DAY 64: CHAPEL

[skeletonenigma]

This time, when the darkness faded and the next thing Skulduggery became aware of was that same bed underneath him, he didn't take the time to absorb the jarring feeling and sort out what might be going on. He leaped off the bed immediately, almost stumbling in the process - damn balance - and took a moment to realize that his eyes were burning and he could barely see a thing.

The room was blinding. The light itself wasn't an issue; it was the fact that Skulduggery's eyes had to slowly adjust to it, a sensation he hadn't experienced in ages and had never expected to experience again. He had a hand pressed to his forehead and was blinking rapidly when a woman knocked on the door and came in.

She was... cheerful. Everything was cheerful, from the bright light and noises outside to the intercom announcement that interrupted the woman's sudden spiel. It was such a startling change from just a few minutes ago that Skulduggery found himself lost for words while the... nurse... nodded brightly at him. She'd said something about a mental hospital, something about a man called Erik, and something else about 'not real' and 'getting better.' With Skulduggery's mental prowess - even operating at less than its usual efficiency - it was easy to work out what she meant.

He studied her openly once the light wasn't so blinding. "You're either a very convincing liar, utterly insane, or a psychopath. Let me find out which one." His head tilted. "Would you believe me if I said there was a woman last night who had been mortally wounded, but who was still walking around?" He cut her off before she could answer. "No, obviously not. And I don't think you're a psychopath who murders people for fun. A convincing liar, then. That doesn't clear anything up in the slightest, but I suppose it's something."

"Mr. MacAuley, you were sleeping all of last night. Are you sure you didn't just have a nightmare?"

Skulduggery wanted to point out that as a skeleton, he didn't sleep, and he certainly didn't have nightmares. The blurriness at the edges of his vision, however, reminded him with a jolt of his mysterious transformation to human. Suddenly, annoyingly, the nurse was making much more sense.

Was it... real, then? Everything with Yomi and the chapel - had that all just been a vivid hallucination? Had his entire life just been a vivid hallucination, like the woman was insisting?

In a slight daze, Skulduggery asked to see the chapel. He was standing there alone now, examining the fountain carefully for any sign of its demonic visage from before. But now it was just a fountain, the water was just water, and despite Skulduggery's best efforts, the water didn't respond to his Elemental magic. It remained stubbornly in its basin without so much as a ripple, silently mocking him.

Skulduggery sat down heavily on one of the pews, mystified. He wasn't insane. He joked sometimes that he was, and it might partly be true, but he wasn't insane on a level like this. He didn't just make up his whole life as he pleased.

[Free! But be prepared for a barrage of questions.]

Comments

[tasteoftruth]

Oh, right. This was Landel's. If the institute itself wasn't torturing you the other patients would take up the slack. "Probably not as much as you could use a kick in the teeth," he mumbled, letting his hands drop and huddling with his elbows on his knees. Even hunched, he still did an admirable job of looming over her. "You got a problem with a guy trying to do a little praying in here?"

Not that he was praying to anyone, per se, but he could use an excuse to make himself seem less despondent.

[selfnighted]

"No," Maya replied serenely, moving her gaze to the bird image at the front. But there was something fallacious about Landel including this structure in the asylum, was there not? All of the religions she'd heard of advocated the sort of thing that the good overlord doctor never seemed to practice. Unless Landel had done it to appease his conscience.

Maya found that unlikely, for the simple reason that he'd never seemed to display anything of the sort. Thayer had said something about the necessity of the asylum; Landel didn't express such feelings.

Pointless speculation. She turned her thoughts back to the situation at hand. Perhaps a conversational distraction was in order. Then again, she hadn't heard what her companion for the morning had mumbled. "To whom are you praying?"

[tasteoftruth]

Anyone who'd listen, at this point, but Badd had in general given up on gods. There were Christians in the department, and Jews, and the people who went by that odd Shinto-esque religion the spirit mediums were fond of, but Badd preferred to rely on himself. He hadn't been to church in decades.

That didn't mean he didn't have his heroes. "Saint Kojak of the Eleventh Precinct. Patron saint of detectives." He ran his tongue over his teeth, adding, "And lollipops." His stonefaced expression didn't so much as twitch.

Why not, nothing else had worked thus far.

[selfnighted]

Ah, he'd taken up the distraction, thank goodness. Maya had only just realized she'd been projecting her deep-rooted feelings for her husband onto Landel, and it would have been an utter embarrassment to admit it if he'd asked, not least because it would mean admitting she actually thought of her husband once in a while. ...Hm.

But never mind that; approaching her current interlocutor was as much for the sake of distracting her from her own thoughts, so she did her best to engage the subject. Food deities weren't uncommon, she didn't think; there was one that was popular with Rennaissance painters—

—Lollipops. "Lollipops?" she echoed. "Essential to his sleuthing, I suppose?" Or simply an eccentricity of his? Maya had never heard of that saint before.

[tasteoftruth]

"He favored 'em. Good for thinking but don't kill your lungs like cigarettes do." Who loves ya, baby? Badd had a certain fondness for the show, he'd watched it avidly when he was younger and while he couldn't remember most of the plots it had contributed to his desire to become a detective himself. And, much later, to his lollipop addiction that he'd swapped for his addiction to smoking.

His hands idly folded together, as if in prayer.

[selfnighted]

True, self-harm was quite silly as a concept.... She was not going to bring up what she'd caught him doing to his eyes a minute ago.

"You're a detective, then?" she piped up after a giving him a moment for that prayer he looked to have been engaged in. For a moment, she considered asking him about what he might have found, but decided against it on the grounds that this was a strictly recreational conversation. No unfun talk allowed. "How is it?"

[tasteoftruth]

There were different ways to self harm. Some simply involved jumping into enough dangerous situations that the other guy did the work for you.

"Was," Badd said, lifting his head. "I'm retired now. It had its perks, but I wouldn't call it a job someone does for fun." So, close enough to his time/place to know what a detective was, not enough to know who Kojak was. At least they could hold a basic conversation.