InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "theres naught so queer as folk"

Deirdre Gwyneth McCrery (naturallygwyn) wrote in inpoormerit,
@ 2010-03-19 19:27:00

Entry tags:

coop, coop and deirdre, deirdre

Wolves and Woods and Graves, Oh My
WHO: Gwyn, Open
WHERE: The Woods and the Newly Found Graveyard
WHEN: Early Morning

The previous night had been, in a word... interesting. Between the general sleeplessness that usually came from being in a new place and the huge ruddy wolves pacing the town throughout the night, well, Gwyn hadn't gotten much rest. She wasn't sure if those animals could be called wolves, though. She had glimpsed one from her window after being startled awake by what she could only assume was one of their howls. Mad creatures, really.

What boggled her even more was their black coats. As she laid there, staring at the ceiling, her hands gripping the sheets around her and listening hard at the scrape of the animals' claws against walkways, she recalled a half-remembered lecture from an early natural history class. Black wolves were only indigenous in North America. Could that possibly mean she'd been transported across the Pond? If it was true, then Colin was a lot closer to home than he could have suspected. (If he suspected at all. Honestly, the poor bloke was so full of worry and concern it had been difficult to leave him the evening before. She hated to see him so, well, ...so.)

Only the promise of a trek through the nearby forest helped to get her out of bed that morning. Not sleeping very well usually put her off food the next day, but she managed a bit of toast and fruit before grabbing a couple of water bottles and stuffing them into her now-empty, but favourite backpack. Finding it in the closet the evening before had been an unexpected, yet welcome surprise. Stepping out into the picturesque, island town, she took in a lungful of the slightly cool morning air. It helped wake her up a little bit more, but it was the solace of the woods she needed.

With her watch gone, it became easy to lose track of the time, especially when she couldn't track the sun's place in the sky half the time. The minutes and hours seemed to melt into nothing, however, when she was away from it all. She couldn't say how much later it was when she discovered the old graveyard. It was so unexpected that she almost didn't believe it was really there at first. A single touch (and a sharp splinter) to the old wooden markers, however, proved that it wasn't an illusion. Gwyn sucked in a breath as the pain from so tiny a thing throbbed through the tip of her index finger. "Bother," she muttered as she started to try digging it out with one of her stubby nails. "Couldn't have my first-aid kit with me, yeah? What I wouldn' give fer a set o' ruddy tweezers."

The little blighter was pretty deep, and trying with just her nails was getting nowhere, so she abandoned it and tried to focus instead on the grave markers. They were so odd, out of place- and old. At least they looked old. There were no dates on any one of them, though. She wasn't sure how she missed it, but she was further caught off-guard by the burned down church building further into the field of graves. No, not caught off-guard: unnerved. Gwyn crossed herself and uttered a little prayer. What could have happened in this place? The hackles rose on the back of her neck. Who or what could have burned down a Holy Place?

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ocrikey
2010-03-26 01:19 am UTC (link)

"Nice to meet you, Gwyn," Coop answered politely. Belle put a lot of stock in good manners, and she had been merciless in housebreaking her husband as well. "So far, we haven't met anyone else with family here, but if that Commissioner is to be believed, there's a lot of people we haven't met yet."

He still didn't quite care for the glowing praise the Commissioner had bestowed upon his wife for her "community service." It made him tense to think about, and it was only with a conscious effort that he was able to bring himself to the present.

Or, in this case, a bit of the past. "I was planning on having a look," he said, gesturing to the ruins. "Care to join me?"

It would be a bit of a perilous walk for the ill-equipped; weeds had sprung up around the old building, some well on their way to becoming real trees. The ceiling had fallen in some time ago, either during the fire or shortly afterwards, leaving bits of crumbling rubble beneath the forest floor.

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naturallygwyn
2010-03-26 02:35 am UTC (link)

Gwyn's mouth pulled to one side, and then she grimaced. "That's the bloke from the computer, right?" she pronounced it 'comp-uter', clearly unused to the word. "Has anyone actually met him? Unless he's daft, I doubt he's showin' his face. Like as not, he'd get his bum handed to him by more'n a few of us."

She looked toward the ruins and barely suppressed a shudder. "Yeah, sure," she said. "Maybe there's strength in numbers in keepin' away the ghoulies and ghosties and goblins and beasties and things that go bump in the' night?"

As they drew closer, that suppressed shudder came to the fore, shaking her shoulders. "Doesn' seem right," Gwyn murmured to no one but herself. She reached a hand out and brushed it over the taller of the long grass and weeds, forgetting her splinter entirely for once. "Everythin' seems old here, but kinda new in town. None of this makes a single bit o' sense."

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ocrikey
2010-03-27 05:13 am UTC (link)

"They probably thought of that," Coop agreed with a small grimace. He was not normally a violent man -- it had, in fact, taken him some time to change that aspect of himself -- but he would be the first to take a swing at the guy...

No one made his wife feel the way this creep (and his friends) did and get away for it. The trouble was that they might have to let him get away with it -- right now, Coop saw no other choice.

