The noise that escaped Mia Winter's lips was not one she could recall ever making before. It was a distinct sort of horrified, strangled yelp that one might be more ready to akin to a wailing forlorn wraith - and quite correctly, too, for while it was not a direct comparison it was closer to this than a sound that the living had any right to utter - than to the woman who actually uttered the sound. On uneven, staggering feet she pulled away as she could to try and win what little distance she could between her and what was left of the other woman. It was strange, she found that she would have preferred to be subjected to the feeling of blood cooling against her skin, but it was the absence of this that took the whole ordeal to a fresh level of wrongness. In the place of blood, and even in the place of a body itself, was a crumbling mass of black mould that looked far too familiar to her. It seemed almost fitting that everything happened to tie back to the very same place, the metaphorical bow tied tight enough to choke her, and yet she was somehow still not the one lying dead on the ground.
But she didn't mean to kill the woman, of course.
She didn't know it was a woman at all.
It had been a doll.
She didn't know that she was hurting someone as she tried to fight for her life.
It wasn't her fault.
She didn't know what she was doing.
It wasn't her fault.
She didn't know she was hurting others.
It wasn't her fault.
She didn't know.
Really, she didn't.
She shook her head to try to clear her mind, this coming at such a force she then had to blink away a lingering haze of unsteadiness that followed. Well, what was done was done, she tried very hard to tell herself, and there was little use trying to convince herself otherwise, and so she took a moment to assess the area with a more analytical eye than she had.
It seemed like something good had come from the otherwise far less than ideal situation, and this almost managed to take away some of the acidic sting in the back of her throat. During the brief time she found herself to be otherwise distracted, the second of the flasks containing a portion of her infant daughter made itself known on a little platform by the front door. Surely it hadn't been there before, surely she hadn't walked right by what she was looking for there, surely she didn't - kill a woman for nothing - go through the horrors lurking within the depths of the house for absolutely nothing. Was there every any just and appropriate end to suffering? She wasn't sure if she wanted to ponder the nature of this question long enough to find the answer to it.
It did not take a great deal of thought for her to come to the conclusion that she spent far too long there, and even less thought to decide that the dead really did make for the most dreadful of company, and so she left. She kept a wide distance between her and what once once a living person, snatched the flask from where it so innocently sat and the key that sat alongside it for good measure, and flung herself out the door without a second to spare.
The house had been musty and a little uncomfortably still, but it was of a perfectly neutral temperature. It seemed she had spent more than long enough in the house to forget that there was a biting bitterness to the chill outside. Truthfully she wasn't sure if it was feeling the cold a little more because she had spent some time away from it, because she had gotten just a little sweaty and so the wind was not being particularly kind to her, or if it really had just gotten a little colder than it had been before she went inside. It did not matter much to her which it was, she was more than willing to feel the cold, to feel real, and if that meant she would be a little less than comfortable then she accepted this wholeheartedly.
It seemed the flowers, which she had remarked upon as blooming oddly well despite the weather and the hour, had not seemed to be quite so ready or willing to accept the weather. In fact, they all seemed to have shrivelled and withered away in a way that suggested they had died a great deal longer than a matter of moments ago, which seemed impossible considering they were blooming scarcely an hour ago. But really, of all the strange and altogether impossible things that she had experienced, both in general and also just in the absolute most immediate series of moments, the mortality of flowers were the least of her concerns at the time.
To try and force a calm about her, she adjusted her coat against the chill. It didn't really do much in the end, but on the absolute most off of chances that someone would see her, she would have the illusion of composure, and as long as she could keep up the illusion then she decided she wasn't outright losing. There wasn't a particular way to win in the situation either, of course, but if she carried herself well enough she could lie to herself enough to think that she was alright. If she could successfully lie to herself, then she could certainly manage to lie to other people. It was easier to lie to others because they didn't have to know it was a lie. No, it was lying to oneself that was tricky, because even through the most convincing of lies there was always a frustrating bead of truth that couldn't be completely and successfully stamped out no matter how often it was attempted. But Mia certainly did try to stamp, and stomp and squish the ugly truths into a far more presentable - and completely false - shape.
She maintained a downturned gaze as she made her way down the winding path. This was less so to maintain her footing on the uneven, damp path, and more to try and keep her thoughts on a single track. If this had to be done literally, then she accepted that she would have to play into the literal then that was just a fact of life and she just had to swallow her pride and get on with the job before she made the mistake of thinking too much into things lest she fall into the trap of guilt and second-guessing, neither of which she could justify.
What a specific reflex that is!
