#magic whumpee

Fire-breathing whumpee kept submerged head to toe in cold water, a tube and mask keeping them breathing with barely enough oxygen.

Whumpee that can manipulate water kept in a cell that feels like an oven, constantly drying any condensation, the only water they’re given being in the form of injections while they sleep.

Super strong whumpee bound with reinforced chains or cords that individually they could easily break- too bad there’s dozens of them, wrapped around every limb, around their waist, their neck, across their chest in an X.

Psychic whumpee forced to wear a helmet that blocks their brain waves, trapping them inside their own head. Additionally, a psychic whumpee that needs to know their surroundings in order to interact with them being subjected to sensory deprivation.

Whumpee whose power comes from their emotions being restrained to a hospital bed while an IV drip fills their bloodstream with sedative, emotion-dulling chemicals that put them in a stupor.

Whumpee with ocular powers made to wear a thick blindfold that doesn’t let even a trace of light through, kept on them for so long they start to forget what their captors’ faces look like.

Nolan sighed, smelling a little salt on the breeze as he reluctantly pushed himself to his feet, brushing idly at the threadbare, paint-splattered work pants he wore. He’d visit the Foxes first, he decided. He hadn’t been by to see them in a while.

There were wildflowers that grew at the edge of the treeline where the cemetery fence had left some open space for them to reach out for sunshine, and he picked a few, here and there, as he went, wondering idly who came out here to mow. It wasn't him, but someone did, even if it was a patchy job that left clumps of tall grass and weeds all over the place. Five-petaled spring beauty, with its white streaked with soft purple lines in each petal. Wild geraniums, from light pink to soft purple. Dandelions and clover marking the spring sunshine. Some odd little orange ones he didn’t recognize. Morning glories wound vines around the fence, and he picked a few of those flowers, too.

Slipping into the cemetery was easy. The gate was hanging open and hadn’t been successfully closed since he was a kid. This cemetery wasn’t in use, anyway. No one had been buried here in… he didn’t know how long. His grandma had been young when they stopped using it, he thought. Nolan moved through the opening the gate left, just big enough to fit if he turned sideways and crab-walked his way through it.

He thought he saw a flash of something pale and turned his head, but a little finch took flight. That must have been it.

Things got quiet, as he started moving through the graves. It was always funny how cemeteries seem to hush the air, even though he’d only been a few feet away before. Birdsong went silent. The soft rustling of leaves was all he heard, the flush of rabbits racing each other to escape the lumbering human in their midst. Large, elaborate stonework decorated the graves of the wealthy, and Nolan snorted at the sight. They hadn’t been able to take their money with them, but they wanted it known they’d had it once. They were nothing now anyway, in this cemetery left to crumble with time. Those descendants they'd thought would always pay for maintenance had long since forgotten them. Smaller, smoother stones marked the graves of lower-income people from a town that used to be nearby that didn’t exist any longer. There were still foundations in the woods you could find, bits of old stone, the occasional midden pile. Nolan let his fingers trail over the pockmarked sandstone and slate. Some of the names could still be read, and his lips moved to echo their syllables. Frederick Johnstone, 1802-1819. Poor guy, barely seventeen. Next to him, another stone with the same last name and a death date only a few years later. Birthyear was impossible to read. Mother, maybe, or sister? Hard to tell.

Chastity Eaton, 1750 - 1800. Not so bad. A good fifty years of living. She had two different husbands, he thought, buried alongside her. Only one grave of a child who hadn't gotten old enough to move elsewhere in adulthood. Not bad at all. 

Finally, he found the part of the cemetery he’d been thinking about. The Foxes.

Taller gray stones stood at either end of them, Micah and Holy Ghost Fox. Man and wife, both the same year and died the same year, sometime in their late thirties. Between them was a set of six graves, each small and white, with the worn-down shape of a lamb on top. The names were worn but readable - only three had lived long enough to be given names at all. Nolan had always felt called to give flowers to the graves of children, the Foxes most of all. That hadn’t changed as he got older, and some part of him - wildly irrational as it was - didn’t want to break the tradition and disappoint their spirits if they still hung around.

