yes, I know I published a chapter just yesterday however this is extremely short, and I just finished editing so I thought I would release it now while I work on the longer chapters
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A void is not painless. Vacancy does not represent stillness of mind, and the lack of agony does not signify the presence of pleasure. It's the opposite, rather - how many people would prefer to feel pain as opposed to feeling nothing at all?
The complete absence of oneself is the worst loss a person can experience, even worse than losing people you love or who you were before. Being nothing and being simultaneously aware of yourself while still not being was the worst hell that Alastor could've ever gone through, his greatest punishment. Hell would be a piece of cake. He had thought, foolishly, that the earth would deliver him from harm, that he would become numbed and die, but he could feel his body frozen in place by hot, wet mud.
The earth encased him in caked-over, hard dirt as if he had been dunked in plasters, the seasons changing his grave with him still very much alive. Perhaps the absence of the senses, his complete loss was a sort of salvation in and of itself, in many ways. Because if he had been within himself, Alastor would've been tormented with the smells of his rotting guardians beside him, together with the far-off scent of the rotting young woman that he had murdered, tossed some ways off from them, but who somehow emitted more of a terrible stench than the other two corpses combined.
Alastor would've probably had some snarky thought about how, in ancient times, the stench of a corpse signified how corrupt and evil it'd been in its life. Alas, he could not think, could not feel, could not see anything, and he had been frozen in place, in time, and in the outsider state of his mind, he could not consider when this strange form of torture would end, if it ever would.
And it wouldn't have, for in the middle of nowhere, in the dangerous wilderness, who would think to start digging where the earth had caved in? The time passed, the rot came, the rot went, the maggots crawled and ate the Cormiers but left the still breathing, still beating body of Alastor mostly intact, feeling the vitality crawling from him like a frozen heart. He could not even question at what moment of decay his guardians were now, could not even remember he had ever had guardians or felt love.
But the strangest thing happened when one decade followed another. His body, encased halfway between earth and hell, began to be pulled to the core of the ground, pulled to hell, almost. And in that depth, his still-beating though slow heart began to pump anew, filling his brain with blood and giving him something like consciousness but not quite.
It turned out that the earth had other plans for him past letting him rest in an endless void. The first thing he truly felt was pain. It was a sharp, inexplicable pain, neither in his mind nor in his body, and yet everywhere all at once. It consumed him in the strangest way, unlike anything he had ever felt before, serrating at his very soul, stealing all the rest and avoidance he had had when the earth had stolen his consciousness.
Years after the pain came the numbness and little buds that would eventually, ever so slowly, blossom into things like thoughts. During that period of numbness and half-consciousness, like the lingering at the doorway of sleep and wakefulness, he had to learn patience—the patience of years, even the patience of nearly an entire decade. Stuck in the ground as he was, it might as well have been the patience of a lifetime, and by the time that his first full-blown thought came about, he had lived many lives.
As a dead man, his first thought, of course, was not really thought but rather the consciousness of dirt everywhere. In his mouth, on his hands, under his fingernails, wrapping itself dryly around the entirety of his body. He felt he was suffocating, as if he were eternally dying over and over again. And yet even that torture was less painful than any of the other stages had been. At that point, he was grateful to be able to feel anything consciously, thinking about his pain and being able to process it and hate it as opposed to being subjected to it blindly.
And so there was a certain pleasure in properly feeling and recognizing his own pain. With a few more years, the suffocating feeling was secondary, and more sophisticated thoughts formed, coiling around in his brain, revolving and developing, gaining complexity and clarity as time passed. In short, Alastor had had nearly twenty-five years to reform himself, and by the time he dug himself out of the ground, Alastor was another man. And perhaps not exactly a better one.
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Picture: times have changed since the very beginning of the twentieth century, and though industrial development had accelerated wildly while Alastor had been frozen in the ground, it still had not reached the remotest areas of Louisiana, which was where he had buried himself along with three other people.
In one of these remote areas, the swamp is seething with heat and the sickeningly sour yet sweet smell of decay mingling together with life. It is a hot March afternoon, and the swamp has begun advancing on the mulch, making everything steamy and flaccid, including the dirt where a certain body has been buried.
The mulch lets the body wiggle about its long fingers, and, very slowly, the man begins to dig himself out of the earth. Picture: a man sputters out of the ground, covered head to toe in black soil. His eyes are glowing, the only visible whiteness coming from his green eyes and the unnerving grin he has plastered on his hellish face.
