Day 107,

The scratching was back last night.  After the first time it woke me up I moved to the couch where I’d be further from the outer wall and couldn’t hear it as well.  Slept better last night than I did previously with that noise.  Strange though for the nature sprite to do the same prank a second time so soon when it was obvious it wasn’t scaring me anymore.

Finally found time to sit down and write about the recent cathedral ruins exploration.  I’ll admit up front that I was in a drowsy haze most of that day, so my recollection may be lacking a bit more in detail than usual.

Starting with my and Cass’s arrival at the library that morning, once we were inside I informed her of the plans for the day.  Her excitement at the prospect of a return trip was held in balance by her discontent at not having been told or consulted ahead of time.  She would have brought a backpack and other supplies if she’d known.  Maybe borrowed a machete.

I asked if she really thought her parents would let her borrow a machete.  She said she’d been allowed to use one for years with chores around the farm.  Sure, she was always supervised for said chores, but she had an apprenticeship now.  Surely she could be trusted to be independent with it now.

Not wanting to show my dubiosity I changed the subject to what we did have, as I had been bringing my own backpack and leftover supplies that hadn’t needed to be returned from the floating island trip and storing them in the archive over the past few days.  And food for lunch as well.  No machete though.  Would have been nice if we had one.

Not too much later Vernon showed up, out of his mediator uniform for once.  Take off that and his glasses and I wonder if people would still recognize him.  (On the note of glasses, I still need to figure out who made his.)  Although how he managed to get out of mediator duties on a market day I’m still not sure of.  He had his own camping gear with him that he’d missed out on using previously.  A bit too much of it really.  Cass pointed out to him that we were only going to be back in the Village by sundown, so the bedroll and tent were hardly necessary.

Sometimes I half suspect she enjoys finding opportunities to point out the lack of practical outdoor skills in townies.  Or maybe it’s just that Vernon in particular makes for nearly an easy target as I am.

Lin showed up while Vernon was in the middle of shedding his excess luggage.  No camping gear on her part, just a bag with what amounted to first aid supplies and her typical upbeat humming.

Unfortunately, those first aid supplies soon had to be put to use.  As we were making our way toward the road out of the Village an out of breath young man waved Lin down.  From the way the humming immediately cut short and her expression went neutral the moment she saw him, I suspect she suspected what he was about to say.  There’d been an accident at the market.  Someone had tripped and dropped something heavy on someone’s leg and maybe broken something.  He’d been sent to go retrieve the doctor and recognized Lin on the street.

Slipping straight into professional mode Lin thanked the man for letting her know, sent him off to get her father just in case the tools she had on hand weren’t sufficient, gave a curt apology to us for not being able to join, and set off toward the market forum at a brisk but measured pace before the rest of us had a chance to say anything.

Sometimes I wonder which is the mask for coping and which is the “normal” Lin.  Or is that even a meaningful distinction to make?

Spirits dampened somewhat, we pressed on to the cathedral without her.  Out the eastern main road and up that unmarked muddy side trail.  Well, formerly muddy.  Here in the last days of the dry season the scene had changed from that dark and stormy night that had burned itself into my memory as my first encounter with this place’s uneasy peculiarities.  The water that once ran down the hill to pool and cascade every root-carved divet was now just a memory carved into wavy patterns on the ground that we kicked up into dust as we made our ascent.  The grass poking between the uneven cobblestone remnants nearer our destination had gone brittle and yellow.

We found Maiko waiting for us, pacing in front of those grand unhinged doors.  She stopped when she saw us.  Asked where Lin was.

We explained.

She let out a disappointed “Oh...” and said no more on that subject.

This spurred Vernon to raise an inquiring eyebrow at me and my response led to an escalating exchange of eyebrows being raised, lowered, and wiggled in an increasingly unsubtle manner.  I’m still not sure if anything comprehensible was actually communicated between us.

I couldn’t make out what Maiko whispered to Cass, but her “whispered” reply that this wasn’t a human thing, Vernon and I are just weird, was clearly meant to be heard by all.  That got a laugh out of Vernon at least, who followed it up with a few jests of his own that made me wonder if he’d planned the whole absurd exchange to lighten the mood before getting everyone back on the topic at hand.

Of the four of us, only Cass and I had been inside before.  Maiko had been aware of the place for a long time and had even stood outside like this on a couple of occasions, but said the ancient edifice so stubbornly resisting nature’s attempts at reclamation (or perhaps not so much resisting as assimilating the forest into its own grandeur) had always felt off to her.  Like she shouldn’t be there.  Or maybe that it shouldn’t be here.

I asked what she meant by that, especially the last part.

She said she didn’t have the words to say any more specifically than that.

