Chapter 13: The Baldwin residence
The entrance to the house on Munson Street was a small, unremarkable door in a grey wall with barbed-wire running along the top. Beth parked next to the narrow sidewalk, and she and Dean stepped out of the Honda. "I used to be afraid of this house when I was a kid," Dean said, slamming the car door.
"You are still afraid," Doctor reminded him.
"Everyone said it was haunted," Dean continued.
"Haunted by who?" Beth said as she walked up to the brown metal door in the concrete wall. There wasn't any kind of knob or handle, but fortunately, it was already ajar.
"Mr. Baldwin and his daughter Amy. She died on his birthday – fell out of a window - and his wife left him half a year later. I heard he killed himself afterwards," Dean informed.
With half-numb fingertips, Beth pushed the door open, revealing a decrepit front yard on the other side. A jungle of weed rose above the thick snow. The entrance to the house itself was a pair of elaborately carved double doors in the wall of a short veranda. Huge cobwebs were suspended over the shadowy corners.
"Yeah, it's a haunted mansion allright," Beth said.
They walked across the cramped yard and up to the porch. Beth expected the double doors to creak ominously, but they turned out to open without the slightest noise. The duo stepped into an entrance hall with a cobweb-shrouded chandelier hanging from the high ceiling. Two narrow balconies ran along the left and right walls at the second floor, four wooden doors at their ends.
A torn page of ruled, yellow paper lay on the table on the ground floor's middle. Beth picked it up and looked at the date. "This was written five years ago. Looks like a kid's handwriting," she commented and began reading aloud: "Dear Diary, today is my burthday and Dad gave me this diary caus I am so good at writing in school. My name is Louise Barkin and today I am 8 yeers old. My dads name is Joseph and my moms name is Patricia. They are vary nice to me. My sisters name is Sharon and I love her vary much." Below the entry was a drawing of the typical family of four stick figures, standing in front of their crude house. A yellow sun in the upper left corner smiled wryly.
"Was that from … Louise's diary?" Dean said.
"Of course it's her diary. I have no idea what it's doing here, though." Beth frowned and placed the yellow scrap back on the table.
Entering through the double doors opposite the house entrance, Beth and Dean found themselves in a wide living room. Couches and easy chairs were gathered around a coffee table. A fireplace in the back wall was covered with an iron plate, the terse explanation 'Do Not Use' scrawled with chalk on the black surface. To secure the plate further, a padlock hung from the left side. It had five number-wheels, each with all nine digits, for vertically lining up the code.
"Well, we might as well start looking for that red book," Beth suggested and began scanning the bookshelves. There were plenty of poem collections and travel guides with red backs, but Beth doubted any of those were necessary for some obscure ceremony.
"I don't think we're going to find something like that just lying about in an ordinary living room," Dean said, trying the other doors. The first one had a broken lock, but the second one opened into a dining room about half as large as the living room. It was cozily decorated with relaxing landscape paintings, a grandfather clock and numerous porcelain dogs and cats on the antique sideboard. The dining table was covered by a white cloth and set with three lit candles and 26 plates.
Mister and Dean gasped, while Doctor remained calm, as the trio's communal eyes fell on the unappetizing dinner on the plates. "Uh, Beth? I … I think you s-should …"
But Beth had already forgotten about the bookshelves and stood next to Dean in the door frame, staring at the plates. The table was shaped in a long rectangle, with one golden plate at the far short end, eleven normal plates at each long side and the last three plates at the nearest end. The golden plate was the only perfectly clean and empty one. The rest were stained with that bright red liquid which Beth and Dean had become so horribly familiar with during the last 24 hours.
Three of the plates – two in the far corners next to the gold plate and one on the middle of the nearest table end – were utterly filled with blood. Weird lumps floated on the middle of the crimson surfaces.
Beth stepped closer, the reek of rotting flesh slowly entering her nostrils. She let her index fingertip touch one of the stained plates for a brief, but sickening moment. The blood felt warm on her pale skin. "Ugh, it's fresh," she said. "Talk about soup du jour"
As soon as the words had left her mouth, Beth inwardly scolded herself for making such a dumb joke about something so seriously fucked-up. How could she act coolly faced with these horrors? "It's this place, Beth, it's starting to get to you …"
'Soup du jour' wasn't part of even Doctor's vocabulary, so Dean didn't get Beth's dry comment, not that he was too interested. "What are those … things, in the middle of the plates?" he asked, pointing to the lumps floating on the three soup surfaces.
"How should I know?" Beth gingerly reached out and poked one of the lumps. It twitched spasmodically and raised its muscular tip, saliva dripping into the soup. Beth let out a brief shriek and recoiled from the table.
