Night 63: M-A Block Hallway

[stop_the_rain]

....the fuck?

Murphy Pendleton couldn't decide what was a dream and what was reality. Another strange bed. Another memory of....

God. What now? Wasn't this nightmare over?

His things were gone again. But...had he even had anything on him, before the darkness took him that last time? No, that couldn't have been real. It had been some...some crazy vision. The town could do that somehow. He just...saw what Cunningham saw, that was all.

Speaking of...there was no one in this place, which looked like a hospital. That was strange...he couldn't remember any hospitals. And it was curiously quiet; no strange giggling or pained moaning echoing through the hallways. No static. Even his clothes were different, and he hadn't changed them himself this time.

"What's going on?" Was the town still playing with him? Or was he like Bobby now, stuck and forced to spend his existence in hell until he broke one of their stupid, arbitrary rules? No. That wasn't fair. That wasn't fair at all, he'd done what he had to, God damnit!

Murphy took a deep breath. He needed to focus on the positives and maintain calm. Whatever was happening, he was still alive. And after everything he'd made it through up until now, he could get through this, too. There had been clothes in the closet of the room he'd woken up in, and a radio and journal to replace the ones lost. Even a flashlight. The best weapon had been a chair, but he'd hauled plenty of chairs all over Silent Hill already.

Having no clues at all to guide him and no sense of immediate danger, Murphy began traversing the halls of the unknown hospital that had claimed him....

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[skeletonenigma]

It was dark, wherever Skulduggery had ended up. Dark, but... pleasant. Pleasantly peaceful.

Peaceful enough that he might not have been so wary, if it weren't for the fact that he was lying on something soft. Of all the times Skulduggery had ever regained consciousness, he could count the number of times it had been on something soft with one hand. Reason enough to be wary right off the bat. Skulduggery lay very still and stared up at the unfamiliar dark ceiling, trying to recall what he'd last been doing. He remembered a flash of yellow, something dragging him backwards, and a clear image of someone calling his name - Valkyrie, calling his name, a terrified look on her face...

Right. The Faceless Ones. Skulduggery had been dragged through the portal after them. And now that portal was closed forever, with no way to open it again, no way to call the Faceless Ones back. Skulduggery had made sure of that, before he had stupidly let himself get pulled in after them.

So he was now trapped forever in another dimension with the gods of evil themselves. For all intents and purposes, Skulduggery realized, he was dead. Properly dead, not just a skeleton with impeccable fashion sense. Not anymore.

But the Faceless Ones didn't traditionally have soft beds, did they? Skulduggery sat up, and cautiously looked around.

He was on a bed. He was on a bed in a small room. Skulduggery stared into the gloomy darkness, wondering what he'd expected from a dimension populated solely by dark gods. A red sky, definitely. Hard rock, maybe some screaming. He'd expected to be doing a lot of the screaming himself, actually. He definitely hadn't been expecting beds.

It was too dark to see exactly what the room was. Skulduggery clicked his fingers to conjure a flame and held it out, his bafflement only increasing with every passing second. There was a dresser and another bed, two wardrobes, a door in the far wall. A normal-looking door. A clean, normal-looking room, without piles of entrails in the corner, or even a musty smell. In fact, the room almost smelled like disinfectant. It might have been a hospital room, except it didn't have any of the medical equipment hospital rooms were usually full of.

The flame grew weaker as he shifted to get off the bed. Skulduggery grunted impatiently and fed it more of his magic, but the flame didn't get any stronger. He glanced down at it, puzzled. It was almost hurting.

And then he saw his hand, lit up by the dancing flame, and that flame instantly snuffed out.

That wasn't right. That couldn't be right. Skulduggery's hand should be chalk-white, nothing but bone. But in that fleeting glimpse, it had looked.... almost like skin. Skulduggery's hands instantly went to his face, and he froze as the sensation of skin touching skin brushed through his mind for the first time in over two hundred years.

He'd heard of glamours, though he'd never tried them himself. Facades, China called them. A way to make someone seem normal for a little bit, to blend into a crowd just long enough to avert suspicion.

