Title: The Thing That Should Not Be
Author: Link Worshiper
Pairings: 1=2, maybe 3=4
Stuff: Heero POV, horror, black magic and occulty nonsense, language, death… OR IS IT :U
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing is a Sunrise thing. Some of the inspiration beyond the Gundam Wing characters is not mine either. (By that, I mean I'm borrowing from the Lovecraft mythos. Oh my, spoilers?) Also, as a note to those of you who are serious practitioners of Wicca, any mention of witchcraft for the sake of this story is not meant to sound derisive, despite people like Wufei mouthing off about it :P
This was intended for Moments of Rapture 2010 but I didn't think I'd be able to finish it in time… not to mention I thought it might be too weird. Of course, I kick myself realizing that I very well COULD have finished it, but alas. This is just to sort of… test the waters. Let me know if it's worth continuing and all that.
"Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal…." ~ HP Lovecraft
When they assigned me to the investigation, I figured it was because I had been the one who'd known him best. We had been comrades during the wars – best friends, you might even say – but that was almost three years ago, and I'd barely seen him since then. For all I knew, he'd wound up dead, and, upon looking through the crime scene dossier, that seemed to be exactly the case. He must have gotten mixed up in something sinister, I thought as I thumbed through the photographs of his decapitated body with a clinical eye, for it wasn't very common to see this degree of violence anymore, even in the most loathsome of cases. Maybe it was just hard to even associate the headless body with my longtime friend, which is what probably made it, at first, a bit easier for me to analyze the documentation of how his hands and feet had been so ritualistically tied back, or what the meaning behind the strange robe the body was attired in might signify. But even I, despite what other people whisper behind my back, found it difficult to face the images of Duo Maxwell's severed head and the empty sockets where his gouged-out eyes had once been.
It was with great resilience that I was able to look back at the photo, noting with a shudder that the stump of his neck was hidden behind the coil of his braid, which was clipped from his head and wound like a seaman's rope to create a rather morbid pedestal for it. The whole scene made me think of some kind of black offering to some nonexistent deity, which only served to unnerve and infuriate me more: it was bad enough that Duo was dead, but it was worse to think he'd been killed for nothing.
Resolved to at least avenge my friend's pointless death, I took the assignment and booked the next available flight to America from my laptop then and there.
After the war, Duo Maxwell had moved to a sleepy New England town called Arkham, and it was here that he had been murdered. I'm not sure I possess the words to fully describe the strangeness of the place other than that I felt as though I had fallen through some kind of rift in space, returning me to an older, long-forgotten era. Even the air smelled antique here, with a sort of fetidness that I might have associated with an abandoned building or a churchyard. On my way to the inn I'd be staying at during the length of the investigation, walking through the narrow streets with Wufei, the fellow officer I'd chosen to accompany me, I got the impression that my initial observations were not totally off base: there was definitely a sense that this township was secluded in some kind of bubble, independent from the rest of the world. Maybe that's what had drawn Duo to live here in the first place, considering the addled stares our Preventers regalia seemed to garner on every corner. Duo had made it clear that he had no interest in maintaining justice once it had been won, and from the looks of things, it seemed as though everyone else here was just as disengaged in the things that occurred outside their borders.
"You'd think they'd all been in on the plot together," Wufei muttered as we entered our hotel, his eyes casting about furtively. "Everyone here seems just as suspicious as the next."
I shot him a hard stare, a frown chiseled onto my features. "I brought you for your sensibility, not your conspiracy theories," I said curtly, my voice a low whisper so that the clerk behind the reception desk might not hear. I quickly went through the process of obtaining the keys to our reserved rooms, handing Wufei his as I led the way to the stairs. "He might not have joined Preventers, but Duo was still one of us," I continued once we were safely out of earshot once more; "I think he deserves a little more than that."
Wufei smartly chose to say nothing as he followed me up the stairs, which relieved me greatly, as I was in no mood to argue with him over something so trifling. Wufei had always been a skeptic on many fronts, and this quality was partially why I'd asked him to be my partner for this, despite the aggravation the trait came packaged with. I had also hoped that having someone along who had come from a similar background would be beneficial not only for my sake, but also for assessing possible motives in the crime at hand. As far as I was concerned, there were no coincidences in this world, and that one of the most publicized of us had turned up viciously murdered proved this philosophy.
The inn was barely more than a six-storey walkup, so the rooms were not that spacious, though more than enough to accommodate us. The furnishings were a bit on the sparse side, with only one dresser and a narrow, brass-posted bed in each room. If that wasn't enough to suggest the lack of modernization, the wash basins in each room that were meant to compensate for the fact that there was only one bathroom per floor confirmed it. I sat on the edge of my bed and simply absorbed all this, staring blankly at the peeling damask wallpaper as my thoughts wandered aimlessly.
I was interrupted by a stiff knock on the door that separated my room from Wufei's, which then promptly opened to reveal my partner. "Shall we visit the police station? The morgue is there," Wufei said, business as usual. I got the impression he was trying to act as indifferent as possible for his own sake, which was probably the only thing that saved him from my annoyance that he could act so callously regarding the death of a friend.
