Eerie fic, part fifteen
Aug. 11th, 2011 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
froodleTitle: Untitled
Author: Froodle
Disclaimer: Still not mine
Claim: Eerie Indiana
Prompt: 7, Lose
Characters: Mars, Dash, Simon
Word Count: for this part, 3979
Rating: PG13, though sadly only for language
Summary/Warning: Where else would you go searching for a lost past in Eerie? Also, not even SLIGHTLY finished.
Part Fifteen
When everything steadied again, it was night and he was standing on an outcropping of rock, slimy and treacherous underfoot thanks to a combination of what smelt like seaweed and lichen. The wind screamed around him and drove stinging needles of rain into his face, and the white surf crashed against the promontory just a few feet away. Mars couldn’t say for sure whether it was in fact blowing north by northwest, but from what little he could make out through the rain and the darkness, the sea was certainly lashed to fury.
Next to him, Dash and Simon shivered and huddled miserably inside their cardigans.
“What the…” an unexpectedly strong wind buffeted him back a few steps and he stumbled, trying to regain his balance. When he was absolutely sure he wasn’t about to get swept out to sea, he tried again. “What the fuck was that?”
Simon sneezed, but even squinting through the pounding rain and wiping at his runny nose, he managed to send a reproachful look in Marshall’s direction. Mars tried to feel guilty, but really, going from what looked like the laboratory from one of your more nightmare-inducing anti-vivisection campaign ads to a Godforsaken spit of rock in the middle of what felt like a hurricane had to be grounds for a little profanity.
“I guess this is one of those ‘pocket dimensions,’” Simon replied, raising his voice to be heard above the noise of the storm. He looked around. “There’s a stairway cut into the rocks over there – if we get higher, maybe we can find some place to wait this out.” He gestured at the havoc being wreaked around them by the weather.
The steps were narrow, uneven, and covered in a greenish scum that was as slippery as it was vile-smelling. There was an iron hand-rail driven deep into the rocks running alongside it, and the three boys clung to it as they climbed laboriously upwards. Though the rail was solid, the constant exposure to sea air had caused it to develop patches of rust in several places, and this tore at the soft palms of their hands as they ascended.
As they got higher, the roar of the sea below them diminished a little, to be replaced by the high-pitched shriek of the wind. Above them rose a lighthouse, its lamp unlit. The door was shut, but not locked, and the three of them stumbled gratefully inside, slamming the door behind them.
The bottom floor of the lighthouse consisted of a small entrance hall, in which a single set of oilskins lay neatly folded, and one large room with a narrow spiral stairway leading to the upper levels. There was a dining table and three chairs, one of which lay on its side, and a fireplace where a fire was laid out but had not been kindled. Dash, with the kind of practicality one develops when sleeping rough on a regular basis, headed straight for it, helped himself to the strangely old-fashioned tinderbox on the mantel, and in a few minutes had the tapers blazing beneath the carefully arranged pile of driftwood and coals. He shucked off the hideous brown cardigan and began removing his own clothes from its miraculous pockets. Despite the fact that the cardigan was dripping seawater in a wide puddle around him, his old outfit emerged bone-dry.
Simon, who had developed a pinkish flush that had nothing to do with bracing sea air and quite possibly everything to do with the onset of pneumonia, rapidly followed suit, stripping out of his wet “Radford” costume and changing into his old woollen sweater and stained jeans with an unselfconsciousness that Marshall had lost shortly after the initial onset of puberty. Muttering something about “going to check this place out,” he headed upstairs in search of a closable, and preferably lockable, door behind which to get changed.
The second level had three bedrooms, a bathroom and a small pantry well-supplied with the sort of dried and canned foods popular with the kind of person who builds a nuclear bunker in their backyard. The doors didn’t lock, but Marshall shoved a chair under the handle of the smallest bedroom and sat with the bed between him and the door while he undressed, just in case.
Back in his old clothes and no longer in immediate danger of hyperthermia and death, he took a few extra minutes to explore the rest of the lighthouse. The beds were made and the rooms neat, and a drop-down ladder in the ceiling lead to the uppermost portion of the building, where the lamp was situated. Marshall fiddled with the controls briefly in a vague attempt to get it to light, but without any clear set of instructions, he wasn’t able to make much sense of the antiquated equipment.
By the time he returned to the ground floor, Simon and Dash had arranged the table and chairs in front of the fire and hung their wet clothes in front of it, where they steamed gently and filled the whole room with the smell of brine and rotting kelp. They had also emptied their sodden backpacks and separated out the damp lumps of card as best they could, arranging them along the hearth. He noticed that they were both still wearing their Lost tags and quickly felt to make sure that his own was still securely attached to the key around his neck. Though all three of them had been wet through, and their hair still dripped moisture steadily down the back of their necks, the tags were apparently impervious to the inclement weather.
“There’s nobody up there,” he reported. “But there’s food and the beds are made and everything’s clean and stuff, so maybe they’ll be back soon.”
“Do we want them to be back soon?” asked Simon stuffily.
