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The graveyard isn't consecrated, the old church had fallen to ruin a few centuries ago, greenery worming its way into the foundations, animals creeping into its eaves and nooks to die. Too much rot and decay had collected, the consecration withering away to nothing, it's all just stones now.
There's probably nothing left in the font either. Though the thought of being this close to a place that might have held so much holy water, even after all this time, leaves Eric a little jittery. He still remembers the time Ligur had suggested they try melting one of him with it, to see whether it would kill all of them. Which had been fucking terrifying, if Eric was being honest - which he usually was with himself. He hadn't wanted to find out either way.
But he's very glad he doesn't have to venture inside the church ruins.
He's not technically alone, he's never really alone, but he still appreciates the bump of his own shoulders on either side as he slips through the graves. The place doesn't feel any different for being ex-consecrated ground. Though he can't help but wonder what would happen if the whole place spontaneously became holy again. Whether he'd immediately burst into flames?
"Or maybe you'd melt like that witch?" Eric Two offers, because he's close enough to catch the edges of what Eric's thinking. "Though there's that rumour that Crowley went into a church once, he just strolled all the way inside, stole some secret knowledge for Satan and then blew the whole place up."
"It's probably not true." Eric Three says, which makes Eric roll his eyes, because Three can be such a buzzcut sometimes. "You know they're always getting stuff wrong about how things works up here."
"It's Crowley, of course it's true." Eric's fairly sure that one had actually happened. Because Dagon had been grudgingly impressed about the whole thing and that was something you didn't get to see very often. Honestly, it's not even the wildest rumour he's heard about the things Crowley had managed to pull off, and that was before he climbed into a bath of Holy Water and threatened a Prince and two Dukes of Hell.
Eric finds what he's looking for behind the church, where the trees have almost overgrown the path. A mausoleum, left forgotten for a few centuries by the look of it. Which probably feels like a lot of time to them, since most humans can't even manage to live for one. He has to wonder if anyone knows it's still here. Humans forget things sometimes. Or they just die and then there's no one left to care. It's probably why they write so much stuff down.
"Blackjack!" he says.
"It's jackpot," Eric Four corrects. "Did no one read the 'colloquialisms' pamphlet?"
"We all did." Eric Three is poking a statue of an angel with its eyes covered. "But there's too many and they're stupid and don't make any sense."
"We haven't met any humans anyway, so it doesn't matter," Eric Two points out.
Eric ignores them all and pulls a few vines out of the way so they can all see the interior of the crypt. The dark, gaping hole into the depths smells like rusted metal, old damp and bones. If not for the chill it would remind him of a few Hellish filing rooms he'd ended up stuck in, doing endless stacks of paperwork. There's a large metal grate blocking their way, which he pops off and tosses into a bush - that it promptly flattens.
"Hey, hey, lets commemorate the occasion."
Eric looks up and finds Eric Two holding his phone up, trying to get a shot of Eric at the entrance.
"Does this count as a selfie, do you think?" Two asks with a laugh, and he takes a few pictures while Eric poses for him.
Eric Four lights the torches at the entrance with a wave and Eric Three impatiently nudges them all inside.
They're a few feet into the dark underground, shuffling forward in the echoey space, when Eric's phone goes off, leaving him flailing for the plastic casing and nearly smashing it on a statue of a weeping angel. No one ever phones him. No one but him even has his number. He's not technically even supposed to have phones from earth. He just thought they were neat.
He hits the little green phone that's lit up on the screen.
"Umm, this is Eric speaking?"
"Eric." The quick snap of his name is not pleased, not even a little. He very nearly flings the phone away from him, suddenly realising that it's a perfectly serviceable conduit straight to him.
"Crowley?" He doesn't quite believe his own voice, which is a new and unpleasant experience.
"Why is Crowley phoning us?" Four sounds horrified. Eric doesn't blame him.
"Who gave Crowley our number?" Eric Three accuses, as if the answer is going to be one of them.
"Maybe he just knew it?" Two suggests. "I mean you've heard the rumours about him too." Rumours like the fact that he'd killed Ligur with a fiendish Holy Water trap that he'd set up himself. Which was probably the evil-est thing anyone has ever done.
"We've all heard the rumours." Eric Three sounds annoyed as if he'd heard more of them than most. And Eric can feel another long spiel about how lucky he is to be working in Dagon's office coming on. They've heard so many of those.
