Chapter 8: The Creepy Basement

“Nice to meet you, Yvette,” I said, her tiny pink paw in mine. “I’m Coralie. What’s that thing coming out of the wall?”

She hopped onto the stone table and smoothed out her whiskers. “That’s a spell gone wrong. Rufus’s ex-wife and her boyfriend did it. They let themselves in, drank a lot of wine, and then they wandered down here looking through his books and stuff one night while Rufus was away on business. I only know because I spy on what goes on here from up in the ceiling sometimes.”

“Do you know what they were trying to do?” I asked.

Yvette snatched a centipede crawling along the edge of the stone table and bit off its head. The rest of it was still wiggling.

“Not really. It had something to do with interdimensional magic or something like that,” she said between bites of centipede. “They were making quite a racket. I didn’t know they weren’t supposed to be here. He doesn’t tell me anything anyway, but what do you expect? I’m an opossum. I wasn’t always one, though.”

The crunching noises coming from Yvette’s mouth made my stomach feel wobbly.

“Sorry,” she said. “But I can’t let a perfectly good centipede go to waste. Anyways, you’re not from around here, are you?”

“Nope. I got here by accident. Because of him,” I said, pointing to Rufus. I was very curious about what she meant when she said she wasn’t always an opossum.

Yvette smiled. The smile drew back her teeth so that it looked like she was snarling. I was happy not to see any bug guts on them. “Rufus’s been in a snit over the pendant since his wife took off with another man.”

“Oh,” I said, “I hadn’t heard that part of it. What should we do about him, by the way?”

Yvette shrugged. “Wait until he wakes up, I suppose.”

“But I need to get home!”

She scratched her ear with her hind paw. “Wouldn’t Addison come to get you? I heard Rufus say he was really powerful.”

“He is. But he’s in the hospital right now. He had a heart attack.”

Yvette’s tiny nostrils flared with surprise. “Oh, no! Then I guess he couldn’t come get you after all.”

“Addison doesn’t even know I’m here. I don’t know what to do.” I started pacing up and down the length of the table, while Yvette watched me with curious, glittering eyes.

“You can’t really do anything until Rufus comes around,” she said.

I stopped mid-pace. “What if he’s dead? Then what do I do?”

“I doubt he’s dead,” Yvette said. “He’s lived through much worse.”

“He has?”

“Yes, you should see some of the experiments he’s done down here. He’s almost gotten himself killed at least fifty times by now, with the undead things he’s conjured up.”

My heart skipped. “Undead?”

“Rufus is a necromancer. And he does embalming and cremations, but at least he does those at funeral homes.”

“A necromancer?” I groaned, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. “Now I have to worry about zombies on top of everything else?”

Yvette began grooming her tail. “Don’t worry. He’s usually able to banish the creatures he calls. Most of ’em aren’t too bad, to be honest. Anyways, I suppose you should check him for a pulse if it makes you feel better.”

Slowly I walked back over to Rufus. I didn’t want to touch him, but I had to know for sure if he was alive. Yvette curled up on the stone table to watch.

Using just my fingertips, I carefully moved his sleeve so I could feel for a pulse. So far, so good. No gory wounds. I probably would’ve fainted on the spot.

Suddenly he gasped and shuddered. I screamed and pulled my hands back so fast I smacked myself in the mouth.

“What in Ransara are you doing?” he said.

“See, I told you he wasn’t dead,” chirped Yvette.

“I was checking to see if you were alive. You were practically thrown across the room,” I said.

Rufus made a face like he just ate a sour pickle. He got up and dusted himself off. “Obviously, I survived. Get back over to that table, before you ruin everything.”

I crossed my arms. “Gee, you’re welcome for checking for signs of life and everything.”

Rufus ignored me and hobbled back to the corner. “Gods, this is worse than I thought.” He raked his fingers through his hair and gazed up at the ceiling as if expecting something to happen.

“Rufus, when can I go home?” I asked.

“Shh, I’m thinking!” he said savagely.

Gods, I’m never going to get home at this rate. He’ll probably curse me for life if I ask him again, I thought.

Finally he said, “Come with me. Not you, rodent.”

Yvette’s mouth dropped open. “For your information, I’m a marsupial, not a rodent.”

