TITLE: Funerary Rites
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: Mature
LENGTH: ~42,000 words
SUMMARY: The dead are walking in Haven again, variously a hindrance and a help. But the ghost in Audrey's head is called Mara and is steeped in ill intent. NOTES: The other stories that are linked with this (Comfortably Numb, Ghost Town, Clockwork) can stand alone and only share minor references. This one, however, is somewhat more dependant on what has come before.
NOTES #2: Ray and Lily McBreen, Mr Sperry and William, all appeared in the season 1 episode Harmony with the music Trouble.
Funerary Rites
PROLOGUE
Nathan found himself unable to sleep. Too many churning uncertainties pulling at his thoughts, though Audrey and Duke were snoring softly, folded into each others' arms on the other side of the bed. The same worries - mostly the same - plagued them, since that day on the hillside when the Barn had not come.
They often slept curled together while Nathan, for whom Audrey's touch provided the opposite of restfulness, disentangled after a while to rearrange himself apart. Tonight it meant he didn't have to wake them as he quietly rose from the bed and grabbed up the clothes he'd worn the day before, taking them almost to the threshold of the door before he pulled them on, fumbling through his lack of sensory input in the moonlight. He left the upstairs apartment of the Gull in total darkness.
All the heartache and planning, all their fears... They'd gone that day expecting a fight, desperate to somehow prevent Audrey from being torn away from them, and the Barn had not come. The weeks stretched, since then, a kind of limbo. There had been no sign of any change in the situation. By now, everyone had stopped expecting that the Barn might yet come.
Nathan took the grit road down the shoreline on foot. His boots crunched with each step and the noise hit the air dully, seeming muffled in the pre-dawn greyness of the world. When the terrain allowed, he cut across the grassy edges of the land and down to the long bay north of the Gull. The tide was a long way out, the waves hushed like his footsteps; like the sea was holding its breath.
The Troubles hadn't left. The Guard were enraged, the Reverend Driscoll's old crowd were riled up, and even the general population was restless, cued-in on an instinctive level to that undercurrent that something had happened, that it was bad, and things weren't the same anymore.
Nathan walked along the foreshore in the dead-quiet of pre-dawn, kicking at the wrack left behind at the head of the tide, inhaling the scent and taste of the salt and the rotting seaweed and stranded carcasses of sea creatures.
He knew why Audrey thought the Barn had not come: its human component was broken. They had intended to prevent her from being the price of stopping the Troubles, but now that it had happened in spite of them, the thought that she could not help was making her bitter. The day after tomorrow - day after today - he was hoping they'd be able to establish once and for all that this wasn't her fault.
Even if it was down to the head injury she'd received, it wasn't her fault.
Nathan couldn't help but be glad that the danger of losing her was past them, even considering the price tag. He wasn't sure what that made him, but had determined, since they couldn't change it either way, that he wasn't going to examine too hard. Maybe it just made him lucky.
Now, though, Haven needed a strategy for dealing with the Troubles long-term as it never had before. That was just one of the many things that kept him awake; that was making it increasingly hard for him to continue in his role as Chief of Police.
He had time enough before Audrey and Duke would be starting to rise, and his own disquiet pushed him to keep moving. He couldn't feel the burn of his limbs from the exercise or the bite of the winds, surely chilling now as they headed toward winter, but if he walked far and fast enough he'd start to feel the light-headedness and euphoria of the exercise after some fashion. The Gull was out of sight before long and he realised he was nearing the rocky, sandy expanses of the shore where Garland Wuornos had died.
