2020-02-01 - We're meant to be...
Beth suffers through the obsessions of a veil creature that she linked her mind to - Part of the plot No love like what I give: https://gray-harbor.com/plot/23
IC Date: 2020-02-01
OOC Date: 2019-09-26
Location: Spruce/Lawson Funeral Home
Related Scenes: 2020-01-29 - Why can't you acknowledge what we have? 2020-02-01 - Help Freely Given 2020-02-16 - I'm Burnin' For You
Plot: None
Scene Number: 3795
It is evening. The last of the mourners have left after a Visitation, and Beth is locking the front doors of the funeral home. She turns around and walks into the visitation room to put Mrs. Rodriguez up for the night. Some may be unnerved to be alone with a corpse but she has spend almost as much time alone with them as she has with the living. She looks over Mrs. Rodriguez's face carefully, taking great care in ensuring she looks good, before she leans in to smooth a flyaway down on the elderly woman's forehead that must have happened from a loved one bending in to give her one last kiss on her cool forehead. After ensuring she doesn't have a lipstick mark on her forehead from a possible kiss she reaches over to close the casket for the night.
Sickly pale, points of jaundiced light in the shadows peer from the gloom as the lid comes down. A flash of sagging gray flesh? Or a simple trick of the light. Pressure builds within the room, and with it a sensation not of malice - Longing. But it's wrong. Like an offset of symmetry that catches the eye but does not quite reveal itself. A heartbeat with a murmur. A sigh with a subtle rasp.
The sight is gone but a rush of air slips over skin - not reassuringly warm, or refreshingly cool. It's something next door, but it leaves a gentle damp in its wake. Cloying
Beth startles and whips her head around quickly when she thinks she sees a glimpse of the monster that murdered the woman in the house on Sycamore the days before. Nothing. Clearly she is imagining things. Still, she can't help but feel watched. She looks around the Visitation room before she walks towards the door. Normally she would flip off the lights but she's spooked so she leaves them on. She starts towards her office. Her heart is beating so loudly she can hear it in her ears.
Minutes pass with Beth in her office, blessedly quiet, but it also smacks of unnatural. Something like thick fog that smothers noise. There is no light showing from the viewing room the next time she looks up. There is an absence of light and sound. A piece of the world cut away like construction paper that doesn't exist because it's not being observed. But there is a smell. Sweet. With a tang that lingers in the back of the throat... Embalming fluid?
Beth spends those few minutes turning on her laptop and filling out paperwork in silence. It is the eeriness of it all that makes her look up from her work. Normally she would hear cars passing on the street outside and there would be more light. She sniffs when that smell hits her. She knows what embalming fluid smells like, of course. It shouldn't smell like that up here. She puts her pen down and stands up from her desk.
The silence thickens, rather than grows, like hearing through a glass pressed to a door. Where the clearest sound is one's heartbeat, and breathing. But there is an offset in the breathing, like an echo from speaks set up but out of sync. A split second accompanying sound.
Beth standing causes a thrill in the air, pins and needles, goose flesh, the rise of the hairs on one's neck when they're sure that there is about to be a crowd shouting 'Surprise!' as they leap from behind the furniture.
Beth's heart begins to race again. This doesn't feel right. Nothing feels right. "Who is there?!" She calls out into the empty funeral home. She reaches down to grab her purse and leave. Her parents live a few blocks away. She'll just walk to their house and make her dad come and check the funeral home. Or maybe she won't because she doesn't want her dad around this.
She starts for the door with quick strides her hands fumbling with her keys to hold them between her knuckles like terrified women often do.
What is that in the air? Dismay? It feels like there is that shake in the air, like someone screaming, but despair over rage. Something slams and the air is clear once more. The sounds of traffic, wind over snow drifts, and then another slam, another. Doors. Lids. Scratching like nails dragging sounding on the other side of the door.
<FS3> Beth rolls Composure: Good Success (8 7 7 7 5 5 4 2) (Rolled by: Portal)
Beth manages not to scream at those slams despite the fact that her heart is nearly in her throat. She flinches at each one, rooted in the spot for a moment, before the scratching begins. She is panting as she reaches out to sense what is beyond the door. What is scratching?
It's familiar and as she reaches out there is a breadth of warm and hot desire that would put lusty teenagers in the midst of a hormonal storm to shame.
Looooooooooooooverrrrr… purrs in the air, wet and crackling like meat turning to char in a cast iron - an attempt to sound inviting, endearing, but it's too much. It's far too much, and it's corrupting itself, feeding itself. The room feels warmer and the scent of embalming fluid is joined with something like mildew and blood.
