Saint Joseph School

((Just in time for Halloween, an uncanny tale of creeping horror open to SJS and BVA students. Please PM if interested to get more background/story info. I'll be coordinating cross-posting, but probably not involving either of my 'toons. And if the name sounds familiar, that's because I totally snatched the basic plot hook from an early episode of 'My Little Pony.' Sue me.))

TAMBELLON

It was a gray day at Bloodvine Academy. The first wave of fall storms were passing over the Rogue Isles, and the choppiness of the water precluded most trips to the larger islands. J. Elias Meriwether and Shan-Yi Welles had organized an impromptu game of hide-and-seek, on the grounds, for the students chafing under confinement. The air was thick and oppressive, and most of the students felt the dropping barometer as a deep subtle ache in their bones.

"Found you," said Kevin to Elaine, looking over a hedge in the garden.

"Have to tag me first, smartypants!" she said, and with a sudden 'pop,' disappeared.

"Aw, man," he said. He looked over his shoulder and ran quickly to intercept Dakota before she could get home free.

"Shoot!" she said, kicking up a cloud of dust. "Am I 'it,' now?

"Join with me and let's rule this crackhouse with an iron fist."

"Yeah, it's gonna rain soon," said J. Elias, materializing with his hand casually on the oak tree designated as "home."

"Now I know why you suggested this game, stalker punk," said Kevin. "Between your invisibility and Elaine's teleports, I'm getting run ragged."

"Oh, you whine like a pwned cape in Bloody Bay."

The three of them teamed up, and coordinating their abilities, tagged out twenty other students. Fifteen others managed to make it home. The first fat raindrops started to fall, hitting their heads with soft cold blows.

"Where's Elaine?" asked Kevin, looking around.

"Probably inside getting a hot meal. Let's follow suit," said J. Elias, pulling his blazer up to cover his head.

Kevin wasn't so sure. Dakota, always technologically prepared, had opened a comm channel, but couldn't hail her.

"Took the unit off," Shan-Yi said. "No sweat."

"You go on in," said Kevin. "I'm 'it,' I'll keep looking." He frowned and ducked his head, his hair falling into his eyes.

The rain fell faster and harder. It felt like being pelted with cold quarters now. He went back to the hedge where he'd last seen her, calling her name.

"I'm here," he heard her say. But her voice sounded strange, as if she were right beside him and far away. "I'm having trouble re-entering the timestream. Keep talking to me, Kev."

He was silent for a moment with surprise. Re-entering the timestream? Was this some sort of joke?

"Kevin! Talk to me."

"Okay," he finally said. "Hurry up and come back because it's chili night and I want my share of the cornbread. And I'm getting wet. So come back, Elaine. I'm right here, waiting."

Elaine re-materialized almost silently. Her face looked very pale, and her hands were shaking. Without teasing, he helped her stand and they walked back to the manor hall together.

________________

In bed that night, Elaine had one of the worst nightmares of her life. She woke up sweating and exhausted, tears squeezing out under her lids. What was it? What had happened?

She'd been running through twisting dirty streets. High spiraling towers and walls loomed above, stabbing up into an ugly yellow sky. She felt vulnerable, knew she was being chased by something terrible. She was naked, and the badly-set cobblestones bruised her bare feet. She'd turned a sharp corner and there was a young boy sitting curled up in a dead-end alley. His skin was covered with flilth and open sores. He'd looked up at her, like he'd been expecting her.

There was a collar around his neck, with a large silver bell.

"Tambellon," he said. The bell around his neck rang with a hideous thrumm.

And then she'd woken up.

She gave in to the shaking feeling in her chest, realized she had been holding back sobs. When the emotional storm passed, she sat up. She'd sweated her sheets wet.

Elaine wrapped her spare blanket around her shoulders and sat down in her desk chair. It helped to rationalize bad dreams. She'd had a problem today teleporting. And the monster-fleeing was just a leftover, a darkside to the joy of hide-and-seek. Just a stupid dream. So why didn't she feel any better?

What do you do when the horse throws you? You get back on the horse. Before your fear starts to own you.

Where was I four hours ago? I was in the dining hall. She closed her eyes, concentrating, and opened them, expecting to see a full hall of hungry students coming in for the evening meal.

But she saw, in rich and terrible detail, the fabric of her nightmare. The wind prickled her naked skin with hard particles of dust. The street, wtih its drab curved towers and rotting mortar walls was utterly silent.

