Skulduggery Pleasant: Raising Cain

Chapter 82 - They're coming for you

Skulduggery – Crow

Anton – Bear

Ghastly – Panda

Dexter – Wolf

Saracen – Weasel

Erskine – Snake

Solomon – Raven

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Chapter 82

"Do you know what's wrong with her?" Valkyrie asked Kenspeckle. As soon as she and Militsa got to the Hibernian Cinema and took Melancholia upstairs, his eyes had bulged and he'd had Valkyrie to put her straight onto a bed. After shooing her out, he put Melancholia into an induced coma to give him more ability to work out what was wrong and fix it without her being in pain or whatever was wrong kill her before he could fix whatever that thing was.

"Not yet," he muttered, going to his lab. Valkyrie followed him and Militsa followed her like a lost puppy. She was skittish outside the Temple, and if they hadn't been trying to save Melancholia's life, she'd have probably found it funny and endearing. But they had been, and it had just been irritating and slowed them down. She'd stopped herself from showing it, just, but it was a close thing when they crossed the fifth road. Kenspeckle started rummaging through his drawers. "I have evaluated her exterior for injuries, and her magic for any signs of defects or manipulating, and I have found multiple of each but I am not yet sure what it is that continues to cause her harm."

"Continues to cause harm?" Valkyrie asked with a frown. "So it's like a parasite?"

"It could be," Kenspeckle agreed as he pulled out large tubs and little pallets for tests. "Or it could be an infection or a disease or it could be a spell. I'm having Civet and Stentor look at her internal injuries, as I'm sure she has a few. No, I'm most worried about the damage that could have been caused to her brain."

Valkyrie bit her lip. "She was acting strangely before we got here when I noticed something was really wrong. She came up to me and held my hand – but she couldn't actually do that, so she just held my finger. She was acting like a little kid and was unresponsive after that. She was standing and doing stuff, but she couldn't talk or move."

Kenspeckle muttered something things under his breath and got under the counter and got out a large bowl and began weighing out ingredients or whatever medical powders and herbs and medicines were called when being mixed. He began mashing and then spoke. "There is a chance, although small, that the damage has only affected her brain in so far as to make it protect itself. It is much like what people with depression or other mental illnesses may do. Her brain simply switched off, so to speak, and St. Clare only did the minimal she needed to survive. As you said, she went to you for help, and when she knew you were helping, she did nothing else. Or perhaps her brain is not shutting things out but reverting to a childlike state of mind as a defence against the actions."

"What do you mean?" Valkyrie asked seriously.

"Well, if it were the first option, she may be effectively shutting her thoughts and actions down in order to escape the pain. She cannot feel if she cannot think, so to speak," Kenspeckle explained. He put down his big bowl and started rifling through draws for something again. "Or there is the possibility that people around her have done her harm and she finds that hard to cope with and that is making her act like a child because when she was a child, that did not happen. I have seen it before, but if you say she was acting like herself and it is just this morning all this happened, I do not know how likely that scenario is. I do not, unfortunately, know everything."