[Victory Road] Ic Inbox

[no_ufo_ending]

This is Henry Townshend, leave a message.

Old IC Inbox

Comments

[no_ufo_ending]

_{[His arm shudders but he doesn't pull away. Henry heaves a blustery sigh and tromps on into the house.]}

It's in here.

_{[He makes his way beyond the ogre hut into the study where he snoozed in his sleeping bag. His personal things were strewn and piled here and there in a sort of organized chaos. But there was one big lump, a huge bundle of an afghan that he yanked out. He'd muffled the thing years ago out of fear and paranoia least it start leaking or whispering or something. Henry carefully unwrapped the board-bound book of red papers. It smelled like soot and blood.]}

This is everything I know about the cult and Walter Sullivan.

[foolishwren]

<sub>[She follows him inside, shedding her luggage in the front hall and shutting the door behind them. And, as an afterthought, locking it. You never fucking know.]

[Then she follows Henry into the office-space that has kind of just become HIS space since she's been away.]

[For a moment, she just looks at the thing. It makes the hair on her arms stand on end.]</sub>

... How long have you had that?

[no_ufo_ending]

_{[Henry sits down and opens the thing across his lap. He doesn't meet her eye.]}

A few years...I couldn't really think of a reason to bring it up. It was around when your dad...nevermind. Here.

_{[He held it out for her to take, should she want to dirty her hands on something that literally came right out of hell.]}

As the Receiver of Wisdom I was left these notes...I found them all over the Otherworld. I copied down a few things myself, things Eileen read for me. But...

_{[Henry heaves a heavy sigh and drops his head into his hands. A single droplet of blood falls from his nose onto the crook of his elbow, staining his scrubs.]}

One day I woke up and there were chains across my door. They stayed and stayed and I started to run out of food. I thought I was going crazy or going to die...but then a hole opened up in the wall and with nothing else left to do I crawled through it.

[foolishwren]

<sub>[She takes it. Even if it makes her skin crawl, it's not like she doesn't have one or two artifacts from Hell squirreled away, herself... The Seal of Metatron has been wrapped up in one of her scarves at the bottom of her bag for years now.]

[As Henry starts his tale, she in turn starts to flip through the book.]</sub>

[no_ufo_ending]

The hole led to...the subway. Somehow. But something was wrong with it.

_{[His eyes drift to the window, hoping to catch sight of Prince. No luck. The Pink Pokemon wasn't going to set paw near the house so long as he was there.]}

There was a woman...and these...dogs.

[foolishwren]

What did the dogs look like?

<sub>[She knows too much to assume that they resemble her own, but it's worth asking.]

[Walter was a cult child too, after all. Maybe his Otherworld had dogs for the same reason Alessa's had.]</sub>

[no_ufo_ending]

_{[Still facing away, Henry's voice falls quiet, as though he were somehow both embarrassed and unsure. His adventure had the terrible quality of a nightmare that you kept false-waking from. He couldn't be sure. But he also had evidence dripping from his nose.]}

Rotten. Green...brown. They didn't have faces, just long tongues. They ate one another. They didn't sound like dogs, they screamed.

[foolishwren]

<sub>[She nods.]

[Different dogs, then.]

[She can't decide if Henry's sound more or less awful than her own. She'll settle on it being a tie.]</sub>

Gotcha.

What happened then?

[no_ufo_ending]

There was a girl...I'd seen her from my window before. She thought it was all a dream...and I did too for a minute.

_{[Henry makes a face.]}

She just...couldn't understand the danger we were in. Walter had picked her as part of the Sacraments...I found her again later with numbers carved into her chest.

[foolishwren]

<sub>[An unpleasant jolt runs down Heather's spine as she recalls the scattered letters she'd stumbled across down in the sewers-- and the body in the mall.]

[Innocent people who'd had the bad luck to get caught up in the flood of the Otherworld as it came rushing in.]

[It hadn't exactly been the same as Walter's hand-picked victims.]

[But close enough.]</sub>

Is that what would've happened to you?

[no_ufo_ending]

_{[Henry nods slowly, miserably, as he reaches up to trace numbers into his collarbone.]}

I'm number twenty one, the last part of the ritual.

[foolishwren]

... We're not gonna let that happen to you.

You might be on your own back there, but here you've got backup.

_{[And not just any backup-- he's got a godslayer. She's not about to say as much out loud, but he'll know what she means.]}

[no_ufo_ending]

Thanks.

_{[It's really nice to have the house behind him. He wishes that he had this kind of support back home...and the one person he had started to be something like friends with disappeared.]}

It was strange, though. That world was full of holes and every time I crawled through one, I woke up in my bed. I started to think maybe it was a dream...I didn't need to eat or drink. It was like time had stopped. My ceiling fan fell.

