It opened into another hallway, lined once more with doors. I made a mental note to track down the architect of Took Manor if I survived, and tell him to calm down with the whole 'doors and hallways' thing. It was becoming thoroughly unacceptable.
Dashing through this one as silently as possible, I went to the end of it this time, towards a big set of double doors. They were made of walnut or something, some kind of expensive wood, but that didn't hold me back from kicking them open. Well, actually it did, since they were heavy doors and didn't budge one bit. I just managed to hurt myself.
Foot throbbing painfully, I tried the handles on the doors, which opened smoothly and easily. I felt like an idiot as I walked through them into some kind of ballroom, huge, expansive, and full of ornate pillars with floral designs carved into them. Mainly roses and vines, but there was one with a little woodsy meadow scene and some goofy looking cupid guy. I thought it looked dumb.
There were two more doors in the room, leading off into the unknown, and I stopped to debate which to take. I'd never been through either in our little pre-dinner tour, but it seemed to me that the one straight ahead would lead back to the dining room. The place where Mr. Slither had first appeared. I swiveled on my toes and headed towards the other door, my steps all too loud against the hardwood floor, no matter how quietly I tried to walk. Well, limp. My foot was still throbbing painfully and had swollen up till it was tight against the inside of my sneaker.
I stopped to rest against one of the pillars, this one with mirrors all over it. Lord knows why. Maybe so when people danced in the ballroom they could admire themselves. My foot still ached painfully, and since I had to rest it for a moment anyways, I decided to try admiring my own self to see what would happen.
I was left unimpressed. Goofy and slightly awkward looking, short and... unwomanly enough in shape to look more like a twelve-year-old than anything else, I did not consider myself very attractive. My short cut, not-quite blond hair didn't help matters, though it was mostly covered by my Snoopy Cap anyways. And of course, my eyes. People always said they were disconcerting, an indeterminate color that was maybe blue, maybe green, maybe silver.
I stared into them for a while, trying to figure out what other people saw, and noticed that I was still holding my hard-nosed Teddy Bear. I had completely forgotten about it, despite the fact that I was clutching it with a death grip in my left hand. I loosened my grip just a little, deciding it was probably okay to calm down. Then the door that I'd just come through opened behind me.
Whirling around, Teddy held high and ready to smash, I saw Vincent Fitzroy, the man I'd argued with over dinner. He looked just as shocked to see me, his mouth hanging open just a little.
"Vincent," I said curtly in greeting, not lowering the Teddy. This man could still be in league with Mr. Slither, or could very well be that dark entity himself. You just never knew with people.
"Ni...cole?" he tried, more of a question than a statement. I found myself not at all surprised that he had failed to remember my name.
"Nillium," I corrected him. "Nillium Neems, and Nil to my friends. You on the other hand, can all me Miss Neems."
He took a few steps towards me. I took a few steps back.
"Have you seen anyone else? Did anyone else make it out alive?"
"I saw the Colonel. He was alive until it got him. What about you?"
Vincent went a little paler at my mention of the Colonel's death.
"Did you... did you see what... what it looked like?"
I shook my head.
"No. During dinner, the last thing I remember before the lights went out, was Silas Took looking towards the heavens with a look of horror on his face."
Vincent gulped, then nodded.
"I have never seen anyone look that terrified. Then the shadow, and then darkness."
"Flailing limbs, snakes, tentacles, maybe some kind of arms, but they were there, so many- "
"Too many," Vincent added, caught up in the memory. "Everyone running, yet it was all black, so damn black- "
"Like it was more than mere darkness- "
"Like it was something different, something otherworldly that had descended upon that room, something, something we weren't meant to see."
I nodded slowly.
"I survived by crawling under the table and waiting till I was pretty sure the door wouldn't be clogged with fleeing people. Then I stumbled through the dark until I found it and hid in a closet in another room."
"Almost wish I'd gone with that approach," Vincent said with a note of distaste on his face, as if he'd swallowed something sour. "I went for the door out like everyone else. Almost didn't make it because that oaf Jon Dobavi had somehow wedged himself in the door. The man isn't even fat, how do you manage to do that? It's a bloody big door!"
"So what happened?" I asked.
Vincent's face, if anything, went just a little bit paler.
"I started shoving at him, just trying to get him out of the way, when I felt something wet and slimy crawl right over my shoulder. One of... His tentacles or arms or whatever they are. It grabbed Dobavi by the shoulder and yanked him right out of the way. I never even heard the man scream. After that I headed at a run for the front door."
"And let me guess, the door and all the windows were covered with vines?"
Vincent looked startled by that, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming pickup truck.
"What!?"
"The windows in the room that I fled to were the same. I don't know how Mr. Slither did it, but he did. He doesn't want any one of us escaping, so he made those stupid vines grow or whatever."
"Stupid vines? You do realize they're alive don't you, you idiot girl!"
Now it was my turn to look a little startled.
"What do you mean by alive?"
"Well, I didn't just get to the front door and say 'whoops, guess there's vines in the way, might as well go back and get eaten by a monster instead'. I did make some effort to actually try and pry the things off. But then they... sort of moved. Started wiggling like live snakes or something. After that I started heading for the back door, hoping it might be clear, which is how I got here."
