-- prologue --
Yeets staggered back from Havenairri Hill with one hand over the side of his face. Three parallel lines of dripping blood ran down over his fingers. "Damn you father! Damn you to hell!" Yeets turned from the home and walked away, then turned back one last time. "I will find a way to the treasure, if it is the last thing that I do!"
There was a flash and a single shot rang out in the night. Yeets dropped to the ground, dead before he landed in the mud. Herman stalked over with the grace of a dancer. "No my son, you never will."
In the distance, blue and red lights were flashing and a siren called out to the night.
-- Today --
The trees moved past the car window with a rhythmic patience borne out of one's own bored mind. Jill had given up the game of counting them miles ago. It was like all of the other times that her father had moved from place to place. One more dull school, one more dull town, ...just one big dull life.
"Hon. Why such a long face?" Ted glanced over at his daughter. 'She is always like this when I find a new job.' "This new job will be wonderful hon. Greenville is large enough that I will not have to move on for quite some time."
Jill sighed. "Dad, once you plan out their sewer system you always have to move on to the next town. It's always the SAME! Its not fair. I finally was making friends at Socksee."
Looking out the window again, Jill turned her mind away from school and jobs all over the US... back to counting trees... except that they were entering town and the trees thinned out, making way for buildings. She started to count them instead. It was a backwards little town at that. All of the houses looked like they were out of the 1930s or something... not to mention how they dressed.
The car slowed down and pulled up to the curb. "Here we are hon! What do you think?"
Jill looked at the old house. "Dad, it looked a lot better in the pictures that you showed us."
Ted looked at the home closely as well. He had to agree, but. "Nah.... I just say that a little washing and it will look just like it did in the photo."
Jill sighed and got out of the car. Her father always managed to get a place sight unseen. "Havenairri Hill: wonderful name for the dump."
Jill's frown quickly moved up to a scowl as she stepped inside the house.
"Honeeeey! Come get a bag, willya?" She scowled, and turned abtuptly stomping back outside. "Daa-aad! This place is worse even than that place we stayed up in"--she stopped, her mouth shutting with a snap as her father bustled past her, with murmerings to the effect of, "Well, sugarplum, I'm sure..." he put the boxes down, and began fishing through them, oblivious to the dust, cobwebs, or even the particular a certain smell wafted up through the floor. The place stank from the floor up.
She wrinkled her nose, glowering at the boxes, refusing to move, as her father hummed away with the luggage.
Ted frowned, casting about for something to say, and finally settled on a rather helpless shrug. "Well... maybe a little more than a window wash," he admitted, moving this box here, another there. "But things can't be so bad. This is supposedly a very good job." Her father's freckled face poked up through the mess with a smile, "Why, just take a whiff of that!" he grinned, moving to stand in the middle of the rotted wooden floor.
"From the smell of things, they definitely need a new sewage system!" he smiled, and bent back down, then got up again, apparently impatient, moving about the room. "Hon? Why don't you take a few of these upstairs?" 'Maybe she'll calm down when she sees her room...'
Leaving her father to stand and inspect the downstairs, Jill quickly grabbed a few of the boxes and headed up to see what else there was. With luck, she would have a working bathroom.
Jill picked up a box of her things and climbed up the stairs.
She balanced the box in one hand and held onto the ornately carved banister with the other.
At the rail's base was a carved Dragon. Jill thought it would have been nice, if it wasn't so creepy. She climbed up, the old stairs creaking and sagging with each step.
At the top, she reached around looking for the light switch. She finally found it, one of those old types with two buttons.
She pressed it, and a dim light from a dusty chandelier on the landing gave off a muted semblance of illumination.
Jill looked at the old sideboard against the wall. A vase was in it's center with some dead flowers dropping in resignation.
She went down the hall, past peeling wallpaper, and creaking floors. The doors to the rooms were closed, and she decided to go to the end of the hall.
All of the rooms were seemingly barricaded with substantial thick, oak doors, their knobs made of clear glass.