Before actually heading in we took a few minutes to plan what all we were going to look at and for.  The top of the list was taking Maiko to see the Reader statue and the scripts carved in the catacombs to see if they were actually a match to what she’d seen on that eastern island.  The mention of catacombs led to specifying to Vernon that it wasn’t The Catacombs, which in turn led to Maiko surprising us by asking what we meant by “The Catacombs,” and for that matter what catacombs even were.

It’s funny how, relative newcomer that I am, I’ve already fallen into that mindset of taking certain things for granted as facts that everyone knew.  If I knew them, then surely everyone else who had lived here longer surely must too?  But in hindsight, it makes sense that, never having really been a part of the Village or interacted with the villagers, of course Maiko wouldn’t be familiar with their mythology.  And while it feels a little rude or maybe even condescending to call it that, really, there’s nothing that I’m aware of to actually prove that’s the nature of shades and where they take people and bodies.  Unless you count the mist night dreams that nearly everyone has had at least once in their lives.  As for Maiko, all she knew about the shades were the observable facts that her mother had told her at a young age; that they come out on mist nights, that they make anyone they catch disappear, and that they won’t go into homes or out on the water.

And so our planning session got derailed into explaining the idea of what a catacomb was as a place where dead bodies are entombed and then the Village beliefs about The Catacombs and their relation to shades and mist night dreams.  I wound up doing most of said explaining given that the unspoken Village taboo about talking about it too much made Cass and Vernon uneasy enough to excuse themselves to a short distance away halfway through the conversation.  Maiko confirmed that she’d had those same dreams herself on a number of occasions, more than most people it seems, but not consistently with every mist night like I seem to get.

She also raised the question of if the villagers always put their dead out for the shades to take away to The Catacombs, then why would this cathedral have its own catacomb underneath?  A fascinating question that I’d been starting to wonder myself since planning this return trip a few days prior.  And one that I’m surprised it took me so long to ask.  Perhaps because the first time I ever even heard The Catacombs mentioned was my own first visit to this place and didn’t have them explained to me until a week later when my mind was much more preoccupied with having just narrowly avoided being taken?

It was when Maiko suggested opening one of the sarcophagi to see if there was actually a body in it or not that Cass spoke up and started reciting the reasons I’d given her all those months ago about why it was a bad idea.  About the risk of disturbing the haunting dead who chant when it rains and how such things always end badly in stories.  I guess she really was listening.  Both to the current conversation and our past ones.  Vernon expressed his own discomfort with the prospect.  

As for myself, now that the prospect had been raised and we had someone probably strong enough to actually be able to move the stone lids my curiosity burned.  Were there bodies in there?  If so, why did the people of the cathedral bury them instead of leaving them for the shades like the modern villagers?  Was the practice replaced, or was it just a relatively small splinter group that took it up for a time?  Or perhaps there was something special about the entombed individuals themselves.  If they were buried with possessions, might those be clues as to why they did this or what happened to them?  And if there were no bodies, what was buried in there?

Ultimately, two things held me back from speaking out in favor of disenteration.  First was that I couldn’t very well go against my own advice in good conscience, especially with it seeming so sensible (when did not disturbing things for fear of ghosts become “sensible”?) and Cass having taken it to heart.  And second were the warnings I’d received from Pat and Theo.  Not of this specifically, but about the fate of outsiders.  How they nearly all eventually become consumed with a curiosity that ultimately drives them to disappear.  The fear that my taboo-breaking desire to know here might be foreshadowing my own path toward such a fate.

While I was lost in that spiral of thought, Vernon changed the topic to get us back on track.  After examining the  and the catacombs we’d come back up and look for parts of the ruins that Cass and I hadn’t explored.  In particular, it had looked like there was some suggestion of a balcony behind the Reader that the stained glass windows were positioned over, and I wanted to see if that was indicative of an upper level or chambers.  Maybe if we found an upper level, we might be able to observe something about the place’s acoustics to indicate that the “chanting” during the rain is just an illusion.  Not sure how we’d test that without coming back during rain, but exploring now for spots to observe from later will surely be safer than doing so while everything is dark, wet, and slick.  Other than that, exploring outside the cathedral itself to look for signs of any other surrounding structures or outbuildings concealed by (judging by Pat’s claims) centuries of overgrowth.

Agenda for our day thusly set

First rain of the season just arrived.  Almost didn’t notice it, so into writing.  I went out on the porch with the lantern to watch and listen to it for a while.  Such mesmerizing nostalgia.  I briefly stepped out to dance in it before the memory of the scratching in the dark these past few nights crept in and spooked me toward coming back inside.  Funny how fear of something you logically know isn’t real can still influence you.

The rain’s already stopped, but by now I’ve changed from my sodden clothes into sleepwear and the hour’s grown late.  I suppose the actual accounting of the exploration can wait for tomorrow now that the preamble is done with.