Chapter 19: Purrberus and the Hellworld

I floated over dagger-sharp teeth that seemed large as mountains as they closed in slow motion behind me. The pendant was caught on the bottom row, next to a space where a bottom canine tooth was missing.

I struggled to move but it was like in a dream where your arms and legs feel like they’re moving through molasses. When I screamed there was no sound. The light from Rufus’s basement snuffed out as Purrberus’s terrible mouth closed. The marble had vanished.

There was nothing but this giant span of darkness that went on forever.

A loud cracking noise happened, like something exploding between my ears. I woke up in my own bed at Addison’s house, Clyde curled up by my feet. It took me a moment to remember what day it was. Addison walked in with a box of doughnuts.

There was a moment of pure joy as I hugged him. I tried to ask about the heart attack, and his hospital stay, but my voice came out too weak.

“I’ve been home for a while,” he said. “We’re celebrating you today.”

He handed me a doughnut and my parents appeared in the doorway. Horror rolled over me.

They don’t look right, I tried to say. Clyde yawned and stretched. He had three heads.

“There was some confusion,” Addison said. “Your parents are here to pick you up.”

They looked like freshly dug up corpses. Dirt crumbled from their hair and clothes onto me and my bed.

“We’ve missed you,” my father said. My mother smiled. She had no teeth.

No no this can’t be right, I want to stay here, I tried to say but my mouth still wouldn’t cooperate. My body felt leaden.

“Have a doughnut, Coralie,” said Addison. He turned to my parents. “I guess the cat’s got her tongue.”

There was another BANG. I was with my friends, the ones Addison called vagrants. We were in a park where there were families having picnics and children playing.

“Coralie,” one of them was saying, “check this out.” He was an older kid named Elias who had been to juvenile lockup.

I turned. Mister Gentry’s pendant dangled in front of my face.

“Those stupid people just wandered away and left their stuff,” Elias said.

Some Jenelle police were talking to a man and a woman further down the path. They looked at us but were too far away for me to see who they were.

Instantly they were much closer.

Rufus and Roanna. “We will press full charges,” they said.

“Crimes against magic users can put you in prison for life,” Roanna said.

“Or get you executed,” Rufus said.

“Here,” Elias said, tossing the pendant at me. It slipped through my fingers as the police grabbed my arms. Handcuffs clinked.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” I argued, engulfed in terror, but my voice was drowned out in the crowd that had gathered to watch. My friends were gone.

“Prison for life!” some of the crowd chanted. “Execution!” others shouted. Rufus and Roanna stood at the front, with him holding the pendant.

Another bang.

I was sitting in the hallway outside the school principal’s office where my mother was in a meeting explaining why I was missing so many days. Their drug use had gotten bad. It’s why we kept moving place to place.

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My mother was screaming at the others. She grabbed me and we left through a labyrinth of damp, underground corridors with peeling paint and cobwebs. The puddles grew and became deeper with murky water. The water rose higher and higher as the corridors became narrower and narrower. There was nowhere to go.

Something grabbed my legs and dragged me under along the walls. It pulled me all the way to some kind of pitch black, flooded boiler room. Masses of rats squealed and skittered above me.

“Coralie will have to stay here because she missed so much school,” my teacher said, seated at her desk that towered high above the water.

My shoes were gone. Something slithered around my ankle and tugged my foot. Water sloshed all over my face, getting in my mouth.

Another bang.

I woke up again, this time curled up on the couch in Addison’s library. Someone was knocking on the door. I vaulted off the couch to answer it.

“Hold on, Coralie,” called Addison, and tossed me a piece of sausage.

I caught it in my mouth. My tail wagged so ferociously I knocked over Addison’s #1 Wizard coffee mug and broke off the handle. My tail…

The door opened. A shadow fell across the threshold.

“We’ve been expecting you,” said Addison.

Mister Gentry glided into the room, his bony fingers stretching towards me. “Aw, look at the cute little puppy dog. Let me see the interesting collar you are wearing!”

Terror crashed over me. I whined and scrambled to hide behind the couch.

“It’s okay Coralie,” said Addison. “Come have a piece of sausage.”

Sausage was too good to pass up but Mister Gentry was one of the most terrifying things I’d ever seen. Addison coaxed me out and gave me a bite but quickly grabbed me while I was distracted. I had been tricked by food again.

“Go on and take what’s yours, demon lord,” Addison said.

Mister Gentry grinned. I snarled and snapped as he removed the pendant.

“Be nice, Coralie,” Addison said. “We’ll get you a new one.”

Another bang. I lay somewhere in cold darkness, my body too heavy to move, my brain too tired to think.

Something heavy-sounding rolled slowly behind me, like the biggest bowling ball in the universe. Moments later I heard it roll the other way. Back and forth, the same rumbling noise, sometimes closer, sometimes further away.

I forced my eyes open. A gigantic blue sphere rolled into sight. I stared at it for what seemed like hours, waiting for it to move. It had been doing that since I came here, forever ago.

It rolled towards me. My body was still too sluggish to get up.

A deafening bang sounded inside my head. For a second I thought I had been jolted out of my skin. Several bodies bumped into me from all directions, then disappeared. Muscle cramps made me gasp in agony, but the pain soon became duller until it faded. I was desperately thirsty.

The darkness dissolved to hazy blue. I floated along until I was rudely dumped on Rufus’s filthy basement floor, narrowly missing a pile of my own puke.

Rufus, Jamison, Yvette, and Tobin all lay slumped over nearby.

Purrberus hacked like she was coughing up a hairball. The marble, now shrunk to normal size, bounced in front of me and zipped into the glove I was still wearing.

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