Who: Dan and ? Where: Close to Ingouf Village When: Night, April 15 into 16 What: Ghosts Warning: Ghosts and how some of them died?
There were ghosts in Ingouf. Of course there were ghosts, they were always there no matter where Dan went. Sometimes he got lucky and they didn't notice him, and he'd get to watch them go about their routines. Sometimes they wanted to chat, like when they showed up in his dreams and visions. And sometimes they really weren't that friendly towards him, or they wanted to feed. Luckily, Ingouf had none of the unfriendly ghosts.
There was the guy down by the water, looking for something amongst the rocks. His back was full of arrows, so it wasn't too hard to guess how he'd died. There was a young woman and a tiny baby who he always saw sitting outside one of the buildings. Dan was no doctor, and his area of work tended towards the other end of people's lives, but he was pretty sure that the baby was a newborn. Again, not hard to work out what had happened, but it was heartbreaking all the same. The woman was one of the ghosts that seemed more aware of what the living folk were doing, and she would always watch Dan when they walked past. There were a few other warriors with clearly fatal wounds, one of them with an axe wedged firmly and deeply into his left shoulder, a couple of kids who looked sick but ran about the place, and an old old lady with long white braids. She was the most real out of all of the ghosts, and Dan knew she wanted to talk to him, just... not yet. But there were two ghosts he had yet to see.
His wife, and his father-in-law.
Brenna had died in this time. She hadn't died in the village, he knew that, but were the ties to this place enough to pull her back? Ghosts didn't have to stay where they'd died, after all. Mrs Massey and Horace Derwent had found him in Florida, after all, which was nowhere near the Overlook. So Brenna might be here. And Magnus? Would he be here, protecting his family even now? Yes, Brenna and Astrid had a lot of brothers, but they were all Magnus's kids. He knew Bryn would drag herself through hell and back for her children, and he couldn't imagine that Magnus would do anything less.
The longer they stayed in Ingouf, the more Dan felt the need to go and find out what he could about them. They might simply be ghosts that tried to go through a routine, like the guy on the beach, or they might be more aware, like the young mother and the old lady.
Dan lay in bed beside Brenna, staring up at the underside of the roof while she slept. Not sleeping was nothing new for him, but tonight felt different for some reason. So he pressed a kiss to Brenna's bare shoulder, slipped out of bed and pulled his clothes and boots back on, and then he went outside. There were no clouds so he could see well enough, and he let his feet lead the way. He'd find himself where he needed to be once he reached the right place, he knew.