“Jenkins~close the pane~turn around~leave again~Little master~don’t return~or I won’t know~which way to turn~”
Humming an unfamiliar tune, Jenkins bypassed Room One and stepped into the innermost room on the second floor, Room Four, pulling the window shut. The four rooms here were clearly rented to different tenants, as he noted the various nameplates on the doors.
The room he needed to enter wasn't locked; otherwise, Chocolate wouldn't have been able to get in. Stepping inside, he was met with a complete mess. The occupant was clearly not fond of cleaning. And at least one of them was male—after all, women didn't use razors.
At least, that's what Jenkins thought.
He had no intention of prying, so after shutting the window, he turned to leave. But a casual glance outside caught his eye: a man in a black top hat was approaching the front door, his hands jammed into his overcoat pockets. The coat was unbuttoned, revealing a garish crimson sweater beneath.
The man walked straight into a blind spot below, even glancing up for a moment. Thankfully, Jenkins had ducked back from the window just in time. As he stood pressed against the wall, he heard the sound of the front door opening and knew instantly that he was in trouble.
“Damn it, they're going to think I'm a burglar!”
Climbing out the window was not a good option; the street was no longer as empty as it had been when he arrived. And escaping through the front door was impossible, as there was no other staircase leading down.
Moving like a cat, Jenkins crept from the window to the door, setting it back to its half-open state. He scanned the room. It was cluttered and small, offering only three potential hiding spots: under the bed, behind the curtains, or inside the wardrobe.
“The bedsheet is too short to hide the space underneath, my feet will show behind the curtains, and the wardrobe is too obvious!”
His final reason was based on contemporary fiction; it seemed that whether in a detective story or a tawdry romance, everyone always hid in the wardrobe.
For whatever reason, Jenkins's worst fear came to pass. The footsteps on the stairs reached the second floor, paused briefly near the entrance of the first room, and then continued straight to the last door.
The man who entered was middle-aged, of average height but with a slender build. He couldn't have washed his face that morning, given his dreadful complexion. His beard was scruffy and untrimmed, and his red hair was a messy tangle, like a bird's nest. He grasped the doorknob, pushed the door open, scanned the interior, and then turned to shut it behind him.
He bent down to check under the bed, then drew the curtains to prevent anyone on the street from seeing inside. Only then did he stride over to the wardrobe and pull the doors open.
There were no clothes in the wardrobe. Only bodies, packed in hand-woven sacks, were arranged neatly inside. Jenkins hadn't smelled any blood just seconds before, likely because the bodies had been drained of all fluids and their skin specially treated.
The man opened one of the sacks, revealing the body of a woman, preserved like a specimen. His eyes immediately filled with a look of rapture, and he proceeded to inspect the other bags.
Half an hour later, after admiring all his “works of art,” the man neatly placed the bodies back inside the wardrobe and left the room with a satisfied smile.
The sound of his footsteps echoed down the stairs. A dozen seconds later, the sounds came from the foyer below. The front door creaked open, and the faint sounds of the street drifted up to the second-floor room.
Finally, the door closed, and silence returned.
“Meow~” Fresh chapters posted on Nove1Fire.net
A small cat's head poked out from under the covers, peering out pitifully before being quickly pulled back. Five minutes later, with no strange noises coming from the house, Jenkins finally crawled out from under the blankets on the bed.
It was an incredibly risky move, extremely dangerous. But people's eyes tend to skim over objects that blend well into the background. Under the bed, in the wardrobe, behind the curtains—those were the most suspicious places.
While hiding, Jenkins had pulled on his Black Robe. Had he been discovered, he would have made a run for it, and no one would have known the intruder's identity. But this time, his luck held; he wouldn't have to shoulder the new title of “burglar.”
“Sage preserve me,” he muttered. “I'm never doing anything again!”
He tucked the cat into his coat, ready to leave, but was suddenly overcome with curiosity about what the man had been doing when he opened the wardrobe. Hiding under the covers, he had only heard fragmented sounds and couldn't see what was happening.
After hesitating for a few seconds, he decided to satisfy his curiosity before he left. He opened the wardrobe and saw the neatly arranged woven sacks. Then, driven by that same curiosity, he opened one of them.
He groaned and recoiled instinctively, but quickly reached out to steady the corpse that had nearly tipped over, setting it back in its place. He closed the wardrobe, bowed his head in a quiet prayer, and made the holy symbol over his chest, hoping the poor souls could rest in peace.
There were five sacks in the wardrobe in total, which meant five bodies: one large and four small. Jenkins didn't know the person who lived here, nor did he know the Kopoler family he was supposed to collect the debt from, so he had no way of knowing the identities of the victims.
“Why do I always run into things ?”
He groaned inwardly but forced himself to open the wardrobe again and inspect each of the five bodies. After he was done, he restored everything to how he had found it and began planning the fastest route to KalFax Field.
He tiptoed to the door, intending to leave the house at once. But just then, a sudden, icy wind blew from behind him, and goosebumps erupted on the back of his neck.
There was no way a draft could have gotten in; the window was shut tight. He spun around to see what was happening, but the room behind him was still empty, though a thin mist seemed to be forming.
Belatedly, he activated his Eye of Reality. A black wind howled through the room as the temperature plummeted. At the same time, a faint figure began to emerge from the wardrobe.
“This is... a spirit's return!”
Since the most distant Epochs, when humanity was still ignorant, it was understood that the souls of the dead had a chance of lingering in the material world. This wasn't interference from some supernatural power but a normal, natural phenomenon, like rain or thunder.
Clearly, Jenkins had just run into some “rain and thunder.”