It was surprisingly easy to sneak out of the high school. Clara and Nick knew all the little tricks, from hopping over one booby-trapped stair that would sound an alarm in the office to the "secret passage" that ran between walls. I tried to seem excited by the passages, as Nick and Clara obviously expected me to, but the truth was, my own school had so many of them I wasn't remotely surprised.
We made our way into a clump of bushes outside, where I started toward the parking lot and the hidden manhole cover that was an entrance into the catacombs. Nick and Clara didn't follow, so I turned to see them giving me funny looks.
"What?" I had another mini panic attack, like I got whenever anybody looked at me too closely. Apparently.
"The catacombs entrance is that way," Nick said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "Where are you going?"
"Uh, not to the catacombs entrance under that manhole cover..." Smooth, Jackson. Commendable save. He rolled his eyes at me.
Clara's eyes widened, and her black lips twitched up in eager anticipation. "There's an entrance to the catacombs in our school parking lot?"
I hesitated, then nodded and sighed with defeat. "It's one of the easiest to use in this town."
"One of?" Nick asked with reservation. "As in, more than one? Er, more than these two?"
"Uh..." I was starting to see where I had messed up. I deflected the question. "How much time do you spend in the catacombs?"
Clara shrugged and crept forward to follow me. "Not very much. We've maybe been down there two or three times. But let's get out of these bushes before my tights snag or something."
I made a mental note to pretend to know less about the catacombs than I did, then led the way to the manhole cover. I could have easily pulled the heavy disk up myself, but that strength wasn't exactly normal, so I asked for help. With three of us, the cover seemed light and lifted off easily. Nick peered uneasily into the darkness, and Clara, too, seemed reluctant to climb down.
"How about I go first," I said quickly, hearing the sounds of police cars coming this way. With agreement from Clara and Nick, I lowered my feet into the hole until they caught on the ladder installed there. The thin metal rods shook a bit as I climbed down.
I reached the slightly damp ground, then Clara followed me. Nick came after her, then we looked up at the hole to the blue sky.
"We should do something about that," said Clara. She put a hand back on the ladder as if she was about to climb back up.
"I'll get it." I went up before Clara could and pulled the manhole cover back on, making a short show of grunting with fake exertion. The police sirens came a bit closer - had somebody seen me? Crap. The cover clunked shut over the opening, sealing us in complete blackness.
Nick switched on a flashlight and lit Clara's hands as she fiddled with some string. As I got off the ladder, she tied a complicated knot around one of the rungss.
"Standard procedure in case we get lost," she explained to me.
"Or a trail for the police to follow." I glanced around at the quasi-familiar crossroads of tunnels. I came this way sometimes, but more often, I used the portal by the gas station that was a bit less conspicuous.
Clara shrugged as she started down a large tunnel, flashlight in hand. "Dude, we barely know about the catacombs, and it took weeks to find the other entrance in the bathroom of my neighbor's pool house. I don't know how you knew about this one, but the police are not going to find us."
"Besides," added Nick, tailing the group to shine more light where I was stepping. "Don't you think that if the police knew about this place, they'd be storming that monster school right now?"
My mouth went dry. "Uh, yeah. I guess so."
"I don't know why they'd do that," grumbled Clara. "I really doubt the monsters actually did anything."
Nick replied in a flat tone, easily conveying his disbelief. "Spray paint in the monster symbol showed up on our school the day after those idiots Jerk and co egged theirs."
"We don't even know if it was them," Clara protested. We stepped around a particularly large spiderweb. I noticed with some discomfort that we were heading towards my school. Hopefully I could reroute Clara and Nick while breaking away... somehow.
"Might as well have been," said Nick. "same result, really. This town has been dying to get after monsters for years now."
"Wait, really?" I interrupted. Then kicked myself. It was probably safer if I just... stayed out of this conversation altogether.
AN: So some fun stuff happens this chapter. Not much, but important conversation and probably some character building. Leave reviews, please! They motivate me to continue and honestly help me to be better. What did you like? What did you not like?