Back, she thought. Where was I two minutes ago? Back. Back! She felt something in her head give, hot and wet, with the fierce anger of her concentration.

What was it that sent her running? There were no footfalls, no telltale sounds of pursuit. The loudest sound was her breathing. And she was afraid to call out. There were no doors or windows in the towers and walls. But someone had to be there. Unless this was just another nightmare, and she was curled up in her desk-chair, asleep.


She ran because she was afraid.

And like her dream, she knew what she would see when she turned that corner. The boy, his filthy scrawny body, the ringing of the bell.

"Tambellon," he said. And the air echoed with the maddening thrumm of the bell.

She shrieked as she was grabbed from behind, her body forced down on the cold broken street-stones. She could see hands on her, the same dun and drab colors of the street. They were on her shoulders, her arms, tangling in her hair.

She felt the leather collar slipped around her neck, buckled tight. And the hands were gone. She turned her head and looked at her attackers.

They had no faces.

She screamed and screamed, and no sound came out. There was only the ringing of the bell.

Sam Stinebrenner was in a pickle.

Something had happened when he'd been fooling around with that teleportation device. Intended destination? Pocket D. Actual destination? Well, at first he'd supposed it was someplace in the Rogue Isles. Everything looked like a dog's dinner, and he'd always assumed that's what the Isles were like.

Plus there were zombies everywhere. From what he knew about the Isles, nothin' said lovin' like a corpse from the coven.

Gradually, and soon, this impression changed. There were no people, no living ones. Just those faceless naked shamblebodies wandering everywhere, moving through the winding streets in random clusters. He'd been cornered by two groups recently, moving together through a narrow alley. He'd pressed himself against a wall and they'd glommed together into one larger group and passed on.

Sam Stinebrenner was naked.

Now this was not normally an unusual set of circumstances. When the days were warm and sunny in Paragon City, he'd taken advantage of his perpetual invisibility to wander around freeballing it. But he'd had his clothes on when he went through the teleporter, and now they were gone. And the weather wasn't balmy. The weather wasn't ANYthing, that was the hell of it. Just cold enough to be slightly uncomfortable, and dry as dust. And it was quiet as the grave.

No, he'd been in a pickle something like four days ago. Now he was in dire straits.

There was no sun in the sky, no difference between day and night. Just that unending flat yellow expanse. But it had to be days. He could feel the time passing. He'd gotten slowly hungrier and hungrier, and there was an ache in his head from thirst. Nothing to eat or drink in this place, unless he wanted to brain a zombie and eat their dessicated flesh ... nope. No way. Not gonna happen. He'd read somewhere that a person could only live two days without water. He wasn't dead, and wasn't starving, either. He was just hungry, and thirsty, and tired. Because there was no surcease--he couldn't sleep.

No water, no food, no sleep. And apparently no death.

It occurred to Sam that he might be dead. And this might be hell.

He pressed his head to the wall and covered his ears as the bell began to ring with a deep bone-shaking base note.

In the beginning, he'd been curious. The first time he'd heard the bell, he'd been shocked, but excited. It was the only sound. When it rang again, he'd run in the direction of the pealing bell. But the streets twisted so strangely that it was hard to make headway. The bell had rung six times before he'd found the source.

The alley had debouched on a large plaza. The paving-stones of the street were set deeper into the ground, and there was less dust.

He'd been pushed forward into the square by a milling throng of the faceless corpses coming to the sound of the bell.

It was there, at the apex of a high rectangular plinth, taller than a flagpole, and inscribed with strange marks.

This place sucks, he thought.

He'd made an attempt to climb the bell-platform, using the carved relief as finger and handholds. But the dust in the cracks and grooves was as slippery as graphite, and he'd fallen down after getting up only a few feet.

The zombies dispersed as the last reverberating echo of the bell fell silent.

So he'd spent some time wandering, looking around for anyone, anything, getting slowly more uncomfortable, deadened by the unending discomfort of fatigue, hunger, thirst, always keeping within a close perimeter of the bell-tower, the only recognizable landmark in this place.

Yesterday, or today, or at some point of time past-but-recent, he'd heard a girl scream. The bell had rung again, drowning out the sound. Sam had tried to find the owner of the voice, but it was hard. The sound of the bell had started to hurt his ears, fill him with bleak despair. Nothing meant anything.

