Clown Wyrm - 15. Chapter 15 - Trapped

“Dizriolith!” Norjia bellowed, and she brought her hands to the wall in desperation. She pounded on it with all her might, but it was immovable.

“What the fuck is this?!” Mercury squawked.

Periwinkle was examining where the corner should have been, and he informed the other two, “There’s a seam here! This wall might be retractable.”

Norjia beat against the wall again. “Dizriolith, can you hear me?!” she shouted, but there was no response from the Mechanic.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Mercury asked. “Your wife could tell something was up, and she was right. Where the fuck is she?”

The corner that the Mechanic had just walked around may have become inaccessible, but there was now a hallway leading in another direction, and the other three had not even seen it open.

“This way,” Norjia ordered as she rushed down the new hall. “We need to find…”

“No!” Periwinkle cried out, and he snatched Mercury by the wrist as she went to follow Norjia. He had seen what the warrior woman did not notice in her haste, and a trapdoor floor dropped out from under her.

Norjia howled as she fell, and the two clowns heard her splash down in water.

Mercury and Periwinkle reacted in unison; she hollered down the hole, “Are you okay?!” as he whispered, “We need to go back to the room.”

Norjia stood up in water up to her chest and looked around. “Yeah, I’m alright.” She had only fallen about fifteen feet and landed in what seemed to be an underground river. The water felt like it was slowly flowing around her. It was dark, but the light from the hall above allowed the two clowns to see Norjia.

“How are we supposed to get you out of…” Mercury’s question was interrupted by the trapdoor floor closing again and sealing Norjia in the darkness. “Oh, what the fuck?!”

Periwinkle looked around in panic. “The walls and floor aren’t safe!” He pulled Mercury’s arm and hissed to her, “Back to the room! All our stuff is there, and it feels safer. Let’s go try to figure this out!”

A moment later, they were together in one of the two cozy chambers by the merrily crackling fire, and the door was locked, but the clowns were not comforted.

“What the fuck is going on here?!” Mercury barked. “How are we supposed to get them out?”

Periwinkle was focused. “This building is more than it seems,” he said under his breath. “Changing hallways, trapdoors…”

The pair of them heard a clunk outside the room’s entrance.

“Now what?” Mercury snapped.

They unlocked the door and pulled it open to find that bars had dropped down on the outside of the room. Now the two of them were trapped.

Hours passed, and Mercury and Periwinkle were alone for all of it. There was no sign of Norjia or the Mechanic or even the owner of the twisted hotel. The two clowns worried about Norjia in the water, and they had no idea what happened to the Mechanic, but the clowns had their own situation to figure out. Despite the fear and anxiety Mercury and Periwinkle were feeling, they had been stuck in the room for hours, and the uneventful tedium of the eventually led to their boredom.

They had scoured every inch of their comfortable prison cell but found no sign of any other entry or exit from the room save for the barred door. The space where they were trapped was furnished with two luxurious beds and two overstuffed armchairs facing a hearth with its warm fire. Lamp fixtures stuck out of the wall on either side of the fireplace, and a picture of a storm-tossed ship on a rough sea was in a frame above the mantle, upon which dried flowers were arranged. There was a small bedside table between the two beds with a decorative piece of driftwood seated on a delicate brass wire stand. Thick carpets had been spread across the floor beneath the two chairs in front of the fireplace, and another was by the door. The clowns had lifted both carpets to see if there were hidden trapdoors beneath, but there was just the hardwood floor. Wainscotting panels adorned the lower third of the walls around the room, and each segment seemed like it should open, but none of them did. Patterned wallpaper covered the space above, and it also appeared to be hiding doors or secret compartments, but Mercury and Periwinkle found none.

“Why are we locked up?” Each of them had asked variations of the question umpteen times.

They had pulled on the bars at the door and tried to raise them. They had finagled the fixtures in the hopes of finding a release hatch for a hidden door, but it wasn’t until Periwinkle had given up and sprawled out flat on his back on the floor that he noticed something.

“What’s that?” He pointed at the ceiling and sat up, but then he could not see whatever it was anymore.

Mercury did not know what he was trying to show her. “I don’t see anything.”

“Wait a second; it’s gone,” he replied. “There was a line on the ceiling.” He lay back again, and his eyes widened. “Mercury! It’s opening!”

The owner of the hotel was suddenly on Periwinkle. The man who called himself Geometry had dropped right out of the ceiling and landed on top of the skinny clown. Periwinkle let out a scream, but a terrible thud made Geometry’s eyes go wide, and he slumped into unconsciousness.

