When the last of the mysterious jars had been loaded into cardboard moving boxes, Gilbert carried them to the foot of the basement stairs, gallantly refusing to let Deegie help. Tiger Spirit grew increasingly restless, and he roamed the basement, huffing, grunting, and head-butting the humans to hurry them along.
“Can you make him stop?” Gilbert asked as he stumbled forward a few steps after a particularly insistent shove. “Why is he so agitated? There’s nothing down here that’s going to hurt you.”
“He seems to think so,” Deegie said. “I trust him; he’s never been wrong. He wants us out of here, and I agree with him. Come on, let’s go.” She nudged the stack of boxes with the side of her foot. “I’ll help you carry these upstairs.”
Gilbert still held the jar of fingers in his hand, and he gave it a brisk shake. The shriveled digits clinked and rattled against the glass. “What about this one?” He wiped at the grime on the jar with the sleeve of his sweatshirt so he could have a better look at the contents. “You know, legally we need to report this to the police. They’re human remains, technically.”
Deegie considered this a moment, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’ll take the risk. All I want to do is get rid of them.” She picked up the box on the top of the stack, grunted a little with the effort, then mounted the stairs. “Come on. Let’s get this stuff out of here.”
Gilbert shook the jar again, and Deegie whipped her head around to shoot him a withering glare. Chastised, he put the jar on top of the next box, picked it up, and followed her up the stairs. The box was heavy, and the jars inside made a brittle clanking noise as he made his way up the risers; the one with the fingers inside rolled dangerously close to the edge. Halfway to the top, the bottom of the box began to split. Gilbert brought a knee up to bolster the sagging cardboard flaps, but to no avail. Fourteen one-hundred-year-old jars fell through the open staircase and smashed on the concrete floor.
“Oh shit,” Gilbert said mildly. “Sorry, Deegie. If you have a broom handy, I’ll be happy to swee—”
An unearthly cry rose up from the litter of shattered glass and torn cardboard, and a cloud of ancient powdered herbs rose up along with it. Tiger Spirit shoved Gilbert to the top of the stairs with his mighty head, then replied to the eerie wail with a deafening roar. Gilbert pitched forward at the top of the stairs, and would have taken a nasty spill if Deegie hadn’t caught him.
“What happened? What’s going on?” Deegie scrambled to the doorway, dread rising in her throat. Gilbert grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her away from the entrance to the basement, but she squirmed out of his grasp and tried once more to go after her spirit guardian. “What was that? Let me see!” She made it over the threshold just as the basement light went out. Something huge and black, blacker than the darkened room itself, came boiling up the stairs, and Gilbert yanked her back again.
Like a mass of thick, polluted fog, the shadow thing loomed in the doorway. Long finger-like projections of blackish smoke shot out like whips, narrowly missing Deegie’s head, and a mass of slit-pupiled eyes, dull orange and sickly, hung in the center like a cluster of diseased grapes. An acrid smell, like burning garbage, filled the hallway. Gilbert let go of Deegie’s arm and streamed white light from his fingertips. The shadow thing howled, but did not retreat. It formed hands and gripped the doorframe while it shrieked at a white-faced Gilbert.
“Deegie, help me, damn it! Don’t let it get out!” The voice of the younger Altman brother rose above the unearthly noise of the smoky horror as he unleashed another blast of protective light.
She wrenched her eyes away from the creature and raised both hands, knowing full well that the enormous amount of energy she was about to release would bring her equally enormous pain. The hellish cloud of black smoke roared at her as the back of the long hallway was illuminated by the double bolts of energy that shot out of Deegie’s palms. The creature staggered back under the witches’ combined forces, but not much, and Deegie realized she had been screaming for Tiger Spirit with both her voice and her mind.
Tiger had already heeded her call. He had been there all along, battling the thing from behind, trying unsuccessfully to pull it back down the staircase and into the gloomy recesses of the basement. Great clots of the thing’s dark body were torn out by Tiger’s claws and teeth, only to reattach themselves seconds later. With a sound like a sheet being torn in two, a hole opened up in the middle of the vaporous beast, right above its lidless eyes, and Tiger burst through in a shower of heat and brilliant gold sparks. Deegie felt the crackle of his energy as he landed between her and Gilbert, and the thunder of his roar shook the floorboards as he challenged the shadow thing to another round. The thing in the doorway pulled back, shrieking in rage as it tried to close the hole in its body. Deegie managed another burst of light and pushed it back even farther.
Gilbert slammed the door, and Deegie sank to her knees with her arms wrapped around her head. There was no grace period this time. The pain in her head came on hard and fast; there wasn’t even time to make it to her bed or the couch to lie down. She was vaguely aware of Tiger standing guard at the door, and the indignant screech of the thing trapped in the basement sounded distant and foggy. Gilbert had a hand on her shoulder and was shaking her roughly, and from somewhere in the vast old house she heard Zach calling out her name, heard his pounding footsteps as he ran to her.
“What happened to her? Is she hurt?”
