Wednesday Addams's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Wednesday Addams measured the great hall one last time and knew it would ruin her ball. She wanted the darkest, most dreadful Halloween party her mansion had ever held. Guests would drift through shadow. Dread would hang like fog. But the hall was too small. Thirty steps across, no more. Pack it with a crowd and no one would feel the cold creeping dark. They would feel elbows. A cramped party is not a haunted one. It is a line at the butcher's. She tapped her measuring tape against her palm and thought. Knocking down walls would take weeks. The ball was in three days. She needed space the house already hid. Her brother found her there, chewing something that still moved. "You're glaring at the floor again," said Pugsley Howloween. He was a stout little pug in an orange pumpkin shirt, a crooked witch hat on his head. He swallowed loudly. "When you glare at the floor, something dies." "The ball dies," Wednesday said. "This room is a coffin that's too short." Pugsley trotted to the far wall and scratched at a seam in the paneling. He did this to everything. Furniture, doors, the occasional guest. "There's more under us, you know. I smell it. Cold and old. Downstairs air." Wednesday went still. "There is no downstairs." "Then why does my nose go down?" He pressed his flat face to the floorboards and snuffled. "Right here. Hollow." She knelt. She rapped her knuckles on the wood. A deep, empty sound answered, far lower than stone. They pried the boards up together. Pugsley dug with his stubby paws. Wednesday pulled with the measuring tape wrapped around her fists. Beneath the floor lay a trapdoor, iron ring rusted black. She hauled it open. Cold breath rose from the dark. Stairs fell away below. Wednesday lit a candle and went down. The light spread and spread and did not find a wall. The cellar ran the whole length of the mansion and further, a stone cavern wide enough to lose a hundred guests in. Dust hung thick. Her candle made a small gold coin of light in all that black. Her footsteps echoed back from far away. "This," she said quietly, "is a ballroom." Pugsley's claws clicked on the stone. "It's cold down here." "Perfect." Then her candle showed the far end. The cavern did not stop. A black passage opened in the rock and led deeper, breathing out a draft that smelled of wet earth and something sour. Pugsley growled low. He backed up the first step. Wednesday held her candle toward the tunnel. She had found her dark hall. But the house held more than she knew, and now it knew she was looking. She would need to see where that passage went before she filled this place with guests. "Three days," she said. "And a door I didn't dig."