what's this two chapters in one month I must be pulling all-nighters but seriously I hope you all enjoy this.
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Alastor arrived at the general area where the Guills' house had been sometime around dawn. The long highways, the winding roads, the darkness, and subsequent light that faded and sometimes shone too brightly in the form of high, overhead lights, had turned his brain to a hyper-focused mush. Harry had been rather calm during the entire car ride, for which Alastor was incredibly grateful because he didn't know how cats took to the road. But he was a lazy cat, so he should've known.
In the time it took to arrive in that area of Louisiana, Alastor was blessed with the gift of no thoughts. The roads had stretched before him and numbed his brain.
It had been the first time since the whole thing with Anthony had happened, from when he had overdosed onwards, that he had felt that his brain was quiet. It felt better than sleeping, better than killing, and he knew that the road that he was taking was the correct one.
He was incredibly thankful for having ripped off the band-aid, called Adelaide, and immediately made his way to the house. He understood now that there was no other path he could've or should've taken. He felt a sort of lethargic calmness despite his energized limbs when he parked his car under the oppressive heat that he already found to be more stifling than the city's, and got out.
Despite modern wonders, roads, and technological advances, the United States was such a massive country, and Louisiana such a tangle of wild nature, that there were places that still could not be reached in any way other than on foot. Alastor would have to make his way in much the same manner that he had when he had gone to the Guills' for the last time with his adoptive parents.
There was something strange about that, though he didn't know what it was. His feet and legs carried him with a strange confidence that he didn't feel, knowing the way with far more certainty than his brain could've. If he had attempted to find the house by thinking about the path, he probably would've lost his way and become reptile bait.
As it was, he and Harry and his singular bag wound their way around the hazardous nature that surrounded the house, the nature which had not changed in decades, the nature under which three corpses, two loved and one detested, had now likely reached their final stage of decomposition. Alastor felt a strange pull to the place that he could not analyze correctly - he did not feel affection for the place where he had lain down the Cormiers, for they had been taken before their time.
This wild, untamed area only reminded him of the deepest pain that he had ever felt, the pain that he carried condensed into a ball within him, attempting to ignore it. He swiped at his forehead and hurried his pace - for Harry's sake, too, since he seemed to like the swamp even less than Alastor did.
The trek did do its job in one way - it kept Alastor's mind preoccupied with something other than his reunion with Adelaide and the house. However, the house came into focus painfully quickly, even though Alastor had been walking for hours (he suspected that his feet had lost the path and then regained it, at some point, rusted over with the years).
The sun was beginning to dip while still at its greatest height, so Alastor rushed to the blessed promise of the shade, knocking on the door expectantly, his heart down by his ankles.
Adelaide took her sweet time to come along and open the door for him, at which time Alastor was sweating bullets and cursing the lazy Harry who had demanded he carry him the entire way lest he dirty his paws on the swamp ground.
Spoiled creature, Alastor thought with some annoyance, since the cat felt like a furnace in the crook of his elbow, overheating him even further. When she opened the door, Alastor was fuming both in heat and in humor, forgetting just how much the humid heat could get to him, even when he was younger it had served to decimate him.
It seemed that Adelaide, in her apparent infinite wisdom even though before she had been younger than Alastor, had been prepared for his current mood, seen it in a crystal ball, so to speak.
She received him with something like the trace of a smirk on her lips and showed him in after forcing him to wipe his shoes on the mat. She eyed Harry with partial surprise and curiosity but picked him up and wiped his paws all the same as if she had known him her whole life.
Harry meowed at the liberties this stranger was taking. Alastor had almost completely forgotten how he had dreaded this very moment, but he was so exhausted that he didn't even have the time to aanalyzethe first proper interaction that he and Adelaide had had in years. As it was, the interaction was not much to speak of.
Adelaide offered him a glass of lemonade. Alastor quickly accepted it. She came out with the entire jug, and Alastor excused himself after drinking the whole lot in a flurry. He had sat down on the kitchen table, and due to his exhaustion, and the heat, he had barely even registered where he was.
He looked around at his surroundings while Adelaide worked in the kitchen, making some sort of concoction of a mysterious nature. He remembered the strange, often borderline sinister things that he saw Mr. Guills do, and decided not to ask about it.
