Author's Note: Hey all! Welcome back, and sorry for the delay. I would say "I hope this makes up for it!" but I doubt it will. And you'll see why in a moment. Have fun!
Obligatory meaningful song lyrics:
I rise from the grave
When the dead start to walk
And I grab Zombie Dave
And say "it's time to ROCK"
We zombies are hungry and we're gonna stalk
The robots are coming our way!
--The Flaming Tsunamis
(There are no zombies OR robots in this chapter. Sorry to get your hopes up.)
Remembering Amity
Chapter 3: Ghost of a Friend
As Samantha stood on the front steps of the almost-familiar house, her thoughts lay mainly on taking a shower and brushing her teeth. She felt drowsy and rumpled from the night's train ride, and had that unwashed feeling that always comes from sleeping in your clothes. Yesterday she'd chosen to wear a pair of dark jeans and a plain lavender sweater, trying to be inconspicuous, and was now a little annoyed because cashmere was not supposed to be wrinkled so. She felt around in her duffle bag and pulled out the unfamiliar key: one that hadn't been used since her parents had first given it to her three years ago in case of some sort of absolute emergency. They were so paranoid.
Her heart skipped a beat when the key did not fit into the lock. For a moment she panicked, visions of her indeed paranoid parents getting the locks changed without bothering to tell her, and now she would be lost in this city, by herself, with absolutely nowhere to go…
She laughed softly, realizing she'd merely been putting the key in upside down. With an expert eye roll she slid it home and turned the decorative handle. The door creaked as it pushed painfully open, like it hadn't been used in months. Considering how much time her parents actually spent there, this was probably the case.
It was eerily silent when she stepped into the large home, not to mention dark. There were cobwebs on the light switch she found next to the door, but the entire foyer was flooded with light when she flicked it on. Trust her parents to pay electrical bills on a house they barely visited just because they could.
It was strange being in the house again. She'd spent a whole two days there after coming home from the hospital after the accident, camped out one of the large chairs in the basement, wrapped in blankets and watching movies her mother assured her were her favorites although she couldn't remember any of them (and hadn't particularly liked any of them either). The basement was cavernous, as was much of the rest of the house. It was deceptive that way, looking rather ordinary on the outside. Samantha had never liked it there, and even now she felt uncomfortable.
"This is my house," she said out loud, trying to make it feel real. She still held the door key in her hand but felt like an intruder all the same.
She found the master bedroom easily enough. At the top of the stairs she saw that all the doors had been left open except those at the very end of the hall: French doors hung with dusty velvet drapes. It was dark and lonely in the overlarge room she found behind them, entirely empty except for a dauntingly huge canopy bed (covered in white dust covers like those downstairs) and two similarly cloaked arm chairs next to a distinctly cold looking fireplace.
Samantha hadn't thought people actually had fireplaces in their bedroom anymore. It was so… Jane Austen. Or Pirates of the Caribbean. There had been lots of fireplaces back at the Academy, of course, but that's because the building was so old. Thinking of the Academy, Samantha was momentarily overcome by a wave of feeling. She wasn't sure if she was homesick for her school, or for the feeling that she wasn't a stranger in this house.
The connecting bathroom was also impractically large, twice the size of Samantha's old dorm room. The focal point was the bath at the center of the room: entirely round and made of neutral toned tiles, raised up from the floor by three encircling steps. A metal ring suspended from the ceiling supported a navy blue shower curtain that could be pulled all the way around the tub.
Perhaps it would have been easier to just use the shower in the corner, but the bath tub looked far too inviting. It was even worth it, she decided, to have to run the water once (her parents luckily kept up with the water bills as well) to clear all the dust out.
As she settled down in the steamy water (laced with bubbled bath, just because she didn't see why she shouldn't indulge a little after her rough night on the train) when it was finally ready. She had drawn the large circular curtain—it was too awkward taking a bath out in the open like that—and decided her time might be best spent planning her next move.
Here she was, Amity Park, allegedly the most haunted city in the country. She hadn't seen any ghosts yet (the idea of having to keep on the lookout for them still seemed rather ludicrous to her, even after the time she spent with the Dream Seer), but the grey, overcast sky outside had carried an alarming sort of greenish tint that in another state would have signified a tornado. She wasn't sure if what it did signify was any less dangerous.
The warm water was making her sleepy, and for a moment she forgot she was supposed to be planning. She'd folded up a towel she'd found in one of the cabinets and placed it beneath her head, leaning back and enjoying the first bath she'd taken in at least a year (it was hard enough having time to shower when sharing a bathroom with seven other girls). The thick curtain around her kept all the steam from escaping and she breathed in, not caring that she was drifting off to sleep, barely noticing that as she did, she began to remember…
Against all odds, she remembered Mr. Lancer first.
She remembered his crisp shirts and overlarge gut and gleaming bald head and "Pride and Prejudice!" and just about everything else about her former teacher. The jump from there was Casper High—dimly she could picture its halls, a classroom or two. Public school. Strange how just yesterday she thought she'd never even been in one.
