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Zachariah Gall… had a lot to consider.
First. Thinking it a perfectly innocent opportunity, he had gotten himself hired by a crew of reasonable-seeming sailors in dire need of some new sails. How was he supposed to have known they were pirates ? Now he was stuck on their ship, fixing what fabrics they needed fixed, and cowering belowdecks whenever they passed another vessel. He hadn’t wanted a life of crime! He hadn’t even wanted adventure, damn it! All he had been hoping for was a nice comfortable easy first job, fresh out of his tailoring apprenticeship. Just something he could make a living out of one day, and give his parents a comfortable retirement with. Turned out he had severely— severely —misjudged what he’d hoped this one would be.
Second. Not only were they a crewful of criminals, they were a crewful of some… weird eldritch criminals. He’d seen the cook and their… arms , and he’d seen glimpses of the captain’s empty eye socket, not to mention the weaponscrafter’s skin that melted like wax and the first mate that didn’t breathe sometimes and the boatswain who literally looked dead , and they were all just somewhere left of human and he wasn’t sure whether he was more scared of the crew themselves or the fact that they may have been truly human once. And if that was the case, what did that mean for him?
Third. They were absolutely awful at providing basic needs. They weren’t by any means uncivil to him, not really, but with their aforementioned… peculiarities, he kept having to remind the crew that yes, he did actually need air and water and food and sleep, preferably regularly and in good quantities. And no, he most definitely couldn’t survive solely on red meat.
But once you got past all of that, and stalwartly ignored the actual sinking-of-other-ships bit, they weren’t… all that terrible? His roommate, Hill, was a decent conversationist, and they had interests in common. On various occasions they’d spent some time discussing different fabrics to be used in various clothing scenarios, and it was a welcome distraction from the fact that that one fellow with the too many eyes kept staring through the crack in the door when he thought no one else would notice. The newest one, Cook, was all right, when they weren’t scuttling around like some insane meat crab or something. More than once he’d caught them purring during casual conversations, and while that was a little disconcerting at first, it was pleasant enough after you got used to the occasional squishing sounds that came with it.
Dorian was—well, Captain Harris was a good-looking man, for lack of a better way to put it, and pleasant to be around, and funny. That wasn’t going to be a viable thought to entertain, though, especially since Zachariah was not by any means a blind man, and he could see the way the rest of the crew were already busy ogling their captain. Honestly, from what he was seeing, they spent more time ogling than actually getting around to shipwork. Not that he was complaining—the less shipwork that got done, the less plundering there was. Less plundering was good.
Zachariah rolled over in bed, staring at the wall. It had been hours, and his thoughts were racing through his head too hard to let him sleep, as they so often did these days. When he did finally sleep, his dreams were strange—it was always him in a plain, square wooden room, being assaulted by some weird being or another. Some nights there were molds and ailments crawling up his legs and creeping through his blood, and on some his skin turned to liquid and dribbled off his face while he clutched at it desperately to keep it there, and from time to time his whole body was bound without give to some other, much larger object which dragged and bashed him hither and yon like some humanoid, broken puppet. It was hard to discern which variety scared him the most.
Anyway, the dreams were better than the waking, as odd as it seemed. At least he felt moderately refreshed after sleeping, which was more than he could say after a day of experiencing the real-life madnesses of the ship. He rolled over again to face outwards into the dark room, lit only barely by a sliver of moonlight coming through the porthole in the wall. The only sounds were the creaking of the boat, the lapping of the water, and Hill’s almost-inaudible snoring somewhere on the other side of the room.
As always, he didn’t know exactly when he finally fell asleep.
Hez blinked awake just as Zachariah sat up.
He didn’t know exactly why he woke at such odd moments, but if the Mother wanted him awake, he knew better than to ignore it. That said, it was pretty obvious what She wanted him to… interfere with, here. The tailor that shared his room was a heavy sleeper, and he’d never before seen him up and about after he’d gone to sleep for the night, so Hezekiah swung his legs around and got up himself.
