Dirge - Beth Byrne

Beth doesn't have a Facebook, and she refuses to get one, so sending Bradford a message is not an option. She scans his info for a phone number and an address, brow furrowed in concentration.


Whether she finds it or not, when her search is done she switches back over to the tab with the article, wondering if there were any eyewitnesses of not-Phoebe that day last week, wondering what happened after she ran that was more than just rumor.
 
Number and address are simple to find. No one bothers to mask that kind of information.


Well, no one without a particular strain of paranoia.


Interesting. Phoebe is listed as missing, nothing else, officially. An 'unknown assailant' is to blame both for Dwayne's death and her disappearance. Police are suppressing details.


The last time she was seen by more than one person - a more reliable sighting, so to speak - was visiting the cemetery a few days before she disappeared.
 
That sends a chill down Beth's spine. New Information: Location of Interest. New Objective: Identify cause for Phoebe's visit.


Still not a lot to work with.


She doesn't have the best feeling about Bradford, but he had seemed to be suppressing details himself when she last spoke to him. Maybe he'd loosen his lips a little if given the chance?


Sighing, she packs her things up and leaves the coffee shop, headed for the nth time that month to the graveyard. As she walks, she dials Bradford's number.
 
Rings three times.


"Hello," answers a Spanish-accented voice, feminine. "This is the Stratton residence, may I take a message?"
 
Beth rolls her eyes. They can't answer their own phone? Her grandparents' small house comes to mind, comfortable and welcoming, without a hint of excess.


"Yes. Tell Bradford I called. I'm..." She pauses, then settles on, "...his classmate." She gives the woman her number, then hangs up, face a little sour. Jumping through hoops just to talk to someone who might know more than he let on doesn't sit well with her, but she's never been the sort to settle on just one way to find answers. On that note, her eyes settle on the gate of the graveyard as it comes into view.
 
Nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps that should be a comfort.


And yet there is a sense something is pulling you forward.
 
She runs a finger between her wrist and the white ribbon tied around it, an uneasy fidget, then walks through the gate, moving slowly among the stones as she makes her way to what has become her new "spot" - the ground at the foot of the large, dark casket whose letters have long ago been lost to weathering.
 
It's quiet here.


It is not silent.


The closer you get, the more the world seems to lose its colour. The green of grass and leaf dimming, the sky going from bright blue to slate. At first you think you hear the wind, but soon it becomes apparent you hear whispers. A dozen voices. A hundred. A low roar at the edge of hearing. You can't make out the words and when you stand mere feet from that casket, that sarcophagus that seems to loom like a black obelisk, the sound is like waves on the shore.
 
Beth listens to the waves crash, straining her hearing to try and make out words. The noise is filling her chest cavity until she feels more in time with the rumbling roar than with the beating of her heart.


She closes the scant distance and looks around, trying to pinpoint where the voices are coming from.
 
The noise surrounds you, but is loudest from the casket. The air feels thin. Everything feels thin, like one wrong move could tear a hole in the world.
 
She wonders how much of this is her own paranoia, but then, Beth Byrne does not hear things unless they are there.


A place of death, or of transitions, or where both might take place. Here, light a flame, and speak the words that will open the way, and the gate will thus open.


The words come unbidden to her mind, an excerpt from one of the many strange things she has read recently. She hasn't got much in the way of flame, and she doesn't know the words, but then she's not wholly convinced a candle and abracadabra will cause anything interesting in the first place.


Beth runs her fingers along the top of the stone casket, then traces the groove between the lid and the body of the monument.


Hypotheses: Someone trapped in casket (unlikely), supernatural voices (unlikely), trick or prank by others (moderately likely), personal psychotic break from reality (inherently impossible but technically likely and thus necessarily included).


She considers answering the voices somehow, but a good experiment consists of more observation than it does personal involvement.
 
The voices bubble and drone until you're sure you can hear the sound of Phoebe weeping underneath it all. Not far away. Somewhere to your left among more recent graves.
 
Beth heads that direction against her best judgement, feeling like she could almost be swept away by it all.


She can't still be here, can she? The police would have looked here, they knew she was last seen here. It's... It's very improbable.
 
The sound leads you to a family burial plot a little removed from the others and immediately recognize the name on one of the nearest stones.


Pheobe's grandmother.


You can see a figure that might be a filth-encrusted Pheobe hunched over something on a different grave. There's a sharp reek of decay and fresh blood commingled into sickening bouquet. It hasn't noticed you.
 
