The sky gives way to boards eaten by rot and grime, and shadows settle in crannies - no, they lurk. There's a certain life to it that he feels when he stares into those bottomless pits, a certain watchfulness. He can't see anything, but he feels it, staring. Does Erie stand watch back there, seeing him and saying nothing? Him in the flesh, or only in soul?

He swallows a lump and smacks the back of his neck, giving it a solid rub, and with it, he wipes the paranoia from his mind. For the time being, anyways. He has to focus. Erie is here. He is, damn it, and the sooner he gets through these rooms, he can move onto the next building if he doesn't find him here. God, the thought puts adrenaline in his legs. He wants to run, to run and scream Erie's name. Almost does, too, but Lacey's words nag at the back of his mind, her angry tirades from every other time they'd been somewhere they weren't supposed to be. These buildings are old and he needs to go slow.

So he goes slow. Wary - half by instinct, half by force - and tense, he checks the rooms on the first floor, all empty. Dust fills his nostrils, chokes him. He coughs. Sneezes. Coughs again. When he puts his mouth to his elbow, the light in the corner of his eye morphs. Movement. A trick of the light, just another shadow. But it leads his gaze to a set of stairs. Slowly, he lowers his arm, and slowly, he approaches the steps. A foul odor fills him up as he rises, something he's never smelled before. Bitter. Sour. Burning.

Even as her own world falls back into place around her, Lacey can't comprehend the sudden rush of seeing through another's eyes and then being thrust back into her own. It's not like she's entirely taken out of her reality, either; these sounds and smells and feelings, they're all there, just thrown alongside those of his. It's too much. It's too much, all at once. Breaths come fast enough to border hyperventilation, and with each short gasp, the sour taste of Malevolence still sits pungent on her tongue.

I'm gonna throw up, she thinks, throwing her hands out to clutch the handle and the edge of the passenger seat. She leans forward. The truck and the road rumble beneath her. She keeps jostling. One eye squints, only one, and she wouldn't be surprised if Jeremy keeps glancing at her so frequently because her face is a lovely shade of green. He says something, but it reaches her ears slow. Slurred. Deeper and chunkier than it ought to be, like his voice has some weak Donald Duck filter over it. "You okay? Laceybug? You're..."

He fades away, and so does she.

The building itself is small, so by default, his time checking upstairs is short. A hall is all there is, with a bedroom to the left and a bathroom to the right; he can tell by how the old tile sits scattered across the floorboards just outside the latter. He's already come to the conclusion that Erie's not in this one, but he has to check, just to make sure, so he takes those three creaking steps and peers into the bathroom.

It's been purged of plumbing, of everything that otherwise would've made it functional. His chest starts thrumming, deep and hard. Where the tub should've been, a person takes up space, cross-legged and naked as the day they were born. Their presence startles him and the exposure nearly sends him running down the stairs, but their back is to him, so he swallows down his growing trepidation and asks, with firmness: "Have you seen a boy around here? Erie Mott?"

No sooner have the words left his mouth (when they most definitely shouldn't have, he knows that now) does the...person snap to attention, their neck craning back to face him. Except it can't face him. There's no face. Where features should twist and protrude, there's just a hairless, blank film of skin.

Shock rises and he cries out. He runs backwards but his foot slips on the loose tiles and he stumbles back on his ass. The back of his head strikes the wall in the hall, and

Lacey gasps. The blurred landscape flying by gives her vertigo. Before she has time to even catch her bearings, Jeremy is flying off the handle, flicking his gaze rapidly from her to the road, over and over. "Your eyes just rolled into the back of your head and I don't like it! Are you okay? I swear to God, if you're messing with me right now-"

"Yeah, no," she forces, driving a thumb into the inner corner of her eye to plug the moisture, "just tired. I...do that when I'm tired and stressed sometimes. Helps...me...yeah, I'm fine. Keep driving." Her organs leap into her throat as the environment outside the windshield takes shape. "No, here, turn here!"

"There's no road there!" he argues.

"Just! Drive over the tracks, dad!"

