Dark Shadows &Friday the 13th The Series
Crossover
Hands Down
Chapter 1
"This is so undignified." Mickey grimaced. Her warm, volcanic green eyes took in the scene before her: dust-laden shades, one lone window, and worst of all, a single bed small enough to sneeze through the window of the closed bicycle shop across the street. "Only two rooms, no porters, no extra beds, no—"
"Aw, come on, Mick!" Ryan prodded. He dumped his duffel bag next to a mirror with a cracked wood frame and plopped down onto the bed. "Up until a few minutes ago you loved this town. 'Quaint and picturesque,' if I remember correctly?" Though her cousin was grinning like an idiot, she knew he was uncomfortable, too. He just hated to show it.
Mickey's shoulders sagged. "That was until we found a hotel that has never heard of a roll-away bed," she said in a pinched voice. Ryan bounced up and down on the mattress before flopping down totally horizontal.
"Don't get bent out of shape," he said. "I'm sure you'll love sleeping on the floor, once you get used to it."
Mickey ignored him and sat on the corner of the bed. She slipped off her tight, red suede pumps and proceeded to massage her sore heels. "And who ever heard of a town like this having only one hotel—they're packed way beyond their means!"
Ryan laughed. He unzipped his jacket, exposing a faded red t-shirt with the name of a rowdy rock band Mickey had never cared to familiarize herself with. "Guess conventions on the occult are big potatoes around small hick towns like this."
"Somehow I doubt that," she frowned. She closed her eyes a moment and at last got back onto her feet, kicking the pumps under the bed. Ryan watched her pace by the window.
"Thing is," he said, "we should be in the center ring for this freak show." He lay down and chuckled, hoping he was lightening the mood a notch.
Mickey didn't answer. Her mouth was kept pinned in a straight line. She rested her hands on her hips as she surveyed the room. It was small, no doubt, but it had charm. The walls were wallpapered with a neutral design of pastel clipper ships roughing it on the high seas. Three antique paintings depicting the harsh but romantic life of fishermen, hung opposite the bathroom. All the furniture was pine, but painted in a dark, glazed finish with attractive old-fashioned brass hardware. The only problems were cracking walls that hadn't been fixed since they were built one hundred years ago, dust on the windowsills and no phones or digital clock radio alarms. What a morning wake-up call consisted of, they would soon discover was an old-fashioned knock on the door every ten minutes until someone answered.
In a show of brave optimism, Mickey dragged one of her three suitcases to the corner nearest the dresser, tried not to look cross that her cousin wasn't offering to help, and took a deep breath before returning to the hall for the last of her luggage. "I mean, this is a far cry from Chicago," she at last commented. "I've never seen a place so cut off from the rest of the world. A four-hour ride from the airport, not even a television for God's sake . . .!"
"We've been in worser situations," Ryan pointed out. He laced his fingers behind his head on the pillow and released a comfortable moan. "Remember when we all went undercover at that Monastery?"
Mickey rolled her eyes. Avoiding touching the rusted radiator spitting behind the door, she dragged in the last of her luggage. "Don't remind me. But I still don't understand why you couldn't share a room with Jack."
Ryan lowered his eyes and grinned at the small space between he and the edge of the bed. "I don't think we'd be right for each other, there, Mickey. Only one old pudgy middle-aged man per square inch. And don't you dare tell him I said that."
Mickey shook her head, already exasperated with her cousin's immeasurable good humor. They had four days in this room until a new one opened up...after the 2-day lecture at the college just outside of town. The small spaces and Ryan's constant jokes would be the test of all tests. At least at their small second floor apartment above the store (the staircase literally emptied right into Ryan's "bedroom" space) Mickey had the option of closing her frilly curtained French doors and ignoring him for a while.
After freshening up in the bathroom, Mickey emerged with a fresh new layer of makeup and her wild red frizzles she had for hair tamed into a barrette bundled up in beads. Her sleek fitted animal print Capri pants and red lace up bodice blouse looked like she had just walked out of a fashion shoot in a Beverly Hills nightclub. But it was February in the tip-top region of New England and she was cold. But she looked good and for the moment, she would thing Spring thoughts. Egyptian gold earrings yanked painfully on her earlobes. Mickey took them out, rubbed the immediate soreness out and hunted for a new pair of earrings.
She picked out her Chinese character earrings, each one with a different character, though she had never noticed it or knew the true meaning of either one. Ryan had already unpacked and was lying with his head at the foot of the bed, nose buried inside of a room service menu. Knowing her cousin, Mickey had more than a sneaking suspicion that inside it was stashed a limp, shabby-looking comic book. He was twenty-six, only two years younger than she was, but she sometimes felt like she was dealing with a twelve year old.