"It's … it's a human tongue," Dean said. "Three human tongues in three soups of blood."
"What the fuck have they been up to in here?" Beth burst out.
Dean shrugged in reply.
"Let's get out of here." The duo returned to the living room and Beth walked past the padlocked fireplace to the last door they hadn't tried yet. It opened into an empty room with a staircase to her immediate right. Beth froze at the sound of a little girl's laughter and running footsteps echoing from a landing above. The woman's wide eyes scanned upwards, but the staircase was deserted.
Beth knit her brows and followed the stairs up. Dust whirled off the banister as her left hand slid along the dark wood. "Good thing Shelley didn't come with us," she remarked.
"Shelley?" Dean said behind her.
"That woman with the fear of stairways. Don't you remember her?"
"Oh, yeah. I just didn't …" Dean trailed off, noticing the book and house map placed on a step between the first and second landings.
Beth took the map of the Baldwin mansion and tucked it in her pocket, thinking it would come in handy later. She then picked up the book and glanced at the brown cover. "Well, it's not that red book we're looking for. This looks like a childrens' fairy tale collection."
The duo proceeded up the stairs to a square room with one wooden door in each wall. Dean tried the doors while Beth checked out the fairy tale book. "There's a story here called 'The King's Dinner'. Once upon a time, there was an old and clever King who needed some new knights to assist in his wars and quests," Beth read aloud. "Many young men from all over the kingdom showed up at the King's castle, hoping that they were strong and brave enough to be knighted. The King picked 25 of these men and invited them for a grand dinner that evening.
The King sat at one end of the table, and an empty gold plate was set in front of him. The 25 men sat in the right alphabetic order around the table – number 1 to the King's right and number 25 to the King's left. And the plates in front of the men contained blood and human tongues instead of normal soup."
Dean, who had now found that all the doors were locked, turned around with a surprised look on his face. "That's just like what we found in the dining room!"
Beth nodded and held out the book, so they could both silently read the rest of the tale:
The men stared at the dinner in disgust. One of them asked why the King's plate was empty.
"Sadly, I have fallen a tad ill and do not feel hungry tonight," the King answered. "But this is my favorite dish, so please, eat your fill."
The men instantly began to eat the tongues and drink the blood, pretending to enjoy the repulsive taste. They told the King that it was the most delicious food they had ever eaten. Only three of them refused to touch the strange meal.
When the dinner was over, the King said that he would only knight the three men who had not eaten.
"Why?!" said the men who had eaten up. They were very disappointed and angry.
"Because I would rather have good, honest souls by my side than despicable liars," the King explained.
The three men were then knighted, while the remaining 22 were punished by execution. The King had their tongues cut off and their blood tapped, so it could all be served for dinner the next time he needed to find new knights.
The End
"Huh? What the hell kind of fairy tale is that?!" Beth said.
"It is not merely a fairy tale," Doctor began. Dean listened to the Doctor's explanation and a smile of understanding appeared on his face. He hurried down the stairs, through the living room and back to the macabre dining table.
"What are you doing?" Beth asked.
Dean's reply was nothing more than silence. He slowly walked around the table and pointed to the first plate to the right of the golden one. It was filled with the scarlet soup, and the human tongue lay in the middle. "The men sat in the right alphabetic order around the table – number 1 to the King's right, and number 25 to the King's left," he quoted, pointing to the other blood-filled plate to the left of the gold plate. "That's 1, and that's 25. Then there's just one knight left who didn't touch his soup …"
Dean walked back to the other end of the table, counting the plates until he reached the third and last one that still contained the unappetizing dinner. "Number 11. So it's 1, 11, 25." He rushed past Beth and back to the living room, where he crouched down in front of the padlocked fireplace. "1, 11, 25," he repeated, turning the wheels to line up the five digits.
The lock clicked and the iron plate swung open.
"Well, it's clever that you found a way to unlock it, but a fire's really the last thing we need right now," Beth said. "Err … What are you looking at?"
Dean had stuck his head into the fireplace and was gazing upwards. Beth crouched down beside him and peeked into the chimney. It turned out there was a rusty ladder leading to an opening in the wall farther up. Dean crawled into the fireplace and out of Beth's range of vision.
"Hey, wait for me!" Beth followed him through the chimney. The bars felt warm and fragile as she used them to climb up the shaft. She couldn't help noticing the brownish handprints on each of the bars – too small to have been left by Dean. "And that colour – it's like dried blood …" Beth shuddered and started climbing faster.
The room at the top turned out to be a small garden. A dismal grey gleam filtered through the fog above and seeped through the skylight pane to illuminate the acacia plants. Dean kneeled in front of a gravestone at the back wall and read the epitaph. "I think this is where he buried his daughter," he concluded.