He gives her a pointed look, solemn and creased, but she keeps her face set with lifted brows and wide eyes. He huffs heavily and jerks the wheel to the left. The tires take charge and they go roaring up the hill as his foot drives down hard on the gas. Rubber bumps the tracks, and the whole vehicle leaps over the metal. Lacey lifts slightly out of the chair when the truck jumps and

collides with the soaked earth, calves brushing the dead grass as he sprints through the field. He can't look back, doesn't have to. Two of those faceless beasts chase after, lumbering along with gnarled fingers outstretched. He keeps his pointed as he runs to give him speed, but he can't quell the panic, can't. His body is so chilled it burns, and he wants to scream. To scream loud and long for help and to get out of here. He should get out of here.

Should. Can't. Won't. Gideon came for Erie and he's not leaving without Erie, no matter the circumstance. An army of Lacey's demons could tail his ass, and he'd still leap across the threshold into another building as he does now, would still call out his name with trembling fervor, as he does now. "Erie! Erie, I'm here, tell me where you are!"

The sweet song of his lover's voice doesn't greet him, only the panic-inducing muffled twittering in the throats of the skinny beasts in the open doorway behind him. Gideon throws his head back for a glance at the thing. It's hunched in a wicked stance. One second. One second before he rushes away to check the other rooms on the floor. He pokes his head into them one-by-one, his palms scraping against the splintered doorframes to keep him from falling inside before he launches off and down the narrow hall again.

Cold pressure wraps around his shoulder. A screech leaves his throat and he wrenches out of its grasp violently before throwing himself at another room. The brief once-over sends his heart plummeting to his bowels when Erie isn't there. He checks another one, and for a moment he almost weeps at the figure he sees standing there, but it's a trick of the light. Just another demon.

"Oh, fuck me," he whimpers, pushing through the new throng.

They're really starting to come out of the woodwork. Oh, God, oh, fuck. His skull crowds with these sentiments. From rooms and stairways and those dastardly shadows, they crawl out and lumber towards him. The ones nearest keep trying to grab on. Their fingers brush him and curl into the fabric of his clothes and jerk him back but he's just as feral, just as thrashing, and he sprints onwards in his wild-eyed search for Erie.

A hand strikes out and slashes open his cheek. He jerks to the side as warmth spills from the broken skin,

and the truck jerks in the middle of the field, forcing the wind out of Lacey as the seatbelt digs into her chest. She blinks profusely, staring out the windows until something about where they are clicks. It does. Just a couple minutes away should be the entrance they've been taking to Isaac's home all this while. It's the right direction, but they need to go beyond that. "Why aren't we moving?"

"I'm trying here," Jeremy grunts, flooring it. The truck shakes, but outside they only hear a loud, wet splutter, and they don't move.

"Keep flooring it. We've gotta keep going." Her hands won't stop fidgeting. Gideon's out there. Gideon's out there, getting surrounded. "C'mon!"

This is where Jeremy gives her a narrow-eyed look of his own. "Lacey, you sent us right into a fucking newborn baby pond." His face softens. "Look out the window. We drove straight into a foot of water."

With dread swinging from her ribs, she shifts so she can peer out. He's right, that much is self-evident: this field is flooded. They must be stuck in the mud, but driving any further in this would probably be one of the worst decisions they could make, because it doesn't seem to get any better as the miles rack up. She sets her lips in a tight line. We can't stop now, though. Phantom pains ache spread through her cheek, and she brushes her fingers along the unbroken skin. I can't stop now.

She sets her face hard: flattened brows, pursed lips, lifted chin. Her fingers tighten around the handle and she flicks her wrist, popping the door open. Through the corner of her eye, Jeremy starts to shake his head. "Lacey. Lacey, no, close the door." She slips from the seat, and he reaches out to grab her but misses. "Get back in the truck. You're not doing this, get-"

She slams the door. And, without a moment's hesitation, she starts running. Well, running as best she can through a foot of water. She lifts her legs as high as she can in order to avoid as much of the slowing effects of walking through water, but still, she has to work hard to wade through the browned fluid. Just a few yards of this and she would've expected her legs to start burning and her lungs to give, but apparently, when you spend two weeks running around Carrick, from demons and towards the unknown, your legs get strong and your stamina increases.

