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Understanding eludes you – at least, until you shift your position a little, and feel the unpleasantly crusty fabric of the wraps give and slide under your feet. The rags in the fireplace are not just bandages, they are footwraps and bandages! Now this whole affair here makes sense.
There are two men. One, possibly both of them, are injured, but only one of them gets it bad. Around the same time, they are exposed to the Strangeness. They feel the need to get off of the streets. They come here and arrange for an extended stay … possibly to ensure that no one checks in on their room for a good long while. They go straight to the room. The non-injured or the less-injured man gets his boots off immediately, while the injured man goes walks around a little bit before getting his off. The two of them make bandages and do their best to tend to their wounds. Once they have done what they can, they make footwraps – but … no – how does that work? The footwraps are still here, and the sheet is not big enough that they could have made four sets of them, on top of all of these spent bandages – and the bandages that the injured man was presumably was still wearing when he left here.
Well … how about … if the more mobile of the two of them went out wearing the footwraps he made to go buy proper boots for them to wear! Great! Now, the injured man is still injured – and obviously, these two are not going to hire a professional. So is it possible that they left here – just to go to another public house? Clearly, they knew about the Strangeness on their boots, otherwise they wouldn’t have left them behind, and were worried about being tracked on account of it, otherwise they never would have left the boots behind. But once they had replacements, they could go … fray it all, just about anywhere. And if your read on the age of the bloodstains is right, then you are already three or four days behind them.
It is agonizing, honestly. You are certain that you are on the trail of something important, but even if you could figure out where they went, you are so pressed for time that you don’t know if you are going to be able to follow –
Hold on, now! You don’t know where they went from here, but you certainly can figure out where they were coming from, possibly even where they were exposed to the Strangeness. And in that vein, if one of them was injured, and they did want to go to another public house to recuperate, they probably would not want to go to far. If you were to check at nearest handful of public houses, you might be able to pick up their trail again after all.
But before you do any of that - or check the alley outside - you should really finish poking through the burn pile. In your excitement Strain-Staining reactivated, so you suppress it once more and start prodding around the back of the bundle, where the fire was set. You turn some half-burnt rags over. Huh, is that some rope back there?
