novelraw Chapter 239: Turnip! Turnip! Turnip!
Chapter 239: Turnip! Turnip! Turnip!
“I thought we had an agreement.”
That smoke-cured, middle-aged rasp sounded again.
This time it wasn’t the manic, ragged laughter. It had shifted—lower, flatter, carrying a note of childlike innocence and mild confusion.
Which did not make it charming.
If anything, hearing that particular combination of qualities emerge from the body of a black rabbit doll produced a specific and immediate physical wrongness in everyone present.
The doll itself hadn’t moved.
Its right eye—the crooked cross stitched shut with crude black thread—and its left eye—the button that seemed to sit in a shade of darkness slightly deeper than anything around it—regarded the people in the doorway without any trace of feeling.
The section chief forced himself to swallow. His throat worked visibly, producing a dry, scraping sound.
Facing this thing, he had to hold his ground. That was his job. And maintaining some semblance of authority in front of his subordinates was the other half of it.
“Yes, we agreed the next block of time was yours,” he said, biting down on each word to keep them from trembling. “But what about the task? The interrogation result you promised? Are you telling me that laughter just now... was the result?”
“Chief—Chief!”
He hadn’t finished speaking when the young clerk beside him suddenly seized his sleeve.
The sound he made carried the specific pitch of someone who has gone past fear into something worse—the almost-tearful trembling that only arrives when terror has been pushed to its outer edge.
“What—” The chief started to turn, faintly impatient.
“Look! There! Look at that!”
The young clerk’s finger was shaking as he pointed to a corner of the room.
The wall to the right of the interrogation table.
The chief’s eyes followed the direction of the finger.
His pupils contracted in an instant.
On the wall—which had been smooth and clean, painted in white acoustic coating—a dark red mold stain had appeared.
It spread in a pattern like a splatter. Like someone had been standing there and vomited a great mouthful of blood, and then instead of running, the blood had simply rotted in place, spreading outward from where it landed, blooming into something foul.
“That's—”
The chief’s heart skipped a full beat.
Before he could process it, the young clerk’s finger had already moved. “And there! The floor!”
Then again, faster—the ceiling’s corner. The back of a chair. Even the floor directly at the chief’s feet.
He couldn’t keep up. The things were appearing faster than a pointing finger could track.
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The entire room was changing at a speed the naked eye could follow.
Those deep red mold stains moved. Breathed. Spread. As if they were alive and methodical about it. The air had begun to carry a dense, stomach-churning combination of iron rust and active rot.
The chief appeared to be constructing some kind of order in his head—a command to issue, a decision to make about leaving the room.
Then, the next moment—
“Hurgh—”
A violent, wrenching sound.
The chief’s knees buckled. He went down onto both of them, hands slamming against the floor to catch himself, the tendons in his neck standing out sharply as he retched and brought up a mouthful of dark red blood.
It hit the pale grey floor.
And immediately—immediately—whatever invisible force was at work in the room found it. Touched it. And the blood stopped being blood, becoming instead another dark red mold stain, spreading from where it had landed.
The young clerk stared.
A thought surfaced in his mind—absurd, but somehow completely clear through the terror:
That rust smell from before... it had been coming from the chief, hadn’t it? Like something inside him had started rotting. Going to rust from the inside out...
“Move! Stop standing there!”
“Turnip! Turnip!! Shout turnip!!”
The middle-aged woman in the cardigan let out a shriek.
The kind that felt like it had edges.
The bald clerk—veteran that he was—had already moved before the scream landed. Before anyone told him to. The instant the chief’s knees hit the floor, he was in motion.
His face was terror. There were already tear tracks on it. But his mouth didn’t hesitate for a single syllable.
Both hands shot up—somewhere between a gesture of surrender and an ancient, instinctive ritual motion.
And he started repeating one word.
“Turnip!”
“Turnip! Turnip! Turnip!”
Fast. Frantic. Unrelenting.
The word appeared to do something real. At the very least, in the small area immediately around the bald clerk, the dark red mold stains stopped advancing. Whatever was reaching for him seemed to pull back. The smell didn’t find him.
The young clerk understood, with cold clarity, that simply saying the word wasn’t the mechanism.
He dragged in a hard breath. Shoved the screaming, animal part of his brain that wanted to run very firmly to one side.
He cycled back through everything the peculiar, slightly unhinged Master Demon Hunter supervisor had covered during interrogation staff onboarding.
He started saying it too.
“Turnip.”
“Turnip.”
“Turnip.”
“Turnip...”
But the speaking was secondary. A guide rail. An anchor for the mind.
What actually mattered was what the mind was doing underneath.
He said the word and simultaneously—repeatedly, furiously—drove one thought through every other thought in his head:
Not a person. A turnip.
Not a person. A turnip.
...Not a person... a turnip...
Not a person... a turnip...
It is a turnip.
The four voices chanting “turnip” in four different registers of fear gradually became quieter.
Duller.
More monotone.
Turnips don’t speak.
So they stopped saying “turnip.”
Turnips don’t think.
So the focus left their eyes. Their gaze went glassy and unfixed.
The corners of their mouths went slack. Transparent drool worked its way out, tracked down their chins, and dropped.
Turnips don’t move.
So without any further ceremony, they folded. All four of them, at different moments, in different directions, collapsed onto the cold floor in untidy heaps.
Each landing made a dull, soft thud.
Turnips don’t breathe...
Well. Turnips actually do breathe, in a technical sense.
So none of the four suffocated in an awkward, undignified fashion.
Their breathing continued, just—barely. Thin as thread. Almost undetectable.
And the mold stains that had been consuming the room—having apparently lost their supply of whatever fed them—began, slowly, to retreat. The color faded. The spread contracted. The edges pulled inward.
Until there was nothing left to see.
..................
Pandora blinked.
She had been sitting in her chair the entire time, watching all of it.
Her posture hadn’t changed once.
Her hands were still resting quietly on her knees.
This wasn’t composure. It wasn’t the calm of someone who had seen things like this before and developed scar tissue.
It was because she had simply never seen what the interrogation office staff had seen.
From her perspective.
No dark red mold stains in splattered patterns.
No iron rust smell.
What she had observed was—
Four people who appeared to lose their minds in the span of about ninety seconds.
One dropped to his knees and vomited blood.
Three started screaming something about “turnips” with the urgency of people whose lives depended on the word—and then went glassy-eyed and folded onto the floor like something had been pulled out of them.
And sitting at the center of the interrogation table, perfectly still, watching all of it—
The black rabbit doll.