Beware the Manor House
Title: Beware the Manor House (4/?)
Rating: PG to R
Pairing: Dom/Billy, others implied
Warnings: AU, angst, horror, ghosts, implied murder, violence, scary imagery, etc. This is sort of, but not really, a death fic. Suffice it to say, major characters are no longer living and as such, are in fact dead. But in the spirit of whodunnit and AU, it really doesn’t matter much. M’kay? Just trust me.
Summary: Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.
The van barreled down the M1 at well over the speed limit for some time before Billy calmed down enough to stop weaving through traffic and ease his foot off the accelerator.
It was one thing when to get a recording to prove that something happened. It was always fun to adjust the treble and white noise and try to pick through the weird sounds and syllables and consonants that sound like speech and make out if a word or sentence has been said, or if the mind was playing tricks.
It was quite another thing entirely when the honest-to-god ghost of a murdered bloke from a century ago asked plain as day what Billy’s mum had to say the first time he’d heard her voice since he was thirteen.
Billy scrubbed his tired eyes with the heel of his hand against the hours of reading and brightness of headlights. When he finally pulled off the motorway, he had no real idea where he meant to go until he found himself parked in the dark outside a familiar, though oft-avoided building just outside of Chinatown.
He gripped the steering wheel tightly, hands frozen in place. It was stupid that he’d run off in the middle of a session, in the middle of so much activity, for fuck’s sake. He’d freaked out and bailed like a piss-legged twat. Maybe it was for penance that he’d brought himself here. There was no escape now anyway; the light above the closed shop door blinked on and Cate emerged, wrapping a long cardigan over nightclothes.
“Sorry,” he muttered through the van’s window without really making eye contact. It never rolled up anymore, and the drive down had been frigid in the cold night air. That he was shivering, confused and hovering on the verge of terror made it all the more embarrassing.
“Come on up. I’ll make some tea,” she replied, turning back to the door.
Cate ran a metaphysical bookshop, darkened with odd shadows from the shelf tops, which held all manner of strange objects, statues of deities from various religions, candles and crystals, the pungent aroma of all manner of incense, and the bounding apparition of Cate’s sleek white cat that followed her everywhere.
Billy hovered awkwardly in the entry of her small upstairs flat until he was directed to sit at the kitchen table while she made tea. The cat leapt onto the tabletop, sat down with its feet primly together and its tail curled tightly around, staring at Billy and purring like a motorbike. It had odd-coloured eyes, one blue and the other green, which never failed to give Billy the heebies. Plus, he kind of objected to cats on eating surfaces on principle.
“Aloysius,” Cate murmured the name, and the cat immediately jumped down to the floor to weave through her legs. She set Billy’s tea in front of him, strong and milky with honey, exactly how he liked it. He chuckled as he took another sip.
He’d first come here over two years ago to fix a leak in the downstairs shop toilet, and over the span of an hour’s plumbing fix and light conversation on their shared paranormal interest, Cate became concerned for Billy’s welfare. She called it concern, anyway. Billy suspected their chakras had aligned just so while Mars crossed into Capricorn or some other shite to that effect. It almost bordered on infatuation of a bizarrely platonic variety. Cate was a mysterious and terrifyingly beautiful woman, and it’s not that Billy hadn’t thought about the possibilities there, considering she was the only woman that took any interest in him at all. It’s just that she was… well, weird. And she probably already knew all about the possibilities he’d thought about, which just made him turn pink around the edges any time he found himself in her presence.
Cate never advertised that she was a medium. Still, she had a gift of some sort, because immediately upon that first meeting, she had known things she couldn’t have known. For the first year afterward, she’d phoned him regularly with a variety of premonitions, everything from his sister’s husband falling ill to avoiding a certain diner, almost as though she couldn’t help herself. It came to the point he’d politely asked her to fuck off, and she had, for the most part. But Billy couldn’t help but notice she had an annoying tendency toward being right most of the time. After all, the next time he’d eaten at that particular diner, he’d spent a miserable night on his bathroom floor.
