iii: Scrappy don't
We had just broken the case wide open. The plan was an advanced pulley weight system. A cage would be at the end of the path and the "monster" would be caught rhythmically. My part of the plan was to be the chased. I would lure the monster to the goal and we would solve the mystery. When I first start explaining this, it sounds easier than it was.
See, the thing is, is that we didn't even get that far. All anyone would have had to do was look around a bit longer at the surroundings. Maybe there would have been a smell or something that would have tipped us off. It was intriguing to say the least, but I was young. Youthful exuberance trumps a lot of things. Some book on a shelf told me that. I forgot the title. I hate to say that seems about right. The problem is a lot things seem right and the same things seem wrong. I don't think that is paradoxical, but it is living in some sort of way.
We had heard the rumor from a newspaper. We pulled over to an old gas station. Some guy still had the nerve to pump our gas. The old fashioned pumps. He walked up to the passenger side window with a grin.
"Fill him up?" The spiny man said, tapping our van.
"Who told you it the van was a boy?" Daphne asked.
"I'm a good guesser."
"It was a 50/50 chance..." Velma mumbled from the back. I just kept watching him grin. He had a snake oil salesman look all over him. Fred leaned over and gave him the what for.
"Can you just fill up our van please? We're kind of in a hurry to get where we're going."
The man stopped grinning. His brown eyes searched for some kind of answer. They circled around. They looked at me for a second before he stepped away and grabbed the nozzle. I could hear it flowing into our gas tank. It always reminded me of pissing. I had to start looking out the window to distract myself from marking territory. The man came back to the window and looked right at Fred. The grin was back.
"Where are y'all going off to in a such a hurry?"
"We're looking for Cedarcrest Manor."
The man looked taken aback for a second. Again he must have been thinking about what to say. He must have been slow. We were in the boondocks.
"Oh well you don't want to go there..." He said.
"Sure we do! Didn't you see the side of our van?"
It was Fred's turn for a smirk.
"Our van is called the Mystery Machine isn't it?"
The man leaned back from the window and let loose a thunderous guffaw. A belly laugh for the ages. My ears wanted to ache.
"Ohhhh! You're those kids from the papers. The national mystery solvers who go all around the country. I never thought I see you around these parts."
"We're pretty quick to the punch. We solve mysteries for Pete's sake."
"Who is Pete?" the man grinned.
Silence calmly settled as I wondered why anybody would try to deconstruct an idiom like that. The whole problem with sayings is that no one knows where they come from. Pete must have been somebody extra important with a heavy amount of status. Like Pete's clout could have had physical mass attributed to its weight. Power and fear and knowledge were probably just abstracts that would take an entire generation of students to understand and reclassify back to him. I think that is why Pete had his own sake.
Clunk. The gas tank full, the man again let loose another whipping laugh. Apparently the man got his kicks from confusing twentysomethings on lonely roads.
Fred handed the seven dollars to Daphne, she exchanged it to the man. The man then pulled the gas nozzle out of the van, and came back to the passenger side window again. I guessed at the time this man had something horribly wrong with him, but my mind only felt uneasy. I hadn't learned the rage of adulthood yet.
"Y'all have a safe trip you hear! Oh, and if you can come back and tell me what you find!"
"We sure will!" Daphne said with fake hospitality.
The van pulled away and headed south down the farm to market road. Fred drove slow. The sun had sunk enough to where it still existed, but not enough to show light. He kept feathering the gas pedal and I counted the times he did that to sixty-seven times.
"That guy, man...he had serious problems."
Shaggy had suddenly found his voice as we could see the mansion growing in the distance. I really wish I can say I wondered why he wasn't speaking so much, but maybe he had the doom in him. No one really ever listened to bait, and that included myself.
"C'mon Shaggy! He was just your typical small town loner."
"But he like, kept staring you know? He had those big, crazy looking eyes."
"You can't judge someone by their eyes Shaggy," Velma said. "I have big eyes too."
"No you don't. You just wear big glasses."
Velma sighed at Shaggy's response. They both tolerated each other. Shaggy was a blown out stoner from California, and Velma was a Biology/Journalism major from a liberal arts college back east.
The middle of nowhere applied here and spoke here. It said "What the hell are you kids doing? Why do you feel the need to solve things?"
We were bad listeners and bad talkers too. That in itself condoned the awkward silence after Shaggy's comment. Sure, you could say it was asinine, but I though it was hilarious. Velma really did have the eyes that went bug house after she put them on.
