henry harper sees dead people (obolos) wrote in monte_logs, @ 2012-05-07 23:50:00 |
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Hel walked to the library with slow and deliberate steps. The music playing on her iPod softly mingled with the voices around her. Some of them were excited; they wanted her to see them. Others were grumbling about liking their anonymity. Occasionally, she talked to them, told them it might not work, but neither side cared about that too much. Hel did. She wanted to know what the people around her looked like, something she used to fantasize about constantly. The one person she really wanted to know about was now gone. He always avoided the personal questions, focusing more on her and her place in the Norse world. Same with Eleanor. The older woman kept telling her it didn’t matter; all she wanted was someone to listen. But Hel wanted to know who her friends, her constant companions, were, if they looked like the picture in her mind, if they looked as happy or disgruntled as they sounded. However, she worried the person she was going to see was pulling her leg. There were many different abilities running around that no one really questioned what people could do. He could be the one that stretched the truth or might lie about what he could see. But if it wasn’t a lie, what if he couldn’t see what Hel heard? She fully believed they were the dead, but what if they really weren’t. What if the voices were the ones pulling her legs slowly out from under her? Hel arrived at the library with a few minutes to spare and sat out front on one of the benches. She looked around for him, remembering his picture from the forum, while the voices talked and her iPod played and her thoughts wound their way around it all. While he would never say it to her, Charon wasn’t exactly so sure he liked this idea. The ghosts had been silent all his life and quite frankly, he liked it that way. It was bad enough that they were around him almost every hour of everyday. No matter where he went, one seemed to appear and as crazy as it sounded, he had grown used to it. The ghost were an odd form of company and he almost liked their presence. He also liked that they couldn’t talk to him. For Charon, they had always been seen, but not heard. The potential for them to speak actually seemed awful to him and he couldn’t help but wonder how Hel put up with it. What if they talked all the time? Did they talk to her when she was trying to sleep? Or when she was in the shower? The more he thought about it, the more questions he had regarding what she heard and the more he thought it was creepy. Of course, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to help her. He wasn’t an asshole like that despite his misgivings about the entire situation. Charon knew all too well the downfalls of powers like theirs, so he felt the need to help to help the young lady in anyway he could. If that meant seeing her dead friends, he was willing to do it. Charon arrived to the library a few minutes late thanks to his aversion to cars and public transportation. Once inside, it didn’t take him long at all to figure out which young lady was Hel. Taking a deep breath, he walked over to her and offered a small, awkward smile. “Hi. Are you... ?” It was only then he realized he never got the young ladies name. When she noticed him, she kept her eyes on him as she pulled out her earbuds and stuffed them into the pocket of her thin black coat. She saw his smile, but her face stayed expressionless, except for the slight wrinkling of her forehead as she tried to figure out his tone. She didn’t want to mess this up before she received some kind of answer. “Bethany,” she said. “Can you see anyone?” A quick five seconds later, she rolled her eyes and turned her head to the left. “But--” She sighed. “I don’t--” She turned her attention back to Charon, her posture, frown, and lack of eye contact making her look like a scolded child. “Hello. My name is Bethany. What’s yours?” Hell hated this. All she wanted to know was if he could see them, not swap stories. She had someone for that. Plus, she didn’t think she was doing a good job with it anyway. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, spoke Eleanor, an older woman who lived a long life full of happy memories of her children and grandchildren. It was the main reason Hel liked her so much; the stories she told always brought something of a smile to her face. She lowered her head and closed her eyes. “Eleanor is here. She’s close because her voice is louder than others. If there aren’t any rules on who you see, then you should be able to see her. If it works that way. I can tell you how she died. Darla is also here, but she’s farther away. I can barely hear her laughter. She wanted to see if she could see you. I know how she died too.” He watched her little exchange with great interest. Though she couldn’t see where