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| 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘿𝙚𝙖𝙙 𝘿𝙤𝙣’𝙩 𝙎𝙩𝙖𝙮 𝘽𝙪𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙙 -> ᴠᴀʀɪᴏᴜs!ᴄʀᴇᴇᴘʏᴘᴀsᴛᴀ x ꜰᴇᴍ!ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ |

word count: 4k / part 1 of 2

summary: girl inherits a funeral home, develops the world’s worst coping mechanisms, and keeps making increasingly questionable life choices while something in the woods takes a concerning amount of interest in her.

love interests: masky, hoodie, eyeless jack, jeff the killer, liu woods, ticci toby, kate the chaser, and jane the killer

Vivian Carlisle was a beautiful girl.

Her warm, olive skin paired best with bold yet cool colors—you'd learned that quickly.

Purples brought out the gold in her undertones, made her look radiant against the harsh overhead lights.

After some experimentation, you found that a liquid blush in a violet shade worked best for the apples of her cheeks. It disguised the dull discoloration there, the kind that had settled in over the past several days. Nothing too concerning, just something that needed covering.

The gray stayed, of course—nothing could quite get rid of it anymore, not with how deep it had sunk into the tissue. But the shade you had picked made her look more lively, almost as if warmth still moved beneath the surface.

Thankfully, her natural beauty did most of the heavy lifting. A dusting of shimmery eyeshadow across her lids, a sparing addition of rosy highlighter along her cheekbones, and she looked serene.

Elegant.

Ready.

Vivian looked as if she was preparing to go to prom.

Maybe an extravagant date, corsage waiting in the refrigerator.

Or a dance recital, leotard hanging nearby.

Perhaps even her graduation, the gown pressed and ready for photographs.

You stepped back to admire your work, your gaze tracing the careful work you'd done around her jaw, the way you'd softened the deep indents marring her flesh, hidden the tears that separated muscle from bone beneath layers of wax and skill.

The young woman was stunning, even now.

It really was a shame that she had died so young.

Vivian had been a girl of sixteen, with waves of inky black locks you had washed and arranged yourself, full cheeks as soft as her apparent personality.

From the eulogy her parents had written, she lived her life generously and kindly; summers full of church retreats and evenings spent at the local SPCA proved her devotion to giving.

You adjusted the lamp one final time, chasing the shadows from her still face.

Shutting the harsh light off completely, you ripped the latex gloves from your hands with a snap. They came away sticky, tacky with sweat and something else that had seeped through the barrier hours ago.

You didn't look too closely.

Instead, you balled up the wrinkled, bloody plastic and stuffed it deep into the pocket of your father's old apron—the canvas littered with faded stains on the hem that never quite washed out.

In a failing mortuary that had nearly gone under twice in the past year, there wasn't spare money for staff.

Or, in other words, there wasn't spare money for you.

After your father's death six months prior, you had absorbed every role he once juggled: funeral director, secretary, coroner, groundskeeper, grief counselor. The odd jobs blurred together until you found yourself elbow-deep in a cadaver's thoracic cavity at two in the morning, phone cradled between shoulder and ear, calmly discussing hydrangeas versus lilies with a widow who couldn't stop crying while your free hand gestured toward a binder open on the far counter.

You still hadn't memorized the floral options.

The apron pulled tight across your shoulders as you leaned against the embalming table, your hip brushing against Vivian's arm—cool now, settling into the temperature of the room.

You didn't move away.

You'd learned not to flinch at contact with the dead. They were easier to manage than the living, most days. They didn't ask for discounts. They didn't complain about the outdated carpet in the entryway or the flickering bulb in the bathroom. They simply waited, patient and present, for you to finish what you'd started.

Your fingers found the edge of the apron pocket, tracing the shape of the discarded gloves through the fabric. Through the doorway, you could hear the phone ringing again—probably another family, probably another body, probably another night of working until your hands shook and your vision blurred at the edges.

You didn't move to answer it.

Not yet.

Instead, you reached out and adjusted the collar of Vivian's hospital gown, straightening it the way you imagined her mother might have done before she went out on the night she died. The fabric was cheap, institutional, but it was all you had until the family brought the dress they'd chosen for the viewing.

"Almost done," you whispered, though whether you were speaking to her or to yourself, you couldn't say.

Perhaps the loneliness was getting to you.

Maybe it was time you went to bed.

