The rusty hinges squeaked loudly as Jules opened the door, revealing an infant's bedroom. A massive wooden cradle, seemingly from the Victorian era, swayed in the middle, the mythical beings carved on the front moving along. An exquisite white sheet with delicate embroidery draped the edges, fluttering under an invisible breeze.
Jules stared at it for a brief instant before shifting his attention to the rest of the room; it was pretty much barren.
Except for the cradle, there was nothing else inside the room; no furniture, no lamps, no rugs, no mirror, and no trinkets—literally nothing else.
If not for the stained-glass window behind it, it'd have been a desolate scene. The moonlight shone through, and Jules lifted his head, narrowing his eyes at the artwork. It depicted the Virgin Mary holding her baby boy with a serene smile, a halo of stars shrouding her from behind, her long hair framing her gentle face.
In Jules's eyes, it felt like she was mocking him.
"The Virgin Mary?" Bastien cocked an eyebrow as the door closed behind him with a thud. They heard the gears turn as the doorknob locked itself, but neither the hunter nor the incubus showed signs of surprise. "What bad taste—"
The rest of the sentence got caught in his throat when, an instant later, the illustration shifted. The blue background turned red, as if the night sky behind the window had been set ablaze. Tears of blood run down the Virgin Mary's face, dripping onto the child in her arms. The halo behind her crumbled to dust, leaving behind a broken afterimage.
"Well, charming."
Pretending he hadn't heard the incubus, Jules flicked his wrist, and the bright, white sword appeared in his hand.
"Stay focused."
A smile was the incubus's response.
Then, both fell silent, scanning the room.
Time slowly ticked, and everything stood eerily still until, ultimately, the illusion of peacefulness was broken by a shrill wail. It echoed throughout the room. At first indistinct, it slowly became clearer, and at some point, words could be distinguished.
"Why?!"
A question full of resentment.
The voice couldn't be qualified as female or male. It seemed to encompass both and neither at the same time. It was a weird cacophony disconnected from reality.
"Why are you still destroying our paradise?!"
Paradise? This place? Jules frowned. It seemed like the owner, or should he say the owners, of this haunted house were delusional. For some of the supernatural beings trapped in this array, this place was no heaven, but a horrible prison no better than hell. The little ghoul under the bed in the doll room and the twins were witnesses to this.
"Haven't you had enough?! How many more of our compatriots must you kill?!" The voices cackled in despair. "Leave us alone! This is our paradise! A paradise you made!"
"I see no paradise; only hell."
Jules gestured for Bastien to watch over his back, and they moved in sync to stand behind each other, eying the shadows dancing on the walls before them. It was difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether that thing was inhabiting these shadows or not; it could conceal its spiritual energy to the point where Jules, despite sharpening his senses, couldn't feel it. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say them.
The thing seemed to be an amalgam of beings, and not just one. A consciousness made of many souls whose ends had come too early and too unfairly.
"Hell?"
Hysterical laughter drilled their eardrums. Amid the discordance of voices, Jules could perceive the giggles of children and the chortles of the elderly.
"The only hell is the despair of seeing your loved ones die in the name of your god!"
"The only hell is to be deprived of your rights and be seen as a disposable tool!"
"The only hell is what you've brought with you to our lands!"
"You are our only hell!"
Piece by piece, the puzzle was being put together in Jules's mind. The manor had been built during the age of imperialism, where people thought they had the duty to invade barbaric cultures to 'civilize' them. The hypocrisy of that era was, in a way, mind-blowing, considering what many of their envoys had done in the name of the crown or religion. The violence they had left in their wake couldn't be brushed off, no matter how much people tried to rewrite history books.
In the end, the past couldn't be amended; what was done was done. The proof lay in the tortured souls left behind.
"That wasn't me, though."
"Don't lie!"
"Don't lie!"
"Don't lie!"
The atmosphere in the room became heavier, and cracks in the wall started to appear. The thing was getting agitated, anger blinding it. To start with, it was long dead, and it couldn't distinguish between what it had fought to protect in the past and what it fought against, nor what brought them misery. It seemed to think of supernatural beings as its people, for they were what was closer to it now, and indiscriminately trapped them inside the manor to protect them, regardless of their thoughts on the matter.
As for the enemies? They were now a source of food. Those who got in the way were also seen as enemies, humans or not.
