Discover Top Posts Tagged with #c rory

Dec 10, 2025

TIMING: Current LOCATION: Sweetwoods Chocolates PARTIES: Regan, Rory, worm SUMMARY: Regan and Rory both end up on the same chocolate tour, only they're both far more interested in splitting off to explore the forbidden cellar. It's possible they aren't alone down there.

It was Marcy who informed Regan about this place, Sweetwood Chocolates. The best chocolate she’s ever had, she said. That made it all but necessary for Regan to investigate and assess whether the quality was sufficient for gifting. Chocolates couldn’t stand on their own as gifts—not dead enough—but they could make a fine accompaniment to a more sophisticated present, like the leg of a bear, or vertebrae held together only by the last strands of soft tissue (Regan felt like those vertebrae sometimes).

The doorknob was clammy and weirdly sticky in Regan’s hand, and inside, the store was a pleasingly dark cavity. She had never seen so many shapes and kinds of chocolate—all shades of brown, white, and cream. You could buy in bulk and pay for the decadent presentation of such a gift, or you could buy a single truffle to pop into your mouth. There were worms, which may or may not have been chocolate. Regan edged along the side of the store, staying away from that glass display, eyes scanning for the best option to purchase for her needs. Big sheets of glass like that were particularly vulnerable to even a too-harsh syllable or stifled cough.

“You killed me dead and now you’re gonna buy yourselves some chocolates?” That nasal voice echoed in her skull, so unlike the admonishments that Cliodhna had scarred into her, the inner voice she was accustomed to. This one was dreadfully familiar in a way she refused to think about. It also possessed a sickening honking quality. It was, Regan thought, the whooping cough of voices.

Regan swatted at the air over her shoulder as if shooing an invisible parrot that perched there. The movement caught someone’s attention.

“Are you here for the tour, ma’am?” A stout, elderly woman asked. Her eyes flit to a group of a few other people, likely truly here for the tour that Regan was only now learning existed. This wasn’t a large store. Actually, it was smaller than most downtown. It was perhaps 800 square feet. The tour couldn’t be very long, and maybe it would help Regan decide what chocolates might be most suitable for Jade.

“I’m here for the tour, yes. I have been looking forward to it.” For perhaps a few seconds now. “You may present the chocolates.”

—

Rory liked chocolate. The sweet taste was something that had been coveted throughout her childhood, when her parents had too many kids to purchase something as frivolous as candy outside of special occasions. After all, one chocolate bar was affordable enough, but seven started to get a little steeper. Chocolate was something of a delicacy amongst the Paredes kids as a result, something they got to enjoy rarely. Birthdays, holidays, Halloween… but not day to day. Which, in all honesty, was probably a good thing. Rory liked chocolate, but too much of it always left her stomach aching and churning, as if it was rejecting what she’d put into it. She’d never quite understood why — no one else she knew had that problem, and none of her siblings seemed to tout it, either — but the feeling wasn’t a pleasant one. Most of the time, of course, Rory found it worth it in the end. The sweetness of the chocolate was always enough to counteract the painful aftermath.

So, she was here. No special occasion, and no six siblings to buy for, either. Just Rory standing in a quaint little chocolate shop, squinting at shelves upon shelves of chocolate that she could buy for herself even without reason. She steered clear of the dark chocolate, which was worse on her stomach and made her thirsty on top of it all, and studied some of the colorful milk chocolate creations. Maybe she’d get something for Mickey, or for Oliver. Or… maybe she’d pretend she was getting something for Mickey and Oliver and instead get three things for herself. The world was her oyster.

Out of the corner of her eye, Rory noticed a woman with bleached hair doing the same thing she was — inspecting chocolates. But… there was something strange about the way she was holding herself. She was leaning away from the empty air beside her, swatting at her shoulder even though nothing was there. Rory watched her curiously for a moment before a voice interrupted her train of thought.

Someone said something about a tour, which both piqued her interest and tipped her curiosity. The shop was so small, and she wondered how a tour could be effectively conducted here. But there was a crowd gathered together, and the strange woman was saying she’d been looking forward to it, so Rory didn’t want to miss out. She slid in with the group, beside the woman with the bleached hair, pretending she knew exactly what she was in for. If nothing else, this would give her a better idea of what this lady’s vibe was.

—

The tour guide smiled sunshine over the group, bright enough to melt chocolate. Bright enough to expose everything if illuminated for too long. Regan eyed a woman who had slid in next to her; she was a little close, but even just standing in a cluster, the tour group took up about half the store. Regan couldn’t exactly fault her. It could have even been a good thing—she seemed to know what she was doing, providing an example to follow. Regan studied her when she thought the woman wasn’t looking. Early twenties, wild hair, confident chin. Human.

“Why do you always look at everyone like you want to skin them and wear it for Halloween?”

"Whisht!” Regan hissed back. Someone looked. “There was a fly.” More people looked around, concerned, and Regan realized that probably wasn’t the right excuse to use anywhere that sold food. “I have dispatched it,” she said, her stomach clamping. “Whisht,” she whispered again, though it didn’t work.

“I told you I don’t know fucking Scottish. English, Español, and Elvish. Triple E!”

First of all, it was Irish. Second, triple E was Eastern equine encephalitis. But Regan felt the heat of examination upon her and didn’t respond. She knew how it must look. She really needed to try harder to ignore this manifestation of her guilty conscience. Surely the burden was heavy enough for her to sink it to the depths of her mind. Couldn’t she drown, one last time?

“Everyone,” the woman said, cutting through chatter, “my name is Ingrid, and I will be your tour guide for today. Now—shh—I will need everyone to form a line to sign our waiver.” She held up a clipboard and pen. “It’s nothing to worry about, really. It’s just something we’ve needed to do since 2007.” Beaming, she pushed the clipboard into someone’s hands. “Please sign, remove the sheet, and pass it on to the next person. I will take the forms here.”

When the clipboard was passed to the woman Regan had watched earlier, she knew she was next in line. And last. No one else seemed to have raised objections to signing. “I wonder who died in 2007,” Regan said, “and how they died. Does the form give any indication?” She eyed the small print from over the woman’s shoulder in a manner that might not have been appreciated; it was difficult to read in the store’s dimness. She could probably ask Dr. Rickers. He would have been here, working, same as always, back in 2007. Perhaps his beard didn’t shed so much in his relative youth. “Ah. Right there. Do you see it?” She pointed. “We are agreeing to stay out of the cellar, which is—emphatically—best for the wellbeing of the chocolate. Someone must have met their end there. Long stairs in the dark… or sheer coincidence, maybe.” She would definitely ask Dr. Rickers. Regan’s gaze was pulled to the door toward the back of the store, where only employees were allowed. The entrance to the cellar must have been in there, not that Regan was contemplating going down there. Not at all. It called to her not at all.

—

The strange woman hissed an unfamiliar word, and Rory shot her a quick side eye even as she claimed she’d been dispatching a fly. (Side note: who said dispatching about a fly?) There was a repeated whisper of the same word, though, low enough that Rory might not have caught it at all if not for her enhanced hearing. Whatever the woman was doing — and there was no fly involved, since Rory definitely would have heard its buzzing — nothing had been dispatched. Whatever was bothering her was still close enough to do so. That much, Rory was certain about.

The ‘tour guide’ caught Rory’s attention again, and though she turned the majority of her focus in Ingrid’s direction, she kept a little on the woman at her side, too. There was something odd about her, and Rory was nosy enough to want to know more. Maybe she was just weird, the way a lot of the people in this town seemed to be. But maybe there was something more exciting than that to be found if she only paid enough attention. The woman wasn’t a shifter, she was pretty sure — she’d already done her sniff test, and while the lady smelled a little odd (like, chemical-y?), there was nothing animalistic about it — but that didn’t mean she wasn’t something else. Oliver had opened Rory’s eyes to a world that expanded way farther than she’d thought it did. She wanted to know more about it.

She also kind of wanted to know more about the tour she’d stumbled into. Weird enough that a small chocolate shop would offer a tour, but there was a waiver to sign, too? Rory was more accustomed to signing waivers when she was doing something that posed at least the illusion of danger. Bungee jumping, parasailing, rock climbing, the whole shebang. A chocolate shop tour, though? What could be dangerous about that? She felt even more excited for the tour now. She’d always loved things with a bit of risk to them.

Evidently, though, she was alone in that. The strange woman with the dispatched fly and the chemical scent was not having the waiver signing. Rory looked up from where she held the clipboard, raising her brows. It was a little dramatic to assume someone had died, wasn’t it? It was probably way more likely that someone had, like, damaged some property or something. Not everything was about death. “Dude,” she complained as the woman peered over her shoulder, uncomfortable with the lurking presence, “can you back off a little?” But an arm snaked around to point at the clipboard, zeroing in on some small text.

