16-2: ???

While all this was going on, Miriam was in a small room off to the side of the basement. The room was only accessible through a spiral staircase, which in turn was only accessible through a hidden panel directly above a normal staircase, which itself could only be reached if you could extend a platform to just below the panel, brace against it, and slide the panel upwards.

Miriam, of course, could extend such a platform. It was pink and fleshy and it dripped a bit onto the stairs below.

Now in this small room, she reverentially ladled freshly brewed coffee from a bowl into a hole on top of an altar, chanting under her breath. The altar took up almost the entire rest of the room that Miriam didn’t. It was made of stone and decorated with words. The words were reddish-brown in hue, and might have been written in blood. Or they might not have been. Who can say?

This wasn’t the ritual to calm the Wordstone. That had been performed at one a.m. on the thirteenth of November, shortly after the group returned from No. 5 Hill Road. Miriam had prepared the altar while she waited for an ambulance to arrive, then left detailed instructions with Alex. It was Charlie who’d actually placed the stone in its altar and done the LLL’s job, while the others wrote in the bloodstained basement. This on 1st December was just a topping-up of the ritual, so to speak.

Miriam finished her pouring and her chanting, the latter of which was just a passage from a dictionary set to music. It wasn’t the best music if we’re honest, but when are we ever? We’re always telling stories, aren’t we, as humans? Stories like, “That looks great on you,” or, “I don’t really mind, you pick,” or as happened a lot in this building, “I could be published some day.” Sometimes the stories are honest. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes honest stories are embellished. Those are my favourites a lot of the time. Anyway, it wasn’t a good tune I was after, and Miriam knew that.

‘Now that’s out of the way,’ said Miriam, opening up the altar and looking at the coffee-covered Wordstone inside, ‘let’s have a quick talk shall we?’

…okay. What do you want to talk about? I’m always happy to hear more words.

‘I want a few in return this time. Your ritual is ridiculous.’

I’m offended. My ritual is perfect to the letter.

‘It involves me wearing that stupid dress, wasting good coffee, shepherding children into a basement like farm animals, and all at this specific time and date every year, using a calendar which is a man-made construct to determine this rather than anything fundamental.’

It doesn’t have you be you wearing the dress. Charlie did the job perfectly well.

‘That isn’t the point.’

Actually not perfectly well. Sloppily, in fact. Haphazardly. The entire thing was a mess from start to finish. Don’t let him do it again.

‘Why does it need doing at all?’

Are you questioning immutable laws of the universe?

‘Immutable my arse. I could feed you words any time you wanted them. Why 1st November?’

Search me. Why is pi precisely three and a bit? Why is the speed of light precisely two nine nine… whatever it is that comes after that, I’ve never been good with numbers, they’re dull.

‘Stop pretending it’s the same!’ Miriam pounded her fist on my altar, rather rudely I thought. ‘I’m not being rude, I’m frustrated! These aren’t cosmological constants, they’re all you! People died because you couldn’t hold yourself in for a few days! And… and… what’s with the madness if we don’t train our powers? They’re university students, they have enough on without that! What’s that about?’

But university work is so boring. Who wants to read about, or hear about, training towards a degree? Training towards not going mad is much more exciting. I can’t just give out boons without some sort of jeopardy, can I? There’s no excitement there. Ash Brytic stops becoming a villain, inflicting madness because of his own madness. He starts to actually have a point. Daz’s mum’s death couldn’t loom over you…

‘You killed my brother so his death could be a plot device?’

I didn’t know he’d die. That’s the fun of it.

‘The fun!?’

Miriam, you’ve done this long enough. You know how it works. I just give the impetus for the stories. It’s the characters who decide where they go from there, I have no control over that. It doesn’t have to be painful. It just usually is.

Hot tears poured down Miriam’s face, as she ground her teeth…

‘Stop narrating my actions!’

Okay, okay! My goodness. Look, we’re at the end of this particular story now, can’t we leave it on a happy note? Appeal to the mass market and all that, they love happy endings.

‘…that’s the reason, isn’t it.’

What is?

‘Why you make the ritual so specific. So it will go wrong. So it’ll kill and hurt and maim us for your amusement. So you’ll get a slightly better story.’

Do you prefer that answer to the bit about pi and the speed of light? I like to think that everything I ask of the LLL has its own kind of internal logic, short of any plot holes I may have intentionally left to give you something to feel good about when you discover them… oh, she’s gone. Stormed out, slammed the panel. Shame it had to end like this. She’s been through such a lot, I just wanted a happy ending for her. I suppose everybody ending up happy would be an immersion-breaking stretch too far, wouldn’t it?

Still though. I thought it was a very good story. Didn’t you? Oh wait, it’s still missing something…

~ FIN ~

There we go!

Content Warnings: death of a relative (mentioned), mental health