Anastacia ran her hand over the spot on the door her spear should have hit in disbelief. It didn’t have even the smallest of nicks on it after getting directly hit with enough force to topple an average sized house. An old wooden door like that should have exploded into a million tiny splinters all over the garden, yet it stood there, mocking the necromancer with its continuing existence. “Fine then, I’ll just burn it down!” Anastacia yelled and took a step back. She would have started flinging fire at it, if it weren’t for Gilbert, who grabbed her arm.
“We’re already stuck inside a mansion; do you want to be stuck inside a burning one? Chances are that it wouldn’t work anyway.” He said and let go.
“What do you think we should do then?” Anastacia asked and kicked a piece of her spear that was laying on the floor.
Gilbert looked around in silence for a bit. “We’re not being attacked at the moment, so I reckon we should just carry on with the quest and check out the body. Maybe we’ll learn something about what’s going on here.” He suggested.
The necromancer frowned. “Fine. I’m not going to touch it though, so if we need to carry it somewhere, it’s on you.” She said and pointed in the direction of the body, as far as she could tell, it was two floors above them and at the other end of the main building.
“Upstairs it is then.” Gilbert nodded and headed up one of the marble staircases.
Once upstairs, the light coming through the foyer’s windows wasn’t enough for them to see anymore, so both adventurers took out their crystal lanterns and hung them from their belts before wandering onwards into the dark hallway. Crystal lanterns were one of the many magical sources of light that were available for people of sufficient wealth, such as adventurers. At its core, they were a simple clear crystal with a light generating enchantment cast on it, which was then put inside two brass cylinders, both of which had large holes in their sides and could be rotated so that the holes aligned with each other and let the light out, or didn’t and the crystal inside was completely hidden. They were well suited for adventurers, who had a tendency to delve into whatever dark crevices the world had to offer and needed a reliable source of light that didn’t require fuel, generate smoke or get blown out in the middle of a fight. The only real downsides the crystals had, were that they didn’t generate any heat and were far too bright for some uses, so they couldn’t really replace campfires or candles.
The second-floor hallway was equally as stunning as the foyer had been. The marble floor was covered with long red carpets that all were probably alone worth more than the humble houses of the rest of the village. On its walls, hung dozens of beautiful paintings that had suffered slightly from the damp cold air inside the mansion and the sight would have probably driven mad anyone that knew enough about art to truly appreciate the pieces. Between the paintings, were intricate candelabras that were either gilded or entirely made of gold, all of them were completely covered in cobwebs and candle wax that hadn’t been cleaned off.
“I don’t like how quiet it is in here. Can you feel anything at all?” Gilbert asked quietly.
“Nothing living, there’s the dead guy, tons of dead rats near it and nothing besides that. No mice, no living rats, no large bugs.” Anastacia shrugged. “So how do we find the ghost?”
Gilbert sighed. “It’s not necessarily a ghost, and unless whatever it is attacks us, I think the body will be the best clue we can get. Though we could peek into some rooms along the way…” He said and pointed at one of the doors a few meters down the hallway.
Anastacia immediately rushed to the door and popped it open. She stared into the room for a bit before glancing at Gilbert and looking more than slightly worried. “Uh… Well, something happened here.” She said and stepped in.
The room was lit by sunlight coming in through a window that was uncovered by drapes because someone or something had torn them off, as evidenced by the metal curtain rod being bent and one of its supports being torn off the wall. The rest of the room was in very much similar shape, every piece of furniture had been torn apart and was missing pieces. What was left of a handsomely sized bed suggested that it may have at some point been a bedroom, but that was as far as the clues went.
Anastacia kicked around some of the wooden scraps that had been tossed all over the floor. “What is this? Was there a fight?” She asked and took a look out of the window.
Gilbert kneeled to inspect a piece of splintered wood that had at some point been a chair. “Hmm… No. This is scavenging. Take a look around you, someone has gone through this room and taken every substantial piece of wood and cloth. All that’s left are the cracked pieces that have a lot of nails in them or broke when the furniture was taken apart. You see this type of a thing when someone is trying to fortify a position during a war, they use whatever they can find to create barricades and such. Whoever did this is gathering materials.” He explained and went to check what the next room over was like, only to find it in the exact same condition, more or less confirming his suspicions. “It’s pretty obvious that no one has broken in here though, they could have just grabbed almost anything and lived well for years off it, but everything valuable seems to be untouched.”
“How abut this: the guy lived here alone, and the ghost slowly drove him insane, so he tried to barricade himself into the room he’s in now, but ran out of water and died?” Anastacia suggested.
