Holl slowly continued walking forward, almost like he was in a trance. His hands finally moved away from his weapons at his belt, and he stared at the gravestones in a daze.
Roth could faintly hear the sound of the captain muttering under his breath, but he couldn’t make out any intelligible words.
At the same time, Bindon stopped flipping through the booklet and looked up at the sky. The dark-haired sailor’s back was turned to Roth, but he could see something moving beneath his leather coat.
“Captain! Snap out of it, there’s something wrong with Bindon!”
Holl didn’t react to Roth’s shout, but Bindon did. He slowly turned around, his shoulders rolling unnaturally beneath his heavy clothing as he turned.
Small black lines webbed across the sailor’s face, splitting it up the canvas of his skin into small, random chunks. Bindon sucked in a deep breath as he turned, and all of the black lines quickly shrunk and disappeared.
“Haah… What a smart bet.”
As his teammate's eyes fixed on him, an intense wave of terror washed over Roth. This person in front of him definitely wasn’t the teammate he knew.
The entire time they were on the island, there was something wrong with Bindon…
Now, he wouldn’t even call this thing Bindon.
“Hmm, hmm. Roth, that’s your name, right?”
Bindon’s body lowered its head and smiled.
“Would you like to make a deal, child?”
Shit!
Roth didn’t even try to answer. The moment the thing in front of him opened its mouth, he was already turning tail to run back down the hill. After only a few steps, one of his feet caught the muddy indent of a footprint, and he completely lost his balance.
He managed to curl into a ball to avoid just face-planting into the mud, and he started to roll down the hill. It was just steep enough for him to start picking up speed, and his speed only increased as he spun down toward the lines of trees.
“Haha! Look at that! I just woke up, and I get to see something this hilarious?”
Roth was turning into a ball of mud as he catapulted down the hill, his jacket, backpack, and hair all gaining a thick coat of mud.
Roth’s path was taking him directly toward one of the lines of trees, and just before he impacted the trunk, Bindon waved his hand. An invisible force shoved Roth to the side, pushing him onto a path that would have him rolling all of the way down to the river.
“Hahaha! He looks like a little rolly-polly!”
Bindon cackled for almost a full minute as he watched Roth roll all of the way down to the bottom of the hill. After finally regaining his composure, a frown slowly grew on his face.
"Weird. That annoying trickster's influence on me seems to be a lot stronger than it was before. No matter."
Bindon dismissively swept his hand through the air, then looked back at Holl, who was continuously fiddling with his red star captain’s badge as he examined the names on all of the recent gravestones.
“Son…”
A faint whisper left Holl’s mouth as he continued looking over the gravestones, not finding what he dreaded to see.
“Hihi, is he dead? Lost at sea?”
Holl didn’t respond, instead just moving further down the line of gravestones, muttering as he continuously read the listed names.
“Interesting, interesting… it seems I have some fun people this time.”
Bindon walked in front of Holl, stopping down to read the gravestone in front of him.
“Lieson… I remember this fellow. He kept blabbering on about his adopted daughter, Alisa or something. Hmph, and he still declined my offer in the end.”
Bindon kicked at the gravestone, easily destroying the carved rock and sending chunks flying meters away. His boot was visibly deformed from the kick, but as he held it up in the air, something pushed against it from the inside, righting the leather.
“Hehe, and you’re still in a trance? It looks like I've finally recovered enough to escape this godforsaken island.”
The possessed sailor raised his arm like he was about to chop down at Holl's neck, then suddenly froze as a faint, ghostly light flickered somewhere within the graveyard.
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"Hmph."
Bindon lowered his arm, then patted Holl’s shoulder and walked off into the night. His path followed a fresh trail in the ground, right where Roth had just rolled down the hill.
“I reckon I can scare this kid pretty badly… It sounds like fun.”
Bindon started shaking his head as he continued down the hill.
“Even with this annoying trickster asleep, it’s still like this. Everything is hilarious.”
His frostbitten fingers tapped lightly on the cover of the booklet.
“Will it change with him gone?”
-
-
Up at the top of the hill, Holl finally stopped going through the gravestones a few minutes after Bindon departed. The cold sweat that’d been soaking his back ever since they arrived at the top of the hill was starting to chill with the night’s frigid temperatures. When he finally regained control over his body and returned to his senses, he slumped down toward the ground.
“I thought I was done for there.”
“Yeah. We’ve gotten ourselves into some messed up shit this time.”
A dark figure slowly walked out from the far side of the graveyard.
“Have you found anything out about the island?”
The figure’s face was revealed as he approached through the rows of stones.
“It’s mainly just these. None of the dates line up in order, it’s like they’re all random.”
Cundy swept his arm out as he walked over to Holl.
“None of ‘em are what we came looking for, though.”
Holl let out a relieved sigh when he heard the previously ‘missing’ crewmate’s words.
“There’s been a lot happening over on my side. We were right about the kid’s map, but it doesn’t seem to be doing nearly as much as that booklet.”
