Bizenghast Fanfiction: Edaniel's Busy Day
I've discovered that I need practice plotting out chaptered stories. Or, maybe I should just not write them. Anyway, chapter three.
Edaniel's Busy Day
Chapter Three: Woo! Plot Twist!
“So if your sister is kept under the tower, what’s actually in the tower?” Dinah asked of the late Margaret Caine as she and Edaniel followed the woman through the winding corridors of the mansion.
“Storage,” said Margaret simply. “My great-grandfather tried to use it as a silo, but that plan turned out to be quite impractical. Now we use it to store furniture, paintings and maiden aunts.”
Dinah fell silent, wishing to avoid further conversation with this odd woman. She felt as if they had been walking for miles in oppressive silence when Margaret finally paused before a large, nondescript door. “I have to warn you, Doctors. Lillian may be difficult to find.”
“Oh no,” said Edaniel. “She’s entirely in your imagination, isn’t she? I’m demanding a raise when I get back. I do not get paid enough for this.”
“Hmm? Oh, no. It’s just that I didn’t want her escaping, so I put her in the Maze.”
“You have a maze under the tower?” asked a dumbfounded Dinah.
“No, the tower is in the center of the Maze. It’s actually under the house and the surrounding fields.”
“And you’re not at all worried that the house and land will, you know, collapse into all the empty space, killing all you know and love?” questioned Edaniel.
“The Maze is carefully built to support the house from underneath,” said Margaret, as if she couldn’t believe Edaniel would think her family so stupid as to build a structurally unsound maze under their house. “Let me show you.”
Opening the door, the party discovered a steep stone staircase leading deep into the ground. A short distance down, the stairs met a solid stonewall, and started to curve around it. Dinah assumed this was the tower at the center. When they finally reached the bottom of the stairs, their way was blocked by an iron gate. Unlike the gate to the mansion, this gate looked new and solid. The lock was small and ornate, but the mechanism looked unyielding. The lock was set into a large plate of iron, which had a variety of weird symbols engraved into it. The ghost of Margaret Caine withdrew a key from a pocket in her dress, unlocked the gate and threw it open with an expansive gesture designed to impress her guests.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see but the first corner of the Maze.
“Wow,” said Edaniel. “A wall.”
“My grandfather designed it,” said Margaret, with more than a trace of pride.
Dinah tried to think of something gracious to say. “Your grandfather was…” Insane. Deranged. A complete and total loon. “…very creative.”
“It runs in the family,” concluded Margaret without a trace of modesty.
“Nooooo kidding,” said Edaniel.
Closing the gate behind them, the three entered the Maze. “Will we have to search much for your sister?” asked Dinah, anxiously. Like all sensible people, she had no desire to wander aimlessly in a locked maze built in a horrific dimension of the dead.
“All we need to do is take three rights,” said Margaret. “That will bring us to the entrance of the room directly under the tower. That’s where Lillian mostly stays. Then you may vindicate me in my sister’s madness.”
Dinah followed the ghost around the first corner, growing more and more apprehensive by the second. Edaniel was right. Margaret, though possibly the saner of the two sisters, was not entirely in her right mind either. Of course, as the poem had stated and the bodies in the dining room illustrated, she had lost both her husband and son to the actions of her crazed sister, so it was understandable that Margaret was a bit off. And maybe saving Margaret from her sister would set her free. But as she was led through moldering corridors, lit only by sputtering torches, Dinah pondered that Margaret being the victim was no guarantee of her being safe.
“Lillian?” called Margaret into the Maze. “Lily? It’s your dear sister. I have brought the doctors to see you, Lillian. They want to help you get better!”
But there was no answer. No sound at all except Margaret and Dinah’s heels and Edaniel’s nails clicking on the stone floor. Ghost Margaret led them around the second corner, still calling for her sister to come out. Nervously, Dinah started to hug the wall, trying to keep one of her sides from being exposed.
But as they rounded the third corner, Dinah’s field of vision was suddenly filled with a whirlwind of activity. A woman with her matted hair chopped off close to the scalp, wearing a tattered shift and no shoes, flung herself into Dinah, knocking them both into a wall. Dinah, of course, screamed. Though with a face full of madwoman, most people would.
“RUN!” screamed the madwoman, who was presumably the late Lillian Caine. “FLEE! Flee from this place! NOW!”
One did not need to tell Dinah twice. Rolling to her left, Dinah got to her feet and launched herself away from the wall. However, despite her cries to run, the ghost woman scuttled after Dinah, grabbing the hem of her dress, ripping the delicate lace. Dinah screamed again, still trying to escape. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a bright green blur coming up behind Lillian’s ghost. Edaniel leapt on the ghost’s head, covering her eyes with his paws. “Got your nose!” he shouted.
