This house of the dead reminded me all too much of the prison.
Investigation revealed several important messages and notes. I learned Alexander was trying to help Daniel throw off The Shadow via some ritual in the Inner Sanctum. It seems Alexander himself had gone through the same terror once, or perhaps still did. Regardless, banishing The Shadow required extraction of "vitae" (the energy Alexander himself had been murdering animals and people to obtain).
The hunt for vitae had its toll, and not just on the mind and soul of Daniel. Rather, those that suffered because of it. Though I couldn't confirm how they died, I found my first insight into what may have happened to those taken from the prison.
Something had killed these people - bodies don't just drop and then scatter everywhere.
Progressing through the morgue I came across a corpse on a table, seemingly being prepped for examination... or for harvest.
No doubt this cadaver held some secret - Amnesia wasn't exactly abudent with corpses. Or so I thought until I entered the next room, where the bodies were to be kept and the incinerator was.
This scene shocked me more than any the game had provided for a while.
A pile of corpses lay in the middle of the room, stacked neatly. These men weren't long dead when they were put like this - the blood pool under suggests either they'd been brought here right after death or killed on the spot. A single lone man seems to have escaped the fate of the others if only for a moment - his cold body lay on the stairs leading to the incinerator. Either he died of his wounds as he slowly crawled away, or something finished him beforehand.
Notes I gathered told me all the staff of the Castle had been vaccinated against the fungi so they could transfer prisoners through. It also mentioned that few servants survived the procedure, and that Alexander would have to make more of them. This comment led me to believe that The Gatherers that now chased me might have looked human once before degrading to their current state. Regardless my mission was clear - I had to obtain the antidote from inside of one of the corpses, and the body on the table was the perfect subject. I went to work looking for tools and managed to find the last one when the eerie silence of the morgue was shattered.
I entered a room and found yet more death and just as I obtained the final piece needed, the door to the morgue entrance exploded in the room behind me. A noise unlike anything I'd yet heard - different from The Shadow and The Gatherers, erupted. Frightened I hid, waiting and hoping for this new threat to pass. It growled like a mix of man and machine and I could hear it move; its movements sounded to me like a machine long past its time being forced to move, rusty metal scrapping and contorting.
After what seemed an eternity it left, clanging down the hallway. I emerged from my hiding spot and, after making sure the coast way clear, got to work drilling a hole in the skull of the poor man who lay before me.
Following this I placed a tube in the hole and collected the blood that came out. With great disgust I downed it, hoping it would serve as some form of protection against the poison below. Though after that last encounter I doubted that mushrooms would top my list of worries in the sewers.
One final note before I descend into water horror yet again - I found an additional note in the morgue, though the way I found it made it seem more like a memory or message. In it, I learned Alexander believed The Shadow had tainted Daniel; he claims to have seen evil in his friends eyes, and believed that he would not be capable of passing through "The Gate". I have no idea what this gate is, but Alexander went on to say that he was sorry he would have to do to Daniel what an individual named "Aggripa" did to himself.
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