Chapter Text
It had to be those Cockney deliverymen again, back for their coffin. In response to the knocks, almost, it itself began to tap on the surface, and he smiled faintly, tinged bittersweet. He had grown to live with the coffin over the past couple of months. Sure, he kept the key in an ice block for protection of whatever lived inside, but he knew it had been growing… sadder, recently. Like it knew it’s time with him had been coming to a close.
It didn’t sing much anymore, even in the rain, which wasn’t especially sad, because its singing was never any good, but it was always lively and sharp, hopeful and… well, he shouldn’t be reminiscing on the creature's hope that he’d let it out, should he?
The knocks came again, and he stood up, the taps on the coffin stopping. He had no doubt that these guys would bust in his door if he didn’t answer, and he’d rather not die in his shabby apartment, thank you very much. Or in Bournemouth as a whole, really.
He puts his glass down on the coffin instinctively, the water rippling, before he carefully moves it into a corner, as he assumes it’s the end of the coffin's time with him. He rushes over to the door and hastily unlocks it, before staring down, well, exactly what he expected.
Two tall cockney delivery men, burly and familiar, with faces he couldn’t quite describe. He let them in silently, as they hadn’t done much talking the last time, but then he reasoned he was never going to see them again (or the coffin, which he felt weird for being sad about), so if he was going to ask any questions, now was going to be the time.
“Where’s John?” he asked, as he assumed that since it was John’s package, he would be the one to pick it up, not… these guys again, but he at least wanted to know where the guy was so he could tell him where to stick it, and also ask for his £10,000, which these guys did not look to be handing him.
“Out caving,” “He’ll be back soon.” … Simple enough, he thought, though he didn’t take the man (at least in his own drug induced perceptions) to be one to go caving, but the coffin gave some credence to the idea. The delivery men finished standing the coffin up and began to package it once more, and just as they were about to carry it out the door he realised that they had forgotten something.
“Don’t you want the key?” he asked, staring wildly at the packaged coffin. He got two blank stares from the delivery men, so he just went over to his freezer and brought it out. The ice was clear enough to see the key inside, large and rusted over terribly.
“He didn’t specify,” “You can go and ask.” And then one of them reached out one huge hand and handed him a black card– a business card, he realised, second after taking it. He could probably get his money now, he thought, but he had briefly been preoccupied with two things.
1. The man who had given him the card was now only supporting the coffin with one arm, and it appeared to have just the same strength as both together, and supported his side of the coffin fully.
2. For the brief moment, his fingers had touched the mans, he had gotten the disconcerting sensation that the man's skin was just… rubber on plastic, free to move over the static joint below it.
He let them leave without any more questions, pocketing the business card and deciding to forget about it for a while. He didn’t truly think he would be getting those £10,000. If he could live with a coffin singing in the rain, he could live with weird delivery men, and not getting his money. They probably had prosthetic arms, thinking about it. They were metal, and had bad skin-coverings. That would be how they supported the coffin effortlessly.
So he felt like he encased the delivery men in a now mental block of ice that he revisited only in nightmares filled with locks turning and skin peeling, and focussed on his job and some personal projects, writing essays for a tribute to the one old architect he actually respected.
Architecture was quite fascinating, he found, if you happened upon the right people. People who were, well, puzzling to say the least, whose definition of a building relied on words that had a lot to do with architecture as a whole, but never in the way they used them. Things like balance, and symmetry.
Yes, he had fallen down the Sir Robert Smirke rabbithole, as various peoples online liked to call it. He found the way the man approached his buildings fascinating, and his books, while dry as all hell, showed a new way of looking at things that… normalised them in a way. It was fitting with his own worldview.
So when he was bookmark searching one day before planning to go out to lunch, and pulled out not a receipt or a slip of paper as usual, but the same business card he had received almost three months ago now, he paused.
Breekon and Hope Deliveries, the text said, and then gave an address somewhere down by the docks of Bournemouth, where he hadn’t travelled much. There was nothing else on it, which he didn’t know if it was unusual or not– he didn’t have a business card, and had never been given one by anyone, or kept any, from his recollection.
He remembered the way the coffin used to sing to him, and squinted down at the card.
The block of ice in his head was still there, but it was thawing, before he looked back at his book, some… sneaking suspicion in hand. Smirke (could he think of him as Smirke? It felt disrespectful) dealt with the supernatural, and a list of all of his buildings was in the back of the book, as a glossary (This book was published after his death as a glossary, so references to buildings needed to have proper references), and he checked the business card and then back to the book several times before his suspicions proved correct.