It looks like a bog creature, an unnatural being that the earth had tried its hardest to keep down but simply couldn't maintain buried. Even that toxic soil seemed to have found the man repulsive and let him go lest he should contaminate it any further. The man stumbles forward without a clear intent in mind, but his body guides him to where he has gone time and time again.
Though his face is young and so is his body, preserved almost entirely in his death-like encasing, the man's eyes look a million years old. How could such a young person seem so old? The aged youth stumbles forward, the mud and dead leaves dropping from his stiff-jointed body as if it formed him entirely. Under many, many layers of dirt, Alastor tries to move again after a twenty-five-year rest.
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There is a woman, no older than forty, the toughness of her leather-like skin leaving exposed to the naked eye a story of her troubled life, a frowning life, a life of pain, coupled together with the deep caves of her brow, a brow spent and worn of its tautness by constant scowling and crying - the weather is the most accurate word one could use to describe such a woman.
She's slender yet noticeably strong and wiry, and you can tell by the way she sweeps the front of her porch that she takes no nonsense, even from the gathered dirt and dust at her steps. She's not frowning at the moment but instead looking solemn and contemplative, lost in a mindless action she doubtlessly carries forward quite often.
Though lost in her own non-thoughts, the woman still has inherent alertness won from a life of paranoia and persecution, so she still notices, far off, the growing figure of somebody caked in dirt walking towards her house. She doesn't have many guests and lives in nearly complete isolation.
The heat has made her head woozy, but she clears up instantly at the first sign of something strange occurring. She holds a hand to her sweated forehead against the cruel afternoon sun and tries to get a better look at the person who is, now doubtlessly, heading towards her.
There is nothing else for miles. The person is limping as if trying to get accustomed to their own limbs. Gawky and twisted, the figure still seems horribly eerie with all that black earth coating its every surface. She stares down the person until it gets right in front of her, and now she can more properly discern the matted black hair, the tall, skinny frame, and the somehow strangely familiar eyes of someone she has known, perhaps in a past life.
She concludes who the swamp monster is almost immediately, but her brain immediately discards it for lack of logic. The two people stare at one another for a stretched-out moment, recognizing the scraps of who they once were in the other, one upright and proud, the other dirty and crooked. "Adelaide?" The swamp monster asks before collapsing right on her steps with a dull thud. Quite irritably, she thinks about how she will have to clean the porch again.
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Picture: that same monster (now cleared of his swamp status, cleaned by the woman on the porch) is rummaging through the woman's garbage. The woman, her arms crossed, stands behind him, observing his strange actions. The frown is now on her face, as it has been since the man collapsed before her house. "There's no savin' it," she tells the man, frowning even deeper. But the man does not listen, and he only continues to rummage through the trash until he finds the sleeve of what was once a shining, beautiful suit.
The man doesn't reply. He only pulls out the different parts of his dirty suit and then heads back into the house to soak it in water. By the pristine conditions of the house, one would think that nearly no time had passed, but the first question the man posed the woman when he awoke was, 'what year is it?' He soon learned it was 1923. His second question was where his suit had been placed since he was now pristine and in relatively clean though dusty clothes.
In the corner of his mind, he realized it must've belonged to Mr. Guills. The late Mr. Guills. The woman promptly replies that she had had to peel the suit from the man's body and throw it in the garbage, where it belonged, tattered old thing that it was. And so there they were.
After helping the man put the ruined suit to soak, the woman demands explanations and then leads him to the kitchen, where she sets a glass of cold water before him and sits in front of him, her hands interlocked. The man looks unnaturally chipper and happy as if he hadn't just fainted in front of her house. He drinks the water politely, and to the woman, it looks like he hasn't had a drink since the days of yore. "Why ain't you aged a day?" She asks curtly, her suspicious eyes narrowing at him. "Everything can be explained by good genetics, dear Adelaide." "That's bullshit if I ever heard it.
You should be dead. Or forty." "And yet I am neither. You could ask explanations, but my face," he says, gesturing to his youthful self in general, "speaks for me." The dissatisfied woman taps her fingers on the table and looks like she has swallowed something sour. "What happened to the Cormiers?" "You mean to say you don't know? The Guills never tried to find out?" "I want to hear what happened from you." "They were killed.
