The Annals of Fear

Hal didn\'t talk about her work with outsiders. If she had been able to discuss it, then describing the fourth generation alumni would have been the biggest challenge of all. In fact, though she never expressed it as such, Hal felt that 90% of her job was ensuring that the fifth and sixth generations did not turn out like them. Sometimes it was like being in a room with eccentrically animated mannequins, though with an intellect which scared and fascinated her in equal measure. She watched the three of them now, all undoubtedly having been scared shitless by whatever had happened to them within the past few hours, but each of them desperately trying not to show it. Nor even to show any emotion. It didn\'t stop them trying to provoke it in the others though. Hal thought she understand this one. It was the \'any show of humanity loses\' game.



Mello was, by unspoken consent, the chairperson. He sat back in a chair, his leather-clad legs akimbo, but an observant person would notice that his hand shook around the chocolate bar gripped in it. Matt sat on the very edge of another chair. A laptop was perched periliously upon his knees. Slightly isolated, Deontic looked robotic upon a third chair. Her back was very straight and her knees were together. Her hands folded and unfolded the same blank piece of paper in her lap. Mello had a serpentine smile, but he was watching them all. "Before we get into it all, are there any burning questions that need to be discussed? I don\'t want us missing anything because someone is awaiting a good moment to ask a hard question."



"Yeah." Matt mumbled. "Who\'s looking after Wammy\'s House if Hal is here?"



Mello rolled his eyes, but looked at Hal. She coughed and inched her own chair forward. "All of the staff are there, including Ann. Near is aware that I\'m not present, but if there is an emergency there, then Linda is currently in residence."



They all looked at her. Mello licked his chocolate with apparent glee. "Linda as Watari. That should be interesting."



Deontic frowned. "And your point is, Mello? Linda is a good friend of mine."



"Like you\'d serve Near, if he asked."



Hal raised her hand to forestall any more arguments, "I didn\'t say that Linda is Watari. I said that she is on the premises. In the extremely unlikely event of something requiring decisive action at the institution, then Linda is there." They were all watching her with expressions ranging from pained to amused. "What?"



"As long as they also have your number." Mello commented. "Moving on. Has anyone got any proper questions that we need to get out of the way?"



Hal bristled slightly, "Linda\'s got a very high IQ." She felt that she ought to defend her charges, if only to communicate the fact that she would defend each of them too. Deontic looked even more agonised, so Hal pushed on. "Yes, I have a question. This case history suggests that there is a likelihood that Century is dead. Why are all of you acting as if he is definitely alive?" There was more hope and a need for reassurance in that question than Hal hoped showed. She wanted to appear as calmly professional as the rest of them, only with a little more humanity. "Is Century alive?"



Mello smirked at her. "Hal, your maternal side is showing."



She gaped. "What?"



"When you look at Century, you see a sweet, little teenager..."



"I don\'t look at Century that often." Hal countered, wryly. "That is kind of the major issue with him."



Mello raised his arm in the air, finger pointing towards the ceiling. "Nevertheless, his file says that he was tragically orphanned at eight years old and he\'s been raised in the institution from Hell. You look at his meagre seventeen years and he looks, on paper, like the only one of us that you can save. Maybe, by saving him, you get to save the rest of us by proxy." The bastard was smiling at her. "Am I right?"



Hal wanted to deny it. She had never acknowledged it quite so coherently and succinctly, even in her own mind. It felt like the truth and she hated that he had discerned that. "It is my job to care about the wellbeing of you all. You put me in this role, Mello. Don\'t forget that."



Deontic frowned, "It was a democratic decision by the whole committee of alumni!"



Matt sniggered and quietly jeered, "Yeah, right."



Deontic stared at him, but Mello was already speaking, "Stop seeing a tragic, little boy, Hal. Century is also one of the fifteen children picked out as a possible heir to L. Would you be panicking quite so much if it was me out there?" As Hal made to rebute his charge, Mello laughed at her. "Don\'t lie now. When I was his age, I survived in the Mafia. Century will survive his own native countryside, even with the ghosts around."



"Not necessarily." Deontic warned and they all looked at her. "Mello, you asked Hal for honesty. I ask the same of you and Matt now. Who was suicidal today? I\'m talking about a strong urge to kill yourself. None of the whole psychological profiling that goes around that, just an instant in time, in or around that house, where you had the," she pitched for a word and found it, "compulsion to end your life."