Where the address led to, Smirke had built.
And that meant something was definitely, totally, wrong with it.
______
Of course, he brought the key anyway.
It had been sitting in his freezer for months, now, and as he never woke up in the middle of the night to take it out and try to open the coffin anymore, the glass was incredibly cold to the touch, and it took over a day of sitting outside before everything had gone to room temperature, and he took the key out to look at it passively for the first time in over four months.
It was quite intricate, knots of swirling patterns that never quite spiralled, more like staircases and tunnels, and he wiped it off on his pants before stuffing the thing in his jacket pocket before heading out. He felt better with it on him, more safe. The key had thawed, and so had the ice block he had put in his own head to stop him getting obsessed, but he didn’t feel like it was a big deal, really. Against his better judgement, this was the coffin he was opening, but if he died, at least it wouldn't be in his apartment. His only hope. Breekon, and Hope, one might say.
He had actually looked up the company, before setting out. They didn't exist. Of course they didn’t exist. He wasn’t sure if it was the mark of the supernatural, that they couldn’t be documented, or the mark of someone else covering everything up. Each felt too improbable to believe, though the sensation of being able to push back skin to feel rivets underneath, seams of metal and plastic and– he calmed himself somehow instinctually, his hand gripping the key in his pocket. He didn’t open the coffin. There was no reason for him to be thinking like this. But going here was probably a bad idea, all in all.
Great idea, Joshua, he thought. If only you had thought of it earlier, before you had headed out with the key in your pocket and the address in your head. In any case, he wasn’t stopping because he was slightly spooked by something that could be explained. He wasn't spooked anymore, even! The coffin, couldn’t be explained. It had an impossible temperature, scratched anything placed on top of it, and sung when it rained. For three months. Someone's weird hand was barely alike.
Eventually, he made his way to the address, a small, decidedly symmetrical building he almost looked past, as it looked like just another shell of a building he had seen many times along the way. But as he checked, this was the right address. He could see Breekon and Hope's truck parked in the back, and wondered what cursed goods they had just brought in, before deciding to enter.
He was going to give John his key back, he decided. It wasn’t his, and he wanted to give it back. It probably wasn’t the right idea, as the key being missing stopped anyone from opening the coffin, and thinking about it he didn’t
want
to give it back, but what other reason could he have to enter the building? So he did go in, key in hand, into the building without a name, that felt, quite inexplicably, uncanny.
He had hoped that it would be a semi-normal building, even with Smirke’s influence drawing in what seemed to be hauntings of all sorts. He strayed away from much of the ghost hunters' raves about the places– architecture itself couldn’t be some summoning ritual for anything, he deemed, and whatever was happening was definitely of a different nature. But overall, he hoped that the building would at least look normal, and act normal, and he could send the key in and be on his way, and get his ten thousand dollars and leave.
… and get a better apartment, but leave first.
Of course, he was wrong. Just as he was wrong to assume that John had forgotten to send him the package, just as he was wrong about caring about a coffin more than any friendships he might make. He had been wrong about a lot of things, he realised.
But the woman he stood across from with no mouth certainly was a first.
Well, no mouth was a weird way to describe her face, and it wasn’t the only thing wrong with her. Her neck was oddly squarish, with things that seemed like corners, in parts, making out a boxy shape. Her hair, even to his awful-perceptions of what it even looked like, was a wig, seemingly just out of a package in an artificial bob cut that seemed too angular to be real. Her eyes were perpetually open, and he felt that if he took a few steps closer that he could count her eyelashes. And her mouth simply didn’t exist. That was the part that was actively covered, and, of course, the part he realised first.
He remembered an old dentist's ad, way back in the day, of a smiling man with several missing teeth, and only one eyebrow. Of course, the message was that you realised the missing teeth before you realised the eyebrow, but the truth to it all was that your mouth, and your teeth, help people know who you are intently, and messing with them could change a lot.
Her lips were painted on, and not very well, which surprised him. Of course, with no outwardly protruding lips to paint, he felt there had to be a limit somewhere for how good you could get (he had never tried makeup in his life, so don’t trust him on that), but the block Queen of hearts style lipstick with a black line from the middle edge of each side of the heart stretching up the face to make it a perfect V, with two small black dots at the end was so- so- inhuman, it was almost unbelievable. It was like someone had draped flesh over eyes and was making do.
He was beginning to regret coming here, but it was a slight sensation, and he was able to push past it. He wasn’t afraid of her, not really. He didn’t live anywhere near here, and he had lived with a coffin for months, so how bad could it be?