The old adventurer scratched his beard. “It’s not a bad theory. I guess we’ll see when we get to the body. Also, we still don’t know if it’s a ghost or not.”
“Right, we only know that you want to be boring about it.” Anastacia remarked and moved on to the next room.
They continued down the hallway, taking a quick peek into the rooms they passed along the way while looking for the stairs to the third floor. As they wandered around for a couple of hours, the pattern that presented itself seemed to be that the more open spaces like lobbies and halls had been unused for a long time, but in good, non-ransacked state, while everything that was hidden behind closed doors was scrapped and torn apart. Eventually they had gone through the entire second floor without finding any kind of clue on what they were dealing with nor the stairs, so Gilbert figured that it was time to return to the foyer and try their luck with the doors there.
“You know what would be cool? If we opened one of the doors and there was just like a ton of cheese or something stupid behind it, and I don’t mean like a storeroom of it, I want like a stack of the stuff from floor to ceiling. Though it would probably be cursed, wouldn’t it?” Anastacia wondered while they were heading back. They were no longer bothering with keeping their voices down since that didn’t appear to matter. “Would cursed cheese still taste the same? Because I might still go for it if the curse isn’t anything too terrible.”
“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never had to eat cursed cheese. Though there was this one time we had to kill a giant alligator that lived in a cursed swamp. Bugs got to our rations so we figured that we might as well eat the alligator since it was there and dead anyway, didn’t want it to go to waste, you know? Anyway, it tasted just fine really, but we all started losing hair before the evening.” The old adventurer explained. “It grew back fine though, so it think it was worth-“ He was about to continue the story but stopped at the top of the stairs they had taken earlier. “That wasn’t there.” He whispered and pointed down at a wooden mannequin that stood in the middle of the foyer, facing directly at them.
Anastacia took a few steps towards it to see if it’d react, but the mannequin remained still. “I saw that one from the window earlier, I recognize the dress.” She whispered and took out one of her remaining spears.
Together they slowly approached the mannequin that was wearing a gorgeous but clumsy looking pure white dress with numerous ribbons and other trinkets attached to it, as well as a pair of long white silk gloves on its ball-jointed arms and a white slightly transparent veil. Once they got close, Anastacia poked it a few times with her staff, but again, received no reaction.
“I think this was my favorite one. Such a shame I can’t take it, but it’d be kind of rude to leave her naked anyway.” The necromancer sighed and fixed one of the ribbons slightly.
Gilbert frowned. “Her? The mannequin?” He asked.
“Ugh… Well obviously! I think she’s kind of pretty too.” Anastacia insisted.
The old adventurer squinted to look at the mannequin’s face. It was almost entirely featureless, besides the rough outlines of a pair of eyes and eyebrows painted on it with black paint. He could maybe see something feminine about the eyes but even that was a stretch. “You know what? Let’s revisit this one when we’re not stuck inside a manor with either mannequins that move on their own, or someone that moves them but isn’t detectable by you.” He said and headed to the door that was on the right from the front door, in the same direction as the corpse. While keeping an eye on the mannequin, he carefully gave the door a slight push and allowed it to creak open on its own. The corridor on the other side was equally empty and quiet as the foyer had been when they first entered the mansion, though it ran along the outer wall of the building and was decently lit by the light coming through the windows. After quickly checking the ceiling, Gilbert noticed a fist-sized lump of something on the floor a couple of meters into the corridor. “What the…” He muttered and went to pick it up.
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“What’d you find?” Anastacia asked and followed Gilbert into the corridor. “Is it ghosts?”
“It’s not ghosts, damnit!” The old adventurer raised his voice slightly. “It’s cheese, very, very old and moldy cheese. It may not be a stack from floor to ceiling, but I don’t think this can be a coincidence.”
Anastacia took the lump of cheese from him and smelled it carefully. While it did smell a bit off, it was mostly dry, and the more poignant stench of the mold faded only a few centimeters away. So the necromancer took off her helmet and stuck the lump on one of the pointy antlers on it. “Thanks to… whoever gave this to me, I suppose.” She said and strapped the helmet back on.
Gilbert didn’t feel like arguing about carrying along a moldy piece of cheese, so he said nothing about it, but something else came to his mind. “Why don’t you wish for something else? We’ll see if whatever we’re dealing with here delivers.” He suggested.
“You think that’s how it works? Okay then, I could really go for some coffee right about now, the stuff we make on the road isn’t great…” Anastacia said and looked around in case there suddenly was a cup of coffee on the floor, but that didn’t seem to be the case.