There was only a touch of wariness when she entered the little cut in the rock wall that served to house the elevator. While she had needed to put up with a great deal worse since then, the first sense that something was off had happened in the darkness there, and so she found herself a little suspicious about it. Fortunately, however, it seemed this suspicion was greatly exaggerated as there was not even a flicker of the lights to suggest that anything even could be amiss there.
Even the rather alarming graffiti that had popped up out of seemingly thin air - the term 'thin air' wasn't completely accurate, however, as the air around the house really was oddly thick for mountain air - had seemed to have vanished back away into the nothingness that it had come from.
Or it was just a figment of her imagination, but she didn't particularly want to think about the implications of her beginning to hallucinate, and especially not so soon after seeing the unpleasantly familiar black mould in the area.
These were the thoughts that she was entertaining, and trying to not entertain in turn, as she made her way through the little graveyard. Much like those around the house, the flowers had withered and died here, the little dolls that were placed as a sort of offering seeming more threadbare, more faded, more cracked and altogether worse for wear in their little bed of weeds and human sorrows. Really, without the vibrant cheer that the little yellow flowers had brought with them, the area really did look a great deal more sombre, and altogether more appropriate for a haunted feeling graveyard. She hoped that the haunted feeling was just that, a feeling, as she had far too many of the metaphorical ghosts to ignore to have to add the literal wandering spirits of the dead to this list too. Really, there were only so many ghosts that she could run from before she tripped and fell and got herself altogether consumed when it caught up to her, and she had stumbled quite dreadfully in that regard and still hadn't regained her footing enough to risk conjuring up another snag to fall flat on her face from.
She had been just a little too caught up in the tripping over of purely metaphorical snagged and so neglected to pay as much attention to the environment as she should have been. Her foot caught on something in the snowy path and she fell forward, protecting her head by throwing her arms up to try and soften her fall. The fall was not the softest, and she let out a little hiss as she did manage to time it just poorly enough to clunk her elbow against the ground, but she had managed to salvage the fall enough to avoid any serious injury.
She assumed that she had managed to trip over a root that had grown out of the path after years of disuse, and so she turned her attention to the offending protrusion so that she could free herself easier.
And then let out a scream before she could stop herself.
It was not a root at all.
It was a hand.
A human hand.
A cold, human hand that was discoloured by death and touched with rot.
And it was wrapped firmly around her ankle.
And its twin was trying to haul up whatever was left of the person the hands belonged to out of the snow-hardened earth.
"Get off me!" she snarled and, with a panicked ferocity, kicked at the hand to try and force it to loosen its grip and win her freedom. This was not as easy as she had thought it might be, for through all the decay, the clammy feeling corpse had a vicelike grip, and so it took several more kicks to actually win the freedom she was hoping for.
When she was, finally, free she scrambled up to her feet as quickly as she could without the risk of either getting caught again or simply fall again. With a little undignified hop to make sure she was far enough away to be safe, Mia broke into a quick run. She did not want to let the corpse - no, she realised to her horror as she glanced back, corpses plural - get close enough to catch her again.
It was a great deal easier, and this was no surprise to her at all, for her to run along the constructed pathways than it was the bridge, which felt somehow closer to collapsing now than it had not even an hour ago. She did try to keep her pace up, but with all the jumping and need to time things carefully, there was no way that she could navigate it with the speed of which she thought was necessary. This was made even slightly harder when the occasional plank decided to collapse out of nowhere. But she reached the other side without plummeting to her death, so she counted this as a win as she charged headlong into the forest.
She had managed to get a good handful of metres in before a corpse fell out of the tree that it had been strung up in like the occasional doll that served as its companion had. The ropes holding it up had rotted away and now the body had the chance to be nowhere near as inanimate as the dead traditionally was. She did not scream this time, but she did let out a little shrill sound as she, with no other option in the more confined space, leaped right over the dead man. Fortunately the corpse's movements were sluggish and so didn't manage to catch her as she threw herself down the uneven path. The fear of rolling her ankle was the least pressing concern in her mind, as one dead body pursuing her quickly became two, then three, then she stopped trying to count as it made things feel a great deal more hopeless.
But finally, and just as her lungs were starting to burn in a way that was far too uncomfortable to ignore, she reached the old gate that lead her away from the forest and back into the central Village. Mia did not stop long enough to think as she throw the gate open, then in turn threw herself through it, only stopping to catch her breath once she knew that the gate was firmly closed and locked up tightly.
"Well well, Mrs. Winters. What an unexpected pleasure to see you are still with us."