Part II, Chapter VIII | Bell Things

Year 702 a.S., Autumn | Arys Academy

LOG ENTRY 2

Name: DREAMHORSE & NIGHTMARE

Type: AWAKENING

User: [REDACTED]

Ability: an awakening that follows the same rules that formed it. When the user experiences substantial positive emotion, they begin to embody the self of their dreams; on the other hand, when experiencing overwhelming negative emotion, the user brings into reality the content of their nightmares.

❧☙

I only stood in utter silence as the bellthing painted me red with the insides of someone else. Before I could make sense of it, Alvis had a bat in his hands and swung it at the thing’s face, hard. The bat phased right through it as if it were a ghost. He swung for a second, then a third time, all with the same result. Then the creature rang its bell, twice again, and its mouth began to pry open, blood gushing back out from down its throat. That same thin, metal chain wrapped around Alvis.

“Al, get away!” Down the same hall the bellthing came from, Charlotte shouted that command, and the bellthing’s chain wrapped around her neck instead. Not another moment passed before the creature disappeared from where it stood and slammed into Charlotte at a speed too quick to track. She was sent flying at an angle against the wall, somehow remaining clearly intact. We waited with bated breath for the thing’s face to close again. For it to become silent. When it finally did, Alvis rushed past the idle thing to his sister’s aid and found her only unconscious, her head bleeding and her arm broken.

“It has no eyes, but it can hear,” Paris observed, her voice nearly too quiet to hear at all. “Somehow, it becomes intangible when idle. What do we do?”

Jericho pulled off her Arys blazer and tossed it to Alvis, who used it as a pillow for his sister. “Do you trust me, Paris?”

“Of course,” she said, gripping her tablet tight. “Be careful.”

Jericho strode forth to face the creature, and already its face began to open up again. Up close, she could see its many rows of teeth. She placed her hands behind her back and held her breath as if that were natural for her. Somehow, she smiled now.

Then we could only wait, silently and patiently, for its mouth to close again. And when it did, it finally turned around to leave.

“Wait,” Jericho said. The bellthing stopped and turned back again. “My name is Jericho March. We’re not here to hurt you. Can you understand me?”

The thing made no indication it could communicate with us, nor did it twitch or even shudder with breath. It stood stock still like a statue, so Jericho continued. She tried to communicate in as many languages she could muster, from Niho to Farsa, Reo and Luri, and Kugo, and Koine, and cycled through them even as its mouth opened again and the bell rang twice—

“Jericho!” Paris cried, to change the one whose neck the chain wrapped around.

Jericho’s eyes flashed to Paris, and without missing a beat, she gripped the chain between them tight in her hands. Dextrously, she coiled the thing’s own chain around the creature’s neck and pulled it to the ground to wring it. The creature snarled and snapped its jaw.

Alvis appeared beside her, his bat having somehow become a golf club; with one solid swing, he took off its head, which rolled over to my feet, where it disintegrated entirely. I dropped to my knees, the shock rolling off me like sweat, and I wiped the blood from my face.

Jericho walked all the way past me, back to Paris. Tears streamed down the president’s eyes, but like Sylvia, she made no effort to wipe them away, and her face was like stone. When she reached her vice-president, she raised her hand and slapped her across the cheek. “Your life is not worth less than mine,” she said. “It seems like you don’t trust me after all.”

❧☙

Our entire group took refuge inside one of the many hotel rooms. We encountered one more bellthing on the way there, but we simply remained silent and let it walk past. Any little sound could set it off. There was no doubt that this was the closest any of us had ever been to death. Now that we were finally safe in this room, none of us wanted to leave again.

“We can’t fight those things,” Alvis said. “Any attempt is unreliable at best. We’re more likely to all die to it. The longer we roam the hotel, the more we’ll lose our cool. Our breathing will become more haggard. Even a small sound like a breath is likely to trigger them.” He looked to Paris. “Is it possible for us to wait here until help arrives?”

She shook her head. “None of our comms have been able to escape this building. We don’t even know where we are right now, or how we got here. And Jericho…” She glanced at the baroness, whose head was resting in her lap, and gently stroked her cheek. “As you can see...”

“Oliver…” Jericho muttered. “Oliver will rescue us.”

Samira pulled at her hair to the point of ripping. “Oliver? What can one guy do against those monsters? We’re all going to die, aren’t we? If we go out, we’ll be killed looking for an exit that doesn’t exit. If we stay here, we’ll die without food or water.”

“If he was sent here with us,” Alvis said, “then Oliver can do it.”

Jericho continued to mumble. “This whole thing would have been just a game if it weren’t for him. I’d be dead already. Paris would be dead. My campaign must have been endorsed by the devil himself, for this monster child to have come to help us.”

“Is he really that incredible of a person?” The words left my mouth without thinking. The Oliver they spoke of was not familiar to me. All I could remember was the crying boy on that firework night.

“You’re his girlfriend,” Paris said. “Shouldn’t you know better than anyone?”

I couldn’t respond to that. My own silence made a silence for them all until Charlotte finally broke it again. “We can’t stay here,” she said. “No matter how much we may want to. Hotel Jonglyo has 55 floors, and 22 rooms per floor. Even if he is here, that’s simply too much area to clear. We have to make it to the first floor at least, if we want a chance to live.”