Rufus whirled around and strode out of the room. His dark robes fanned out elegantly behind him when he did and fluttered in my face. I’m pretty sure he did it on purpose. So far, he’d shaped up to be a world-class jerk.

Worse, he was a necromancer, and probably one hundred percent dedicated to disgusting, gross-out magic.

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I had to race-walk to keep up with him. “Where are we going? I hope you don’t plan on sticking me in your dungeon. Addison will be--”

“I don’t have a dungeon, you idiot,” he interrupted. “You’ve thrown quite a wrench into my plans.”

“Quit calling me idiot,” I said. “If you’d just waited for Addison to return your pendant like a rational person, none of this would be happening right now.”

He spun around, quivering with barely controlled rage, eyes aglow. “You are the one who dragged yourself along on this adventure, so here you’ll stay until I put things in order.”

“Oh, like the weird interdimensional thing that’s coming out of the wall in your laboratory?” I said.

The rest of the color drained from his already pale face. “How do you know about that?”

I pressed my lips together and shrugged.

Rufus glared at me so fiercely I thought smoke would start coming out the back of my skull. “Yvette. I’ll throttle that nosy rat.”

Cold prickles of fear crawled up and down my spine. “No! I saw it when you were knocked out. I was just curious.”

He rubbed his face. “I told you to stay by the stone table. You have no idea what’s going in here, but it’s a lot more serious than you can imagine.”

“Maybe if you told me what the problem is, I could help,” I said.

Rufus cackled.

I fumed. “I help Addison all the time.”

“Let’s go,” Rufus said, rolling his eyes.

I followed him to the end of the hall and up two flights of stairs. He threw open a door of ornately carved dark wood at the top. I caught a glimpse of snarling, sneering faces in the design as we passed.

He led me through his kitchen (which looked surprisingly ordinary) to a small sitting room. There were two chairs and an end table of dark wood, similarly carved as the door I’d seen.

“Don’t touch anything that looks fragile,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back shortly.” He disappeared in a flutter of black robes.

“But what about me getting home?” I said to nobody.

I sighed and sat down. The dark purple velveteen cushions were a bit stiff, like nobody sat in them much. I wondered how often he had company.

The sitting room was interesting, at least. One wall was a built-in bookcase. I got up to investigate. He had a wide variety of reading material, from astrology to zoology texts. On the bottom shelf was a set of Fielding’s Encyclopedias, the fancy ones with gold-leaf edging. They probably cost almost eight-hundred direts.

To my amusement, a selection of romance novels was tucked into a corner. Maybe they’d belonged to his ex-wife. I didn’t see any spell books, not that I would have dared touch them. He’d never keep them here anyways. They were most likely down in his basement laboratory.

I hadn’t seen a phone anywhere. There was nothing I could do about getting home for now, so I grabbed Crewe’s Book of Famous Quotations off the shelf and got comfy in the chair. Just as I was reading quotes about having courage in adverse situations, scratching sounds came from behind the end table.

“Psst, it’s me!” Yvette’s pointy snout poked through a heat vent in the wall.

“How did you get in there?” I asked.

She pushed the grate open. It clattered to the floor. “I can get almost anywhere. I climb between the walls and the ceiling. It’s easy.”

“That’s handy, I guess,” I said. “By the way, is there a phone here I could use?”

Yvette shook her head. “It got broken a while ago and Rufus hasn’t replaced it. He just uses the Chimbrelis anyway.” She clambered onto the chair’s arm. “What’re you reading?”

I showed her the book.

“Are there any quotes about opossums?” she asked.

I flipped through the table of contents and then the index. “I don’t think so. They’re about love and destiny and greatness. Stuff like that.”

“Oh,” she said, flicking her dark ears. “Maybe I should make up my own quotes about opossums. How about ‘An opossum in the hand in worth two in the bush’?”

“I think that one might be taken already.”

Yvette’s ears drooped. “That figures. It’s hard to come up with your own sayings, especially if you’re new at being an opossum.”

I frowned. “I was curious about that.”

“I’ve only been one for a few years,” she sighed. “Before that I was a person.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh. Didn’t it surprise you that I can talk?”

“Well,” I said, and told her all about the dog fur scarf.

Yvette’s whiskers drooped again. “Mine is more permanent. Irreversible.”

I placed the book on the end table. “I have to hear this story. Tell me what happened.”

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