Chapter Text

Layton woke to the sense that someone was watching him.

Slowly, he opened one eye the barest sliver, two tentative fingers peering through shuttered blinds. Dawn was flaky and stiff as it spread through the room, still stretching sleep from the long limbed shapes that splayed over the walls and floor. It was a cold dawn, one made utterly colourless, as though to spite all those dawns that had come before it and all those who had anticipated a more splendorous end to night's thrall.

The thing watching him sat opposing, had scarlet eyes, and looked like Professor Sycamore

Slowly, Layton placed a hand upon the man's shoulder. With equal slowness, Descole's gaze—bright, blood red—moved; first to his brother's hand, then, with arched eyebrows, back to Layton's eyes. He looked almost amused.

"Something wrong, Layton?" It was chilling, the difference between the alter's voice, the jarring suddenness with which it would become acerbic and unaccountably bitter.

That look in his eyes felt like a coolly appraising hand tilting Layton's face this way and that. Perhaps it was the result of so often wearing a mask, or perhaps just some disturbing quirk of being a secondary personality, but Descole's eyes never looked quite right. In an almost undefinable way, they were too still, too stiff; the emotions in them snagged and stayed for longer than they were supposed to. It was both mesmerising and unsettling.

"I want to go look at the graveyard," Descole announced, after too long a moment. "It's the only bit of this dreary little place I've not seen yet."

Everything was incredibly dull to Descole. Layton wondered if he even had the capacity to appreciate something unrelated to his goals, whether he was genuinely so miserable or simply incapable. Maybe that was the flaw in his creation, in his immutable focus.

"We can arrange it, I'm sure," Layton agreed. "It's on the way to the house. A detour shouldn't take us too long." Descole nodded, his attention falling away like mist only moments later. Absentmindedly, he squeezed Layton's wrist, removed it from his shoulder, and vanished.

Layton glanced towards the table, still strewn with the detritus of last night's investigation. Overlaying the orderly stacks of letters (sorted, now, by sender and date) was a piece of paper, much larger in proportion, that, when Layton edged closer, was revealed to be a map of the area, with locations circled in red.

There was Maidenhull, its border almost perfectly circular, but it's lack of red adornment seemed to indicate it was of secondary importance. Of far more interest was a spot a few miles away, a place that the map seemed to think should be perfectly empty; a place that was unremarkable but for the ink that marked it in more of Sycamore's peculiar cipher and long lines that connected it to a city on the periphery of the map, just shy of falling off the world.

Folsense.

The Professor felt eyes on his back.

They dressed and departed the inn without much conversation. Yesterday had been full of uncommon brightness and perhaps this morning sought to rectify that, for it was entirely and enduringly grey. If he had been with Desmond, there might have been some passing statements about the weather, the night before and the day ahead, or some idle thought or story that had occurred to him, but Descole was not like that. Walking with him was like walking alongside a spectre, even when he wasn't wearing his cloak and mask; the living ghost of someone Layton should have known.

Not for the first time, Layton was struck by the feeling that he didn't really understand Descole, that no matter how close he became to Sycamore, the alter would always, in some ways, be a stranger to him. And that he would always be the same to Descole; an ally, not a friend, not a brother. It was an eerie feeling, one not made any better by the earliness of the hour.

A light mist dusted the village and though bars of sunlight pierced its soft contours, it showed no interest in actually dissipating. It was a soft fog, dewy and young, like warm breath, and nebulous shapes flitted through its amorphous swells, despite the fact that nothing was moving. The streets they walked through were empty, and just as he couldn't have imagined them without hoards of people before, it was now impossible for Layton to believe anyone but themselves had ever stood here.

"It's too quiet," Descole said suddenly, words sharp and bitten. Layton listened to the air, then rather wished he hadn't; the land through which they walked was stubbled with bushland, with the occasional spindly, sun-bleached tree raising its limbs into the blank white sky. Under the growing light of day, there should have been some life to the place, birds, insects, animals, something, the innocent guileless rustle of things in the undergrowth. The lack, once noticed, was hideous. Still, neither spoke; Descole's strong voice had sounded thready, half-dead in his throat, and Layton didn't want to hear what the vacuum did to his own.

