Bizenghast Fanfiction: Edaniel's Busy Day
Man, I am just banging this story out.
Edaniel’s Busy Day
Chapter Two: Everything’s Better With Edaniel
Dinah arrived alone at the Sunken Mausoleum the next night. Vincent had tried to convince her that he was able to come, but his arm had, in fact, been broken. And though it was possible that it wouldn’t be a detriment, a broken arm was not something one wanted when avoiding murderous ghosts with death traps demonstrating exactly how long they’d had to think them up.
Edainel greeted her in the graveyard, wearing a pith helmet with little cutouts for his ears and an army green backpack. “Captain Oblivious not coming tonight? That’s all right; the Great Green Hunter is at your side.”
Dinah was not necessarily reassured.
Nor was she sure how to begin. Vincent usually chose the vault they would open that night, and she had no idea what criteria he used to determine which was next. (It was the one that was the closest, but Dinah thought it was more complicated than that.)
To her left was a gravestone featuring a large statue of a hooded woman offering up at eye level what appeared to be a massive knot of stone cords. Peering into the statue’s hood, found the statue had no eyes, just soft depressions where eyes should have been. Yet, differently colored veins in the marble seemed to suggest the eyeless statue was crying. Dinah backed away, slightly creeped out, and decided to focus on the knot instead.
It wasn’t as if she had any way of untying it. Even though both ends of the cord were visible on the left and right sides, it was still made of unyielding stone. Dinah gently touched the knot, wondering if she could remove it from the statue’s hands. Instead, the knot split directly down the middle and fell apart in symmetrical halves. Behind the statue, a trapdoor opened, revealing nothing but empty darkness. Dinah blinked in surprise. “That was easier than I expected,” she said, ill at ease.
“Wow,” said Edaniel. “Another hole in the ground. Obviously we are dealing with the cream of the undead crop. So, who are we going after tonight, anyway?”
Dinah read off the gravestone:
CAINE
I lost my child, my love, my life,
And by my own folly, I am bound,
To struggle with she who called herself sister,-
“The last line is missing,” said Dinah. “It looks like it was worn away.”
“And that’s why we don’t allow grave rubbings in the Mausoleum!” said Edaniel. “You think you’re getting a memento, but all you’re doing is damning a ghost for all eternity! Don’t worry, Dinah. Sure those poems are frequently clues to the ghost’s cause of death, and not knowing pertinent information can lead to an early and horrible demise-”
“I’m sure we will be fine,” Dinah interrupted, more to convince herself than anything else. She carefully peered into the darkness. A ladder appeared out of the gloom, inviting Dinah in and down. Sweeping up the hem of her dress, Dinah turned around and mounted the ladder.
“It’ll be wicky splenda!” cried Edaniel, putting on his Wicky Splenda Top Hat and doing his Wicky Splenda Waltz at the top of the ladder.
“Edaniel,” said Dinah, looking up at him as she picked her way down the ladder, “I have a hard enough time understanding you when you don’t make up words.”
Edaniel, with amazing dexterity, leapt from rung to rung after Dinah, chattering all the while. “I do not make up words,” he said. “Well, I do, on occasion. Being a Tower Guard is not all spooky speeches and information dispensing. It’s also centuries of The Price is Right and using the pages of my brother’s dull philosophy books to make paper airplanes, jets and helicopters. And a zeppelin, but that didn’t work out too well. Anyway, while I may develop a new word once in a while, I did not make up those. Unless I did and just forgot. Which is entirely possible. And why are we stopping?”
“The ladder ends here,” said Dinah, looking down to see only more empty darkness.
“That’s shoddy workmanship,” said Edaniel. “This ghost should fire his sub-contractor.”
“What do we do?”
“Jump!” suggested Edaniel. Dinah gave him a look that plainly said, “Are you kidding me?”, even if she didn’t vocalize this thought.
“Well, what else are we going to do?” asked Edaniel. “Wait for the elevator? You know, it doesn’t matter how often you push the button; it isn’t going to show up any faster.”