Now, here he was, in her kitchen sipping tea, waiting for an I told you so that never came. Cate merely sipped from her own cup in amiable silence while the cat licked itself smooth, then tucked its feet under and pretended to sleep. Billy had nearly drained his cup before any coherent thoughts had managed to string themselves together.
“She told me the kettle was on,” he muttered, peering down at the dredges, “Mum, the first time I recorded her,” he gave a snort of bitter laughter. “I didn’t even have a kettle.”
It had been nothing more profound than that, nor had any of the few other times he’d managed to be aware of her. There had been no final words that hadn’t been said in life, no goodbyes or I love you’s. She didn’t say she was proud of the man he’d become. It had been nothing more than a residual trace of something she’d said so often, an echo of some Sunday morning a long time ago.
He didn’t try much anymore. It wasn’t as though it brought her back, or that he could speak to her about all his problems and she’d give the appropriate motherly advice he’d missed out on in his teenage years or the subsequent decade and then some after. She was still dead. Only whispers of her remained.
Still, it was easier to tell this to Cate sitting across from him, a solid, living, flesh-and-blood human being.
“They don’t do these things, Cate, they don’t want to know things like that,” He argued, though she’d offered no debate besides the mere possibility of disagreeing with him. “They don’t want change. They don’t have the capacity to understand beyond what they knew in their lives. There isn’t enough left of them to understand.”
He glared across the table at her as he finished his tirade. The cat had looked up at his raised voice, its mouth forming a serene sort of smile.
“Perhaps,” Cate ventured, her lips turning up in the same manner, “Ghosts were people too.”
Billy rolled his eyes. “Oh, I suppose you know them, then? Invite them in for a cuppa and quality discussion over biscuits? Tell me, what does your gran think about the new prime minister?”
“My grandmother still lives in Melbourne, and complains about my care packages. My Great Uncle Albert, though, he thought it was funny to knock pictures off the walls. I could see him when the others didn’t, laughing like Santa Claus at their faces,” she answered fondly before flicking her gaze back to him, “But I never met him in life. Alive. He died years before I was ever born. I know as much about ghosts as you, Billy. And if either of us really knew a damn thing, people would think we’re crazier than they already do.”
Billy blinked, “All due respect, love, I’m not the one selling paintings of Ganesh, Pan, and Mother Mary having a picnic.”
“No,” she smiled wryly, “But I don’t default on my credit cards buying military grade thermal cameras either.”
“I returned that bloody thing!” Billy grumbled, affronted. “Never even got to use it. It would come in handy about now.”
“Mmm. Paid your overdue bills though.”
Billy opened his mouth and shut it again. Never, ever get into it with a psychic. He sighed, and then laughed, the crazy giggle of a plumber whose life has just required him to hunt ghosts and solve centuries-old murders. “I don’t know what to do.”
Cate ruffled his hair and took their cups to the sink, then made her way to a small linen closet and pulled out blankets and pillows, making up the sofa in the adjacent living room. Billy watched dumbly from the archway, deducing eventually that she meant him to stay. Somewhere in the back of the flat, a clock struck one AM.
“I should go.”
“You should sleep,” she answered, without turning from her work.
Watching the shift of her slim shoulder blades beneath the cardigan, Billy was struck by something she’d said before, something that could not possibly…
She jumped at the touch of his hand, but stilled when he very gently pulled down the edges of the fine knitting, revealing the racerback vest she wore beneath. His own breath shivered out of him at the sight of her skin, where the welts on her back were a mirror of his own.
“How?” He whispered, “How, Cate? This isn’t possible, this can’t happen-“
“Well, it did!” she answered furiously, turning and hitching her clothing back up. Why didn’t you listen to me?”
“I never do, do I?” he tried, smiling faultily.
She glared at him, crossing her arms. “I thought you didn’t take money for these things.”
“How did you-“ he gaped, but stopped guiltily.
“Please, Billy, the way you keep checking it’s there, you’d think you were toting a gun in your pocket.”
“I need the money, Cate,” he pleaded. “I’m two months past due on my rent, and I’ve hardly any business otherwise. I don’t have a choice.”
“Don’t you?”
