Welcome back to Sip, Swallow & Scream, where Baltimore’s amateur sleuth, Sesame Swallow, and her besties are up to their necks in a murder mystery! In our last episode, Sesame, Regan and Lindsay had made their way to the Ravenwood Estate for the big haunted dance/costume party, which was one of the main reasons they were in town in the first place. They didn’t expect to witness a murder and have a mystery to solve, so now all thoughts of partying have been put to bed — their latest clue has pointed them to an underground chamber beneath a trap door. And nothing good comes from a secret chamber you access via trap door!
I waited until Regan was down, then moved ahead, the light of Lindsay’s phone shining ahead. It didn’t do an adequate job — typical phone flashlight app, but at least it wasn’t broken. She broke her phones often enough herself; I didn’t want to be the cause this time.
She held my hand as we walked, ducking a little because the ceiling was low and there was no way I was getting any damned spiderwebs in my hair. You never know where the spiders might be, and nobody has time for that. The light from the phone flickered, which was odd, I thought, even more so because it seemed to flicker when I felt a bit of a draft. Was it just nerves? Were we even in the right place? And then it dawned on me: “Are we heading back towards the ballroom?”
I stopped, my voice lost in the darkness for a moment, holding my breath, listening. The walls seemed to tremble in the light — another hallucination or had we broken her phone after all? And then, out there somewhere, I could hear the faint sound of music, the oomph of the bass. I reached out and touched the wall, feeling the grooves and irregularities of the rough stone. It vibrated. We’d climbed down the ladder, but it hadn’t occurred to me which direction we were going.
“Definitely,” said Regan, stepping forward into the light, her hand running along the wall. “I can feel it. The party. The heart of the whirl,” she said, eyes flashing. “We couldn’t have been more than fifty meters out, less now. We’ve been clumping along here for a bit. Thirty meters? Twenty-five and then we’ll be right underneath the ballroom, I think. Did you notice the floor is on a slope? We’re going down.”
“Down where?” said Linds, swinging the flashlight around until it was right in my eyes.
I reached out and redirected, catching a glint of something just ahead. “Hold ‘er steady, Linds. Right up there. Or down there. I think,” I said and took a few cautious steps forward. I could feel the incline, or the decline, as it were, the floor sloping down, now that Regan mentioned it. In heels, a girl could feel everything about the floor, and added pressure on my toes and up through to my knees told the rest of the story. We were heading down now, down to a keyhole in the wall. It was right there, Lindsay’s light resting on a little metal keyhole in the middle of a blank wall, the very end of our underground tunnel.
“Hollowed realm, where riddles swirl, Unlock the hidden room in the heart of the whirl.” Lindsay’s voice was barely a whisper as I reached up and unfeathered my cap.
A twist, and a tentative smile back at the girls, and I nestled the key into the waiting hole, gave it a turn to the right, and heard an audible click. The click led to a series of rumbles; something deep in the wall or chamber beyond, or whatever was there, and then that entire section of wall began to slide with a low grinding noise, as these kinds of secret wall doors into secret chambers when in search of secret treasures always do. I’d seen it in so many movies, and to witness it myself — well, It was almost cool.
It’d have been cooler if when the wall started sliding, we all hadn’t gotten blasted with frigid air, like a winter storm whistling past my ears. Cooler if Lindsay hadn’t screamed and dropped her phone again. I imagined I heard the case crack because the scream was still echoing in my ears when the light went out. Cooler still if the blast of icy blast hadn’t been accompanied by a horrific howl, or moan or groan, or whatever the hell that was. It shot past us with the wind, like a beast being released from its cage. Was it just the wind? Or was there something else in the dark with us? And why was there wind in a secret room in a basement in a 17th-century estate house in the first place? Or had I just imagined all of that? But Linds, clutching my arm, her body trembling as she latched onto me, told me that maybe I hadn’t.
“Logical explanation,” said Regan, coming up beside me and handing me the phone. I gave it a shake, watching the flashlight blink on and off, then on again, as we formed our own little circle of fear. “That sound has a logical explanation.” Her voice was steady, but I’d known her a while, and I recognized the way her eyes were darting around, looking for danger. Her grip was firm, not like Lindsay’s death grip, but I could feel how tense she was, her muscles primed for action.
“Yeah, there’s a werewolf in there, and it just got its favorite dinner served up raw and wriggling.” Linds’ nails dug into my arm, and I reached around, trying for a second to extract myself from her Clutch of Death, until I just shook my head and let her be. I’d have a bruise tomorrow, but she’d feel safe tonight. It was a fair tradeoff.