I felt like...Walter was leading me through some sort of carnival dark ride, making me look at all these different things. The orphanage in the woods. The prison on the lake. Every time I went somewhere new, someone else died.

[foolishwren]

<sub>[She nods.]

[The Otherworld had felt like that, sometimes-- like the town itself had been laying out a path before you. Showing you just what you needed to know.]

[But that had always just been a feeling. For Henry, it might well have been literal.]</sub>

[no_ufo_ending]

_{[Suddenly, Henry looks up, his brows furrowed with a sudden realization.]}

I think...the only person he wasn't intending to kill...was Mr. Sunderland. Out of the whole building.

[foolishwren]

_{[--now THAT is a name Heather hasn't heard in a LONG time, and she looks up from the grungy notebook.]}

Sunderland?

Was his first name 'James', by any chance?

[no_ufo_ending]

_{[He glances over, brows still set in frustration. WHY DID UMBILICAL CORD GEORGE GET SPARED AND NOT THE REST OF THEM?]}

Oh...no, his name was Frank. Frank Sunderland. He was the super. He...found Walter's umbilical cord when his parents abandoned him in my apartment. And kept it.

[foolishwren]

Frank? Huh...

_{[But any further speculation on whether or not this 'Frank' had any relation to James or his wife is cut off pretty much immediately by what Henry says next.]}

--what? He WHAT?

_[EW?]

[no_ufo_ending]

It was in this wooden box in his room. It was--cursed, I think. When I looked at it, I felt a piercing pain shoot through my skull.

_{[Now he was wringing his hands as he remembered his adventure. It was impossible to tell the story in order.]}

I met a man in the prison...the guard. I found notes. So many kids, before Walter even, died there. I found their beds...maybe I found them. The monsters, I mean...and he watched them. Eventually I found him drowned.

But the people--the people I met before they died, they all returned as ghosts even worse than the ghosts that followed me in the subway.

[foolishwren]

<sub>[Heather lapses back into silence to listen.]

[Even more than the nastiness of hearing about some weird old dude keeping an umbilical cord in a box, hearing about the dead children hits her hard.]

[She'd always known there were other kids in the cult beyond just the ones of the people in Dahlia's immediate circle. There were Order-run orphanages, after all.]

[Ugh.]</sub>

... Ghosts are mean, gnarly fuckers.

_{[Had she told him about the time one pushed her in front of a train? ... Probably.]}

[no_ufo_ending]

_{[He nods wearily.]}

If I had become a ghost because of Walter...I would have probably been the same. I think Walter was a ghost as well. He had to be--both of him.

_{[Here, Henry drew himself up, suddenly wondering why Walter had manifested here as the scary long-haired man and not the innocent little boy.]}

The ghosts made through the ritual...must have been special. They could reach into my heart, knock me down...that must have been how he dug up his body--how he planted himself in the wall, filled himself with the tubes...but how he became two ghosts, I'm not sure. There was another Walter. A little boy I spoke to...he didn't seem to know me.

[foolishwren]

<sub>[Another Walter. A younger one.]

[Not a circumstance that was at all likely for physical beings, even though it was possible (Heather of all people would know that)... but if they were ghosts, that explained it. It had to be easier that way, when the fragments didn't need vessels of their own.]</sub>

Souls can be split apart.

It doesn't happen often, but it can.

Maybe it was the same thing with Walter.

[no_ufo_ending]

_{[He turns to look at Heather curiously. She seems to know quite a bit about ghosts--and while he knows she went through hell like he did, he didn't expect her to study the place.]}

Why does it happen?

[foolishwren]

Why?

<sub>[... Hmn.]

[How to explain it without... derailing Henry's narrative entirely. Because while if she was going to spill those personal details to ANYBODY, it was her big-brother-in-arms, this... wasn't the time.]</sub>

Well... I mean, trauma, for one. It's not easy or pleasant.

But-- okay, for example, some of the... shady occult stuff the Order does-- or did-- it involves the human soul. But for it to work, the whole soul has to be there. You can't do stuff like summon God with like, half a soul. Won't work.

So I mean... at least in the case I know, the soul was... split. To stall them. To make it impossible for them to finish the ritual until the soul had been put back together.

I doubt that's what happened to Walter since it sounds like he was a willing participant, but, I mean, it's an example.

[no_ufo_ending]

That would explain...why he captured his younger self. If he needed to be whole.

_{[As much as Henry read about the ritual, he felt he still didn't fully grasp how it worked. It was weird to think that something like his heart or his soul could be a part of that.]}

It was such a long day, Heather...