-CHAPTER 3-

-2D's POV-
I'm not a fan of breakfast. For starters, it's in the morning. I don't like mornings. Maybe it's because I always feel like I have a hangover even if I didn't have anything to drink at all the night before. You know—headache, tired, dry throat and a sort of overall sickish feeling? That's me every morning. That right there is one mark against breakfast. I mean, really, if you ever meet anybody who actually feels like eating anything when they've got a hangover, tell them that they are very, very weird. And let them know that I said it.

Another reason that I'm not a big fan of breakfast is that after you've eaten your cereal or your fried eggs or your handful of packaged cookies or whatever else you like to eat in the morning, all the food just sort of…sits there. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just try to imagine having a bowling ball sitting in the bottom of your stomach and I don't mean one of those kiddy-sized five pound bowling balls, either. I mean one of those big, heavy black things you can't even lift up without popping your arm out of its socket. That's about how it feels. As you might have guessed, it's not a very comfortable feeling and it doesn't happen after any other meal of the day. Just breakfast.

Normally, I sleep late enough to skip breakfast, but not on that day. On that day I was up and at 'em at the crack of dawn. I guess that should have been my first clue that something weird was going to happen. I mean, sure, I can wake up early if I absolutely have to, but until then I'd never been up before Noodle. Even when Murdoc gets into one of his really anal moods and makes us start recording extra early Noodle will have been up and brewed a pot of coffee and put on a kettle before me or any of the other guys have even thought about rolling out of bed. I'd gotten so used to coming into the kitchen to the smell of coffee in the morning that I didn't know what to think when I walked into the kitchen and it was all dark and empty.

For a few seconds, I thought about making the coffee myself. Then I realized that I had absolutely no idea how to work the stupid coffeemaker. "Well, there goes that idea then," I muttered to no one in particular. I ended up pouring myself a glass of apple juice that was so old that it smelled like it had started to ferment. When I went to put the bottle of apple juice back in the fridge I noticed that there was a half-eaten box of Cheerios in there. That might sound weird to you, but after you've lived in Kong for a while you don't let piddly little things like that bother you too much. I poured myself a bowl of dry cereal (there wasn't any milk), stuck the box right back in the fridge where I'd found it and started crunching away.

So there I was in the kitchen eating my very glamorous breakfast of dry cereal and semi-alcoholic apple juice when the door went flying open and Russel came in. (Actually, what I really meant was something more like, 'Russel hit the door with the force of a charging rhinoceros and the door almost flew off its hinges.') Just from the way he was carrying himself, it was obvious that there was something very, very wrong. I thought that maybe he was pissed off about something (or just plain pissed), but one look at his face was enough to tell me that that wasn't it. His eyes were totally wild and he had this look on his face that reminded me of every victim from every campy teen slasher flick ever made. You know the look I'm talking about—that "Oh-shit-I'm-royally-fucked" expression that the horny high school kids get right before the killer in the hockey mask slashes through their necks with a butcher knife. He was so worked up that he didn't even seem to notice me standing there at the counter with my mouth full of Cheerios. Whatever it was that he was upset about, it had to be bad.

I swallowed my mouthful of cereal, cleared my throat to give him a little warning that he wasn't alone and then said, "Uhm…Russ? What's going on? Are you all right?"

He blinked and that crazed expression melted into something closer to concern. He relaxed his posture a bit, too, but that wasn't enough to hide the fact that something was definitely going on. "Oh, hi, D," he said. "Didn't see you there." He paused for a second and scratched at the back of his neck as if to say, "I'm not really all that upset—look here I am scratching my neck before I say anything else just so show you that I'm not in any real hurry." When he stopped scratching his neck, he added, "I was just looking for Noodle. Have you seen her yet today?"

"No. Why are you looking for her?" I waited a few more seconds before carefully asking, "Did something happen to her?"

The answer came too quickly for comfort: a loud, forceful, "No!" He rubbed at his forehead with a sigh and then in a much calmer tone said, "No. I don't think so. No."

I frowned, starting to get a little worried. Russel is usually a pretty cool customer when it comes to bad situations. If anybody is going to lose their head and start acting completely bazonkers over something, it's usually me. "Russel, what happened?"

"Do you remember what happened with Noodle yesterday in the recording booth? You know; when she looked like she was about to faint?"

I felt a lump in the back of my throat. I swallowed it back down. It tasted like stale Cheerios. "Yeah…she…she didn't look so good. What happened? Did something happen? Is she OK?"