Squinting at the area where the woman indicated, Rory noted the mention of the cellar. And that seemed way more exciting than a chocolate tour, even if odds were low that anyone had actually died in there. Rory didn’t know this lady, but she was more than willing to piggyback off her paranoia to have a more exciting adventure here. “I think you should let us see the cellar,” she told Ingrid. “I mean, this lady clearly isn’t gonna rest until you prove nobody died there, right? So you should show us that it’s a normal cellar, and then she’ll sign your sheet.” Probably. Maybe not. Oh, well.

—

Regan did not want to go into the cellar. She certainly hadn’t been indicating otherwise, a flicker of interest in her eyes, her tingling fingertips twitching toward the closed door. She hadn’t been. She was going to remain here, right here, and participate in this standard, ordinary, live humans tour. So when the girl pointed to her and Ingrid’s gaze seared into her like she’d just tried to steal a fistful of chocolate worms, Regan shrank back. She felt her turtleneck brush her chin. “I didn’t, um—” The wind of authority had always been better at billowing and puffing her up than setting her sail. Cliodhna’s insistence that she was a force of nature never had the intended effect. She was flaccid, empty skin.

“The cellar is off-limits,” Ingrid said, more spine in her voice than Regan felt inside of her. What had she been reduced to? A notochord? Ingrid grabbed the clipboard from the girl and pushed it into Regan’s hands. Her finger tapped the final waiver, nail clacking against the board. “Sign, or you won’t be able to join the tour. You won’t be able to join the tour if you don’t sign.” Her eyes never left Regan. She should just sign it, shouldn’t she? For the tour. But how could she promise she’d never go into the cellar? What if someone else died down there in the future, and the medical examiner was required? What if her cellphone rolled—well, fell—down the stairs, somehow? What if there was something velvety and dark seducing her attention, and she lost track of where her feet happened to place themselves? She felt a shock of sweat on her neck.

“Mom I wanna see the chocolate!” A little girl tugged on her mother’s arm, her eyes big and watery. “When are we gonna see the chocolate?”

Finally, Ingrid released Regan from her attention. “The tour begins now. Anyone who hasn’t signed yet… you may join once you’ve filled out the waiver. Come along, come along. We’ll begin over here, with the chocolate. Then we will move on to the chocolate over there…”

She could breathe again. But there was still a decision before her. Regan looked down at the clipboard in her hands. She found the spot to sign, considered, and… shook her head instead of putting pen to paper. “I don’t think I can sign this,” she told the girl, who hung back with her (though Regan hadn’t forgotten or forgiven her for before). “You never know. And I have rejected terms and conditions forms for less.” She, in fact, rejected almost all of them, which led to a pile of products and services she no longer participated in. “And I didn’t say I wanted to see the cellar. There is probably nothing there.” The lie made her wince.

Before Regan could set the pen down, her hand jerked over the page. Coldness seeped under her skin and spread like rot—nothing like the tender embrace of decomposition she was accustomed to. She jumped, mouth open at the line of blue ink she’d apparently slashed across paper. What? But she didn’t—and she wasn’t done. Her hand moved again. She could only watch. Finally, the tension and madness left her arm, her fingers, and the pen simply dropped from her hand, making a quiet plastic noise as it hit the floor. She tried to look composed, like she’d intended to do that, nothing to see here. “I guess I changed my mind. One should always be open to new—” She looked at the waiver. Regan had signed. But instead of her name, and her handwriting, on the line was “DICK PUBIK” in crude, unfamiliar chickenscratch.

—

She’d kind of thought she had an ally here, was the thing. The weird woman with her odd speech patterns and strange vibes was difficult to pin down entirely, but Rory had at least assumed she wanted to see the death cellar badly enough to stand firm. Instead, she seemed to crumple like tissue paper the moment Ingrid looked at her, as if Ingrid was some big and scary thing. And she wasn’t, really. Rory had met a thousand Ingrids throughout her life, seen countless people handed some small amount of authority who thought it made them more important than they were. High school science teachers who talked down to her when she fell asleep in class, librarians who shushed her with a little too much vigor when she wasn’t even talking that loud, fast food managers who got a real power trip out of the idea of bossing around teenagers who worked under them… The world was full of Ingrids. Rory wasn’t even sure if she wanted to see the cellar with any genuine desire or if she just wanted to piss this lady off.

In any case, she’d clearly been wrong about the Fly Dispatcher’s air of authority. The proud set of the woman’s shoulders and the authoritative stance melted in an instant, leaving her stammering and uncertain. Which sucked, actually! Rory wanted to see the stupid cellar, and it was easier to achieve goals like that with numbers. She was ready to snap the stupid clipboard in half until some kid whined about the tour, and then Ingrid was off, forbidding Rory and the Fly Dispatcher from following on a tour that could only realistically move, like, eight steps away.

Huffing a frustrated exhale through her nose, Rory turned back to her would-be ally, who was staring at the clipboard. “Who cares if you sign it?” She shrugged, glancing down at the paper. “The tour probably sucks, anyway. And I wanna see the cellar. Do you really think somebody died down there? Because that would be way more interesting than looking at chocolate. I’ve seen chocolate before.” Not that she’d never seen somewhere where people died, but… She liked the idea of a cellar much better than the bloody scene in the woods she’d seen with Vic. There was some level of control to that, Rory thought; the cellar would be fun, not… whatever that had been.

In an instant, though, the woman’s hand was scratching letters onto the page, which might mean she wanted to see the tour after all. Rory felt her brows shoot up at the sudden change of heart, and she watched the way the woman stared at her hand. There was definitely something… weird about it. Rory’s brow furrowed, and as the woman finally finished writing her name, Rory leaned forward to look. Her eyes narrowed, head tilting to the side at what was scratched there. “Ooookay,” she said, reaching for the clipboard. She took the top sheet off, then scratched the pen on the paper of the one beneath it. When she finished, she nodded down. Seymour Butts was written on the page in a mimic of the woman’s chickenscratch. “Think Ingrid will fall for that?”

—

“Of course someone died down there.” Regan muttered. That had never been in question. “I am not going to bring you down there so you can gawk at someone’s death scene. I mean, I am not going to bring you down there at all, because we’re not going down there.” But… she still technically didn’t sign the waiver; not with her own name, anyway. She wasn’t exactly bound to it. She could go to the cellar. If she were so inclined (which, she reminded herself, she was not). And there was the matter of how her hand had just behaved—her cherished, capable hand that never failed her. Why now was it so affected by that swirling, tarry pit that’d formed in her chest since that alleyway, since Pubik?

“What’s the matter, doc? Gonna keep ignoring me and go commit a little murder down in that cellar? Jesus, how many bodies have you made? Was I even your—”

“No.” Regan said. But it seemed more like she was protesting the girl taking the clipboard. Hopefully. She shook her head and let her swipe it and pick up the pen. “I mean, that’s right,” Regan said, “go ahead and sign. Go on the tour. Since we’re not going into the cellar, and you have no scruples with the waiver. So you might as well—” The girl looked pleased, self-satisfied, a little shine in her eyes. Fall for what? Regan tilted her head at the paper. Seymour Butts. “I don’t follow. But it doesn’t matter. Enjoy the tour, Ms. Butts.”

At least Seymour didn’t seem to suspect that Regan had signed the name of a man she’d murdered. What did people do to remove their guilt? Was that the purpose of therapists? Seymour wasn’t leaving, though. No, she didn’t look to be going anywhere. Regan was looking toward the employee only door. Then toward the tour. Ingrid seemed to be telling the group about chocolate, which was likely what the entire tour comprised of. They were moving from display to display. Most of the people in the group only needed to swivel around to keep up with Ingrid’s pointing; there was little space for much else. But, they were all fairly engrossed in it. Not paying attention to Regan. Not that she was intending to slip away, or anything like that.

“I am going to use the restroom,” she told Seymour, which she supposed was also a goodbye. The restroom, Regan assumed, had to be in the employee section of the store. “I would prefer to not interrupt the tour. Say, do you think it would be back there?” Regan gestured to the door they were not to open, per the waiver. “I’m sure they don’t mind. I’ll be brief. It is only urination.”

The door opened, welcoming her forth to the darkest corners of the store. And Regan didn’t even need to touch the knob.

—

“Of course?” Rory repeated, brows shooting up. What did that even mean, of course? Was that to be expected? Dark cellars were pretty sketch, sure, but Rory didn’t assume someone had died in every cellar she came across. And so, the question became: did this woman know what she was talking about, or was she just saying shit? Unfortunately, Rory had no idea which was the more likely option. She’d only just met the lady, and she didn’t know the first thing about her. She was pretty sure her name wasn’t Dick Pubik, but she couldn’t get a very good read on her outside of that. “I don’t want to gawk. I’m just curious. Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know what they’re hiding?”