He shook himself roughly. No more of that. It reminded him too much of those first few weeks at SJS. Not being seen, not being heard half the time, or being ignored... Sam Stinebrenner had developed coping skills that made him uniquely suitable to survive in this environment. He had advantages that the screaming girl didn't have. And he was a hero!

He smiled an invisible smile, the first in a long time. He pinched his arm, feeling the sharp pain as a panacea against the subtler aches in his body, the deadened feel of his skin.

He pulled some dust out of the cracks in the cobbles, spat on it, and drew an arrow in the mud, pointing towards the bell-tower square. And he walked away from it, pausing at each twisting intersection to draw another arrow with the spittle of his increasingly dry and dusty mouth.

There was a smell in the air. He tilted his head up and sniffed. Perfume. Warm flesh. Life! Nothing had ever smelled so appealing. He moved upwind, hoping against hope.

And finally he saw the thing he'd been looking for. A young woman, with long red hair, naked, her face a mix of despair and defiant courage.

Nieves felt a hand on her arm, and nearly jumped out of her skin. She opened her mouth to call out, but clapped a hand over her lips, frightened by what she'd almost done.

Sorry! I didn't mean to scare you, said a voice inside her head. I'm Sam. Sam Stinebrenner. I'm invisible. And I'm lost. Who are you?

Nieves looked around, wondering if she'd gone completely crazy. She reached out, felt a warm human body under her hand.

Nieves! she said, with a psychic yell. I'm Nieves Trudeaux Oh, God! Someone else alive here!

They took a moment to hug one another, each infinitely grateful for the feel of warm human skin, the presence of another breathing person. They let go of each other, but didn't stop holding hands.

Why don't you talk out loud, Nieves?

Scared to, she replied. There's something out there listening, chere, and it's not friendly.

Sam thought about the screamer.

We have to find other people, Nieves. I'm almost positive there are more... lost here, like us. We should try to find them.

Just don't ... let go of my hand.

No way.

The bell tolled. Its gonging a terrible weight that always seemed too eager to inflict itself. However, this time it was incessant, and almost maddening. Were it not for the warm, reassuring hand of Sam, Nieves was certain she would have snapped and cried out in protest. Instead, the boy from St Joseph's comforted her, by his sheer touch, alone.

The zombie hordes shambled toward the bell, in a mockery of the throngs that gathered for sunday mass. Nieves was getting an idea, but she would need to formulate it more into a plan. It was time to make sacrifices, and she was willing to hurt a little, in order to see it through. All she needed was a plan.

Sam, do you think we might be able to stop the tolling of the bell, the red-haired teen asked telepathically. I was also thinking of a few other things, but, I need a plan before we discuss those.

Plans, he asked back. What do you mean plans. Nieves, we can't do an awful lot, remember?

Well, duh, she replied to her invisible friend. We need to find the others, if they even exist as people, anymore

Sister Mary Sybil awoke with a start. Her heart was racing and she could feel that the bed was damp from her sweat. She spent a few minutes in prayer to calm herself before reflecting on her dream.

This was the fourth time in the past month she'd dreamed of the limbus infantium. The children's limbo. The fact of that such a place existed was sad enough. It was where unbaptized children went, a place between heaven and hell. Their poor souls were denied the joy of God's Holy Presence, but were at least saved from the tortures of Hell. But even lacking Hell's torments, what a wretched existance they had! An eternity of drifting, of forgetfullness and loss.

Her dreams had shown her much about the place. Though they scared her, horrified her even, she was thankful that God had blessed her with dreams and visions. She would relate what she learned to others who could hopefully use the information to affect positive changes in line with God's will.

She'd learned that children's limbo was a hungry place. It craved souls. For millenia, its thirst had been sated by the atrocities of humans. Child sacrifice. War. Abortion. Many were the ways that humanity sent its children to early, forsaken graves.

But something had changed.

Limbo was being robbed. These poor souls were being drawn out of limbo and forced into corpses. It was an easy way to make a zombie. There were other ways; magic provided had many paths to an end. This particular way was clumsy, but so appealing in its simplicity. In the past decade, the number of zombies being created had skyrocketed.

Limbo had been drained of enough souls that something had taken notice. Something was hungry, thirsty, craving for more.

That alone would be disturbing, but there was more: the creation of so many zombies hadn't just pulled souls from limbo. It had pulled limbo itself, pulled it closer to the world of the living than it had ever been before.

She felt that there was more here, something that she was missing. Something that would perhaps be revealed to her in future dreams.

For now, though, she would pray.