Chapter Text
PRELUDE
23rd of September, 1875
On the banks of the Mississippi sat the town of Clementine.
In summertime, the wilderness surrounding it was humid and sticky. Early autumn was not dissimilar, the air heavy with wet dirt, magnolia blossoms, and the brackish water. Beetles droned and cypress trees lined the waterways, reflecting duck-egg skies and rolling clouds.
Wind rustled the grass and milkweeds. Time passed with languid cadence, much as the townsfolk did on sultry, autumn days. Everything moved slower this side of the river. Like molasses, oppressive and sweet, not in a rush to get anywhere at all.
Clementine itself was small but affluent.
Limewashed buildings dripped with Spanish moss, weighing down upon the sagging earth beneath them. Mansions lined the county’s outskirts, gated with wrought-iron fences. It was an idyllic marriage of rural charm and old money, an escape for those worn-weary of city living.
Most Sunday mornings, Clementine was a peaceful mimicry of the life the townsfolk had tried to escape. Church bells rather than the rushed clatter of hooves and gossip to replace the pound of polished shoes. When the pastor's sermon ended, most residents would take a basket to the riverbanks and picnic in leisurely sunshine until twilight fell.
But this Sunday, Clementine was void of life.
There were no bells. No excited titter of ladies in dresses, hair pinned away from sweaty napes. There was no one in the Moreau house, a forgotten cup of tea cooling on the porch. The dentist’s door creaked like the crooked branches of the hickory trees that shaded empty streets.
The polished floorboards of each mercantile was warm with footsteps, fading in the absence of their creators. Each magnificent home was abandoned. Open windows danced with flickering, lace curtains. At the centre of the town the church doors opened to a skeleton of empty pews.
Not one of Clementine’s three-hundred residents were in the chapel. They were all over the hill, watching the Phantomhive mansion burn to the ground.
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Paint bubbled like white magma.
Soot billowed upward from the mansion and fell to the earth like sour snow. The pillars of the largest, most admired house in the county blackened beneath the lash of a hot, red tongue.
The townsfolk gathered at the feet of the decaying mansion. The men cooled their faces with their hats. The women batted air over their noses with lace fans. Many watched bare-foot, in too much of a rush to care for burdens such as shoes. Half-pinned hair and unlaced dresses rustled in the wind as they all looked on in horror.
The mansion belonged to the richest family in town, none of which could be accounted for amongst the crowd. The realisation began in whispers. Where is the lady of the house? Where are the children? The words came just as softly as the ash-warm breeze.
The mansion belonged to the richest family in town, none of whom could be accounted for amongst the crowd. Nor the household staff. Griggs was nowhere near the gate. Nobody had seen Baptiste leave the stables. Someone had laid a body on the lawn beneath a horse blanket. Another rested near the carriage path, boots protruding beneath a soot-black tarp. Women clutched one another and cried, the realisation spreading in whispers.
And those whispers devolved into panic, a ripple of discontent. A woman fainted, her dress crumpling in a scene of rosewood silk and pearls. That was the sight Clementine’s sole undertaker arrived to as he made his way toward the front of the crowd.
Adrian never bothered with Sunday finery.
Therefore, he was the most aptly dressed, rolling up the sleeves of his crisp shirt. He watched smoke lift to the heavens, struck dumb. There were no words for such a spectacle and when Adrian gasped, his throat peppered and he coughed.
The ashes of the Phantomhive family would rain down on Clementine for months to come, like powdered sugar over beignets. Adrian flinched as a window burst into a million shards. His heart did something similar, his grief like an internal bleed that trickled into his stomach.
His thoughts were interrupted by a click as the sheriff pushed tobacco past his teeth.
“Lord have mercy,” Mayfield exhaled. “I’ve never seen the like of this. Looks like Hell itself.”
Adrian cut him a glance, his long hair tugged by the wind. The sheriff cocked an eyebrow and then he choked, blush chewing into his already ruddy cheeks.
“Well shit. I didn’t mean to be discourteous. You were close to the family, weren’t you?”
The word close paled in comparison to Adrian’s relationship to the Phantomhives. He declined to answer, turning to the smouldering wreckage he was so acquainted with. Another window burst open, a cavity that revealed an engulfed ballroom, the lacquered floors his boots had danced across, time and time again.
“What happened?” Adrian asked.
Mayfield stood apart from the crowd, uniform sooty with rescue attempts rescinded by the flames. There was too long of a pause between question and answer. Adrian’s mounting terror took place of his usual temperament.