We located the police house with the aid of a map, which was the only help the disinterested clerk at the desk had to offer when we asked him for directions. Wufei had been irritated at the lack of respect we were shown with such treatment, but I was more discomforted by the fact that it seemed like the clerk was making an effort to hinder our investigation with his closed-mouthedness. At once I thought of what Wufei had said on our way in, but quickly shook the thought: there was no room for anything less than methodology and scientific fundamentalism here, and there would be no one accused until I had finished an entirely thorough investigation that was backed up with evidence and hard fact.
Our second traipse through the city had me taking in what a derelict place the town seemed to have become. Once, perhaps in the early era of the ancient 20th century, this might have been an ideal place to visit or live, but now, I found it almost disparaging how the buildings seemed like mere shells of the colonial architecture they represented, ghosts of what had once been. In a way, despite my usual candor, the black spires of the belfries and vaulting garrets against the twilight sky left a sense of eerie dread, and I was once again stuck with bewilderment as to why Duo had chosen this place to be his home. Maybe Duo had found some kind of morbid attachment to the haunted alleyways, a thought that brought a trifle of humour to my lips: it would be the sort of thing he'd do.
Upon reaching the police station, Wufei and I were met with a similar attitude to the one displayed by the clerk at our hotel. We had expected a sheriff or some other authority figure representing the murder investigation so far to help walk us through what had since been discovered and perhaps through any learning gleaned through autopsy, but none of this was the case. Instead, it was as though no one there had even been expecting us, and even producing official badges and identification seemed to have no effect on any of the officers loitering about. Wufei arched his eyebrows at me, but I refused to budge on his implication.
Stuck at an impasse, we wasted a good hour, stubbornly fixed to a pair of seats in the station's reception area. It wasn't until an older man in a doctor's coat appeared at our service that our luck began to turn around. He was an older man who limped slightly when he walked, but otherwise displayed an efficiency that I immediately took a liking to. He apologized profusely for his colleagues before introducing himself as Dr. Willett and indicating that we follow him to the morgue.
"Truthfully, they are more disturbed by this than you might initially guess," Willett explained as he led us along. "I think most of them would rather just pretend it hadn't happened at all."
"To a point of impeding an investigation?" Wufei voiced with indignation, almost as if the very suggestion of it was offensive to his sensibilities.
"Maybe," said Willett with a shrug. He stopped in front of a door at the end of the hallway we had been traversing and unlocked it with a thumbprint sensitive pad above the handle. "Arkham lives in a strange limbo between the modern and darker days," the doctor continued as he pushed the door inwards and held it open for us to enter after him; "Most of the people of this town adhere to a long tradition of superstition."
Wufei couldn't surprise a scoff as he rolled his eyes at the statement, but I took note of it and filed it away, wondering if it would perhaps become a vital clue later. I also made a mental note to ask the doctor if there was a library I could visit to check the town records lest there be something in recent news that might shed some more light on the mysterious murder of our friend.
"I might not laugh so easily at it," advised Willett as he closed the door and moved to stand near the large refrigerator that housed the corpses destined for autopsy in his laboratory. It was easily the most modern fixture in the entire room. "I saw the crime scene myself, and it reeked of something sinister and occult," he went on as he laid a hand on one of the refrigerator doors as though he meant to pull it open. "There is no hiding the fact that these rural parts are home to many a coven, some of which are even more ancient than those so famously purged in Salem so long ago."
"So now witches have killed Maxwell?" Wufei rejoined incredulously, his arms crossed defiantly over his chest. It was clear that he was quickly losing respect for Willett at the mere mention of anything to do with ritual magic. I wanted to rebuke his doubt by pointing out that it didn't matter what we knew to be true when it came to the killer's motivation: if whoever murdered Duo thought that he was perfecting some kind of rite or dark spell, the more we knew about it, the easier it would be to pinpoint the offender. At least, that's what I thought at the time.
"I don't know what information you were provided with in your dossier, but I can assure you there was maleficent intent in the beheading of your comrade," Willett said, moving towards a small writing desk that was crammed almost unnoticeably into one corner of the room. Quickly, he retrieved a folder labeled 'Maxwell, Duo' and returned to us to spread the folder's contents across the steel dissecting table. "Note the strange markings and symbols drawn around the carnage, and the way his head has been placed with care so that it might face west," he said as he showed us photographs of the crime scene we hadn't been privy to before. "It is almost as if the place had been prepared for this single crime long before it ever occurred."
"Let me see those," Wufei snapped tersely, reaching to ferry all of the photos to himself. Arranging them on the table, he glared down at them with a furrowed brow and an angry scowl on his face before looking up and announcing to us: "This is utter bullshit. In all my years of study, I have never seen any cryptology like this." He slid the photos back across the dissecting table towards Willett, concluding, "Someone is trying to play you and your superstitions, and it's making your entire hamlet out to be fools."
