Chapter Thirty Five
For a second no one says anything until someone throws a toy pumpkin candy bucket through the windows with a laugh. The stupid candy bucket hits the floor and candy shoots out of it and across the floor.
Dina jumps and shakes her head. “I shouldn’t be talking to you about this. Forget I said anything. I-I’m just tired from this mess. Please don’t listen to anything I’m saying right now. I have to clean this up.”
I grab her arm. “Dina, wait. What do you know about the cult and their doomsday shit? We’re trying to help.”
Dina waves me off and grabs a broom. “I’m not in my right mind. Don’t mind me,” she says, sweeping glass.
“Have you heard anything about a World Eater?” I ask.
Dina stops sweeping the glass and looks up at me. “What did you say?”
“A World Eater. It’s going to end the world today by making one happy freaking halloween treat out of this town and this world if we don’t stop it. If you know anything, now's the time to tell us or we’re all going to be on the menu.”
Dina’s eyes dart to the windows. I follow where she’s looking and see a group of men across the street. They’re easy to spot with how focused they are on Dina’s busted up restaurant. They don’t look at anyone or anything else, not even when a man on stilts walks by.
“Are they watching you?”
Dina nods. “Yeah, follow me to the back. Quick.”
“Come on, we’re following her. We’ve got eyes on us out here,” I tell Jaak and Charlie. Charlie moves to turn to look over his shoulder but Jaak snags his cloak and forces him to walk in front of him.
“Be discreet, Gamemaster.”
“Right, right.”
Dina leads us through the swinging door of the kitchen and straight on back. The kitchen looks neat and orderly. Whatever happened only happened out there, not here. When we come to the back of the room she points at a big metal shelf that has cans of tomato sauce and mustard stacked on it.
“Help me move this?” She goes to grab one end of it but a flick of my wrist has the shelf sliding across the floor.
Once it’s out of the way I see there’s a trap door in the floor.
Interesting. Dina looks at me with big eyes and then nods like she’s confirming something to herself. “I knew you were a witch.”
“Am I that obvious?” I joke and help her lift the big trap door by the iron ring that marks it.
“A little,” she says with a grunt when we push the door open.
“I’m not that great at reading magic. Never have been but I’m an oracle, not a reader.
I only picked up on you because you’re pretty powerful, so I wasn’t sure.
I might have poked around a bit if I hadn’t been so distracted with Dustin’s disappearance. ”
“Dustin is your husband?” I guess.
Dina goes down a few steps and then flips on a light switch. “Yeah, he’s always been…absent. Coming and going. That man was like having a cat,” she mutters. “You all come on down here, we’ll need to hide before those goons come looking for us.”
“How can we trust her?” Charlie asks when I start to go down the stairs.
“She warned us before not to join the business club which is just code for the cult, and from the looks of her diner out there it doesn’t look like she’s on friendly terms with them, plus,” I grab him by his cloak so he has to be down to my level, “there’s also the fact that Jaak maybe exploded her husband so I think we owe her some trust.”
Charlie nearly falls headfirst down the stairs. “You did what to her husband?”
“Everything all right back there? We really should hurry.” Dina comes back to look at us.
Charlie and I both nod. “Peachy,” I say. “We’ll be right down. Won’t we?” I ask, looking at Charlie.
“Yes, on the double. Absolutely all for going into the mysterious basement.”
I roll my eyes at him and head after Dina.
I know when Charlie and Jaak have made it in when I hear the door shut behind us.
Dina motions for us to follow her down the basement hallway.
At least, I think it’s a basement. The walls are stone, so they’re more tunnels now that I think about it.
We head off to the left and then take another left immediately in silence.
“We’re going to go on up back towards Main Street. These tunnels will take you right to the Chamber of Commerce.”
“What are these?” I ask, putting my hand to the wall. “Why are they here?”
“Back in the day the first settlers used to use them in the winter to pass all kinds of things between the businesses. There’s even some tunnels that go to homes that were used for deliveries. These tunnels run all over town but no one uses them much anymore.”
“Does the doomsday cult use them?” Charlie asks.
“No, they can’t enter them.”
Jaak chuckles. “Are these wards I see here?” he asks.
I stop and look back to see him press his hand to the rock wall.
The second he touches it the wall lights up like the Fourth of July.
Rainbow-colored lights undulate in front of me and then there’s the writing.
All kinds of writing in a language I can’t understand.
“It’s beautiful,” I say. I tentatively put a finger to the wall and almost jerk my hand back but I can’t, it’s like putting my finger in a live socket.
Power shifts and surges in the rock, it paralyzes me from the sheer force of it.
In the blink of an eye I feel small and insignificant, far too young in the grand scheme of things.