The ghost woman shrieked and tried to pull Edaniel off her head as Dinah crawled away from the thrashing woman. Edaniel didn’t cling too hard, as he only wanted to distract the ghost. With an agile bound, Edaniel landed beside Dinah wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat, and remarked in a fake drawl, “I think I got a 25, but she only racked up a 10 at most.”
The angered ghost spun toward them, growling. “Lily!” cried Margaret, in a furious tone, her face contorted with rage. The ghost froze and glared at Margaret, then ran off in the opposite direction, somewhere deep in the Maze.
“I am very sorry to have frightened you, Doctor,” said Margaret, composing herself as she turned to Dinah and Edaniel. “But you see how she is.”
“How…how long has she been that way?” asked Dinah, still pulling herself together.
“Ever since she killed her husband and her son,” replied Margaret, a sad look appearing on her face. “Why she did that, I’ll never know.”
“Her husband and son?” Dinah asked warily, a slow, cold drip of fear sliding down her spine. “I thought they were your husband and son.”
“Oh, no, Doctor. I have never been married. Lillian was always the lucky one in love. Makes it all the more tragic, doesn’t it? Father was very happy with Robert, yes, and they were blessed with child early. And look at her now. Father wanted me to live in the Tower because no men came, but who’s living there now, hmmm?”
Dinah had the sneaking suspicion that she had done something terribly stupid.
“How did she kill them?” asked Dinah as she backed up slowly against the wall. Edaniel was flanking Margaret on her other side, apparently having picked up the same vibe. Margaret was not between them and the gate, but being a ghost probably gave her some advantages. Like not being bound by time or space.
Margaret did not appear to notice Dinah’s hesitancy. “Poison. In their fish. Poison in the poisson.” Margaret gave a nervous giggle at her own joke. “They still haven’t left the dining room, as you saw.”
“Lady,” started Edaniel, “as much as we enjoy gallows humor and the occasional lame pun, we really should get going. We’ve got gall bladder surgery at five, and an emergency piscterectomy at eight. Your sister’s crazy, you’re crazy, this maze is crazy, Dinah here was crazy coming in, and I’m off the rails on the Crazy Train. Consider this our professional diagnosis.”
“I’m not crazy,” said Margaret, pursing her lips.
“Of course you’re not,” said Edaniel patronizingly.
“Edaniel,” whispered Dinah, “could you not antagonize her?”
“I could,” replied Edaniel, “but it would be entirely contradictory to my nature.”
“We need to find Lillian!” demanded Margaret. “We need to find her so you can take her away and lock her up!”
“You’ve already done a fine job of that,” said Edaniel. “Maybe we should try a little reversal, huh? You want to spend a little time down here? Cozy mildew covered walls, a few poisonous spiders, an eternity of lonely torment…just like mamma would have wanted for you.”
“Be quiet!” shouted Margaret. “She started it!”
Dinah pushed back against the wall, staring in horrified silence as the dead ghost of a murderess and sororicide faced off against her most improbably foe, a talking green cat. “Let me guess,” said Edaniel, cocking his head and putting a paw to his very pointy chin. “She was happy and you weren’t?”
“I hate her! I hate her! I hate her!” screamed Margaret, scrunching up her face most unattractively. “And I hate you!” And with that she vanished with a shriek like metal twisted into a balloon animal.
“I think I handled that pretty well,” said Edaniel, nodding as he turned around to head back to the gate. Dinah merely stared. “What? It’s not like we’re dead.”
However, when they returned to the gate, they realized that Margaret had shut and locked it behind them. And now that they were without Margaret… “Okay,” said Edaniel. “So we are locked in an scary labyrinth of doom. But we’re not actually dead yet, so that’s a point in our favor.”
Studying the bars, Dinah realized there was a solution, though it was not one of which she was particularly fond. “You could probably fit through, Edainel.”
“What kind of cat monster do you take me for?” asked an offended Edaniel. “I wouldn’t leave you alone in a crazy ghost infested maze when there were other options. Now let’s have a look at this gate. Check out the crazy symbols on the lock. Bet it’s some kind of secret code.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yeah, there’s always a secret code or mystical puzzle to solve. Ghosts have waaaay too much time on their hands. Hmmm…I think I’ve seen this writing before.”
“You can read that?” asked an amazed Dinah.
“Not only am I a doctor,” said Edaniel, “but I also graduated from the Robert Langdon Correspondence School of Symbology. Free secret decoder ring with every degree. Give me a lift up, would ya?”
