Close to Nowhere (Larry Stylinson)

five

...

"You're sure you don't know anything."

Tex didn't respond, but each thud of the hammer against the nail was met with more force than the last.

"And there aren't any records?"

"I don't know nothing except what's here. The property, the house. The barn is new, wasn't here before we put it up."

"Four hundred acres of land," Louis mused, resting against the worn wood. His shoes were sinking into the mud and in that moment he understood the necessity of boots. "There has to be something here."

"There's a graveyard in a clearing in the forest. That's all I know."

"On the property?"

"Uh-huh."

"And you've been there before?"

"Uh-huh."

"Why didn't you tell us?" Louis hissed, suddenly pissed off. He wasn't going to get to the bottom of anything paranormal if he didn't have a full grasp on the situation.

A flash of heat passed through him but it was instantly interrupted by the icy stare Harry shot him, telling him he was being rude. Louis didn't give a fuck about being rude—he was pissed Tex had kept this from them for so long.

"Can you point us in the correct direction, please?" Harry asked politely.

Louis zoned out as Tex relayed directions to get to the cemetery. His mind was still reeling from the two visions he'd had earlier: the one about the fire, about burning alive, and the other one... He didn't even want to think about it, about what it meant. Not that it meant anything. And not that it had anything to do with the case, either.

Stumbling through the forest wasn't fun. Harry had an awful sense of direction and they got so lost, Louis had to close his eyes and use distal mapping to get them to the cemetery. He and Harry agreed they would map the rest of the property tonight, to see if there was something else Tex wasn't telling them.

The cemetery was tucked away in the mountain, swathed in forestland, a little meadow on the hill. Louis could feel the dark energy before he even saw the small, eroded headstones popping out of the ground. The soil was fertile from bodies buried without caskets. Wildflowers bloomed bright yellow and white, lining the meadow and the graves.

"Well shit," Harry muttered, taking in the same sight as Louis.

"You shouldn't curse in front of the dead." He crouched down behind one of the stones, careful not to step over the bodies, although it was difficult to tell where they were. "Where do you wanna start?"

Harry shook his head, kneeling beside Louis and brushing his curls out of his face. When they first met, his hair was much longer, almost down to his shoulders. But one day he had a premonition and decided to cut it, right then and there. He never told Louis what he saw that made him want to cut it, and Louis never asked.

"I can't read anything on these. Can you?"

Louis ran his fingers over the stone, relieved to find it didn't force him into a vision. "No."

They stared at each other for a second, as if deciding.

"We can try scrying," Louis offered. Scrying technically required looking into a reflective surface to see the future, but Louis liked to use the term for any time when he got information from an object.

"We can, but... It'll help to have their names. It'll be safer that way too. So we know what we're getting ourselves into."

"Right."