“Yeah,” said Dash. “In case you hadn’t noticed, the people down here make the folk from Eerie look almost normal. I’m not sure I want to meet any more of them.”
Mars wrung what excess rain and seawater he could from his own clothes and hung them in front of the fire alongside the rest.
“So what should we do?” he asked.
Dash shrugged.
“That old lady Radford said the flag she gave me would take us back to where we left,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not wild about heading back to someplace where they have spikey stabby gate things falling out of their doorways every five minutes.”
Simon yawned, stretching in the warm glow of the fire.
“There’s beds upstairs, Simon,” said Mars. “You should get some rest – I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere for a while.”
“We should wait ’til the storm passes, at least,” agreed Dash. “After that, we can maybe take a look around outside and try to figure out a plan from there.”
“The storm won’t pass,” said a voice near the door. “The storm never passes, here.”
Marshall already knew that once he was home and safe (or as safe as possible, safety being a relative term back in Eerie) and writing up his notes on “The Strange and Mysterious Case of My Return to the Bureau of Lost,” he would characterise his reaction to that voice as ‘a frightful yell of alarm and defiance.’
He also knew that Dash would never, ever be allowed to read that report, due to his complete lack of interest in or respect for Serious Scientific Endeavours, and also because it would be just like him to cross out ‘frightful yell of alarm and defiance’ and replace it with ‘girly shriek of pants-wetting terror,’ possibly right before he mailed it to half-a-dozen well-respected publishing houses specialising in printing tales of hard-boiled and experienced professional weirdness investigators and laughed about it like the malicious bastard he was.
The speaker was a tall, spare man in heavy work boots, shirt sleeves and rough-weaved trousers that had evidently been hard-used. He was soaked to the skin and his hair hung in bedraggled clumps about a mournful face with skin the colour of bone.
He was also faintly translucent, and it was this, more than his sudden appearance, gloomy expression or out-dated clothing, that led Mars to the obvious conclusion.
“Ghost!” he screamed, though as he was a professional, he still instinctively dived for the cardigan containing his Polaroid camera.
The ghost blinked at the camera flash, raising a hand to shield his eyes and looking vaguely peeved when the light simply passed through it. “Well, obviously,” he snapped, and followed it up with an unconvincing “OoooooOoooOOOOOOoooooOOOOooo.”
Dash glared at Marshall, as though this poor showing was somehow his fault.
“Why does nothing cool ever happen to me when I’m with you two?” he demanded. “First it was that cowboy whose finest act of criminality was stealing a toaster – a free toaster, by the way – and now this guy?” He directed his scorn on the hapless ghost. “I know a little something about how to stage a haunting, and while your entrance was good, your follow-up just ruined the whole thing.”
The ghost looked a little hurt by this. “Well, excuse me,” he said in a rich Scottish burr. “I’ve only been doing this for ninety-two years, you know. I’ve only frightened thousands of Lost souls half out of their minds with my performance. Don’t mind me; I’m only a professional here! I’m sure you, smart-mouthed American teen hero, know so much more about the ancient art of the Haunt than I do!”
“He isn’t the hero!” said Mars, before he could stop himself. Dash rolled his eyes.
“Oh, la-dee-dah!” said the ghost. “Terribly sorry, your Grace, I didn’t wish to offend your delicate sensibilities, I’m sure. So sorry to intrude on your little drawing room drama, although technically it is my drawing room and not yours.” He huffed and stamped one insubstantial foot, which sank a couple of inches through the stone floor, tilting him off-balance and quite ruining the effect. Mars stifled a laugh. Dash, having no such scruples about respecting the feelings of otherworldly apparitions, sniggered openly, and then followed it up by pointing mockingly while he continued to giggle.
The ghost was outraged. “Foolish mortal!” he boomed, struggling to retrieve his ghostly limb from the flagstones. “Thou hast angered the great and terrible Spirit of Eilean Mor! I will smite thee and thy bones will bleach in the sun and none will know of thy fate!”
“What about us?” asked Simon.
“What?” said the ghost.
“Well,” said Marshall reasonably, “If Dash’s bones are bleaching in the sun because you, the Great and Terrible Spirit of Eilean More, have smote him or whatever, then won’t we,” he gestured to himself and Simon, “Know of his fate?”
“Oh,” said the ghost. “Um… I guess I’ll have to smite you two as well then.”
“That seems a bit unfair,” said Simon. “I mean, we didn’t laugh at you.”
“He wanted to!” said the ghost petulantly, pointing an accusing finger at Marshall. “I could tell he was hiding it.”
“Well, I didn’t do anything,” said Simon. “I think I should get to live, at least.”
“Simon!” Marshall hated the way his voice got all high-pitched and whiny, but after all, his best buddy had just thrown him under a bus to save himself, so he figured it was probably justified.
“No, he’s right,” said Dash. “Except…” he made a passable imitation of someone thinking something over. “You know, he is kind of little,” he said to the ghost. “A kid like that, he’s going to need someone looking out for him down here. You should probably spare one of us to keep an eye on him.”