Billy had no answer, waiting for her - the bloody psychic - to give him one. What else was he to do?
She only sighed. “You should sleep.”
“Cate…”
“You should sleep, so I can sleep.” With that she pushed him down to sit on the made-up sofa, then picked up a deck of tarot cards from the coffee table, shuffling them as she sat beside him.
Billy watched warily. Cate didn’t give readings, and he didn’t buy into this shite anyway. “Cate…”
She laid the deck on the table, ignoring his protests. “Cut the deck.”
Billy gave a sigh and did so. “It’ll come up with Death, I bet. Imagine that.”
She glared at him, picking up the card from the top of the place he’d cut and laying it down face up: the Moon, upside down. When she spoke, her voice took on that low tone of certainty. “Deception. Illusion. Trickery. Loss of control.”
She laid the next card beside it, the Five of Cups. “Blindness. Obsession. Lost love.”
Billy glanced from the cards to her face, watching her eyes trace the pictures and interpret their meanings. He knew with absolute truth that this rubbish thrived on everyone’s creative ability to apply vague descriptions to events in their own lives. Yet he couldn’t help but wonder… “Are you reading him or me?”
She didn’t answer, drawing the last card slowly, hesitating before she turned it over. Her hand trembled as she lay it down beside the others, her voice now a whisper, “The Ten of Swords. Pain. Ruin. Hope.”
She hastily stood as Billy gazed at the card. “Cate, are you reading him or me?” But she disappeared into her bedroom and closed the door.
“Goodnight to you too, love,” Billy grumbled exasperatedly, kicking off his shoes, turning out the lamp and huddling under the blanket on the lumpy sofa. The cat jumped up and settled into the crook of his elbow, still purring as ever, kneading its paws on the fuzzy blanket. He raised a hand tentatively to stroke it, smiling as the cat leaned into his touch. “What does she mean, eh?”
He took up the last card up from the table, studying the disturbing artwork in the sulphuric city light from the window. The card showed a dead man, prone on the ground, stabbed by ten swords. You didn’t get any more dead than that. “How does this mean hope?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Rating: PG to R
Pairing: Dom/Billy, others implied
Warnings: AU, angst, horror, ghosts, implied murder, violence, scary imagery, etc. This is sort of, but not really, a death fic. Suffice it to say, major characters are no longer living and as such, are in fact dead. But in the spirit of whodunnit and AU, it really doesn’t matter much. M’kay? Just trust me.
Summary: Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.
The van barreled down the M1 at well over the speed limit for some time before Billy calmed down enough to stop weaving through traffic and ease his foot off the accelerator.
It was one thing when to get a recording to prove that something happened. It was always fun to adjust the treble and white noise and try to pick through the weird sounds and syllables and consonants that sound like speech and make out if a word or sentence has been said, or if the mind was playing tricks.
It was quite another thing entirely when the honest-to-god ghost of a murdered bloke from a century ago asked plain as day what Billy’s mum had to say the first time he’d heard her voice since he was thirteen.
Billy scrubbed his tired eyes with the heel of his hand against the hours of reading and brightness of headlights. When he finally pulled off the motorway, he had no real idea where he meant to go until he found himself parked in the dark outside a familiar, though oft-avoided building just outside of Chinatown.
He gripped the steering wheel tightly, hands frozen in place. It was stupid that he’d run off in the middle of a session, in the middle of so much activity, for fuck’s sake. He’d freaked out and bailed like a piss-legged twat. Maybe it was for penance that he’d brought himself here. There was no escape now anyway; the light above the closed shop door blinked on and Cate emerged, wrapping a long cardigan over nightclothes.
“Sorry,” he muttered through the van’s window without really making eye contact. It never rolled up anymore, and the drive down had been frigid in the cold night air. That he was shivering, confused and hovering on the verge of terror made it all the more embarrassing.
“Come on up. I’ll make some tea,” she replied, turning back to the door.
Cate ran a metaphysical bookshop, darkened with odd shadows from the shelf tops, which held all manner of strange objects, statues of deities from various religions, candles and crystals, the pungent aroma of all manner of incense, and the bounding apparition of Cate’s sleek white cat that followed her everywhere.
