Night 65: X-Ray Room

[damned_intercom]

Once again, a couple of bursts of static greeted Link as he entered the room, but there was no audio message waiting for him. Strangely, the drawing from last night remained largely intact, as if it had been impossible for their captors to remove. The only thing different was that the vibrant glow from before had diminished, and the image was mostly reduced to a faint, green outline.

But more than that, a companion clue had apparently been set up for whoever entered here. This one required a flashlight to fully examine, but a well-aimed beam would illuminate a framed oil painting hanging from the wall. Beneath that were words written in the same green, glowing paint from last night:

Salome with the Head of John the Baptist

If that wasn't odd enough, though, whoever had arranged the clues also left a small pile of dried leaves beneath the painting. The leaves themselves were unremarkable, and were likely pulled from a common tree. Was it another message, perhaps?

Despite the cryptic clue, though, the person who had come before did not want the patients' troubles to go unrewarded. A first aid kit with these items was perched on the table in the center of the room.

Comments

[fourstonewalls]

[from here]

Lana pulled her pistol out as she stepped into the room, and swung both hands, locked together, across the scene, keeping both flashlight and gun barrel pointed away from the door and her companions.

Nothing. At least nothing alive, and nothing dead except a smile pile of leaves on the ground.

[Timeskipped to after the other groups]

[ryuuzaki]

If L had chills, they had more to do with the low-grade fever he'd been suffering for the previous four days. He felt tired, he ached, but his wariness wasn't exactly the same thing as fear. As they moved, he also addressed Nina's question.

"I tried once. If I had equipment of my own I might be able to do more. As it is, I haven't heard of anyone being able to get into them. That doesn't mean that no one has, but in this place, I would have expected word to get around."

They made the left turn in the corridor and found the door to the X-Ray Room, and Lana produced a pistol and took the lead yet again. Clearing a room... it was more comfortable to have someone else do it in the same way that it was more comfortable to have anyone else take on a task that was dangerous, necessary, and not specialized enough to require L's personal attention. He found himself appreciating her initiative, even if he questioned her ability to fully carry through on it.

When it was established that the room was clear, he followed Lana into it.

It would have been impossible to miss the message under any conditions. The glowing letters drew his attention immediately, and he focused the beam of his flashlight on the painting, then on the area around it, settling on the pile of leaves on the floor beneath it. The stomach drawing from the previous night was still there, and it was as reported, but faded in comparison to the painting's caption.

The painting was incongruous in a clinical setting, no one had mentioned it on the bulletin board earlier in the day, and the glowing letters beneath it were clearly fresh: all of it suggested that this was the new clue. He moved close to the painting and peered at it, then bent and picked up one of the leaves and held it up in the beam of his flashlight: nothing special. He began to consider what it all might mean.

Beheading... that was the second reference to cutting in the Harrington clues. Could it be a metaphor? Nip it in the bud, cut it off at the root... no, that interpretation would only make sense if it involved cutting off someone's feet.

"SHJB" meant nothing to him, and if the words were an anagram, the three of them would be there all night trying to suss out a meaningful phrase.

If it was a phrase, why use a painting at all? Why hadn't Harrington just told them what he knew to begin with? Why the cryptic clues--why send sick people on a chase, or leave a clue that insinuated that they needed to butcher themselves as carefully as they could manage? Was he playing games with the patients, or... could it be that whoever was physically leaving these clues was under the same kind of injunction that Marc had been under the first time he and L had met, the one that also seemed to affect patients who had been in the Coliseum? If so, using something pictorial, a metaphor, would make sense.

He frowned, staring at the painting. It would be possible to overanalyze it... under these circumstances, it seemed unlikely that examining paint chips under a microscope would yield anything worth his time.

L himself had never possessed much religious faith, but knowledge of the history of art and the meaning of some of the most common subjects was necessary in his work. If you were recovering a stolen object, understanding its value on several levels was useful--this was, he thought, an Italian Baroque piece, one by a master. But the caption emphasized the subject, not the painting's origins.

As to its subject... Salome had danced and John had been executed. But before that, John had lived in the wilderness, and he had baptized Jesus, his cousin, in the Jordan.

Which element seemed the most pertinent? Salome and John were just names; which actions were indicated? What might they say? You could dance in the ballroom, but no one did, and it didn't seem to fit. Baptism, though... consecration, purification... that seemed more likely to be connected to healing. Where would you baptize someone at Landel's?

There was a fountain upstairs in the chapel. However, almost as soon as it came to mind, L began to doubt it was the place indicated by the message.

