//------------------------------// // Act Eleven: Read the Fucking Script. // Story: Delinquency // by Daemon McRae //------------------------------// Act Eleven: Read the Fucking Script. One rather clever use of topography in horror films and video games today is that of buildings and hallways that change around its occupants, in a distinctly effective method of confusing and entrapping them. Doors you’ve recently left will now lead into entirely different rooms, some of which you were sure weren’t even part of the original floorplan. From a cinematic standpoint, it’s extremely effective in creating tension, setting the tone for the severity of the situation, and allowing the viewer or player a visual medium with which to align their mental state with that of the protagonist as their confusion begins to mirror the characters’. In, for lack of a better word, ‘practical’ application, it is extremely rare. The amount of energy required to generate such physical changes in the scope and time portrayed in common media is such that the resulting cold spot would present a greater threat of hypothermia than the shifting rooms and corridors would an unsolvable maze. One seemingly senseless constant that supernatural phenomena seems to follow is that of the First Law of Thermodynamics, stating that the total amount of matter and energy in a closed system cannot be created nor destroyed, but can be converted from one form to another. The amount of ‘spiritual’ energy -a common term used to refer to the seemingly nonphysical presence of a haunting spirit- required to enact a change so drastic is nearly unfathomable. Of course, the boy’s experience of this phenomena less than a month ago could easily be accounted for by the presence of another dimension rubbing against our own. It is difficult to create a ‘closed system’ when there’s an entire other universe to account for. The closed system represented by the house was, if not expansive, much more finite. There was no way to create such a drastic change in the environment without either a massive unchecked source of energy, or breaking down a substantial amount of matter in another location- “-which brings me to the question, how the hell did you get us lost in a straight fucking line?!” Treble finished, having spoken at length about how ‘the walls could not be shifting around them’ when Ms. Inkwell had tried to use exactly that excuse to account for their lack of bearings or proper direction, having emerged from the basement at the nearest available exit, into a rather unfamiliar -if not cozy and immediately useful- sitting room. Having taken a break and aloud their injured a moment to rest in a less hostile location, Treble, Indigo, and Raven had opted to simply head back to camp and tag out their exploration team with people who weren’t bleeding or broken. Upon leaving said sitting room, however, and following the guidance of Ms. Inkwell herself, they found that the front door and, in fact, their base of operations was significantly more elusive than it should be. “Excuse me,” Raven sniped, but I think I know my own house. This isn’t what the first floor should look like at all.” Indigo peeked around the kitchenette they’d stumbled across, and mused, “Nope, no front door here.” Seeing the less-than-enthusiastic expressions on her companion’s faces, she added quickly, “Maybe we didn’t come out on the first floor? I mean, there were a lot of stairs on the way up here.” Raven scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. I think I’d know the second floor of my… own… house,” she finished slowly, as the color returned to her cheeks with enthusiasm. She quickly turned on her heel and stomped a ways down the hall, at which point she threw open a set of double doors Treble had thought for a second might have been the front entrance, sans the grand entranceway. Treble and Zap looked over her shoulders to see, with no lack of disbelief, a shorter set of stairs descending to a lower floor. “Ahem. This way, children,” she said with an air of no authority whatsoever, trying and failing to save face. Indigo rolled her eyes so hard they could have dislocated, while Treble settled for a smug grin that would have sent some politicians out of the office at speed. “So, um, where exactly are we?” he asked, rather admirably stifling an ‘I told you so’ as they descended the stairwell to a familiar hallway- that of the one opposite the corridor leading from their base to the library. In fact, once they were all the way into the hall, they could see around the corner some of the hallmark décor of the entrance. “Somewhere between ‘shut your mouth’ and ‘paycut’,” Inkwell growled, as they rounded the corner and made their way into the sitting room with the rest of their crew. “Someone here please have some good news for meohGOD what is that smell?!” she bellowed, backing out of the room with almost the same urgency as she’d entered. Indigo pulled a face not unlike those of the psychedelic acid trips that passed for cartoons in the fifties. “Oh sweet Jesus H CHRIST that is rank!” she yelled, and turned to leave the room in a similar hurry, only to be pulled back by Treble Who, to be fair, was similarly distressed. “That’s the smell of decomp. Where the hell did you all find a dead body?!” he barked, frog-marching a rather protestant Indigo to a chair and ordering her in no uncertain terms to sit down. “Stay put or I’ll find the smell and bury it in your van’s engine,” he threatened, returning