Digging Two Graves - SCP Foundation

A brief interstitial wherein a necromancer and a corpse talk about death.

Anorrack

Digging Two Graves (4013 words, 20 min. read)

Author: Anorrack

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Pueblo, Colorado, 20:21

The harsh, buzzing lights of the two-star motel strained the late-night eyes. The muggy evening suffocated the wheezing A/C, but Gonzalez was eerily cool and calm in front of the chintzy motel counter.

The receptionist stared up at Gonzalez, who met his gaze with equal measure, his face a death mask of dead nerves. The two were quite a contrast. The receptionist’s skin was pimply and greasy, Gonzalez’s was smooth and clammy. The receptionist’s eyes were baggy and bloodshot, whereas Gonzalez’s were tight and glassy.

One was alive, while the other was dead.

Cristóbal Gonzalez — a maintenance tech-turned-corpse — was a bit underdressed. He wore the tattered remnants of a blue tarp around his waist, tied like a locker room towel, and a medium FBI jacket on his triple-X-L frame. The zipper had burst right as he opened the front door, and the Y-incision on his barrel chest was plainly visible — as was the circlet cut into his skull, both crudely stitched up with postmortem sutures. A large chunk of his left pectoral was missing, and if someone had undressed him, they would have found a similarly grisly entry wound on his back. Almost as if he had been shot.

And contrary to all logic and common sense, he was standing in the lobby of a rundown motel, staring down with the wooden stiffness of the most resolute of boards.

Before the receptionist could ask any questions, Quinn Law, federal necromancer, lolled her head and smirked. Her voice came out slurred, her Miami accent prominent. “Me and Chris came up for a friend’s party for the longest day of the year, hehe. Costume party. I’m Scully and he’s the dead body I’m ‘investigating’ tonight.” Quinn giggled again, but the smile disappeared and she rapped against the desk. “Double room, please.”

The receptionist was either too tired or too inebriated to ask too many questions, so he passed the key over without issue. “Room 013.” A good omen.

Quinn paid in cash and dragged “Chris” out of the lobby, down the row of lot-facing rooms and pushed him inside before securing the deadbolt behind her. The act dropped, and her face turned into a haggard mess to rival the receptionist. She swiveled towards one of the beds and made towards it like a zombie, a creature she had a great deal of familiarity with.

Gonzalez looked around as Quinn flopped onto the bed, not bothering to get undressed. “How long are we staying for?”

She rolled over, staring at the popcorn ceiling through half-slitted eyes. “If Jenny’s using the solstice as an auspicious amplifier, we have until noon to stop her. A call went out to every UIU office within two hundred miles of here, so by the time we roll up to Florence we should have a small occult army backing us. Once we get the appropriate warrants of course.”

Saying that while on a moderately-soft bed took too much out of Quinn, her eyelids wavering and threatening to fully close. Throughout the day, she had fought several different monsters, was involved in a high-octane car chase, and had tunneled through dimensions twice. Even with a powerful and illegal occult focus like the pneumanite pendant, that was a lot of stuff to achieve on little sleep and too much caffeine.

Quinn’s face sunk into the pillow a bit more. “Jus… guard door please. Need to close eyes for a bit.” She needed a full eight hours. Maybe twelve.

The springs on the other bed creaked. “Don’t worry. You got time.”

The last thing she saw was Gonzalez's hulking frame, staring at the door with a splintered baseball bat in his hands. Then the siren call of sleep finally won against her protesting mind and her eyes closed, letting her descend into a haunted dreamscape.

Quinn dreamt of seas of clutching hands tearing at her hair, suspended above swirling whirlpools of blood. The Spider was there, weaving a barbed web to catch her, smiling with crooked, uncountable teeth as the silk dripped poison and bile. A legion of corpses marched from Hades, the Pit, and the rest of the Twenty-Three Hells, whispering Murderer. Pig. Oathbreaker. They divided her soul amongst them, dragged each struggling bit back into their respective afterlives. Fifty-five became fifty-six, another pallid face joining the host in an endless mirror maze. Quinn could hear a tinny sound, a small unending shriek that pierced through the hateful dead’s chants and rattled inside of her skull like tinnitus. Her own scream.

It wasn’t the worst dream she had that year.