Hastily deciding that a nap was easier than confronting the isolation that weighed on your already encumbered mind you moved Vivian from the embalming table to a gurney, then rolled her through the refrigerated storage room to the drawer marked with her name in your father's handwriting—sharpie on masking tape, the letters already starting to bleed from the condensation.

*Vivian Carlisle. 16. DOA.*

Your heavy footsteps echoed off the grimy tile, following you down the narrow hallway like a second shadow. The sound bounced off stainless steel and peeling wallpaper, hollow and too loud in the empty building.

At the end of the corridor, a creaking staircase climbed toward the ceiling, each step bowed in the center from decades of use. You ascended in darkness, your hand trailing along the splintered banister more from memory than sight.

The apartment two floors above had been your father's. Now it was yours.

You pulled the frayed string that dangled from the ceiling fixture, and the exposed bulb flickered once, twice, then surrendered to darkness. The warmth of it lingered on your face for a moment—a ghost of light—before you stripped off your jacket and kicked the rain boots you'd been using as work shoes into the corner. They landed with a wet thud, still slick from the basement floor.

You no longer cringed at the sickening sound—the wet suction of tissue separating, the crack of rigor mortis breaking, the heavy finality of a drawer sealing shut. You were too tired, and too far beyond perturbation to register much of anything anymore.

In your short few months as coroner, you had seen boys barely a third of your age gutted like fish on a dock, their insides spilled and gleaming.

You had stood before a sea of limbs in the aftermath of a highway collision, tasked with the grotesque puzzle of reassembling them into however many complete people had existed before impact.

You had processed bodies so defiled—by fire, by water, by human cruelty—that you could not confidently identify a single cause of death, only a constellation of possibilities.

Simply put, your skin had thickened. And your mind had learned to fold itself around the horror, compacting it into something small and manageable, something you could set on a shelf alongside your father's old textbooks and forget until morning.

You reached the top of the stairs and pushed open the apartment door, the hinges whining in protest. The space beyond was small, cluttered with the artifacts of a life interrupted—your father's reading glasses still folded on the nightstand, your long forgotten mother's ceramic figurines staring with painted eyes from the windowsill, and now your own scattered belongings, your exhaustion, your growing inability to distinguish where the mortuary ended and you began.

The bed waited, unmade, the sheets smelling of dust and the chemical tang that seemed to permeate everything now, rising from your pores no matter how hard you scrubbed.

You fell into it without removing your clothes, your arm flung over your eyes to block out the streetlight filtering through thin curtains.

Downstairs, in the dark, Vivian rested in her metal drawer.

And for a moment, as sleep dragged you under, you could have sworn you heard her breathing.

In the uncomfortable, stuffy peace of your twin bed your life began replaying through your mind, questioning what could have possibly made you end up here.

The last thing you remember is the sound of your grandmother's voice, warning you about walking the ridge after dark.

You're standing at the edge of the tree line behind your grandfather's cabin, where the pines grow so thick no moonlight reaches the ground. The air smells like wet limestone and rotting leaves. You know you shouldn't be there, but your feet keep moving, crunching through the frost-brittle undergrowth.

That's when you hear it—a wet, dragging sound, like someone pulling a heavy sack through wet clay.

You turn, and there he is.

No-Eyes doesn't walk so much as he unfolds from the darkness between two oak trees.

His hood is up, drawn tight, but you can see where his face should be. Where eyes should sit, there's only smooth, waxy skin stretched too tight over bone, glistening faintly like a mushroom cap in the dim light.

No sockets.

No scars.

Just blank, curved flesh that somehow still seems to be looking directly at you.

You try to run, but your legs sink into the earth as if the mountain itself is swallowing you. The dragging sound gets closer. You can smell him now—an inhuman musk and copper, the inside of a penny jar left too long in the sun.

He leans down, and you see his hands. Long fingers, black at the tips, reaching toward your side, toward the soft place just above your hip where your kidney sits.

Your voice is gone. You can only stare into that eyeless face as his mouth opens, revealing teeth that look like they've been filed down to points, and he whispers something that you can’t quite decipher.

His fingers brush your skin—

You jackknife upright in bed, a strangled scream caught in your throat, sheets twisted around your legs like vines. Your heart hammers against your ribs so hard you can feel it in your teeth. For a terrible second, you swear you still smell copper and stale smoke.