They continued on. The quiet grew heavier, and the mist grew denser, and still neither spoke.

Presently, they came to that point at which the road divided, with the more meticulously maintained headed towards the Holt residence, and it's tangle-down, pebble-strewn partner veering rebelliously off towards the distant grey spires of the graveyard, which were impossible to see in the fog. There was no marker, no road sign of any sort to indicate which way to those without some prior instruction, and, if one listened carefully, the subtle and continuous mumble of water over rocks came forbiddingly from the direction of the graveyard.

Their short walk to the source brought no variance in the sound, it's undulating warble constant in tone and, inexplicably, volume. A stream, about ten feet wide and stony, it's surface disarrayed by every quirk and ridge in its bed, rapid as though restless. Shallow, perhaps a only hand's breadth deep, but swift and purposeful, it was pure as daylight and made of cold. Interspersed throughout were large, flat sones, over which the contentious waters would occasionally run in giddy swells. Beyond it was the gate to the cemetery in all its macabre glory.

There was something...strange, about the front of the gate.

Appearing almost eager, the first real emotion he had expressed, Descole skipped easily across the stepping stones, steps uncanny in their lightness. Layton followed at a more reserved pace. The water had made the little causeway quite slick, and he shouldn't have liked to be swept away so early in the day.

Perhaps there should have been some occasion once the other side had been reached, the great iron gate flinging itself wide in capitulatory welcome or some such fancy, or perhaps it was foolish to even half anticipate reward. Regardless, the outcome was the same; the two brothers stood on the far bank, who's shores only offered a few feet of safety from the water, looking up at a locked gate whose iron demeanour and accompanying plaque lent it a supercilious air, closed with self-possessed authority.

The part of Layton that wasn't disheartened at being refused entry by an inanimate object took to looking around at the very little there was to see. A few scraggly bushes eked out a living at the foot of the fence, so similar in colour to the steel one could be forgiven for assuming them roots, as though the cemetery, in its own grey-dead fashion, were a living, growing thing. Lichen, butter bright and startling, clustered on every nook that was not reached by the harsh, moorland winds. Within the graveyard itself, there were disorderly ranks of headstones, disheveled with ivy and wreathed in colourful flowers, reduced to smudges of colour and ropes of shade by the mist. Layton squinted; there was an odd variance in the colour of the dirt within the graveyard, in trench-like slits, each roughly the size of a man. It was too distant for any meaningful distinction to be drawn, however.

On the leftmost post of the gate, a grand affair of stone that looked unbefittingly blocky besides the elegant needles of the fence, there was a plaque, metal, worn and worried by the hungry teeth of too many years, it's lettering verdigris blue, the screws pinning it in place bleeding crimson rust.

Descole, in all his immense frustration, was examining the lock of the fate as though it had done him some personal injustice. If it had been a simple matter of a padlock, he would have gained entry easily. Even a sturdier lock could have been dealt with, but the puzzling contraption withholding the cemetery from visitors was not something he knew what to do with at all.

In all likelihood, it was simply some strange act of ornamentation. The rest of the divider was so sparsely decorated, however, that this uncanny addition was almost a grotesquerie. More than useless or confounding, it was unsettling.

On the front of the gate, where there would usually be a lock of some kind, two hands of stone clasped each other in a fond and eternal embrace. There was no seam by which to separate them, and their fingers were all intertwined, bound to one another until some erosion more permanent than death took them. Nor was there any apparent attachment; they sprouted from the surrounding steel of the bars as though their existence were...organic.

Both hands were finely carved, exquisitely detailed; never had stone looked more like flesh.

There was no keyhole. Perhaps this shouldn't have come as a shock—there are, as Descole knew well, plenty of other ways to lock a door—but after a thorough examination failed to reveal any puzzle or trick sequence the door would yield to instead, Descole was left at a loss. The hands gripped each other, marble pale fingers locked tight in endless solidarity against him, as though each had taken a vow of silence for the other and held on now in promise.

There was no keyhole, and yet the graveyard sat beyond; there had to be a way in.

"It's no good." Descole straightened from his investigation, startling Layton slightly. "I'm afraid we wasted a journey."

"Are you certain?" Descole stepped back and allowed The Professor to conduct his own cursory investigation. "Well, that is certainly an...innovative lock. How peculiar."

