Arkr's Cairn IC [Horror] [Mystery] [Survival]

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TOWN HALL, red
Ray and Veronica make their introductions - a strange injection of normalcy they are both grateful for - and then make their preparations to enter the building that looms high in front of them. Veronica leads, makeshift weapon clutched tightly in hand, and Ray is happy to let her. There is a pause as they push the still-intact door open and make their way truly into the hall, placing their feet carefully around the splinters strewn across the floor in the entryway. There is the thud of their footsteps on floorboards and a slight creaking from the weight of them, treading ground that has laid dormant for seemingly many years, perhaps even decades. They stand still inside the doors. There is a faint moment of anti-climax.

The two begin exploring the ground floor. Veronica pads around the perimeter, on the outside of the horseshoe pattern made by the tables, staying close to the wall and keeping a good view of the entire hall. She only lets her gaze from the main space waver when she crosses the bottom of the stairway - she risks a quick glance up, seeing nothing but a wooden wall at the top where the stairs level out onto a small platform before turning back on themselves to lead up to the second floor. Veronica rubs the dust off the bronze plaque nailed to the wall beside the stairway. It reads 'Mayor's Office' on one line, and 'Nathaniel Miles' below it. She moves on, circling back to the doors, stepping cautiously over the splinters and bloodstains.

Ray, meanwhile, meandered into the middle of the horseshoe, spiraling around and edging ever closer to the lectern every circle, closer to the book that lies upon it. She can see it clearer now. It's dark red and leather-bound, with gold-edged paper making it thick. Dust has not settled upon it and on the front there is a deep tear - or perhaps gouge - in the red leather. It forms a shape that looks like two triangles overlapped - but Ray looks again, and she can see that is in a unbroken line weaving and interconnecting within itself to create something that almost resembles a star. Ray wants to feel the torn leather. She reaches out to the book with a single finger, to run it along the lines that make the shape.

The book is flung open and a scream pierces the minds of everyone in the town. It lasts for a nanosecond, maybe even less, before it is accompanied by flashes of fire, metal, blood, fear, pain, and then gone again. The book falls to the floor, closed once more, red leather still torn.

There is creaking coming from the upstairs floorboards.

THE ASYLUM, red
The asylum is deathly quiet as Jon enters. His footsteps click on the tiled floor and echo back to him. The door to patient registry rattles as the lock holds strong, as does the staff door in reception. The air is still and warm as Jon walks back to the entryway, and then calls out.

His voice reverberates in the space. It amplifies tenfold in the echo and sounds like twenty separate souls crying the question back at him. Then it morphs and twists into a women's scream, and the flash hits him. Visions of flame and steel. Sensations of pain and fear and confusion push him to his knees - and then it's gone. The quiet reinstates itself, but the voices soon come again - a single low moan of numb pain, soon joined by whimpers and soft sobbing from other sources.

From behind the staff door in the reception, a quiet scraping of metal on wood begins, accompanied by a light tapping that slowly grows in its frequency and fury.

There's a faint click as the patient registry door unlocks, but does not open.
 
Veronica made sure to make a notation of the name Nathaniel Miles the, one could safely assume, former Mayor of this little slice of paradise. Just then the scream drives Veronica to her knees, and then the nightmarish visions made it even worse.

Veronica shook her head trying to loosen up the cobwebs in her mind. The visions she saw were brutal, stark, and full of pain. At that moment Veronica began to question her hold on reality. She didn't know exactly where she was, and the one thing that she knew for certain was that she wanted out of here.

Veronica heard the creaking overhead and looked towards Ray and pointed up hoping that Ray was able to see her. Veronica gripped her piece of wood a bit tighter and moved so slow a slug could've given her a challenge in terms of speed at that moment. Could it have been someone up there, or given the condition of the building could it have been the building settling, or maybe it was rat walking around.

I'm not sure I want to meet the rat that can make a floorboard creak like that. Whatever happened here it was brutal almost savage. The bloodstains, the smell, and the dust tells me that this happened a while ago. If the Mayor here was anything any other politician he had to have made some kind of notes, or records as to what happened. I gotta find a way into his office.

With that Veronica began to cautiously make her way to the Mayor's Office.
 