Your hands fly to your sides, pressing against your ribs, feeling for the telltale tenderness, the phantom sensation of those black-tipped fingers.

Nothing.

Just sweat-damp skin and your own frantic pulse.

The room is silent except for your ragged breathing. Outside, the wind moves through the pines, and for a moment, you hear it—that wet, dragging sound. You freeze, staring at the dark rectangle of your window, waiting for a hooded silhouette to unfold from the shadows.

But there's nothing. Only the dim light of the rising sun, and the lingering certainty that somewhere in the hollows, No-Eyes is still walking.

Most people from Eerie had chalked No-Eyes up to an urban legend. Even your old classmates who used to tell the most haunting stories of him—like Shauna Sterling, who claimed to speak to the dead at sleepovers using a Ouija board she'd inherited from her aunt who'd died in a mining collapse, or Devon McKinley, who would all too frequently lock freshmen in the old utilities building during homecoming week and leave them there until morning—were all silent on the matter now.

Their Facebook profiles showed them living aggressively normal lives: Shauna selling real estate in Pittsburgh, Devon working as a dental hygienist in Harrisburg, both of them posting photos of golden retrievers and craft beer.

The former children of Split River High were all so adamant that the incident which had all but solidified the rumors of No-Eyes—or The Pine Devil or The Ridge Walker, whatever they called him depending on which hollow their grandparents had come from—was nothing but a mortal tragedy. A gas leak, they'd say. A structural failure.

They used words like "unfortunate" and "preventable" and "closure." They held fundraisers for the families. They planted a memorial tree that died within the year.

It was all just a horrible accident.

Sure it was.

You'd been in the parking lot that night, sitting in the back of Devon's Bronco, passing a warm can of Yuengling between half a dozen people, listening to the radio crackle with static that shouldn't have existed this far from the broadcast tower.

You'd heard the screaming, or something like screaming—more like the sound of wet fabric tearing, or a deer being field-dressed by someone who didn't know what they were doing.

You'd seen the abandoned dorm building of P.E.R.I—the Penn-Eerie something or other, an all too advanced private college—standing against the ridge, dark except for a single light moving in the upper window, and you'd felt the pull of it, the gravitational certainty that something was happening in there that would redefine the geometry of your life.

From there the night went South, the premonition in your gut making you no less then a soothsayer as it all went to hell.

You'd run. You were the one who ran, who left Shauna convulsing in the gravel with her mouth open, Becca Holt sobbing violently by her side as McKinley sped off in search of something.

Ever the skeptic, you kept your peace by simply shoving the paranoia and pondering to the back of your mind in favor of swinging your legs over the side of your creaky, inherited bed and beginning your day.

Lake Harmony was nothing like Eerie. Here, the mountains were gentler, rounded by glaciers instead of carved by coal extraction and desperation.

The locals were seasonal—ski instructors in winter, boat rental operators in summer—and they didn't carry the weight of generational haunting that everyone in Eerie seemed to inherit at birth like a birthmark or a debt.

You stood at the window, looking out at the gray morning light on the water, and you catalogued the normal things: a heron standing in the reeds, a UPS truck grinding its way up the private road, the soft chatter of birds perched on the shop next door.

You made a mental list of the tasks that would fill the day—fixing the loose step on the deck, calling the plumber about the sulfur smell in the well water, maybe driving into town for groceries if you could summon the energy to interact with cashiers.

But your hand found the scar again, as it always did, the smooth patch of skin on your left side where a part of you should have been.

You let the curtain fall back into place. The heron took flight, startled by something you couldn't see.

Downstairs, the coffee maker gurgled and spat, and you went to meet the day, leaving the bed unmade behind you, the sheets still holding the impression of your body.

The ancient Mr. Brew machine finishes its cycle with a sound like a death rattle, that final wet slurp that usually signals the start of your morning.

You pour it into the chipped mug—one of the few things you brought with you, cherry red ceramic with a white handle and the letters U, N, and T following after—and lift it to your face.

The smell hits first.

Not the roasted, nutty aroma of grounds, but something else entirely.

Wet limestone.

Stale dirt.

A glass of milk left out in the sun.

You lower the mug, staring at the black surface.

It looks like coffee.

It steams like coffee.

But when you taste it, it coats your tongue with a flavor that has no name in any language you speak.

