The Tombstone Tourist

by Daniel-Gleebits

The Curious Discovery of the Charcoal Sticks

The Tombstone Tourist

When imagining the sorts of people one meets in a cemetery, one may be forgiven for imagining finding people there of a somewhat eccentric nature.

People at a cemetery on what can reasonably be called official business, we might pass off as ordinary: Casual mourners making the journey to the resting spots of their recently dead. Military veterans visiting to pay their respects to fallen comrades. Elderly individuals making regular pilgrimages to the graves of their deceased partners and friends.

If, on the other hand, one saw a rowdy group of teenagers kicking headstones, or people in eccentric clothes pacing around with unknown intent, most would probably agree that a call to the police was in order.

What is one to do, then, when the person one sees in a cemetery is none of these things? What is the appropriate response to a teenage girl of unassuming aspect and bearing kneeling at the outer edge of a graveyard surrounded by a cluster of animals? What does one do?

Fluttershy arranged the daises delicately on the small mounds, making sure to appoint the correct colour to each. She knew that Leopard had liked orange, Ruffles had been fond of purple, and Mrs. Nizbit pink.

“It’s okay, Mr. Nizbit,” she said sympathetically. “No one is judging you here.”

The badger beside her sniffed loudly, its beady black eyes glimmering with tears.

“That’s right, let it all out. We all know how much the two of you loved each other,” Fluttershy breathed, putting a gentle hand over Mr. Nizbit’s shoulders.

Several sparrows, a blue tit, and a sombre raven milling on a low hanging branch of the willow tree overhanging the scene all nodded in agreement, along with the rabbit parents and children standing at a respectful distance beside a female deer.

“Would someone like to say a few words?” Fluttershy asked quietly, looking around at the animals.

All of them looked around at each other rather awkwardly. Several mice edged behind the rabbit children as their parents made a show of trying to quieten their offspring, and the female deer tapped a hoof into the grass, avoiding Fluttershy’s gaze. After a somewhat awkward pause, a mallard waddled forward, his green head bowed low.

“Thank you, Professor Northumberland,” Fluttershy said gratefully, edging a little to the side to let him forward.

Professor Northumberland reached the edge of the earthen mound, and gave Mr. Nizbit a solemn look. Then in a strong, clear quack, began a sedate oration, making respectful gestures with his grey and purple wings, and finishing on a low note as he bowed himself back as unassumingly as a duck can.

Fluttershy wiped an eye as Mr. Nizbit burst into a fit of loud sobbing and threw himself on Professor Northumberland’s shoulders. The duck collapsed under the badger’s greater weight, but managed to flap a wing weakly onto Mr. Nizbit’s shoulder.

“Thank you very much, Professor,” Fluttershy sniffed, gathering Mr. Nizbit up and taking the brunt of the old badger’s outpouring of grief. “Thank you all for being here,” she said to the group at large. “I know it won’t be easy, Mr. Nizbit, but please remember that we’re all here for you should you need us.”

Mr. Nizbit took a moment or two to compose himself, and then sniffing loudly, gave his shaky thanks.

---

Surprising though it may be, Fluttershy had received very few complaints or threats of opposition to her activities in the graveyard. A policeman had once found her in the midst of burying one of the rabbit’s relatives there, but had been so caught off-guard by her quiet demeanour and his own uncertainty about the legality of what she was doing, that he departed without any fuss.

In fact, whatever it was about Fluttershy or her activities that had this effect, it seemed to permeate throughout the entire area. No one questioned her, no one interfered. Her friends knew of and understood it as a natural part of her, and some of them had even spared time to attend several of her ceremonies. Pinkie Pie had even twice planned after-services, and to Fluttershy’s delight, conducted them with appropriate levels of respect and deference to the bereaved. Although Rainbow Dash, who had also been in attendance, swore that she had nightmares about what she called Quiet Pinkie for several weeks.

She had been using the same spot for several years now, and Fluttershy’s personal little corner of the graveyard underneath the willow tree went undisturbed, and frequented whenever Fluttershy experienced a loss amongst her animal friends. That is, until one day in late summer, a week to the day after Mrs. Nizbit’s funeral, when Fluttershy came across something odd at school.

---

Lunch being the usual loud affair, Rainbow Dash frequently took advantage of it to indulge in her newfound bad habit with Aria, who appreciated and reciprocated it.

“Sup’, bitch?” Rainbow asked, shifting over to make room.

“Nothing much, you gay-pride looking fucknugget.”

