jamieproctor.ca

On a particularly normal day on the planet Earth in an average sort of month at a perfectly meaningless hour, a message arrived.

It came on wavelengths of light and radio and other things; it was registered in telescopes and satellite transmission; it was about nineteen seconds long and it was very complicated and then it stopped.

It also had arrived from Tau Ceti. Probably.

***

There were Concerns.

Some were excited about the message, believing it was a sign that not only life existed elsewhere, but it wanted to make friends. Some were skeptical, believing it was some sort of meaningless nonsense. Some were paranoid and believed it had been done by other humans as part of a nefarious plot that explained the sixteen other nefarious plots they already believed other humans were masterminding. Some were a little TOO excited, believing it was a sign from someone to do something. And most of them were a few of the above mushed together in one way or another.

This led to arguments which led to escalation which led to death which led to more arguments but louder and hoarser. Explosives became involved.

Meanwhile, some small groups of people, in varying degrees of secrecy and isolation, worked on the message. Was it a warning? Was it a threat? Was it a welcome? Was it a secret? Was it a gift? Was it a puzzle? Was it abstract, obtuse, and convoluted or simple, straightforward, and direct? Computers were designed and applied; codebreakers and mathematicians and linguistics experts were grouped and employed; occasionally someone was killed with high-speed explosives by someone else, and the world, with increasing erraticism, spun on.

Then the second message arrived. It was half as long as the first, and had half as many characters, and halfway through receiving it someone launched a nuclear missile, which caused other things to happen.

***

While the first sets of missiles were in the air, one of the earlier teams managed to crack the first, more structured message. It was a plea for assistance from someone, anyone, since the sender’s society had torn itself to shreds from pre-existing internal divisions while trying to decipher an inexplicable message they’d received from space, and they were placing themselves at the mercy of any potential recipients, whom they hoped would be wise and benevolent.

The second message was a useless assemblage of symbols, such as might be created by something or someone falling over on top of an input device.

***

The code team decided not to bother retranslating the message into earthly languages before rebroadcasting it. It would’ve taken time they didn’t have, and after all, this one had already proven itself to be decipherable at least once.

I like it out here. It’s hard work because Uncle won’t take a turn at the oars, and he won’t load the cargo, and he won’t unload the cargo, and he smacks me on the back of the head if I’m slow.

But I like it out here anyways. The night so dark it blends into the sea and the land and it looks like if I wanted to I could row the dinghy everywhere from anywhere. Of course that makes steering a little tricky but that’s what Uncle does since he doesn’t let me touch the spyglass.

“Port,” he whispered and I shifted port.

Hard to see the monaskerry this time of night, but hard to see us too. That’s what made the trade work. Lot of hungry, hungry initiates out there learning wisdom and aestheticism and how one could sup on seafoam for supper and salt air for breakfast in time and such and so on. And there was a lot of real nice folks in town that could make the most wonderful whelk chowder, or berry jams, or candied salmon. And right in between them there was me, my uncle, and his dinghy.

The dinghy isn’t special, mind you – it’s us. Nobody else in town goes out at night. Scared of the nefarious squid, I think. I’m not sure why; it’s not like they can climb onto the boat or anything, and we’re going swimming. Uncle says it’s superstitious bullshit.

“Starboard,” whispered Uncle, and I shifted starboard.

It was nice, in a weird way, to do this. To fall inside my own muscles and my own heart and lungs and just listen to myself and forget about what I was doing. The oars barely existed in my palms except as textures. The soreness in my butt was divorced from the existence of the bench. I couldn’t even smell the warm cooked herbs leaking gently from the casque under my feet.

“Fuck,” hissed Uncle, “too loud,” which was weird because I was sure I hadn’t made a ripple. But he was already swearing and tugging at lines so I got up from the oars and started fumbling at the ties and dumping the cargo overboard one basket and barrel and bag at a time. Each weighted with a little stone for ballast, nature’s anchor, plish plash. “Fuck. FUCK,” he whisper-shouted into my ears. “Not so loud!”

I slowed down.
“Not so slow!”