I nodded, only half-trusting him. His story could well be true. It probably was. Though it was also possible that he had left out the parts about killing the other guests and turning into Mr. Slither. I did not trust his goatee.
"So, what now?" I asked. "Join forces and head for the back door?"
Then another one of the ballroom doors opened, the one that I had decided probably led back towards the dining room. For just a few moments I thought it was another dinner guest shuffling into the room, until I realized that this newcomer was merely human-shaped. It had arms and legs, hands and feet, even a head, though it appeared to be composed of sewer-green plant vines, writhing about like angry snakes that had merely decided to take the shape of a person.
I shared a glance with Vincent Fitzroy.
"Run?" he suggested.
I shook my head. We already had Mr. Slither to deal with. The last thing I wanted was to run from this thing, only to be caught inbetween it and Slither Face later on.
"Grab something to hit it with," I said firmly. "It seems to be slower than us, so I think we can take it on."
Vincent gave me one disbelieving look, then turned and ran back the way we had come. Coward. With a sigh, I hefted my Teddy Bear and charged.
A few feet from the plant zombie, I juked to the left as it reached out a hand and swung my bear as hard as I could at the side of its head. The plant zombie stumbled a little, nearly fell, and then some of the vines unwound from around its head and reached out, snatching the bear from my grasp. The top of a human head was now revealed beneath the fretwork of vines, just barely visible beneath all of that writhing chaos.
Taking a step back, weaponless, I felt desperately in my pockets for anything that I might use to defend myself. My fingers tumbled over a quarter, a key of unknown origin, and a single signed baseball card from Derek Norris. He was one of my favorite players because his beard was cool.
I turned and ran, putting enough distance between me and the monster so that I could survey the room for something to use against it. I had no intention of leaving the room without at least an attempt to kill it. Which is probably why I started muttering to myself like a crazy person, thinking aloud as I surveyed the room for something I could use.
"Classy Victorian Mansion, expensive, showy, ridiculously opulent," my eyes roved back and forth across the room, scanning the walls, the pillars, everything. "Candlesticks, knives, paintings, serving people, swords," the last word sparked a few neurons at last, and I stopped and stood still, pausing in my mad search. Every mansion had swords hanging on a wall somewhere, and surely this one was no different. What better place than a ballroom, somewhere meant to display the wealth of its owner?
I started running along the perimeter of the room, looking at about head height for the swords. I had temporarily forgotten about the plant zombie, who had unfortunately gotten uncomfortably close. I picked up the speed until there was a comfortable distance between us once more, and just as I turned my head to search the walls again, low and behold, there they were!
There were two of them, crossed swords that were probably cheap reproductions of something famous, hanging casually on the wall as if the master of the house liked to do a bit of sword-fighting on a Saturday morning, just to keep his hand in.
I snatched them off the wall with a shout of triumph, images of Zorro and the Three Musketeers flashing through my mind as I prepared to do something heroic. It was only as I lifted them that I realized they were literally fused together, nothing but show pieces and poor ones at that. It seemed that Mr. Silas Took, lord and master of Took Mansion, was a cheapskate...
The plant zombie drew closer, vines peeling away layer by layer to reveal the corpse beneath, as they reached towards me like feelers. They seemed all too hungry for a bite of Neems-shaped flesh.
I studied the crossed swords. They did look sort of sharp. With a sigh, suspecting I was about to do something really stupid, I held the swords out in front of me so they almost seemed like a stupid-looking pair of garden shears, and charged the monster. I didn't really have much fear of hurting whichever dinner guest was buried beneath all those vines, for I kind of knew that he was long past dead, just a handy shape for the vines to take their form around.
My foe managed to hiss at me before I took him through the chest, pushing him backwards and right off his feet with me following after. The impact of the ground helped drive the swords deeper into his chest, carving off a few vines in the process, but to my horror, the monster didn't seem too fazed.
One veiny, gross little tendril, unwound from the mass and headed towards my face. There was a little bulb on the end, which opened up to reveal a single, sickly pale eyeball. Beneath the eyeball was a creepy-looking sucker.
Screaming in panic, unaware that several of the other vines were already starting to wind themselves around my legs and waist, I pulled the swords loose and stabbed them forwards, cutting clean through the eyeball stalk. It tumbled to the ground with a wet squishy sound, and all of the vines around me started to writhe like mad.
Then they went limp, falling loosely around me like dead noodles (as opposed to live noodles). Warily, I grabbed a handful of them and tugged, delighted when they just slipped off. I'd killed it.
Throwing my rather embarrassing weapon aside, I tugged a few more vines away from the corpse, revealing the face of Jon Dobavi, the navy guy from dinner. I'd only talked with him briefly, and not much at that, all I knew was that he used to stock cereal for a living before becoming a corpsman. Now he was a corpseman. I chuckled at my joke and then felt sick. I was losing it.
Trying to keep it together, I got to my feet, spared one last sorry look at Jon, wishing I could do more for him, and then picked up the swords again in case I needed them. I took one step and then dropped them. They were stupid and unwieldy. I needed something comforting. Casting my gaze around, I found the Teddy Bear and picked it back up. Perhaps it would prove more useful next time.
Cuddling my Teddy Bear, almost yet not quite crying, I took the door that didn't lead towards the dining room. I also made a serious mental note to uproot all of the plants in Mom's garden. Today, was not a happy sort of day.