"Not as old as this, anyway," Coop agreed instantly as he peered into a hold left in the wall. Whether it was a small window or simply a hole, Coop wasn't entirely certain. "This island must have been inhabited before being put to its current use." Whoever the people had been, they had been religious. Ah, this must have been a window, Coop realized suddenly, his eye catching the gleam of glass scattered on the inner windowpane. "There's glass here. Be careful." So saying, he skirted to the side in order to hoist himself up on some rubble.

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	ocrikey 2010-03-27 05:14 am UTC (link)
	OOC: Just feel free to make things up if you like -- find a cornerstone or an old hymn book... Anything! <3 (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

naturallygwyn
2010-03-27 08:09 am UTC (link)

Nodding her head, Gwyn made a small sound of ascent at her new acquaintance's- friend? was it too soon for that?- thoughts on their current surroundings. She was a bit distracted, truth be told; it was taking every bit of her self-control just to keep moving forward, toward the church. She watched him head toward a darker shadow in the blackened wall, and then heard his warning. Self-consciously, she looked down at her feet- ah, good: trainers, thick soled. The would be more than up to the task of keeping her feet protected.

Her hands were another matter, and she wished she had the regular contents of her backpack. It might have seemed odd, but she usually had a pair of thick work gloves. One never knew when they could come in handy, and they were great for tree climbing. While she didn't have the contents, at least she had the backpack. In this instance, however, it was a very minor good thing in the grand scheme of the whole mad affair. She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she almost missed it.

Its pages were so browned and yellowed that Gwyn almost mistook it for another bit of twisting weeds, but some of the gold embossing on the front retained its sheen and caught the sun's light, dragging her attention to it before she passed it by completely. Crouching over it, she bent to examine and then lifted it very carefully after brushing away some loose dirt and a few weeds. It was a book of some kind, she knew that immediately, maybe a book of Prayer or a hymnal. The words on the spine and cover- whatever they had been- had long since worn away. Even from where she gingerly held it away from herself the musty smell of mildewed paper was unmistakable.

She hated to open it, for fear that it would crumble to pieces, but a desire to find out what it was overrode any of her reluctance. "In for a penny," she muttered to herself, and then gingerly peeled some of the pages apart, wincing as most of them tore into clumps of mush and went plopping to the ground. As a reward, however, a whole page, its paper brown and black around the edges, presented itself to her. Her breath caught as a familiar line of text and notes filled the page.

Somehow, around a lump the size of the entire British Isles in her throat, she managed a few, slightly warbling words of the traditional song: "Rop tú mo baile, a Choimdiu cride: ní ní nech aile acht Rí secht nime."

A tremulous smile pulled at her lips as she stood again. "'S a hymnal," she said after she cleared her throat, resolutely ignoring the sting in her eyes. "'S very old." Gwyn carefully turned to another page. "Mostly in English." She gave a tiny laugh and shrugged a shoulder. "Doesn't seem t' matter where you wind up. God always has a way to find yeh." Feeling a bit sheepish for all of her sudden emotion, she glanced back at Cooper. "Have yeh found anything?"

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ocrikey
2010-03-29 12:31 am UTC (link)

Coop had glanced at his companion when his ear caught the sound of her voice. She appeared to be holding an old book...

He smiled in response and shrugged back at her. He wasn't a religious man himself, at least not as much as his wife. And because of his wife, he could certainly understand Gywn's emotion.

"I don't think there's much more to find," Coop answered, glancing down into the rubble. "Not without an excavation team, anyway."

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naturallygwyn
2010-04-02 04:02 am UTC (link)

Part of her wanted to take the Hymnal with her, but the more reasonable piece of her knew how weird it would be to have a mouldy book lying around her flat. She carefully put it back on the ground, more or less where she found it, and then stood, dusting her hands off. "An' me fresh without m' paleontology equipment," she joked. Her mouth pulled downward. "We're not really a step closer to findin' out where we are, though."

She sighed and brushed down the thighs of her pants, although she doubted they were dirty. "Seems like maybe we should be gettin' on. Or I should. I know that Overseer bloke said somethin' about not goin' out after dark, but I can't imagine it would be too bad to do a bit more explorin' of these woods."

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ocrikey
2010-04-03 05:32 am UTC (link)

"The woods seem safe enough during the day," Coop agreed readily. The eerie sensation of being watched -- stalked, really -- he had felt the previous night was gone, replaced by the usual sense of calm he had always felt in the woods.

Coop carefully climbed down from the pile of rubble, his sense of curiosity and adventure far from sated. But, he had promised his wife there would be ice cream to go along with her pie -- and that he would not disappear on her again.

"We're having Belle's famous homemade pie for dessert tonight -- and Poppy's ice cream recipe. Better get there early, because there won't be anything left after I'm done." He grinned and shrugged slightly, although he was only half-kidding. If Belle wasn't careful, he'd sneak enough before dinner to spoil his appetite.

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