The no seemed to answer her question, except… it didn’t exactly seem directed towards her. If anything, the woman seemed distracted. Not by the clipboard, or even by the tour, but by something else entirely. Rory couldn’t even begin to imagine what. There wasn’t anything else in the store to be distracted by, was there? It was pretty dull in here, aside from the mysterious cellar of it all. “I don’t want to go on the tour. I just want to lull Ingrid into a false sense of — wait, huh?” Was this woman playing along, or did she actually think Rory’s name was Seymour Butts? This whole thing was just getting weirder and weirder.

But… maybe the stranger was just acting. Playing it straight to make sure they wouldn’t be caught. It was a smart move, actually; there was no telling whether or not Ingrid was listening in or keeping a close eye on them in spite of the tour. In a town like Wicked’s Rest, you couldn’t discount someone literally having eyes in the back of their head.

“Riiiight,” Rory nodded, understanding what the woman was doing. She was establishing an excuse ahead of time, and making sure Rory was in on it! If they got caught, it would be easy to say they were just looking for the bathroom. Though Rory wouldn’t be saying anything about urination, if only because she was pretty sure people didn’t actually talk like that. “You know, I actually have to use the bathroom, too! We should go together.”

The doors opened on their own like an invitation, and Rory grinned. “Come on,” she beckoned to the woman. “We’d better go ‘look for the bathroom’ before Ingrid checks up on us.”

—

Regan wasn’t so sure about Seymour. There was a childish playfulness to her curiosity that reminded Regan of all the times her brothers ‘were just messing with her’ or her peers at school laughed at her and not with her. But as a rule, she rarely discouraged curiosity. In Saol Eile, even with all she had lost, that had been one of the greatest depletions of her spirit—’we do not question Fate,’ her grandmother barked, until Regan’s questions remained sealed in her mouth, then only were they in her skull, and then finally, they were dregs in the recesses of her lungs before a breath could form.

“I cannot refute your need to use the bathroom,” she said, stepping through that forbidden door (the first of a few, perhaps). Seymour could come, but that didn’t mean Regan had to enjoy her company. “They might not be hiding anything. The death I—they likely reported any death that occurred here. It might have been long ago.”

Regan brushed past a large kitchen area smelling of sugar and dental cavities, and then they were in a short hallway. There was a door, a very bathroom-looking door, slate grey with a sign on the wall that said ‘UNISEX’ and another taped to the door that said ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY’ along with a drawing of a toilet and a caption that said ‘TOILET IN THE BATHROOM’. Regan looked over it for a moment, read the signs a couple of times. She received a nosefull of volatile organic compounds, indicating recent cleaning. A little further down the hall from the probable bathroom door was a second door. And that door, which said ‘NO ENTRY’ and ‘CELLAR NO ELECTRICITY,’ was also clearly marked.

She turned to Seymour. “We may want to go down a level. The bathroom could be down there,” Regan pointed out. The door itself was also that heavy slate grey, but this one was reinforced, with what looked like some kind of electronic lock and several deadbolts (which Regan always found to be a disappointing word, given the inanimacy). She tested her weight against it. There was no knob.

The door was as hefty as it looked. Regan’s hands strained to push it open, but before she could give it another shove, the door was flung out from beneath her. She almost fell, tumbling down stairs and stairs too steep and numerous to see. Why didn’t she fall? Regan choked on a breath and turned to Seymour, who she found herself clinging to. Regan released the girl at once, and wiped her hands on her thighs, like she could dust the failure off. (She couldn’t; it greased every pore.)

“The, uh, the bathroom…” She pointed down the exposed stairs, several degrees too meekly. “Should we decide to check down there. It might not even be the cellar that was off-limits. Perhaps there is another cellar-like entrance and space.” That sensation was stronger now though, death wafting through the open door and whistling against her skin. Of course someone died. And Regan could almost feel more—it was near, like a missing word on the tip of her tongue. If she could only be a little closer.

“Stay here, if you like. In fact, that might be best. Our efforts to find the bathroom will be more likely to bear fruit if we divide our search. I will take the ce—this downstairs area, and you can search up here.” Without ceremony, Regan started down the stairs. Her fingers were tight against the wooden railing, steps careful, and so thorough was the darkness, she felt as though she were giving a colonoscopy without a camera.

—

Whatever oddities she’d noticed about the woman already seemed more and more pronounced with every word out of her mouth. She was strange, though strange had never been quite enough to scare Rory off. After all, Rory herself had often been thought of as strange by the people around her, an outsider in every circle she attempted to run in. Too brash, too honest, too blunt, too angry, too something. Pick an adjective, paste it on. It didn’t matter what, just that there was too much of it. Rory wondered absently if this woman could relate. For most people, Rory would guess, she was probably too strange. Rory decided, almost on a whim, that this would not be the case for her. The woman wasn’t too strange for her. She was cool, actually. There was zero projection here, don’t be stupid. She just thought this woman was exactly the right amount of weird to be fun to hang around.

“Right,” she agreed. “You don’t know my bladder.” It was hard to know if this was the woman saying it was fine for Rory to tag along, or if she genuinely meant that she had no idea whether or not Rory actually needed to pee. Normally, she’d go with the former, because it seemed obvious. Except there was nothing normal about this woman. And while Rory had decided that this made her cool, it didn’t make her any easier to understand. “Really?” She challenged, raising a brow in quiet disbelief. “You saw how cagey Ingrid was out there. If she didn’t have anything to hide, why would she be acting like there’s a body stashed down here?” Whatever happened, Rory doubted they’d reported it to anyone. (Of course, maybe some of that was just because Rory wanted the truth to be exciting, and there was nothing exciting about paperwork.)

There was a door that seemed to be the bathroom; Rory ignored it. She was pleased to see that her newfound companion did the same. That had to mean that this wasn’t actually about the bathroom, didn’t it? It was so hard to tell for certain, but this seemed like a sure sign in the column marked for curiosity rather than the alternative.

The woman then stated that the bathroom was probably behind the door marked for the cellar, and Rory nodded along as if she agreed. If this was what they were going with, fine. Rory could vibe with that, even if the lie wouldn’t hold much water if they were caught now. She could come up with another excuse on the fly, if she had to. She was good at that. “Yup,” she replied, popping the p. “Totally. That’s how it usually works in places like this. The bathroom is never on the main level.”

She let her companion move for the door, though she was expecting her to find it locked. The cellar was dark and mysterious and not the sort of thing you’d leave open for anyone to find, wasn’t it? Except… the door opened suddenly, despite the fact that it had seemed stuck before. Rory reached out without thinking, and the woman clung to her in a way that seemed similarly thoughtless, the two of them coming together with unintentional teamwork to keep the woman from falling down the stairs.

“Whoa,” she breathed quietly, looking down the stairs. She couldn’t see the bottom, even if she squinted; she wished she were better at shifting so she could try it with Penelope’s eyes, because surely the ocelot would have a better view of things. As it was, though, they were probably going to have to go in blind. The woman’s voice drew Rory back to herself, and she glanced over. “Uh, totally,” she agreed. “We were told to stay out of a different cellar. On the other side of the building, I bet.” Not that the portion of the building they’d been in had even been big enough to truly have an ‘other side,’ but whatever. If this lady could offer up flimsy excuses, Rory could, too. Rory could make flimsy excuses with the best of them.

“Actually, I’m thinking teamwork makes the dream work here. We don’t know how big the space down there is, right? We definitely need two sets of eyes.” She followed the woman down. The moment she stepped onto the stairs, the door slammed shut behind her. Rory blinked, looking back towards it. “Uh… I did not shut that.” The sound of a lock clicking echoed through the stairwell. “Or that.”

—

The door slammed shut behind them, sealing them off in the darkness like a swollen, obstructing epiglottis. The sound knocked Regan’s bones. Nothing lit up. There was no backup, no bleeding red light around doorways and emergency switches. They were effectively blind. “Feck! Why did you—” No, Seymour was just as stuck. “Automatic lock.” Her fists went tight as her chest.

Now the time Pubik locked her in the Apple Store warehouse seemed generous with all of those tiny sources of light, even if her mind had produced a curdling tar pit where there was only a cement floor. Was that what awaited her at the bottom here, too? It wouldn’t be the first time her grandmother lured her with the dead then speared her like she wished Regan would join them. Even a trout needed its lethal hook to be dressed as a mayfly. Like food. You had to be a fool to run willingly toward death. Here she was.

“What’s wrong, cadaver-gnawer? Afraid of the dark? Afraid of falling?”

