Chapter Text
Chapter One - Undeath
Death… was not like he had expected it to be.
His whole life, the idea of heaven and hell being a human’s only possible afterlife was taught as fact. But what he experienced after his own untimely demise was something quite different.
He knew he was dead. He even had a vague idea of how he’d died - the storm overhead just before everything had gone black was hint enough, certainly. But there were no pearly gates, and no burning lakes of fire and sulphur. Instead, he - drifted.
When he’d been young, perhaps six or seven, he’d fallen and broken his wrist. A doctor had been called to set the bone and stitch the gash. Before the rather grisly undertaking, he’d been given a dose of laudanum. He barely felt the bone being snapped back into place, nor the needle repeatedly piercing his skin. Instead, he’d floated on a haze of clouds, thoughts stretched out beyond his comprehension, grasping at reality only to have it continuously slip through his fingers.
Death was, surprisingly, very much like a drug induced stupor. He drifted and floated. At first, he was still wholly himself. He just… no longer cared. None of the things in his life mattered any more, as though seeing them from a great distance made them utterly insignificant. He still knew things, like his name and his favorite meal and the best shop in town to purchase ink from. But there was no need for such things, so, like a thousand other little facts of his living existence, they just… faded away.
His grandfather, god rest his soul, had started to lose his mind a few years before his body finally gave out. He stopped recognizing his loved ones, he no longer knew the day or month or even year, he would lose his train of thought mid-conversation and not have any idea what he’d just been saying. One foot in the grave, they’d called it. It was only later that the truth of that phrase became so wholly apparent. In the grave completely was much the same. Time held no meaning and memory slipped as the brain slowly lost its shape.
Some things stayed. The one-two-three steps of a waltz, ingrained in him over and over through dozens of lessons and then repeated at gatherings throughout this life. The memory of the way lilac smelled, a fresh sprig in his mother’s hair in spring, or oil daubbed on her wrists in long bitter winters. The sharp agony of heartbreak, the burn of betrayal from a lover. Music - lovely, aching, haunting music, the notes that had consumed him and fueled him and had become more of a language to him than his own native English. Eternities could be whiled away composing spectral symphonies, or replaying works he’d memorized long ago, or arranging the noises of wildlife and insects into harmonies.
After a while, everything faded. It grew quiet. The call of birds grew distant, the scuttle of animals through the brush above dimmed. There was the quiet ticking of the arthropods as they feasted on decaying matter and the soft squiggle of earthworms burrowing through the dirt. Then even those noises were lost, and all that remained was the gentle hum of the earth itself.
It was the most peace he had ever known, and he surrendered to it.
***
Wuuuuuuuuum
Wuuuuuuuuuum
Wuuuuuuuuum
Wuuuuuuuuum
Skreeet shooooooooop thud
thud
thud
A slow awareness prickled through him, barely more than a murmur. Something tickled at what was once his frontal cortex, like the slightest static shock.
Thud
huuhu eeree oouue icc
It continued on, unintelligible. Bits of vowels and muted consonants that were something he knew should be familiar to him but he couldn’t quite grasp from where.
Wuuuuuuuuuum
The hum of the earth quieted, for a while, an undercurrent to whatever this new thing was. It was impossible to say how long it went on for, as time held no meaning. But eventually, it stopped. The earth’s lulling resumed, and he knew no more.
***
thud
thud
thud
There was rustling - from above him? he couldn’t be sure - and then it was back. The sound that drew him from his listless haze.
Eve on oo at
And it suddenly occurred to him why those sounds were so familiar. They were words. Speech, muffled and muted and impossible to understand. But words, none the less. He didn’t think he was hearing them so much as feeling them, vibrating through the earth around him and into the lifeless mass that was once his cochlea.
Once he realized this, it was easy enough to expand that awareness to more than just the hum of sound. There was weight above him - directly above him. It would be sitting on his chest, were he not six feet underground. It was… comforting. How odd. Why should it be comforting? The words came again, and he was able to discern that they were coming from the weight.