Russel held up a hand to tell me that I should shut up. (And this is where I'm very glad that I was dealing with Russel instead of Murdoc. If it'd been Murdoc, he probably would have yelled something like, "Shut your cake hole or I'll wallop you, brain ache!" This worked just as well and it didn't leave me fearing for my life.) "Look, calm down," he said. I'm still not sure whether that was meant for me or for himself. "I'm not even sure that there's anything to worry about yet. It's just that a couple of hours after the recording session Noodle had a sort of…Jesus; I don't even know what to call it. I guess I'd have to say it was a fit. She was upset about something—I mean really upset. She was crying, D."

"What happened?" I gasped. I'd never seen Noodle cry before. Up until that point I was convinced that either she didn't know how or she just physically could not do it. I was so shocked by what Russel had said that the rest of what he was telling me just started to melt together in my brain. I still nodded at all the right places and all that, but I wasn't really processing what he was saying at all.

The next thing I knew, I was on my way to the lift, planning to go downstairs to look for Noodle while Russel stayed in the kitchen eating the rest of my breakfast. I'm not exactly sure how that happened. I don't remember Russel asking me to go downstairs. I don't remember suggesting it. And I don't remember how Russel ended up with my food, either, but oh well. None of those little details are all that important, so it doesn't really matter if I remember them or not anyways.

As soon as I stepped off the lift, I knew that something was up. You know how you get that gut feeling that something is really, seriously wrong? Well, that's what I felt right then; this creepy, uncomfortable feeling that grabbed hold of my guts and twisted until I felt like I was about ready to grace the world with a "Technicolor yawn." (Lovely image, isn't it? Heard it from one of the guys that worked at dad's carnival. He was a pimply-faced little git who worked a ride called The Liquidator.)

I willed my spoiled apple juice and stale cereal to stay down and then quietly called out, "Noodle? Are you down here?" The only answer I got was a faint drift of borderline maniacal laughter from the demons that live in the loo. That wasn't anything out of the ordinary, but I couldn't shake the idea that something was really, really off.

A nervous sweat popped out on my face and started to roll down my back; the kind of sweat that reeks like raw onions. I took a wary step forward and then called out a little louder, "Noodle? Hey, Noods! Where are you at?"

I strained my ears to pick up any sign of the kid's voice, and that was when I heard something that was a lot stranger than the demons in the loo. It was a funny scratchy squealing noise that sounded like…well, actually, scratch the comparison. I can't think of anything bizarre enough to compare it to. The point is it was one of the weirdest sounds I'd ever heard and it seemed to be coming from the booth.

That nasty feeling wrenched through my guts again: something is wrong; get the hell out of there, you dumbass—run away, run away, runawayrunaway! I walked forward without even thinking about what I was doing. I felt like I was stoned without the nice giggly-happy feeling. I paused with my hand on the doorknob for just a second (just long enough to think, this is a really bad idea) and then pushed the door open and walked inside.

The sound was louder in the booth (the squealing was creepy enough to make all the hair on my arms stand up and the scratching was more like a papery crunching sound), but the booth was completely empty. I almost lost my nerve and turned around and left at that point, but then I realized that it would be silly to back out after going so far. Besides that, if Russel or Murdoc ever got wind of the fact that I'd been scared off by some harmless little noise they would never let me forget it. With that thought in mind, I decided to get it over with and barged into the studio kitchen.

It was even worse in the studio kitchen. I actually had to stop and plug my ears to block out the squealing because it was sending chills down my spine that made my whole back twitch. I looked around the kitchen, trying to find anything that might have been making the sound, but I didn't see anything. Nothing was out of place—even the half-eaten hero sandwich that Russel had left lying out on the counter yesterday was right where he'd left it.

"Damn it," I muttered. The sound wasn't scary anymore; it was just annoying the blinkers out of me and I wanted it to stop. I started off towards the desk room and then tripped over the garbage can and ended up rolling through the door in a very graceful tangle of arms and legs. After picking myself up off the ground (and picking a banana peel out of my hair), I glanced around the desk room and then muttered a string of curses that would have probably even embarrassed Murdoc if he'd heard them.

I'd found what was causing the screeching noise. Somebody had taken a tape, ripped all of the black recording film out of it and then jammed the whole deal into the tape player and hit the play button with the volume all the way up. But it wasn't just any tape. This particular tape happened to be the one that had everything we'd recorded during our marathon recording session on it. I knew that Murdoc was going to be very, very pissed off and that somebody was probably going to die a very painful death. Most likely, that somebody was going to be me, especially if he happened to catch me in the studio with the ruined tape.