Cundy nodded as he took a small chunk of jerky out of his pack to chew on as they talked.
“That booklet just showed up in my stuff in the middle of the night, there’s obviously something wrong with it. It definitely wasn’t with Bindon’s stuff before we got off the ship. Hell, I got lucky that I didn’t open it up, or you might be down a man right now.”
“Even if we brought him on to investigate originally, Bindon was still a good crewmate. I’m already down someone I could trust.”
Holl crouched down in front of the broken gravestone that was kicked by the unnaturally strong Bindon.
“The kid should still be good, for now at least. We can’t leave him to whatever that thing is that took Bindon.”
Cundy looked at Holl in surprise.
“You want to go near that monster again?”
“We don’t know how long, or if a boat will show up. Maybe our guns will work to take care of that monster, but I’d rather have something supernatural to fight the supernatural with.”
Tucked within Holl’s jacket was a weapon neither Bindon nor Roth knew anything about. A model 29 revolver, the most powerful pistol on the market. According to what Holl had told the other crewmates, there were no firearms on board, yet he knew that there was another one of the same model on Cundy, as well.
“That kid is smart enough not to just run back to the campsite right away, it might be tough for us to find him before Bindon does.”
“Splitting up, or together?”
“Split. If you see Bindon, put him down and run. He might get back up. Let’s meet up in two days at the campsite, unless you see a ship coming.”
Cundy nodded and started heading for the forest in the direction of the stream.
“Good luck, then.”
Holl continued standing up on the hilltop, even after Cundy disappeared into the forest below.
“I hope he doesn’t die…”
Instead of following him out into the woods to help look for Roth, Holl turned around and walked over to one of the nearby graves that he’d read earlier. He could recognize the name on it.
Unlike everywhere else where the ground was a muddy mess, the graveyard’s dirt was firm and hard. It was similar to what one would expect from frozen dirt.
“F. Mezuo, the one before Lancon Smith.”
Holl didn’t care about the second name, it was the first one he knew.
“The captain of the Inkerman… how could he have a grave here?”
It was the name of the captain of a French military vessel that disappeared on its maiden voyage. Three brand new minesweepers set off into the great lake. The next morning, only one of them reached a refuge port, battered and nearly having sunk to a powerful blizzard.
None of the men aboard the other two ships ever turned up, and even decades later, no signs of the wrecks were ever found.
With 79 members aboard the two missing ships, it was the largest loss of life the lakes had seen in a single accident.
“They shouldn’t have even been close to here, though… they couldn’t have been close to here.”
Holl’s jaw clenched as he pulled his backpack off of his back and tossed it down onto the ground. Reaching inside of it with his gloved hands, he pulled out a small hand-sized spade, then plunged it into the frozen ground in front of the death marker.
Just over a dozen centimeters down, he hit something harder than dirt.
“Hm? A grave robber?”
Holl jumped up in shock at the sudden voice. Sitting just a few meters in front of him was a Native American woman. Holl could faintly see the ground behind her.
“G-Ghost?!”
Holl’s hand quickly reached into his jacket, withdrawing his revolver.
“Really?”
The woman sat still, giving Holl the most disappointed and scornful look she could muster.
“Grave robbing and trying to shoot a random person, after I saved your life, no less. You should be ashamed.”
Holl kept his gun at the ready as he examined the woman in front of him, but he didn’t point it at her.
The woman was wearing traditional Dakota clothing, and there was a wide drum sitting on her crossed legs. Her hands lightly tapped on the instrument as she stared at Holl.
“...Sorry. Do you know what this island is?”
Seeing as how the woman didn’t appear to be instantly physically hostile, Holl decided to question her.
“A grave of the lost. A prison. Gitchi Gami asked me to come here to watch over it…”
The woman looked down from the hill, off toward the stream.
“But it seems like my post will be coming to an end, soon.”
“I- I see. Are you able to help us? There is some unnatural stuff happening here, and I don’t know if we can survive.”
The woman tilted her head.
“Why would I want to help a murderous grave robber?”
Holl coughed into his arm.
“I was actually looking for my son’s grave… He went missing somewhere around here.”
The woman lifted one of her hands and pointed at Mezou’s grave.
“This is your son?”
“Uhm… No.”
The woman continued staring at Holl for a moment before letting out a long sigh.
“At least it isn’t for greed. I don’t know if I can help you find your son… but I wish you luck. Families should not be torn apart.”
The woman motioned for Holl to come closer.
“I won’t be around for much longer, so I suppose I’ll give you what little help I can. It has told me that Regards will slowly change people… hopefully mine can change you for the better.”
“What?”
The woman tapped on her drum a bit harder, sending out an invisible wave of energy that focused on Holl.
“The Regard of Feather… it sounds quite good. Please use it to search for your son.”
The woman started to fade away at the same time that Holl’s consciousness faded away. He collapsed to the ground, a mysterious energy coursing through his veins.