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Something about this building makes your skin crawl and it isn't the face of the clown gazing down on you from the sign. Although that wasn't helping.
"Let me sweep around the exterior real quick and do my thing, see if either entrance has anything to say."
Grey gives you a shallow nod returns to his observations with laser focus. You take a breath and let your eyes be closed for a few seconds until you start to feel the skin of your forearms start to raise in tiny bumps, slowly you walk towards the entrance with your hand outstretched for the handle when suddenly you feel it.
A cold breeze blows past you, flowing through the smallest of slits and crack in the door's frame, it grazes your skin like light freezing fingertips. It makes your stomach contract and your lungs ache like running a marathon in the dead of winter; you feel a radiating warmth just beyond the door coming up from your ankles to your calves and finally stopping just below your waist. You take a step back.
"Sense something?" Gray asks without looking at you as he inspects a parking spot on bended knee.
"Something for sure. Let me check the back."
He gives you a thumbs up as he pulls his phone from his back pocket with his free hand; you leave him to his own work and head around the side on the street. Access to the back alley from the street is blocked by a chain-link fence and gate, even from here you can see the bright silver padlock clasping it shut as you approach you notice that strangely enough it's only locked around the links of the fence itself, only slightly away from the proper placement, you wonder if this was done on purpose or if it was just a fortunate accident. You open the gate and step into the alley and shudder as the smell of freshly printed paper and still drying ink hits your nose, but only for a moment as when you lift your nose to the air again all you intake is stale garbage and exhaust fumes from the road behind you.
"What the hell was that?" You mumble to yourself.
'Necromancy, green idolatry, and greed.' You think to yourself.
You freeze in place. You thought that but you didn't. It's inexplainable but the thought that entered your head just then wasn't yours, you could just tell by how it appeared apropos of nothing at all, different than any normal intrusive thought this felt planted but not even in the same way as what you experienced with John Jones. Your palms sweat as you scan the alley.
"Hello?" You quietly ask.
The surging whoosh of a passing car is your only answer as the alley falls into deathly silence once more. No sign of anything. Your wandering eyes eventually fall on the rear entrance, plastered to the back is a an old yellowing poster showing the same face of the clown on the sign out front, you approach this door same as you did the last with your hand extended for the dented and dirty knob. Your hand wraps around the door knob and you find yourself staring into the clowns eyes.