All in all, he thought that the place looked the same. The house was in much the same condition as it had been the first time that he had come, after he had been buried, and now. Somehow, that felt wrong. Places, like people, were supposed to grow and change. It was like the ghost of all the people that had frequented this house kept on adding to its essence, to its very nature.
It was odd that Adelaide, living here all alone, should keep the house in precisely the same conditions that she had when there were three instead of one. Alastor made no mention of the condition of the house, finding it a little inappropriate even though it would've been normal to remark on how well-preserved it was.
He sat in complete silence as he finished his glasses of lemonade, having removed some of the ice cubes and rubbing them on his neck to cool down as Adelaide silently worked at whatever she was doing.
The quiet was well-established, and now Alastor felt the true full force of being back. "Tired?" Adelaide suddenly asked as Alastor came into a truer state of clarity. "Deathly," Alastor replied with a sigh. "The cat?" She asked as Harry curled himself around her legs - apparently, he liked bossy women, since he had taken to Adelaide with a wild quickness. "He's low-maintenance," Alastor lied. "If a gator gets 'im I ain't to blame," she told him. "Bed's made up in your old room," she added as a flyaway comment, still focused on her work. "Thank you," he replied. Your old room.
With something like second nature embedded into him in this house, Alastor picked up his things, his energy partially restored, and headed down the strangely old yet familiar hallways, the breath of all the lives lived and lost in the house sweeping down his neck.
When he got to what Adelaide had called his old room, he was struck by the sudden sensation of smallness. The room seemed peculiarly tiny compared to what he remembered of it, a little crooked, like a picture frame that someone had hung incorrectly. He was well aware that he was taller and older than when he had last been here, but he couldn't shake the feeling that there was something amiss, either in himself or in the house.
Still, despite all that, it was a comfort to be back here. He found that there weren't as many terrible memories as he might've thought. He said his things and sat down on the now too-small bed, grateful for the comfort after so many hours of unconscious and very uncomfortable driving.
He took off his shoes and lay down, contemplating. He fondly remembered how every single time that he had come here, after the afternoon walk that this place always required, he would come to this very room set his things down, and feel like he moving in slow motion, while an overheated sleep-covered him suddenly and without struggle… Alastor awoke as he usually did in this house, sticky, hot, and somehow even less refreshed than when he had arrived, though when he started to move around, he realized how revitalizing that nap had been.
As it always had been. It was as if the nap was one of those permanent things inside the house, one of those things that Adelaide had preserved. He left his room to find that the afternoon was leaking away from the sky and heard the gentle, tinkling noises of Adelaide cooking in the kitchen, and even humming to herself. That was certainly something he didn't know. He was willing to bet that Harry was with her, and he couldn't help but remember with a certain fondness of yet another Harry who had also been with her.
He felt a certain timidity wash over him as he approached the kitchen to re-greet Adelaide, feeling that this was their real first reencounter since he had been barely conscious when he had arrived. However, when he emerged in the kitchen and found her making something fragrant in a big pot, the shyness melted away, and he discovered that it was just him, and Adelaide, waiting for the soup to be done. She didn't even look up when he came in, so inherently casual was the nature of their dynamic. "You aged," she said curtly.
Alastor grinned a bit, sitting down on one of the kitchen chairs. "As people do," he said simply, ignoring that she had witnessed him coming out of the ground with the same face he had had two decades ago. She snorted, knowing that they both knew the truth. "How's New Orleans?" She asked. "Eventful," he replied. "How are things here?" "Uneventful," she said, popping the lid on the pot and suddenly turning around. "I'll get us some tobacco," she told him, and before Alastor could tell her he didn't smoke, she was gone.
She returned a few seconds later with her rolling equipment and sat down on a chair before him. "So, how bleak are things in the city that you had to come over here?" She asked, the hint of a bitter laugh edging on her tone. "I wouldn't say bleak… just lonely. Like everywhere." They were silent for a while after that before Alastor realized he was giving her non-answers for her perfectly valid questions. The type of charming imbecility he used in the city would be ridiculous here, and he felt a bit of his persona being rubbed away. "Truth be told, I needed to come here. I don't know exactly why, but I did," he explained cautiously, needing to get used to the weird feeling of telling the truth to someone, of exposing himself.
