Faramir Fiction Archive

The haunting of Minas Tirith (PG)

Written by Fawsley

22 December 2006 | 2722 words

Pairing: Faramir, Aragorn, Boromir, Bergil, Jumble the hound
Summary: A Hallowe’n tale. Can it be true that the dead do walk? Or is there a more down-to-earth explanation?
Feedback: Would be delightful
Disclaimer: Not my characters, they belong to the Professor. I just toss pumpkins with them.

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Huddled on cushions and furs before the fireplace, hugging his knees and looking seriously thoughtful, Faramir watched the dancing flames – red, yellow and blue. He shivered despite the heat.

”Do you think it’s true? Do the dead really walk on this night?” he asked of the King.

Beregond had come to them earlier with a wild tale almost beyond belief. Bergil, it seemed, had been drawn to the Houses of the Dead by strange noises. Faramir secretly thought the boy had probably been on a dare with his friends on this night of the Day of the Dead, but had refrained from suggesting as much.

Unearthly wails and howls had been coming from the Houses, enough to make your blood run cold, apparently. Bergil had seen that the door was slightly ajar and – although terrified – put his shoulder to it and slammed it shut, dropping the lock against whatever foul fiends had awoken inside.

At that very moment ghoulish fists had begun to pound from the other side, demanding to be let out, pleading to be freed. Bergil had, quite understandably, taken to his heels and fled to find his father. Shaking with a mixture of terror and excitement, safe now in the guardroom with Minas Tirith’s finest protecting him, he poured out the story over a beaker of watered brandy. The lad was usually honest and genuinely scared, so Beregond felt obliged to inform King and Steward of the strange events. All three men had been slightly disbelieving – until the first of the howls had rent the air and struck a cold chord in all their hearts.

Aragorn smiled at his Steward’s fears but did his best to allay them.

“And if the dead do walk, what of it? I have met with the dead, raised an army of them. We would not be here now were it not for the dead. Should they wish to come find us, I doubt there is much we can do to prevent it. Anyway, we cope with Boromir.”

“But he’s not dead. Not any more, anyway.”

“No, I see what you mean.”

The blood-curdling howls that had echoed around the Citadel earlier had ceased and Faramir hoped that whatever had been the cause had now found peace and crossed back over the divide between the living and the dead. He was not entirely convinced by Aragorn’s calm response.

“If they do walk, I certainly hope my father doesn’t decide to pay us a visit!”

“No, perhaps not. But your grandfather! Oh, I should so like to see him again! A great man was Ecthelion. Boromir reminds me much of him.”

It was, perhaps inevitably, just as Aragorn spoke these words that the chamber door swung slowly and quite ominously open to reveal a figure of such abomination that both men recoiled gasping from the sight. For a moment the shape stood rocking in the doorway, then took one limping step forward, then another, and another. Ghastly white, ragged, bloodied and dishevelled, the putrid stench of the grave upon it, the horror approached.

Aragorn was first to find his voice, but it was a small and timid whisper that Faramir had not heard from his King before.

“Ec.. Ec… Ecthelion?”

Faramir’s mind shot to the solemn statue of his grandfather standing guard in the throne room. There was indeed a definite resemblance between that cold figure and the unearthly terror now bearing down upon them.

The ghost – for surely that was what it was – groaned miserably, and behind him another unhappy form appeared from the shadows: Ecthelion’s faithful hound, carved at his side on the statue, obviously still loyal to its master in death. The dog’s head hung low, its tongue lolled, it rocked as it paced slowly, slowly, slowly towards where King and Steward cowered.

Nearer came the dog. Closer came the man. Soon an icy touch would be upon them, their souls stolen, their lives shrivelled to eternal nothingness….

Then the hound reached the water bowl, slurped and slopped and sluiced until there was nothing left, circled round once, circled twice then backwards again, sighed long and loud and slumped down in front of the fire.

Just like Jumble did.

Exactly like Jumble did.

In fact….

“Jumble?”

“Ooooh…” groaned the ghost “I need a drink. And a lie down. And something to eat. And a bath. Oh please I really really need a bath. But a drink first. Make it a big one. Make it two big ones.”

“Boromir?

“I think” began his brother “that first of all you owe us an explanation.”