Gilbert scratched his beard and looked around. “What if I…” He mumbled and walked back to the door they just came through and closed it. Before even a second had passed, he pulled it open again, only to find the dressed-up mannequin less than a meter away from the door, with a small porcelain cup between its hands. “Fuck!” The adventurer yelped in surprise and jumped back.
“What a brave adventurer you are.” Anastacia sneered, walked up to the mannequin and accepted its gift. Though instead of coffee, the cup was filled with whole coffee beans and murky water that smelled like it might have been from the pond outside. “Uh… Thanks for trying.” She said and awkwardly placed the cup on a windowsill.
“I’m going to be frank about this: I don’t have a clue about what this even could be. Nothing I know of fits this, which means it’s either something I don’t know about or something that’s behaving abnormally, both of which are very, very, very dangerous. Basically, we have no idea what it is, what it’ll do or what we can do about it.” Gilbert explained and looked unusually shaken by the realization, as it wasn’t something he ran into too often.
Anastacia shrugged. “Really? Honestly, I’m having a great time. I mean, look...” She said and closed the door again. “Bring me tits!” The necromancer demanded and pulled the door open to reveal a large painting, that depicted a scantily clad woman sleeping in a garden, leaning against the mannequin. “It’s clearly a benevolent ghost.”
“Or it’s a trap” Gilbert pointed out.
Anastacia scoffed at the idea and went ahead to open another door a bit further along the corridor. Unsurprisingly, on the other side was another completely trashed room, perhaps a dining room of some kind. But there was a single detail about it that immediately caught her eye: in the middle of the large room was an intact bottle of wine. The broken pieces of furniture had been scattered everywhere as they had been in every other room they had checked so far, but the bottle’s surroundings were clear of shrapnel, which wasn’t like anything what they had seen before. Curious about the bottle, Anastacia entered the room and started to poke it with her staff.
Gilbert was about to follow her but happened to glance at the mannequin and felt a chill down his spine. “Yeah, I just don’t like this at all.” He said and went to close the door to get some peace of mind.
Right before it was about to slam shut, the door thumped against something. Gilbert tried to push it a bit harder, but the door wouldn’t budge anymore. Before he had time to back off, someone shoved their arm through the small gap and grabbed his wrist. Gilbert felt something sting his arm and looked down to see that the hand grasping his wrist had several rusty nails driven through it and the white silk glove it wore. Most of the nails stuck into his leather bracer, but a few found their way through and dug into his skin. The adventurer groaned in pain and tackled the door with all his weight while trying to pull the hand off his wrist, tearing his skin more in the process and covering both his and the attacker’s arms in blood.
All of a sudden, he heard a loud popping sound and the door slammed shut with the attacker’s arm still firmly stuck on his. He was able to pull it off, as it no longer fought him after getting detached, and threw it at a wall as hard as he could, right as Anastacia dashed out of the room she had gone into.
“What?! Ghosts?!” The necromancer asked and looked around while spinning one of her spears, until she noticed the severed arm on the floor. “What the fuck, Gil?! You didn’t have to break her arm even if she was a bit creepy!” She yelled and picked up the wooden piece of a mannequin from the floor.
“But, it…” The old adventurer started and looked at his own wrist, which was now miraculously healed and completely clean from blood, just like the severed mannequin arm, which had also somehow lost the nails it previously had in it. “…attacked me?”
Anastacia shoved him out of the way and opened the door again. “Yeah right, I’m sure it did. Be careful with that cup of coffee too, or it might ‘attack’ you as well.” She mocked Gilbert and picked up the one-armed mannequin to lean it against the wall because it wouldn’t stay upright anymore. “Sorry about that, he can be a bit too paranoid about things.” She whispered to it and placed the severed arm on the floor next to it.
Gilbert took his glove and bracer off to see if his arm was really unharmed. He could have sworn that he felt the nails dig into his skin and that he saw blood gushing everywhere, but now it was as if nothing had happened. “Anna, you’ve got to believe me. There’s something very weird going on.” He insisted.
“Sure, I believe you, no reason not to. Maybe the mannequin came alive for a bit, maybe it tried to attack you, but I’m not seeing anything like that here. It’s pretty clear that there’s something going on, but are you absolutely sure that whatever just happened wasn’t in your head? Because I’d be pretty much screwed if you start going nuts.” Anastacia said and poked her friend in the stomach with her staff. “I’m not supposed to be the levelheaded one here. Now, let’s go, I found a way to the kitchen.”