I sped up.

“Not so loud!”

“Hoy there,” said a patch of the gloom as it lurked above us. “Is there something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” said Uncle. “We’re fishing.”
“Funny time to be fishing,” said another voice from above a murky railway, above a towering old pile of timber and barnacle, above the water. “And for the third night this week.”
“We need the money,” said Uncle and this wasn’t actually a lie for once. Uncle wasn’t as good at cards as he thought he was.

“Catch anything yet?”
“No, because SOMEONE keeps scaring the fucking fish away.”
“Just doing our jobs,” said the first voice again. “Keeping an eye out for nefarious raiders from asea.”
“Or ashore,” added the second.
“No, no, nothing nefarious there. These folks are just fishing, right? With empty nets, at night. Aren’t you worried about the nefarious squid?”
“Superstitious nonsense,” said Uncle shortly.

“Nothing superstitious about nefarious squids. We see them all the time out here. Big. Long arms.”
“And they don’t bother you neither.”
“Well of course not. We’re in a proper ship and you’re in a dinghy.”
“Your ship’s a rotten old hulk and you’ve scared away the damned fish.”

More than the two voices laughed at that.

“Well, we’ll leave you be then,” said the first. “But you watch yourself. Hard to see anything out on nights like this, and if you were a little bit quieter why, we might just run you down.”

Uncle didn’t say anything to that, and he didn’t say anything as the monaskerry guard-ship creaked and groaned away from us, but when they were gone for good he DID smack me on the head so hard it echoed all the way to shore.

“Ow!”
“THAT is for splashing the damned oars so loud,” he hissed. “Three times. In one week!”
“I didn’t!”

“I heard it! I heard you splashing! Now we’ve lost our income AGAIN, and we’ll have to pay restitution at this rate! Do you know how nasty the jam-maker gets if she doesn’t get her cut? DO YOU?”

“No,” I lied. Glisset was always friendly to me, but she had a short touch with creditors and didn’t like my uncle and had exactly the forearms you’d expect from someone who spent all day grinding and pressing tough little salt-hardened berries into sweetness with a big mallet.

“I don’t know why I put up with my niece,” he said aloud into the general darkness, even though we both knew it was because my mother was dead and he was a goddamned greedy scumbag. “It must be because my sister is dead, and I’m a goddamned merciful saint.”

I rowed, and tried to fall back into myself again. Didn’t quite make it.

***

Two beautiful clear days in a row after that. No clouds, moon still fat enough to show itself low on the horizon in the afternoon and keep the water glittering happily at night.

Uncle hated it. He was so put out that he didn’t even go to his card games, which didn’t make our money problems any worse but did put me in the way of more whacks to the head. I spent the time we weren’t fishing out on the street and up the hill and once – when I got very bold and had taken a shot from Uncle’s bottle-under-the-floorboard – trying to persuade Glisset to bring me berry-picking, which turned very awkward when she took me literally and spent an earnest half-hour telling me about why you should never hike out to the berry patches at night (it was bears).

The third day was a bit wispy in the morning. Then it was a bit cloudy in the afternoon, leaving the water lead-dull. Then as the sun came down the fog came up and the whole town turned the kind of deep-down damp you can only escape by setting yourself on fire.

Uncle was ecstatic, eyes glittering in the wet air. He whistled – actually whistled! Badly, mind you – the whole time we collected the cargo; he helped pack it up for once; he even kept humming after we left dock, soundless as mice.

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” he said conversationally as I rowed. “Red sky in the morning, sailor’s take warning. Fog bank at night? Heart takes flight, I say.”

I nodded to keep him happy, but man I didn’t agree inside. I was cold and felt half-soaked.

“You know the best part? Keeps the sound down.”

I nodded again.

“No splashes, no guard-ships, no fuss. Nothing out of you.”
I made a terrible mistake then and looked at Uncle to see what had him in a good mood, which was the fastest way I knew of getting him out of a good mood. Luckily, I did this just as he was coming at me with his knife and so for once that sort of worked out. Unluckily, I blocked the knife with the haft of my port oar so he got pretty mad anyways.

