Mwahahahahah I liiiiive…Well, mid-terms have hit, so everything's slowing to a crawl, but I'm catching back up, and have ended up with a decent plan of where this will be headed, and who is and isn't showing up…which I'm going to keep mum on for now - I'm sure some of it'll be a sur-prise. -plotplot- Of course, some things are going to take a bit to come in and out of the picture…

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It was almost 2 am; Vincent had holed up in the Historical Society library, to take a second look at many of the documents and see what he could piece together in light of some of the…new realizations, and the evidence he'd turned up in the locked records only members were allowed near. Of course, even with those, his knowledge was still cramped; he was allowed in one of the rooms for his bookkeeping work, but not the other. Things came back to the big fire, to the actions of Claudia's predecessor and mentor, and to the links between what was visible of the history of the town, and the hidden story related to the drug trade and the cult.

The more he read, the more there was a growing unease. The fire department hadn't responded for several hours; the mayor had come up with five contradictory excuses, and any commentary or record of the real reasons was lost. The house where it'd started was Dahlia's, and the infamous little ghost had been trapped inside - reported dead, but he'd found records in Kaufmann's old papers that she hadn't been. How much of Dahlia's sway over the town did Claudia maintain? "Burned half the town and her own daughter, police, fire department, mayor all on a leash…Vincent, you've gotten in over your head this time."

He took off his glasses, and went to rub his eyes; the book open in his lap shifted, and an old photo fell out. Replacing his glasses, he picked it up.

It was a familiar dark-haired girl in a powder blue dress, arms crossed, fixing the camera with a forbidding gaze; marked on the bottom was a date seven years after the fire. Something moved on the edge of his vision, and he looked up; a familiar dark-haired girl in a powder blue dress, arms crossed, with a forbidding expression.

At first he was just confused, chalking the afterimage up to sleep deprivation - he'd just stopped looking at the picture. He hadn't really slept much in the last two days. Then it dawned on him that she wasn't just static like the picture, she was actually there, and that it was the same girl that he'd been seeing since he arrived, and that she matched the photograph down to the slightest detail -

Except for the bandaged, burned, vaguely canine mass of flesh sitting sprawled obediently at her feet, all recognizable features destroyed by its apparent injuries.

"You're…the girl from before…"

"Alessa Gillespie." She sounded half like she was correcting, half like she was repeating.

"Aless…." The photo was thirteen, almost fourteen years old; she didn't look any older than fourteen, nor did she show any of the signs of - of the injuries described in the fragmented parts of Kaufmann's records he'd found. He was glancing between the photo, her, and the beast resting at her feet. "You're a ghost."

"No, ghosts are dead." She sounded like she was explaining something to a small child.

"You're not dead?" He was too tired, too confused, too unused to thinking of the supernatural as more than mumbo-jumbo spouted by two-bit manipulative cons that wanted to feel important.

Her response was a bitter laugh. "No…only dreaming."

"And that?" He tipped his head to nod at the creature.

"He's a dream. My puppy - from before the fire." The thing suddenly began twitching and twisting, warping, the wounds pulling together, bandages dissolving to ash that vanished in dust, skin growing over muscle and sinew, until there was a full grown Doberman-rottweiler mix curled at her feet panting.

He could feel the last bits of his guarded skepticism falling away at the spectacle. Bits of evidence had tacked onto bits of evidence, and now it was staring him right in the face, and it seemed more dangerous to assume that it was just sleep deprivation than to treat it as something real.

"If you're not dead, then how are you here, just like you…were, or would've been, in 1980?"

"This isn't my body."

There had to be an explanation, and she was a major part of all this - there were too many pieces to track down, too many details he'd need to know to understand what he'd walked into. "Then where is your body?"

She tensed, a darker glare covering her features, as if she were looking through his skin at something underneath. "You want to know where I've been all these years?" The dog twisted and warped, skin peeling away, flesh rotting and scorching, bandages reforming, the head splitting sideways in a yawn lined with bits of jagged glass and bone. He was being studied, threatened, tested on some level he was only barely aware of.

Then the dark glare returned to the more usual only-slightly-cracked hunted expression. "If you want to find me, go to the Alchemilla hospital; get into the basement. There'll be a nurse there named Lisa Silverman; don't ask for her at the desk, just go straight to the basement and she'll be waiting. She'll take you to me."

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The next day around noon, he returned to Alchemilla hospital, taking his usual side route in; it was too easy to get in there without getting caught. While maneuvering around to one of the doors with access to the basement, he spotted Nancy, and a brief whim took him; he veered off, waving her over.

"Vincent? Didn't expect to see you here again so quickly - is there someone here you know, or…well…you don't plan on trying to talk to Mary again, do you?"

"No, I think I've disturbed the poor lady enough; I have something else I'm…curious about." He put on his best charming smile, hoping to disarm her tired confusion.

"And what would that be?"

"You wouldn't happen to know anything about a nurse named Lisa Silverman, would you?"

Her expression quickly took a few turns towards dark, worn out, and very, very irritated. "Is this historical society business, or did some kid put you up to this?"

"Did I say something wrong?" Cue the wounded look.