Subconsciously, he supposed he'd avoided that part of the coast ever since. Now, with the Haven his father had left to his care barely clinging on and tensions ready to drag the town apart at the seams, was surely as good a time as any to revisit. A grim thought stilled Nathan's feet as he rounded the concrete flat of the parking lot that intruded the wild coast, and beheld that stretch of bay again. Pieces of the Chief had been strewn across the sand, some fine like dust. It could never be possible for Dave and Vince Teagues to lift it all from the site where Garland had fallen. Mixed with the sand and pebbles on this beach, constantly moved by the tide, were still rock fragments that had been Nathan's adopted father. He breathed in thinking uneasily of dust on the wind. Surely, though, he thought, this was as good a resting place as that vale where he'd buried the cooler, or where Vince and Dave had moved Garland later. He struck out across the rocks, avoiding the ugliness of the crumbling lot. Eternity here was surely as good as or better than a cooler or a respectable grave. Though Garland had, anyway, preferred the woods.
Garland wasn't lingering in any case. Nathan had had confirmation of that when the horror Trouble struck town and he'd had opportunity to speak to some genuine ghosts. There was no spectre of his father to talk with here, explain the unfathomable disintegration of Haven's centuries-long cycle on that island slope... No Garland to ask if he was still the man to take Haven forward, now the rules had changed.
Nathan wasn't sure he'd been the man for the job before. It still enraged him that Haven notables of years gone by had perpetuated the sacrifice of Audrey's past selves. All the secrets and the secret-keepers were coming out of the woodwork now, approaching him, as what they'd known ceased to hold meaning. The Guard had a damned bunker full of information.
Angular dark shapes struck up from the profile of the beach ahead, over toward the tideline and the lapping waves, jagged and jutting. Nathan squinted and slowed his pace. There'd been some storms recently, but there were no craft left missing and unaccounted for. Probably it was some unfortunate lobster-man's wrecked lobster pots. Not thinking too much of it, but heading much that way anyway, Nathan amended his course slightly, watching his feet in the gathering light - the smallest crack of yellow showed on the base of the horizon now - as he picked through the uneven sand, seaweed and pebbles.
Just because Nathan hadn't ultimately been faced with that choice of allowing Audrey to be sent away, sacrificed, against their own freedom from the Troubles, that didn't mean there weren't people in town who judged he'd somehow already made it. Somehow he'd disabled the engine that took the Troubles away to save Audrey. They all knew, after all, what she was to him.
Increasingly, they also knew about Duke, and that was getting to be a problem. Nathan had never expected himself to be a focus for scandal. Duke alone would've been alright: raised a few eyebrows, sure, but his genetics were a greater problem than his sex. In the same way, Audrey's role was the problem with his association with her, though perhaps not an insurmountable one on its own.
But the town wasn't ready in any sense to accept his relationship with both Duke and Audrey. He was starting to feel the pinch of growing disapproval in the new climate and wasn't sure he'd hang onto his position much longer. Losing that would lose him much of his influence to protect Duke and Audrey if worst came to worst. Being disgraced wasn't anything he couldn't live with, but that could hurt them.
The shapes in front of him, Nathan realised with an unpleasant psychosomatic twist in his stomach, looked increasingly less like the wreckage of lobster pots. On the night air, just for a moment, he suddenly thought he heard faint, faltering music. Then, thready through the breeze and the distance, he thought he heard a woman's voice call out for help.
Nathan shivered, even though he couldn't feel the cold. There were legends up the coastline about female beings who preyed upon sailors, drawing them to crash on the rocks. This was a safe bay with few rocks, adequate for a landing when the tide was right, but in Haven he wouldn't discount the possibility of sirens out on the waters.
He stopped still and examined himself for any abnormal desire to be drawn toward that noise.
"People in trouble," a gruff voice came from behind him, raw with emotions other than the implied criticism in a fashion Nathan had seldom heard it in life. "Should go help, 'stead of loitering with your thumb up your ass."
Nathan's breath was caught in his throat. His head swam. The world was still dingy and grey, without really the visibility to tell if his vision blurred, but he was still sure the shapes in the semi-darkness wavered a moment. Not- it couldn't be. Not here on this beach...
He turned stiffly, jaw already working. The man at his back was rounding him, too, so they met before Nathan anticipated. He knew who he'd expected, but was unsure what. This... didn't look like a ghost. Nathan reached out for the other man, grabbed him by both shoulders, and there was weight there, solidity, clothing that crinkled under the pressure of his fingers. "Dad?"
