Vicar dreamt long and hard of things better left forgotten. He awoke in the middle of the afternoon, or so the clock by the bedside table said, but the heaviness of the curtains on the windows and thickness of the sheets that draped over the bed gave the room an oddly night-like quality. Pushing himself up, Vicar found that he'd been sweating - whatever it was that he dreamt of, it had no doubt been an extension of his waking woes. He wiped the cold salt from his neck and looked around. It was impossible to ascertain how long he'd been in here. He couldn't remember what time he'd staggered into bed, nor what the sky had looked like. The hallway leading up to this room was, after all, dark; the doors were dark wood, the floor was a dark carpet. How anyone could make their way down here without tumbling down and rolling through a wall was a mystery indeed to Vicar.

Once he'd collected some of his bearings, he staggered out of the bed, eyes opened as wide as they could go. This was Gaston's old room (not the one he'd taken to hiding in when he died, but the master bedroom he'd moved into after their father had finally given up the ghost), and it still smelled of him. Vicar wondered if any of the guests or relatives had riffled through its contents in the days leading up to the funeral. A flick of a switch and an orange, dying light strobed briefly before maintaining a steady illumination over the mess. The bed was itself not too much of a disaster, but the chest at the foot of the bed quickly disrupted the illusion of neatness. There was a severe scattering of money, envelopes, letter openers, quill fragments, emptied ink bottles, all strewn about on the limited space.

Now wobbling to a stand, Vicar found he'd crunched on something when he fell onto the sheets earlier in the day (or night?), and had neglected to clean it in some sleep-induced haze of guilt. His foot stung; was he bleeding? The light was paltry, barely lit anything in this den of gloom.

Cursing, he limped to the window and threw aside the curtains to better inspect himself. At least the carpet wasn't white! He didn't know how to clean blood out of anything, but he would have to learn fast at the rate his foot spilled it's contents on the floor.

"Damn it all." The smell of copper and wet filled his nose and he held back the urge to gag. The last time Vicar had smelled blood was in America. It was the smell that had woken him up, not the fire or the screams, but the smell of blood filling his nostrils. It had given him nightmares, flooded his mind with horrific dreams of murder and torture and slaughtered animals. The reality wasn't far off - Henson's voice, so perfectly suited for high volumes, had broken sound barriers, so shrill did it grow amidst the inferno. At the time, Vicar hadn't been able to hear Bobby or James or Harrison, but the other three! By God, they had squealed like stuck pigs as the fire swept them up, as they pleaded with anyone, with Vicar, to rescue them. Still, he hadn't woken up, not until a shelf came crashing down on Bobby. Poor Bobby, only a few feet away, and still unable to cry out. The hand that reached out so close to Vicar had been right in the way of the unstable shelf Vicar kept his most important papers, the ones due within a day. It fell every evening when the library door was opened and scattered the contents on the floor. If Vicar had an ounce of sense in him, he would have had it repaired, but always so tired! He was always tired. He should have fixed it that day, but he hadn't any sleep the night before, had too many things to grade for the French professor, too many notes to take for tomorrow's lesson. 

The shelf fell and the nails that stuck awkwardly out had come crashing down with a violence on Bobby's outstretched arm. It was only a few feet away; the sound of the skin tearing ought to have woken Vicar up, the deep tearing noise like paper being shredded, or perhaps fabric being torn. Alas, it was that horrid smell that reached him first. He'd twitched and writhed in his sleep until it finally forced him awake. If it was the smell that woke him, it was the blood itself that he recognised next, the boiling liquid running on the floor and his desk. It was rather impressive how far the blood had spattered once the shelf fell. Vicar could even remember the taste of it, how it fell in trickles down his lips. He sat, unrecognising for a moment, until he noticed Bobby's silent cries, the tears that evaporated as soon as they touched the poor boy's skin. Even the blood was crackling and crisping, turning into a sleeve of reds and browns on his arm. 

The window blew open and jolted Vicar from his memories. He was on the floor, somehow, hands covered in the blood from his foot, tears covering his cheeks. When had he sat down? Shaking, he tried to wipe the blood off, but it merely moved around his clothes, stained other parts of his arms. 

"Damn it all," he repeated. He turned his focus to the window, anything to distract him from what he'd just seen in his mind. Anything to get Bobby's look of betrayal and fear  to leave. His hands found the curtains and threw the inner sheets aside, only to immediately cover his face in shock. The last time he'd looked outside, the ugly gray-green of the sky and the lamp lights on the street had filtered in, but now! Now, it was snowing. Why? Vicar couldn't remember the last time it had snowed, not here in Cambridge, not anywhere. He was going mad, he was sure. The stunning brightness of the snow disagreed with him, as real as it looked. Surely, even that was a hallucination - even if it had snowed, why would it be so white and... beautiful?