Billy hovered awkwardly in the entry of her small upstairs flat until he was directed to sit at the kitchen table while she made tea. The cat leapt onto the tabletop, sat down with its feet primly together and its tail curled tightly around, staring at Billy and purring like a motorbike. It had odd-coloured eyes, one blue and the other green, which never failed to give Billy the heebies. Plus, he kind of objected to cats on eating surfaces on principle.
“Aloysius,” Cate murmured the name, and the cat immediately jumped down to the floor to weave through her legs. She set Billy’s tea in front of him, strong and milky with honey, exactly how he liked it. He chuckled as he took another sip.
He’d first come here over two years ago to fix a leak in the downstairs shop toilet, and over the span of an hour’s plumbing fix and light conversation on their shared paranormal interest, Cate became concerned for Billy’s welfare. She called it concern, anyway. Billy suspected their chakras had aligned just so while Mars crossed into Capricorn or some other shite to that effect. It almost bordered on infatuation of a bizarrely platonic variety. Cate was a mysterious and terrifyingly beautiful woman, and it’s not that Billy hadn’t thought about the possibilities there, considering she was the only woman that took any interest in him at all. It’s just that she was… well, weird. And she probably already knew all about the possibilities he’d thought about, which just made him turn pink around the edges any time he found himself in her presence.
Cate never advertised that she was a medium. Still, she had a gift of some sort, because immediately upon that first meeting, she had known things she couldn’t have known. For the first year afterward, she’d phoned him regularly with a variety of premonitions, everything from his sister’s husband falling ill to avoiding a certain diner, almost as though she couldn’t help herself. It came to the point he’d politely asked her to fuck off, and she had, for the most part. But Billy couldn’t help but notice she had an annoying tendency toward being right most of the time. After all, the next time he’d eaten at that particular diner, he’d spent a miserable night on his bathroom floor.
Now, here he was, in her kitchen sipping tea, waiting for an I told you so that never came. Cate merely sipped from her own cup in amiable silence while the cat licked itself smooth, then tucked its feet under and pretended to sleep. Billy had nearly drained his cup before any coherent thoughts had managed to string themselves together.
“She told me the kettle was on,” he muttered, peering down at the dredges, “Mum, the first time I recorded her,” he gave a snort of bitter laughter. “I didn’t even have a kettle.”
It had been nothing more profound than that, nor had any of the few other times he’d managed to be aware of her. There had been no final words that hadn’t been said in life, no goodbyes or I love you’s. She didn’t say she was proud of the man he’d become. It had been nothing more than a residual trace of something she’d said so often, an echo of some Sunday morning a long time ago.
He didn’t try much anymore. It wasn’t as though it brought her back, or that he could speak to her about all his problems and she’d give the appropriate motherly advice he’d missed out on in his teenage years or the subsequent decade and then some after. She was still dead. Only whispers of her remained.
Still, it was easier to tell this to Cate sitting across from him, a solid, living, flesh-and-blood human being.
“They don’t do these things, Cate, they don’t want to know things like that,” He argued, though she’d offered no debate besides the mere possibility of disagreeing with him. “They don’t want change. They don’t have the capacity to understand beyond what they knew in their lives. There isn’t enough left of them to understand.”
He glared across the table at her as he finished his tirade. The cat had looked up at his raised voice, its mouth forming a serene sort of smile.
“Perhaps,” Cate ventured, her lips turning up in the same manner, “Ghosts were people too.”
Billy rolled his eyes. “Oh, I suppose you know them, then? Invite them in for a cuppa and quality discussion over biscuits? Tell me, what does your gran think about the new prime minister?”
“My grandmother still lives in Melbourne, and complains about my care packages. My Great Uncle Albert, though, he thought it was funny to knock pictures off the walls. I could see him when the others didn’t, laughing like Santa Claus at their faces,” she answered fondly before flicking her gaze back to him, “But I never met him in life. Alive. He died years before I was ever born. I know as much about ghosts as you, Billy. And if either of us really knew a damn thing, people would think we’re crazier than they already do.”