"Son." He found himself yanked into Garland Wuornos' gruff embrace, which was hard enough that even Nathan's body recognised it, registering the weighty thumps of blunt hands upon his back from the way they made his whole balance sway.
He probably shouldn't even ask how, after everything that he had seen. It wasn't the first time the dead had walked in Haven. It wasn't even the first time his father had, though he hadn't been solid and real like this. It was a Trouble, though. Of that, he could be certain.
Garland pulled back just as swiftly and gruffly. "I mean it, Nathan. Something wrong up ahead. I'm here, for starters."
Hard to argue with that. "Alright," Nathan choke out. "You. You're-" His hand was still gripping his father's sleeve, unwilling to let go. They took several steps across the beach debris before he finally had to make himself let go for the sake of his balance.
"Not gonna vanish right now," Garland said. "Well. Pretty sure. You got your sidearm?"
As it happened, Nathan was untrusting enough of the current state of affairs that he'd buckled his gun belt on automatically even for the early morning stroll. He unclipped it now, while Garland's shadow patted empty flanks and grumbled. Nathan wished the sun would hurry up and rise, let him see the spectre better and judge how real this Garland Wuornos was. It would make walking easier, too. Considering the limitations of his own Trouble, it had been arguably foolish not to bring a flashlight.
"Do you remember...?" he begun, then faltered.
"Dying? At least the location was nice; decent fishing spot. And of the folks left in this town I give a damn about, I was attended by the best."
It hadn't actually been what Nathan was going to ask, since it struck him as oddly insensitive. Nathan gave it a moment, then tried again, "Do you remember coming back before? Kyle Hopkins' Trouble? With Simon Crocker and the Rev?"
Garland grunted and gave a tight nod. "A mess. You know, it's difficult to find the right words, right fashion to deal with a situation, when you're pulled up from wherever you were all abrupt like that."
"...You mean you've... been thinking better of what you said since then?"
"Must have. Don't remember. Maybe that's just the way things are. Can't carry anything back..." Garland's feet stumbled over the ground like real living feet as he sped up suddenly. "Whoa! Hey, Nathan, now, over here..."
Nathan picked out white, pale skin and bundled clothing around the shape of a human body even as Garland fell to his knees beside it. Garland's hands were on the person's neck, feeling for warmth, taking a pulse, patting at the skin when he presumably found it. Nathan caught up and dropped beside him, reaching...
He saw the man's face in the dim light and stopped.
"Hey, hey there. You alive in there?" Garland's voice rose between sharp slaps. Nathan caught his hand before he could land another.
"Don't. I know who he is. Think this is all the reaction you get." Howard Sperry had been unable to move or communicate without Troubled assistance.
But Nathan had heard music just now...
He jerked back. The associated memory that rose up was unpleasant. But he'd done the madness, and the madness hadn't felt like this. He turned and stared at Garland... Hallucinations, now? Had the madness taken another form? But, no, last time everyone who'd been hit had been hit hard with crazy rage, it didn't vary. Unless Ray's Trouble had mutated...
Ray! Ray McBreen and Lily. He remembered the woman's voice he'd heard through the darkness, and whatever altered state his mind was in that he might not be able to fully register or understand, it still seemed that if they were here then they needed help.
He stood, leaving Garland to crouch puzzled over the unmoving man, frowning back up at him. "Lily!" Nathan shouted. "Ray!"
"Oh, thank goodness!" The woman's voice came thinly out of the dark further along the shore. "Please, please help me. He's hurt..."
"We're on our way!"
"You know what this is?" Garland asked, patting Sperry's face again before starting to winch himself up. "We'll be back, son. You hang in there."
Nathan spared a brief look back, resisting the temptation to let his eyes get caught on his father's apparition. "Yeah. I think I know what this is. Some of this." He'd known at the time that this happy ending was strictly temporary.
