Detour

Who: Clay and Billy
When: Sunset
Where: Near the Old City Orphanage

The band of streets making up the meat of Marquette's center were packed with a church for every scumbag, a cemetery for every failure, and even a neonatal facility for every failure-to-be. Hothrem could venture through the labyrinth and pick out the streets that were secluded, lacking gangbang holiness, but it was hardly entertaining to play the role of trapped animal for a walk. He had to go to Nevermore anyway. But he got out near Trowbridge and started to hear the tattoo shop's wailing brand of rock, then gave up on the direct route and turned south, hopping the train tracks. So much for roaming free.

He had meant to go back up to Nevermore, really.

He had also meant for it to be a quick jaunt, a chance to stretch his legs and reassume the afternoon meditation Mike had so kindly bequeathed upon him earlier. He didn't bother with his car. But concrete was a lot less friendly than corn, and the day had taken on the kind of gagging heat that kept all the scumbags indoors and the failures rotting faster. He had slept and showered a few hours away and emerged from Arcadia's chrysalis only to end up sopping in his own sweat. The demon wished he had gone north into Trowbridge at the unkind intersection; he knew where to get some water, there.

The street he was on had nothing but a boarded-up orphanage, and a law firm stately gleaming from the next intersection. Luckily lawyers felt no need to advertise their coolness by blasting heavy metal into the afternoon heat. Hothrem gave a passing glance to the backside of the orphanage but kept moving east, lakeward. At least unlike churches and cemeteries, that crumpled building felt perfectly welcoming. All he had to do was avoid the ghost children. Right. Hothrem stopped and glared back against the sunset at the rundown establishment, but nothing happened.

Not a spook on the block, unless you wanted to count him.

The sun was setting and Billy knew that he should be heading home, but curiosity had lead him here this evening. He'd been working down the street this afternoon and when he'd been driving past the orphanage when he'd recalled the dream of a girl he'd Walked in the other night. Weird dream, full of half-remembered shots. She'd been outside this building though, then gone inside - at which point it'd gotten really fucking creepy and that was the point that he'd taken control and, for both their sakes, turned it into something a lot nicer. But when he recognised the actual building, his curiosity was peaked and he stopped his truck at the side of the road, climbing out and headed towards the building - noticing the one other person standing around and nodding his head in a silent greeting.

Only when he almost tripped over an upraised panel of the sidewalk did Hothrem realize he had been taking small steps backward from the truck as it slowed down. Not because he thought it was an incognito cop or a hunter, but since he had been reminded of the real danger the vehicle represented. Yet the driver killed the engine, and his shoulders sank accordingly.

The guy was looking at the orphanage. Or at least he was till he noticed the demon, and Hothrem found himself quirking one brow at a voiceless salutation.

"Hey," he responded, blinking between the man and the wooden boards obscuring every window on the building's face. "It's closed-off, mostly." The stranger didn't really look like a surveyor or construction worker here to evaluate the architecture. It was just another wanderer, maybe. But whatever his profession, the curiosity seemed to be contagious.

A very small smile began crawling up Hothrem's face, dying somewhere between his lips and his eyes. "Did you come here to see the ghosts?"

Billy's lips twitched in a momentary smile that disappeared almost as soon as it had come, leaving behind a twinkle in his eyes. He held be the compulsion to reach out and touch this guy, wondering for an instant if he was one of them, a ghost - he certainly had looked a little... well, not surprised, maybe interested and curious as Billy had nodded to him. The dreamwalker couldn't actually tell the difference between a spirit and a corporeal being without that touch, but it was kinda rude, so he didn't. "This place haunted then?" he asked instead, looking from the guy, to the building, and back again.

For a would-be ghost, Hothrem was certainly faring poorly under the heat. He looked on the verge of melting away down the gutter, and kept glancing at the waving lines of heat that broiled off the concrete lot behind the orphanage.

"Well that's the story," he picked through his words carefully. The guy seemed friendly enough, though afflicted with a predisposition to accept the weirder parts of Marquette the way most people he had met recently tended to be. That tone of voice, like they'd seen it all. "Nuns torturing little kids, violent deaths, all that fun stuff."

He took off his glasses and circles his thumb over the steamed lenses, then gave up and tucked them into his back pocket. "But don't take my word for it. The only part I can believe is that nuns are inherently frightening." Why had the guy come here and then asked if the place was haunted?

Billy nodded - that fit with the dream he'd been in. Which was... disconcerting to say the least. He really didn't like it when he Walked in dreams that appeared to have actual historical fact - especially when the Dreamer was probably too young to know. Except, of course, what did he know? Possibly they weren't - their self-image had been of a little girl, but maybe they were older. Especially if the torturing was done to kids. Oh god - what if he'd met a victim? That very thought made him shudder.

