- Jewel Day Challenge: Moonstone Necklace - Write a Soulmate!AU

- 2017 Drabbles: Dreadful

Word Count: 1954

To Love a Ghoul

Barty stared out of the window, resting his chin on his hands. He was utterly miserable.

He had been twenty-five for three days now, and his soulmate was nowhere to be found. He knew he was being impatient — some people waited years and years until their soulmate came along. His father had waited thirty years before meeting his mother, by which time he hardly had a shred of skin left on his body. Mr Crouch had made sure to tell Barty in great detail about the smell that just wouldn't leave his favourite suit.

Now that Barty's mother had passed away, Mr Crouch was beginning to fade again. It wouldn't be long before he withered away into nothingness, now that his soulmate had died. He spent most of his time in bed, for which Barty was thankful. He never really got on with his father.

The world wasn't kind if you didn't find your soulmate. There came a point in life when the body turned twenty-five that it began to die. Not the person within the vessel, but the actual body. Slowly but surely, the body would decompose and mould, until you were nothing more than a walking corpse. It wasn't unknown for people to live like this forever, slowly worsening whilever they waited for their soulmate.

Until you found the one person that you were supposed to be with. Then, everything would go back to normal. The body would start ticking again, and you were able to grow old with your soulmate. More often than not, the pair would live together and die together in harmony.

Unless, such was in Barty's father's case, illness struck one member of the duo. If one died before the other, the one who remained would stop living again, but this time, once the body died past a coping point, you passed away with it.

Barty had seen corpses walking the streets since he was a child, and the idea of becoming one of them one day terrified him. The really affected were known as Ghouls, and the longer you became a Ghoul, the less chance you had of finding your soulmate. Ghouls tended to revert to a nomadic lifestyle once their appearance became so dreadful that others found them intolerable, and then the likelihood of bumping into their soulmates became slim to none. Barty knew that he wouldn't be able to live with himself if he became a Ghoul.

As soon as the clock ticked into the day after his twenty-fifth birthday, Barty's heart had stopped beating. He had been laying awake, listening to it thrumming in his ears, and then suddenly — nothing.

It was the scariest thing he had ever experienced.

oOo

Thirty-five days after his birthday, Barty took up a job delivering newspapers for the local newsagent. Even though his depression wanted him to stay indoors and wait for his inevitable Ghoul to emerge, he needed some Get Up and Go.

"Are you under twenty-five?" the aged newsagent had asked, peering at Barty suspiciously. No-one wanted a Ghoul working for them, and even though Barty had technically been dead for a little over a month, he knew that he was starting to look a little worse for wear. He had taken to wearing a wig to cover up the patches where his hair was falling out, and he was spending a lot of money at professional Preservers. The nice lady who he saw injected a formaldehyde mixture into several different sections of his body every week. After a day or two of stiffness, he would be able to move again — albeit a little rigidly. It made him smell a little funny, but Barty preferred the chemical scent over the rotting odour of a corpse.

A lot of body spray and aftershave masked the smell of embalming fluid, and aside from a little paleness under the slick of make-up he used on his face, he figured that he could pass for being very much alive.

"Twenty-four," Barty replied confidently. "Just turned twenty-four."

The newsagent shrugged. "You're hired."

oOo

He delivered newspapers all over town, and the job was exhausting. If he had a live working body, it would be a piece of cake, but while his muscles didn't function and he had very limited bone density now. He had to go slowly, and return to the newsagents with a positive smile.

After several weeks of arduous walking, he finally stopped outside the steel gates of a mansion that sat atop a hill. He had never delivered a newspaper here before, and there was no need for him to really — but the abandoned old house was intriguing. He peered at the dirt-caked plaque on the gate, and used his sleeve to rub away the muck. House of Black.

Barty raised an eyebrow. The surname was familiar to him, from the stories that many people around town told. The Blacks were an old family, who used to be aristocratic and prominent in certain circles. They never ventured into being Ghouls. For centuries, they always found their soulmates from an early age. Most of their hearts never stopped beating at all. They never had to suffer the empty silence of death.

The last Blacks had died nearly a hundred years ago. Walburga and Orion withered away together, both well into their eighties, and no-one really knew what happened to their two sons. The rumours were that Walburga had disowned the eldest son after he found his soulmate, who was from a family that she didn't want to associate with, and the youngest took his own life when he failed to find his soulmate.

Now, the house just stood here like an old ghost. Barty's curiosity was peaked.

oOo

He found a loose board on a back window, and was able to wriggle through the gap and into the house. He landed on a damp, wooden kitchen worktop, and the smell of mouldy food hit his nostrils. Grimacing, he jumped down from the worktop, wishing that being dead had prevented his sense of smell. The universe was full of strange rules.