I shut off the tape player, popped the tape out and examined it, hoping that maybe there was something I could do to fix it. It didn't take long for me to realize that there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to put all that black film back inside the cassette where it belonged. The tape was well and totally destroyed.

What the hell am I going to do about this? I hopelessly wondered. I can see exactly what'll happen if I out and out tell Murdoc about it. "Oh, uh, Murdoc? So you know how you said that tape was all rubbish and shit? Well, it's totally destroyed now, so you don't have to worry about it anymore." And then he beats me completely senseless. But I can't just throw it away—that would look even worse. What am I going to do? "Well, either way I'm fucked," I muttered.

I was about to set the ruined tape down on the desk and then get my skinny heinie out of that studio before anybody else came in and saw me, but then I heard a quiet, shaky whimper from the instrument room. Suddenly everything just seemed to stop because I knew exactly who was making that noise, even though I'd never heard her do it before and I never thought that I would hear her doing it. That sense of doom, death and destruction came back and clamped down with a vengeance. "Noodle?"

She didn't answer. That scared the hell out of me. I ran for the instrument room without even bothering to put the tape down somewhere first. She was hunched over something in the corner with her back to me. Her whole body was shaking and she was making this high-pitched whining sound in the back of her throat. My mum used to have a scrappy little Dachshund when I was little. It would make noises like that whenever we had a thunder storm.

"Noodle?" She didn't even turn around. I don't think she even knew I was there. My stomach was doing this insane Irish jig. It felt like a whole troupe of Riverdancers was jumping up and down inside my stomach.

I didn't know what to do except stand there in the doorway like an idiot. "N-Noods? Are you all right? I'm…." I stopped to clear my throat. My voice sounded like it was about two octaves too high. "I'm going to come over to you, OK?" Slowly, I crossed the room until I was close enough to reach out and touch her. That's when I saw what she was looking at.

It was a tatty old cardboard box. It looked like it could have been a box that none of us had gotten around to unpacking, except for what was in it. At first I thought it was a bunch of wigs. But after a second, I realized that it wasn't fake hair—it was bunches and bunches of real hair from real people's heads and there was a lot of it. It was all women's hair. I don't know how I knew that, but somehow I knew that it was women's hair. Red, black, brown, blonde—lots of blonde—curly, straight…all of it different, but all of it somehow the same, too. Noodle was clutching clumps of it in her hands tight enough to turn her knuckles white and just staring at it without seeming to see it.

"Oh," I whispered. Because what in the hell else are you supposed to say in a situation like that?

Noodle dropped the hair in her hands and turned around to face me, but she was moving like a zombie. Even when she was looking right at me, I don't think she realized I was there. I noticed she had a scratch on her cheek. It was long and deep enough that it was that dark pinkish color you get sometimes when a cut isn't quite deep enough to bleed. It looked like it probably hurt. She didn't seem to care. She just stood there staring and that's when I noticed she wasn't looking at me at all—she was looking towards the doorway behind me.

I turned around to look in the direction she was looking and came the closest I'd come yet to losing my breakfast that day. There was something there in the doorway but I didn't know what it was. At first I thought it looked a little like the zombies you see in movies like Night of the Living Dead, but then my brain sort of just numbed up at that idea. There was no way that what I was looking at had ever been human. No way. It was too brutalized—the limbs were all wrong and the face…could I even call it a face? Not even the most over-the-top movie producer in the world could have dreamed up something so wrong. So my brain just said, Nope—that thing isn't, wasn't and can't be human. End of story.

As I was still trying to come to grips with what I was looking at, the thing in the doorway started to move. Don't ask me how it moved on legs that shouldn't have even been able to bend at all, the point is that it did move and it was skittering or sliding or I-don't-know-what-to-call-it-ing across the floor towards me. I stepped back and bumped into Noodle, who still hadn't moved. The last corner of my brain that was still trying to hold on thought, I've gotta keep that thing away from Noodle. And then that last little holdout decided to quit hanging on and I completely lost it.

-Murdoc's POV-
I woke up to two extremely nasty things that morning. Number one was the most fiendishly bitchy hangover I'd had in years. I tried to remember what I'd had after polishing off the bottle of grade-A shit blush wine and couldn't. Not that any of that mattered much when I felt like finding a nice rock to crawl under and die, mind you.

The second (and by far more annoying) thing I woke up to was 2D squealing like a pig in a slaughter house. For a few minutes I tried to ignore the fact that his screaming was making my headache bad enough to make me want to bash my skull in with a sledgehammer. I even resorted to burying my head under my pillow to blot out the sound, but it didn't help. He was really screeching and even through my brain-boggling headache and the mounting urge to vomit up the sour lump that was sitting in my stomach I could tell that it wasn't going to stop unless I did something about it.