“Indeed” seconded the King. “You said you needed an early night and disappeared off doing the biggest yawns I’ve seen from you since Gimli decided on an all-night recital of dwarf poetry. That was some hours ago. What exactly have you been up to?”

“Well, you wouldn’t have let me do it if I’d told you, would you?”

“Do what?

“Can I have a drink first? Some brandy? A big brandy?”

“You can have water and water alone until you’ve told us all there is to tell. In the meantime that dog is going to have a bath!”

Aragorn lugged an exceedingly unwilling Jumble out into the passageway and yelled for someone to please take him down the kennels to be cleaned up. Returning to the fireside he subjected Boromir to one of his sternest looks.

And waited.

Borormir was the bravest of Gondor’s warriors.

He had fought a cave troll.

He had faced a balrog.

He had even conquered death itself.

But his nerve ever crumbled when confronted by Aragorn’s Hard Stare.

“Oh. All right then….

“I wanted to know whether the dead do truly walk at this time, so I decided to spend the night in the Houses of the Dead. I wasn’t scared – having been dead once there didn’t seem much to be scared about – but I thought I’d take Jumble with me for company, and he’s quite useful to snuggle up to if it gets cold.

“Anyway, I took a torch, sneaked in there and pulled the door shut, leaving just a crack open so we could get out again but not enough for anyone to notice the light and come to investigate. Then we waited. It was all rather boring really, nothing happened at all. Well, apart from Jumble going to sleep. I got pretty fed up after a while, so I decided to sing to pass the time, and as both of you have said that my singing is enough to wake the dead, I thought I’d put your theory to the test.

“Jumble woke up and joined in too. We had a thoroughly jolly time, me singing, him howling. Quite splendid. Did a bit of marching up and down as well. Then there was this awful thud and I realised that some idiot had closed the door and shut us in! I yelled at them to open up, thumped and kicked, but the bugger must have run off. If I ever find out who did it, I’ll wring their bloody neck!

“So there we were, locked in with the dead. And as the dead didn’t seem to be doing much walking and I’d no idea when someone would come in there again, the only thing to do was to look for another way out. I started exploring those storerooms at the far end. They’re dark and full of all sorts of rubbish, could do with a good clearing out, but one of them has got a little window. Very high up and difficult to reach, but it was our only chance of getting out.

“There are some shelves below the window so I was able to climb up and look out to see where it would get us. A stone gutter trough runs all along the side of the Houses and the window is just above it, so we could get out of the window and into the gutter. Then at least then we’d be outside.

“I really can’t recommend trying to heave a hound out of a window, especially when the window is above your head and you’re balanced on wobbly shelves and there’s a pretty nasty drop on the other side. You’ve never heard anything like the fuss he made! Howling and moaning – if the dead had woken up they’d have been scared out of their lives. Or deaths. Or something.

“It took ages! Ages and ages! I’d just about get him through and he’d start struggling again, brace his paws against the wall and just refuse. You have no idea how bloody stubborn he is. And heavy. Massive! Should go on a diet. Eventually I must have caught him off guard because he sort of popped through the hole. I had to scramble out as fast as possible to stop him getting back in again. Once we were outside the gutter was so narrow that he couldn’t get back round me and had to go onwards whether he liked it or not. And he didn’t.

“Don’t think anyone’s cleaned out that gutter for years, if ever. It’s all blocked up. I had to crawl along on my hands and knees because it was so high up and it was full of rubbish. Leaves and twigs and moss and old nests and bird shit and dead things and horrible squelchy sludgy stuff. It stank. Absolutely stank. Well, you can probably smell how it stank. I really do need a bath, you know…

“Jumble was still howling all the time and trying to go backwards so he kept sticking his arse in my face and that is not at all a pleasant experience, I can tell you. Eventually we got to the end of the gutter. I hadn’t really thought about what we were going to do when we got there so when we did, well, we were still pretty much stuck. And of course it was dark and I’d had to leave my torch behind. I suppose I was hoping there’d be a way to climb down. Hadn’t quite thought what to do about the dog.

