Archive of Our Own

The thing that the Institute doesn’t understand about the Lukas family is that not all of them are like Peter, militantly preferring physical isolation in order to channel The One Alone. Jon and Martin are perhaps biased by their interactions with Peter and their own encounter with the Lonely, though Eric maintains that he helped a lot with that particular problem. Peter’s nearsightedness certainly explained why his ritual was so easily frustrated. Real loneliness was never about architecture.

The far better talent, as Eric’s father had always told him, was to be able to be alone in the middle of a crowded room. This talent, Eric had in spades. He was always a social child, the kind of Lukas that usually got quietly repatriated before they reached their teens. However, Eric’s charm, his ability to instantly win people to his cause and see his perspective, also came with a fatal kind of blandness. People liked and admired him, and they also forgot him as soon as he exited their lives. In special cases, when he exited the room. He remembers the first time that it really sunk in: when his father had insisted on homeschooling him and Eric had made fervent pacts with his many school friends to keep in touch. They traded home phone numbers and promised to meet on weekends or holidays. Weeks later, Eric would call them, small fingers navigating the rotary dials of the phone. They were all so pleased to hear from him, so pleased to talk. They would promise to organize a meetup and would never call back, or just never show up. Eric would end up sitting at an arcade, surrounded by kids who were impressed with his high scores in Dig Dug. None of them were the school friends he had come to meet.

Eventually, Eric just leaned into it. He smiled at people and watched them blush and open like flowers towards the sun, and felt nothing. They wouldn’t be able to pull him out of a lineup in four days. Peter smiled distantly and called it the family gift. Eric’s brother Evan called it being a manipulative piece of shit. Eric didn’t care which it was, which he guessed proved Peter right.

Eric had never fully embraced The One Alone. Peter had told him the story of his ‘first time,’ the traveler that he had compelled into the Lonely. When Eric was nineteen, his girlfriend Amy told him  that he made her feel ‘like she was the only girl in the room.’ Eric broke up with her the next day. It wasn’t worth the risk. After that, Eric stopped dating altogether. He would sleep with someone casually, but he had to be careful about it. They were always people with clear and healthy ties, middle children of large families or someone in the middle of a codependent friend group. He made sure they enjoyed themselves and then contented himself knowing that their encounter would become a happy and hazy memory in a few weeks. They never called him.

As it turns out, being attractive and instantly forgettable lent itself to a number of very interesting professions. Eric did the requisite few years in his father’s shipping company with Peter, conveniently looking the other way when workers on the Tundra would mysteriously go missing. He also dabbled in foreign intelligence, professional theater and stage magic, doing a brief stint in Las Vegas. He took some ironic pleasure in learning the requisite slights of hand to make objects disappear.

Indeed, Eric’s twenties stretched out in his mind as an interminable set of travels. It wasn’t until much later that he started considering the possibility that his twenties lasted more than the typical ten years. Time could go . . . weirdly, sometimes, and, to be fair, it was difficult to keep track of dates when you were manning a shipping freighter in the South China sea or deep undercover in a mission for MI5 in eastern Kiev. It was all a long time ago.

It took Evan’s death to make a change. Eric was thirty-three, or far, far older, when he got the news. Your brother is dead, a text came through his phone without warning, from an unknown number. Come and see him.

Eric hadn’t talked to Evan in years. Evan was always angry, one way or the other, about Eric’s ease with people, his natural inclination towards hollow popularity. He had been horrified, rather than proud, when Eric’s powers really manifested.

“That’s not at all concerning to you?” Evan had asked accusingly, “that you can maybe make people feel things that they wouldn’t otherwise feel? Make them do things they don’t want to?”

“That’s not how it works,” Eric had said defensively. “I don’t... I wouldn’t do anything bad with it. I can’t make people do things they really wouldn’t otherwise like, or enjoy. It’s not like that.”

“How would you know?” Evan replied.

Evan had fled the family by college, renouncing his trust fund and choosing to make his own way in life. Eric had envied him and pitied him in turn. He hadn’t known, at the time, that Evan had gotten engaged. In his better moments, Eric liked to believe that he would have intervened in what happened to Naomi Herne if he had known. Eric was vaguely aware that those tied to his family via marriage either embraced the family mission or died. His grandmother— Peter’s and his father’s mother— wasn’t a Lukas by birth but reigned effectively as the family matriarch. Others weren’t so lucky.

Years later, Eric used the Magnus Institute’s records to find Naomi and apologized. She looked at him like he was a ghost. Eric realized that, though he hasn’t seen Evan since he was a teenager, they probably looked a lot alike as adults. He had brought Georgie along, by which he meant that Georgie had belligerently insisted on accompanying him.

“I’m so — I mean— ” Eric struggled, uncharacteristically searching for words, while Naomi panicked in her doorway.

Georgie shouldered past him into the house, shooting Naomi a surprisingly soft smile.  “Ignore him, we all do,” she said encouragingly. “Did you really, like, disappear into a church made of fog? That’s proper spooky. We just had to deal with some weird coffins. Heard you met Jon too. Isn’t he the worst?”

After a while, Naomi launched into her explanation of the aftermath of Evan’s death, and both Eric and Georgie kindly pretended that they hadn’t heard the Extended Archival Version on tape before. Eric tried to avoid the topic of his own personal life as much as possible, and recoiled the moment that conversation turned to his own marriage and Naomi looked toward him with surprise.

Eventually, Georgie pushed him out of the front door of Naomi’s apartment. “Go take a walk,” she said. “You look like you need it. I’ll stay here, your sister-in-law is a lot more interesting than you are.”

Eric started down a random street and thought about the way he used to follow Evan around like an earnest shadow, picking up his discarded comics and reading them like they were guidebooks on getting his older brother to like him. Evan was always quiet and introverted, much more of a traditional Lukas, but unfailingly kind to the core in the way the rest of Eric’s family wasn’t. Evan bristled at Eric’s powers of compulsion, and Eric always found himself saying or doing the wrong thing. By the time they reached their teens, Eric and Evan had determinedly avoided each other— Evan saw Eric’s abilities as the worst manifestations of the Lukas Family Project, and Eric couldn’t spend time with Evan without grappling in terror with the idea that Evan’s revulsion was how everyone would see him, would treat him if it weren’t for whatever he could do.

Eric said as much to his father in passing, once. “You’re on your way, Eric,” his father said distractedly, reaching down to pat him on the head and missing by several inches as he walked down the hallway.

After Evan’s death, everything changed. Instead of attending the funeral, Eric made the first truly rash decision of his adult life; he fled to an island in the Channel that was as far from the Lukas influence as he could imagine. He set up a business as a funeral director because it was the opposite of what they would expect from him. He wanted to anchor himself in a tiny community of people who have to recognize him, have to know him and couldn’t forget him.

Naturally, he chose an island already gripped by a rival eldritch fear entity. Eric had never been prized for his foresight.

It’s actually really helpful, when arriving in a new place under an alias, to have someone hissing your name whenever you enter the room. It certainly beats any of the memory techniques that Eric had tried before. He’s picked hundred of fake names, ones that are semi-distortions of ‘Lukas’ that he’ll easily respond to and others that intentionally cast away from the aura of the Lukas family.

