r/HFY•8 mo. ago

[The Shotgun Girl] Chapter 5 of 17

OC-Series

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A whole-house sweep punctuated by fights to the death, while far from a unique morning for us, was still a tiring affair. The second stage of our arrival at a new manor-house was normally to start a thorough and detailed ransacking of the place, but we all needed some rest and refreshment first. Therefore, it was decided to head back downstairs for a break. Blondie offered to cook up some lunch for us and Red volunteered to help her. Blackie declared that she was going to take it easy for a bit on account of her ribs, so she snagged a book from the parlor -- not, unfortunately, a copy of The Amnesiac Ladies' Guide to Escaping Endless Country Manors -- and a chair to read it in.

Left to my own devices, I used the time to poke around that area for something to improvise a new weapon out of, the shotgun being down to its last shell. Which, once that was fired, would leave it as a very elaborate, heavy, and poorly-balanced bludgeon. And that was a shame. I found myself... saddened... by the idea of leaving the trusty scattergun behind. And not just saddened, but anxious, too. The shotgun had been by my side for so long and through so much with me, it was almost like a part of who I was, now. Brown, the Shotgun Girl. It had a certain ring to it.

Somehow, the prospect of being Brown, the Fireplace Poker Girl or Brown, the Chair-Leg-with-Nails Girl didn't really appeal.

We sometimes played the Who Were We? game. After the daylight had faded away to the point that detailed searching or ransacking was pointless, after the evening meal had been cooked and eaten, but no one was quite sleepy enough for bed, we might sit and listen to the thunder and ask each other, "Who do you think I was, before?" Perhaps Blondie, the most nurturing of us, had been a teacher? Maybe a scholar of some sort who was also a mother? The daring Red might have been a competitive athlete, and Blackie possibly a lawyer. The consensus was usually that I may well have been a soldier, although Blackie sometimes laughingly suggested 'gangster'. And I suppose I can see the logic there.

But to be honest, I never really liked Who Were We? Discussing it just served to drive home the fact that, no matter how we might wish or think or focus or speculate, there were simply no memories left to us of who we might have been before. Even the fragments that I thought I saw in dreams were no more than wisps of smoke that drifted to nothing the moment I tried to grasp them. There was a time when we had carefully examined every picture in each house, read every printed word, anything to find a clue, a trigger, any sliver of information that could lead to one of us saying, "Wait, this reminds me..." But nothing ever did. Nothing. Ever.

But a human needs an identity. A sense of themselves and who they are. And whoever I may have been before, Brown, the Shotgun Girl, had become a comfortable if not exactly desirable persona for me. Having the shotgun, being capable in its use, keeping it ready, these had become a major part of who I was. But what is the Shotgun Girl when the shotgun is gone?

One more shell, then I'd be finding out.

Blondie fried up plenty of eggs and potatoes and we ate them off the finest china, with water from the scullery tap served in tall, fluted glasses. We sat at one end of a long table in the main dining room, under the stern and faintly judgmental portraits of strangers and framed scenes of places that sparked no hint of nostalgia in us, no trace of familiarity. The electric chandelier over the table had hummed and flickered worryingly, so we'd left it off and thrown open the curtains.

"--look at the evidence, it just makes sense," Red was saying during a break between helpings of fried egg. "It's all there in the symbolism."

"I'm not sure you can call something as inherently subjective as symbolism 'evidence'," Blackie retorted. She wasn't really arguing against Red. Had she been, Red would probably have just given up, because you don't win debates with Blackie. But it was Blackie's way to start poking for holes in any idea put before her.

"But is it truly 'subjective' if everybody recognizes it?" Red shot back,

"That's still not the same as objective fact, though perhaps a distinction without a real difference, given the circumstances." Blackie motioned with her fork for Red to go on.

Red was expounding, as Blackie had promised she could, on her pet theory that we four were trapped souls and that the mansion around us and all its unending kin was our own personal Purgatory. We'd had this discussion, or some variation of it, many times before. But there was no harm in re-examining it. Besides, what else were we going to talk about? What else did we have?

"So, anyway, the symbolism." Red was, if not the most eloquent of us, an energetic and engaging speaker to watch. Always gesturing, emphasizing, being expressive. "It's the seven deadly sins, right? And we have to learn to master them. You've got the mirrors, representing vanity, which is pride. And then there's the clockwork soldiers, who are wrath."

"They're automatons," Blondie broke in. "I wouldn't think they'd feel wrathful. Or any emotion, really."

I nodded at that. "Yeah, mirror-clones are just as homicidal and are seriously angry. Why wouldn't they be wrath?"

Red remained unperturbed. "Because it's not about them, it's about how we handle them. Wrath is passing. If you can avoid responding and wait it out, it will spend itself, like a clockwork soldier's key winding down. But you can't wait out pride. That's best dealt with pre-emptively, just like how we deal with mirrors."

I felt like she might be reaching, but saw no sense in saying so just yet.

"So, sucker bait represents gluttony, then?" Blondie asked, sounding unconvinced, yet at the same time open to being convinced. She was a smart woman and nearly as good at arguing as Blackie, but was always nicer about it. Lose an argument with Blackie, and you felt the sting of being made to be in the wrong. Lose one to Blondie, and it was more like you'd just come around to the belief that she was in the right. "Or maybe greed?"

"Gluttony, certainly." Red's mouth was partly-full of salted potato, so she got that down before continuing, despite its aptness as a visual aid. "But mainly sloth." She held up a finger. "Think about it. Sucker bait comes in lots of different forms. So, sure, the poisoned sweets and tainted treats and such punish the desire to stuff your face. But if you look at the other stuff, like the clothes left out full of barbed pins and bone spiders, or the tub of nice hot bathwater with so much lye in it that your skin burns off, what does that do if not enforce a work ethic on us? If we want new clothes that won't hurt or kill us, we have to hunt for them, pry open crates, pick locks on wardrobes. We want a hot soak, we have to fill buckets with water, heat them up, and dump them in the tub ourselves. Anything attained without effort ends up being bad for us, but things we have to work for are okay."