Dinah began to doubt that she had solved the knot puzzle properly. What if this wasn’t the right entrance to the vault? Maybe they should climb back up and she could fiddle with the knot a little more.
Throughout her musings, she did not notice Edaniel bunching up his hind legs in preparation for a leap. She did notice however, when he jumped over her head, and disappeared into the darkness with a “SITTING BULL!” A long “WHEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” that grew gradually softer and then faded out all together followed his shout.
“Edaniel!” shouted Dinah after him. She was at the crux of a dilemma. Did she follow Edaniel into the nothingness, or did she abandon him and try to find another way down? Steeling her nerve, Dinah forced herself to let go of the ladder and followed Edaniel’s lead.
She hit ground about two seconds later, her knees aching from the jolt of landing.
“You should bend your knees more,” advised Edaniel, who was standing a little ways off.
“I thought it would be further,” said Dinah. “I heard your shout and thought-”
“Nah,” said Edaniel. “I was just messin’ with you.”
Dinah took a look around her. She and Edaniel were standing at the edge of a groove of skeleton trees a short distance from a gently sloping hill. The grass was brown, but hard grown long. It didn’t appear that anyone had come this way for a while. At the top of the hill was a large manor house surrounded by a high wrought iron fence. From the back of the house, a single turret loomed, almost like a castle keep.
“Another ghost in a crumbling mansion. There must have been a lot of mansions in Bizenghast at one time,” mused Dinah.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” said Edaniel, leaning in conspiratorially. “They’re actually all the same house.”
“Really?”
“No, I just totally made that up.”
Dinah spared Edaniel a troubled glance as she hurried toward the fence. She felt exposed at the bottom of the hill, but was afraid that the gate would be locked. She needn’t have worried. The gate, though high and imposing, had rusted so severely that she could push it down with little effort.
There was a wide gravel path border by scraggly bushes leading to the front entrance of the mansion. As Dinah and Edaniel crept toward the house, Dinah could swear she could hear someone scrapping the gravel behind her. But every time she turned to look, there was no one there. Not surprising, as they were dealing with ghosts, after all, but unnerving nonetheless. Dinah was severely agitated by the time she reached the door, not sure whether there was someone else there, or if she was just imagining it all. Just as she was about to try the knob, something flurried behind her, and she turned with a gasp. Behind her was a disheveled ghost woman with her hands clasped in front of her as if beseeching.
“Are you the doctors?” the ghost asked.
“Doctors?”
“To see my sister,” supplied the ghost.
“Well,” said Edaniel. “I’m a doctor. Don’t know if I’m the doctor.”
Despite coming from a green, cat-like monster, this appeared to satisfy the ghost, who quickly grabbed Dinah’s hand. “Please, come inside. I’ll explain everything.”
Dinah shivered at the cold touch of the ghost. Though tangible, the ghost’s flesh seemed to shift around Dinah’s hand like the skin of an overripe peach over the fruit. Dinah wanted to pull away, but allowed herself to be led into the house. She was anxious to learn what had happened so she could leave and get back to Vincent as soon as possible.
Once in the foyer, the ghost slammed the doors shut, and leaned against them, pressing her forehead to the seam between the doors. “I’m glad you came,” said the ghost, not turning around. “I’ve been ever so worried about Lillian.”
Turning around, the ghost pushed stray brown hair that had escaped from her braid behind her ears, and looked firmly at the ground. “My name is Margaret Caine, and my sister has done something…horrible.” She whispered the last word and looked up at Dinah with wide eyes.
“What did she do?” asked Dinah, steeling herself for the worst possible tale of murder and betrayal.
The ghost beckoned Dinah to a door off to the side, and opened it slowly. Without stepping into the room, Dinah could see the end of a table and a heavy looking chair, and assumed this was the dining room. Stepping inside, she stifled a cry. Lying on the table were two bodies, one of a man about Margaret’s age, the other of a little boy no more than five or six. There was nothing in particular about them that suggested they were dead, but normal people did not take naps on the dining room table.
