engine was back. But at least she wasn't crying? She just looked like she was gonna punch me again. That might have been a step in the right direction. I wasn't really sure. I wished I had some salt. Great for driving back spirits. Not sure why... maybe it's symbolic of something.
… Not that I thought I needed to protect myself from Lydia, mind you.
Really.
Well, regardless, she was getting kinda scary again, and didn't have much in the way of salt or even pepper, so I decided maybe calming her down was a good option.
“Well, when you put it that way, it makes you sound really bad, so...”
“I am an abomination!” she snapped.
“Fine! You wanna see yourself as a monster? That's fine. You never hurt anyone on purpose, and you've tried your best to protect both family and total strangers for a very, very long time. That puts you as one of the nicer monsters I've ever met, and I've actually met a couple really pleasant ones.” It's true, too. Gnomes are quite personable, and I've never had a problem with any sort of dryad. I once met a pixie who washed my car! But that really was getting beside the point.
“More to the point, there's a worse monster right outside, who's done much worse than you, and who definitely doesn't mean well in any way, shape, or form. If you really wanna blame someone for this situation, you blame him, because it is his fault and he relishes that fact. He has spent a century of death and almost that much life systematically torturing and murdering everyone he could get his hands on. The only thing you did was get scared by a scary situation. So tell me, of the two of you, who's worse?”
“You should go,” Lydia said, very softly. Her voice wasn't sad, or angry, or much of anything. She just sounded tired.
“Look, I know how hard it is. But you need to focus on-” I began.
“No, I mean you should go because he's tired of waiting,” she said, pointing at the door. Something black and viscous that smelled vaguely of rotting meat was beginning to drip down it.
“... Oh. Well. Um. We should get out of here.”
“We don't have to do anything. You said yourself, he can't hurt me. He can't do anything to me. I shall stay here, and... I do not know,” she said with a hopeless shrug. “I don't know anything anymore.”
I sighed. “Dammit. So that's your final answer? Well, guess I can't blame you. You've had it rough, and frankly not everyone is cut out for this life. Er... death. At least you're not afraid anymore, that should help.”
“I'm not anything anymore,” she said softly. And indeed, she did appear to be somehow less than she had been. Less solid, less substantial, just somehow, terribly less.
Damn. I'd been trying to get her to show some backbone, and yeah, hadn't gone at all as planned. The poor thing was traumatized, overly emotional, and my attempts to snap her out of her fear had apparently just dumped her onto the emotional roller-coaster straight to Depression Town. Great.
Still, it worked in a way. Her fear wouldn't be feeding Stanfield anymore, since she had none left to give at this point. Despite this, I felt like I should apologize, even if I would be pretending later that this wasn't my fault. “Look... I'm sorry. I was trying to help, and in the end it looks like I just kind of ran you through the ringer, huh. And, well, if I get out of this alive, I'll get rid of him for you? I don't have much else to give you, sorry. I mean, I have a knife, but it's the only one I have since I lost the other one in the room with the boar-bear. Bear-boar. You know what I mean.”
There! I had apologized, so I now had a clear conscience. That's how it works, I'm told. “Well, glad we covered that! Catch ya later, have a nice afterlife. Hope ya cheer up.”
She blinked a few times, as if confused. I wasn't sure why. She told me to leave, I was leaving. Common sense, right? Perhaps my tone of voice threw her off? But I mean, no sense sounding depressed as you walked into probable death. You might die, sure, but moping won't make that better.
“Well, you're not in any danger, so I don't really have to stick with you, right? Plus, I've only known you for like, half an hour. And there's kinda like, some sort of ghost juice coming under the door. I've already swam in ghost juice today, and it wasn't fun. Sooooo, I'm gonna get going,” I said with a smile. “I wish you'd get up and help me, I really do. But I can't force you to do anything. I'll just say that wallowing in despair never did anyone any good.”
Lydia shrugged right back. “Nothing does any good. Is there some reason for me to do anything but fade away?”
“I've always been a fan of revenge, personally,” I said.
Lydia sighed, and turned away from me. “Just go. The black liquid is starting to pool.”