“Snitch! Sneak!” he hissed. I grabbed his arm, he grabbed my arm, the knife wiggled in between us like an eel on a hook. “I take you in, I feed you, and you tip off the guards every night! How much’d they pay you? How much did you take to splash and splash and call ‘em in every night? Three nights in ONE WEEK?”

“Huh?” I said, and he actually screamed at that- just a little, involuntary, like someone had kicked him in the right spot and it leaked out. He tugged and yanked and heaved and I let go of the knife so he fell half-ass-down and I kicked my boot loose into his belt region.

Now THAT didn’t make him scream. It made him wheeze and sit down, which was troublesome because he was standing at the gunwales and there was nothing to sit on but thin foggy air and thick smooth water.

It was quite a splash – big and solid and juicy, droplets in my damned eyes – and it kept going as he foundered and floundered and came up over the side leg-up, knife waving. I pulled up the oar and held it overhead and was just about to bring it down when he squeaked like a mouse and vanished immediately, straight down.

I waited.

Then I put the oar down and waited some more.

Then I waited a little longer, just to be safe, and I rowed up to the monaskerry’s little half-hidden shingle beach and gave sixteen delicious meals to a furtive and wealthy acolyte and went home and slept well for the first time in six years.

***

I still fished after that. It was hard by myself, but Uncle hadn’t helped too much to begin with, and it was more for appearances than anything. The real profit came in on the dark nights, when I took up the cargo and put out the dinghy and rowed into the dark and then – halfway out, just a ways to go – I cut loose about one-quarter of my load into the water and watched as it sank a little and then was sucked down by something too quick and hungry to be gravity.

It’s easiest to deal with the nefarious squids this way, I think. It’s certainly a lot cheaper than waiting for them to get impatient and start splashing for the guard-ship; they don’t need me to give them EVERYTHING, just enough to take the edge off. Eyes bigger than their stomachs.

Of course, I had to put the prices up a little to make up for it. But I told them all that the work was harder since Uncle passed, and they believed that enough.

It isn’t even entirely wrong. The nefarious squids take the jams and chowder and jerky well enough on every trip, it’s true. But Uncle? After they took him, they didn’t ask for food for six whole days.

June 13^th

Not my finest showing today, diary. I was out trimming the hedges with my earplugs in – safety first! – and it took me a good thirty seconds to realize there were visitors on the estate, and that was because one of them got fed up and leaned on the horn for a good six seconds. Startled me pretty good when I turned around, and I’m ashamed to say I was so rattled they had to repeat themselves a few times before I could understand them or say anything.

It seems they were friends and associates of little Tommy H. Feldingway – god, it’d been AGES since I’d heard that name, the family never spoke of his father after he moved out. As it turned out he’d come home as the now-last of his line to spend the night in the estate’s guest wing so as to claim his inheritance in accord with the remits of his grandfather’s will (a classic move from ‘Old Hawthorn’).

But that wasn’t the REAL problem. The REAL problem was that Tommy was NOT the last living Feldingway, because long-lost family-shame cousin ‘Rigor’ Mortimer Feldingway had arrived two nights ago and was hiding in the attics somewhere and I had absolutely failed to find a way to shoo him out yet, even after he’d dismembered the postman. I’d tried traps, spraying, even clanging pots and pans at all hours to drive him out; nothing worked. This was the absolute nadir of my tenure as groundskeeper, and you know how bad my imposter syndrome’s always been, diary! I was sure I was about to lose my job! But if I didn’t warn them about Mortimer, they’d be a real pickle – and if I DID warn them about Mortimer, I’d be violating the blood oath six generations of Otuses had sworn unto the service of the Feldingways to keep their secrets! So there I stood, tongue-tied and wide-eyed as six bizarrely gorgeous young people with artfully coifed hair sat in their fancy car and stared at me.

“So, like, can we go in?” asked little Tommy.

“Can’t say as I can stop you,” I blurted out. Oh god, WHY did I say that?! It was so rude! I was trying to HELP these people, not scold them! “But you’d best take care. The house isn’t very friendly at night.”