Mickey began to unpack her suitcase and deposit its contents into what few drawers Ryan hadn't already claimed. "Haven't you already read that one?" she asked, though she already knew his answer. As if on cue, a motley- colored comic book flopped out from its hiding place out onto Ryan's chest. Ryan's cheeks bent into that simple, boyish grin of his. With his short brown hair looking mussed and his dark, round brown eyes sparkling with mischief, Mickey smiled despite herself. He was just a big child.
"What, Captain Morman of Worbo?" he asked, acting offended. "It's still good the second—or tenth—time around. Comics are like a good movie. You know what happens but getting there is half the fun."
"Well, we're not here for fun. Remember?"
Ryan's porous smile sunk into seriousness. "How can I forget? That's hardly a part of my vocabulary anymore. And you're not the only one suffering, I'll have you know. I had to give up a date with the most beautiful, sexy, and, well—you know— woman on this earth to come here. We don't even know if that hand, or whatever, is even still here in Collinsport. Did Jack tell you anymore about this thing than he did to me?"
Mickey scrunched her lips to the side and than passively shook her head. "Not really."
"We don't know what this thing does at all?"
Mickey opened her mouth but found she had only the same doubts her cousin had rising to greet her. Her confirming shrug was all she needed to say. The slap of the hotel menu as Ryan struck it against his hand made her jump.
"So we're going into this blind, as usual. My favorite, and just happens to be our specialty, might I add."
Mickey yanked the cord for the blinds, sending a swirling cloud of dust into the air. She waved it away, sneezed, and bent down to open the top dresser drawer. "Look," she said a little testily, "all I know is that he wanted to come up and look for this K. Young's widow, the name that was written in Uncle Lewis's ledger and see if we could just buy the hand back."
"Yeah, right," Ryan scoffed. "Like it's ever been that easy. That tagline is getting very old. But how does this convention dinner thing tonight fit in?"
She shut one drawer and yanked open the next one which was stiff with rust and New England dampness. Something dark skittered just out of view. She shivered and unconsciously wiped her palms on her thighs and said, "The woman who is the guest speaker is an expert in the field of religious relics and talismans. Since Jack could find next to nothing about the hand in his research, he thought he could kill two birds with one stone and see what he could find out from her. Don't forget, it's at eight o'clock—and we have to dress for the occasion."
Her cousin made a face. "You know," he said, half moaning as he got up from his lying position, "whether you see it or not, we're kind of like the comic superheroes like Captain Morman here. We pretend to be good law- abiding citizens by day and by night we're evil-fighting machines, ready for action when the sun sets. Except we don't have the x-ray vision or those fancy costumes and stuff."
Mickey sent him a look telling him she didn't buy it. She worried about the same things Ryan did. She at least admitted that much. Every day was a new challenge, facing killers that had once been good people, but had been blackened by the touch of the Devil's greedy power. Their seemingly endless search for fatal antiques wore on them like a dull knife on a strip of rope. Even Ryan's energetic jokes had taken on a more caustic delivery lately, sounding more tired, bitter. She was sure it was changing her, too, but didn't like to think too hard about it. It only made her angry. But Jack had dedicated his whole life to recovering the cursed antiques, making it his one and only goal whereas she and Ryan had gotten sucked into the realm of blackness and lies purely accidentally. The three of them had come close to death so many times chasing after the owners of the antiques who had become so possessed by their greed that they would stop at nothing until they got to the top. But these spineless killers always found they would never be satisfied, and the unquenchable thirst for blood would drive them onward, more and more into insanity.
Life had been so simple just a few years ago. Mickey had been engaged to a successful, young, ambitious lawyer, was planning a career in music as a promising singer—and suddenly she found herself saddled with an inheritance she didn't want, and still couldn't get rid of. She and Ryan had thought the recovery of the antiques they had unwittingly sold the day before they met Jack would only take a week, maybe two. When weeks turned to months, Mickey began to realize what she had gotten herself into. But even though her fiancé put it to her that it was either him or the store, she found she couldn't abandon Ryan and Jack and the work they did. Selfishly, many times she wished their Uncle Lewis hadn't died. But that wouldn't have made anything any better. Lewis would still have been running his antique shop, circulating more and more of his dangerous, cursed wares.