The name “Chapman” actually came from a man Eric used to work with on the Tundra. He was American— brash and friendly and totally oblivious to the hushed palor of the ship that Peter and Thaddeus Dahl had tried so hard to cultivate. Chapman was a big, burly white guy with a scruffy grey beard and a red cap that was almost surgically affixed to his head; he looked like a grizzled and slightly felonious Santa Claus. He was from somewhere in Massachusetts called Warrick that he pronounced ‘Wahhick’ and enjoyed long and impassioned tangents on the disappointment that was British beer. Peter loathed him, but Eric, who was usually ready to vibrate out of his skin by this portion of the Tundra’s journey, was glad to have a voluble coworker. Hunched over a deck of cards and two gently sloshing ales, Chapman told Eric stories about the wreck of the Andrea Gail and the hurricanes that wracked the eastern seaboard in his tenure as a fisherman.

“We give the big ones names,” he said, gesturing out the window at the storm that was lashing at the bolthole windows, typical winter weather in the South Atlantic. “Every year, we go back ta’ the beginning the alphabet and give the storm's names, like they’re fucking people. I don’t know whose job it is to pick them out. What a weird fucking job. But it seems right, y’know? It’s a sign of respect. Each storm I’ve seen has a different personality, for sure, and I’ve seen the big ones— Bob, Edna, Carol, Andrew. But that one in ’91— it never got a name. See, back then, we used chips  in the buoys to figure how high the swells got.”

Eric sat, listening to this windburnt and slightly drunk man expound on hurricane patterns and found himself unexpectedly captivated.

“I remember seeing the waves cresting high— too high,” Chapman said. “I was on a shipping crew like this off the coast’a Maine, and it was like being on a fucking rollercoaster from God. Whatever glimpses I got outside, I remember thinking, ‘there aren’t gonna be any buoys left for them to measure.’ It made sense that that one didn’t get a name.”

Eric remembered the moment that the crew of the Tundra floated out in the lifeboats when Dahl blew the boatswain’s whistle across the water. Eric was craning his neck to see who was left on the lifeboats, looking for signs of the newer members of the crew. Chapman wasn’t there, and Peter met Eric’s gaze across the rowboat, looking typically placid. “Nothing personal, Eric,” he said casually. “He just . . . went on, didn’t he?”

It wasn’t the vaguely eldritch murder that bothered him— Eric had, at that point, passively or actively participated in the death of several people. It was the knowledge that Chapman would hate to die this way— with the quiet, muffled slide into isolation rather than the roar of wind and waves. Eric quit the Tundra shortly after that. Peter couldn’t care less, and his father seemed to approve that Eric wanted to make his own way. “You’ll never reach your potential on that rusting wasteland,” he wrote in a letter with no return address. Eric tore up the letter and did nine months with Medicine Sans Frontiers, trying to get the musty smell of fog out of his nose. Years later, he had to put a last name on the paperwork he was faxing (faxing!) to the mayor’s assistant, some extremely competent woman named Marjorie, and Eric remembered the weathered intensity of Chapman’s stare and the wet flash of lighting against the windows in the middle of a storm.

Three weeks into his stay at Piffling Vale, Georgie made a sarcastic reference to “Hurricane Chapman” and Eric paused, semi-hidden in a doorway in his own cafe. She meant it as an insult (everything Georgie initially said about him was meant as an insult), but there was something deeply compelling in thinking about himself as a being measured in gale force.

Eric doesn’t mean to usurp the Funn’s business. He’s not used to thinking about how his actions affect other people. The last time someone held Eric accountable for his own actions was . . . well, Eric can’t remember the year, but there was a lot less internet and people were wearing chunkier shoes. And to be fair, there should be enough business on Piffling Vale to sustain two decently managed funeral homes.

Eric wrote off his initial encounter with the Funns as a case of acute professional paranoia, but when he returned, and returned, and returned, the three of them— the Funns and Georgie— still looked at him with a mix of resentment, nervousness, and disdain. They don’t like me, Eric remembered thinking, first with surprise and then growing awe. They didn’t find any of his jokes or professional catchphrases charming. His overtures of friendship were immediately rejected. They were not impressed by his general sense of popularity and acclaim.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” Rudyard snapped to the Village Council, shortly after Eric displaced him. “Is this some sort of mass hallucination?”

Yes, Eric wanted to say. Yes, it is. Why doesn’t it work on you?

In the beginning, having a group of people who leaned away from him rather than toward him was a novelty in itself. Eric would make excuses to go and see them, happily put up with their ludicrous attempts at professional sabotage. It was slightly masochistic, but it was some of the healthiest social interactions Eric had had in years. He gently hit on Georgie and she looked at him like something she had found stuck to the bottom of her shoe. Antigone was clearly attracted to him and still refused to speak to him for longer than five minutes without backpedaling into the alarming shadows of Funn Funerals. Rudyard genuinely thought that they were nemeses. Eric was still confused by that, but there was something refreshingly long-term about having a nemesis.

Eventually, though, it became less novel. Eric genuinely liked them— apart from the fact that they were seemingly immune to Eric’s Lukas-adjacent powers, Rudyard, Antigone and Georgie were all endlessly interesting. Antigone was so smart, and Georgie was genuinely talented at everything in a way that Eric couldn’t replicate with all his money and time and power, and Rudyard was . . .  weirdly compelling, despite being a walking social catastrophe.  The rest of Piffling Vale loved Eric, to an alarming degree— he was probably about five years away from getting a statue named after him, which was par for the course for Eric in small towns. But Eric couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like if those three, the pariahs of the village, did come around to liking him. What it would be like to have friends, real friends, who criticized him when he deserved it but also liked him as an active choice, not as the inevitable path of least resistance.

In retrospect, it seemed incredibly obvious that Eric was dealing with Evan’s death by hyperfixating on the only other people he’d met who didn’t react to Eric’s charm and popularity. This is, at least, what Tim confidently said years later when the two of them left the S.S. Piffling one night and got horribly and irresponsibly drunk.

“I was hyperfixating,” Eric said earnestly to Rudyard when he and Georgie arrive to cart them back to the marina. Georgie had begrudgingly agreed to give Tim a piggy-back ride and Tim was ecstatically happy. Eric was in much better shape, and so was just leaning on Rudyard’s shoulder in a way that sometimes lead them to lurch sideways. “Just inth’beginning. Nows’just fixating, I guess.”

“Those are all certainly words, Chapman,” Rudyard said acidly, but pulled on Eric’s jumper when he swayed too far backward again, carefully maneuvering him into an upright position.

“I like you, though,” Eric says, trying to poke Rudyard in the chest and ending somewhere near the tip his shoulder. “It’s not juss’ about Evan.”

They had a proper row about it months later after Rudyard learned about Eric’s family through Elias’ menacing intervention and Eric learned that Rudyard had been under the ludicrous impression that Evan was some sort of ex that Eric was pining over.

“How the hell was I supposed to connect the dots to tragically dead brother?” Rudyard snapped. “For all I know you were made in some sort of laboratory.”

“You could have just asked,” Eric said, who was being way too defensive because he knew he was in the wrong.

Rudyard had several things to say to that, most of which Eric admittedly deserved.

It took an embarrassingly long time for Eric to figure out what was happening. The thing is, Eric knew that his family was connected to some sort of paranormal fear cult. He helped his uncle disappear people on a boat that carted empty containers across the Atlantic. He was hardly a skeptic.  Eric had just never connected that fact with the possibility that there could be more than one weird fear cult around. So when Eric first woke up inside a coffin after his first few months in Piffling, his first thought was goddamn it, Peter.