It was still dark in the motel room when she awoke to the sweet scent of human decay. The odd car could be heard moving outside, headlights occasionally piercing through the Venetian blinds to paint moving bars against the wall and Cristóbal’s face.

He had moved from the bed to the stained couch, gaze cast downwards. He was experimentally picking at his forearm, near the bullet wound that had bored between the bones in a clean cylinder of excised flesh. He would pinch the skin next to the expanding wound, and peel it back until it tore away from the rest of his hide, upon which he would drop the patch of skin in a wastepaper basket between his legs. Repeat. He had methodically degloved almost his entire forearm in that manner, the ligaments and sinews visibly contracting and relaxing as he flexed his hand.

Law rapidly blinked sleep out of her eyes, stretching out to flick on the lamp, bathing the room in a warm orange glow. “What are you doing, Cristóbal?”

He didn’t blink as he looked up. He hadn’t blinked in hours. Hadn’t found the need to. His voice was a sotto wheeze from his punctured lung. “I can’t feel it. It’s numb.”

Quinn rubbed her eyes as she stood. “Why didn’t you rest?”

Cristóbal started on his hand, peeling the inside skin of his thumb up to the pad. “Couldn’t sleep. Don’t know if I can. Just waiting at this point.”

Right. His soul wasn’t chained to biological functions anymore. Always on, all the time. Wasn’t like normal ghosts, where they essentially sleep-walked through death until disturbed or agitated. He was 24/7, 365.

Quinn glanced over at the bedside clock. 4:30. The dawn of the solstice wasn’t until 5:00, but the sky was already beginning to lighten. “And you have been doing this.”

“There was a puzzle in the closet, but it was missing some pieces. Couldn’t really go for a walk outside either, not without clothes or a beating heart.”

Quinn shuffled over to him, fluttering her hand. “Scooch.”

Cristóbal obliged, and Quinn sat next to him on the sofa. She dragged out her duffel and pulled out some granola. She munched on the bar, studying the man’s profile.

He had the body of a linebacker, barrel-chested and muscular. He had probably a head-and-a-half and one-twenty pounds on her, a looming hulk compared to her less-than-average build. Cristóbal’s features were rough and rounded, but he was handsome. Well, he would have been, if not for the rot.

The Pannypsycho’s touch, Snow White Syndrome, had previously left him perfectly preserved by shackling his soul to his corpse. But through a combination of Quinn’s meddling and the coming of Midsummer — a cosmological reset through which many curses and enchantments were broken — time was finally beginning to catch up with Cristóbal. His formerly marbled, grayed features were now bruised and violently colored, his legs and feet purpled and blackened. His raven hair was falling out in tufts, scattering in an unfelt wind to kiss the shag carpeting. Quinn could see a few maggots in the exposed flesh of his arm, spawned through an act of magical abiogenesis. Entropy on fast-forward. Cristóbal would be ash by dawn.

She gently asked him a question as a means of distraction, both for him and herself. “How’d you end up doing HVAC for the Pentagram?”

Cristóbal paused, rolling a half-torn piece of skin between his fingers. “Happenstance, I suppose.”

There was a pause as Quinn waited for him to elaborate, and Cristóbal let out a rattling sigh. “Worked at Marquette for five years, did construction with my dad the seven before. I had planned on going to college, but…“ He rolled his shoulder and produced a clicking sound distinct from the rigor mortis.

“Dislocation?”

“Full. PT was hard and I couldn’t get my football scholarship, so there went that plan. Dropped out of construction for the same reason. The strain was getting… too much.” The dredged-up memory made his lips pull into a white-lipped grimace.

“Ah.”

“Yeah.” Cristóbal thrust himself off the couch and moved to the window. Looking across the twilight-shrouded parking lot to the first hints of dawn in the east, he visibly relaxed, his profile softening under the gentle glow.

Quinn took another bite of granola, looking at the discarded skin in the wastebasket. One strip curled into itself, darkening and segmenting until a newly-formed mealworm rolled over and began to happily munch on the other pieces of skin.

“What about you?”

She looked up. “Hm?”

Cristóbal turned, smiled faintly and wiggled his fingers, the nails buckling and cracking from the bloat. “How’d you get your gig, Doctor Frankenstein?”

“Oh, yeah. Mother was a lawyer, Dad was a tow truck driver. Didn’t really want to mess with cars all my life, so I went into law enforcement.”