While a fountain in a church could certainly be assumed to be a baptismal font, the chapel at Landel's seemed not just nondenominational but irreligious. Past that, there should have been little need for a baptismal font in a psychiatric hospital: were patients there often pregnant, and would their newborn children have been kept there for baptism? Adults could be baptized too, but it was less common; there was also the possibility that the building itself had a more complicated history, but there wasn't much about this particular scenario that indicated that a background of that nature was relevant to what Harrington was trying to tell them, and there were less convoluted ways to tell them to go upstairs. But to L, the most convincing problem with the assumption that the clue might indicate the chapel fountain was that it didn't take the leaves into account.

So, considering the leaves... were they supposed to go make a beverage of them with the water from a given location? There was nothing in the painting to indicate doing anything with the leaves at all. Baptism and leaves....

Where was a body of water near trees?

L could think of two places. The first was the courtyard, which wasn't far away. But if that was the intended location, why hadn't Harrington's announcement just directed people there? If he could say to go to the X-Ray Room, it stood to reason that he could say to go to the Courtyard. Furthermore, what could they do in the Courtyard that would help them that they couldn't do in the X-Ray Room and that had something to do with a foreign object in their stomachs?

The river near the ruins, the one he had heard when he was there in the past, was the other location that came to mind, and as soon as it did, several ideas began to coalesce. John the Baptist had done his most famous baptism in a river, not a fountain. And Marc had helped L and Lunge in the ruins about a week and a half ago, meaning that it was probably one of the more accessible areas to anyone who wanted to assist a patient.

In that respect, directing patients to the river made sense. If the reason the clues had been so cryptic as to be questionable or useless was that Harrington or his agent was physically unable to leave a more explicit message on the grounds of the Institute, it might be possible that someone was able to talk freely further afield.

Less than a minute had passed since L had picked up the leaf. Now, his expression shifted, the perplexed frown replaced by determination. He spoke in a low, calm voice.

"I think I know where to go, although I have to admit that I don't yet understand what we're meant to be doing there. If you'll trust me, I'll explain on the way... it's going to be a long walk, and we'll need to move as fast as we can. I don't know how much more time we have tonight."

His usual route to the ruined town would be impossible tonight: he didn't think he'd be able to get over the back wall with this shoulder injury even if he were otherwise healthy. It would take at least another day of healing, and even then, it would be painful.

However, if they were very lucky, they should be able to use the front door out of the Institute. It depended now on whether or not something was guarding it. The walk itself would be long and uncomfortable, but he thought he could manage it, especially in the face of some of the alternatives.

He moved back towards the door.

[mirrorimage]

Nina nodded in response to Ryuuzaki's answer. "Mmm. I see," was all she said out loud, but if anyone glanced at her in the dark, they'd see her pursing her lips thoughtfully. The institute was a small, confined place, and news seemed to travel fast. That meant it was probably safe to assume that nobody had gotten in after all, right? Maybe not. Maybe it was never safe to assume anything at all.

Nina felt mildly guilty that a sick woman had to be the one to clear the room. She was well, after all. It should have been her. But Nina had no weapon that would be effective at such a thing, so she reluctantly acknowledged to herself that perhaps Lana was best for that task after all.

When the light from Ryuuzaki's flashlight hit the painting and then the area around it, Nina frowned and wandered over to get a closer look. It seemed like the leaves had been arranged there, so that must have meant they were part of the clue. But what could leaves mean? And the letters?

Nina stared at them next. "SHJB". Her mind raced, comping up with a few acronyms in German, English and Czech, but none of them made any sense in context. She frowned, frustrated, stumped. She hoped one of other two, more familiar with the institute and the surrounding grounds than she was, might know something more or be able to come up with something.

She was lost in her own thoughts until Ryuuzaki spoke. Then she turned to him. She bit her lip uncertainly, but her eyes lit up and her voice was laced with hope. "You do?" she said, when he said he would know where to go.

There was always a chance that he might be wrong, even though he was clearly intelligent, but Nina herself had no ideas, and even going to a wrong location was better than doing nothing all night. She looked over at Lana, searching the other woman's face for something, when he moved back towards the door. "What do you think?" Nina asked her. It was possible Lana might have an idea of her own, after all. But if she didn't, then letting Ryuuzaki lead the way was their only option.

[fourstonewalls]

Lana's fingers itched for a camera. Or, failing that, at least something to put the evidence in rather than Ryuuzaki's bare hands. Amateurs, she thought.

None of it added up. She wanted quiet, and precise diagrams, and a night or two to think about it; being the Chief did have some benefits when it came to scheduling. Basically, she could leave it up to Ryuuzaki, who was dangling the fact that he had a theory in front of them like a particularly informative carrot, or she could try to come up with something right now. Even if she hadn't been ill, she might have been hard-pressed to do so.

She answered, not with words, but with action. She stepped over and pushed open the door, holding it for Ryuuzaki to lead them through. Then she followed close on his heels.

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