If the monster had never bothered anyone until it was hungry, it seemed obvious that we needed to get it some food. Best case scenario, it'd pig out and fall asleep. Then we could unlock the door, sneak inside, and kill it before it even realized we were coming.
Of course, this plan depended on a lot of things. We needed enough food to give it. We also needed to convince Keys to go into the basement with us. Even if he did go down there, there was no guarantee any of his keys would even work on that specific door. And then there was the question of how we would actually kill the monster.
I got up from the table and walked over to Face and Tang. "Do you guys have any traps set?" I asked.
"Yeah," Face said.
"How many?"
"Seven."
"How long will it take for you to check them all?" I said.
"Thirty minutes at the most."
"Okay. Go. Bring back whatever you can get."
Face nodded. "We just need to get our coats and some bags and our flashlights from the basement."
"Flashlights?" I said. I remembered the pins of light on Halloween. How could I have almost forgotten about that? "Do those work in the basement?"
Face grunted. "No. Don't be stupid. We don't have time for this."
"But there was light down there. On Halloween. I saw it through the bag you had over my head."
Some of the others let out surprised noises. No one had suspected that there was light in the basement. No one had wanted to go down there to find out.
He hesitated. "One room has a lightbulb. It's where we stay."
"And you can turn it on and off. I remember."
He didn't respond.
"When everything's over," I said. "You're going to give me a full tour of the basement."
I saw my face engulfed in flames in Face's glass oval. My mouth hung open and my tongue was on fire. My eyelids burned away and my eyeballs charred to black. I refused to let him win. I didn't look away.
After a second, he turned. "Come on, Tang. Let's get going."
The two brothers disappeared into the basement.
I turned to face the others. No one had moved from their seats. "Z. D-Rip. Were you guys able to find any weapons?"
Kit jumped to her feet. "Weapons!"
"A few," Z said.
"Go get them," I said.
The twins got up and ran out of the kitchen. Kit was in my face not a second later.
"What do you mean weapons?" she asked, her teeth gritted, voice low.
"I mean weapons."
"You did that behind my back?"
"Would you have let us get them in front of your back?" I asked.
She glared, but I kept her eye contact. I felt hot all of a sudden.
"I thought they'd come in handy. Looks like I was right."
"You should've told me."
Face and Tang came back up into the kitchen. They each had on a winter coat and carried a flashlight and cloth bag. Neither of them even acknowledged us. They just ran through the kitchen, down the front hall, and slammed the front door behind them.
The twins came back a few seconds later and dumped what they'd collected at my feet. An axe, two butcher's knives, and a baseball bat with nails hammered through it.
"That's it?" I said.
"What? We put the nails in the bat," D-rip said. "Dibs on the axe!" He leaned down and grabbed it.
"The bat's mine," Z said. He grabbed that. "Revenge is gonna be sweet."
Kit sighed and shook her head. She went over to a drawer, yanked it open, and took out the two biggest knives we had. She brought them over and set them on the floor. "Here." She was not happy.
I turned to the kitchen table. No one still sitting looked at me.
"Light. Keys. We need your help."
Light nodded. He stood and, to everyone's surprise, the kitchen brightened back to its normal gloom. "I'll go. For Porcelain."
My mouth fell open. I hadn't expected it to be that easy. "Thanks, Light."
He came over to us and picked up one of the knives. He looked at the blade and nodded.
"Keys?"
He sat there but didn't look up. He was thinking hard, though.
"We need you, Keys," I said.
He slowly looked up at me. His eyes were totally blank.
"We do have an axe," D-rip said. The head of the axe rested over his shoulder. "Maybe we don't need him. We can just chop down the door."
Kit shook her head. "It'd hear us coming. If this is going to go right, we really do need a key . . ."
Us? We? "Kit, you do realize you're not coming, right?" I said
She looked at me sharply. "Of course, I'm coming! Porcelain needs me!"
"And so does everyone else we're leaving up here," I said.
She looked at the others still sitting around the table, Evry and Legs and Rope and Eyes and Mair and Keys. She knew that they'd need someone to hold them together while the rest of us went into the basement. nodded. She also knew they would especially need her if we didn't come back.
She nodded. "You're right."
Chair legs scraped the floor and we all turned. Keys had stood up. Slowly, he came over to us, shoulders slumped, eyes down. He looked like he was ready to pass out any second.
Kit shoved through the middle of us and hugged him. "Thank you, Keys," she whispered.
He pushed her away. "I can't really hold anything with these." He held up his nine skeleton keys. "You guys need to keep me safe. I won't have any weapons."
"What are you talking about," D-rip said. "Those are weapons! Jab those things into its eyes or throat if you get the chance!"
Keys looked at his fingers in wide-eyed horror and then quickly put his hands behind his back.
"So, the plan is to give that thing a ton of food and wait for it to fall asleep. Then we go into the room. But then what? We need a real plan of how we're going to kill this thing," I said.
"We don't even know what it looks like," Light said.
"Well, from what we heard at night, it sounds like it walks on two feet," I said.
The others nodded.
"And it sounds huge," Z said.
"Which means it's probably really strong," Keys said.
"We need to overpower it. We all go for it at once." I was surprised at how confident I sounded. "We need to go for anything that will hurt it bad. The throat, its eyes. We should try to make it so it can't move around. That means cutting the Achilles—"
"Jeeze, Words!" Kit dug her nails into her hair.
"What?" I said. "We've got to talk about this stuff. If this plan is going to work."
Kit started pacing. "I can't believe this is happening. This is not good. This is not good."
"No, it's not," I said.
She stopped and looked at me.
"But what else are we supposed to do?"
We looked at each other for a few seconds. Eventually, she nodded and then started pacing again. I reached down and picked up a knife.
No one said anything until Face and Tang got back.
The empty cloth bags they took with them now had lumps in them. They found more than they thought they would—a possum, two squirrels, and a raccoon. Kit offered that we give it the rest of the turkey, too. "The more meat, the better, right?" she said.
Face shook his head. "I don't think it's into anything . . . well done."
I swear she almost passed out.
I filled them in on our plan of attack—swarm it and go for the weak spots. They both listened and nodded.
"Makes sense," Face said.
Tang grunted his approval.
They each picked up a knife.
I led the way to the basement door and pulled it open. I looked down the stairs. The darkness felt alive, like an animal that was clawing its way up to get at us.
I thought about Face and Tang. They'd lived down there in that darkness, feeding that thing for months. Maybe they really only fed it to keep themselves safe, and maybe they wouldn't have cared if it ate us rather than them, but they were risking their own lives to save Porcelain. We'd never be friends, but it was nice to see that they didn't only care about themselves. And there was a part of me that knew I should be grateful to them for teaming up with us to kill that thing. I'd never tell them that, though.
"Light," I said. "You're up."
Light nodded. He pushed his way through everyone and stepped down onto the top stair. Instead of shooting a beam of light out of his hand, he closed his eyes and concentrated. His face and arms started to glow. It gave off light in every direction instead of just one. Everything came into view, the cracked plaster, the splintered wood of the stairs.
We all cried out in surprise at his surprise. Even Face and Tang were impressed by the awestruck sounds they made.
"Come on," he said. He barely kept himself from smiling as he started down the stairs and led the way.