Chapter 366

Chapter 366: A Case.

Annie left in high spirits. She looked as if she did not suspect anything at all – in the end, Annie was only a small child.

The Old Caretaker stood at the cemetery gate for a long time, staring in the direction Annie had gone. Only after who-knew-how-long did he suddenly shiver and come back to himself. His fingers trembled slightly as he reached to the pocket on his chest, took out a vial of medicine, and poured it into his mouth.

He felt much better.

“This matter is far too strange… I must report to the Cathedral at once… God of Death above… this matter is far too strange…”

The old man muttered under his breath, then turned and hurried toward the Warden’s hut. After he went inside and shut the door, he went straight to the old, ordinary-looking desk beside the bed. When he opened a hinged panel on the desktop, an intricate set of pipes and valves appeared underneath, along with buttons and levers.

Several metal capsule chambers lay quietly in a compartment beside the pipes.

The old man took a sheet of stationery from the desk drawer, sat down, picked up the fountain pen at hand, and began to write a report at great speed. Then he rolled the report up and stuffed it into a Metal Capsule Cartridge. After that, he opened a section of pipe hidden in the desk, and set the capsule into a slot.

“May Bartok bless this pipeline and the air rushing through it… may the valves run smoothly, without jamming, losing pressure, or exploding – and may the sorting and dispatch center’s Sorting Engine make no mistake.”

The old man finished this brief benediction, then pressed a button beside the pneumatic tube line. When the green light inside the hidden compartment lit up, he pulled the lever beside the button.

A strange gurgling sound came from deep inside the pipes, like air being blocked. But the sound faded quickly. The normal hissing of the pneumatic tube line, and the faint whoosh of the capsule racing along inside, followed right after.

The old man glanced at the pipe with some concern and muttered: “…surely it’s not because the letter mentioned a Higher Being and that somehow affected the machine…”

After a while, two green lights lit up, showing that the express dispatch had reached the higher sorting center. Only then did the Old Caretaker finally relax and close the cover of the hidden compartment.

…

Alice walked down the street with a large paper bag in her arms, looking curiously at the buildings around her. She studied this city that was completely different from Pland, and watched how people here lived.

In the paper bag were the things she had just bought from the corner shop – some vegetables, eggs, a block of rock-hard frozen butter, and two pieces of mutton. They were the ingredients for today’s lunch.

Alice could already go out and buy things on her own. She was not very skilled, and sometimes she got the change wrong, but she was working hard to learn all of this – she made progress every day, even if it was not much.

She lowered her head a little. One arm held the paper bag, and with her other hand she felt inside and pulled out a slip of paper to check what was written there.

Crooked letters covered the slip. It was today’s shopping list. Part of it was written in words she already knew how to read and write. The rest was made up of simple little drawings. She had written the list herself, and it had taken a lot of effort.

She planned her own menu for each day, decided what ingredients she needed, wrote her own shopping list, and went to the shop herself. She tried to calculate the change correctly, and tried to get home on time. If she managed all that, the captain would be pleased.

Alice would be pleased too.

After making sure the list and the contents of the bag matched, the Doll put the slip away, satisfied, and went on toward their temporary lodgings on Oak Street.

But when she was only halfway there, a burst of commotion from a street corner suddenly drew her attention.

She raised her head toward the noise and saw a dozen or so people gathered beside an old-looking residential building. Some of them were pointing up at the upper floors. Everyone was talking at once, and she caught words like “that woman is crazy”, “poor thing”, and “even the Church is alarmed”.

Alice could not help slowing her steps, slower and slower, until she finally stopped, staring toward that direction with great hesitation.

That was… a lively scene. The captain had said she must not rush into lively crowds, because if her head fell off in a place full of people, the commotion would be far too big.

But things over there really did look interesting. And what they were talking about… also sounded like something the captain would be interested in.

Alice struggled with herself, and, while struggling, she shuffled a little closer. Then a little closer again.

[I’ll just go see what’s going on… I’m helping the captain collect information… this isn’t idly joining a crowd, this is very serious crowd-joining…]

Alice used all her wisdom to talk herself into it, and she succeeded.

