After explaining everything to Fini, Jenkins pressed his left hand against the door. The Inexhaustible Fla stread down his arm and spread across the surface, but the door seed to be non-flammable. It remained utterly unchanged, even when completely engulfed in fire.
He drew back the flas, then slamd a fist radiating a frosty chill against the door. That, too, had no effect.
"Step back a little."
he instructed. Fini imdiately ducked behind him, her view of his hands completely obstructed.
He took a deep breath, and a miner's lamp pieced together entirely from tal components materialized in his hand. A hair-thin, silver-blue beam shot from the lamp, striking a spot on the door no larger than the tip of his little finger. A shower of tiny parts clattered to the floor from the targeted area, but then the door, like a living creature, rapidly regenerated, sealing the hole in an instant.
That single, thin beam had consud a twentieth of Jenkins's Spirit. To create an opening large enough for them to pass through, he would likely have to expend all of his Spirit, and even then it might not be enough—especially considering how quickly the door repaired itself.
"Now we're in real trouble."
He turned and peered into the pitch-black living room. In the oppressive darkness, he had the unnerving feeling that sothing was watching him.
"It'll be alright."
He whispered, comforting the trembling Fini. Everything that had just happened was a profound shock to the girl's still-developing worldview.
"We'll get out of here soon. Until then, you need to stay right by my side. Can you do that?"
"Yes, sir."
she replied in a small voice, pressing against his leg. Then she asked,
"My aunt and the others..."
"Right now, we can only look after ourselves."
"I understand."
She was a child of the slums, after all. So things didn't need to be spelled out.
Since leaving was impossible for now, the only option was to figure out what was happening. Jenkins put on his monocle again. Beyond the black spiritual aura that perated the entire house, he was surprised to see another glowing, statue-like object toward the rear of the building.
Based on the typical layout of hos in the Fidektri Kingdom, that location would be the master bedroom.
"Could this be it?"
He wondered, handing his Purification Candle to Fini. He held the miner's lamp, and the two of them walked hand-in-hand toward the living room.
Outside, the blizzard raged on with no sign of letting up, the sky completely obscured by thick layers of cloud and fog. The house was silent and dark; even when Jenkins found the switch for the gas lamp on the wall, it wouldn't light.
They soon found the Stress family in the living room. The family was slumped against a wall, their eyes vacant as they stared at the cautious man and the young girl.
A closer look revealed that, with the exception of Mrs. Stress, the other four family mbers were little more than living corpses.
They were all ordinary people; despite their bizarre condition, they possessed no supernatural power. Mustering their courage, Jenkins and Fini approached Mrs. Stress, hoping to ask what had happened. But all she did was repeat the sa phrase over and over:
"One must not be greedy."
"Fini, do the people who live here have a habit of keeping diaries?"
The girl started at his question, still not accustod to him using her first na so familiarly.
"No. Besides my uncle, no one here can read or write."
"Right, that was an oversight."
He tapped his forehead, then glanced warily toward the location of the statue-like object. Reaching into his coat, he pulled out his cat, which had been squirming restlessly for so ti.
"I've run into so trouble."
He murmured, "So don't go running off. If you see anything strange, you tell . And don't touch anything. Got it?"
Chocolate nodded, then hooked his claws into Jenkins's shoulder, motioning for him to place him there.
Fini recalled the cat's gesture from the previous night, how it had seed to invite her into the room. Her understanding deepened: the kind Mr. Williatte possessed truly formidable power.
Although six people lived in the house, it wasn't particularly large. There were three rooms that could pass for bedrooms; aside from the master bedroom, the other two were pitifully cramped.
Jenkins and Fini thodically searched every room except the master bedroom, discovering so strange signs. If his eyes weren't deceiving him, the impressions left in the two smaller bedrooms—which he hadn't entered on his last visit—suggested they had once held nurous expensive decorations. Similarly, while the furniture was old, it was clear that it had been quite costly when first purchased.
This starkly contradicted the image Jenkins and Fini had of an impoverished family.
More importantly, Fini's little cousin—an infant less than three months old—was gone. There was no trace of him anywhere, only an empty crib to prove he had existed at all.
In Jenkins's estimation, the Stress family had absolutely not been poor, at least as of a week ago. The leftover food scraps and the quality of the clothes in the closet attested to that. Yet, within a single week, all signs of their forr comfort were vanishing, as if the family's fortunes had suddenly collapsed. This was a decline far too steep to be explained by simple gambling debts.
He grew intensely curious about the family's source of inco, speculating whether Mr. Stress, an accountant in the Docklands, might have been secretly involved in illegal smuggling.
He and Fini searched the rooms again, even more ticulously this ti, but their only discovery was a stack of IOUs hidden in the ceiling—all of them signed within the past week.
Ultimately, it was a mishap that led to their next discovery.
It happened in the boys' bedroom, in front of the wardrobe. Fini was tugging on the hem of Jenkins's coat, and she pulled so hard that when Jenkins crawled out from under the bed, he nearly sent her tumbling.
He reacted instantly, steadying the girl, but the sudden movent nearly dislodged the cat from his shoulder. Displeased, Chocolate swatted the back of Jenkins's neck with his tail. The unexpected fluffy touch in the dark made Jenkins jump, and he instinctively lurched forward, unfortunately slamming his head right into the wardrobe door. The thin wood panel splintered, and his head plunged through, revealing a hole hidden at the bottom of the wardrobe.
It was in a perfect blind spot, impossible to see without crawling right inside.
There was nothing frightening in the hole, just a single diary lying there quietly.
"I really didn't know my uncle had a habit of keeping a diary."
Fini said, her face flushing, but Jenkins paid her embarrassnt no mind.
It was a remarkably thick journal, bound in fine leather with a gilded clasp. The first entry was dated to the spring of the just-past year, 1865 of the Universal Calendar. While the entries weren't daily, it seed he had recorded the week's events at least once every week.
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