Solo Haunted pt 1

[Madeira Dusk]

Haunted
21st of Winter, 520
13th bell

"Actually, Aldgare, sir, since I have you here I've been meaning to ask you something.", Madeira hated to raise her voice, but it was necessary to be heard over the screaming. She glanced up at Aldgare Dusk, face inches from her own, as they both struggled to maneuver the skinny arm of a young man through the loop of a knotted rope.

"I'm not sure this is the best time", the patriarch breathed hard through his clenched teeth, his knuckles white as he shoved at the thrashing limb trapped between them. For a mage pushing sixty he was surprisingly virile. "Shouldn't this wait until after the exorcism?"

Three grown men, along with Chiona, Madeira and Aldgare, were needed to hold down the possessed body of sixteen-year-old Adrian Lumin. The boy was naked from the waist down, covered in only a thin nightshirt and a sheen of sweat. His ribs were pushed up from his hollow chest like they were trying to break through and escape. He was alternating between screaming like a lunatic and panting like a racehorse.

With nowhere else to put him, the Dusk family had lashed the boy to their dining room table. The idea of a family of spiritists not having any dedicated space to put the madly possessed blew Madeira's mind. The basement of the Craven manor was ripe with such tools of the trade.

"Don't you have a blessed alter slab in this house?" Madeira had asked as she had fetched Chiona from her room and raced back to the dining hall. "A stretching rack? Padded restraints?"

Chiona had turned her head just enough so Madeira could see the look on her face. "What kind of people do you think we are?"

Madeira had dropped the subject after that.

Working together, Madeira and Aldgare managed to wrestle the boy's arm into the loop of rope and tighten it over his wrist. "It's just that you're such a busy man, sir." Madeira snatched her hands away from Adrian's bicep just as he craned his neck to try and bite her. "I thought, why not two birds with one stone? An exorcism and a chat."

At Adrian's feet Chiona and a man Madeira didn't know were tying his ankles to the legs of the table. The man was pushing hard on Adrian's knee in an effort to keep his leg still and straight enough to lash him tightly. Madeira saw the dangerous bend in the straining joint and swooped down on the man.

"Are you trying to break his leg?!" Madeira knocked him aside, wordlessly gesturing to hold Adrian's shin while she put all her weight across his thigh. "He can't feel pain. He'll break this body to free it. Never hold a possessed person by the neck, head or joints!"

All at once, as the group was still struggling to restrain him, Adrian's eyes rolled back and his limbs slackened. The group exchanged alarmed glances, but before anyone could ask the question his body gave a few vicious twitches and then finally stilled. Adrian's breathing stuttered, stopped, and then leveled out. He looked like he could be asleep.

[Madeira Dusk]

Chiona was the first to voice the question on everyone's mind. "What the hai just happened?"

"Possession takes a lot of energy. The ghost has expended itself", Madeira explained simply, wiping her brow with her sleeve. "It will be back though, it's dormant, not gone."

With the boy no longer resisting them, it took no time to secure his remaining limbs. Afterwards Madeira turned to the younger men in the room with a smile full of gratitude. "Thank you for your help, we can take it from here." The men glanced at Aldgare, who nodded his consent, and they shuffled out.

"Well, this is exciting!", Madeira's dress flared as she spun back to face the boy lashed to the table, her hands clapped to her chest. "I haven't seen a possession this bad in a long time. This will be a great learning experience." She pretended not to see the two Dusk's left in the room exchanging a look behind her back.

"You are a bizarre creature, miss Craven", Aldgare took the effort to smile indulgently. "But I'm grateful for any opportunity to learn. What do we do next?"

"You can tell me about him, to start. He's been possessed a very long time, I think."

"How can you tell?"

Beckoning her students closer, she bent over the boy's legs. They were molted with the sickly green and yellow of old bruises, and the muscles ran like wires beneath the taut skin.

"Excessive and unexplainable bruising is a good sign", she ran an experimental hand over the top of one of the fresher bruises. The boy groaned and his head flopped to the other side. That was good. Reacting to pain meant the boy was back in control. "So is this build: excessively skinny but still somehow hard as a rock. Ghost's tend to push their host body really hard, so this kind of muscle can develop over time.

