their balance while walking through the portal with a few other people, the Hudsons found a deeper darkness on the other side and began moving slowly through a maze when a large, cloaked figure emerged in front of them.
“Oh my God!” Faith gasped as the figure raised a severed human head before them, then vanished.
“It’s not real, Mom!” Gage laughed.
“I know, sweetie. It just startled me. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, this is so dope!”
But the underlying nervousness in Gage’s voice worried Faith, making her wonder if he’d be okay. Especially with what seemed to be up ahead.
Agonizing pleas beckoned them to the Dungeons of Dread and a darkened narrow walkway that reeked of rotten eggs and had water trickling down its jagged stone walls.
“Oh, no, let go! No!” a teenager ahead of them shrieked.
Something scratched at Faith’s ankles. Then it gripped them before she kicked free. Looking to her feet she saw clawlike hands reaching out from barred windows where the condemned, confined in a subterranean prison, grabbed desperately at them, calling, “Save us! Don’t leave us!”
Hurrying through the dungeons, the Hudsons came to another dark twisting connection echoing with wails, growing louder as they got closer to the next chamber.
There, the entire scene glowed in flickering orange, yellow and red as flames licked from a massive mound of wood and bramble. A large post protruded from the center. Bound to it, a woman wrapped in a white nightshirt, her head shorn, face glistening, her eyes inflamed, screeched, “So you think burning me, the witch queen, will be my end! Fools! I curse you all! I’ll torment you from hell!”
The temperature soared, giving the scene a heightened degree of authenticity. Faith saw one man point out for his wife how the flames were controlled from a gas line, that the wood pile was a prop, like the gas fireplace in an expensive home.
“Did you hear me?” the witch queen screamed. “You’re all cursed! Forever!”
Faith found kinship with the witch queen.
Her writhing against her bindings echoed how Faith felt, bound to her heartache. Cal had grown distant over the last couple years and she didn’t know why. After one of his big stories he’d grow pensive. Faith didn’t know what was happening with him. Whenever she tried to talk about it, he’d shut her down. He’d become absorbed in his work and was never home. She was always alone, making her feel that he preferred the long hours of working with cops, criminals and street-smart, pretty female reporters to being with her.
Had he fallen out of love with her? Once, she’d overheard him on a call joking to someone that journalists were truth seekers and PR people were professional liars. Did he feel that way about her? Most of her work was for big nonprofit groups and charities, and that was the only time she’d heard him talk that way, so she let it go.
Or tried to.
Faith needed to hold things together for Gage’s sake. But it wasn’t easy. She knew Gage idolized his father and lived for any free moment Cal spared for him. But it only happened when it was convenient for Cal. How many times had he canceled at the last minute on promised father-son days to see a movie, or the Cubs, or check out video games because he had to work late?
Gage was crushed every time. He was resilient, but still, it broke Faith’s heart.
Cal had promised her that he would leave the crime beat and advance up the editorial ladder toward a more stable job and life. It never happened—and she knew it never would because he loved what he was doing. That’s why she saw the looming layoffs at the paper as a chance for him to start something new, for them to reconnect. Because little by little she felt something was slipping away from them. They were growing apart, forcing Faith to take a hard look at taking control of matters because she and Cal couldn’t go on like this.
They used to be so much in love. What was happening to them?
The cries of the witch queen soon faded as the Hudsons navigated another labyrinthian connection to the next chamber where they were met by the distinct sound of vigorous chopping. Then, emerging in the gloomy darkness, they saw a man in a blood-streaked apron swinging a cleaver, blood running down his arm while he chopped slabs of meat on a table.
“Whoa!” Gage said. “It’s the insane butcher!”
Legs and arms, some twitching, were displayed on the hooks and chains near the butcher as he worked. His hair as wild as Medusa’s, his face contorted and smeared with blood, as he stopped his work to offer the Hudsons delicacies from an array of bowls. One was filled with eyeballs, one brimmed with fingers and another held brains.
“Gross!” Gage laughed.
“No, thanks,” Cal said.
As the Hudsons moved on with a small group, the light grew increasingly darker, making it nearly impossible to see each other, let alone Gage’s face. The actors and sets were of a higher caliber than Faith had anticipated and she worried that Gage was going to have nightmares after this.
She reached for his hand but he shook her attempt away.
“I’m not a baby, Mom!”
Suddenly the air filled with a loud hellish combination of perverted circus music and a thousand fingernails scraping on chalkboards. They came to a clown, malevolent makeup covering his face. Enormous fangs jutted from his head. He sat before an organ on a stool of bones while playing a demonic tune on a keyboard of little skulls, offering entertainment at the gateway to the next chamber.
It was the darkest passage yet.
Faith felt the floor beneath them undulating as thunder cracked. They were walking on something twisting, rolling and squirming.
Something slimy and alive!
Sudden lightning flashes revealed they were on a stream of snakes.
“Oh God!” Faith screamed, rushing ahead, thinking they couldn’t be real—they must be some sort of animatronics or CGI, though they sure felt real.
The connection, dimly lit with the lightning flashes, led them through a cavern-like passage overwhelmed with spiders and bats, forcing Faith to swat frantically at her face and hair.
They’re not real, Faith assured herself, swatting around her hair.
“Gage? Cal?”
“Right behind you,” Cal said.
Continuing in the next narrow connection they were nearly blind in the dark. They came upon rumbling so powerful everything vibrated. Feeling their way forward they brushed against earthen walls that were moving, closing in on them, forcing them to turn sideways to pass through. Sounds grew louder with the foreboding rumbling and heightened the sickening sense of being crushed and entombed.
“I don’t like this,” Faith said.
“Keep pushing forward,” Cal said. “It’ll be okay.”
The walls were actually constructed of foam and, after the