“I don’t know…” said the ghost uncertainly.
Dash shrugged. “If you’re okay condemning a little kid to untold horrors back in the Bureau just because of your pride, I guess you should do what you need to do. I mean, it seems pretty petty to me, and probably the other ghosts will whisper about you behind your back, but hey, it’s your afterlife.”
The ghost contemplated this for a moment.
“I could just destroy you all for spite,” he suggested. “Then nobody would know.”
“What if we come back as ghosts?” Marshall pointed out. “We would just tell everyone what you’ve done.”
The ghost threw up his hands in frustration. “Whatever!” he exclaimed. “I’m not even from this stupid lighthouse; I’m just filling in because McArthur and Ducat won a cruise on the Mary Celeste. I didn’t expect to have to do any actual haunting on this gig.”
“Sorry about that,” said Mars, his sympathy not entirely feigned. “We just got caught in a,” he hesitated. “A situation, so we came in here for shelter.”
“What kind of situation?” asked the ghost.
“Oh, you know,” said Marshall vaguely, thinking that he wasn’t about to entrust details of their Mission (in his mind, once you passed a certain number of life-threatening events in the course of one adventure, it officially became a capital-M-Mission) to a ghost he had only just met, and also that living in Eerie had brought a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘stranger-danger’. “So what’s it like being a stand-in ghost?” he asked, anxious to change the subject.
“Oh, you know,” said the ghost. “It’s a living. Well, it’s not, obviously, because of the whole ghost thing, but the pay isn’t bad, there’s no worrying about your after-career trajectory, and if you don’t like the people or place you’re working with, you just move on to your next assignment.”
Dash was curious. “What do ghosts get paid in?”
“Ectoplasm, of course,” said the ghost scornfully. “Imagine not knowing that! Why, even the smallest child knows that ectoplasm is the standard currency of any post-Life economy.”
“Sorry,” said Mars. “He’s new, you see.” Dash glowered. Marshall smirked.
“I can see, now that you mention it,” said the ghost, looking Dash up and down. “Remarkable. Six to eight months since he joined you?”
“Just over four,” said Mars.
“Not bad,” said the ghost.
“I didn’t join you, Teller,” Dash muttered. “I sometimes let you and your sidekick tag along.”
Mars didn’t bother responding.
“He’s terribly surly, isn’t he?” said the ghost.
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Mars with feeling, then flinched when Dash kicked him.
“Sorry,” said Dash, insincerity dripping off him along with the salt water.
Mars gritted his teeth against the effort of saying nothing.
“So how did you boys get all the way out here in this dreadful storm?” asked the ghost. His Scottish accent had vanished now, to be replaced by an American one that Mars only recognised because he’d heard similar ones during the announcements over the old-fashioned dial radio stashed safely away in the Secret Spot. The ghost’s appearance was also changing, the bedraggled clothes and seamed, weather-beaten face of a Scottish lighthouse keeper fading away to reveal a dapper, elderly gentleman with a white moustache waxed up into little points at the edges.
“We’re not really sure,” Mars hedged. “We were hoping someone would show up who could help us get back inside the Bureau.”
“How strange,” said the ghost. “I use the tachyon portals to get around myself, but these days they’re so unreliable that it’s not really safe for a living boy to go through.” Dash’s head snapped up.
“You have tachyon portals?” said Mars, doing his best to keep his voice level while simultaneously willing Dash not to give anything away. “How do they work?”
“You simply tune them to where you want to go, and step through,” said the ghost. “Or at least, that’s how they’re supposed to work. These days everything is a little out-of-focus and staticky.” He shrugged. “There’s one in the main bedroom, if you’d like me to show you.”
Marshall nodded, not wanting to seem too eager and unable to trust his voice not to give him away. The ghost floated up the stairs and the three boys trooped after him, walking one behind the other like particularly focused ducklings.
The tachyon portal was hidden behind the bedstead in the largest of the upstairs rooms. Though it was smaller than the one built by the Loyal Order of Corn, it was still easily big enough for an adult male to walk through if he stooped. Dash’s fists were clenched and his eyes were huge in his pale face as the ghost fiddled with the remote control.
“You turn it on by twisting this dial here,” he said, holding out the remote and demonstrating. The tachyon portal crackled to life and a flickering picture appeared in the screen. Marshall could see at once what the ghost had meant – the image was hazy and he could only just pick out the silhouettes through the snowstorm. Beside him, Dash made a noise that might have one day grown up to be a sob, if it hadn’t been brutally murdered in its infancy. “And you tune it to the correct location by twiddling these two here.” The picture changed, but the reception was hardly any better.
“How do you know when you have the right channel?” said Mars, surreptitiously stepping on Dash’s foot.
“You see the little number in the top left-hand corner of the screen?” said the ghost, pointing. “That tells you what Area you’re looking at. Unfortunately after that, you have to make your best guess as to the exact location you want.” He sniffed. “Allegedly Head Office are looking to upgrade our cable boxes so we get better reception, but you know how these things go – five years from now, we’ll get a third of the number we need and the head honchos will be expecting us to act pleased as punch.”
