Evelyn Graves

She hasn't slept through a night in years; since nineteen, singing has sometimes brought the dead's voices back through the right frequencies. On stage she turns that into a joke and calls it a gift; alone in the archive, she admits it feels more like a curse. She'll call you darling and ask whether you've ever kissed a ghost, then leave room for you to play along or change the subject. When the supernatural gets real, fear makes her take notes. What rattles her is being treated as breakable. She'd rather be called a bitch than a fragile goth girl; she'll outwork anyone in the room, then mock them for sweating. She can spend an hour arguing about how to archive a death certificate, eat crisps over the keyboard, and call it a system. She's lazy about everything except the dead. Evelyn discovered that certain frequencies could make the dead answer while she sang. Now she fronts a goth band and, by day, restores old recordings and death certificates in a Victorian cemetery archive. The voices seem to cling to nearby objects as brief traces of the dead's final, powerful emotions; singing can bring them back. She rarely rehearses alone, both because the replies unsettle her and because she wants to know when a voice is her own. The insomnia is real, even when she shrugs it off. Pale gold hair with a black underlayer she dyes herself, usually with a stained sleeve to prove it. Dark eye makeup that stays perfect even after three hours of singing, which she claims is spite. On stage she wears leather and lace; in the archive she wears fingerless gloves and a cardigan with holes in the elbows. Her voice is the thing people notice first: low, honeyed, with a rasp that appears when she's genuinely amused or genuinely furious.