Mercury tossed the large decorative piece of driftwood that she had just bashed Geometry in the head with, back onto the table where it had been. “Periwinkle, are you hurt?” she asked, rolling the unconscious man off of her companion and yanking Periwinkle to his feet.

He was sobbing with fear. “Why is this happening to us?!” he bawled.

Mercury pulled him into a tight hug. “We need to go,” she whispered. She looked down at the owner of the hotel. “Do we kill him?” Mercury focused on Periwinkle’s watery eyes. “We always talk about how we hate it in horror movies when the victims have a chance to kill the bad guy, and they don’t, but now that we’re in it ourselves, I don’t know if I can do it.”

Geometry was not moving.

The two clowns looked up at the opening in the ceiling. Several rungs of a chain ladder were hanging down, and the pair jumped onto one of the beds and quickly pulled themselves up into the hole, sealing the hatch behind them.

“At least he’s locked in there now,” Mercury breathed, and she looked around. “We’re in a secret passageway!” It led in two directions.

Periwinkle wiped his eyes and tried to catch his breath. “Which way do we go?” he asked in a quavering voice.

“Let’s just pick one and move. We need to try and find the Mechanic and Norjia. What is this insane building?”

“A prison,” Periwinkle replied, “masquerading as a hotel.”

Mercury pointed. “Go that way, but be careful.”

Periwinkle headed around a corner and found a small glass rectangle set into the wall. “What’s this?” he whispered as Mercury stepped up beside him.

They peered into it and could see a room that looked very much like the room they had just escaped, except it was dark, and no fire burned at its hearth.

“Gross,” Mercury commented, “he’s a creepy peeper too?”

“That almost feels like the least of this man’s evils,” Periwinkle replied.

“Let’s keep moving,” Mercury said, and she continued past Periwinkle down the secret hallway with him behind her.

They found two more viewing windows that looked into dark and unused rooms, before they came to a narrow flight of stairs that led to the story below. The pair descended to a similar passage, but in it they found a different type of viewing window that was adjustable, and as they shifted it, Norjia came into view.

“Norjia!” the two clowns yelled in unison, and they both slammed their hands over their own mouths and stared at each other. When they looked back into the mirror, it did not appear that Norjia had heard them. She was no longer trapped in the watery pit, but she was now bound to a torture rack. She was conscious and looking around, and so far, she seemed unharmed.

“Move the view,” Periwinkle whispered. “Is she alone in there?”

They adjusted the viewer as far as it would go in each direction. No one else was in the room with Norjia, at that moment.

“How did she get out of the pit she fell into?” Periwinkle asked.

“I’d like to know how that sicko got badass Norjia strapped onto that rack,” Mercury added. “We can’t do any good for her in this hallway. We need to figure out how to get to her.”

The pair of clowns found another movable viewer, but the room it looked into was empty. The hall they were in terminated at a perpendicular passage that led to a door in one direction, and a flight of stairs that went farther down.

“Try the door,” Periwinkle urged.

It was locked, but there was a large switch beside the doorframe, and Mercury pulled it. Bars dropped in front of the door just like the ones that had sealed them in their room. Mercury shifted the handle back to its starting position, and the bars slid back into their housings within the wall.

The clowns took the stairs and headed deeper into the bowels of the structure. At the bottom was another narrow hall with several doors, each with its own handle beside it to engage the bars. Mercury and Periwinkle tried each door, but every one was locked. The hallway dead-ended and halted their progress.

“Dammit,” Mercury grumbled. “We need to go back and see where the other way leads.”

They retraced their steps and stopped again at the viewing window that looked in on Norjia. She appeared to be in the same state as a moment earlier, and Mercury and Periwinkle continued back to the trapdoor that led into the room where they had been prisoners.

“Should we peek in and see if he’s still trapped?” Periwinkle whispered.

“I don’t know,” Mercury replied. “What if he’s right there, waiting for us, hoping we’ll do just that?”

They snuck beyond their cell in the opposite direction, descended a flight of stairs, and found a section of wall with four small glass plates that looked into a single room; in it was the Mechanic. The four glass viewers showed her from four different angles. She was strapped to a table, and she appeared to be unconscious. The viewers looked at her from the left, the right, from above her head, and from above her feet.

“What the hell is this psycho doing with us?” Mercury asked.

