I spend some days watching, but mostly I wait. Rhys and Regelus keep to themselves, their movements languid and slow reflecting the years that we have to wait until we are needed. Rest and solitude are harder to come by on the days that lead swiftly to the end. Rhys and Regelus are adept at their skill and know when to begin preparations even before the clouds shift. The trees that line the walk up to the house are creaking and breaking as I write this. Yesterday my brothers and I gathered the wood needed to build the scaffolds to hold the body. Today I hear their hammer strikes as they build ever higher. I’ve seen the catacombs once before, when the bodies had yet to be entered, and that was enough for me. The image still hangs in my mind and each cleaning is recalled to me.
The scaffolds looked much like the skeletons of the animals my brothers hunted. The empty slots that would soon be filled with bodies gaped and the vast expanse of dusty dirt floor spread out around them. In the center of the cavern is a fire place, often my brothers need light to keep away the animals and to continue their work into the early evening. I am sure now that the scaffolds reach nearly out to the center of the room and that the ceilings are barely visible. The walls that were once bare and rocky are no doubt smooth and lined with skeletons and fresh corpses. Rhys often tries to tell me about their work, about the catacombs, but I always stop him. Maybe it is the fear of the unknown that keeps me from venturing there, if that is the case then I shall never know for I will not let him educate me.
They won’t be returning until the scaffoldings are finished. I weep at the thought that the village below us will once again be bare and that our actions will usher in a new wave of victims. The bodies in the catacombs rise so high as to touch the ceiling, with nothing but thin slabs of wood separating them. I know that the future tenants of the town will someday find the remnants of corpses beneath the town; I only hope that he plague is on its way by then so that fear doesn’t grip them too tightly. Several years ago I found a small piece of parchment among the wreckage of the village courthouse, scrawled in cramped letter was a name, Tobias Dent. Those two words brought life and vitality to my surroundings. All the years that I’d spent until that day meant nothing. The men and women that I helped clear from the streets of the town suddenly became more than corpses.
2: The Rushing
With the shifting of the clouds comes the inevitable panic of the people. Though the clouds change often, one can tell it is different. Our small hamlet, so very peaceful every other time of the year, descends into chaos and order is lost. The animals sense the change first, scattering to the forests as far from the people as possible. The clouds grow heavy with darkness and the smell of the sea is masked by the foulness from the mountains. The fruit falls from the trees and the crops shrivel in the fields. The villagers go indoors earlier each night and it seems as though for certain the village is already dead. The death comes swiftly to those that are marked and the change in the air is palpable. If all goes according to the timeline of the sickness, we should start seeing corpses by the end of the week. With any luck they will remain within the limits of the village so the cleaning will be a bit easier.
The first act of each and every village without fail is to look to the man or woman that deems themselves ruler. After the ruler fails to produce an answer to their plight, the villagers often rid themselves of the burden of government. With no definite ruler or order, the people resort to whatever means necessary to stay alive. The fires have been burning at the village gates for hours now, as if by some miracle they may stave off the fear. I think they know something is coming. The lights that burn through the night on the hearthstones of the people have been extinguished and several families have gone. The ones that stay are either braver than their others or crave the release that death may bring. The fear that they feel simply drives them to the edge of their tolerance. They can no longer stay within the confines of reason and often decide that they should take matters into their own hands.
Rhys came back just this morning from the catacombs, meaning that the scaffolds are ready and the deaths are just hours away. I know no what this wave brings, all I know is that two days ago a man from the village walled himself up inside his house. I suppose one could call this fear, or insanity. Another man climbed into one of the stoves and locked the door, only to be turned to ash hours later by an unsuspecting baker warming his stoves. The panic spreads quickly among a town so close knit. The few that come before the general outbreak are like fire starters; they do one thing that changes the feeling of the entire town, sending it into utter chaos. The crowds that were once silently fearful descend into panic and the fear builds so that each and every person in the town fears the other, but what’s more is that they fear the rest of the world.
The fires as the north gate burn low and the men and women stoke them. The bodies of the dead serve for firewood, apparently some died without our knowledge. They burn the makeshift pyres to keep us out, for it is the belief of the people that we are the cause of the sickness. The first day of the six that ends in the death of the village started today. Seven villagers were accused of having killed the children of the village and were as a result hanged. Those watching felt a wave of guilt immediately after letting the innocent die; several of the villagers cried out as their last breath fell from their lips and the crowds descended into chaos. The men and women that had sentenced their fellows to death realized the price of their actions and the eventual coming of the consequences. Their hearts break as the necks crack before them and they are again driven mad by their fear.