Dinah picked him up and held him level to the lock. Edaniel placed his paws to either side of the writing and started mumbling under his breath. Dinah waited anxiously. “What does it say, Edaniel?”
“It says…Drink…More…Ovaltine.”
“What?”
“I’m just yanking your chain. It’s actually the poem from the gravestone. Only this one has the last line. It says, ‘In action, not words, can truth be found.’ Well, I think we can file that under ‘Things we needed to know ahead of time.’”
Dinah crumbled to the ground and held her face in her hands. Sure, the dusty floor was ruining her nice dress, but by this time she had learned that any outfit that went on a ghost rescuing expedition was going to return unwearable. As long as she herself returned to make and wear outlandish dresses, it didn’t really matter.
“Now what do we do?” asked Dinah through her hands. She really didn’t want to break down and cry, but she had made a botch of this entire enterprise. She’d mistaken the tormented ghost for the sister doing the tormenting, allowed herself to be lured into a trap, and now had no idea how to get out of a maze hundreds of feet under the ground.
Edaniel, on the other hand, was not predisposed to brood. “We find this Lillian chick, escape and plot our revenge,” he said. “And then get some dinner and maybe catch a late movie on HBO.”
“Edaniel, we’re in a maze. We already chased Lillian away, we’re locked in and there’s nothing to distinguish one part of the maze from another. We could wander for days.”
“Luckily, Ms. Margaret Crazy-Pants has provided us with a solution to one of those problems. My afghan may suffer, but the sacrifice of my bag of yarn will not be in vain.”
“Yarn? Yarn is going to save us from dying?”
“Haven’t you ever read any mythology?” asked a surprised Edaniel. “A bag of yarn is the answer to all your labyrinth needs. We’ll just tie one end to the gate here, and let it trail behind us. We won’t accidentally go in circles, and when we’ve found Lily Caine, we can find our way back to the entrance.”
“But how will we get out?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we’ve burnt it, Dinah. First, I’ve got to shred this yarn so we’ll have more.”
To Dinah, it looked more like playing than shredding, what with the way Edaniel lay on his back and tossed balls of yarn into the air, using his claws to rip wound threads apart before batting it back up. Finally, rolling over onto the shredded pile of yarn, Edaniel sighed. “Oh, yeah. That was some good yarn. Let’s get going.”
Edaniel's Busy Day
Chapter Three: Woo! Plot Twist!
“So if your sister is kept under the tower, what’s actually in the tower?” Dinah asked of the late Margaret Caine as she and Edaniel followed the woman through the winding corridors of the mansion.
“Storage,” said Margaret simply. “My great-grandfather tried to use it as a silo, but that plan turned out to be quite impractical. Now we use it to store furniture, paintings and maiden aunts.”
Dinah fell silent, wishing to avoid further conversation with this odd woman. She felt as if they had been walking for miles in oppressive silence when Margaret finally paused before a large, nondescript door. “I have to warn you, Doctors. Lillian may be difficult to find.”
“Oh no,” said Edaniel. “She’s entirely in your imagination, isn’t she? I’m demanding a raise when I get back. I do not get paid enough for this.”
“Hmm? Oh, no. It’s just that I didn’t want her escaping, so I put her in the Maze.”
“You have a maze under the tower?” asked a dumbfounded Dinah.
“No, the tower is in the center of the Maze. It’s actually under the house and the surrounding fields.”
“And you’re not at all worried that the house and land will, you know, collapse into all the empty space, killing all you know and love?” questioned Edaniel.
“The Maze is carefully built to support the house from underneath,” said Margaret, as if she couldn’t believe Edaniel would think her family so stupid as to build a structurally unsound maze under their house. “Let me show you.”
Opening the door, the party discovered a steep stone staircase leading deep into the ground. A short distance down, the stairs met a solid stonewall, and started to curve around it. Dinah assumed this was the tower at the center. When they finally reached the bottom of the stairs, their way was blocked by an iron gate. Unlike the gate to the mansion, this gate looked new and solid. The lock was small and ornate, but the mechanism looked unyielding. The lock was set into a large plate of iron, which had a variety of weird symbols engraved into it. The ghost of Margaret Caine withdrew a key from a pocket in her dress, unlocked the gate and threw it open with an expansive gesture designed to impress her guests.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see but the first corner of the Maze.
“Wow,” said Edaniel. “A wall.”
“My grandfather designed it,” said Margaret, with more than a trace of pride.
Dinah tried to think of something gracious to say. “Your grandfather was…” Insane. Deranged. A complete and total loon. “…very creative.”