“I don’t feel fear! Stop—” The stairs wobbled beneath her feet, like they were swaying in a fierce wind. The groaning age of the wood was suddenly relevant. The thickness. The fact she couldn’t see a thing. She gripped the rail hard enough to hurt her fingernails. “Hold the railing!” she shouted, hoping Seymour had groped for it in time. She didn’t hear the horrible sound of a body rolling down (she had before… increasingly wet thuds, the sound slightly lighter whenever the face, instead of the cranium, was oriented toward the tread—though sometimes a crunch for the nose). What she did hear was Seymour’s heavy breaths. The wobbling eased, just enough for Regan to fumble for her phone. Her eyes watered at the spatter of brightness the screen gave off (an automatic reflex to such brightness, nothing to do with fear). Cracked but functional. And she saw Seymour. Alive. Shadows catching every surprised muscle in a way that added years to one’s appearance.

Slowly, the shaking subsided.

Regan shined the beam downward—visibility on the stairs was more important than whatever was to be seen at their terminal. One stair, two, a hazy third, then shadows and tar barely kept at bay. She could feel it, though, more inviting and present with each step: there was death here. No question. (Except, actually, she did have many.)

“We’re—we are fine. We will find a way out. There will be an exit down there, I’m certain. A bulkhead, perhaps. So just—go slowly.”

Regan allowed herself to experience physical relief for a single second, just one second to sigh (one more than what should have been allowed). Her breath came out too quick, too sharp. Her phone couldn’t survive that one. The light was snatched away, more glass trickling down. Her eyes were met with nothing. “Fearg an chinniúint!” Regan hissed. She dropped her useless phone with a thunk that would have horrified Eve but didn’t compare to a body. All she could do was huddle closer to Seymour Butts, but there was danger in that, too. She’d killed hundreds of phones by now, monetary value too painful to calculate. The only thing more valuable that she’d brought to an end was a life.

“Your eyes are younger than mine… what do you see? Anything?” Usually, Regan would have delighted in the implication of her aging body, but being locked in the cellar of a chocolate store apparently ruined even that.

—

Rory prepared to defend herself against the notion that it was her fault they’d been locked within the cellar, but it seemed there was no real need to do so. The woman quickly caught on to the truth of the automatic locks that sealed them inside, and while she could have still found some way to blame Rory, who had not thought to prop the door open before following her into the darkness, she didn’t seem interested in doing so. There was something nice about that. Had it been one of Rory’s siblings in here with her instead, facing down the darkness and all the fear that came along with it, she had no doubt that they would have saddled the blame onto her shoulders with relative ease. In situations like this one, it was easier to have someone to blame. The youngest sibling was, more often than not, the one who tended to end up shouldering that.

Of course, Rory might have liked someone else to blame, too. Part of her wanted to blame the strange woman, though she knew it was unfair. It was Rory who’d been gung ho about traveling to the cellar, Rory who chose to follow when she could have just as easily said no. She could find a way to blame Ingrid, if she tried hard enough, but even that felt like a stretch. Rory’s situation was her own fault if it was anyone’s at all, which wasn’t the sort of thing she liked to admit.

The woman’s voice drew her from her thoughts, her brow furrowing at her words. “What? I never said you were scared. You’re totally projecting here, dude.” Which probably meant she was scared. Was it the dark? Plenty of people were afraid of the dark, though Rory had never counted herself to be among them. Her sister had insisted upon a nightlight in their shared room as children, but all it had ever done for Rory was make it harder to sleep.

Before her companion could confirm or deny the accusation of projecting, the entire room began to shake. It was all Rory could do to grab onto the railing beside the staircase in time to avoid being thrown, her grip an anchor that she couldn’t afford to raise. It was loud, too; her sensitive ears catalogued every screech and groan of the stairs, every rattle of the nails holding them together. Rory resisted the urge to remove her hands from the rail to cover her ears, knowing that remaining upright and not tumbling down the steps was more important than protecting herself from the painfully loud sounds around her.

Eventually, the shaking stopped; it took Rory a moment to realize it had, her grip on the railing loosening just a little. “Was that a fucking earthquake? Are there earthquakes in Maine? Fuck.” She brought a hand up to cup her ear absently, as if she could rub away the painful aftermath of the disorienting sound. The woman shone her phone’s flashlights down the steps, and Rory sighed. The light didn’t reach very far; it wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the room at the bottom of the steps well enough to see if there was any kind of door to head towards. That would have been too easy, apparently.

“How certain is certain?” She questioned, her own doubts clear in her tone. “Because there might be nothing down there at all, you know.” At least, as far as doors went. The basement being empty felt impossible, because why try to hide it if there was nothing there to hide? Even if the door above them hadn’t been locked, Rory didn’t think she’d have tried to leave without seeing what was at the bottom of the stairs. She was far too curious for that.

That, of course, meant that the only way to go was down. Rory took a few careful steps down the stairs, past the woman. She paused when the light went off, assuming the phone’s battery must have died. Great. Not that Rory could talk; her phone was sitting at a mostly-useless five percent battery. Rather than pulling it out, she retrieved a lighter from her pocket and flicked it on to illuminate the space in a flickering orange light far too dull to do a lot of good.

“It looks like a shitty staircase,” she said dryly, walking slowly down the steps. “Do you think this thing was, like, approved by safety people? There’s no way, right? It’s gotta be some flavor of illegal.” She continued down as she spoke, her foot finally making contact with the floor at the bottom of the basement. She sniffed the air experimentally. Dull, but sweet. “Well, there’s definitely chocolate down here. And…” Another sniff. “Something else. Something kind of…” She trailed off, bumping something. She brought her lighter around to illuminate it curiously.

It was… chocolate. A lot of chocolate. It was taller than she was, in fact, and shaped similarly. Squinting, she could see that the part of it closest to her lighter — which was beginning to drip due to the heat of the small flame — looked like a face. A horrified face, frozen in a chocolatey scream. Rory squinted at it. “Uh, Dick? You might want to… I don’t know. See this?”

—

“Rarely. Shoddy construction, certainly. This store should be ashamed.” Regan had tried to use the earthquake excuse with Jade once—Californian she was— and she knew better than to try again. “There are dozens of things that can cause that kind of… shaking. Construction outside. That is my assumption.” The lighter worked, but how did Seymour not have a phone? Oh well. It didn’t matter—they weren’t staying down here long. Find the death, and leave. That was all. She’d been in worse situations before, her nose always attuned to and tracking that phantom cadaverine and putrescine. Regan let go of the railing when she felt the last stair beneath her feet. The floor had the feel and sound of cement under her boots, replying in small, echoing slaps. She followed Seymour (or at least the small light in her hands) and as distasteful as she found following anyone, Seymour was walking straight toward the source Regan could feel anyway. And chocolate. Seymour smelled it first, but it hit Regan’s nose not long after.

She wrinkled her nose. That was a strong smell, actually. Strong in the way some people described the stenches she bathed in every day, but devoid of all decomposition’s enchanting character. This was heavy and too sweet, like hot, liquid sugar rolling down the back of her throat. “Yes, I smell it, too. And don’t call me D—”

Regan stopped short behind Seymour. Because there was a mound of chocolate, a wall of chocolate. Regan couldn’t even see how far up and down and surface to surface it went. And there, by the lighter and Seymour’s shaking hand—the chocolate sweat from the heat, seeping down the face of—

Her lungs spasmed and twisted. There was a face, an open mouth, a scream that wanted to summon her own. And there was death. It was there, right there, hooking her closer and begging her for contact, for closure; warm and sweet against her skin. Regan reached out, but her hand stopped before she touched the chocolate, fingers aching to connect with it. What would she see, and was she ready to see it? This was more than just chocolate molded into a cruel shape. There was someone trapped in there—maybe only the bones at this point, or maybe the chocolate acted as a substitute bog, preserving flesh and sinew. Inside: a nugget of adipocere waiting for her.

“This is it, what we came for,” Regan said, “I mean, other than the bathr—forget it. This. Here. There’s someone—we need to move this chocolate, get it out of here. Get it to the morgue. Do you understand?” But there were logistical issues. Regan could look the other way at a lot of things, but this probably wasn’t one of them. “If we can get out of here at all. We should go back up and try the door again. Bang on it.”

Heavy, squelching thumps made the floor shake. A throaty voice hissed, and Regan smelled hot chocolate. “This…” the darkness gargled, “...is not… part of the tour.”