"I can still hear you if you don't put your hand over the phone," Crowley snaps from the thin piece of glass and plastic. "Now shut up and tell me you didn't go into the Carrington Mausoleum?"
"Er -" Eric looks around at the gloomy grey stone walls. He's fairly sure he's not technically allowed to be talking to Crowley, what with him being a traitor to Hell and everything. Definitely not supposed to be telling him about the top secret mission he's on for Hell. Definitely not that.
Eric Two hooks his chin over his shoulder. "We went inside, yes," he says. Eric garbles a protest at him and belatedly presses a hand over his mouth.
Crowley can be heard hissing inside the phone. When it finally peters out there's a quiet mutter that sounds like 'they went in, absolute idiots,' directed at someone else. There were rumours that he'd moved in with the angel and was now guilty of 'obscene practices.' Which - Eric's been up here enough times to know exactly what that means and quite frankly the idea of a demon having balls enough to just shamelessly do that with an angel - well it's more than a little terrifying. Just the thought of it. Eric's pretty sure angels are holy all the way through. How do they even...?
"Do you think they wear gloves when they -"
Eric Three reaches out and pulls Eric Two's scarf up over his mouth, muffling the end of the sentence.
"Right," the phone says sharply, making them all jump. "The mausoleum was trapped by witches in the eighteenth century. Some sort of spat between them and the landowners. Hell has been trying to get its grubby fingers on the cursed artifact they left in the centre since then, and they've been gruesomely and repeatedly discorporated every time."
This time Eric puts his hand over the phone before he speaks.
"Hell never told us that," he says flatly.
"Eric, you were in charge of checking out the records," Eric Three accuses.
Eric Two shrugs. "Half of them were burnt. The rest didn't look very important."
"It's not like we haven't been discorporated before," Four offers, in a way that manages to perfectly combine annoyance and misery. "In almost every way there is to be discorporated." He shrugs, the ruffled collar of his shirt fluttering in the breeze from the entrance passageway. "Won't be anything that surprises us."
Eric uncovers the phone again.
"I have spares, just in case."
"Hang up on him," Eric Three suggests. "We'll get in trouble if they find out we were talking to him."
"You want me to hang up on Crowley?" Eric hopes he's conveying what a stupid idea that is. Is he more afraid of Crowley than he is of Hell? Or maybe he's just more used to Hell being murderously disappointed in him.
"Do not hang up on me," Crowley hisses.
Eric fumbles with the phone, which tips out of his hand, smacks into the floor, and promptly disconnects the call.
"Shit."
"We'll be fine," Eric Four insists. "There's four of us."
-
Ten feet into the interior of the place a large slab of marble levers unexpectedly out of the wall. Eric Four had been half way through a contemplation of whether they could take any of the mausoleum spiders home with them. But all they can see of him now is the hand he was using to gesture at a particularly dense web. The fingers are still twitching.
"And that would be a trap," Eric Three says miserably.
Eric is too afraid to move for a moment, in case something else comes out of a wall and kills one of them. He should really have been able to dodge that, he's excellent at dodging - even though Downstairs it's almost always a better idea to just get hit. If anyone has to chase him they tend to make him pay for it.
"Can I have his watch?" Two asks, prodding the deceased Eric's wrist.
Eric smacks his hand, then rifles in his coat for his phone.
"Crowley's going to tell us that he told us so," Eric Three points out.
"He did tell us so," Eric Two reminds them. "We ignored him." He's managed to get Four's watch loose, but is shaking it miserably, which suggests his prize is broken. "It's not the same if you fix it with occult powers," he says miserably.
The sound of the phone waiting for Crowley to pick up is very loud in the dark interior of the mausoleum.
"Someone died," Crowley says immediately, as if he was waiting for someone to call, he sounds very annoyed.
"We may have had a casualty," Eric tells him.
"Eric was squashed by a wall," Three adds over his shoulder.
"Right, course he was. Listen, idiots, we have the plans of the whole thing -" he breaks off to briefly talk to someone behind him, and his voice is immediately softer and much less angry. Before it abruptly comes back to the phone sounding significantly more murderous. Though Eric has technically never been killed by Crowley before. "Correction, we have most of the plans for the whole thing. All you've got to do is exactly what we tell you to."
Eric holds the phone up, lets it illuminate all of their faces.
"That shouldn't be a problem."
-
Ten minutes later Eric Two falls in a spike pit.
Eric holds the phone over the depth of it, so his crumpled and unpleasantly spiked corpse can be seen.