Did unnamed babies get to haunt things? Or were they too new to feel held to any place or time or form of existence? Nana would have known the answer to that. 

Nolan knelt to set a few of his wildflowers down before the first grave. Baby Girl Fox. d. 1835. Probably born and died in one day, just like Baby Boy Fox and Baby Girl Fox on either side of her, those two in 1836 and 1837 respectively. He gave them their flowers, too, before moving to the named stones. Margaret Fox, the firstborn who had lived for two years, got morning glories mostly. He felt like they would have been her favorite. Anthony Fox had made it to four years, the youngest child born and the last before whatever had killed Micah and Holy Ghost only a year after Anthony's own death, and he gave him some clover and dandelions.

Finally, Abel Fox, who had no birth or death year, just had his name and Found & Lost beneath. What that meant, Nolan never had been able to figure out. 

He laid the last of his flowers on Abel’s grave and then stood up, stretching a little, arching his back and taking another quick look at the sky. If anything, it had gone even more red, and the wind was picking up. Less lover than pushy friend, he thought. Worrying over him, wanting him safe. Maybe the wind was the reason he felt like he was being watched today.

“Okay, okay, fine, I’ll go,” He grumbled good-naturedly to a natural element that definitely couldn’t hear him. His hair ruffled again in the breeze and he caught himself laughing a little. Like it was happy he listened to it. He turned to head back when he heard the soft, incredibly purposeful snap of a stick cracking underfoot nearby.

Nolan froze. 

The only people he had ever seen in his entire life here had been his grandmother and, well, himself. Nobody lived here, or anywhere near here. No one else even remembered this cemetery existed except for a little group that had come out and taken pictures for a website a few years ago, just after Nana had died. They’d been excited and asked him if he wanted to be in any of the photos.

He had politely told them to please get off his property and gone back inside.

(And then gone and looked the photos up on the website later, secretly happy with how well they had captured the names and researched the families.)

The sound had to be a deer, or something wild anyway. Nolan took another couple of steps, trying to look casually unconcerned, not wanting to scare off whatever wildlife might be trying to grab some breakfast before huddling down to hide from the oncoming rain.It was coming. He could smell it now, the way the world smelled just before it rained. It was coming, and it was coming soon. 

He slipped back through the gate and headed back up the hill, his calf muscles stretching as he made himself move as fast as he could without making it obvious. He kept hearing rustling behind him, and told himself it was just the grass and leaves. A single raindrop landed on his nose and he twitched, rubbing at it. 

He could have sworn there were whispers in the wind, the sound of a mourning dove calling somewhere nearby, crying out to him.

His grandmother had always told him not to listen to the pleading of ghosts.

Maybe he’d woken one of the children’s spirits up and they wanted to follow him home. He had things for that, not that he really remembered how to use them. But there was always salt and herbs and the iron his grandma had set around every doorframe. That should hold off a child’s soul, right?

Maybe?

He needed to get his grandmother’s books down from the attic and start reading them again, clearly.

The rain began just as he came back out of the woods to the clearing where his Nana’s home still stood, its own sort of natural formation. Three stories tall and once a stately sort of mansion hidden in the hills, it was still mostly white. Paint had started to peel back from the wood in some area and the window in the attic had a crack across it diagonally like a wound. 

The garden off to the side was still sparse except for the early spring radishes and peas, with spinach and lettuce and other greens just about ready to pick. Nolan did okay with gardens, even if he didn’t have the talent for them that his Nana had. 

He still felt eyes on his back as he walked, and he hunched himself against the feeling. Every time he looked back, though, all he saw was the trees, the branches waving, the dark sky.

