Act Twenty: Don’t Say the “M”-Word
The most disturbing thing about reanimating corpses, to most people, is the smell. The odor of decaying flesh is both unique and easily recognizable. Some might say that we are programmed to notice and identify it immediately, as a defense mechanism: surely we would want, on a basic and instinctual level, to avoid anything that not only would kill us, but leave us to rot. Of course, with the advent of mortuaries and corpse-dressing, half that smell nowadays can be attributed to formaldehyde, a smell we are programmed to dislike by sheer virtue of it smelling like ripe, chemical ass.
Barring the smell, the next most disturbing thing about reanimating a corpse, on a subconscious level (seeing as the conscious mind is primarily focused on “Holy shit, zombies!”), is the movement. The dead are not concerned with pulling muscled, dislocating joints, or other forms of damage. This gives them both disturbing flexibility and unconscionable strength. Especially when someone else is doing the driving.
This current incarnation of mobile dead seemed to be driven as a single unit, moving in a single wave, washing over the tile and fixtures like overlarge spiders in tattered clothing. The creaking of their joints and the alien stretching of their leathered flesh was easily drowned out by the heavy, staccato pattering of their feet, hands, or whatever limbs they were using to drag themselves along the floor, and some, the walls. A few had even scattered to the ceiling, and all were in a driving tide towards the back of the room.
Which, unfortunately, happened to be where all of the living in attendance had gathered. Well, mostly. “Hey, HEY! Watch the hair! Someone wanna GET ME OUT OF HERE?!” Rubble yelled, his parking spot by the counter being blatantly disregarded by these newfound intruders. Although, given their tenancy in the house, they probably had more right to be here than the people they were climbing over. Rubble glared around, his eyes narrowing as the girls rushed the rear door to the kitchen, scrambling to get to the hall. Treble and Dusty had taken up arms, a kitchen knife and wrench, respectively, and were guarding the furnace. Well, less guarding, and more backed into the wall. Treble yelped and jumped forward slightly as the heat from the iron brushed against his back.
The children were fast, agile, and filled with unknowable intent. They’d descended upon the back of the room in less than a minute, an impressive feat given the numbers, and size of the room. Dusty had already beaten a few back with his trusty wrench, and Treble had swung at one or two with his knife hand, both to little avail. The ones knocked aside were replaced in an instant, and the knife had little to no effect against dead flesh.
Spooks had woken angrily, glaring around the room as the corpses surged forward, and climbed over him, giving him little to no attention. He eyeballed Rubble, currently guarding his head and shoulders from the little urchins, who viewed him as little more than an obstacle to be surmounted. Following the tide of movement, and analyzing the fighting going on in the back of the room, Spooks yelled over the din, “The book, asshole! They want the book!”
“No shit, Sherlock! That’s kind of why I’m fighting them off!” Dusty yelled back.
Bones rolled his eyes. “No, you dick! I mean they aren’t going to hurt any of us! They literally just want to get the book! Have any of them even attacked you yet?!”
Dusty paused as he held one body at arm’s length while swatting at a particularly grabby young boy reaching for his bag, where he’d shoved the text when the fighting had started. “Uh… no?!” he yelled back unevenly, his attention divided between keeping the munchkins off of him, and doing a mental inventory of any injuries he’d sustained so far. The answer was ‘none’, surprisingly. “Oh. OH!” he barked, finally getting it. He threw the growing pile of bodies off himself, with some help from Treble (who had completely abandoned the knife), and dug around in his bag for the book.
The children seemed to follow his every move, and once he had the book out, it was all they had eyes for. Still they came forward, eyes on the prize, trying to climb up Dusty’s outreached arm to take the book from him. He lightly tossed the book over to Treble, who had freed himself of the mass of bodies, and had maneuvered himself over to the now open oven. Flames still licked the inside of the metal, the scent of burnt leather and small clouds of ashed wafting into the room on invisible waves of heat.
He leaned the book closer to the opening, and almost immediately, the bodies recoiled. Even the ones now grasping his legs and climbing their way up his deteriorating three-piece suit (which he had long since given up keeping in tact), had started to back away and relax their grips. Experimentally, he moved away from the furnace, and the children cautiously approached him again. When they got too close, he reached back to the furnace again, holding them at bay. They watched DT warily, never taking their unblinking eyes off the book, now clenched firmly in his hand as he rested against the wall.
