PREVIOUSLY...
TWELVE FOR A DASTARDLY CURSE2: A MARE AT THE FAIR ON THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
Johannes Sebastian Hill was not overly fond of his name; it did not serve him well in this town. Johannes was too vaguely foreign, and people took a disliking to it, or deemed him untrustworthy based on their misguided assumptions. Sebastian was too fancy, too formal - people associated it with toffs and high society, and failed to take him seriously because of it. He’d tried Jo for a while, hard ‘J’ unlike the full moniker, but people spelt it wrong or asked what it was short for, and that led right back to the first problem. Eventually, in middle school, he’d settled on Seb, another abbreviation that didn’t sit quite right on the tongue, but had worked well enough. He was Seb for a long while, short and simple and easy to say, and conversation got easier and people got more trusting. Eventually he stopped being Seb and started being Officer Hill; then Deputy Hill, then, eventually,
Sheriff Hill. People trusted him and listened to what he had to say then, with the weight of the badge leaning over every word, and the shining silver revolver stealing side glances from anyone who still scoffed and snorted. He still didn’t like his full name, though, and he made that clear to his officers. ‘Sheriff Hill or you’ll catch Hell’ he’d once heard a more seasoned deputy say to some baby-faced rookie: it was catchy, Hill had thought, and put the message across quite clearly.
So when Daniel Runner, Hill’s most newly appointed Deputy, interrupted his morning coffee with a call to say
“Johannes...you’re gonna need to be here for this one,” Sheriff Hill stood without a word, strapped his pistol around his waist, and departed the station as quickly as he could to get over to Deputy Runner’s location.
-
Lindsay Oak had been a bright and cheerful, if slightly rambunctious, young girl. She and her friends had been picked up by the local cruisers a couple times, mostly on underage drinking, a few times smelling of pot but nowhere near enough for a possession charge; anyway, this was a quiet town, Sheriff Hill liked to think, and his town to run besides, and he thought dropping a few good-time-having teens back to their parents was a better safeguard against them causing trouble than chucking them in the overnight cells and fostering resentment and rebellion. Lindsay was a nice girl, for certain.
All these thoughts and more, every tender incident and interaction, ran through Sheriff Hill’s head as he stood at a distance, stealing furtive glances at the decapitated head of the young miss Oak. Blood had leaked and stained the ground around the stump of the neck. Her hair was matted and torn, chunks haphazardly sheared off and small bits of scalp loose or missing where hair had been ripped out. The face itself was contorted into an expression of deep anguish. Her eyes were faded and glassy and would not close, and from their corners ran two tear lines of blood that stained her cheeks; an officer had already tried, naively and with a shaking hand, to wipe the blood from her cheeks: it had come away easily, but the streaks were quickly replaced by fresh rivers. Somewhere off to his left, Sheriff Hill could hear Deputy Runner vomiting, although it sounded vaguely muffled, as if listening through drywall; Hill suppressed the urge himself.
“Who found her?” He eventually asked, and immediately wished he hadn’t; the smell of congealed blood seemed to invade his mouth and stick to his tongue. He felt bile rising in his throat, but swallowed hard and spat a glob of thick, gooey saliva instead. Deputy Runner answered from behind him, still folded at the waist and supporting himself with his hands on his knees.
“That Keys kid. Out here dickin’ around in the woods and tripped over that damn thing.”“Jesus Christ...where is he now?”“Station with his folks. Babbling away...said he heard it crying, Sheriff. Crying. Said the blood didn’t start until he looked at it, and it was sobbing. What the hell do you make of that?”Sheriff Hill didn’t answer, just looked back at the head. It wasn’t crying now.
“Close this whole side of town. Get the coroner’s office out here to take this back to the morgue. You and Officer Rake find out everything you can about her last whereabouts, I want CCTV, witnesses, everything. And then...get a search party together and have them canvas a 5-square-mile radius to start with.”“What’re they lookin’ for, Sheriff?”“The body. And call ahead to my wife and tell her to pull out my best slacks and shoes. I’m going to go talk to the Oaks.”-
Eve skulked around the edges of the scene, listening to the words on the wind as conversation drifted towards her. The thought had occurred that it would be quite easy to leave town just as she’d arrived, drifting through like a bad omen; something compelled her to stay, some misplaced mixture of righteousness and a guilty conscience. The image of the magpie, splayed awkward and unmoving across the cobbles at her feet, burned at the edges of her vision. She could feel a terrible premonition in her bones: she was being targeted, haunted. If she left, she would merely take the misery with her. Best to stop it here, plug the hole at the source. Monster-slaying and the damming of evil was not unknown territory for her.
The sheriff’s department were beginning their canvassing for the body. Eve doubted they’d find it until months later, flecks of blood in tilled soil in the new year when the ground thawed and small, intricately carved bones washing up in winter rain. Metacarpals, usually; there was dexterity in human hands that lent the bones well to witch-work, and there was no doubt this was witch-work. She could feel it in the air, a cold, earthy dread that permeated the skin and rested uncomfortably behind your eyes. Eve needed the head, as disquieting as the notion was; she might be able to glean some last moments from it. There was no opportunity to seize it now; if she moved, her glamour would fail, and she would likely be hauled into the station and made the scapegoat. As it was, the coroner's office arrived to collect what small portion of carcass there was, and Eve stayed steady and still as the canvassing officers moved ever closer - they wouldn’t see her, she was confident of that. They would merely see a gnarled, twisted tree, off-kilter and itchy to look at; they would look away, and then forget they saw it at all.
