For Sunbathingdragon and the Deckerstar Network Helloween Exchange! (Oddly, this is the first fic I've ever done for an exchange)
Normally, Chloe and Lucifer were at least able to sit down before their suspects began pleading. Normally, said pleading person pledged innocence, or called for a lawyer, or (when Lucifer did his mojo thing), sometimes, their lives. The betting pool behind the interrogation room's glass panel loved to favor that last option; it didn't happen nearly as often as any rubberneckers would like. Still, each bet was, at the very least, dependent on both Chloe and Lucifer sitting, or even shutting the door fully after they'd entered the room. Joshua Baker was having none of that.
"I'm possessed!"
Lucifer smirked and pulled out one of the wooden chairs for Chloe before taking the other for himself. The door shut.
"I'm possessed, I swear it! I need an exorcist!" There was a manic energy to Baker's words, a dribble of saliva meandering its way down his chins.
"What," Lucifer said, "is the devil? Is it the devil making you do it?" He scoffed. "It's always me making them do it." The 'it' in question was the murder of a college student and the subsequent attempt at disposing the body by hiding it in a zombie-themed haunted house. Gruesome, once the staff figured out that they were working with a dead man.
Baker blinked. "Why would the devil bother with me?" He wiped the spittle from his neck with his shoulder. "I've got a ghost. I need a priest—or, or an exorcist—"
"LAPD ghostbusters?"
"There's a department for that?"
"No." Chloe tapped Lucifer with her elbow, and her partner obediently leant back into his chair, giving her the floor. "Why do you think you're possessed, Mr. Baker?" Chloe was willing to take a wild guess that he chose possession because it was October. The criminally superstitious always come out in force in October. And on Friday the Thirteenths. And June Sixth around six am and six pm, and during eclipses, full moons, Christmas… Inevitably, everyone's ghosts, demons, and devils (which Lucifer took offense to without fail) were no less human that any of the rest of LA. "Mr. Baker?"
"Cause I wasn't me when I killed that boy. It wasn't my thoughts—something was in my head, ya' see? In my head!"
"Okay." At least the confession was easy enough. "Where did you put the weapon?"
"I didn't put that sword nowhere—the ghost did, see? After it made me kill that… that poor boy." Baker swallowed. "I couldn't move my arms," he began again, slower, voice hoarse, "or my legs, or eyes, or nothin'. Like some stupid string puppet." Right. Chloe resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Ghostly possession, because that definitely existed.
"Where did the ghost move you with the sword?" she asked. Lucifer smoothed out some wrinkles in his suit—the black one which probably cost more than Chloe's fire insurance—and relaxed farther back in his seat, a perfect mask of amused indifference crossing his face. Baker stared at him, bloodshot eyes transfixed.
"Mr. Baker," Chloe said.
"Ghost." Baker blinked and licked his cracked lips. "It made me go back to its house. Weird place. Haunted. By a ghost."
"It made you leave the sword there?"
"Yeah. Woke up with it covered in blood, and then I ran. It wasn't me who killed that boy. I mean, it was me, but not me. Possessed, see? I need an exorcist. Or a priest, or someone, or ghostbusters, and—I think it's still in me—"
"Oh, buck up, Joshua." Lucifer tipped his chair forwards so all four legs were back on the ground. "You're not possessed. You're just scared because you killed a man. Now, why not you tell the Detective here where this house is, and then you can spend the next little bit in a cozy cell, hmm?"
Baker twitched his gaze between the two of them. He licked his lips again, then settled his attention on Chloe. "I tell you, I get an exorcist. Or a priest."
"You're in no position to bargain, Mr. Baker." Another week, another murder. "Tell us where the house is, and I'll consider it."
Again, Baker hesitated. They would track down where the murder weapon was with or without him; he would simply make it much, much easier. Much easier meant more time with Trixie this evening. They were having a Halloween movie marathon this evening, with Casper and The Nightmare Before Christmas at the top of the playlist.
"Come on, Joshua," Lucifer ribbed, smiling. "You can tell us."
Lucifer didn't even have to use his mojo, and Chloe could practically hear the money changing hands on the other side of the interrogation room's black-reflecting window.