Now, that's not to say she's an athlete now, not by any means. Her clothes soak up water and everything starts to droop and drag, but the pace she's at is enough to keep her ahead of the middle-aged man who stumbles as soon as his legs dip into the water. He yells her name, yells it at the top of his lungs - "Lacey, for the love of God, stop!" - but she doesn't.

Sorry, dad. I swear, after this I'll never ignore you again.

A burning sun peeks through the thin line of trees to her left. It turns the muddied water to sparkling fire. Uprooted shafts of withered corn stalks float and try to catch onto her but she bats them away, spreading ripples out far and wide from her aggressive wading.

Her foot catches on something. She shrieks and throws out an arm to

grab onto a rusted doorknob to another room but his fingertips only chip a few red flakes off before the ground disappears from beneath him. The knob that'd been so close shrinks to a pinpoint. There's a weightlessness to his body for a moment but it ends hard as his shoulderblades crack against a window. The only thing that keeps him from going straight through it are his wiry arms busting against the frame and legs against the wall underneath.

Glass rains around him in broad shards. They clink onto the hardwood and his knees buckle; he slips to the ground without much choice to join them. Around him, the room tilts, and so do the dozen faceless fiends prowling forward. His breaths start to come and go swift and shallow. He puts his hand to his chest and could just give it a good squeeze to rip his own heart out, that's how hard it pounds. A thought passes through his mind, fleeting: I'm gonna die here today.

A panicked wheeze leaves his throat. He pinches himself. Erie. Erie. Erie. Timber skin and brown eyes aglow with sunlight entering from the side of his iris fill his vision. He tries to remind himself of the boy's voice, but it doesn't show up in his mind right. It's warbled. I need to hear it again. I need to.

He takes a deep breath to soothe himself. His creased features smooth over. With Erie's face in mind, a fearlessness, wicked in nature, fills him up. Lifts him up, and a particularly pointed shard of glass, too. It knocks against the wall behind him and scrapes the wood. He sharpens an unblinking gaze on an encroaching demon. It seems to see him, too. To delight in a challenge.

It rushes him all at once and he slashes out. Hot blood spurts onto his cheeks and he flinches but takes off. The front door crashes against his elbows. He leaps out across the front steps and into the warm morning light.

He doesn't stop running, but still glances back as he does. These malicious humanoids pause at the front of the house, spilling out slowly. He pauses, too. Their whispers fill the air, puzzle-piece twitters of, "You will die, boy, you will die, boy, a shame a shame a shame to die, boy." Without really being conscious of it until the things hesitate, his face drips into something harsh, into a thing of bone-chilling nothingness, dead-pan anger.

"I will not die before I find him. I swear it."

Then, all at once, the muscles beneath their cheeks stretch, as if to smile. Then, all at once, they lurch forward. One kicks off its haunches to leap at him. He roars as he strikes out to catch it in the chest with the glass.

She splashes water into her own mouth on accident and gags at the bitter droplets. Her trek hasn't stopped or slowed, much to her relief. Apparently, she runs on auto-pilot when his eyes become hers, but she's not quite sure the distance she's made. Doesn't matter, she reminds herself. She'll get there when she gets there but she hopes that's soon.

Movement lurks in the corners of her vision and her breath hitches. She turns her face to the left. Her nostrils scrunch as she sniffs. It's hard to get a good read with the water producing enough of a thick, earthen smell on its own, but the entity's aura doesn't light her chest up with frenzy. That bone-thin man in the overalls, one strap falling off his shoulder, limps beside her. She allows herself to breathe. Benevolence.

In front of her, another ripple collides with her own. She glances to the right to find another man, this one in a pressed uniform. A musket rests against his shoulder and he marches with it stiffly, keeping pace with her several yards away. And beyond him her eyes reach.

Shapes move beneath the surface of the water all across the field and, from that same water, they emerge. A woman bogged down by her own thick Victorian dress drags herself up and sprints forward, cloth bunched up in her hands to keep from tripping over the phantom linens. Even from here, there's a visible vengeance in her eyes.