—

The shaking certainly felt too strong to be construction on a neighboring building, but beyond the idea of an earthquake, Rory had no other explanation for it. She hoped it wasn’t a sign of the building above them falling, though she couldn’t imagine what would cause a thing like that. It wasn’t as if buildings in Maine toppled to the ground on sunny days with no real reason behind the fall, after all, and Dick seemed too unconcerned for it to feel like a real possibility. As strange as she was, she did seem to have at least some semblance of what was going on. Or maybe she just used enough big words to convince Rory of as much. Either way, Rory figured it would be better not to question Dick’s explanation of the phenomenon. “I mean, the shop owners probably didn’t build the building, right? It’s their landlord that should be ashamed. For the shoddy workmanship, and also for being a landlord.” She made a face at that, wrinkling her nose and rolling her eyes a little.

It was a little hard to focus on anything that wasn’t the smell of chocolate as they moved further into the cellar, though. Rory understood that it was normal for a chocolate shop to sell strongly of the thing it sold — it would have been weird if there was no chocolate smell at all, too — but this seemed a little like overkill, didn’t it? Could they even sell this much chocolate before it expired? Wicked’s Rest wasn’t a very big town.

But why make this much chocolate if you couldn’t sell it? Why waste money and product on something just to shove it in the cellar? Maybe this was just where they stored the special orders, the customized things people asked for for parties. That had to be the explanation behind the chocolate person, didn’t it? Because, now that Rory was looking at it a little closer, that was precisely what it was. Not just a face, but a body, too. Tall and detailed enough that she could see the lines of his clothes in the chocolate.

Looking at the chocolate man a little closer meant getting close enough to smell it a little more, too. That scent that had lurked beneath the overwhelming smell of chocolate was still faint, but it was a little clearer now, a little more familiar. It was the stench of rot and decay, and it was enough to make Rory’s lip curl up in faint disgust. A sign that the chocolate was going bad after all? Maybe someone had ordered this custom and not want it after the fact?

Dick spoke, and Rory turned back to her. She’d half forgotten the other woman was there at all, so focused on the strange findings of the chocolate person stood in the corner. “What? What do you mean this is what we came for? This is… just a hunk of chocolate. Expired chocolate, if I had to guess. It isn’t…” She trailed off, registering the words a little better. The morgue? “Wait, are you saying… You think this is a person? Like, an actual person?” The thought had her heart jumping into her throat, uncertainty clinging to her skin. Was that even possible? Rory had certainly seen stranger things in Wicked’s Rest.

The sound of something in the darkness caught Rory off guard, and she took an uncertain step away from it. This knocked her into the chocolate person (chocolate corpse?) which fell, one chocolate arm breaking off as it hit the ground. Rory’s eyes followed it as it slid, unsure whether to be apathetic or horrified. (If it was a normal hunk of chocolate, it didn’t matter. If it was a person…) The arm skidded to a stop on top of something on the ground, and Rory’s eyes widened. “Oh, shit. That’s a trap door! …also made of chocolate.” Because of course it was. “Forget the stairs, we should go that way!”

—

Regan supposed it wasn’t the girl’s fault she couldn’t feel the death mixed into the chocolate like milk. It could curdle and spoil most beautifully, and humans would be blind to it. But every hair on Regan’s body was bristling and begging, and it was harder to focus on the sound of breathing next to her than the sound of nothing in front of her. Seymour’s senses were pitifully limited. “A person, yes. Was. This is like a plaster made of chocolate, I think… a full plaster.” Regan replied, quiet. Her thoughts were elsewhere—how could they move this? How could—

Snap.

Seymour tumbled back, and in the dark, Regan heard what sounded like a piece of chocolate breaking off. And hitting the floor. Her lungs swelled but before she could make a noise, she saw a flash of a door before the lighter went out. And that squelching—too many things were happening at once. Choices, for her, were usually easy. This one was: they couldn’t leave, not now. Because the chocolate remains changed everything, and those wouldn’t fit through the door Seymour had found. “But the body!” Regan shouted, the sound higher and sharper than it should have been. No time to apologize for that. “I won’t just leave it!” Despite it being a chunk of chocolate. Remains were in there somewhere, had to be.

Everything went dark as Seymour must have dropped the lighter.

“Nnnnnot on the touuuuur…” That was not the voice of Richard Pubik. It was not the voice of Cliodhna, either, Regan thought. There was relief in the fact Seymour heard this one, too; three blades to her brain would be too many. This was still problematic.

The acoustics changed, sounds echoing less, and in the dark, Regan could make out why—there was something enormous slithering in the shadows, the source of those noises. Closer, closer, dripping a fluid onto the floor. When it moved, it sounded like a great tongue being dragged across cement. “Nnnot on the…” Its fermented breath hit Regan’s nose. “You sssssigned…” Heat clouded around it like flies. Get the body get the body get the body. Regan only needed to do one thing, and then they could leave. Get away from whatever flavor of impossible was meeting them down here. And then convince herself she saw nothing when she woke in the middle of the night.

Regan backed up and felt something at the back of her shins—Seymour. “The lighter! Get the—where is the lighter?” Not close enough. Whatever was in there with them was sliding closer. “Or just—can you see the chocolate? We need it. I am not leaving it.”

The creature’s long body lashed between them, Regan falling back. She palmed the floor, and her fingers found what felt like a handle. It was the door, sticky and hot against her hand. The one that would make sense to escape through, right now, so they didn’t die down here with that poor victim who had been lost to the chocolate. That door. All the sense in the world, yes. She could wrench it open and they could go wherever it led. Safety.

Regan ignored it and kept swiping around, reaching for the dead.

—

When she was a kid, there were days when everything felt like a little too much. Her sister called it sensory overload in a tone that always sounded sympathetic, though Rory would have found the same tone from anyone else grating and condescending. It never felt that way with Celeste, who once pressed a pair of earbuds with a noise cancellation feature into her hand on her birthday with a small, knowing smile. Rory hadn’t quite known how to explain that it wasn’t just her ears that often got overwhelmed, but her nose, too. She didn’t know how to tell Celeste that there were days when she smelled so strong that it gave Rory a headache, days when their brothers were so loud through the bedroom wall that she wanted to scream. None of her siblings had the same problem, and so Rory had swallowed it. She didn’t want anything else that marked her as different, not when there were so many other things already.

But swallowing that sensory overload didn’t negate it entirely. It was still there, still lurking. The world was loud and bright and it smelled, sometimes, and this room with this rotting chocolate and this strange woman was overwhelming even before the sound of something squelching across the concrete floor in the darkness joined the barrage of her senses. She didn’t mean to drop the lighter, but there was so much going on that holding onto it seemed an impossible task. It clattered to the ground and that sound, too, joined the fray.

“You might fucking have to!” She yelled in response to the strange woman’s words, not even entirely meaning to raise her voice. It felt a little as if she had to in order to be heard over the… everything going on in the cellar, but she knew it was unnecessary. Dick Pubik was strange, with her white hair and her odd way of speaking and her apparent obsession with death, but she wasn’t a shifter. Rory was utterly certain of that.

She was equally certain that she wanted absolutely nothing to do with whatever was making those sounds in the darkness. A voice cut through the cloak of empty blackness surrounding them; it took Rory a moment to place it. “Ingrid?” She gasped, eyes widening. “Dude, what are you even doing?” Her eyes began to adjust, slower than they normally would have due to how utterly overwhelmed she was. As they did, she saw Ingrid take shape. Except… the shape she took was all kinds of wrong.

There was Ingrid’s face, as pinched and uncomfortable-seeming as it had been upstairs in the shop, but that was where the similarities seemed to end. The smart coat she’d been wearing seemed more stuck on her than anything else now, as if it was glued to her. Except… instead of glue, there was a slimy substance dripping from her body, which was now long and twisted behind her. No legs, no arms. No real indication of where torso gave way to hips, either, or to where her neck began.

One other thing remained the same as it had upstairs, though: Ingrid looked seriously pissed off.

Rory stumbled back, aware of the woman she’d come down here with asking for the lighter but not particularly interested in looking for it. Instead, her eyes locked onto the door she’d found earlier — the same one the other woman had found and then dismissed. Rory dove for it as Ingrid inched towards her, her entire body scooting along the ground and leaving a wet trail behind her.

The door, when Rory touched it, felt sticky under her fingers. It took a moment to understand why; when she pulled her hand back, the sticky substance remained on her fingers. Chocolate. Naturally. There was no time to think about that. Rory tore the door open, looking down into what looked a little like a sewer. (Or… the version of a sewer they’d gone with for the IT movies. Did sewers look like that in real life?) “I’ve got the body,” she lied, because she figured the woman wouldn’t leave without it, and she’d feel… a little weird, leaving her behind with this weird, wormy version of a pissed off tour guide. “Go!” In the door, hurry!”

