Book Eight, Chapter 13: Fire Trap

The strange thing about Lark House was that while it was immediately apparent that the rooms and hallways had been rearranged, it wasn’t like the house was moving in front of us. Instead, it just appeared as if the house had been built differently than we remembered.

Many of the hallways near the stairs were gone, and there was much more space throughout the area.

“This is different,” I said, feeling the need to comment on the changes On-Screen. “There were more hallways over here.”

The others shone their flashlights around to confirm what I had said.

“This makes no sense,” Camden said. “Even if there were mechanisms for closing off the doors, the walls themselves look like they’ve moved.”

“No,” I said. “They look like they were never here.”

We couldn’t discuss any further because, in the distance, we heard Bellanti screaming, an angry roar.

“Let’s talk about this outside,” Dina said.

We were all in agreement and started running up the stairs, but as we moved upward, we realized that there were no doors, not where they were supposed to be, at least. It was easy to tell that we’d passed the ground floor without any way of exiting the stairwell. The audience might not have been as clued in, though, so we had to say something.

“Have we passed the ground floor?” Nicole asked. “We’ve gone up at least two flights of stairs.”

“Have you seen a door?” I asked. “I’m going up because there’s nowhere else to go.”

And we continued up until we finally got to the end of the stairwell, but even then, we didn’t find a proper door. Instead, there was a hatch, the kind that you would lift up and climb out of.

“I think we’re at the attic,” I said.

“There is no attic,” Camden said. “Did you never look up when you were in the foyer?”

“I’m looking up right now,” I said, “and there is a hatch. I think there is an attic, or else this makes no sense.”

“Let me see,” Camden said as he squeezed past me and lifted up the hatch to peek out. He lost a little bit of that bravery as he stuck his head through so he could look around and shine his flashlight.

“This is one of the second-floor bedrooms, I think,” he said. “But I don’t understand how it’s here.” He closed the hatch behind him, and we stood in the stairwell, all of us just contemplating our next move.

I grabbed my radio and said, “Bobby, Molly, do you guys hear me?”

A voice pushed through the static and said, “Riley, you shouldn’t—” but then it stopped. It wasn’t quite to the point that my character should be able to recognize it, I didn’t think. It was still ghostly and staticky.

Soon, I would have no choice but to acknowledge it.

“I’m here,” Bobby said soon after the voice faded. “Thank God you got through. I lost Molly. I can’t find my way out. Something is really weird here. I think I saw…”

He started to say, but then he didn’t continue.

“Bobby, what floor are you on?” I asked.

It took a moment for him to answer. “A stone floor,” he said eventually.

“That’s either the basement or ground level,” Camden said.

“Keep looking for an exit,” I said into the radio. “We’re trying to figure this out.”

I nodded to Camden, and he opened the hatch all the way up so that we could climb through, and when we did, we found a relatively normal-looking room, a few odd items here and there that hadn’t been purchased in the auction, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The room we climbed into had hallways moving in multiple directions, and we picked one to try to find our bearings.

“Either this is the most elaborate practical joke ever,” Camden said eventually, “or we may have to concede that something supernatural has occurred here.”

“We may have to concede it,” Dina said mockingly. “The crazy guy in the basement told us everything we need to know. This house is trying to eat us alive. If we keep walking where it wants us to, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I say instead of finding a new door, we make one.”

It was pretty convenient that we happened to have pry bars on us, so that’s what we did. We found our way to another random-looking bedroom that I hadn’t even seen before, meaning it had been constructed completely by the house, and we started digging through one of the walls in the direction we thought the stairs were.

It was a pretty simple act. The boards were largely intact, so we just had to pry them off the wall one by one.

There was a pretty large space between the wall we were breaking through and the next wall, possibly even large enough for a person to walk through, although I wasn’t sure that was a wise move.

Still, Dina looked in and shone her flashlight around.

She screamed.

I quickly followed where she had looked and saw what had caught her attention. It was, by at least some definition, a mummy. It was a dried corpse leaning against one of the inner walls like whoever it was had simply sat down and chosen to die.

“Help me with this,” I said to Camden as we continued to pry a few more boards loose until we revealed the body. In the distance, there were other partial skeletons sticking out of the woodwork, but I didn’t draw attention to them.

We were staring at the mummy. He was wearing modern clothes, and he still had a thin covering of tight skin around his face, though I didn’t recognize him.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“He looks at peace,” Dina said. “Like he just fell asleep.”

We took a moment just to stare, maybe a moment of silence even.

“That’s either going to sink the resale value or put it through the roof,” Nicole said. “Could this be one of Bellanti’s victims? Maybe that’s why he said they were haunting him.”

We continued to look at the corpse as the dust settled.

“This isn’t one of Bellanti’s,” Camden said. “Not if he really was stuck in the safe room this whole time. This is a recent death. In fact,” he trailed off as he got closer to get a better look with his flashlight. “I know who this is.”

He looked back at us as if waiting for us to respond.

“Go on. Tell us,” I said.

“His name is Sims. I hired him to rob the vault,” he said. “He flaked on me, or I thought so.”

Yeah, I had wondered when Camden’s disappearing thief would show up.

“Turns out he just planned on cutting you out of the heist altogether,” I said.

“It’s strange,” Camden said. “It looks like he’s set into the wood, almost like he started to be absorbed.”

“It’s sounding like Bellanti wasn’t so crazy after all,” I said. “He must have been telling the truth. We may be in very serious trouble.”

My radio came alive with a voice, this time much clearer than it had ever been before.

“Riley, you have to get out,” it said. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

There was no way my character could deny recognizing that voice, even though I technically didn’t.

I froze like I had heard a ghost because I had.

“Marcus?” I asked. “Marcus, is that you?”