his attention to the rather solemn-looking group. Spooks was, predictably, so nose-deep in a book that Treble wasn’t sure he could smell anything more than newsprint. The only clue that he was aware of his surroundings was the fact that he’d pulled up his faceguard. Which DT wasn’t even aware he’d brought with him. Dusty and Rubble were leaning over a… something with Dusty’s coat draped over it. They seemed either completely immune or indifferent to the odor, which seemed to be emanating from the jacket. Twilight had crammed herself into an even smaller corner behind her machines, a fan going and a bottle of air freshener at the ready right next to her keyboard. “Alright, what did we miss while we were getting assaulted by teddy bears?” “I’m sorry WHAT?” Twilight asked loudly, almost faulting out of her chair. The boys seemed to have similar, if watered down reactions. Indigo gestured to her arm in its makeshift sling, which Dusty immediately set about tending to with a proper first aid kit. “Toy chest exploded. Took a croquet bal to the collarbone. Hairline fracture. Also Raven’s bleeding, but that’s what you get when you dive headlong into a table.” Spooks gave their employer a concerned look as he set the book on the table. Now that it was closed and out in the open, Treble got a good look at it, and flinched away visibly. “Bones, why in God’s name are you anywhere near that forsaken thing?” The wispy kid gave his friend a stern look, and went about grabbing some rubbing alcohol and leftover bandages out of the same kit, getting Raven set up with a head wrap. She thought about protesting, but Spooky had a way of getting people to stop talking with a look. “I’ll explain once I cover this bleeding. Dusty, do you have a splint on you?” “You don’t splint a collarbone, Spooks,” Dusty groaned. “Her arm’s in the sling to limit her mobility so she doesn’t stress the surrounding muscle and compound the damage. Rubble, do we have any ice in the cooler? I think both our fair maidens need some,” he added with a smirk, as both ‘fair maidens’ gave him glares to kill a man at forty paces. Rubble grunted his way across the room and kicked the cooler open with his good leg. “We do, but it’s kinda free-floating. And I don’t have any plastic bags, natch.” “I do!” Twilight chirped, happy to be talking about anything other than the decomposing body or the atrocious dark magic at work around them. “Why do- nope, don’t care. Not sue I even want to know,” Treble groaned, giving the book one last nasty glare and scooting the cooler around the table, where Twilight started making ice packs. Rubble took the opportunity to take a seat at the couch again, in the middle of the group (and away from the body). A few peppered conversations filled the air as everyone busied themselves all at once, but when that was all done, and everyone was sitting down, silence reigned again. Until Treble had had enough. “So, ok. Let’s start with maybe the easier stories first? The basement is a fucking fallout shelter. Concrete walls, three-inch thick storm doors, the works. Except it’s like a hedge maze and a storage unit had a creepy incest baby. There’s crap everywhere, and all kinds of passages leading to all over the house We came out on the second floor when we left.” Twilight clacked away on her computer, pursing her lips in frustration. “I don’t see really any of that on the blueprints. I might be able to find the permits and stuff online, if I could connect she growled at a particular little gray box with several cables sticking out the back. “Unfortunately I think our host has about as much patience with satellite internet as he does satphones. But it would explain some of the missing information I have, if there are parts of the house that were built without sending the final plans to city hall, or really even asking for permission in the first place. I imagine the Inkwells weren’t one to shy away from greasing palms?” she asked, poising the question to the only Inkwell in the room. “Not even close. I mean, my grades were okay as a kid, but some of the schools I went to, there was no WAY I got there on my own,” she muttered, wincing as she adjusted the icepack on her head. The bandages, while well-applied, weren’t doing her hair any favors, and a stray lock had snuck its way underneath it all, sitting just over her eye. She blew at it in annoyance, and continued, “So to answer your question, the likelihood that someone paid someone else something to keep something out of official records is a distinct possibility. “Well that’s nice,” Indigo interjected. “But I doubt any of that money went towards explosive toy chests, or self-steering bicycles.” Rubble raised an eyebrow. “HOLD up. Be kind, rewind. What about bikes?” Indigo relayed with great enthusiasm, if not cheer, the events from their leaving the room to their tactical retreat. Spooks jumped in at the part about the large sigil on the caretaker’s ceiling, to which Indigo had few answers, but otherwise her story went uninterrupted. When she finished, she demanded, “Which brings us to now and the question of ‘Why does this room reek like decomp?!” The boys all traded various glances, until Rubble stood up, metaphorically, to explain. “It started a bit after you sent up the pictures, Deep. We’d gotten some ideas about what the big-ass spell is, and had sat down to try to piece it together a block at a time, when this… when she showed up.” He explained, in unfortunate detail, the ‘puppet