I decided to allow Wufei to be irritated by his apparent discovery, knowing full well that if I had also convinced myself that someone had killed Duo for the simple sake of scaring the village, I would have been just as frustrated. However, I had a hunch there might be more worth exploring, and asked Willett if he could suggest some research material regarding the traditions of the area. It was all too deliberate to be arbitrary, I maintained to the doctor, even if Wufei wasn't going to back me up on it. I liked to consider myself a bit more of a spontaneous thinker, though perhaps it had taken the influence of Duo's camaraderie to make me fully realize it. In any case, I wasn't about to ignore the needling in my gut that there was more to this whole affair than what met the eye.
"You might want to even keep an ear out for some of the town gossip. I am more than certain that there are particular rumours that people are afraid to speak in more than a whisper," remarked Willett as he returned to the mortuary refrigerator with the intention to pull out Duo's corpse for our viewing, just as he had intended to before the distraction of the photographs. He grasped the handle of one of the fridge doors and released it so that he might open it, adding, "Unbiased men such as yourselves might be able to make better sense of some of that muttering – so long as you don't implicate yourselves, that is."
"Excuse me? Just what are you trying to suggest?" Wufei was really starting to get perturbed, and for the first time, I rethought my decision to bring him along.
Willett cast his eyes about as though he were nervous someone might be listening and then cleared his throat, "Well, you didn't hear it from me," he began hesitantly, his voice suddenly an octave lower than before, "but there are those who think it better this way and refuse to help the likes of us because they are of the mind that they best leave well enough alone."
It was my turn to frown, not pleased by what Willett seemed to be suggesting. It was one thing for a deranged psychopath to think ill enough of Duo to want him dead, but it was another thing entirely for wholesome, sane people to also think the same. Duo had been my friend before I even knew what a friend was, and to think that he could have been anything less than the most popular man in Arkham was an impossibility to me. I had the vague urge to run to the streets and decry whatever it was they thought of Duo, disproportionately bothered by the fact that my best friend had been so wholly misjudged.
Though secretly, I was also somewhat pleased by the seeming fact that Duo hadn't allowed anyone to see the same soul I had found so much affinity with during the wars. Perhaps, then again, the Duo I knew was the secret him after all – a notion that reminded me of how kindred we truly were.
Willett was elaborating on the subject of Duo's ill reputation when I rejoined the present moment. "It never sat well with the natives that he moved into the old Pickman place. They're apt to tell you the ghosts there drove him to madness – or that what lurks in the shadows of that old house is what finished him in the end," he was explaining. "He was secretive, even by Arkham standards, but he made an effort to at least try and keep from disturbing the way of life here too much, despite his rather unusual idiosyncrasies."
I wrote this off easily enough: "Duo was always a bit morbid and eccentric," I explained to Willett. "It's not surprising that rural people like them found him more than a little weird: Duo was weird." Which was why I liked him, I added silently – because he was the only person who was as weird as me.
"I suppose it's to be assumed. I'm not sure many people here truly comprehend what it meant to fight like he did in the wars," said Willett, finally pulling the handle of the fridge so that he might show us Duo's corpse and explain his autopsy findings. He reached into the fridge to draw out the retractable table, only to freeze in shock as he stared into the darkened aperture with a look of terrible shock written across his face. "Heaven almighty," he murmured, taking a moment to quickly gesture the Sign of the Cross over his person.
"What's wrong?" Wufei demanded, clearly not amused by what he thought to be idle chatter. Angrily, he stalked over to Willett and pushed him aside so that he might speed things along, only to also stop cold when he came upon the same discovery as the doctor. He recovered after a few moments, and as if to answer my unspoken question, decided that showing me what had roused both he and Willett would be far more effective than trying to explain. If I hadn't known better, I might have sworn I saw Wufei's hand shake as he reached into the fridge to pull out the slab, which I quickly found, to my horror, was completely devoid of any sign that there had been a body there at all.
All three of us stared at the corpse-less tray, aghast at who might have had the audacity to tamper with the dead. In a mad rush of futility, Willett ran to his desk to double and triple check his records of Duo's body, whilst Wufei and I examined all the other slots in the mortuary fridge. We found two other specimens that, according to Willett, were part of another investigation, in their proper place, which only made it more clear that whatever body thieving crime had occurred was targeted on Duo's body and no other.
"I can't believe this," Willett was fretting with embarrassment. "Only a very select few are even granted access to this room! I don't understand how the body could have simply vanished!"
I didn't blame Willett for this happenstance, but I couldn't say I was any more pleased about it than Wufei, who was making quite a show of his feelings about the situation with a series of pissed off glares and scowling. The entire affair didn't sit right with me, though: dead bodies didn't just stand up and walk away after autopsy without help, and I was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery as analytically as possible – mostly so that there was no chance that the son of a bitch who'd done this would be able to skate free.
With a quick gesture, I motioned for Wufei to follow me so that we could regroup, and he was on the ball almost immediately. Willett had a lapse before he quite grasped what was happening, since Wufei and I could communicate with a silent jargon most civilians weren't privy to, but was quick to try and delay us. "I would ask that you keep this little incident to yourselves," he was saying as he shuffled towards the door in an effort to impede us. "As I mentioned before, the townsfolk are very superstitious, and…."