The coffin definitely wasn’t one of his; the inside was lined with cheap silk that caught and dragged on Eric’s fingernails when he initially flailed out, trying to get his bearings. When he felt the seam of the top, Eric couldn’t feel the catch that he built into the coffins at Chapman’s. It smelled musty, like antiques badly preserved, and the edges of the silk felt wormy and frayed.

“Hello?” Eric called, feeling foolish. “Anyone there?” He listened carefully to any kind of exterior noise. All heard was hollow silence and the shallow sound of his own breather. “Oh, god,” he said quietly to himself. “This is really bad.”

The next morning, Eric wrote it off as a bad dream. He brewed some extra-strong coffee and told himself that stress could cause incredibly vivid nightmares. He opened the cafe, presided over four funerals, and made himself some soothing peppermint tea at night.

Eric woke up in the coffin again.

He couldn’t bring anything inside the coffin with him— Eric first tried a flashlight, then a cell phone, then a book— and he was somehow not falling over of sleep deprivation, so his mind must be processing REM sleep even as Eric shouted himself hoarse underground. Staying up all night worked the first time, until Eric passed out at 4 pm the next day on his couch and found himself in a coffin instead of presiding over the Dekker funeral.

After a few nights of alternatively attacking the coffins from the inside and sinking into a stupor, Eric realized that his family was probably not punishing him for defecting through extended coffin entrapment. It certainly wasn’t the Lukas style. While he was certainly isolated in the coffin, Eric was less conscious of the chilled despondency that The One Alone fed on and more a sense of claustrophobic breathlessness, like he was being slowly choked or pressed to death. Sometimes he could almost hear the ground moving around him as if it was deliberately pushing down on the lid of the coffin.

Eric was perilously close to breaking and contacting his family with questions when he woke up one night in the coffin with someone else. This, technically speaking, shouldn’t be possible; when Eric had been stuck alone his shoulders were just inches from the sides, but now he was pressed lightly against another body with quite a bit of wiggle room. This other person was thin— their shoulder poked sharply against Eric’s— and smelled faintly of clementines.

“Chapman?” Rudyard asked, fuzzy and lacking his usual knife-edge rancor.

“Come here often?” Eric asked cheerily, and then instantly hated himself.

Rudyard was so incandescently angry that for a moment Eric could literally feel him vibrating through their three points of contact. “Is there anywhere,” he growled, “where you won’t just invite yourself?”

“Sorry, what?”

“This is outrageous,” Rudyard continued. “I’m unconscious. I deserve to be haunted alone.”

“I have literally no idea what’s happening right now.”

“Get out,” Rudyard snapped, reaching out and shoving him with a hand that felt like it was covered in gritty dust. “Find your own coffin, damn you.”

“Calm down, Rudyard,” Eric snapped, trying to grab the hands that were fairly ineffectually hitting him in the face and shoulder. “There isn’t even room for us to fight, this is ridiculous.”

“You can’t kill me Chapman, it’s my coffin dream, you’re just invading it—”

Suffice to say, in terms of extracting information that might save them both from being buried alive, that first night was not a rousing success. Chapman opened his eyes blearily in the morning to his 5 AM alarm, rolling out of bed to start baking the croissants that were featured in the bakery this week. He was in the middle of pre-heating the oven when he remembered his evening with a start. Eric briefly considered dashing across the road and demanding answers from Rudyard right then, but decided against it. Better to let him cool down.

Instead, Eric kept an eye on the front door of Funn Funerals through the morning while stress baking several dozen more croissants than he could realistically sell at the bakery. He walked over in the mid-afternoon, clutching a box of them as a kind of peace offering.

The front office of Funn Funerals was as dusty and dark as ever, the windows letting in only the faintest drafts of light through battered glass panes. Rudyard was seated at the front desk, writing intently in a leger that seemed to outline a timetable of the upcoming Windcombe funeral with almost alarming precision. Chapman hovered awkwardly in front of the desk, waiting for Rudyard to look up and notice him while swallowing the comment that one did not usually cut off a eulogy after precisely six minutes.

“If he wanted to tell more stories about his brother’s fishing trips, he should have thought of that before demanding a noon service,” Rudyard muttered as if responding to Chapman’s unspoken criticism, before looking up and nearly falling out of his chair with a hoarse yelp.

“Hi Rudyard,” Eric said. “Croissant?”

“Chapman,” Rudyard snapped. “What the hell are you doing hovering there? Why didn’t I hear you come in?”

“Oh, it seemed like you were pretty intent on your notes for the Widcombe funeral,” Eric responded. “Also, I learned how to muffle my footsteps during some training I did with Mossad. It was—”

“—a long time ago, I know,” Rudyard said impatiently. “Stop looming with baked goods. What do you want?”

Eric ignored Rudyard and handed him a croissant, which he regarded with extreme suspicion but accepted and started to eat with the manner of someone who has just realized how hungry they were. “I wanted to talk to you about last night,” Eric said brightly.

Rudyard looked up at him from the croissant blankly. Eric pushed onwards. “You know, the thing where we got stuck in a nightmare coffin together.”

Rudyard paled. The mouse that Eric sometimes saw traveling in Rudyard’s jumpers started squeaking from some hidden corner of the office. “Be quiet, Madeline,” Rudyard said without rancor as the mouse continued squeaking in a shrill stream. “Later. Later. No, absolutely not.”   

“I can wait,” Eric said impatiently.

“Now, look here,” Rudyard began, simultaneously looking petrified and furious. “I don’t know what you think that you saw or experienced—”

“I think that we got locked in a coffin, together, overnight,” Eric said plainly. “It wasn’t the first time that I’d been locked in that coffin, and it seemed like it had happened to you before as well. I want some answers. And, preferably, to stop waking up in coffins.”

“Well, we all want that, don’t we Chapman,” Rudyard said nonsensically. “I certainly didn’t want you there.”

“Okay, so you aren’t behind all this?”

“I resent the implication,” Rudyard began, his tone fluctuating wildly, “that I would use supernatural coffin powers— which I don’t have— to spend even more time in your presence.”

“Right. Well if you didn’t do it, then who did?”

Rudyard sighed, deflating. “I don’t know. It’s been going on for as long as I can remember.”

“For as long as— “ Eric spluttered. “do you mean to tell me that you’ve been waking up in underground coffins for your whole life? Because I’m on week three and I am not having a good time. How the hell are you still sane?” He paused. “Actually, that explains a lot.”

Rudyard’s response to this was interrupted by the ding of the bell over the front door, which has oddly not rung when Chapman arrived. Both men jerked up and moved slightly further apart.

“What’s going on here?” Georgie asked, shouldering through the door.

“Hi, Georgie,” Chapman said, internally wincing at his own eagerness.

“Oh, for god’s sake,” Rudyard muttered under his breath.

Georgie leaned confidently in the doorway and took in the scene in front of her.

“Chapman was just leaving,” Rudyard said pointedly.

“I was just arriving, actually,” Eric said cheerfully. “Rudyard was filling me in on some important details about the island’s history.”

Rudyard made a quiet sound that was between a growl and a sigh.

“Alright,” Georgie said, looking back and forth between them bemusedly. “I’ll leave you two to whatever it is you’re actually doing. If you see Antigone, tell her I got more clementines for her embalming fluid.”

“Right, yes, of course,” Rudyard said, flustered. “Thank you, Georgie.”

“Eric, I just got this place cleaned up,” Georgie said, glaring at him on her way out the door. “Don’t touch anything.”