The guy - concentrate on the guy, less on the dream. The guy... "Nuns are frightening? How so?" he asked, ignoring the fact that his brain was busy filling in dream-details about exactly why these particular nuns were fucking scary as all hell.

"Don't know. I guess I just have something against the overtly religious," Hothrem said as he crouched down to pick up a stone from the sidewalk. He walked closer to the orphanage, but not too close. "That and I saw posters for Sister Act once." The demon pulled his arm back, then lobbed the stone at the back wall of the decrepit building. It shattered on contact, but the orphanage did little more than continue to draw them beneath its shadow as the sun sank.

He looked over his shoulder at the stranger and grinned. "You could always go inside and look, if it bothered you enough to stop here. Not all the windows are covered and it's not like anyone cares what happens to this place. The last time it was open-- well, that was years ago I think."

Billy looked back at the building - it bothered him, gave him chills. Which was really hard to do to the dreamwalker who'd experienced more than his fair share of overly creepy shit. "I'd heard something about this place - just wanted to check it out, see how much of it was real." Apparently a little too much. But what could checking it out hurt? It was just an abandoned building, after all. Of course, Billy had never been very good at thinking things through. "You know, I might just do that," he added, starting towards the building, looking for a way in.

Hothrem hesitated to follow. It wasn't that the building was innately spooky, but he looked back to the road with a hint of wariness. Was it okay to go messing around with old places so soon after a certain shed obliteration? It wasn't like the police had any evidence that had Clay was here written on the side. And he definitely had no reasons to catch anything on fire at this point. He didn't have a specific cause for following a stranger into a haunted house either, but it would be cooler inside. One-mile walk to the lake versus fifty-foot walk to the orphanage? Possessed orphanage wins.

"Wait - I'll go with you," the demon started as he caught up, then looked up the wall of wood-zippered windows. "I want to know, too." He walked ahead and touched his fingers to the brick and mortar, then ran them along the side as he moved to the first uncovered windowpane he could find. The latch was of course on the inside, and it was locked. But it was also old, and at the very least the glass could be broken and opened from there. He couldn't see anything past the window itself: just a pit of cobwebs and blackness.

Testing the window's resilience to simply being pushed on, he glanced back at his odd, nameless companion. "Don't suppose you have a flashlight in your truck?" One hand raised briefly to indicate the sun, which was burning red on the horizon as it melted out of sight. Not exactly a trustworthy light source.

"Actually, yeah, I do," Billy told him with a grin. Since they were breaking and entering, they may as well be prepared. He hot-footed it back to the truck, grabbing the large flashlight he kept there for when the damn thing broke down after dark, as it had been doing more and more lately - he needed to get it replaced before winter, but that was a while away yet. He also found a smaller one in his workbag and took that as well.

"Here you go," he said, making to throw the smaller flashlight at the guy. "I'm Billy, by the way," he told the guy, since they were going to be accomplices.

"Clay." He caught the flashlight even as the windowpane finally gave under the pressure and slipped out of the frame, crashing onto the floor inside the orphanage. Hothrem smirked; good thing the only ones around to hear that were spiders. He reached out and unlatched the wood frame for good measure, pushing it up as a moderate cascade of dust fluttered down through the air.

Balancing his hands on the windowsill he poked his head inside, looking aimlessly around the pitch for a moment before crawling the rest of the way in. It was a narrower fit than he thought it would be, but he made it and ended up pushing himself off the floor.

The floor covered in shards of fractured glass. Fun! He picked a few out of his palm and then switched on the flashlight, illuminating the floor so Billy would not have to meet the same fate. "Watch your step."

Billy slung the flashlight over his shoulder by its strap and hoisted himself through the window. He was slim, but strong from manual labour and he had no problems getting through the space and he juimped down only stumbling a little before he found his feet. He switched on the flashlight and found Clay with the beam. "You okay, man?" he asked, looking at the guy's hand.

Hothrem raised the hand under scrutiny to shield his eyes from the light shining into his face, then wagged his fingers at Billy to indicate that they were still functional. His palm and wrist reflected the harsh illumination like they were covered in translucent tape. Nothing injured though, not even a scratch.

"I'll survive," he grinned, then turned around to aim his flashlight into the room itself. "Cool," the demon said, though it was not a very adequate description given the architecture before them. Hothrem liked it because the walls were patchworks of waterspots and rot, plaster peeling away from the underlying wood and stone. Strings of crimson sunlight were wafting through the window they had broken in from, but he could see a few out in the hall beyond as well.