The old adventurer slapped himself on the cheeks a few times to perk up and followed Anastacia into the room she had checked earlier. The wine bottle was now shattered on the floor and the wine itself frozen solid. The only ice mage present insisted that she had no idea what had happened and urged them to move onwards through another door in the corner of the room into a large kitchen that would have at one point employed at least half a dozen chefs but was now covered in a thick layer cobwebs and dust. Even if the late owner of the mansion hadn’t been dead for the entire year, he certainly hadn’t found much use for the kitchen, as it looked like it had been out of commission for far longer than that. Though it was notable that whoever had gathered all the available materials from the other rooms, hadn’t gotten their hands on the cookery yet.
Gilbert looked around but couldn’t find anything special about the room itself, or a reason why Anastacia wanted to go there. “Why are we here?” He asked and picked up a rotten, dried up onion from a bowl on one of the counters.
Anastacia pointed at the ceiling and a small hatch in it, barely big enough for a regular sized man to squeeze through. “Maybe it’s a secret passage?” She suggested and handed Gilbert her staff because she was too short to reach the trapdoor’s handle even with it.
“Maybe it is, but I won’t be able to fit in there.” Gilbert pointed out and tapped the handle a few times with the staff.
When the hatch finally opened, it released a massive cloud of dust into the room below and had the adventurers coughing for a good while. Along with the dust, an inbuilt set of ladders lowered from the hatch, almost hitting Gilbert on the way down.
After shaking most of the dust off herself, Anastacia took her staff and began climbing. “I’ll check it out, try not to get attacked while I’m up there. Some of those ladles next to the stove looked pretty mean.” She grinned and disappeared into the darkness.
Gilbert could hear her steps through the ceiling as the boards creaked under the necromancer’s feet. “Try not to wander too far, okay?” He said and heard Anastacia dismiss the comment somewhere directly above him. He took a sip of water and sat down on a dusty counter in a place where he could see both the ladder and the door they came in from, he wasn’t about to forget the mannequin’s existence.
Suddenly, something odd caught Gilbert’s nose: a very faint scent of burning wood. His first thought was that Anastacia was up to something again, but no way even she would be stupid enough to use fire magic in a dusty crawlspace. From the corner of his eye he noticed a tiny puff of smoke rising from the stove’s firebox. Wizened from the earlier experience with the door, he moved further away from the stove and closer to the ladders while grasping his mace tight. Slowly the firebox creaked open, revealing a full blaze inside the stove, far larger than it was supposed to have even when in use. Gilbert’s mind raced to find possible explanations, but everything he was able to come up it was farfetched to the point of ludicrousness, and when an extremely long and lanky arm made of cinder and fire reached out from the flames, he gave up on the idea of a magical self-lighting stove.
“Anna! Do you smell smoke?” He asked and watched a second, equally disturbing looking arm emerge from the fire.
“Wasn’t me!” The necromancer responded from the crawlspace. “What’s up?”
While bouncing his gaze between the stove, the door they came in from and the hatch Anastacia crawled into, Gilbert took a few deep breaths. “I think it’s happening again! Can you please hurry back here?!” He asked with a noticeable amount of distress in his voice.
“No can do.” Anastacia coughed. “I stepped through a few boards and my foot is a bit stuck, can you hold on for a few seconds?”
Gilbert felt the stinging pain in his wrist again; the wounds from the previous encounter were back. When a third fiery arm clawed its way out of the stove, he decided that enough was enough, charged the stove and kicked the firebox shut. It was enough to snap one of the arms clean off, but the other two began flailing blindly and set the cobwebs around the room on fire. Even though it was severed, the fallen arm was still wriggling and grasping on the floor, so Gilbert decided to stomp on it. That turned out to be a mistake however, as the gross, four-jointed fingers effortlessly burned their way through the adventurer’s leather boots and scorched his foot. Howling in pain, Gilbert fell on his back and used his other leg to kick the fiery arm off. Things might have taken a turn for the worse, if it weren’t for Anastacia’s hurried steps that banished the fiery nightmare in a blink of an eye and returned everything back to their extremely dusty state.
“Is it ghosts?!” Anastacia asked excitedly and slid down the ladder, only to discover Gilbert lying on the dusty floor, holding his foot as the stove’s hatch slowly swung shut. “Did you… kick a stove? You need to calm down.” She laughed and offered to cool down Gilbert’s foot.
The old adventurer was breathing heavily and hastily took his boot off. Both his leg and wrist were unharmed again. He sighed started to regret leaving the enchanted rope in his backpack by the gates outside, having Anastacia tied to his belt would have come in handy.