As the lights of the fire waned, the villagers’ screams rang out and my brothers and I readied for the end. The night of the first day serves to make the presence of something sinister known to the people of the village below. The second day broke and the discovery of twelve villagers dead in their beds was made public. Though I was not present at the pronouncing, the worried conversations of the coroners drifted up to the castle. The faces of the dead were contorted in pain according to one account. According to another the hearts of the afflicted had burst. The ladder of the two seemed plausible as fear has a way of over stressing the human heart. I suppose that they took one of the bodies apart to see the explosion but perhaps they just decided that the hearts must not be whole. This village in particular is a much more inquisitive group of villagers than any other.
Regelus is growing restless and curses the length of the sickness. Rhys grows dreamy and spends much of his days thinking of a life away from this castle. I grow weary of their constant musings, and long for the last day of the sickness so that they might fall back into their quiet reverie. The third day came quietly, not at all like the two before; twenty of the villagers had crept away in the night to a burrow in the forest to goad a bear into ending their suffering. I have no recollection of their screams during the night, but that isn’t to say that they didn’t regret facing their fear in the end. It seems to me that it was those men and women that wanted to face their fears head on in life cowered in the village while those that seemed as if they would spend their whole lives searching for safety goaded a bear. I do hope that they died quickly but I sincerely doubt it.
Rhys and Regelus surveyed the layout of the village from one of the upmost turrets this morning; they always do this in time to create an effective plan for clearing the streets in the least amount of time. The sweep generally starts on the south side of the city, sweeping north toward our castle, this time it will be no different. They follow the road toward the north gate of the town, stopping ever so often to dump a load of corpses on the wagon that goes to the catacombs. I follow closely behind them, sketching the buildings and charting the number of the dead. The third day always marks the countdown until the first day of our cleaning for soon the sickness will end and the dead will need tending. We watch from above, the whispered stories of the villagers making their way to us so that we might prepare for the carnage that awaits us.
The fourth day was filled again with screams as houses sho
t up in flame and people fought invisible demons in the street. The largest numbers of the dead tend to pile up on the fifth day as the sixth is reserved for stragglers and hangers on, as per tradition, this town followed the pattern. At least a hundred bodies piled up on the street and the last few living souls fearing reanimation, hacked many of them to bits in order to prevent their coming back. My ledgers are ready and the ink founts have been filled. The fifth day brought the death of the last woman, who raved and railed against the men that tried to help her until finally breaking her own neck in a fence. Had I not seen her do it herself I would not have believed that the killing twist came at her own hand. I will relate the story now and even though it has been quite some time since I witnessed the event, it still sticks out in my mind.
She wailed so that I was drawn to the window to see by what means the creature issuing the noise was being tortured. Her hair flew wildly about her face and the dress that she wore swung wildly about her knees. Her anger was ill aimed at the men that tried to hold her, to prevent her hurting herself. She hurled profanities this way and that against the men that were doing their best to restrain her. As she beat her hands wildly about her person, one of the men caught her fist just below his left eye. He promptly released her, damning her to hell, while the other man, presumably her son held her fast. It was a knee to the groin that finally released her from his grips and she ran full tilt toward the fence around the home she was in front of. Her eyes bulged and she tried to climb through the stiff wooden slats, catching the hem of her dress on a wayward root protruding from the ground beneath her.
The men again tried to help her as she thrashed and convulsed before the final snap of bone was heard and her body went limp. She had become tangled so as to make removal impossible and a sheet was thrown over her corpse that was left to hang until the fence could be dismantled. Her corpse still hangs there between the third and fourth rung of split pine waiting for the end so that we may take her to her final resting place. The sixth day found the last three men crucifying a corpse in an effort to create a modern day Christ that might save them. Shortly after they realized that the limp corpse was not their savior, they bludgeoned one another to death beneath the sagging visage. We watched, as we do, until the sun of the seventh day broke and the dust settled. Rhys and Regelus rounded up their barrows and I tucked my satchel beneath my arm. Our duty has begun and shall continue for seven days to follow.
3: The Holding
The trip to the south side of town is the hardest. This is the time when the corpses still lay where they fell and the stench still lingers in the air around the town. The bodies are much fewer this time around, as the fears of the living drove them to the destruction of dozens of corpses. This extreme dismemberment made the corpses seem to double. I counted the beds in the houses first, after Rhys and Regelus cleared the bodies that filled them, and then compared their number to that of the corpses that came from each house. The majority of my calculations rely on the number of beds and corpses. Neither Rhys nor Regelus have a head for records, so the responsibility falls to me. I am a librarian of lives, guiding each and every one to its respective end. They are the pages in my books, the names in my mind, and the faces in my dreams. I cannot match the faces to the names or the numbers to the bodies that were once living but I am certain that their visages will haunt me each time that I decide to close my eyes.