the voice had come from, Charon could see the little old lady plain as day. As usual, her mouth moved, but his ears were only met with silence. He could gather what she was saying based on the exchange with Hel, which was certainly something new to him. New, though he wasn’t quite sure he liked it. “Henry. It’s nice to meet you.” Pausing a moment, he glanced at the old woman. “And your friends too.” Following the brief exchange, there a brief moment of silence where he pondered how exactly to proceed with this conversation. All of his life, people had been asking him to describe the people he saw. They had mostly been doctors trying to help him, though in the past few years it was mainly curious individuals. Never once had anymore asked him to describe a ghost he or her personally interacted with, so Hel would be a first. “Well. There is a little old woman almost right beside you. She... she looks like one of those stereotypical little old woman. African-American. Looks like she would give you hugs and cookies.” Charon hoped none of his descriptions offended dear Eleanor. In spite of herself, Hel smiled. It was partly because she found someone else who had contact with the dead, but it was mostly from getting a more accurate picture of Eleanor. When she saw the older woman, she brought forward her mother’s grandmother, a woman she only saw in pictures. It wasn’t the ideal picture. Her great-grandmother was never smiling, so it was hard to believe that face could be talking so cheerfully about family. Overall, she was extremely glad to be wrong. “No,” she said after Eleanor asked if Henry could hear her. “Unless he’s lying to me.” Opening her eyes, she looked up at him. “You really can’t hear them?” Hel didn’t wait for him to answer her question and just barreled on through. “She just said you have her grandson’s chin. And she was anything but stereotypical.” Her eyes moved off Henry for a second as she shook her head, said ‘No’, then sighed. “And she wants you to know she skied for the first time when she was sixty.” Calming down, Hel started wondering if how he felt about being able to see the dead and even how it worked for him. She almost rattled off a succession of questions about how his world worked, but stopped after asking, “Do you like seeing them?” It was rather nice to meet someone else with similar powers to his own. While he wasn’t going to say it, Charon hoped that she could understand at least a fraction of what he had gone through in life. He wanted to ask her questions like whether or not people had thought she was mentally ill due to her gift, but decided that was probably inappropriate because they had just met. If they continued to talk, perhaps he could ask some other time. “Wait,” he answered as he leaned back in his chair with a small look of surprise on his face. “I really can’t hear them. Like, her mouth is moving but I can’t hear anything.” He thought that was an odd thing to lie about here. At the mention of his chin, Charon blushed ever so slightly. “Sixty? That’s pretty amazing.” He last question took him by surprise and honestly, no one had ever asked him that before now. “I’ve seen them all my life. I don’t really know any different.” Charon wasn’t so sure if he liked seeing them, but at the same time it was part of him. If he stopped seeing ghosts, he might honestly not know what to do with himself as it was so ingrained in his being. “But if you stopped,” Hel started but stopped mid-thought. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to pry; it was because that was how she felt. She was like this from birth, there was nothing else to compare it to. If it suddenly went quiet, she wouldn’t know what do, and she wanted to believe that was the same for him. “You seem normal. Was it easier to live just seeing them?” Hel shook her head. “Never mind. Do you see all of them, or just a section of the dead? I can only hear those who died of sickness, old age mostly. There are others, like deaths from famine, but I have yet to come in contact with someone who died that way. Basically, I get the rest of them, those who have been called less honorable. “I’m Hel,” she added. “I guess you can call me the Norse equivalent of Hades. I even had a dog.” He only nodded at that thought as she didn’t need to go any further with it. There really wasn’t much use entertaining the thought anyway. It wasn’t like any of them could just take a pill and make their powers disappear. At the normal comment, he scrunched his nose and tried not to laugh. Charon’s life had been anything but normal for the first seventeen years of his life, so he was glad he could apparently pull off looking normal well. “I guess I see all of them. I mean, I’ve never really noticed anything special about it. And I don’t think seeing them was any easier. People don’t like it when you say you can see things.” Probably about as much as they like it when