“Sealed room maybe,” said Regan, countering. She was closer than normal, and I wasn’t sure if I felt her trembling on that side of me, or if I was trembling in her direction. Linds was shaking enough for the both of us on my left, even given she’d had a ghost go right through her only twenty-four hours ago. “Air pressure differential. Lots of logical and scientific explanations.”
“Definitely a werewolf,” shot back Linds, “and I didn’t even wear those silver earrings I brought.”
We stepped forward -- correction: I stepped forward, phone up, the light streaming into the gloom, and pulled my best bitchachos along with me, each of them holding an elbow. I felt like Dorothy walking through the Haunted Forest with my Lion and Scarecrow friend — or was Linds the Tin Man? — and reciting, “Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!” No, I realized, watching the dust motes flutter across the light beam, Regan was the Tin Man — all heart, and Linds was the Scarecrow. I was the Lion.
I exhaled, watching the wisp of cloud billowing away from my mouth. It matched the mist swirling beneath our feet. All of it like we were entering a different world, some mystical land forever frozen in time. The temperature dropped with each step forward, our footfalls swallowed up in the darkness, and then I could feel the walls recede, the area around us opening up, like we were stepping into something larger. The light played left and right, as if it was directing itself, else I was shivering so much I couldn’t hold it steady, and before I could even focus the beam in any one direction, a series of clicks and clanks echoed overhead, and old electric lamps hanging from the ceiling glowed to life, shining down on us with an eerie, reddish glow, like we’d suddenly walked into some sinister oven.
And right there, next to Regan, stood a solemn figure, unmoving.
“What the fuck?” shouted Regan, shoving us all to the side, her voice lost to echoes as the very same words spilled out of my mouth a half-second behind her.
But the figure didn’t move, and when I whipped the light across it, I felt the air go out of my lungs. “Jesus fuck,” I mumbled, annoyed at the statue. Who or what it was, well, who could tell? It just stood there, probably a man, folded in a gesture of contemplation, encased in a patina of age, cracked and dusty, the red light giving it an ominous glow.
“A museum?” Linds startled me, but as my attention swung back to the room, the assessment seemed apropo. Everywhere my gaze landed, I could feel history staring back at us—towering suits of armor, racks of ancient weapons, faded tapestries adorning the stone walls, sturdy old tables piled high with trinkets and knick-knacks. It was as if the Ravenwoods of old had been famous treasure seekers, or even pirates, and this was where X marked their spot. And all around the edges of the massive chamber, dusty shelves of books lined the walls, the nearest of them towering over us like a giant. The whole place tingled with an unsettling aura. Probably the red lights overhead, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we weren’t supposed to be here.
“What’s that noise?” said Linds.
“The dance. The party above us. The heart of the whirl,” said Regan, and she was right. It wasn’t obvious at first, but the bass was coming through the floor, as was the tap, tap, tapping of dozens of feet in boots and heels and monster parts. The party was going, and we three idiots were down here in some creepy pirate’s den trying to find a book.
“It’s in here somewhere, right?” I said. “Let’s spread out and find it.” I took a step forward, trying to extract myself from the grippy hands gripping me, and after a moment of shaking it off, Taylor-style, I managed to extract myself from the clutches of the clutchy. “Come on, bitchachos, buck up.” I glowered my best glower, hoping to motivate some bitches, and when both Regan and Lindsay looked back at me, I just shrugged. “We gotta find the thing, the book. It’s gotta be in here.”
“On shelf of dust, in gloom’s embrace, A silvered spine, out of time and place. Veiled by webs, a title worn and shy, The Telltale Lines where secrets lie.” It was Lindsay’s voice now, quiet, like the mist swirling around our feet, the fog her breath formed. The words seemed to float in the air on that fog, hovering in front of her and then fading away to nothing.
“Okay, a silver spine. I’ll take this side,” said Regan, and she turned and walked right. I pointed the other way, and Linds turned, looking less than confident. Then, she reached out and snatched her phone out of my hand.
“I’m gonna record all of this for, you know, prosperity.”
