The Worst Smell Yet!

"Deeper and deeper into her domain," the mysterious voice had said.

It looked like we had no choice.

"Are you kidding me?! We're locked in? But this is sand! How is that even possible?!"

I pounded desperately on the front door of the sandcastle. No good. The big double doors we had entered through weren't budging.

As soon as we started hearing the ghostly voice, we had backtracked to the entrance hoping to escape. No such luck.

"Kekekekeke…" came the mysterious voice from nowhere. "It's no use trying to run. My precious, precious pretties are blocking all escape routes. And only bad kids try to bail when the fun's just coming up. Good kids come deeper, ever deeper into the world of madness…"

What the hell? What was this? It was like whoever this creepy voice belonged to couldn't decide whether she wanted to sound like a ghost or a witch.

Of course she actually sounded, in my humble opinion, like she needed a throat lozenge. Seriously, lady. Not all witches sounded like they gargled with sandpaper. She was really hamming it up.

More importantly than any of that though, there was another thought gnawing at the back of my brain, and I just couldn't ignore it.

We had first heard the creepy disembodied witch voice when we were further inside the castle. Now that we were back at the entrance, we were still hearing it.

And it was narrating our every move. Which of course meant…

The thought hit me like a sledgehammer.

She knows where we are.

She's watching us.

Suddenly, I felt my stomach plummet. This was like, really bad, wasn't it?

Was this the curse's doing again? Were we actually in for it this time? Was it just me, or was it getting even darker in here? And colder? And what the actual hell was that foul smell in the air? It smelled like…

DEATH!

"Eeek!" I shrieked out loud and Snowball and Fence, both cool as an ice cream truck at a ski slope despite the danger we were clearly in, looked at me like I was bonafide nutso. But could you blame me? I couldn't help it. The curse was finally coming to collect, and I had built up so much bad karma thinking about knocking down all the sand furniture that I was probably first on its hit list.

Or, wait. What was it Snowball had said?

A collection of curses. Not just one curse, but a whole big bundle of them. That was what Snowball had suggested we were being subjected to today. What she'd proposed Waxing Bay was as a whole. A whole lot of little afflictions all bunching up into one big bundle of badness.

If that was the case, then being trapped in this creepy sand mansion was the worst curse yet.

Snowball spoke up, stating the blisteringly obvious but at the same time voicing the cold, hard truth. "We have no choice but to follow the creepy lady's voice."

I slammed my fists against the unmoving door one more time, not even in an attempt to open it but in sheer frustration at the futility of the situation.

"Dammit…" I sank to the sand in despair… mostly performatively, but hey, the situation called for it, and you couldn't say I wasn't answering.

"Don't look so down, dude," said Fence, seemingly unphased by any of this. "Want to know what I think?"

"That since we're probably going to die today, you forgive me for stealing your Power Rangers underwear when we were seven?"

"Dude, that was you?! What the hell! Come on, dude!"

"Sorry."

"You didn't even like the show!"

"I know."

"A-anyway, that's not what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say" — he did what the stupid witch who had trapped us in her sand mansion desperately needed to do and cleared his throat — "is that sometimes you just gotta take a bad situation and embrace it."

"Embrace it?"

"Yeah, dude. Embrace it."

I wasn't sure why at the time, but those words stuck in my head for some strange reason. They stuck to the inside of my skull like a fly to flypaper. Maybe it was the way Fence said them. Or maybe it was the way he was picking his nose, really getting deep in there, mining for gold, as he said them.

Or maybe, just maybe, it was that my subconscious mind knew they meant something, something important, even if it took the rest of my brain a little while to catch up.

At the time though, all I could think was that we were trapped, the curse was out to get us, and Fence must be nuts to think we ought to embrace it.

"Yeah, well…" was all I could think to say.

"Alright, dude," said Fence, helping me up. "With that decided, I think Snowball's right. All we can do is follow the voice."

"Right! And head further in!" Snowball whipped out her camera again. "This will give me the chance to take some more pictures of this place too!"

"Good thinking," I told her. "Just in case we meet our untimely end in here and need to leave evidence of our demise so that this never happens to anyone again?"

"No, silly. For my photo album."

#

"Yeeeesssss, yeeeeessssssssss, that's riiiiight. Come deeper into my domaaaaiiiiinnnnn."

