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Charles Rowland couldn’t breathe. As a ghost, he could breathe perfectly fine, but as a ghost going through Hell, it felt like he was wearing a binder again. His chest feels tight, head feels heavy, and he can’t catch his breath. It’s a terrible feeling.
The descent into Hell is dizzying. After walking down three levels of the spiral staircase, Charles had to sit himself against the wall to close his eyes and catch his breath, reminding himself that this wouldn’t last forever, and his best mate needs him.
He passes by a young woman, sobbing hysterically into her hands. “Hey, you all right?” Charles asks, slowing down his steps as he approaches her. The woman’s jumps in surprise, backing away from the edge of the staircase, and stares up at Charles. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but did you happen to see a British teenage boy?”
“Are you talking to me?” The woman gasps, “do you know why I’m here?”
Charles shakes his head, “no, uh, sorry. No I don’t.” She grabs at his legs, startling Charles nearly over the edge of the staircase. Without a second thought, he bypasses the woman and continues down the stairs at a faster pace. In the distance, he can hear her shouts for him to come back, asking why she landed herself in Hell. Frankly, he doesn’t wanna know.
It’s very easy to find the First Circle of Hell, although it's rather empty. The room is tall with two staircases that lead to a second level. Charles finds himself staring at the mirrored walls, and it’s odd to see himself in these mirrored walls. This version of himself has been around longer than when he was alive. A version where he is happy. A version where he feels authentically himself. A version with his favourite person, who happens to be stuck in Hell (again).
Not wanting to waste any time, Charles continues up the stairs to the front desk. Edwin’s notes in his leatherbound book confuse him, leading him to the bell on the desk, but not finding where the next doorway is supposed to be. Charles decides to ring the bell, which wasn’t his brightest idea due to the distant screaming, but he couldn’t help himself. If there’s a button, he’s going to push it.
The next two rooms are empty as well. Edwin has them labelled in his book as the Second and Third Circles of Hell, both truly awful and unbearable to walk through. Charles has no doubt what Edwin saw was awful, but he just can’t see it (and hopefully he never will see it).
Charles finds the entrance to the Dollhouse through a wall behind an arcade machine. This place is awful compared to the other three rooms. It’s extremely dark and filled with broken porcelain dolls.
Before he walks too far in, Charles reaches into his backpack and takes out the lantern. He shutters at the sight before him and descends further into Hell.
—
“Charles?”
“Yeah, mate?”
Edwin gives him a wavering smile, looking everywhere but Charles’s eyes. “I . . I find myself . . . it’s very unusual for me to . . .”
A bright smile casts over Charles’s face, “apologise? I know, I'm still gobsmacked at that one.”
“No,” Edwin sighs, face growing pinkish, “not that. Listen, Monty unearthed some . . . feelings within me.” Charles watches his hands mess with the cuffs of his shirt, one of Edwin’s habits when he’s nervous. It pains Charles’s heart that he’s nervous to talk about his feelings with him.
Charles reaches a hand out to hold his fidgeting hands. “You could’ve told me you liked him. Don’t matter one bit to me.” His smile fades, finding his fingers brushing against the cat bracelet resting neatly against Edwin’s wrist. “Oi. This is why you’ve been acting so cagey with the Cat King. He trying to get frisky with you?” The colour on his face only deepens in embarrassment, which tells Charles everything he needs to know about that pesky man. “I’m going to knock his whiskers off his little face.”
Edwin laughs, taking his hands back from Charles and pulling his right sleeve over the pesky bracelet. “Thank you, but I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that. He’s another case.” He takes a shaky breath, eyes finally reaching Charles as he works up the courage to say what’s on his mind. “I’ve been realising that I . . .”
If only Edwin could have finished that sentence. The Night Nurse appears from the front of the room, startling the two boys from their private moment together. She continues Edwin’s sentence, “you’ve been realising I was right!” The cheerfulness sounds forced, as she’s probably still upset about the being-eaten-by-a-giant-fish thing. “Let’s all go to the afterlife so thoughtfully appointed to us, how about that?”