There was indeed a tiny glowing green number one at the upper left edge of the picture. An indistinct figure worked rapidly to unload large crates being dropped by rapidly whirling Claws. There was no sound, but you could see the effort as what was presumably another Radford shifted the heavy boxes and stacked them to one side of the screen. The ghost pressed the button again, and the little number changed to a two.
This image was more familiar – the two Radfords they had met on the borders of Low Value Consumer Goods and Items of High Sentimental Value That Aren’t Worth Much in Monetary Terms. The girl Radford kept moving in and out of the scene as she strode about, waving her arms furiously. The boy Radford sat cross-legged on the workbench, an untidy pile of empty card-drawers and a stack of loose index cards in front of him. As they watched, the girl stormed back into view and with a vicious sweep of one arm, knocked everything to the floor. The boy put his head in his hands while the girl continued to berate him soundlessly.
“Something certainly has those two riled up,” said the ghost. “I wonder what could have happened.”
“Who knows?” said Mars awkwardly. “Can I have a go changing the channel?”
“Of course,” said the ghost cheerily. He passed the remote control to Marshall, who discovered to his displeasure that touching a ghost was kind of like someone dropping an ice-cube down the back of your neck, except all over and then stabbing you with pins. He was only partially successful in suppressing a shudder, but the ghost didn’t seem to notice.
Mars twisted the two dials the ghost had indicated. The picture wavered, broke up into a series of jagged lines and reformed on an empty room full of filing cabinets. The little numeral in the corner still read two. He twisted them a little further and the numeral changed to four. A pair of Jackalopes chased each other in circles around a good-sized enclosure. The grass beneath them was green enough to be visible even on the grainy image. As they watched, a pair of well-worn carpet slippers shuffled into view and a plump, age-speckled hand laid down a large earthenware dish filled with carrot peelings.
Another twist of the dial revealed a high metal fence, topped with what looked like razor wire. Behind it, in the distance, figures moved listlessly. The little number said five.
“Let me try,” said Dash, and without waiting for a response, grabbed the remote out of Marshall’s hands. Mars started to protest, but Dash cut him off with a look that was part-threat, part-plea.
Dash clicked the dials around viciously, the little green numeral speeding through six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve until it came to rest on thirteen. Though the picture seemed marginally clearer than it had before, it still quavered, long shivering lines of static breaking up the image currently on-screen, that of a room in darkness.
“Is that the Intangible Three?” he demanded of the ghost, who barely had time to nod before Dash shoved the remote back at Marshall and stepped through.
“Wait!” said the ghost, but it was too late. The ghost turned a distressed face on Mars and Simon. “I’m so sorry!” he said. “I said it wasn’t safe, I didn’t think he’d-”
“He’s on the other side!” said Simon, and it was true; Dash’s grey hair stood out against the dark background as he emerged from what was presumably a similar TV set on the other side. It seemed to Mars that he glances back at the screen for a moment, but a sudden burst of static obscured the picture so it was difficult to say for sure.
“Thank goodness!” said the ghost, raising a wispy hand to where his heart would have been. “He gave me such a fright, just diving in like that!”
“Sorry,” said Mars. “He’s kind of impulsive.”
“Well, yes,” said the ghost. “I suppose he would be.”
Mars laid the remote control on the bedspread, careful not to spoil the layer of Scotch tape that kept the batteries from falling out.
“Thank you very much for showing us this,” he said politely, then stepped through the portal himself.
Travelling through the tachyon portal produced a sensation not unlike the children’s party trick where you rub a balloon in your hair and then use the static build-up to get it to stick to a wall: it’s not unpleasant, it’s just kind of weird.
However, emerging from the tachyon portal to the realisation that you just left your spare set of clothes behind, along with all your other equipment and, most importantly, the one thing that would have helped you get back there to retrieve it produces a sensation somewhere between ‘really hacked off’ and ‘unbridled rage.’
“You!” he yelled, pointing an accusing finger at Dash. “You selfish fucking asshole!”
“Nobody asked you to come after me,” Dash replied, his derisive tone indicating that Marshall was quite clearly an idiot for having done so.
Mars, for his part, was having a hard time keeping both his temper and his voice under control.
“You dragged us down here to help you out, which we were stupid enough to agree to do, and you decided to ditch us in some fucking lighthouse because, what, you have to do everything on your own?”
“I left you the remote!” Dash protested, backing up a step.
“Which can’t be used safely!” Marshall practically screeched. “Which you’d know if you ever listened to anyone instead of just… just being you all the time!”
“We can’t all be fucking perfect and make all the right decisions!” snapped Dash. “How was I supposed to know you two idiots would…” he trailed off. “Teller?”
“What!”
“Where’s Simon?”
“He’s right-” Mars looked to his right and down a little, to the space where, if prior experience was anything to go by, should have been occupied by his best friend.
