Rogan the Detective ONC

The Secret Passage

There is no use crying over spilled wine.

Or, in my case, over my utterly ruined reputation. I was supposed to be the calm and collected detective who sat with a glass of gin, dramatically smoking a cigar. Yet, there I was, fainting like a fragile Victorian lady at the sight of blood, and that was the last thing I wanted to be.

You might be wondering why it mattered to me so much when we were all faced with imminent death, but I would say it was even more crucial because of it. After our freedom was so abruptly taken away, all I had left was my personality. My quirkiness, if you will. If I lost that, what would be left of me? Who would I even be without that large piece of my personality?

Being a detective has been an enormous part of who I was since that fateful day, and without that persona, I was not sure who I would be. It has shaped my life in ways other people could never imagine. All they ever saw was an oddball playing detective. However, they could never tell it was so much more to me than that. And I never explained because dredging up the past was always a painful experience.

"Rogan?" Elizabeth's voice cut through my reflections, sounding properly scared for the first time since I met her.

Perhaps it took her mind a while to process our situation, or maybe the second dead body finally convinced her our captor was insane and that there was no way out for us. No talking things through or winning the game.

Either way, it scared me. Even though I wished for her to show her weak side, now that she did, it terrified me. Maybe because it was a sign that I also had to accept my own mortality, I had to grapple with the possibility that this adventure would be my last one, and that wasn't something I was ready to deal with. Was anyone ever prepared to come to terms with something like that?

"Rogan, you need to wake up now," Elizabeth said, her voice quivering slightly. "We have to stick together. Besides, we can't do this without the great Rogan the Detective."

"Do you really think that will wake him up?" Thomas whispered, his voice coming from somewhere further away.

"That title seems to matter to him a lot, so I thought I might as well give it a try," Elizabeth said, sounding tired, like she was about to faint. "Did you cover up the body? Have you figured out who she was?"

"I don't know who she was, I don't think we saw her among the staff here, but I can't be sure. For now, I just covered the body with a sheet. There wasn't much else I could do for her," Thomas said, his voice calmer than I expected.

It was as if dealing with blood and dead bodies was soothing for him. Maybe it helped him escape into his doctor mode and not let those things get to him, as many of the doctors I know seemed to become detached, as that might have been the only way for them to deal with death that lurked at every corner. I'm not sure, but whatever the case, I felt too exhausted to get up and join their discussions.

"However, I do think I know what to do with Rogan," Thomas said, his voice moving away even as he spoke.

The next thing I knew, I could smell the fresh, piney smell of gin. My hands grabbed blindly for it even before my eyes popped open, eliciting a sigh of relief from Elizabeth and a disapproving scoff from Thomas, acting as if he had never needed just one shot of courage before.

"What?" I asked him challengingly after drinking far more than one shot. "Can't a man get some refreshments before he faces his death?"

That got their attention, as they both froze mid-action as if saying things out loud was all that was needed to make them real. They acted as if they wouldn't have happened the same way, whether I said something or not. It was an odd logic but one I had in the past. I never talked about death or things like that in fear that by talking about them, I might summon them, but at that moment, I was too far gone into the sea of misery to care. Or I was too drunk. Either way, I just said things as I saw them.