teaganmitchell (teaganmitchell) wrote in horror_story, @ 2012-10-31 19:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | alternate universe, holiday: halloween, tatum, teagan |
Halloween AU: Season of the Witch
Who: Tatum and Teagan
When: Halloween Night
Where: Teagan's late grandmother's home.
What: Demonic literature which, of course, Teagan reads out loud.
Warning: TBD (unfinished)
“It’s a book,” Teagan said, rather unnecessarily. Clearly, it was a book. The thickness of the pages, the rough leather binding, and the weight of the thing all indicated that it was an old book. Possibly some kind of valuable antique. She opened it, gingerly. No printing press had been involved in the manufacturing process, that was certain. Some of the words were in English, but they seemed to be misspelled. Many of them weren’t in any language Teagan knew. She examined several pages before she spoke again. “This looks like it was all done by hand... maybe it’s religious? Hey, do you think it’s worth anything?”
Closing the book again to examine the cover, Teagan decided that it was probably religious. All of the cryptic symbols, the mixed languages... what else could it be but some religious text? It certainly wasn’t anyone’s personal journal, and it was far too meticulous to be some kind of fictional work. Some of it looked like a field guide of some kind, but it was difficult to tell. For the first time in her life, Teagan was thinking that maybe she should have gotten to know her grandmother better. The woman had died a stranger to her, which made going through her belongings a source of guilt, rather than grief. Better to be curious, then, than guilty. Teagan’s mother was religious, so it made sense that her grandmother had been, as well.
Gaze shifting up from the book, Teagan looked across the attic at the other girl. “Um. Thanks again for helping me with this stuff. I know you probably had better shit to do.”
---
“Huh?” Tatum murmured, looking up from the box of old clothes she had been sorting through. There was a pile of t-shirts set aside, most of them probably from some time in the late sixties. She had given them a smell test, and they were definitely musty, but they were way too cool and kitschy to resist. They could always wash them, and she thought Teagan would like them. She had, however, only half been listening to what the other girl was saying. She looked up to see her leafing through the book, and furrowed her eyebrows at her slightly.
“B-By hand? That thing’s h-huge,” she said, leaning forward a bit to try to get a better look at the cover as Teagan began examining it. “Probably r-religious though.. n-nobody but a religious p-person would have that much patience, r-right? Same idea as n-nuns.”
When Teagan looked at her, Tatum immediately smiled crookedly, averting her eyes to her lap and the pile of shirts beside her legs. “Uh, it’s all good. I d-didn’t have plans, t-trust me. This is c-cool.. I l-love old shit like this,” she told her. It was true, but for so many reasons. Her brother and sister were, of course, going to a Halloween party. She had wanted to stay in her room, play some games online probably. Her guild was supposed to be getting together sometime tonight. But her stepmother had basically given the option of joining her siblings, or handing out candy. Both of these involved dressing up. Hiding in her room was out of the question. When Teagan had texted her and asked her if she wanted to come over, she had leapt at the chance.
She had been relieved for the escape from her house and her family, and honestly, what was better than spending Halloween with her friend, also known as the girl that she had a massive crush on? Not that she could tell her that, good God no, but her presence was much appreciated. She just wished she could stop smiling like a goof around her all of the time. Getting stoned, that’s what she needed to do. She was much more relaxed then. “Can you r-read any of it?” she asked. “If you want to try and get in t-touch with J-Jesus over there, I’m r-rolling a joint.” Her hands were already reaching for the papers in her sweater pocket.
---
If Teagan had known that there’d been the option of going to a Halloween party - with costumes, no less - she would have been irate that the other girl had passed up the chance. Teagan took every opportunity to dress up, herself. Even now, though she’d been resigned to wasting at least the majority of the evening in her late grandmother’s attic, Teagan was costumed. Black and orange striped tights under an uneven black and purple plaid skirt, clunky ankle boots, a collared, black button-up dress shirt, a pumpkin tie, and jack-o-lantern earrings. Her long brown hair was in pigtail braids, accented by orange and black plastic spiders that Teagan had found in the dollar store. They’d been manufactured as children’s party favor rings, but snipping the ring part with scissors had turned them into very festive hair accessories. All in all, she looked like some kind of demented Halloween-themed schoolgirl. All she need was some Britney Spears theme music to play when she walked in a room.
