Diary of an Ooze Witch (Joseph de Steel) 1.9 - 1.10

(Sorry this took longer than anticipated. It was originally a lot shorter, but it quickly ballooned as inspiration bit me)

1.9

The doctor was unable to answer our call until the following morning, which meant that for the night, we had to watch over dear William and make sure he did not hurt himself or anyone else. It was presumed that by binding him to a chair and having the household servants watch over him, we would be fine. I suspected some of them were prone to gossip, but I stressed to all of them that this affair should be kept under the strictest confidence. A scandal as devastating as this could ruin the family name for generations, something I was not in any rush to do. As Father was off on business for the week, it was up to me as man of the house to protect the family, even from ourselves.

Unfortunately, even detained, the ghoul wearing my Brother’s skin had ways of provoking our anguish and misery. In his more feral moments, he yowled into the early hours of the morning, screaming guttural cries of anguish as he struggled against his bonds. Dear Mother became inconsolable as her eldest son wore his madness upon his countenance like a badge. Despite the best efforts of the house servants to muffle his caterwauling, William chewed threw several makeshift gags to continue spewing his incoherent ramblings. I soon urged Mother to take Sister with her and cordon themselves off in the furthest end of the manor, where hopefully they would be far enough to not be subject to Brother’s madness.

Regardless, I decided to personally oversee William’s captivity myself. The servants were taken aback by my decision, but I could not in good conscience allow them to be subject to his ranting. If I was to gain the respect of the household, I must take responsibility for its hardships. By this point, Brother had screamed his throat raw and began staring aimlessly at the walls of his confinement. Whatever demon had befell him had a grip upon his very soul and as I sat opposite him, he could not meet my gaze. Perchance there was some small amount of shame left in William’s soul? Sitting across a table from him, I vigilantly kept watch for anything unusual. And as the hours passed by into the early hours of the morning, he stayed mostly silent. I had hoped that the worst of it was at its end.

I could not tell you when I fell asleep, only that I had been stirred to wakefulness by the mutterings of William. Chiding myself for my lack of discipline, I stood up quickly, drawing his attention. What sat before me was the dried up husk of a man, tainted by a madness he could not contain. I could see in his eyes a tiredness of life that spoke of a flame on its last embers. Through dry and cracked lips, he pursed them as if to speak to me. I instinctively flinched at this, dreading what would tumble out of them.

“Burn it.”

I looked on in bewilderment as the light in William’s eyes dimmed for the last time, his body slackened as if he had spent the last of his strength to speak those words to me. In the moment, I was unsure of what he meant, but a part of me knew that through the madness and horror, those would be the last words my Brother would speak to me. I wanted to ask him what he had meant by that, but as I moved to act on my thought, one of the house servants came to inform me that the doctor had at last arrived. Looking from my catatonic Brother to my servant and back to him again, I relented to convention and erred on the side of having William cared for by a professional. It is fortunate the Devil inside of him had fatigued him to the point of listlessness, making it easier for the physician to properly administer his aid.

The doctor spent an hour diagnosing my Brother’s ailment. He seemed confident that what my Brother was suffering from was a sickness called Vapor Poisoning, a madness caused by excessive use of a particularly odious plant brought over by traveling Ulqorran merchants. Apparently, by burning the substance and inhaling the vapors emitted, one could elicit hallucinations that were indistinguishable from reality. From the doctor’s assessment, William had partook of the plant too often and had burned the memories of such hallucinations permanently into his mind.

