applesaucedream | The Shavings Off Your Mind are the Only Rent [Open to All]

The Shavings Off Your Mind are the Only Rent [Open to All]

photo JulyDreamPartyImage01_zps8d9e51ff.jpg

Picture a house. Actually, picture two houses. They're (almost) identical structures that share an uneasy coexistence, tangled together on a quantum level. One of the houses is Good: bright, cheerful, full of comfortable furniture and a pervasive feeling of safety. The other house is Evil: dingy, dilapidated, and haunted by the dreamers' greatest fears.

The good news - and bad news - is that travel from one house to the other is as simple as passing through a door. All a dreamer has to do is walk through a doorway, any doorway, and they'll find themselves in whichever house they weren't in before they crossed the threshold. Perhaps they'll step out of a beautiful library and find themselves in a threatening hallway - or perhaps they'll flee a menacing kitchen and find themselves in a perfectly safe dining room. That is the nature of the houses' entanglement: every door is a portal between the two.

There are, of course, complications. Dreamers in one house can't perceive the other; if you're in the Good house and looking through a doorway, the space beyond will look as nice and inviting as the space you're in now (until you step through that doorway, of course). Dreamers also can't really perceive one another if they're in the same room, but in different houses, though they might see a flash of movement out of the corner of their eye, or think they heard something.

Perhaps the greatest complications are the houses themselves. They have rather strong personalities, and they aren't very fond of one another. Each house will want to keep you if it can (keep you safe, in the case of the Good house, or keep you for itself, in the case of the Evil one). Dreamers may attempt to cross a hall and find the door that looked open and inviting a moment ago is now barred shut, leaving them trapped in the hall - or have doors suddenly close in their faces before they can end up anywhere unpleasant. Still, there's only so much either house can do, and even a locked door can be jimmied open or busted down.

Escape from the houses is possible, but the formal gardens beyond are similarly entangled, with neatly trimmed lawns and expertly plotted flower beds becoming overgrown tangles of nettles and algae-choked reflecting pools. An archway is as good as a door, as far as the gardens are concerned, and there are plenty of arbors and arches over the paths. Of course, dreamers may find that a sound arbor in the Good garden has collapsed in the Evil one… and heaven help anyone who dares to explore the hedge maze.

[ooc: y'all know the drill. ALL characters are welcome, regardless of whether they're in the game. Characters can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion.

Also, this dream party marks the aforementioned calendar freeze. For the next three weeks, the IG date will sit on July 3rd. Posts dated July 3rd or earlier are allowed and encouraged. The calendar will resume forward motion at a 4:1 ratio on Saturday, July 26th.]

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He's not expecting the attack, and it's that more than anything which drives his back against the doorjamb with a thump that resonates in his belly. Beside them, the door clicks to, and after a moment, Doctor Unthank starts to laugh. He is impressed. Desperate, jagged Johnny Truant, a head shorter than him if he's an inch, and here he is snarling up at him like a rat terrier. What fun.

Presently, he swallows back his laughter, tipping his chin down to look at the boy as if he were a student he was particularly disappointed by. 'Tch, come now,' he murmurs, rolling his shoulders against the wall, 'there's no need for violence.'

Casually, he brings a hand up to hover over Johnny's throat, tipping his own head to the side to study the shadow it casts, before catching-- hooking his thumb up under the hinge of Johnny's jaw, no longer casual at all but quite, quite purposeful.

'Now, didn't I say I'd get you out?' His voice and face are still mild, and he forcefully turns Johnny's head to look. The room they're in is not simply ordinary, it's downright welcoming. Everything about it seems warm, somehow, from the beautifully polished wainscoting to the luxuriant fabric to the lazy sunlight picking dust motes out of the air. He smiles, only a little sardonic, and lets go his hand.

'I like to think I'm a man of my word.'

He's so calm. Johnny doesn't know what he expected. This man is not afraid of him, has no reason to be, has no reason to defer to his wishes, and this he makes expressly clear when his hand curls around Johnny's throat.

Instantly Johnny goes very, extremely still. His hands drop at once, as though burned, and his breath hitches hard when Niall forcibly turns his head. His hands hang limp at his sides, useless, not an impulse left even to fight back against the unwelcome grip; it's true, the room is better, gentler, calmer, and Johnny feels an unnatural burst of shame at having ignored it.