Metallic, yes, but beneath that, something organic. Cellular. Like drinking the excess of something that had died awhile ago.

You spit it into the sink. The liquid hits the stainless steel with a sound that is wrong, too heavy, and leaves a residue the color of rust.

You run the tap, watching it swirl down the drain, and your reflection in the faucet's chrome curve looks distorted, stretched, eyeless.

The well water.

It has to be the well water!

You’d been ignoring the sulfur smell for three days, telling yourself it's normal for this part of the Poconos, that limestone deposits create mineral tang, that you're being paranoid. But now your mouth tastes like you've been sucking on a battery.

You need to get out of the cabin.

Your keys are in your hand before you can even think of anything else, ratty Dr. Martens slipped over socks you had worn holes into. You don't grab a jacket despite the October chill, don't check your hair or your phone or the voicemail machine that blinks a needy red.

You just go, stumbling on the gravel driveway in untied boots, the stones slipping in and biting into your soles with a pain that is welcome.

Your car starts on the third try, and you pull onto the narrow road that winds down toward the lake, passing the closed-up summer homes with their FOR RENT signs and their dark windows.

Through the dense morning fog you see it.

Heaven.

Harmony Brew, the local coffee shop—with a logo of two fish forming a yin-yang—sits at the intersection where the private roads meet the state route.

You park crooked, barely in your space on one side with too much room on the other, and push through the door with too much force.

The bell chimes overhead, a cheerful sound that catches the attention of a woman behind the counter with a wiry mass of blonde hair.

“Oh my god, you’re alive!”

A dramatic but all too familiar voice meets your ears, and before you know it a pair of slender arms are thrown around you.

The hug presses your ribs with a familiarity that makes you want to weep. Coconut shampoo and vanilla lotion.

Bryn.

"You're alive," she repeats, but not with relief—with the flat annoyance of someone who has been inconvenienced. "Three days. Do you know how many times I called your…" she snaps her manicured fingers in the air trying to recall the word “…your home phone!”

That was why your landline had been ringing off the hook.

She pulls back, and you see her properly for the first time in weeks.

Her blonde hair was pulled back with a neon claw clip meant to look like hibiscus flowers.

The Harmony Brew t-shirt, still creased from the package.

She's gained weight, or lost it—you can't tell, your perception of other people's bodies has atrophied along with everything else.

"I've been working," you say.

"Yeah, I know. Your Dad’s place. New deck." Bryn moves behind the counter with the leisure of someone who wasn’t being paid to be here. "I drove by. Saw you hauling lumber at six in the morning. You looked like a freaking scarecrow."

She fills a mug from the carafe, slides it across the counter.

The coffee is dark, oily, exactly what you came for.

"I got this job because I needed health insurance," Bryn continues on, leaning against the espresso machine. "My mom’s won’t cover my stuff anymore and being an aspiring actress doesn’t come with dental. But also, kinda because you stopped answering your phone, and I figured if I was somewhere you had to go eventually, I'd at least see you before you starved to death or something.”

You can’t help but laugh at the jovial delivery of her dry humor.

Thankfully, the coffee tastes like coffee.

You hadn't expected that. You'd braced for copper, for the mineral tang that's been haunting the well water, but this is just burnt and bitter, the way coffee should be.

"How long?" you ask.

"Two weeks. They fired the morning person for stealing from the tip jar, which she wasn't doing, by the way. The owner just didn't like her face." Bryn wipes down a spot on the counter that doesn't need wiping. "She was weird, though. Margaret. Kept saying the espresso machine made weird noises at night. Not in a cute way. In a 'I'm going to take this apart with a screwdriver' way."

Outside, a truck rumbles past on the state route, hauling kayaks.

The shop is empty except for you, Bryn, and an older man busying himself in the back.

The morning rush had yet to come, the sun barely starting to rise, leaving you with the smell of fresh pastries and the awkwardness of being a small businesses first customer.

“I wasn’t avoiding you,” you clarified awkwardly.

“Yes, you so were.” Bryn didn’t look up from the counter. “You’re avoiding everything. Your dad’s lawyer literally called me because you won’t return his emails about the property taxes.”

You stared down into your coffee instead, watching the dark liquid slide around the mug in slow hypnotic circles. The fluorescent lights reflected strangely against its surface—warped gold stretching thin and snapping apart every time your hand moved.

