novelraw Chapter 237: All Wrapped Up~
Chapter 237: All Wrapped Up~
The section chief glanced at him again, a barely-there smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.
“What’s the rush. I handled it personally. You think I’d walk out empty-handed?”
The bald clerk’s face went white in an instant.
“You—wait, you actually—you got it?”
The chief made a dismissive sound through his nose, reached into the inner pocket of his longcoat, and pulled out a crumpled cigarette. He stuck it between his lips without lighting it.
“Obviously. He confessed.”
“Deliberately inciting the confrontation, all five kills, start to finish. Every detail lined up.”
“With the physical evidence to back it, the rest of the procedure should be straightforward. Hand it over to the adjudication room and let them deal with it. That kind of garbage should have been torn apart a long time ago.”
The bald clerk blinked, then immediately rose on his tiptoes and craned his neck to peer through the gap of Interrogation Room C’s door.
The man in the chair—the one he’d been calling “today’s difficult new face”—was slumped against the backrest, eyes unfocused, a thin trickle of foam at the corner of his mouth.
That answered the question.
“Ahhh no, I lost again...”
All the vitality drained out of the bald clerk’s face at once, like someone had pulled a plug.
The young clerk said nothing. But the pallor that chronic sleep deprivation had installed on his face had been replaced, quite visibly, by healthy color.
The middle-aged woman in the cardigan shook her head with an appreciative click of her tongue.
“Chief, you just keep getting better at this. Last time you had that hard-mouth case, wasn’t it still only half an hour?”
The chief waved her off. He didn’t appear interested in discussing it.
He took one look at the bald clerk’s expression and reached the obvious conclusion—he’d placed another bet, and lost it, which was the only outcome the man had ever produced from gambling and somehow continued not to learn from.
Some people were just made that way.
“Oh, chief—” The young clerk hesitated, then seemed to decide the question was worth asking. “That girl. Is she still... not done?”
“Which girl.” The chief’s brow creased. He pulled a second cigarette from the pack.
“Things have been non-stop around here. Half the people in this building are a ‘that girl’ to someone.”
The young clerk thought about it for a moment.
“The one called... Douglas. Something Douglas.”
“Oh—Pandora Douglas!”
He added, dropping his voice like he was worried the name would hear itself being spoken.
At that name, the chief’s hand paused mid-motion.
He raised his eyes, looking past the clutter of documents stacked across the desk, toward the far end of the interrogation block.
There was a door at the back. A separate one.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Nothing like the regular oak doors of Room C or Room B.
Room S had a door that was simply, absolutely black.
The kind of black that looked like it absorbed whatever light touched it and gave none of it back.
“Her...”
The chief murmured it, pulling his gaze back with a studied casualness and gesturing vaguely in that direction.
“She should still be in there.”
His voice carried something layered and difficult to put a name to.
“You've been curious, haven’t you. Why don’t you go look for yourself.”
The color shifted in the young clerk’s face.
He looked carefully at the black door.
The depth of that color felt like it could pull something out of you just by being looked at.
“They used Mr. Long-Ears on this one,” the middle-aged woman offered from the side, in a tone that was only barely not teasing. “He wouldn’t dare go in alone.”
The young clerk swallowed.
He looked at the black door again—a more careful look this time, with a component of genuine unease in it.
That darkness felt like an omen of something.
“I'll... I’ll just wait out here for the results.”
He said it quietly.
The bald clerk, meanwhile, had managed to drag himself most of the way back from the devastation of losing his bet. He grabbed the energy drink on the desk—long since gone cold—and threw back a long swallow, apparently hoping the chemical taste would displace the feeling of financial loss.
“Mr. Long-Ears?” He set the bottle down and wiped his mouth. “They actually pulled that out for this Douglas girl? Bit extreme, isn’t it?”
The chief’s face, when the bald clerk looked at it, was not relaxed.
He shook his head slowly.
“Don’t underestimate her.”
He glanced toward Room S’s black door. The look in his eyes was heavier than the conversation seemed to call for.
“She’s not on the standard Corpse-Plague Acolyte path that most of our Corpse Hall apprentices use. From what the investigation turned up, she’s apparently on a different system entirely. Something called Wizard.”
“Wizard?”
The bald clerk stopped, then nodded with an expression somewhere between puzzled and mildly contemptuous.
“A Wizard, huh? Yeah, that’s unusual. What are people thinking when they pick those other paths? You've got a perfectly good body sitting there, you could be making it into something, and instead you go off and do all that strange esoteric whatever...”
He trailed off, then brightened slightly as another thought arrived.
“Still, they've got Mr. Long-Ears in there with her. It’ll be fine.”
The bald clerk had witnessed Mr. Long-Ears' effects firsthand. The thing was a genuine nightmare for the psyche. Even the toughest apprentices who’d ever been put in a room with it hadn’t lasted three minutes.
So he felt, at this particular moment, entirely at ease. There was even a small, not very charitable flicker of something like amusement at the thought of that little girl called Pandora sitting in there having a very bad time.
The section chief—a man who had conducted the preliminary interrogation himself and therefore knew more about Pandora Douglas than anyone else in this office—shook his head.
“Not a sure thing yet.”
He said it under his breath, the words tasting like a concern he couldn’t quite swallow.
“That girl is strange in ways I can’t account for. Don’t get complacent.”
“Come on.” The bald clerk snorted, dismissing the caution with a wave.
“Mr. Long-Ears is one of our most reliable interrogation assets. Nothing’s ever stayed sealed up against it, and there’s no way anyone could actually—”
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Laughter.
Strange laughter.
It erupted without warning.
Not from outside the door.
Not from any of the interrogation rooms.
From around them. From inside the walls. From the thin gaps in the ceiling. From every corner of the office, simultaneously, seeping through all of it at once.
The sound was unbearable in its quality—like something being forced out of lungs that had been marinated in smoke for several decades. Every syllable dragged out, one running into the next with almost no breath between them, building into a continuous resonance that made the skin on the back of the neck want to crawl somewhere safer.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”
All four people in the office went rigid.
The bald clerk’s mouth was still open. Whatever word had been on its way out died in his throat.
The chief’s fingers—holding the unlit cigarette—trembled. Just barely. Just once.
They looked at each other.
The same expression on every face.
Shock.
And fear.
The office had gone absolutely silent except for that laughter.
That skin-crawling, apparently endless laughter, bouncing through the sealed space with nowhere to go.
They all knew what Room S’s soundproofing was.
The door had been treated with specialized materials—isolation wards layered into it, acoustic-dampening compounds worked into the frame. Under normal conditions, short of an explosion or an artillery impact, nothing was supposed to make it through that door into the outer office.
And yet.
The volume of what they were hearing right now was completely, utterly ordinary.
The volume of a person laughing loudly in a room.
Clear.
Present.
Close enough that you could hear, underneath the raw noise of it, the specific texture of the thing producing it.
The unhinged quality of something that was genuinely, deeply delighted.