I fulfill my duty happily; glad to be spared of the gore that paints Rhys and Regelus from head to toe by the end of the day. I revel in the fact that my dresses have endured these last few years with little but dust besmirching their delicate brocade. Rhys and Regelus have clothes that have been designated for the cleaning, which consequently go into the flames with the bodies and the remnants of buildings on the last day of the cleaning. Their rust colored hair is plastered to their foreheads by the end of the day with a mixture of sweat and blood and their glistening blue eyes become as dull and lifeless as the corpses they must carry. Their countenance becomes grizzled and their patience grows short. The time that it takes to move the corpses drains them both physically and mentally so that by the end of the cleaning they are listless for months.
I watch, the green of my eyes glinting in the sun as Rhys has described it, and I wait. I watch as their broad forms sweep up and down the streets hauling bodies here and there, and I watch as Rhys bends low to set the kindling for the burning. Regelus, though more weary of the task than either of us know, waits patiently as Rhys and I strive to complete what must be done before any of us can move on. His patient demeanor affords us the small bit of grace that we need to be able to continue on in what we do. Though by the end of the cleaning we have seen far too much of one another, the days spent ensuring that another society will form bring us closer than anything. We are one in our mission to damn yet another village to death that we may never experience for ourselves. I’ve thought once or twice of doing what Daphene did, of taking my destiny into my own hands, but my brothers keep me here.
Rhys is a bit slower than Regelus, taking care to gaze into the eyes of each and every body that he personally places on the wagon. I’ve often asked him why he feels the need to do this, the closest thing to an answer that I’ve ever been given is that he is checking to make sure that they are dead. The time passes quickly as we work and though I spend only the first day in the town with my brothers, I can tell by the look in their eyes upon their arrival back at the castle at sunset just how difficult their task was. I know it seems that it should be dangerous to leave so many corpses so as to work by the light of the day, never once have the bodies been discovered while we worked, never once have our movements been detected. Our stealth has grown with the years and we have learned to alter our movements according to need. We are like the phantoms that they equate us with.
It is much easier for the boys to find what they are looking for, my task is a bit more complex. No matter what era we are in or how wholly the sickness destroys the town, one can always find the center of power. Many times, the centers are churches and the basis from my records come from baptisms and marriages, this time however there existed a small town hall that contained all the information I needed. The town hall stood, still stands for that matter, at the center of a vast courtyard in the roman style that upon my crossing was still speckled with the blood and carnage left over from the corpses. The paving stones, bathed in blood, were slippery beneath my feet and twice I nearly toppled into the pools of blood that welled there. The huts and houses about me were covered in the bloody handprints of those that died trying to gain entry or escape.
No building save for the town hall is clear of these bloody markings. Left unattended by the masses, the hall stands clear of any blood, the windows are still bolted tightly and the door was secured in its frame. I walked around the expanse of the building twice before entering, making sure to see that the windows had not been breeched, that the likelihood of life within was small. I checked it thus for once before many centuries ago, one woman held fast in the center of the town, the building to which I needed to gain entry. She was so near death when we found her that she died of fright when the sunlight from the mid July morning struck her in the face. She cowered in the coroner for a moment before her life sputtered out, but the scene none the less shook me, so now I check for life before I begin my looking.
The halls of the small, musky building were vacant; records hadn’t seemed to mean that much to the men and women in the days leading to their deaths. Doors were still firmly bolted and the windows pulled tight, and one by one I busted them in my search for the records room. They were in the last two rooms of the building. One room held the birth and marriage records, the other held the death certificates. I remember that it seemed funny to me that even though they were doomed to die themselves, the people of the village were so careful to keep a clear distinction between life and death. I think lightly to myself that this shall be as every cleaning before; the records will be poorly kept as mortals are likely to do, and
I will be set with righting them.
I poured through the birth records first, the room of life, and bundled them tightly together before stuffing them into the satchel at my side. Next I pulled the book or marriages and nestled it in among the nest of already pilfered papers. I never liked doing my work among the dead places and my brothers would soon be burning the buildings to disguise the death. I crossed the hall quickly to the room of death, noticing as I pulled the file from its shelf that though it was small, it was soon to grow. Out of habit or fear of who knows what, I glanced about me, taking in the smell of musky pages and dust. It smelled of the years that the records had collected. Though the time of the village was short lived, in the one hundred years until now, history had collected here. It always did. With the new villagers came their history from the lives they had lived until then.
Soon the remnants of the town would be gone and the only proof that it had ever existed would rest within me and my ability to chronicle the past. The buildings would be ash and the corpses would be safely tucked away in the mountains around us and all that would be left of their lives would belong to me. The importance of my duty seemed far grander to me than it ever had to my brothers. Had they been given their way the bodies of the dead along with the buildings and the records would have gone up in smoke without a second thought. They never cared for dates or figures or even remembering for that matter; many times they had to be reminded of birthdays and years gone past. The idea unsettled me in the least when it was first proposed during the weeks following the first sickness. I wanted badly to leave the bodies as a warning to the villagers to come, I wanted to go to the people that came to the village and tell them that death was all they could hope for here.
The Crypt Keepers Page 3
