"How could the landlord let someone rent a room?"
Jenkins grumbled under his breath, then immediately remembered that the spirit beside him was likely the owner of this place. But the ghost offered no reaction to his tactless comment.
The room's contents were crammed together so tightly that there was barely any room to walk. The woman's spirit had led Jenkins here, but she offered no reason for their visit—or perhaps she simply couldn't explain it.
The owner of this room, however, was probably not among the bodies Jenkins had just seen. The wardrobe contained only four children and one woman.
"Perhaps the man from before was the owner of this room," he mused. "That might be why the woman's spirit guided me here." Tʜe sourcᴇ of thɪs content ɪs N0veI.Fiɾe.net
He considered the possibility, gave his agitated cat another soothing pat, and then stepped into the room.
Though small enough to be taken in at a glance, the overwhelming clutter of books and papers made a random search extremely difficult.
Jenkins wasn't even sure what he was supposed to be looking for; all he could do was rummage aimlessly. He hoped the resident had a habit of keeping a diary. To his pleasant surprise, guided by Chocolate, he found a notebook tucked away beneath copies of "An Exploration of Ancient Sorcery" and "An Introduction to the Study of Modern Mysticism."
The handwriting in the diary matched the annotations scrawled on the fake occult materials, confirming it belonged to the room's owner. Jenkins skimmed through it, initially expecting mundane records of daily life, but he soon stumbled upon something truly extraordinary.
The reason for this sudden change was explained in the following passage:
[In a trance, I received a mysterious revelation. Unspeakable whispers and murmurs now constantly echo in my ears. At midnight, wondrous visions and terrifying landscapes torment me, yet they also fill me with wonder and excitement. I believe I have received a revelation. It is time to change my life.]
This was a textbook case of being lured by an evil god or some other unspeakable creature, prompting a change in lifestyle to pursue illegal rituals and spells. In fact, Jenkins had seen at least ten similar accounts in the Church's records, almost word for word.
But he had never heard of an ordinary person, induced by those terrifying entities, resorting to studying such obviously fake materials. Evil gods and unspeakable abominations would grant their humble mortal followers some simple power and blasphemous knowledge; they would never make them start studying from scratch.
Mortals both feared and craved the supernatural, and there were certainly plenty of fraudulent materials to be found in illicit bookshops or in the hands of bored noblewomen and village witches. An ordinary person had no way of telling the real from the fake. This reporter, it seemed, hadn't managed to get his hands on a single genuine article.
"Just who tempted him? Was some god with the domain of lies playing a joke on him? ...Oh, right. That would be me."
Jenkins truly couldn't imagine the answer.
The diary indicated that the reporter had been alive until a week ago. The final entry was a single, cryptic sentence:
[I understand. I am coming.]
The pages after that were blank. Clearly, Billy Schultz had left and never returned. But he couldn't have been the man in Room 4. Based on the diary's contents, Billy Schultz was obsessed with his research but showed no desire to kill, nor any fascination with corpses.
Aside from the life-altering influence of some unknown entity, the diary also sporadically recorded events happening around him. Most entries, however, were complaints about his neighbors disturbing him or the landlord refusing to give him a few more days to pay the rent. Having lost his job and spent a fortune on a pile of strange objects, he could no longer even cover his daily expenses.
Jenkins was particularly interested in his descriptions of the neighbors. Of the landlord's family on the first floor, he wrote:
[Unbelievably stingy. God, I have never seen such a miserly family. The man is, the woman is, and so are the three children. Greed must run in their veins instead of blood, their bodies filled with nothing but a lust for gold pounds...]
Schultz was deeply dissatisfied with his living situation and mentioned in his diary multiple times that he would move out as soon as his research bore fruit.
He described the family across the hall, by the stairs, as such:
[The Leviathan family is the most ridiculous I have ever seen. That bald middle-aged man, that obese woman, and that detestable little boy. Damn it. At least they don't live next door. The very sight of them makes me want to vomit.]
His displeasure with the Leviathans seemed to stem from something that had happened long ago, a detail he could glean from the writing. But Jenkins couldn't find any other diaries, so he had no idea where the animosity began.
His neighbor to the left, in Room 2, was a middle-aged man named Howard Link who lived alone. The review of him was equally filled with resentment:
[That damned dwarf, what is he doing coming and going every night? That cursed man, I curse you!]
The young reporter's resentment toward his neighbors hadn't begun with his obsession with mysticism. From the very first page of the diary, he was constantly complaining.
He complained about his boss, his colleagues at the newspaper, his neighbors, and anything else he could possibly complain about.
His description of his neighbor to the right, the one whose room held the bodies, was the most minimal. Jenkins couldn't find a single complete paragraph about him.
However, from occasional fragments, it seemed the young reporter considered the man to be kind and friendly, though his professional habits allowed him to observe things more closely than an ordinary person.
[Like a mental patient I reported on][His eyes are strange, a bit scary][I think he's a dangerous man, but it's best not to point it out]
These were the only few notes on the man. And based on his physical description of his neighbor, Mr. Brown, it was clear he was the same man Jenkins had seen examining the bodies earlier.
"Hiding corpses in your own room? How interesting."
By now, the events that had transpired in this two-story apartment were starting to come into focus. From the clues he had gathered, Mrs. Kepler and her children, who lived on the first floor, had been killed by Mr. Brown from Room 4 on the second floor. He had then turned their bodies into specimens and hidden them in his wardrobe. Schultz, the reporter from Room 3, had begun studying mysticism a month ago after receiving a "calling" from an unknown entity. He disappeared a week ago, leaving behind the notebook Jenkins had just found.
As for the family in Room 1 and the man living alone in Room 2, while there were no clues about their whereabouts, it was obvious something terrible had happened to them as well.