Chapter 31: Exhumed Remains of a Reanimated Nature
“Is everything okay up there?” Phoenie called from the room below.
“It’s bloody ain’t okay,” Theseus replied, shielding his face from the dust and potential infections that swam through the awakened death-nest, “If I were a lesser man I’d sure as hell be throwing up right now.”
The bile was in his throat, though. Knowing that the others wouldn’t be able to hack it, he rammed his spear through a boarded window in the hopes the fresh air might clear things out. As the pale evening light filtered through the silk curtains he pulled himself through the cobwebs that dragged at his feet and managed to knock out two more windows. Then he noticed the decomposed body slouched in the far corner. Mice – or worse – had burrowed into the skeletal remains and something had created a nest in the skull, but Theseus didn’t want to investigate the slither of movement he swore he noticed in the hollow sockets. He reasoned it would be a good idea to keep the others from visiting this side of the room. They’d never handle it – Theseus was having a hard-enough time holding back the vomit as it was. As an ineffective precaution he used the pole to sweep some of the web blankets over the body.
“Can we come up now?” asked Phoenie.
Theseus returned to the hole in the floor and reached down to help their leader up. Whatever fears she had must have been dispelled by her stubborn desire to expose the mansion’s secrets to the world. She grimaced at the sight of the room but put on a brave face.
“Team, make sure you take a deep breath before you come up here,”
Katrina was testing her footing on the metal cabinet when a loud knock startled everyone. Theseus stuck his head through the hole and noticed the door, and its shoddy barricade, rattle with another. An unnatural rustling sound, like the skittering of a hundred spiders through a bed of leaves, followed and he could have sworn it was a voice saying ‘will kill you all’. Had this been a movie he was watching on John’s home cinema system, Theseus would have laughed it off as cheesy, but the panic among his friends was very real.
“Hurry, team, they’re after us!” urged Phoenie.
Theseus pulled Katrina up, and then the two of them helped Andromeda and John. The door shook with louder bangs and the sound of wood splintering, as if someone were on the other side attacking it with a battering ram. With everyone safe on the new floor, Theseus grabbed the nearby vanity table and tipped it over the hole, sending all manner of dust-covered trinkets, wooden splinters and glass shards tumbling into the room below.
It wasn’t an adrenaline rush, he lied to himself.
***
First they’d been chased into a corner by exhumed remains of a reanimated nature and now her personage of supernatural significance was a malevolent incorporeal entity of a violent temperament – this adventure was the zenith of all Phoenie’s investigations by far! Theseus, no doubt fuelled by his frustration and anger at the truth coming out, tipped a broken desk over to cover the tear in the floor. Everyone covered their faces to avoid the cloud of dust kicked up by the desperate manoeuvre and the sound of the desk’s contents tumbling out into the room below camouflaged the supernatural break-in attempt. Time to escape before the entity realised!
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