Fanfic 100 - 035, Sixth Sense
Aug. 1st, 2007 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolevalanTitle: Something Not Very Nice
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Characters: OC, mention of Mrs. Lovett
Prompt: 035, Sixth Sense
Word Count: 794
Rating: PG
Summary: Mrs. Lovett takes a renter.
Author's Notes: And my random original character streak returns.
No one will go near it.
The young man looked up at the window above him with a small sense of foreboding. He’d been warned it was haunted, and though he didn’t believe in ghosts, still, he was not looking forward to the state the room must be in if no one had touched it in five years. Robert repeated the adage to himself about beggars and choosing and he mounted the outside stair to take a look. The landlady hadn’t even wanted to come up, choosing instead to give him a key and warn him about the thrashing he’d receive if he stole it. Mrs. Lovett didn’t strike him as the type that believed in ghosts; then again, if he’d been a better judge of people, perhaps he wouldn’t be in his current state.
They were about the same size as his former rooms, though much more meanly furnished. The dust lay like a thick gray icing over everything from the table to the windowsill. There was even a small cradle in the corner, abandoned by the former owners. A bit uncanny; still nothing here to be afraid of except the work it would take to get the place clean.
He inspected the rooms, and found them adequate. He couldn’t do better on his current budget, certainly. And so, he paid the first month’s rent in advance as required, and started settling in as best he could. He had few possessions, and the chambers seemed somehow too large for them.
Still, rooms were rooms, Robert told himself. It wasn’t as if one set of rooms was substantially better than another, at least under his current circumstances.
It was the second night when he heard it.
He thought it was the landlady at first. Sometimes he could hear her moving around below, though usually she went to bed early enough. And she wasn’t much of a music-lover, really. But the voice he heard humming was definitely female. It was high and fine, silvery somehow. He lay very, very still, trying to identify the direction that the lullaby was coming from. He held his breath, as if by staying perfectly still, he could dissolve into ether.
It came and went, drifting around the room. Once, he thought he heard a baby cry. Then, around midnight, it went quiet.
He convinced himself, the next morning, that it had been a dream.
The following evening, as the light started to dim, he heard the same song, in a different voice. It was a young man’s this time, a rich, high baritone. He almost caught the snatch of a word, but couldn’t quite place it. It stayed just out of reach. He went downstairs, to see if it was a customer. But the landlady was there, alone, rolling out the dough with small grunts of work that no one could mistake for music, no matter how wishful their thinking became. She looked up with a smile and asked him if he was hungry.
He wasn’t.
Weeks passed and the voices kept coming back. Sometimes the man, sometimes the woman, but never both at once, as if they kept missing each other. Robert was becoming obsessed with the nameless song. One morning, he found himself humming it as he shaved and stopped, abruptly, when he noticed.
But still, he told himself it was just overwork. That he must have heard the song somewhere.
The banging was harder to ignore. About a month after he’d started living in the rooms, Robert awoke abruptly to the sound of a door slamming open. He got up, reaching for both his trousers and his walking stick clumsily with the rush borne of adrenaline when he realized that his doors were all closed. When he checked them, they were latched, and hadn’t been disturbed.
A woman was weeping, somewhere. It could have been a woman in the street below, he told himself, a bit frantically now beneath his exterior. There were women in Fleet Street at night, and the Lord knew they had reason to weep. But still, still… it was the woman who hummed. He knew it without knowing how he knew it, but he was more certain than he had been of most things in his life. She was weeping, and he began, slowly, to fear she would never cease.
Robert was packed by first light. He’d not slept another instant, listening to the weeping, though the door did not bang again. There was no more music. And though he still most firmly did not believe in the ethereal, he could surely find more comfortable, less noisy rooms elsewhere.
It was only years later, when he found himself humming the same song, that he realized the damage had been, perhaps irrevocably, done.
Fandom: Sweeney Todd
Characters: OC, mention of Mrs. Lovett
Prompt: 035, Sixth Sense
Word Count: 794
Rating: PG
Summary: Mrs. Lovett takes a renter.
Author's Notes: And my random original character streak returns.
No one will go near it.
The young man looked up at the window above him with a small sense of foreboding. He’d been warned it was haunted, and though he didn’t believe in ghosts, still, he was not looking forward to the state the room must be in if no one had touched it in five years. Robert repeated the adage to himself about beggars and choosing and he mounted the outside stair to take a look. The landlady hadn’t even wanted to come up, choosing instead to give him a key and warn him about the thrashing he’d receive if he stole it. Mrs. Lovett didn’t strike him as the type that believed in ghosts; then again, if he’d been a better judge of people, perhaps he wouldn’t be in his current state.
They were about the same size as his former rooms, though much more meanly furnished. The dust lay like a thick gray icing over everything from the table to the windowsill. There was even a small cradle in the corner, abandoned by the former owners. A bit uncanny; still nothing here to be afraid of except the work it would take to get the place clean.
He inspected the rooms, and found them adequate. He couldn’t do better on his current budget, certainly. And so, he paid the first month’s rent in advance as required, and started settling in as best he could. He had few possessions, and the chambers seemed somehow too large for them.
Still, rooms were rooms, Robert told himself. It wasn’t as if one set of rooms was substantially better than another, at least under his current circumstances.
It was the second night when he heard it.
He thought it was the landlady at first. Sometimes he could hear her moving around below, though usually she went to bed early enough. And she wasn’t much of a music-lover, really. But the voice he heard humming was definitely female. It was high and fine, silvery somehow. He lay very, very still, trying to identify the direction that the lullaby was coming from. He held his breath, as if by staying perfectly still, he could dissolve into ether.
It came and went, drifting around the room. Once, he thought he heard a baby cry. Then, around midnight, it went quiet.
He convinced himself, the next morning, that it had been a dream.
The following evening, as the light started to dim, he heard the same song, in a different voice. It was a young man’s this time, a rich, high baritone. He almost caught the snatch of a word, but couldn’t quite place it. It stayed just out of reach. He went downstairs, to see if it was a customer. But the landlady was there, alone, rolling out the dough with small grunts of work that no one could mistake for music, no matter how wishful their thinking became. She looked up with a smile and asked him if he was hungry.
He wasn’t.
Weeks passed and the voices kept coming back. Sometimes the man, sometimes the woman, but never both at once, as if they kept missing each other. Robert was becoming obsessed with the nameless song. One morning, he found himself humming it as he shaved and stopped, abruptly, when he noticed.
But still, he told himself it was just overwork. That he must have heard the song somewhere.
The banging was harder to ignore. About a month after he’d started living in the rooms, Robert awoke abruptly to the sound of a door slamming open. He got up, reaching for both his trousers and his walking stick clumsily with the rush borne of adrenaline when he realized that his doors were all closed. When he checked them, they were latched, and hadn’t been disturbed.
A woman was weeping, somewhere. It could have been a woman in the street below, he told himself, a bit frantically now beneath his exterior. There were women in Fleet Street at night, and the Lord knew they had reason to weep. But still, still… it was the woman who hummed. He knew it without knowing how he knew it, but he was more certain than he had been of most things in his life. She was weeping, and he began, slowly, to fear she would never cease.
Robert was packed by first light. He’d not slept another instant, listening to the weeping, though the door did not bang again. There was no more music. And though he still most firmly did not believe in the ethereal, he could surely find more comfortable, less noisy rooms elsewhere.
It was only years later, when he found himself humming the same song, that he realized the damage had been, perhaps irrevocably, done.
