I spend the day avoiding everyone, with a vague hope that everyone but Nikki will leave.  They don't of course.  Ian doesn't come back, either, he's fled entirely for the hills.  That's fine.  I'm not really thinking about anything, just moving.  I spend half an hour quietly knocking everything in my room over, on a sudden mission to make it all the same height.  Moving furniture is cathartic, and it's good thinking-time, too.  This done, I snuggle down in the pile of blankets that used to be on my bed and take a nap, and dream about the weird tiled tunnels again.  When I wake up, I'm thinking of the carriage house and have made a connection.  Or is it a leap of logic?

Either way, I smell tuna.  I wander down to the kitchen, and Nikki has made a cute little tuna casserole.  It feels and smells like a peace offering, and not in a bad way.  There's no sign of Gray, or of Martin, and only Nikki and Doctor Edward are in the dining room.  The shades are drawn.  My dining room always seems to be the darkest room in the house (not counting the basement) whether the curtains are open or not, though.  There are trees right outside the window, I think that's why.  Nikki has lit a few candles though, and it's elegant.  I wonder why it never occurred to me to do that.

Doctor Edward's got his little laptop computer, and I sit down across from him.  Nikki appears at my elbow like a ghost and puts down a plate of tuna casserole and a glass of orange juice, then sits down a seat away from me.  I notice a big puffy swatch of gauze on her hand and realize that she must have gotten slashed trying to bat my arrow out of the air.  Okay, now I feel terrible.  Getting good and mad is worthless if you hurt the wrong people. 

The room is tense, the way the air gets after there's been a big argument that's not resolved yet.  I scrunch up my face, stretching the skin over the swelly spots where Nikki hit me.  It still hurts, but not in an obtrusive way.

I'm in the mood for resolution, though.  The angry-snake has had the shit beaten out of it, but it's not sleeping by a long shot.  I eat for a while, because it sucks to make food that no one eats and I don't want to make Nikki feel useless like that, and then I say, "Welcome to my little world.  I am in a very deep sulk now."  Teague appears from a pocket dimension, jumps up on my lap and sniffs for a handout.  "Not now, James, we're busy," I tell him, and twist my hips to dump him off.

Doctor Edward looks up at me and says, "I'd sulk too, if I had chased all my friends away.  Ian was trying to help you, you know." 

He clearly doesn't know what a very deep sulk means, in my language.  At the very least, it means, don't talk back.  I drain my orange juice, which Nikki hasn't spiked, bless her heart, then wrap my fingers tight around the glass and slam my knuckles into the table so hard that the juice glass shatters.  It's a horrible, painful outburst that, to be honest, I learned from Alison, and it has the desired effect.  Doctor Edward's mouth falls open in naked, stupid shock.

While he's staring at me, I lunge forward across the table and grab his laptop.  The cables pop out when I yank it toward me, and I sidearm it as hard as I can toward the ballroom.  It doesn't quite make it there, but it does bounce wonderfully off of the wall and then hits the floor with a very satisfying breaking noise. 

"Aw, Christ!" Doctor Edward yells.  "Bitch!  You!  Computer!  Floor!"  Doctors (real and otherwise) are so funny when they're incoherent.

I tell Nikki, "I'm sorry I shot you," and she nods.  She doesn't seem surprised about the computer; she's looking at my fingers.  I notice that my hand is bleeding, just like hers no doubt was.  Perhaps I've paid my karma debt.  "I have to go now."

"Go where?"

"I don't know exactly.  But I have a map.  Ian's coming back soon, isn't he?"

"You'll have worse guests than that," she says.  Worse?  How could the company get any worse than Martin and his homicidal Eurotrash girlfriend?

I'm heading for the front door, through the ballroom.  "Walk with me."  Along the way I grab a napkin and cram it into my palm.

"Your hand.  A bandage?"

"Don't need it." 

"Fucking hell, you're crazier than she is."

And we both know who she's talking about.  "Cuter, too," I say.  I get my coat out of the closet,  and then find a scarf that looks like Ian's.  I wrap it around my hand.  "And maybe half as dangerous."

There's confusion in Nikki's blue eyes.  "We're going outside?"

"Outside," I repeat.  Somewhere on the top shelf there should be a big red flashlight, there it is.

It's getting dark, and it's going to be a freezing evening.  I head straight for the carriage house.  I can hear Nikki following, scrutching through the snow, but I don't look back.  Inside, I walk around the Packard once, touching it, feeling the cold metal under my fingers.  It feels like possibility.  I imagine the ghosts of four more cars, filling the empty space.  Then I switch on the flashlight and go to the crack in the floor.

I kneel and look into it.  It's more than just a crack, as I thought.  There's air coming out of it.  The flashlight's beam doesn't touch the bottom.  I stand up and run my foot along the edge of it.

Nikki catches up and looks at me, confused.  "What?" she asks.

I give the big vent in the floor a good, healthy stomp.  Nikki jumps back with a little curse, and the carriage house wall shakes.   Two more stomps, and an eight-foot section of the garage floor vanishes downward, crumbled concrete bouncing and rolling down some slope.  A long slope, from the sound of it.  "Curiouser and curiouser," I say, thinking of the dream again.  I shine the light into the hole.  The bottom is about eight feet down, and it slopes away to...which way is that?  It's south.

"You're going down there, aren't you?" Nikki asks.  She sounds frightened.

"Maybe."

"You're not thinking straight, Lexi."

"I'm always like this," I tell her.

"Lexi, you'll freeze to death down there."

"Better than butterfly nets."

"Don't," Nikki says. 

"Don't let anyone take the house while I'm gone," I say, and jump into the hole.  A short, predictable fall through darkness and there I am, landing on the uneven floor and falling right on my butt.  At least I don't drop the flashlight.  Either way, ice is hard.  Owie.