Chapter Text
"Gallo's Soultide Special"
There was one section of graves at Common Grounds Cemetery that was designed as a circle. For some reason known only to the original diggers, it was a family of buried individuals whose headstones all faced each other on opposite sides in a roundabout sort of way, so that, if you stood in the middle, you would be faced by all of their headstones at once.
Gallo Belgrave hadn't been involved in its construction and he didn't know any of the family, so he couldn't have said why they were designed like that, outside of some intense family tradition or other. However, every time he wandered through the rows of plots at Common Grounds, his eyes were likely to meet with the circle at least once, and he would be reminded of the first time he really made a connection with those headstones, almost two or maybe three years before Grace Morgan entered into his life...
It was 1977, and Gallo hadn't begun wearing his skull makeup on his face yet.
That was a gimmick he picked up later, after he began interacting with the people of Grimshaw at large in a more direct fashion, when it became prudent to want to hide behind a mask he didn't have to take off. In 1977, though, it was just himself, Wilma Barrow, and the ghosts of Common Grounds for company, and he didn't feel especially like hiding his skeletal, bony, pale-white face just yet.
As that year wore on — his first in the town itself, as opposed to being cooped up at Castle Gaunt on the top of the hill overlooking everything — he learned more and more about the ins and outs of graveyard operations. He stsrted digging graves for upcoming burials; he helped Wilma perform autopsies and cremations, and even the occasional stuffing of souls into their lead-crafted soul jars called funeral grails; eventually, he discovered the barely-functioning hearse at the cemetery that would become known as the Death Coach, once he began cruising around town from corpse pick-up to corpse pick-up with it...
And he became excited for his first Soultide away from the castle.
At Castle Gaunt, Soultide was something to be ignored, rather than acknowledged. The actions of the long-standing Count and Baron meant that the castle had become inundated with ghosts of all sorts; but because the castle's walls had been lined with lead during its construction, which acts as a natural repellant and shield againat magic ans spiritual energies of all sorts in Inglenook, they were trapped there and could even be corralled into specific rooms that were never meant to be opened again, for fear of letting the ghosts wash out in a flood of horrid energies.
Soultide, as it goes, was a spirit-based holiday. It was the end of the year celebration for all things spiritual, including the passing of loved or hated ones, as well as a time of "leaping" during which extra days the calendar had added up would be accounted for, and the next year could be synchronized properly again. So, if those days were especially high in number, there could be several days of extra time where nothing much really mattered at all, and Soultide would be extended vastly between its start on the Hallowed Eve and official end with the Remnance Festival on the first day of the next year.
Something else that never happened in Grimshaw during that time that made Soultide not quite as well-treasured there as it was in the rest of Inglenook was the appearance of the Alderghast, the patron spirit of the end-of-year period, who used the extra time and days as a period in which to travel Inglenook and collect wandering spirits, ideally to take them back to his home in Elder Hollow and protect them from rotting away into violent, forgetful, looping spirits, as loose energy of deceased consciousness often tended to when they became ghosts.
For some reason, the Alderghast had never shown up in Grimshaw, or anywhere in the Grim Grove, for any of the almost-two centuries of the region's existence since the Enlightenment in the 1700s. In fact, as the Soultide period of 1977 approached, Gallo Belgrave and Wilma Barrow found themselves having a conversation about that very subject, and it started with a simple statement, like so:
"My sister used to say the Alderghast doesn't come here because he abandoned us," Gallo said. "That Grimshaw is so cursed and so evil, that we're all just so monstrous, that the Alderghast turned his back on us so even our ghosts can't find peace."
Wilma raised her eyebrows at him. "Wasn't your sister a murderous cannibal?"
Gallo tossed a bag of soil down near the garden by the graveyard keeper's house, where they were working that day. "I guess."
"Do you believe what she said, Gallo?" Wilma asked.
"That we're all monsters and, deep down, we're just so evil that we don't deserve peace?" Gallo said, glancing at her. "I believe she believes it."
"It still gets to you," Wilma said.
"Why would it?" Gallo asked. "I'm not even a person, so I can't be a monster either."
Wilma stared at him half-sideways. "The Alderghast will be here. He's got no good reason not to be this year."
Gallo lit up a cigarette and took a puff. "I know."
On the day of Soultide itself, Gallo woke up feeling nothing — it was how he usually felt.
He slept in a coffin, in the stone crypt underneath the church at the heart of Common Grounds, and although it was nice and the close quarters were dark and strangely comforting to him, it was also cold, and dank, and usually fairly dark, and he hadn't even have a kettle to put coffee on with until he managed to scarper one from the groundskeeper's house just to do so.
There were roaches there, and rats, and all number of bugs and filthy things, as well as gathered trash from various parties and dead people's possessions that no one wanted, and not especially much to keep him busy apart from that, so he was left to take in the mornings of most days away from Castle Gaunt more or less alone.
As he drank his coffee and consorted with ghosts, some part of him felt oddly hopeful at the idea of seeing the Alderghast later, even though the majority of his heart knew it wouldn't be happening.
"Don't you have anyone you'd like to see?"
Wilma was found asking him, hours later, as he sat — bored out of his mind — by the side of the circle of graves where he had been hoping the Alderghast would materialize.
Gallo thought of his life at Castle Gaunt, his family before staying at Common Grounds; his father, and his sister, and the mother he'd always been told about but never knew — flashes of a life with them, memories of daydreams of anything but.
"No," Gallo said, not looking at her. "Just him."
Wilma looked on, her eyes filled with Gallo's form. "Well, the world out there is a big place. I imagine he'll be along soon, if he finds the time."
"He doesn't actually come to the Grim Grove, does he?" Gallo asked, as more of a conclusion than a question.
Wilma glanced at the empty circle in the middle of the row of tombstones, then at the sky, then at Gallo. "No, not really. Something about this place just doesn't connect with the Alderghast. Or it pushes him away, or it poisons him, or something or other."
"I bet that's why there's so many ghosts here," Gallo said.
"Yeah," Wilma said. "He doesn't collect them, so they pile up. Only so much lead to make grails out of, and to be honest, no one's quite bothered enough."
"At least there are plenty here at Common Grounds to go around," he said, as a few of the cemetery's known spirits began to materialize, in the safety of their Alderghast-less world within the woods.
Wilma scoffed. "Ha, you think they're convenient now..." She turned away from the scene and started heading for the groundskeeper's house, grumbling the entire way. "Just wait, Gallo. You'll see how these glorified phantoms can really be."
The ghosts known as Fleabag, Cannonball, and Harvey Stoker all materialized spectral forms around Gallo's sitting form, until a wisp of wind and aetheric mist briefly cast what Gallo imagined to be the form of the Alderghast within the empty circle. Then, all at once, the candles blew out and the specters vanished, and Gallo and the cemetery were alone in the dark once more.