"It's hard to believe we're being threatened by a blob of resentment," Bastien chortled, his golden eyes shining in the dim-lit room.
"Don't ever underestimate human emotions."
Monsters born out of human emotions were often the more ruthless ones, a mix of irrational and rational. It wasn't something that could be understood. But at the end of the day, they were but emotional beings blinded by their hatred. This thing couldn't have created the array encasing the manor. No, it felt more like they were a part of the array, the source that kept the barrier up.
'You are our only hell,' these words popped back into Jules's mind. At first, he thought they referred to his angelic appearance, a reminder of the faith people used as an excuse to slaughter a part of the souls making it up. It made sense, at first.
But what if…?
"Jules, watch out!"
Bastien grabbed his head and brought the man down to his knees as the shadows elongated into spears, piercing the empty space where they had stood a moment ago.
"Your wound isn't closing," Jules noted as he glanced at the incubus's arms, where a deep laceration cut through his skin. "Are there some residues from the shadows embedded in your flesh?"
"It seems like it."
"What a pain."
What was the point of having a high healing ability if the shadows prevented it from being activated? It was still eating at Bastien's flesh, maintaining a statu quo. The new cells were destroyed, but the shadow couldn't dig deeper into his wound. Still, Jules couldn't get careless; this time, his wounds wouldn't close.
"Damn, I'm not good with intangible stuff," Bastien let out a self-loathing laugh. Ghosts, in their book, weren't exactly intangible as they had a soul they could reach and crush. A mass of resentment? Not so much. "What about you?"
"Always better than with arrays."
"How much better exactly?"
There was no answer as Jules propelled himself forward to roll on the floor, then flapped his wings to pull his body up fast, avoiding a shadowy spear in the nick of time. One second later, and that would have impaled him.
The hunter clicked his tongue. Masses of emotions were a pain in the butt to handle, and only a few exorcists specialized in appeasing them. These kinds of things gathered all the bad energy in an area, festering as time passed, into something rotten. Considering the history of this land, Jules didn't want to imagine just how much resentment, hatred, and seething anger it had harvested throughout the years.
Traditionally, when hunters couldn't handle this stuff, they would seal it off. In an array. In a meaningful place where the emotions were born or where the resentment could be directed. Like, let's say, the manor of an envoy.
"I can't believe I didn't notice," Jules snorted.
Arrays were one of the few fields he didn't excel at. He had noticed it was an array used to trap beings inside, and at first, he had thought it was to trap their human prey, then to protect weaker supernatural beings. Now, it might have been to trap a being hunters couldn't handle in their time.
It made sense.
Adding a temporal aspect to the array, where it accelerated time inside, could help erase the beings living in the mansion faster. Nothing was forever continuous, and everything came to an end at some point. One day, that mass of festering emotions would vanish.
But something went horribly wrong, even if Jules couldn't tell what exactly. It could be that the array grew unstable, allowing humans to enter; it could also be that the dunces who erected it didn't think of prohibiting access to other supernatural beings. They seem to have connected the barrier to the mass of emotions, so that it would fuel it and keep the array functional, even long after the hunters' deaths.
A day would come when the mass of emotions would have vanished, and the array would then be lifted, meaning that interdimensional space would vanish, crumbling to dust.
In principle, it was a good idea. Most likely, none of the hunters involved thought that the mansion would be sold off to an amusement park in the future and turned into a haunted house, an attraction for people to visit.
To make matters worse, according to the pamphlet, things were being brought inside and out of the manor, then scattered throughout other haunted houses as props. But, because of the time the objects spent in the haunted house, it was now linked to the array, as the mass of emotions present was still overwhelmingly strong, capable of affecting any object that entered the haunted house, even for a relatively short period of time.
Then, each year, on October 31st, the realms were weakened, allowing the haunted house to connect with those 'parts' of it that had been scattered throughout the country, spiriting away humans all around, whose deaths, filled with fear, anger, and hatred, only served to strengthen the mass of emotion.
It was an endless circle.
In short, the hunters inadvertently screwed up big time when they set up their array, not even bothering to record it in the archive. The Association's carelessness and bad management seemed like one thing that had never changed, as Jules's colleagues were still prone to taking care of the immediate issue without thinking about the future.
As always, it was up to the new generation to clean up their predecessors' mess, and as always, they were the ones to pay the price for their half-assed job.