Chapter Text
It started with a Funeral.
Everything starts with a funeral. Without a funeral, everything just goes on, but with funerals, things begin. A feud, a healing, the novelisation of an existential crisis – all the good stuff. Except of course the existence of the corpse-in-question, referring to the short and strange lifespan of one Balthazar Addams, although his rather spectacular cause of death by decapitation sparked events that would certainly honour his heritage.
The House loomed over the city like a Lovecraftian nightmare, with its bell tower growing like a beacon of doom out of that gravestone covered hill of the Addams Family Cemetery. October territory left no doubt that all reminiscence of a golden fall was diminished and sent the world towards a nasty, cold and wet November. Foremost suitable conditions for a proper Halloween night. The soundscape of muffled moaning, feral howling and the occasional scream produced that very peculiar cosy feeling of home.
A respectable amount of relatives and acquaintances had assembled on the burial grounds, presenting a fashion show all throughout the history of mourning attires. It was not necessarily proof of taking deeper interest in either life or death of the deceased – he counted as somewhat of an odd-job amidst a family full of witches, sorcerers, crooks, lunatics and other dabblers in the occult. Their interest was directed on a different target.
His name was Gomez Addams, and he had seen evil. He was a direct descendant, after all.
He was a handsome, high-spirited man in his early twenties - a pirate on his way to a fancy dinner with wines, violins and a good natured looting afterwards. With his coming-of-age he experienced that a moustache, fine and thin like drawn with a carbon pen, had an immense effect on potential romantic partners of all sides of the spectrum. His carbon-black hair was back-combed and streamlined to jump into action at once – dances, fights, riots.
He was also, at this time of night, the only known murder suspect of his cousin Balthazar.
Gomez rightfully suspected that many attendees had come mainly to find out how he had acquired this honourable title (and because they had heard about the open bar). He had not planned to reveal any more information about that than necessary and was curious himself what kind of truth this night would produce.
His father beside him, Alfonso Addams, surely had done nothing to refute the intriguing accusations. He enjoyed an early retirement by exploring hidden atrocities all over the world, so Gomez found himself more often than not as a Master of a House that not long ago had belonged to somebody else. It was mostly inhabited by Lurch, the family butler of unknown age and friend of few words (the word was Mmmh), and a disembodied Hand, wandering the hallways in secret, checking that if any mischief was committed in the house, it would be managed by the Hand themselves.
Tonight, Alfonso went on to play the generous host.
“Gomez…” He leaned over to him. “Where is your brother? …Is he still mad?”
Gomez had a cigar in the corner of his mouth and got it lighted by Thing, the loyal right-hand to the family.
“Of course he is!” Gomez answered in surprise. “As for his whereabouts - well, you know him, sulking in the swamp, crawling back through the cellar floor. Same old, murderous Fester.”
“As always!” Father Addams smiled. “Although he has never been gone for so long.”
“Oh, he’ll turn up sooner or later. Never missed a funeral feast. –“
A cordial thrashing between the brothers was no rarity, but after the last fight, Fester had made off without further notice, and the house was so silent without his howling.
To put a long legend short: Gomez Addams was lonely.
There were phases when every birthday was celebrated like the Fall of Rome. At other times, the old faces appeared only for the weddings and, well, for the funerals. It did seem you had to occasionally murder someone to get a hold of the bunch.
At the foot of the grave stood Mucus Addams, a shrivelled old man wrapped up in a dusted coat, whose puberty had hit around civil war times. He had been assigned to give the eulogy, produced about ten words per minute and fell asleep from time to time. The speech was altogether recognized as already held on two other deceased family members, one third-grade aunt and a drunken house-cat.
Balthazar’s lack of attractive features called for the re-use of old material. The deceased had not really inspired any deeper emotions that commonly resulted in the craving to kill: He had been too odd to be murdered. And yet, with all experiences in the pain department, none of the Addamses could think of a precedence of someone tearing off their own head.
The Family was keen on finding the murderer of Balthazar Addams to pay him the due respect. And to salute him with terrible vengeance, naturally. A murder was only as exciting as the passing of judgement. Therefore, the victim could be as dull as a holiday slideshow, because the fun started afterwards.
It started with a funeral.
The left side of the grave belonged to Balthazar’s parents - Desperata and Pythia Addams.
Desperata was a gaunt, proud person, towering impressively over the company. Their face remained in constant shadow, covered by a veil applied to a velvet turban. Their black mourning frock coat was fitting to stride into battle at any given moment.