It was as if I was trying as hard as I could to incriminate myself, diary. They laughed at me and it was like the first day of first grade all over again – I was so busy reliving the moment when Nelson Munsch pulled down my pants in front of the whole gym class that I don’t think I replied to a single word they said after that, just stared at them all glassy-eyed until they drove off.

Now I’ve got two Feldingways under one roof and only one of them can inherit the house and I know, I just KNOW, I just KNOW that ‘Rigor’ is going to cut the phone lines before dawn. He always did that, he always does that, he doesn’t know that mobile phones exist and if he did he wouldn’t care. I’m going to have to spend all morning splicing the wire back together and it’s an absolute bitch, pardon my language, diary.

I really wish I was better at asserting myself. This whole pickle wouldn’t be happening if I were a bit less introverted.

***

June 17^th

I’m sorry for spending so much time away from you, diary. Cleaning up after the ‘Mortimassacre’ took a LOT of time and spoons from me, and once I was home I just wanted to sleep. And beyond the physical wear and mental tear, emotionally I still feel guilty about the whole mess; especially what happened to the weathervane. It had spent over a hundred and forty years on that roof without ONCE harming anybody, and did not deserve what happened to it.

All of that actually makes me feel a little better about the other thing that happened today. Suffice to say it, diary, I really stuck my foot right in my mouth yet again. But at least this time it was because I was already a basket case from the LAST time I was too shy to speak up!

Ugh. I’m spiralling.

I cleaned out the last of the plumbing this morning, then spent the afternoon doing the final mop circuit to scrub the last stains out of the upper hallways, and I was just sitting on my workbench out front and getting ready to finally resharpen the woodaxe after all the abuse Mortimer put it through when someone – I kid you not – cleared their actual throat at me. I looked up and oh my god, it was Professor Mesquin, the REAL Professor Mesquin, the actual, honest-to-god, world-famous local-legend Professor Richard Mesquin, who was standing there in short sleeves and a light jacket with a suitcase and a backpack of all things. He had that look people get, diary – the one where they’ve been waiting for me to notice them for too long.

So I sat there with my axe in one hand and the whetstone in the other and my mouth shut and stared until he said “is this the Feldingway estate?” and I just nodded because what else was I meant to do? Would it be rude to ask him to sign my copy of Antique Observatories And Star-Cultists Of New England? Would it be sycophantic to say I’d been really impressed by his essay last year on the ‘doom spiral’ pattern of familial sects when inheritance and religious fervor produced contradictory drives within increasingly resource-poor congregations that overwhelmingly led to outbursts of massive filial violence?

“Are you the groundskeeper?”

Oh god, was I even the groundskeeper still? There were no Feldingways left, but I’d never been fired, and my wage was still being autodeposited, but was I technically an employee of the bank now? I never understood finance or law. If I made an authoritative proclamation now and he put it in his book would I get arrested?
“Depends who’s asking,” I hedged.

“Hmm,” he judged. I died inside a few hundred times and when I was done he was staring at me again and had clearly just asked me something.

“The keys,” he repeated.

“Sure thing,” I said in total relief and handed him my entire keychain. His arm sagged under it.
“And the observatory key is…?”
“Here,” I said, fishing it up off the keychain.
“Thank you,” he said, and turned on his heel. “I’ll return it tomorrow morning.”

Wait he was going in the observatory oh god oh god oh god wait what? “I wouldn’t do that,” I said without thinking WHY do I say things WITHOUT THINKING?”
“Excuse me?” he asked, and it was too polite, too polite means he isn’t actually polite anymore oh jeez DAMNIT.

“That place isn’t safe,” I said. “Especially at night. Loose stone and shoddy mortar. Needs repairing.”
“And who is responsible for the repair?”
Oh god WAS that my job? It was, wasn’t it? But I’d also been told if I ever set foot in there without the explicit permission of a Feldingway I’d be torn limb from limb by the proto-aeonic beings that slept within the walls and floors, chained into the young stone with elder sleep.

