Chapter Ninety-Five: The Casks and the Crime Scene
As we stood outside the cellar door, the crowds of masked guests continued to rage and demand to be allowed in to see their bodies.
Some in the periphery of the crowd seemed to be less worried about their fate. They casually stared on and mocked those who panicked. Others stayed away from the main crowd simply so that they could gossip with each other, but they spoke in such hushed whispers that I wasn't able to pick up on the scuttlebutt.
Eventually, a group of people including both Cristobal and Mrs. Midnight left to go search the cellar for any trace of a killer. Many of those closest to the entrance claimed to be able to sense that no one had entered or exited during the timeframe of the murder who wasn't accounted for.
“How could someone murder her and leave without being flagged by the seal?” One man, Mr. Oakheart wondered aloud.
By my estimation, there were all manner of lesser sorcerers among the group. I couldn't see their level, but by the way they spoke on the matter, I could see that many of them were educated on whatever magical spell protected the cask room below.
I tried to listen intently as Grace had instructed. The things the NPCs were saying were supposed to help narrow the possibilities down. It was difficult when mystery mixed with fantasy. If you didn't know the magic system, how were you supposed to guess the many ways that the murder could have been committed?
Grace was less daunted.
“It appears that until we get confirmation to the contrary,” she said. “The murderer did not enter the cask room after the most recent casks were loaded into it, and somehow, they did not leave after the murder. Keep your ears and eyes open for information that could contradict that; otherwise, we must assume that it is true.”
Grace seemed to be very confident in her understanding of the nature of Carousel's mysteries.
Naturally, I was more skeptical. In most storylines, it was fully possible for you to miss crucial information, but from the way she spoke about murder mysteries, it sounded as if Carousel would intentionally provide the rules of how the puzzle worked. The way Grace described it, we weren't supposed to spend the story learning how the Society's magic worked on a deep level. We only needed the basics.
In this case, we were just supposed to believe that the magical seal had not been broken. As I stood there and waited, I got more and more nervous, and it became more difficult to just trust an assumption like that. This directly clashed with my natural curiosity.
I started thinking that perhaps one of the sorcerers had magically floated a knife to kill the victim, but that wasn't possible because the victim had seen her attacker and called him Mr. Evergreen.
That left one obvious possibility that I pondered as I walked back to Mrs. Cloudburst.
“Is it possible someone left their cask and murdered Ms. Monarch?” I asked as I approached Mrs. Cloudburst.
As soon as she heard me, she started to laugh as if that was the silliest thing she'd ever heard.
Was that my answer?
“I know this can be very frightening, but there's no reason to lose our heads,” she said.
Earlier she had been the one freaking out, and now she was talking to me as if I were panicking. Of course, I could never know exactly why she had laughed at that suggestion until I saw the casks that everyone had been talking about.
Eventually, the next scene arrived as Cristobal and Mrs. Midnight proclaimed that the cask room was safe and that there were no unaccounted-for persons within that room.
“Come, my people," Cristobal said. Somehow, in the short duration between when I had first seen him and when he came from the cellar door, I noticed that he was visibly tired and sickly. His hair was greasy and thin, his eyes were dark, and his skin was clammy. “Come see for yourself that your bodies have been kept safe.”
As everyone began moving down into the open cellar doors, I was vaguely reminded of being ushered forth into a dark ride at an amusement park. The difference was that I was terrified of what I was about to see. The glitz and the glamour of the storyline so far were not befitting of a true horror movie. I had spent the last few hours waiting for the other shoe to drop.
As we were led down into the cask room, I kept my eyes open for any passages that might lead in or out of the room, but I didn't find any. I knew for a fact that the mansion had hidden doors, but I wasn't sure how I was going to look for them in front of dozens upon dozens of enemies.
The stone steps down into the cask room were large, and as we went down, I noticed that something was missing from the stairway and from the room below: light sources.
There were no torches hanging on the walls to guide our steps. There were no collections of candles left burning to light the way. There were no modern lights of any kind that I could find, and yet, I was able to see. There wasn't much light to see with—the room was lit very dimly—but I couldn't figure out where the light was coming from. This was magic.
Once we reached the bottom, the entire group congregated in an open space where tables filled with strange ingredients and flasks of various sizes and shapes were kept. It reminded me of the Astralists' secret laboratory, except it took a definitive step toward the fantastical and away from the pseudo-science fiction of that story.
These weren't chemicals. These were potions—brews of a magical sort.
But the tables with all of their ingredients could not hold my attention for long. Opposite them was an opening to a large room that must have taken up much of the basement beneath the mansion.
Within it, stacked neatly in rows, were dozens if not hundreds of barrels. Some of the barrels were made of wood, others of shining copper, and still others of glass. The majority of them, however, were made of both wood and clay of some sort reinforced with bands of metal.
Other than that, their features were common with each other. They were about the size that I would expect a medium to a large wine barrel to be. Just big enough for the average human to get into. They had all sorts of copper tubing sticking out of them that had been connected to a larger plumbing system that ran up and along the ceiling, all leading back to a large bubbling cauldron in the center of the room.
Another feature that the vast majority of these casks had was a glass viewing port like you might find on a ship. Just a round glass window riveted into the cask. Most of the glass windows were completely covered in debris, dust, and a strange green slime.
Because some of the casks were made of green glass, which was mostly see-through, I could roughly make out what was inside. They were bodies, of course. Naked, contorted to fit their container, bodies that had apparently been in the liquid for so long that they had lost many of the features that I would associate with the human body.
The skin was puffy, and the limbs atrophied. They looked like those sideshow fetuses preserved in formaldehyde. I had seen something like this in a science class, but it had been a fetal pig.