He directed the tiny spot of white light up to the ceiling, but it vanished into a dark mire. The second floor had split open, jagged boughs of wood lining the gap. He swiveled the flashlight around the edges for a moment before feeling content with moving toward the hallway. "Don't see any dead bodies yet. I can't even tell what room this was."

Billy was a dreamwalker - and more than that, he was a very experienced dreamwalker, despite his young age. He'd worked at it, immersed himself in it, gone through some hard and dangerous times and come out with the scars to prove it. And stock-in-trade for someone such as he was to notice detail. You needed an eye for what wasn't normal, what didn't fit, what shouldn't be there to survive a dream, definitely a nightmare and Billy saw things without even realising half the time, took things for granted. It was the one skill he had that translated over into the waking world.

And so he noticed the reflection. He noticed the lack of blood or any type of injury from the glass. And it gave him pause, gave him misgivings. Made him want to ask 'what are you?' - which he didn't, because he was at least attempting to learn caution. He let Clay get a ways ahead of him before he started to follow, swinging the beam around. The building had been whole in the dream, decorated and lit and it took Billy until they reached a doorway in the wall for him to get his bearings. "that was the chapel," he told Clay with confidence, shining his light into the ruined room, chairs stacked up against one wall.

He had been mid-step through the doorway in question when he heard "chapel" and backed out. Hothrem tried to make it look like he had tripped over a floorboard, and brushed a hand vaguely toward his ankles as if he was clearing away debris. Looking like an idiot was better than stepping into the inferno.

And Billy had sounded very certain of himself, though Hothrem could not see why. There were no crosses, no pulpits, and the lone window was boarded up. The demon wondered if it still counted as holy ground when the nuns were all crazy. He already knew the orphanage as a whole had not been given any special kind of blessing, which only made sense. After all, people had suffered here.

"I'll take your word for it," he mumbled as he moved back into the hall at large. At one point the walls had clearly been painted, but now all the color had rubbed off so it was like walking down a rotting white log. Hothrem panned his light through a couple rooms but did not see anything of interest, then found one with a door still intact. He put his hand on the knob, then pulled it off again when he felt something cold and unpleasant beneath his fingers. He shined his light on it: the knob was an iron knot of rust. "I don't suppose you know what this one is?"

Billy noted the way he backed out when the word 'chapel' was mentioned, raising an eyebrow slightly. He had to admit that it didn't help his growing caution and again he let the guy walk ahead of them before he followed, casually keeping his distance without making a thing of it.

He stopped as the guy spoke and realised he'd have to walk forward to get his bearings. He shone a light on the walls, up and down the corridor, then into the room. "The nurse's office," he said, getting his bearings. He was fairly sure of that - it had featured in the dream. This was too weird.

But Hothrem hadn't even opened the door yet. It had been something of a rhetorical question, the correct answer was I don't know. The demon turned his light off the doorknob and toward Billy briefly, noticing how far back his partner-in-crime was pacing himself.

"How'd you figure that?" he asked, frowning, but put his other hand on the knob and pushed it forward anyway. He wouldn't get anywhere by standing around and doubting. The door would not open at his first efforts, so he put a shoulder to it and leaned till it rattled off its hinges and fell off.

Billy admonished himself - he should at least have waited until the damn guy had opened the door. "Lucky guess?" he suggested, trying to cover. But this didn't happen to him very often - usually dreams were just that - dreams. In other words, made up, your subconscious talking to you, telling you something based on fiction. Not real, not the kind of place you could drive up to and look around. It was freaking him out some.

"That's not a very good lie, Billy," the demon's voice floated softly out of the nurse's office. Hothrem's flashlight had shuddered wildly over the room as he tried to assess the situation, but it looked like Billy was right. A large desk was broken in half at the far side, with two decayed silk curtains covering outlets to other rooms. An intact wooden sign nailed next to one of the curtained doorways read EXAM.

There was a strange smell, like household cleaner gone bad. He pressed the back of his hand against his nose, coughing once to get the dust out of his lungs. Approaching one of the tattered curtains, he ran his fingers just above the dull red fabric but did not touch it. Gaze turned back to the door, searching for Billy. "But if you're the tour guide, where are we headed?"

Billy decided then and there that this? Was a bad idea - both the place and the company. He was feeling increasingly wary by the second, especially now he'd broken his first rule and given himself away as knowing more than he should. Stupid, stupid, he thought to himself as he backed out of the room. "This way," he said, dully, really wanting to leave now, but unable to think of a way to yet calmly extricate himself from this situation. Maddie was going to kill him if she ever found out.