The whole place was creeping her out, big time. And it's not that she hadn't seen blood before--she'd seen meth-heads with self-inflicted face wounds, and she stayed in a hospital for a long time--but seeing it splattered so enthusiastically around the room was not giving her any sort of comfort.

The book, well... she hadn't expected anything bad to happen. It was just a book, right? She expected some creepy pictures and some cultist ritual bullshit, but what actually happened was such a surprise that it nearly knocked her off her feet. And, for a brief second, she wasn't sure if it was her screaming or the book.

Silence settled back into the large room a second later. And then a noise from above. She looked over at Veronica from where she was still standing, wide-eyed, hands covering her ears out of terror. She stared at her while she dismissed the noise and started to head into the office near the stairs.

"Um..." Ray managed, trying not to freak out, trying to keep her voice down. What was that? She crossed the room, glancing up the stairs on her way, not about to let the policewoman leave her alone in this creepy, blood-covered room when something might be upstairs. "Are we not going to talk about the horrible screaming that just happened?"
 
Veronica looked over at her new "partner" and said, "It's over with for the moment, but I'll be about a year's pay that the scream and all of this are somehow connected. My instincts tell me that this is not happening in a vacuum. There's something much larger at work and it's all connected somehow. "

Veronica looked around and said, "We find out what happened to bring all of this to the point we're at now, and we might have some answers to more questions later on. I don't mean to discount what happened to us with the scream, and I assume you saw them to, the visions we had but we need to try and understand what happened to cause all this."

Veronica gathered her thoughts and said, "It's like any other investigation we look at the facts before us and follow the evidence where it may lead us. Our facts right now is that there was a massacre here of some kind. We are dealing with Supernatural aspects as well and we are here for a reason of some kind. We need to understand the whys of our situation before we start questioning the other circumstances. I gotta feeling the Mayor's office might help us gain some more understanding."

Veronica turned back to her new partner and said, "By the way, what's your name? If we're gonna be working together I'd prefer to have a name to work with as well."
 
It hit him like a torrent of water, rushing down upon and drowning him for but a moment. Shrieks and screams filled with rage and confusion surrounded his mind and cornered it. It was as if all the light around him were sucked away as he came crashing down to the floor, feeling his age pull back on him as his knees hit the hard tile below. All the while Jon pressed his palms with all the force he could muster against his ears to no avail, the terrible symphony of screams would not be muted. His stomach began to turn as he began to feel everything crash down on him, while random memories scurried through his mind a midst the terrible noise; none of which seemed relevant but that damned bridge and creek, it stuck out like a canker sore on the inner lip. Yet suddenly it stopped.

Within the silence Jon swore whispers still came from a hidden source, yet it seemed all around him. A faint click came from the room he'd just left, as if inviting him back in to sate his curiosity. But he remained on his knees, damp palms pressed against the dirty floor, leaving a creeping cool sensation as beads of sweat cautiously dripped from his brow. He didn't know what to do. He was scared shitless, despite all that he'd experienced in his long life, never had something like that occurred and it left him frozen in place as his mind raced in circles as horrendous speeds. After a few moments he snapped out of it and jumped to his feet, still wide eyed. He peered through the walled glass back into the room, halfway expecting to see something different; another part of him had gone back in age, almost like a kid silently urging a parent to leave due to fear and fright.

This is fucking stupid Jon. Just run. Just. Run.

Against all his better judgement, Jon made his way back into the registry toward the office, somehow expecting the door to open before he'd even touch the knob. The walk seemed long, as if he'd trekked over a few acres in fifteen steps; anticipation and fear mingled as he reached for the knob, he feet ready to spin him around and dash for the exit as if the hounds of hell were biting at his heels. The knob turned slowly, it gave no fight this time, no lock kept it in place and the door squeaked open after a firm push.

Just look around... there's got to be something here... though at this point, Jon wasn't even sure if there was anything to be found. Why am I still here? Why am I not running? Any sane man would run, right? God damnit Jon, RUN! "Or maybe..." he spoke, seeing out of the entire cabinet, but one slot remained open, appearing to be a handful of organized files. Sifting through the very tops he saw names of patients and general statistics on height, body weight, et cetera, et cetera. Pulling out a folder at random, Jon opened and began to read, hoping to find something, anything. Dates, locations... he pulled out a few other files and laid them out on the desk opposite the cabinets and began reading...
 