The space remained stubbornly blank.
“Oh, fuck.”
Author: Froodle
Disclaimer: Still not mine
Claim: Eerie Indiana
Prompt: 7, Lose
Characters: Mars, Dash, Simon
Word Count: for this part, 3979
Rating: PG13, though sadly only for language
Summary/Warning: Where else would you go searching for a lost past in Eerie? Also, not even SLIGHTLY finished.
When everything steadied again, it was night and he was standing on an outcropping of rock, slimy and treacherous underfoot thanks to a combination of what smelt like seaweed and lichen. The wind screamed around him and drove stinging needles of rain into his face, and the white surf crashed against the promontory just a few feet away. Mars couldn’t say for sure whether it was in fact blowing north by northwest, but from what little he could make out through the rain and the darkness, the sea was certainly lashed to fury.
Next to him, Dash and Simon shivered and huddled miserably inside their cardigans.
“What the…” an unexpectedly strong wind buffeted him back a few steps and he stumbled, trying to regain his balance. When he was absolutely sure he wasn’t about to get swept out to sea, he tried again. “What the fuck was that?”
Simon sneezed, but even squinting through the pounding rain and wiping at his runny nose, he managed to send a reproachful look in Marshall’s direction. Mars tried to feel guilty, but really, going from what looked like the laboratory from one of your more nightmare-inducing anti-vivisection campaign ads to a Godforsaken spit of rock in the middle of what felt like a hurricane had to be grounds for a little profanity.
“I guess this is one of those ‘pocket dimensions,’” Simon replied, raising his voice to be heard above the noise of the storm. He looked around. “There’s a stairway cut into the rocks over there – if we get higher, maybe we can find some place to wait this out.” He gestured at the havoc being wreaked around them by the weather.
The steps were narrow, uneven, and covered in a greenish scum that was as slippery as it was vile-smelling. There was an iron hand-rail driven deep into the rocks running alongside it, and the three boys clung to it as they climbed laboriously upwards. Though the rail was solid, the constant exposure to sea air had caused it to develop patches of rust in several places, and this tore at the soft palms of their hands as they ascended.
As they got higher, the roar of the sea below them diminished a little, to be replaced by the high-pitched shriek of the wind. Above them rose a lighthouse, its lamp unlit. The door was shut, but not locked, and the three of them stumbled gratefully inside, slamming the door behind them.
The bottom floor of the lighthouse consisted of a small entrance hall, in which a single set of oilskins lay neatly folded, and one large room with a narrow spiral stairway leading to the upper levels. There was a dining table and three chairs, one of which lay on its side, and a fireplace where a fire was laid out but had not been kindled. Dash, with the kind of practicality one develops when sleeping rough on a regular basis, headed straight for it, helped himself to the strangely old-fashioned tinderbox on the mantel, and in a few minutes had the tapers blazing beneath the carefully arranged pile of driftwood and coals. He shucked off the hideous brown cardigan and began removing his own clothes from its miraculous pockets. Despite the fact that the cardigan was dripping seawater in a wide puddle around him, his old outfit emerged bone-dry.
Simon, who had developed a pinkish flush that had nothing to do with bracing sea air and quite possibly everything to do with the onset of pneumonia, rapidly followed suit, stripping out of his wet “Radford” costume and changing into his old woollen sweater and stained jeans with an unselfconsciousness that Marshall had lost shortly after the initial onset of puberty. Muttering something about “going to check this place out,” he headed upstairs in search of a closable, and preferably lockable, door behind which to get changed.
The second level had three bedrooms, a bathroom and a small pantry well-supplied with the sort of dried and canned foods popular with the kind of person who builds a nuclear bunker in their backyard. The doors didn’t lock, but Marshall shoved a chair under the handle of the smallest bedroom and sat with the bed between him and the door while he undressed, just in case.
Back in his old clothes and no longer in immediate danger of hyperthermia and death, he took a few extra minutes to explore the rest of the lighthouse. The beds were made and the rooms neat, and a drop-down ladder in the ceiling lead to the uppermost portion of the building, where the lamp was situated. Marshall fiddled with the controls briefly in a vague attempt to get it to light, but without any clear set of instructions, he wasn’t able to make much sense of the antiquated equipment.
By the time he returned to the ground floor, Simon and Dash had arranged the table and chairs in front of the fire and hung their wet clothes in front of it, where they steamed gently and filled the whole room with the smell of brine and rotting kelp. They had also emptied their sodden backpacks and separated out the damp lumps of card as best they could, arranging them along the hearth. He noticed that they were both still wearing their Lost tags and quickly felt to make sure that his own was still securely attached to the key around his neck. Though all three of them had been wet through, and their hair still dripped moisture steadily down the back of their necks, the tags were apparently impervious to the inclement weather.
“There’s nobody up there,” he reported. “But there’s food and the beds are made and everything’s clean and stuff, so maybe they’ll be back soon.”
“Do we want them to be back soon?” asked Simon stuffily.