He led the way to some stairs and down, knowing they were headed for the auditorium. He didn't like this - leading the way like this, the guy at his back. He kept coming back to the strange look of his skin, the lack of cuts, the... offness of that. He was a reticent guy to begin with, but that made him more so - he didn't even attempt to make conversation, he couldn't think of what he'd say.

Hothrem, in his usual fashion, was a model of zen philosophy. He was bothered more than frightened. He could get scared, but not by this place. Not by this guy. The demon was regarding the back of Billy's head with an ounce of irritation rather than nerves.

"Shouldn't you be saying you looked at a floorplan or lived here or something by now?" he asked. The silence was the worst. Hothrem had never been a quiet demon, and if there was anything that might reach in and really grab at him it was a lack of response in the muffling claustrophobe's nightmare of a staircase. "At least it's cool down here." A remarkably flippant comment given the situation, but that was why he had followed Billy in the first place.

"I looked at a floorplan," Billy told him in monotone - because, well, it was as good as anything else. He stopped and turned, shining the beam straight at Clay. "You could say I've seen film footage of the place - it's just weird piecing it all together. And it's dark," he said, the almost-truth coming out much more naturally. "Everything looks different in the dark." And in the real world - nothing in dreams, even fact, was exactly the same. Everything was distorted by the perception of the dreamer.

He did not bother shielding his eyes this time, but continued advancing down the steps till he was caught up with his stationary accomplish. Hothrem had to squint against the light, but his expression was unchanged. With him it could be hard to differentiate concern and annoyance.

"So we're going down to - what?" The smell from the nurse's office was stuck in his nose, burning slightly. It made him think of the chapel above, and how if Billy intended any sort of harm he could have just as easily let the demon walk in and observed the reaction. Hothrem had a hard time believing the guy was a threat, or even knew what he was, but this unexplained intimacy with the orphanage's layout... "Neither of us have seen any evidence of weirdness here," the demon did not consider himself in the statement. "But you think it's beneath somewhere?"

"You were the one who said this place was haunted," Billy replied, carefully. He dropped the beam a little. It was fully dark now and this place was getting more unsettling by the minute. "The auditorium, I guess - big room thing. Or we could go back if you'd prefer. I doubt there's much here." He tried to sound nonchalant, but he had an increasing wish to just get the hell out of here. Exploring creepy places in the dark - he'd list it in the short list of fucking stupid things to do, but, unfortunately, in his life, compared to what else he'd done, it didn't even come close.

Hothrem smiled.

"I can stay for an auditorium," he offered, attempting to halt any escape plans. He wasn't quite sure what the problem was, as the orphanage had already proven itself quite innocuous unless you happened to be scared of the dark. There were no auras, no silent, creeping warnings coming down the walls. It was just a building.

Hothrem moved forward, sliding past his accomplice and then arranging himself on the step below. "Keep your light pointed up so I don't walk into anything. I'll tell you if there's something on the steps to worry about." Their ability to sense was limited to the cones of illumination from their flashlights, and though Hothrem didn't mind he was aware that normal people were not terribly fond of blindly stumbling around. So he'd take the pressure off Billy, for a time.

He gave the guy an easygoing grin, marketing its ability to suggest a return to normalcy. "I didn't mean to accuse you of anything. But I would appreciate it if you didn't cut and run just because I'm going to walk ahead." The demon did as he promised, aiming his flashlight at the steps to ensure he didn't trip and heading down. It wasn't long, with him in the lead, till he saw concrete floor instead of wood. Hothrem got off the stairs and panned his light, but the only walls he caught in it were the ones directly to the left and right. Every other direction was pitch black. "Which way?"

"To be honest, man," Billy said, making a decision. "I think I'm gonna go back." Because this was fucking ridiculous. He was in an abandoned building that in places was falling apart, which he knew his way around because of a dream. With some guy who was obviously not totally human, given what he'd seen. In the dark. This had 'bad idea' written all over it and if Maddie found out, she'd rip him a new one and he'd been trying so hard not to fuck up recently.

"I understand," Hothrem said, though he didn't except for the notion that humans had lines of tolerance much easier to break than his own. Foreboding could run you over, then back up for a second go in a place like this. It was unfortunate, though, because it might have been fun to leave the guy down here. Maybe sans flashlight.

But that was really against his proprieties of the moment. He turned and held out the smaller flashlight. "Here, I'll just follow you out. Sucks not to find the monsters you were looking for, yeah?"