The discovery was oddly comforting. Now this was what he expected from gods out to make his life a misery. Random glamours and facades. A little archaic, perhaps, and he couldn't really see the point, unless the point was to unsettle him. And it was definitely doing that. Skulduggery slowly reached a hand up and placed it carefully down on top of his head. Yes, he had hair. Real, natural hair, not the artificial wiry stuff of the wigs he wore in public. The Skeleton Detective had to suppress a smile. He hadn't been lying when he told Valkyrie that if there was one thing he missed about being alive, it was hair.

Skulduggery slowly moved his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. A little shakier than normal, maybe, but every limb was there, and moving when told. He was a little stiff, and some of his fingers had to be persuaded to form a fist, but on the whole, it could have been worse.

It should have been worse. It should have been a lot worse.

Skulduggery conjured the flame into his hand again, but this time, it took real effort. His breathing, usually perfectly under his control, was getting fast and shallow. He concentrated on holding the flame there for as long as he could, but after a few more seconds, he gave in and the flame petered out. Skulduggery took a deep breath and clicked his fingers again. This time, he didn't even feel the heat of the friction. Nothing was binding his powers - the flame wouldn't have worked at all if something was - so the only conclusion he could draw was that he just couldn't do it anymore.

How embarrassing. It was a good thing Valkyrie wasn't around to see this. She'd never let him live it down.

Skulduggery's mood turned dark as he thought of Valkyrie, thought of never seeing her or Ghastly again. At least they would be safe, with the Faceless Ones stuck for good. And Ghastly, or Tanith, or maybe both, would watch out for Valkyrie. Kenspeckle Grouse certainly wouldn't let anything bad happen to her. Kenspeckle Grouse would probably be happy about this whole situation.

Well, Skulduggery thought to himself as he held his hand out, at least someone would be.

The air that rippled against his fingers brought no clear sensations of anything in the room with him. That was one piece of good news, unless the addition of fake skin was interfering somehow. Or worse, his manipulation of air was as bad as fire. Skulduggery considered testing it, but decided not to. If anything did jump out at him, and he could only displace air for a limited time, he wasn't going to waste any of it now.

He rummaged through the dresser drawers quickly on the off-chance that something useful, like his gun, might be in them. All he found, strangely, were clothes. Sweatpants in the bottom drawer, and what felt like undershirts in the top. A thought occurred to Skulduggery, and he finally examined what he was wearing.

It wasn't his beloved suit, the one he knew he was wearing when they arrived at Aranmore Farm. He was wearing one of those pairs of sweatpants, and a basic t-shirt with a picture of a cheery smiley-face on it. The pants were too short for him, stopping a few inches above his ankles, and the t-shirt hung off his tall, skinny frame.

Skulduggery wasn't quite sure whether to feel amused or irritated. Amused was a fuzzier feeling, but they took his suit, and they replaced it with an annoyingly cheerful smiley face. Opting for a mixture of amused and irritated, Skulduggery went to search the wardrobes. Nothing useful in there, either, just shoes and more shirts and sweatshirts.

Skulduggery was forgiving a lot in these first few minutes, but now he was starting to question whether the Faceless Ones in charge had any idea how a proper hell dimension was supposed to be run. 'Slightly unsettled' was not the feeling they were supposed to be going for. Not that Skulduggery was complaining.

He hesitated, then pulled out the thick coat from the right-hand wardrobe and pulled it on. Better than a t-shirt, definitely better than a sweatshirt, and with no strange smiley-faces plastered on. He looked at the shoes for a moment, but passed them by. He didn't need or want sneakers, and slippers... well, slippers were just insulting.

Skulduggery tried the door, and found it unlocked. He was halfway over the threshold when he remembered that he apparently had skin now, fake as it may be, and going barefoot probably wasn't the best idea. A moment's hesitation, but when nothing out of the ordinary was disturbing the air in the hallway outside – at least, as far as Skulduggery could tell – he made his decision and stepped out.

[skeletonenigma]

[To here.]