"Lisa Silverman's dead. She was on White Claudia and a few other hard drugs; she ran away and disappeared seven years ago, then turned up dead in South Ashfield of an overdose. The local kids think it's great fun to send people in here asking about her and stuff, because she's supposed to've been linked to some kind of ghost stories or something. I don't see why anyone would care about it unless they were into stupid superstitions."

"Ah. I see." Other drugs might've made this fuzzy, but White Claudia was purely the domain of the cult; a major source of their income. "Well, then, sorry to bother you; I'll be on my way." He half-bowed, backed up a step, then turned on one heel and walked away; coincidentally, the way out happened to be near the door to the basement.

He shut it behind him carefully, hoping nobody noticed that it wasn't locked; getting trapped down here would be the last thing he needed. The lights were naked bulbs hanging from the fixtures with cobwebbed pull-cords dangling from them; pipes ran bare and rusted across the ceiling with spiderwebs, spiders, and cockroaches decorating them, the masonry water-stained and mildewed in places until there wasn't any white left. The floor was blotched, pitted concrete, and standing at the bottom of the steps down was a slim, attractive blonde lady in an old-fashioned nurse's uniform with a fuzzy pink sweater draped over her shoulders, blue eyes watching him brightly and a little vacantly. "You must be Vincent! I'm Lisa."

She looked quite good for a dead woman.

"Ah…yes. I'm here to see Alessa?" He walked down the stairs, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose.

"Yep, she told me you'd be coming - right this way." She seemed both out of place and completely oblivious to the state of her surroundings. He'd heard ghosts were supposed to be creepy rotting things in the middle of otherwise normal surroundings, not the other way around.

She led down a couple side hallways in the web of basement without even a second look, stopping at a locked, worn door at the end of one hallway, a solid metal one without any windows; producing a key, she opened the lock, and held the door open for him.

He walked far enough in for Lisa to shut the door behind him, then stopped.

The room was in perhaps worse condition than the hallway outside; the light came on as he entered, untouched, sending cockroaches the size of his hand scurrying for cover, spiders disappearing into the pipes. A bank of wheezing machines was set up against one wall, hooked up to a bandaged, black and red husk in the bed; an IV drip hung on the other side. A rusted, dinged metal chair sat beside the bed. It was almost difficult to identify the wreck in the bed as human, much less female; a few tufts of ragged, matted black hair stuck out in places from stained bandages and broken skin, red-soaked pads were held in place by equally yellow-and-red stained bandages over the eyes, what wasn't covered with soaked through bandages was a cracked mix of charcoal and blood with boils and blisters breaking up the monotony here and there where something passed for skin; small patches of off-white showed in places where the collarbone and shoulders had burned down to bone. The mouth and nose were covered by a mask that led to more tubes, hooked into the machines.

It was one thing to read reports that edged around the subject of decades of suffering and torture, quite another to be suddenly faced with the wreckage of the abuse; it occurred to him that she'd been this way for almost twenty years, a pitiful, forgotten mess, scared to the point of being almost inhuman. He slowly crossed the room to stand beside the bed in mute shock; everything he'd seen must've been poltergeist projections, he'd be afraid to move the ragged thing in the bed, much less expect her to move on her own power. He held out a hand to touch her face, as if to confirm that she was real, then stopped just short; there was no skin left, even the slightest contact or movement would likely cause nothing but more pain.

Her apparition faded into the side of his vision, standing at the foot of the bed.

"So you've….been like this…ever since the fire?" His voice wavered.

"They won't let me heal - at all." She was grimly unconcerned, bitter, yet seemed resigned to her fate.

He couldn't find words, just shook his head slowly; to inflict this on a child, this long, and not only that but her own daughter, then to pass on the torment so that it wouldn't end…this was real evil; no demon or monster would ever match the kind of simple human cruelty reflected here. Something blurred the bottom of his glasses, and he realized there were actually tears.

"You don't need to worry about hurting me; I don't feel anything when I'm…out like this." She looked away from her body to the wall, arms crossed so that her hands were on her shoulders.

He nodded slightly, putting one hand over the burned one cautiously. It was real; the hand was warm, jagged and rough where it was burned, damp with the slight sheen of blood and never-quite-banished infection, fragile enough that he was afraid it would crumble if he closed his grip on it; as her arm shifted, a spider scuttled from a convenient hiding place between the bandages, darting off the bed to find a dark corner elsewhere. If anyone on Earth had earned the right to be bitter, it was the burned living scar in front of him, condemned by her own mother to this one room and a Hell of nightmares.

Something in him broke in sympathy, tears dissolving bits of the scabs on the cracked hand he was leaning over. Alessa shifted uncomfortably on the foot of the bed, then walked over to him.

"Look up - at me."

He took a deep breath, pulling back some composure, and looked up at the black-haired ghost, regarding him with a grim and unreadable gaze.

She reached out one hand and touched the center of his chest, and everything collapsed inward, the room blacking out into a spinning image of a crimson seal with three halos within, the blood humming in his veins taking on an alien chant, and a sudden awareness of the growing, infinite darkness that breathed beneath the town.

Then it broke back to reality, and the quiet room, the murmur of the machines and buzz of the lights, and Alessa standing over him.

"As long as you have that mark, the Nightmares won't bother you. Lisa will lead you back out to the exit."

And the apparition disappeared, leaving him alone with her near-corpse.