"I sssaid left," Crowley hisses, and he sounds mad enough to come through the phone and finish them all off. Eric wishes that he would, to be honest, Crowley would probably have them out of here in no time.
"He was pretty far left," Eric Three says from floor level. "I think some of the stone is crumbling from all the modifications made for the traps."
"Which makes my comment that you should watch where you're fucking going -" ...."Crowley, really, getting annoyed isn't going to help anyone." .... "It's not my fault they're all idiots, angel." .... "Darling, they're relying on you to get at least one of them out of there undiscorporated."
Eric Three looks up from his crouched position and mouths 'darling?' at him. Eric very carefully doesn't make any expression at all. Because Crowley is bloody terrifying sometimes. How on earth did he tame an angel? One immune to Hellfire at that.
"We could just leave?" Eric suggests cautiously. "We could just say we came in and then couldn't find it." They could do that. That, in fact, is starting to feel like a really good plan.
"You can't leave, what about the word 'trapped' do you not understand? There's a blessing over the entrance now, which is why you can't use any occult powers. Did you not even try?"
Eric and Eric Three pull awkward faces at each other.
"That does explain why we couldn't dodge the wall," Three says eventually.
"Once no one's left alive in the mausoleum the traps disarm." The voice that offers that is not Crowley's. Eric isn't sure exactly how worried he should be about an angel talking to him. Especially the same one who he asked if he could rough up a little.
Do angels hold grudges? They probably hold grudges.
"It's not far to the middle now though, and lifting the artifact should disarm the traps too." There's a quiet noise as the phone is presumably handed back to Crowley. "So it's your choice really, die or complete the mission."
Eric Three stops peering into the spooky urn he'd found on the other side of the room. "Ask him why he's helping us?"
"Why are you helping us?" Eric asks curiously, because that's a good question.
"Because I'm sick of idiot demons with negative IQs, no earth experience, and no idea what they're doing coming up here and causing a scene that I have to quietly smooth over. And since you're the only demon I know who has the first idea how to at least pretend how to be human, I'd quite like you to succeed at one blessed mission so they give you Earth privileges instead."
Oh fuck. Earth privileges.
"You think they'd give me earth privileges?" Eric asks. No one's ever suggested he could get earth privileges before.
"Only if you don't fucking die," Crowley snaps.
Which is a fair point.
Eric Three gives him a thumbs up.
The spooky urn he's holding promptly ejects a writhing column of spiders, which immediately swarms up his arm in a wave. He drops the urn with a shriek, and when it hits the floor more of them spill from its rolling lip in a wave, covering his feet and climbing his legs as he stumbles back into the wall.
Eric doesn't stick around to hear the shrieking turn to choking. He slips into the narrow passage that is the way forward, holding the phone up in front of him like an illuminated talisman.
"So, Eric may have just been eaten by spiders," he offers.
There's a sigh on the other end. "Fifty feet to the middle, do not tread on any stone which has a triangle on and do not touch the wall." ... "Oh, and he might want to hold his breath." ... "And hold your breath."
"How long for?"
"Until I tell you you can breathe again," Crowley grates out.
Eric does as he's told.
-
The centre of the mausoleum is almost an anti-climax. It's just a chipped grey pedestal with a rusty metal object on it.
"Is this it?" he asks the phone. He doesn't really want to touch it, even though the angel had said that picking it up would probably disarm all the traps. There's only one of him left and that's never a pleasant feeling.
If he dies, will the versions of him still in Hell even care? Probably not. Bit depressing really.
"I can't actually see what you're talking about," Crowley reminds him.
"Right, right. Shall I send a picture? I'm not exactly sure how to do that. Do I hang up first?"
Crowley's sigh through the phone is very loud.
The photo is eventually sent.
"It's a set of thumbscrews." Crowley doesn't sound impressed. "Old by the look of them, probably used on one of the witches, definitely cursed."
"Safe for me to pick up then?" Eric asks.
"Nnrgh."
Eric has no idea what that noise means. Whether it's a good noise, or a bad noise. He waits for a bit.
"Yes, Eric, pick it up, I do have other things to do today."
Eric picks up the rusty clump of metal, and its curse creeps across his hand with a friendly little shiver of occult energy. The air in the mausoleum gives a strange pop, and Eric finds himself with access to his demonic powers again.
"Oh, hey, I think I did it."
There's no reply, Crowley has already hung up on him.
"Far too cool to say goodbye," Eric realises.
He'll have to remember that.