Page 62 of The King of Halloween
“It was a dirt lot that grew watermelons.”
“The most terrifying of melon,” Adam said, getting a momentary chuckle from the man about to have a panic attack. Poor Raj kept darting his eyes around like he expected the teenagers to burst through the wall and take him.
“Look.” Adam clasped his palms to Raj’s shoulders, getting the man to focus on him. “There’s got to be a logical answer. We’ll find it.”
“You promise?” His plea rang out like anAve Mariain the middle of a poltergeist attack.
“I do.”
“If this doesn’t work…”
“It will. You just need the Stein touch.” Adam raised his arms in dramatic fashion.
The lights went out.
“That wasn’t it.”
“Damn it. Not this half too. Come on. I swear, it’s got to be the breaker.”
Clinging to Raj’s shoulder, Adam was led through the back alleys in the pitch dark. Every once in a while, Raj would call out “Duck” or “Move to the left” just before a large hand would try to crush him. It was like he knew the place better than the inside of his eyelids. “I don’t get it. I’ve tested every fuse, every light. It should be working. The draw’s good. We’re not overloading. But if I leave the place running for longer than an hour, it does, well…this.”
They descended the cement steps into a makeshift bunker. Cold bit at Adam like he was on the wrong side of a grave. Raj beamed his phone’s flashlight at the command center of the damned. A table was set up below a fuse box. On it was a laptop hooked up to what looked like a server or some kind of mechanical doodad.
It quickly hit Adam that he had no idea what any of this was. Raj babbled to himself about all the whooseits and whatsits galore while Adam kept nodding, not understanding a thing. After pushing a button on the laptop that made a lot of little buttons turn red, Raj glanced back at him.
“What do you think?”
He didn’t have a damn clue how to help him. It’d be so easy to walk away, leave Raj to the mandibles of the un-entertained outside. When did helping someone ever not bite him the ass? “Maybe there’s a loose plug?” Adam said, grimacing for the groan.
Raj’s heavy head fell. “Maybe,” he said, brimming with dejection. “This is it. If I can’t get this to work, then…I don’t think the haunt will happen.”
“What? But there’s still…a couple more weekends left in Halloween. And next year too.”
“Assuming there is a next year,” Raj mumbled. He’d said it so quietly, Adam suspected he wasn’t supposed to hear. But concrete bunkers had amazing acoustics.
Adam’s heart fluttered like a butterfly with wings of razor blades. Was the hotel in trouble? Was Raj? No. He couldn’t pack up and go back to California. Not now, not when…
“We’ll find it,” Adam said, taking Raj’s hand. He stared up at him with such hope in his eyes, Adam couldn’t help but cup his cheek. “Whatever’s messing his place up, we’ll find it and fix it.” Holding him tight, Adam pulled the beleaguered man to him for a kiss. The touch sealed his promise to not only help, but stay for the worst of it.
Raj gave a sputtering breath as he kept running his fingers through Adam’s gelled hair. He finished by circling Adam’s ear with a finger and gazed at him. “Really?”
“And if we can’t, we tell them a ghost is fucking it all up.”
?
Raj cracked open his toolbox and inspected his weapons. “Here, for sticking something that’s supposed to stick.” He placed a roll of duct tape in Adam’s hands. “And for unsticking something that’s not supposed to be stuck.”
Adam cracked open the jar, his eyebrow rising in surprise. “Crisco?”
“It’s digestible,” Raj said without thinking.
He got a knowing smile from the man, then closed the jar before slipping it into his pocket. “Oh, and this is so we can communicate.” Raj handed over one of the walkie-talkies and hung the other on his belt.
“I’ll have you know I’m an exemplary communicator, according to my grade school counselor. I use my words and not my fists. Well, not unless someone asks for one.”
Raj tried to focus, but he couldn’t stop his jaw from dropping. Bundling all those thoughts away for much later, he pointed to a path. “Take that, check the wires you find as you go. I’ll do the other side. We should be done in…”
Not ten minutes. Well, they’d already waited an hour; what was another fifteen minutes more?