“Well, good-day,” he said and oh god I’d been staring again hadn’t I. Just like the teachers used to complain about.

Well, it was too late to apologize or endear myself to the Professor now, and judging by the heft of that suitcase (and the fibula protruding from the loose zipper) he had most of a human skeleton in there. Was it a Feldingway? Fuck, was he going to send them ‘back to the stars’ as the family had done back in the old times? Did he know the correct syllables and the correct apologies and the correct warnings and when would be the incorrect times to say any of them? Would warning him violate my promise to ‘ne’er leash the sins of the sky with tongue form’d oft dirt’? Maybe I could give him a hint, but would he want one? Did he need one? He was an expert? Maybe I could pretend it was a joke. But I’m not funny.

“Good-day is well and good,” I called after him, “but be careful of the night.”

He turned and the incredulity on his face was like a boot to my face. He said “excuse me?” and I resumed sharpening the axe until he gave up and went away.

Well, that was enough fuel for my social anxiety for the rest of my life. Why am I LIKE THIS, diary?

***

June 24^th

The police stopped by again today, diary. At first I thought they’d changed their minds about me being a suspect in the Mortimassacre or the mysterious disappearance of Professor R. Mesquin on the night of the sudden and inexplicable meteor showers that turned the town teal for three days, but it turned out to be about something else entirely: it seems that the storms and lightning on the 18^th exposed a secret entrance in the graveyard that led into “Old Hawthorn’ Feldingway’s hidden underground bioterrorism lab. Oh diary, I didn’t know where to put my face for embarrassment; I had NO IDEA that I’d done such a miserable job of cleaning the grounds. I just put my head in my hands and cried like a baby, and when I finally had the strength to speak again they’d placed a call to our local Specialized Unit for National Safeguarding, who showed up just half an hour ago. Diary, I tried to warn them that ‘Old Hawthorn’ hadn’t been able to tend to the vat-spawners in a dog’s age and that the hidden steel corridors and hallways that honeycomb the earth underneath the estate are doubtlessly now rife with escaped froggoths, zoombys, and dogodiles, but I was so shaken up about what a miserable mess I’d made of everything that all I could do was blubber about how terrible and monstrous and evil I was, and I think they might have mostly focused on me screaming about ‘TERRIBLE, MONSTROUS EVIL’ and run off half-cocked after taking my keys.

There’s been a lot of screaming since they went down there, and then the regular policemen followed them, and now I’m stuck up here and I’m not quite sure what to do. Are they in trouble? They looked big and strong and competent and were wearing bulletproof vests and they told me the situation was under control and it would be pretty egotistical of me to assume I know better than they do. I’m not even sure if I know if it’s POSSIBLE to kill a froggoth, for instance, and I never learned more about their confinement measures than their hatred of salt. Who would I be to chime in and nag these professionals? They’re busy. Did they tell me how to fix the shingles after the meteor storm? Would I have been happy if they had? No! God, I’m so selfish and paranoid.         The idea of trying to tell these experts how to do their jobs just absolutely makes me want to cringe into a ball and die. Maybe I’ll just leave some medical supplies and ammunition around the complex, hidden in cupboards and under desks? You know, discreetly. In case they need it.

Damn my spoons! This would all be so much easier if I could just TALK to people!

***

June 25^th

Well, the estate exploded. I’ve had it, diary. I’m tired of trying to talk to people and warn them off being foolish; I’m tired of being ignored and misinterpreted; I’m tired of stumbling over my own tongue.

So I’m going to write ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE on a big wooden sign and leave it out front of the gate. That ought to clear things up for good.

Weirdest thing happened at work today, honey. A dungeon erupted beneath the breakroom and swallowed everyone during lunch.

It explains a lot – turns out our furnace breaking last spring wasn’t just from poor maintenance, but also the work of pernicious delving spirits!

Mostly the poor maintenance though.

