Hector knew that something was amiss the moment he saw his friend.

Standing in the doorway of their favorite pub, stood Victor, looking as if he had one foot in the grave and the other on a wet fish.

“Vic! What happened? You look just awful.”

And that really was an understatement. Victor, the one who’s always got himself put together, the one who’s perfectionistic ways cause him to have obsessive tendencies towards cleanliness and outward appearances, now stands before Hector in his favorite suit, at least what’s left of it. Torn and ratted and smeared with dirt, Hector thought he looked something from a Poe poem.

“Hector… I- I have to tell you something. I’ve- I think I’ve found something completely morbid.”

Victor looked as if he might collapse, so Hector quickly put his arm around him to steady him. He tried to guide him to the nearest table to sit but Victor shook him off.

“NO!”

Startled Hector backed off.

Urgently he spat out, “ We have to go now, I wa- this can’t wait… you have to see it NOW.” Victor’s voice was as hard and cold as ice, and Hector knew that whatever this was, it was an emergency.

So they hurried out, Hector following him on horseback.

~

They were a long ways from the village. Hector had never seen this area of land in his life, and growing up he had always been the adventures type. Victor however, had always been the hermit and stuck close to home in his study.

“Vic, my friend, how did you ever end up here?”

Victor had been frighteningly silent the whole ride there. With only his back to gaze at, Hector’s anxieties have been cranked up to an all time high.

“We’re almost there Hec,” his voice was a rasp and so low that Hector hardly heard him. “You simply will not believe it. It’s terrible.”

Victor always been straight as a pen, the one who kept Hector out of trouble growing up. The one who was always there. Always.

“We’re here Hector.”

“Here?”

There was hardly a difference to where they were now to where they were an hour ago. Just trees in every direction; so tall that they seem to go on and on.

“Yes, but we still have to go pass that boulder over there, just on foot.”

This came out of Victors mouth in a frenzy. Whether it was out of nerves or excitement, Hector couldn’t decide.

They hopped off there horses and made there way to the spot.

“So my friend, do you plan on telling me what it is we came to see?”

“Oh believe me, you’ll know it when you see it.”

Hector hardly had a choice but to believe him and walked passed the boulder to see- nothing.

“Vic what- wait.”

There was something. A LOT of it.

Mounds. Everywhere piles and piles of disturbed earth for as far as Hector could see. It-it’s a gravesite.

“Victor what the fuck-.”

THWACK

That’s when he fell unconscious.

~

Victor always had a fascination with death. As a child he liked to perform autopsies on the small critters that wandered around the village. He dreamed of becoming a surgeon. But because he lived in such a small village in the middle of nowhere, the opportunities were slim.

He was an outcast because of it. Nobody dared to come near him because of his peculiarities. Exact that one idiot. Except his best friend. Except Hector.

They always stuck together after their bond. Never apart, they went on little adventures, much to Hector persuasion, and Victor happily complied, thankful to have a friend.

Everything was good for a time. Everything was perfect.

Until two weeks ago.

Victor shakes himself from his thoughts as Hector lays gasping, waking up from the blow to the head. In his newly dug home.

He looks strange from here Victor thinks, almost too small, too vulnerable.

“Vic- why-?” He stops and bursts into a fit of coughs

Oh, I’m going to enjoy this, thinks Victor.

~

Hector looks up to his childhood friend in horror. Victor leans over him, resting himself on the shovel that’s now coated in his blood.

“Why, he asks,” he’s laughing now, he doesn’t sound like himself, it’s too crazed, too awful “ I’ll tell you why. You were the one thing in my life that wasn’t fucked. The one person who I can count on as a companion for as long as we lived-.” He choked on his words.

“Then I wake up one day with you GONE, you never told me where you went. I half thought that you were dead. Which I probably would have preferred.”

Hector can’t do anything but stare.

“Months go by, and I find you at the pub with a ring on your finger, and your arm around a common WHORE.” Victors eyes go wide with intensity.

“So that’s where you had gone. Some local village you had wandered into like a moron, and went and got yourself hitched.” He’s laughing again more forced.

“Hmm but I got busy when you were away, you see. Without someone to keep me occupied, I had to find my own ways of entertainment and ohhhh my friend, how I’ve found my calling.”

Victor smiles down at Hector like he’s telling him, warmly, about his accomplishments and not about to kill him.

“The first was a quick death to try and get used to it but it felt so easy, so natural. So RELIEVING. I couldn’t stop myself from doing it over and over.”

“And now my friend, it’s your turn. Now, I can finally bring this sad part of my life to a close. I do wonder though, how much soil I’ll find mixed with your blood in your lungs, when I dig you up and cut you open.”

Hector’s final moments were spent gazing out into the starry sky, dreaming of a sunny morning, where he and his friend would play.