"But every possession is different. There have also been cases of people staying in bed for days, or just wandering off. Not all possessions are violent. Some ghosts destroy their hosts with apathy."

Both Dusks, their eyes keen and bright, took note of the sign and nodded to show they understood. "How about these scars?" Aldgare gently pushed up the sleeve of the boy's nightshirt. A great gash of a scar, long healed but still an angry shade of pink, ran jaggedly from his wrist and disappeared up his forearm.

"That's more likely a symptom of mental illness", Madeira smoothed a hand tenderly over the wound. "I've never heard of a ghost actually trying to commit suicide during possession. Something in a living body, some primal will to live, always stops them. It's like your body's safeguard."

"Thank gods", Chiona mumbled, disturbed. "Wait, haven't you said that an altered mental state can make it easier to be possessed? So if this poor boy is battling a mental illness, that could be why he was targeted."

"Absolutely", Madeira straightened up and smiled, impressed with her best student. "A possession can also just look like a mental illness, too. So unless they start speaking in dead languages or doing impossible physical feats it can sometimes be hard to tell the two apart."

The boy groaned again, and his eyelashes fluttered. His eyes were bloodshot with stress, but his irises were a beautiful, chocolate shade of brown. He tried to lift his hands as if to wipe them, but the rope around his wrist was barely taut before they fell weakly back to the table.

"Gently, Adrian", Madeira was standing by his head in an instant, slipping an arm behind his neck to raise his head. With a handkerchief conjured from a pocket somewhere in her voluminous dress she dabbed motheringly at his leaking eyes. "You were gone for a bit, but now you're back home to yourself. There, now."

"Where am I? Who are you people?"

[Madeira Dusk]

"We're your friends", she assured him. "You're in the Dusk tower. There is a sickness in you and we're here to help get it out."

"Get it out", he mumbled. His pupils began to float like he was about to pass out, only for them to sharped to pinpricks in his pretty eyes. "Get it out! Get it out! GET IT OUT!"

Worried he was about to try and bite her again, Madeira slipped quickly out from behind his neck. But the boy didn't seem to notice she was there anymore.

"Sir?" Madeira mouthed to Aldgare, motioning her head towards the door. The man nodded and followed her out of the room, leaving Chiona to tend to the boy. When they stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind them the sound muffled to bearable levels.

"So", Madeira continued conversationally, smoothing back her tightly bound hair. "What's his story? Did you talk to whoever brought him here?"

Aldgare nodded, his expression thoughtful. "His family brought him in. People will usually call on Rothsam for help in these kinds of situations, but he was too far away and Adrian here is a bit of a flight risk. So they brought him here instead."

Madeira crossed her arms over her chest and studied the floor where she stood.

"Did they give you a clue as to when this started?"

"They're not sure. He's struggled with fits since he was a child. He would hit people, throw things... they described as 'like a toddler in a temper tantrum'. His family would lock him in his room until he calmed down."

"That 'toddler' is 5'9 and built like a neurotic acrobat."

"Indeed. The only thing that's changed in his life recently has been the start of his membership at the Hunter's Guild. He's been more irritable and tired the last two weeks but this" he waved delicately at the closed door, from which they could hear Chiona trying to calm the boy down, "had begun less than twelve hours ago. Before that they didn't even realize he was possessed."

Madeira nodded at the floor. When she looked up she met Aldgare's eye expectantly. "It's a shame we have to tie the boy down in your home. Seems like there should be a better way."

Aldgare chuffed with a shake of his head. "I see. Is this what you wished to talk to me about, my dear?"

"I propose a new business", Madeira launched into the topic with no more preamble. "You are the gatekeepers of spiritism in Lhavit, yet you don't actually have a formal institute that provides spiritism services."

"That would be because Lhavit already has one. The Den of the Lost has a well established reputation."

"Exactly. Why is this citizen mage, with no formal education and no oversight, the one practicing your magic in your city? It's ridiculous. I have every qualification to do it better, safer, and with the blessing of the Tower to build trust with the people here."

"My magic? My city? I'm flattered my dear, but that's not the case."

"Am I wrong, though?"