“There was—we had an accident,” Gilbert said, panting for breath. “Apparently there was some sort of ... entity ... down there, and it’s pretty pissed off at us. I’ve managed to contain it, and I should be able to—”
“What? What do you mean? What the hell did you do to her, you asshole?” Zach knelt by Deegie’s side and brushed her wild black hair out of her eyes. “Deeg? You okay?”
“Nothing! I didn’t do anything to her! She just fell after we fought off that thing down there!” Gilbert’s face was ashen, and his tone was that of an indignant child. He stood up and wrung his hands as he looked down at Deegie.
She opened her mouth to assure the Altman brothers that she was uninjured, but she was preempted by another volley of enraged screeches and howls from the thing in the basement. She opened her eyes to slits and saw that Gilbert had sealed the door with a Locking Spell; fierce golden light filled the cracks around the edges, and she felt Tiger Spirit filling the space between her prone body and the basement door. She managed to rise to a sitting position, holding tightly to Zach’s arms for support.
“I’m okay.” Her voice wavered under the immense pressure in her head, and she extended an arm in the general direction of the basement. “There’s something down there, Zach. Oh, shit, Murphy was right! It’s worse than a ghost. It came up from the floor, right after the jars ...” Her hands went to her head again, pressing tightly, and her eyes became huge and glassy in her face as a sudden realization clicked into place. “The jars broke. The one with the fingers ...” She recalled the day she’d sat in the Bus outside the house, remembered the strange, disjointed words the gentle Lisbet had spoken when the two of them made contact: The glass must not break ... never break it ...
“There was something besides fingers in that jar, something horrible. When the jar broke, it got out. Black magic. I should have known.”
The shadow thing roared and hissed in its basement prison, adding emphasis to Deegie’s revelation.
“I didn’t mean to,” said Gilbert. “The box ripped. How was I to know that—”
“How about you shut up, and we take care of Deegie first?” Zach observed the way basement door shook and bowed out from its frame under the relentless blows of the demon on the other side. “Can that ... that thing get out?”
“No. I used the Locking Spell, and Deegie’s tiger guardian is here. It can’t get out. I don’t think so, anyway.”
Zach helped Deegie to her feet, and when she stumbled, he scooped her up in his arms. “Come on, genius,” he said, “let’s get her to the couch.”
Gilbert nodded, white-faced, and followed his brother into the living room.
Once she was stationed on the couch, wrapped in blankets, and given pain relievers, Deegie managed to explain her condition, although her teeth were still clenched in pain and her body was tense and trembling. “I’ll be all right,” she told the two of them in a voice barely above a whisper. “I get the worst headaches when I ... when I use my abilities.” She offered a weak smile of apology and felt more than a little embarrassed that her strange affliction had made itself known. “It happens sometimes with natural-born witches. I can only do a little magic at a time. It’s called—”
“Witch’s Cramp,” Gilbert broke in. “It’s rare among natural-borns. They can produce enormous amounts of energy, but it doesn’t last long and causes the most awful headaches.”
Deegie massaged her temples and said nothing.
“Witch’s Cramp? I’ve never heard of it. Is there anything else I can do for you? God, you’re so pale!” Zach wore a look of extreme distress and the racket from the dark creature in the basement certainly wasn’t helping.
“No, no, I’ll be fine, I just ... I get real weak, and ... it just hurts, that’s all. It’ll be a while before I can use my powers again, but I’m okay, Zach.” Deegie hugged her legs and rested her pain-filled head on her knees. Trying to formulate a plan for what to do next was impossible right now, and all she really wanted was to be left alone until she was able to function again.
“Can you kill that thing or something? Make it go back to Hades, or wherever it came from?” Zach shrugged, palms up. “I’m sorry if that sounds stupid. I just ... I just don’t understand how this works. I’m the normal one here, remember.”
“I have absolutely no idea,” Gilbert admitted, and he got up and went to the window to stare glumly out at the night.
Deegie grimaced and massaged her temples. “Guys, just shut up a sec, okay? I can’t think right now. Ugh! My damn head!”
Zach’s hand hesitated over Deegie’s head, then dropped to his side. “Let’s go in the other room for a few minutes,” he said to Gilbert. To Deegie, he said, “We’re not leaving you here by yourself tonight, you know.”
Once the room was quiet–save for the incessant low growling of the basement demon from the floor below–Deegie was able to relax her overtaxed body by slow degrees, and the agonizing pressure in her head lessened. Only then was she able to replay the situation in her mind and decide what to do next. I have a demon in my basement. If it had been happening on TV or in a book, she would have laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. At least no one was hurt–or worse. Tiger Spirit had blocked the entire end of the hall, and she heard his panting breath from across the house. Zach and Gilbert were safe too; she heard the quiet murmur of their voices in the next room, and Bast was ...
“Bast?” Deegie tossed aside the blankets and sat up. Where was Bast? “Kitty, kitty? Oh no, please don’t let him be in the basement ...”