Then two young adults rise from the shallow depths, a boy and a girl donned in leg warmers and muted bright colors. They walk hand in hand, squeezing so tight that the blood beneath their skin must be all stopped up. Further ahead, a little girl sprouts from the ripples, dress pink and drenched but of no bother to her. She skips along.

More and more rise up and Lacey loses her breath. Some faces she recognizes, and some don't ring a bell at all, but something is new about all of these lost field ghosts: they don't look so lost anymore. Gone is the aimless wandering, there's a purpose in their step, a destination in their eyes. And they walk with Lacey to the end of it.

She swallows down a sudden cry of emotion that begs to be let out. Instead, she picks up the pace. "Let's not let another person die before his time," she breathes. She throws her head back this time and lets the eyes roll into the back of her head willingly. She has to make sure her words still have a chance.

Time has passed. Gideon stumbles through the entrance of another shack, a set of double-doors so old they take on an appearance similar to that of spongy bone. He nudges one door open with little energy and it swings in fast enough to clack the wall behind it. With a groan, he kicks it "shut" again. His hand throbs too much to touch anything. One look down dizzies him, the palm split open and dripping rubies from driving that glass shard into the skin. It's gone now, and his flesh screams in agony.

He sucks cold air between his teeth and limps towards the nearest open room. A draft chills the bare skin where his shirt has been split open, where it hangs on only by sparse threads. The hoodie is gone, abandoned as nothing more than shreds out in the several inches of water out there. Goose pimples take root and his eyes water at the stinging pain that rocks through the scratches littering his skin. "Fuck," he croaks, and bites his lip as he pushes away from the door frame and moves towards the next one.

At this point, they don't even have to run to catch up with him. They trail him with leisure and grab on with calm, needy hands as he drags himself through the empty front room. Erie's name flies from his lips every few seconds. The touching is non-stop. They mock him. "Erie, please!"

No response. His body is on fire and the water in his eyes breaks and falls. Weary, he hobbles over to the window and stares out, unsure of what to do now, unsure if there's anything he can do. They block the front door. Around him, they collect, and their hands roam over his arms, back, neck, stomach. Maybe he will die. If he's lucky, he won't find Erie in whatever world he winds up in when he does. If he's lucky, Erie clings onto life even now, somewhere. His heart twitches. He has to find him. But-

A hand slaps against the grimy window glass in front of him and he flinches. Another bang, another pound. Those roaming hands slither up and cover his mouth, his eyes, but they don't stop - what did Lacey call it? - Malevolence from shattering the glass and reaching through the broken places to leech the warm life from his body.

The fingers overlapping his eyes split for a moment. Everything spins. Everything blurs. Everything good dies within him, because he just wanted to hear Erie talk again, but he won't get to.

The semi-circle of shacks is within sight. Behind her, something akin to a small army of salt-breathers marches with her. True, they may not throw themselves into the line of fire alone when a malevolent spirit is within reach, but this many at once? Even death cannot take away their reassurance, their sudden spurts of bravery. They see the shack spilling with beasties just the same as Lacey.

"Find him," she says.

The soldier salutes her. And all at once, they rush ahead with mist trailing behind them, tickling the surface of the water which has lessened to their calves here. Malevolence sees them coming; they turn on the salt-breathers with a fever. They clash with Benevolence head-on. Salt spills from scared mouths of its own accord, and the stretchy skin of the demons sizzles and reddens and burns.

Lacey continues to run forward. There should be enough of a distraction going on for her to force her way in without getting her throat ripped out.

She thinks too soon. She runs by at the wrong moment, the only moment where one of the malevolent spirits breaks its own face apart to consume the soul of a sad spirit that'd ran here with her. There's a scream, but only for a second. It's cut short. Lacey clamps her eyes shut and keeps running.

She meets with the Victorian woman just outside the shack, the one with the blaze burning in the hollows of her eyes. "I take it not all of us will make it out, Miss Waits," she asks, voice low and controlled.