for the fourteenth time, trevor blasted through the lead door and looked up to the open hatch before whirling around, charging through the maze of shelves and jars, and squeezing between the vertical partition into the light of his computer where—two minutes before—he watched ava vanish into her bedroom, black because of the gifted goddamn paint.

he paced in front of his desk like mia paced the living room. "leave," he said aloud, then opened the music playlist. "leave," he said again, then cranked the volume until he could feel the bass through the brick and rock and steel. "LEAVE."

the girl—the cupcake little girl—had literally trapped herself inside when the only thing he wanted was for her to jump in a car and drive away.

but then she called her fucking boyfriend.

another person poking around.

another person to distract ava and find the hatch and SEE the face of trevor (and if that happened he would be forced to react and his transformation would never be complete).

as trevor checked the hatch for the fifteenth time, he realized the boyfriend might be an advantage...

back through the cellar. back to his desk. he snatched a failed recipe for cherry hooch, flipped it over, and scrawled FIVE WORDS in red marker.

he slipped the note in his pocket.

he grabbed the old silver key from the nail above his desk and slipped it beside the note.

trevor rushed again through the shelves to the storage room door with the padlock and the noose hanging on the spike. he snatched the rope with its century-old fray and duct-taped tail.

one last time he checked the hatch... then twirled a one-eighty and dashed through the tunnel.

the storm grew louder with every step, first on cement, then wood, then dirt, then mud. a brown waterfall cascaded from the shitter above his head. trevor reached through the rapids to find the rope (cut from the same cord as the noose in his hand), then grasped the knots to pull himself through the home's muddy asshole.

the shack swayed but didn't break. trevor trudged past the fire pit and through the woods, grinning in the tempest of dead leaves and horizontal rain. he clenched his chest and grit his teeth and refused, refused, REFUSED to find joy in the crashing clouds and torrential downpour, plodding through puddles without splashing, listening to thunder without busting a nut.

he dashed down the alley between the house and garage then stopped at the porch and crouched. he wound the noose taut around his lefthand glove. he reached in his pocket for the pills...

he forgot them. he forgot the fucking pills.

you're getting rusty, he told himself. but that means you're getting better. it means the last fifty-one weeks haven't been in vain.

most of all, it meant the boy was gonna put up a fight.

* * *

ava took comfort in the pounding music muffled through her thick closet walls.

she dangled her legs in the house's open mouth (does that make the hatch a tongue? she wondered). she opened her journal and scanned her most recent stanzas. she still couldn't call her poems "good," but they certainly weren't the prattlings of a love-sick basket case. they were... mature... and she owed it all to him.

ava closed the leather folds, tied the tie, and returned her journal to her pocket.

the throat was deeper than she expected; fifteen rungs to be exact. she stretched her leg to the first step, plunged into the dark, and leapt to the concrete pad at the base. she tilted her head to the open square, then mouthed the word "goodbye."

she used light from the hatch to move through the cinderblock tunnel accepting fear like one accepts roller coasters or scary movies, knowing she wouldn't be hurt.

* * *

the door's decorative window provided mia a narrow view of the car pulling into her driveway.

nolan! she yelled in her head, then screamed out loud, "turn around!"

she abandoned the door, dashed to the nearest living room window, jerked at the boards, and kicked her bare foot against the glass.

her heel cracked. the window stayed firm.

outside, nolan parked, opened the car, and dashed through the rain.

he must have seen her waving furiously through the wet window because he slowed and squinted. he smiled right at her. it wasn't a happy smile, but a RELIEVED smile—an i-don't-know-what's-happening-but-i-love-you-anyway smile—and he headed for the front door—

it was over in an instant; the beast from the right, the rope around her boyfriend's throat, a flurry of flailing limbs. mia threw herself between the boards and pressed her face against the window, but nolan was gone.

she didn't move. she held the prison-bar slats and watched rivers of mud split, converge, and snake toward her home.

WHAM.

a hand slammed an inch from her face and vanished just as suddenly, leaving a note stuck to the pane—"LEAVE AND YOUR BOYFRIEND LIVES"—soggy, dripping red, and sending mia scrambling back on all fours as music smothered her screams.