Margaret nodded wisely, and pulled Dinah out of the dining room. She continued to clutch Dinah’s arm, and pushed her face into Dinah’s. “She’s mad, Doctor. I had to lock her under the tower; else she would have killed me too. I’ll take you there after tea.”
“Perhaps we should go now,” said Dinah, really wanting to avoid yet another meal-related incident with a ghost.
“NO!” shouted Margaret, rounding on Dinah. “Not yet! After tea. After tea, you can see for yourself that my sister is mad.”
“I think she’s a few constellations short of a complete zodiac herself,” said Edaniel in an undertone to Dinah.
The ghost seemed to relax once they were all having tea and sandwiches. She even smiled as she asked Dinah and Edaniel for news from town. Edaniel made up a wild story about wild boars stampeding through the local cathedral, causing the priest to hold an exorcism to drive out the spirit of an angry pig that Dinah found ridiculous, but the ghost seemed to find absolutely fascinating. “I wonder if restless pig spirits are common?” she asked.
“About as common as restless cat spirits,” said Dinah.
“Are there many of those?”
“Meow,” said Edaniel.
“Oh! You have such a darling kitty, Mrs. Doctor,” cried Margaret, as if she had not just spent the past half hour talking to said kitty about boars and priests.
“What?” asked Edaniel, for even he was unsure how to respond to this.
“Kitty want a bag of yarn?” said the ghost of Margaret Caine in a squeaky baby voice, digging through a nearby basket for a satchel of yellow, lavender and light pink yarn. Dinah half expected Edaniel to bite her head off for calling him a kitty, or for talking like she’d just inhaled a whole party’s worth of helium balloons, but to her surprise, Edaniel merely took the bag of yarn and hauled it up on his back.
“All right! Bag of yarn!” said Edaniel. “My afghan will soon be finished.”
“Now!” said the ghost, rising abruptly from her chair. “Shall we go under the tower?”
“Under?” asked Dinah.
Edaniel’s Busy Day
Chapter Two: Everything’s Better With Edaniel
Dinah arrived alone at the Sunken Mausoleum the next night. Vincent had tried to convince her that he was able to come, but his arm had, in fact, been broken. And though it was possible that it wouldn’t be a detriment, a broken arm was not something one wanted when avoiding murderous ghosts with death traps demonstrating exactly how long they’d had to think them up.
Edainel greeted her in the graveyard, wearing a pith helmet with little cutouts for his ears and an army green backpack. “Captain Oblivious not coming tonight? That’s all right; the Great Green Hunter is at your side.”
Dinah was not necessarily reassured.
Nor was she sure how to begin. Vincent usually chose the vault they would open that night, and she had no idea what criteria he used to determine which was next. (It was the one that was the closest, but Dinah thought it was more complicated than that.)
To her left was a gravestone featuring a large statue of a hooded woman offering up at eye level what appeared to be a massive knot of stone cords. Peering into the statue’s hood, found the statue had no eyes, just soft depressions where eyes should have been. Yet, differently colored veins in the marble seemed to suggest the eyeless statue was crying. Dinah backed away, slightly creeped out, and decided to focus on the knot instead.
It wasn’t as if she had any way of untying it. Even though both ends of the cord were visible on the left and right sides, it was still made of unyielding stone. Dinah gently touched the knot, wondering if she could remove it from the statue’s hands. Instead, the knot split directly down the middle and fell apart in symmetrical halves. Behind the statue, a trapdoor opened, revealing nothing but empty darkness. Dinah blinked in surprise. “That was easier than I expected,” she said, ill at ease.
“Wow,” said Edaniel. “Another hole in the ground. Obviously we are dealing with the cream of the undead crop. So, who are we going after tonight, anyway?”
Dinah read off the gravestone:
CAINE
I lost my child, my love, my life,
And by my own folly, I am bound,
To struggle with she who called herself sister,-
“The last line is missing,” said Dinah. “It looks like it was worn away.”