Silence hung heavily in the room. Mello broke it. "Century is alive because he\'s been in contact with Chrissie. We know this because Chrissie hasn\'t called us demanding answers for ages. For him to have done that, he\'s found a telephone or a computer. We can further deduce that he knows where he are, insofar as Chrissie and Salvo know where we are. What he doesn\'t know is that I didn\'t shoot a gun at him."



Deontic shook her head. "Chrissie would have more sense than that. She would know that you would arrive at that conclusion and therefore she would call just to ensure that you didn\'t."



Mello smiled, "Yes, she would." His gaze was fixed upon Deontic, who blushed slightly.



"So the very fact that she hasn\'t means that," Deontic stared into space, "Chrissie is loyal to Century, but she\'s secretly conveying the message to us that he\'s safe."



Mello clicked his fingers. "She got it!" He peered at Hal. "Reassured now, house mama?"



Hal smiled at him, "You can be such a smug bastard at times, Mello." She nodded towards the laptop on Matt\'s knees. "If we called her and asked her outright, would she reply?"



"No." Matt stated blandly. "Not yet, anyway."



Mello cast a sharp look at his husband, which didn\'t go unnoticed by Hal and Deontic. For a moment, Mello\'s mask slid and they nearly saw the suspected insecurity beneath. It worried Hal to see Mello this frightened. He was not a man who was easily scared. She had seen him through Kira and the abduction of Matt and she had didn\'t recall ever seeing him this shaken. Hal deflected attention away, "Deontic was making a point about suicidal feelings. We have a wonderful psychologist at the House now. She really helping the children..."



"No, I don\'t want to see your shrink." Mello spat. "Yes, make your point, Dee."



"We were all on edge. All day. There were things within our psychologies which didn\'t add up." Deontic looked at the floor, not at any of her companions. "But down by the river, I came so close to just giving up and letting myself drown. It was a compulsion." Her finger stroked the paper. "I am not generally suicidal. I refuse to believe that those were my thoughts."



"Then you are saying that something was in your head." Mello pointed out.



"Yes, I am."



He nodded. "That\'s consistent."



Deontic took a deep breath. Her words came out sharply. "Did it happen to you, Mello? Did you have to fight against suicide?"



Mello took the chocolate from his mouth and his hand rose with all the dramatics of a ham actor, "O, that that this too too solid flesh would melt thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix\'d His canon \'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!"



"Mello."



"Fie on\'t! ah fie! \'tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. That it should come to this!"



Hal interupted him this time. "Mello, answer the question please."



Mello shrugged and let his hand drop. He nibbled on his chocolate. "It wasn\'t so much a compulsion to actually kill myself as an unwillingness to stop circumstances doing it for me." He didn\'t look around to catch their bewildered expressions. "I thought I was in a cellar full of explosives, which were going to destroy the room I was in and all of the building above it. I didn\'t leave."



"Ah." said Hal, who had obviously read his file.



Deontic turned her attention to Matt. "And you?"



Matt shook his head. Mello\'s eyes narrowed and Deontic just watched him intently. Matt\'s shoulder twitched, but if he felt the pressure to say more, he didn\'t rise to the bait. Mello prompted him, "You said that you nearly shot a rat in an enclosed space."



"Yes, but I didn\'t." Matt replied, quietly. "I had the gun out, but I didn\'t do it. I realised that there was a high probability of a bullet rebounding to hit me."



Deontic\'s voice sounded strained, "But you are the one who emerged covered in cuts and bruises. You\'re not telling me that you and Mello had rampant sex on the way back!"



Matt coughed out a laugh, while Mello roared, rocking backwards and forwards. "Oh my God!" Mello tittered. "Classic line!" The tension in the atmosphere was being burned away under their hilarity. Hal risked a smile. "But no, you\'re right. We didn\'t have sex. I\'m actually innocent for once."



"Right." Deontic\'s face was scarlet. "So how did he end up covered in blood?"



Matt took his time, rolling a cigarette and lighting it, before answering. "There was a jar. I used it to try and hammer out the nails from underneath."



All three raised their eyebrows at that. Mello carefully asked for clarification, "You attempted to use a glass jar as a hammer?" Under their gaze, Matt was wooden again. "To hammer something above your head, with a glass hammer." Matt\'s eyes met Mello\'s and he didn\'t look impressed. Mello wore the faintest of smiles. "I\'m sure there\'s a Darwin Award in there somewhere, Matt."



Quick as a flash, Matt responded, "At least I tried to get out of my room, Mello."



Mello winced, like the blow had been physical, "Touché."



Deontic raised her hand, "Mello, you were in a cellar. Were the doors locked?"



"No."



"Did the situation relate to a difficult time in your past?"