The hallway had a worn rug in its center, the colors muted and reddened by time. Several unidentifiable stains on its threadbare surface. Jill approached her last door, feeling frightened but not able to explain why.
Jill set the box on on ornately carved chair by the wall, and reached forward to open the door. As she reached out, a bright spark jumped from the knob to her hand!
Jill gasped and almost screamed, then sighed, "Static electricity.. thats all..." She reached out and opned the door to her room.
Hours later, Jill was looking for the remote control for the TV in what passed for a living room downstairs. "Dad, where is the remote?" Her father looked over at her for a moment... then at the TV.
"Well hon... I am afraid to tell you this but that TV is from the 'stone age.' No remote. You have to get up, walk over to it, pull the power switch out, then change the channel by turnning the knob."
Jill glared at her father, but got up anyways and went over to the odd TV. She flipped it on and turned the knob, which promptly fell apart in her hand. She sat back and looked at the TV. It was on NBC. "We only get one channel on this TV, father."
"Thats fine, Hon."
Jill gave up on the TV and headed out to the kitchen again. As she was going through the hall there was a knock at the door. Sighing, she went over to it and opened the door. Two people were on the other side holding out a pie.
"Hello there! Are you really moving in here? Been such a long time since anyone lived here. I thought that we should bake you a pie as a welcoming gift."
Jill grinned at the locals. Maybe they were not so bad. "Well... thank you...?"
"...Mindy and Stan Craber. You are very much welcome."
Jill thought to herself, 'Nice people... but they would get really annoying fast if you had to spend time with them.' Then she spoke, "Would you like to come in and meet my father?" She smiled at the two visitors.
Mindy and Stan just looked at each other. "Um... No... I don't think that we will come in." They held out the apple pie for Jill to take. "You see, it isn't you or anything, it is just that, the house is cursed." They both grinned at the girl. "Not that it would matter to big city folk like you."
Jill smiled back at them and said thank you. She had been right. These two would get annoying really fast. She bid them goodbye and headed back to the living room.
"Hello Dad."
"Who was that at the door, hon?" Ted didn't even look up from his book.
"Just a couple of people that live next door. They gave us an apple pie as well."
Ted looked up at last. "Why didn't you ask them in?"
"I did dad. They didn't want to come in. Said the house was haunted or something."
"Whatever, hon."
Ted frowned, turning one page after the other as his daughter proceeded to turn herself into a vegetable in fromt of the TV. She seemed to be settling into things. As long as she got over the shock of her room, ...her room..... He frowned, pushing his glasses up. "You see your room yet?"
His daughter shrugged, watching the tv, and he frowned, becoming not as interested in her answer as he was of that smell... which was creeping up from the floorboards. He put his book down on the table, got up and paced the floor, taking things off the wall, then putting them back.
He did this for some time, before realizing it was exactly what he'd done yesterday. But he knelt this time, by the figure of the dragon, running his finger idly down the carved claw tips, then stooped, rubbing his hands over the boards. The floor was very smooth, but worn and splintered. What had been thick and strong was worn thin. "Maybe I ought to see about a few things, first." 'Where was the sewage system,' he frowned thinking to himself, and went into the kitchen. The smell was worse near the kitchen. He called out, "Hon, you mind coming with me?" His daughter blinked, then had to go back twice to shut off the television set--forgetting momentarily again, you couldn't do it with a remote.
"Come along with me and tell me if the smell gets worse as we get nearer to the kitchen." She wrinkled her nose and followed...
"No, dad, I think it gets better..." She frowned, brow furrowed, and looked up at him, then back at the TV.
"How exactly better?" he looked down at the floor boards.
Some of them creaked in response to his feet, but not many. In fact, it looked as though they had been...
"As if it's not there at all. Really, dad, it just..." she shrugged, "Moves away. Disappears."
Ted scowled, rubbing at his face, "Well, to me it just gets worse. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say the whole city pipelined under us..." He stopped speaking, a grin tugging at his features. His daughter shared, it, too. It was the only part of his work she enjoyed... "Why don't we go explore it...?"