"And dug her up again?" Beth said, gesturing to the deep, rectangular hole before the headstone. An empty child-size coffin rested on the bottom. Small footprints of dried blood led from the hole to the ladder.
Dean nodded, staring at the contrast of pitchblack soil in the middle of green grass. Suddenly, he noticed a third colour lying in the grass – a yellowish scrap of paper. He picked it up and felt a piece of warm metal taped to the back. Turning the paper around, he carefully removed the small key and read the tag.
"What's that for?" Beth asked.
"It says 'First Floor Study'," Dean said, tucking the key into his pocket. "And this piece of paper looks like another part of Louise's diary …"
Beth walked up behind Dean to read the torn page over his shoulder. This entry was from four years ago, about one year after Louise had gotten the diary for her birthday.
Dear Diary, today we went to Lakeside amusement park but mom and dad were yelling a lot at eechother so it wasnt very fun. Dad said Mom is scruwing around, I wonder what that meens? Sharon wont sleep in her room anymore becaus she is afraid there is a monster in the bed. I dont think theres a monster there. but I let her sleep in the chair in my room.
There was another drawing below the entry, depicting a bed with two pillows and a teddy bear. The words 'its safe Sharon!' were written at the end of an arrow pointing to the mattress. "The Bedridden …" Beth shivered, putting two and two together. "In the Otherworld, people's thoughts and ideas take physical shape," Louise had explained. "Their most wonderful dreams and worst nightmares just appear all of a sudden."
"What's the Bedridden?" Dean said, vaguely curious.
Beth's mind raced back to the current situation and she realized she had spoken the creature's nickname out loud. "You really don't want to know," she answered and produced the map of the house. "Now, which room was that key for?"
"The study, on the first floor."
Beth's index finger traced their route on the map – through the dining room, across a hallway and into the room marked 'Study'. "That shouldn't be too hard to find," she said, tucked the map into her pocket and climbed back down the ladder.
The duo quickly made their way back to the dining room. The 26 plates were now perfectly clean, and it was nigh impossible to picture to oneself how they could ever have contained a cannibalistic meal. Reflections of the three candles' flames danced on the white china. "It's … gone," Beth breathed, pointing out the obvious. "All that blood …"
Dean nodded and walked up to the door to their immediate right, turning the knob. He looked back over his shoulder, annoyed. "Are you gonna keep standing there?"
Beth tore herself away from the astonishing sight and followed Dean through the door. The T-shaped hallway beyond was located just south of the entrance hall. The door adjacent to the dining room wouldn't open, but Dean unlocked it with the key he had found in the hidden garden.
The study was a dark, dusty room with an even more depressing atmosphere than the rest of the house. Bookshelves filled with bulky encyclopedias and scriptures lined the walls. Beth started examining the tomes while Dean stepped past a half-open door in the back wall and entered what was marked as the bedroom on the house map. However, there was no furniture in there apart from a single table in the middle. Torn gift-wrapping paper, an empty box and a birthday card lay on the mahogany surface.
Meanwhile, Beth had noticed that one of the upper shelves only consisted of 26 books, each with a single letter on its back. They were clearly placed in alphabetic order, starting with A at the left end and Z at the far right. Beth began pulling out random books. They all stopped about an inch from the shelf and wouldn't move farther no matter how hard she pulled. "It has to be another combination lock …"
"Dean, what were those numbers for the padlock?"
"1, 11, 25," the man said, returning to the study from the bedroom that lacked a bed.
… The men sat in the right alphabetic order around the table – number 1 to the King's right, and number 25 to the King's left …
Beth counted up to the letters of the alphabet.
Number 1, A.
Number 11, M.
Number 25, Y.
"Amy," Beth muttered. "Of course." She pushed back all the books she had randomly pulled out, and proceeded to pull the three correct books – spelling the name of Ernest Baldwin's late daughter.
'Click'
The entire shelf swung out and revealed another shelf concealed inside the wall. The books on the secret shelf were far more interesting than the rest of the room's written works combined. Beth ran her eyes over titles like 'The Descent of the Holy Mother' and 'Tome of the Seer', until she found a faded red back on the middle of the shelf.
Feeling somewhat like Eve plucking a forbidden apple, Beth reached for the shelf and snatched the unholy book. Her suspicion was confirmed when she saw the two words on the cover.
Crimson Ceremony
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A/N: Hmm, I'm not sure disembodied tongues can float in real life … but what the hell, this is Silent Hill. Oh, and if you're dying to see some new monsters, I promise the next chapter will introduce a new species … So tune in next week, -E.P.O.
