Utterly Mad

"Alabaster saint." Catnip thought. She didn't know what alabaster was, nor did she know the source of the thought. Pricetowns underground had turned out to be a more disturbingly familiar setting than she expected. Not sewers, but a lab. In her life, Catnip had been in two labs. That of the insane AI, C.I.D., and that of her birth. Both had been unpleasant experiences. The lab she found herself in now smelled faintly of smoke, the smells of a place which had been put to the torch long ago. If Catnip had encountered robots, she would have lost her nerve and gone back, but she encountered nothing more than a trio of turrets that beeped and clicked weakly at her.

At some point as she wandered, looking for a back entrance of some kind, she realized she was being drawn on into the greyscale darkness. She wasn't sure she could find her way back if she had to. The air down here was thick and stale. When she grew thirsty, she discovered that most of the water in the lab had either dried up or was foul beyond even her ability to tolerate.

The darkness thrummed around her, oddly oppressive and hostile. The world felt thin somehow, and yet she moved on until she encountered a lit room. What had brought her to the room was a high whistling noise. The sound, she discovered, was emanating from a tiny model of the kind of tower her friend Dee had once placed a device he called a "repeater" on, except that this framework tower was topped with a series of little spinning dishes like tiny bowls. The sound those little bowls made as they spun was pleasant, but she felt an urge to stop it. "Why though?" she thought. The urge was like the words that had come into her mind before, not her own. Catnip was dimly aware that for some time, she had begun to have trouble seeing. Some kind of dust had filled the air the deeper in she had gone, obstructing her vision. In the deep part of her mind, far back, she could feel the alarm bells of instinct suddenly spring to life in an attempt to get her to turn and run. Instead, she shrugged off that warning and made what she believed was a terrible decision. She stopped the tower.

The stillness of the air told her nothing, but as soon as the pleasant song of the tower-
"voice of the wind"
-had stopped, something at the far end of the lab had begun to move and her sight became obstructed. The alarm bells rang louder than ever. There were eyes in the fog, something that glistened and stared lifelessly. In her head, she heard the voice.

"Did Richie send you? Have you come to collect Rita for him? Have you come to collect his bride?"