“Zachariah,” he whispered. When Zachariah didn’t spare him so much as a moment to pause, Hez repeated himself, more loudly. No response. He just left bed robotically, steadily, without hesitation or notice, and began to walk for the door with his steps surreally slow and even.
Hez recognized that walk. As an avatar of the Mother of Puppets, it was impossible not to. It was the walk of a man whose actions were not of his own volition. The tailor was sleepwalking, and pretty heavily as well, it looked like. Hez fumbled for the box of matches on his bedside table and struck one to light a candle with—agh, where was Henrique when you needed him—and hurried to follow.
Knowing that at this point asking Zachariah what he was doing was borderline useless, Hez had little choice but to go along after him, watching the tailor plod slowly up the stairs and into another wing of the ship. His eyes were shut, but every step was placed with such deliberate precision Hez suspected for a moment that one of the Web’s other servants might be at play. Or was it one of Kailani’s people? Terminus tended to have associations with dreams and sleeping, didn’t it?
Hez was still half-lost in his thoughts when Zachariah pushed a side door open and entered a room, so half-lost that for a moment he couldn’t tell where they were. When he’d set the candle on a low shelf by the doorway and given his eyes enough time to adjust, he noticed several things. None of them good.
Firstly, that the two of them were in the storage room just off the training room, where the weapons and equipment were kept when not being used. The mannequins were all hung neatly up along one wall, misshapen heads with empty eyeholes sagging over nonexistent necks. There was something red slowly seeping down the wall below them, and it took Hez a moment to realize that the red of the targets painted on each of their chests had started running, dripping down their cloth bodies and splattering onto the floor, raw and wet.
Secondly, Zachariah had obtained a knife. Hez wasn’t sure when—had he been looking away?—but he had a knife now, and was taking down the first mannequin on the wall, the largest, and was pressing the blade in right at the base of the neck where the spine would theoretically begin. The fabric parted with a slow grating sound as Zachariah’s practiced fingers dragged it downwards through the cloth.
Once the torso was laid open wide, straw scattered across the floor, Zachariah brought the knife slowly across the thing’s neck, its head tilting up on its crown from the loss of anchor. Picking it up, he pressed the knife up through the exposed neckhole and began sawing its face off.
Hez could only watch in mute horror as the scene unfurled before him. He had felt helpless in situations before, a long time ago now, and he hated it, hated the feeling of being the one controlled rather than the controller. He couldn’t explain why it was happening now of all times, only that what he was witnessing all felt so distant from him no matter how far he reached out. He felt…
He felt like a stranger.
That was when things began to fall into place, and it was also when Zachariah lifted the severed face of the mannequin and pressed it over his own.
“ZACHARIAH!” Hez yelled, but it fell on deaf ears. Zachariah pulled pieces of the mannequin over himself, fitting its chest over his chest and picking up handfuls after handfuls of paint-thick straw. It stuck to him, it all stuck to him, stuck to his skin like it was eating him alive. And still he slept.
“WAKE UP!”
It was a scared shout, higher than he would have liked, a last resort—laced through so thickly with webs they were almost visible, all working at once to alter Zachariah’s mental state and force him to open his eyes. And it worked, at least for a moment or two. His eyelids fluttered under the canvas, then shut again, and Hez almost swore aloud just from the pure frustration. Damn it!
But his eyes shifted again, then opened in earnest.
Hez began to open his mouth in relief, to tell him off for being an idiot or wrap an arm around him in the gladness that he was all right—
—but then his very bones went cold as Zachariah began screaming.
Hez internally thanked the Mother that he’d had the foresight to put the candle down beforehand as he jerked reflexively backwards, flattening himself against the far wall. Zachariah twisted in on himself where he knelt, clawing desperately at his limbs and torso where the rough canvas clung close on his skin like some sick parody of comfort.
