As Victor yelped I glanced over just in time to see the trapdoor close.
I sigh and looked over to Hilary.
"I swear, we need to put homing beacons on those two, or maybe leashes!"
I didn't see what Victor had done to trigger the trapdoor and I wasn't about to make the kids with me go through such a thing even if I had so my only option was to blunder ahead and hope that I would run across both Miki and now Victor later.
Finally we reached the end of the tunnel, which just like before dead ended at a sliding door to another room. Sliding the door open we stepped in to find one of missing girls from our group! She was the girl that had been wearing a fairy costume with glittery wings and had her back towards us. She was leaning over something on the floor giggling.
As I entered and called her number out she turned to look at us.
Only, she didn't look like she had before.
Now she had black lines running across her face and blackened teeth in her mouth. Her dainty child's fingers were now gnarled looking talons.
I looked at the poor child in horror.
"What has been done to you?" I asked.
"Fool bitch. I am as I have always really been. Nothing was done to me in this place. We've just decided to let my true nature show through!"
One of the children that had gone to school with her clutched my leg and asked. "What does that mean?"
Before I could answer I could hear the sliding door behind us slid open again.
Not wishing to take my eyes off the now deformed child in front of us, I turned slightly so I could keep an eye on both directions at once.
I felt a cold clammy grip of fear take me over as I spied Pinhead, leader of the Cenobites glide into the room. The monstrous mockery of a man however didn't even glance at me but was staring at the child thing kneeling on the floor.
Almost instinctively I herded the children that were with me back towards a wall removing us from between the two nightmare creatures.
From our new perspective I could see that the thing on the floor the 'child' have been leaning over was a dried husk of a man in a maintenance uniform. It looked like every bit of life had been sucked out of him and he had died in intense agony.
"I'll suck your soul." The child like thing screeched, and I didn't know if it was talking to me or to Pinhead.
"Such an inelegant and pathetically crude manner you have." Pinhead intoned.
My eyes widened as I made a mental connection. "You were never after Miki, Victor, me or the kids here." I said to Pinhead, wrapping my arms around the kids that were clutching onto me. "You want them... Whatever the hell they are." I added gesturing at the withered and totally evil thing that had once appeared as a fresh faced innocent little girl.
Pinhead didn't answer or even bother to glance at me but I figured his silence was confirmation enough.
"What are we going to do?" One of the little boys with me whimpered.
"We're going to try and stay out of their way and find Miki and Victor." I whispered as I tried to inch the children that were with me, and I hoped all of them really still were children and not more of those creatures pretending to be kids, along the wall hoping to reach the exit to the room without drawing the attention of the thing on the floor or the Cenobite who were staring at each other with obvious malice.