Rostislav Zelenka (ghostsongs) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2017-11-07 21:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | #september 2017, jared, jared x rostislav, rostislav |
Who: Jared and Rost
When: Monday, Sept 11, late night
Where: the cemetery
Status: complete
Rost was close to distraught as he called the police for the second time within a week. He’d been out doing his patrol -- something he had stepped up the frequency of after the last incident -- and found another desecrated grave. This time they’d gone so far as to break the coffin itself. It was upsetting and scary. How did this keep happening without him hearing anything? He hadn’t even been drinking that night. And so quickly! He was patrolling every hour. It took a while to dig up a grave that old.
He’d been lucky to see the pile of rough earth before he got too close to the hole. It would’ve been easy to fall into if he’d been coming from the other direction. Rost had shined his flashlight down into it and winced back immediately. Disturbed corpses were not good for the energies in an area, and the cemetery already had its fair share of badness inside of it.
He’d called the police from right where he was standing to best describe the scene, and they said they would send someone out to do a report. So he’d walked to the front gate and stepped out in front of it, looking fretfully around as he waited for the officer.
For a small town Point Pleasant could get weirdly busy and tonight Grady called Jared in early that evening even if it was technically his day off. It wasn't so bad, it was late and he'd had the whole day off up until that point and random hours kind of came with the job. He'd looked into some of the vandalism at the cemetery before and was a little surprised when he got sent back out there for a new case.
He parked outside the gate and headed inside, shining his flashlight around to see if there was anything out of the ordinary before he got to where Rost was waiting for him. "Zelenka," he muttered in greeting before walking with him back to the scene of the crime, furrowing his brows as he shone his light on the open grave. That was creepy and honestly pretty nasty. The coffin looked like it had been broken and Jared couldn't help but sigh at the thought of having to go check out if the body was intact in there. So much for a nice day. "This is just-" he started, shaking his head as he gave Rost a sympathetic frown. "When did you last see this place untouched?"
Rost had been grateful to see him pull up, which was not a feeling he was used to having about cops, but all of this had him kind of on edge. He led the officer back to the site of the vandalism, crossing his arms over his chest and looking uneasily around. Nothing else seemed to be out of place at the moment, and he hoped it all stayed that way. Twice wasn’t enough to make a pattern, right? And this scene was different than the last. Maybe unrelated. He had to hope. “I have been patrolling on the hour,” he said, trying not to sound defensive about it. “So ... hour and a half ago, around ten.” He glanced down at the wrecked coffin, already dreading leaving it open like that. But the police would want to gather evidence, he couldn’t re-bury the man yet. “Have you found anything about the last time?”
Jared shook his head and crouched down to peer down into the grave. He had spoken with some people but nobody had seen a thing. There had been no physical evidence to be found and no leads to go on. Maybe this time would be different as it seemed far more 'hands on' than last time. "Might be a good idea to petition the local government to put up cameras," he muttered before rising to his feet again so he could climb down in there. Which was the last thing he wanted to do and it was moments like these where he really questioned his life choices. "You didn't hear anything?" he asked once he found his footing and stuck his flashlight between his lips so he could use both hands to cautiously pull the broken pieces of the coffin aside.
“Nothing,” Rost answered, watching the cop climb down into the hole. He moved himself a little to peer down into the grave more effectively, his own flashlight trained on the corpse that was being revealed. “There was nothing written this time,” he added, feeling kind of compelled to keep talking, considering what they were doing. Sometimes if the mind was focused on chatter, it couldn’t fully process the horror of whatever was going on in front of it. “Could be different people? But so close together ... Cameras is good idea, the damage was expensive last time, and you know how tight their pockets are.”
"Hah, tell me about it," Jared grumbled and thanked his lucky stars that at least this body was old enough to not be a horrifying mess. Still, it didn't smell great in there, the smell of chemicals and rot wafting up as he pushed the pieces aside to see if the body had been tempered with. "Don't suppose this guy only had nine fingers when he went in the ground," he muttered and glanced up at Rost as if he might actually know that. The guy knew random things so it wasn't all that far fetched, he might just drop a knowledge bomb on Jared now, telling him the guy had been known as Nine-Finger Dave or something.