"I," he stammers, stops and swallows. He is not going to apologize. He will not. Instead he casts his eyes downward, feeling small and pathetic, which is almost as bad. "They're private, is all."

Ohhh, he likes Johnny more and more the more he learns of him. The immediate, thoughtless, helpless stillness at the hand to his throat is-- well. He feels like a connoisseur having unintentionally stumbled upon a lost Da Vinci. His usual modus operandi is to be genial and kindly until he's coaxed a person into his trust (although obviously he's already somewhat eschewed that), but this gives him a whole new level to play with.

'Of course they are,' he says soothingly. 'Nor are they my interest. Every man has the right to his own... personal business. But I admit, Johnny,' he pushes himself off the wall with another roll of his shoulders, straightening and taking half a step forward-- Johnny will have to retreat or allow the distance between them to close-- 'I am curious about, oh, a great many things. I hope you might be able to help me.'

Edited 2014-07-08 07:08 (UTC)

Johnny does retreat, stepping back slightly, just moment behind the casual advance. He keeps his eyes averted, gazing dully at the floor, and at Niall's shoes. "How," he murmurs flatly, not uttered like a question at all, though the wonder is genuine. Johnny can't help anyone, hasn't that always been the case? Doesn't he know?

Edited 2014-07-08 07:17 (UTC)

'Ohh, let's not sulk.'

He offers another one of those genial smiles, and tips Johnny's chin up with two fingers. It's an innocent enough gesture, the touch light and not lingering, but it does come rather soon after that chokehold.

'You,' he says, sounding quite genuinely interested, 'know about the house, and I am quite, quite curious. I've heard rumours, you see, and your name does keep cropping up. One wonders what you've been getting yourself into, Mr. Truant. So I thought I'd go straight to the source, as it were.'

Johnny blinks up at him, wary, lips parted slightly and unconsciously. These are dangerous questions, questions he does not want to answer. Questions he doesn't even know how to answer.

He smiles, weak and bewildered, his broken tooth too visible, only for a second. "You've got the wrong guy, man," he says. "I don't know anything. I'm the go-between. I wouldn't even know where to start."

He hadn't known where to start before. It's not like he really knows anything. This is good; maybe Niall will see he's not worth it, let him be.

'Oh, you needn't worry; I hardly expect you to be an expert.'

He peers down at Johnny, a tweedy shark in bifocals and a small, falsely mild smile. Caressingly, his gaze takes in the chipped tooth, the ill-looking cast to his smile, and he imagines for a moment taking him by the throat again. But no, no, not yet.

'Like I say, I know nothing at all, really; I am merely a... student.'

'Come now!' he says with sudden briskness, stepping around Johnny in such a way that his hand ends up at his lower back; gentle, encouraging pressure for Johnny to follow as he makes his way to the bed. 'Let's have a talk, hmm? Just a talk. Why don't you tell me about how you found the manuscript?'

Bewildered enough to be swept up, Johnny allows himself to be drawn, caught between reluctance and indecision. At the unworded invitation he sits on only the very edge of the bed, hands gripping tightly at his knees (his fingers have healed now, now that he's free of the room, that's something at least).

"It was..." The words boil up in his throat, hard to keep down. He'd resisted so well not so long ago, the last time someone had demanded his story, but now it seems so difficult to resist, or difficult to conjure up a reason. He swallows. It's all fresh, if jumbled, in his mind.

"Lude called me," he murmurs. "My friend Lude. I wish he hadn't. God I wish he hadn't."

That's not enough of a beginning but he needs to pause anyway, steadying his breathing, it's okay, it's going to be okay. "His neighbor had died. A man called Zampanò. He wanted me to come take a look at what he'd found, because he knew..."

Miserably, he sighs, letting the rest out on a defeated breath: "He knew I'd be interested."

He guides Johnny to the edge of the bed with a last, lingering press of his fingertips, before relinquishing the contact to go sit in an armchair by the bedside. Lifting his glasses off his nose to slide them over the crown of his head, he fixes sharp eyes on Johnny, sitting casually slumped, one ankle balanced on the opposite knee.

'And you were,' he murmurs. 'Interested.' It sounds like that fact pleases him; he likes people with an irrisistable compulsion to poke their noses where they shouldn't. 'Tell me why. What about the manuscript... drew you in?'