Water splashed on his cheeks and fell like shards of ice onto his scalp. He picked up his speed, but he’d only made it halfway across the yard at a quick walk when the sky opened up like someone had dumped a bucket directly over his head. 

Nolan took off running, then, dodging the old clothesline and a small yard tractor that hadn’t moved since long before Nolan had been born and left with his grandmother for safekeeping by a mother who had more interesting things to do than raise a son. He had no idea who his father had been.

Fathers weren’t very important in his family. He’d met aunts and great-aunts and cousins and none of them had know who their fathers were, either. None of them had kept their sons. Nana was the odd one out for keeping him.

Wind pushed at his back, forcing him faster, and he all but fell onto the steps up to the wraparound porch as rain beat against his back in anger. The wood creaked alarmingly underfoot, but it held him as he turned around to squint against the rain and look out at the storm. Off to his side, the porch swing moved back and forth in the breeze as if someone was there, as if he might blink and see his Nana sipping her ‘tea’ which was never really tea, smiling and watching and murmuring about how good it would be for the garden once the rain had spent itself. 

Leaves lashed along treetops at the edge of the clearing, beating at each other with their branches unwillingly. What had been red before in the sky was now a stone gray. It looked like it was still night out there, and after a second the automatic light by the shed kicked on. 

Directly underneath it was a man.

Nolan stumbled back, heart and breath both fighting for room in his throat. He let out a cry as he tripped over his own damn feet and fell straight on his ass, grunting as he caught himself and one wrist sent pain twinging up his arm to his shoulder. 

“Shit!”

The wind swallowed his voice and carried it too far to be heard. He wasn’t even sure he’d said it out loud. Maybe it was in his head.

He looked back at the shed.

The figure under the light hadn’t moved. It wasn’t clear enough to get a good look, but Nolan was sure it was a man, or maybe a woman with no hair, but human anyway. He could see legs, thin and seemingly bare. The hint of a sharp jawline and high cheekbones. A long shirt or dress that only went to mid-thigh, some indeterminate color in the hint of light. 

Glowing bright green eyes, reflective, like a cat’s.

Nolan slowly backed up, step by step, until he backed right into his own front door. He fumbled for the doorknob without looking away, even though the figure didn’t move at all. When it finally opened, the stupid tricky thing, he flung himself into and slammed the door shut, locking it behind him.

The only sound in the house was the ticking of the old cuckoo clock he still had hanging on the dining room wall and his own ragged breathing. He peeked out the front window through the filmy old curtains that were white when they’d first been set up and were now a dusty cream and saw…

Nothing.

The man was gone.

Probably just a spirit, then.

Spirits wouldn't be able to follow him inside. He could deal with whatever it was or might want later on. Nolan sighed and ran a hand down his face, trying to calm his heartbeat through sheer force of will and failing miserably. He slipped out of his shoes, staring down at the puddle he was creating in the entryway, before he sighed and pulled his shirt off, then dropped his pants and boxers, too. He carried the soaking cloth into the laundry room and left everything in a clump on top of the washing machine.

He had a basket of clean laundry by the stairs he hadn’t taken up yet, so he grabbed sweatpants and a sweater off the top, one in soft teal and another in a hunter green. Who cared if they matched? It wasn’t like anyone lived here but him these days. 

Drying his hair off with a towel, he moved into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee to try and warm back up. The soft hiss-drip-drip-drip of the coffee brewing was a comfortable sound, its smell a warmth inside and out even before he drank it.

If what he’d seen outside was a spirit, then the iron and silver worked into the doorframes would keep it out. If it wasn’t, hopefully the locks would. If neither did, maybe he could scare it off with the ancient shotgun he kept next to the front door. He wasn’t even sure the damn thing worked, but generally you didn’t have to actually shoot, right? Just… sort of wave it around and be threatening with it?

An hour passed, and then two.