“You’re supposed to be at the bottom of the ocean,” Charles exclaims, holding his ground in front of Edwin.
The Night Nurse smiles quizzically at Charles. “For all intents and purposes, I’m an eternal, trans-dimensional being. You can’t kill me by kicking me into a sea monster.”
“Wait, you’re trans, too?”
“Charles, that’s the wrong type of trans.”
The woman runs a hand down her face, failing to wipe the frustrated look off her face.
Edwin lays a comforting hand on Charles’s shoulder to help ease the tension that has formed in the matter of seconds since the Night Nurse has appeared in the room. It’s hard to tell if his touch has comforted Charles, but it’s the thought that counts.
“Can’t we talk this out?” Edwin asks, glancing over to look at the woman, who definitely looks unhappy to be hunting the two of them down once again.
Before the Night Nurse is given the chance to talk, Charles clears his throat. “You cannot split us up. It was me who kicked you, yeah?” Edwin shutters at the thought of where this conversation is heading. “Send me wherever, but Edwin doesn’t belong in Hell. He was only there on a technicality because of a muck-up.”
She scoffs, “the afterlife is incapable of a muck-up.” The Night Nurse doesn’t waste a second to summon Charles and Edwin’s files into her hands. She glances down at their files finding Edwin’s file glitching in her hands. “That’s odd. It’s not supposed to . . “ The afterlife location on his file changes a couple more times before the Night Nurse looks back up at the two ghosts before her. “A technicality, you say? With Hell?”
A pained expression crosses over Edwin’s face. “I was sacrificed by classmates who didn’t know what they were doing. The demon who took me away even apologised for the technicality.”
The Night Nurse can’t seem to fathom this information. She stares down at the files, thinking the words would stop flickering on the page and tell her Edwin doesn’t belong in Hell. The flickering only seems to get worse.
“Over two million hours in this post, miles of paperwork,” she sighs, “never once have I seen an error like this.” The Night Nurse takes a breath and sends the files away, not sparring another glance at the oddity. “Whilst I suss out the cause of this aberration, you two may stay together. With me. In the Lost and Found Department. . . Temporarily.”
Charles turns back towards Edwin, grabbing ahold of his mate’s hand on his shoulder and squeezing it tightly. This solution might not be the most ideal, but as long as they have each other, they’re going to be quite alright.
It’s ironic, really, thinking everything was going to be fine. Charles should’ve known better.
The room is quickly filled with high pitched laughter and a low grumble. There’s no tell where the noise is coming from, or who it’s coming from, but it startles Edwin out of his relaxed state with Charles. “No, please no,” Edwin gasps, finding it rather difficult to breathe. Charles wants to comfort him, and the moment he steps forward, Edwin takes two steps back, shaking his head and wrapping his arms around himself. “No, it’s coming from Hell! It’s coming from–”
It happens too fast.
The low grumble turns into a loud roar as the closet is ripped open. Edwin doesn’t get a chance to run away as the spidery monster sprints into the room, picks him up, and disappears back into the depths of Hell. He screams for Charles. Charles screams back for him.
It’s too late.
—
The orange glow of the lantern guides Charles down the long hallways, watching for signs of Edwin or the monster that took Edwin. It feels like he’s been walking for hours. It feels like he’s already walked down this hall. It feels like he’s never going to find Edwin.
Charles turns the corner, finding the creature crawling back and forth between the left hallway and right hallway, until ultimately deciding to go down the right hallway. It growls at a low volume, staying as quiet as possible when looking for its next victim.
He makes the decision to go down the left hallway to avoid the monster at all costs. To Charles's surprise, he finds bloody footprints running along the floor, leading him straight to a shaking figure in tattered clothing.
“Edwin?” Charles whispers, slowing down his steps when approaching his mate. “Edwin, is that you?”
The person’s breath hitches upon hearing Edwin’s name. Charles stops walking, waiting for a sign from this person to be Edwin and not someone else who’s landed themselves in the Dollhouse. He watches the person at the end of the hall lift up their head from their lap, staring helplessly at Charles with lines of dried blood down the right side of their face. To Charles’s surprise, this person looks like Edwin, but with longer hair and rounder features, and it hits him. It hits him like a slap to the face and tears immediately fill at the corners of his eyes.