Rost crouched down where he was, squinting at where the corpse’s hands were crossed on its chest. He didn’t generally see them out of their coffins, and it made him uneasy. This was supposed to be a place of rest, and it hadn’t been lately. “I have no idea,” he said. With the stage of decay, he couldn’t tell if that had been done before or after the poor man had passed. “I hope that he did,” Rost added in a mutter. If someone was grave-robbing, that went beyond some normal prank behavior. Bad things could happen with pieces of corpses.
Jared peered closer and with his limited forensics knowledge he could still guess that this had been a recent loss. There was just something about the cut and the mess left on the man's long since eroded shirt. "I'm gonna have to call this in," Jared sighed. "I think they took a finger." He frowned up at Rost before pulling his radio down. So much for reburying the guy and letting this go.
Rost groaned and straightened up, some more anxiety shooting through him. The only reasons he knew of to take a corpse finger were all bad ones. Bad magic that didn’t need to be in this town, that was for sure at least. He wondered if any of his witch friends knew anything about it, and if he should be calling out warnings by now. “That is not ideal,” he muttered as he walked away a few paces, shining his light around again. Rost half expected to see some other sort of damage, but everything else looked in place. None of the angels even seemed to have shifted.
Jared huffed softly because no, it was not ideal and that was a mild way of putting it. His mind didn't go to dark magic though, just some sick freaks who liked weird souvenirs or simply to rattle the good people around them. He radioed in and let them know he needed another officer out there and why, then clambered out of the grave again. "Where were you when you weren't patrolling?" he asked as he dusted himself off and much like Rost tried not to sound defensive, Jared tried not to sound accusative. He didn't think Rost had anything to do with this but the man kept saying he was always around, always walking the yard and it just didn't add up.
“In my trailer,” Rost answered, making a vague gesture in that direction. It sat at the back of the cemetery, which was now seeming like a bad place to be, strategically. But no one who came to the cemetery wanted to look at the eyesore he lived in. He wasn’t surprised at being asked -- he would be a reasonable suspect, after all. Always there, almost always alone. But he had served faithfully for several years, and disturbing these souls was the last thing he wanted to do. “I have no alibi, before you ask ... but if I did things like this --” he pointed at the open grave, “-- I would not be surviving here. They would never allow me to stay.” He didn’t know if the officer was a believer or not, but Rost knew it to be true.
"I don't think you did," Jared said reassuringly and for all he knew the 'they' Rost spoke of were the local government or whoever paid his bills. "But I think this-" he gestured at the grave as well. "Was pretty loud and if you were close by you would have heard it. Last time too." He could think of reasons why Rost might not have heard a thing but he wasn't about to suggest them or put words in his mouth. No man had dug up a grave in an hour or broken the lid of a coffin without the sound carrying so there had to be something Rost was leaving out - even if it was a fact as simple as him not patrolling as often as he said he did.
Rost absolutely meant the spirits in the cemetery, but the cop didn’t ask, so he didn’t elaborate. He’d put a lot of work into establishing his reputation with them as being harmless. He knew if he breached that fragile trust, he wouldn’t be long for the mortal world. “I heard nothing,” he repeated firmly, shaking his head. “Well, last time ... I heard the stone crack. That is all. No digging, no voices. Nothing this time. But see? Stone is intact. No spraypaint.” He pointed his flashlight at the headstone to show him.
"Yeah but, broken coffin and a whole lot of digging," Jared said skeptically and looked back at the vandalized grave. "You patrolled every hour? You didn't let it slide just this once?" He was trying hard to imagine how long it would take to dig that deep without a machine and under an hour didn't seem possible. "I'm not trying to get you into trouble," he added as he looked back to Rost. "Just trying to figure out the timeline here."
He understood that it was hard to believe. It was hard to believe a lot of things that he knew to be true, and he was fairly certain Deputy Gaines knew to be true also. Rost knew he wasn’t a newcomer to Point Pleasant, he was unfortunately familiar with all of the cops in town. “Every hour, faithfully,” he said firmly. “I saw nothing, I heard nothing.” He knew that would probably make him more suspicious in the eyes of the law, but he wasn’t going to lie about this. They needed to get to the real truth.