"I don't know. Nothing about it. In particular." He frowns, gaze fixed on the ambiguous middle distance, not yet able to meet the eyes of his strange companion. "Just the thing itself. Its weight. Like there was more in it than there was outside to hold it. And... I mean, there was."

He almost laughs, almost, the sound doesn't quite resolve into anything particularly amused-sounding, just the faint echo of a remembered reaction. "That was the whole point, I guess. Lude knew I'd want to find out what it was. Maybe. I don't know. But I did. I mean I wanted to find out."

Yes, that he'd known, or suspected at least, from what he's heard. Things like the manuscript, the house, things that resonate through time, they're always larger than their physical forms can possibly contain. Much like people, really. That's what makes them significant.

'Mmm,' he hums, eyes still on Johnny. His fingertips stroke idly over the tense curve of the chair's arm, remembering the feel of the letters pasted to the door.

'And then you started adding to it, mm? Like an academic; we're forever unable to resist throwing in our tuppence.' A self-deprecating smile. 'But... not just that; yourself, your own experiences... those letters of yours. Almost as if you were feeding it. Now there's a macabre thought.'

And he wonders, he does, where that power comes from. Is it drawn from the attentions of poor fools like Johnny, latching on and sucking them dry, or is it intrinsical to the thing itself? Though where the borders of the thing end is unclear.

Johnny may be unwilling to meet his eyes yet, but Doctor Unthank's snap up out of his thoughts to find them regardless, forceful and penetrating; Johnny will look when he's ready. 'Tell me what it did to you.'

He can feel the stare well enough, and he meets it slowly, tugged up by it, matching its intensity as best he can. He's not afraid. He's not afraid.

"You know what," he guesses. "It got inside me, inside my head, made me feel things, see things, all five cardinal senses really. It made me crazy. Just like her. Just like my-"

His voice cracks, oh no, not ready for that yet. Not ready for it ever. Shouldn't have said it, really. Terrible thing to say. To even think. He lets his eyelids slide shut again, briefly, briefly, just to steady himself, before facing the good Doctor again.

"It almost killed me," he says. "Almost."

Johnny meets his eyes in a bold pretense of courage, and Doctor Unthank smiles.

Just like his mother, is how that sentence ought to end, or so he gathers from the oh-so-private letters he'd seen on the door to the other room, but Unthank doesn't especially care what trauma or abuse the boy may have suffered at the hands of a lunatic mother. Obviously it's given him... issues, but those are less interesting than the ones brought about by the manuscript.

'Now that is interesting. And how do you think it did that? What... gives a book that kind of ~power over men's minds?'

If we're going to call that a smile. Johnny finds the effect wholly unnerving.

"Not the book," he says derisively, with an unveiled air of keep up, stupid. "The house. The idea of it. It's not just a house, like... a physical place, a single spot. It's more. It's so much more. It's a concept, a mythology unto itself, a lie, and a monster as old as fuckin time, probably. It cuts right into the earth, just like it cut into me. You can't even fuckin imagine."

He's losing the patience for this now. Getting twitchy. One of his legs jiggles involuntarily under his grip. "We done here?"

He waves a dismissive hand in response to Johnny's correction. The book, the film, the house; they're entangled to such a degree that, as he understands it, it would be pointless to try and separate them. The power is there in all three, even if the house is its origin.

'But you never went to the house, did you? All you had was the book, and yet...'

But oh, does Johnny want to leave? Tch, a man might feel insulted. His eyebrows lift as he purses his lips, pulling his glasses down and wrinkling his nose as he settles them. He uncrosses his legs. 'Oh, I don't know; I think that's up to you. You know what'll happen, don't you, if we leave this room? There's all ~manner of nastiness in this house. Speaking of houses.'

"I never did," confirms Johnny, feeling irritable. He gets up, attempting to be decisive. "But it doesn't matter. I'm more used to fucked up house shit than you realize. I don't want to just sit here, having this conversation with-" He flails an arm in Niall's general direction. "-Doctor Strangelove."

He pulls away from the bed, and the man, looking for an exit. A number of doors to choose from, and for a moment that holds him up.

That's probably supposed to be an insult; Unthank just lifts his eyebrows, amused. He sits still, for a moment, when Johnny gets up, wearing a tolerant expression like a man watching a favoured pet refusing to come to heel, before standing himself, shoving his hands into the pockets of his blazer.

