07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

through the closed door, “Shinichi, we’ve got your sister here! If you want her back you’ll stay quiet
and not make us throw her down the stairs.”
There was silence from the root cellar. Elena chose to think of it as submissive silence.
At least Shinichi wasn’t yelling threats.
“Okay,” Elena whispered. She’d taken a position directly behind Misao. “When I count
to three, we push as hard as we can.”
“Wait!” Matt said in a miserable whisper-shout. “You said we wouldn’t throw her down
the stairs.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Elena said grimly. “You think he doesn’t have some surprise for us?”
“But—”
“Leave it, Matt,” said Meredith quietly. She had the stave ready in her left hand and with
her right was ready to push on the panel for opening the door. “Everybody ready?”
Everyone nodded. Elena felt sorry for Matt and Stefan, who were the most honest and
sensitive of all of them.
“One,” she whispered softly, “two, three.”
On three Meredith hit the concealed wall switch. And then things began to happen in very
slow motion.
By “two” Elena had already begun to shove Misao toward the door. On “three” the
others joined her.
But the door seemed to take forever to open. And before the ending of forever, everything
went wrong.
The greenery around Misao’s head spread twigs in all directions. One strand shot out and
snagged Elena around the wrist. She heard a yell of outrage from Matt and knew that another strand
had gotten him.
“Push!” Meredith shouted and then Elena saw the stave coming at her. Meredith
whisked with the stave through the greenery connected to Misao. The vine that had been cutting into
Elena’s wrist fell to the floor.
Any remaining misgivings about throwing Misao down the stairs vanished. Elena joined
in the crowd trying to push her through the opening. But there was something wrong in the basement.
For one thing, they were shoving Misao into pitch-darkness…and movement.
The basement was full of—something. Some things.
Elena looked down at her ankle and was horrified to see a gigantic maggot that seemed
to have crawled out of the root cellar. Or at least a maggot was the first thing she could think of to
compare it to—maybe it was a headless slug. It was translucent and black and about a foot long, but
far too fat for her to have put a hand around it. It seemed to have two ways of moving, one by the
familiar hunch-and-straighten method and the other by simply sticking to other maggots, which were
exploding up over Elena’s head like a hideous fountain.
Elena looked up and wished she hadn’t.
There was a cobra waving over them, out of the root cellar and into the kitchen. It was a
cobra made of black translucent maggots stuck together, and every so often one would fall off and
land among the group and there would be a cry.
If Bonnie had been with them, she would have screamed until the wineglasses in the
cupboards shattered, Elena thought wildly. Meredith was trying to attack the cobra with the stave and
reach into her jeans pocket for Post-it Notes at the same time.
“I’ll get the notes,” Elena gasped, and wriggled her hand into Meredith’s pocket. Her