novelraw Chapter 238: Mr. Long-Ears
Chapter 238: Mr. Long-Ears
“That sound... that’s Mr. Long-Ears... right?”
The young clerk was the first to speak.
He looked at the section chief, hoping very much for a denial.
The chief—a man whose composure was usually something you could set a clock by—had his brow drawn into a deep furrow.
His eyes were fixed on the black door as if he could push his vision through the thick wood and see whatever was happening inside.
“It does sound like it.”
His voice came out dry.
“But... how is it reaching outside the interrogation room?”
That wasn’t supposed to be possible.
The middle-aged woman in the cardigan had fear written plainly across her face. She pressed her document folder tighter against her chest, her voice unsteady.
“Maybe... it’s lost control again?”
The chief didn’t answer immediately.
He just kept his lips pressed together.
Whatever confidence the bald clerk had been carrying had evaporated completely.
He looked at the black door—which now seemed to be giving off something that felt distinctly like a bad omen—and suggested quietly:
“Should we... go in and check?”
The chief hesitated.
The manic, ragged laughter continued without pause, without any sign of stopping—and if anything, it seemed to be getting louder. More... excited.
Finally, the chief nodded.
He drew a long, slow breath, like a man committing to something.
Then he extended his left hand.
Under the tense, unblinking attention of the other three.
He took his left pinky finger and slowly, deliberately...
Bent it backward.
Crack.
A sound—tiny, and deeply unpleasant in the way that only joint sounds can be.
The finger bent ninety degrees backward at an angle no human joint was designed to reach.
No blood.
What showed at the break was a set of precise, faintly metallic gears.
This was the key to Room S.
He slid the bent finger slowly into the keyhole of the black door.
Turned it gently.
Click.
The lock opened.
And the instant it did, that continuous, ragged, manic laughter—
Stopped.
Just like that.
No trailing off. No fading. Just gone.
The office plunged back into silence—a silence that was, somehow, heavier than it had been before the laughter started.
The other three clerks held their breath without deciding to.
The young clerk could hear his own heartbeat hammering against the inside of his chest. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Their minds, without asking permission, started generating images of what might be waiting behind that door.
A shredded body?
A girl who had broken completely, lost to psychosis, harming herself in some dark corner?
Or something worse?
The chief’s hand settled on the cold metal of the door handle.
One more long breath.
Then he pushed.
The door opened.
What was inside was none of the things any of them had imagined.
The first thing that reached them was still laughter.
But the voice producing it was completely different.
Gone was the decades-marinated, smoke-cured rasp of something not quite human.
What replaced it was...
Clear.
Young. Faintly unpolished.
And not unpleasant.
The laughter of a girl.
“Pfft—hahaha, seriously? That actually happened? Hahaha—”
It was light. Easy. Almost childlike in its lack of self-consciousness.
The lights inside were on and functioning normally.
A cool, mildly white glow came down from the ceiling, illuminating everything in the room the same way it always had.
The interior was identical to every other interrogation room in the block.
A wide metal interrogation table, bolted to the floor.
Two chairs.
A one-way mirror along one wall.
Even a half-dead potted plant in the corner that nobody had watered in what appeared to be quite some time.
And Pandora Douglas—
She was sitting in the chair on the subject’s side of the interrogation table.
Except she wasn’t facing the table.
She was turned sideways.
Left elbow resting on the tabletop, palm propping up her cheek, face angled toward the other side of the table.
Like she was looking at something.
Something invisible, sitting across from her.
She was laughing.
Her shoulders were shaking slightly with it. Her eyes had curved into crescents. There were even the faintest glittering traces of tears caught on her eyelashes from laughing hard enough to produce them.
That smile was bright. Relaxed. Completely unguarded.
Just a girl who had heard something genuinely hilarious and couldn’t hold it together anymore.
When she registered the door opening and the people standing in it, she seemed to gradually surface from wherever she’d been.
She brought the laughter down a few notches, lifted a hand, and dabbed at the corner of her eye.
Then she adjusted her posture.
Turned around.
Faced the front of the table.
Which was to say: the door that had just been pushed open, and the four people standing in it with their mouths not quite closed.
Everyone looking at this scene felt the same thing simultaneously.
A profound and specific kind of wrongness.
From any angle, by any reading of the situation, the subject under interrogation—Pandora Douglas—appeared to have simply...
Been made to laugh by something.
And enjoyed it thoroughly.
And yet.
What she’d been facing was—
Nobody’s eyes stayed on Pandora for long.
They moved, slowly and without anyone deciding to make them move.
And converged on what was sitting in the center of the interrogation table.
It sat there quietly.
A rabbit doll.
A black rabbit doll.
About the size of two open palms set side by side. Covered entirely in dense, soft fur—if fur was the right word for something that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, making it look darker than anything else in the room.
Where the right eye should have been, black thread had been used to stitch a crooked, uneven cross.
The left eye was a button.
A black button.
The mouth.
The mouth had been stitched with that same black thread into an enormous, exaggerated upward curve.
The stitching was crude. It pulled at the surrounding fur, giving the smile a stretched, strained quality.
Something rigid about it.
Something that didn’t quite sit right.
When the young clerk’s gaze landed on the black rabbit doll—landed there involuntarily, drawn by something he couldn’t name—
He became aware of something.
A smell.
Faint. On the edge of being imagined.
Rust.
Iron.
It was barely there. Barely anything.
And yet unmistakable.
He inhaled again without thinking about it.
And couldn’t determine, no matter how he tried.
Where exactly that smell was coming from.