A person.
A person sitting at the foot of his gravestone. Speaking.
He got the impression that this wasn’t something that had happened much, and not at all in a very long time.
The words continued for a while, and then the weight shifted. There was more rustling, and then the quiet rhythmic pressure of footsteps. So light. A child? He couldn’t tell. But they faded away, and he let everything else fade with them.
***
thud thud thud THUD
Oo an tody I op or doog well
Either the words were becoming clearer the more he focused, or he was imagining that they were, out of his desperation to experience anything except for the unrelenting nothingness of death.
Something was set down on the ground beside the person, something lighter than them but still substantial. Then they settled themselves into the familiar spot and continued speaking.
Not wanting to drive himself mad - could a dead person go mad? - trying to understand the still muffled speech, he instead focused on how clear he could grasp the world above because of the sound. The air vibrated with the sound waves, bouncing off of everything around them. Trees, whose roots extended down to the dirt he was encased in. Bushes and weeds and ivy filling up the space and rustling minutely in the wind. Unyielding blocks of granite and marble, some small, some larger. The one above him surprisingly tall and uniquely shaped.
And a person. A person who gave off multiple kinds of sounds and vibrations if he focused. The hum of their voice, the frequent thumps of their movements, and the steady, rhythmic beat of their heart. Comforting. Soothing. Despite the barrage of other sounds that he had to sift through to find that soft heartbeat, it was worth it. He focused on that, finding it more restful than all the eternity of nothingness before it had been.
But then it was fading away as the person left once more. Forlorn, it was harder to slip back into numbness again. The apathy that had swaddled him for so long was replaced by something else.
Longing.
***
It became easier to sift through the sounds, the more frequently the visits occurred. It took a while, but he realized several things. The visitor was one person, coming repeatedly. The visits were frequent. And that she was a young woman. These facts surprised him. He couldn’t remember much of his life, but he didn’t get the feeling that there had been many young women in it, and certainly any that might have mourned him would have long grown old. He didn’t know how long he’d been dead for, but it seemed an eternity or more. So she was a stranger then. A stranger that had stumbled across his grave, abandoned in the Bachelor’s cemetery, and decided to continue to visit.
On one occasion, she seemed to be clearing away the overgrowth and moss that had become wild in the unkempt graveyard. On another, she brought wax and parchment and created a rubbing of his tombstone. He wondered what it said. His name, his birthdate, his relationships to others in his life, had long since faded.
But still, this girl continued to visit him.
Eventually, he was able to discern that she was speaking English, though it was a radically different English than the one he had spoken. Some of the words were wholly unfamiliar to him, like spazz, car, phone, rad, and so many more. Others he recognized, but seemed to have completely different meanings. She mentioned tanning once, but spoke of it happening in a bed, rather than a tannery. School was spoken of frequently, but seemed to be a prison-like institution that she went to each day and returned from with frequent work to complete in the evenings.
Much of her time was spent speaking of various injustices in her life, and with what little he could understand, he felt sorrow for her pain. Her mother had been murdered - what had his own mother been like? Something trickled into his mind, bright and soft, and then disappeared - and her father remarried a Janet. The woman sounded like a nightmare. Cruel for the sake of cruelty, and hiding it behind claims to only want what was best for her family. It seemed that her family only consisted of her new husband and her biological daughter, though - and that a step daughter was an unwanted tag along.
Her instructors didn’t understand her, her father was so dense he might as well have been absent, and her new sister too perfect to be any sort of companion. The only person she spoke of with any warmth was a boy she had never actually met, but who edited a publication that she frequently submitted her poetry to. She had read her poems in the graveyard several times, and while he had no idea what modern standards were for greatness, he found them quite lovely. They didn’t follow iambic pentameter, but there was depth to them, a darkness borne from her past tragedy.
The boy, Michael, seemed to recognize her talent. That was a relief, at least. There was someone in his companion’s life that appreciated her, even if only from afar.
That made two of them, then.