Had she been invited to a party, it would have been so much worse. It would have been latex appliances spirit-gummed to her face, fake open wounds and chocolate-cherry flavored blood. This was a Halloween Teagan toned down. One that was just hoping someone would ring the doorbell downstairs, so that she’d have an excuse to show off the witchy black eyelashes she’d spent twenty minutes getting right. Holiday spirit did not earn her all that many friends, however, not in the face of the rest of it. Enthusiasm was something Teagan had in spades, but she was strange. Off-putting to others, and made no real effort to not be strange. There just wasn’t much of a filter with her, and most people didn’t want to hear a long explanation about how the makeup artist in Cannibal Holocaust had mocked up her own self-impalement with a bicycle seat, no more than they wanted to discuss how many vertebrae were in an articulated cat spine, or answer inappropriate questions about their own dead relatives, dead pets, or sex lives.
“I’ve already put in enough time with Jesus,” Teagan said, and while her time in The Family was one of the closer things she had to a taboo conversational subject, it was still something she had a tendency to bring up a lot, and another thing nobody wanted to hear much about, as it had a tendency to make them uncomfortable. “I basically have him on speed dial. I mean, pretty much.” She flashed Tatum one of her overly wide, faraway smiles. “And Jesus would want you to roll that joint, and Jesus would want you to share. He’d probably give us booze, too, and snacks, ‘cause Jesus was really into certain spiritual comforts, you know? So long as they were food and drink and foot massages and mutual love and not, like, material possessions or wealth or leaders; especially not religious leaders, and I bet he wasn’t too big into nails there, by the end, or thorns...”
As she babbled, Teagan did go back to the book, just to see if a second glance would make more of it legible. At one of the pages a little less than halfway in, the smile faltered. She stared at the page for a moment, turned to the page before it as if to get context, and then went back to staring at the page she’d found. “Huh. Okay, maybe this isn’t Jesus, so much. I mean, last I checked, Jesus didn’t eat babies.”
---
Teagan’s rambling was comforting to Tatum, as she began to busy herself with the work of whipping up a joint, good enough to share as instructed. She liked that the other girl had a tendency to talk, because it kept the awkward silences at bay that normally set in every time that Tatum tried to speak to someone about.. well, anything. With Teagan, she did most of the talking for both of them, and if Tatum didn’t have something to say, it always seemed like Teagan had something to fill that space with. She didn’t often make friends with girls, but Teagan was all right. It was hard for many reasons for Tatum to relate to girls, the fact that she had a tendency to crush on any girl that smiled at her had never helped. There were a surprising few girls out there that wanted a stammering redheaded puppy dog trailing after them. Evidently, Teagan didn’t seem to mind.
Tatum had just been licking the paper, sealing the edge and twisting the end, when Teagan spoke up about eating babies. That caught the other girl’s attention, Tatum’s brow knitting together again as she hesitated in making the filter for the joint. “B-Babies?” she replied, keeping the almost finished joint in the palm of her hand, but standing up from where she had been sitting. She crossed the small space of the attic, coming to crouch down beside Teagan and look down at the book, getting her first better look.
It was an ancient looking illustration, also clearly by hand, but it was clear just what was going on in the depiction. Tatum paled, even more than usual, as she turned her head a bit to regard Teagan. “No, I d-definitely don’t think Jesus c-chowed down on any b-babies.. unless t-they left that out at S-Sunday school. It seems l-like the kind of thing t-that’s hard to uhm, skim over,” she murmured, avoiding looking at the page mostly. It was easier to play it off with dry humor than admit that the picture was giving her the creeps.
---
“Yeah, they skipped a whole bunch of years, but I thought it was supposed to be because most churches don’t want to talk about all the tail he was getting. I mean, that’s what I learned. Not to cover up his cannibal days,” Teagan said, her faced screwed up in a thoughtful expression as she looked at the drawing. None of the words on the page around the illustration seemed to be in English, however, so there was no context for her. No reference point. Maybe it was some sort of warning. “At least he looks happy about it.”
Indeed, the bearded man in the illustration looked positively blissful. The baby less so. I would cook them, first, Teagan thought to herself. It was just mean to eat things live like that. Nothing wanted to know it was being digested. Didn’t they believe in quick deaths and butchering back then?
Unless it was a warning. Something evil that would come to take away the bad kids. Except, if that were the case, Teagan would have given the bearded man monster teeth and hooved feet and maybe horns. The guy’s jaw was opening awfully wide, but other than that it was basically just a bearded man who looked a little like Jesus eating a baby. Maybe it was religious commentary. A thousand-year-old satire. The world’s very first New Yorker. Though that made the illustrations that basically looked like plant identification guides more baffling. Text, text, leaf-berry-root illustrations, text, text... Naked people. Women and men... some bearded, some too young for beards. Teagan frowned. “Okay, this is the part I was talking about. Jesus orgies. This is a religious text, for crazy people.”