—

Seymour thought Ingrid was down here with them. But that made no sense. Unless… there could have been another entrance. Regan swept her eyes in every direction, but she resolved nothing—only darkness—and Seymour’s movements sounded more like careful steps than blind fumbling. Then there was the other sound. Somewhere in front of her. A large body leaking fluid, dragging itself along the floor. The reek of it grew stronger—an overly sweet buttery banana smell. Esters and ketones burning in the massive furnace of its body. Its gargling voice vibrated on the hard floor. It was in Regan’s feet, up her legs. “No... leeeeeaving…” Her cheek spiked numb at the heat wafting against it.

Fast movement at her right. Human footsteps pounding the ground, and a whoosh of air at Regan’s side. Seymour had moved. Regan needed to be faster. She whipped her hand in front of her toward the sound and the death, waving wildly across the floor. It was close, she knew it was. Like strings tied to her fingers, guiding her hand. But those strings were only tugging, all too gentle, when what she needed was a sharp jerk. A little more help. If she could focus better—

What did Seymour mean she had the body? Regan could still feel it right there! Just out of reach!

“No you don’t! You lie!” Regan snapped—there was nothing worse than lying about death. Regan categorically refused to do that. Others did so without care. “Not without the remains!” So she ignored Seymour, stayed sprawled on her belly and searched the floor. She pulled herself closer, closer, death inches from her fingertips. That heavy, wet dragging sound loomed closer too, and—

The door at her side opened. Seymour had yanked it wide. Light from below speared her vision, but it was only comparatively brighter. Seymour’s silhouette jumped right through the door, calling for her to follow. But Regan could see it—the lump of dead chocolate on the floor, the remains that needed their dignity restored. She clawed for it one more time and—there!

“I have you,” she panted, hugging the chocolate arm closer, “I have you. We’re leaving.” That was enough for now, for testing, possibly identification. Regan scrambled on the floor to follow Seymour through the door. A thick drop of something landed next to her hand.

And Regan looked up. The light was dim. But not dim enough. Regan could see her now; Ingrid’s face—was it really her?---was a distorted knot of features. Her tongue and teeth dripped putrid chocolate. Her eyes were glossed over with white, pupils lost to whatever impossible affliction had consumed her. Regan’s whole body shuddered. Ingrid opened her mouth and a long, steaming breath poured from her lips, no words. Hhhhhhhhhhh…

Something heavy slammed down on Regan’s leg. Pinned it. Pain shot through the numbness. Regan screeched. The chocolate arm flaked and Ingrid—some part of her—recoiled, her throaty roar ringing almost as loudly as Regan’s own screech. Regan’s muscles wanted her to curl, legs closer to her center, tucked and protected. Assess the injury. But that was not what the remains needed. The door. Get to the door. Seymour. Pieces of Ingrid melted from her mass, pooling on the floor. Regan dragged herself through the liquid, through the pain, and the fingers of her free hand curled around the frame of the door. The chocolate arm was secure. What was left of it. With one last heave, Regan pulled herself through.

She landed with her leg twisted underneath her, something definitely sprained, and liquid penetrated her mouth. She didn’t trust her urge to spit. Don’t scream. Seymour was right there. She’d managed to keep hold of the arm. Don’t scream. Regan could see again—it was dark but well in her range of visibility. The door above had been slammed shut—Seymour’s doing—and slowly, Regan pushed herself up against the side of a curved wall. Her leg stumbled and complained but fell in line. When her lungs burned for air and not noise, she spat sweet sewage from her mouth, felt it dribble down her chin in glops—sugary refuse of some kind.

“You…” Regan hugged the arm closer to her chest, gooey chocolate smearing against her sweater. She didn’t care. “You… lied.” She couldn’t read Seymour’s expression. Both of them were breathing hard, and Seymour’s hair was wet with sweat and sewer water. Or chocolate. “About the remains,” Regan pointed a finger at her, “You said… that you had them. You lied.”

—

There were very few things that were consistent between different species. Rory had never paid much attention in science class, so she didn’t really know all the fancy words or the details behind it, but she liked to think she knew a thing or two about animals. After all, didn’t she have a wildcat’s spirit living inside her chest? Distant and hard to access sometimes, but there all the same, a part of her just as much as the blood in her veins and the cells that made up her body. She knew that there were things that felt so different to her than they felt to normal humans, knew that she had thoughts and feelings and instincts that other people lacked because Rory was never Rory alone. She was always both person and animal, was always two things combined. Those two things were at odds so often, like warring pieces of a puzzle that didn’t want to be solved. There weren’t a lot of things that Rory thought her human side and her ocelot side agreed on wholeheartedly.

But there was one that was a constant. There was one that Rory was pretty sure every living thing had somewhere in their gut, one that existed in humans and animals alike. (It might have even existed in plants, though Rory knew far less about plants than she did about animals; working in a plant store didn’t actually teach her very much, at the end of the day.) Everything that lived, Rory thought, wanted to live. Everything that lived had some kind of survival instinct, some kind of something in their chest that drove them to keep breathing.

Everything, perhaps, except for Dick Pubik, the strange white-haired woman who refused to leave a hunk of chocolate shaped like a corpse behind.

Maybe it wasn’t entirely fair. Dick didn’t have Rory’s night vision, which meant she couldn’t see the giant Ingrid worm that was slithering through the cellar towards them. If she could, maybe she would have been more okay leaving the chocolate arm behind. People did things they probably wouldn’t have done otherwise when being chased by something that made them fear for their lives, after all. (Rory refused to let herself think about the stranger’s basement and Brigit’s corpse, which she’d left behind in her haste to escape.) But there was something about Dick’s anger when she called out Rory’s lie, something about the way she scrambled for that chocolate arm even as Rory jumped down the trapdoor. Rory wasn’t sure she’d have done anything different, even if she had seen the massive Wormgrid.

The fall down the trapdoor was thankfully a short one. Rory landed in something wet and thick, scrambling to her feet. The liquid was flowing like a river, but it certainly wasn’t water. It was some kind of sludge, and it took a moment for her senses to catch up to her to slam her with the overwhelming stench of chocolate. She looked down at her feet, at the consistency of the sludge and the way it moved and… yeah. It looked a lot like the chocolate fondue fountain the prom committee sprung for her senior year, when her sister told her she wasn’t allowed to ditch the event. Rory made a face, putting her back against the wall, which — yeah. All right. The wall was also made of chocolate. Motherfucker.

She tore her gaze away from the chocolate… everything to cast an anxious look up the trapdoor. Dick still hadn’t dropped down behind her yet, and Rory wasn’t sure the ladder — doubtlessly made of chocolate — would hold her weight if she needed to climb back up to retrieve the strange woman. She should have made Dick jump down first. She should have dragged her down, or pushed her in. (She shouldn’t have let Brigit go up those stairs.)

She was just about to try jumping for the trapdoor when Dick fell through, still clinging to that chocolate arm. Rory yanked the trapdoor shut behind her, praying that the worm’s lack of hands would prevent her from opening it and coming after them. She turned on Dick, breathing heavy and still a little panicked from the whole ordeal.

“Yeah!” She snapped. “Yeah, I fucking lied! Because you weren’t going to leave without that stupid body, and you would have fucking died for it!” Her voice was shrill, pitch higher than she meant for it to be. Her heart was still pounding; her chest was still heaving; she was still thinking about Brigit’s body, abandoned in the basement where she’d died. “You would have died, and then what? Then there’s two bodies, and — and what? Someone dies trying to get yours out of there next? And then someone else dies for theirs? And then — And then it just keeps fucking going, and it’s stupid! It’s fucking stupid! It’s a fucking body! It doesn’t matter as much as your fucking life! I lied about having it because you were going to stay and die for it, and I’d fucking do it again!”

She was angrier than she thought she’d been, and she knew it wasn’t entirely the fault of Dick or this situation. She knew that a good deal of this anger was misplaced, but misplaced anger felt better than whatever else was in her chest, so she clung to it until it deflated. She sighed, running a hand through her hair and getting chocolate all over her face in the process. It stuck to her hair, her fingers. She’d need a billion showers to get it all out. “We need to go,” she said. “I don’t know which way, but we need to — we need to get out of here. Are you coming?”

—

Seymour had no shame. How did she not understand how seriously she had errored? She lied. About a body! And Regan—Regan thought they were in agreement. Every action they had taken before the remains had, in some way, been aligned, like the two of them were teeth in the same mouth. How did Seymour not care? The realization made Regan feel marrowless, pits in her anatomy. Flaccid and empty again. They had been communicating and behaving and collaborating like humans who were in touch with that ineffable quality that made humans… human. Or Regan thought that was the case.

But she should have known: she had never been human enough. The chocolate walls shouted it at her in Seymour’s voice. There might have been a honking cackle, too.