***
When she was gone, he wondered about her. It was difficult not to, as she was the only thing of note that had happened in his afterlife.
He wondered what she was doing, if she was alright. Wondered if she’d eaten enough, since her hateful stepmother seemed to take malicious glee in sabotaging the family meals with excesses of meat despite knowing that her step daughter didn’t consume flesh. Wondered if she’d turned in the paper she’d been working so hard on, and whether the stodgy Mr. White would penalize her for the beautifully descriptive language she preferred. Wondered when she would return, and what she would want to discuss when she did.
Wondered why he had wakened.
Was it that she was the first one to come to his grave since the cemetery had been left abandoned, or was it something about her , specifically?
He had to believe it was the latter. There had been youths in the time before, when his consciousness was still strong enough to discern them. And surely there had been more since, while he had been so close to the silence of oblivion. It had to be her. Something in her called out to him, or something within him was drawn helplessly to her. What, he couldn’t say. But he felt it all the same.
More and more, he was in tune with her specifically. He could discern her steps long before she crossed the boundary of the cemetery from their unique cadence, and he could count the rhythm of her heart.
All that, and yet he still didn’t even know her name.
It didn’t matter, really. It wasn’t as though he could ever call her by it. There was only himself to commune with, and the monikers of companion, kindred spirit, friend, worked just as well. Still, it would be nice to know her name. To be able to imagine introducing himself to her - in his life, when he could stand and greet her as a man, both gentle and courteous. He would hold out his hand to her and accept her own much smaller one, then pull it to his lips for a chase kiss to her knuckles along with a short bow. A pleasure, Miss-
It was foolish to play out the scene. He did not know her surname, so he couldn’t complete the dialogue. He didn’t even know his own name to return the introduction. He didn’t know what he looked like any more - had he been tall in life? Broad? Dark or pale? And her… There was much he could tell from his inhuman sense of the world around him. She was slight, that he knew. Her feet small, her hands very likely matching. She seemed to have long tresses, which were often braided. But what color were they? What about her eyes? What shape were they, which hue were her irises, how did her lashes look curled against her cheek?
There was only a petite blur when the blank canvas that was him bent over her hand, and it frustrated him. What he wouldn’t give for a simple glimpse of her, just the briefest of looks to cement in his mind and come back to in her absences.
Something that he could hold onto when, inevitably, she stopped coming all together.
***
“Boys are the worst,” she was saying, voice tight with anger. He silently agreed. Whether this was a new phenomenon, or whether boys from his own life had been terrible, he couldn’t say, but certainly the boys in her own time were abysmal. “Like, I get it, immature boy likes dirty innuendo, but can they really not come up with anything more original? Lisa Swallows, har fucking har. One idiot makes a blow job joke and all the others laugh like he’s hysterical, like it isn’t the most basic thing ever. And do they even realize that when they make that jerk off gesture to their own mouths they look like they’re the ones sucking cock?? - but I’m the one who’s supposed to be embarrassed?!” She let out a short scream of frustration and flopped on the ground, sprawled out.
Shock, followed quickly by rage, suffused him.
From what he’d gathered during her talks, morals in this time period were not what they had been during his own. It seemed that congress out of wedlock was quite commonplace, and while occasionally frowned upon, boys in particular were given the freedom to chase their lusts to their heart’s content. Some of the step sister’s graphically described escapades had been quite eye opening in their variety and vigor. He couldn’t remember the color of his eyes but he was quite certain that he’d never had a woman’s mouth there-
But even still, despite the casual nature of sexual relations in his time, to have males making such comments to her, and vulgar gestures on top of that! It was intolerable. So outraged was he on her behalf that he almost missed the gift he’d been given.
Lisa Swallows
Her name. She’d said her name. Said it in the context of the crass mocking she’d been subjected to, but still, she’d said it. He knew her name.
Lisa.