So it was a real rough time for a bit, because me and Ed and Mary had landed on top of some sort of yawning portal in the earth that led to forgotten secrets and ancient tombs, and there was no way back up since we haven’t had the budget to replace the janitor’s ladder since it broke cleaning the gutters last month. So instead they threw down a bunch of the old football equipment for padding and some knives from the kitchen and told us they’d count it as emergency absences with no penalty as long as we could get back out before the next workday. It was pretty funny!

Well, I say pretty funny. At the time it wasn’t great. Mary landed on my lunch. But then Ed opened the darkened ominous creaking gate that was our only exit and we were swarmed by koblins, so I guess I had to let it go pretty fast. It’s hard to stay hungry when you’re trying to put a butter knife through a screaming biped-shaped coyote-frog-monkey-thingy, you know? Took them down, found a few shiny stones in the heel of the biggest one’s shoe, and we moved on. Mary found a secret passage in the next room that led to a hidden chest filled with old, rusty swords, so that was nice I guess.

Still mad about lunch though. I fucking loved those noodles, honey. After a full overnight of flavour intensification? I was FANTASIZING about them all morning.

Oh right, the swords. There were like, sixteen of them, which turned out okay because the next room we found was some kind of dankened primordial pit that opened up underneath the gymnasium and the volleyball team’s practice had gone long so they were stuck in there with Coach Maple, battling some sort of disintegrating slime-beast. Looked a bit like a dog or a whale but longer and more rotten? Smelled like a dumpster, I tell you what. So me and Mary distracted it while Ed armed the volleyball team and we stabbed it until it stopped moving,, and we found some sort of shield in the disintegrating remains of its torso that shone with eldritch runes, which we gave to Ed because I’ll be honest with you that man was NOT pulling his weight and maybe if he had something to hide behind he’d stop flinching, you know? Maybe he’d learn to stand his ground. Maybe he’d stop caving to the damned parents and ensuring the rest of us got flooded with requests to extend deadlines because my little Sammi got an extension for her math homework so why can’t you do that for history, blah blah bitch bitch blah blah BLAH.

Sorry honey. It’s just. Ugh.

Anyways the only way onward was downward so we descended the foetid staircase into the rotten sump, which was a clear sign that our plumbing was in even worse shape than we’d thought after the furnace died and let the pipes freeze. Remember that? Also there was some kind of primeval inscrutable idol and one of the volleyball players started yelling and screaming and trying to stab the rest of us until we could hold her down for a few minutes; said she saw us all as monstrous horrors! Mary said enough was enough and her and Coach Maple tipped the thing over and kicked it until it fell apart. I saw a glowing pearl that shone like a full moon fall out, so I grabbed that before we moved on.

So the next room was full of skeletons – and listen, honey, when I say ‘skeletons,’ I’m NOT saying ‘human skeletons.’ It looked like a herpetology exhibition down there; Mary said there was everything from iguanas and skinks to komodo dragons, and I’m not sure what kind of crocodile the biggest one was but believe you me it was an ANGRY one. We had numbers on our side though, even after Ed blocked a strike from a big snake and turned him into a rat. Ed is a rat now. It’s a real pity none of us could decipher the runic script on that shield; guess it just does that. So everyone was very surprised and Ed was even more scared of the snake than he’d been before and he wouldn’t stop this godawful SQUEALING and then the crocodile or alligator or whatever grabbed my leg and it hurt a lot and sort of took my attention away from whatever was going on, so I’m not quite sure how we managed to pull that one off. Coach Maple said she hit the snake with a skink. I’m sure I won’t argue with her.

So this next bit was stuff everyone else told me because I fainted from the pain and blood loss of having a skeletal crocodile or alligator or whatever chew on my leg. It seems like we were in a foyer to a sort of arcane laboratory, which was occupied by a crazed wizard? I’d love to know how he got any funding for that, honey, let alone paid. So when we ran in Mary asked for help and he was really mad we’d killed his bodyguards and started throwing lightning bolts at people. Completely inconsiderate. Luckily enough it turns out being up close and personal with an old-fashioned alchemical setup is REALLY bad for your vision, so he didn’t land a single shot before Coach Maple skewered him in the giblets. The hard part was that after that happened there was nobody left to explain his awful shorthand he’d labelled all the potions with, so we had to experiment – Ed got voluntold for it, since he was a rat and maybe a potion would fix that, I don’t know. I really wish we’d had Lani with us; the only thing I remember from chemistry is that fume hoods are important. The wizard didn’t have one, by the way.