An hour later, Ted and Jill, dressed up in their yellow rubber sewer clothing, were finally down in the muck. The nearest manhole hadn't been anywhere near their house, and it had taken some searching to find it.
"Look at this!" Ted said with a mixture of disgust and enthusiasm, bending down to pick up a bit of fetid slime. "This is totally stagnant. I bet it never even drains except in major rainstorms..."
"Hey, dad?" Jill said, "Isn't this tunnel going the wrong way?"
"What do you -- oh, right. Our house is *that* way." He pointed towards one of the tunnel walls. "There must be a junction nearby... which way...?..."
"Why don't we split up?"
Ted gave Jill a look. "Because ONE of us will get lost again."
"That was years ago, dad... I'm a big girl now. And I don't want to listen to you going on about the three major types of solid waste." She shuddered and made an 'ick' face.
Ted thought about it a little. "Okay, as long as we don't go far. As soon as you find a junction, come right back here... or also if you go a half mile without finding anything. Okay?"
Jill rolled her eyes. "Deal."
The two of them looked at each other for another couple seconds, then turned and walked their separate ways.
Jill plodded through the thick slime, imagining she was the intrepid space marine, sneaking into the fearsome alien's lair... "I'll have to get a group together here," she murmered to herself. "If anyone lives close enough..."
Jill stopped, and scowled. There it was, a standard four-way junction, not 200 feet from the manhole, cutting her tunnel-crawl short. "Geez," she sighed, then turned and headed back.
And of course her father wasn't done, yet. He was walking off a mile down the sub-line. "He'll probably go two miles before he gives up," she mumbled, leaning against the wall to wait.
And wait. And wait. "This is crazy. HEY, DAD?!"
No response. "Dad?" Jill called one more time, then headed down the tunnel, following his boot-prints in the stagnant waste.
Jill continued down the passageway, glad that she had put new batteries in her flashlight.
Her father's footprints faded in and out of the fetid waste that lined the floor. Small puddles of liquid were here and there with.. who-knew-what lying in them.
She moved onward, her nose hardly noticing the raw smell of sewage and waste that permeated the tunnel anymore. Having explored passages like this with her father before, and having been here for almost an hour now, she was used to it. Jill reached a turn in the huge pipe, and then stopped.
She was faced with a solid wall of concrete. Well, not solid. There was an opening about three foot on a side. An old iron grate that had been mounted over it had been forced aside. Her father's footprints continued around the corner, and then stopped. "Well, I guess he went in there." Jill took a breath and called out into the smaller hole, "Hey Dad! Dad!?!
No answer. "Hmmph! He tells me to wait to go into other passage, but does he wait? NNNooooooooooo...!"
Jill sighed and bent down to enter the passage, she moved carefully, her yellow slicker getting caught in the rusty grate. "Rats, let go..you!'
Jill pulled her slicker loose, and crawling on her hands and knees, lumbered down the passage.
This pipe had a distinct downward angle, and a small riverlet of.water (?) trickled down it's center.
Jill carefully crawled along, every once in a while calling out for her father, "Hey Dad? You down here?"
After what seemed like ages, she finally reached the end, the pipe seeming to just end in mid air. She leaned out the end, and showed her flashlight around the new space.
It was a large space, all concrete with holes in the walls, and small streams of waste splashing out and down the walls to end up in a pit in the room's center.
She showed her light directly down from the mouth of the tunnel she was in, to see where and if she had flooring to get out, ...and blinked. There on the concrete ledge below 'her' pipe was a shoe. Her Dads shoe! "Dad! Where are you, " Jill sreamed!
Something touched her shoulder and she almost leaped into the pit of waste in the center of the room. "Hon! Hon! It is just me. No reason to scream like that. Now do you smell it? It is coming from here."
Jill looked at the pit in the middle of the room. "Dad. -Its a sewer-. The smell here is always bad."