No true reasons, for the white men of this town will find an excuse for violence even if there is none," Alastor replies nonchalantly as if it were nothing to him. He doesn't realize he is echoing the words that Guidry Cormier had spoken to him so long ago. "And the Lundelvilles?" Adelaide asks. Alastor pauses, but only a split second. Still, a woman as sharp as Adelaide catches such a thing. "Why they got what was coming to them, didn't they?" He says, a smile stretching out across his face, seeming to create a gaping wound below his nose. "They said that the Lundelville girl ate her mother and made her father mad, then killed herself.
At least, that was the rumor, though they ain't ever find the body, did they?" She asks suspiciously. "Well, rotten habits create rotten minds, wouldn't you say?" Alastor counters. "But on the topic of how people turned out, whatever happened to the Guills?" Adelaide frowns deeper and then pours herself a glass of lemonade, then proceeds to stand up and pour a transparent liquid into the glass, too. "They heard about what happened to the Cormiers, and they weren't ever the same.
None of us were. Still, right around that time, this little kitten came to our doorstep…" she trails off, her eyes glazing over in memory. "Don't matter, anyway," she gulps her vodka lemonade, "they lived a few more years before passing of old age. 'Bout the most peaceful death a person can get," she says, with a small smile on her lips as she speaks. Alastor gives out a strange little laugh that doesn't seem inappropriate, though it grates against the ear in the strangest, alien way. "That sounds about right, Adelaide. What happened to the cat?" "The cat?" "Yes, the cat." "It lived a long life," Adelaide tells him hesitantly. "And it really did bring a new life to our little family. A good cat," Adelaide concludes. "He really was," Alastor mumbles under his breath. "What was that?" "Oh, nothing, nothing. Anyhow, thank you for your lovely hospitality, but I really must get going now.
Lots of things to do," Alastor says lightly, standing up. "Wait, you ain't in no condition to be going out," Adelaide argues, though she doesn't seem very willing to keep him under her roof - he gives her the creeps, and his vague answers don't help with the added aura of mystery and darkness that seems to seep from his very pores. "Nonsense! I'm quite alright now. I'll just get my suit and get going… but Adelaide. Where did you put my things?" He asks, and now he leans forward to stare her right in the face, his eyes seeming to grow ever larger.
Adelaide swallows hard. "I put the stuff in the suit on the guest room nightstand." "Excellent! Thank you for everything. Your kindness will not be forgotten," and with that, he heads out of the dining room and goes to search for his things. Adelaide hovers by the living room, waiting for him to come out. "Right, then. Farewell," he greets, moving towards the door. "Wait a second.
Why ain't you telling me the truth?" Adelaide demands, blocking the way to the door with her body. She notices how anxious the man seems to make his departure - what is he so excited to get to? He scrutinizes her, that same ghastly smile he usually has still on his face. "Some things are best left buried, Adelaide." "Tell me. I can stomach it," she says, lifting her chin. One look at her demeanor shows that she really does look as tough as she claims to be. She's led a hard life, Alastor remembers.
Perhaps as hard as his. "Very well, if you will keep what I say to yourself." "I will," she replies. Alastor looks at her for another moment, analyzing whether he can truly trust her, his face falling serious for just a second before apparently deciding he can reveal what he did to her. In that split second, the woman remembers quite suddenly how she used to dream about the boy, even having a bit of a crush on him, and though his features have changed almost nothing, the same person he was, she realizes, is long lost. "Carmelita Lundelville did, indeed, eat her own mother. Well, not entirely. Heaven knows how long it would take to consume an entire human body! Ha ha! And, of course, she was under slight coercion… but never mind.
What matters is that I ruined that family; if I were given a redo on everything, I'd do it again. Perhaps with a bit more flourish, but alas… Carmelita Lundelville is, of course, rotting in an unmarked grave. In which I put her. And all is right in the world." Adelaide stands by the door, her lips pierced together, but she doesn't seem angry or appalled, much to Alastor's pleasure.
Instead, she even seems a bit grateful. She doesn't need to know more, like how Alastor preserved himself or how exactly he managed to pull off, convincing everyone that Carmelita Lundelville had decided to go insane and eat her mother. Those parts she can decipher on her own. "Alright, then," she says and opens the door for him. Alastor grins and walks through it. Halfway across the porch, however, as Adelaide shuts the door on him, he turns around. "Adelaide?" "Yes?" "Thank you." Her brow furrows deeper. "For what." "For taking care of that cat. Harry was a good boy."