infodatos Chapter 46: Prelude to Conflict
Chapter 46: Prelude to Conflict
"There was clearly no one inside just now. Could it be that Viscount Hammond used some special method to conceal it?"
The officer lowered his voice, his hand already on the doorknob, "This girl is so pitiful, we have to get her out."
Are you blind? I feel like that should be a man.
"Don't move." Norman Lovecraft looked suspicious and slapped his hand away. "What if what you're seeing now is just an illusion?"
"We haven't met the person we're looking for yet. Let's not waste time in this ambiguous place." Norman looked at Inspector Angus. "Let's meet up first. The Birmingham Chamber of Commerce is upstairs."
Angus nodded, knowing that the Chamber of Commerce member referred to Winston, and glared at the officer who seemed either bewitched by some mysterious force or simply eager to save lives: "Execute orders, let's go."
The officer looked suspicious, but after being filmed by the detective's bloody opening and fuck-themed Bboxing, he could only shut his mouth and join the others in forming a line as they moved deeper into the corridor.
The Viscount's mansion was fairly well-lit, but perhaps because it was late at night, it had an eerie atmosphere.
Halfway through the journey, nothing happened. Someone couldn't help but secretly close their eyes, cover their mouth, and yawn.
Just then, the door to a room on one side of the corridor behind them opened silently.
A male servant from the Viscount's mansion, dressed in a black vest, came out. He appeared perfectly normal from head to toe, but only upon close inspection could one see the deep hatred in his eyes.
He held a blood-stained fire poker in his hand and, without warning, swung it at the back of the head of the police officer who was still yawning in the back row!
"Be careful!"
Inspector Angus's ears twitched, and he turned around instantly, drawing his pistol in the blink of an eye.
Compared to his colleagues who were completely unfamiliar with the structure of a revolver, the detective was indeed a detective, deeply understanding the essence of American iaido from another universe. Before Norman's brain could react, he saw the male servant behind him shudder as if he had been electrocuted!
Immediately afterward, the sound of a gunshot reached my ears—bang!
Gunpowder smoke exploded in the narrow corridor, a bullet struck the servant in the chest, the huge impact knocking him to the ground, where he immediately stopped moving. The fire poker in his hand spun in the air and landed with a thud among the police officers.
One of them bent down, rubbed some red liquid from the fire poker with his finger, sniffed it, and said with a grim face, "It's blood."
"Damn it, are they crazy?! Didn't they recognize us as police officers?"
The tension of being deep in enemy territory belatedly surged into everyone's hearts. They all took out their weapons and vigilantly surveyed their surroundings, fearing that someone might be lying in ambush in the shadows.
Inspector Angus killed someone in the blink of an eye, but felt no remorse, only remarking:
"This is troublesome. This time I've encountered a real cultist."
He was more worried about Winston, who had spent the night at the Viscount's mansion, than about the few servants who had died.
Will tonight's mission turn into rescuing heavyweight hostages? If so, I'm doomed! One act of courageous flattery has resulted in a lifetime of downfall. Your Majesty, for the sake of the divine decree, please bless the Prime Minister!
Norman Lovecraft was also a little worried about his former student. In order to find Winston as soon as possible, the seventy-year-old man kept his eyes wide open in the middle of the night, holding a kerosene lamp and searching for any suspicious signs in the corridor.
"Forget about the dead. Don't you think our footsteps sounded strange when we came over? When conducting indoor investigations and involving the occult, there are three things that need to be observed and confirmed first: whether the spatial structure is abnormal, whether the senses are consistent, and whether the time is accurate... Aha!"
Norman suddenly chuckled like a bull hissing, squatted down halfway with his kerosene lamp in hand, and pointed to the carpet at his feet, saying:
"That's too stupid, too simple. The top alchemists always treat everyone else like fools. Do you see anything strange about it?"
The officers looked down in the direction he was pointing.
The carpet in the corridor was old but neat, with a pattern that ran all the way through. There were no tears or bloodstains, and at first glance, there seemed to be no problem.
"If you can't see the problem, take a look at the wall."
The wallpaper features a common Victorian vine pattern, which appears exceptionally beautiful and warm in the firelight.
"Are you guys really stupid? Look at both of them side by side!"
Inspector Angus frowned, and after a few seconds, he finally realized, "The patterns don't match!"
"Exactly." Norman's tone held a hint of suppressed excitement. "The carpet's main pattern repeats in four-step cycles, while the wallpaper repeats in three-step cycles. Bedford Place is an affluent area, and under normal circumstances, the room decorations here would never produce this kind of mismatch that makes people increasingly annoyed."
After he finished speaking, he stood up and raised the kerosene lamp high. The light extended along the corridor, and the police realized that the seemingly straight corridor gave a visual illusion of "sliding," as if... the walls and the floor did not belong to the same "layer."
"Someone has set up alchemy here," Norman concluded definitively. "There's something else on the wall that the caster didn't want us to see, so they've covered it up."
One officer muttered, "Even the Viscount's male servants are attacking police officers. I can't understand how evil things have to be for there to be a need to cover it up."
Norman grinned. "We'll see. Give me a few minutes; I need to find its anchor point for stability."
He took a step forward, moving close to the wall, his fingers tracing the wallpaper, counting in sequence:
"Three steps in a cycle... one, two, three... then three more steps..."
After a brief, incomprehensible process of identification and calculation, Norman actually only took a little over a minute before he said, "Found it."
It was an inconspicuous spot where a vine leaf had appeared on the wallpaper. The leaf was slightly darker than the surrounding ones, making it almost imperceptible.
He handed the kerosene lamp to someone nearby, took out a small silver pocket watch clasp from his coat pocket, and then gently pierced the center of the leaf with the tip of the clasp.
The next second, the light in the corridor, including the kerosene lamps the police had brought from outside, trembled as if they were living creatures filled with fear.
The light suddenly stretched and compressed, the misalignment between the wall and the floor abruptly magnified, and the carpet under the police officers' feet slid back an inch before instantly returning to its original position.
"If you feel dizzy, just close your eyes," Norman reminded them. "It'll be over soon. Also, you should always remember to carry a silver needle with you. Silver is the bane of most alchemy. When a mystic suspects he's trapped by alchemy and can't find his anchor, he usually uses a silver needle to poke around randomly until he breaks the spell or gets arrested as a mental patient..."
Norman stopped halfway through his speech.
He stared at the flesh-colored membrane that covered the entire wall and stretched into the endless void, and suddenly lost the ability to vibrate his vocal cords.