Script (The Sentinel - gen, 2150 words)
Okay, a last-minute scramble, but I have something to offer for the Spook Me Multi-Fandom Ficathon. The prompt was a picture of Ye Classic Olde Horror Story Grimoire, and I admit I only used it for a starting place and went off the track more than a little...
This was also written to fit (if with a pinch, because it's larger than normal :) the sentinel_thurs prompt "read" from earlier this year. Hey, Blair and old books in any condition always work for me.
Script
They are just a pile of grimy, crumpled pages, ripped from a very old book sometimes long ago and printed in uneven, ugly type. In the margins, between the lines and sometimes even across the printed words was handwriting, faint, spidery and at the same time almost... slithery. Very hard to read, even if I wanted to read it.
I don't want to.
I also didn't want Sandburg to from the start, but try to explain that without telling him why, telling him that I don't think the writing's... quite...
Dead?
Sandburg thinks they will help him with the background to his dissertation, and that they're about Sentinels, and that's all he needs to know to get obsessed.
They were given to him a couple of weeks ago by 'a friend' at the University. Funny, in all his chatter I suffer through, I can't recall him ever telling me who this friend is or even how long he's known her. But I've seen her, oh yeah: pale and abstracted, somewhat gaunt, stick-insect-thin and somehow utterly unmemorable, she comes and goes and three minutes after she goes, it takes a real effort to even remember her name or what she looks like.
I haven't actually asked Sandburg if he remembers, because I don't want him to start worrying about whether Sentinels lose their memories or their minds as they get older. And he would, I know it. He's Sandburg.
Mind you, he's also not chattering as much these last couple of weeks since he started what he calls a serious study of the pages. I also can't remember what it's about or why it’s so important, something to do with building a Sentinel history and witch trials and spells and 17th century something or other and... hey, I admit it, I zoned out when he was explaining it. Now of course I damn well wish I hadn't, even if none of it made a lot of sense at the time, or would make sense now.
But anyway, this friend gave him the pages, said the rest of the book was lost... long ago, she didn't know how long, but long long ago, but these thirty-odd pages had been saved. She didn't know who wrote the book, or ripped it apart, or scribbled the notes all over these few pages. Or if she did, she didn't tell Sandburg.
I don't know what it's about, and don't really want to. All I know if that I could swear that sometimes, when I catch a glimpse of it from the corner of my eye, from across the room or on the stairs... I can see the letters moving, shifting, stretching slightly in a slow, skitterish, vaguely unclean way, sliding under Sandburg's forefinger as he reads.
And I could swear that sometimes, just sometimes, when he's been working on them too long, and I get too near and bend too close... he looks up, and from the pages and on his skin I catch a faint whiff of something stale, soiled, like dirt and mould.
Sandburg says they're important. He says he needs them. He doesn't know that when he finally gives up and goes to bed, I take them and lock them in my gun safe, and then get them out again in the bright light of morning before he wakes. I just don't want them lying around. I don't want to try and explain that, either, but I do it every damn night.
Because he's working on them every damn night. He says she says that she won't need them back, that she's more than happy to give them to him, just as she was given them by someone who died when she was Sandburg's age, and who was given them, and who... I get the picture. I don't like it, I just get it.
The only good thing about it is that Sandburg? - he honestly doesn't want them as a gift, which - from what he tells me - surprises her as much as it does me. He honestly just wants to get the work done and hand them back. Which is a good thing because I don't want them in the house any longer than necessary, and if I had my way, they'd be in the trash tomorrow. Today. Hell, three weeks ago when this all started.
Because I could also swear that they feel... cold and dank under my hand, the scrawl of handwriting even icier so I can trace the lettering (that I can't read) with my fingers. I know that Sentinel touch is Sandburg-could-tell-me-how-unhumanly sensitive, but somehow, I don't think it's all down to that, or even the imagination I don't really even have. The writing feels... not quite dead. Doesn't make sense, I get that, paper and ink isn't exactly alive but... not quite dead is the only way I can explain it.
I know, I know, if I could explain it to anyone, it would and should be Sandburg. I get that. But somehow... well, maybe I don't want to hear what he thinks it all says about me. Or that's my excuse.
That and the fact that he's not exactly... well. Not sick as such, but I know him far too well, and he's looking paler, his face hollowing out slightly, eyes bigger and darker and shadowed like he's not really sleeping even when he does get to bed. One morning he says he had this odd, bad dream about skittering, slithering things in the darkness, but somehow I don't think it’s the first dream, only the first he remembers.
His hands shake a little around his coffee mug, or a pen; he moves a little slower, more sluggishly. His voice loses something, its life and color, and is tired, somehow faded. He doesn't even talk to himself when he's working - it's sadly true I’ve had to learn to tune him out over time but that makes it worse because now it's a silence I'm not used to. And in that silence I could swear that late at night or in the dark hours of the morning, I can hear it: thready, tangled scraps of soft, scratchy, barely subliminal sound, like voices whispering in languages I somehow know no one speaks anymore.
