Saturday, May 22, 2010

Ghouls and NCIS

There was a small closet located where Cyrus' cage is in the computer room. Well, it was the computer room, except instead of a computer and Ralph's crate there was my bed. And instead of Cyrus' cage, there was the small closet. It had a light shining through the crack in the door, but it had always been there, and I had never opened it. Then Meredith came over, and asked what was in the closet. I was a little puzzled, and said that I didn't know. So she climbed over the mound of junk that was in the way, and opened the closet door.
There was a little tunnel, like the one in the Coraline film but less well-lit. As we peered through the tunnel, a door on the other end opened, and a ghoul appeared. Now I don't know what a ghoul really looks like, but this was definitely a ghoul. It had a stretched-out elasticky face, like that in Munch's "The Scream", with sharp teeth and spiky hair on it's head and on the back of it's hands, which looked like rubber except for the rather horrifyingly sharp claws. It didn't look very threatening at the moment, though, it just looked at us, blinked and shut the door. We shut ours, and a second later we heard loud cries, a lot of them, from the other side. I'd never heard sounds coming from the closet before, but now I could. There was a "thunk" sound, and we heard one of them running down the tunnel toward our door. Meredith and I scotch-taped it shut. The light on the other side was brighter than it ever had been, so we covered the crack in printer paper to dull the light.
I called Dad and told him we had ghouls in our house. He sounded more frustrated than scared, and asked us what we'd done about it. I told him we'd taped the door shut, and he said that he'd look into it when he had time.
I had to sleep in the little room that night, and I really didn't want to. My father told me to suck it up, nothing would come through the door. I lay on my bed for a while, the light was very distracting. I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of dizziness, and I sat up. Meredith was sitting there, looking at me. After a few seconds of her looking at me in a kind of creepy way, I remembered that in the Dresdenverse ghouls could take human form. I asked Meredith to prick her finger so I could check that her blood was red. She did, and she was genuine. She told me that my father had given her a number to call.
In the morning, there were a bunch of guys in uniforms out in the backyard, doing what guys in uniforms do when they are in your backyard, talking into walky-talkies and looking at blades of grass and stuff. Also, Gibbs from NCIS was there. He gave a little speech about how to deal with ghouls, I don't remember it, but it amounted to arming ourselves to the teeth and charging through the tunnel.
We came out on the other side into a square concrete room, with a large pit in the center and a door on the other side. And the pit was filled with ghouls, who began to scramble out and charge at us. The pit must have been bottomless, because they kept coming. We were able to keep them back with gunfire, though.
Then I woke up as the battle really began.

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