“GOD—HELP ME, PLEASE, PLEASE HELP ME, HEZEKIAH, ANYONE, IT- IT HURTS , PLEASE, HEZ, PLEASE- ” he was screaming, over and over, voice cracking and going hoarse. Even in the dim light, it was clear that the canvas was spreading , weaving down his arms and legs, digging its way into his skin. The paint was running down the wall, running down onto Zachariah, pooling slick on the floor and mixing with the blood that had started to weep from where the cloth was ripping through his flesh. In a moment of clarity, Hez took a shaky step forward again to fall at Zachariah’s side, to grab a handful of the fabric on his chest and try to pull it away, but it squelched in his fingers and it felt like human skin and Zachariah howled like his heart was being torn out so Hez could only let go. There was blood on the walls. There was blood on the walls.
The door slammed open behind him, and light flooded the room to outline Dorian standing horrified in the doorway, Clarence just behind him with a lantern. Jolted back into action by the arrival of others (that he recognized , that made sense ), Hez began to reach forwards to Zachariah again, to help, but a few too many arms wrapped around him from behind and pulled him gently out of the room.
Around half the crew had awoken and were gathered around the room within which Zachariah was still screaming. Cook, who had been the one to pull Hez back, patted the top of his head in reassurance, although it didn’t stop the shaking. Dorian himself didn’t look like he knew what to do, torn between rushing forwards and trying to stop the process himself and slamming the door shut and running away.
In the end (although it couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds) it was Clarence who made the decision for him, closing the closet door with a definitive click, muffling the agony. There was tense silence for a heartbeat, while the first mate looked like he was debating whether or not to send everyone back to sleep, before he let out a long sigh through his nose and just turned and walked away. The rest of the gathered crew stayed where they were.
Zachariah’s screams by this point had dwindled into begging, and with time the begging turned to hoarse whispers and crying.
Minutes passed, and turned slowly into hours.
The crying didn’t stop for a long time.
It was early in the morning when it was finally peaceful, and Dorian was still sitting there, head spinning. Of course he’d known about the other avatar transformations of the crew, but witnessing one firsthand was sickening to a degree he hadn’t even considered. There was… more blood involved in this one than there had been in his own. A lot more blood, and a lot more… canvas .
Their brief period of respite didn’t last long, however. The muttering started soon after, a soft, interested lilting thing accompanied by clumsy movements and the occasional clunk. It sounded just like Zachariah, but there was something wrong with the tone and the emotion and the everything that put it just to the left of where it should have been, and it made Dorian want to throw the door wide open and send a bullet through whatever thing was in there pretending to be someone he’d known and even liked. There were few enough people out there that Dorian liked, and chances were that he’d just lost another.
Clarence had returned around a half-hour prior, and had taken a seat between Dorian and Hez, who at some point had drifted asleep on his shoulder. Dorian took a moment to lean into him as well, putting his head to where the Buried avatar’s slow, heavy heartbeat was, and trying his best to gain some little reassurance in it before whatever happened next.
The door was flung open with a concussive bang. Everyone jumped.
Zachariah Gall stood before them, a wide grin on his face.
Everything about him was wrong. His skin had hardly changed colour, but there was something in the way it caught the light that made it immediately obvious as to what he was made of. His hair had fused with the yarn on the heads of the mannequins, curling in a semi-organic tangle down one side of his head. His pupils were little cross-stitches framed with something white that was only mostly like a human sclera, and there was a short piece of wood much like the dummy’s support post right where his midriff wasn’t.
Perhaps most striking was the perfectly circular red bullseye painted right in the center of his chest. Despite its cleanliness, Dorian couldn’t get the image of what it had looked like last night, distorted and weeping, out of his head.
“Hello!” Zachariah said brightly. “I remember you all!”
There were a few beats of disconcerted silence before Dorian remembered that he was supposed to be in charge of things and stood up. “I- hello.”
“Captain! So nice of you to come out and see me first thing in the morning! I have a little question for you—what just happened to me?” He sounded absolutely delighted. It was sickening.
“…Uh, yes. Actually, Zachariah—could you come with me for a moment? We should… probably… talk about that.”
“Zachariah.” He turned the word around in his mouth, putting one long-fingered hand to his chin and the other on his hip. “Zaaak-ar- iah . Zachariah Gall. Ooh, I like that bit. Could you call me Gall instead?”
Just like that, Gall was Gall, and the Stranger had boarded the ship.