Their wife Pythia, a stout figure with the face of a friendly raisin, sat in a wheelchair beside them. She wore a black, moth-bitten cotton dress and a tartan blanket on her knees. Since a magical experiment gone awry, her mind seemed to have problems to keep up with the order of events. She often replied to questions that no-one had posed, so it was always a bit of luck involved if one caught her in the present. Every now and then, Pythia broke the dull atmosphere with a mystifying comment.
“Don’t call us”, she said to no-one in this particular timeline, “we’ll call you!”
Gomez’ attention wandered from his aunt’s comment of the day to the person behind them.
“What happened to Lurch, by the way?”
Alfonso and Gomez hardly reached the shoulders of their Butler, Lurch, with the tranquil face of a graveyard inhabitant – usually. Lurch was as tall and bony as ever, but his features had turned into those of a nervous rodent, with a snout as the tip of his nose, and wiry whiskers growing out of his cheeks. His yellow eyes moved hysterically from left to right.
“You getting along, old fellow?” Alfonso asked happily. Lurch growled. Well, he would have growled but all that came out of his throat was a high-pitched squeaking.
“Taking up a new hobby?” Gomez smirked.
“The effect is temporal, but striking.” Alfonso held up a simple blowpipe. “It is supposed to reveal the target’s nagual!” He placed the pipe between his lips like Gomez his cigar. “…their animal counterpart.”
There was a whirring sound, and Mucus Addams slapped his hand at his neck. Brownish feathers grew out of the pores around his already beak-like nose, but the fact that his face was transforming into that of a sparrow didn’t stop him from holding the speech with a confused chirping.
“Knight to D seven!”, proclaimed Pythia Addams, and her brother-in-law and nephew burst out into surpressed laughter. Thing jumped up and down on Gomez’ shoulder in a scolding way. A cloud of indignant air pressed through Desperata’s veil.
“Alfonso”, they hissed, “this is my son’s funeral!”
“Don’t bother, Despi, you would do the same for my sons! Right, Pythia?”
“Checkmate.”
Desperata, an Addams after all, replied from the corner of their mouth: “If you have to fool around, at least do it with somebody outside the family.”
“Special wish, my dear? – Oh, what about them. I’ve been abroad for a while, I cannot quite place them.”
He pointed at a small group standing on the acquaintance side of the grave. Three women were watching the ceremony thoughtfully.
“Mother or daughter?”, murmured Alfonso. They looked at the oldest of the three, covered in rags and felted hair. She wore a sad smile and moved her head in circles to the nervous, twittering voice of the orator, as if dancing to music. Her looks led to believe that she was related to at least one of the others, a younger woman with a tousled appearance, a cloud of white hair surrounding her face.
Desperata sniffed. “The Mother.”
“Watch out, Ladies and Gentleghouls”, whispered Alfonso Addams. He put the pipe to his lips again and blew. For a few seconds, the Addamses observed the witch keeping on swaying…then she gave a little shout of surprise, clapped her hands against her cheeks and felt her head transforming under her fingers. Her chittering like an outraged insect startled up the bystanders. The young woman next to her exclaimed, “Maman!”, and took the shoulders of the witch, like she could let her head change back by violently shaking it.
The other attendants couldn’t help noticing the spectacle. Despite the screaming and the transformation of his head, Mucus had not looked up from his parchment and stubbornly continued his speech.
Gomez grinned dubiously. He saw the bewildered young woman scurrying around her confused mother, yattering a duet with her. But while Alfonso and a bunch of further guests did not make the effort to supress their schadenfreude, and Pythia Addams held a monologue about the Einstein-Rosen bridge, something irritated Gomez.
He could not identify it at once.
It was a black spot in his field of vision.
And then he had a revelation. In marked contrast to the wailing and gesturing mother and daughter, the third woman stood about ten feet beside them, completely motionless. Clad all in black, she blended perfectly into her nocturnal surrounding. It was the white oval of her face that had caught Gomez’ eyes. She did not bother about the bedlam all around. She had crossed her hands above her chest, her gaze turned into one direction without blinking.
She was looking at him.
“Frump!”
Desperata and Alfonso turned right, surprised to hear a comment from Pythia that did seem to be addressed to the presence.