It was strange, it made him feel like the very ground beneath him was shaky. "Hm. I can understand that," Adelaide said. "Sometimes I feel the opposite - that I need to leave here," she told him, a glaze coating her eyes as she finished rolling her cigarette. "You could always come to visit me," Alastor offered half-heartedly. She finally fixed her gaze on him. There were a few seconds, just a few seconds, in which the two of them maintained eye contact, where it seemed as though Adelaide could see right through him.
Alastor found himself wondering whether she knew. Was it possible that she could tell, just by the way that he sat, just by the look in his eyes, that he was a serial murderer? Could she perceive the darkness inside of him, the darkness that he had only barely had a smidgeon of when they had been children?
It was very possible because she had perceived that same darkness, having been the first person that he saw when he was released from the earth. She knew that he had killed Carmelita, and had tortured her and her family, but if his memory served him right, she had not taken it as something necessarily bad.
Granted, the whole episode with Carmelita had been the true awakening of something deep and terrible within him. But there was not a single part of him that was not proud of what he had done. Other things, however… well, that was another story. "Somehow, that feels like it's out of the question," Adelaide said simply, and without a hint of resentment to her tone.
Alastor let out a breath. It was likely that she did know - what was he going to do? Invite her over to drink eyeball martinis? Was he going to tell her, that he got into a ketchup battle when he returned home with a splatter of blood on his clothes, with a scent of metal on him, the smell of death and rot?
He didn't even want to expose her to that, no matter how she acted, or how morally grey she appeared to be. "Well, you know the drill," she suddenly stated, bringing her hands together as if they had been discussing the weather, dismissing the whole thing just like that, getting his scrawny ass up to set the table.
He was asked to fetch things and put them away, and when they sat down, he found that the soup was so delicious he couldn't speak at all. Alastor didn't want to analyze the psychological implications of it, but it felt sort of good to be back in a dynamic where some lady was bossing him around, one that he was a little bit scared of because deep down he did respect Adelaide.
He just didn't know her anymore. It was sure enough, however, that old Rose had done her best to raise her, and if he were to judge only by her outer appearance, and the limited interactions that they had had, Alastor was certain that Adelaide was a strong woman. They ate in relative silence. Adelaide asked, with quite a bit of caution, what his job was.
Alastor didn't know what she had been expecting, for him to come out and say that he was a serial killer by profession. She seemed rather surprised that he was on the radio, but then she seemed to recall that he had always had an affinity for the electronics that were, of course, technically behind his time.
Once Adelaide had confirmed that he was not some insane psychopath who had isolated himself in a brothel and dedicated himself to killing women in the street, it seemed that she relaxed a little bit in front of him. She broke out the bread, forced him to dip it in his soup, and gave him both alcohol and iced tea, both of which he usually didn't drink but felt obligated to accept, and by the end of the meal, she seemed much more at ease with him than before. She was just a person who was not used to having company.
They were chatting quite placidly after dinner, with long periods of silence in between, for neither of them was the type of person who felt the need to fill silences unnecessarily, and only spoke when they truly wanted to talk to the other. Adelaide was smoking and having a whiskey soda while Alastor politely sipped on his own when Adelaide suddenly fixed her intense gaze on him again.
It appeared to him that he could always perceive when she was about to say something very relevant, despite the years and the distance. The only two survivors, he thought again, not without a little bit of a morbid feeling. "I know what you came here for," she suddenly stated after a small period of silence. "Oh?" He asked, genuinely interested - not even he knew what he had come here for, as he had told her. All of a sudden, Adelaide stood up without much explanation.
Alastor watched her back as she faded into one of the other rooms of the house, and he suddenly started hearing things moving. His heart began thumping - was she doing what he thought she was doing? The night had grown considerably colder than the day had been, so cold that it was not out of the question for Adelaide to build a fire.
But there was something so ritualistic, so memory-striking about the simple act of hearing logs being chucked into a hearth that made Alastor almost nervous. He sat, alone on the kitchen table, listening to the faint sounds of Adelaide working in the other rooms.
It wasn't just that she had built the fire and lit it, she was removing different things from different places, and then accommodating them in the living room.