“It runs in the family,” concluded Margaret without a trace of modesty.
“Nooooo kidding,” said Edaniel.
Closing the gate behind them, the three entered the Maze. “Will we have to search much for your sister?” asked Dinah, anxiously. Like all sensible people, she had no desire to wander aimlessly in a locked maze built in a horrific dimension of the dead.
“All we need to do is take three rights,” said Margaret. “That will bring us to the entrance of the room directly under the tower. That’s where Lillian mostly stays. Then you may vindicate me in my sister’s madness.”
Dinah followed the ghost around the first corner, growing more and more apprehensive by the second. Edaniel was right. Margaret, though possibly the saner of the two sisters, was not entirely in her right mind either. Of course, as the poem had stated and the bodies in the dining room illustrated, she had lost both her husband and son to the actions of her crazed sister, so it was understandable that Margaret was a bit off. And maybe saving Margaret from her sister would set her free. But as she was led through moldering corridors, lit only by sputtering torches, Dinah pondered that Margaret being the victim was no guarantee of her being safe.
“Lillian?” called Margaret into the Maze. “Lily? It’s your dear sister. I have brought the doctors to see you, Lillian. They want to help you get better!”
But there was no answer. No sound at all except Margaret and Dinah’s heels and Edaniel’s nails clicking on the stone floor. Ghost Margaret led them around the second corner, still calling for her sister to come out. Nervously, Dinah started to hug the wall, trying to keep one of her sides from being exposed.
But as they rounded the third corner, Dinah’s field of vision was suddenly filled with a whirlwind of activity. A woman with her matted hair chopped off close to the scalp, wearing a tattered shift and no shoes, flung herself into Dinah, knocking them both into a wall. Dinah, of course, screamed. Though with a face full of madwoman, most people would.
“RUN!” screamed the madwoman, who was presumably the late Lillian Caine. “FLEE! Flee from this place! NOW!”
One did not need to tell Dinah twice. Rolling to her left, Dinah got to her feet and launched herself away from the wall. However, despite her cries to run, the ghost woman scuttled after Dinah, grabbing the hem of her dress, ripping the delicate lace. Dinah screamed again, still trying to escape. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a bright green blur coming up behind Lillian’s ghost. Edaniel leapt on the ghost’s head, covering her eyes with his paws. “Got your nose!” he shouted.
The ghost woman shrieked and tried to pull Edaniel off her head as Dinah crawled away from the thrashing woman. Edaniel didn’t cling too hard, as he only wanted to distract the ghost. With an agile bound, Edaniel landed beside Dinah wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat, and remarked in a fake drawl, “I think I got a 25, but she only racked up a 10 at most.”
The angered ghost spun toward them, growling. “Lily!” cried Margaret, in a furious tone, her face contorted with rage. The ghost froze and glared at Margaret, then ran off in the opposite direction, somewhere deep in the Maze.
“I am very sorry to have frightened you, Doctor,” said Margaret, composing herself as she turned to Dinah and Edaniel. “But you see how she is.”
“How…how long has she been that way?” asked Dinah, still pulling herself together.
“Ever since she killed her husband and her son,” replied Margaret, a sad look appearing on her face. “Why she did that, I’ll never know.”
“Her husband and son?” Dinah asked warily, a slow, cold drip of fear sliding down her spine. “I thought they were your husband and son.”
“Oh, no, Doctor. I have never been married. Lillian was always the lucky one in love. Makes it all the more tragic, doesn’t it? Father was very happy with Robert, yes, and they were blessed with child early. And look at her now. Father wanted me to live in the Tower because no men came, but who’s living there now, hmmm?”
Dinah had the sneaking suspicion that she had done something terribly stupid.
“How did she kill them?” asked Dinah as she backed up slowly against the wall. Edaniel was flanking Margaret on her other side, apparently having picked up the same vibe. Margaret was not between them and the gate, but being a ghost probably gave her some advantages. Like not being bound by time or space.
Margaret did not appear to notice Dinah’s hesitancy. “Poison. In their fish. Poison in the poisson.” Margaret gave a nervous giggle at her own joke. “They still haven’t left the dining room, as you saw.”
“Lady,” started Edaniel, “as much as we enjoy gallows humor and the occasional lame pun, we really should get going. We’ve got gall bladder surgery at five, and an emergency piscterectomy at eight. Your sister’s crazy, you’re crazy, this maze is crazy, Dinah here was crazy coming in, and I’m off the rails on the Crazy Train. Consider this our professional diagnosis.”