"Yes, it did." Mello sat up very straight now, though his legs were still sprawled in front of him. "Which I\'m not prepared to go into."



"Same question for you, Matt."



Matt nodded. "You know it did. You were there helping me last time I was trapped in an oubliette."



Mello added, "Where are you going with this, Dee?"



She sniffed, "I\'m trying to ascertain two things. We all felt endangered. How much of what we went through was purely psychological and in what regard were we truly in danger?" She looked from person to person. "In which real capacity could any one of us have been killed this evening?"



Hal felt it time to interject. "Deontic, I was informed that you were only two steps away from solid ground. The officer who pulled you to safety was standing on the bank. He couldn\'t understand why you stayed where you were. The river around you was really quite shallow." Her focus moved to Mello. "There was nothing but coal in that cellar."



"I know." Mello admitted, subdued.



"Matt," Hal continued, "with the greatest of respect, you were trapped but in no clear and present danger."



"He was." Mello stated carefully, his gaze travelling back to Deontic. "Are you afraid of water?"



She responded instantly, "No."



"No, because that\'s admitting a weakness in front of the worst possible people? No because you\'ve watched me twice pulling a gun on Century and you don\'t want to find yourself being dunked in a bath?"



Matt smiled over his cigarette. "Chlorea."



Mello\'s eyes snapped onto his husband. "What?" Realisation dawned. "Yes! In Greece, you said that your parents died of chlorea. I think we can deduce that bad water played some part in you becoming an orphan and thus eligible for the clutches of Watari."



Deontic rolled her eyes, "I was only two at the time. I don\'t recall much about it. I\'m not afraid of water."



"Yet there\'s a memory in there." Mello probed. "You\'re wary of water. Enough in there to fuel real fear." He took a bite of chocolate and stared into space. His voice was distant, as he worked things out inside. "Enough there to kill. Scared to death. Heart swamped with calcium ions."



She glared at him. "I think I was also hallucinating by the end of the experience. I saw something rise from the water. It disappeared into the mists."



"Something?"



"It\'s hard to..." Deontic bowed her head. The paper in her hands finally tore. "I was over-wrought."



"And you\'re certain that it was an hallucination?" Mello pressed, thinking of Nathalie. Deontic didn\'t reply. She had no firm conclusions here, but was loathe to admit to them that there was something that she hadn\'t worked out. Mello waited for a few tense moments, then conceded. "It\'s possible. There is enough evidence to state that the environment was conducive to hallucination."



There was a short rap on the door and Hal tore her attention away from Mello. She ran to answer it and was confronted with an officer saluating. "Message for you, ma\'am." He handed over the folded paper and she thanked him, before stepping back to read it. There were no further instructions for him, so she sent him away and returned to the group.



"The telephone number is registered to a Nokia cellphone belonging to Siân Morgan-Jones." She looked at the address, but many of the words appeared unintelligible. She seized on the town and hoped for the best, "Con... why?" She handed it to Deontic, who seemed just as puzzled.



Matt asked, "How are you spelling it?"



"C-O-N-W-Y." Hal replied.



He tapped into his laptop and a moment later replied, "Con-hwee, I think it\'s pronounced. It\'s in North Wales anyway and not close enough to be reached on foot."



Mello wasn\'t interested, he was still pondering the rest of their clues. "The band were scared to death. Something came close to scaring us to death. It\'s psychological, which is why it\'s working on the album too. Yet we were spared and they weren\'t."



Deontic shook her head. "It wasn\'t all psychological, Mello. Something put those nails into the floorboard and..." She wrinkled her forehead, "We never did clarify this, did anyone actually fire a gun?"



"I didn\'t." Mello looked towards Matt, who shook his head. "And I\'m fairly certain that Century wouldn\'t."



"Did anyone else hear the gunshot?" Deontic pressed.



Mello nodded, "I did."



"I didn\'t." Matt mumbled, then smirked. "Chrissie\'s replied." He read quickly. "She says that she might be able to get a message to Century and asked what the situation is here."



Mello crossed himself. "Thank you, God. Matt write back this. Tell her that the situation is that, if he contacts us directly, then my vote is likely to be more favourable, when the committee meets to discuss matters concerning Siân Morgan-Jones."



"Mello!" Hal gasped. Deontic just sighed. "Is this how you blackmailed him into coming in the first place? What did you threaten him with that time?" She glanced sharply at Matt, but he was already typing. "Matt, hold up just a moment!" He pressed \'send\'. "You pair are unbelievable."



"No." Mello winked. "We just play to win."