Chapter Text
In the inky, quiet hours of the night, the mist lapping at his ankles and seeping into his socks and trousers is a dazzling blue. Cloudy, waxen moonlight spills onto the earth and makes each ripple of a puddle shine, spinning circles of light fanning out and dissipating, only to come again each time a raindrop hits the ground.
Dark, wet and cold. What a gauche combination. Alastor almost sneers in delight at the cliche.
At eleven years old, he has already mastered an idea of what makes for good entertainment. Novelty — newness, freshness — makes for good entertainment. Cliches and gaucheness, simply put, do not.
But cliches become cliches for a reason.
So on this quiet night, save for a few crickets here and there and the gentle pitter-patter of rain surrounding him, he allows himself to step into this tale as old as time, and he allows the eyes he feels on his back to watch him.
Wetness soaks into his shoulders, trails down into his belt. His hair's plastered to his head, curls unraveling and coiling tighter at random, desperately trying to get into his eyes.
He allows all of it, for the sake of a good show.
Because he knows he's has an audience, a faithful one at that.
And he also knows he's had this audience for the last few days now.
As Alastor wades through the mist, approaching the gravestone, his fingers flex over the stumpy blade in his pocket, thumbing the newly sharpened edge of it.
He doesn't know if it will do any good. He doesn't think it will, either.
But some protection is better than none.
And superstitious as his mother was, she had yet to teach him how to protect himself from ghosts.
That is, if he truly was being followed by a ghost.
She must be one. He's only seen her in glimpses, but she's pale, pale as white soot and dry rock. Tall, too tall, face always obscured by a tree branch, or a door frame.
And most of all, she was there for the funeral.
When he'd looked up from the casket, hands clasped together, he'd seen her. Shrouded in shadow behind a tree, paper -white skin awfully dull in the broad daylight. A head hidden almost perfectly behind a cloak of tree leaves. Right there, at the edge of the cemetery, stock-still as a garden sculpture.
He might've taken her for one too, if it weren't for her dress swaying in the wind.
Looking around, he found no one else had spotted her. And when he glanced back, she'd slipped a little closer to the tree.
Not gone. But clearly hiding.
And then he saw her, again, and again, and again. Always in the distance. Always lurking at the edges. Always…
…there.
He thought he was hallucinating at first. And how cliche must that be, too — a child loses his mother and goes stark, raving mad. Claims that the dolls are winking at him. Sees shadows dance, and gaunt womens' faces in the vanity mirror while he dresses up to go to school.
And, really, if no one else can see her, what is there to assume but that he has gone stark, raving mad?
It's not out of the question. His mother, fondly but warily, always used to warn him he acted far too unlike what little children should act like.
Something was wired wrong up in his head, and, tonight, he was going to break open the casing and sift through the cogs until he either chipped something or he snipped off just the right part.
He comes to a stop in front of the grave stone, feeling his chest rise and fall faster and faster the longer he stares down at the Earth.
Amélie Dubois, etched into the stone. 1883 to 1911.
There is no epithet, because they couldn't afford the extra three dollars; but his father had still made the time to buy a new suit for the wake. What with no longer having a seamstress in the house to take care of it for him for free.
It's plain, unassuming, and stands out solely because of the small bouquet of rises and coneflowers and one milkweed and tufts of grass, knotted with a flimsy red string, currently sinking into the mud pooling on top of the grave.
It's also one of the few graves without a cross on top. Maman would've hated that.
Perhaps that's also why the ghost is able to linger so close to it.
All it takes is one blink, and he finds himself staring at a white waterfall of a gown, laced with intricate layers of chiffon and ornery stitching, and hemming. The kind of dress he supposes his grandmother would have worn, could she have afforded it.
Maybe his grandmother on his father's side.
For a moment, he stays stock still, hand unmoving in his pocket.
Darkness swallows up the edges of his periphery, but that whiteness, under this moonlight, it burns into his vision. Lingers like a hot iron kissing his retinas.
A long moment passes by, wherein he doesn't blink, doesn't breathe, doesn't even shudder, despite how cold he is. Despite how something wet is slipping down the back of his neck, making every thin hair on his body prickle and stand on end. Despite the mist biting into his skin, dredging it's filthy little claws up his trousers to clasp at him and keep him in place.
Both time and Earth betray him, so he exerts his best weapon — his smile — and maintains his self-discipline for ten seconds.
Then he breathes.
One blink once more, and he tightens his grip on the pocket knife.
Like a cornered stray dog, he bares his teeth, grinning with menace as he drags his gaze upwards.
Almost incomprehensibly depthful ebony eyes stare down at him.
Her dress holds more ruffles and collars and layers than he's held in his closet in a lifetime, so, at the least, he can assure himself this isn't a plantation ghost. (Though the pale skin really should've been the tip-off.)