“It is not stupid!” Regan’s voice pitched back. “You are the one who endangered us both by lying to me about the remains! This was someone’s child, someone’s parent, or neighbor, or friend. You betrayed them. You betrayed m—it is not stupid! I am the only one who will be able to identify who this was. Someone has been waiting months or years to learn what happened to their—” Regan forced herself to take a breath. “You either understand or you do not.” She cradled the arm tighter. She needed to stay calm. Enclosed space, child with sensitive ears, her voice bleeding beyond its bounds. She was less volatile than Seymour, less prone to such deleterious emotion. She had to be; she had to remember. She was getting chocolate underneath her nails.

Regan’s eyes were sharp on Seymour’s. “Yes, I would have died for it. This is the correct thing to die for. Not that I was going to die here. I had the situation under control. You were never going to die here, either.” Always in control. I gcónaí i rialú. She tasted the last of the bitterness in her mouth. It came out soft and melted. “And—and you lied about the remains. To me.”

Why did Seymour care whether Regan lived or died, when she didn’t care about the person who had already died?

For a moment, Regan heard only the echoes of their directionless movement. Splash. Clop. Splash. “It is a tunnel. There are only two ways to go.” And they were two (weren’t they?). But Regan quickly abandoned that idea; she was not so bloated with ungainly emotion that she required sequestration. That was for a leanbh. “Your ears and eyes seem better than mine. Is there a difference in the sound or light?”

She trudged a few wet paces to the right, the sloshing of the chocolate liquid against her legs echoing through the tunnel. It was an uneven sound; her leg dragged slightly. Regan looked down at the liquid. She hugged the grateful arm, but her grip loosened slightly. Her fingernails felt heavy and there were new smears near her elbow. Seymour was similarly covered and deflated. Perhaps she regretted trying to leave the remains. Regan would allow amends. And… Seymour might have had at least one good point. “I am sorry for putting you in danger. Are you hurt?”

—

The sound of her own heart pounding was a symphony echoing through the sewer, the loudest thing she’d ever heard. Each beat was a movement, screaming louder than even the shrill sound of Dick Pubik’s angry voice. Rory couldn’t understand the other woman’s anger any more than she understood her own, but stubborn pride insisted that Rory’s rage was the correct flavor. This did not stop the other woman’s anger from feeling just as hot as the torch that had been used to burn her flesh, just as sharp as the teeth that dug into her.

They were arguing about a hunk of chocolate that Rory wasn’t even entirely convinced was a real corpse. It smelled wrong, sure, but desperation insisted that the chocolate may have just gone bad, or that something else had died in the basement, or that the rot of the floorboards had infected whatever was down there and turned everything else to rot, too. But how much would it matter if the body was a body? How much would it matter if it was exactly what Dick thought it was? They were alive, and body was dead. Wasn’t it more important to save the living than it was to bring the dead home?

“That is such bullshit!” Her own voice was shrill, too, bouncing off the concrete walls around them. It was not louder than that pounding in her chest, because nothing was. Her heart felt as though it was working overtime, as if it was slamming against the walls of her body to remind her that it — that they — were still alive. They were not in a cellar surrounded by chocolate; they were not in a basement tied to a chair. They were here, in a chocolate sewer with a screaming woman and a chocolate arm. And that was better, sure, but she’d have liked it more without the screaming. (That wouldn’t stop her from screaming back, of course; nothing would.)

She ran a hand through her hair, chocolate sticking the strands to her forehead. “That is such bullshit,” she repeated, pretending her hand didn’t tremble as she dropped it back to her side. “No decent fucking person would be okay with someone dying just to get a body back. Her family would not want us to die just to bring a fucking corpse home! It sucks that she’s dead, but that isn’t our fault! It sucks that we had to leave her behind, but what else were we going to do? We’re alive, and she’s dead. And she’d be just as fucking dead if we left her body there as she would be if we died trying to get her out!” It was unconscious, the switch to referring to the chocolate corpse as she instead of it or they. Rory’s mind was in two places now. It wasn’t something that had ever really happened to her before. She didn’t even realize it was happening at all.

“I’m sorry,” she sneered, “that I saved your stupid life. Next time, I’ll let the fucking worm eat you and you can rot next to the other corpses.” She exhaled, an infuriating, shuddering thing. Her heart was still pounding, and her teeth were tightly clenched. Part of her wanted to say fuck it and storm off in one direction or the other, leaving Dick Pubik and her stupid chocolate arm behind, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. (She’d left enough people behind by now, hadn’t she?)

Jaw set, she concentrated on her senses instead of her anger. She tried her best to block out the overwhelming and somewhat distracting stench of chocolate, listening closely and letting her eyes dart between the two directions. The echo was more pronounced from the left side of the ladder. It was darker, too, and she couldn’t see as far as she could if she looked to the right. “I think that way ends in a dead end,” she said, nodding to the left. “So… we should go the other way.” It was all the direction she gave before she trudged off towards the right, feet splashing through the sludging chocolate.

She tensed a little at the question, unsure how to answer. She wasn’t hurt; physically, it was as though nothing had happened at all. Her heart was pounding, of course, and her mouth felt dry, but she was fine. (Somehow, that made it worse. It felt stupid, being this… whatever she was when nothing had even happened.) “I’m fine,” she said, sounding a little defeated, the sloshing of chocolate punctuating the words. “Are you? Is your leg okay?” It wasn’t Dick’s fault. Rory wanted to be angry at her because she was there, but it wasn’t her fault. As it always tended to, Rory’s curiosity had landed her into this situation — and maybe landed someone else in it along with her. (She thought of Brigit, dead because Rory had wanted to go to an escape room. She shook the thought from her mind.) “It wasn’t your fault, anyway. I mean, the arm thing was, and that was stupid. But the rest of it was… It’s not like you made me go down there.”

—

She. The arm was not especially gracile. Regan had it under her fingertips, traced the bulge of the brachioradialis. She suspected male, but certainly there was no way to know without testing, without identifying who it had once been attached to. So there was not a she. Not here and now, anyway. She understood.

Regan could carry a grudge for years—and that long memory would probably only stretch with her lifespan. But Regan could also forgive a lot in grief. She was spat on at least once a week. When the tissue boxes in the viewing room were not restocked, she had seen next of kin press their faces into the drapes. Once, a fistful of hair was torn from her scalp. She had witnessed family attempting to rush into the death scene, past the tape and investigators, sobbing over a rusty stain in the pavement. She had her shirt clawed at. She had been threatened, demeaned, pushed with a harsh hand to her sternum.

Almost all of her next of kin thanked her. Given time, given care. They had her care.

Regan let Seymour yell. It wasn’t especially loud, anyway. Unimpressive volume, even in this giant, hollow tube. Only a minute ago, Regan’s lungs had been full and ready to pour out an argument. She flashed hot in offense more often than she wanted to admit, too many tender wounds with swollen margins. But now the fight within her was exhausted, more beat down than her anatomy. She raised her voice for grief; not against it. And right now, Regan could hear Seymour’s breathing, too quick and too loud, too painfully alive for the girl to catch.

She followed Seymour’s directional skill, though she couldn’t see a difference between left and right. She didn’t say anything. She hardly expected Seymour to either, but slowly, Regan could hear the girl’s breathing level out. Her heart was probably still rabbit-fast. Even Regan’s remained less sluggish than usual. And so Seymour spoke.

Regan froze for a moment, pausing for a step. “Good. I’m—I am glad for that. You never should have been so close to danger.” The admission made her stomach sear hot, more like a truth than a lie. “My leg is fine. Injury is a small cost.” Her stomach was not easing. Because Regan had made Seymour go down there. Perhaps not by force, but how many opportunities were there to dissuade the girl? To be honest about her own intentions?

It slithered from her lower abdomen and up into her chest, tried to tear her throat. Not a scream, but a confession. “That isn’t… I was not completely honest with you. I apologize for that. I—when I said I needed the bathroom, it was a lie.” She kicked the water, moving more or less steadily again. Her leg complained. It was not fine. “Or not my main objective, anyway. I was looking for the cellar. I felt the death. I tricked you into coming with me, because I did not want to admit that I lied about the bathroom. It was never only urination. So you see, it is my fault that we’re down here. I was dishonest.” She glanced over to Seymour, covered and contoured in darkness, but Regan could see the grief. “That is something to be angry about. Not the arm.”

And perhaps that was not the thing to say, because Regan was fairly sure the temperature had spiked up. Or maybe they were getting closer to the end of the sewer tunnel, and the sun was shining. Regan didn’t wait for Seymour to resume screaming (again, she was not especially skilled at it—embarrassing).

