Chapter 06

I applied Occam's Razor to Shaggy's disappearance and the most likely explanation is that he had triggered the bookcase and it had spun around, sweeping him into the hidden room. While this sounds ludicrous like something from an old cartoon, most of the other solutions involved entering the hidden room on his own, leaving this room on his own, or being kidnapped by some kind of ghost. I considered all other options to be lesser probabilities and stepped over to the bookcase.

Tapping at the back panel of the wood, I whispered as loudly as I could "Shaggy?"

No response.

I tried again both tapping and whispering more loudly.

Still no response.

I was about to shout when I realized my voice might carry and be heard outside of the building. Oddly, that was the first time I thought about the fact that we were breaking and entering. My next thought was that it was only a misdemeanor. Never before in my life would I have put the word 'only' in front of a misdemeanor. That was when I learned that I could get so fixated on a mystery that I left common sense to the winds. I would probably have been better off if I had learned a lesson from this at the time. But no lesson was learned and the rest is history.

Getting back to the story at hand, Shaggy was not answering which led me to believe that he had not found the way into the secret room and had left to go elsewhere in the building. Why someone with Shaggy's allergy to personal risk would strike out on his own was beyond me. But we needed to go and search.

Scooby Doo protected me from the rear as he followed me out into the hallway. I listened as I walked. I could hear a quiet conversation upstairs between Fred and Daphne. The fact that they were using their mouths to make words made me revise my assumption of what they were doing up there.

Then I could hear nothing over a loud rumble. I had forgotten how loudly the dog's stomach thundered when he was hungry.

"Rorry."

We turned down an unlit hallway leading toward the rear of the building. I whispered again. "Shaggy." My whisper disappeared into the empty darkness. Then, without warning, I heard a rapid patter of feet and was jolted by Scooby Doo caroming off of me as he hurtled down the corridor. That was when I learned to always keep a strap on my glasses. When he bumped into me, my eyewear flew off my face and landed on the floor some feet away.

It might as well have been a mile. The severity of my astigmatism isn't exaggerated. I can't see a thing… you know the rest. Scooby was a vague shape disappearing into the fuzzy environment that I now perceived. When I dropped to my knees to start the blind grope for the glasses, I heard a rattling, clanking sound and then got kicked hard in the side. This hurt me badly and I sprawled on the floor.

If you look at the episode that aired on the network, you will see some terrible editing here. This was the one episode they released where I wasn't in charge of that, and the lack of quality is why I staged my mini-strike. They used our actual video for the moment right after I got kicked and you can see my hair is realistically disheveled. Then suddenly my hair is perfectly combed (and I am a year and a half older).

But at that moment, the main thing that had my attention was the pain in my side. I knew that I had been kicked by someone wearing a suit of armor. At no point did I ever mistake it for Shaggy. Nor did I have a bottle of medicine on me. I hated that added scene.

I was struggling up to my knees, my right hand found my glasses just as arms wrapped around my waist, lifted me in the air and I was suddenly being caring down the hall like someone's pet cat. And, since the arms were wrapped around my waist, the place in my side where I got kicked was setting records for pain with each thudding step. But that was nothing against the impact this was having on my aversion to being touched. I hate people touching me. And I had not yet fully recovered from the manhandling I had taken during the kidnapping.

Not ready to be kidnapped a second time, I started fighting.

"Velma, what are you doing? Stop biting me." It was Shaggy's voice.

We burst through a door and were outside. I felt myself being placed on the ground with relative gentleness and finally got my glasses on. Shaggy was leaning over with his hands on his knees panting. But at least he wasn't touching me anymore.

There was a flash of pain in my side which made me wince.

"Are you okay?"

I tried to take a deep breath. It hurt. I breathed in little gasps. "Where were you?"

He shrugged. "I went to the bathroom."

My earlier Occam's Razor needed sharpening. Checking the bathroom would have been a better starting point than randomly wandering the halls.

Then I went what The Gang would later refer to as 'full Velma'. "Why did you carry me away? We had him!"