“I’m not crazy,” said Margaret, pursing her lips.
“Of course you’re not,” said Edaniel patronizingly.
“Edaniel,” whispered Dinah, “could you not antagonize her?”
“I could,” replied Edaniel, “but it would be entirely contradictory to my nature.”
“We need to find Lillian!” demanded Margaret. “We need to find her so you can take her away and lock her up!”
“You’ve already done a fine job of that,” said Edaniel. “Maybe we should try a little reversal, huh? You want to spend a little time down here? Cozy mildew covered walls, a few poisonous spiders, an eternity of lonely torment…just like mamma would have wanted for you.”
“Be quiet!” shouted Margaret. “She started it!”
Dinah pushed back against the wall, staring in horrified silence as the dead ghost of a murderess and sororicide faced off against her most improbably foe, a talking green cat. “Let me guess,” said Edaniel, cocking his head and putting a paw to his very pointy chin. “She was happy and you weren’t?”
“I hate her! I hate her! I hate her!” screamed Margaret, scrunching up her face most unattractively. “And I hate you!” And with that she vanished with a shriek like metal twisted into a balloon animal.
“I think I handled that pretty well,” said Edaniel, nodding as he turned around to head back to the gate. Dinah merely stared. “What? It’s not like we’re dead.”
However, when they returned to the gate, they realized that Margaret had shut and locked it behind them. And now that they were without Margaret… “Okay,” said Edaniel. “So we are locked in an scary labyrinth of doom. But we’re not actually dead yet, so that’s a point in our favor.”
Studying the bars, Dinah realized there was a solution, though it was not one of which she was particularly fond. “You could probably fit through, Edainel.”
“What kind of cat monster do you take me for?” asked an offended Edaniel. “I wouldn’t leave you alone in a crazy ghost infested maze when there were other options. Now let’s have a look at this gate. Check out the crazy symbols on the lock. Bet it’s some kind of secret code.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yeah, there’s always a secret code or mystical puzzle to solve. Ghosts have waaaay too much time on their hands. Hmmm…I think I’ve seen this writing before.”
“You can read that?” asked an amazed Dinah.
“Not only am I a doctor,” said Edaniel, “but I also graduated from the Robert Langdon Correspondence School of Symbology. Free secret decoder ring with every degree. Give me a lift up, would ya?”
Dinah picked him up and held him level to the lock. Edaniel placed his paws to either side of the writing and started mumbling under his breath. Dinah waited anxiously. “What does it say, Edaniel?”
“It says…Drink…More…Ovaltine.”
“What?”
“I’m just yanking your chain. It’s actually the poem from the gravestone. Only this one has the last line. It says, ‘In action, not words, can truth be found.’ Well, I think we can file that under ‘Things we needed to know ahead of time.’”
Dinah crumbled to the ground and held her face in her hands. Sure, the dusty floor was ruining her nice dress, but by this time she had learned that any outfit that went on a ghost rescuing expedition was going to return unwearable. As long as she herself returned to make and wear outlandish dresses, it didn’t really matter.
“Now what do we do?” asked Dinah through her hands. She really didn’t want to break down and cry, but she had made a botch of this entire enterprise. She’d mistaken the tormented ghost for the sister doing the tormenting, allowed herself to be lured into a trap, and now had no idea how to get out of a maze hundreds of feet under the ground.
Edaniel, on the other hand, was not predisposed to brood. “We find this Lillian chick, escape and plot our revenge,” he said. “And then get some dinner and maybe catch a late movie on HBO.”
“Edaniel, we’re in a maze. We already chased Lillian away, we’re locked in and there’s nothing to distinguish one part of the maze from another. We could wander for days.”
“Luckily, Ms. Margaret Crazy-Pants has provided us with a solution to one of those problems. My afghan may suffer, but the sacrifice of my bag of yarn will not be in vain.”
“Yarn? Yarn is going to save us from dying?”
“Haven’t you ever read any mythology?” asked a surprised Edaniel. “A bag of yarn is the answer to all your labyrinth needs. We’ll just tie one end to the gate here, and let it trail behind us. We won’t accidentally go in circles, and when we’ve found Lily Caine, we can find our way back to the entrance.”
“But how will we get out?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we’ve burnt it, Dinah. First, I’ve got to shred this yarn so we’ll have more.”
To Dinah, it looked more like playing than shredding, what with the way Edaniel lay on his back and tossed balls of yarn into the air, using his claws to rip wound threads apart before batting it back up. Finally, rolling over onto the shredded pile of yarn, Edaniel sighed. “Oh, yeah. That was some good yarn. Let’s get going.”