“Charles?” Edwin asks helplessly. “Is that you?”
He runs his free hand across his eyes, smiling sadly at his friend. “Oh, mate, I have–”
The creature comes barreling down the hallway and swiftly picks Edwin up from the floor. His screams mix with the creature’s snarls as it dashes down the hallway, disappearing around the corner.
Charles rolls out his back and shakes out his arm holding the lantern. There’s a nasty feeling in his gut seeing Edwin in Hell. In the last thirty years of knowing him, he’s never talked about it. Never mentioned the dolls. Never mentioned the hallway labyrinth. Never mentioned what he looked like. It’s heartbreaking.
It doesn’t take long to find Edwin. Charles sees him inside the far corner of a seemingly empty room, rocking back and forth on the floor. He won’t let him go this time.
“Edwin!” Charles says happily, walking quickly into the room and failing to see him sharing the room with the porcelain doll monster.
Instead of celebrating, like Charles thought would be happening, Edwin pulls him down to the ground and places his hand on Charles’s mouth. “You have to be very, very quiet,” he whispers, taking his hand away from his mate’s mouth and brushing his hair behind his left ear. “Charles, what are you doing here?”
“I’m here to rescue you,” Charles says with a soft smile, “someone’s gotta do it.” He moves the lantern from his right hand into his left hand, finding Edwin’s face wiped clean from blood. “Where’d all the blood go, mate? You were covered in it.”
Edwin shivers. “That was the last me,” and in that moment, the creature snarls like it did in Port Townsend, and digs through the pile of bodies in the other corner of the room. “I run, it catches me. It tears me apart and gnaws on me. Then it starts again. Over and over. For decades. Over and over and over.”
Charles is horrified. He wants to say more. There’s questions swarming around in his brain, and the moment he comes up with something to say, Edwin’s hand finds a place over his mouth again.
“I never wanted you to see me like this.” Edwin takes a shaky breath, but keeps his hand firmly in place. “I cut my hair, it grows back longer. I can’t find anything to bind my chest and I’m wearing ruffles, fucking ruffles. It is awful. I know it is awful. I’m terrified it’s going to happen to you.” The sentence ends with Edwin sobbing quietly, taking his hand away from Charles’s mouth for the second time to cover his own face.
“Hey, hey.” Charles says softly, placing the lantern down and grabbing both of Edwin’s hands to pull away from his face. He rubs his thumbs over his knuckles, squeezing his hands tightly. “You are Edwin Payne, one of the toughest boys I know. You solve mysteries. You read really complicated books that I can’t even begin to understand. You are the only person I want to spend the rest of my afterlife with, but this version of you before me is a curse from Hell. You are not a pair of ruffles and long hair.”
Tears slowly fall from Edwin’s eyes, dripping off his face and landing in his lap. Charles brings both of their hands up to Edwin’s face and carefully wipes away the tears, making the two boys quietly giggle at the struggle to manoeuvre both of their hands. “I think it’s time to get you out of here,” Charles drops both of their hands to stand up from the floor, only for Edwin to tug him back to the ground. “What–?”
“The moment I run, it’ll chase.” His eyes move from Charles’s face to the creature in the middle of the room, then back to Charles. Edwin shakes his head, “I can’t get away from it. I can’t–”
“Well,” Charles interrupts Edwin and swings his backpack around, “I’m here now.” He picks up the lantern from the ground and places it back into his magical bag, not wanting to risk leaving it behind (it means too much to them). His hand rummages around for a stick of dynamite, feeling the cylinder shape in his hand and releasing it’s lit. “Time for the old shill and dash play.”
Without providing any explanation, Charles throws the explosive towards the porcelain monster, grabs ahold of Edwin’s hand, and runs out the narrow doorway. The creature screams from pain, not releasing what happened, but noticing Edwin’s disappearance, which only makes it more upset.
