Ode fell into a brief silence, motes of dust drifting lazily through the parched air.
Cavendish kept his gaze fixed on that empty patch of void, seemingly waiting for him to respond.
But his hopes were destined to be dashed. Ode soon looked away, glancing around as if he hadn’t heard a word, taking in the cramped underground room—no more than forty square feet, by his estimate.
“Two bookshelves, stuffed with files. This must be a room the principal built specifically to stash these away. And if I’m not mistaken, these are all…”
Ode quickly rifled through a few files before tossing them back onto the shelf in disgust. “Proof of his crimes before he fled to Dreamcatcher Town.”
“Not surprising. A man who cares nothing for human life, only for preserving his own reputation, must be well accustomed to watching lives slip through his fingers.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re talking about someone specific?” Cavendish drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and meticulously wiped the lingering gunpowder residue from his fingers.
Ode sidled up to the wall to examine the marks beneath the bullet holes. “You’re overthinking it, Mr. Cavendish. Not everything revolves around you. What’s this? Claw marks?”
Ode frowned as he traced the chaotic gouges etched into the wall. Then he finally lowered his gaze to the body sprawled face-down on the floor at his feet.
“Mind describing the scene for me?” Cavendish asked politely.
Ode shot a glance at Cavendish, who had reverted to the demeanor he’d worn upon entering the basement. He had to admit, this mutual pretense of ignorance suited them both perfectly for now. “…It’s the corpse of an adult male. Definitely not Lola.”
He crouched down for a closer look. “The skin’s shriveled up bad… Gross. It looks like a mummy freshly dragged out of the Pyramids, bandages and all ripped off.”
Pinching his nose in revulsion, Ode studied the body’s posture. “Face-down on the ground… One hand stretched out, clawing at the floor. There’s a huge hole in the back—like something bit clean through it.”
“Sounds like it was being chased by a beast and got caught—then chomped.”
“But this is a basement, surrounded by earthen walls—” Ode paused abruptly, remembering that “Dream Realm” from minutes ago. “Ever heard of the Hounds of Tindalos?”
Ode had only mentioned it offhand, not expecting any real answer from Cavendish. But the next instant, to his surprise, Cavendish replied, “I have.”
“Those things can slip out of any angle less than 120 degrees, suck out their prey’s blood with straw-like tongues—no way this is a Hound of Tindalos’s work.”
“Victims killed by Hounds of Tindalos have smooth cuts on them, covered in weird crystals at the edges. If the wounds looked like that, you wouldn’t call it ‘like a beast bite,’ would you?”
Cavendish paused for a moment, receiving no reply. He tilted his head slightly. “Ode?”
Ode mumbled a vague acknowledgment, then carefully flipped the body over. Beneath the abdomen, he spotted a notebook pinned under it.
Without lingering, he pocketed the notebook, stood, and reached for Cavendish. “No sign of Lola. Nothing left for us here. Let’s head to the dense woods—”
“Why?” This time, Cavendish didn’t budge.
He sat rooted to the spot. Ode tugged hard, feeling like he was trying to shift an anvil. “Why the dense woods?”
“You think Lola was sneaking a read when she stumbled on whatever monster attacked this guy, and it dragged her off to the woods?”
“But—if Lola was grabbed by a monster, how would she even know it was heading to the woods? Did it snatch her up while yelling, ‘I’m taking you to the dense woods’?”
Ode yanked at Cavendish a few more futile times before taking a deep breath. Mustering his patience, he rapid-fired at the stubborn pea rooted to the ground. “No, I’m just assuming this man-eating monster is the same one the waiter mentioned lurking in the woods. Satisfied?”
The stubborn pea arched a brow, and its roots finally loosened. Ode shoved him urgently out of the basement, striding toward the library exit while asking, “By the way—you mind footing the bill for a carriage later? I don’t fancy legging it into the woods like an idiot, arriving half-dead before facing the monster.”
.
Ode had to concede that, for all Cavendish’s flaws—some potentially lethal—the man wasn’t stingy.
Ensconced in the opulent carriage Cavendish had arrived in Dreamcatcher Town with, Ode furrowed his brow. He once more doused a silver dinner knife—pilfered from Cavendish’s carriage—in Masson Cognac, the sort that would fetch two hundred thousand pounds at auction in 1980. Then he aimed it at his own finger. “…Hiss.”
Cavendish, seated at the other end of the carriage, looked up at the sound. A copy of The Little Prince lay open on his knee—a book that wouldn’t be published until 1943. “You afraid of pain?”
“Obviously.” Ode silently prayed this cut wouldn’t heal quite so fast as the last. Cradling his shotgun, he began sketching an Alchemy Array from memory, just as in the dream. “I’m not some masochistic lunatic—hiss, hiss.”
Cavendish wore that intrigued expression again. “Yet here you are, courting suffering. If we run into that monster, your wounds won’t be so trivial as a knife nick.”
“That’s different,” Ode snapped, as if the potentially lethal Alchemy Array he was drawing were mere doodles. “Read your book, why don’t you? Don’t you have your own business?”