Eve stayed for two hours letting the search party move around her, before they finally gave her distance enough to move away. She knew where the morgue they were taking the head to was, but in truth it didn’t matter - she just had to follow the lullaby-sound of Lindsay Oak’s soft, mournful whimpering.
-
The sheriff's department buzzed like an upset wasp’s nest. Activity was everywhere; officers taking phone calls, manning the tip-lines, copying notes, shuffling files. Some were busy; some merely
looked busy. Eve could see a cork board on the far wall; a couple Polaroids of teens and bums adorned it with labels like ‘THIEF’ and ‘DRUNK’ and ‘PEEPER’ attached below the informal mugshots, but there were also flyers for community initiatives and optional extra training. It was clear that this was not an exciting town for those in the business of law enforcement; Eve suspected, looking derisively around the station at the men who appeared lackadaisical, apathetic, and incompetent in the face of the current crisis, that it was that exact lack of activity that attracted these people to their line of work. They looked weak, indifferent. Incapable. Eve was sure many of them would die before the devilry was done.
“Do you need help, Ma’am?”The voice interrupted Eve’s train of thought and pulled her back to reality from the macabre stupor she had been delving into. It belonged to a lithe young man with short blonde hair, his uniform shirt slightly too big for him and eyes darting with a sincere, if caffeinated, energy. He looked...Eve tried to think of a diplomatic word. He looked
earnest.
“I need to speak to the Sheriff.” She said, blunt and forceful. Eve furrowed her brow, pushing an emphatic, hardened stare onto the officer. He met it, though she could feel him quake beneath her eye.
“A-and what would this be regarding?” He got out, shakily to start but picking up confidence.
“There was a young girl killed this morning. You need my help.” Eve replied. She tried to put on the same sincere affectation that the young man had initially approached her with, trying to utilize empathy; instead, the officer got only a distinct sense of misguided mimicry. He felt uncomfortably similar to a cornered field-mouse, being convinced by an approaching buzzard that its beak was a warm respite from running in the dirt. To him, he felt circled by a predator, clever enough to attempt deception, but too hungry to be convincing. He took a step back.
“Take a seat.” He said, gesturing to a rickety wooden chair that stood miraculously empty next to the reception desk.
“I’ll fetch him now.”-
Three hours later, Eve pulled her head up off her hands that rested uncomfortably atop the cold metal table in front of her. Her wrists were shackled, and the chain of the cuffs were threaded through a steel loop built into the tabletop. She’d sat on the wooden chair for a few minutes before she’d been collected by another officer and escorted to this room, and then pushed down roughly into the seat and put in binds. She pulled and rattled futilely at the cuffs, and briefly considered invoking a spell to transmute the metal into something more malleable; instead, she settled on staring at the ‘mirror’ that lined the wall opposite her. She focused her gaze until she could feel heat in her dead eye. The reflection seemed to shudder and ripple outwards, like drops hitting the surface of still water. For a brief moment, so rapid Eve wasn’t sure it happened at all, she thought she saw the vaguest shadow of a figure standing next to her mirrored self.
The door to the room opened, and in stepped Sheriff Hill, flanked by the deputy that had escorted her here, and the officer that she’d initially spoken to.
“You got a shitty way of treating concerned citizens.” Eve said, staring hard at the Sheriff as he sat down. He paused and made himself comfortable before responding.
“My concerned citizens are at home, sending their prayers to the good folks who lost their daughter today.” He gestured to the deputy, who uncuffed Eve; she snatched her arms back quickly, rubbing her forearms to restore warmth and blood flow.
“My concerned citizens are out in the woods, looking for the rest of poor little Lindsay, so her family can bury her proper and get a good funeral and have even the smallest degree of closure.” He gestured to the officer, who produced Eve’s bag; Eve tried to take it, but the Sheriff held it back as the deputy restrained her.
“My concerned citizens are on the phones, telling my department about a strange wanderer with a bad attitude, who arrived in town under darkness just last night, boarded up in our destitute house, and was seen killing birds in the town square, shortly before she was spotted moving away from the search area.” He rummaged inside Eve’s bag for a minute, and then slammed two objects onto the table in front of Eve. She took a quiet moment to understand exactly how careless she had been, before beginning to think of how exactly she was going to navigate this precarious situation.
The items on the table were family artifacts Eve had liberated from the Coffin House on her last night within the walls of the manor; old, steeped relics that had served a terrible purpose too many times over through the centuries of the Coffin legacy, and that Eve now intended to either put to better, more altruistic use, or destroy completely. The first was a flat black knife, utilitarian in its construction: a metal blade, a knotted wooden handle. Runes carved upon the length of it, hilt and blade alike. It was known as an Athame, and it served as a ritual knife; it had seen much blood in its lifetime, spent on mundane ambitions.