Edwin finds himself running faster than Charles when running from the monster. Usually, he’s keeping pace with Charles, not wanting to lose him when running from ghosts in previous cases, and while he’s confident in his friend to keep up, there’s no way he’s going to slow down when inside the Dollhouse.
The snarling grows increasingly louder as they turn down the different hallways. Charles is almost certain it’s about to catch up to them, but then he finds Edwin slowing down his pace as they approach the hole in the wall that leads them to the Third Circle of Hell.
“Squeeze through,” Charles shouts, “I’ll be right behind you. Go!”
Edwin doesn’t waste a second going into the room, and Charles breathes a sigh of relief. They’re one room closer to leaving Hell. The monster isn’t happy about it one bit. It roars behind Charles, which only gives him the motivation to move faster.
The moment Charles squeezes out from behind the arcade game, he collides with Edwin’s back and gets a mouth full of hair. “Mate, why’d you–” he hears it before he sees it: people retching, eating mouthfuls of food, and retching again. It makes Charles feel nauseous, which shouldn’t be possible. “Where did they all come from?”
Edwin ignores his question. “Come on,” he murmurs, pushing forward past the bodies in the room. Charles follows close behind him, never being more than an arm’s length away from Edwin at all times.
A heavy breath escapes from Edwin’s mouth as another person vomits on the ground in front of them. It’s hard to watch a room full of gluttony and regurgitation. It’s sickening. Charles might actually be sick.
The next doorway to the Second Circle of Hell comes into view and Edwin rushes forward. Charles steps through the door and finds the previously empty room filled with bodies seductively sprawled across the floor. It made him uncomfortable. It made Edwin feel worse.
“None of this horror was here before,” Charles gasps out, eyes darting across the room to avoid staring for too long.
“You have to experience Hell to really see what’s here,” Edwin responds quietly, taking a few careful steps into the room. After stepping on some of the bloodied bodies, he gives up and starts to move as quickly as possible without falling over.
A low moan from one of the bodies beneath Charles sent a shiver down his spine. He doesn’t waste a second picking up his pace and jumping over the slew of bodies. A few people make attempts to grab at his pants leg, smearing their bodily fluids over his clothes (which already has the previous room’s bodily fluids on his shoes), and it only sends Charles into a further panic.
“Charles!” Edwin screams from behind him. “Charles! Charles!”
He finds Edwin halfway to the ground with three sets of hands grabbing onto his legs, ruffles, and the ends of his hair. Who knew lust had such a strong hold on people?
“Get off him!” Charles screams, running back towards Edwin and stepping on multiple people. As soon as he could, Charles grabs ahold of his mate’s hands and begins pulling him away from the massive pile of people. They pulled back equally as hard, nearly dragging Edwin further into the bloodied heap of lust.
Charles takes a swinging kick at the closest body holding Edwin back. It sends the body flying and freeing most of Edwin from the growing pile. With one last tug, Charles frees Edwin and the running to the next doorway continues.
This time Charles stops a little after the doorway into the First Circle of Hell and Edwin runs into his backpack. He lets out a little groan, rubbing a hand down his face and scowling at his friend. Edwin knows why he stopped moving, it’s the same reason why he had the hardest time figuring out this Circle of Hell.
The room is filled with people in limbo. They stand completely motionless and make soft cries of pain. It truly makes one feel helpless.
“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Edwin says sadly, stepping around his friend to see how little the room has changed in thirty years.
“And what about the bell?”
Edwin throws his hand out in front of Charles. “No, it hurts them.” A strangled growl cries out from the Second Circle of Hell; the creature is catching up to them. A flash of worry crosses Edwin’s face, “come on.”
The two of them easily escape the last room and begin ascending the spiral staircase. They make it around four levels of spirals before Edwin slows himself down, panting heavily from exertion.
“Oh, come on,” Charles says as he slows down to let Edwin catch up to him, “we’re almost out.”
“I just need a tick.” Edwin stops on one of the steps below Charles and stares up at him. His green eyes narrow at Charles, making his whole expression turn dark as he catches his breath. “And also,” he finally begins, “I cannot believe you would risk your entire existence coming to this operatic horror show for me. It’s so fucking stupid, it’s unbelievable.”
