InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "SWEEEEP!"

Qebhet (coolwaters) wrote in nevermore_logs,
@ 2021-01-13 19:12:00

Entry tags:

qebhet

WHO Qebhet
WHEN Tuesday, early afternoon
WHERE The Hole
WHAT Fulfilling a promise
WARNINGS None

It takes Qebhet over an hour to make the trip from Harlem to the crossroads that Hecate named. Forty-five minutes on the subway, followed by a trudging twenty-minute walk across Conduit Boulevard with its cacophony of car horns and roaring traffic.

She walks, and the roar gradually fades to a murmur, the urgent rush of traffic slowing to the occasional trickle. Eventually, the only cars she sees are the ones parked – or abandoned – among the tall weeds growing along the sides of the road. Some are missing licence plates, or windscreens, or front bumpers.

She walks, and the pavement turns cracked and crumbling before vanishing entirely, and the streets become swamps, soaked with puddles so large they might as well be called lakes.

There’s scarcely a living soul in sight. Even the dead keep their distance, huddling in doorways and keeping grim watch over empty lots. The few who mark Qebhet’s passage at all do so with suspicious eyes.

She walks until the road she’s following is abruptly claimed by murky water. It’s submerged the entire street, she sees: a brown, stagnant river that’s swallowed up a vast stretch of road, at least half a block long. She decides not to risk traversing it, and instead backtracks to detour through a nearby avenue, and that’s how she comes to meet Vincent.

He’s kicking around in a vacant block when she spies him – kicking through it, really, bounding up tall piles of trash and rubble and then leaping clear to drift lazily toward the ground on a vague memory of gravity. The fall would almost certainly kill him, if he weren’t already dead.

When Qebhet waves to him, he waves back, and that, too, sets him apart.

He’s young. Qebhet doesn’t have Hecate’s innate sense of these things, but she’d be surprised if he were any older than fourteen or fifteen. He’s lanky and brown-skinned, a grey hoodie pulled up over his short locs.

She doesn’t ask him how he died. It’s fresh enough that she can smell it on him, can almost see dark bloom of blood soaking his hoodie where the cop’s bullet tore through his chest. Instead, she asks him whether he’s busy right now, and earns by way of response an incredulous cock of the eyebrow, as though to say, what do you think, lady?

She can see the learned wariness in his stance, the tensed shoulders – ready to bolt if it becomes necessary. But he hasn’t moved yet, and his eyes are curious.

So Qebhet tells him what little she can: that there’s a boy living in one of these houses, about Vincent’s age, and he may be in danger. That she needs somebody to look out for him where she can’t and to alert her if he’s ever in need of help. That she would pay for this help in kind, a dedicated offering for every day of service.

Vincent scrunches his face dubiously. He’s already dead, after all. What’s he need with offerings?

Food and drink, Qebhet explains, to nourish the soul.

He mulls that one over for a long moment, until Qebhet’s sure he’s ready to blow her off. Instead, his eyes light up with a flash of inspiration. Can you get me beer?

He looks, in that instant, so disarmingly, crushingly young, like a child who’s just found the loophole in his teacher’s rules. Qebhet has to hide her smile; she nods gravely, and the deal is struck.

Vincent grows talkative as he follows her down the street past rust-streaked trailers and around black puddles, evidently warming to the novelty of a living person who can see him. He tells her about the weird shit he’s seen people dump around here. There was this mob boss in the old days, he says, by which he means the eighties, who used the Hole as a dumping ground for bodies. She doesn’t want to talk to their ghosts, he assures her. He’d thought the dead mobsters looked like some tough motherfuckers when he started hanging out here, but they’re just kinda sad. Hanging out in weed-choked lots all day waiting for somebody to stumble upon their bones.

Qebhet slows, but doesn’t stop, as they near the crossroads. She recognises the house from Hecate’s description – paint peeling, weatherboard swollen with damp, a couple of cars parked in the drive. “There,” she tells Vincent.

The yard, unfortunately, is stark; cracked concrete surrounded by a chain link fence. Nothing grows beside a single stringy weed, and she can tell from a glance the foliage isn’t robust enough to conceal the charm of protection she had hoped to place. She could probably wedge it between the rotting weatherboards, but she’s reluctant to approach the house, uncertain who might be around to see. She keeps walking instead.

She’s intending to circle back for a second pass when her attention snags on something across the street. Woven into a wire fence is a twisted circle of willow branches. It’s humble, almost unremarkable, but when she brushes the wilted leaves with a thumb, Qebhet feels the soft pulse of a prayer. Hecate mentioned the boy had set up a shrine.

With a quick glance in either direction to make sure she’s not being observed, Qebhet reaches into her shoulder bag and draws out the charm. It’s a small thing, the better to go unnoticed, a turquoise-coloured wedjat eye threaded onto a white ostrich feather. Blue-green, for life and protection. The Sun’s right eye, for warding away evil. Ma’at’s feather, for balance. She winds it through the willow branches, concealing it among them as best she can. She can’t say if it will help. She hopes that it does.

She turns back to Vincent, who snaps off a grinning salute, gives the house one final look, before starting the long, trudging walk back up the road.