“…Frump!”, she repeated in an unsteady voice, like her inner radio was still trying to find the right temporal wavelength. Pythia Addams could not place most of the things people said to her, but the screams of the targeted woman obviously triggered a thought. “There is this saying”, her voice continued like through a broken loudspeaker. “About an all-female family. No living male ancestors, no male offspring. One of them turns out to be a mantis.”
Alfonso frowned. “One of them transforms into a little insect?”
“The one is destined to a life of loneliness, for every man wishing to seduce her will die trying.”
Alfonso and Desperata attentively waited for more to come, but that seemed to conclude Pythia’s short excursion to the Here and Now. Alfonso pondered: “There are Praying Mantises in the south-American jungles. I’ve heard about them. After mating, the female bites off the male’s head.”
Gomez’ head roamed in blissful absentmindedness.
His perception was completely confined to a pale face with fine features, red lips curled to the ghost of a smile, and her eyes: an endless darkness, with an auspicious gleam way back in the distance. Long black hair framed this face, fell over slender shoulders to where slim white fingers were clinched into each other. He was so devotedly fixed on her that he got the impression she was only one step away, so he opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was his glowing cigar falling into the hole in the ground.
Thing knocked on his shoulder, but Gomez just rose his hand dreamily and with a minimal gesture he flipped Thing away, the hand flew through the air and crushed into a buggy, in which young Lumpy Addams started chuckling about the new toy.
The stranger in the black dress seemed to be just as absent. She reacted in no way to the noise right beside her that even had found a way into the consciousness of Pythia Addams.
“Frump”, repeated Desperata. “Old friends of Pythia’s. Working class witches, got roots dating back to the French Revolution.”
“Which side were they on?”, asked Alfonso.
“The Guillotine’s.”
“Ah, well – now here comes poor Balthazar.”
Conversations faded. Mucus allowed himself a break and even the two Frump Women lapsed into silence. Lurch took up an old accordion that looked – and sounded - like something the dog had buried in the swamps. The Butler began to play a slow and depressing requiem.
Four small, bold fauns in black suits and top-hats carried what obviously was a plywood box, showing signs of glue and tape that were supposed to prevent the coffin from falling apart. On the lid there was a label: “FRAGILE”.
The Addams Family knew about coffins. The occasions where family members had complained about the lack of cushions and velvet in their caskets had been comparatively rare, mostly connected to relatives of the vampiric persuasion. A good old plywood box was low-cost, practical, and available on short notice. Every undertaker trying to convince them of the XXL mahogany sleep-well casket with hand-carved decorations would quickly receive the offer to test their goods all by themselves.
Desperata sniffed into a black handkerchief.
Pythia chirped, “Everything not saved will be lost…”
The fauns slowly let the coffin sink into the earth.
“Let the grounds take back what the grounds spat out!”, croaked Mucus.
A boy and a girl to each side of the open grave ignored the whole procedure.
The fauns let go off the box, and as it touched the ground, a corner of the wood cracked and sparks jumped up from under the coffin. Thing excitedly hopped to the edge of the hole.
“…And with strange aeons, even death may die!”, proclaimed Alfonso melancholically.
Mucus said: “Ashes to ashes…”
Thing pulled Alfonso’s trouser leg.
“What is it, Thing? … Oh, my - indeed!”
Desperata looked down. “What is it, Alfonso?”
“Well, I fear the coffin is on fire, my dear!”
“…and dust to dust”, finished Mucus.
Alfonso und Desperata glanced into the grave.
“Balthazar used to be rather dry – “
A darting flame burst out of the hole and the whole coffin was on fire.
The mourning attendees ran around the hole in the mud, screaming in excitement. All peculiar liquids and toxins flourishing in the earth of the Addams burial grounds dramatically interacted with Gomez’ cigar that had fallen into the grave.
The older Frump Woman had taken a bottle out of her garter and emptied it into the flames, which increased the disaster even more. Other people were searching for something to douse the flames and eventually tried it with the tartan blanket from Aunt Pythia’s knees, while Untie Desperata sneered into their nephew’s ear, judging his attempt on absolutely doing nothing about saving their son’s remains as a definite proof for his guilt.
Gomez had entered a parallel universe in which the chaos of screams and flames was nothing but a distant dream. He experienced a hitherto unknown sensation growing in his stomach that would have otherwise worried him. It was elevating and consuming him at the same time.
He stared at this most seducing, vaguely smiling face, now surrounded by uprising fire, a dark-clouded night sky, distant screaming, with flames dancing in her eyes.
