Chapter Text
Sly’s goal was to accumulate Geo. The means was selling his stock. The amount of junk in his shop should shrink and the amount of Geo in his safe should grow.
This was mediated by customers. Mostly not the other townsfolk, but wanderers who passed through. Lately, one wanderer in particular, a nailmaster with unlimited Geo and unlimited willingness to relieve Sly of junk. That was the kind of customer he liked.
He therefore saw it as a subversion of the natural order when that wanderer came in dragging a huge load behind him. That was entirely backwards.
“Hey! Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
He looked again. What he had first thought to be a large sack was actually a bug, wrapped up with string, faintly struggling. No, not just a bug—an infected husk, with telltale orange pinpricks in its eyes.
“What’s this? Why are you bringing that in here?”
The wanderer didn’t answer. But then they never talked to begin with. They tipped the husk upright, as if that would explain it.
It was an all-around average bug. A hard hat with a Lumafly headlamp was perched on its head. A pickaxe was jammed in with the string. All of its limbs were securely folded up against its body.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
The wanderer lowered the husk, walked up to his counter, and started piling up a small heap of Geo. A transaction, then. Not a gift.
“There’s nothing I can do with this. I can stash it in my basement. Is that what you want?”
They stepped backward, relinquishing the heap to him. He took that as a yes.
They wanted storage. Storage was business, and he wasn’t one to reject business. If he scrutinized all the weird whims of his customers he’d never get anything done, but Geo was easy to understand.
He counted out the Geo and did some quick arithmetic. “I’ll keep it around for a week. Pay me more after that. No guarantees if it breaks loose. Understand?”
The wanderer looked him in the eyes for a moment. Then they turned and left, leaving the husk.
Sly knew how to carry large, heavy objects. Getting the husk downstairs was no obstacle.
He removed the equipment and checked its bonds and tightened them here and there. It wouldn’t do to have it get loose. He might have to damage it if that happened.
As he rolled it over, it started making a funny noise. It took a moment to recognize it as a hum. There was a melody in it. It was familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
After stashing it between a few boxes he raised his hands and sniffed them. They smelled sickly sweet. He knew that smell. The dream that had led him down the well had smelled the same.
He scrubbed them thoroughly before returning to his shop.
The husk’s melody followed him into his dreams. He was humming it when he woke up, until he caught himself.
The husk had moved a little, but it hadn’t broken free, and it hadn’t gotten any deader. That was good.
He didn’t bother trying to feed it. The infection made that unnecessary. He had spent weeks holed up in that ghost town without eating a thing. Something about it just let you go on and on beyond all reason, without food or sleep.
When he got settled behind the counter he noticed he was humming the tune again. This was getting ridiculous. He was sure he had heard it before. He couldn’t have picked it up from the husk so thoroughly in so short a time.
He went digging through his storeroom. He did have this old compendium of songs lying around somewhere. The trouble was all the other things also lying around and getting in the way.
After a long search he concluded that it was somewhere else. He did find some forgotten merchandise to sell, so the search hadn’t been a waste.
The basement, then? With the items of a more sentimental value?
As he searched, the husk hummed, and he hummed along. It brought the text to the tip of his tongue.
“Bury…” he muttered as he moved things aside. “Bury my…”
The humming from the other side of the room was interrupted by a whisper. “…mother…”
That was it. That was how it went. Oh, bury my mother, something something. The husk had life left in it yet.
He sat down next to the husk and repeated it. “Oh, bury my mother…”
The husk muttered along and continued. “…pale… and slight…”
That was definitely it. Together they stumbled through the verse, syllables slotting into place.
…bury my… father… with his eyes shut tight…
…bury my sisters… two by two…
…and then when you’re done… let’s bury me too…
He thought there were more verses, but they repeated this first one a few times. By the end, he knew it by heart.
He climbed back up to his shop, a little disoriented.
He was still humming on his customary walk around town.
Elderbug remarked on it, always trying to strike up a conversation. “You sound cheerful!” He was clutching a white flower.
“Oh, you know. I have some things on my mind.”
“Is it related to the ruckus that young bug made? It was quite the sight, watching what they dragged into your shop.”
“Heh. Nothing escapes your notice.”
“Oh, I do not mean to be nosy…”
“It keeps getting weirder! I’m now—”
A shudder went through the world.
A deafening silence drowned out all noise. Darkness rippled through the view. Sly briefly felt weightless.
“Did you feel that?” asked Elderbug, redundantly.
A change came over the air. It smelled rawer. There had been a sweet undertone, so pervasive that Sly hadn’t been consciously aware of it, but that was gone now.
Elderbug was looking around. “Could it have been an earthquake?”
“I better check on my shop,” said Sly. He hurried off.
Nothing had fallen off the shelves. That was his first concern.
His second concern was downstairs. Something had changed there.
The husk wasn’t struggling any more. Its eyes no longer lit up. But it was breathing, slowly and shallowly. The infection was gone.
Very carefully, ready to reach for a nail at a moment’s notice, he started undoing its bonds. It still didn’t move.
This complicated things. Taking care of a husk was one thing, but now he had to take care of a person.
Well, first things first. A person shouldn’t sleep on the floor. He had a spare bed between all the old furniture, so he cleared that out, and gently laid down the bug on it.
He didn’t know what would happen now. Was this regular sleep, or was it a coma?
He himself had been awakened from his stupor pretty easily. But this looked different. He’d have to wait and see.
He found himself checking in below too often to keep his shop open. Better to just stay in the basement. He hated missing out on potential business, but a few things in life weighed more heavily than Geo.
He had things to do in the meantime. Inventory to index. Nails to polish. Journals and other odds and ends to investigate.
He sang while he worked. The same old tune. And when he finally found the rest of the text, he sung that too.
“Oh, bury the knight with her broken nail,
bury the lady, lovely and pale!
Bury the priest in his tattered gown,
then bury the beggar with his shining crown!“
He didn’t know if it helped. He liked to think it did. Whatever the case, after a while, the bug stirred.