He relaxed. No real person would be dumb enough to stand out in the rain for so long. Nolan drank two cups of coffee, did some dishes, stared outside as the storm raged. Eventually he headed over to the couch and settled in, pulling the old knitted afghan over himself and turning on a movie he’d seen about two hundred times before. 

He must have fallen asleep.

When he woke, there were glowing eyes watching him from the corner of the room.

He sat up, staring at the definitely a man in his house who didn’t even move a muscle. Nolan tried to scream but his voice caught in his throat, a strangled cry the only thing that made it out. Hardly loud enough to hear outside these walls. His heartbeat was louder.

Not that anyone lived close enough to hear even if he’d been as loud as a fire truck. 

“... what the fuck-”

“You forgot to lock the cellar door,” The man said, his voice raspy and seemingly young. He still didn’t move. He was wearing just one big t-shirt, Nolan realized, with mysterious splotches and stains on it that his eyes refused to identify as dried blood. The man was dripping onto his living room floor, his arms crossed defensively in front of himself. Shivering, maybe.

Nolan felt a strange, bizarre urge to offer him his sweater.

“... okay, but I’ll say it again, what the fuck?” Nolan slowly stood, eyeing the doorway that led to the front door, to the shotgun. 

The man watched him right back. “Are you Deloise Redding’s son?”

Nolan blinked, taking a step to the side. Deloise? Who was... oh. He took another step, and then another. “No.”

The man only blinked, eyebrows furrowing slightly. His eyes stopped glowing - just fucking turned off, like a light switch. “Grandson?”

Nolan kept edging closer to the doorway. The man had to turn his head slightly to keep watching him. “Great-grandson. Who are you?”

“Great-grandson…” The man frowned vaguely. The expression seemed… rusty, like he wasn’t used to having feelings that made it out of his own head. “How long have I been away?”

“... how the hell would I know? She’s dead. So's her daughter. How do you know her?"

"That's not important."

"I mean, it's pretty damn important. Look, can you leave my house now?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Almost there. He could see the shotgun now. 

“Because you’re on hallowed ground, and I need somewhere safe to hide.”

"What-" The man was right in front of him. He’d traveled the room in a heartbeat, and Nolan had to back up. The man followed him until Nolan backed right into the wall, knocking an old family photo off the wall. It clattered to the floor, glass breaking, but the man blocked him in, an arm on either side of him, palms against the wall. Nolan’s breathing was fast and shallow, his head spinning. 

“Cemeteries are hallowed ground,” Nolan whispered. “Go to the cemetery… uh, please?"

“This house is hallowed, too.” The man’s breath puffed onto his face, warm and it smelled like… like toothpaste and flowers. Nolan’s nose wrinkled instinctively. Beneath that, the man’s body smelled like sweat and something metallic and mineral. This close, he could see shadows under the man’s eyes, and bloodied bruises around his throat like he’d been gnawed on by an animal. A scar on one high cheekbone. “I’m staying here.” A blink, and those eyes were glowing again. There were all he could see.

The rest of the house was gone.

Everything was dark except those bright green glowing eyes. 

“You’re staying here,” He whispered, feeling as if he wasn’t the one repeating it. Someone else was puppeting him, making him say it. 

“Good boy,” The man murmured. “You need to keep napping, I think. I need the time to get settled without you bothering me."

“I need to keep napping-... wait.” Nolan shook himself a little, like a dog shaking off water. “I’m not-... I’m twenty-eight years old and this is my house."

“Fair enough. Good man, then. Is that better?"

"I-... this is my house."

"No. It's mine, for now. What's your name?"

"... Nolan James Redding," He whispered. The words came slowly, as if pouring from his mouth like molasses, bitter and dark on his tongue. “What’s... your name?”

“Until an hour ago, I couldn't have told you. But hallowed ground always helps." He flicked the center of Nolan’s forehead with a playful smile. "My name is Abel. Now sleep.”

The man - Abel - caught Nolan under the arms as his knees buckled.