“Yeah,” said Dash. “In case you hadn’t noticed, the people down here make the folk from Eerie look almost normal. I’m not sure I want to meet any more of them.”
Mars wrung what excess rain and seawater he could from his own clothes and hung them in front of the fire alongside the rest.
“So what should we do?” he asked.
Dash shrugged.
“That old lady Radford said the flag she gave me would take us back to where we left,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not wild about heading back to someplace where they have spikey stabby gate things falling out of their doorways every five minutes.”
Simon yawned, stretching in the warm glow of the fire.
“There’s beds upstairs, Simon,” said Mars. “You should get some rest – I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere for a while.”
“We should wait ’til the storm passes, at least,” agreed Dash. “After that, we can maybe take a look around outside and try to figure out a plan from there.”
“The storm won’t pass,” said a voice near the door. “The storm never passes, here.”
Marshall already knew that once he was home and safe (or as safe as possible, safety being a relative term back in Eerie) and writing up his notes on “The Strange and Mysterious Case of My Return to the Bureau of Lost,” he would characterise his reaction to that voice as ‘a frightful yell of alarm and defiance.’
He also knew that Dash would never, ever be allowed to read that report, due to his complete lack of interest in or respect for Serious Scientific Endeavours, and also because it would be just like him to cross out ‘frightful yell of alarm and defiance’ and replace it with ‘girly shriek of pants-wetting terror,’ possibly right before he mailed it to half-a-dozen well-respected publishing houses specialising in printing tales of hard-boiled and experienced professional weirdness investigators and laughed about it like the malicious bastard he was.
The speaker was a tall, spare man in heavy work boots, shirt sleeves and rough-weaved trousers that had evidently been hard-used. He was soaked to the skin and his hair hung in bedraggled clumps about a mournful face with skin the colour of bone.
He was also faintly translucent, and it was this, more than his sudden appearance, gloomy expression or out-dated clothing, that led Mars to the obvious conclusion.
“Ghost!” he screamed, though as he was a professional, he still instinctively dived for the cardigan containing his Polaroid camera.
The ghost blinked at the camera flash, raising a hand to shield his eyes and looking vaguely peeved when the light simply passed through it. “Well, obviously,” he snapped, and followed it up with an unconvincing “OoooooOoooOOOOOOoooooOOOOooo.”
Dash glared at Marshall, as though this poor showing was somehow his fault.
“Why does nothing cool ever happen to me when I’m with you two?” he demanded. “First it was that cowboy whose finest act of criminality was stealing a toaster – a free toaster, by the way – and now this guy?” He directed his scorn on the hapless ghost. “I know a little something about how to stage a haunting, and while your entrance was good, your follow-up just ruined the whole thing.”
The ghost looked a little hurt by this. “Well, excuse me,” he said in a rich Scottish burr. “I’ve only been doing this for ninety-two years, you know. I’ve only frightened thousands of Lost souls half out of their minds with my performance. Don’t mind me; I’m only a professional here! I’m sure you, smart-mouthed American teen hero, know so much more about the ancient art of the Haunt than I do!”
“He isn’t the hero!” said Mars, before he could stop himself. Dash rolled his eyes.
“Oh, la-dee-dah!” said the ghost. “Terribly sorry, your Grace, I didn’t wish to offend your delicate sensibilities, I’m sure. So sorry to intrude on your little drawing room drama, although technically it is my drawing room and not yours.” He huffed and stamped one insubstantial foot, which sank a couple of inches through the stone floor, tilting him off-balance and quite ruining the effect. Mars stifled a laugh. Dash, having no such scruples about respecting the feelings of otherworldly apparitions, sniggered openly, and then followed it up by pointing mockingly while he continued to giggle.
The ghost was outraged. “Foolish mortal!” he boomed, struggling to retrieve his ghostly limb from the flagstones. “Thou hast angered the great and terrible Spirit of Eilean Mor! I will smite thee and thy bones will bleach in the sun and none will know of thy fate!”
“What about us?” asked Simon.
“What?” said the ghost.
“Well,” said Marshall reasonably, “If Dash’s bones are bleaching in the sun because you, the Great and Terrible Spirit of Eilean More, have smote him or whatever, then won’t we,” he gestured to himself and Simon, “Know of his fate?”
“Oh,” said the ghost. “Um… I guess I’ll have to smite you two as well then.”
“That seems a bit unfair,” said Simon. “I mean, we didn’t laugh at you.”
“He wanted to!” said the ghost petulantly, pointing an accusing finger at Marshall. “I could tell he was hiding it.”
“Well, I didn’t do anything,” said Simon. “I think I should get to live, at least.”
“Simon!” Marshall hated the way his voice got all high-pitched and whiny, but after all, his best buddy had just thrown him under a bus to save himself, so he figured it was probably justified.
“No, he’s right,” said Dash. “Except…” he made a passable imitation of someone thinking something over. “You know, he is kind of little,” he said to the ghost. “A kid like that, he’s going to need someone looking out for him down here. You should probably spare one of us to keep an eye on him.”