As usual, Rarity’s expression tensed as the two friends bumped knuckles and grinned at each other.

“It’s still not clever, or funny,” she said to Rainbow Dash rather than Aria.

“Lighten up, Rarity,” Rainbow grunted, waving dismissively. “It’s just our thing.”

“Let ‘em be, Rarity,” Applejack said, taking a healthy bite of her frozen peaches. “They’ll grow out of it sooner or later. You’re just prolongin’ it by harpin on to ‘em.”

“Hey Adagio,” Sunset said, hailing her to the table whilst Rarity simmered next to her. “Isn’t Sonata with you two?”

“She’s not at school today,” Adagio said, sitting regally down before picking up her pizza and scrutinising it distastefully. Dabbing it with a napkin to get off the majority of the visible grease, she took a bite. “Don’t ask me how,” she continued when she noticed Sunset giving her a questioning look. “She came in from the garden with her hand bleeding and wouldn’t tell me how it happened.”

“Looked to me like an animal bit her,” Aria said.

Fluttershy looked up from her home-made salad. “An animal?” she asked.

“Did she go to the doctor?” Sunset asked, raising her eyebrows a little.

“She got a shot just in case,” Adagio said airily, then smirked. “Being a big baby about it,” she added, shaking her head.

“Um, I hope you don’t mind me asking,” Fluttershy said, leaning tentatively across the table. “I hope she’s okay. I don’t suppose you know what animal it was?”

Aria shrugged. “I don’t know, she wouldn’t show it to me.” She ate a fry. “We get lots of animals in the garden though. Deer, groundhogs, cats.”

“Remember that dog?” Adagio asked, grinning.

“Oh yeah,” Aria chuckled, smiling reminiscently. “Slipped underneath the fence,” she explained as everyone else at the table looked at her inquiringly. “Tore up the whole place. The gardener was in tears!”

Both Adagio and Aria burst out laughing.

“You had to be there I suppose,” Adagio said, shrugging and opening her drink.

“It was the right thing to get a shot just in case,” Fluttershy said, touching a finger to her chin. “Unfortunately, poor little creatures sometimes have terrible diseases that hurt them very badly, and sometimes people too if they’re not careful around them.”

“Mm,” Adagio said, taking another bite of her pizza as she lounged back in her chair.

“Well, could you tell Sonata that I hope that she gets well soon? I mean,” she added quickly. “If you think she’d like to hear that from me. You could maybe just tell her that I hope to see her again soon. At school.”

“What?” Adagio said, looking up suddenly from her berry-punch smoothie. “Oh, yeah, sure. Whatever.”

---

Fluttershy modestly congratulated herself for this small conversation. Quite apart from building up the gumption to speak to Adagio, who even after several months of being on speaking terms with her friends, was as haughty and self-important as ever, Fluttershy knew that she was one of those uncomfortable breeds of people whose sensibilities don’t quite conform to standards of normalcy.

It wasn’t a point of self-flattery disguised as a criticism, it was simply how she was. To deny it was simply churlish.

Although she did feel bad for Sonata being bitten, and genuinely worried for her health, Fluttershy’s immediate, slightly guilty thought, had been to wonder if the creature who’d attacked Sonata had been injured.

Fluttershy knew every single wild animal for three districts within the city, including the sewer rats, who were a surprisingly recondite bunch much given to hashing out existential philosophy, although Fluttershy could never think without shuddering the cannibalistic means by which most disagreements were inevitably settled. With this all-encompassing knowledge of the local animal population, she help worrying if any of them had been involved.

It was unlikely of course; Sonata and her sisters lived on the other side of town, quite a distance from where any of the animals she knew would even venture to.

But it couldn’t be helped. The more she thought about it, the more her nerves wound up to a higher pitch.

Fluttershy shuddered in the breeze as she reached the little creek in the city park. The creek ran off into the greater river a ways down beyond the park’s boundary, meaning that a decorative iron arch ran over the creek in the spot where the fence was interrupted. Passing under this, Fluttershy found herself at the small dam of the beaver family she knew there.

“She’s sort of thin, with blue hair usually in a ponytail,” she explained to the unimaginatively named but stoic Mr. Beaver. “You haven’t seen her?”

Mr. Beaver shook his head, his hands at his hips, one eye on the pile of sticks and twigs he’d been working on.

Fluttershy next tried the ferret who dwelt in the trees along the older urban district nearby. An escaped pet, her owner had long since moved away, and so eked out a lazy living scavenging rubbish bins and relaxing on tree branches. She listened good-naturedly to Fluttershy’s questioning, but shook her head at last, and went back to chewing on some half-finished peanut-brittle.