But somehow, that makes it all the more petrifying.
Whoever this ghost was, they must've died rich. Rich and plentiful, but hurt badly, so badly. Why else would she be devoid of a nose and eyes? Why else would her smile be so hauntingly sharp, as though filed down to incisors rather than teeth?
He holds his breath for a moment longer, just as he holds her gaze.
Un. Dé. Trwa.
Her beam stretches, wide, wider still, impossibly so, almost literally ear to ear. It occurs to him that maybe, she's not a ghost, maybe she's a vampire. Maybe she's come to unhinge her jaw and eat him whole.
She certainly looks hungry. Her eyes flicker over him like he knows his own rove over the steak in all those fancy restaurants people like him have no entry to.
Maybe tataille came in the form of grotesquely nostalgic women too, and not simply fuzzy, leaf-clad, beastly old men.
Kat, he counts, stiffening as she leans down, so frightening close. He cannot see himself reflected in the dark pools of her eyes, and thus, he concludes, there are likely no pools at all. They are simply void. Pits.
If he stuck a hand in there, would it get swallowed up, or would his fingertips graze her brain?
On sink, she leers at him, face-to-face, eye-to-eye, and his own smile sharpens like he's grinded it against stone.
She smells like wet decay. Maybe it's the cemetery, but— but no, when she leans in, he smells it. Rot and worms and gray-skinned corpses. Her mere breath rattles it's way up his nose.
And her eyes widen gleefully like she's cornered in on satisfactory prey.
In a split second, he brings out his pocket knife, holding it up between them, pointed at where her nose should've been. Where a flat expanse of ashen, porcelain-like flesh sits instead, between those two inkwells in her head.
He holds it close enough to hover over her, but not yet enough to actually tap her skin.
She doesn't even look alarmed.
On the contrary, she's delighted.
"Oh, you naughty little thing," She murmurs, in an accent so unlike anything he's ever heard before. There is no doubt in his mind now that she is absolutely not a plantation ghost.
Wherever she's from, it's a place of rolling pastures and cool air, where cotton fields are far out of sight and crimson tapestries and red silk roll out underfoot on the streets.
His hand does not tremble, despite the chill that settles onto his skin as his sleeve rolls down ungracefully. "If I stab you, miss, will it hurt?"
Something flickers across her expression, too uncomfortably human.
Something he thinks he sees in himself, more often than not.
The unexpected rush of delight, when you find yourself in a conversation you'd never expected yourself to fall into, not even in a hundred years. That itching delight when you shuffle your cards in your head and take a split second to decide, to say—
"Will you, human?" She tilts her head, the brim of her hat now encompassing over the both of them.
He eyes the edge of the knife, contemplating jerking his hand.
It'd be quick. So very quick. Just as quick as grabbing a lizard, as quick as pulling it's tail off. Like holding your gaze with a bird, then jumping upwards, outstretching your arms to make them think you're some kind of a hawk. Like pinning a rabbit down in the forest.
Like holding your knife to it's throat, watching it's chest flutter as it rises and falls, raising it up, and—
"If I have to," He grits out, swallowing as discretely as he can manage.
There is no cliche or script to follow here, for how to react when one doesn't shudder in the face of a knife held to their face. And his audience has seemingly joined the cast — perhaps as an antagonist, though he can't quite tell yet since she's done little to oppose him.
If anything, she seems to like him. Which was entirely the opposite of what an apparition like her was meant to do with a boy like him.
"Well, let's hope you don't, dear," She grins, wagging a finger and rising back up, up, up, looming over him like a snake draws back over a mouse, teeth glinting. She's so awfully tall, she nearly eclipses the moon overhead. "Don't you know it's bad manners to start fights on burial grounds? 'Course you do. You're a right little gentleman, aint'cha? — from what I've seen, at least."
Rain drips down his forehead to his lips, tasting of salt. He thinks he's sweating, somehow, in spite of the frigidity. "So you won't hurt me."
He intends for it to come out as a question, but disbelief mars it into something less polite. Commanding. Far too audacious for a boy of his stature, to a woman of her nature.
And somehow, she glosses over his insolence like it's nothing. "I'm a fair woman, pumpkin. And an honest one, too. So if I tell you I expect good manners, you ought'a take my word for it when I say that means I'll behave myself too. Capiche?"
Years of living in the slums meant he'd interacted with enough Italian diaspora to know how to respond. "…si."
With that, he lowers his knife, down, not in his pockets and not out of his hands, but far enough that he won't be able to drive it into the cracks between her teeth in less than three seconds.
No ripping tails or outstretching arms or pinning fluttering hearts down here. He can be courteous, even if only for the moment.
He supposes the most polite thing to do would be to break the silence with the most obvious question.
"Why are you following me?"