The vintage wallpaper was damp and peeling off the walls, and the wooden floorboard were rotten, and Barty had to step carefully to make sure he didn't plunge into the unknown recesses of the basement. Every window was covered with corrugated iron or thick wooden boards, so only thin streams of daylight shone through into the dark house, highlighting every speck of dust that floated through the air.

Barty continued venturing through the old house, peering curiously into the old cabinets that still stood proudly, and letting his gaze linger on the old pictures of the many members of the Black family. One room he found was filled with nothing but pictures; they filled every blank space on all four walls, some were small, some were huge. Hundreds of pairs of narrow, dark eyes gazed down at him.

He stopped in front of the largest picture. It was an oil painting, framed elegantly in gold gilt, and contained four members of the family. The only woman in the family was a tall and menacing vision, with a high cheekbones and an intimidating look in her eyes. Her blonde hair was scraped back tightly, and she wore a high necked, long-sleeved black gown. She stood besides her husband, who was dressed stuffily in a three-piece suit. In front of the couple stood two younger men; one who was taller and scruffier, with untidy hair and mischievous eyes, and one who looked a little more reserved, with shiny dark hair and a slightly haunted expression.

It was strange. As Barty lingered on the younger son, he was sure he felt something that hadn't happened for weeks. Tha-dump.

He clutched the left side of his chest. Surely that was just a trick of the imagination.

"Who's there?" a hollow croak from the corner of the room made Barty flinch. He spun around on his heel and backed up against the painting and peered into the gloom. Tha-dump. There was that familiar old feeling again.

An eerie white hand extended from the darkness, and Barty watched it clutch the left side of it's own body. He saw a wisp of white hair, and a brief glimmer of the off-white texture of bare bone. "Strange," the croaky voice continued. "I am almost sure my heart was beating just a moment ago."

"Are you a Ghoul?" Barty whispered, squinting through the darkness. He cringed as the person edged out of the corner and stepped into a narrow stream of light. Never in all of his life had Barty ever seen such a ghoulier Ghoul.

There was next to no skin left on his face, and the scraps that still clung to the dead muscle and thin bone structure was grey and lifeless. His hands were void of any skin or flesh, instead he held a skeletal hand to his chest. The smell was beyond anything Barty had ever experienced in his life, and as the Ghoul came closer, he was forced to cover his nose automatically.

The closer the Ghoul came, the more features Barty was able to place. The faded suit he wore was reminiscent of the ones that many of the men in the pictures were dressed in. Even though the Ghoul no longer had eyelids, the colour still remained in the irises; a steely, stormy grey.

And then everything started moving again. Barty's heart drummed loudly in his ears, and he felt the organ begin to spark light into every other part of his body. He felt the blood rushing like a tidal wave through his veins, warming his skin and bones with a heat that he had almost forgotten about. His lungs suddenly needed air again, and he sucked in cold oxygen gratefully. His scalp tingled, and he pulled the wig off his head and ran his fingers through his hair, marvelling at how it became thicker by the second.

But the transformation of the Ghoul was much more astonishing. As if by magic, the flesh began to knit back across his body in thick threads, followed by pale skin which stretched across his body. Eyelids slipped from the back of the pearly orbs and each dark eyelash grew at an unbelievable speed. Ebony threads of hair flowed out of his scalp as fast as snakes, stopping its growth just beneath his ears. He stared at the back of his hands, mesmerised by the pink slither of his new fingernails.

"I don't believe it," he murmured, and his voice was silky and polite and out of this era, unlike the raspy croak Barty had heard before. "I thought I would never live again."

"You're," Barty breathed, glancing back at the painting behind him. "You're a…"

The man stepped forward, straightening the decayed suit, and extended his hand to Barty. "My name is Regulus Black," he spoke softly. "It would appear that you're my soulmate."

Barty shook his hand, feeling the sensation of sparks when their hands touched. He thought that had just been a myth. "Barty," he replied. "Barty Crouch."

"I must say that I'm glad you've finally come along," Regulus Black continued. "I've been mouldering away up here for over eighty years. Shall we take a walk outside?"

Barty nodded, feeling slightly dumbfounded. He dropped the bag of newspapers he had been holding, and let Regulus slip his arm into the crook of Barty's. Now that he had found his soulmate, he wouldn't be needing to wander aimlessly around town anymore.

Things were looking up already, and Barty hadn't even had to venture into life as a Ghoul.

Happiness bloomed through him like wildfire.