I nodded silently, deciding not to correct her, and watched her tip-toe away like she was crossing thin ice. It was straight ahead for me then, opposite the way we’d come in, my path weaving between the various dust-and-clutter-covered tables that littered the middle of the room. Six massive bookshelves lined the wall, reaching almost to the ceiling, and my first thought was that I didn’t see a ladder to reach the upper shelves. None of us being taller than five foot six inches, except in heels, it looked like we might have a problem. Next to each bookcase stood two suits of armor, empty of course — I hoped, and in the hands of each suit of armor, like a guardian watching over the secret room, a weapon of some sort. A spear, or a spear with an axe on it, or a long curved blade. Were those things even real? And how heavy were they? I pictured myself using a spear to pull down some books, which seemed like overkill, and then I imagined shredded pages raining down around me like snowflakes.
But maybe the book wasn’t on a shelf. The eerie red light played over the baubles on each table, making every little thing look baked into the past. No books in sight, but so many interesting things. I mean, I was no Indiana Jones, but I recognized most of the items -- dolls and toys from another era on one table, tribal masks and some ancient tools on another. Still another table was stacked with scrolls and stone tablets and wooden discs that looked like you could spin them around to do some kind of calculation. What kind of person had Lord Ravenwood been anyway? That wasn’t something that we’d Googled, but I was sure there was a Wikipedia or other webpage somewhere that would tell us once this little mystery was solved and Victor could rest in peace.
Nothing on the tables, except a missed opportunity to inhale a nose full of dust and spend the next ten minutes sneezing. That left me with the bookcases.
Only the bookcases weren’t giving me the right vibe. Maybe it was the red light, but everything seemed to be caked in antiquity, as if someone had layered a thick carpet of last century on the entire room. I was looking for a silvered spine, something that might glint in the light, even in the sinister red glow that bathed the room. And yet, nothing presented itself, nothing until I turned around in frustration and found that very glint back across the other side of the room, a glint that grew into a glow, ghostly and familiar.
“There!” I shouted, unable to hold it in, realizing that I didn’t want Regan to miss it this time.
The mist that had danced around our every step, swirled around the statue we’d first encountered, bathing the thing in an otherworldly glow, and then the face came alive, and I saw Not-Poe, er, Victor Hughes, his eyes blinking open right where the statues eyes would have been, his mouth moving, spectral letters and figures spewing out in a Danse Macabre.
“Me! I got it,” shrieked Linds, her phone up and filming as she closed in. Regan stood where she’d turned, and I edged her way, watching the cipher play out across the room while keeping my eyes on my friend. She was tough, her time in the Marines notwithstanding, but this wasn’t something the average, courageous soldier encountered. When I touched her arm, she wrapped it around me, pulling me into her, and we both watched Linds leaning left and right, like a professional cameraman trying to get the shot.
“Holy fuck,” said Regan, a wisp of fog flowing from her lips as she exhaled.
“Yeah.” It was as much as I had at the moment. I’d have liked to have said, “Been there, done that,” but that seemed a little dickish, and when you get that arrogant, shit usually goes wrong. “Got it, Linds?” The unreal utterances were still flowing, and she was still filming, but she threw me a thumbs up and smile, which quickly turned into a frown and another shriek.
“Watch out!” she yelled and pointed, her camera swinging around and aiming it at us, just as I turned and shoved Regan out of the way. One of those great iron spear things crashed across the table next to us, shattering it and sending its collection raining down as I scrambled across the floor on my hands and knees, trying to climb back to my feet and face the tall black shadow in the elaborate mask.
Author’s Notes: What better place to find a clue than a creepy old underground chamber filled with dusty books and suits of armor and — who the fuck is that in the elaborate mask? Well, we’ll find out in the next episode.
Meanwhile, the fun continues with another appearance by Not Poe. This guy, Victor Hughes, was an early idea — let’s let the ghost tour guy die, the guy who also happens to be the person who found the Poe manuscript. But it wasn’t until later that I thought to bring him back as a ghost to help the crew solve the mystery. And then, because the manuscript has some cryptography in it, and Lindsay’s character is a bit of a genius, I thought it would be cool to bring codes into the story. But how would the girls get the codes, or find them? Why not let the ghost of Victor Hughes use Poe’s ciphers to communicate? Okay, it’s convenient that Lindsay has a thing for cryptography, but hey, it’s my story, and I thought that would be a neat aspect — the ciphers break down to Poe-try (see what I did there?), and then the girls have to solve the riddle of the poems.
Eh, this is what happens when you want to challenge your characters. You have to give them some solid obstacles and make them work together.
Either way, I hope you are enjoying the ride. We’re only half-way through the story! What do you think of it so far?
Keep going to episode 8!
