[Book Four / other chapters linked here]
SEVEN
Corbomite
They walked in the door, and found themselves in the House. Just the house. The original floorplan, the original dust. In the living room, their bags sat in a pile on the floor; everyone rushed to pick up theirs, rifling through them to see what was inside.
“So what do we know about this house?” Alice asked.
“It reads our minds,” Eliza said, pulling a notebook out of her backpack. “And it’s afraid of those marks.”
The others pulled out notebooks, and they started to write. They hashed out the rules together:
It has power over the House, but not infinite power - making everyone’s illusions drained it, for a time. That’s why they ended up here.
It can’t leave the house; Laura remembered that it spared the firefighter, which if it’s trapped here, means it needs the house - if it burnt down, it would be dead.
Remembering the visions, Summer went looking underneath the stairs, and discovered two spray cans that had bounced down there. Still fresh, somehow, as was the sweat and blood smeared on it; Summer wiped that off on her shirt.
They gathered around the notebook, and they wrote down a plan, thinking of it without thought…
***
Within my walls, the toys dwelt, and they were angry. They were angry.
It seized control of its deer-skull avatar, and it moved it from out of the empty space - where it was trying to rebuild itself, to build new playgrounds to occupy its time - and towards the pinpoints of thought: “I HATE YOU”, “I’LL KILL YOU”, “I WANT OUT OF HERE”, all of the voices of the toys in such incredible anger.
But one of them stood out. A voice of the one it didn’t get before, Laura; “I’ll blow it up! I will! I’ll burn it all down!”
It carried itself forward with great speed, down the chimney and into the living room - empty - and into the kitchen, where Laura held up a match to a pile of detritus in the corner. It raised its voice, spoke from the bones of the house to the bone of its avatar. “You won’t. You aren’t capable. Everyone knows that. Everyone here hates you.” It stepped forward. “I know you’re bluffing.” Behind it, another of the toys thought “yeah, get her”. “You won’t really do it.”
“Yeah.”
Something blew onto its side, and it burnt. The Mark of Confinement…it turned around, bones rattling in a snarl that never came. Summer, the one of the labyrinth, holding a spray paint can. Still she thought: “yeah. I hate Laura. Good. Kill her.”
They were bluffing, it thought. They were…
***
The creature fled through the house, shards of bone flaking off and turning into crystals that melted into nothing before they hit the ground. The House’s walls bulged out, and here and there a head popped out: the waving antenna of an insectoid, the fangs of a chupacabra (Eliza stopped running for her life to look over that one), the cackling visage of the Devil. They, too, broke up into tiny crystals, and clattered to the floor.
The creature turned and broke through the basement door, its bones scorched by some unknown energy; it tumbled down the stairs and crashed into concrete skull-first, and it shattered into millions of tiny shards that flew all over the floor, and down into a craterous hole, and all was dead.