INTESTINAL 5.04

I think this one turned out pretty great! Much more of a focus on the horror aspects. I think the things it implies might be just a bit misleading if you jump the gun, but if we can share Ilia's doubts and questions, I'm sure we'll all figure out what's going on and no one will be hurt and everyone will live forever!

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I boᴎ'Ɉ υᴎbɘᴙꙅɈɒᴎb wʜγ γoυ'ᴙɘ boiᴎϱ Ɉʜiꙅ. IɈ'ꙅ... ꙅʜɘ ꙅʜoυlbᴎ'Ɉ dɘ mɘɘɈiᴎϱ ꙅo mɒᴎγ biɈɈɘᴙɘᴎɈ qiɘↄɘꙅ. Tʜɘᴙɘ ꙅʜoυlbᴎ'Ɉ ɘvɘᴎ dɘ Ɉʜiꙅ mɒᴎγ biɈɈɘᴙɘᴎɈ oᴎɘꙅ iᴎ Ɉʜɘ ꙅɒmɘ qlɒↄɘ, ᴎoɈ γɘɈ. Wʜγ⸮ 

Wɘll. MiϱʜɈ dɘ ɈʜɒɈ γoυ'ᴙɘ ᴎoɈ boiᴎϱ ɒᴎγɈʜiᴎϱ, ʜυʜ⸮ Alwɒγꙅ ʜɒᴙb Ɉo Ɉɘll wʜɘᴙɘ Ɉʜɘ liᴎɘ iꙅ. 

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Calling it a mess would be… frankly, a little unfair.

There’s absolutely some clutter in the house, a trash bag in the kitchen that looks freshly pulled from the can and ready to be taken out, a few shoes organized a little less than neatly in the foyer, but it’s no pigsty. The house smells dry and new, as if freshly finished, and the main issue seems to be the absolute darkness in the space. Having established enough rep to be let in, I decide that I draw the line with walking into the pitch black of the further hallways without a light, adding my phone flashlight to the meager illumination making its way in through the windows.

Michael glances back, wincing a bit at the brightness, but doesn’t comment. He just keeps walking deeper into the house, the gun in his hands held limply and the trailing threads coming off of him barely a glimmer. 

The light from my phone doesn’t go nearly as deep into the home as it should. Like there’s a weight to the dark in there, and it takes more than such a paltry tool to push it back. My host vanishes into it, the barest hint of his shoulder leaving my light as he turns into what might be a living room down the entry hall.

I walk into the house. I leave the door open behind me. 

As I enter, I begin to see a bit more of things I could call a mess. Really, the house just looks… normal. Lived in. Which feels ironic, in a way, because there’s a fine layer of dust coating almost everything I see. There’s dishes drying on a kitchen rack as I walk by, decorations that don’t look like they came with the house, a jacket tossed into a closet here, a candle with a bit of smoke wafting off its edge- and yet all of it looks simultaneously like it’s sat there, unused, for a long time. Days, at the least. The only part of the house that seems free of the fine powder of disuse is the trail of footsteps leading to the door and back again from deeper in the house, and which now turn into the living room.

I follow them, my ears open for the slightest hint of sound, the phone camera my only illumination into the dark.

He’s sitting there, staring at nothing. The gun is in his lap now, but he still has a hand on it, resting on the shiny chrome of the revolver’s well-cleaned parts. He’s staring at the far wall, the one with a tv and a window into the kitchen, and a kitchen window beyond that, saying nothing. His eyes shift very slightly to me as I enter the room, and he trails me as I walk into the space. There’s a few lounge chairs here, and considering he’s taken over the sofa, I take one closest to opposite him, my back now to the hallway I took to come in here.

I hear a very low creaking sound coming from that hallway the instant I start sitting down. By the time my butt’s hit the seat and I’m moving to get back up and look behind me, I’ve already heard the sound of the door clicking shut. 

There’s something else in the house, then. Alright. Sure. Why not. 

I put my phone on the coffee table between us, face down, but keep the flashlight on. It illuminates nothing, letting the darkness take over the space once again, but it’s more convenient if I need to grab it and light the space up again. This way, there’s a chance that my night vision can adjust enough for me to see in the dark, rather than in only a limited cone of light. Keep it as just insurance.

“So,” Michael says, invisible in the near pitch-black of his house, “what do you want?”

Operating under the assumption that he can see me, I give a shrug. “Can’t two strangers just say hi? Introduce themselves? Figure out some of the weirdness they’ve got going on?”

He doesn’t respond. Alright then. Tough crowd. Humor’s not my friend here, it would seem. 

“Do you have a gun?” he asks.

I blink. “I- no, I didn’t bring one. I’ll take yours, if you’re offering.”

Damnit. Defense mechanism. Hard to shut off.

“What’s in your pocket then?”

I let out a little breath. 

Yeah. My right hand’s stayed hidden in my pocket since I arrived here. Implied threat, sure- but I also didn’t want to just scare this guy away outright, or be waving my fucking knife-hand in his face. 

Considering that an unknown something shut the door behind me and the visibly depressed stranger in front of me does indeed have his own gun, and I’m trying to earn his damn trust, I decide to wave a knife-hand in his face.