Now, I didn’t quite get the full story of how many potions everyone went through or what they all did, but by the time I woke up, here’s what was going on:

My leg was better.

Ed was purple.

Coach Maple was holding a twisted staff formed from the wizard’s spine, I think. It was probably his spine. It looked fresh, okay?

The laboratory had exploded and there was glass everywhere.

Ed was still a rat.

It seemed like we got pretty lucky? Especially since the staff could open the locked back door, which was good. I was pretty done with the dungeon thing and wanted back out, so imagine how happy I was when we stepped out into the sunshine! It just sort of sucked that that the sunlight wasn’t coming from our sun, but a miniature one embedded in the ceiling filled with screaming, burning ghosts and orbited by nine spinning spherical skulls, all of which started chanting malign curses.

I was REALLY not happy, honey. I won’t lie, I swore at work. I swore in front of the kids. Nothing mild either, a full-on no-holds-barred ‘oh for FUCK’S sake.’ Grandma would’ve been proud of me.

So that was just a miserable time. The skulls kept spitting comets at us, and the comets bruised and blistered, and Mary was too short to reach any of them and the first time Coach Maple hit one of them with the staff it screamed loud enough most of us had a little bit of blood come out of our ears and Ed was a rat, so it was just me and the volleyball team. But one of them jumped high enough to grab one of the skulls, then they said ‘it just sort of clicked’ and the next thing we knew they were just absolutely dunking on them, or serving them, or whatever the term is. Skulls flying at skulls being used to smash skulls, everywhere, forever. The sun got spiked by six flying skulls at once and well I think that’s the closest I’ve ever been to a supernova. I hope none of us got radiation exposure; I don’t think the school’ll cover any of that.

Oh, and the dying sun spat out a pearl that blazed like fire. We took that and my old moon-pearl and put one in each eyesocket of Coach Maple’s skull-staff, and then it didn’t really do anything, so we tried touching it to Ed to see if he stopped being a rat. He was still a rat.

We were all dead tired – except the kids, they’d just gotten warmed up – but nobody wanted to try and take a break down there, so we kept pushing on. Some sort of stalagmite forest filled with giant crystal spiders; an endless staircase whose steps kept flying out from underfoot and falling into an infinite abyss; and a crypt with a big smashed-open sarcophagus, ten glistening obelisks, and a pair of slowly-crushing walls.

We lucked out on the last one – it turned out when Coach Maple laid the pearl-eyed skull-staff to rest in the sarcophagus, it telescoped the whole apparatus into the ceiling like an elaborate spiral staircase. Gave me the heebles, but not as badly as the scorched and blackened sword that she took from the tomb to replace it. Ed hated that, but it might have been because he was a rat; he REALLY was jittery after that happened to him, and I mean jittery by Ed standards even. Oh, and the staircase took us up into the school board’s meeting room, which they were very unhappy about until Coach Maple’s eyes shone bright red and her sword caught on fire and she screamed about these being those betrayed her and started stabbing. I think the sword and skull might have belonged to Superintendent Mendez, she sounded like him. The board shed their skins and revealed themselves to be monstrous worm-ghouls but the sword was REALLY on fire so in the end the whole school board was executed by Coach Maple, she got exorcised by Mary pouring six salt shakers from the cafeteria down her face, and we all got to go home early while the fire department investigated the new rooms for fire hazards. The volleyball team didn’t get to keep their swords, which they weren’t happy about, but oh well. I told them I’d ask Coach Maple if they could use them after practice once she comes out of her swoon; they figure it should pass before the week is out since it was only a vengeful wraith and not a malign one.

Anyways it was a long, shitty day, but we all pulled through in the end, the kids are all okay, and there’s no real lasting harm done. Except Ed is a rat now. Do you want to order pizza?