“What did you find?” He snapped. “Who’s been pulled out?”
The sheriff’s shoulders rose nearly to his ears. He gestured toward the second story, where tarred curtains flapped outward like strips of sinew.
“Looks like Rachel and Vincent in the main bedroom,” Mayfield said around tobacco. “Hard to say with how fast the fire took hold. Griggs out front by the gate. Landry near the carriage house. One of the hands by the stables. God knows how many are still inside.”
A sob forced its way up Adrian’s throat. He snapped his jaw shut. The mansion creaked as beams collapsed inward, ribs enclosing around everything soft and living.
“And what of the boys?”
The sheriff gritted his jaw and looked away. Beyond the withered rosebushes, two soot-covered forms lay beside the fountain beneath linen sheets. One was terribly small. More glass shattered. A pillar gave way with a thunderous crack that weakened the knees of those who watched. Adrian did not flinch. He felt numb.
“I don’t know,” the sheriff said.
He wiped his face with a handkerchief, his sweat stained with soot. Adrian’s fists curled.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
The smell of the mansion irritated his nose and he rubbed it, fingers catching on a rivulet sliding off his cheek. Sweat or tears, he could not tell.
“Their bedroom was empty,” Mayfield said. “We didn’t have time to search the west side before the stairs collapsed—”
“How do you lose two boys?”
The stress made Adrian irate. The cloying taste of varnished wood even more so. A chunk of timber broke loose from the roof and landed with an onyx puff that showered the onlookers. Women shrieked and Adrian shut his eyes as warm air blasted him like a steam engine.
Paint blistered and popped. Adrian unclenched his hands, a sickly feeling in his gut. When he opened his eyes he found the row of oak trees that lead toward the mansion. The stables beyond. The distant screaming whinny of horses. The scorched steps, the ones he’d sat upon with loosened tie, conversing with old friends.
He spied the cellar door that lay flush to the earth, sitting a stone’s throw from the flames.
“Did you look in there?” Adrian asked.
The sheriff followed his line of sight to the set of doors, closed with a padlock. From the way he gulped, Adrian knew the sheriff hadn’t. He shouldered past the man and headed for the cellar.
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Everyone knew about the Phantomhive twins.
Their father was the richest man in town and their mother was the loveliest thing Clementine ever saw. Until the twins were born, that is. They were born as doe-eyed as Rachel but as clever and handsome as Vincent. Ciel especially, who’d been the talk of the town for most of his young life, although the rumours weren’t always as sweet as the ones about the rest of his family.
Although identical, the townsfolk swore the eldest twin inherited Vincent’s strong jaw and business savvy. They all saw the younger took after his mother, in ways that outnumbered the obvious. He wore his hair down to his elbows as she did, although his was gossamer grey. He dressed effetely, adorning himself with rings and mother-of-pearl buttons. He was slight, quick with his tongue, the more charismatic of the two. But they hated to be compared.
The brothers were rarely caught alone without the other. They were always together, and there were some rumours they could communicate to each other without words. They’d swap secrets with raised eyebrows, a lilt to their heads. They accompanied one another to Clementine’s exuberant social events, hand in hand, even as they entered their adulthood.
In death, it was just as obvious how close they were.
Adrian sucked in a breath when he saw them. The cellar was clouded with smoke but eerily untouched by flames. It would seem at first glance that the small, damp room was a haven from the fire. But Adrian discovered the twin corpses holding one another, stiff in each other’s arms.
“God damn it,” Adrian said, the words catching in his throat.
His voice echoed off the walls with the sheriff’s footsteps as he clambered down to join him. He swore under his breath, shoving his handkerchief against his nose.
“It stinks to high heaven in here,” Mayfield drawled.
He didn’t come any closer, pressed to the wall furthest from the scene. Adrian was not as easily shocked. But he found it hard to approach to the bodies, something unravelling in his chest.
Don’t let it be true, he begged.
But there was no mistaking the stench of death. Adrian had seen the bodies on the lawn and still this smelled worse, close and wet and trapped beneath the earth. He stepped toward the knot of pale limbs and coagulated blood, the boy’s faces hidden in the tangles of the youngest’s hair. There was a sweetness in the way their bodies met and Adrian found himself reluctant to separate them. This morbid embrace had been their final comfort.
“What a tragedy,” Adrian whispered. “They were just boys.”
“Psht,” the sheriff scoffed.
Adrian clenched his jaw.
“Were boys,” the sheriff added a moment later. “Ain’t they twenty?”