When I asked if there was any remedy for his condition, the doctor balked at my optimism. Perhaps if we had caught his malady earlier this tragedy could have been averted, but at this point, William’s madness had progressed past the point of any recovery. He offered his advice that perhaps it would be best to keep William in an Asylum for continued observation, where his needs could be met in peace and without the risk of scandal by keeping a barking mad husk of a man in the manor. While I had no patience for what my Brother had put Mother through, I hesitated at committing him to the Mad House. To make such a decision, to damn him to exile or to keep him around in the hope that he would recover… It weighed too heavily upon my conscience. The guilt pulled at my heart, trapped by obligation to my family and what loyalty I had left to the shell that was William. In the end, it was too brutal a choice for me to make as I decided it would be best to wait for Father to levy his judgment. A messenger was sent out immediately as arrangements were made to detain Brother away from the manor, to be kept temporarily on the outskirts of the city, away from prying eyes until a decision could be rendered.

Even now as I write this, I ponder if I had done this out of respect or cowardice. Part of me wants to punish myself for such action, but what choice was there to make? Damn my Brother or risk Scandal? It is too big a judgment for me to make.

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1.10

Father returned post haste when word had reached him of Brother’s illness. It took not even a day’s passage for him to make his way back to the family estate. Demanding to see William, he was guided to his location where he could see what had befallen his eldest son. Watching his countenance, it was obvious how much this pained Father, to see his first born son withered and broken. He tried in earnest to provoke a reaction from him, but to no avail. Whatever spirit that had inhabited William had since departed, taking my Brother away with it. With a heavy heart, Father made the final judgment, the choice that I had been too meek to address. As the Hospitaliers drug William to the Asylum, I gazed upon Father as he averted his eyes from his eldest son, tears streaming down his face. It had been the first time in my life I had witnessed Father cry, and the memory burned itself into my psyche, branding it forever with its anguish.

Father and I returned back home after that without a word. The color had left his face as he wore a look of devastation, unable to hide such great sorrow. The man who I looked up to for my entire life, so thoroughly defeated, it stunned me almost as much as my guilt for having him make the decision I was too weak to. I dare not broach the subject at such a time, only carrying on in silence as we walked into the family manor.

And that was that. There was no funeral service, no settling of affairs. William was gone but not dead, and yet life carried on. The family would grieve in their own ways. Mother sat in her bedroom, silently pining by the window as she gazed out into the city, distraught and powerless. Father buried himself in work, finding no time for family or thoughts for drama. Sister tried to continue as she had, looking to act as if Brother had not been removed from our life, leaving a hole where his presence once was. I can’t really blame her, after all, what can one do in the face of such illness? We must carry on lest we succumb to our melancholy.

As for myself, I found myself awash in questions. Had my brother’s madness lay solely to blame on an Ulqorran plant? Were his ravings about a woman of impossible beauty been a hallucination brought about by madness or something else? And if they were not a figment of his scattered mind, could they be found out in the world, still spreading their insidious charm, a foul temptress who robs men of their sanity? I tried not to obsess over this as it was up to me to keep family affairs in order. The household servants worked tirelessly to clean the halls of my Brother’s episode, scrubbing away the memory of what had happened. Even still, William’s room remained largely untouched by them, perhaps the specter of his presence still clung to his dwellings, frightening them away.

I stood at the threshold of his door and peered in. The grotesque conditions he had lived in caused me to blanch. Filth caked the walls as the fetid stench of urine and other fluids stung my nostrils hard enough to water my eyes. I could not blame the household servants for postponing their cleansing of this particular room as I thought whether setting it afire would be a less costly endeavor.

“Burn it.”

The words returned to the forefront of my mind. The last two words William had spoken to me in his final moments of lucidity. What had he meant by that? Did he mean something in his room? My eyes scanned for something, anything that he could have meant for me to destroy. As I slowly spied my surroundings, I saw the easel he had set up with a canvas sat upon it, the painting facing away from me. It was obvious to me that that was what he had meant. I squinted at the object as determination swept over me to complete my Brother’s last wish. Pulling a handkerchief to my face, I braved the threshold to his room and walked into the den.

