"I swear, if I'm dying tonight because of you, I'm gonna haunt your ass so hard, Harrington!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm gonna go full Poltergeist and shit!"
"Then bring it, Graveswood."
"Challenge accepted."
***
In which after years of suppressing their...
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Chapter One-Hundred-And-Twenty-Eight: Just Another Manic Friday
(The Hellfire Club)
***
She was back at the house again.
Rowan stared at the decaying structure before her—a house that would have been grand now rotting, disintegrating boards threaded with fleshy vines and splintered windows showing nothing but darkness. Peeling paint revealed crumbling wood and the pillars holding the house's roof up looked like the only thing keeping it together—that, and the vines slithering across the house. A stained glass image of a rose in the front door captured Rowan's attention until shrieks came and she looked up to see a cloud of dark creatures—monsters—flying around the attic, illuminated by the bloody lightning that did little to penetrate the gloom of this rotting nightmare-world.
It felt like the set of a horror movie, and it made Rowan's skin crawl more than it already did when she found herself back in the horrifying world of the Upside Down.
The attic window caught Rowan's attention and she looked at it, the darkness yawning from it. Something about the darkness felt like it was watching Rowan and she wanted to run, teleport or burn it away with her lightning, and yet she couldn't move, frozen in place as her mind screamed why she was here, what was it about this goddamned house, she had to move—
A voice cut through the toxic air, cut through the paralysis gripping Rowan, cut through the painfully wrong feeling of the Upside Down's frequency, raspy and cold, sliding into Rowan's ears—into her brain—skittering across it like a spider and have her body riot in shivers.
A voice she had heard last summer, back in a secret underground lab and next to a machine breaking apart worlds. A voice she thought she would never hear again.
"Rowan."
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
A person stood at the door, back to her, the hair colour and clothes slightly familiar.
"Rowan."
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The person turned to her.
"Rowan."
Tick! Tock! Tick! Tock!
"Rowan!"
Instead of a human face or identifying features, there were only voids for eyes and a mouth. Spiders crawled out of the empty holes, black and bulbous with spindly legs and red flashing on their abdomens as the face's mouth opened wide, wider than humanly possible, as a long, distorted scream splintered the air, drowning out the ticking and the voice.