Mickey pushed the past away in a violent rush of will and turned her attention back to her job of unpacking. She got down on one knee and a swelling scent of mothballs greeted her. A black speck like a discarded button rested on a pile of clothes she had just put down. She didn't remember seeing it there before but wasn't really concerned how it got there. Before folding the jeans she had in hand, she made a quick brushing movement across the neatly folded satiny cloth of the blouse to remove it. In a flash she leapt back, the jeans landing in a clump on the floor.
"Oh my god, spider!!" she screamed.
"And every superhero has his kryptonite," joked her unaffected cousin.
"Oh shut-up, Ryan, and just kill it!" she cried shrilly.
"All right, all right, don't get all worked up. It's just a spider." Ryan got to his feet, rolling up his comic book in a tight tube shape. "You face death and demons every day and you're clowning around about a harmless bug."
"I don't care," she insisted hotly.
Ryan shifted through the drawers and almost jumped himself when he saw the size of the arachnid. "Stand back, Mickey. This one may splatter." Mickey moaned at his theatrics, but still took a safe vantage point behind him to make sure she saw the spider's quick and complete demise. Swinging with the might of a lightening strike, Ryan made contact. The spider was dead, for sure, though he stuck like glue to the death-enforced instrument. "Feels like those Monastery days all over again, doesn't it?" he said grimacing at the mangled carcass.
"My hero," she tossed back sarcastically.
Ryan grinned. "Can't imagine what you would've done without me sharing the room tonight. You would have probably stayed up all night with a flashlight."
"That's not funny, Ryan," she huffed. She grabbed a blouse from the suitcase and shook it with an indignant snap. A mild knock and a soft muffled voice broke up the mutiny building between the cousins.
"Mickey? Ryan?"
She and Ryan exchanged knowing glances.
"Yeah, Jack?" answered Ryan though the door. He was frowning over his favorite piece of literature now smeared with insect guts.
"I'm already settled in. I'll be waiting for you downstairs in the diner when you're ready." Jack obviously didn't expect an answer, for they heard his footsteps pepper away from their door as soon as he stopped speaking. They would have guessed as much. Whenever they were on a case, Jack never thought, ate, breathed or lived anything but accomplishing their mission. Ryan found a trashcan and let the comic book fall in with a deadening clunk.
"Get that cape on, Captain Morman," he said giving a sloppy smirk. "It's down into the mines we go."
Mickey made sure she made her cousin aware she found nothing funny about it and abandoned the task of unpacking to get ready to meet Jack downstairs.
Crossover
Hands Down
Chapter 1
"This is so undignified." Mickey grimaced. Her warm, volcanic green eyes took in the scene before her: dust-laden shades, one lone window, and worst of all, a single bed small enough to sneeze through the window of the closed bicycle shop across the street. "Only two rooms, no porters, no extra beds, no—"
"Aw, come on, Mick!" Ryan prodded. He dumped his duffel bag next to a mirror with a cracked wood frame and plopped down onto the bed. "Up until a few minutes ago you loved this town. 'Quaint and picturesque,' if I remember correctly?" Though her cousin was grinning like an idiot, she knew he was uncomfortable, too. He just hated to show it.
Mickey's shoulders sagged. "That was until we found a hotel that has never heard of a roll-away bed," she said in a pinched voice. Ryan bounced up and down on the mattress before flopping down totally horizontal.
"Don't get bent out of shape," he said. "I'm sure you'll love sleeping on the floor, once you get used to it."
Mickey ignored him and sat on the corner of the bed. She slipped off her tight, red suede pumps and proceeded to massage her sore heels. "And who ever heard of a town like this having only one hotel—they're packed way beyond their means!"
Ryan laughed. He unzipped his jacket, exposing a faded red t-shirt with the name of a rowdy rock band Mickey had never cared to familiarize herself with. "Guess conventions on the occult are big potatoes around small hick towns like this."
"Somehow I doubt that," she frowned. She closed her eyes a moment and at last got back onto her feet, kicking the pumps under the bed. Ryan watched her pace by the window.
"Thing is," he said, "we should be in the center ring for this freak show." He lay down and chuckled, hoping he was lightening the mood a notch.
Mickey didn't answer. Her mouth was kept pinned in a straight line. She rested her hands on her hips as she surveyed the room. It was small, no doubt, but it had charm. The walls were wallpapered with a neutral design of pastel clipper ships roughing it on the high seas. Three antique paintings depicting the harsh but romantic life of fishermen, hung opposite the bathroom. All the furniture was pine, but painted in a dark, glazed finish with attractive old-fashioned brass hardware. The only problems were cracking walls that hadn't been fixed since they were built one hundred years ago, dust on the windowsills and no phones or digital clock radio alarms. What a morning wake-up call consisted of, they would soon discover was an old-fashioned knock on the door every ten minutes until someone answered.