* * *

light from the closet faded with every step through the tunnel. the music merged with thunder into a syncopated thumping a million miles away.

just as ava lost sight of her hand outstretched in front of her, her fingertips brushed the cold surface of a metal door. she almost knocked and said, "hello." instead, she wiggled it open, stepped inside, closed it behind her, and thanked god her eyes had grown accustomed to dark spaces.

the size of the room was only apparent thanks to yellow-green glimmers sprawled before her like a thousand frozen fireflies. she didn't step toward the lights, but continued to follow her fingers along the back stone wall.

in twenty strides she discovered a second door she could feel but couldn't see. a quick grope revealed a standard padlock.

she abandoned the wall. she breathed the dry air that smelled just like apples. she stepped into the open dark.

the galaxy of glimmers shifted around her as she moved.

her foot smacked the base of something hard. she blinked, cleared her eyes, and realized she was standing outside a corridor of racks five shelves high and two feet deep, filled from top to bottom with enormous mason jars—hundreds of them—catching stray glimmers of light in their curves.

ava roamed between shelves and stacks of barrels just like the one rotting outside the shack, weaving closer and closer to the source of the faint olive glow.

there seemed to be no logical order to the racks; she took two lefts and a right before realizing they'd been arranged to confuse. luckily, the light grew brighter with every turn and allowed her to pick up the pace.

she hit another stack of barrels, backtracked, took an extra left, a few more steps, then emerged from the catacombs onto the soundstage of a 50's sitcom.

this new half of the basement was illuminated by a single floor lamp with a beat-up shade. yellow linoleum, green walls; a kitchen area on the right with cupboards and a microwave and a half-tiled backsplash.

a cot—HIS cot—sat against the left wall among a heap of sheets and balled up clothes. a desk—HIS desk—housed a computer and monitor in the same corner.

ava admired the bizarre sight from a row of vertical support beams; a wall which never got built. a stack of lumber on her left and a table saw on her right seemed to confirm this theory.

she stepped into the light. she found another set of droopy shelves, but these were filled with books instead of jars. ava ran her fingers over the spines; astronomy, psychology, serial killer biographies—

movement to her left caught her eye. the computer screen.

ava stepped from the bookshelf to the desk. duct tape held a dozen pieces of paper to the wall behind the monitor. she leaned across the desk to read them...

they were her poems.

there were only a few snippets, but they represented her best work, re-typed on a computer and printed on a printer with low ink. she smiled.

another flash on the monitor drew her attention to a grid of security footage from around her home. the movement was mia. she was pacing frantically, leaping across the grid from the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom. ava remembered the camera in the chandelier, but she couldn't find her own room on the monitor... then she noticed the black square in the center and grinned.

humidity fogged the exterior video feeds but nolan's car was clearly visible in the driveway.

a split second after his name entered ava's brain, she HEARD him. she lowered her ear to the screen to see if she could make out his words... but his voice wasn't coming from the computer.

she felt exposed in the lamplight so she sauntered toward the commotion, squeezed silently through the unfinished partition, and took a single step back into the maze. she could hear nolan across the catacombs, but she couldn't make out the words through the rocky reverberations.

the voice of a second man cut through the chamber with ease. "she is SMART," it said, restrained, as if every word had to ask permission before leaving his lips. "she's smart. she's insightful. and she doesn't need a fucking mental institution."

the jangle of keys.

the scream of a rusty hinge.

a struggle of voices, gaging, "NO!" coughed nolan and a door clanged shut.

ava caught herself mid-breath and sealed her lips. she listened.

the buzz of the mini-fridge.

the grumble of thunder from another dimension.

dry footfalls of shoes against clay.

then a voice—HIS voice—a hundred feet away and floating like a breeze to ava's ear; "hey there, pretty girl."

* * *

darkness.

nolan coughed. his muddy fingers trembled against his throat and brushed the torn flesh around his adam's apple. he winced, gagged, then forced his legs to stop shaking and shouldered the metal door. "let me out!" he screamed, but the words jammed in the back of his crushed throat and he gagged and coughed again.

rapid breaths through his nose; in-out-in-out-in-out. he whiffed the sticky stench of death and patted his pockets for a flashlight... but his phone was gone. "let me ouuut!"

"shhh," hissed a voice in the dark.

nolan stumbled backward and rammed his spine against a shelf. "wh- who—"

the strike of a match cut him off, the scrape first, then the flare of red-orange light.

nolan's vision blurred, swiveled into focus, then latched onto the pair of faces flickering before him. he blinked to make sure they were real. "gary!" he shouted through the pain then turned from the shirtless boy to another guy wearing a torn black tee. "you must be—"

a finger extended from the dark and touched his lips.

"shhh," gary said. "don't... make... a sound..."

NOTE: Two chapters tomorrow will finish off the book!