It fit her perfectly, somehow. And despite the modern interpretation of swallows, it reminded him instead of songbirds, small and graceful. He wished he could tell her such, to help ease the sting of the idiots taunting. Instead, he could do nothing more than listen to her outraged huffing slowly turn into quiet sobs. His heart - or whatever the metaphorical equivalent was, as he was sure his physical one was atrophied into nothingness - ached for her. His only longing stronger than his desire to comfort her was his burning need to punish those that had hurt her. He envisioned crushing their throats beneath his fingers. Ripping out their vile tongues.
Had emotions been this volatile in his life? He couldn’t recall. It didn’t matter really. Because he was dead and buried and she was up there, in a world he could neither protect her from nor endure beside her.
***
The gift of her mother’s rosary was both humbling and terrifying. Of course, he was honored by her bequeathment, something unspeakably precious to her that she was being pressured by the conventions of society - and likely her dreaded step mother - to give up. But she left this precious thing at his tombstone, delicate glass beads clinking lightly against the cold marble, and there was nothing he could do to defend it. Now that he was once again aware of his surroundings, he could sense the rambunctious racoons that made their homes in the nearby trees, the corvids that were always on the look out for shiny things to take back to their nests, the squirrels that were sure to be curious about a brightly colored addition to the graveyard.
It was bad enough to think that some animal might abscond with the rosary, let alone the idea that a human might stumble through and steal or destroy it. If one did, there would be nothing at all that he could do to stop it. This remnant of her mother would be lost, and he would be helpless. Lisa had already lost so much in her young life. He couldn’t bear it if she lost more.
And yet, there the rosary stayed while she went off to attend the party she was clearly not looking forward to.
The wind picked up, and thunder shook the ground. He had long since stopped believing in god, but he prayed anyway that the inevitable storm would not harm his fragile treasure.
***
The sound of stumbling footsteps pulled him from his attempts to stop fretting.
It was Lisa, back much more quickly than he was sure she ought to have been. He was certain of it, and yet, her steps were different than usual, more hesitant and then rushing, listing sideways and then surging forward. Not like his light footed, graceful companion at all. Her breathing was different, too, rapid and shallow. Her heart was pounding inside her chest as though strained with terror. But there were no other sounds behind her, no one coming after her.
What was causing her such distress?
Was she injured? There was no blood dripping into the dirt, but perhaps a broken ankle, or some sort of illness was afflicting her. Just like the rosary, he was helpless to do anything to defend the precious thing above him.
When she spoke, her words were slightly muddled, and he had a sudden flash of memory from his life. A man, clothing disheveled and eyes bloodshot, stumbling out of an opium den. Ssss too fukkkking bright ouuut, he’d slurred as he lurched past. Was Lisa intoxicated?
She’d spoken of others her age using drugs or alcohol to excess, but hadn’t ever seemed interested herself. Now though, it seemed as though that had changed. Perhaps the party had inclined her to recreational use, or the stress of it had induced imbibing.
She reached his grave and screamed, voice piercing and raw and full of pain.
The last steps to his headstone were steadier, and he swore he could almost feel it when she touched the cold marble with her trembling fingers.
“It’s you…”
It’s me.
“I wish I was with you,” she whispered.
Her longing matched his own, and whatever atoms of him remained all ached with want of her. It felt as though every fibre of his unquiet soul was reaching out to her, trying to either join her above or bring her down with him. Time stood, frozen for one endless moment, as their beings connected beyond reason, beyond comprehension, beyond explanation.
And then it shattered as she swept away, leaving the cemetery just as abruptly as she had come.
He could only listen to her footfalls drawing further and further away until they were drowned out by the storm. She was gone. She was gone, and he remained, as he always did, rotting six feet below.
Why?
Why was he conscious? Why could he hear her? Why had he been drawn from that near-oblivion that was the closest he could come to peace? Was this hell? Had he committed some great sin in his life and this was punishment for his crime? Or maybe god was as dead as he, and there was no rhyme or reason in this mad, cruel world.
He was cursing his useless half existence, raging below as the storm raged above, when there was a shattering
boom
and he knew no more.