'By all means, put your expertise to use.'

He nods at the doors installed in all three facing walls. Let Johnny make the choice. Doctor Unthank is... more or less confident that, however this house works, it will choose to prey on Johnny before him. And he rather likes the element of choice. Or the illusion of it, at any rate.

Johnny ignores the remark, though it riles him a little, the smooth, sickeningly sweet way this guy talks, so sanctimonious and so heavy on the sort of professorial social grace. Fuck him.

Still, there's something about having him at his back. He feels a little staid, like just running off, trying to lose him in the house isn't an option. There's something pinning him down here, and he's not sure how to wriggle out. A situation familiar enough.

He steps toward the nearest door on the adjacent wall and tries the handle. It swings open without hesitation. The next room looks just as pleasant as this one. Maybe Niall was wrong. Or just lying to him.

He steps through, and immediately, no, it's different, not at all the room he just saw. He stops short, his breath catching, as the room shifts from an elegant sort of hallway to something grim and dark and coated thickly in dust and cobwebs. The lights are all burned out, the only illumination is coming from a dim window on the other side of the hall. There are several doors here too, but each one is boarded shut.

He takes stock. Three doors along the right wall, probably more bedrooms. A smaller door, maybe a bathroom, to his immediate left; before them, a stairwell plunging down into the shadows, a rotting bannister fencing it around the top, looking like it wouldn't keep anyone from tumbling into the abyss if they were to lean on it too heavily. Beyond that a fourth bedroom door.

Too many choices. Johnny is frozen for a moment, staring at it all, no idea where to turn. So far there doesn't seem to be anything dangerous here, and nothing so gruesomely personal, but the ominous air hangs over him just the same.

It's fascinating, the way the house shifts, somewhere beyond the perception of vision. The door opens onto a brightly-lit, perfectly pleasant-seeming corridor... until they step through it, and it doesn't. It's not even a matter of blinking and missing it; it's as if one had simply seen it wrong the first time, and this was the eyes correcting themselves.

The true image-- the room they're in now-- is decrepit, certainly, everything dirtied and rotting, wood crumbling and all begrimed with dust and the leavings of insects and mice, but there's no immediate, personal horror that he can see. Certainly nothing as obvious as the room he'd found Johnny in, nor some he'd passed through before, designed to prey on his own, well-buried fears. Until-- ahh. There, in the corner. Shadows, such as he'd seen himself, roiling like the darkness behind the stars, heaving sick and predatory, creeping delicately through cracks in the floorboards.

But not, he thinks, for him.

Unthank's shoes barely make a sound in the dust as he paces up to join Johnny, looming close enough behind him that even a deep inhalation might have his chest brushing Johnny's shoulderblades. 'Dare you choose another?' he murmurs, leaning down to speak in Johnny's ear.

Johnny can feel the doctor hovering close behind him, the electromagnetic field crackling palpably between them, the proximity and suggestion making his shoulder itch and ache with the anticipation of touch. The sudden closeness of Niall's voice startles him, and he shivers involuntarily before forcing himself to step away.

"Well, the next one will be fine, right?" he says doggedly. "Isn't that what you said?"

Still, though. The doors frighten him. He doesn't want to approach a single one of them. What waits for him on the other side? He stands in paralyzed hesitation again, and this time when he feels a presence creeping toward him, he first assumes it is the doctor, come again to whisper and needle at him.

But it's not. There are artifacts here, a cold, coiling sensation rooted down deep in his memory. The sharp tang of metal on the air, wrapping thick around his tongue. He squeezes his eyes shut. Don't look. Don't look, but really this time, don't do it, don't do it, don't-

The creak of a floorboard beneath his own foot as he shifts his weight jolts him enough to disobey his own directive, but he only makes it halfway around before something tangles itself around his neck and heaves him roughly off balance.

His terrified yell is cut short when he crashes to the floor, the air forced from his lungs. Oh no, oh no, it's here, it followed him, nesting here in this house just like all the others. He can't see it against the dark of the unlit hallway, but he can hear it, can feel it against his skin, pressing down on his throat, his mouth so full of the iron taste that for a minute he thinks he's going to hurl. Claws creeping down over his shoulder, threatening, suggesting. Cut him up, take him apart. Remake him into something wrong.

The petrified silence breaks. He screams and screams, frantic and devoid of reason, lost and, for the moment, alone.