The key in his pocket jingled against his car keys, and he was brought back to the present to the woman still staring at him, as if unable to blink. Maybe not unable, he thought, walking forward, turning to humour in the face of someone thing he couldn’t entirely explain away. Maybe she doesn’t know how.
That would be silly, though, as the human body has to blink or else your eyes would dry out, right? “Uh, hello?” He said, trying to catch the woman's eye. Unfortunately, she looked up at him first, still not blinking.
“Hello !” She said, from her neck. Wait, what? So, he had very much noticed that she did not have a mouth. That was the first thing he noticed. What he didn’t really comprehend was the fact that if she had no mouth, how was he going to speak to her? And… How was she speaking now?
Sure, he felt like it came from her neck, but that was just his intuition, and he knew ventriloquists could throw their voices around, right? “What are you here for, sir ?” Uh, still from her neck. Still unmoving. Great, he would tell his troubles to odd almost clown lady.
“I’m here to see, ah, John… John… he didn’t give me a last name, but I did a huge favour for him,” Does a probably over 200 pound coffin count as a huge favour? It sang when it rained, it definitely did. “I might be in records, my name is, ah, Joshua Gillespie.” The woman finally moved her head in a larger motion than meeting his eyes and began to type something on her small computer.
“Do you have an appointment ?” She asked, and he shook his head. Dude, who was coming in here for an appointment? Also, what even was this place? It couldn’t just be Breekon and Hope deliveries, because she had implied that if he had an appointment he could meet John, which—
“Uh, no, I got a business card from Breekon and Hope to come here, and they said I could ‘go and ask’, so I kind of need to do that, if you don’t mind? Rather… Large amount of money on the table.” Enough to buy a much nicer flat– or at least a flat not in Bournemouth, which had nothing of any true note within it.
The woman nodded, which he didn’t take to be a great sign, so he took the key out of his pocket. “I’m also here to… return this?” He said, basically as a question, because he didn’t want to return it, but if that was what got him to Jon he could just put it away, right? Yeah, that would work.
“He’s in the back .” The woman said, and he nodded, before turning and walked down the only other hallway in the place, quietly scoping it out. For a weird shell of a building, it seemed structurally sound at least– it was a Smirke building, they didn’t often fall into much disrepair, though he wondered how they had gotten a hold of such a place– Smirke was rather popular, he thought. He had certainly needed to write several essays on his work when he went to college, and looking at listings, they cost a lot.
These people were at least saying they would pay him £10,000, so perhaps he had his answers in front of him already. The hallways ended soon enough, and he went through a plain brown door with a cracked handle into a smaller room that looked as if it was used for storage, boxes stacked up in orderly rows. Each was labelled in Russian, so he wasn’t exactly able to translate, and he guessed it was things like stationary and other…. Office things? What else would a delivery company need in boxes? Petrol?
John wasn’t immediately there, so he was beginning to turn around when he heard a clatter from a corner, and… there was John. he was hit by the memories of the man, almost forgotten in a drunk haze. He hadn’t really remembered what the man looked like, only that he had a… density about him, like he was closer to the earth than he should be.
That feeling sadly remained, but he guessed he wasn’t as spooked by it as his drunk self was, as he simply shoved the key back in his jacket pocket as John climbed out, shoes tracking dust and dirt all over the place, his grime coated jacket not much better. “Uh, hello there!” he said, taking his hands out of his pockets in some sort of peace gesture? He still didn’t know what exactly was in the coffin, and also very much knew he had never given John his address. “Breekon and Hope picked up their coffin– wait, no, so sorry, it’s your coffin, they picked up your coffin from my house a while back, and the terms we signed on back in Amsterdam said that you would give me 10,00 pounds for… taking it, and that’s what I did, so I’d understandably like the money. It’s okay if you don’t have it right away, but as soon as you can, it would be good.”
John was silent for a while, which was very much not a good sign to him, but he just stared at him, biting his lip. Least he’d die as some tribute to Smirke, he guessed. Another guy to die in one of his buildings. Guess the glossary would have to be updated. Finally, Josh moved, the cap on his head lifting up as he looked at him, his face finally catching the light.
“If you took care of the coffin, you should’ve known better than to come here boy,” John said, and he took a step back, hands in his jacket pockets. He could throw the key at the man, probably. But as he looked back at John as he stepped towards him, the light finally caught his eyes directly.
Directly, and unnaturally.
His eyes were
glass
.