All of this Alastor could hear with his sharp ears from the kitchen, and in his mind, he could almost look at her as she arranged all of the little trinkets that the Guills had always used. It brought back memories of him, Guidry, and Ren sitting on the porch, smoking and drinking as the women set up the space for what would take place later in the evening.
Alastor briefly wondered if that same crocodile still frequented the body of water that surrounded the Guill's home. In a much shorter time than he remembered, because when he had been younger, those moments on the porch as he waited for everything to be complete seemed eternal to him, Adelaide suddenly came into the kitchen, her cheeks a little bit flushed through her dark skin, actually looking excited. "Well, come on, then.
I haven't had a chance to do this in years," she said, and he could hear the anticipation in her voice. Alastor himself could hardly wait, and when he stepped into the living room and went to that same old sofa that had swallowed him so many times, he understood that Adelaide was right, that this was what he had come for.
So many times, in the most critical of moments, the visions that he had been given while on his trips had been crucial in grounding him in what was, and what had to be. "Can't do this sort of thing alone, nohow," she said, shaking her head, a little smile creeping on her lips. Alastor asked himself why he needed a mental breakdown to come to visit her - she truly was a lovely woman. Strong, sturdy, intelligent, silently having learned much from solitude.
But he knew that she had been marked, like him, and that the comfort of another's company was a privilege that neither of them had been born with. "Will you be alright? I seem to remember a certain time when Molly had to" "Aw, come on, I was young," Adelaide refuted with a laugh, making Alastor laugh, in turn, with how serious it had seemed when she had had a bad trip.
He didn't realize it, but it was the first time he had been able to think of Molly without the picture of her with a hole in her head. "Alright, come, sit," she urged, and Alastor giddily sat on one of the couches, looking around with childish amazement at all the different colored rocks and things that Adelaide had brought out, in much the way that the adults (for adults they still were to Alastor, even though he and Adelaide were the only adults, now) had done it, but with her little touches to it, her slight differences. "I think the spirits don't like being neglected, but they know the rules as well as I do - can't do it alone, just in case," she said, a small smile on her lips.
Alastor was happy that this would not just help him, but Adelaide also. It must've been painful for her not to be able to share voodoo with anyone, since all those that had known of that ancient practice had passed and left no one behind.
A sudden, dark thought came to Alistair. Would he be able to properly communicate now that he had touched what was not meant to be touched? Now that he felt that his soul had been thoroughly corrupted? What something bad happen to him if he attempted this? Well, if it did, it would simply be the end of him.
He had come here for something to happen, and that was that. At first, he had thought that the day of reckoning would be dictated by what Adelaide would think of him, whether she would shut him out for his filthy mind and his terrible soul, or whether she would accept him as he was. But he had realized that Adelaide was not the person that he was meant to be seeking respite from.
It was not her fault, but she could not give him what he needed, a true awakening, true answers, something real yet intangible to hold, something that did not just come from the warped passages of his mind. Oh, how vividly he remembered that crimson smoke curling up into the air, that taste in his mouth, tart, inherently belonging to this place, yet to another time.
The sound of Adelaide playing a strange, metallic instrument, very simple, like a whistle, was almost like a calling to him. Suddenly, the setting, tastes, and smells, seemed to place him back into his old body. Granted, on a more technical level, his body had not changed all that much from his earlier days, even though now he had the body of a man.
But he felt that if the soul existed before the body, and the soul was that which dictated what the body was like, then it had changed radically. But now, here he was, strangely enough almost Harry again. Even though he lived with a cat that he had named Harry, he was so alienated from his original name, from his original life, that he had almost forgotten that people had addressed him by that name, that some people had even loved him by that name.
He could certainly feel the presence of his old glasses against his nose, he becoming smaller, his shoulders slighter, the lighting even warmer and fuzzier, the way that it had looked all those times that he had come here with his parents. When he looked over at Adelaide, he was not surprised to find that she, too, had reverted to the state in which he had originally known her.
She was so young, and she suddenly seemed shrunken. He had forgotten how scared and fragile she had once been, almost as shockingly as he realized that he had forgotten how scared and fragile he had been.
He didn't even question all the things that he was seeing, that he was feeling. All the different times that he had done this with many different people had finally taught him how to ride this particular wave, and he knew what he was here for, he suddenly understood that no spirit would reject him, they were simply there for communication. Sure, like people, some spirits might reserve themselves for the morally superior. But, also like people, they tend to like the interesting, and the complex above all.