“Was necromancy taught at the FBI?”

“Well, I guess blood-sucking lawyers and necromancers aren’t too far removed from each other, are they?”

Cristóbal’s smile grew into a grin. “Does she know magic too?”

That drew a smirk to her lips. “Nah, but she was legal wizard, I swear. A bureaumancer, summoning reams of petitions to kill people by paper cut. She knew of magic, but didn’t know magic. Prosecuted UIU cases. Never actually told me, but then again she never did keep her documents secure enough from preteen me.”

Cristóbal’s smile faded. “Wait, ‘was'?”

Quinn nodded, her eyes again fixed on the waste paper basket. Ten worms, now. “About six years ago. Dad was heartbroken.”

“And he’s-?”

“Retired, out in Key West. He comes to visit every so often. My coworkers love him.”

Cristóbal remembered to take a breath, air softly whistling out of the bullet wound. “But… you’re a necromancer.”

She was shaking her head before Cristóbal finished. “No. I’m not doing that to her. Wherever she is…. not trying that.” Quinn took another bite. “Besides, she warded her casket just in case I got any funny ideas.”

Cristóbal clicked his teeth in frustration. “But again, you’re a necromancer! An honest-to-God necromancer, you don’t have to deal with-“ he paused, and parroted Quinn again. “‘Wherever she is'. Like, Heaven.”

Quinn nodded again, eyes still downcast.

Cristóbal sat down next to her again, shedding maggots from his skeletonizing arm. “You believe there’s a Heaven.”

Quinn turned to look Cristóbal in his glassy eyes, whitening with cataracts. “And you don’t?”

His voice came out softly. “Of course I do.”

It should have been quiet in the motel room, but people do not stop talking after death. The fifty-five souls in her duffel bag muttered muffled curses, trapped in their prismatic tomb. A lone, reedy cry of a corpse somewhere in the woods behind the motel. Dried insects wrapped in a curled piece of flypaper, droning white noise. Layers of skin cells, itching. It would have been overwhelming if Quinn hadn’t been used to it, and it was always worse when she was tired.

Quinn rocked onto her heels, clapping her hands together to break the un-silence. “Let’s finish that puzzle while there’s still moonlight.”

Out of a 500-piece puzzle, there were about 475 jigsaws left. The rest had scattered to the wind, either falling into disused corners or behind furniture or into a traveler’s luggage. But that still meant they had 95% of a puzzle to do: a family of cartoon animals on a fantasy picnic.

They had just about finished the edge before Cristóbal spoke again. “Heaven, huh.”

Quinn had been working on assembling the picnickers. “Yeah.”

The corpse fumbled the pieces with his degloved fingers. “You’re religious then?”

“If you had to put a name on it, I guess it would be…” Quinn waved her hand holding the remnants of the granola bar. “Lowercase-c catholic deist with Aquinian characteristics? No, ‘religious’ is fine, I think.”

“Would all this make you a heretic? What with the necromancy and the blaspheming and such.” Cristóbal ran out of edge pieces and moved onto the bear and bee hive.

Quinn spoke around the rest of the granola. “God has special providence for fools and Americans. I happen to be both, so my soul is secure.”

“You and me both, eh?”

“I sure hope so. What about you?”

“I never really thought about it. I figured I would care about that stuff when I was either old or dead.” Cristóbal let out a cold bark of a laugh, causing something to ooze out of his abdominal wound. “Guess now is a good time for this talk.”

Quinn glanced at the clock. 4:48. Close, now. "Yeah, guess it is.”

They continued to play, going through the motions despite both of them knowing the puzzle would never be completed. It was a while before Cristóbal spoke up again.

“What makes you so sure?” Cristóbal’s face was twisted, his voice slurring and cloyed, as if the rot had gotten to his vocal cords. His motor control was fading, the holographic heart stitched onto his chest beating arrhythmically. His voice took on a desperate edge. “What makes you so sure there’s something else?”

Cristóbal was a dead man walking in more ways than one. Quinn knew it, and he knew it too. His probing questions were a means to solicit an answer in the little time he had left. The Answer, maybe. As a necromancer, she was closer to death than most people who weren’t actively dying. She had the Answer, didn’t she?

“I just know.”

“How? Are you sure?”

