Chapter 17—Nightmare Bedroom

    Scamp, Angel, Patch, Penny, and Lucky found themselves trapped in the cage that Horace and Jasper locked them up in. The room they were trapped in was a small old bedroom that had beds infested with bedbugs and lacked air conditioning. If the window shade was not left open, it would have been completely dark. A couple of little chairs occupied the room, along with a escritorio facing the window. The floorboards were loose and out of place, and it was hard to see anything in the room.
    “This must be meant for only one dog,” Lucky complained, rattling the bars of the cage. “We can’t all fit in here.”
    “Yeah,” Patch complained. “Figures though… it’s exactly how she’d treat us. Angel, can tu get us out?”
    “I don’t know,” ángel explained. “It’s a tight fit to do anything in here.”
    “But...” Scamp declared. “We know what to do when we leave here, don’t we?”
    The other cachorritos looked blankly at Scamp. Even ángel looked astonished. At last, Penny asked, “Well… what?”
    “We go and turn that switch off in Cruella’s room,” Scamp explained, shivering a little bit with each word he spoke.
    The cachorritos gasped. They knew that the possibility existed, but it terrified them all the same. “But that would be so dangerous!” Penny fearfully trembled. “She’d skin us at the moment!”
    Patch however, shook his head. “I think he has it right,” he stated reluctantly. “We can either attempt to get out ourselves o wait to be skinned. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather try to escape,” he finished solemnly while looking down on the floor.
    “But… it’s so risky!” Penny stated fearfully. “Oh, I knew I shouldn’t have run off!”
    Angel, meanwhile, gasped, “Hey…. We can leave after all… Horace and Jasper didn’t lock the cage!”
    “But…” Lucky stated, but gasped as ángel grabbed the combination lock with her teeth and smiled.
    “The idiots forgot to lock it,” she explained as she dropped the lock as it hit the metal floor with a clang. “They just put the lock on it and didn’t close it.”
    “Wow, we’re in luck!” Scamp exclaimed. At once, Scamp pushed open the cage door.
The door swung open with a clang. Carefully making their way and avoiding the faint silhouettes of objects like beds, chairs, and garbage cans, they walked up to the place where they knew the door was…
And the door did not budge.
    “Oh, not another one of these!” Penny explained. “I can’t see anything here though… not in detail anyway… we need light. Maybe we should wait until our eyes get adjusted to the dark.”
    “I know where the switch would be,” Lucky stated.
    The others looked at him, before he explained, “It’s to the right of the door.”
    Lucky then moved over to the right side of the door, and then jumped up. He felt a switch, and then, light flooded the room abruptly.
    “Wahoo! It’s light in here!” Scamp declared excitedly.
    “We have to turn that light off,” Penny worried. “When we get out… o else Cruella will see us.”
    “So can we break out of this one?” Patch asked Angel.
    “It’s like the first lock I broke,” ángel explained calmly as she looked más and más at the lock. “This one shouldn’t be too bad. Tenderfoot, tu can do the honors if tu wish…”
    “Okay,” Scamp stated excitedly. Scamp jumped upon the escritorio right siguiente to the door handle. He tried to twist it, but he fell down on the floor, gasping, “Woah!”
    “You’re okay, tenderfoot?” ángel asked.
    “They didn’t forget to lock this one,” Scamp groaned, feeling the pain on his back. “Ouch, this hurts…”
    “Let me try,” Patch stated. He looked at the door handle, and then he jumped onto the handle, but he fell down with a thud. “Urgh… he’s right, it is locked.”
    “I can do it, if tu want,” ángel told Scamp.
    Scamp shook his head. “Let me try this one. Don’t worry, I’ll get it open,” Scamp stated firmly. “I won’t give up.”
“Well, okay tenderfoot,” ángel told him. “But we have to be pretty quiet o else they’d hear us.”
As quietly as he could, Scamp played with the lock for a bit. The other cachorritos watched apprehensively, carefully listening for any sort of noise, but silence was all that enveloped them apart from Scamp’s struggles with the door handle, which were certainly louder than Angel’s. Until then, all of a sudden, a small click signified that he fixed the latch. Patch, jumping again on the handle, opened up the door.
    “So we’re out,” Patch whispered, taking his first few steps into the hallway when he returned to the ground.
    “I’m scared,” Penny cried, recoiling slightly back into the bedroom. With a stutter in her voice, she asked, “What are we to do?”
    “Look for Cruella’s room,” ángel whispered. The whole upstairs hallway was dark, very long, and eerily silent. They could just see the shadow at the end of the room that meant the other wall. However, there was a bit of el espacio with bright light in it two doors down from them, facing the front. After a few seconds, a screeching noise came from the room.
    “That’s probably where she is,” Patch commented. “It sounds creepy.”
    “Can I go watch TV in there?” Lucky asked.
    “Probably not…” Penny whispered sadly. “Do tu see what’s happening in there?”
    “Scamp and I’ll go check,” ángel told the Dalmatians, and she and Scamp walked over to the door and peered under the crack.
    There, underneath the door, was…
    “She’s… singing,” ángel whispered to Scamp.
    Scamp began to laugh. “Wow… she sounds awful! She sounds even worse than that time my sisters sang about their lovely bath.”
    The Dalmatians also peered under the door, and they laughed. They couldn’t see much, but Cruella’s shoes were dancing through the room. They were brushing the dusty red carpet, as she wore her favorito! pelaje, piel coat, dangling in and out of their vision, and she was loudly screeching about how pretty her new pelaje, piel capa would be.
    “Ick… she’s gross,” Penny stated. “Maybe… do tu think we can…”
    But then, Cruella abruptly stopped singing, and they saw her shoes moving toward the door.