Georgie closed the front door so hard that some dust shook off the walls at the reverberation, falling softly around them in the front office.

“Does Georgie know about the weird coffin thing?” Eric asked casually.

“What? No!” Rudyard said, bristling.

“I wasn’t sure if the ‘don’t touch anything’ was a warning about accidentally getting my hands on anything supernatural or— oh, you know what,” Eric hastily amended. “Never mind, I get it now.”

Rudyard thankfully seemed uninterested in asking follow-up questions. “Now look here,” he began. “I don’t know why you showed up in what was supposed to be my coffin. You’re forever taking things that belong to me, so I should guess that this was no different. But you can’t just go talking to people about it.”

“So, this is like Nightmare Fight Club?” Eric asked.

“I don’t know what that means,” Rudyard said.

“Why do you hate me so much?” Eric finally asked on their third night, as they both stared at the grain of the mahogany coffin inches from their face.

Rudyard groaned. “Can I not, for one minute, contemplate my own burial without interference?”

“Look, I’m just thinking, maybe there’s a reason we’re both here. Maybe it’s like a Groundhog Day scenario.”

“Chapman, I don’t know how many groundhogs you’ve met,” Rudyard replied wearily, “but they don’t spend a lot of time in coffins.”

“No, like the movie. You know, a guy wakes up and relives the same day over and over again, and no matter what he does nothing ever changes.”

“That’s already an accurate description of my life,” Rudyard said in a humorless monotone.

“Well,” Eric continued, ignoring him, “we keep reliving the same night over and over again, even though we’re moving forward in time during the day. Originally we were on our own, but now we’re in the same coffin. There’s got to be a reason why— something we can do together.”

For a moment Eric swore he could hear Rudyard rolling his eyes at him. “Well, I’ve already tried murdering you. It didn’t work, I just woke up in the morning clutching a hammer like a lunatic carpenter. Suffice to say that I have zero interest in the other option.”

“Yes, thank you, Rudyard, I got that,” Eric said defensively. “I wasn’t prepositioning you, I’m just saying that we should talk.”

“Are we not talking now?”

“No, I mean talk talk. Like have a proper heart to heat,” Eric said, trying for a conciliatory tone. “I believe that open and honest communication can solve most problems.”

“ . . . . . no, you don’t,” Rudyard replied incredulously after a short silence.

“What?”

“Chapman,” Rudyard began, “Contrary to popular belief, while I am not a beacon of popularity in Piffling Vale—”

“Bit of an understatement.”

Rudyard ignored him.“I do understand enough about human communication to know that you’re lying through your teeth ninety percent of the time.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Eric protested. “Wait, what’s happening during the other ten percent?”

“Usually you’re yelling at me.”

“That’s not true,” Eric said. “I almost always talk to people honestly.”

“No, you don’t, you just . . . . “ Rudyard waved again “You just Chapman at them.”

“You mean I’m nice to them?” Eric asked incredulously. “Is that what ‘Chapmanning’ is?”

“No, I’ve met nice people before,” Rudyard said with distaste. “This is different.”

Eric opened his mouth and found it difficult to choose a response. On the one hand, Rudyard was the absolute last person who should lecture anyone on their tactics of social engagement. On the other, he had hit disturbingly close to the truth without realizing it. While Eric worked very hard to prevent people from doing or feeling things that would later dislike, he did occasionally muffle emotions like anger, sadness or resentment that were more inconvenient to deal with.

“If I had come to Piffling Vale and opened any other business,” Eric asked carefully, “do you think you would have liked me?”

Rudyard snorted. “No,” he said simply. “But I would have much more free time. Probably also a kettle. You’ve been hell on our finances.”

“Why not?” Eric asked, trying to sound casually curious and not incredibly petulant.

Rudyard sighed. “Because you act like you’re the main character in everyone else’s lives,” he said. “And most of the time, people let you get away with it.”

“Oh.”

“If we’re really set on being honest, I got that from Antigone,” Rudyard admitted. “I just think you’re a nightmare.”

“Thanks, Rudyard,” Eric said.

“To be fair,” Rudyard pointed out, “we do spend our nights locked in a coffin together, Nightmare is less of an insult and more of a—”

“— grimly defined reality.” Eric finished. “Yeah, I get it.”

The thing about Eric lying through his teeth to people did rankle for the next few days. He was busy installing a water slide into the second floor of his pub when Reverend Wavering arrived, hovering behind him while Eric finished testing the pH of the water.

“Eric!” Wavering said cheerily. “How are you?”

“My sleep pattern has been interrupted by being stuck in a coffin with my nemesis, a weirdly attractive social disaster who hates me” Eric thought. “Also, my brother just died and I might be going through a weird version of a midlife crisis, given that I am in my thirties but have also likely lived several decades beyond a normal human lifespan because my family participates a murderous fear cult.”

“Hello, Reverend!” Eric’s mouth said. “Can’t complain. How’s Desmond?”

Eric spent the next fifteen minutes crouching next to a waterslide and listening to Reverend Wavering’s concerns about Desmond’s hectic schedule. “I realize that he’s kept very busy,” Wavering confided, “but I’d just like to be one of his top priories, you know?”

“I totally understand, Reverend,” Eric said, though he hadn’t been in a stable long-term relationship since uni. “Maybe tell him everything that you’re saying to me?”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Wavering replied, frowning. “He takes his job so seriously. I don’t want to bother him.”

Eric grinned. “I’m sure he appreciates you bothering him, Nigel,” he said conspiratorially. “Why not talk through it with him and come to a compromise?”

Reverend Wavering beamed. “Thanks, Eric,” he said. “You know, I always feel better after talking to you. You’re an absolute tonic.”

Eric’s smile faltered after Revered Wavering turned away. It was always difficult to measure the level of influence that Eric was exerting, especially if it wasn’t on his own behalf. Was the relationship between Desmond and Wavering healthy, or was Eric supernaturally egging them on because he was lonely and bored? He didn’t use to overthink the platitudes that he dealt out to people. He never advised anyone to do anything shocking or bad, but he also never followed up with the people who stumbled away from his advice.

“Nigel,” Eric said, thundering down the stairs after him. “I don’t want you to confront Desmond if it makes you uncomfortable, though.”

Reverend Wavering shrugged. “Confrontation is always uncomfortable, Eric my lad,”  he said, looking up at him wryly.

“I know,” Eric said earnestly. “I just— I want you to do what you want.”

Reverend Wavering smiled. “I know,” he said. “When you get to my age, it’s difficult to change the way that you’ve done things all your life. Some people are worth the discomfort.”

Eric nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I get that. Ah, well. Enjoy yourself.”

Reverend Wavering turned around and continued walking down the back stairs of Chapman’s pub. “God only knows if I will,” he said. “If you’re into that sort of epistemological system, I mean.” 

Later, Eric watched Wavering and Desmond out of the corner of his eye at the pub, leaning conspiratorially into each other’s space and laughing. Wavering caught his eye and winked, and Eric managed a smile.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” Eric said that night, shifting against the silk wall of the coffin.

“Can it wait?” Rudyard asked brusquely. “I’m trying to find a way to explain to Mrs. Middleton that her uncle’s body has been accidentally flambéd. Damn open caskets.”

“Oh, she’s already asked me to take over the funeral.”

“Of course she has,” Rudyard grumbled. “You lightly burn a corpse once—”

“This is serious, Rudyard.” Eric interrupted.