My eyes narrowed into an expression that was probably far more intimidating than all of Wufei's combined agitations, and one look at my countenance was enough to make his words taper off.
"Wh-What I mean is," he amended, his voice taking on a tremor that hadn't been present before. "Please try and be discreet in your sleuthing."
For the first time since we'd arrived, I looked at him as though he were stupid.
From our base of operations in the hotel, Wufei and I reconvened to discuss our new plan of attack. Solving a murder was one thing, but finding a stolen body was another matter altogether. Both of us agreed that something was severely out of joint and that from then on, it would probably be best for us to keep things between ourselves as much as possible. Wufei was just short of being ready to lock up everyone within a ten mile radius of Arkham's town center on the grounds that they made him uncomfortable, and to be honest, I couldn't say that his distaste was completely unfounded. Even the good doctor Willett seemed a little less than reliable, the very notion of which left a horrible taste in my mouth.
We eventually decided that we would be best served by splitting up, not only to draw less attention to ourselves, but also so that we might canvas a wider scope in half the time. Each of us were individually equipped the competence and facilities every member of even a well-polished forensics team would envy, so I had no concerns that we would be crippled by such a measure. Surprisingly, though, it was Wufei who suggested that I be the one to investigate Duo's residence at the old Pickman place, citing his observation that he had always considered the two of us to be a bit closer to one another than we had been anyone else in our little circle of friends. "I might overlook something that stands out to you, since you probably know some things about him that I don't," he said with a shrug by way of explanation.
"Are you sure you're not just buying into those rumours that the house he lived in was haunted?" I deadpanned, though there was the hint of a smirk at the corner of my mouth.
Wufei was hardly amused. "Didn't take you to be one with a sense of humour, Yuy," he retorted flatly, his eyebrows an even line across his face.
It was my turn to shrug as I replied, "Perhaps it's just something that you could say Duo knew about me."
Something about the way Wufei was looking at me shifted into some form of scrutiny, like he was trying to piece something together in his head. I wasn't quite sure what it was about, though, so I changed the subject. "Anyway, maybe you could see what some of the townsfolk actually thought of Duo and pick up on some of the local lore?" I suggested as I stared off at the corner of the room, somehow interested in the crumbling plaster that was exposed by the peeling wallpaper. "Or maybe examining what's left of the crime scene might prove useful as well."
"Fine," Wufei said abruptly, turning to pick up his plainclothes jacket before striding purposefully for the door. "I'll be back in two hours; you better be here."
I remained where I was after he left, taking a few minutes to think. I couldn't quite figure out why I was bothered, since the idea that Wufei's lack of protest was the cause was a little ridiculous. I knew Wufei had always been the sort to leap to conclusions and that such behaviour was just part of his hotheaded temper – nothing to too take too seriously. It unnerved me nevertheless.
The house commonly referred to as 'the old Pickman place' was an ancient affair that was standing only with the aid of a lot of renovation and a miracle. It occupied a small, overgrown lot near the edge of town, isolated from its slightly more gentrified neighbours by a wrought iron fence that was rusting around the edge of the property. As I awkwardly passed through the gate that fell in broken disrepair across the pathway leading up to the wide front porch, I was struck with the oddity of how derelict the yard seemed in comparison to a building that had obviously benefited from Duo's fine craftsmanship. Though the house retained its rather crooked character, there was no mistaking the fact that Duo had been patching it up after uncountable eons of neglect: I could see his signature in almost every new piece of wood or welded metal, in new hinges, paneling and flooring, the latter of which I glimpsed when I screwed my eyes up against the large, oblong window that was fixed into the front door.
That same front door, however, presented another very Maxwell-like detail that definitely wasn't part of the house's original design, and that was an incredibly advanced and modern locking mechanism in place of a traditional doorknob. Upon closer inspection, I was able to determine that the design of it was entirely of Duo's own design, and would have been more than enough to dismay burglars and nosy neighbours alike. Upon further examination, I was quick to notice an impossibly small surveillance camera fixed just behind one of the large lanterns hanging on either side of the front door, its tiny red light still blinking faintly to indicate that it was still functionally recording. I wasn't sure why I found this odd, since it was perfectly plausible that Duo had no reason to ever turn it off, but it left me wondering what kind of operation Duo had set up if his security equipment would still be in order after almost two weeks of no maintenance.
Hacking Duo's encryptions wasn't so difficult if you knew what to look for. With the aid of some rather ingenious hardware of my own, I was able to crack Duo's security system before long, though it surprised me somewhat that the pass code that allowed my entry into the house turned out to be Wing Zero's confidential serial number. I had at least expected the keyword to be something more significant to Duo, but I guess he had deemed something relating to himself a little too obvious.
The first thing I became aware of when I entered the Pickman house was that my nostrils were overwhelmed with an alien fetor that I couldn't quite identify. I wasn't sure that the smell was entirely unlikable, but it certainly wasn't anything I could say I was used to either. I decided that it probably had something to do with the eldritch state of the house and its many years of neglect, though a small voice in the back of my mind questioned why such a scent would still permeate if Duo had been taking such strains to restore the place to what it had once been.