DT looked to Spooks, who took the nonverbal cue. It was few and far between, but Spooks had had occasion to use his family’s gift in front of his friends more than once. It wasn’t painful, embarrassing, or taxing, but in his current state, he rather thought jumping in the furnace and letting the Good Lord whisk him off to the next life sounded almost comparable to doing any more work before he passed out for good. Unfortunately, corpse-talking wasn’t exactly a learned skill, so it wasn’t like he could pawn the task off on any of the others.
With the girls in the hall, and probably some distance away, everyone in the room knew what to expect. It still didn’t make it any easier to witness. Buried Bones made the dead talk like the living. Spooky Bones, on the other hand, could talk like the dead.
In a voice no one should have to hear before they pass on.
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The three girls rushed into the sitting room with the kind of urgency one might flee an explosion, and landed in the chairs and sofas like they hadn’t quite escaped the blast. Throwing themselves into the imagined safety of the cushions, they all spent the next few minutes drawing ragged breaths and settling their slowly deteriorating nerves.
“I just wanted to drive like ten miles and make twenty bucks, what even is this shit I just wanna go home this isn’t anything like The Walking Dead why did you LIE to me Norman Reedus WHYYYYY?!” Indigo bellowed into the old fabric of the loveseat she’d landed in. The rest of her ranting was muffled by the cushion she was pushing into her face, and it was a few noisy, unintelligible minutes before she came up for air.
Raven Inkwell had opted for simply staring at the ceiling in an almost trance-like state, the cogs in her head spinning like race tires as she tried to map out everything that had happened to her this evening and put it in some kind of logical order. Even as much as a recollective timeline whould suit her; anything to help her focus and keep her mind off the impossibilities of the events surrounding her newly acquired house.
On the far end of the spectrum, Twilight Sparkle was pouring over her precious instruments with renewed ferocity. She had had a few false starts trying to find her bearings, as her heart slowed and her vision stopped swimming, but some stubborn minutes later she was boring a hole in her computer screen with her eyes as she attempted to retrieve some recordable data. Many of her devices had been left running, but without built-in timers, she had the long task ahead of her of lining up the readings with the timeline of the night’s events, matching spikes to specific phenomena. It didn’t help that there were several she couldn’t account for, and some devices hadn’t even registered the phenomena she was thee for.
All three of them had lost themselves in their own little coping devices, so the voice that joined them nearly flung them all to the ceiling in surprise. “Well, isn’t this the productive evening we’re having?”
Indigo reacted first, throwing herself from her loveseat and sliding across the (now empty) table, coming to a crash on the floor with all of its contents. Twilight looked up from her station to glare at Indigo, then some small part of her lizard brain caught up with the outside world, and she registered the presence of a fourth person in the room. Raven simply glanced over to the far side of the room, where the voice emanated, and jumped up in her seat when she saw who it was that had spoken.
It was the little girl they’d burned not hours before. Though this time she wasn’t a mangled corpse. She was a translucent, almost luminescent presence sitting on a nightstand, kicking her feet in the air like, well, a child. “Hello to you, too,” she added, with a tinge of amusement in her voice. “I can see you’ve all had a very stressful night.”
“Wh-wh-wha-what the hell?!” Zap stammered, baking into the couch Raven had stretched out on, and falling back into the woman’s lap.
“Oof! Thank you for that, Indigo,” Inkwell deadpanned. She turned her attention to the apparition. “Do I even want to know why you’re here, miss...” she left the end of the sentence open, as an inquisition.
The girl ghost tilted her head to the side innocently, as if trying to remember if she’d left a light on. “I think it was Eventide. You can call me Tide. As to why I’m here, it’s to say thank you.”
There was a lot of blinking at this declaration. After a moment of confused silence, Twilight said, almost asked, “Uh… you’re welcome?”
Tide hopped down and strolled across the floor. Twilight watched her feet wearily as she did so, although she neither floated across the room, nor left strange, glowing footprints. Tide disregarded her staring, and approached Raven and Indigo. “For freeing me. Burning my body. You wouldn’t believe how long Mr. Song has left me locked up in that dreary old thing. I daresay I’m older than all of you. At once.”
Zap had scooted to the far side of the couch, regarding Tide with an uneasy smile, while Raven’s common courtesy and innate curiosity had found a foothold over her sense of panic. “So why appear to us now? If you wanted simply to say thank you, I imagine there might be easier ways than manifesting yourself. Of course, I’m far from an expert.”