show’ their host had provided them, and the discovery of the nature of the ‘dancer’, now currently laid to rest underneath a jacket DD never intended to wear again. “I took a look at her body afterward, and found a bunch of weird scar tissue patterns on her arms and legs. Like, the holes where the wires were-” he stopped, seeing the reluctant expressions on the girl’s faces, “-the explainable injurie were obvious, but there was a bunch of extra damage that seemed… extraneous. But it wasn’t like those rage-killings you hear about where there’s a bunch of stab marks for no reason? And there wasn’t a pattern to it, like symbols or anything. More like… ok, you know how you get bored in class or detention or whatever and draw on your arm with sharpie, not really paying attention, just like making patterns and stuff?” Everyone but Twilight and Raven nodded. “Um… sure, ok, let’s say I understand what you’re talking about,” the latter added, wanting to move forward. “Right. It looked like… absentminded doodling, but with a knife. Like the guy was… bored,” Rubble growled, feeling his temper rise the more he spoke. “How do you get bored turning a little girl into… that?!” he asked, his voice peaking as he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. Spooks patted his shoulder lightly, a gesture that might have looked less like actual contact and more like a ghost of movement. Neither were very good at physical emotion. “I don’t know,” Bones said simply. Twilight shivered. “That sounds like that serial killer from the Twenties,” she whimpered. She looked up to see all of the boys staring at her very intently. “What?” “What ‘serial killer’?” Dusty demanded sharply. “Um… it was almost a hundred years ago, and… right. Ghosts. But it was on the other side of the county!” she protested. Spooks raised an eyebrow. “Hmm. It doesn’t sound right, but why don’t you tell us anyway? We’ve got more questions than answers, so really, anything helps.” Twilight fidgeted, but relaxed a bit with Spooky’s calm demeanor. “Well, we did a project about him in our Local History class last year. Nobody knew his real name, he was never caught, the typical urban nightmare. He would kill kids of all ages and tie them up, hanging them from streetlights and signs and trees in the park. They referred to him, or her, as ‘The Marie’ or ‘The Mary’.” “Makes sense,” Treble mused, which garnered looks from everyone else. “What?” Dusty sighed in disbelief. “This is one of those weird things you know that we don’t want to know how you know, isn’t it?” Treble shrugged. “The word ‘marionette’ is french, meaning ‘little Mary’, as the first marionettes were made of religious figures, most commonly the Virgin Mary.” Seeing as he hadn’t answered any of their questions as to how he knew, he continued, “Look, my mom worked a divorce case where these kids were contesting the will of this old lady that collected the things. She had like, half a million in rare dolls and dollmaking stuff. I asked, got an answer, and it just kinda stuck.” Indigo shrugged, and Raven seemed satisfied, but the other boys kept staring at him. “Ok, ok, there was this French transfer student at the time and I wanted to impress, ok? Didn’t help, turns out she’d watched ‘Chucky’ at an early age and hated dolls. Sue me.” “...anywayyy...” Twilight interjected, before the obvious mocking could start, “They were active for almost a decade nearly a century ago. I remembered it because for the longest time they’d suspected this one guy from the Inkwell family, because all the kids were children of Inkwell employees, but nobody’d found any evidence.” Raven’s eye twitched. “Um… this suspect wouldn’t happen to be named Culling Song, would he?” “Yes, how did you- oh no,” Twilight groaned. “Please tell me your family didn’t pay to cover up a serial killer in the family. Please?” Raven shook her head. “I don’t know. I didn’t even know about The Marie until just now. I know him because there’s this family saying, ‘Don’t be like Cousin Song’. He was considered a major disappointment to the family, bringing embarrassment and shame to them all at the time. Nobody would talk about why, but the timeline matches, as far as I know. I mean, I asked a bunch of times what Cousin Song did, and the furthest I got was ‘If your great-grandfather was here, he could tell you,’ but that’s it. I just don’t know.” Rubble leaned back into the chair. “Ok. So, we have a possible serial killer that the family covered up that has the same MO as the decades-old corpse behind us, a giant sigil in a house within a house designed to lock something in that requires so much spellwork we can’t even source it all, a ghost that considers himself an entertainer in the worst way, a bunch of major cold spots, and a big-ass library with books so secretive even the author’s families didn’t know about them. SO, what ELSE do we know?” “What I want to know,” Treble growled, staring at the book on the table, “Is why somebody thought it was a good idea to bring the Crow’s Hand out of the box?” Spooks leaned forward and grabbed the book, pulling it to himself and flipping to a marked page with a practiced hand. “Because some of the smaller glyphs used in the overarching spellwork in the Groundskeepers house pointed to it. And I think I found the exact spell they used.” DT threw his hands in the air. “Oh, fucking wonderful. Glad to know I was standing underneath a giant armed nuke with nothing more than a taser and some holy water.” Indigo flinched