In the dark, her skin does not glow or look particularly radiant. But it's easy to see. Like a dry bone in the night, like a dusty handkerchief under your bed.
What really does seem to shine are her teeth, which spread like an alligator measuring it's own bite.
"Following you?" She grins. "I'm not necessarily following you, dear. We just happen to conveniently be in the same place, at the same time. And I'm curious as to why."
Alastor's brow furrows. "You don't know?"
She chuckles good-naturedly. "Hey, neither do you. I don't hold all the answers, kid."
"But shouldn't you know? Since… you're…"
He trails off, suddenly all too unsure of himself.
Forget the 'most obvious' question. He needs to ask the most pressing one.
He looks back up at her, how the light dances around the brim of her hat, how her frighteningly wide maw glints, wonders if it's really something he can't figure out himself.
Then, impulsively: "Are you real?"
That, much to his surprise, makes her snort. It's the kind of snort you hear in a parlour, when the women are getting their hair done. Maman doesn't tend to get haircuts very often, but when she does— did.
When she did, she was surrounded by women who traded gossip like men traded business cards, and they'd burst into hysterics not too long after.
An inner world he was only privy to because he was seated on a chair in the corner, left with an ancient, thin and pulpy magazine that made his fingers itch. It was communal. It was human.
It was far too human for whatever this was.
"That entirely depends," She says, sidestepping the grave to walk around him in an ophidian circle, "on what counts as real to you, and what doesn't. What do you think?"
Much like a school-teacher, she seemed to speak in questions and doctrines. All she was missing was an apple to go with her musings.
"I think you're a ghoul," He admits in a soft voice, eyeing the wispy trails of her dress. They don't fade into the air like a spirit's should. They don't cloud behind her and dissipate. They drag, as dresses should. "I think I'm seeing things."
Something snakes around his wrist, and he flinches so hard his teeth chatter together, his knife almost slicing through the air if it weren't for the iron-grip around it.
He unabashedly shakes and stares at her as she holds onto him, the spitting picture of a steely matron. He nearly expects a ruler to make itself known on his knuckles by now.
But she does no such thing, and merely digs her nails into his arms.
"Tell me, human," She mutters, decayed smile stretching taut. "Don't I feel real to you?"
Something in Alastor's resolve splinters a little. Only in the slightest. But it's enough.
Despite himself, he shudders. "I think— I think I must be seeing things. I think you're the most convincing hallucination any person could ever have."
"A hallucination! Could you imagine!" She shakes her head with air-piercing laughter, wide hat swaying with the movement. He notes the feathers swaying from the top of it, then, with only half a mind present to do so, notes the feathers lining her collarbone and her neck, all the way up to just beneath her jaw. "I can assure you, dear, whether I'm real or not is arbitrary. What you must know, really, is that I exist."
"I'm seeing things," He repeats once more, less with conviction, more as a self-assurance.
The more he looks her over, the more solid she appears. The harder his newly-forming bruise pangs, the more wiry she appears, rather than lean.
Like a walking cadaver, she's emaciated, neck far too small and ribs protruding before gaping inwards like she held no organs beneath. Like she'd had her insides scooped out, and skin stretched to vacuum the space that was missing. Thin in the way only girls his age ever were.
Her hand squeezes like she's trying to prove something to him.
Almost idly, she rolls his wrist side to side in her palm, making his arm twitch uncomfortably. It'd be sore. It already was sore. But he was no stranger to pain, and he'd make sure she was well aware of that fact.
When her nails dig into him, he just holds her gaze.
"It's curious," She mutters, expression shifting to something a bit more solemn the longer she stares at him. "I've never seen a soul quite like yours before."
If she expected that to make him preen, she's sorely mistaken.
But she has piqued his curiousity.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing. Nothing you'd understand, really," She says, squeezing again. He wonders how he'll explain the marks to his father in the morning. He wonders if he'll even ask. "Though if you really must know — you've got double-armor, kid. Some sort of an… extra layer. Let's say, a protection spell."
Alastor blinks, brows furrowing, as his gaze slithers back down to her wrist in him. The mottled skin peeking out beneath her iron grip.
His mind takes his hand and walks him through every other bitchin'-and-bruisin' he'd taken since they'd lowered his mother's casket into the ground. Makes him think of aches in his back, stings on his face, and of sweeping glass from floorboards till he'd inevitably gotten a shard thin as a hair stuck in his finger and had to needle it out with ice-water.
Before he realises it, his smile drops. "I don't think it's working very well."
"Sure it is!" She cocks a brow, back to smiling menacingly. "Why'd you think I haven't eaten you up already?"
"I… I, u-uhm—"
"Relax, kid," She says, abruptly dropping his hand, which he hisses at to cradle to himself. Oh. It was a deep one. This wouldn't go away for maybe two weeks at minimum. "I don't eat the living. I'm a scavenger. But it's a nifty card you've got up your sleeve, y'know, if it ever comes to needin' it."
