"So, you're saying the one who killed you and hid your body was Brown, the tenant in Room Four?"
Jenkins asked the spirit beside him.
The spirit nodded gently. It looked more human now than when it had first appeared, its unnatural features having noticeably faded. Jenkins wasn't sure if it was because the woman saw a glimmer of hope for revenge, or because he had promised to give her children a proper burial.
In truth, the more significant reason was its constant conversation with a benevolent god.
Knowing the murderer's name and general build was a crucial advantage for catching him. So Jenkins asked Mrs. Kepler's spirit again if he could lay her to rest, but the soul refused once more.
It floated out of the room, drifted past Room Two, and stopped before the door to Room One—the Leviathans' apartment. The door faced the top of the stairs and bore no nameplate, only a child's drawing. If he hadn't found information about the occupants in the journalist's diary, Jenkins wouldn't have even known their family name.
The door was locked, so once again, Mrs. Kepler's spirit had to open it for him from the inside.
With three people living in such a narrow space, the room was even more cramped than the journalist's. The family of three wasn't home, of course. The moment Jenkins pushed the door open, an odor of decay hit him. His eyes immediately fell on a bowl of fish soup sitting on the table.
The food inside had thoroughly decomposed. The smell had been contained behind the closed door, but taking just two steps inside was enough to make even Chocolate recoil in disgust.
That was his initial assessment.
He searched for a diary out of habit but found nothing. That made sense; the young journalist had described the family as "illiterate country bumpkins."
Though he found no diary, Jenkins did discover several more drawings in the same bizarre style as the one taped to the door. They were all the work of the family's young son, hidden in various places: tucked under the mattress, wedged in the gap between the wardrobe and the wall, and two were even rolled into tight cylinders and stuffed into the crevice where the gas pipe met the wall.
The boy was clearly disturbed. Even Jenkins felt a sense of unease as he held the seven drawings. The subjects themselves were ordinary enough, but the bizarre color palette, twisted lines, and distorted figures combined to evoke an intense nausea, enough to make an ordinary person physically sick.
"Just ordinary drawings, he says. Incredible."
After a brief glance, Jenkins couldn't bear to look at them any longer. He flipped the papers facedown on the table and turned to Mrs. Kepler's spirit:
"I've found your killer's name and a general description of him. What else do you need from me?" For more chapters visıt novel(ꜰ)ire.net
The spirit pointed to the drawings on the table, its face twisting into a pleading expression that belonged on a living person.
The spirit directed him to the drawing with the simplest composition. It depicted ten small, stick-like figures in what looked like a forest—at least, that was Jenkins's interpretation.
She pointed to one of the figures that vaguely resembled a woman, then gestured to herself.
Jenkins asked, and the spirit immediately nodded.
A few seconds later, the drawing's meaning dawned on him. There were exactly ten people living in the building: the woman downstairs with her three children, the family of three in Room One, and the three single men in the other rooms. A total of ten people. The math was right.
But that thought brought another to mind, a question he had overlooked until now: if Mrs. Kepler from downstairs only had three children, then who was the fourth child in the wardrobe?
The answer was painfully obvious. There was only one other child in the entire building. It seemed highly likely that the young Leviathan boy, the artist of those bizarre drawings, was the fourth body in the wardrobe.
With that thought, he turned and led the cat and ghost back to Room Four. This time, he wouldn't just peek into the burlap sacks at the faces within; he would take the bodies out completely.
Jenkins's Eye of Reality could see through any Benefactor, living or dead, but the young boy wasn't one. His ability to create those disturbing drawings was likely connected to the same mysterious calling the journalist had experienced.
By touching each corpse and observing the resulting feedback, Jenkins easily distinguished Mrs. Kepler's three children from the young Leviathan boy.
The Leviathan boy was the smallest of the four. The corpse had been treated in some way, making it impossible for Jenkins to determine his condition just before death. However, based on what he could see, the cause was definitely not physical trauma.
He tried to ask Mrs. Kepler's spirit how the boy had died, but the ghost just kept shaking its head, apparently just as clueless as he was.
The boy's fists were open; he wasn't clutching anything. His clothes had likely been searched by the killer, Brown, so there were no welcome surprises to be found.
"Hmm, so what does this all mean?"
Jenkins sat among the bodies, his brow furrowed in concentration:
"The Leviathan boy obviously knew something, but the drawings he left behind are indecipherable, and I don't have any way to communicate with the dead right now. Will I have to banish the spirit here and let the Church handle the investigation? It feels cruel, but I might not have a choice."
The thought made him look at the spirit beside him, and the urge to destroy it returned.
But a sliver of compassion made him hesitate just long enough to reason with himself. He succeeded, realizing he wasn't out of options just yet:
"Wait a minute. I have plenty of clues; I just haven't reached the final conclusion. Haven't I been in this exact situation countless times before?"
He gave a self-deprecating smile and tapped his head, then invoked The Unknown Path, calling for the guidance of fate.
An elegant purple thread of light extended from before Jenkins. Following its guidance back to Room One, he once again picked up one of the Leviathan boy's seven drawings.
While he could barely make out the scenes and figures in the other drawings, this one was utterly inscrutable. If Jenkins were forced to interpret it, he would say it depicted a group of people standing before a pitch-black hole, every single one of them contorted in struggle.
It was impossible to count how many people there were; their limbs were so deformed and twisted together that they looked like ropes. This was the most mentally corrupting drawing of all. Even without any supernatural element at play, it was something no ordinary person should ever lay eyes on.
"A pitch-black hole... all the tenants on the second floor seem to be mentally unstable... Hmm... I think I'm starting to understand."