These were grown humans. The glass was foggy, and it was difficult to see through the clouded liquid inside, but I got the distinct impression that these bodies were very old. Some of them had been inside their tanks for so long that their hair had grown to such a length that it covered entire portions of the cask.
The entire time I had walked down the stairs, I was afraid of one particular thing: the magical seal that was meant to keep people out of the room without consent from the masses.
I was an impostor, so depending on how that magical seal worked, it may or may not let me inside the room. As I walked through an area at the entrance of the casks room to join the crowd, I felt a strange electrical pulse. I was afraid that I might be triggering some alarm but, looking around, others also felt that pulse; they reacted to it like a chill up their spine.
This was meaningful, I thought. It meant that this magical seal did have weaknesses and that as long as the members of the society consented, one could enter. It did not matter if you were the person they thought you were. Informed consent was not needed.
I looked back toward Grace to see her walk through the electrical field, and as I did, she made eye contact with me and nodded. She understood.
That didn't solve the problem, though. Just because an impostor was able to get in and out of the seal, that did not mean that someone could get in and out without being detected. The sorcerers had been very clear that no one had entered or exited unaccounted for.
“Everyone line up in front of your body so that we can get a good roll call,” Mrs. Midnight said.
As soon as I heard that, I started to panic on the inside. I had no idea which of these bodies belonged to the real Mr. Gray Amber. Luckily, before I had a heart attack, I realized that each of the rows had been labeled with a color.
My mask was an orangish-gray color. So I found the orange line and walked until I found a cask conveniently labeled Gray Amber.
It just so happened that monarch butterflies, like the one Ms. Monarch's mask had been modeled after, were also orange.
In fact, as I walked down the row, I saw that to my left was the green row, and far in front of me was the crime scene.
Mr. Gray Amber, whoever he was, must have been one of the wealthier members because his cask was made of sturdy metal and looked brand new. Of course, that could simply be because he was relatively new and the technology had evolved.
As I stood before him, it dawned on me that the real man I had been impersonating was literally right there in front of me unable to tell anyone that I was an impostor. That had been another fear of entering the cask room, that perhaps our real counterparts would be able to open their casks and reveal our identities.
Mrs. Cloudburst had scoffed at my worries that someone could leave their cask, but I still wasn't sure if they were able to communicate. I quickly saw that that was not the case.
Mr. Gray Amber floated crumpled up inside of his cask. He didn't move. All I saw were the strange bubbles that would come out of his nose as he breathed. Strange, because he wasn't breathing in air. How was he breathing it out?
As I stared into the metal tank through the viewport, I noticed that one of his eyelids started to twitch and open just a slight amount. I was quick to turn around and put my back to the viewport. I didn't know if he could see out, but I wasn't going to risk it.
By my estimate, my pickled friend was in his late 80s or early 90s. With any luck, his eyesight in his real body might be poor.
Still, I found myself overcome with nerves.
I decided to study the crime scene a few casks down in order to distract myself. Because green was on the row next to orange, Grace, Ms. Emerald, was directly across from the crime scene. A perfect vantage point for the detective.
The ground was wet with the liquid that had been inside Ms. Monarch's cask. Much of it had sloshed out as the killer attempted to pull her real body out of the tank in order to kill her. It was hard to look at the poor woman as she lay splayed out over the side of the tank.
Although not all of the casks were made of clay, they were all sealed with it. Inscriptions that I couldn't read were etched into them before they dried.
Miss Monarch's seal had been destroyed when the killer opened her wooden cask.
After she had been pulled out partially, the killer slit her throat, which bled down onto the ground and mixed with the liquid from her cask. Blood also flowed from her injured fingers. It appeared that she had tried to defend herself, but the killer's knife was too sharp and her body was too frail.
Her immortality had been cut short.
Ms. Monarch was so old that I could not even guess the age of her body.
After I had surveyed the scene, I had to look away. It felt like a great violation to look at a dead body like that.
Not long after we got there, Mr. Red Rock arrived to cover the body with a sheet.
Cristobal and Mrs. Midnight stood near the crime scene and started asking witnesses if they had seen anything through their real bodies at the time of the murder.
“I didn't even notice at the time,” one man said.
A woman nearby agreed. “When the murder was taking place, I don't remember seeing anything. In fact, I didn't see anything until Mr. Red Rock came down to check on the body. You have to understand my eyes haven't been good in fifty years.”
The sentiments of the others in the area were similar. A room full of witnesses and no one saw a thing.
We stood there as more witnesses were interviewed. They asked Grace if she had seen anything, and she echoed what the others had said. I did the same a few minutes later.
Cristobal went through the cask room and asked each and every person whether they had seen anything or had any theories. We flickered on and off-screen as it happened. While we waited, Grace examined the seal on her cask.
I turned and looked at the one on mine.
It was unbroken. I looked around the room and realized that every single cask had that same clay seal, and none that I could see had been broken. I was starting to see why Mrs. Cloudburst had laughed at my guess that someone had left their cask for the murder. If they had, they would surely be unable to reseal it. More than that, I started to wonder if any of these bodies even could leave their tanks willingly. They were so feeble.
This left an even more curious conundrum.
The killer had not left the room, assuming my understanding of the seal was correct. The people in the casks could not have done it without breaking their seals. Ms. Monarch had seen her attacker but no one else had.
What did that leave? Teleportation? Perhaps the killer was a magical creation or had disguised themselves in the room.
All I could think of were numerous possible explanations, but as I looked at Grace, she was hiding a sly smile.
Had she figured it out?
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