Next she tried the weasels who lived on the river’s edge, the various rabbit families whose burrows ran along the wild trees that had long since grown over a section of compulsory purchase land, and even tried to make inquiries with the small deer herd that dwelled in the area, despite their buck’s secretive demeanour.

But the results were all the same. None of them had, or at least could remember, seeing or interacting with, Sonata Dusk.

She was about to go home with her nerves a bit better than they had been, when she suddenly remembered that she hadn’t asked or seen Mr. Nizbitit, and so turned towards where she knew his burrow to lie. Upon finding it empty in the hills near of a small apartment square, she considered that it was probable that he was visiting his wife’s grave, being the one week anniversary of her funeral.

---

The graveyard lay within one city block from the eastern end of the city park, a circumstance that Fluttershy knew – thanks to Applejack’s unexpected foreknowledge on the subject – had been a subject of some concern to the inhabitants. There had been nothing for it however, given the proximity of the needed land by the creek to feed the artificial lake, and the already seventy plus year establishment of the cemetery. Fluttershy’s journey from Mr. Nizbit’s home to the graveyard was, therefore, a short journey, along which she hoped to find the badger in question.

If Fluttershy were honest with herself, she found Mr. Nizbit’s absence somewhat ominous.

Passing by the tall, white monument on the edge of the grave-markers closest to the animal graveyard, Fluttershy stepped off the rectangular-stone path, and onto the grass approaching the willow tree, and the cluster of small white stones. She could already see that Mr. Nizbit wasn’t there, but continued on as her mind picked up on a half-perceived peculiarity.

The daises that she’d placed there had been disturbed. They were not placed in the little pot in the same way that she had placed them a week ago.

This, on its own, wouldn’t have occasioned Fluttershy any concern normally. It’d been a week, so she was frankly surprised that they were still there. But then she noticed that the painted white stones along the newer graves had also been shifted. Not removed; they were still there. But someone, or something, had moved them. The indentations in the soil were more pronounced, and in some cases off to one side, like something had tried to push them down further into the ground.

Over one of the stones, Fluttershy noticed as she peered closer, was what looked like a black scratch, like a pencil mark. Rubbing at it a little, she felt grains and dust, and found that it left a dry smelling black residue on her finger.

“Charcoal?” she muttered, frowning. “How did...”

She looked quickly over her shoulder. She didn’t expect to find anything, but scoped the landscape around her. As was to be expected, she saw nothing but markers, tombstones, and memorials. And a tree or two. But nothing to explain the presence of charcoal on the grave stones.

Frowning with curiosity, she turned back to the graves before her. Clasping her hands briefly, she muttered a respectful prayer for Mrs. Nizbit before turning around and beginning to ponder where she might find Mr. Nizbit. She was really becoming quite concerned with his absence.

A crunching beneath her foot made her jump back and look down.

“Oh no!” Fluttershy gasped. “I hope I didn’t step on any adorable little beetle or snail.”

Instead of a deceased mollusc or inset, she instead found several small, black sticks, all crushed or snapped in several places. Charcoal.

Fluttershy blinked. “So... somebody came by with a stick of charcoal?” Fluttershy looked back at her small cluster of white-washed grave marker stones, secluded away from the main graveyard. It didn’t make any sense. They didn’t seem to have done anything except scuff one of the stones a little.

Fluttershy felt a twinge of concern. Were there vandals perhaps? People desecrating the graveyard?

But after a moment or two, she became sceptical of the idea. Vandals using charcoal sticks? The idea was ludicrous. But then why would someone come to a cemetery with charcoal sticks, and why would they come to Fluttershy’s unofficial little animal graveyard? None of it made the least bit of sense.

- To be Continued

Comments

[Lazy_]

Still cracking up over that picture. So... We got Marvin from HGttG, nice to see the good ol' depressed android getting some recognition.

Transformers movies... yup, died after the second one, third kinda' ended it but it was a bit shit so yeah.

45.media.tumblr.com/1b3600417f6a294470f889fcf852d3e1/tumblr_o06yky1UNG1v0mubyo1_500.gif

Even Freiza's trying to push back into the spotlight. tut-tut, Freiza. Your days are over.

[quipdoesmc]

Hmmm interesting can't wait to find out what's going down.

[Norm De Plume]

Grave-rubbings. Rather than grave-robbing. Maybe.