Slowly, my other hand raised a bit to show I’ve got nothing there, I pull the Glove out of my jacket pocket. It clicks as it moves, very faintly, all seven fingers crackling a bit as they stretch out from the clenched fist I was holding it in. In that movement, there are hints of the things hidden within it, glimmering moments of sharp-edged bone and twisted, clever sinew flexing in and out of sight. 

Michael takes in a long, slow breath, and lets it back out.

“Ok. You can put your hands down.”

I do. 

For a little while, we just stare at each other, deep in the dark. We wait for long enough that I start to be able to make out the vague shape of him, the illumination from the lights and sky outside enough to hint at form without ever providing details. 

“What does it do?” he asks.

“The Glove?” I ask back, raising my hand. “Well… honestly, not very much yet. Scary looking, sharp, has tools in it. I… in theory I can use it for more, but it’s been… messy lately. Hard to find time for the little things, so to speak. How about yours?”

I hear the pause in his voice, the way his tone shifts. “I… my hands?”

I shake my head. “No. The threads. The ones-”

There’s the click of a hammer being pulled back. Even in the dark, it’s easy enough to see his shoulder shifting, bringing the weapon up further.

“What do you know about the threads?” he asks, his voice low and steady.

I keep my hands plainly visible and my breathing even. I don’t slip entirely behind the glass, but I feel it there, at the back of me, waiting to slam down and force me to make decisions I would rather not have to make. 

The gun makes a sound as it moves, not quite a click, not quite anything else. Metal-on-metal. I think he’s waved it a bit with his wrist. 

“Talk. Tell me what you know about them.”

Can’t show fear. Can’t show panic. There’s a fine line here, where he thinks I’m dangerous, thinks I’m just like him, and thinks I’m not a direct threat. It’s hard to find, harder still to see in this darkness, but I have to. The alternative is that this gets much uglier.

“I have some ideas about what they might be. If you’re asking where they come from, what they do, what they mean, I haven’t the fucking slightest.”

“Then- you know something about them. You-”

“You had an experience, right?”

His silence says what I need. 

“Something happened. Maybe you went looking for something, maybe it just found you. Something happened that seemed almost normal at first, but when you looked a little closer, you realized that it made no sense, that nothing lined up properly. And then, either right away or not long after, you started noticing something weird. I’m assuming, for you, that you started experiencing these threads?”

“...feels like I’m talking to a psychic. All the vaguest shit you need to fill in the blanks yourself.”

I snort. “No, that’s someone else. Pretty sure they got tarot cards and shit. Me? I played a videogame. A weird one. And then the world started getting weirder too. Want to tell me yours?”

I don’t hear anything from him for a while. Just silence and the weight of the gun between us, making the world quieter than it should be. Some animal part of me is so awake, so aware, that it’s cast aside things like the smell of the place, the discomfort of wearing so many layers, the shittiness of this whole situation. It trades all that away for an awareness of every single part of this space, centered on the lump of metal that could end me as easily as twitch.

I realize I’ve been holding my breath when I remember to inhale, watching his shoulder lower the gun back into his lap.

“My granddad. He… he made me a present. He said it would keep me safe. Said I could follow in his footsteps, get into the family business. I tried to tell him that woodworking isn’t really the same anymore, that people want different things, but he just insisted, like he was so damn sure. I thought it was just the Alzheimer's talking. Fucking horror show. Like watching him empty away. I… I couldn’t say no.”

His voice drifts as he talks, taking an almost dreamlike quality. Like he’s saying a story he’s rehearsed in his head before. I move my hands back down to my sides, one of them going into my jacket pocket to hold the kitchen knife I brought. 

The weight is both reassuring and terrifying, but somehow that feels better than the quiet of powerlessness. It might not be much, but it’s something.

Either Michael doesn’t notice, or he’s focused on more important things.

“He made us dolls. Me, my sisters, my dad when he was a kid. Little wooden cars and stuff, the kind of stuff you see in an old christmas special. Didn’t see him for a while, and then when we did, he was sick, and he was making the little toys again. He…

“I went to the nursing home one day and he had it ready for me. He said it would keep me safe. That it would be my friend. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it looked wrong. He made the face and it… it had too many curves on it. And the sticks for the limbs weren’t the right sizes. And… I don’t know. I figured it was the dementia. Like when they paint stuff and it gets freakier the more they deteriorate. It just…”

He goes quiet. The only thing I can see, beyond his outline, is the faint glinting of the strings coming from him and going up. 

One of them twitches, as if plucked. I watch him shudder, the hand the string connects to letting out a spasm. 

“I think he got it wrong,” he whispers. I can’t see them, but I can hear the tears he’s holding back, the weight he’s putting on every word. “I think… I think he was just too far gone, you know? I think he forgot. Forgot how puppets are supposed to work. Mixed up some of his thoughts.”

Behind me, something creaks. A floorboard, maybe. The house settling, or, in a darker scenario, moving under the weight of something standing atop it.

Or, worst case scenario, the creaking doesn’t come from the house. 

“I think he just forgot where the strings go.”