"Indeed." Descole gave a dismissive sniff, mind already flitting towards other things. "There must be a caretaker or undertaker who still has business in this place. We will ask them for the keys after we've spoken to Lillian." So saying, he turned about and took off across the stepping stones as lightly as he'd come. The water seemed to laugh as it leapt in little bounds to catch at his heels.

Layton took one last look at the scene, eyes lingering on the aged plaque, before he too departed.

This cemetery contains the remains of those who died in the disaster of 1748.
This plaque remains to commemorate our loss.

~Charles Bennington, Mayor of Maidenhull 1749~

•~*~•

A result of the increasing mist, they came upon the Holt residence rather suddenly, it's non-linear configuration of walls and sloping roofs looming imperiously over the white-blanketed grounds as though it intended to upbraid them for their presumptuous entry to its domain. Silver shapes danced in the windows, neither inside nor out, less than illusion. Everything close enough to be visible had a wet gleam, like the glimmer of eyes in torchlight, and seemed more real somehow, weightier, dense with mist. Trees, with leaves like pieces of wet cloth drooping from branches that had shrunk to impressionists art, black streaks on the ever undulating white, leant close to each other and exchanged secrets in gnarled voices.

The mist saved them from the House's uncanny strangeness, and yet it was just as unwelcoming a place as yesterday. Greyscale and glossy, it looked like old teeth, sat snaggletoothed in a dislocated jaw, all askew and displaced. Everything was off, even the things that weren't immediately visible.

There were no lights in the windows, where they should have glowed jewel-bright in their startling array of colour. Instead, the house sat there, it's face dull-eyed, the windows dark. The quiet had snuck inside and filled up the rooms like iced water.

Three times The Professors knocked on the door, and immediately they could tell no one was inside. The ghost of the knock reverberated throughout each hollow hall of the house, echoing off of uncaring walls, unlistening furniture. For some reason, the second the knocker hit the plate, the image that flashed to the forefront of Layton's mind was of the painting in the study, of the family, their glassy eyes staring ahead, inattentive but undeniably present. Every other noise had sounded muffled by the silence; the rap of the knocker was bitingly sharp.

No footsteps came from inside. Their only response was a deepening of the quiet, their isolation stretching for miles around them, a world empty of birdsong and morning's golden light.

The Professor felt a shiver run through the narrow of his bones. This early in the morning, it was almost unreasonable to expect Lillian to be away from home. So where was she?

The house stared ahead, windows dark, it's secrets clamped between obstinate plaster teeth.

"I don't like this," Descole snapped, unconsciously voicing Layton's own creeping fears. He seemed jumpier, never looking in one direction for long, irises the bright scarlet of fresh blood. He, too, was innately unsettling, and a combination of the mist and the proximity to the aberrant house made the way he moved so much more uncanny, marionette-sharp as he moved over to one of the emerald windows to the front hall. Layton seized his arm before it could achieve whatever intentions it had; there was a lock pick, lean and sly, between its fingers.

"Please tell me you aren't seriously considering breaking in to our client's house?"

"For someone who has seen the broad extent of things I'm willing to do, you seem awfully surprised about this." Irately, Descole shook off The Professor's constraining grip. "Unhand me, Layton. I will not be impeded."

Layton took a step back, conveniently placing himself before the window.

"Now, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this," he placated. "What we cannot afford is losing Lilian's trust over something as insignificant as an unanswered house-call. For once, be rational."

"What do you suggest then, Layton?" Lifeless tundras had more warmth than his voice, but there was curiosity there too, and regard, however muted.

"If she is out, she cannot have gone far. Indeed, unless something compelled her to walk out on to the moors, there's only one other place she could be. Why don't you wait here, to meet her if she returns, and I'll head back in to the village to search for her?" For a long moment, Descole said nothing. When he did respond, it was a quick, sharp nod, like a knife severing a rope, though his mouth stayed set in its thin, disapproving line.

"Be on your guard."

Layton shivered. There was a changeling quality to Descole's pretence at times like this; in every aspect of dress and expression, he was Sycamore, with nothing about him indicating otherwise, save for the absolute dead-cold of his eyes. They were deepest scarlet, and entirely without warmth, and he felt them on the back of his head until long after he passed beyond their sight. It was a guilty relief to be away.

