself inside a concrete panic room. There was a massive steel door that could seal off the entrance to the secret passages. He guessed that this was the real reason for the so-called Mad King deciding to build his home with hidden passages behind the walls: as a secret means of defense and escape.

The room reminded Marcus of a bomb shelter, but bigger. Rows of canned food and provisions lined one wall. The opposite wall was covered with guns, like the back half of a sporting goods store.

Marcus knew about guns. His father had showed him how to use them, and they had always been around the house. But not guns like these. These were weapons of war.

He approached cautiously. He wanted to pick them up, but he didn’t. He stood transfixed before them, considering the implications. His father had said that Eddie’s dad and the people he worked for were bad men. But how bad did you have to be to need this many guns and a fortress to keep them in?

A massive steel door, like that of a bank vault, stood in front of him. Beyond it, he heard the screaming.

Looking back to the wall of guns, his fear of what monster waited in the darkness convinced him to choose a weapon. He tested a few of the big black guns and finally found one that was small enough for him to handle. He didn’t bother to load it. He had no intention of shooting anyone. He didn’t even like to kill insects. But he was also relatively certain that he could bluff his way past any man. A crazy child with a machine gun could be pretty frightening, or so he imagined. Still, he wondered: What if the thing beyond the door was no man, but some sort of demon? If that were the case, there would be no reasoning with it, no bluffing his way past. He would be dead.

This time, he heard Eddie’s voice saying, Don’t be stupid, freak.

With the gun in his right hand, he reached out with his left to spin the door’s release. On the other side, he found a series of concrete tunnels. The corridors were lit by bare bulbs hanging from unfinished ceilings. He came first to some storage spaces filled with boxes and old filing cabinets.

But it didn’t take him long to find the source of the screaming. He peered around the corner and saw a large man with no neck and gray hair wearing a simple black suit. The big man stood beside another steel door and was mumbling to himself about the B-word driving him crazy.

Marcus listened for a moment and waited. He jumped as the big man slapped the door twice and yelled, “Shut up. Or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

There was no doubt in Marcus’s young mind that whoever was in pain beyond that metal door would not live to see another day unless he did something about it. It might’ve been stupid to think that he could take on a behemoth of an adult like the man in the black suit, but he also knew that, even though it was stupid, it was the right thing to do.

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