I thought that sounded reasonable, but Paris glared at the young girl. “No. Lady Jericho, at least, will remain here. And Lord Alvis, to defend her. If we find Oliver, we’ll tell him where to find them.”

“That’s fine,” Charlotte said. “Any objections?”

Jericho wrapped her arms around Paris’ waist. “My lucky must remain by my side as well.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Paris said. “With all of our radio signals dysfunctional, my eye and data augment is all we have to record usable footage today.”

Jericho only gripped her tighter. “To hell with the footage. I don’t give a damn. Just stay here with me.”

“It matters. You know it does, Ricco. And you may not believe it, but my attachment to my own life is greater than your attachment to it. Trust me.”

The manner in which the two held each other made me feel like we were looking in on something we weren’t supposed to. It took a few minutes before she finally convinced Jericho to let go, but when she did, the shadows on her face deepened, and she crawled into the bed to hide.

❧☙

From the moment we left the room, the miasma I’d felt from the hotel already dissipated significantly. For some reason, I could tell that there were no longer any bellthings here, on this floor at least. Paris seemed glued to her tablet the entire time, but a glance told me that she was simply drawing a map of the floor as we explored.

It took ten minutes to find the elevator with Charlotte leading the way. Once we did, there was no discussion to be had about whether we’d enter. We simply did. If Paris wanted to turn back to retrieve Jericho and Alvis, she would’ve said something, but she didn’t.

When we entered, I was the one who hit the button for floor 1, and the doors closed soon thereafter. Through the elevator speakers, a jovial muzak played and filled the descending metal box with a mismatched atmosphere that further unnerved us. I couldn’t handle it, so I pulled my sewing needle out from the cuff of my sleeve and pricked my finger a little. The pain helped me focus.

It didn’t take long for us to reach the first floor. Maybe fifteen seconds, maximum. The elevator did not ding when we arrived. I’m sure we were all thankful for that, but it didn’t change anything.

The doors slid open.

I noticed the bloodsoaked wallpaper first; the torn plaid skirt of an Arys schoolgirl plastered to it; a shredded blazer too, now crimson red. I couldn’t help but gasp at the sight of it.

The army of bellthings almost blended in with the environment until they turned to me, faces open with their teeth out. Chains launched out from their collars to wrap around mine, adorning me like necklaces, like a slave. In that instant, I had already given up. At 17 years old and in the face of death, I didn’t bat an eye. Maybe I had been right. Maybe the idea of death did not scare me. I wondered how the others reacted. Did they scream? Did they wrack their brains for some sort of solution? I’m sure that in that situation, I was the only one who slumped back, sighed, and tried absolutely nothing.

“Give it back,” a voice cried.

With that cry, my eyes widened, and I felt my heart unravel into strings. Each string was sent out through my chest and attached to each bellthing, causing them to pause for just a moment. A moment was long enough for a certain black-haired boy to dash out from behind a pillar, strange cubes thrown from between each finger. He released his long-held breath and swung his arms out, releasing the cubes with it. Each one popped through a bellthing’s head like pellets through cardboard, splattering spots of ink across the bloodied walls. The ones that were struck disintegrated into dust soon thereafter, but there were nearly a dozen more down the hall, a dozen whose attention he just attracted. Before they could turn their heads his way, he tucked into a roll into the elevator with us, jumped up and slammed the button to go back up.

The bellthings’ mouths began to open right when the doors slid closed, and a classic muzak clicked back on from the speakers; the five of us scrunched together to make room for him.

“Hey, glad to see you guys still kicking,” Oliver said, rummaging through his pockets for more of his strange cubes. I tapped on his shoulder and asked to see, so he plopped one in my hand. It was a weighted D6 die, black with white pips. He used these to kill those things?

“Oliver, what—” Samira began.

“I’m guessing you don’t know what’s going on either, so I won’t ask,” he interrupted, rubbing his eyes. “There were two students down there. I knew them. I didn’t realize the trick behind those things until they had already died.”

“Oliver…” I began, but he shrugged me off.

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “We weren’t really friends. But just seeing them so alive with fear in one moment, and nothing but a stain on the wall the next…”

Paris leaned against the elevator wall. “It’s often said the price to kill a person is only 11 cents. That’s how much it costs to charge one round in a plasmic sidearm.”

Oliver only laughed at that. “Great. That makes me feel better.”

Soon, the elevator dinged, and the number was 1.

“Umm, weren’t we supposed to be going up?” I asked.

“Nope,” Oliver said. “Tried that. This elevator can do nothing but loop. Turns out that once you make it to Floor 1, you can’t leave Floor 1.”

When the doors slid open again, the bellthings had already gathered around the door and opened their maws. A siren wailed from the speakers of Paris’ tablet, and she tossed it into the open for the bellthings to turn their attention to. Oliver slid out with the sirens and hurled his new set of dice at the things, reducing them to piles of sand. A subsequent survey of his surroundings had him find a final three in the distance, chains attached to the tablet behind him.

Like a frog, he leapt straight up, the toes of his sneakers melting off with the bristles of carpet below and the tablet that attracted them. It took a somersault for him to face the bellthings again, and he launched another set of dice, clacking together to ricochet at unpredictable angles; the clacking attracted the bellthings’ ear, and their chains appeared once more only for them to be reduced to dust by the ricocheting cubes.

Oliver landed again, arms out like a gymnast, turning to us to bow.

Charlotte and Paris chuckled and clapped as if this were normal, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was even human.