Curiousity overcame him, and he opened the glass that shuddered under his touch. The snow still fell in trickles over him, light pieces floating and covering his hair. This couldn't be real! Just last night, the weather had been... boring, usual, disgusting! Vicar trembled as a gust of wind blew past, knocking snow just past his head and onto the ground below. He squinted where it had fallen. Were the guests still here? He supposed the funeral hadn't actually started - was it just the wake that the scattering of cousins and aunts had attended? Something was in the garden, whatever the case, something stark against the icy white. 

Not wishing to reveal himself, Vicar moved to lean back inside, but his hands (how quickly he'd already forgotten about them in the startling revelation of snow!) slid against the window frame and shook loose the blood that coated them. In paralyzed fear, he could only watch as the red liquid fell and fell and fell, until it scattered across the snow and besides the shapes. It was impossible to tell what was down there! 

Nothing moved. He breathed out a sigh of relief, ready to pull himself back in and explain the blood later, until something did move. Vicar could have screamed, but the pale face of a guest looked up at him and strangely, put a finger to the bright red lips that stood out against the distance and snow. Who was that? Vicar threw himself back inside and fell to the floor, gasping for breath. Why were people still here, damn it all! Why was anyone outside, and just what had they been doing under his window? He knew he would have to get up and close the window, but he did not want to face whoever was down there. How much explaining would he have to do! He hadn't been at the wake, hadn't even been seen in the last day, and the house was his, now, wasn't it? The dead man had been his brother. Vicar shuddered to think of the questions the women that populated the first floor would have for him, but he hadn't recognised the one outside. Was it even a woman? 

Those red lips were far too cruel and familiar, he decided. Where did he know that mouth from? Feeling as though he'd fallen from the window, he swallowed the bile that had risen in his throat and crawled to the curtains again. His foot still stung; why hadn't he at least bound it in something? Slowly pulling himself up, Vicar nudged his head into the curtains and peered through the opened window, blinking as a snowflake rested on his lashes. 

They were still there. 

Seeing the person wouldn't have been so bad, if only they weren't still looking up at the window! Vicar trembled and leaned back slightly, but there was no use in hiding. Whoever it was, they had seen him and seen his blood. To his horror, the red lips formed into a smile and the figure stepped out of view. Where had they gone? He leaned forward, daring to test the limits of the window to better see, but there was no sign of the stranger, not even a footstep in the snow. All Vicar could see was the broken, wire fence of the garden and the snow-covered tops of some long-dead plants. There was something else in the garden - far too small to be a person this time - just in the corner, something oblong and awkward looking that surely didn't belong there. It looked like... like a box, a long and open box. 

Vicar slammed the window shut this time, panting as the curtains fell back over the bright outdoors and cloaking the room once more in gloom. The paltry light had since flickered out, which didn't really surprise Vicar at all. This house was a dying mess and so was everything in it. Not even people could survive long here! He briefly wondered if anyone had ever died of old age in the house before shuddering at the flash of the stranger passing before his eyes. 

He should be moving. If it was a relative (he had a sneaking suspicion it wasn't, but who else would come to funeral of a shut-in eccentric?), they would be making their way upstairs and into the old haunt of his brother, no doubt to yell at him and drag him to attend the reading of the will, or whatever it was people did at funerals. He'd been careful to avoid the ones the Pendragon-Hall held for the Professor and Amelia and all of her friends.

Looking around, the room just barely visible in the cracks of light the window allowed in, Vicar felt a suffocating sense of loss. Prison-like loss, it was. He thought about Evelyn Thomas and how much she would have hated living in here. Was his father the same? Was it the room that made the late Piere Andrews such a miserable, violent mess of a father? Surely the vampiric walls had sapped everyone in here of their life, though, if Gaston's last notes held any truth to them, it was really the house as a whole that stole the lifeforce from its residents. Gaston hadn't died in here (or, at least Vicar thought), but in Winnifred's old room. Were those walls cursed as well?

Making sure to take the only remains of Winn Peterson's life from the stand beside the bed, Vicar and the journal padded out of the room, leaving behind faint red footsteps on the carpet, though, nobody of natural means could have seen them. The smell, however, followed them downstairs, where even the walls of the house could have detected the all-too familiar stench of blood.