“There’s a sort of hole in the stonework where the rainwater is supposed to go – except that everything is clogged up so it doesn’t – and under that there must have been a drainpipe at some time but it’s long gone now. So there we were, stuck on the roof, goodness only knows how high up, in the middle of the night. Me and a dog. The Fellowship was beginning to feel like a summer picnic jaunt compared to all this. And Jumble just wouldn’t stop howling. I nearly pushed him over the edge I was so fed up.

“In the end I decided I’d have to go back inside and see if I could find any rope. Couldn’t face taking Jumble so I used my belt to tie him up through the hole in the stonework, looping it back up over the gutter edge. He wasn’t at all pleased about it but there was no way he was coming back with me, he’d have jumped through the window and never come out again.

“So off I went, crawling in the dark through all that damned filth, back to the little window. Luckily there was a coil of old rope in one of the storerooms. Goodness only knows what it was there for. Not for tying down the dead I presume. Hoisted that over my shoulder and then it’s time for my third trip through the grim gutter, back to my miserable companion. I think we both pretty much hated each other by then.

“Jumble hated me even more once I’d fashioned a sort of harness thing for him out of my belt and the rope. That’s when he bit me. But not too badly. He was just very, very grumpy. I tied the rope through the hole and over the stonework again, wrapped it round me, braced myself as best I could and, well, lowered away. As I said, Jumble is horribly heavy and I really thought I was going to drop him. But in the end, the rope broke before that happened…

“He made this odd whooping noise when he fell then there was this horrible wet thud and then just… nothing. I thought I must have killed him! Kept calling but nothing, nothing at all. Poor old dog. I got quite upset. But I still had to get out of the gutter myself. There was quite a lot of rope left and I had to hope that it would bear my weight long enough to let me get pretty close to the ground.

“I was near enough to the wall to brace my legs against it and sort of walk down with my feet whilst going down the rope hand over hand. It was hard work and jolly slow and horrid having to do it in the dark. And I didn’t know quite when the rope was going to run out. But then it did and all I could do was let go and hope for the best. I thought that at best I was going to land on a pile of dead dog.

“Do you remember when the flour bins got weevily a few months back and Cook had to throw it all away? Well, I found the flour again. Dumped behind the Houses of the Dead. Now it’s a great putrid mass like pastry gone wrong. And I landed in it. At least it was fairly soft. So I was back on the ground again and there was Jumble, covered in floury goo as well, waiting for me. Well he had to, because I had to untie him from the remains of the harness and there was still a fence to climb and a load of bushes and the compost heaps to get through…

“And so here we are. Can I have a bath and a brandy now please?”

King and Steward had listened to Boromir’s story with ever-widening eyes and dropping jaws. Now they dissolved into paroxysms of laughter, reduced to shrieking shaking wrecks.

Boromir was not impressed.

“Don’t you care? Does neither of you have any sympathy for me? You don’t know what I’ve gone through tonight, how I’ve suffered!”

Aragorn fought to compose himself, leaving a gasping Faramir to roll on the floor and clutch at his aching ribs.

“Boromir, believe me, we are most deeply moved by the account of your adventures and I can safely say that…”

But quite what Aragorn was about to say was lost, for the door opened once more, allowing a skittish Jumble to bound towards the fire, followed by he who had accompanied the hound on his return from the kennels…

Bergil.

“B-B-Bergil” Aragorn was stuttering with laughter “Meet your friend from the Houses of the Dead…”

Bergil looked at the ghost and the ghost looked at Bergil.

The boy did his best to hold his ground as a brave guard should but this was a walking member of the dead facing him, though it did look awfully like Boromir…

“Boromir. Meet the culprit who locked you in!”

Bergil went white and froze for a moment, then realisation kicked in and he was gone, fleeing from Boromir’s notorious temper rather than from the risen dead. Boromir roared and – bath and brandy both forgotten – set off in pursuit. But Bergil was young and quick and hadn’t spent the evening in a stinking gutter with a bad tempered dog. There was not going to be any real competition in this race.

Aragorn and Faramir collapsed once more into giggling, cushion-thumping joy.

“That has to be the best Day of the Dead story ever”

“Only Boromir could get into a mess like that! Only Boromir!”

“Still worried that the dead might be coming to haunt us tonight?”

“If they’re as hilarious as my brother, they can come haunt me any day of the week!”

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