Soon enough, they were outside of the asylum, but they still didn't know where they were. However, before they could find sufficient time to worry about that, they had to get on their feet quickly. The travel had made them more than a little weary, but there was no time to think about that. Anything could happen at any time, and they didn't have even the slightest control over it.

After that was done, which was pretty soon, Charles noticed something quite odd. They were in his street, which he would always recognise due to the sheer dullness and misery of their surroundings. A moment later, he also noticed that they were not only in his street but right in front of his house as well. A chill went up his spine as the nearby mist enshrouded everything in sight.

He could stand there and wonder why any of this was happening for hours, but he knew very well that it wouldn't have been of any help. Noticing that everyone else but Henry was afraid, he, despite being rather afraid himself, decided not to show it. He curled his hands into fists and marched into his residence with an expression of unwavering determination. It clearly worked, for the others soon followed right behind him.

Henry was the last to enter, merely because he didn't walk very fast due to his old age. He stretched out his feeble right hand to close the door, but it slammed itself as soon as he did that. Thinking nothing of it, he kept walking slowly, and to the others, although they were momentarily unnerved, there were much more pressing issues than strange doors.

One jumped right in their face the instant they entered the dining room. The mist began creeping towards them from the outside, doing so with the help of the doors and windows that all suddenly opened themselves at the same time, also forcing the harsh winds of cold upon their exhausted bodies, making them intensely wrap their hands around their figures.

The dining room was illuminated by an eerie purple light about whose origins they also had no idea, appearing to be completely and utterly empty despite the presence of a starkly black silhouette in every chair. Charles made his way towards one of the silhouettes, waving right in its face, observing every facet of it for an answer, which didn't come to him despite all his efforts, seeming as if it never would come. Every atom within him consumed by frustration, he let out a deep sigh, at which the silhouette moved towards him, causing the chair to creak. He flinched so suddenly that he fell right onto the floor, shuddering for a few seconds before he gathered the courage to get up again.

While he was getting up, Edna stretched out her right hand towards him. "Charles, are you alright? Do you need some help?"

"No," he said sternly, jumping from the ground, thus returning to his former position. "It's nothing that I can't handle on my own, thanks."

"I was just asking," she whispered, taking a few steps back.

Before they could do anything else, the house shook for an entire minute, the same eerie purple light from before flickering aggressively, disorienting them completely. They were back to normal once it ended, but everything in the dining room was now entirely different.

The purple light had become brighter, softly illuminating the dining room that otherwise didn't have anything strange about it, or so it seemed at the first glance. It, especially the table, stretched on for eternity, housing an enormous amount of tall black chairs that were somehow all filled, on them sitting guests who had hardly anything to eat on their plates and only slightly more to drink in their tall and fancy glasses, them being merely half-filled with red wine. These glasses were elegantly held by all the guests, who were subtly clanging them while laughing amidst a conversation in which the words couldn't be made out by anyone else. It was because the words echoed off the walls at an achingly slow pace, giving a suffocating air of surrealness to the conversation. Luckily, it didn't last too long, for when they seated themselves by the table, everything was perfectly understandable. At least when it came to speech.

Charles, Edna, Aaron, Lavinia, and Henry's relatives were all seated very closely, all engaging in the same conversation, the same dinner, as though it were something perfectly mundane. Obviously, Charles' family took up the most space, for he had plenty of cousins, and they loved to gather and talk to other people whenever they could. They wouldn't miss it for anything in the world. Edna and Aaron had only one relative to account for them, their mother and wife respectively. Her laugh was the most forced, clearly designed to hide her grief. Lavinia's cousins were also enjoying themselves, feeling absolutely no shame because of what they did. Henry's parents, who through some miracle were somehow still alive in their early nineties, were relegated to the pitch-black corner full of cobwebs like the unimportant people they were. Not a sound could be heard from them. Except for Henry, who seemed as if he would laugh in literally any circumstance, everyone was haunted by this scene, so they felt an urgent need to shatter it all at once.

"Hello, Dolores," Aaron said softly to his wife. "I'm sorry, I know you've missed me, but there's a good explanation for everything."

She began sobbing. "No, this cannot be! I must be going insane! Aaron is dead, I know it..."

"I'm not dead," he began. "I'm here."

She was still sobbing with her back turned to him.

"There was no car," he continued. "Someone thought I tried to take my own life and they put me into the asylum, but I've escaped."

"That is ridiculous," she responded, sniffling. "I'm the insane one here. I'm talking to a hallucination."

