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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Audrik" data-source="post: 6763721" data-attributes="member: 73653">Night Floors - Session 5bThe agents then went upstairs to Louis Post’s apartment. He was reportedly the last tenant to have the play, so that was a good place to start. As they reached the second floor, they spotted a very large, greyish-brown dog walking up the stairs to the third floor. The dog looked to be nearly three feet tall at the shoulders and probably outweighed both agents together. The mastiff stopped halfway up and turned to look at them with slobber dripping from its sagging features.REDOX took a step backwards and down, but the dog simply turned away and continued up the creaking stairs. Once it was out of sight, the agents hurried to Mr. Post’s apartment and knocked on the door. When there was no answer, Agent REINHARD bypassed the old lock by sliding a credit card between the door and the frame.The door creaked open to reveal the same disaster of an apartment they’d seen before, only this time it was bigger. There was more space between the furniture, and the apartment itself was wider than the building should have allowed. Even still, nearly every square foot was covered by pizza boxes, soda bottles, and discarded drawings. One other thing was different; there was a three-foot-high ornate mirror on the coffee table, and Mr. Post’s desk chair had been pulled up to face it. REDOX opened the blinds on the side facing the street, and Agent RON radioed to let him know he had eyes on the apartment.While Agent REINHARD fished through the mess looking for the play, REDOX examined the mirror, and he almost immediately regretted it. He noticed that the reflection was a bit darker, like the lights were dimmed, and the closet door opened into darkness. He turned to look, and his suspicion was confirmed; the door was closed, but the reflection showed it open.As REDOX looked back to the mirror, the reflection showed a man with a briefcase and white shoes entering the closet, but when he turned, he saw the door was still closed. He pointed this out to REINHARD, and both agents agreed the mirror should be smashed. REDOX did the honors, and REINHARD examined the closet.The map they’d found had this closet labelled “Slaughterhouse.” He slowly turned the knob and pulled the closet door open. No sooner had he done so than the sounds of automatic gunfire could be heard, and bullets started to pepper the opposite wall. Agent REINHARD stepped out of the way, and REDOX drew his gun and began firing into the darkness. Agent RON also fired a couple shots from his rifle.The automatic gunfire stopped abruptly, and the agents could hear a blood-curdling scream from deep in the closet. REDOX shined his flashlight inside, and while the first several feet were carpeted and lined by hanging coats, the closet eventually opened up into a much larger room. The floor was hardwood, and the ceiling was high. It looked like a ballroom.That was enough for REDOX. He gave the evacuation order, and the agents climbed out the broken street-facing window and down to the sidewalk below. No sign of the play, but maybe they’d done some good in there anyway. There was no longer any doubt in either agent’s mind that this building and its occupants were a threat.REDOX radioed RON, but the sniper heard only static. He radioed back, and REDOX heard only static. REDOX tried the phone, and that seemed to work just fine. He told RON to meet them at the rendezvous point, and they’d carpool to the hotel. If the tenants of the Macallistar building didn’t retaliate somehow, maybe they could go back in the morning. Once in the relative safety of the Marriott, the agents split up and headed to their respective rooms.REINHARD had one thing to do before bed: listen to Manuel’s recordings. He plugged the hard drive into his laptop and listened from the beginning. Each recording began with an introduction by Thomas Manuel stating the name and number of the recording, and at first they seemed to be followed only by white noise, but soon there seemed to be something faint and musical in the background. Agent REINHARD listened to a few of the earlier recordings multiple times, and eventually he could hear the voices clearly.It seemed rehearsed like dialogue from a movie or play. One voice, a young woman named Cassilda, sang a haunting song about a city named Carcosa near a lake called Hali. Some of the dialogue mentioned a masquerade ball thrown in the court of the king. The king was sometimes mentioned as wearing tattered yellow robes. One other person who seemed prominent was a visitor who was unknown to the other guests and was referred to simply as the Phantom.Agent REINHARD listened closely to each recording several times, and at some point the dialogue began to be spoken in French. In every incarnation, Cassilda’s song chilled him, but he couldn’t keep himself from replaying it. He had the distinct feeling the song would never leave him; when a song would get stuck in his head as songs tend to do, that song would always be this one.</blockquote>

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