There was a hole in the picnic basket, a missing jigsaw piece Quinn couldn’t find. She sighed, and searched for something, a way to find the right words to say, but it all fell apart in her head.

No, of course I’m not sure. There has never been evidence of an afterlife in any reputable journal, she wanted to say. But I’ve seen too much and know too much to know that this isn’t the end, whatever comes next. I’ve seen gods, I’ve seen the edge of Hell, I bargained with the Devil and won. For ten drachma I can buy a soul from a man with a backwards smile, but it costs two to cross the Styx. Good profit for him, which means that there’s something on the other side, doesn’t it?

Quinn’s vision blurred, and she found herself standing, pacing. Thinking, trying to figure out how to tell a dying man what she knew without lying to him. There are other worlds, other realities, both above and below, left and right, so why not something forward, huh? Why can’t there be something ahead to look forward to?

They haunted her, the dead she knew. The mummified punk in the crone’s nest, the bodyguard at the governor’s mansion, the kids at Deer. The fifty-five in the pendant. Her mother. People she couldn’t save, and didn’t know if they had been, or could have been, or ever could be.

Quinn broke, grinding her teeth so hard she thought sparks would fly or bone would crack. Her voice trembled a little as she tried to form a coherent thought. “Ghosts… aren’t people. They are reflections. Shades. Everything you do ripples out, and those ripples can make something. A real something. A ghost is something you leave behind, which means you go somewhere. They found the weight of the soul using a very precise scale. Once you die, that weight disappears. It goes somewhere, it becomes something else.”

She hazarded a glimpse at Cristóbal, and saw his eyes glint like two silver dollars. His voice had degraded further to a ragged whisper. “What does it become?”

Quinn turned away from Cristóbal and looked out the window. The sky was turning pink, the mountains looked like purple construction paper cutouts a toddler glued to the horizon. “Something… better. I think. There is power in a soul. And that power can’t just go away and dissipate to nothing. Sometimes it forms a ghost, and sometimes…

“I’ve never talked to the dying, only the dead. I thought I would be better at this than this.”

Cris stared at the wood grain of the table for a bit, then dropped a puzzle piece and stood. He slowly limped towards her, his left Achilles tendon having decayed to dust. He offered a hand — his good hand — to Quinn, her eyes bright and glimmering, his dull and flat. They were still able to convey a warmth that Quinn hadn’t felt in a while.

“Watch the sunrise with me.”

On the balcony there were two folding chairs overlooking the parking lot, with nylon straps as creaky as dried leather. They roughly complained as Cris collapsed into one, his tarp exchanged for a white bathrobe stained brown from his rotted, oozing fluids.

“What’s your plan?” Cris rolled his head to look at Quinn, his neck rupturing and darkening with spoiled blood. “I know you have a plan for Jenny. I want to know the plan before I go.”

Quinn bit her lip and nodded. “The inklings of one, yeah.” She looked down at her hands, and noted for the first time their blackened tips from where she had held the soul-shard pendant. The pneumanite was a powerful focus, capable of awesome things, but it exacted a toll on its wielder. If employed too much, it sucked the soul out of the wizard using it and added it to its roster. Assuming the crystal didn’t shatter under the strain first, releasing all of the trapped, vengeful souls in the process.

Law exhaled, then told Cris the plan, adding details on the fly that she hadn’t quite figured out until that point. Met with ponderous silence, she hastened to add a qualifier: "I know it's not much."

“That seems to be the running theme with all of your ideas.”

Quinn clicked her teeth. “Well, you wanted to know.”

“So sue me.”

The tree rustled, and the lost corpse in the woods seemed to lessen his scraping screams with the coming dawn. Cris spoke up again. “I want to help.”

Quinn sighed and palmed her face. “Cris, you are actively decaying.”

“I still want to help-”

“You can’t-”

“I will!” Cris roared, hacking up phlegm and blood and God-knows-what-else on the concrete. He wiped the red spittle from his mouth onto the already-ruined bathrobe and cleared his throat. “I will. You will help me help you.”

Quinn gently rested a hand on his softening arm. “I can’t. You need to rest, Cris.”

“I’ll rest when I’m dead for good.”