Realising that she was never going to believe him, Aaron let out a deep sigh before giving up. At seeing that, Edna slumped her head, unsure of what to do now. Not wanting to see her like that, Charles stepped in, sitting right beside her. Stunned, she swiftly turned her head towards him, but before she could say anything, he began to speak:

"I understand that it may seem hopeless, but I just want to remind you that every feeling of hopelessness fades over time. I know that I might not be the best person to say this, and I know that I've never felt what you've felt, but everything will be alright someday. Although your mother is firmly stuck in her grief and refuses to acknowledge the recent turn of events, she just needs time to accept the current situation. It's frightening and unexplainable, so none of us may ever fully accept it, but with time and effort, we'll find the answer. And at least your father's alive. I'm sure it'll be of much help."

Dolores swiftly turned her head in his direction. "Other people can see Aaron too?"

However, just as Edna smiled, endlessly grateful for Charles's speech, Dolores's whole body shook with immeasurable terror. "No, there's no way that this is happening! I've become so insane that my delusions are now significantly detailed!"

She then proceeded to run out of the house in a comical manner, sobbing the whole time, leaving the room in a state of awkward silence for a while.

"Thanks, Charles," Edna grumbled, knowing that it wasn't really his fault, but she couldn't help but feel that everything would've gone better if he'd just kept his mouth shut.

Charles refused to respond.

A few seconds later, he suddenly stood up from his chair, making his way toward his parents, who were only five chairs away. Met with stern gazes he knew he'd get, he sat in between his mother and father, prepared for the worst. Letting out a heavy sigh, he listened carefully to every word his father, who eagerly initiated the conversation, had to say.

"What are you doing here, Charles?" he said disapprovingly. "I thought you were supposed to be kept inside the insane asylum."

"I thought you would be happy to see me," Charles said in a voice bereft of emotion. "You believed I was insane when you forgot that Edna existed, but now that we all know that she exists, I ought to be free."

"But you escaped," the father retorted, shaking his head. "There's a reason they've kept you in there even after the whole ordeal was over."

The mother nodded solemnly.

"What?!" Charles shouted, waving his hands in the air. "What are you talking about?!"

"You know the reason perfectly well, son," the father said irritatedly. "Your college experience is crystal-clear proof of it. You've always been an oddity to some extent, inexplicably stressed by the blessed existence you were given. So what if we pressured you sometimes? There was no reason for you to be this sensitive. You're simply weak."

"You've never understood me!" Charles screamed, banging his fist onto the table. "It was never mere pressure. When I was under your roof, everything was about school. I was not allowed to have a life. I was lucky to have been a valedictorian throughout primary and secondary school, but there was always so much weight on my shoulders because every bad mark and every single mistake meant that I was not worthy in your eyes. All because you wanted me to be an influential politician as if it would just happen if I broke my back enough. And you think that's normal? There's so much that's wrong with that way of thinking that I don't know where to begin."

"Why are you here if you don't like it then?" the mother grumbled. "Please leave."

Charles wanted to explain that it wasn't exactly his choice because unknown magic had brought him there for an unclear reason, but he knew that it would've been fruitless, so he discarded that idea. "No."

The mother refused to continue the conversation, which left the room silent yet again. It lasted for a while until Lavinia's cousins initiated their own conversation, which was full of laughter. Lavinia couldn't understand the whole of it, but from what she understood, it was based on the recollection of a summer vacation in France from five years ago, which she also remembered because she was also there and it was an exceptionally wonderful experience, but this time, it made her mad. All of her relatives still refused to acknowledge their sins, so she abruptly stood up from her chair and marched over to them to do just that.

"How dare you?!" she screamed into their faces. "It's the anniversary of my father's murder, and you dare laugh and enjoy yourselves as though nothing happened! Also, it's every one of you's fault! You're unendingly shameless for doing this!"

"Maybe you should stop moralising all the time," said her brother, whom she recognised immediately from the snooty tone he constantly spoke in. "You've told us that we're greedy and selfish multiple times, but what makes you better than us? Also, is trying to console ourselves amidst all the wealth we've lost that bad? We simply miss the numerous privileges we used to have, Lavinia."