“Do you think I don’t take the theft of my business seriously?” Rudyard asked, enraged. “If anything, Mr. Middleton looked better with a little bit of charring on him—”

“—No, I mean,” Eric hesitated. “I’m trying to tell you something about me.”

Rudyard paused. “I’ll allow it,” he said uncertainly.

Eric paused. “Right. So you know how weird things happen to you?”

“What could you possibly be referring to, Chapman,” Rudyard deadpanned.

“Yeah, sorry. I’m just trying to say— this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened to me.”

Rudyard reared back, momentarily hitting his head on the side of the coffin. “Have you been buried in coffins with other people?”

“No!” Eric assured him. “It’s not a burial thing. I just— I have other, you know, powers.” He coughed, uncomfortable with Rudyard’s sudden silence. “You know how . . . most people like me?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Well,” Eric pressed on. “That’s not, you know a coincidence.”

“What are you saying Chapman, that you’re some sort of mind manipulator?” Rudyard said sarcastically. “Making everyone enjoy themselves through dark sorcery?”

Eric grimaced. “Kind of?”

There was a long silence in the coffin.

“You’re joking,” Rudyard said, his voice dropping low.

“I can’t manipulate anyone’s mind,” Eric hastened to add. “It’s more of a general . . . good feeling?”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Rudyard said dangerously, “that this whole time you’ve been swanning around as king of the village, you’ve been cursing everyone into liking you?”

“Swanning around is a little much, Rudyard.”

“There were fireworks!” Rudyard shouted. “There’s a lake named after you! I was there! This is outrageous, I should have known that you would resort to ensorcellment—”

“I’m stuck in a coffin because of you!” Eric shouted backed. “You’ve got your own, you know, ensorcelling thing going on.”

“Yes, well, excuse me if live burial seems a bit like the short end of the stick,” Rudyard snapped.

“I didn’t ask for this!”

“Oh, of course you didn’t,” Rudyard said sardonically. “The power of popularity and acclaim just tripped and fell into your lap, like everything else does. I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

Eric was so wildly defensive that for a moment he almost launched into an explanation about his family, the whole sordid history of the Lukas empire and their dedication to The One Alone. However, that story also highlighted some of the less savory aspects of Eric’s participation in the family business. There was also the matter of the Lukas tradition of vanishing those they cared about, or really anyone that mildly inconvenienced them, which Eric didn’t really care to explain to the man who regularly paraded around Piffling proclaiming himself Eric’s nemesis.

Years later, Eric sat with Naomi Hearne and wallowed in guilt while quietly explaining the traditional relationships of the Lukas family to her. “Evan didn’t want any of that,” he hastened to explain. “He wouldn’t have ever wanted to put you in danger.”

Naomi sighed. “Yes, I know. I just— why didn’t he tell me? I could have helped, maybe I could have done something.”

Maybe he thought you wouldn’t believe him, Eric meant to say, and instead responded: “Maybe he thought you would leave him.” He immediately flushed, and Georgie pretended to study Naomi’s bookshelves with sudden intensity.

“Well, that’s stupid,” Naomi said defiantly.

“Right. Yeah, I guess so.” 

“Mind you,” she added. “I had just assumed that Evan’s family were, like, posh snobs or anti-vaxxers.”

“Oh, definitely not,” Eric said with a lightness he hadn’t felt since he knocked on the door. “We may be members of an eldritch fear cult, but we vaccinate. We’re not monsters.”

Fifteen minutes into telling Rudyard about his compulsion powers, Eric was already regretting it.

“Ugh, Rudyard,” Rudyard mocked, “I’m a monster. People are cursed into liking me.”

“That’s not— is that supposed to be my voice?”

“Ugh, Rudyard, my life is so hard,” Rudyard continued in the same high tone.

“Oh, fuck off,” Eric snapped, “you have no idea. Can you imagine what it’s like to have people constantly forgetting you?”

“I dream of forgetting you constantly, Chapman,” Rudyard replied automatically.

“No you don’t,” Eric said, turning as much as he could to face Rudyard in the pitch black of the coffin after an uncomfortable beat of silence. “You don’t, right?”

Rudyard sighed. “No, I guess not,” he admitted. “I’d have to go through the process of re-meeting you all over again, since I’m sure you’d just follow me like a overpopular shadow. And there is something slightly invigorating about having a nemesis.”

Eric grinned, invisible in the dark. “We don’t have to be nemeses, you know.”

“We hardly have any other choice. Unless you’re planning to leave the funeral business anytime soon.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Eric said breezily. “Though, I have to admit, I’m starting to have not-great feelings towards coffins.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Rudyard said. “And don’t change the topic, we’re discussing your twisted supernatural history. What’s the weirdest thing that you’ve ever made someone do?”

Eric made a face at him. “I don’t try to make people do things.”

“Chapman, you have a seat on the Village Council, more building permits than anyone should get greenlighted, and a literal fan club,” Rudyard said drily. “You make people do things.”

“No, I get that,” Eric said sheepishly, “I mean I try not to intentionally manipulate their actions, or make them do something that’s totally out of character.”

“Why not? I would.”

“Yes, I know you would,” Eric said, still grinning. “You’d be a total nightmare. You’d probably turn into a supervillain.”

“But a popular supervillain,” Rudyard insisted archly.

Eric laughed and tried to tamper down a blooming feeling of fondness. “You wouldn’t be able to talk to Madeline,” he pointed out. “How is that related to the coffin thing, by the way?”

Rudyard shrugged, which Eric felt rather than saw. “I try not to think about it too much,” he said. “Maybe she’s special. Maybe it only works with animals that are associated with the ground.”

“Haven’t you tried it out on other animals?”

“Not really,” Rudyard said shortly.

“Why not?” Eric pressed. “I mean, if I could talk to animals I’d want to do it constantly.”

“Most of them don’t like me very much. It’s called rejection, Chapman, I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t, would I?” Eric snapped. He expected Rudyard to snap back at him, but the man fell silent instead. The coffin filled with a tense silence that made Eric itch.

“I did help rob a bank once,” he offered, almost against his will. “With my powers.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t a real bank robbery,” Eric hastened to add. “I was working with Interpol undercover to—”

“No, there’s no walking that back Chapman, you’re a hardened criminal,” Rudyard said impatiently. “Tell me the rest of the story about this heist that you orchestrated.”

Eric grinned and crossed his arms, humming meditatively. “Well, I was in charge of approaching the bank teller,” he started.

Rudyard groaned. “Let me guess, she just handed over the money, you didn’t have to wave a gun around at all.”

“No,” Eric remonstrated, “because that would have made my coworkers very curious. I just calmed everyone down around me. Made sure that they were all, you know—“

“Enjoying themselves?” Rudyard prompted smugly.

“The most dangerous part of any bank robbery is if a civilian tries to improvise,” Eric explained. “Or if the teller panics and acts against the measures that are required in their training.”

“So you’re like an evil ray of sunshine,” Rudyard said in satisfaction.

As it turns out, the entire time that Eric had been trying to befriend Rudyard by seeming like a genial and well-meaning guy with accidental good luck and charm, he had been working from the totally wrong angle. Rudyard was very interested in Eric’s stories now that he was vindicated in his assessment of him as a nefarious and manipulative mastermind. This certainly made sharing a coffin easier, although Eric was starting to feel like a morally ambiguous Scheherazade.

“Do you do your thing on the people coming to you for funerals?” Rudyard demanded several nights later after Eric had finished telling the story about that mission in Kiev where he’d charmed his way out of a mafia bar.

