Disclaimer: Spooks is property of Kudos. No copywright infringement is intended. This fiction is for fun and not profit.
"BOO!" yelled Adam and Zaf, in unison, for at least the seventh time that day. Ruth, again for the seventh time, jumped clean out of her skin.
"Oh will you two cut it out and grow up!" she muttered, impatiently. "You're not 5 years old and it is not funny anymore!"
"Oh relax, Ruth. Zaf and I aren't here tomorrow and we just want to have a bit of Halloween fun."
"I think the plastic spiders in people's drawers and the skeleton which popped out of the stationary cupboard were quite enough though," she sighed, wearily.
"Spoilsport," one of them muttered. She wasn't sure which, and shot them both an angry glare before stomping off to her desk.
She had only been seated about ten minutes when the lights went off, and two torch-lit faces revealed themselves from behind a partition.
"For goodness sake!" moaned Ruth. "Turn them back on."
She was joined in her chorus by Malcolm, who appeared from the other end of the office, initially bemoaning the state of the electrics in the building before coming face to face with two rather smug looking young men.
"You'll be sorry if Harry comes back from his meeting right now," Ruth warned.
They shrugged, nonchalantly and Zaf made a display of swooping around the desks, his face still partially illuminated, creating deep shadows by his eyes.
Jo, typically, giggled at Zaf's behaviour.
"A looong tiiiiime agooo," he began, "a woman lived deep in the forest in a tiny cottage and sold herbal remedies for a living. Folks living in the town nearby called her Bloody Mary, and said she was a witch. None dared cross the old crone for fear that their cows would go dry, their food-stores would rot away before winter, their children would take sick with fever, or any number of terrible things that an angry witch could do to-"
He stopped, abruptly. The lights were back on and the brunette woman with her hand on the switch was not Ruth, but Juliet.
"Bloody hell," laughed Adam, ignoring the steely disapproval he was met with. "I didn't know those sorts of stories came true mate." He nodded is head at Juliet and the three youngest members of the team sniggered.
Juliet winced at the sound and tried to calmly collect her thoughts by counting to ten. "I don't think I'm even going to ask. Suffice to say I'm looking for Harry, I assume he isn't here and I now have one more thing on my list of things to tell him when I find him."
"How long is the list and how long is it likely to take?" asked the unimpressed man that had silently appeared behind her.
"That depends on how nice you are to me," she responded, a hint of flirtation in her voice, which irritated Ruth more than she thought it probably should have done.
Harry merely gave Juliet an exasperated look and headed for his office, not caring if she followed or not. At his movement, the rest of the team hurriedly moved back to their desks and resumed working.
By the time Juliet had paced across Harry's office for the seventh time, Ruth had had enough. She was full of irrational hatred towards the woman and, on top of that, Adam and Zaf's sulking muttering about was driving her crazy.
"I'm off," she announced, even though it was barely half past five. "I'm not listening to any more nonsense."
"Don't you believe in it even a tiny bit?"
"No. Ghosts and ghouls and goblins…we fight terrorism every day, why would we possibly want to celebrate a day which promotes fear, especially when it's not even true!"
She managed to collect her belonging and make it to the pods before they had a chance to reply, and bundled herself into the glass cylinder feeling thoroughly narked with it all. Ah well, she thought, at least they're out off the Grid tomorrow.
They may have been off the Grid but, by the end of Friday, the day had been suitably nightmarish that she was beginning to think it would have made little difference whether they were there to wind her up or not. She had thrown her morning coffee down her blouse, been caught by both Miranda and the puppy dog researcher who had taken to stalking her in two consecutive lift journeys, had had to endure Juliet arriving twice and, most disappointing of all, had not had any chance at all to talk to Harry. To top it off, however, she had just ended a call with her best friend from uni and had found herself invited to the fancy dress Halloween party of her 6 year old Godson.
That was all she needed - a mad dash across London to find a costume, followed by an evening spent in the company of a bunch of hyperactive six year olds. Lovely. Cursing fluently under her breath about 'emotional blackmail' and 'sodding Halloween', she hastily printed off a list of fancy dress shops, gathered up her belongings and snuck off the Grid early.
It had taken the best part of two hours to find a costume and even then she wasn't happy about the one she had eventually agreed to hire. She hadn't really had much of a choice though; all the good stuff had been snapped up weeks earlier and so she had been left with choosing between an enormous padded pumpkin suit or a giant spider outfit, complete with fake, hairy legs. The pumpkin outfit had immediately got her vote as the better option of the two and she had taken it to the counter and paid for it before she could talk herself out of it altogether.
Her struggle to get the costume and her hastily bought treats for the party goers home on the bus did nothing to help put her in a better mood and by the time she launched herself through her front door and dumped the costume at the bottom of the stairs she had had about as much of Halloween as she could take. She had a good mind to ring Sophie and tell her that something urgent had come up but the thought of her Godson's disappointed face stopped her from going through with it. Instead, she headed to the kitchen for a small glass of well deserved wine. She couldn't put her finger on it but the instant she stepped foot inside the kitchen something seemed...wrong. A quick scan revealed nothing to her and she shrugged it off. As she strode towards the fridge, she spotted the light flashing on her answer machine. Praying it was Sophie letting her off tonight, she hit play and listened to the automated voice telling her she had two new messages.
The first message was indeed Sophie but, much to Ruth's chagrin, it was to tell her how excited Jake was about Auntie Ruth coming to his party. Cursing, she wrenched open the fridge door and reached for the bottle of chilled white wine. She was just musing over the contents of her fridge and debating the merits of a quick sandwich versus last night's left over pasta, when the second message began to play. At first it just seemed to be a lot of static on the other end and Ruth paid it little attention, until her name was said quite clearly in the midst of it all. She craned her neck around the side of the fridge and stared quizzically at the machine as the same, slightly hissing, voice said her name over and over again.
She jumped when the machine beeped loudly to signal that the message had ended and realised just how tightly she was gripping on to the fridge door. She could feel her heart thumping loudly in her chest and, although she had no desire to listen to the eerie message again, she found herself crossing back over to the machine and hitting play again. If anything, it was slightly more disturbing the second time around because she was listening to it more intently, trying to figure out who the person on the other end was. By the fourth repeat of the message, she had calmed slightly and was considering just deleting it when there was a thud from upstairs.
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