"Well, this is fitting, isn't it?" Lucifer pushed open the disintegrating door and swept into the building. A house, Baker had termed it. It was a house as much as a spot of mold was moss. Both were in the same category of thing, sure, but one was generally far nicer than the other. Whatever this structure may have been at some point in the very, very distant past, it had been weathered and eroded until all that remained was the padded skeleton of timber and sinews of draped cloth and peeling paper. The door was mostly a formality. "Our murderer hides a body in a haunted house, claims to be possessed by a ghost—which, for the sake of clarity, my sister would never allow—and then sends us to a haunted house that could feature on the cover of Halloween Weekly." It was broad daylight, and Chloe wished she had brought a flashlight.
"Let's find the sword and leave." She stepped around Lucifer. The floor creaked beneath her feet, the noise somehow carrying through the structure and reverberating through its rotting flesh. And yet, somehow, this place wasn't condemned. A column of dust twisted around her. Lucifer, silent, followed just behind her.
The creaks and cries of the tortured wood were the loudest sound. Each step, an airplane landing next to her. Each breath, every slow beat of her heart, a rock concert. If she couldn't see the dust swirling around them as they inched towards the heart of the structure, she could hardly perceive the air. No sword in the first room, and none in the second. The creaks were offset from her steps.
Chloe shoved Lucifer against a wall and held a finger to her lips before he could make some innuendo or another. She looked at him just long enough to perceive his wide eyed look of innocence, the one that went something like 'but Detective, I didn't actually say anything' followed by a smug and slightly pouty smirk, before she turned her full attention down the corridor.
The creaks continued. Rhythmic. They were coming from in front—no, behind. No, above them. No. They stopped.
"That was a very noisy ghost, wouldn't you say, Detective?"
"Ghosts aren't real."
There must be someone else in the building with them. Chloe rested her hand on her sidearm and continued down the corridor. Quicker.
"Ghosts are real. We simply never see them because my little sister is quite dutiful." It didn't sound like there anything moving. Not now, anyway.
"Your sister?"
"The angel of death."
"Right." Just Lucifer being Lucifer. They checked the last room on the ground before and began up the stairs. The stairs, of course, were just as trustworthy as the rest of the derelict of a house. Chloe couldn't even imagine anyone living here. Not at this stage of decay. Something crashed back down the corridor.
Chloe's breath hitched. The clatter resounded. Somehow, it bellowed. She swallowed. There was nothing there; just her and Lucifer, and maybe someone trying to find the murder weapon before them. Somehow she and Lucifer had gotten there before the forensics van. Lucifer never had the patience to wait for them. Another bang, up above. Two people? A third. Fourth. Chloe sighed and kept her hand resting on her gun. "Just rats."
"They must be large rats."
Five more stairs, and then the top floor, and maybe (hopefully) the sword, and then they just needed to wait for forensics, and then they could leave. That's it. That's everything. Free to fly home. Well, home, as in, the precinct. She had ungodly amounts of paperwork to complete, and that was a horror story in and of itself.
"Maybe I should go ahead, Detective." Lucifer tried to slide past her, but Chloe held out her arm and stopped him. Just because he thought he was near invincible, and just because they were probably the only people left living in this structure, didn't mean that she was going to let him risk himself. He did that often enough. "Detective?"
"Let's just finish up and go."
The door to the next room almost disintegrated when Chloe pressed against it. Its hinges squealed, and the dust, billows of it, swirled wildly through a mote of desperate light. No one had entered this room in ages. Chloe took no more than two steps into the room before she realized she was leaving a trail of slightly cleaner floorboards. They were almost as dust-free as the patch in the dead center of the room.
Chloe swallowed. "Weird air current?" No scuff marks indicative of someone jumping there (and it would have been one hell of a jump). Practical joke, with a pair of boots attached to a stick and moved once the dust settled?
"They could have flown."
"With a jetpack?" Chloe left the door open, and they continued down the hall.
"Wings." Lucifer tamped down the remnant scraps of a rug before she could trip on it. "They aren't just for show."
Nothing in this room. "Right." Not even dust. The house resumed its creaking. "Like angel wings."
Lucifer smiled, but it didn't meet his eyes. "Exactly."
The following room had those same clean footprints. Whoever had made them had large feet. Skittering rustled through the walls, but no rat prints laced the dust. Shoes on a stick or weird air currents, or someone crawled their way across the ceiling somehow. There were no wires or rigging on the ceiling.