For a little while we just sit there in the quiet. The sounds of the night beyond us are muted here, near-silent, and the state of the man in front of me is so broken down that he suits it. If not for the trembling of the strings as he moves, I would think he’s as still as the rest of this place, an unmoving shape wrapped in shadow. 

Eventually, I hear him draw in a breath, forcing it past the weeping that the darkness hid from me.

“So. You… you know something. About this. You know how I can fix this.”

His tone changes as he speaks, cycling between different meanings. I can feel when he starts to add more “oomph” to the words, where his tone starts to go from pleading to demanding. The shift is matched by the way the gun glints in the minute light from the outside world, shifting its weight in his grasp to start to turn towards me.

He might shoot me. He’s not exactly in the healthiest frame of mind to begin with.

I don’t let the fear show on my face. I don’t shift my body or move in any way. I slide halfway behind the glass, up at the back of her head, behind my mind, and stay perfectly still.

“You’re going to tell me how I can fix this. If I can just-”

“I’d need to examine you before I could say anything else, Michael.”

He freezes at the sound of my voice, flinching like a deer in headlights. He really got lost in his recollection, in wherever the memory took him, and I don’t know if he even remembered I could talk. Trauma will do that to a person, twist their logic, their sense of place and causality, as the brain tries to compensate for the harm, find the reasons behind it. Whatever else Michael Bansnick might be, he is absolutely a traumatized human being. 

“I… what do you mean? What do you mean, examine me?”

“It’s very dark in here, Michael. I… when things escalated. When you started noticing changes. Did you start to see anything when you focus? When you sort of… see things sideways? Maybe you started seeing strings tied to things, right before some sort of event happened to the pieces knotted together. Something like that?”

He shakes his head, still clouded by shadow. “No. I- no, nothing like that. It’s just… sometimes it’s there. In front of me. Sometimes I can feel it pulling at me, can feel myself doing things I don’t want to do, things I wouldn’t normally do, and I can’t- I can’t stop it. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Hmm. Could be it’s manifesting in a different way… or it could be that something else is going on. Dani told me that everyone who gets these sorts of manifestations, if they get changed by it, start to see things. My own game-skill, Glimpse Beyond, is plenty proof of that- but if he’s telling the truth…

“Ok. Does it- alright. It doesn’t matter. My… thing, the thing that changed my hand? I can see stuff sometimes. Look underneath things, find the parts underneath. But I need to be able to see for that, Michael. Ok? I need some light in here.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while again. I hear him breathing, low and ragged, like he’s run a marathon. Despite the accumulation of dust that coats everything, the vague scent of disuse, he stinks of moth and old cotton and sweat, piled high and agonizingly wrapped around itself. I can’t imagine that he’s showered in the last few days, maybe longer. 

“I can use my flashlight, if you want,” I say. “You don’t have to-”

“It doesn’t like lights on in the house,” he whispers, his hands cradling the gun, playing with it like a fidget toy. 

“It doesn’t have to be for long. But if you want me to try and take a look, Michael, I’m going to need to be able to see. And if I can see, then maybe I can help. Ok?”

From behind the glass, I feel my heartbeat racing the longer he stays quiet, the longer he holds that gun in his hands. 

And then I see him nod. A convulsion, almost, just a spasm back and forth. He takes a deep breath, exhales, then again, faster, like he’s trying to pump up his heart, get his blood flowing-

His hand darts out to one side of him, without the gun, and grabs at something.

There’s a single heartbeat where I have to hold myself back from flinching in fear of the gun, as his hand moves. In that instant, I see the strings, moving along his limbs so as to always be pulling straight up, as if tied to the ceiling- and I see a few of them go taut, holding a tension that wasn’t there before as he reaches for the table beside the sofa. 

I hear him make a little grunt, or maybe a whimper- and then he forces his hand that final inch, and pulls on a small chain.

The lamp on the table, invisible in the darkness, lights the room with an easy, quiet glow. It’s a beautiful amber shade, filling the living room with a warm light that would look right at home in a cozy autumn night. 

The light doesn’t get very far. Not nearly as far as it should.

It gets just far enough for me to see something that looks like a piece of wood, darting up towards the ceiling and into an up that is-not-there.

It’s just bright enough for me to see the way the strings are pulling taut against Michael’s skin, digging in with an added tension that shouldn’t exist in anything static. 

It’s just enough light for me to see the window behind him, on the other side of the room. In it, I see my reflection, cast by the softness of the light. I see the back of Michael’s head, and the wound that sits there, like a closed eyelid. I see myself, across from him, plump in all my many layers and surrounded by the lounge chair I’ve chosen.

I see, behind me, two long sticks, one to either side of me. They’re only partially carved, with rooting branches still sticking out from them. They bend at one point each, at differing heights, and both seem to bow inward to a central point somewhere above me.

I sit there, entirely behind the glass, and smile reassuringly at Michael. He’s crying. I would be too, if I could see what he sees in my home every day.

One of the twigs takes a single step closer, as if to allow an upper body to loom over me.

Two legs of something much too tall. Something that shouldn’t fit in the room. Something that goes too far up.

Michael lets out a little sob.

“Please. Make the strings go away.”