The next thing that became immediately apparent to me was that, despite the online security system, the inside of the house was dark, and fumbling with a wall switch or two showed only that Duo had not wired any overhead lights for illumination. Instead, it seemed he had been making regular use of candles and smaller reading lamps, which I found commonly dispersed throughout every room after I finally managed to find a working one on the front table. This was another thing that struck me as peculiar: if Duo had enough electricity running throughout the house to power such an advanced security system, there was no reason that he couldn't have diverted even a small fraction of that to provide more efficient lighting. As I lighted a small oil lamp that I found next to the electric one I'd just turned on, I wondered what reason Duo might have for keeping himself bathed in relative darkness, and suddenly found myself much more empathetic towards the superstitious townsfolk for whispering as they did.
The front foyer was a long room that stretched towards the back of the house with a slightly wreathed staircase that rose into a canopy of shadow. There was incredible carpentry in the staircase's newel and balusters, which, upon closer inspection, I realized was more modern than their design implied – a detail that impressed me greatly when I figured that Duo must have been the one to so seamlessly restore such grandeur to the withering structure. A door with a slanted lintel to fit the incline of the staircase was fixed beneath, but was locked with a similar mechanism to the one I had just hacked to enter the house; I decided that I would first take a sweep of the main floor before attempting to open this one too.
Despite the effort to restore the house's structure to its original state, Duo's eclectic tastes were apparent throughout the ground floor, even with a cursory glance. It was obvious what furniture had remained from the house's previous (and probably long-since dead) owners, and what had been of Duo's recent choosing. He hadn't bothered to buy new pieces that complimented the older styles that had come with the place, despite his obvious effort to reupholster, re-stain and repair what he could of those moth-eaten relics. A coffee table that looked like one of his welding projects stood next to a Victorian couch; a morbid portrait of some kind of flesh-eating sewer beast hung innocuously over an incredible Baroque writing desk, which I somehow found myself drawn to, even from across the room.
Experimentally, I sat down on the wheeled computer chair in front of the desk and looked at the surface as though I were Duo. The apparent disarray was nothing if one knew the way Duo's brain was organized, and it didn't take me long to discover that he had apparently only used this desk for circumstantial convenience. For one thing, there was an empty section that a number of unplugged cords suggested was the resting place for a laptop that traveled with him from place to place, not to mention that the collection sandwiched between the two bookends at the top was definitely missing a volume or two. Curious, I pulled out a few of the books that remained to see what sorts of things Duo had kept within easy reach of this workstation, not at all surprised to find titles such as Le Livre d'Eibon, and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Duo had always seemed to have a taste for the bizarre, and upon flipping through the yellowed tomes, I found that these were exemplary of such fascinations.
However, the discovery of a loose piece of paper folded between the pages of the second book did distress me slightly, which, when I unfolded it, detailed a drawing that reminded me very much of the occult markings that had been found around Duo's decapitated corpse. A look at the page it had been on top of was no less consoling, for in addition to an extremely similar drawing, my rudimentary German was enough to pick up the gist of the accompanying paragraph, discerning the book as a disturbing kind of grimoire as opposed to a mere historical reflection of ancient cults (as I had previously thought upon first look). Comparing the two drawings, it almost seemed as though the modern reproducer was actually attempting to revise the older drawing in the way a scientist might re-approach a formula that wasn't working quite right. I was hesitated to attribute the drawing to Duo: the concept was nightmarish enough, but to suggest that Duo might have had a hand in the plans that had been his untimely end was even more so.
I decided I would take Unaussprechlichen Kulten with me so that I might share my findings with Wufei, who would probably doubt my tale unless I brought him some evidence of it. With the grimoire in hand, I got up from the desk and continued through the house, not finding much else out of joint until I returned to the mysterious locked door beneath the staircase. Here, I noted that the odd smell in the air was particularly pungent as I stood before the door, rigging my hacking device to Duo's lock. As it hummed and whirred with its work, I tried to place the scent that assailed my nostrils, but only able to vaguely liken it to smelling salts or something similarly perfumed.
The beeping of my device's successful decryption of Duo's code sounded, drawing me out of my internal musing. Again, when I examined the bug's findings on Duo's password for this lock, I found myself surprised by his choice – a numeric reference to the school we had enrolled in together as undercover students. I hadn't realized that Duo still thought about those things like they were important. To be frank, I hadn't realized Duo thought about me – at least not as frequently or with the same flavour that I did him.
Pulling the door open, I found myself nearly intoxicated by the smell, which, now unbridled, was undoubtedly coming from somewhere beyond the black aperture that I now loitered before. I honestly couldn't tell if the heavy scent was meant to attract or mask something much darker, though the weight of the book in my hand left me favouring the latter. Holding the oil lamp aloft, I began my descent into Duo's abandoned basement, not entirely sure what I should expect to find there.