Aldgare considered her for a moment, standing bright eyed and fierce below him. "No, what you say has merit. And far be it for me to get in the way of anything Madeira Craven wants." He smiled fondly at her. "I will consider what you say. Lets continue this conversation later, shall we? There is a young man strapped to my dining table that needs your urgent attention."

Satisfied for now, Madeira softens and smiles. "Okay, what do you think we should do?"

Suprised, Aldgare chuffed with a shake of his head. "Your dedication to your work as a teacher is exemplary, professor, but this is a touch beyond my capabilities. I worry that my lack of experience would hurt the boy."

"A student of medicine does not begin by cutting people open", Madeira countered. "Think of yourself as my apprentice, or shadow. Everything is a teachable moment and I'd like your input."

"If that's the case", Aldgare rubbed at the shadow of stubble on his chin. "We should talk to the boy first, see if we can get information out of him concerning the spirit and what it wants from him."

"Excellent, sir", Madeira beamed, motioning towards the door. "After you."

[Madeira Dusk]

The boy had calmed down since they had been gone. His nightshirt was clinging to his damp body, which shone like he was in fever. Chiona had taken over moping his brow and was speaking in low, soothing tones.

"Hello, Adrian. I'm Aldgare. We're not going to hurt you, we just want to talk." There was something grandfatherly about his tone as he pulled up a dinning chair and sat beside the boy. "Do you know what's happening to you?"

"My passenger", the boy sucked in a ragged breath. "You want to take him out of me."

Aldgare glanced at Madeira, and she nodded for him to keep going. "Yes, your passenger. Do you know who he is?"

"He was my friend. He'd whisper to me."

"What would he whisper?"

"Things. I don't know. It was just nice not to be alone, to not have to be me all the time. But then he began to whisper bad things. Telling me to..." They waited for him to go on, but the thought never finished. He began to cry.

Madeira put her hand on Aldgare's shoulder, subtly letting him know she wanted to speak next. "You tried to remove him, didn't you? That was a very strong thing to do." The other two looked at her, wondering how she came to that conclusion, but she waved them off. She would explain it later. Intuition meant a lot in situations like this. The ghost seemed to not have been hindering Adrian too much, until suddenly it snapped. Adrian must have done something to enrage it. "What happened?"

"I didn't... This man, he started watching me as I went to work. I didn't notice at first. He never followed. He just sat at the same corner every day and watched me. Then one day he spoke to me. He gave me medicine, and said to put it in my body and my passenger would leave. I didn't believe him. I-"

A spiritist. It must have been. How would they have known Adrian was possessed otherwise?

"Adrian, did you recognize this man?", Chiona spoke. Her disgust at the implications were written all over her face. At her side her dao hand was tightened into a fist.

"I don't know. He was- he was wearing a hood."

"Okay, that's okay", Madeira cut in before Chiona could continue. There was something more important right now. "Did you take the medicine he gave you? Did you swallow it?"

"No, I put it in my body."

Everyone shared an alarmed glance.

"You must be cold, Adrian. I'm going to take off your dirty nightshirt and get you a nice clean blanket, okay?" Madeira leaned over him and smiled warmly. "Bear with me for just a tick." Taking the cue, Chiona tapped to the door, intending to have a servant fetch a blanket for the boy. Meanwhile she began to unbutton his shirt. She began by rolling up the arms, looking for the huge puncture holes of those metal needles she'd seen doctors use, but there was nothing but old scare tissue. A cursory glance told her his nose and ears were clear too, or at least not with anything she could see.

"Drugs?" Aldgare whispered in her ear, returning the cloth to the boy's forehead so he would close his eyes.

Madeira didn't answer. She hoped that was all this was. Starting at his collar, she worked her way down, threading button after button and revealing more and more skin, until she shivered to a stop at his navel. She pushed his shirt wider open and Aldgare leaned over her. For a long second the breath on her neck stopped.

On Adrian's belly, left of his navel, was a patch of skin several shades darker than his own. It had been sewn on with embroidery thread, and the edges were fresh, weeping and dark. The obviously foreign skin had been treated, but not very much, and not very well. The corners were puckered and the edges dark with blood that was about to kickstart the impending rot.

Aldgare looked at his teacher like he expected her to know what was going on. And Madeira, the accomplished spiritist, so certain she had seen it all before, could only look her student in the eye and whisper, "Holy petch."