Her heart thuds in her chest - once, like a warning - before settling back into a (mostly) normal rhythm. Holding her breath, Beth steps closer, hoping to get a look at whatever poor thing it's hunched over without drawing its attention.


Problematic. Obvious hiding place; how have police not found? Hypothesis: They aren't trying.


It was weeping? Phoebe's grandmother's grave. Phoebe-thing may be more Phoebe than previously hypothesized. Emotive; can be reasoned with?


Beth cranes her neck.
 
The ragged, stained thing squats over the torn corpse of a police officer, greedily chewing on flesh ripped from his face.
 
Beth has seen dead bodies before. She has seen viscera burst out several feet in each direction.


And she's prepared for a gruesome sight this time around.


In spite of all this, lunch threatens to expel itself. Slowly, Beth retreats, taking care not to make noise.


...No reasoning with it, then. Right. Time to go. Now.
 
Perhaps only because the creature is distracted, you manage to slip away. But the bubbling of eerie voices remains.
 
What are the damn voices saying? She sometimes thinks she hears snippets, but then it's lost on her. And again, she thinks of the ritual.


In all her research, she has found several phrases that supposedly open doors and portals. Only one, a more recent discovery, mentioned anything about fire. Theoretically speaking, doing what she is considering doing is difficult and dangerous. Logically speaking, it's impossible. But she's seen a good few impossible things, lately.


Stepping as lightly as she can, Beth continues backing away from the thing until her back is to the heavy door of the small church that is presumably responsible for these burial grounds. As she slips inside, she wonders what the clergy thinks of the monster taking residence outside.


She's closer to one of her objectives, at least - finding out why not-Phoebe was last seen here. Phoebe's family was buried here... including her recently deceased grandmother. Beth understands little of death except the effect it has on the living.


Casting her gaze through the church, she spots several rows of candles near the entrance. She steps over to them and lifts one, gazing at it ponderously.


Beth Byrne, are you really considering going back into the construct within which a flesh-eating monster is residing with a candle and speaking strange Latin words that may very well draw its attention?


No. I am considering waiting for it to leave, though.


Sighing, she slips back outside and steps softly to the family plot to see if the thing is still there.
 
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Nothing but the sighing wind and grass slick with blood. A sharp, rich scent reaches you and you have to fight to keep your last meal down. The body may be gone, but it seems parts were left behnd.
 
Ugh. It's a long moment's work to calm her stomach and her nerves.


The candle is warm in her hands. She replays the words it might require in her head as she makes her way to the casket that has become her refuge. The whispers surrounding her seems to deliver what she is casting about for into her ear in one brief moment of clarity.


Simpler than I thought it would be.


"Viam aperit."


Flawless enunciation, if I do say so myself.
 
Nothing changes.


The whispers continue. The sounds of the ocean seem to drift from somewhere. The air feels... thin.


As you look around, the sense of isolation becomes claustrophobic. Like you're the last person in the whole world.  The sounds of the city are gone. 


Was the casket always so dark? The light so dull? 


Even the grass seems gray. Dead.


The smell of funerary ash seizes your nostrils, and it occurs to you there's no way you could know what a cremation smells like.


And then the earth swallows you.
 
For a moment there's disappointment. Then there is relief. It's chased by confusion, displacement.


The solitude is almost welcome, a reduction of the number of variable she has to consider, but then the sensory assault takes her and she coughs, eyes roving about to find the source until abruptly, there is nothing except a hook in her gut that implies she is falling.


For a flash in time, she's floating, all senses dead like the grass that ate her up.
 
You're in a room. No, a tomb. No, a cave.


A tunnel.


The walls are close; dark rock unworked by any hand, bone-dry. Here and there luminous moss takes the shape of skulls, or ribcages, or other similar forms. Pareidolia, you're sure. Your brain finding pattern where there is none.


You still hold the candle, and burns perfectly in the still air. Providing a little illumination.


It's not cold here, per se. There is an absence of heat, certainly, but it's almost more an absence of sensation at all.


The tunnel stretches ahead and behind, and neither direction seems too different from the other.
 
She forges ahead carefully. The absence of feeling has a duality to it. Things are fractionally simpler (1/5 simpler if you want to be literal, 1/6 simpler if you want to be metaphorical and/or superstitious). Her mind isn't running ahead of her and assessing what every sensory brush means and placing it into the appropriate data column; there is a peace in that. Nonetheless, she feels stripped of an important tool, empty-handed.


The shaped moss is distracting. Though logic suggests she is making symbols out of it, she likes to think she is above tricking herself. Creeping to a halt, Beth nudges a nearby skull with her foot.
 
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