WHERE: St. Luke’s Churchyard, Tutshill, Gloucestershire / A bus stop outside the Butchers, Ottery St. Catchpole.
WHEN: 18.23PM, August 14th, 2002 / 12.07PM, August 14th, 2002.
STATUS: closed / @purkiss
18.23PM, St. Luke’s Churchyard, Tutshill.
The graveyard was surprisingly alive, all things considered.
Full of growing, green things overtaking the stone monuments raised to the dead, sprawling trees and prickly rosebushes and thick moss, chirping insects and birdsong. Fabian had spent the weeks since his release from holding desperately searching for something that was always just out of his reach. It lingered in moments—in Molly’s infrequent laughs, in photographs crowded with ghosts—a glimmer of something that’d he’d thought was familiarity, of timelessness, but now in the shadow of the woods he grew up in, amidst the line of stones that marked the resting places of his ancestors, he knew what it was.
Home. He’d felt it the moment he’d stumbled out of the bus onto the grass verge of the road leading into the village, shaking the stiffness from his shoulders and his knees, and been overwhelmed by the rush of it with his first breath. His feet had found the path before he’d even considered it, Doris’s persistent chatter in his ear drowned out by the rush of blood in his ears as he settled the pair of shovels that had earned them so many looks from their fellow passengers over his shoulder and turned to follow the path that circled the edge of the town and led them to the Churchyard.
It felt inherently wrong, to break the hard earth under which he’d been buried, and yet he did it anyway, the stiff ache of his shoulders and cramped legs ignored as the shovel dug hard into the ground again and again, turning the earth beneath it. His grave had been pristine, twin bunches of wildflowers settled into vases at the double headstone. The words on the epitaph were burned into his bleary eyes as he focused on anything but them, on the pinching skin of his palms, the fiery ache of his arms and the short, sharp huffs of air in his lungs.
This should be hard, he’d decided, but it could have been significantly easier with some help.
He glanced up, sweeping the sweaty tangle of hair back off his forehead and eyed Doris pointedly, too out of breath to even make the argument. “It’ll take—” he held up a hand, panting heavily as he stared down at the progress he’d made before glancing up again, “It’ll take all bloody night at this rate. How do Muggles do this?”
12.07PM, outside the Butchers, Ottery St. Catchpole.
The heat of the midday sun was already sticking his t-shirt (freshly-laundered by Molly’s had, but still, somehow, smelling of the chest it had been stowed away in) to his back, the weight of the shovels balanced carefully against his knee as he lent back into the bench of the bus stop that Janice (flustered and bewildered at being called out on the street) had directed him to stopping the nervous jiggling of his leg. He’d been on the brink of something all day. Unluckily for Ted, that something had insisted he leave for the village by 11.40 at the latest and Arthur’s shed had been convenient.
According to the frenzied correspondence of the week, Doris had been supposed to meet him at midday, at the bus stop, next Wednesday. He only hoped Molly’s owl hadn’t gone astray and that she’d gotten his note that morning. There was a wildness to the buzzing beneath his skin today, the kind of feeling that had always overtaken him when he was on the verge of breaking a big story or standing out in the middle of a thunderstorm. Like nothing in the world could get in his path right now.
The shadow that crawled across him before dropping down onto the bench next to him was the first thing he’d paid any real heed to since slipping one of Arthur’s tools through the lock in the shed behind him. “Bus is running late,” he offered after a moment, distractedly, digging his fingers into the grooves of the seat beneath him. “Janice brought us tickets.”
He wasn’t sure she’d actually offered, but Fabian had been distracted today. He’d try and smoke if there’d been any left in the pack.
Doris would have no clue how severely unprepared she was for a task such as this; she’d learn that later, when she was laboring in exhaustion, stomache growling, over a growing pile of dirt. This was nothing she’d ever done before - and there was no reason, truly, she should have done it before, but this was Doris Purkiss, after all... you couldn’t be too certain of what she’d put herself up to the task of.
She might have been a tad late, in typical Purkiss fashion, due in part to her having to hail what Barb had called a “tack see cab” (she’d been introduced to them on an errands run with Barb, and only knew that they were quite costly), having her driver let her off a few blocks south of her meeting place, and getting caught up by a piece of thin, light parchment which had been floating in the wind past her. Suspicious that it had been a note meant for her (a la the Ministry’s paper planes in lieu of owls), she’d snatched it out of the breeze and spread it open in her palm to scrutinize. Random, printed words in a tidy list and numbers to the far right of each item were under a large title of, “Dickie’s Spirits”. She opted to pocket the paper after deliberating several minutes too long on what the note could mean and at least attempt to meet Fabian before the bus arrived.
She was in luck, it seemed, as she approached her partner-in-crime still waiting patiently for her on a bench. A mixture of spices and iron punctuated the air, aroma drifting towards them in slow wafts as she dropped into the seat beside him. “S’pose that means Janice is good for something.”
The task at hand loomed over them, a dark raincloud threatening lightning. It was possibly one of the heaviest and hardest investigations she’d agreed to, and yet, in spite of it all, she couldn’t help but to feel excited and anticipatory. The end result would do something for them. What that was, she didn’t know, but Merlin was she ready to figure it out.
From a deep pocket in her jeans, she pulled out a flask, took a swig, and passed it along. “Shovels hard to find?”
18:23pm. The (un)resting spot of the Prewetts.
Her forehead fell forward onto her shovel handle, long, low groan emanating from her lips. “’m gonna bet muggles have more than two people shoveling up their graves. And I’d bet they get paid to do it.”
It was about one hour into the bus ride that Doris had realized they were in for a long ride, plagued by the weight of a shovel and antsy legs that yearned to stretch. It was about five minutes into shoveling that she’d realized they were in for a long evening. She would never had said she was unfit, but her arms were certainly not cut out for the repetitive motion of removing heavy dirt from the compacted ground.
“Fabian...” she huffed, heaping more dirt into the pile behind her, “When... if - we make it to your coffin,” another blade-ful of earth, “How are we opening it?” When left to her own devices, left to her thoughts, they began to fester and grow until she’d thought every last thing she could think of. It just so happened that she’d thought of an upcoming dilemma this time. Doris wished she’d sat down and tossed together a list of preparation tactics before they’d left. She’d have, at the very least, worn something a bit looser. The jeans were proving to have been a mistake, as well as the sweatshirt, sleeves now rolled high up her arms in an effort to keep her cool. The only saving graces of the mission was that it would come with answers, and she was beginning to realize that her company wasn’t half bad.
As they dug, Doris thoughts drifted now to the question of what they’d find at the bottom of their hole. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to find. Skeletal remains deepened the question of what am I? - Fabian would undoubtedly launch into an internal crises that she’d be fully incapable of turning around or calming down. On the other hand, no skeletal remains meant they were still built from their own bones, which implied a level of humanity they still had, but then raised the question of how their bones found them once again, and if other future Returned would already have empty resting places.