"You were laying on the ground holding your side. Scooby was nowhere to be seen. And there was a ghost in a suit of armor on the ground next to you getting up to its knees. That checked all of the boxes for a 'run away' moment!"

"Well, now it's time for a 'run toward' moment. Let's get back in there and catch whoever is in that suit." This sounded good, but then I tried to stand up and my side hurt so bad that I flopped gracelessly back down to the ground."

"It doesn't look like you're in any shape to go around tackling ghosts."

The door behind us opened and Shaggy jumped into the air and then heroically hid behind me. "Who's there?"

Fred's head stuck out the door. "It's just us. He whispered. "What's with all the noise?"

"We were attacked by the Black Knight!" Shaggy whined.

I needed to set the record straight. "We weren't exactly attacked. He was chasing Scooby Doo and then he tripped over me."

Shaggy was belligerent. "If you weren't attacked, then stand up by yourself."

Well… I've never been one to back down from a challenge and I did stand up without assistance. It was slow. It was painful. And it was punctuated by four groans, two whimpers, and a muffled sob. But I made it. I also made Shaggy's point.

Fred's face was red. From therapy I knew that could mean he was angry, out of breath, or having a stroke. Angry seemed the logical conclusion. I wasn't sure what I had done wrong.

When he spoke, his voice was controlled. "We are going to find this guy and we are going to make him pay."

Daphne placed her hand on Fred's arm. "Fred, we're going to find out what's going on and then we are going to tell the police and they will make him pay."

Fred visibly relaxed. "Yeah. Sure. We'll do it that way."

It took that long for me to understand that Fred was not mad at me. He was mad for me.

I mentally reviewed the on-line sociology course I had taken. For Fred to get emotionally angry on my behalf meant that he considered me a part of his team. And an attack on me was the same as an attack on him. And then there was Shaggy—self-proclaimed coward. He had run directly toward a known threat in order to carry me away from it. While that was not my proffered plan, it exhibited the same thing. We were an 'us' and the Black Knight was 'them'.

And then, of course, Daphne didn't call me 'Irma' anymore. There was that.

I had never been a part of an 'us' before.

Scooby Doo showed up a few minutes later having hidden in a flowerpot. The chase scene in the network version which showed Scooby destroying and then rebuilding a set of Tyrannosaurus Rex bones was all ridiculous and a combination of green screen and CGI which was added in post-production. I refused to have any part of it and disown that nonsense to this day.

Scooby recounted what he heard of the movements of the Black Knight after we had left.

"Ree Rack Right stopped in the hallway and reemed to be doing romething. Rye hmeard romething that sounded rechanical and then the rhost went into Rickles' office. Rand the most rooky thing was that when Rye got out of the flower pot, there was a rask in the hallway which was rowing red."

Daphne's head cocked sideways in that way she had. "A rask was rowing red? What does that even mean?"

Scooby sighed.

Shaggy translated. "A mask was glowing red."

I remembered that mask. "There was a replica mask in the corridor between Mr. Wickles' office and that other room. It seemed sort of weird to be sitting on a column in the middle of the hall." I then let out another small groan. It hurt to breath and talking was awful. By, being me, I wasn't about to stop talking when I could say something cryptic. "But, if that red glow is what I think it is, then we might just have this mystery solved."

And no. I didn't tell any of them my conjectures. I have my process.

The rest of the night was spent taking me to the 24-hour clinic where my parent's deductible for the year got spent. I was diagnosed with a subperiosteal hematoma and a slightly fractured rib. In other words, it was hurting and was going to continue to hurt for several days. The good news was that the severity of the bone bruise was such that they gave me a prescription for high-octane pain killer.

I don't remember much of the ride home, but I do remember Shaggy eyeing my bottle of pills and my parents meeting me at the door and pretending to believe that I tripped down a flight of stairs. Fred and Shaggy each held one of my arms and Daphne held the doors for me as we got me to my bedroom and to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. They didn't have to do that.

I was asleep, fully clothed before I even slumped over.