Alastor thought that he understood all about spirits at that time, though in truth he knew nothing, and so he simply closed his eyes and allowed himself to be taken away by any which one that would grasp him. When he opened his eyes - well, even before he opened his eyes he knew that he wasn't in Kansas anymore.
In any case, upon opening them, he found himself in a rather tall, rather long hallway. It had that distinct hallway characteristic that they always have in dreams, wherein they're strangely stretched and vague on all the sharp corners that they should have.
There was a curling mist surrounding the entire hallway, and Alastor was right at the end of it. Due to the incredible length, and the light mist that was coating it, he could not fully see to the other side. He looked around, a little bit confused.
There was a distinct, almost red light that was emanating from the entire space, though there were no windows, he had the strangest feeling that the air here was different, worse. "He's the Radio Demon…" he heard from far off, somewhere very far ahead in this infinite hallway.
The voice was faint, and he couldn't discern whether it was supposed to be male or female. He started to walk towards the source, so it was a fairly daunting task since the hallway seemed to have no end.
As he walked, he realized that there were doors all around him, and he didn't know why, but he felt certain that they were all closed, and that inside those rooms, there was nothing but emptiness. He kept walking. "No, "He's the Radio Demon…" he heard yet again, this time much closer.
In the dream, Alastor attempted to run, but it felt as though he were moving through molasses, slow and inefficient. He was endlessly frustrated with his movements, but he kept on going, feeling that he was getting much closer.
He began to hear muffled voices coming from the left side of the hall, and he stuck to it, trying to hear which room exactly they were coming from. It seemed to be only two people. After what seemed an eternity of struggle, of endless attempts and terrible effort, he finally found what he took to be the room where the two people were, and the door that corresponded to it. He quickly ran over to it, excited now, but it seemed very much like dream logic when the door was locked.
Alastor felt around his clothes, and his body, but he realized that he had nothing on him, additionally, he could no longer use any of his little tricks.
No cane, no magic. He wondered whether he might kick the door, without even questioning to himself why in the hell he was so committed to listening in on this conversation in the first place. But he had been placed in this hallway, and this was the only thing in the hallway - it seemed pretty obvious to him. With the slightest tinge of despair, he realized that if he kicked the door down then the people inside would definitely know of his presence and then he wouldn't be able to eavesdrop on them, which it seemed important to do, for some reason.
He pressed himself against the wall as if in some way he could try and hear them clearer.
It was to no avail since their voices sounded just as distorted through the wall as they had throughout the hallway. He was about to curse himself and curse the dream when the wallpaper seemed to suddenly be sucking him into it, incorporating his skin into its pattern, drinking him in, and taking him as his own.
Alastor would've screamed at the uncanny, almost jelly-like sensation that this spread throughout his body, but he was so shocked and so confused, that not a single noise came out of his mouth.
And so he simply allowed himself to be sunk into the wall, as he had, in other times, allowed a certain sofa to swallow him into it, and many other times he had been eaten by the ground. This sort of sensation wasn't exactly new to him, but he had not felt it in years and had not been prepared for it. And yet, when the wall was done with its consumption of him, it didn't spit to him back out, nor did it issue him out onto its other side.
Instead, it had incorporated him into something else entirely, something that had been also stuck to the wall. Alastor emerged into a mirror. "… "He's the Radio Demon…" the person inside was saying, the voice now clearly female. It was as if the conversation were taking place from the very beginning. "I know, I know, but sometimes…" the other person started. Alastor, having needed that time to get used to the fact that he was looking into the room only through a mirror, suddenly looked upon the two figures. The first thing he thought was 'Anthony'.
The second person that had spoken had a shock of white-blonde hair, of the same silken quality as Anthony's, but the hyper-feminine, much skinnier and shorter figure quickly discarded her from being Anthony, though it did give Alastor a start. Upon closer inspection, her hair was a different color, and a different texture, though quite lovely still. The other, the one that had spoken first, also gave Alastor quite a start, but because he found the creature to be incredibly odd.
It was humanoid, Alastor would have to admit, but there was something very strange about it as if a human had been given many animalistic attributes, both physically and in demeanor. "He's the Radio Demon…" The first one said, and now that he saw her long hair he thought she might be a 'her'- honestly, Alastor had not seen such a strange since his earlier years at Hogwarts.
