but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you. Who: Elvira Treveil. What: Hauntings and the haunted; patrol rounds. Where: Around Emillion → The Necrohol When: Here and there of her life → Today, small hours. Rating: PG-13 ( corpses, mentions of the dead ) Status: Complete narrative.
A sprig of green sprang from the ground as winter melted into spring. Soon the sleeping would wake but the dead stayed dead. Or so people hoped but that was often not the case.
Elvira swung her head around, swearing something followed her on her patrols, a hand clenched around an unsheathed sword. Her foot snagged in a crevice and she spun, arms outstretched to take flight, to catch herself.
A laugh, a shadow,
a ghost.
Knock, knock on the door of where the Treveils lived when peacekeepers arrived to inform the family of their discovery.
Found dead: one (1) blonde girl in early adolescence, her body frozen and rotted in place. The alleyway dumpster shielded her from sight, spilt its thrownaway innards around her body. Like a dancer frozen in time, she rested her mangled and twisting limbs unmoving on the ground. Mites burrowed into skin, maggots feasted on flesh.
A white dress, the canvas for a collage of evidence and garbage, stuck to her skin where blood stained and crusted. The rank of iron overrode ammonia and sulfur, organs having fallen limp after she drew her last breath. Her blood spreads out like wings, saintlike but red, staining the pavement.
One Treveil daughter was dead now, and the other wore her sister’s fetid skin as a mask. The remaining waited for her parents at home as they went to identify the body. Elvira lay in the morgue with a white blanket over her face; Elvia wore a white dress to make footprints in the dusted kitchen floor. (Or it was the other way around. No matter.)
Her parents had forgotten their keys so they banged on the locked door. The girl Treveil threw the door open so the noise would stop but it didn’t.
Knock, knock, the sound of tooth on tooth. Her teeth clashed together to turn a memstone on. She clicked and grinded the bone to hear the murmuring, the murmuration. Voices that did not belong to Faram rang out in whispers embedded in her skull. When they spoke, she imagined what they might be seeing as if their eyes have been plucked out and sewn tight the optic nerves to hers, creating train of eye on eye on eye that linked the city’s birds together. She followed their voices to earn wings and fly to her Faram.
It brought a certain comfort or an imitation of comfort, enough to molt downy feathers, tear off Elvia’s face and make her own name among birds.
But her waxen wings melted so she fell and her sister’s hand reached out to catch her down.
Down, down, down.
She laughed and brushed the dirt off her pauldrons. “Silly me,” the holy knight said to her patrol partner who held out a hand to lift the blonde up from the ground. Elvira smiled up at the other fighter in a way mirrors did when someone happy looked into them. (Doing, not feeling; saying, not Meaning; living, not Living.)
“Silly, clumsy m—”
“Hush.”
Knock, knock. Both women looked side to side in search of the source; one let out an exasperated groan. The skeleton of someone once loved scraped against the floors of the crypt. Its head bobbed against the wall, eyes gaping open, vacant. Without flinching, Elvira's patrol partner took the weakened enemy down. It clattered to the floor at first contact against a holy weapon.
“Sir Treveil!”
Witnessing one undead too many this shift, Elvira was halfway down the tunnel by the time anyone noticed she had gone. With surprising force, she elbowed aside another lifeless being that hobbled to her, clearing a path for her to hunch over, breathless. Her throat ached as though she had been screaming and her insides fought to expel themselves out her mouth. She gasped, heaved.
Her heart pounded against inner walls of her chest.