•~*~•

Descole was quite convinced that Layton had not seen the thing following them.

Whatever it was had appeared after they turned back onto the main path, this skeletal reminder of mortality dogging their heels like graveyard dirt on their shoes. But where even the most persistent mud could be scraped away, left behind in drips and drags until there was nothing left at all, this thing was relentless in its pursuit. It had found a quiet and comfortable home in Descole's peripherals and would not be dissuaded from its self-appointed post, ever present, consistent in both distance and placing at all times, a sentinel.

And here it was now, standing shamelessly on the path Layton had disappeared down, bold and striking as sunlight. So long as he could see it, Descole reasoned to himself, Layton would be fine; nothing could be in two places at once, not even something such as...this...

Perhaps, at one time, this thing had been recognisable as something beyond an abomination, but such was not the case now. It had the gaunt appearance of an ancient sculpture, who's face has been ravaged by all depravities of weather, and subjected to every shameless and brutal rigour of time, until what is left is the most meagre representation of what was intended, reduced and almost featureless. But this was not a statue, who could have borne such disgrace with somber dignity, it was a face. A person's face. What was left of a person's face.

It's eyes—immense, lamp-like protrudences, an unsettling shade of amber—were fixed upon his own with a singular intensity. It was as though they had been crafted solely for the purpose of watching him and now, this task accomplished, were unable to stop.

Seeing it more clearly—indeed, in its entirety—was, in no way whatsoever, a relief. While the face might have passed, however tenuously, for some interpretive take on humanity from someone who had never met another person, that was the extent of the association. It's neck was elongated and reduced to functions—the pulsing channel of its throat obscene, wrapped in a delicate lacery of blood-bright veins, bare of both muscle and flesh—and the configuration of its body resembled something anatomically close to a dog, but made of bare bone and with organs stiff as starched linen, all of it horribly active.

Descole was not a religious man but, at that moment, he sincerely wished there were some deity present, so he could ask it to justify having this putrefaction of life exist.

For a long moment, the thing did not move.

Then, it did, and as hideous as it had looked stationary, it was infinitely worse in motion, the impossibility of it exposed further with every shift. It was coming closer.

No act of evolution, or order of society, no aspect of humanity had prepared for the day it came face to face with this, and so, for a long moment, Descole stood appalled. Then, in a fit of ill-advised bravery, he retaliated, beginning to walk in steps as steady as he could make them towards the creature, certain they would meet in the middle.

But, at that first step, the creature drew back. That unbreakable distance between them stretched like a kind no-man's-land; clearly, he had been expected to withdraw.

To withdraw from the thing. From the house it guarded.

Descole took another step, this time towards the door, and found the creature once more in his way, his mirror and perfect opposition.

For a long while, they continued in that vein, a pitter-patter, cat-and-mouse chase, roles exchanged with regularity; one moment, the thing would be the pursuer, the next it would switch. The only consistency was, again, the distance between them, one always in sight of the other. Every sensibility raged against the pursuit, every fibre of him shrieking abnegation, but there was such a calamitous joy in it that he could do nothing else.

So they continued, the thing always dancing just a step beyond him, behind him, always out of reach, a grim omnipresence in every direction he span.

Until, suddenly, it wasn't.

Descole stopped, enveloped in mist that had grown in opacity to such a degree that it now gathered about him like fabric, with ruffles and folds all incredibly tangible despite their nonexistence. The creature was...gone. In all the world, there was only himself, the ground beneath his feet, the skeletal sketch of a tree nearby, and a corner of the house.

The small part of his mind that was still Sycamore blanched that he'd sent Layton out in to this.

Descole banished those ideas before they had opportunity to form in any distinction; now was not the time for divided attentions. It was here somewhere, it had to be, it—

He could still see a section of the house. From out of the window stared that terrible head, stained lurid shades from the glass. Descole couldn't be sure of his sight's accuracy, but the way the segments of glass warped the head made it look like it was smiling.

The window swung open under his hand, sweetly inviting.

The thing inside stared at him, silhouetted by the doorway now, just within seeing distance.

Against every shrieking instinct, Descole pursued.