Her father sighed. "Not that Hon. The other smell! The same one as in the house."
Jill looked up at her dad closely for the first time. "Dad, Like I said before I didn't......." She backed up from her 'dad'. "OH... mother of God."
In just one moment after she witnessed the 'flesh' of the 'dad thing' crawl around on his face, she could see nothing but blackness.
-----
Hours later Jill woke screaming. "Was that a Dream?"
There was movement to the right of her. An old woman looked up from a teapot. "No my dear. You only saw the Glom. He wouldn't harm anyone at all. Most people just don't like his looks."
"What about my father! Where is he! I saw his shoe!"
There was a crashing sound to the right and her fathers head popped up from behind a table full of books. "Right here hon. The Glom saved me. I'd fallen into that waste pit.
"Dad?"
The old woman came over to her... "Drink this, dear. We will tell you everything soon."
The woman offered her a cup full of a soft, steaming liquid, and she reached out, holding onto it with careful fingers, realizing as she reached just how hot it was. "Tell me... tell me what?"
Her father frowned, clearing his throat. He was wearing... she squinted... not believing... brown suspenders.
"Tell me what?" she repeated, and focused on the suspenders again as the room waved around her.
"She's tired," she heard the lady(?) nurse(?) tell her father, and she tried to signal that she wasn't, only she managed to drop the cup.
"I know..." she heard he father sigh, and her eyes closed. "She took a nasty scare." Hell, maybe she WAS tired...scared of--what had that thing been--
=============
*tickticktick* She found herself jerking awake in measured steps with the tick of the clock. It was the strangest feeling. The mechanical sound guided her to wakefulness, and she found another cup of broth near the bedside under a dusty lamp. The rest of the room was like that, too... dusty but well kept... the kind of house you would expect for an old woman. As she listened, she realized they must be at the Craber's house-- Mindy and Stan? That must be it. She made up her mind to get out of the bed...
She reached the door.. quiet voices came to her from the outside, and she found a way out. It was indeed the Craber house--the Crabers sat on the porch outside, talking animatedly with her dad.
"Not really--it was more of a draft of cold air--" That was her dad, probabally discussing the three types of.. she stumbled, catching herself on one of the chairs. "Honeey---you shouldn't be up! With that fall you took..."
Her dad was there, grabbing her arm and hoisting her up. As she did, she cought a look at Mr. Craber's face... he was watching her dad ..with a little more than interest. Nahhh... can't be.
"That Glom startled you pretty well, didn't he?" Mrs Craber said, coming in from somewhere in the kitchen.
"Most people are just afraid of his looks..." She patted Jill's arm, and the girl sat up, leaning against the table.
She found it in herself to mutter, "Maybe it's just his sense of humor."
She sniffed, and leaned back, falling slightly to the side, but now that she was moving, she found herself able to function a little better. "So what was it?" she asked finally, and they fell into a hundred explanations, none of which made any sense... except the Glom was this big gigantic thing, and that she and her dad mustn't risk themselves like that... then the flow of conversation changed... would she like some apple pie? They had lots of that. And that Mr. Craber was smiling at her dad again... she idly wondered if his wife was watching, then moved the apple pie aside with a murmered, "no thank you..."
She looked over, "So what happened to you, dad?"
"Not now, honey," her dad said, "I've already told the Crabers a thousand times. I'll tell you when we get home."
"So let's *go* then, already!" Jill said, then murmered an apology as the Crabers all turned to stare at her, obviously offended.
"No... no, I understand," Mrs Craber said, at last. "We must be terribly boring for a big city girl like you."
"It's not *that*," Jill said, "It's just..."
"Come on, we'd better go," Ted said, glancing nervously at Mr. Craber. "I'll come back tonight, after we've unpacked a little. I promise." Mr. Craber nodded, then Ted grabbed Jill and hurried off. Jill's eyes went wide in surprise at the force of her father's grip, like he was angry at her.