The words Cavendish hadn’t voiced that morning came spilling from Ode instead.
Silence reigned in the carriage for two minutes.
After a moment, Cavendish, fingers tracing the Braille on the page, spoke again. “I still don’t see what’s so tearjerking about the last two chapters.”
“It’s just the Little Prince deciding to return to his planet and his rose. So he lets the snake bite him, freeing his soul to rejoin her—”
“He succeeds. The pilot stranded in the desert with him gets rescued too. Isn’t that a happy ending?”
Ode halted his drawing, irritation flaring at the mere sound of Cavendish’s voice. He spent three seconds composing himself before looking up with a polite, forced smile. “Maybe put it down, sir. It’s not for you. Spare yourself—and the book.”
“Here,” he fished the notebook from his pocket and tossed it to Cavendish. “Read this instead. Bet you can feel the writing on the pages. More your speed—no emotional intelligence required.”
Cavendish’s expression soured, but he flipped open the notebook anyway, stowing The Little Prince. Clearly, he had no intention of heeding the advice and planned to wrestle with it later. “It’s a… private journal. The owner was a Child of the Dust.”
“A what?” Ever since getting nabbed at the bank, Ode felt like a kindergartener, confronted by novelties at every turn.
“Children of the Dust. An ancient cult.” Cavendish’s fingertips glided over the paper. “They worship an entity called ‘Quachil Uttaus’…”
Cavendish paused at length, searching for the right word. “Existence.”
“Evil god.” Ode pegged Quachil Uttaus’s place instantly. “Keep reading? Was that corpse in the basement the journal’s owner? What were Children of the Dust doing here?”
After a quiet read, Cavendish replied, “Yes. The body in the basement belonged to a Child of the Dust. As for the second question—the journal says he came here with the other brothers and sisters of the cult, summoned by ‘the divine’.”
Ode, just finishing the final stroke of his array, clutched his shotgun in one arm. He stared at Cavendish in shock for several seconds before scooting over beside him, peering at the journal. “What?? So on top of a possible Deep One Outpost, Dreamcatcher Town’s hiding a Children of the Dust cult?”
“What’s this ‘summoned by the divine’ mean? What did Quachil Uttaus call them here for?”
The journal page splayed on Cavendish’s knee bore a fervent paean:
【O divine one from the dark frontier lands, we praise You.
You grant Your followers eternity, boundless time to pursue knowledge.
You bestow upon us decay and affliction, but we know well that is the price of immortality.
You are a generous god, a cruel god, a merciful god.
Brothers and sisters, when at last you can bear no more the pains and frailty that accompany eternal life, invoke the god’s name! It shall claim your souls, reducing your useless husks to dust.】
Ode forcibly suppressed the scientific worldview he’d built over twenty-one years, struggling to process the passage. “So… in plain English, Quachil Uttaus grants immortality, but you have to endure endless pain and decay as the tradeoff. If you can’t take it anymore, Quachil Uttaus mercy-kills the ‘blessed’ soul, leaving just a pile of ashes?”
A faint, fleeting smile tugged at Cavendish’s lips, as if he took pleasure in Ode’s irreverent summary. “Its power is actually dominion over death—or rather, over localized, finite time.”
“If you have a book called Karnamagos Testament at home, don’t open it lightly. Just reading it might summon Quachil Uttaus.”
“It will age everyone in the room to dust in moments.”
“If you form a pact with Him, He grants you eternity: immunity to death, injury, poison, madness—you could think of it as Him halting time on your body.”
“But the price is your spine twisting on the spot… Imagine it. That agony lasts forever, until you beg Quachil Uttaus to turn you into painless dust.”
Ode’s pupils contracted slightly. He instinctively reached to touch his still-aching lower back but caught himself before his arm moved.
Not necessarily.
How painful could a twisted spine be? His back was at worst herniated from some impact—not twisted.
And his time wasn’t paused, right? That Deep One had still beaten him to a pulp.
Ode silently committed the information to memory. He lifted the carriage curtain and glanced outside. “Stop the carriage for a moment. I have something to fetch.”
Three minutes later, the driverless carriage set off once more from in front of Lola’s farm. Inside the compartment, Cavendish stared in silence at the Border Collie happily wagging its tail.
The Border Collie huffed and panted.
Cavendish said nothing.
Cavendish subtly tugged his lapel away from the shedding fur, making his disdain for the canine species abundantly clear. “May I ask why we’ve acquired an extra passenger aboard?”
Ode was still leafing through the diary, trying to puzzle out why Quachil Uttaus had summoned his followers to Dreamcatcher Town. “How else are we supposed to find Lola without it?”
He pinched the edge of a page, utterly baffled. “Nothing at all. No explanation for why Quachil Uttaus called them here. But the moment he did, they came eagerly scampering along.”
With a sigh, he tossed the diary aside and peered past the curtain. Endless fields stretched into the distance; they had left the town behind and were drawing near the edge of the dense forest.