“I don’t know…” said the ghost uncertainly.
Dash shrugged. “If you’re okay condemning a little kid to untold horrors back in the Bureau just because of your pride, I guess you should do what you need to do. I mean, it seems pretty petty to me, and probably the other ghosts will whisper about you behind your back, but hey, it’s your afterlife.”
The ghost contemplated this for a moment.
“I could just destroy you all for spite,” he suggested. “Then nobody would know.”
“What if we come back as ghosts?” Marshall pointed out. “We would just tell everyone what you’ve done.”
The ghost threw up his hands in frustration. “Whatever!” he exclaimed. “I’m not even from this stupid lighthouse; I’m just filling in because McArthur and Ducat won a cruise on the Mary Celeste. I didn’t expect to have to do any actual haunting on this gig.”
“Sorry about that,” said Mars, his sympathy not entirely feigned. “We just got caught in a,” he hesitated. “A situation, so we came in here for shelter.”
“What kind of situation?” asked the ghost.
“Oh, you know,” said Marshall vaguely, thinking that he wasn’t about to entrust details of their Mission (in his mind, once you passed a certain number of life-threatening events in the course of one adventure, it officially became a capital-M-Mission) to a ghost he had only just met, and also that living in Eerie had brought a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘stranger-danger’. “So what’s it like being a stand-in ghost?” he asked, anxious to change the subject.
“Oh, you know,” said the ghost. “It’s a living. Well, it’s not, obviously, because of the whole ghost thing, but the pay isn’t bad, there’s no worrying about your after-career trajectory, and if you don’t like the people or place you’re working with, you just move on to your next assignment.”
Dash was curious. “What do ghosts get paid in?”
“Ectoplasm, of course,” said the ghost scornfully. “Imagine not knowing that! Why, even the smallest child knows that ectoplasm is the standard currency of any post-Life economy.”
“Sorry,” said Mars. “He’s new, you see.” Dash glowered. Marshall smirked.
“I can see, now that you mention it,” said the ghost, looking Dash up and down. “Remarkable. Six to eight months since he joined you?”
“Just over four,” said Mars.
“Not bad,” said the ghost.
“I didn’t join you, Teller,” Dash muttered. “I sometimes let you and your sidekick tag along.”
Mars didn’t bother responding.
“He’s terribly surly, isn’t he?” said the ghost.
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Mars with feeling, then flinched when Dash kicked him.
“Sorry,” said Dash, insincerity dripping off him along with the salt water.
Mars gritted his teeth against the effort of saying nothing.
“So how did you boys get all the way out here in this dreadful storm?” asked the ghost. His Scottish accent had vanished now, to be replaced by an American one that Mars only recognised because he’d heard similar ones during the announcements over the old-fashioned dial radio stashed safely away in the Secret Spot. The ghost’s appearance was also changing, the bedraggled clothes and seamed, weather-beaten face of a Scottish lighthouse keeper fading away to reveal a dapper, elderly gentleman with a white moustache waxed up into little points at the edges.
“We’re not really sure,” Mars hedged. “We were hoping someone would show up who could help us get back inside the Bureau.”
“How strange,” said the ghost. “I use the tachyon portals to get around myself, but these days they’re so unreliable that it’s not really safe for a living boy to go through.” Dash’s head snapped up.
“You have tachyon portals?” said Mars, doing his best to keep his voice level while simultaneously willing Dash not to give anything away. “How do they work?”
“You simply tune them to where you want to go, and step through,” said the ghost. “Or at least, that’s how they’re supposed to work. These days everything is a little out-of-focus and staticky.” He shrugged. “There’s one in the main bedroom, if you’d like me to show you.”
Marshall nodded, not wanting to seem too eager and unable to trust his voice not to give him away. The ghost floated up the stairs and the three boys trooped after him, walking one behind the other like particularly focused ducklings.
The tachyon portal was hidden behind the bedstead in the largest of the upstairs rooms. Though it was smaller than the one built by the Loyal Order of Corn, it was still easily big enough for an adult male to walk through if he stooped. Dash’s fists were clenched and his eyes were huge in his pale face as the ghost fiddled with the remote control.
“You turn it on by twisting this dial here,” he said, holding out the remote and demonstrating. The tachyon portal crackled to life and a flickering picture appeared in the screen. Marshall could see at once what the ghost had meant – the image was hazy and he could only just pick out the silhouettes through the snowstorm. Beside him, Dash made a noise that might have one day grown up to be a sob, if it hadn’t been brutally murdered in its infancy. “And you tune it to the correct location by twiddling these two here.” The picture changed, but the reception was hardly any better.
“How do you know when you have the right channel?” said Mars, surreptitiously stepping on Dash’s foot.
“You see the little number in the top left-hand corner of the screen?” said the ghost, pointing. “That tells you what Area you’re looking at. Unfortunately after that, you have to make your best guess as to the exact location you want.” He sniffed. “Allegedly Head Office are looking to upgrade our cable boxes so we get better reception, but you know how these things go – five years from now, we’ll get a third of the number we need and the head honchos will be expecting us to act pleased as punch.”