I could swear I can taste a sickness in the air.
I hate that I don't know what to do. I know what I'm seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling.... thinking doesn't make any sense, and would make even less if I tried to tell Sandburg, even if I could get him to stop reading and rereading and re-rereading, and look at me and see me and listen to me the way he always has, the way he doesn't these last couple of weeks, because he's too abstracted, like she...
Damn. Now I've thought of that, I can't stop thinking about it. Pale. Abstracted. Thin and getting thinner. Both of them.
Sandburg comes in late one day, white and shaken and horrified, and tells me she's dead. No one knows why, they talk about psycho-stuff and depression, vague illnesses getting worse, no eating or sleeping or...
And then, in the dark places in my mind, I can see the words moving under her ageing non-Sentinel eyes as she spent her life reading and rereading them. I can smell the dirt like an old graveyard on her skin and on her breath. I can feel them cold and twisting under her skeletal-thin, shaking fingers. I can hear the thready, wind-soft sounds like unknown words in unknown voices around her unhearing head.
She didn't know. Sandburg doesn't know. Hell, I don't know, I only feel, but isn't that what my senses are for? And unlike the woman whose name I can't even recall, unlike whoever was before her, Sandburg has me and my senses and my need to protect him, even from things I can only feel.
I don't know what to do, but I'm gonna do it anyway.
In a bad horror movie, I know, this would be when Sandburg and I search for the book the pages came from, and find the evil lurking in them, and find a way to get rid of it: his brains, my brawn. This would be when we find out - to our cost or not, bad horror goes both ways - what it was that created the evil and why it does what it does to people. This is when we have to fight for his soul...
But damn it, Blair's soul is safe in my keeping, it has to be, and I am... well, who I am. Bad horror movies were never my thing. Guns and explosions and doing things the simple way, that's more like me.
Sandburg goes to the funeral and then spends a couple of hours at the wake with her friends - or at least, with his friends who know her as well, and remember her as much, as he did, but might make the effort to remember.
Or not.
He's back after just a few hours and I can swear, non-Sentinel that he is, he feels the difference even as he walks in.
"Hey Jim," and his voice is still tired but hey, there's that spark, a fitful touch of life back at once, "where did those papers I was working on get to? I could have sworn I left them..."
"Sorry, Chief, they must've been thrown out with the trash this morning -"
"What? But -"
"We were both pretty out of it last night." Well, he was. "Doubt we can get them back now, were they that important?"
"Yes! I mean, man..." Sandburg stops, his brow furrows, and he seems to think about it. I just hope he doesn't mean that yes, because not only the old pages and their handwritten notes are gone, but every scrap, every paper, every word of his work on them as well. "Umm... I think it was, I really did a lot of work on them, had some brilliant stuff on the historical background to Sentinels and links between heightened senses, witchcraft and the early witch trials, it was, was... like maybe not brilliant, but good."
"You can rewrite it, can't you?" No he can't, I'll made sure of it. Somehow.
"Probably... most. Some... not much." He shakes his head as if to clear it. "Damn, it's all a bit muzzy, I remember reading it, all of it, once or twice -"
Or more. Much more.
"-But now I'm having trouble remembering. It was good, pretty good. Well, some of it was. My own fault, I guess, I know I haven't felt quite..."
"Yeah. I noticed."
"Damn it, Jim," and Sandburg flops on the couch, looking up at me with eyes that are still ringed with exhaustion, but only exhaustion. "I was going to give them back to her, you know. Just a few more days to get the last of the transliteration done, then I was definitely... they were real historical documents, you know? But they sort of... gave me the creeps."
I know. I'm just surprised that he knew too, but then I remember - he really wanted to give them back.
"Really. It was mostly rather vague now I think about it, nothing all that good. I guess." His eyes are closed, his voice fuzzing over with weariness; carefully, from the corner of my eye, I watch his body (thin, but not yet nearly as thin as she was) relax into stillness. "I'll think about it some more... tomorrow, okay?"
I watch him slide into what I only hope is honest rest. It seems I did the right thing, even if I didn't know what the right thing was. After all, I'm just a simple cop, I don't think too hard like Sandburg and people like him. I went with what I felt, took the pages out of the house, out somewhere remote that I'll never tell him about, shot them up, then burnt the remains to ashes.
It all just felt like the right thing to do. Looking at Sandburg asleep, and appreciating the quiet, the stillness, the fresh, sweet air, the clean feel of nothing on my skin, I'm still pretty sure it was. Though try and explain that without telling him why...? No.
And okay, I admit to myself as I head up the stairs to bed, taking the ashes and then dumping them on her grave while he was at the wake was probably overkill; I don't know for sure that she knew whatever it was she was doing to him when she tried to offload the pages on him, and in some ways I guess I can't blame her for wanting to offload them, but it was Sandburg she did it to.
So what if I gave them back to her for eternity?
-the end-
The picture is here if anyone is interested :)