At the bottom of the stairs, I had to fumble through the darkness until I found a more viable light source, which turned out to be a desk lamp sitting on the edge of a long workbench that seemed to serve as Duo's base of operations, at least as far as his security was concerned. He had to have at least three computers involved in his setup and twice that many screens rigged to the wall above the workbench. Two of the screens were divided into sections that displayed a live feed from cameras positioned around the Pickman estate, and I found myself drawn to them to satisfy my egotistical curiosity as to whether or not I had managed to successfully identify the positions of them all. But while I was easily able to recognize the areas that one of the screens displayed, I was absolutely mystified by those shown on the other: I couldn't place them anywhere in the house, for instead of the wainscoted rooms I had just traversed, I found myself staring at shadowed images that hinted at a location far more cryptic and sinister in purpose. The feed was a little too dark to be certain, but I could swear that what I was seeing was some kind of subterranean labyrinth, long since forgotten beneath the streets of Arkham. Again I felt the book weigh down my hand as I tried to ascertain, if that was so, how Duo had managed to discover such a place and utilize it for… whatever his mind had been occupied with since the end of the war.
It didn't take me long to draw the conclusion that the house itself served as a mere gateway to more festering mysteries beneath, though only a discerning eye – or perhaps one that was accustomed to Duo – would be able to see it. Whatever was associated with the unknown depths must be what terrified the locals about this house, even if subconsciously.
Turning away from the security station, I looked around the large expanse of the basement area, searching for something that might suggest a hidden passageway or door to Duo's secrets. At first glance, I found only more bookshelves and an array of scientific equipment and other ongoing Maxwell projects that seemed to have been in storage down there. There was a washing machine and its twin dryer squirreled away in one corner and in another, a peculiar table-like structure, which, upon closer examination, I realized wasn't a table at all. Rather, it was a round well built of stone and sealed at the top by a wooden lid that had been reinforced with steel. Duo hadn't really tried to mask the fact that this was the obvious entrance to his untold netherworld, probably because he assumed it safe behind his locked doors, but that still didn't stop him from adding yet another security mechanism to the lid to keep it from being so easily opened. Much to my dismay, I quickly realized that even my hacking device would be of no use here, and I resigned myself to trying to break Duo's code the old-fashioned way.
Before I got too carried away, though, I took a moment to think. I had seen Duo at work with this kind of thing before, and I had noted that he took a particular joy in setting up riddles when it came to any number of related encryptions, a habit he had obviously kept up with considering that the two passwords I'd unearthed so far were both related to me. The question was, of course, why – and furthermore, what did the two combined encryptions hint at? I closed my eyes and strained to remember anything that had occurred during our stay at that academy so long ago, but the only things relating to that period and my Gundam that sprang to mind were mundane battles and stratagems whispered under the cover of night.
Emblazoned in the darkness behind my eyelids, I could almost see the knoll where we'd hidden Deathscythe and Wing, our younger selves dwarfed by the massive killing machines that peeked out from the underbrush. I remembered Duo's face, pale in the electric glow of our flashlights as we huddled by Wing's foot, his swaggering voice louder than I thought safe as he tried to impress me with talk of ace piloting and explosions that were sure to best my own. I remember telling him very succinctly to shut the hell up.
"Make me," he'd said flippantly, as if our game of rivalry carried over into other things besides the destruction of the base we'd bet each other on.
It was then that I realized that he was a lot closer to me than he'd been moments before, his flashlight discarded like a forgotten toy as he scrutinized the side of my face. Absorbed in repairing a component for Wing's control panel, I barely noticed until the sound of his breathing became overbearingly husky in my ear. Before I could try to reprimand him for invading my personal space, he had grabbed my chin and engaged our mouths in a much more silent activity that made my stomach tingle and my loins warm.
"Better?" he'd asked, the words tumbling across my tongue before he slowly drew away with tantalizing lethargy. Much to my embarrassment, I recalled lunging into him slightly as he withdrew his kiss, instinctively trying to prolong the pleasing sensation the exchange had washed over me. "No wonder you give Miss Relena such a cold shoulder," he'd teased with a rather self-satisfied smirk, though it was only recently that I figured out what he'd meant by that.
I'd narrowed my eyes at him with a tart frown at the time, but I'd already betrayed myself to him. Still smirking at me, Duo had continued with an air that affirmed my place in the palm of his hand: "Forget about it, pal: I don't pass first base on a first date – especially with someone whose name I don't even know."
"You know my name," I'd automatically responded, though I could only hope that such a response would elicit the same results as my last terse comment to him.
"Ch, I know you're codename," Duo retorted with a roll of his eyes. He shuffled close again, his nose scant centimeters away from mine, his drooping eyelids creating a rather unforgettable expression that still haunts and teases me to this very day. "But what about your real name? Why don't you tell me that, hmm?"
Had I been in a proper state of mind, I'd have reeled at the request: I'd have jumped back a hundred feet, alarms ringing in my head that he was trying to set me up and procure classified information from me for some possibly counteractive purpose. But despite a lifetime of having such precautions ingrained into my very being, not a single one of them even occurred to me at the time. Instead, all I could think of was Duo's breath on my lips, and the way he kind of smelled like something tropical – pineapples, perhaps – and whether or not I had imagined the voltage running through my skin at his mere closeness.
So, with only one end in mind, I leaned in to tell him my most intimate feature before kissing him one more time.
