Beam grabbed it, merely to test his luck. Of course, he didn't expect it to be open. Sure enough, the door didn't move, as though someone had nailed it shut. His eyes darted to the windows instead. The wooden shutters had been closed tightly too, but they certainly seemed to offer more hope of entry than that thick door.
With his newly gauntleted fist, Judas had followed his gaze. A smug smile crossed his face, as he drew back his fist, without even being given the order to do so.
A loud bang resounded, as the armour of his hand collided with the centre of a wooden shutter. A crack ran through it – yet it didn't fall from its frame just yet. Another fist followed it, breaking it straight through.
"There ya go, all open," Judas said smugly. He reached his hand inside, and flicked open the latch, so that he might push the rest of the debris out of the window frame. It fell inside with a crash that seemed to echo too loudly inside of that ominous house.
"And now what?" The sergeant remarked. He, like everyone else, had been looking at Judas somewhat wryly. The man was clearly used to breaking into houses. There hadn't been an ounce of hesitation before he went to punching through the window.
"Get someone to crawl in and open the door from the inside. We'd usually get Brem to do that – seems to be able to get into all the tight spaces he does... But given that Brem isn't here," he trailed off, looking towards Beam.
"Didn't we just agree that this was dangerous? And we're already splitting up?" Nila pointed out.
"I can't say we have much choice. Unless you've got any other way past that door," Judas said.
"But there could be anything waiting inside. I don't know much about fighting, but going in through that tight space, you're leaving yourself too open, aren't you?" She continued.
"I'll go," Beam said firmly. "We don't have much time. We're going to have to take some risks."
Beam took his torch, and crossed the room, towards where the Elder had made him sit, that time Beam had needed to visit him. He could have sworn somewhere in his memory there were crystals of some sort, but as he searched the desk, he could find nothing of that description now.
There was merely a mountain of paperwork, seeming to be ledgers of some sort, accounting for the various debts that the Elder owed.
He brushed them aside with a frown. There didn't seem to be anything interesting among them.
He then began to search the desk's drawers instead. The top one – empty. The middle one – empty. And then the bottom one was empty all the same.
"This has been cleared out," Beam noted with a frown.
The sergeant was looking in the fireplace, raking through the ashes with his hand. "These are stone cold. It hasn't been lit in days. And look at these – paper ashes."
The ashes from paper didn't crumble in the same way that ashes from wood did. Instead, they sat in thicker flakes, making a mess of the fireplace.
"More than suspicious, do you not think?" The sergeant said, as he dusted off his hands.
Beam nodded. The place had been cleared out in a hurry, it certainly seemed. But why? Just what was the old man hiding.
"This is the creepiest fuckin' place," Judas murmured, looking at the skull of a deer on the wall. Its horns had been painted black. "By the way, how's the door locked from the inside when no one's here?"