“Cris…”

“Quinn, this is my choice. I can’t rest easy knowing that you’re going to be in trouble within a couple hours. And if I can do something in this nutso plan you’ve half-baked, I damn well will.” His withered lips and gums were set in a stubborn snarl. “I’m not just going to sit and rot here while you get yourself shot. Now hurry up and help me help you so this beautiful morning doesn’t go to waste.”

Quinn clenched her jaw, her skin crackling with static electricity charged by her anger. Type-A spirit. Awareness and Agency. God damn it all. She unclenched the hands that she had unconsciously balled into fists. “Fine. But you’re not going to like it.”

Cris' mouth split open in a Glasgow smile. “Try me.”

The mountains had started gaining detail, their purple outlines slowly resolving into blue forests and gray rocky crags. Quinn’s face resembled those old stones, worry lines etched like the marks of old creek beds as she tried to remember the forbidden geometries of the working found only in confiscated manuscripts. It was delicate going, and they had limited time. “In Florida, we don’t really have mountains, heh. It’s mostly just us and the sea.”

Cris' voice was as raspy as Quinn’s chalk, scraping lines and curves onto the balcony’s concrete. “Same with Chicago and the lake. Sometimes when the sun rose, it was like the water was on fire.

“I wish I was home.”

“Do you have family there?”

“My parents. I was helping them with bills. My girlfriend and siblings. You?”

The agent smiled faintly, completing the circle. “Yeah, my partner is back home. Haven’t seen her in weeks, but… hopefully I’ll see her soon.”

“Yeah, you will.”

She smiled grimly. “If you say so.”

The pastel gradient advanced across the firmament. Cris slumped in his chair as the flesh and sinews of his legs peeled from their holdfasts, leaving greasy, stained bones behind. His face was bruised and swelling.

“Will it hurt?”

Quinn’s voice wasn’t above a whisper, now. She didn’t trust it to go any louder for fear of it cracking. “Not any more than the first time. And I’m with you now, every step of the way.”

She threaded her fingers between his and squeezed them, looking past the squelching flesh into the eyes of the man she had just met scant hours before. “It will be okay. I’m here.”

Cris tried to inhale to speak once more, but he choked and twitched. The warm rays of the rising sun pierced over the peaks of the Colorado range and kissed his cheeks. His cataracts glittered a brilliant white as he looked into the sun. “It’s so beautiful.”

Quinn tightened her grip on his slack hand. “What do you see?”

The corpse’s neck fell forward as the ligaments sloughed away, the head rolling across the balcony. But Cris still sat in the chair as a shimmering mirage, his voice the sound of chiming glass as hazy eyes stared into the dawn. He didn’t turn to look at Quinn, for she knew he couldn’t see her anymore. “Stars.

“I see stars.”

The mirage evaporated and the corpse of Cris disintegrated into dust, leaving nothing but ash and polished bone behind. The curse sloughed off like a plume of smoke, but was contained by the hexagrammatic warding circle Quinn had drawn underneath the deck chair. The smoke buffeted and swirled, drawn down into the grounding wire until it shone silver, energizing the working. The ringing echo of Cris’ voice tuned down into a tenor, then a baritone, then an infrasonic boom that rattled fillings, the resonant frequency of ash.

His remains twitched, shuddered, and slowly began to clump together again, larger chunks rolling within the circle and collecting the ash like a kid building a snowman. The ashball hovered in the air as a dark grey orb, and began to shrink. It grew smaller and smaller, condensing and heating white-hot until Quinn thought it would disappear entirely in a miniature fireball, before dropping to the ground with a fragile clink.

Among the gleaming bones and scorched infernal calculus drawn in concrete was a small clear sliver of glass, the size and shape of a carpentry nail. Within that small sliver, as it caught the light of the rising sun, a fragment of a single eye could be seen, caught with a mixture of surprise and horror. Cristóbal’s eye, trapped in a prism of pure pneumanite.

Quinn dispelled the errant energies that still eddied around the circle and approached the smoking bones, carefully dangling the pneumanite pendant by the cord. Like a magnet, it slowly moved against gravity until it hung directly above what was once Cristóbal Gonzalez. The sliver on the ground quaked and rattled, before flying upwards and joining his damned brethren. Fifty-five became fifty-six, and a new voice joined the hateful ensemble.

A cloud passed over the sun, leaving Quinn alone in its shadow but for the whispers of the dead.

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