In a show of brave optimism, Mickey dragged one of her three suitcases to the corner nearest the dresser, tried not to look cross that her cousin wasn't offering to help, and took a deep breath before returning to the hall for the last of her luggage. "I mean, this is a far cry from Chicago," she at last commented. "I've never seen a place so cut off from the rest of the world. A four-hour ride from the airport, not even a television for God's sake . . .!"
"We've been in worser situations," Ryan pointed out. He laced his fingers behind his head on the pillow and released a comfortable moan. "Remember when we all went undercover at that Monastery?"
Mickey rolled her eyes. Avoiding touching the rusted radiator spitting behind the door, she dragged in the last of her luggage. "Don't remind me. But I still don't understand why you couldn't share a room with Jack."
Ryan lowered his eyes and grinned at the small space between he and the edge of the bed. "I don't think we'd be right for each other, there, Mickey. Only one old pudgy middle-aged man per square inch. And don't you dare tell him I said that."
Mickey shook her head, already exasperated with her cousin's immeasurable good humor. They had four days in this room until a new one opened up...after the 2-day lecture at the college just outside of town. The small spaces and Ryan's constant jokes would be the test of all tests. At least at their small second floor apartment above the store (the staircase literally emptied right into Ryan's "bedroom" space) Mickey had the option of closing her frilly curtained French doors and ignoring him for a while.
After freshening up in the bathroom, Mickey emerged with a fresh new layer of makeup and her wild red frizzles she had for hair tamed into a barrette bundled up in beads. Her sleek fitted animal print Capri pants and red lace up bodice blouse looked like she had just walked out of a fashion shoot in a Beverly Hills nightclub. But it was February in the tip-top region of New England and she was cold. But she looked good and for the moment, she would thing Spring thoughts. Egyptian gold earrings yanked painfully on her earlobes. Mickey took them out, rubbed the immediate soreness out and hunted for a new pair of earrings.
She picked out her Chinese character earrings, each one with a different character, though she had never noticed it or knew the true meaning of either one. Ryan had already unpacked and was lying with his head at the foot of the bed, nose buried inside of a room service menu. Knowing her cousin, Mickey had more than a sneaking suspicion that inside it was stashed a limp, shabby-looking comic book. He was twenty-six, only two years younger than she was, but she sometimes felt like she was dealing with a twelve year old.
Mickey began to unpack her suitcase and deposit its contents into what few drawers Ryan hadn't already claimed. "Haven't you already read that one?" she asked, though she already knew his answer. As if on cue, a motley- colored comic book flopped out from its hiding place out onto Ryan's chest. Ryan's cheeks bent into that simple, boyish grin of his. With his short brown hair looking mussed and his dark, round brown eyes sparkling with mischief, Mickey smiled despite herself. He was just a big child.
"What, Captain Morman of Worbo?" he asked, acting offended. "It's still good the second—or tenth—time around. Comics are like a good movie. You know what happens but getting there is half the fun."
"Well, we're not here for fun. Remember?"
Ryan's porous smile sunk into seriousness. "How can I forget? That's hardly a part of my vocabulary anymore. And you're not the only one suffering, I'll have you know. I had to give up a date with the most beautiful, sexy, and, well—you know— woman on this earth to come here. We don't even know if that hand, or whatever, is even still here in Collinsport. Did Jack tell you anymore about this thing than he did to me?"
Mickey scrunched her lips to the side and than passively shook her head. "Not really."
"We don't know what this thing does at all?"
Mickey opened her mouth but found she had only the same doubts her cousin had rising to greet her. Her confirming shrug was all she needed to say. The slap of the hotel menu as Ryan struck it against his hand made her jump.
"So we're going into this blind, as usual. My favorite, and just happens to be our specialty, might I add."
Mickey yanked the cord for the blinds, sending a swirling cloud of dust into the air. She waved it away, sneezed, and bent down to open the top dresser drawer. "Look," she said a little testily, "all I know is that he wanted to come up and look for this K. Young's widow, the name that was written in Uncle Lewis's ledger and see if we could just buy the hand back."
"Yeah, right," Ryan scoffed. "Like it's ever been that easy. That tagline is getting very old. But how does this convention dinner thing tonight fit in?"
She shut one drawer and yanked open the next one which was stiff with rust and New England dampness. Something dark skittered just out of view. She shivered and unconsciously wiped her palms on her thighs and said, "The woman who is the guest speaker is an expert in the field of religious relics and talismans. Since Jack could find next to nothing about the hand in his research, he thought he could kill two birds with one stone and see what he could find out from her. Don't forget, it's at eight o'clock—and we have to dress for the occasion."