“And that’s why we don’t allow grave rubbings in the Mausoleum!” said Edaniel. “You think you’re getting a memento, but all you’re doing is damning a ghost for all eternity! Don’t worry, Dinah. Sure those poems are frequently clues to the ghost’s cause of death, and not knowing pertinent information can lead to an early and horrible demise-”
“I’m sure we will be fine,” Dinah interrupted, more to convince herself than anything else. She carefully peered into the darkness. A ladder appeared out of the gloom, inviting Dinah in and down. Sweeping up the hem of her dress, Dinah turned around and mounted the ladder.
“It’ll be wicky splenda!” cried Edaniel, putting on his Wicky Splenda Top Hat and doing his Wicky Splenda Waltz at the top of the ladder.
“Edaniel,” said Dinah, looking up at him as she picked her way down the ladder, “I have a hard enough time understanding you when you don’t make up words.”
Edaniel, with amazing dexterity, leapt from rung to rung after Dinah, chattering all the while. “I do not make up words,” he said. “Well, I do, on occasion. Being a Tower Guard is not all spooky speeches and information dispensing. It’s also centuries of The Price is Right and using the pages of my brother’s dull philosophy books to make paper airplanes, jets and helicopters. And a zeppelin, but that didn’t work out too well. Anyway, while I may develop a new word once in a while, I did not make up those. Unless I did and just forgot. Which is entirely possible. And why are we stopping?”
“The ladder ends here,” said Dinah, looking down to see only more empty darkness.
“That’s shoddy workmanship,” said Edaniel. “This ghost should fire his sub-contractor.”
“What do we do?”
“Jump!” suggested Edaniel. Dinah gave him a look that plainly said, “Are you kidding me?”, even if she didn’t vocalize this thought.
“Well, what else are we going to do?” asked Edaniel. “Wait for the elevator? You know, it doesn’t matter how often you push the button; it isn’t going to show up any faster.”
Dinah began to doubt that she had solved the knot puzzle properly. What if this wasn’t the right entrance to the vault? Maybe they should climb back up and she could fiddle with the knot a little more.
Throughout her musings, she did not notice Edaniel bunching up his hind legs in preparation for a leap. She did notice however, when he jumped over her head, and disappeared into the darkness with a “SITTING BULL!” A long “WHEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” that grew gradually softer and then faded out all together followed his shout.
“Edaniel!” shouted Dinah after him. She was at the crux of a dilemma. Did she follow Edaniel into the nothingness, or did she abandon him and try to find another way down? Steeling her nerve, Dinah forced herself to let go of the ladder and followed Edaniel’s lead.
She hit ground about two seconds later, her knees aching from the jolt of landing.
“You should bend your knees more,” advised Edaniel, who was standing a little ways off.
“I thought it would be further,” said Dinah. “I heard your shout and thought-”
“Nah,” said Edaniel. “I was just messin’ with you.”
Dinah took a look around her. She and Edaniel were standing at the edge of a groove of skeleton trees a short distance from a gently sloping hill. The grass was brown, but hard grown long. It didn’t appear that anyone had come this way for a while. At the top of the hill was a large manor house surrounded by a high wrought iron fence. From the back of the house, a single turret loomed, almost like a castle keep.
“Another ghost in a crumbling mansion. There must have been a lot of mansions in Bizenghast at one time,” mused Dinah.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” said Edaniel, leaning in conspiratorially. “They’re actually all the same house.”
“Really?”
“No, I just totally made that up.”
Dinah spared Edaniel a troubled glance as she hurried toward the fence. She felt exposed at the bottom of the hill, but was afraid that the gate would be locked. She needn’t have worried. The gate, though high and imposing, had rusted so severely that she could push it down with little effort.
