Author Games: Town of Mayhem

Paranoic Mayhem | Easton Adaire

Doctor: Easton Adaire

When she dashes from the cellar back up to her home and slams the front door behind her, fingers trembling as she fastens the latch, Ean is no longer there. At first, she is too caught up in her own fear to notice, but when she collapses on the chair in the kitchen and finds herself drenched in a puddle of blood, she remembers. "Ean?" she calls, her voice soft for fear that the ghost can still hear her, will suddenly apparate through the walls of her home and scare her half to death, but there is no response. With careful footsteps across the creaking floorboard, she scours the rooms, frown deepening with each room the bleeding man is absent from. When she circles around back to the kitchen, she makes for the door.

But as her hand clasps around the latch once more, Easton finds she cannot make herself open it.

She sleeps fitfully. Her dreams are of the blood that had leaked from her mother's scalp into her flawless bun as the brain slowly lost all sense of personality and memory and everything that had made her mother, well, her mother. And Easton wonders if she, too, is not losing it- just not as instantaneously as her mother had. No, she is slowly forgetting who she is... who she is without the constant fear that eats away at her mind.

She wakes to the sound of her own screams and a harsh knocking at the door. "Miss Adaire? Are you alright?" a gentle, feminine voice calls, voice muffled by the thick blockade at the entrance of the home.

Panic sends her bolting from bed as a sudden, terrifying thought flashes through her mind. Though she has always known Elsa to be friendly, Easton wonders if Else does not suspect her of the horrid crimes painted all over the property. Ean's blood across the doorstep and the kitchen, Agathina's body still resting in the cellar, and of course, the various knives she uses to pull foreign objects from wounds... the ghosts have set her up flawlessly.

Stay casual, Easton, her mother would have said. Invite them in for tea.

But when does tea stop being the solution?

She takes a shuddery breath in, then descends to the front door, where Elsa patiently waits. Each step shrieks with nerves, and her heartbeat refuses to cooperate with the deep breaths she takes, attempting to apply her medical training in anxiety to her own self. How difficult it is to force herself to do what she forces others to.

"Elsa! What a pleasant surprise," Easton forces a smile as the door creaks open. "Would you like to come in for tea?"

The girl returns a thin smile. "I'm afraid not, Miss Adaire, but would you mind coming out to the square for a moment? We're trying to collect everyone."

For a moment, Easton thinks it will be her own self hanging in the center of the town's square. She quickly leans out of the doorway, observing the others scattered throughout the area; startlingly few remain, each pinched face appearing as anxious as her own. They are not killers, she tells herself.

Her gaze bounces back to Elsa. "Of course. I'll be right out."

Shutting the door, Easton scurries to the nearest mirror, fixing her hair- Mother always taught her how to look good. But as she stares back at her reflection of blatant exhaustion, she lets the ribbons drop from her grasp, waves tumbling freely for the first time in years. She traces the dark bags under her eyes in the mirror, the red lining her eyes from constant crying from perpetual fear. She breathes with chapped lips. "She didn't know anything beyond her parties," Easton whispers, staring at a woman with reflection her mother would have deemed appalling. But she realizes her mother only knew what to do in the comfort of a rich, hospitable home and really, all she'd ever needed. She realizes that her mother would have no idea how to cope with killings across town and mysterious ghosts appearing in the cellar.