Her cousin made a face. "You know," he said, half moaning as he got up from his lying position, "whether you see it or not, we're kind of like the comic superheroes like Captain Morman here. We pretend to be good law- abiding citizens by day and by night we're evil-fighting machines, ready for action when the sun sets. Except we don't have the x-ray vision or those fancy costumes and stuff."
Mickey sent him a look telling him she didn't buy it. She worried about the same things Ryan did. She at least admitted that much. Every day was a new challenge, facing killers that had once been good people, but had been blackened by the touch of the Devil's greedy power. Their seemingly endless search for fatal antiques wore on them like a dull knife on a strip of rope. Even Ryan's energetic jokes had taken on a more caustic delivery lately, sounding more tired, bitter. She was sure it was changing her, too, but didn't like to think too hard about it. It only made her angry. But Jack had dedicated his whole life to recovering the cursed antiques, making it his one and only goal whereas she and Ryan had gotten sucked into the realm of blackness and lies purely accidentally. The three of them had come close to death so many times chasing after the owners of the antiques who had become so possessed by their greed that they would stop at nothing until they got to the top. But these spineless killers always found they would never be satisfied, and the unquenchable thirst for blood would drive them onward, more and more into insanity.
Life had been so simple just a few years ago. Mickey had been engaged to a successful, young, ambitious lawyer, was planning a career in music as a promising singer—and suddenly she found herself saddled with an inheritance she didn't want, and still couldn't get rid of. She and Ryan had thought the recovery of the antiques they had unwittingly sold the day before they met Jack would only take a week, maybe two. When weeks turned to months, Mickey began to realize what she had gotten herself into. But even though her fiancé put it to her that it was either him or the store, she found she couldn't abandon Ryan and Jack and the work they did. Selfishly, many times she wished their Uncle Lewis hadn't died. But that wouldn't have made anything any better. Lewis would still have been running his antique shop, circulating more and more of his dangerous, cursed wares.
Mickey pushed the past away in a violent rush of will and turned her attention back to her job of unpacking. She got down on one knee and a swelling scent of mothballs greeted her. A black speck like a discarded button rested on a pile of clothes she had just put down. She didn't remember seeing it there before but wasn't really concerned how it got there. Before folding the jeans she had in hand, she made a quick brushing movement across the neatly folded satiny cloth of the blouse to remove it. In a flash she leapt back, the jeans landing in a clump on the floor.
"Oh my god, spider!!" she screamed.
"And every superhero has his kryptonite," joked her unaffected cousin.
"Oh shut-up, Ryan, and just kill it!" she cried shrilly.
"All right, all right, don't get all worked up. It's just a spider." Ryan got to his feet, rolling up his comic book in a tight tube shape. "You face death and demons every day and you're clowning around about a harmless bug."
"I don't care," she insisted hotly.
Ryan shifted through the drawers and almost jumped himself when he saw the size of the arachnid. "Stand back, Mickey. This one may splatter." Mickey moaned at his theatrics, but still took a safe vantage point behind him to make sure she saw the spider's quick and complete demise. Swinging with the might of a lightening strike, Ryan made contact. The spider was dead, for sure, though he stuck like glue to the death-enforced instrument. "Feels like those Monastery days all over again, doesn't it?" he said grimacing at the mangled carcass.
"My hero," she tossed back sarcastically.
Ryan grinned. "Can't imagine what you would've done without me sharing the room tonight. You would have probably stayed up all night with a flashlight."
"That's not funny, Ryan," she huffed. She grabbed a blouse from the suitcase and shook it with an indignant snap. A mild knock and a soft muffled voice broke up the mutiny building between the cousins.
"Mickey? Ryan?"
She and Ryan exchanged knowing glances.
"Yeah, Jack?" answered Ryan though the door. He was frowning over his favorite piece of literature now smeared with insect guts.
"I'm already settled in. I'll be waiting for you downstairs in the diner when you're ready." Jack obviously didn't expect an answer, for they heard his footsteps pepper away from their door as soon as he stopped speaking. They would have guessed as much. Whenever they were on a case, Jack never thought, ate, breathed or lived anything but accomplishing their mission. Ryan found a trashcan and let the comic book fall in with a deadening clunk.
"Get that cape on, Captain Morman," he said giving a sloppy smirk. "It's down into the mines we go."
Mickey made sure she made her cousin aware she found nothing funny about it and abandoned the task of unpacking to get ready to meet Jack downstairs.