“…and you call it Winston?” asked Podark.

“Him. I call him Winston,” replied Bleuamar.

Podark sat in one of the still intact armchairs, puffing at his pipe and taking notes. Broken furniture lay strewn about—the aftermath of an overindulgence in liquor. But then, Podark had thought he had lost one of his best friends. He squinted, then asked,

“And you say… he… speaks to you?” Bleuamar cocked his head to one side, looking at the revolver that lay on the stool between them, nodded a few times, then said,

“Well, yes.”

“Do you ever reply?”

“Well, of course.”

“Does it happen at any particular time of day?”

“The entire day, sometimes he even wakes me up at night.”

“So you and… Winston… have conversations daily?” Bleuamar looked at the revolver, then up at Podark.

“Well, yes, of course, he is my closest friend.”

Podark was stunned. This Winston seemed to have taken his place within a week’s time. Bleuamar had not been entirely the same since he had died.

“No,” said Bleuamar, then paused. “No,” he said again, shook his head, then picked up the revolver and holstered it. Podark puffed at his pipe again.

“You said he does not like the dark or small spaces?”

“Exactly why I did that. Sometimes I have to chastise him, understand,” replied Bleuamar.

“Well then,” said Podark. “We have been avoiding this conversation for a while. Tell me about the time you spent, well, dead?” Bleuamar leaned back against the sofa, fingering at a rip in the fabric. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.

“It was like waking up,” Bleaumar started. “My life had seemed like a dream at first, I couldn’t remember my death. There was a dim light emanating from me like I was a lantern of some sort, but beyond that was only darkness. I stumbled around, trying to recall how I had gotten there. Vague memories of sewers, rats, books… THERE… and a single phrase flooded my mind.” He tapped his holster, irritatedly. “Walk the path of the snake, open to receive and begin life anew.” He swallowed.

“That phrase seemed important somehow. As I stumbled through the darkness I came upon other people. Some of them had beards and hair that were so long that it seemed they hadn’t cut them in lifetimes. They all murmured that phrase. Some of them were moaning and groaning. Some of them cried out. It felt more like an asylum than death. There were pillars, broad and strong; seamless as if cut from a single stone. The floor was smooth and cold as ice. Finally, I stumbled into a wall; I followed that wall to a corner. Then that wall to the next corner, and so on, until I was fairly certain that I had come to the same place. That is when I knew I would be trapped there for a very long time.”

Bleuamar unholstered the revolver and set it beside him on the sofa. “I meditated on that phrase, and I thought: Well if it means anything, why don’t I just start looking for a snake? So I started at one corner and walked up and down, trying to cover every inch of the floor in this cube-like hall.”

Podark set down a glass of whiskey for Bleuamar before returning to his armchair. He picked up the pipe, lit it and puffed some smoke. Bleuamar took several liberal gulps and then placed the revolver, barrel first, into the glass.

“That is when I met him. The only person in that entire place that seemed to have a shred of sanity left. With him, he had a staff with two skulls hanging from one side. I knew his face, even with long hair and a beard that covered his body, his face was familiar. He spoke to me—asked me where I had come from and why. I told him my name and asked him for his. Wilhelm Wickgen, he answered. That name remained with me for as long as I was there, and it was the first thing I thought when I returned here.”

Bleuamar removed the revolver from the glass and sat it on the sofa again. “So, in short, it was a massive hall, with hundreds of senile people, one man with a staff and then a bunch of pillars.” He finished the rest of the whiskey in one gulp, then gestured to Podark for more. Podark set down his pipe, removed the cap from the bottle and poured another glass for Bleuamar.

“I must have walked up and down that hall a hundred times before I noticed a small red line on the floor. It snaked around the hall this way and that, before coiling up in an arbitrary location. I followed it, and came to a single jewel. A man would miss it completely if it was approached from a different angle. I stood there and heard a clicking sound. ‘Open to receive, and begin life anew’, I thought. But there was nothing to open.”

He put a pillow beneath the revolver. “I then went searching for Wilhelm Wickgen again. I found him and told him about the line on the ground. He laughed eerily, then commanded me to show him. I thought something was amiss, so I told him that before I would show him, he had to tell me what it was and why.”

Podark wrote in his notebook: ‘My friend has gone completely mad.’

“He told me it was the way out of there. That the staff was needed to open the device that would regenerate our bodies and make us alive once more. That is when it dawned on me that I was in fact, dead. He also told me that not everyone in this place was to be allowed out of there. This was some sort of holding cell, capturing the mind of anyone who died from unnatural causes—anyone who had touched the key. Apparently, his eyes had become too weak to find the snaking line on the ground, and that is why he was stuck there. He seemed truthful to me at the time. He bode me to guide him down the snake, and he would show me how to get out.”

Bleuamar stroked the revolver, then scratched it on the cylinder. “So I found the line again. Wilhelm in tow. Walked down it until we stepped on the Jewel. He then looked at me, smiling, shook the staff, and opened his mouth. He burst into a bright light and disappeared. I was thrown back, off the path, and struck a pillar. The burst of light attracted the attention of some of the other prisoners. They clawed and stumbled their way closer, groaning as they came.”

  Bleuamar took another liberal gulp of whiskey. “That was when I noticed my thirst and hunger. That is also when I started panicking. There was nothing to eat in this place, nothing to drink, and no one left to talk to. A man would certainly lose his mind of starvation and thirst. So with the staff being gone, I thought I wouldn’t have a chance to get out, but I tried nonetheless. I found the line, walked it, stood on the jewel, looked up and opened my mouth.”

He gulped down the rest of the whiskey. “Then I woke up in a box, Podark.” He looked at Podark judgingly. “A box without a spade, without air, and with maggots crawling all over my jacket.”

Podark shrugged. “I spent nearly an hour scratching away at the splintered wood of the coffin’s cover before realising the key was with me. So I rolled onto my left shoulder and tapped it.”

Bleuamar gestured for another glass and Podark refilled it. “The THERE seemed worse than before. It seemed overjoyed, with even more activity… even more grotesqueness. Something I haven’t seen before coiled around my leg, trying to drag me into a throbbing organ. Anyway, when I returned here, I was halfway out of the ground, I literally had to dig myself out with one hand. In that time, it is when it dawned on me. That man in the paintings, that man was Wilhelm Wickgen.” Podark scratched in his notebook then said,

“So Winston wasn’t there with you?”

“Oh no!” Bleuamar patted the revolver. “I walk into a shop and hear this scream: ‘Somebody help me!’”

Podark scratched his forehead, trying to comprehend. “I investigated the scream until I tracked it down to the revolver counter. I almost left him there, Podark. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. But then I thought, what kind of person would I be to leave something or someone in peril without helping it.”

Podark tried accepting the idea that his friend Ricard Bleuamar was completely sane, and yet, had developed a friendship with a revolver named Winston. That, and the fact that Ricard had set free a man that was potentially the champion of all evil in this land.

The door burst open.

“Podark! Bleuamar!” Harold called. “Someone has destroyed it! Someone destroyed the statue beneath the church!”

At that moment Podark knew that their suspicions were true. Wilhelm Wickgen had been set free, and with him, doom and ruin were unleashed upon Adelwreth.