There was a wide gravel path border by scraggly bushes leading to the front entrance of the mansion. As Dinah and Edaniel crept toward the house, Dinah could swear she could hear someone scrapping the gravel behind her. But every time she turned to look, there was no one there. Not surprising, as they were dealing with ghosts, after all, but unnerving nonetheless. Dinah was severely agitated by the time she reached the door, not sure whether there was someone else there, or if she was just imagining it all. Just as she was about to try the knob, something flurried behind her, and she turned with a gasp. Behind her was a disheveled ghost woman with her hands clasped in front of her as if beseeching.
“Are you the doctors?” the ghost asked.
“Doctors?”
“To see my sister,” supplied the ghost.
“Well,” said Edaniel. “I’m a doctor. Don’t know if I’m the doctor.”
Despite coming from a green, cat-like monster, this appeared to satisfy the ghost, who quickly grabbed Dinah’s hand. “Please, come inside. I’ll explain everything.”
Dinah shivered at the cold touch of the ghost. Though tangible, the ghost’s flesh seemed to shift around Dinah’s hand like the skin of an overripe peach over the fruit. Dinah wanted to pull away, but allowed herself to be led into the house. She was anxious to learn what had happened so she could leave and get back to Vincent as soon as possible.
Once in the foyer, the ghost slammed the doors shut, and leaned against them, pressing her forehead to the seam between the doors. “I’m glad you came,” said the ghost, not turning around. “I’ve been ever so worried about Lillian.”
Turning around, the ghost pushed stray brown hair that had escaped from her braid behind her ears, and looked firmly at the ground. “My name is Margaret Caine, and my sister has done something…horrible.” She whispered the last word and looked up at Dinah with wide eyes.
“What did she do?” asked Dinah, steeling herself for the worst possible tale of murder and betrayal.
The ghost beckoned Dinah to a door off to the side, and opened it slowly. Without stepping into the room, Dinah could see the end of a table and a heavy looking chair, and assumed this was the dining room. Stepping inside, she stifled a cry. Lying on the table were two bodies, one of a man about Margaret’s age, the other of a little boy no more than five or six. There was nothing in particular about them that suggested they were dead, but normal people did not take naps on the dining room table.
Margaret nodded wisely, and pulled Dinah out of the dining room. She continued to clutch Dinah’s arm, and pushed her face into Dinah’s. “She’s mad, Doctor. I had to lock her under the tower; else she would have killed me too. I’ll take you there after tea.”
“Perhaps we should go now,” said Dinah, really wanting to avoid yet another meal-related incident with a ghost.
“NO!” shouted Margaret, rounding on Dinah. “Not yet! After tea. After tea, you can see for yourself that my sister is mad.”
“I think she’s a few constellations short of a complete zodiac herself,” said Edaniel in an undertone to Dinah.
The ghost seemed to relax once they were all having tea and sandwiches. She even smiled as she asked Dinah and Edaniel for news from town. Edaniel made up a wild story about wild boars stampeding through the local cathedral, causing the priest to hold an exorcism to drive out the spirit of an angry pig that Dinah found ridiculous, but the ghost seemed to find absolutely fascinating. “I wonder if restless pig spirits are common?” she asked.
“About as common as restless cat spirits,” said Dinah.
“Are there many of those?”
“Meow,” said Edaniel.
“Oh! You have such a darling kitty, Mrs. Doctor,” cried Margaret, as if she had not just spent the past half hour talking to said kitty about boars and priests.
“What?” asked Edaniel, for even he was unsure how to respond to this.
“Kitty want a bag of yarn?” said the ghost of Margaret Caine in a squeaky baby voice, digging through a nearby basket for a satchel of yellow, lavender and light pink yarn. Dinah half expected Edaniel to bite her head off for calling him a kitty, or for talking like she’d just inhaled a whole party’s worth of helium balloons, but to her surprise, Edaniel merely took the bag of yarn and hauled it up on his back.
“All right! Bag of yarn!” said Edaniel. “My afghan will soon be finished.”
“Now!” said the ghost, rising abruptly from her chair. “Shall we go under the tower?”
“Under?” asked Dinah.