The second was a flat stone disc, rounded and smooth to the touch; it was pleasant to hold, with a good weight and comfortable grip. It rocked gently back and forth on the table, never seeming to lose its momentum; Eve resisted the urge to reach out and steady it. Sudden movements were not in her best interest. Atop the stone was emblazoned a pentacle in stark white, carved in and painted. The disc was a Paten; used to channel evocation, imparting blessing from the transfer of magic through it to the intended recipient. Mostly it had been used to impart stolen power upon her family line.
There was a long, still moment. The Sheriff was the one to break the silence, and when he did, it was a low, calm sound, full of menace and intent.
“We don’t want anymore witch trouble here in Petrified Copse. We’ve paid our dues.”Eve didn’t say anything. The Sheriff continued, his voice still low, but softer now.
“Now honestly, I don’t think you’re our girl. You got that nasty eye, and you got these suspicious articles, and you got your odd behavior, and it all adds up to suspicion; but there’s a look about you that dissuades me from accusation. And there’s nothing to tie you to the crime. No blood on you, or anything in your bag. The knife ain’t been used in years. But like I said. We’ve had enough witch-work in this town.”The Sheriff scooped up the athame and paten and dropped them back in Eve’s bag, then slid the whole thing across the table towards her. The deputy released her arms, and she pulled the bag into her chest, zipping it closed.
“So I got a proposal. A polite suggestion. My good deputy here will escort you to the bus station you got off at, and they’ll pay your fee to leave my town, and you won’t come back, and I won’t have to formally arrest and investigate you. You get to keep drifting on, and I get to rid my town of an odd woman, with hidden things she shouldn’t have, demanding to see dead little girls and embroil herself in business that ain’t nothin t’do with her.”The deputy hooked his hand beneath Eve’s shoulder, and wrenched her up out of her seat. Eve pulled her arm from his grip and scowled at the Sheriff.
“You’re in over your head, and you have no idea what kind of forces are coming for you.”Sheriff Hill just scowled back.
“I’ve made my offer, lady. We don’t want your ‘help’. You can leave, or I can formally arrest you. And the people in this town ain’t fond of strangers with black eyes.”Eve felt a grip on her arm again, and snatched herself away; when she whirled around furiously, the deputy had not laid hands on her, and had in fact taken a step back. There was a dark moment where Eve thought of the athame in her bag and how the hilt might feel sequestered in the palm of her hand. She looked back at the Sheriff, who had not gotten up.
“Fine. I don’t care. Get your town killed. That blood is on your hands now.”-
The trip from the sheriff’s office to the bus rank was a short walk; the streets were quiet, and the few people that were out saw either Eve’s eye, or the deputy escorting her with a firm hand, and looked away quickly. Eve held her bag tightly, and when the coach driver offered to stow it in the storage rack beneath the bus, she glowered at him until he paled beneath her, and hurried on to the other passengers. The deputy bought her ticket and handed it over, and then she was on the coach, cloistering herself away in the very rear corner. There were only a handful of other people scattered across the rest of the seats; most looked like drifters themselves, with only one girl that stood out to Eve; she was young, nearly too young to be travelling by herself, with a healthy wave of sand-blonde hair and an innocent, youthful face. She turned around in her seat and looked at Eve, smiling at her with a warm, wide grin. When Eve glared back, furrowing her brow in a concerted effort to impart hostility, the girl giggled before turning back around.
Eve brushed the interaction off, then took her jacket off to use as a blanket, nestling into the cushioned seating. She closed her eyes, attempting to sleep; it was only when the engine sputtered to life and the low rumble soothed her mind as the coach moved away that she actually managed to slip into her dreams.
-
Eve dreamt of fear and paranoia, of young girls and blood, and of old men and suspicion.
-
Eve got off in the first town the coach stopped at; her ticket hadn’t been for any cross-country trip, and she felt claustrophobic and trapped in the tube of the coach. She was thirsty when she woke, and it was dark outside; the air was frosty and her breath fogged when she stepped off the bus, bag slung over her shoulder. She needed something to drink, and she needed somewhere to spend the night; she was parched and exhausted in that order, and then she needed to find out where she was
now. She couldn’t shrug the feeling of a haunting still, but avoided thinking about it - whatever was following her wasn’t attacking right now, and she wasn’t in any fit state to defend herself regardless. Eve needed to get her bearings first and begin the arduous task of looking after herself;
then she could start fending off whatever dark presence had latched itself onto her.
She walked to the first building with lights on and low music playing - it was a small bar, independently owned, and clearly independently decorated: it attempted to reconcile small-town america with traditional English pub, and failed demonstrably at both. She was struck dramatically by deja vu, but proceeded through the bar regardless.
It was when she saw a single line of grimy-looking taps behind the bar that she began to become concerned; when she asked what was available, and the bartender answered ‘Bud Light’ with his back turned, she began to worry. But it was only when the bartender turned around, and Eve recognize him as the exact bartender from the night previous, and then recognize the bar as the exact bar from the night previous, and the bartender failed to recognize Eve whatsoever - that was when Eve began to panic.
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