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"Supernatural?" Ray whispered harshly towards her new and sudden partner in crime, creeping close behind her, "You mean, like, ghosts?"

She could hardly believe what she was hearing. For an officer of the law to see all this and automatically assume--she didn't know--a haunting or something, she suddenly felt like her own stupid zombie theory was the better of the two. Zombies could be caused by diseases and stuff that humans almost understand. Ghosts? Monsters? Or, what, vampires? Demons? Ray didn't believe in those things. Ray believed in bad people, and Ray believed that some truly bizarre and horrible things could happen in nature, but even after the sudden flash of visions (she can still hear it, ringing off at the edges of her mind), she was not ready to chalk any of this up to "supernatural".

She snuck a glance back at the book on the ground, and then where the noise had come upstairs. "Um, I'm Ray. Just... Hurry up."

That's all she was going to offer. She was all for going in that office if it meant it would get them out of the room where murder obviously happened. Every time she looked back, she was sickeningly compelled to pick the book up again. Maybe it wouldn't hurt her this time. Maybe she'd find the trick to it. But she stayed where she was, hoping the office was unlocked. She didn't want to solve the mystery, and she was already starting to have second thoughts about Veronica, but anything was better than the horrible compulsion.
 
Veronica looked back at Ray and said, "First off nice to meet you Ray wish it was under better circumstances. Secondly in terms of the supernatural face it there are somethings here that logic can't explain." Veronica let out an exhale and shook her head and said, "I'm the first one to admit a high skepticism in things of the bizarre and paranormal. Believe me we get nut jobs coming into the station on a daily almost hourly basis, and my whole feeling is throw them in Belvue and let the State deal with them."

She looked around and said, "However what just happened with you and that book happened to both of us at the same time. We're in a city that makes anything else in 'The Walking Dead' look like Waikiki and there seems to be no one else here, so I'm willing to go on a leap of faith in this case that what we're dealing with is beyond our understanding. For the moment I reserve the right to change my mind later on."

Veronica looked back at the door and said, "My number goal is for us to get out of here, and it seems like the only way to do that is to figure out what happened so we don't make the same mistakes." Veronica approached the door and motioned for Ray to get on the other side of the door frame. She gave Ray the piece of wood she was carrying around as a bat and said to her in a whisper, "I open on 3. Anything comes out swing away at it."

Veronica put her hand on the door knob and gently and slowly began to turn it.
 
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TOWN HALL, red
Veronica and Ray make their choices. They recover from the book and its strange psychic assault, recover from the horror of the town hall's ground floor, recover from the sudden fear that instilled itself within their hearts. They make their way up the staircase at the back of the hall, and then toward the door marked Mayor's Office, the door that the plaque below no doubt referred to. Veronica sets her hand on the doorknob, relaying instructions to Ray. Ray steels herself. After the scream, neither of them know what to expect. Neither of them are sure what they want to find behind the door. Demons might be easier to accept that the sheer evil of a man's heart. Veronica counts to three. Both tense up. The door swings open at her pull. Cold air sweeps past them both, and they peer into the darkness.

There is a hole in the wall on the far side of the office. Something tore the wood and smashed the beams and fled - or escaped. There is a desk and a chair and an oil lamp, and shelving along the walls. Candles flank a small metal rod, no bigger than Ray's hand, set upon a small table against one of the side walls. The rod bears the same strange star-symbol upon its flat top, but the table is empty from anything else. There is a rough, leather-bound journal on the floor beside the desk, small and dirty with old dust. The room is still.
THE ASYLUM, red
The files Jon pulled splayed out on the floor in front of him, a strange innocence in the beige paper of the folders. They seemed so disconnected to the world around them, their design out of time and anachronistic to the architecture of the building that held them. In fact, the entire room seemed strangely modern, the carpet a dull patterned brown and the desk wooden and functional. Jon was confused, momentarily, but it quickly subsided. In any case, he had more pressing matters upon his mind.

Two files reached out to him. One was labelled Hale, S., while the other simply bore the name Marius. Jon opened Hale's file.