The mansion appeared finally after forty-five minutes of painfully annoying driving from Fred. Sadly, it wasn't as big as we had expected. Probably about seven to ten rooms with only two stories. If there was a ghost here we were going to find it, unless a massive basement lurked below.
I was the one to wake Scooby up. The poor bastard was getting old. He wasn't "We're going to have to put him down" old, but "Senior Dog Food for Resting Large Dogs!" old. He was right, but due to the diet him and Shaggy had blown themselves on, Scooby had cardiac arrest or doggy stroke written all over him.
"We're here Uncle!" I licked him on the bridge of his nose. It was the way he liked to be woken up.
He blinked three times and yawned forward the smell of a Scooby snack. We pretty much gave him a snack anytime he looked bored.
"Rappy! We rere?"
"Yeah. Let's go!"
We both jumped down from the back of the van. Everyone else was scoping the grounds of the mansion for any outward signs of ghostly activity or any activity. If we were lucky, we tended to see something outside the place of interest. Pursuit became possible.
This time though? Nothing but Fred looking through his binoculars too long.
The small cobblestone roadway up to the manor had antiquating tastes, but the style left something modern. Cedarcrest was made of stone. The windows were without glass, but had wood to form the pretense of windows. It felt like a bizarre combination of a Pueblo domicile, yet leading up, felt medieval. The stone had aged too. It was a deeper sandstone or limestone or something. It had a dark orange.
"Do you see anything?" Daphne asked.
"Only a real need for a good landscaper! Weeds everywhere, you know?" Fred spoke.
I think that time was a collective sighing from everyone except my uncle. Scooby hissed through his laughter. His breath wheezed and crackled like an audible tumbleweed. A rusted gate barely blocked our path. The emblem of a cedar tree and a shield somehow held the gate together. The lower portion though could be squeezed through. Everyone except Scooby and I, ducked through. Us dogs knew how to handle fences.
The front door had a solitary knocker that reached almost as far as Fred could reach. He somehow grabbed it and gave it a decent whack. It barely generated any noise. Velma and I gave each other a glance. We both knew this was architecturally and historically bonkers. Why build a strange New Mexican/British stone house in the gut of Kansas? Nothing was out here except badlands and weakened homesteads. I guess there wasn't a true municipality. The farmlands out here had no need for any real human interaction. Maybe some old rich person from years ago built this place as their Xanadu.
Fred opened the door anyway. Breaking and entering with ghosts never tended to go with complaint. Well, every ghost we ever encountered was a human trying to run a scheme. I mean we lucked out that none of us died. We were always playing a dumb game sure, but if none of us survived we wouldn't be called thrill-seekers or meddling kids.
The dust berated itself upon walking in. Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy's flashlights sleeked past the darkness of the room. This time? Weirder. The furniture looked religious. Despite its tiny space, there were pews elongated all way the across from end to end. Three rows of each. The middle led to an altar. A bird skeleton had been dismembered or something. There was still blood edged along its bones.
Part of me felt excited that we were onto something much more sinister. For awhile it had been capitalistic bullshit mixed with location, but the look of this place had some kind of monster waiting.
"What the Scooby Snack is that?" Shaggy whispered.
"Rooby Rack?" Scooby barked.
Silence again, became a monotony. We decided not to give him another snack
"No, we need to understand what this means." Fred, for some reason loudly spoke. "We need to scout the premises and find out what is really happening here."
Velma and I winked at each other with reckless companionship. He was going to say it. He always said it.
"We need to split up, gang!"
Each of us had broken off into the typical, as of late, commonality. Shaggy and Scooby had gone towards the left parts of the mansion. Daphne and Fred went right, and as for Velma and myself we went to study the altar, birded bones and all.
"It seems like a sacrifice. Santeria almost. This looks like the remnants of a ceremony to something."
"It looks more like someone ate dinner."
"What's the difference?"
We both laughed. See, the thing was, was that Velma and I were intellectual equals to some point. I had gotten older and she had been somewhat stagnant. Well to my perspective we had become that way, but truthfully she was smart and over the years I aged appropriately. Competition rises to tougher opponents.
"What do you think? This looks a lot more messed up than usual." I said.
"Jenkies."
"If Fred was here to hear you say that, I just lost a hundred dollars."
Velma giggled with her left hand over her mouth like some television show. I thought I had something right.
"It looks vicious, but there is nothing here minus some very old dried blood. Let's double back with everyone else and see what they found."
"So we're splitting up a split?" I winked.
"When you say it like that, you make it sound so wrong."