"You shouldn't be so rude to your hosts," Ted said, as they walked home. Apparently they hadn't driven to the Crabers, because their car was nowhere to be seen. "A good girl should respect her neighbors."
"Dad, are you okay?" Jill asked, trying to pull her hand out of his grip -- but it was too tight.
"You need to learn to be *polite*, Jill. The Crabers pulled you out of that nasty sewer, and gave you medicine, and apple pie, and put you up for the night, and this is how you repay them?"
"I thought the Glom saved me... ow! Let go!"
Ted didn't seem to listen, instead dragging Jill at an increasing pace through the thin forest. She stumbled and jogged to keep up. "But if you want to go home, *we'll* take you home!"
Jill's father almost dragged her through the forest toward the back of their house. As they reached the door, Jill reached for the knob. It was locked. "You'll have to open it, Dad." I don't have a key yet."
Jill's father looked blank for a moment, then something seemed to click. He said "I must have lost mine in the sewer, you'll have to climb in a window."
"Well, ok, "Jill said, "I hope the cops don't come by. Which window, Dad?"
Jill's Dad looked at the house. "Around the side."
They walked around the house to the dining room window, it's dusty panes reflecting the early evening light like dead eyes. "Ok.. this one," Jill's dad said, motioning toward the window. "Climb in."
Jill looked at the window, "I can't reach it Dad, it's too high up. Let me stand on your back."
Again, Jill's Dad looked blank, and then, like a light turning on, he moved to kneel and his hands and knees.
"Ok,... hang on Dad."
Jill didn't feel well, but there was something strange here. Something just just didn't feel right. Her dad was acting strange, but then He had had a tough day too.
Anyway, she wanted to get inside and take a shower and then go to bed, she'd worry about it tomorrow. 'Ok, here I go...'
Jill carefully stepped on her Father';s back. For some reason it felt...well, squishy. She reached up and pushed up on the window. It creaked upwards a few inches and then stopped.
Jill said, "Hang on dad, it's stuck."
Jill pushed up hard on the window. It finally gave way opening fully, but as it did, Jill lost her balance. She stepped back, and with a sickining squishing sound, and a smell of sewage and feces, her father's body collapsed into a puddle of poop!
Jill screamed at the top of her lungs and ran into the woods away from the animated sewer. She ran as fast and as far as she could before collapsing to the ground in exhaustion. She panted, her chest heaving up and down with the effort to breath at all. She looked around at where she was and spotted a manhole. It was only a moment before she was over to and lifting the lid off of the portal. She would get her father, her real father, if it was the last thing that she did. With that in mind she stepped down into the smelly warm pit.
"Father! I am coming for you!"
Soon after she went down the hole two figures came quietly through the woods. Mindy and Stan looked down the hole and 'click clurk slicked' to each other... Or in English: 'Where she goes. We must follow.'
Jill kicked her feet up through the muck, as if in defiance of what she had seen before. She heard it splatter against the walls ..a solid sound, something real...not just like in nightmares. This whole place, this whole job was turning out to be a nightmare. Whatever the Glom was, it wasn't her friend...
"Or I am..." a cold tendril snaked around under her socks, real and solid. But when she looked down in panic...
"Shhh! Nothing's there...I'm not here. Just... ignore me. Ignore me, okay? I made a mistake. I shouldn't have told you--now you're..."
"Going to panic..." the voice whispered softly. And she turned and ran. Whatever it was vanished, but she realized, after a while of running, that she was heading the wrong way. She'd already passed the original manhole she'd come down in---"Me and my dad," she choked, standing and shivering against the wall. She could still feel his hand, being grabbed... and then waking up in the dark, dusty but neat room of the old woman and the old man.
"The old woman and the old man".. she sobbed, turning around, and she began to make her way back in the direction of the manhole. Her father had been wrong... they weren't nice neighbors...they...
"No, no they weren't." It was the voice again, and she felt the cold tendril go about her face. "Shush. They're not... they're... this whole place is old. It's very old, Jill...I do not think you would believe me if I told you how old. --Now, will you stop trying to scream?"