One hand pressed on her head and the other held the paper bag. The Doll soon squeezed in beside the gathered crowd and joined them in looking up at the residential building in front of them.

Unlike the small two-story house the captain had rented, this building was even older and more cramped. The narrow windows and the gas pipes clinging to the outside wall looked crowded and messy. It seemed that many separate tenants lived inside this structure.

The people around her were all talking at once. Alice listened for a long time and still did not understand what was going on, so she carefully tapped the shoulder of the person next to her and asked very politely: “Excuse me… what happened here?”

The person beside her jumped in fright. But when he saw the speaker was only a veiled young lady, he relaxed, pointed up, and said: “A woman went crazy. She insists she killed her own husband, and she even tried to strangle her own child… first the Constables were alarmed, and now even people from the Church are here. I think this is no small matter.”

As soon as he finished, another person next to them spoke up: “Since even the Church is here… maybe it really is something not very good?”

“…Let’s hope nothing major happens,” a woman in the crowd muttered. “I live right below them. If something really happens, we’ll have nowhere to go…”

“No matter what it is, we should go to the Cathedral today and have a priest perform an exorcism. It’s always better to be careful.”

The crowd started talking over each other again, and soon the topic drifted back into things Alice could not understand. Her mind wandered among the noisy voices, and her gaze slowly drifted up into the air.

Weightless strands floated in her vision. More thin threads stretched out from the nearby residential building, drifting in the air like hair in the wind, quietly stirring the sky.

Alice suddenly blinked.

She had just noticed that some of the lines floating above the city looked especially unreal and transparent. They even flickered like electric lamps with a bad connection.

…

A faint smell of mildew hung in the old residential building. Somewhere in the worn-out pipe system there was a small leak, and the sound of dripping water reached the ears from time to time. Black-clad Guardians, holding Gatekeeper’s canes and consecrated lanterns, crowded into the living room and made the already narrow space feel even more cramped.

A long-haired woman with tangled hair curled up in the corner of the sofa like a frightened animal. She lowered her head and sometimes muttered unclear sentences.

Two Guardians stood beside her, closely watching over this woman whose mind had lost its balance.

The Guardians were searching the house for lingering clues. They had already been working here for two hours.

Just then, a gust of Ashen Wind blew down the corridor, passed through the open front door, and spun into the living room.

The Guardians all stopped what they were doing and bowed to the gray-white whirlwind.

Agatha stepped out of the vortex and into the room. Her gaze swept across the living room.

“How is the situation now?” She lifted her head and looked toward the highest-ranking Guardian at the scene.

The captain of the Guardians was a sharp-looking woman with black, ear-length hair. Faced with the Gatekeeper’s question, she stepped forward at once and said: “We collected a small amount of ‘mud’ from the floor in the washroom. We have confirmed that it matches the samples we collected before.”

“elements…” Agatha said softly, then frowned. “A small amount? How much? Is that all?”

“About one test tube,” the short-haired captain said, lifting her hand to show the rough amount. “That is all of it. We have searched the whole building from top to bottom. Only a little remained on the washroom floor.”

Agatha fell silent for a moment, then turned her head to look at the long-haired woman curled in the corner of the sofa.

“She is the one involved?”

“Yes,” the Squad Captain said with a nod. “She rents this place. We checked her history. Her background is clean and she has no criminal record. She works as an assistant accountant at an office nearby. Her husband used to work in the Boiling Gold Mine. Records show he died in a mining accident three years ago.”

Boiling Gold Mine… a mining accident…

Maybe because of recent events, those words drew Agatha’s notice at once. She steadied herself, then walked over to the woman who was still muttering on the sofa.

“Lady – I am the city-state’s Gatekeeper. You are safe now,” Agatha said in a calm, deep voice, quietly calling on her power to soothe the mind. “Tell me, what exactly happened?”

The long-haired woman stopped trembling when she heard the voice. She mumbled something under her breath, then suddenly lifted her head.

A pair of bloodshot eyes, still full of fear and madness, locked onto Agatha.

“He came back, he came back… I killed him, I killed that monster… in the bathroom! It melted in the bathroom!”