Chapter Text
"My Hearse Is Dead"
Gallo's hearse stopped working; as if death wasn't enough.
It got him all the way to town and back, only to shudder with a horrifying wheeze right at the gates of Common Grounds, too far for the ghosts to help and too close to bother with. This was already the end of the road, so there would be no passing carriages unless they were visiting the cemetery, so he was essentially on his own for this one.
Gripping the wheel tightly, he gritted his rotting teeth, stepped out, and started pushing.
It was afternoon when he got back to the cemetery itself, pushing the hearse up to the side of the keeper's house where it normally was anyway. There was even a patch of grass missing where the hearse normally kept it shaded from the lack-of-sun in the sky above Grimshaw. Now, the only thing to do was the smart thing: have someone else fix it for him.
In the entire graveyard, there was only one ghost of anyone who knew anything about mechanical engineering, and that was the ghost of Captain Stoker's brother, Harvey Stoker. He had worked on the fishing boats for quite sometime, especially the Captain's own steamship, and had picked up a bit of knowledge that one might say could transfer over.
Gallo would have to have him take a look at it; that much was for sure.
Harvey was buried in a grave about three rows from the keeper's house, and his ghost tended to hover somewhere around there. "There isn't much for a boat engineer to do stuck on land, you know," he had once told Gallo while hovering over the skeleton-faced gravedigger. "You could try livening up this place for folks like me, if you really wanted to."
Gallo ended up glaring at him. "And how."
In the present, he was plenty lucky enough to find Harvey's ghost — a cumbersome, short, burly fellow with a thick moustache and patchy head of hair, at least once materialized in spectral form — lurking near the grave of former stage actress Penelope Wainwright, thought to be a contender for why the Peerless Playhouse was named the way it was.
Harvey glanced aside at him as he approached. "She was fetching, you know. Penelope. Only one eye to speak of, but you could still lose yourself in it for an hour, or perhaps even two."
Gallo nodded, as if he knew what she looked like. "Of course. Harvey, my hearse is dead."
Harvey blinked, and turned to him. "Well, I'm not surprised, the way you captain that thing."
"You're always asking me for something to do around here," Gallo said.
"Quite so," Harvey replied. "It's not made of lead, is it?"
"No," Gallo said, putting his hands on his hips.
"Ah," Harvey said. "Lead the way."
Gallo led, and Harvey followed.
It took about an hour to determine the issue; there was a dent in one of the internal mechanisms that needed hammering out, clogging up the works as badly as it had been.
"We'll need to completely remove it so we can hammer it back into shape," Harvey said. "Any chance you have the right devices for such a treatment?"
"Maybe," Gallo said. "Get started, and I'll see what I have."