Beth lets out a sob of despair as her worst fears are confirmed. It did follow her. For a brief moment she is paralyzed in fear. Unable to move and yet her legs tremble and she feels weak with fear. "Snap out of it." She whispers to herself. And then another whisper, "Move stupid bitch."
She formulates a plan. Get to the garage. Get into the hearse. Drive like mad. Get the fuck out of here.
Then she forces herself to move. Her legs are still weak as she runs towards the viewing room to the door leading to the garage.
"Don't go!" the voice again, but no longer part of the air, a corruption in atmosphere. It calls, weak from the visiting room "Please... I got you... Come...**" eyes in the dark. Those eyes, mournful with a face only hinted at by the soft light.
"Lover... you heard me... You understood... you. We. Connected" there's a wet sound, like a tap dripping.
Beth is sprinting and when she hears that voice right in the room she was dashing into she nearly falls over her heels. She grabs the tall table where pamphlets about Mrs. Rodriguez's life and funeral service have been left and spills them onto the floor. "No!" She shouts so loud that the volume surprises her. "I don't want you! You're bad! You're a murderer!" She takes a step back out of the Visitation room, thinking to turn and run out the door.
Speakers, at her computer, any in the visiting area, they scratch and music trills out, voices singing of twilight and love crooning even as Beth's words draw out a sob. "But... But you reached. You found me. You reached for me and I took your hand!" the eyes glittering in the dark and a wet sound rushes out with the voice.
"This is... it must be. I'm not bad. I had to! We had to be together. They couldn't SEE... they couldn't FEEL... But I loved them... Oh I love you... I love you to the end... Beettttthhhhh…" the name savored, like sweet water on a parched tongue.
<FS3> Beth rolls Mental: Great Success (6 6 6 6 6 5 1 1) (Rolled by: Portal)
"To make you stop!" Beth cries out, as annoyed as she is terrified at this point even though she knows there's no point to talking to it. She shouts over the Platters, "I just wanted you to stop hurting her! You're a fucking murderer!" She is going to die. She needs to run. She needs to vanish. She continues backing out of the doorway to the visitation room and as she backs out she crafts an illusion to blend herself into her surroundings.
"NO! NNNOOOOOOO!" the darkness in the visitation room evaporates and with it the obfuscation of what has happened.
Mrs. Rodriguez is up, the split of the dress used to clothe the body drifting like flames. The rods meant for pallbearers to hold while carrying the casket torn free and driven through the small of the body's back to emerge in a V beneath her chin, propping the head up. A grin pushed into her flesh, and pinned there by black slivers and peeled back eyelids allow eyes clouding from dust scratches on the desiccating orbs to stare blankly in a mad harlequin smile.
The ribs are bent, not broken, in a graceful set of sweeps - the sternum gone, the lungs laying in a heap on the floor where the rods are thrust and the embalming fluid pools. Her heart is held up on bits of bone and sinew, a display and a letter hangs in her stiffened fingers, which are folded at the dead woman's waist.
"I DID IT FOR YOU!"
<FS3> Beth rolls Mental: Good Success (8 8 8 5 4 3 3 2) (Rolled by: Portal)
Beth puts her hands over her mouth to suppress a scream of horror that threatens to rip from her lips and give herself away. Fearful tears roll down her cheeks. She holds her hands there to keep it all in. She wants to live. She keeps to keep her wits about her if she wants to live.
She crafts an illusion of the door to the garage where the hearse is being open. Like she just slipped out of it. Then she turns to run towards the front door.
It appears , from the shadow and slams into the door of the garage that isn't really open. Sickly, gray, slick and shriveled. It slaps wetly against the door and screeches a sound like heartache. That mournful keening. Fists slamming again and again on the door until it snaps and bursts to flinders.
"NO! NO! DON'T RUN AWAY!*" it falls to its knees sobbing black ichor down it's cheeks. "You're supposed to love me.**"
As she makes her way out the front, it fades, leaving a thickened moisture on the floor where she knelt.
Just as the monster slams into the garage door Beth slips out of the front door. She runs hard towards her small suv parked in the parking lot. It is unlocked with the keys still in her hand and she climbs in the driver's seat. The keys are inserted into the ignition and she throws it into reverse before hitting the gas petal. It's jerky and frantic, but she manages to get backed up very quickly. She reaches down to throw it into drive and punches the gas.
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