KATRIN ALONE IN THE TOWN HALL
kintire wrote:Kat stares for a long moment at the window. However, after the previous battle with mouth filled mucus, she does feel rather squeamish about the slime. She slips around to the back door, presses her back to the building.s wall and takes a swift peek within. If she sees nothing alarming, she then crouches and takes a longer look, her head reemerging at a different place than it was drawn back. If it seems safe, she checks the hinges of the door for likely creaking, and makes her way cautiously inside
The hinges creak but not loudly.
Katrin finds a dim, musty room with casks and boxes stacked on the floor and on low shelves.
Opening the shutters on the window open gives her light and fresh air.
A door stands slightly ajar at the far end of the room.
Looking about the supplies, she finds wine, brown ale, oil, vellum, flour, cheese, nails, canvas, rope, and dried fish.
One crate partly covers a trap door near the outer wall. Moving the box and investigating the hatch, she uncovers a shallow cellar about ten feet square. This underground space smells moldy and damp, and reddish stains creep over the lime-washed walls and floor, with big clumps of rust-brown fuzzy growth almost hiding the three large chests stacked near open space under the hatchway.
Apart from the trapdoor to the cellar, Katrin notices a closed wooden door on the main floor, opposite the way she entered.
Checking this interior doorway, she finds it lets into one of the front rooms of the town hall.
Just past the door to her eight, in the corner, a brick fireplace with a tin chimney pipe running up through the ceiling stands cold and sooty, a little ash spilled out onto the stone floor at its base.
Straight ahead across the spacious room she sees the broken window she saw out front. Little light penetrates the tangled curtains snagged on broken glass, just enough to show the vague outline of furniture, darkened rectangles of doors on all four walls, and some light colored squares affixed to an upright board set apart from the wall ahead and to the left. Squinting, she realizes these are papers or parchments tacked to a bulletin.
The curtains and notices flutter to the soft exhalations of cold air coming through the fireplace with a faint whistling sound. A little puff of wood-ash she can smell but not see almost makes her sneeze.
(In her chambermaid days, she came across more than one dirty floor caused by a flue carelessly left open).
Checking the various doors in this front room, she finds that the double doors near the window are barred and locked. She can lift the bar, but opening the lock might take some time-it's well-made.
These are obviously the front doors she viewed from outside, though, and let onto the wooden portico.
Moving past a long desk built along part of the front wall , she comes to a door at the far, darkened end of the room. Not locked. A faint glow shows through the keyhole.
Openly it cautiously she sees sunlight filtered through a curtained window in a smaller room.
Creeping inside and opening the curtain, she finds she's in a records office. Lots of papers, ledgers, scrolls, Not ransacked, though a few loose items lie on the floor.
Back into the lobby and then to the rear wall, she discovers doors along the rear wall leading into two more rooms,which, once she has opened shutters and curtains, she sees are an meeting chamber or courtroom with tables and an office with desks and bookshelves.
The third door on the rear wall of the lobby is the one she came through from the back corner room for storage and cellar access.
On the side of the lobby closer the storage room, between the brick fireplace and the bulletin board, Katrin finds another door, this one set in an angled section of the wall.
It's locked, but she's able to spring the mechanism after a little bit of work.
Inside, she finds a shadowy office near the front of the building and, beyond a waist-high wooden dividing rail with a gap in the middle, two iron-barred jail cells in the back.
As Katrin pulls curtains and opens shutters to let in light and air, she becomes aware of someone else breathing heavily in the room.
Then, tittering laughter from the shadows.
"Tehhheeehhheeehehheheeee."
Turning to look into the jail area, she sees a pale-faced, dark-haired woman dressed in torn, dirty clothes getting up from underneath a cot and scuttling to the cell front. The woman jerks upright and thrusts her arms through the bars.
The stranger hisses,
"Come here! I want to tell you something, but softly, softly... They mustn't hear. They are always listening. Come here. I won't hurt you. I promise."
https://imgur.com/gallery/lJ4WQiX