Doctor Unthank feels the change in the air before the thing moves, a prickle of hairs, a shiver of damp darkness curling around his neck. It's as well that he can, because it can't be seen, amongst the shadows; part of them, made of them, the worm in the heart of all houses. But even if he couldn't feel it, a moment later, it's jerked Johnny to the floor and the boy is writhing and screaming and jerking, and Unthank stands immersed in the pools of shadow, watching him, eyes a little too wide and intrigued to be sane.

There is a part of him that's afraid. It is not, he's sure, coincidence, that this shadow-beast looks so like the things that lurk in peripheral vision when he walks between times, hungry for the death he's denied for long years. But that part is easily quelled, and after a moment of simply watching, rapt, he steps forward and speaks, drawing on old words, powerful words.

'Forþfēre!'

This is, after all, but a dream. Any mind of sufficient strength may bend a dream to its will, and so he turns to the shadow and intones into the darkness, a priest at a black mass.

'Ic i hæfe gewald cwealmen; wiþhabbest nā ānweald hēr. Forþfēre, oþþe ic willan ābrēote þū. Ic willan bregde þū geond deorcest heolstorhof and macian þū giernan feorhbealu.'

The shadow seethes, claws extending out of nothing, stretching for him, but all dissipate into nothing, and a moment later, there is only Johnny, splayed out in the dust, and Unthank bends to catch his wrist in long fingers. The pulse hammers beneath the thin skin, and his grip, for a moment, convulsively tightens as he jerks him close and up.

'Come on,' he growls, 'unless you'd like another go against that thing.'

The words - the words Niall Mortimer utters, ancient to the point of feeling inhuman, cut through the dark and into Johnny's head; his eyes snap open, he stares up, frightened and still, at the man standing over him. For a moment, a quivering, transient moment between heartbeats, he can feel the overwhelming profundity of his odd companion, multitudinous experience and capability. The feeling shatters and dissipates as quickly as his attacker when Niall grips his wrist, dragging him up off the floor.

"What," he says, breathless, "what was that? How did you do that?"

Without waiting for an answer he struggles to his feet and propels himself toward the nearest door, his legs shaking. He grips the door's knob, rattles it violently, swearing through gritted teeth. "I - I can't - Help me!"

The boy doesn't wait for an answer, stumbling coltlike on unsteady legs as he all but throws himself into the door, rattling the knob with furious panic. It's locked, of course, but Unthank wonders if, just perhaps-- and he has to restrain a laugh even to think of it. How delightful, if the dream-house did let him, just imagine poor pathetic Johnny's face then.

Worth a try.

He comes up behind Johnny again, bent over him like a shadow himself, and lays his hand atop Johnny's on the doorknob. His fingers curl around flesh and bone and the rusting metal beneath it, and he closes his eyes, willing the power, willing the dream to obey.

'Onspanne,' he murmurs, and in that one word, in this dream-space, divorced from the constraints of mundane reality, his voice seems almost to crackle.

The door opens on a shriek of unoiled hinges.

The effort-- both of banishing the shadow-creature and even this little magic-- has tired him more than he'd care to admit, but he's still composed enough to wait, to bend down to murmur ironically into Johnny's ear. 'At your service.'

Johnny's breath catches in his throat when Niall's fingers wrap around his hand, and again when another word comes, a command to what, the door, the house, the dream itself? He jumps when the door bursts open, thudding back against the doctor's chest, and shivers when the whisper comes against his ear.

He pulls away with some effort, moving forward into the new room, which reshapes itself around him like the others - another bedroom, a little smaller but no less pleasant - and he turns to face Niall, breathing sharp and heavy.

"What are you?" he demands, his voice coming apart at the seams, raw and afraid.

There is a part of him that very much wishes to advance on Johnny, perhaps catch that lurching breath under his hand, feel it stutter and catch, make it come faster yet when he releases him. But things are sweeter when they've been made to wait, and instead he merely leans back against the closed door, letting the singing unease stretch in the air as he fishes for his glasses, sliding them down onto his nose again.

'Just a man,' he says mildly, once again simply, apparently that, harmless and professorial. 'I have... made a study of many arts, but I remain a man.' His whiskers bristle around a smile. 'No eldritch horror come to haunt your dreams, I promise.' He finds Johnny's eyes with his. 'For which you should be thankful.'

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