"I've gotten old, so I make everything sound wrong."
"You're only two and half years old."
"I'm almost eighteen."
"So you count dog years?"
"Oh, so you count human years?"
Velma patted me on the head for that one. She liked wit. Wit from a talking dog? There might have been an entire minority who loved talking dogs with witty repertoire.
She handed me one of the extra flashlights.
We hit our fists together and went our separate paths. Velma went towards Fred and Daphne. I went toward my Uncle Scooby, and Shaggy.
The left part had no real doorways. I assumed the whole place was like this. Easy entry, very breezy, I bet the summers were real nice here. I assumed the kitchen would be close. Scooby always put his head down upon splitting up. He knew where all the eats were. I never did, but his nose put mine to shame.
I walked into what looked like a room full of coffins or caskets really. Some had pictures on them along with some kind of finished wood to it with a glossy touch. The others looked cliché and vampire-like. It was strange because how many of looked brand new as if to expect it.
The groaning is what threw me off faster than anything. It became stage directed. I was waiting for some kind of a performer to appear or a spotlight to hit me.
The voice was my uncle's. It was too easy to tell. His voice was as unmistakable as mine. Me, a nasal countertenor, him a brunt baritone. I started checking every container in the room. Each opening with a louder crack than the last. See, the problem was that his voice felt omnidirectional bouncing from place to place faster than an echo. The noise started to get louder, but not deafening. I kept looking around as I pulled each lid to keep an eye out for an attacker.
I had always had this fantasy that I would be murdered by someone unexpectedly. Like I could see myself just getting shot out of nowhere by stray bullet or run over by a drunk driver. Just some kind of instantaneous death I was never going to explain to anyone because I'd be ash soon enough.
I finally got to the last container in the left corner of the room and it kept shaking itself through small movements. Uncle had to be inside of that one. He must have been scared out of his mind to be in there; he was scared of everything.
The lid came off and the moaning stops instantly. My mind was screaming expletives at light speeds or something. I remembered my head darting all over checking each lid that I had opened. The flashlights shined on each one and each one had remained open. I whipped myself back around to look inside. Nothing. I even had put my paw inside of it and rubbed it to make sure I was not hallucinating.
Thanks to my flashlight, I finally found my attacker's shadow from behind one of the caskets. I assumed what I considered a fighting position. I knew I was dead though. I mean I was and still am two feet tall tops. There was no way to fight them off even being a dog. I flashed the light and it moved almost right on top of me. I attempted to shine the light on my attacker's face, but it was knocked out of my hands. There was only the shock of my nerves spiking upward. There was not even a chance to be scared.
What was weirder than all of it, was that I knew who she was.
"Weren't you going to say 'puppy power'?"
I sighed harshly. My breath wavered. I was out of shape.
"Fuck you that was a great joke!" I walked up and pushed her back just a touch. "How the hell did you do that?"
"I took a ventriloquism class my junior year of college."
"Again, you hold out on me Velma."
"Oh please. I hold on out on everyone."
It was how she said it. It slithered from her lips and ended with one of the worst smiles I had ever seen. Broken and demonically straightforward she squinted her eyes a bit. The joke being I didn't even notice the fangs extend. This was a joke somewhere in my life.
She grabbed my throat and lifted me into air. Her nails toyed with me. The orange nail polish I thought looked great on her was digging into my skin. Her thumb pressed hard into my windpipe. I lost any ability to remain audible to anyone left. Everyone else must have been murdered...Why the hell didn't I see this coming?
"Scrappy, you always were a dumbass, but at least you were likable."
"Hhhhhhhh..."
"Oh, are you trying to say something? I could tell you how I did it I suppose? Or are you wondering where the others are?"
"Errrrrr..."
"Look, let me put it this way. If you survive this, and let me just say I hope you do because I need good company for this kind of bullshit, I'll tell you how this all went down."
The fangs felt no worse than a flu shot. Sure it was sharp for a second, but then the warmness crept down my body until it hit my balls. Part of me thought I was pissing the floor. I could not really tell.
I just kept looking into her eyes. They were the same brown as always. Her glasses, black and thick framed gave no hint of what the future meant.
I'll be the first to tell you that a disappearing act is unbelievable, but what is, is the story behind the magic. How do we get where we are without the help of other people? My job was no different than any other internship, but hey, at least I was going to make this right and I was going to get paid, right?
Fuck, what am I saying.
What I really mean to say is that I am vampire and pun intended, it sucks the life out of me. I just want to go fucking home.