"So someone dug this hole, broke the coffin and got away while you were making rounds," Jared said if only to remind Rost just how unbelievable that sounded. Digging that hole was one thing but if Rost was doing his rounds he would have been near by when the digging was done and whoever had done this hadn't opened the coffin and sneakily left. No, they had broken the damn thing which... To be honest, Jared had no idea how they had managed that to begin with. "This isn't just vandalism," he said with a sigh. "I'm going to need a statement from you and it's really important that you tell the truth."
“This is truth,” Rost insisted, a bit of his own frustration rising. This whole thing was upsetting and dangerous, and he didn’t like one bit of it. “Not just vandalism, and not just normal people doing it, either!” He pointed down into the grave with his flashlight as if to point that out to the cop. “Normal people do not steal dead fingers. And if they are not normal, perhaps they can stay hidden as well.” He already knew from past experience that he probably wouldn’t be believed, but he was going to keep saying it anyway. It was the only thing that made any sense. Rost pursed his lips and gave Jared a Look. “You know not everyone or everything is normal, I know that you must.”
Jared knew a lot of people weren't 'normal' but given who he was talking to he was pretty sure Rost wasn't talking about crazy junkies or the like. He didn't want to entertain the thought that this had been a supernatural event, that something was out there being decidedly not natural, causing weird things to happen - like graves being dug up, corpse-fingers stolen and strange train-sounds coming from nowhere. He gave Rost a tired and exasperated look before shining his own flashlight at the grave. It wasn't really a serious enough crime to call for forensics though in light of everything that had been going on in town Barrett might decide they needed them after all and really, that was his call to make. Jared hoped he'd call them, whoever was doing these things shouldn't get away with them. "We'll find this guy and take him in," he muttered. "I've done had enough of all this nonsense."
Rost had almost no faith that would be the case, but it wouldn’t do him any good to say so, not when he’d already irritated the officer. He just didn’t think it was a mundane problem that the mundane cops could take care of. Still, he had to call and report everything, that was his job. It was frustrating not to be believed, but he also knew that dark things like this might be had a tendency to generate disbelief around themselves, like a protective cloak. “I hope so,” he said in his own mutter. “Until then, will you patrol extra around here?” Rost doubted it would help, but maybe if more of the cops themselves didn’t see or hear anything, they wouldn’t eye him quite so suspiciously.
Jared didn't think that was going to happen. Keeping the living safe was a much higher priority than watching the dead but maybe Barrett would want them to drive by more often given how damn creepy it was and the fact that it wasn't an isolated incident. "That's up to the sheriff," he said. "I'll run it by him, but you should definitely try to get some cameras out here, it'll make your job - and ours - easier." He gave Rost a somewhat sympathetic look. The man was an oddball, sure, but it couldn't be easy working out here by himself even without graves getting desecrated. "When we're done here, do you want to make your statement at the station? Get some coffee in you?"
“I will speak with them,” Rost agreed. Really it was all he could do. He couldn’t afford to put cameras up himself or anything. He was pretty sure they wouldn’t do much good -- if whoever was fucking with the graves could do it without being heard, they could probably do it without being seen too. At the question, Rost rubbed his hands over his face and sighed a bit. He didn’t really want to leave the graveyard, but maybe a change of scenery would be good for him. Even if it was the police station. “As long as you are not arresting me,” he said with a faint chuckle.
"I'm not arresting you," Jared promised since he had no reason to do so. Maybe if he later found out that Rost was part of some grand conspiracy to spook the citizens of Point Pleasant he might change his mind but there was nothing suggesting such a thing now. "Might even have some cupcakes left from this afternoon." He gestured at Rost to follow him as he stepped away from the grave. "Let's head to the gate, make sure they know where to go."
Rost cast one more unsure glance at the open hole, then moved to walk with the deputy. It wasn’t like there was much he could do if they came back for more of the corpse, or to take any others. He might as well go to the station. The police would be around for a little while anyway, and that would hopefully deter the trouble makers. That sense of protection would be short-lived, Rost reckoned. He didn’t have a good feeling about any of it, but it was beyond his reach to fix that very night. Might as well have some coffee and cupcakes.