It was cold.
Kanda forced open an eye gone gritty with sleep and an overindulgence of beer. Nausea rolled through him, along with that split second of sleepy displacement. Where was he, and why was it so fucking cold?
Sometime in the night it had started raining, an insistent little drum, lightning flashed outside the windows, a silent strobe that illuminated the empty room. Twelve seconds later thunder grumbled.
Kanda rolled over and sat up. His stomach rebelled, his eyes burned, and he was shivering.
How could he be shivering? In the middle of the freaking night in a July storm? There was no air conditioning, the house was decrepit and abandoned, which was why it had been perfect for a bunch of teenage boys bound for college in too few too short weeks to break into and get fall on your face drunk. His breath puffed out in a condensed little cloud, and he couldn't quite drum up the mental capacity to be freaked the fuck out.
He was, after all, still heroically drunk.
The cold was enough to pierce bone, his lips had actually gone numb, and he licked them as he looked around. Lavi and Daisya were passed out next to several discarded pizza boxes, the twins had commandeered what was left of the last six pack and had conked out on the stained mattress some other squatter had left, and Alma was curled up like a kitten to the side of them using a corner of it as a pillow.
The trash from their impromptu party, a paint drum they had dug out of the trash in the back, an old rusted shopping cart turned on its side, and the filthy mattress were the only furniture in the whole house.
They had drug out the broken refrigerator earlier that evening to pile inside and "ride" it down the grass covered slope, which had been fun until it hit a rock and flipped. Kanda had been among the sane to wait at the base, but his phone had video. They had already been into the beer by that point.
Someone, at some point, had gone to the corner to be sick. With the nausea so sharp and thick in his throat Kanda wasn't 100 percent certain it hadn't been him.
Shivering, and really really needing to piss, he braced himself against the wall to try and pull himself up.
He got eighteen inches off the floor, the average height of a Barbie doll, when he saw it. The human shape or shadow outside the window. He froze in the ridiculous hunched over position he was in, with feet on the ground and ass and knees raised, and thought "shit."
There was fear, not terror of the kind in horror movies, but the very real very intense dread that belongs to a teenager about to be caught doing what he and everyone else knows he ought not to have.
He didn't think ghost, or serial murderer, or even the squatter to whom the stained and soiled mattress belonged. As much as the logic in movies in mocked, when you do something stupid in the middle of the night, like necking in the woods near an asylum, or breaking into abandoned houses for underage drinking, you fear first and foremost the wrath of authority.
The shape wavered, and Kanda realized it wasn't outside the window, but INSIDE the room. And THAT'S when he thought serial murderer.
Lightning arched. Brighter, closer, the thunder came faster and louder, and in that light the image of a boy became clear.
Kanda shoved off the wall and stood on legs of rubber, his pocket knife out with its distinctive 'snk.' "Who are you." He kept the now darkened imprint of the boy in his sight, listened for movement, with his other hand he fished his phone out, pressed the button to light the screen.
Nothing.
"Huuunmg" Alma made some kind of noise and sat up. "Yu? Whaswrong?"
"Someone's here." He circled the room, his cell screen a pitiful torch, kicking Lavi's leg as he passed. "Wake up." He barked.
"Uuuhg, watizit?" Lavi sat up, and just as quickly flopped back over swearing in every language he knew. "Watimeizit?" No way in fucking hell he could be hung over. It was still dark out. He must still be drunk. He should have eaten more pizza. He should have thrown up some of it like Kanda. He should have just broken his neck on the slope and died and not had to face whatever it was he was going to face.
"Someone was in here. Come on. Wake the others and let's go."
Kanda's hand with the knife was trembling and he forced it to steady. How had the boy moved so fast, so quickly? Was he some kid from the neighborhood? Was he using this place to hang out, get high?
If he had been trying to rummage through their pockets he had been out of luck. None of them had brought more money than was needed to buy the food and booze. Had cells though, and those were worth something. Small. Easily fenced.
"Sweet mother of the baby Jesus why is it so fucking cold?" Lavi shook Daisya awake. "What did I do to deserve this inhumane treatment?"
"Yu? JasDevi aren't waking up."
Probably because they were stoned on top of everything else. At least Jasdero was in an upright position. If blinking demon red stoner eyes at him.
"Fuck. Just grab one. Let's go."
"Sure you didn't have a bad dream?"
"I saw someone. Right here. You want to stick around if they call the cops?"
Alma pouted, but took his share of the drowsy morons.
They made their quick, for drunk teens, escape. It was itself an adventure. The rain that drenched them in seconds, the adrenaline, the fear of getting caught, dropping one of the twins, no one really remembers which, when they had tried scaling the chain link fence.
Kanda had been the one to throw his bomber jacket over the barbwire and straddle the top, constantly looking back at the house which led to him dropping his burden, making sure no one followed them out.
The side yard was small, the kitchen door they escaped from was open and hanging crooked from a single hinge. Lightning struck; the kind that heralded in some unfortunate event, it was a dark and stormy night and blah blah blah, Kanda found it tired and cliché, but it struck the sole tree in the yard, a fruitless mulberry with rotten wood pieces nailed to the trunk as ladder, so close he could feel the power of it against his skin.
The world went white; he didn't remember the thunder, only the toneless whine inside his head. For a moment they were deaf and blind.
They would rag on him for years after, how they got drunk and Kanda had them scrambling scared in the rain because he thought he saw some ghost.
But he had been watching that doorway, and to this day he could still see with perfect clarity. The boy, in that indistinguishable era of prepubescense where you couldn't tell if it was a tall twelve year old or a babyface teen, standing there.
He could see the short open hallway that led into the den, where some joker had scrawled REDRUM in spray-paint once possibly the color of blood now faded to a really dirty pink. It stood out black in his mind, with a new message.
TRESSPASSERS
That would have been freaky enough. If he hadn't seen it, and everything else, through the very transparent youth less than seven feet away.
He stood there like mist, like fog that you only saw if there was light.
He would drive past some days, visiting Tiedoll, and see the house through the sagging chain link fence, a little worse off, every year eroding just that much more away. The tree grew crooked now, parts of it still black. He would look at the big broken front window, no boards, no one around to bother, no one owned it anymore. Not even a bank. The image would remain, superimposed, and he would turn quickly away. Drive just a little faster.
Drive away from the run down house and its secrets, away from the ghost with eyes as grey and violent as that long ago storm.