While the distance to the painting was but less than a dozen steps before me, it might as well have been an ocean’s width between us. Step after step, I carried myself forward as I had but one target in this putrid place. The smell permeated through the cloth as I could feel the urge to retch rising in my throat. I forced myself forward, forbidding my body from succumbing to the filth that surrounded me as my legs ached in betrayal. I ignored the instincts within me telling me to turn back now, my will steeled by my obligation to carrying forth William’s last request. Trudging forth, I rose my hands to the canvas, gripping it with strength I had not imagined possessing. Ripping it from the easel, I pulled the painting off of it with both hands, my fingers pressed deeply into the edges of the frame still damp with what I had hoped was paint.

My goal in hand, I relinquished myself to my greater instincts and escaped the room with tremendous haste. My feet fell about each other, desperate to reach back past the threshold of William’s room and salvation from this filthy prison. My head grew light with the rancid odors that seemed to cling to me, wrapping themselves around my being and poisoning my very soul. Eyes watering, I could barely make sense of what direction I was heading in… Until finally, I had crossed the threshold once more, finding myself in the hall once more, the painting firmly in hand. I had done it!

Breathing deeply in relief, I neglected to account for the simple fact that the painting possessed the same rancid stench that had infected the room. As I took the smell into my lungs, I dropped the painting before turning and falling to my hands and knees. I retched in horror as my dry heaving seized my body in pure agony. The household servants rushed to my side in order to help as several of them almost immediately averted their noses just being in the vicinity of the painting.

Without looking, I extended a finger behind me, doing my best to point at the painting before commanding the household servants, “Burn it!”

I could hear several servants murmur behind my back amongst themselves before sounds of them picking it up and ushering the vile thing away. Moments passed as I recovered my strength enough to return to my feet. Dazed, I looked around and found myself alone once more, only the lingering scent of excrement hanging on the air to accompany me. Pushing myself to lurch away from William’s room, I staggered against the walls of the manor, still weakened by my sickness. Pressing a hand against the wall, I shuddered as the squish of grime beneath my fingertips stained it with filth. Pulling away from the wall, I gazed in horror at my fingers, each dotted with the filth that had clung to the painting, dark whirling spots that stained where I had grasped the canvas.

Desperately, I looked for the nearest bath to cleanse myself of the abhorrent stench that clung to my fingers. Sprinting through the halls, I found a room with which I could wash myself in and beat down the door with reckless abandon. I scrubbed my hands against one another in the water basin, frantic to remove the stains of the painting upon them. Thankfully, as the water clouded up, I could feel my fingers relieved of the stains that had plagued them. Emptying the basin into a chamber pot, I refilled it with water and grabbed a bar of soap to redouble my efforts, scourging even the memory of the filth’s presence on my fingers. Finally, as the last of my fingers was rubbed raw, I felt as if I had been cleansed of a curse. I ran my thumbs along the tips of my other fingers, making one final check before I could be free of this.

It would be on this inspection that I found a curious strand of hair. Long and blonde, I felt it beneath my fingertips, silken and soft. I searched my mind for who it could have belonged to and found myself at an impasse. No one in my family had blonde hair, and none of the servants were known to take care of their hair well enough to be suspect. Before I knew it, I caught myself stroking the strand of hair almost obsessively. Why was I so enamored by it?

It was as I was scouring my brain for what it could mean, I thought back to my Brother when he sat before his canvas. At the time, I hadn’t caught it, but as I dwelled on his descent into madness, the image of a lock of silken hair around his knuckle came into clarity.

I gazed at the strand of hair, fair as the dawn and softer than the down of a dove, I caught myself from returning to madness and washed my hands of it. It was then that I had my answer: Whatever had bewitched my Brother, it was real, and not the hallucination of some Ulqorran plant. This idle strand of hair, however innocuous, was proof of that. It represented a clear and present danger, a danger that devoured William whole, emptying him until only a void remained where his soul had been.

I vowed to make sense of this tragedy and remedy this thorough destruction of my Brother. Out in the city of Placedo existed the foul temptress who robbed William of his sanity. It was my intention to use the resources available to me to bring this harlot to justice.

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