"What is it?" Ted jumped up, fearing his friend might have been poisoned. "What is it? Are you sick?"
Ted battled the mental image of himself strapped onto a torture table somewhere east of Neul.
Luckily, there was a doctor in the restaurant. Mad got better within two hours.
The same could not be said about Ted's piece of mind.
He got three private detectives to work for him on that very night. It seemed to him like he had been partially right, but the trails did not seem to lead east.
He was puzzled, and a bit upset, too – he had not considered that he might be hunted by several factions at once. It was like pull the rye with an infinite pack, or that was how Mad put it. He was never too sick to use elaborate language to describe things that a normal person would have put shortly.
They were in a mess.
Nothing about the situation was revealed to the cultists, but they were still urged to be careful and only sleep with one man or woman guarding them. They took it as an opportunity for an adventure, and Ted thought it was a fine way of looking at it, or it would have been without the constant tension.
Eknie and Mad joined him many times in front of the fireplace, talking about possible solutions to the problem.
"We can just…" Ted shook his head. He had exhausted every possible route in his head. He was tired. He wanted to sleep.
"Oh, just take a night off," Eknie said. "We'll deal with the other stuff."
He slept, and to his surprise, he woke up the next morning.
He felt all right. There were eight hundred members now, and it just kept on snowballing from there. He had almost exhausted the available human resources, though, and while they could not move their lodgings just yet, there was something Ted and Eknie could do to get even more members.
It happened to be so that just outside the city, there was an asylum for women whose mental health was not strong enough to withstand the winds of modern life. There were more women like that than there were beds in the asylum, and this was why the head of the organization was more than willing to let the girls ask the cult leader some questions about some rehabilitation as members of the Society.
Ted drove his best car into the yard and thought about it, finally realized that it could be a grave mistake to let insane people around his best vehicle, and hid the car.
Eknie was not feeling well, but he did not think it was anything more than regular fever. There had been no signs of poisoning. He had let her stay in his manor for the day.
"And good day to you, cor," the lady who was apparently not one of the crazy ones said. She was surrounded by women clothed in white, but her own outfit was so dull and sensible that she had to be the boss.
The girls did not look all right. Most of them had a terrifying, vacant stare in their eyes. Some were so thin that their bones were sticking out. A redhead with a sad expression was chewing her fingers badly enough that little drops of blood could be seen.
"Good day to you, cor," the sorrowful redhead whispered.
She sounded like she was physically incapable of speaking with a normal voice.
Ted happened to know a lot about the mind. He knew that sometimes people thought they had good reasons to stop eating, or to hurt someone, and in these cases, that someone was often the person in the mirror. Such had been life for many weak-willed women Ted had known. Eknie was an exception to the rule that said: women hurt inwards. Men hurt outwards.
Ted was invited to a scruffy house that smelled like chloroform and armpit sweat.
Madness was not glamorous. Madness was a tragedy for everyone involved, and modern medicine knew no cure.
Ted tried his best to act normal, like he did not know all too well how difficult it was at times to pretend to understand why the world worked against itself. He knew the fire these women were burning in, he knew the hatred in their eyes, and he certainly did not like the matronly woman fussing over lost stockings and unwashed dishes.
Sometimes, Ted thought how much pain he would have saved as an arsonist. The process of choking in a room full of smoke was considerably quicker and less tedious than conforming to whatever expectations stuck-up and small-minded people had.
He stared at the mushroom pie on the coffee table. He did not trust the girls to pick the right kind of mushrooms.
"It's not poisoned," the matriarch said, sounding a bit offended. "Cor."
"I just ate. Besides, I don't want to make you people feel like you have to put in effort for my sake. I am here to relieve you."
"Yes. We have more women here than we can realistically feed."
"If any of the girls have a penchant for volunteering, it would be a sign of a suitable personality." Ted sipped his tea. It was not poisoned – at least, it was not likely to be poisoned, for the brew was too mild to cover any bitterness.
"All of the girls have been engaging in activities that are comparable to volunteering, cor."
"Really? Like what?"
"Like…gardening, and collecting wild thrushweed."
If a garden was infested with thrushweed, there was no point in weeding anything any longer. It was a lost case, and the work done was work done in vain.
The madness of the matriarch angered Ted so badly that he almost said something about it.
Almost.
He was a sensible man, after all – but it would have satisfied him to his core to rid the world of that tyrant of a woman.
"That is good," he said and smiled. "Take me to meet more of these ladies."