Outside, rain crawled down the windows in crooked streams.

The whole town smelled wet lately.

Wet earth. Wet leaves. Wet stone.

Like the mountains themselves were rotting.

“I just forgot,” you muttered.

“Mm.” Bryn tore open a sugar packet with her teeth. “For three weeks.”

The shop hummed quietly around you.

The sharp hiss of the espresso machine behind the counter.

The soft playing of music over hidden speakers.

Normal sounds.

You focused on them carefully.

Anything to keep your thoughts from drifting back downstairs.

Back to fluorescent lights and the cold weight of Vivian Carlisle’s wrist in your hand.

You could still feel it if you thought too hard.

The stiffness beneath the skin.

The fracture hidden beneath carefully arranged curls.

You swallowed hard and lifted the mug to your lips.

The coffee had gone lukewarm.

Bryn finally glanced up from the register.

“You look like shit.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it lovingly.”

“I can tell.”

“You’re pale.”

“I’m always pale.”

“No, like—” She paused. “Hospital pale.”

That made your stomach tighten.

Not hospital pale.

Mortuary pale.

There was a difference.

Hospitals fought death.

Funeral homes just cleaned up after it.

Your gaze drifted toward the rain-streaked windows again.

Main Street sat quiet beyond the glass, wrapped in fog and early evening dark. Jim Thorpe always looked vaguely haunted in bad weather. The old buildings climbed the hillsides in uneven rows, their windows glowing amber through the mist like watchful eyes.

Tourists loved it in October.

They came for ghost tours and fall foliage and train rides through the mountains.

Most of them never stayed long enough to notice how strange the town actually was.

Bryn nudged your arm with her fork.

“You’re doing it again.”

Before you could answer, the bell above the diner door jingled softly.

Cold air spilled inside.

A man stepped through the doorway, bringing rain and the smell of damp wool with him.

You recognized Officer Harlow immediately.

Everyone in town recognized Officer Harlow.

Tall. Mid-forties. Permanently exhausted-looking.

The kind of man who always seemed uncomfortable inside his own uniform.

This morning he looked worse than usual.

Water dripped from the shoulders of his coat onto the checkered tile floor.

His eyes found you almost immediately.

Your stomach sank.

Bryn noticed too.

“Oh,” she murmured quietly. “That’s probably not good.”

Harlow approached the booth slowly, removing his hat as he reached the counter.

For a second he just stood there.

Not speaking.

You noticed dirt beneath his fingernails.

Dark mud splashed along the hem of his pants.

Forest mud.

Mountain mud.

“You busy?” he asked finally.

Something about his voice felt wrong.

Tight.

Careful.

You set your mug down.

“What happened?”

Harlow glanced toward Bryn before answering.

“Need you down at Lake Harmony.”

Your friend frowned immediately. “Why?”

Harlow hesitated.

That frightened you more than if he’d answered outright.

“We found a body,” he said.

Silence settled over the shop.

The espresso machine hissed somewhere behind the counter.

Your mouth went dry.

“What does that have to do with me?” you asked, though you already knew.

Harlow blinked, visibly thrown.

“…You’re the coroner?”

“Oh.” You stared into your coffee. “Yeah. Right.”

Bryn slowly lowered the rag in her hand. “Jesus Christ.”

Harlow cleared his throat. “You haven’t been answering dispatch.”

“I took the morning off.”

“You didn’t tell anybody.”

You rubbed at your temple. “What’s so urgent?”

The officer hesitated.

That was the first bad sign.

“The body was found out near Blackwater Road.”

Your stomach tightened instantly.

“And?” you asked carefully.

Harlow reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a clear evidence bag.

Inside was a photograph.

Even upside down, you recognized the scene immediately.

A body propped upright against a tree.

Hands folded neatly in its lap.

Your pulse stuttered.

Harlow watched your face carefully. “Thought you should see it before the others.”

You swallowed hard. “Why?”

Another pause.

Then:

“Because this one had your name carved into its chest.”

•18+ Adults Only

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word count: 4.6k / part 2 of 2

summary: a mortuary grapples with her struggling business, and an affinity for bad luck—like the undead corpse with her name carved in it stirring up trouble in her small town

love interests: masky, hoodie, eyeless jack, jeff the killer, liu woods, ticci toby, kate the chaser, and jane the killer

a/n: find previous parts under the tag #tddsb