Adrian crouched on his haunches to get a closer look. The youngest was resting mostly on the eldest’s chest, head laying in the crook of his brother’s shoulder.
“Twenty is terribly young,” Adrian mourned.
There was a thick, squishing sound as Adrian moved into the pool of blood that encircled the two boys. He moved the youngest first, carefully fitting his arm around his skinny waist and rolling him onto his back. His body slapped against the wet floor, face shrouded by his mop of blood-black hair.
“Oh,” Adrian exhaled.
With his younger sibling gone, the eldest’s face was revealed to Adrian. He was void of blood, completely white. His mouth was parted, lips blue, and resting between both sets of eyelashes was a bullet hole penetrating his skull. The wound was neat in comparison to the one on his stomach. His intestines spilled out from a gash cut hip-to-hip, leaving him entirely eviscerated.
His fingernails were caked with blood. His pyjamas were unsalvageable. His innards stuck to the space between the brother’s bodies like sycamore sap, oozing slowly now the weight on top had been removed. Adrian, who had seen a thousand corpses, retched.
“Fucking hell,” Mayfield muttered.
The cause of death for the youngest twin was not as obvious. His face was completely soaked in blood with no visible wound. His body was seemingly intact, arms folded across his chest like he was resting inside a coffin. Adrian crawled closer, using his thumbs to clear the jelly-like blood off the young man’s face.
“Who did this to you?” Adrian asked the corpse.
The sheriff treaded closer, staring down his nose at the bodies. He whistled through his teeth, equally as stumped at how this fire became a murder. He pushed his boot against the younger twin’s pellucid leg, curling up his lip.
“Revolting,” he said.
Adrian squared his jaw, still working to thumb loose the gore that masked the younger’s features. The blood was lukewarm like they hadn’t long been dead.
“They were beautiful,” Adrian said, bristling in defence. “Heartbreakers, the pair of them.”
The sheriff made a noncommittal grunt, jabbing at the corpse’s side.
“That’s the youngest, right? The effete one?”
He sucked from the back of his throat and spat beside the corpses. It landed with a splat that smelt of tobacco. The scent of the bodies was permeating but Adrian screwed his nose up at the spit, pausing his work to glare up at the other man.
“His name is Ciel,” Adrian said, giving Mayfield a look that could peel paint.
The sheriff didn’t meet the undertaker’s eyes, glancing at the rafters. He stepped back, allowing Adrian to return to his cleaning. His hands began to shake, shock dissipating and dread seeping in to take its place.
“Y’know everyone said he was neither one nor the other,” the sheriff remarked.
Adrian’s thumbs paused where they nursed the corpse’s temples. Ciel’s head was heavy in his hands. He could remember the day the kid was born and he felt just as useless as he did now, cradling such a tiny, fragile thing in his trembling hands.
“And a cocksucker too,” Mayfield added a moment later.
“You can wait outside if you’d prefer,” Adrian said.
The sheriff sniffed, turning to do so. Adrian’s legs ached from where he squatted, cradling his dearest friend’s son. He brushed back sticky hair to reveal the pronounced line of Ciel’s lips. They were parted, blood resting on his teeth. When his thumb passed over his mouth some spilled out and Adrian startled.
Hot. The blood was hot.
Then the corpse coughed.
Adrian shouted. He fell rearward onto his hands, dropping Ciel’s body. The stairs shook as the sheriff rushed down to join him. Adrian panted, eyes wide open as the boy coughed again. The sound was raw and wet like the boy was melting from inside, suffocating in his own blood. Vermilion spit shot from his lips and his hand twitched, chest trembling as he sucked in air.
“I’ve heard about this!” Mayfield shouted, pressed against the wall. “It’s just a death rattle, ain’t it? Air leaving the body?”
Adrian held his breath as he watched the corpse take one of its own. There was no other movement, face concealed with blood, but his chest rose. Every so often came a rattling cough.
“That ain’t no death rattle,” Adrian uttered.
He scrambled forward with renewed vigour, wiping the blood that caked Ciel’s nostrils. The boy’s chest swelled, a whimper lost beneath a wall of blood. Adrian turned him sideways and struck his fist between his shoulder blades, and blood burst from his lips and nose. The undertaker shook his head, striking the boy again until a second breath tore through him.
Clementine’s very own revenant.
With bated breath he pushed his fingers against Ciel’s throat. Through petal-thin skin he felt a thud. Fragile, but very much there. Thud. Thud. Thud. Adrian’s vision blurred with tears.
“This little one ain't dead.”
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