“First of all, can we not call it ‘doing my thing’?”

Rudyard made an impatient noise.

“Yes, a bit,” Eric admitted. “But just so they’ll be, you know, a little. . . happier That’s why I like doing funerals. People are living through some of the worst days of their life. I might as well help make it a little easier on them.”

“Chapman, it’s a funeral,” Rudyard objected. “Just let them be miserable and throw things at you like everyone else.”

“Oh, that’s rich, coming from you.  Have you ever conducted a funeral that hasn’t ended in one of your clients trying to hit you?”

“We’re not talking about my blunt and honest nature, Chapman, we’re still focusing on your nefarious business practices.”

“Sure,” Eric said, “just let me know when it’s my turn to talk about your ‘blunt and honest nature,’ I’ll start making mental notes now.”

Eric realized as he said this that he was flirting. This was a troubling turn of events.

Eric had, in his entire supernaturally prolonged life, made maybe three truly good decisions. The first was to, of all the people in his family, stick to Evan like a sad barnacle as a child. The second was to leave the Tundra before Peter finished grooming him into a fully active member of the family cult. The third was to say ‘no thanks’ to that one B&E job in Foggy Bottom that he was offered during his stint in America, which in retrospect caused a mess even Eric might not have smarmed his way out of. The rest of Eric’s personal history was more or less a series of narrowly averted disasters that he escaped by the skin of someone else’s teeth.

Realizing that he had feelings for the rude social disaster he shared a coffin with wasn’t particularly surprising. The glaring error was that, while trapped and beholden to a  eldritch nightmare for several weeks, Eric had turned it into an opportunity to flirt rather than, you know, figure out a means of escape. The consequences of this became particularly clear when said eldritch being caught on to the fact that neither of the coffin inhabitants was filled with mortal terror and changed tactics.

Eric had never been afraid of the dark or of dead bodies— he wouldn’t have studied mortuary sciences if he was. The Lukas family tended to kill their sacrifices out of corporeal displacement, not just because it fed into the sense of despondency and isolation linked to The One Alone, but because it was just neater. Eventually, the victims sent into the Lonely died of one cause or another, and the Lukas who sent them there never had to get their hands dirty. Eric had bucked tradition by getting his hands very dirty— first as a doctor, later as a spy, and finally as a mortician. Initially, he thought he could figure out a way to connect with people by holding their life in his hands, in one way or another. When that didn’t work, Eric settled for the ability to understand people in the way you could only when elbow-deep in their internal organs. Eric wasn’t lying when he told Rudyard that liked conducting funerals to help people, to distract them on particularly sad and trying days. But there was also a refreshing honesty about a dead person— they didn’t particularly like or dislike him, which, up until he moved to Piffling Vale, was the closest Eric usually came to unaltered human interaction.

This is all to say that when Eric’s basement mortuary became haunted, it took him a few days to notice.

At first, it was just a problem of light. Eric had installed windows near the ceiling of his mortuary because — unlike Antigone Funn— he enjoyed a little natural light in his workspace. When he was plunged into darkness, Eric initially thought that perhaps his power hade gone out. It was only after experimenting with his generator and bringing his full grasp of electrical engineering to the problem that Eric realized that the darkness wasn’t caused by a short circuit. He circled the outside of Chapman’s, looking at the dirt that clustered by his basement windows, and felt that same feeling he experienced in his first few days in the coffin— the awareness of the ground closing around him with live malice, like a snake slowly tightening its coils.

It wasn’t long before that feeling of claustrophobic predation started following him elsewhere. One morning, Eric was preparing for the Hargreaves funeral, setting up the last of the floral arrangements around the burial plot, when he felt the ground almost tug at his feet, causing him to lurch and almost pitch forward into the open grave. Eric windmilled backward, shaking his feet as if to dislodge twining ropes, but when he had scuttled several feet away from the opening, all he could see was a little dust on his shoes.  Eric stared down at the unassuming plot, six feet of neatly dug dirt surrounded by bright green turf. He wondered what would happen if he had fallen in— if the ground was just waiting to swallow him down into the coffin that was waiting somewhere in this graveyard for him. Eric finished setting up the flowers and nearly collided with Reverend Wavering, who was traipsing through the graveyard talking gently to Hollis Hargreaves.

“Eric!” Reverend Wavering said cheerily. “I was just talking to young Hollis here about the fact that his grandfather has reached a sense of serenity in a higher place. At least, there are good odds that that’s what happened. How are you this morning?”

“Hi, Reverend,” Eric said, his voice tense. “Listen, I’ve got to go run an errand quickly. Any change you can stall the funeral until I get back?”

“Of course,” Reverend Wavering said, frowning at Eric’s expression. “I think Hargreaves’ sister is a Catholic, so if I play my cards right I can certainly buy you twenty minutes on transubstantiation alone.”

“Great, thanks,” Eric said brusquely, rushing out of the graveyard. He breathed easier as soon as his feet hit asphalt.

Eric hadn’t visited Funn Funerals since the dreams stopped. At first, he wasn’t sure if it was because Rudyard had found a way to block him out, and it was awkward trying to navigate the possible conversational intricacies of the question ‘hey, did you expel me from our shared burial nightmare because I started to flirt with you.’ Rudyard had always remained particularly adamant that they Didn’t Talk About the Coffin, so Eric had just fallen back into their regular daytime dynamic. Now, though, Eric needed answers.

“Hello?” He called, pushing through the door of Funn Funerals, which was dim and uninhabited. Rudyard must be out buying materials for an upcoming funeral, but Antigone was almost certainly in her mortuary. All the better.

Eric opened the door to Antigone’s mortuary and opened his mouth to call down, but choked instead. The stairs down to the mortuary ended with a large, barely visible room that emanated the strong smell of formaldehyde but also the predatory menace that Eric first felt in the coffin, but multiplied exponentially. It was like staring in front of an ocean after only encountering rivers, if the ocean was an eldritch fear entity that wanted to bury you alive.

Unbelievably, as Eric was wheezing and holding the side of the doorway for support— or to keep himself from falling headway down the stairs, Antigone poked her head out from somewhere and walked to the foot of the stairs.

“Chapman?” she called up uncertainly. “Is that you? Christ alive, what’s happened to you?”

Eric continued lightly hyperventilating as Antigone emerged from the stirs, blinking in the dim light like an irritated nocturnal animal and closing the door firmly behind her, restoring some of Eric’s equanimity.

“Antigone,” Eric finally gasped. “What the hell is going on down there?”

“Embalming?”

“No,” Eric pressed, finally straightening and with one hand pressed for support against the wall. “What is alive down there?”

“No one’s alive down there but me, Chapman,” Antigone said. “I could hardly embalm someone while they were still alive, they’d certainly have my license for that.” She let out a nervous, high-pitched giggle.

“No, there’s something else down there,” Eric insisted. “I’ve felt it before, but never that strongly.”

Antigone stopped giggling and looked at him sharply. “You’ve felt what before?”

With the mortuary door closed and the full focus of Antigone’s gaze on him, Eric suddenly felt foolish. “This is going to sound ridiculous,” he blustered. “But, um, that is to say, have you ever felt like the ground hates you?”

Antigone looked at him, if anything getting unbelievably paler. “This is somehow Rudyard’s fault, isn’t it.”

“No!” Eric hastened to add.“I mean, sort of, but the problem was there before— Antigone, how can you work down there?”