I returned to the present with a shudder, a rather frustrated sensation rocketing through my entire core at the end of the reflection. That night probably had been nothing more than Duo's usual fooling around, since nothing even remotely like it ever occurred again, but it had left me a changed person. I had been a loner before then, just waiting by myself, but for better or for worse, Duo had managed to awaken things within me that I hadn't even realized I'd wanted before then. At first, when the disappointment of Duo's apparent platonic feelings for me began to actually weigh down upon me, I had chalked my attachment to him as mere circumstance, a direct byproduct of exploring such things with him for the first time. But dabbling in some experimental kisses with others left me realizing that I was only deluding myself in trying to think otherwise. When I'd tried to kiss Relena, for instance, I think she was more startled by my impulse to do so than the actual conclusion I drew from it.
But this – this was something far removed from what I'd formally hypothesized about Duo. In slowly typing in the letters of the name my long forgotten mother had given me, I couldn't help but wonder if Duo had left all this with the intention of allowing but me the ability to gain entry to his hidden realm. As the lock beeped with merry acceptance at the password I'd typed, I could only wonder what it was that Duo had left for me to see, and why he had chosen me as his sole beneficiary.
The disengaged lock allowed me to remove the well's lid, which revealed a dark shaft that penetrated the ground to depths unknown. A length of rusted rungs affixed to the vertical tunnel's wall descended into the blackness, which forced my decision to leave my coat, the oil lamp, and Unaussprechlichen Kulten with Duo's security rig so that I might easily make my way down into the hidden world below the Pickman estate. As I swung my legs over the rim of the well, I couldn't help but notice that the odd pungency was stronger than ever, as if its source was something to be discovered at the bottom. Praying I wouldn't be overwhelmed by the noxious fumes, I mounted the rungs and began my descent into the unknown.
The air at the bottom of the shaft was damp, the flagstone walls both mossy and slimy. I dismounted the ladder and slowly turned around to find myself standing at the head of a long corridor that was flanked with dark archways as it extended into the gloom ahead. Without a doubt, the moment I took stock of that crypt-like hall, I knew that it had been the defining feature of this old estate for Duo. The only question was whether or not he'd known it was here when he'd chosen to move in, or if the troubles he'd stirred up were something he'd uncovered after his acquisition of the property. Knowing there was only one way to find out, I doggedly trudged forward with the pen flashlight on my keychain serving as my only guide.
The archways that lined that somber corridor were entryways to little niches that Duo seemed to have assigned to various purposes, such as miniature laboratories, studies and libraries. Upon further investigation of one of these alcoves, I noted that it (and the others like it) had once served a much more morbid purpose, though Duo clearly found the storage of books and scientific apparatus far more important than the sacred sleep of the dead. I was impressed that Duo had managed to amass such a comprehensive collection of material in this place, though I had to admit I was still a little hazy as to what exactly he seemed to be researching so adamantly, especially considering that some of his methods were downright archaic. That observation stuck out to me the most, knowing as much as I did about Duo's incredibly comprehensive knowledge of modern machinery, chemistry and astrophysics.
One of the last niches was home to a collection far more obscure than books or beakers. As I cast my tiny flashlight about, I found that the recesses in the stone walls were home to dozens of small jars and urns, each of which seemed to bear a label with symbols I couldn't place. Curiously removing one of the jars, I took off the lid to peer inside, perplexed that all there seemed to be was a very fine dust that seemed to glow a pale rosy hue in the darkness. Opening a few other jars with similar labels found the same substance, albeit a variance in colour here and there. Another kind of jar bore a far more sticky, dirt-like material, and another still contained large crystals that reminded me of earth salts or minerals. Perplexed, I returned everything to the state I had found it in and left the niche, unsatisfied. Clearly Duo had meticulously saved, catalogued and organized all that mysterious powder for something, but even with all my education, I was completely at a loss as to what that might be.
As I stepped back into the main corridor, I thought I heard a strange echo from somewhere deeper in the tomb. It was not the first time I'd noticed the sound since I'd come down here, but this time, I couldn't so easily attribute it to being a trick of some subterranean breeze or draft, for I found my nerves truly chilled by the distinct sound of wailing. I couldn't quite call it human, per se, but it definitely wasn't animal either. It was then that I noticed that my tiny flashlight seemed to illuminate more than it ought to have been able to, which I quickly realized was due to the fact that many of the niches I had just visited bore lamps that had already been lighted before I'd arrived there. The suggestion that I wasn't alone in that dreary hallow unnerved even me, and I had been one to laugh Death in the face.
The corridor soon opened up into a huge rotunda, the architecture of which impressed even me, and I honestly couldn't assess whether this place had been dug out beneath Arkham, or if Arkham had merely been erected over top to conceal such a dark place. The walls were etched with worn bas-relief that depicted strange creatures with alien features in a fashion I couldn't quite associate with any one culture or history. Another curious feature was that there were intermittent flagstones worked into the floor that were pierced with randomly spaced holes, which seemed to be ventilation for whatever the source of that putrid scent was. I was also a little disturbed to notice that there were a few metal brackets affixed to the walls, all hung with chains and cuffs like they were meant to imprison the unwilling; the brackish red-brown stains near these chains wasn't that much more settling.