Jill gulped air..and did more than that. She nearly fainted. Instantly the whatever-it-was was gone, headed up into the raf--the the pipes that ran along the ceiling of the sewer. "How old?" she asked... (she could form a coherent sentence. Amazing).
"You wouldn't believe it..." came the voice. "Just... just calm down, and find your father..."
Jill felt herself slowly becoming calm, and found herself walking through the tunnel, towards the grating. "He went this way," she said, or maybe it said. "Shh..."
She squeezed through the grating, and into the pipe, and crawled down and down to the large open room. She didn't have a flashlight, and the light filtering through the manhole was long since gone, but she could still see by the light of a strange greenish glow, that seemed to come from the air, the walls, the... crap. Everywhere. Even from her.
In the ghostly light, she saw her father's shoe again as a patch of total darkness. A trail of the same darkness led around the edge of the room, vanishing behind a small pillar-like ridge in the wall. Jill carefully dropped down, and made her way across the floor, following the trail.
"Does this... lead to my father?" she asked.
"Shh, be quiet," the voice replied, immediately followed by a sickening burbling from the pool of slime in the center of the room. "Oh -- oh, no. Hurry... but don't panic."
"What -- what is it?" Jill asked, frozen with her back against the wall.
Jill watched, frozen, as a mound of slime rose up from the center of the pool. When it was about a sixth of an arc, six long, slimy tentacles whipped out from the slime and waved about in the air.
Jill screamed, and immediately all six tentacles swiveled to face her. Finally, she turned tail and ran, following the trail around the pillar. Her father had gone this way, there had to be a --
Jill rounded the edge of the pillar and stopped, surprised. "What the --"
Jill rounded to corner to see a most unusual sight.
A brightly lit room, lit by what seemed from the smell of methane gas lamps all around. A group of 'people'? were all seated on benches facing the front of the room. There on a pedestal with it's seat as high as she was tall, stood a giant... "Toilet?"
No one seemed to hear her, or even notice that Jill hand entered. They all murmered and seemed to be in a daze. As their murmerings reached a crescendo, one of the group dressed in brown robes stood and approached the giant bowl. With a loud shout he reached up and pressed the silver handle on the side of the giant potty.
With a huge roar, the toilet flushed, the audience gasped as.. A stinking brown ooze with bits of celery and corn embeded in it rose from the bowl, shifting and forming into a human shaped thing, eyes and a mouth, arms and legs forming as it congealed and settled sitting on the toilet.
The audience rose to it's feet, and then fell to it's knees in a worshipful genuflection. They cried as one, "Welcome back your majesty, All praise King Shit!'
Jill looked around, ...there unconcious and tied to the wall was her dad!
"Dad!" She shouted out with all her might. Now everyone in the room turned around and looked at her. They all looked just like Mindy and Stan. Just as if they were twins.
The little voice that had been talking to her whispered to her again. "Now you know what *not* to do. My next suggestion is to run around and run as fast as you can or the Mindy-Stans will catch you and tie you to the wall with your father."
Jill was too stunned to do anything for a moment. Then the Mindy-Stans got her around legs and arms. The voice sighed. "You never do listen, do you Jill?"
She was dragged to the back wall and chained up with her dad by the Mindy-Stans. "Father? Father! Wake up father!
With a groggy moan Ted's eyes fluttered open. "What... Jill! Oh no! They caught you too!"
King Shit came squishily accross the floor to them. Then with a soft halting voice, he talked with them. "Agent Ted. I didn't know your people took their own children on this kind of assignment. Now I will have to kill her as well. Your puny government will not be able to stop us this time. For the Deathsludge is almost complete!"
Jill stared at her father. "Agent?"
"She knows nothing!" her father cried, "Let her go! I'm the one you want!"
King Shit chuckled. "Did you get that from a phrasebook? She's seen too much, I'm afraid... MUCH too much. Besides, she wouldn't live long even if we let her go... none of you will."