Patient reports, nothing more, simply notes from nurses, doctors, and orderlies alike. Hale had been blind, a result of some manner of trauma to the face. He suffered manic, ranting episodes. His behavior grew vindictive and destructive, toward both others and himself. He'd been prescribed sedatives, and was often kept bound. There was little else - beyond identity, weight, and height, the notes continued in much the same vain until the last one: 'Patient found dead. Cause: blunt trauma to chest. Suicide.' Then there was nothing. Jon closed the file.

He didn't have time to flip through the other one. The scraping and tapping that had started from behind the staff door in visitor's reception had increased in violence and frequency, and now the sound of splintering wood surrounded Jon. He stood, quickly and quietly, turning toward the door, Marius' file in hand as he tucked it into his jacket. The Patient Registry door was still open. There were two sets of footprints making a barefoot slap on the tiles outside, and then one came around the doorway.

It was disgusting. Its legs were thin and frail, stuck at awkward angles and wobbling, threatening to give out at any moment, though the creature stayed upright. Though the thing was clearly naked, there were no genitalia, nor any external markings of the human form of any kind; its skin was merely a sickly gray pulled over its unnatural - but still recognizably human - shape. The shoulders were pulled forward up to the neck and set far further into the torso, extending into the biceps and triceps of the upper arm before melding into the lower chest, just ugly protrusions that hinted at a creature once human, now something monstrous. But its face...

There was no face. No head. A slight, bulky neck, with rolls over rubbery skin folded over beneath a massive metal spike, extending a good two feet forward out of the body. Rough, cold iron, cracked and welded into a horrible cone, strapped at the wider end to a metal plate that had been welded - black skin and lumpy scar tissue showing the burns that had sealed it - to the back of the creature's head. The tip of the spike oozed, dripped with a viscous, off-colour liquid, something the foul shade and smell of rot and decay.

Then another, quite the same, joined it. They stopped in the doorway, making odd, pained, twitchy movements - and then, without eyes or nose or mouth, looked at Jon. They began their awakward, wobbly, stuttering steps into the room, making odd chirruping and mechanical hissing sounds. There was another door behind Jon, one that he had not noticed. One that led, almost certainly, further into the asylum.
 
Recoiling in utter fear Jon's thoughts raced as the two abominations stuttered across the room toward him. The very sight of such creatures nearly stole the life from him, only now though did his heart truly race as the fear clutched deeper into his being. Never had he thought he'd see such horrors; his thoughts left him for a moment and found their way to a distant battlefield many years ago. The last time he'd seen something truly gruesome.

The morning had come to late and fields below the entrenchments of the FOB were littered with body parts. No piece clung to another, not anymore. Chunks of flesh and bone had found their way over the trench; burnt flesh stuck to charred wood made for a smell that turned the stomachs of the already sick and exhausted soldiers who still stirred. The night had been a hell, long and tedious was the battle of flesh, bombs and bullets. At the entrance three soldiers kept careful watch over the fields, Jon stood among the three. His face a grimy mix of dried blood and dirt, wounds from the night had sealed themselves and left him a bloodied shell of a man. Jon's sight began to diminish and the asylum office came back into view.

Colds beads of sweat tickled his forehead as the two creatures straddled on.

What do I do? What do I do?

He turned his head every which way to find an out and spotted the door behind him. He reached for it and the knob let the door come loose, leading elsewhere in this hell Jon had discovered. He turned back to the office door and rushed toward it, slamming it shut then reaching for the cabinet behind him. It took a strong shove as the metallic underside scraped across the tile and came to a halt as it whacked the door. Turning back without hesitation Jon opened the door again and proceeded forth, hoping to find another way out. But a part of him already knew he'd just entered a labyrinth. A labyrinth which had been darkened by something else. A labyrinth that had forgotten the light of day.

I have to find another way out of this place. I have to find a way out... This can't be real. No, that was real. That was really fucking real. Just as real as anything else. Fuck. fuck. FUCK!

Jon raced down the hall, holding the documents he'd picked up close to his chest as if it would somehow protect him. But the halls began to grow dark, as if light were being choked at its breathing points. Its embrace smothered deeper and deeper. Whether it had been the running, the fear or the whiskey, Jon felt an emotion he'd not experience for decades. It wasn't just fear. It was something deeper than that, something abysmal where fear itself dare not tread.
 
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