"Forget one of my siblings, Detective," Lucifer said, staring at the footprints. Chloe looked to him. There was the funniest note in his voice, and Chloe decided that she may have been relying somewhat too heavily on Lucifer's confidence that ghosts don't happen. "There might actually be something here."
"Ghosts aren't real." No sword. Chloe pushed Lucifer out and shut that door. Just a creepy old house, with creepy old bits, and creepy old dust, and creepy new footprints, and a small blood stain. Nothing else for a fine Wednesday morning.
The next room had no door. It used to have a door—there were hinges and a frame—and the house liked to pretend that it still had a door, because the rusty scream that assaulted Chloe's ears and forced her hands to her head was simply the louder version of all the other doors. A warm hand, Lucifer's, tugged her gently out from the threshold and into that dusty room. The silence was just as ringing.
The sword was a gladius-type hunk of misshapen metal, and it lay proudly within arm's length of the screaming not-door. There was a perfect field of undisturbed dust beyond it, but before it, tracks of both animals and people. Rivulets of dried blood sealed the blade to the ground. The creaking resumed to their right, through the outer wall.
"Don't touch it," Chloe said. Lucifer paused, having stooped to grab the sword, and looked at her. "We need to wait for forensics."
"What point is there to that? The murderer confessed and we have the weapon. He's guilty. Everyone knows that."
"Lucifer."
Those weren't there a second ago. No shift of the wind. No pair of dangling boots. No one crawling across the ceiling. No wings. But footprints. Pure and clean, lifting dust from the floor, and very much not there a second ago.
"Ah." Another pair of dust-free prints appeared some feet away from the original, and Chloe drew her sidearm. People weren't invisible, and ghosts didn't exist, but one of those was clearly wrong. Lucifer's eyes tracked across the room. "I believe my sister has been slacking, Detective." He tsked and shook his head in mock disapproval, and continued, "LAPD's ghostbusting future is on the rise." The creaking of the building amplified.
Ghosts don't exist.
"You can see it?"
"Hm? Of course I can—I'm the devil. And he's not an it; he simply wandered a little too far north on his way down." He batted at her arms and pressed them back down to her sides. "A gun is not effective against a ghost, Detective." Creaks from two sides, behind and fore.
"Then what is?" Closer. Skipping steps. Closer.
Lucifer smiled, yet it somehow did little to reassure Chloe that she wasn't about to be killed by something invisible (ghosts don't exist). "He's more scared of me than you are of him. So relax. Enjoy your discovery of the persistence of the human soul." Louder. Louder. Lucifer stared down air. Louder. Louder.
"Hi, guys!"
Oh, shit.
"Wow." Ella snapped on a pair of gloves and grinned, glancing between the two of them. "Did I interrupt something?"
Chloe had a beating heart. She had working lungs. She was too aware of those facts.
"The Detective has just seen her first ghost." Lucifer's warm hand pushed gently on her shoulder, softly steering her out of the room.
Ella nodded, face drawn. "First time's so startling." She lunged forward into a quick hug, careful to keep the gloves free from contact, and Chloe absentmindedly returned it. She was fine. Everything was just fine. Ghosts really don't exist. "Don't worry, Chloe! It gets easier, and they're not normally dangerous. I mean, most of them are super nice. Just, you know, a bit lost? Ordinary but slightly very dead people, really." Ella pulled back. "I mean, if they exist. But, like, ghosts, right? Right? Pshh."
"Yeah." Chloe looked at the footsteps. Distinctly there, dust free. Ghosts definitely don't exist. Absolutely not. Nope. "I'm going to go back to the precinct. Paperwork. Uh." She wet her lips. A pair of forensics techs strolled on in, taking pictures as they went. This rotting corpse of a house... "Yeah. Lucifer, you coming?" Chloe blinked when she realized that Lucifer had his 'I'm going to respond with an innuendo' face on. "Don't say it."
Lucifer pouted. "Say what, Detective? Something uncouth?" Clean footsteps in dust filled rooms. Doors which don't have doors with sound. The entire building. Ghosts can't exist.
"Just—" Ghosts can't exists, and they don't exist, because the supernatural doesn't exist. New spy gear, or—or something. "I need coffee."
"You have a latte in your car."
"That's different." That's for middle of the day, fully awake, need-something-to-sort-of-hydrate-on. Not for pulling herself out of a dream. Wasn't this a bit of a dream?
"I need morning coffee. Black. Bitter."
It didn't feel like a dream.