you say you can hear things. “Charon. Ferryman of the dead for the Greek.” Huh. A female Hades. “Did the Norse have anyone like me?” “People don’t like it when you stare at walls either. Or talk to empty corners.” She thought about his question. There was a lot of information that was thrown at her when she found out who she was. Hel still wasn’t sure of everyone, especially those who didn’t play a part in her immediate world, either through family relationships or Niflheimr. She was about to tell him about the Valkyries when she remembered the giantess. Feeling a little stupid, she nodded. “Móðguðr. She was the giantess who guarded the bridge Gjallarbrú over the river Gjöll. She let the dead cross. And some of the living. “How did you get your job?” Charon gave a weird smile. “They tend to think you’re crazy.” And he loved to hear about other pantheons and their stories. It was all so exciting to him how they all existed at once, some even with similar stories, yet not of them knew about each other. Any information he could gather right from the source was a big deal to him. “Móðguðr.” He probably butchered the pronunciation. ‘I wonder if she is here. I’d really like to meet someone who had the same job as me.” Speaking of jobs. “I went to school here. When I was finished, there just happened to be a position for me.” Hel nodded. “Call you a freak.” The pronunciation of Móðguðr wasn’t too bad, but the corner of her lips raised ever so slightly. “I don’t know. I haven’t met her yet, but I pretty much just got here and it’s a big enough campus. She might not even be here.” She looked away. “I have to think about where I’m going some day. I don’t want to leave, but I’m not going to be that lucky.” She almost said something more but stopped herself. The last thing she needed was to start talking about silly school problems with a stranger. The voices didn’t want to be ignored any longer. A few of them started talking loud, making her come out with a louder, “You don’t have to shout. I can hear you,” which made a few people walking by look at her strangely. He could only nod at her freak commentary because all though it was simple, it was also true. “Oh. I suppose maybe she isn’t.” That was a rather disappointing thought. Perhaps she hadn’t been reborn yet or maybe she just didn’t care about it. Charon really shouldn’t have been surprised considering half the persons he knew had yet to make an appearance. He would have answered her concern about school, but the faces of the ghost caught his attention more. Judging from the way they were acting, he was glad he couldn’t hear them. “Do they get mad when you don’t talk to them?” She didn’t want to ignore the living at the moment, so Hel quickly pushed out “Later” under her breath. “Sometimes?” she said turning her attention back to Charon. There were times when it was true. Some of the more pushier ones didn’t exactly enjoy being tuned out, but a lot of them were somewhat respectful. “A lot of the ones who’ve been dead for a while can be pushy. They don’t get to talk to a lot of the living, so they get, um,” she paused to find the right word, “excited. There are the ones who aren’t so nice. And then there are the kids.” Taking a second, Hel thought about what the people behind the voices looked like when they were trying to vie for her attention. Is that what Charon saw all the time? Did they ever smile at him, thankful that they weren’t alone in death, even though he couldn’t hear what they were saying? Did Charon even feel protective of the dead or was it different for him than it was her, being their professions in their other lives were different? “Do they ever smile at you?” she finally asked, choosing that question out of the crowd. He saw a whole range of emotions with the dead. Mainly, they seemed lost to him and often confused about their circumstances. Even as a young boy, Charon had figured out that not all the figure he saw knew they were dead and that was evident in their faces, especially their eyes. Their eyes told every story. But not all of them had this fate. Some of them were quite aware they were dead and quite okay with that. Others were dead and not okay with that. As many deceased people as there were out there, not one of them was exactly the same. Some smiled, some scowled. After awhile, they all seemed to melt together for him and rarely it seemed any of them stuck out in particular. Hel wanting him to describe them to her actually forced him to look at the ghosts in a way he hadn't in a long while. “Sometimes. Sometimes they look quite pissed off. Or sad.” He paused a moment and drummed his fingers on the table. “I’d say most of them looked sad. Confused. Or both.” Leaning back in the chair, he offered her an awkward smile before the two of them continued on with the semi-private conversation. After all these years, it was finally nice to meet someone who understood. |