“Ah, well. Again... hope you feel better. As for me, I guess I better get back to dealing with our resident murderghost. It's not gonna be easy without my exorcism kit, but I still have a few tricks up my sleeve and this isn't my first ghost. I admit he's a bit of a nastier ghost than I usually deal with, but he should be a bit less horrifyingly terrible now that you're not all scared anymore. And I have a few more options.” I said, reaching for one of the bottles on the shelves.
I smiled.
“Wow. A lot of these bottles still have liquid in them! You gotta appreciate that, y'know? Really good, quality bottles that keep the air out and stop all these great torture-chemicals nice and damp, for all this time! I really appreciate quality workmanship like that.
“Especially when it gives me access to just... wow, all kinda nice flammable chemicals, and I still have a gun in my ankle holster.” I looked through the bottles, picking out the ones whose faded labels still had the warnings against flame visible. Once I'd picked out six or seven, I smiled down at the steadily growing pool of black sludge under the door.
Hee, hee, hee.
I started to pour bottles into other bottles, giggling just a tiny bit unsteadily under my breath. I couldn't help it! These were the moments I lived for, the moments that life stopped making sense and just started being a mad rush of adrenaline and something not entirely unlike raw awesome. I was in my element, right on the razor's edge between living in an action movie and dying like a dog. I knew it was a personality flaw, and I knew it would probably get me killed some day, but God, life without these moments just wasn't worth living.
The first bottle was full, and starting to make a weird hissing sound. I considered that a good start, and jammed a cork into it. Next bottle! Oh, so many random chemicals, I had no idea what most of them did - beyond assisting in torture-murder, I mean, since clearly Harry did have specialized tastes - but I bet that mixing all of them together like this was super dangerous.
Hee, hee, hee.
Ah, well. As fun as this was, it looked like I was gonna have to put them to good use soon; the pool was getting poolier. Harry was gonna break the door down soon, so I might as well go out to meet him and save my door. Yes, my door. This was my house now and I was not going to be bullied anymore! Time to take out the trash.
I grabbed the bottles I'd prepared, slipping one into an inside pocket of my coat (see? Convenient!) and holding the other in my right hand, slipping the holdout gun from my ankle holster into my left. I walked to the door, trying not to step in the icky black stuff, and said, “See you around, Lyd. I hope. And if you don't mind my saying...?”
“I suspect I could not stop you if I cared to. You are quite insane,” She said.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But even a loony can have a point, right? And my point is... well, if you wanna just fade away, that's your business. But if you wanna feel better? If you want your life, or I guess afterlife, to mean something? Sitting around and doing nothing is not gonna accomplish that. Giving in is easy and pointless. Atoning is hard, but unlike moping, it actually helps. Just, y'know, something to ponder.”
Then I opened the door and stepped out of the Closet of Doom back into the Kitchen of Anguish.
Ugh. My pro
perty values were plummeting.
Harry had been busy while we'd been locked up. The kitchen was still a shambles, of course, but it was now even more of a shambles than decades of neglect had left it. The disrepair was all still there, of course, but it was now well kind of soaked. Not in blood, like the entrance hall, but with that same semi-liquid black sludge that had begun seeping into the closet. Every inch of every surface dripped. Oozed. The place smelled like a dozen corpses had been chopped up and left to rot and liquefy in the center of the room. And in the center, coated in it, that damn hook still in his hand, was Stanfield. He still wore the same mask, but he looked different in a few key ways.
First, he seemed less solid than before. I couldn't exactly see through him, but it was a bit like staring at opaque glass. You can't see what's on the other side, but light still goes through it...
The second change was that he now appeared to be rotting. His body dripped with what I was rapidly beginning to realize was liquefied corpse. Maggots crawled visibly under his spectral skin, occasionally burrowing out to fall to the floor and vanish in the pool at his feet.
Um.
Ew.
“Suffer. Suffer. Suffer. Suffer. Suffer. Suffer,” he said, again and again. I guess his waning powers and the fact I had 'defiled' his favorite souvenirs had put an end to his chatty mood. Oh, how ever would