Chapter Thirty-Four - Gerard the Very Very Sane Plushie-Maker

The weird stuff turned out to be a sort of constant, rhythmic chanting. Charlotte couldn’t make out the words, not quite.

They sounded like she should understand them, almost familiar but not. She had once tried to learn another language from a cousin who spoke two fluently. Just a word here and there, and maybe a sentence or two.

It had been a wasted effort, in the end. She didn’t have a gift for languages, and no real opportunities or needs to practice.

The chanting ahead reminded her of hearing snatches of that language, a few words that sounded almost, tantalisingly, familiar.

She shifted her shoulders and tried to ignore the shivers crawling up her spine.

Dreamer stopped in front of a door. It was one of the last ones in the long corridor. Light was spilling out from beneath it, oranges and yellows and reds, the colours of open flames. Charlotte suspected that they were somewhere under the centre of the hill.

“Do you have a plan?” Charlotte whispered.

“A plan?” Dreamer asked.

“Well, I’m pretty sure that whatever’s on the other side of this door, they’re not going to be too happy to see us,” Charlotte said.

“That sounds like a them problem,” Dreamer said.

Charlotte exhaled from her nose. “Maybe. I’m just worried they might attack before we have time to ask any questions or find out what’s happening.”

“Oh,” Dreamer said. She frowned and crossed her arms. It was a strangely Daphne-like gesture to make. “Okay, so I’m going to grab everyone in there before we walk in. then even if they want to attack, they won’t be able to.”

“That sounds like the start--” Charlotte cut off as screams, squeals, and a few shouts of panic came from the other side of the doorway. “Did you already grab them all?” she asked.

Dreamer nodded. “What’s the next part of the plan?”

Charlotte sighed. She reached over to the door and shoved it open. “We assess things, I guess,” she said as she pulled her sword out of its sheath and held it up in a simple guard posture.

Dreamer skipped into the room ahead of her, head tilted back to take it all in.

Unlike most of the rooms they passed, this one seemed far more unfinished. It was more of a cavern, wide and deep, with a good half of the area taken up by a shallow pool of water that disappeared into a crack in the far wall. Two large braziers burned bright, wood and books within them making the room uncomfortably warm.

Charlotte only spent a moment taking in the room itself. What interested her a lot more were the people held in mid-air by coiling tentacles that sprouted from nothing and that grasped them around the waist and head and arms.

In reality, there was only one person in the room. All the other tentacles were gripped around dolls. Hundreds of dolls who were trashing and fighting and screaming.

“Wow, they’re noisy,” Dreamer said.

“Yeah, I guess they are,” Charlotte said. She held her sword lower, ready to snap it out towards anything that jumped at her, but it seemed that Dreamer had everything in hand... so to speak.

“Right, well enough of that,” Dreamer said.

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There was a single loud squelch, and all the dolls in the room were crushed the same way Charlotte might squish an over-ripe lemon. Plush and entrails splattered to the floor, some of them disappearing into the gaps where Dreamer’s tentacles retreated to.

It left the room blessedly silent.

The only remaining person was gently swung around so that he hovered before Charlotte and Dreamer.

He was an older man, in dirty clothes stained by water and blood. He had an apron on, with a few tools left in it, and a mod of frizzy white hair on his head, somehow unstained despite the rest of him. His eyes were wild as they took Dreamer and Charlotte in. “W-who are you?” he gasped.

“Hello sir,” Charlotte said. “You wouldn’t happen to work at the plush shop?”

“We’re looking for a plushie for the Winter Solstice,” Dreamer explained. “It’s for Abigail.”

“A... what?” he asked. He blinked slowly. “You’re not with the Inquisition? You’re not here to stop me?”

“No?” Dreamer said. “We’re here for a plushie.”

“That’s why I’m here too!” he said. “I’m here to make the greatest doll of them all. One so life-like, so real that it will be indistinguishable from the living! No! It will be better than the living!”

Charlotte sighed. “He’s insane.”

“I am not insane! I am Gerard the plushie-maker! And I have never been more sane!”

Charlotte lowered her sword. “Is that why you were chanting while surrounded by living meat-dolls?”

“We were chanting to a greater being! I sought guidance, counsel from beyond the veil! Let me go, and give me your flesh so that I might make life!” Gerard screamed.

Dreamer stared at him for a bit, then turned to Charlotte. “He’s nuts, right?”

“I think so, yeah,” Charlotte said.

The air between the braziers warped and twisted. “Quick! Give me your flesh! I must feed the being from beyond the stars! Feed it, and it will give me the spark of life!”

Dreamer sighed.

A pair of tentacles appeared above and below and reached into the warping space between the braziers. They pulled, and it opened a hole in the world.

Charlotte stared in. It was dark, darkness unending, but filled with billions of specks. They twisted around and blinked, and Charlotte realized that they were a multitude of eyes.

“Hey,” Dreamer said into the pit. “This guy’s one of yours, yeah?”

Something passed through the void.

“Yeah, okay,” Dreamer said.

She tossed Gerard in. The man’s screams were muffled almost as soon as he was past the gap.

“Now go away. This place is mine.”

The eyes blinked at her.

“Fine, then I’ll--” Dreamer began.

The opened shut, like an eye blinking closed on being poked.

“Oh, it left,” Dreamer said. “I barely started to eat it at all.”

“W-what was it?” Charlotte asked. She took a moment to compose herself. Things were moving fast.

“Just a tadpole that thought it was bigger than it is. If it really was strong, then it wouldn’t be bothering with some human for its lunch.”

Dreamer turned and started to leave the room.

“Where are you going?” Charlotte asked.

Dreamer shrugged. “To get an Abigail Plushie. This one didn’t work out at all. But it’s a good thing we can time travel, that means we’re not wasting any actual time.”

***