I take in a deep breath and force my hand back in time to slap Charlie’s hand from touching it. “That packs a punch. You don’t wanna do that, trust me.” I look towards Dina. “What language is this?”
“I can’t say. It’s the work of the witches that settled this place. They weren’t from around here and they refused to teach anyone their language, so none of us can read what it says but I know what it does.”
“And what’s that?” I ask.
“It keeps that damn cult in its place. Contains them and refuses to let them use their full power. If these tunnels weren’t here they would have already destroyed the world. We’re lucky they’re bound here the way they are.”
“When you say bound do you mean spiritually or physically?”
“It should be in all ways, physically, spiritually, magically…” Dina’s voice trails off and she gives me a sidelong look. “Why?”
I rub my forehead. My secret about Dina’s husband has reached a head. There’s no way around an uncomfortable conversation other than through it. “Well, we saw them in the woods near our town.”
“The cult town,” she says.
“The other cult town,” Charlie supplies from over my shoulder.
Dina nods. “Right, the other cult town. You saw the mages there? My husband was with them, but they’re dead now. No mages can be away from this town for more than a day before they die.”
“The mages have a kill switch?” I look at the walls and jerk a thumb at them. “From these?”
“Yeah, it’s their curse. They join and get immense power and status but they’re forever bound to this town.
My husband joined when I begged him not to.
I stayed with him like a fool, but that’s over now.
I can only imagine misfortune befell them if they went to your woods and never returned.
I’ve heard whispers from them when Dustin held meetings in our home.
Whispers about a Chosen One…is that you?
” she asks. There’s hope in her voice, so much hope that I hate to say no.
I shake my head. “No, I’m not the Chosen One, that’s my best friend,” Dina starts to look deflated so I hold up a hand, “but I’m like…Chosen One adjacent and that’s just as good.”
“Is it?” she asks.
“Yes, it is. I’m powerful, you felt it yourself and I’m not alone. I have backup,” I say, pointing at Charlie and Jaak. “And we’re going to stop the World Eater. We’re going to save everyone and you’re going to get to be with Clyde.”
At the mention of Clyde her eyes go soft and Dina smiles. “Then I will help you. Follow me to the Chamber of Commerce. That is where the summoning will happen.”
“So you know about the World Eater? Can you tell us anything about the one that we’re going up against?” I ask.
“I know it’s old, like one of the oldest to have ever been created.
I don’t know much other than that except that it needs an anchor.
Something about the old one deserting them.
” Jaak and I look at each other when she says anchor, but neither of us say anything.
We let Dina keep talking as we walk down the tunnels.
“Everything I know is just bits and pieces. I was never in the cult, I refused it. I married my husband for love and it was out of the memory of that love that I stayed with him and pretended what I felt for Clyde wasn’t real.
I would have left him years ago if I’d been selfish. ”
Dina balls her hands into fists and presses them to her eyes with a ragged sigh.
“I should have been selfish. I waited all my life for permission to be me and now the world is about to end? A-and they took him,” she says, voice breaking.
“That’s why the diner is in the state it's in. He was helping me open. We were excited. We’d confessed our feelings when I was sure my husband was dead.
Everything seemed so bright and on the start of a busy holiday too.
But when we opened the doors it wasn’t the crowd that came in, it was the cult’s thugs.
Not all of them went out into the woods to do whatever it was they were doing.
They wrecked the place and grabbed Clyde.
Said that only he would do for the offering. ”
The offering.
“I know a thing or two about that. I’m sorry, Dina. I know that had to have been scary but we’re going to fix it. Just because they took Clyde doesn’t mean he isn’t still alive. Can you remember anything, anything at all, about when they said this World Eater was going to be chowing down?”
Dina takes a deep breath and thinks. I can see it in the way that she tenses up and curls in on herself as we keep walking.
“I-I can’t,” she says. “They never talked about that at the meetings at our house. Only that it would be a feast on Halloween. I kept thinking it was going to be a secret meal or something but just a few days ago, the day before he left, my husband said the World Eater would bless them. Devour us whole, swallow the world whole. I thought he was talking big, he does that so much that I didn’t take what I heard seriously. I was so stupid.”
I put a hand on her back. “You weren’t stupid. It’s not like there’s a handbook for the end of the world. You’re doing great now, Dina. We’re going to fix this, remember?”
She gives me a teary smile. “Yeah. You’re being so nice to me, why?”
“Why not? You were kind to us when we arrived in town.”
“That was just breakfast though, this is so much bigger.”
“What’s one kindness versus another? There’s no way to say something was kinder, it just is.”
“You’re really going to bring Clyde back to me?”
Earlier when I promised we would help her clean up the diner, I thought hey, what’s the worst that can happen? If we don’t succeed then it’s not like we broke a promise but now I don’t think that way. Now, I know I’m going to save the world.
“Yes, I am. I swear it.”