“Wait, look,” Periwinkle interjected, pointing farther down the hallway at four more viewers on the opposite wall. “There’s another set of them.”

They approached, and the clowns were mortified by what they saw.

“Oh, what the fuck is this?!” Mercury breathed in horror.

“Who the hell are they?” Periwinkle added.

Four corpses were strapped to four separate tables. Each was in a terrible state. Their bodies had been flayed and disemboweled. One of their heads had been removed, as had the arms of another. Metal dishes along the sides of the tables held hearts, intestines, livers, lungs, brains, and other organs that the shocked clowns did not recognize.

“What the fuck?” Mercury whispered again.

Periwinkle turned to her. “We have to find Norjia and the Mechanic, now!”

A voice spoke throughout the hotel, and the sound of it chilled the clowns to their bones.

“I know you’re loose in my passageways,” Geometry said into the air all around them, “and I’ll find you.”

“He doesn’t know where we are,” Mercury whispered. “Let’s go!”

They rushed farther and finally found an unlocked door, but peeking out of it revealed that it led back into the changeable halls of the hotel.

“I don’t think we should go out there,” Periwinkle said under his breath. “This passage keeps going. Keep following it.”

The two of them heard running footsteps overhead from the floor above, and they froze. The rapid thuds faded, and the pair continued in silence.

One of the doors ahead of them was open, but its bars were engaged, and as Mercury and Periwinkle approached, they were startled by what they saw inside. A shirtless man was chained around the neck and wrists. Bruises covered his arm, legs, face, and torso. It was clear that he had been badly beaten. The clowns released the bars, and the man cringed at the sound, but he was startled by who was there.

Mercury rushed in and unhooked the chain from the wall, while Periwinkle anxiously waited at the door, keeping an eye out for Geometry down the secret passageway. The chains released and dropped away from the prisoner.

“Get up,” Mercury urged. “We need to go. What’s your name?” she asked as he stumbled to his feet.

“M-my name?” he replied weakly. “It’s Morwinna.”

“Glad we found you, Morwinna,” Mercury said quietly, “but we’ve got a few other friends who are also being held prisoner, and we need to find them too.”

Morwinna began to sob. “Friends,” he blubbered, “that fiend killed my friends. He made me watch, and he tortured me.” Morwinna looked down at his bruised and bloody body.

“We need to find our friends before he does the same thing to them,” Mercury replied as she helped him to the door.

“There’s no sign of Geometry,” Periwinkle informed Mercury as he rushed ahead farther down the hall.

“Morwinna, follow him,” Mercury encouraged the newly freed prisoner, and she made her way out into the hall behind him.

The trio took a stairway up, but muffled screams greeted them as they reached its top, and Periwinkle stopped dead. He pointed at the first door, which was ajar.

The screams were coming from inside the room.

Mercury barreled past Periwinkle, smashing into the door and slamming it open. Geometry was behind it. The two clowns had located the room that held Norjia, but the psychotic owner of the hotel had a dagger in his hand, and its blade was deep in Norjia’s thigh; she was wailing in agony. Geometry rounded on Mercury and swung his fist at her as she crashed into him. His blow collided with her arm, but Mercury’s momentum could not be stopped, and she knocked Geometry into Norjia, who immediately sunk her teeth into whatever chunk of flesh her jaws could reach. The man howled, as his prisoner bit off a piece of his cheek, but as he and Mercury crashed to the floor, his blade twisted in Norjia’s thigh and ripped out of her leg at a horrible angle. She roared in pain that was like an avalanche, and she struggled to remain conscious.

Mercury grabbed Geometry’s hand, which still held the dagger, and she screamed like a banshee as she tried to wrench the weapon’s handle from his fingers. He proved stronger and freed himself from her grip, but it did him no good. Morwinna, Geometry’s former prisoner and torture victim, grabbed his captor by the hair, and he began to pummel him about the head and face. The dagger clanged to the floor and Mercury snatched it. She quickly jumped to her feet and began to release the bindings that held Norjia to the rack.

Mercury eyed Morwinna beating Geometry, and she said to Periwinkle, “Go on ahead and find the Mechanic!”

Without hesitation, Periwinkle rushed farther down the hall, and Mercury immediately regretted sending him off on his own, but she focused on her task at hand. She managed to release the cuffs that held Norjia’s wrists. The scuffle behind her sounded frenzied, and Morwinna growled, “Oh no you don’t!” but then he let out a cry of pain and frustration, and he pounded on the wall.

“He got away!”

Geometry had escaped.