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In a moment of inspiration, it occurs to you that there might be a hidden passage, or hiding spot underneath the chest - which would handily explain the brackets inside - and so you eagerly set down the stick and bundle once more and alight upon the cold cast iron rungs. But as hard as you tug on them, they do not give - and when you rap on the bottom of the chest, it doesn't sound hollow at all. You are still not entirely convinced, until you get your head - and more importantly, your eyes - directly over the hole drilled into the bottom of the chest. From this vantage point, you can see what looks to be packed dirt or dirty stone just a few inches down. You get up, rest your right foot on the lip of the chest, and push with all your weight ... but there is no give. You might as well have tried to push the foundations. In fact, for all you know, that chest is secured right into the foundations. It is close enough to the wall.
Unsatisfied, you take every up once more and quit the room, retracing your steps through the basement, through the room with the furniture under the sheets and the crates where you found the False Silverware, through the room with the preserves on the walls and the sausage on the ceiling where you made all that noise and into the room where you hid. With the light from your 'stick augmented by the light from your eyes, you are confident in your initial assessment of the room - it is empty. Standing in silence, you can once again hear that near-imperceptible noise, off in the distance. Shaking your head to focus yourself, you start to orientate yourself towards where the 'compass of misery' was pointing - when suddenly, the effects of the ranged remediation cast; the heat, the nausea, the chills, the aches, all of it comes roaring back in an instant, and all the stronger for it. Where it was once simply 'miserable', now it knocks the wind from your lungs, the cogence from your mind - in fact, it is to the point that your first articulate thought after the effects come back is that this must be an deliberate, targeted attack. But as it is, you are in no state to run away. For several seconds, it is all that you can do to shudder and gasp and dry heave jacked over at the waist as the room spins around you, mostly in darkness.
By the time that you recover yourself, enough time has past for a Witch to kill you a dozen-dozen times over - but just as before, no assailants appeared - and once again you find yourself forced to assume that you are alone down here.
That is little relief, and it is made less once you determine that not only is the 'compass of misery' is not providing your stomach the relief that it once was, it is pointing in a completely different direction. Not towards where it was before it stopped while you were investigating the chest, and not towards where you think the unknown noise might be coming from.