Billy blinked, “All due respect, love, I’m not the one selling paintings of Ganesh, Pan, and Mother Mary having a picnic.”
“No,” she smiled wryly, “But I don’t default on my credit cards buying military grade thermal cameras either.”
“I returned that bloody thing!” Billy grumbled, affronted. “Never even got to use it. It would come in handy about now.”
“Mmm. Paid your overdue bills though.”
Billy opened his mouth and shut it again. Never, ever get into it with a psychic. He sighed, and then laughed, the crazy giggle of a plumber whose life has just required him to hunt ghosts and solve centuries-old murders. “I don’t know what to do.”
Cate ruffled his hair and took their cups to the sink, then made her way to a small linen closet and pulled out blankets and pillows, making up the sofa in the adjacent living room. Billy watched dumbly from the archway, deducing eventually that she meant him to stay. Somewhere in the back of the flat, a clock struck one AM.
“I should go.”
“You should sleep,” she answered, without turning from her work.
Watching the shift of her slim shoulder blades beneath the cardigan, Billy was struck by something she’d said before, something that could not possibly…
She jumped at the touch of his hand, but stilled when he very gently pulled down the edges of the fine knitting, revealing the racerback vest she wore beneath. His own breath shivered out of him at the sight of her skin, where the welts on her back were a mirror of his own.
“How?” He whispered, “How, Cate? This isn’t possible, this can’t happen-“
“Well, it did!” she answered furiously, turning and hitching her clothing back up. Why didn’t you listen to me?”
“I never do, do I?” he tried, smiling faultily.
She glared at him, crossing her arms. “I thought you didn’t take money for these things.”
“How did you-“ he gaped, but stopped guiltily.
“Please, Billy, the way you keep checking it’s there, you’d think you were toting a gun in your pocket.”
“I need the money, Cate,” he pleaded. “I’m two months past due on my rent, and I’ve hardly any business otherwise. I don’t have a choice.”
“Don’t you?”
Billy had no answer, waiting for her - the bloody psychic - to give him one. What else was he to do?
She only sighed. “You should sleep.”
“Cate…”
“You should sleep, so I can sleep.” With that she pushed him down to sit on the made-up sofa, then picked up a deck of tarot cards from the coffee table, shuffling them as she sat beside him.
Billy watched warily. Cate didn’t give readings, and he didn’t buy into this shite anyway. “Cate…”
She laid the deck on the table, ignoring his protests. “Cut the deck.”
Billy gave a sigh and did so. “It’ll come up with Death, I bet. Imagine that.”
She glared at him, picking up the card from the top of the place he’d cut and laying it down face up: the Moon, upside down. When she spoke, her voice took on that low tone of certainty. “Deception. Illusion. Trickery. Loss of control.”
She laid the next card beside it, the Five of Cups. “Blindness. Obsession. Lost love.”
Billy glanced from the cards to her face, watching her eyes trace the pictures and interpret their meanings. He knew with absolute truth that this rubbish thrived on everyone’s creative ability to apply vague descriptions to events in their own lives. Yet he couldn’t help but wonder… “Are you reading him or me?”
She didn’t answer, drawing the last card slowly, hesitating before she turned it over. Her hand trembled as she lay it down beside the others, her voice now a whisper, “The Ten of Swords. Pain. Ruin. Hope.”
She hastily stood as Billy gazed at the card. “Cate, are you reading him or me?” But she disappeared into her bedroom and closed the door.
“Goodnight to you too, love,” Billy grumbled exasperatedly, kicking off his shoes, turning out the lamp and huddling under the blanket on the lumpy sofa. The cat jumped up and settled into the crook of his elbow, still purring as ever, kneading its paws on the fuzzy blanket. He raised a hand tentatively to stroke it, smiling as the cat leaned into his touch. “What does she mean, eh?”
He took up the last card up from the table, studying the disturbing artwork in the sulphuric city light from the window. The card showed a dead man, prone on the ground, stabbed by ten swords. You didn’t get any more dead than that. “How does this mean hope?”
CHAPTER FIVE