“You’re not wrong, though. A… manifestation like this, as you put it… is mildly taxing. Although, it’s not like I have an awful lot to do after this, so it hardly matters. Anyway, I did have some more to talk to you about than just a simple extension of gratitude. Prolonged conversations are much easier like this, after all. I also thought it might be a bit more polite than a disembodied voice floating around the room,” she reasoned, taking a seat on the bare table.
Twilight regarded her with a sense of awe and wonder, her fear forgotten and buried under her scientific mind. “Um… if you don’t mind me asking, how do you manifest yourself like that?”
Tide gave her an inquisitive glance. “Not to sound rude, but I doubt you’d be able to understand it. It would be like explaining how I know that an apple is an apple or a different color from a tree. Sure, I could spout a bunch of words at you, most of which you might understand, but the basics, the instinct behind it, is much less scientific, let alone readily explainable.”
“You sure don’t talk like a nine year old girl,” Inkwell observed.
Tide raised a reproachful eyebrow. “Young lady, I am easily several decades older than you. Not everyone who dies ceases to be, and I have been in this house for a very, very long time. The body might not age, but the mind never stops growing. Now, on to more pressing matters. For example, your survival. I believe you have already met the master of the house, Mr. Song?”
Indigo seemed to finally find her voice. “Yeah, that ‘Culling’ guy? What a charmer.”
Tide paused for a second, and giggled, very much the image of a nine year old, despite her protests. “Oh, NO. Culling is a sweetheart. He’s the one who has kept such good care of us over the years. His father, on the other hand, is a macabre and monstrous bastard.”
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Spooky made his way around the counter, dragging his feet in exhaustion. He slumped down in front of a particular young boy, who had come to a rest on all fours, some feet away from Treble and the furnace. Taking a seat, Indian style, he leaned forward and met the boy’s eyes. At first, the corpse had no eyes for him, staring intently at the book and the teenager brandishing it in front of an open flame. Slowly, though, as if only now aware of his presence, he turned his gaze to Bones, meeting him eye to eye.
Then Spooky spoke, and the other boys shivered. His voice was like dry leaves and brittle bones underfoot: indecipherable syllables scattered over the rocks of a growling accent, a hollow, chittering sound so far from English as to be alien. There was something else in his voice, too. An old sound, a sense of age and weariness, as if the language had long sense worn out its days and came to him on its last legs, as if he was dragging each syllable along one step at a time. None of the boys could tell what he said given a hundred years, but they would understand him perfectly the moment they’d passed on; they knew that much from second-hand experience that they’d really rather have done without.
When the corpse in question made no attempts to respond beyond a few low growls, Spooks raised an eyebrow. Then, as if a lightbulb went off in his head, his eyes widened, and he turned his gaze away, scanning the floor. It took him less than a second to find what he was looking for: the knife that Treble had cast away. Picking it up in a tense, steady grasp, he brought the blade to the corpse’s mouth. The boy made no move to shy away from the edge, and didn’t even flinch as Bones dug the blade into the expanse of dried flesh where his mouth used to be. With a swift, singular motion, he cut a wide gap in the corpse’s face, which fell open with an awful smell and waft of dead air. Spooks hardly blinked. Once again, he spoke to the dead.
[What are you doing here? What is so important about the book?] he asked, his voice low, slow, and almost unbearable.
The corpse responded in kind, although in a slightly higher pitch, and a bit faster. The dead always spoke faster; it was their native language, after all. [Mr. Song wants the book. The key. He wants the lock open.]
[Why?] Spooks asked. [He wants out? What for? Is he strong enough to leave the house?]
[No,] said the corpse. [Not out. In. Mr. Song wants in. The door is weak, but he is strong. He needs only the right key.]
[In where? Where could be better than here? Heaven? Has he found a way into Heaven?] Spooky’s words came faster, a little at a time. Some with urgency, some with practice.
[Not Heaven. Or Hell. The Other Place. The Bad Place. The Monster Place.]
Spooks shook his head. [What other place? Where else could he go from here?]
The boy tilted his head slightly. [I have seen it. We all have. He shows us the Bad Place. Tells us what he will do there. What he will become. So much more. More than what he is. You have seen it, too. I see the Bad Place in your eyes.]
Treble, Dusty, and Rubble had all gathered round, best they could, to watch the conversation, keeping on alert in case the undead attacked their friend (it was known to happen). Even with Treble’s poor line of sight, he recognized the look on Spooky’s face. One he saw very rarely. They all recognized it.
Fear.
Spooky Bones knew exactly what the boy was talking about. [He wants into the Tenebrae.]