She let out a deep sigh. "Thomas, you don't seem to understand anything outside of your privileged little bubble, even though it's been an entire year since we've been driven into poverty. You're greedy and selfish because you orchestrated Father's murder - yes, Thomas, I know it was you who did it, as I've known all along - just because he left all of us in his will! Shame on you! Also, you don't deserve to be consoled. Even I don't. The fact that everything we own was burned down, driving us into poverty, is karma for how we've mistreated people over the years, and I guess I'm a part of it too. It's incredible how wealth can warp anyone's brain, really. We were buried so deep in our delusions that there was no other way for us to have learned our lesson."

He snorted. "If you've known all along, why didn't you do anything about it, huh? I guess it's much easier to just scold me about it than it is to be actually be proactive, right?"

She nodded solemnly. "Yes. However, I'll never forgive you for dragging us all into this. Father's blood will be on your hands until you yourself are dead, Thomas. Think about it. Can't wait to see how well you'll sleep at night."

His face began turning red. "I'm not planning on mourning that jerk! He was a horrible person, and you know it! You of all people should know it. After all, despite our best efforts, he was the one who dragged you into the asylum because he 'didn't want you ruining his family any longer', as he said. He was always enraged to even hear of your... Delusions..."

He energetically waved his hands in the air to emphasize her appearance, which he thought crystal-clear proof of the strangeness of her character. He'd always felt mildly unnerved due to her appearance. Her pale white skin and gaunt figure, which was the consequence of her constant sickness; her emerald eyes that always contained a disturbing amount of emotion within them; and especially her coal-black dress and parasol with lace of the same colour - they made her look as if she'd walked right out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, which didn't at all fit the aesthetics of the rest of the family. However, Lavinia was used to such reactions, and worse, from him, so she continued the conversation as if nothing had happened at all.

Her jaw dropped at remembering what he said. "Father spoke such terrible words about me?! That's not the Father I know!"

He shook his head. "My dear naive sister, such monsters would never show such disrespect in front of those they think beneath them. Vain people who use others as mere tools to get ahead in life have learned to put on a mask early on. That's why you can't decide if Father was kind or terrible. You've seen both sides of him, and now you feel conflicted. I feel so sorry for you, but hey, at least that won't be happening anymore."

As to not burst into tears, Lavinia changed the topic. "Um, that does not matter, you know? What matters if that he's dead and that our gardener burnt our villa down and that we will never recover from this. Maybe I'm selfish to some extent, but I don't want any of you to ever forget about this. We need to be aware of the damage we've caused so that we can become better people, after all."

"Does that mean you're siding with that lunatic called Nessie?" said a woman Lavinia had forgotten was even in the room due to how much less she spoke than usual. She'd always remember her well. The woman in question was Betsy, also known as Thomas's wife, and she looked and acted exactly how someone would expect a woman who married Thomas to look and act. She had long blond hair that was soaked with an expensive-smelling perfume, long black eyelashes which she often batted to look charming when she wanted something from others, large and soft lips that were overwhelmed with red lipstick, a multi-layered ruby necklace that covered her entire pale neck, a knee-length black dress over which she wore a thick fur coat, tall black high-heels, and also a fashionable black pipe that she loved to smoke from constantly, including during this conversation. Her legs, just like now, tended to be crossed. Most importantly, her accent was posh, just like her way of presenting herself. There was something quite respectable about the way she interacted with others and held her own at all times, so Lavinia heavily regretted having to crush her spirit. However, she didn't want to think too much about it, so she simply blurted out the unfortunate news without too much thinking:

"Nessie has, or rather had before the fire she stoked killed her, her reasons to be mad at us all. She was born poor and our family had always treated her horribly. For example, she was Thomas's mistress at one point, but he dumped her shortly before the fire, knowing that, if they were to be found out, everything in his life would be ruined."

"That is not true!" Thomas said, shaking with his whole body. "Guys, you know that Lavinia's delusional, right? I mean, she sees eldritch beings and all..."

"I know that look in your eyes, Thomas," Betsy growled, sinking her nails into her knife. "It means that, on some level, you've always seen me as disposable. I'm not worthy of you, now am I, Thomas?! Well, now you're going to regret it. You're going to regret everything."

"Don't do anything to me!" he cried as she waved the knife right in front of his face. "It's going to have grave consequences for you as well!"

Unfortunately, Betsy was a pretty good fighter even without the threat of murder, so she forcefully yanked him by the hair and slammed his head onto the table, hurting him immensely. This instigated a fierce battle between all of Lavinia's relatives, but fortunately, the same portal that brought Charles, Edna, Aaron, her and Henry into the dining room swallowed them immediately and returned them into the asylum. However, maybe the latter wasn't so fortunate.