Antigone exhaled quietly. “You get used to it,” she said, unconsciously echoing her twin. “I’m going to kill him.”

“No, wait,” Eric said, backtracking towards the door hurriedly. “I have to go— I’m conducting the Hargreaves funeral in five minutes and I still haven’t picked up those cherry scones from Jerry.”

“Chapman!” Antigone said insistently. “This is actually more important.”

“I promised the Reverend I would be back,” Eric said. “Enj— uh, we’ll talk later, I promise. Don’t yell at him.”

Eric nearly ran across the Square, half in genuine guilt over leaving the Hargreaves without scones or a funeral director, and half because he couldn’t face having a conversation with Antigone right now, not when he felt like he only had half of the information. It had been stupid, of course, to imagine that Rudyard was connected to some fear cult and Antigone wasn’t. They were twins, for god’s sake. Eric should have known them better than that. Still, if whatever was tormenting Eric lived in Funn Funerals, that complicated things.

Eric blew into Jerry’s bakery in a gale force of anxiety and adrenaline. “Hello, Jerry!” He shouted with false cheer.

“Oh, hi Eric,” Jerry said unenthusiastically from behind his counter. “Was expectin’ you earlier.”

“I got delayed!” Eric said brightly. “Here for the Hargreaves scones though, sorry to put a rush on you.”

“No bother,” Jerry said, turning and beckoning him behind the counter.  “I just finished a fresh batch in the basement, come and have a look in.”

Eric hesitated. “Could... I possibly just wait for them here?” He asked, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible.

Jerry scowled at him. “Thought you were in a hurry,” he said. “I can hardly carry them all up myself.”

“Right,” Eric said, hesitating. It was a bakery, not a mortuary. It couldn’t hurt going into a bakery basement for two minutes, could it? “Yes, sorry. Coming!”

Eric started down the stairs after the grumpy baker, forcing himself to acknowledge how different this basement was from Antigone’s mortuary. The air smelled like cherries and yeast, and there was sunlight shining in from the high, flat basement windows. He was going to be fine.

“Will these do?” Jerry asked, pulling a pan of fresh scones out of the central oven. Eric crossed the room to appraise them, already saying “I’m sure they’re fine, Jerry—” when he felt the darkness fall around him and knew that he had made a terrible mistake.

Jerry turned away from the oven and frowning in the growing darkness, squinting up at one of the windows. “What on earth?  Wasn’t supposed to be any yard work today.”

Eric grabbed for Jerry’s arm as he walked toward the windows and missed by a hair. “No, Jerry don’t go near—”

With a loud crash, every window in the room shattered inward, dirt pouring in like a terrifying waterfall of dust. Eric, who had shielded his face against his arm against the spray of the glass, looked up to see Jerry knocked under the tidal wave of earth, screaming and choking. Eric windmilled backward, unable to see in the dust that clouded around the upper half of the room. His hand landed on something that burned, and Eric snatched it away before grabbing it again, anchoring himself against the rising onslaught of dirt and dust. He was immobilized up to his waist when he heard a rasping growl somewhere near him in the room.

“—Carve out the sky” it growled, sounding like a human vocal box dragged over hot sand. “—in the forever buried.”

“Jerry?” Eric called, choking and trying to move closer to the center of the room. “Is that you?”

There was a breakfast pause where the only thing Eric heard was the roar of the earth, and then Jerry’s voice, harsh and precise. “A funeral is for life.”

The dirt rose up to Eric’s chin as he wrestled, trying to move his arms upward. He tried to scream but it just let in more dirt, and Eric finally succumbed to choking unconsciousness.

Eric woke up in a hospital bed, in a room blessedly above ground. He could see the sun streaming in from the large windows and breathed. There was a small forest of flowers parked by the door of his sterile white room, carnations and tulips and a collection of truly impressive tiger lilies that must have been from Petunia Bloom. A helium balloon bobbling happily on the ceiling, decorated with an alarming rendition of Jesus riding a unicorn. Someone— probably Reverend Wavering— had written GET WELL ERIC across the front in Sharpie.

On the other side of the room, three people were sleeping in various stages of discomfort. Georgie and Antigone were sitting side by side in two painfully angular metal chairs. Georgie’s head was tipped back against the wall slightly tilted to the side to allow for Antigone to slump fully against her shoulder at an angle that made Eric’s neck ache in sympathy. Rudyard had pulled his chair up to Eric’s bed and was lying face down on his threadbare comforter, drooling somewhere near Eric’s left ankle.

“Ah, Eric,” Dr. Edgeware said, walking into the room at a sedate pace slowed by obvious exhaustion. “You’re awake.”

Rudyard, Antigone and Georgie immediately shuffled into wakefulness. Eric felt a pang of regret. “Yeah,” he croaked. It felt like his throat was full of sawdust. “What happened?”

Georgie shook off her muscle stiffness quickly enough to pour and hand him a glass of water. The three were still ominously silent. Eric gulped the water gratefully.

Dr. Edgeware looked even more wan. “I suppose I don’t need to tell you that Jerry’s has passed away,” he said with brusque sympathy. “Asphyxiation. He went quickly.”

Eric looked down at his right hand, which was swathed in bandages.

“There must have been a structural problem with the bakery basement” Edgeware continued. “Bad windows.” He was frowning at a series of papers on a clipboard, looking up at Eric every few seconds as if to verify the information that was written on them. Eric felt a momentary pang of irritation that, as the victim of a supernatural assassination attempt, he wasn’t being taken very seriously. “Besides the burned hand and the strained throat, you’re in perfect health Eric. You might have a bad cough for a while.”

Eric frowned. “No, that’s not possible. I couldn’t— I mean the dirt was up to my neck.”

Di. Edgeware frowned. “There was barely two feet of debris in the basement. I’m sure it was some sort of panic attack,” He added tiredly. “Or a serious manic episode, but I have neither the time nor resources to investigate that. Just stay out of basements for a while, Eric.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Eric said in distress. “This wasn’t an accident. I saw Jerry die.”

Dr. Edgware hummed. “Yes, and it must have been traumatic—”

“Listen to me,” Eric commanded, pushing forward the staticky fog in the back of his head in a way that he hadn’t intentionally tried in years.

Dr Edgeware nodded intently, smiling at Eric and straightening to attention. Then he bent over and started to cough, horrible dry retching that reminded Eric of Jerry’s last moments. Wet clumps of dirt fell out his mouth to the floor.

“Chapman,” Rudyard said urgently, grabbing his arm.

“I’m not doing anything!” Eric protested. Dr. Edgware continued to choke. “That’s . . . that’s not what I do!”

Georgie slapped Dr. Edgware on the back, “Well, it is now,” she said grimly. “Make it stop.”

“I don’t know how I’m doing it!” Eric snapped. “I didn’t— I didn’t cause this. I didn’t cause any of this!”

“Yes, we know Chapman,” Rudyard with uncharacteristic gentleness. “Can you think of something else? Something calming?”

Eric watched Dr. Edgeware wheeze and remembered the flood of dust that hit his face when the windows burst, tiny shards of glass settling in the folds of his clothing.

“Tell them about that bank robbery, Chapman,” Rudyard coaxed. “I can’t believe I’ve been concealing your criminal history for so long.”

“It wasn’t a bank robbery,” Eric said indignantly, finally tearing his eyes away from Dr. Edgeware, who was lying prostrate on the floor. “I was working for Interpol. We were testing the security of IMF offshore accounts.” By the time that he finished a rough account of his role in the plot to expose corporate banking training mismanagement, Dr. Edgeware was unconscious but alive on the floor. Georgie had checked his pulse several times and put him in an approximation of the Bolus position for good measure.