It didn't have to be. Troubles didn't go away, but I heard Ray's playing and I'm not mad... or not mad like before... Sperry is still catatonic, but Lily seems together... Or could be that's the crisis showing. People do things in moments of need that normally they can't...
He stumbled onward over rocks. The shapes he'd seen from afar resolved into ruined fragments of the motorboat, the biggest lying broken but with the basic frame intact. He could see Ray and Lily in silhouette, and he'd heard them both, after a fashion. His search abruptly switched to looking around for the fourth member of this crew. "Where's William?" he asked urgently. The younger man had been in the same state as Sperry...
"He left us in Hawaii," Lily said. "Found a local cure. It didn't work on Howard."
Nathan breathed out in relief and went to the Troubled couple. Ray seemed semi-conscious. Nathan let Garland slide in to examine him and take his pulse. "Skin's hot as hell, hard to tell if that's clammy or sea damp, but I'm guessing fever," Garland said. "He was sick before the crash?"
Lily said, "He's been sick for days. We had to come inland to... to get help. We needed to anyway, for Howard. Ray's Trouble... doesn't work on him anymore."
"It didn't work on me just now, either," Nathan said.
"...No..." Lily raised her head and looked between them both slowly. "You. You're Detective Wuornos. You were-" Her voice turned a little uncomfortable - remembering last time, Nathan judged.
"He's Chief Wuornos, now," Garland corrected gruffly.
"And you're...?" Lily said.
"Chief Wuornos," Garland bit off, even more gruffly.
"Oh." Nathan could hear her perplexed frown.
"This is my father," Nathan said, trying not to sound quite as gruff, although he was by no means certain of his success. "It's probably a long story."
"'C'mon, get off him." Garland teased for Lily's cooperation, pulling at Ray. "Nathan, you give me a hand here, we'll get him away from of the wreck, up the sand clear of the tide. Guessing since you didn't pull it out already you don't got your phone with you." Nathan had been uncomfortably increasingly aware of that oversight. "We gotta... get these three up to shelter between us, then you run back up the coast to fetch help from the Gull. Break in if you have to, this time of night. We need their phones."
"I don't have to break in," Nathan said. "Audrey lives above the Gull now."
"Well, good. You can move on your own okay, can't you, girl?" Garland asked Lily.
"I'm not hurt," she said. "We need to take care of Ray." Her hand curled over a small set of wooden pipes on Ray's chest, inches from his unconscious fingers.
"We will," Nathan promised. He grasped Ray's shoulders as Garland took his legs. Even with Lily spotting the terrain for them, it was treacherous going to move him up the beach, and coming back for Sperry was even harder. Garland was panting and shaking like a real live old man by the time they were putting Sperry down, safe at the base of the slight slope off from the remote parking lot, where the sand was soft and grassy, where the edge of the concrete shaded out the winds.
"Best you get going," Garland heaved. "Bring some proper help for them. Beyond me what's the matter with this fellow, but it don't look good."
"Lucassi knows him of old," Nathan said automatically, and amended, "That's our M.E. now. Sorry." He hesitated, not wanting to pull himself away. "You..."
"I sure as hell ain't doing the running part." Garland flapped a hand up from where he leaned bent over his knees, still recovering his breath, and waved Nathan off.
Nathan was afraid he wasn't going to be there anymore by the time he got back. Whatever had brought him here tonight, they didn't know what that was yet, and if he might be gone... "Dad." Nathan reached out his hand, grasped his adoptive father's. Ridiculous gesture. He almost froze up. Couldn't do, couldn't think anything else. Words wouldn't come.
"You daft sod," Garland grumped, shaking his head and waving him off again. "I'm still going to be here when you get back."
But he wasn't.
Nathan returned along the coast road with the Bronco a little over an hour later. The ambulance crew he'd called from the Gull had beat him to it, passing him on the route.
Lily wasn't there. Garland wasn't there. The only thing left were the two abandoned bodies of the sick men, and yet another Haven mystery.