“You must have people in your life who you are close to, who you love. What would they think if you simply never returned home? If you were missing? You die. Years and years pass. It destroys them.” Regan stared straight ahead. The tunnel seemed to narrow. The chocolate liquid sloshing around her legs felt like the cool water of Millinocket Lake. Her brothers shouted—Reilly chasing Liam, not standing a chance after Liam’s awkward growth spurt. Alv running off with Regan’s long-handled net, the one she used to scoop up the dead frogs from the deeper parts of the lake and reeds. Laughter. Everything. “You do not let it go. Six months or a decade, it does not heal; not knowing is a torment.”

One she inflicted every day, like a few closed files on her desk could be her penance.

“I am going to take x-rays and a CT scan. If there is anything to find inside of this arm—which, there is, I can feel it—I will capture it in black and white. I will open it. I will take a DNA sample. I will inform the next of kin. And I would die for that.” She soldiered forward. There was more light now. She was not imagining it.

“Who was she?”

And if Seymour did not wish to speak, Regan would let absence answer.

—

Her father used to say that Rory was more like a firecracker than a forest fire. She exploded, yes, her anger hot and loud and destructive, sometimes, but it was usually over as quickly as it began. Her fuse might have been short, but so was the fireworks show that lived at the end of it. She was always sorry after, always apologized for whatever terrible things her anger wrought, but the next time her fuse was lit, she’d explode just the same. But the destruction was never widespread. It wasn’t the kind of thing that burned for days and days, turning the whole sky black with smoke. It happened, it was loud and dramatic, and then it was over. Rory did not fester, did not hold grudges for years and years.

So her anger towards Dick faded when she finished her tirade, even though part of her wanted to hold onto it. It was better than the alternative, better than feeling small and lost and afraid like she had in that basement. But… in a way, the anger was never real to begin with. Rory was always small and lost and afraid. Part of her never left that basement at all, sat there still with Brigit’s body and the instruments a mad woman had planned on using to take her apart piece by piece, would be there always just as part of her would always be a terrified girl unable to shift quickly enough to save her family or remember what had happened to them after. She wanted to be something better, wanted to climb up the stairs and leave, but she didn’t know how. Stepping over Brigit’s corpse had been easy when it was a physical thing; it was a little harder to do in her mind, where the body seemed to be the biggest thing in the room.

“Have you lived in this town for long?” Rory asked, a quiet huff punctuating the rhetorical question. “Everyone is in danger all the fucking time. It’s not the kind of thing you can avoid.” You go to the grocery store, and there are cartoon animals tearing each other to pieces. You try to buy a banana at a farmer’s market, and it takes over your mind and sends you wandering into the woods. You go to an escape room with a coworker when your shift is over, and —

She shook the thought from her mind. She didn’t want to keep coming back here, didn’t want to live in that stupid basement any longer. She wanted to be done with it, wanted to just… shove it to some dark corner of her mind and forget it had ever happened, like you did when you were a kid and you reworked trauma into a hazy thing that felt like trying to remember a dream you’d had once. But Rory wasn’t a kid anymore, and Brigit’s death wasn’t some half-forgotten childhood trauma that could easily be tucked away.

Her eyes darted down briefly to the other woman’s leg, trying to ascertain the damage there. But it was difficult to do, considering how… stoic Dick Pubik was. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, or maybe she was just used to it. “Some stranger’s severed arm would have been a smaller cost,” she replied, because it was hard not to push it. This woman’s life mattered more than something already dead. It had to. Because if it didn’t… If it didn’t, then Rory’s life hadn’t mattered more than getting Brigit’s body out of that basement. If it didn’t, then Rory had done something unforgivable.

She glanced up as the woman admitted to not having been completely honest. She wasn’t sure what kind of confession she was expecting here, wasn’t sure what she could say that would make the pieces fall into place. That she’d known the owner of the arm, maybe? That the whole ordeal had been by design, some attempt to avenge something? Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t what she got. And the unexpectedness of it was enough to draw a surprised laugh from somewhere deep within her chest. “Wow,” she said dryly, “next you’re going to tell me your name isn’t actually Dick Pubik.” She rolled her eyes, though not in an angry way. “I didn’t have to pee, either. I just wanted to see the cellar. You didn’t trick me.”

The woman continued then. She talked about missing persons, about how their families suffered when they were gone, and it was impossible not to think about the girl she’d left in a basement, impossible to save but maybe not impossible to return. She thought of Brigit’s brother, who must have stopped calling her phone eventually. Of her parents, who had probably filed a report with the police. Would any of them ever stop wondering? Would Rory ever stop wondering about her family, if she failed to find them? She clenched her hands into fists, her fingernails digging crescent shapes into the palms of her hands. She had done the only thing she could, hadn’t she? She had saved herself. She had made sure one corpse didn’t turn into two. Wasn’t that worth something? Wasn’t that better?

“If you had died for that,” she said quietly, “in that stupid basement, with that crazy woman, people would wonder what happened to you, too. And the family of whoever’s arm that is wouldn’t have gotten their answers, either. And then what? Two groups of people wondering forever instead of one? How is that better?”

Would anyone have wondered, for Rory? Her own family was somewhere far away, with no idea what she was doing already. She had a few friends in Wicked’s Rest, sure, but she doubted she’d made enough of an impact for anyone to think of her for long. Mateo might be worried if she didn’t show up for their regularly scheduled mischief, Owen might be pissed if she didn’t pick up the next time he called for help with a job, Madison might be upset she missed movie night, Talia and Guillermo might wonder why she stopped showing up at the Chimera, but they’d all forget her in a week or two. They’d figure she’d left town without saying anything, which wouldn’t even be out of character for Rory. No one would worry or wonder the way they were doubtlessly doing for Brigit, the way someone must have been for the owner of this arm, the way they would have for the woman walking beside her. Rory was alone, and she wondered if that meant her life mattered less. She wondered if that meant she should have accepted dying instead of leaving Brigit’s body behind to rot.

Ahead of them, the sun stretched into the tunnel. There must have been an opening nearby; Rory moved towards it while watching Dick out of the corner of her eye. One wet step forward, and another side by side. They probably both smelled like shit, but she could only smell the arm. One of the two sets of footsteps faltered at the question that bounced off the empty walls, a simple thing that revealed Rory had already said more than she meant to. She swallowed, looking down at the chocolate covering her shoes and the bottoms of her pants. “Somebody I knew,” she admitted quietly. A friend didn’t sound quite right, because she wasn’t sure Brigit had been. And wasn’t there something especially cruel about that? To die with no one there to witness it but the person who’d killed you and someone who couldn’t even call you their friend? There was nothing fair about any of it. “Come on. I can see the exit. We should get your arm to the lab, or whatever.”

—

“That isn’t my name,” Regan said, a little too quickly, a little too harshly, “Do not call me that again. It’s Regan. That signature earlier was just… my hand slipped.” And wrote DICK PUBIK. Even she couldn’t claim that to be a coincidence. Her guilt had taken the wheel. At least she could put to rest any guilt about leading Seymour astray. She had been in on it. Apparently, Regan hadn’t been as convincing as she thought. She’d have to remember not to use that urination line again. Another one struck from the list.

Somebody Seymour knew. She. Her “she” was always somebody they knew. Most people didn’t spare thought for the ones they didn’t know. Names stripped, faces blank, left forgotten with the flies. The owner of this arm would not lose their identity to a cellar of chocolate. Regan knew she was different in that regard—a fragment of bone was worth her own bones fragmenting. But so was Dr. Rickers; for all his faults (numerous as his hairs) he cared. So was Marcy. So was everyone who worked for the dead in this town, banshee or not.

The light made the water look murky and milky. They had started sloshing through it in synch at some point. Faster. The sun was harsh, and Regan tucked the arm awkwardly under her jacket, placing her own arm over it to secure it. She wasn’t going to let it melt after all that, and her own body heat was negligible.

Regan wanted to ask. Who, why, where the body was now, whether Seymour had stepped over it or after it. Peel the grief back until she could pin the moment in her death sight. But she kept her mouth shut. She had already said too much, probably, about the ones who never made their way home. The ones who would never lie casket to casket with parents and siblings and loved ones. Do you hold an endless search party or do you hold a funeral? Do you place flowers in a plot or keep them in a vase, perfect and waiting, like the door might open? Do you pray or do you mourn?

Does the hazy photo stay in the papers forever? Do they even look the same anymore? Is there flesh? Is there bone?

She still looked exactly like the photo. Medical school graduation. Ten years.

Regan noticed another strange pronoun from Seymour: we. “Yes, we do,” she said. "You can come, if you would like. We have showers there. Not the same ones the cadavers use—they get baths, not showers. Usually. The arm will get neither.” Regan looked sideways at Seymour as they emerged from the pipe—they were in some woods, liquid chocolate flowing into a rocky stream. Regan could see houses through the trees.

“Let’s bring them home.”

#c rory #writing #choco-too-late

kadavernagh