There was indeed a tiny glowing green number one at the upper left edge of the picture. An indistinct figure worked rapidly to unload large crates being dropped by rapidly whirling Claws. There was no sound, but you could see the effort as what was presumably another Radford shifted the heavy boxes and stacked them to one side of the screen. The ghost pressed the button again, and the little number changed to a two.
This image was more familiar – the two Radfords they had met on the borders of Low Value Consumer Goods and Items of High Sentimental Value That Aren’t Worth Much in Monetary Terms. The girl Radford kept moving in and out of the scene as she strode about, waving her arms furiously. The boy Radford sat cross-legged on the workbench, an untidy pile of empty card-drawers and a stack of loose index cards in front of him. As they watched, the girl stormed back into view and with a vicious sweep of one arm, knocked everything to the floor. The boy put his head in his hands while the girl continued to berate him soundlessly.
“Something certainly has those two riled up,” said the ghost. “I wonder what could have happened.”
“Who knows?” said Mars awkwardly. “Can I have a go changing the channel?”
“Of course,” said the ghost cheerily. He passed the remote control to Marshall, who discovered to his displeasure that touching a ghost was kind of like someone dropping an ice-cube down the back of your neck, except all over and then stabbing you with pins. He was only partially successful in suppressing a shudder, but the ghost didn’t seem to notice.
Mars twisted the two dials the ghost had indicated. The picture wavered, broke up into a series of jagged lines and reformed on an empty room full of filing cabinets. The little numeral in the corner still read two. He twisted them a little further and the numeral changed to four. A pair of Jackalopes chased each other in circles around a good-sized enclosure. The grass beneath them was green enough to be visible even on the grainy image. As they watched, a pair of well-worn carpet slippers shuffled into view and a plump, age-speckled hand laid down a large earthenware dish filled with carrot peelings.
Another twist of the dial revealed a high metal fence, topped with what looked like razor wire. Behind it, in the distance, figures moved listlessly. The little number said five.
“Let me try,” said Dash, and without waiting for a response, grabbed the remote out of Marshall’s hands. Mars started to protest, but Dash cut him off with a look that was part-threat, part-plea.
Dash clicked the dials around viciously, the little green numeral speeding through six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve until it came to rest on thirteen. Though the picture seemed marginally clearer than it had before, it still quavered, long shivering lines of static breaking up the image currently on-screen, that of a room in darkness.
“Is that the Intangible Three?” he demanded of the ghost, who barely had time to nod before Dash shoved the remote back at Marshall and stepped through.
“Wait!” said the ghost, but it was too late. The ghost turned a distressed face on Mars and Simon. “I’m so sorry!” he said. “I said it wasn’t safe, I didn’t think he’d-”
“He’s on the other side!” said Simon, and it was true; Dash’s grey hair stood out against the dark background as he emerged from what was presumably a similar TV set on the other side. It seemed to Mars that he glances back at the screen for a moment, but a sudden burst of static obscured the picture so it was difficult to say for sure.
“Thank goodness!” said the ghost, raising a wispy hand to where his heart would have been. “He gave me such a fright, just diving in like that!”
“Sorry,” said Mars. “He’s kind of impulsive.”
“Well, yes,” said the ghost. “I suppose he would be.”
Mars laid the remote control on the bedspread, careful not to spoil the layer of Scotch tape that kept the batteries from falling out.
“Thank you very much for showing us this,” he said politely, then stepped through the portal himself.
Travelling through the tachyon portal produced a sensation not unlike the children’s party trick where you rub a balloon in your hair and then use the static build-up to get it to stick to a wall: it’s not unpleasant, it’s just kind of weird.
However, emerging from the tachyon portal to the realisation that you just left your spare set of clothes behind, along with all your other equipment and, most importantly, the one thing that would have helped you get back there to retrieve it produces a sensation somewhere between ‘really hacked off’ and ‘unbridled rage.’
“You!” he yelled, pointing an accusing finger at Dash. “You selfish fucking asshole!”
“Nobody asked you to come after me,” Dash replied, his derisive tone indicating that Marshall was quite clearly an idiot for having done so.
Mars, for his part, was having a hard time keeping both his temper and his voice under control.
“You dragged us down here to help you out, which we were stupid enough to agree to do, and you decided to ditch us in some fucking lighthouse because, what, you have to do everything on your own?”
“I left you the remote!” Dash protested, backing up a step.
“Which can’t be used safely!” Marshall practically screeched. “Which you’d know if you ever listened to anyone instead of just… just being you all the time!”
“We can’t all be fucking perfect and make all the right decisions!” snapped Dash. “How was I supposed to know you two idiots would…” he trailed off. “Teller?”
“What!”
“Where’s Simon?”
“He’s right-” Mars looked to his right and down a little, to the space where, if prior experience was anything to go by, should have been occupied by his best friend.
The space remained stubbornly blank.
“Oh, fuck.”