Charles dramatically rolls his eyes down at him. “Sorry, there’s no version of this where I didn’t come get you.” The flash of anger across Edwin’s face melts away, revealing a relieved and scared boy that Charles has never seen before. He knows he was being hard on Edwin, especially after everything he’s been through in the last couple of hours, but Charles would yell at Edwin hundreds of more times if that meant saving him from Hell.
With a frustrated huff, Charles turns on his heels and begins walking up the stairs again. He doesn’t get a chance to complete his first step when a hand grabs onto his own, stopping him from going any further.
“Wait, Charles,” Edwin says softly, letting go of his friend’s hand. “I’m not mad. I . . . I’m . . .” He takes a deep breath, tucks a piece of hair behind his ear, and looks up at him. “I’ve been hiding some things from you. And since I might not get the chance to say them again–”
“You can say whatever it is you want to say to me,” Charles glances anxiously behind Edwin, looking for any signs of the creature,”if we keep moving, please.”
“I love you.”
Charles sighs, turning back towards the stairs. “Great. Love you too. Can we go?”
“As more than a friend, I’m afraid.” Edwin’s heart is racing, his chest feels tight, and he quite literally wants to crawl back to his place in England, but he can’t stop talking. “Charles, I’m in love with you. You don’t have to feel the same way. I just need you to know.”
Charles laughs. Edwin’s blood runs cold. “Oh, I get it. This is like one of those Orpheus and Eurydice moments, yeah?”
He can’t believe what he’s hearing. “I certainly hope not. That story ends tragically.” Edwin knows he sounds whiney, but he can’t help it. Everything about this situation is upsetting him. He’s in Hell, his friend isn’t taking his love confession seriously, and he looking like a fucking girl.
“Right,” Charles finally turns back around to face Edwin, “never finished it.”
“Charles, I’m being quite serious, in the event that wasn’t obvious.” Edwin takes his hands and waves them around the stairs of Hell, then waves them around himself. The waving stops the moment Charles’s hands come in contact with his shoulders. His thumbs run over his clothed collarbones, sending a shiver down Edwin’s spine that makes him quietly gasp.
“I want you to listen to me. You, Edwin Payne, are my best mate. That will never change. You are the most important person in the world to me.” Charles’s breath wavers a bit, quickly glancing down at the ground before looking back up at Edwin. “You are in an extremely vulnerable state at this moment. With literally everything,” he waves his hand around the same way Edwin did moments before, earning a small laugh from his teary eyes. “I would love to revisit these feelings when we’re both in better spaces, physically and mentally. And we’ve got literally forever to figure out what the rest means. As long as we get out of here. Okay?”
Edwin sniffles. It wasn’t a dismissal of his feelings; Charles is simply focused on getting them out of Hell. It makes him want to sob.
The creature roars to life at the bottom of the stairs. The two boys break out of their emotional trance, hands falling from collarbones and wiping away tears from their faces. The moment the porcelain monster spots Edwin on the fourth level of the spiral staircase, Charles takes his hands and begins running up the remaining three levels to reach the doorway.
Edwin can hear Niko and the Night Nurse from the Crystal’s room in the apartment, but he can’t focus on a word they’re saying with the creature closely behind them. Charles can’t believe how close they are to the exit. They’re going to make it.
Charles shoves Edwin through the door once they arrive at the portal back to the mortal plane. The shove is hard enough to push Edwin to the floor instead of walking safely into the room towards Niko, which Charles didn’t expect to happen. When entering the room himself, he tripped over Edwin’s legs and fell on the ground next to him.
The creature shrieks with anger as the Night Nurse closes the portal to Hell. Its body crashes into the wall a few times before the portal completely disappears and turns back into a normal door to the rest of the apartment complex.
They did it.
Charles looks up to see Edwin staring back at him. After a quick double take, he notices Edwin’s hair is cropped short again, his pinstriped suit is back (and very wrinkled), and despite being on the dirty floor, looks extremely calm.
“Mate, you alright?”
“Never better.”