as she leaned forward. “Someone want to explain Mr. Drama Queen here?” Dusty chuckled. ‘There’s no explaining this guy, honestly. But what he’s currently got his nipples in a tweak over is this book. It’s called The Book of The Morrighan. Written during the crusades by a coven of Celtic Witches who worshiped a goddess known as the Crone of War, it was a how-to manual on not only evading capture, rigging the ‘tests’ the crusaders used to determine if someone was a witch, and outright killing soldiers of god, it was intended as a countermeasure to the Malleus Maleficarum, or the Witches Hammer, a book written by the church that detailed in great measure the proper methods of torture, execution, and disposal of those guilty of witchcraft. It was war, back then, and these were the nuclear options. Unfortunately, neither side was shy about using either of them.” Raven gave the book a distasteful look. “So what good… or bad… does any of it do now?” Treble groaned and took over the explanation. “Because people are psychopaths. These weren’t just spells about killing soldiers in large numbers, evading capture, and cheating on the final. This was the kind of magic written specifically to subvert the power of God on Earth. There’s even a rumor that one of the spells in here can kill The Walking Man.” “Who?” Twilight asked, then quieted down as Rubble gave her a strained look. “Trust me, don’t ask. We’ve never met him, but we’ve heard stories. Like how he almost tore a hole in the heart of London a few years ago. But back to more pressing and depressing matters. Spooks, you said you found the spell?” RM redirected, looking to their resident scholar. “I have. Mostly. It’s more like a template. The finer details are all situational, of course, like time, place, person, all that happy hoo-hah. But I was right that it’s a binding spell. It’s designed to lock a vengeful spirit in place, and turn it into an attack dog. It’s like that scene in Harry Potter where they blinded the dragon in the goblin’s vault,” Bones added, to the comprehensive relief of pretty much everyone in the room. “And it’s not just normal spirits. We’re talking like, Jack the Ripper moves to Amityville. Seriously deranged and psychotic presences. Which, naturally, isn’t the worst part.” “Of course it isn’t,” Dusty whined. “I hate it when there’s more.” “Which is always,” Spooks mused. “The spell isn’t just a cage. It’s a generator. It’s designed not just to trap a spirit, but to empower it. Feed it.” Twilight cringed. “What do you mean, feed it?” Treble shook his head sadly. “I’ve heard of this shit before. I mean, not this spell in particular, or I’d have just ran out the room screaming in the first place, but stuff like it. It’s ritual sacrifice. Which is both extremely powerful and super nasty magic.” “Wait,” Indigo jumped in. “Don’t you have to do a bunch of stuff for a ritual sacrifice? Like, I don’t know, a ritual?” “Normally, yes,” Spooks answered. “That’s something Hollywood gets disturbingly right, if not the details. There’s usually a lot of to-do in a ritual sacrifice, because you have to get the thing’s attention first, so it knows it’s dinner time. Otherwise you’re slaughtering cattle in an empty field. But imagine not having to get its attention every time. Having a monster in your basement you can just throw the hogs to whenever they step out of line. This is ritual sacrifice turned into fast food. If this thing is strong enough, they might not even need to do the killing themselves. Of course, there is still an element or two they need for each death, otherwise it’s just a body. Sacrifice requires intent. Accidents and murders in blind rage don’t have the right… they don’t flip the right switches, so to speak.” “So if they’ve been feeding this thing since… god knows how long,” Raven interjected, having regained enough of her senses to ask questions again, “Why haven’t there been any stories in my family about the ghost before? I’d imagine keeping this thing on a leash would lead to at least someone in the family seeing a floating book or two. I mean, I don’t expect they’d have let outsiders know, but I’d like to think I wasn’t that out of touch with things around here.” Spooks gave her a sad look. “Because the phenomena didn’t start until the meat ran dry. Your grandfather, I assume, was one of the people feeding the thing. When he died, the fresh food went away, and the seal started to weaken. Now it’s slowly getting out, it’s a lot stronger, and it’s very pissed off. Even the dead have a survival instinct. Your family probably tuned tail and ran from the house when they realized what was going on. I think your grandfather left you the house because you were the only one who didn’t know about the ghost. Maybe he wanted to just let it die. He certainly couldn’t have expected you to fed the damn thing, or he’d have given it to someone else,” he offered consolingly. It wasn’t much in the face of the knowledge that her family was not only responsible for covering up a serial killer, but had taken over his work to keep him happy in the hereafter, but it was something. A sign that her grandfather regretted his actions, and sought to put things in the hands of someone with no blood on them. “Of course, there’s also the possibility that he brought you here so the damn thing could eat you, shut up again, and the house would go to someone else who would keep on feeding it,” Treble mused darkly. “You are SO CLOSE to fired, young man,” Raven growled.