At the word 'scavenger', he finds himself glancing back down at her plumage, which spills over her collar neatly.
"Like a vulture?"
The woman grins. "Clever boy. Just like a vulture."
And that, of course, prompts Alastor to think. A vulture-like possible-vampire, lurking around a cemetery for so long. Lurking around him for so long. Who's already looking at him like a meal nearly ripe for the taking.
His eyes slip to the dank, slick-shining tombstone behind her, the rain relentless pelting and buffing it.
She seems to catch his eye at the same time as he moves it, voids tightening into a thin, paper-like crease. "Don't worry," She says with a strange brand of wretched glee, "I'll leave her be. My usual tastes… well, they differ."
Strangely enough, that does relax him, and he gently nods despite himself, murmuring quietly, "thank you."
"So polite," She reaches out a clawed hand to pinch his cheek, and, unsurprisingly, it hurts. He gasps, but otherwise holds his composure, merely standing in place as she pats the light scratches left behind. Her hands feel like rough leather. "It's such a shame."
A shame?
He plasters on as tight a smile as he can muster, feeling something ice-cold curdle under his skin. "Pardon?"
Wryly, her head tilts, like she's sharing a funny little secret with him. "It's a shame," She repeats, head tilting, and tilting, and tilting, 'til it looks damn near ready to fall off, "That you smell of… well. I don't know if I should say."
"Just say it!"
In any other situation, he'd have likely been clapped across the face for such impudence.
Instead, she chuckles. Perhaps human children are like bugs to her: not worth entertaining.
"Death, my dear," She coos, and his hair stands on end. "You just reekof it."
The conclusion floats in the space between them, unspoken: vultures love to circle their prey. They can do it for days, perhaps even hours, on end.
Perhaps at this very moment, somewhere in the world, there is a bull in the desert who is parched beyond belief. Who lies on it's side under the beating sun and sees mirages of black choirs of angels descending upon it. Who is, really, being circled until it's last rattling breath is drawn and it can be taken for what it will be soon: a delicacy.
Alastor absolutely refuses to be that bull.
Stepping backwards, he nearly slips on the mud his foot's almost entirely sunk into, gasping softly as he holds his balance.
Her laughter rings out, and he notes how it's amplified, unmuffled, slicing through the rain. Unaffected.
She is either not apart of this world, or she's inserted herself into it so strangely it refuses to bend to her.
He steps back, again, again, and again and again, until he's backed up against another tombstone — and this one has a cross on it, of course, better yet, an angel — and he's scrabbling to go around it as her cackles burst louder and louder.
"Oh, Alastor!" His blood runs cold, "You might be the strangest, funniest little boy I've ever come across!"
"Stay away, you hag!" He calls out in turn, all the showmanship drained out of his voice as he swings his pocket-knife in the air uselessly. "Kite m poukont mwen!"
To a human, this is a warning. To… whatever she is — vampire, ghost, ghoul, hallucination: this is a waving of the white flag.
And, oh, how he loathes it. With every ounce of his being, does he loathe it.
He finds that hatred seems to overpower the fear far more effectively than anything else.
And when she doesn't make any motion to follow him — because vultures are not hunters, vultures observe and watch and wait for that final draw of breath to flap their wings — he turns heel and he runs.
Alastor runs, and he runs and he runs, and he doesn't stop when he slips on the pavement of a wet road and scrapes his arm, no, he just gets up and keeps running. He keeps going, even with the red rivuleting down his elbows and drip-drip-dripping down, tickling the downy hair of his wrists.
By the time he gets home, the sky has gone from a nightmarish black to a soft navy, and he finds himself gulping in litres of air he couldn't only ten minutes ago.
If his heart is beating so hard in his chest, what could possibly convince her he's close to death? If he can hear the blood rushing through his ears, see it pumping out of his arm in lively lines, what could possiblymake her think he's worth circling?
Death, my dear. You just reek of it.
You reek of it. Death.
You reek of death.
Perhaps, he thinks with far more levity than he thought he could hold in a time like this, staying away from the cemetery as of now would be wise.
Maman wouldn't be upset. He hopes.
As he quietly slinks his way into the house, careful to avoid all the untrustworthy floorboards he knows would love nothing more than to betray his presence — thankfully, his father is a heavy sleeper — and settling in the bathroom, washing his massive graze with a hiss, he thinks long and hard about how badly she'd thrown him off.
In the face of his father's anger, he could hold a smile. In the wake of his mother's death, he was, at the least, able to abate his tears.
Here, when he needed his greatest weapon most, it failed him.
He'd never run like that from a fight before. That she-tataille had scared him so badly, he…
…
He'd never caught her name.
And he never gave her his either.