As we delved further into the haunted sandcastle, the creepy voice wasn't letting up.

"So what are you anyway?" I asked out loud. I knew she could hear us, somehow, so I figured I might as well.

"Wh-wha?!?! Isn't it obvious? I'm a witch! An evil wicked witch who preys on kids like you."

"Not even gonna deny it? Pretend you're a sweet old grandma who wants to bake us a cake and lure us in with that? That would be typical witch behavior, but you do you, I guess." I shrugged. I knew by now she wasn't a real witch, or ghost, or whatever. Probably just some crazed loon batty enough to build a two-way speaker system into a giant sandcastle. We had found it a few rooms ago, when we happened across a door marked "MEN'S." Fence needed to go so Snowball and I were just waiting in the room over, marveling over the fact that we were in what was probably the world's first sandcastle with indoor plumbing, when a gushing sound louder than Niagara Falls came blasting in from the ceiling. That was when we noticed that the waiting room was wired up with speakers that the witch was using to project her voice. And all the rooms we continued to pass through — from dining rooms to sitting rooms to old smoking rooms straight out of some 19th century novel or whatever — were too. This one was projecting Fence's, uh, "projection" if you know what I mean.

It was actually pretty impressive how the witch was able to construct a sandcastle with a full speaker system installed. Even Snowball was impressed by the feat of engineering.

But none of that meant we could relax. Just because the witch wasn't a real witch didn't mean we were in the clear. In fact, I now realized we were even worse off than I had thought. We were dealing with someone batty enough to pretend to be a witch, to the point of constructing a haunted mansion out of sand.

"D-dangit!" The witch shouted back at my taunting. "I forgot to deny it– ERRR! I MEAN! O-of course I'm not g-going to deny it. Why would I? You foolish children have already fallen into my trap with no hope of escape! Kekekekeke!"

Oh, brother. The "witch" was suddenly tripping up like a kindergartener who didn't even know how to tie their own shoes.

We ventured deeper into the darkness of the castle, drawing close to the heart of it all. The further we went, the worse the smell got. It wasn't just a pinprick of awfulness on our noses anymore. No, it was much more. We were in full-on "walked into a fart cloud" territory at this point.

Except next to this smell, even the worst of passed gas could pass as air freshener, practically.

"It's seriously reeking now," I said, holding my nose.

From behind the collar of his shirt, which he'd bunched up to cover his face, Fence answered: "Who" — he paused for dramatic effect — "NOSE, dude. Get it? Who NOSE? Heh. Get it? Huh? Get it? Do you get it?"

"Ugh, yes. We get it."

Snowball clearly didn't share my exasperation. She was laughing like it was the best joke she had ever heard, which, if you ask me, was total BS. The last five jokes I had told her were all miles better than that one. Hmph. Her sense of humor was seriously screwy.

"Yes, children, yes… You are approaching the heart… The evil center of my domain… Oooooohhhhhh… Kekekekeke…"

Yeah. And the smell was almost unbearable. The only explanation was that this faux witch was trying to mix up potions or something, and we were drawing ever closer to her kitchen. God knew what kind of ingredients she was working with if the smell alone made you want to puke, and from hundreds of feet away at that.

Somehow or another, we powered through. We arrived in another hall, at the end of which stood another large, imposing double door, even bigger than the one in the entryway.

My sense of smell had, unfortunately, not been completely murdered yet, so I could tell the witch and whatever she was brewing were right behind this door. We all could. Me, Fence, and Snowball shared a three-way look. This was the heart of the mansion. Where we had been led. And we all knew it.

All at once, we nodded decisively, dispelling any fear we still may have held. Beckoned here, we had made it this far. And we weren't going to back down now.

"We need to get out of here. And the only way out is in." I clenched a confident fist.

"I need to thank the witch for all the cool pictures I was able to take." Snowball held up her instant camera for all to see.

"..." Fence said.

We both raised eyebrows at him.

He shrugged. "What? Look, I'm just along for the ride. Always have been."

Eh. Good enough for me.

Together, with courage held in our hearts and noses held between our fingers, we pushed with all we had. The door, heavy on its hinges despite its building material, eventually gave, groaning open to reveal…

To be continued!