The chanting around the toilet started again, faster this time. "It is far better that both of you serve a greater cause. Minions! Unchain them and feed them to the Deathsludge!" The Craberlings, still chanting, danced around Ted and Jill, brushing them with cold limbs as they undid the manacles and began to carry them towards the pool where the tentacled horror awaited.
"Help! Somebody h -- eek!" Jill screamed as a Craberling tore her shirt and pulled it off. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her father suffering a similar indignity. "HELP!"
Suddenly, all the lanterns went out as a chill wind blew through the room. The Craberlings stopped moving, frozen in mid-gibber.
Jill and Ted struggled to free themselves from the clammy, slimy grasp as King Shit bellowed in rage. "No! Not again! You won't stop me this time, father!"
"Hurry..." the voice said softly, and Ted grabbed Jill and dragged her out of the room, past the momentarily quiescent tentacles, back towards the pipe that led to the exit, as the King of Shit struggled to get past his addled populace.
The voice led them back to the pipe, but as they reached it's end, they found the grate had been replaced, and a huge lock had been attatched closing it solidly.
Jill sighed, "Oh no! We'll have to go back!"
Jill's dad patted her on the shoulder, "Yes.. but stay close to me. As King Shit said, I am an agent. I work for the government. I have been sent by them to find and eliminate King Shit."
Ted winked, "I think I know what to do"
The two of them backed out of the pipe, back into the room with all the pipes.
Around the pillar, they heard a tremendous battle. King Shit's voice rose in anger, "I will not, father. I am King Shit now, you have no control over me!"
King Shit's father's voice was heard to reply, "You only think you are King Shit, but you are just a little turd in a big commode. I am still in charge, and I will SHOW you who is in charge here!"
Ted and Jill heard the sounds of.. well, sounds of squishing and farting and pooping and all sorts of disgusting bathroom noises. The battle raged on, neither side seeming to win or loose, both claiming their evil power over the other. It seemed the battle would never end. It was indeed, a constipated issue.
Jill (having learned her lesson) whispered, "Father, how will we get out?"
Ted reached behind his back and pulled out a small package, "I hate to do it, but.. I'll have to use this."
Jill looked at the package, "Ex-Lax?"
Ted nodded and opened the package, it was Ex-Lax all right, with a small explosive charge and a timer on it. Ted set the timer and pulled the pin, tossing it into the room behind the pillar.
***BOOM!!***
Chunks and globs of the King his father and the Craberlings blasted around the pillar, coating them both in.. well, in stuff.
Ted looked around the corner, the room was covered in brown, slimy goo that coated the walls.
"Look" said Ted, "See that ladder on the far wall?"
Jill and Ted went to the far wall, past the blasted shards of the giant toilet, and up the ladder, it's rungs coated with sticky smelly goo.
They reached a small trap door at the top, Ted lifted it and stepped out, he reached down and helped Jill out. She wasn't surprised to find that it opened under their house. Right below the kitchen.
They crawled out of the crawlspace under the house. Ted went inside and came back out with an attache case, he opened it. Inside, packaged like a .007 weapons kit were Kaopectate, Pepto Bismol, a plunger, and a large bottle of Metamusil.
Ted reached in and pulled out a blue and white can of Drano. "I'll have to go back and take care of the Deathsludge." Ted crawled down the passageway, Jill anxiously waiting behind.
Jill waited, nervously, and in a few moments her dad's head reappeared, "Hang on dear."
They waited a second, as Ted crawled out...
******BBBOOOOOMMM!!!******
The trap door popped open, and then slammed shut.
Ted smiled, "And so ends the saga of King Shit."
Jill looked at Ted, "Dad..who was that..the one who helped us?":
"I don't know Jill, but I'm glad we had his help, and I hope he is all right."
They hugged and went inside, ready to take showers and leave Havenairri Hill forever.
From deep in the wood an old woman watched Jell and Ted leave the hill. Slowly she faded from view, the memory of her in their minds forgotten again.