What was going on here? What was he being shown? "I know!" The other girl suddenly burst out, turning around to Alastor's side of the room so that he finally properly saw her face. He was immediately struck by how weirdly beautiful she was. The other girl, with her grey skin, and her missing eye, did nothing short of creep him out.
But this girl? Granted, both of them looked strange, off, somehow. Something that did not belong in the living world, or any world that he had known so far. And yet… "You should tell him to leave," the grey-skinned girl told her, looking as though she were a mixture both of annoyed and self-righteous. "How can I tell him to leave? He's-" but in her monologue, the beautiful girl was heading to the side of the room where Alastor observed them through the mirror.
Her eyes caught something amiss in its reflection, almost missing it in the heat of her discussion. Her eyes met his, and he fell into a panic. They were large, wide, somehow both frightened and shaking but with the same type of strength that Alastor had always perceived within himself - how could that be possible?
He smiled at her, not wanting to be menacing, but he was suddenly terribly aware of sharp teeth, a too-long grin, coloring that was not exactly his, and that his body was clad in a suit that was not his color. The wall took him back. The scene in the room immediately spiraled away from him, and then in its place, Alastor was falling, falling, falling.
The sensation was enough to give him terrible vertigo, which seemed to creep up from his spine to the very base of his neck.
He was utterly and completely confused, totally put off by what he had seen and what he had felt. What did he just witness? What was that place? It had the strangest feeling of being something real, and yet utterly otherworldly. And yet he had no time to analyze it, or even think about it because he was constantly falling, and as he fell he realized that he wasn't just in any place.
He had initially thought that he was falling something like a well, but looking to the sides it was as though this infinite well, which kept going down, down, down, pictures engraved on the side of it. No, not pictures. Once he tried to train his mind to look at those images properly despite the speed that he was gathering, he realized that they were actions. And terrible ones, at that. The several images that he passed were both infinite and self-contained. And they were all bloody.
A girl walking alone at night and getting snatched in a dark alley. A young boy was orphaned, crying on the feet of the man who had killed his mother and father. A man stuck into a massive tire and then set aflame within it, rolling down an empty hill.
Throughout all of these images, of which there were many and very varied, always of somebody hurting someone else, Alastor could see their perpetrators. At first, he was utterly shocked by the images that were before him, but since he was a bloody person himself, that quickly wore away and he started wondering what he was supposed to be seeing because it became clear to him that this fall was meant to show him something.
At first, he wondered whether this was not something that was trying to tell him that he was a hurting, bloody, and violent person and should end his terrible actions. But all the people being killed in these images were utterly innocent, he could feel it in his bones, could see it in their eyes as they died or had vital things taken away from them. He looked closer, knowing that there was something that he was missing.
Why could he see the faces of the perpetrators, why did the coloring and sharpness of the images seem to focus on them? Ultimately, he started focusing only on those who were committing the violence. And something finally clicked when he recognized one of them. It was one of Montenegro's men. The shock took Alistair aback.
Of course, he knew that Montenegro was a mafioso, it was why he had started interacting with him in the first place, though that line had blurred what with Anthony and everything. He was suddenly overcome by the feeling that all of these murders were somehow connected to Montenegro - no, they couldn't be.
If there was one thing that Alastor knew, it was Montenegro's men, gathering intel on them since the very first day. He was certain that aside from the boys in the lower ranks, he could recognize each of their faces.
And though he saw a few of them reoccurring in those images, most of the men who were committing these actions were part of other mafias. Was he being shown pictures of the mafia committing crimes? Was it supposed to be something to awaken him to what he was ignoring?
He was targeting petty criminals, people who committed crimes and terrible deeds on a debatably smaller scale. Even though they weren't any better than mafiosos, at least they didn't have as much reach and access as the mafia did. Eventually, even Alastor felt the need to shut his eyes to all the terrible violence being committed before him in the world, but he didn't.
He took it all, he accepted it all, and he engraved every single one of those men's faces into his memory as he fell, fell, fell
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I bet none of you saw that coming now did you I would love to see the look on you guys faces like I said multiple times before nobody knows what I have plans unless I spoil it