"Still sounds more like punishing us for greed," I offered.

Red shook her head, wavy copper bob-cut bouncing on her shoulders. "No, this is greed's representation." She pinched a fold of her gown and tugged on it. "This right here. Opulent. Beautiful, even." And it was, too. Despite all the rigors and struggles, all the climbing and hard wear Red's blue evening gown had been through, all the attic-dust and the disarray of being in two fights, it was still a stunning piece. "Also bothersome and totally impractical," she went on. "And do I have to even mention the shoes?"

I grunted in agreement. The stupid fancy heels we kept getting stuck with were the worst. I won't say I'd have killed to have a set of boots again, because that's not a thing you should say lightly when you've murdered a friend before, but I might have been willing to do some pretty shameful things to get some.

Red gestured around us. "All of it. This house. All this luxury, all this finery is ours... and we hate it. We'd do anything to be rid of it. It would be more comfortable to just go without clothes than to wear this stuff, but we can't do that because of bone spiders and rusty nails and everything else in these houses. And we can't even just strip down and live outside in the gardens instead, because of the cool air and the rain."

"Now you're sounding more Biblical," Blackie inserted. Her habitual little half-smile, which had been scarce since the clockwork general had stabbed her, was back and she leaned back in her chair, twirling a finger in her night-black hair. "Naked in the garden like Adam and Eve. Or in our case, Eve and Eve and Eve and Eve. Or maybe a Lilith thrown in for good measure." She laughed, a pleasant, musical sound that tapered off into a wince and a hand on her injured ribs. "So, granting all that," she went on after the wince had passed, "we're still only up to five deadly sins. Where is envy in all this?"

Red just pointed at the pictures looking down on us from the dining room walls. Sober-faced couples posing for the photographer in their best clothes. Dignified ancestors in bright coats and tricorne hats standing with head high and chest outthrust amongst their hounds or books, warts and wrinkles glossed over by portrait painters' hands. Family gathered on the steps of a church, a young bride and groom in the midst. A hunter in safari gear and pith helmet seated before a tent, native guides and servants standing at his back. A group of ladies in broad cartwheel hats, taking tea at the seaside. Parents and children. Husbands and wives. Friends and associates. At home, at work, at play. Glimpses, pieces, fragments of lives and connections rendered in black and white and every gray and color in between. Each one a cherished memory to someone.

But nothing, nothing at all, to any of us four.

"Tell me you don't envy them," Red said, voice soft and a little wistful.

Blackie's smirk faded. "Touche."

There was quiet for a bit after that, broken only by the clink of silverware on china. Clouds were gathering outside -- right on schedule -- and the room darkened just a little.

"Six," I mumbled. It was hard. I had the urge to break the silence that had settled on us. Had to. And yet, the thought of just shattering it with some trite bit of noise or insipid phrase... It daunted me. The silence needed to be broken, but it must be a gentle, easy breaking. A loaf of bread being split between friends, not... not a mallet smashing a mirror. "That's still only six," I said more clearly, looking up from my plate at Red. "Six deadly sins. What about the last one? What about lust?"

Red grinned, and the cloud that had blocked the sunlight must have moved on past, as the room brightened again, just for a moment. "Seriously, Brown?" She cocked her head. "Have you looked at us?"

I wasn't entirely sure where she was going with that and turned to the others for some help. But Blackie returned my glance with just a single coolly arched eyebrow. Blondie, meanwhile, was looking down at her plate, but her lips were pressed together like she was holding something in and either her cheeks were a little pinker than normal, or the lighting was just making them look that way.

It felt like I was being left out of something. Like there was a secret being kept from me. I didn't like that feeling, not at all. Especially when Blackie was involved. Always smiling like she was privy to something the rest of us weren't. Always knowing the best thing to say. Always so lucky. Damn lucky. Like this world favored her. Always getting the breaks. Surviving where Red or Blondie or I might not have.

I couldn't even remember the last time I'd seen her die...

"So," Blackie said, oblivious to my dark ponderings, "accepting for the moment that the whole 'deadly sins' thing could be a motif, that still doesn't translate to us being in Purgatory."

"That's a fair point," Blondie agreed. "If we are, as I suspect, trapped in a machine-induced simulation of a reality -- a sort of artificial hallucination, if you will -- then that machine and its parameters would have been delineated by people. And those people may have consciously or unconsciously included symbolism like that as a component of the simulation."

"It's more than symbolism or motifs, though." Red didn't sound the least bit offended by their doubts. "Do we not find Bibles in virtually every one of these houses?"

"We find copies of Peter Pan and Wendy in lots of these houses, too." Blackie held up the book she'd been reading before lunch. "Perhaps that means we're in Neverland?"

"You're just being silly, now."

"Am I? Are we not four Darlings who've been whisked away? Are we not the Lost Girls, remembering no past and never growing old? Are we--" Blackie stopped, like she was catching herself, and shut her mouth with a sigh. "Yes, of course I'm being silly, Red."

"A harsh way to make your point," Blondie told her, lips pursed.

Blackie sighed again, then nodded. "Yes, it was and I apologize for that."

Red shrugged and waved that off. "Don't worry about it. I don't offend easily. And besides, I know how you like playing devil's advocate."

Blackie chuckled a little, but her smile didn't reach anywhere beyond her lips. She raised her glass of water in salute. "You know me so well," she said, then drained the glass.

But she said nothing else, nothing at all, for the remainder of the meal.

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