Ode let the curtain fall back into place. Just as the heavy fabric began to block his view, a flicker of deep blue caught the corner of his eye amid the rice paddies.
He yanked the curtain open again. There, plain as day, stood a Soap Company employee in a cheap dark blue suit, camera raised to snap photos. It wasn’t the same one he’d spotted at the cliffside. “Look over there! Another one. How are these guys popping up everywhere, taking pictures?”
Cavendish shot back with flawless logic. “Don’t you take photos when you’re traveling?”
Ode fired right back. “When you travel and snap pictures, do you act so guilty that you’d rather flee straight into gunfire? I’m starting to wonder if this whole Soap Company is just another cult. What if they’re surveilling Dreamcatcher Town?”
If he weren’t in such a rush to plunge into the forest after Lola, Ode would have leaped from the carriage right then, jammed a gun against the suspicious employee’s skull, and demanded every last photo.
Cavendish offered no reply.
He remained locked in his staring contest with the dog. “Once we enter the forest, it becomes useless.”
“What?”
“I said, the closer we get to the forest, the more it will—”
“Woo… Woof!” The Border Collie, which had been sitting obediently until now, lurched to its feet. Its fur stood on end, bristling straight toward the forest. Its cute muzzle wrinkled back like a beast poised to strike, baring razor-sharp teeth and blood-red gums. “Woof woof! Awoo… Woof!”
“?!” Ode had pored over every possible detail—except this one. His reflexes kicked in just as the Border Collie lunged for the edge of the carriage. He seized its leash. “Sit! Bruto, sit!”
“Woo… Woof! Woof woof!!” Bruto shook violently, thrashing like a mad thing. It nearly yanked the lightweight star poli-sci graduate straight off the carriage.
Ode stumbled forward and braced his free hand against the carriage wall. In a flash of inspiration, he looped the leash around the arm of Cavendish, who sat rigidly beside him. “Sit! Bruto!”
Cavendish, conscripted as an impromptu anchor for the second time, turned his head ever so slowly. “…?”
He plucked the leash from his wrist. With a deft flick of his fingers, he unfastened the clasp. The leash slithered free across the fabric of his suit. Bruto bolted, tearing off in the opposite direction from the forest without a backward glance.
“You—” Ode clenched his jaw.
Cavendish remained utterly serene. “You expect a dog this terrified before even entering the woods to stay calm once inside and track down its owner with pinpoint accuracy?”
Ode knew full well he had a point. But without Bruto, searching for Lola in that forest would be like hunting for a needle in a haystack. And besides… “This isn’t just you disliking dogs and sabotaging things on purpose, is it?”
Cavendish began, “Do you really distrust me that mu—”
“Boom—rumble…”
Deep in the forest, the thunderous crack of massive trees splintering echoed from afar. It sounded as if some armored behemoth, tank-like in its bulk, was barreling away at impossible speed.
Ode’s head snapped up toward the source of the din. He hadn’t even caught a glimpse of whatever was out there when their horse reared up with a shriek of pure terror. It wheeled sharply to the right.
The horse is spooked!
The realization had barely formed in Ode’s mind when the carriage lurched into a brutal sideswipe. The side of the compartment slammed into a particularly thick tree trunk at the forest’s fringe.
In the instant before the ornate but fragile carriage splintered apart, Ode lunged for Cavendish’s collar with one hand. His other hand gripped the opposite door, smashing the lock in a desperate bid to haul them both to safety. But the horse veered wildly once more.
“Clang—”
The carriage whipped in the other direction, flinging Ode and Cavendish out through the open door.
In that breathless half-second, Ode spotted a carpet of thick moss and red-capped mushrooms below. It would cushion the fall, at least. But the man whose collar he clutched planted his feet with impossible steadiness, defying all laws of physics. Ode staggered upright beside him, clinging on like a passenger gripping a bus strap.
“…” Cavendish’s expression grew profoundly awkward. After a long moment of hesitation, he said, “Could you let go of my collar now?”
Ode replayed the last few seconds from Cavendish’s perspective: first choked by his own collar, then yanked about by it. No different from how he’d just manhandled Bruto’s leash. “…Sorry about that.”
Feigning utmost nonchalance, Ode released his grip. He smoothed out the rumpled collar and gave it a light pat. “There. You can’t even tell up close.”
Cavendish stared. “…………”
Ode would have bet his life that, if circumstances allowed, Cavendish would have throttled him with the leash by now—or something far crueler.
He clasped his hands behind his back and circled Cavendish with feigned casualness. “Anyway, no more dog or horse. We’ll have to rely on our own two—”
His words died in his throat as he rounded behind Cavendish and spotted something nestled amid the gnarled roots of a nearby tree.
“?” Cavendish was acutely attuned to every little twitch from Ode. “What is it?”
“I see… another Soap Company employee.” Ode’s voice came out parched. “He’s… dead.”
“Burned to death. The body looks just like…”
Just like the victim in the photos Faust had shown him.
“Creeeak…”
A low, distinct groan rose from the surrounding trees. Like puppets harboring restless souls, they all bent northward by several degrees.