"Keep it up, brain ache," I growled. I slid out of bed and stared at the floor until the walls decided to stop tipping back and forth. I could feel my stomach slosh dangerously, but then it settled back into the still nauseous (but somewhat manageable) tight feeling I'd had when I first woke up. "Just keep it up. I'll really give you something to scream about." I started toward the door of my Winnie, stopped, considered pulling on at least a pair of jeans, decided against it and then wobbled my way out into the car park.

I'd thought the screaming had been coming from the dullard's room. Once I was out in the car park, it became fairly obvious that it wasn't coming from his room. Which meant that I was going to have to hunt around the whole goddamned ground floor in order to shut him up. Which meant that when I found him I was really going to beat the shit out of him. Or maybe I'd wait to do it until I didn't feel like somebody was shoving a pickaxe through my left temple. Either way, he'd get what was coming to him.

I had a fairly easy time of finding 2D once I started looking. His shrieking was impossible to miss. I found him in the instrument room with his eyes squeezed shut, screaming at the top of his lungs. He was pale and looked like he was about ready to piss himself. He looked so terrified that if my head wasn't about to explode I might have considered not handing him his ass.

I was well aware of the fact that he was in a difficult position—one that required delicacy and care. To that end, I handled the situation as gently and eloquently as I could under the circumstances. "What in bleeding hell is your problem?"

The only reply he gave me was another round of squealing. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard enough to make his head snap back and forth. "Shut the fuck up, brain ache!" I shouted.

Luckily, that seemed to do the trick. He snapped his eyes open, darted a wild look around the room and then shuddered as though he'd been zapped by a power line. "M-Muds," he whispered.

"You've got four seconds to convince why I shouldn't rip your head off and use it as a cricket ball. One."

He stared at me like a particularly stupid cow.

"Two."

"Muds, didn't…didn't you see…?"

"Thr—"

"What in the hell is going on in here?"

I cursed under my breath. No way was I going to punch dullard's face in with Russel standing right there. I may have had a hangover, and as generally unpleasant as that can be, I wanted to be alive long enough for it to go away.

"Russ," 2D whimpered. "Did you see…?"

"What? D, what happened? Did you find—oh, Christ! Noodle!"

Russel barged past me and 2D and then I noticed that Noodle had been standing behind 2D. The expression on her face was one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen, and I'm not ashamed to admit that with me, that's really saying something. Her eyes were glazed and her jaw was completely slack and her skin had gone a stony grayish color, save for an ugly, pinkish gash on her cheek. From the way she reacted (or rather, failed to react) to Russel when he put his hand on her shoulder, it was clear that she had no idea that any of us were with her. The lights were on, but not only was nobody home—they had run away and joined the circus indefinitely.

"What the hell did you do, Muds?" Russel demanded.

"Me? You're asking me what I did?" I furiously demanded. "Fuck, I just came in here and found face ache screeching. What the fuck do you think I—"

"Didn't you see it?" 2D gasped.

Russel and I both stared at him. "See what?" Russel carefully asked.

"But…but it was there—right there!" He raised a trembling finger to point at the doorway and shook his head. "I don't understand how...where it went. I saw a—I don't know what to call it. A—a m-monster?"

For a full five seconds, Russel and I just stared at him. Russel opened his mouth as though to say something, and then closed it again. And that was when I noticed the wad of black film that was trailing from 2D's fingers.

"What the fuck is this?" I snarled, ripping the mass of recording tape out of his hands—an impressive feat if you consider that fact that my hand-eye coordination was still completely out the window at that point. He looked at it with a look of utter bewilderment and made as if to reach for it. I yanked it back out of his reach and repeated, "WHAT IN THE BLOODY FUCKING HELL IS THIS? WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU—"

I felt a restraining hand on my shoulder and vaguely heard Russel say, "Just let it go right now, Muds. We need to help Noodle right now."

Noodle? Who was Noodle? I didn't give a blooming fuck about anything except the tangle of recording tape in my hands. Somebody had to die (preferably in the most painful manner imaginable), and lucky for me, 2D was sitting right there; right within striking distance….

Author's Notes: There! An update just in time for Halloween! Sorry about the long delay. College is eating my soul right now, so updates are probably going to be pretty sparse for a while. I'll try and write when I can though. Please review—it'll give you good karma!

Next chapter: Lights Out