“Well,” she said, patting Dr. Edgeware’s body on the shoulder, “at least he’s finally going to get some rest.”

“It wasn’t just a structural collapse at the bakery,” Eric said hoarsely, tearing his eyes away from Dr. Edgeware to look at Antigone and Rudyard. “You know that, right?”

“Eric,” Antigone said warily. “Have you thought about leaving?”

“Leaving?” Eric echoed in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Leaving Piffling Vale,” Antigone replied, her tone consciously gentle. “It’s not a funeral business thing,” she rushed to clarify. “But you do seem to be on the brink of dying a horrible death here.”

“But I can’t leave,” Eric protested. “What about you and Rudyard?”

“We’ll survive,” Antigone said.

“Yes,” Rudyard said quietly.

“That’s not fair,” Eric said weakly, finally looking over at Rudyard. He looked awful, even in the context of a hotel room littered with supernatural dirt and unconscious doctors. The dark smudges under his eyes that advertised near-constant exhaustion had darkened to an ugly purple. They looked almost like bruises.

“Chapman,” he said, halting. “Please go.”

Eric’s apartment in London was on the thirty-eighth floor of a glass-and-concrete monstrosity recently erected on the South Bank. He had signed a check in the building’s foyer, distantly queasy at the idea that one of the Lukas family retainers was bound to notice a three million dollar transfer out of his accounts. The building manager smoothly informed him of the amenities of the building, describing a luxury rooftop garden that Eric was never, ever going to visit. The apartment was tastefully decorated with minimalist, slightly spiky furniture and coffee tables that doubled as art pieces. The apartment’s selling feature— Eric had never been particularly interested in the open-plan, Bond-villain aesthetic— was its height. On sunnier days, Eric could go and sit out on his balcony, the ground reduced to a mosaic of moving granules and drifting construction cranes.

There was hardly any bare ground to be seen on Eric’s block; everything was covered in concrete or asphalt save for a few straggling, fenced rectangles where telephone poles and street signs were planted alongside weedy grass. When Eric woke up, gasping and alone, he would go to his window and take comfort at his distance from the ground. He was the opposite of buried; he was elevated, suspended permanently in the air. In other circumstances, Eric would have been concerned at the extent to which his new setup perfectly suited a Lukas: the glass-walled skyscraper screamed luxurious, conscious isolation. However, that part of his brain that fuzzed constantly with quiet static was quieter now, more muted. Shared real estate, Eric thought wryly.

After two weeks of sequestering himself mid-stratosphere, Eric finally started checking the emails that he’d ignored in his time in Piffling Vale, the endless requests and job offers and inquiries from the varied other chapters of his life.

He thought daily about calling Funn Funerals. They had a volatile landline that tended to connect calls only between the hours of 5 AM and 9 AM, and even then the static obscured every third word. Eric had initially thought that Rudyard’s practice of shouting into the phone like it was a recalcitrant senior citizen was just a natural extension of his personality, but no, service on the island was just that bad. Eric had no idea what he would say, if he did call them. ‘How goes your local fear god’ didn’t trip off the tongue easily, even after all of Eric’s acting and elocution training. Besides, Eric didn’t know if he wanted to know. If he had served as a kind of minor nuisance or a stumbling block, then whatever original purpose the Funns were to serve was likely right back on course.

If something happened, if whatever Eric had disrupted finally completed its slow arc towards realization, then the only people who held full, concrete memories of Eric would be wiped from the earth. It would be like the last year never happened; even in Piffling Vale, Eric Chapman would become a fond, fuzzy byword, a name attached to an empty building and a duck pond. Funn Funerals and Chapman’s would sit across the square from each other like twin ghosts.

Eric realized that in his attempt to avoid a conversation about his own family, he had never asked Rudyard if he and Antigone had broken from their parents before they died-- whether their current predicament was because they had avoided or accepted their family legacy. Eric assumed it was the former. He wondered about how many other people the eldritch horror lurking in that funeral parlor had tried to claim, and how many times Rudyard, who genuinely hated almost everyone, had pushed it back. He thought about Antigone spending seventeen years underground in that mortuary, emerging with an intact wonder and yearning for love. He thought about Jerry, already dead and gasping “a funeral is for life.”

“You know what,” Eric said thoughtfully in his apartment, looking out onto the magnificent vista, “fuck this.”

Two hours later, Eric strolled up to the Royal Air Force base in Northolt, smiling cheerily at the guards. “Hi there,” he said, drawing a sheaf of papers out of from the inside of his coat. “I’m Eric Lukas. I’d like to borrow one of your helicopters.”

The guard frowned at him, looking confused, as his hand hovered over the control panel for the base gates. “I don’t think we can give you a helicopter, Mr. Lukas,” he said faintly.

Eric smiled wider. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

The combination of Eric’s family connections and the intentional application of his compulsion powers got him onto a tarmac in a little under forty-five minutes. The guard was only lightly coughing a near-translucent cloud of dust when a grinning sergeant escorted Eric

“Can you fly a helicopter, Mr. Lukas?” the sergeant shouted over the whir of the blades as if this was a question that was just occurring to him and not something that should have been established long before the RAF handed over the keys to a Bell CH-14 Griffon to a civilian.

Eric clapped a hand on the sergeant’s shoulder reassuringly. “Of course, my friend!” he shouted back. “I trained for my pilot’s license in Belarus. It was all a long time ago.”

Eric had one foot into the cockpit of the helicopter when an idea occurred to him. He leaned back out of the door, still ducking to avoid the blades overhead. “Sergeant!” He shouted, gathering the static in the back of his head and pushing it forward. “What do you lot have in the way of C4?”

Eric obediently recounted the rest of the story to Jon during his initial statement at the Institute: lining the Funn Funerals building with C4 and watching it collapse into the dark like a snake’s head retreating back down its burrow as they flew over the island, Antigone and Rudyard watching with drawn and pale faces in the helicopter as they flew over the Channel.

Because it was more of a personal detail (and because Jonathan Simms didn’t seem particularly interested in Eric’s narrative tangents), Eric didn’t describe the feeling of relief when he set the helicopter down in the middle of the village square, the residents of Piffling Vale wheeling back in alarm. Petunia Bloom, who was dragging her flower car away from the blades, relaxed when she saw Eric in the pilot’s seat. Sid Marlowe ran out his shop, his craggy face creased in consternation, before grinning and leaning back against the shop door. “Eric, my boy,” he yelled. “Knew you’d come back!”

“Hi everyone!” Eric called, waving and grinning like an absolute lunatic. “Nothing to see here, just popping back in for a visit.“

Eric ducked out of the cockpit just as three people burst out of Funn Funerals. They were all yelling at each other, though the noise of the helicopter prevented him from hearing what they were saying. Eric froze, slightly hunched over out of instinct underneath the whirling helicopter blades. The three turned to face him, all quieting in varied expressions of shock, horror, and awe.

“Where did you get a helicopter?” Georgie finally shouted, caught between ecstasy and jealousy.

“I stole it from a military base,” Eric admitted.

“Chapman,” Rudyard began, hesitating over Eric’s stolen name with unusual care  and concern, “what are you doing here?”

“I’ve decided to become a supervillain after all,” Eric said with a lightness he didn’t feel. “I thought I’d start by blowing up your house.”