The center of the rotunda was even stranger still. The floor was carved with markings that I found bore an uncomfortable resemblance to those found around Duo's body. In the middle, there was a raised dais upon which stood a wrought iron bookstand flanked with similarly designed candelabras. As I approached the bookstand to examine it and the open tome that rested upon it, I couldn't help the disquiet I felt at all the signs of ritual around me. Duo was the last person in the world I'd have ever expected to fall into the grips of some bullshit cult, especially considering how disdainfully he regarded even more mainstream practices, such as the Catholic teachings with which he had been raised. There had to be more to all of this than what met the eye, but unfortunately, without Duo around to ask, I had to admit I was a bit stumped on the issue.
The leather bound book I found waiting for me was absolutely enormous and decrepit with age. It was already opened and waiting for someone to stand and read from its dreaded pages, but as I idly flipped through, I could only assess that the book's author had been a madman. The text was filled with ravings about ancient magic and forbidden knowledge of cosmic entities that bore names like Yog-Sothoth and Cthulu. I'm not sure what chilled me about simply reading words that were practically gibberish, but I can safely say that I was considerably bothered by that loathsome book. Quickly, I hefted the enormous grimoire closed, unsure if the heavy metal clasps that were affixed to the front cover were meant merely to help hold the thick volume together, or if they served a more protective purpose. 'What were you doing down here, Duo?' I thought as I ran my fingers across the embossed letters of the book's title: The Necronomicon.
Quickly abandoning that accursed book, I retreated to the other side of the rotunda, relieved to note that my heart seemed to be slowing down to a more natural rate when I did so. Finding a door hiding in the shadows of this far side of the room, I decided to quickly press on in search of more clues. I didn't expect the door to be locked, but I was still surprised by the ease with which it opened, considering that it was a rather old and heavy wooden affair. I supposed it had also benefited from Duo's repair work in the recent past.
I found myself in another long corridor, though this one was far more narrow and stifling than the other had been. There were no archways or antechambers here, though the walls were carven with similar niches to the ones that Duo had been using for storage in his little laboratories. However, unlike those much more innocent spaces, much to my horror, I discovered that Duo had retained the original purpose of those grim shelves, each of them stocked with a corpse or two, each in various states of rot and decay, some embalmed, and others merely skeletons or maggot-eaten lumps of flesh. The soulless eyes staring at me in the blanched glow of my flashlight seemed to be staring right through me, and I wanted nothing more than to snap it off in hopes that those tortured faces would leave my haunted mind. Plagued by a fear that I hadn't experienced since I was young and had been met with the Death for the first time, I tore down that hallway in hopes I could escape to another room before I was choked by the atrocities that I'd committed during the war.
But that wasn't even the worst of what I found in that horrific crypt. No, the worst lay in an open sarcophagus that was situated at the end of the narrow passageway, elevated as if it were resting upon some kind of altar. Inside was the corpse of none other than Duo Maxwell, still bloody, decapitated and very much dead. His hands were folded across his chest in the traditional fashion, a very curious stone of alien colour and geometry cupped in his hands. I could hardly bring myself to look at his empty eye sockets, which were now just gory hollows in his head, unable to keep myself from remembering the bright blue irises that used to shine in place of such carnage. They'd always reminded me of the freeing sky.
Hurrying back the way I'd come, I reentered the rotunda to again hear that wailing echo filled the stale air, far too distinct to try and make any other reasonable excuses for what the source might be. I looked around the empty rotunda in search of anything that might allude to the source of the noise, but found nothing that could satiate the question save those mysterious flagstones with the holes, which I had noticed around the perimeter of the room when I'd first come upon it. After what I'd just seen, I was starting to get incredibly concerned about what I might find.
Stooping by one of the punctured grates, I ran my hands over it as I provided it a more detailed scrutiny. Lingering there, it didn't take me long to ascertain a few things rather quickly: one, there was a small catch to make removal of the stone easier, and two: whatever lay below the perforated flagstone was, without a doubt, the source of the wailing and the noxious scent that permeated the air. Truth be told, there was a part of me that didn't want to investigate much further, but I knew that I owed it to both myself, Duo and the rest of the Preventers who had been associated with the case to fulfill my duty there. So, with more trepidation than I'd exhibited in an incredibly long time, I popped the flagstone up and removed it from its cradle so that I might cast my flashlight into the miasmic darkness beneath it.
I recoiled almost immediately, nearly dropping my flashlight into the gloom when I was greeted with a piercing screech that threatened to bleed my ears. With my heart pounding hard enough to shake my entire form, I scuttled like a cowardly crab as far from that devilish hole as I cold get, unable to forget the horror I'd glimpsed down there. It was only a logical sense of responsibility that made my hands return the removable flagstone to its proper place before I quickly made my escape from that hellish tomb, the memory of that half-eaten cadaver as it lurched up at me with its yellowed phalanges still fresh in my mind.
TBC? You guys let me know if it's worth it...