She half-consciously tried to picture the campus, the surrounding area. She shuddered as she recalled a fast food restaurant she must have frequented—to think all the meat products they must sell there, slathered in God knew how much grease and—
Her body was still safely immersed in the warm, soapy water, but she could feel the temperature change on her face and neck. The room had suddenly gone several degrees colder. She froze, hardly daring to breathe. Normally this would not be something to worry about. After living in a building as old as the Academy for as long as she had, she was quite used to the more than occasional draft. But it seemed nearly impossible in this window-less bathroom, especially with the impermeable shower curtain surrounding her.
She turned over so she was on her stomach and waded to the side of the bath she thought was close to the door—coincidentally where the ends of the blue curtain had met. With her chin resting on the side of the tub the curtain was just within her farthest reach. There's nothing here, she told herself, straining her ears all the while to see if she could make out anyone (or anything, she supposed) else in the room. After taking a quiet, deep breath, she jerked the curtain open.
There was absolutely no one there. At least, not that she could see. That's why it was so startling when she heard the scream, coming from apparently right in front of her.
Naturally, she screamed in response, jerking the curtain closed again, and slipped backwards in the tub. For a moment she sat there, stunned. Her unwelcome visitor had stopped screaming but he (despite the high-pitched quality of his scream she had determined it was a boy) sounded well on his way to hyperventilating.
Could ghosts hyperventilate?
But she was jumping to conclusions, she decided, suddenly all business. She stood up and wrapped herself in her towel, in the back of her mind rather annoyed that it had gotten a little wet already. She descended the tile steps carefully, not wanting to slip with her wet feet, and with equal caution opened the curtain for a second time. She didn't want to set whoever it was off again.
"Hello?" she called out, feeling like an idiot. She wasn't sure what else to say, though. There was no reply. This made her angry.
"Look," she said, stepping out and glaring around her, "I don't know just who you think you are, spying on me when I'm in the bath like that, but it is totally perverted and—"
"I'm sorry!" a voice cried startlingly close to her, "I didn't mean to—I mean—I didn't see anything, I swear I didn't see anything!"
She was only a little surprised when a boy materialized two feet directly in front of her. He was taller than she was by three or so inches—a few more because he was floating a few from the ground. He was African American, she noticed vaguely, but his brown skin had a bizarre grey-ish pallor to it which was most extreme around his eyes and the roots of his hair (the bits of which sticking out from beneath his green beret were stark silver). He was dressed like a normal teen, (except for a strange, cylindrical object hung from one of his belt loops) and glowing, and she shuddered, recalling once more her ordeal the night before.
Getting a hold of herself, she took a moment to wrap her towel more tightly about herself. The ghost looked as if he would be blushing if there'd been any blood in him to rush to his face: he was very pointedly averting his gaze all around the room, sometimes casting his glance toward her but significantly never her chest. She crossed her arms and scowled.
"Tucker," she said, "Just what the hell do you think you're doing?"
"Sorry, I—" he began, but was cut off rather abruptly when the metal curtain ring crashed to the floor with a loud clatter, and then the ceiling fell in after it.
-AP-
He peered up at the building analytically, sharp eyes scanning each of the six floors one at a time, checking for damage, for exits, and most importantly, evidence of any humans. It had once been the second largest department store in Amity Park, but it hadn't survived the drastic changes the town had made over the years and the company had shipped off to a new location. They'd left some things behind—old crates, partitions, counters, and mannequins still peering eerily from the darkness through the wide glass windows—those not boarded up, anyway.
No one had claimed the building since, and no one bothered to say that it was haunted. That much was obvious.
What he wanted—needed—to be sure of was that there weren't any humans inside. Kids, exploring on a dare, a vagabond making an impermanent home… there were too many possibilities, and he wasn't sure that he'd be able to keep them safe.
In less than an hour they'd be there, meeting on the top story. Like they had been for months, like it had taken him this long to figure out. It still frustrated him that he hadn't realized sooner—hadn't even been able to sense the ghost portal that must be up there as well. A day later and their plan might have been put into motion.
"Close but no cigar…" he murmured to himself, addressing his absent enemies. He grinned then, and if he hadn't been invisible any passersby would have been immediately alarmed. It was not a pleasant grin. More like a hunter, imagining his prey, relishing in thoughts of the moment he would bring them down. It smacked outlandish on his boyish face.
He flew inside, directly through the old rotating front doors, and began a systematic check for any signs of habitation.
Valerie was going to be very angry, he though guiltily, when she found out he had come without her.
-AP-
Amity Park had always been an average, crowded, urban-ish area. Families lived there because the school system was decent, and if anything they had a good football team. The crime rate was low, the sanitation workers hardly ever went on strike, and then of course there were at least good imitations of the benefits of city life without the same expenses.
Assuming you set your expectations low enough, it was the perfect place to live. Or at least it had been until almost over night it became a beacon of paranormal activity.
Few knew the story of the first portal—the Fentons somehow figured out how to breach the barrier between dimensions and create a gateway between the living world and… the other one. (The 'ghost zone' as it was called, though in casual conversation Amity Park denizens also referred to it as 'over there', 'the other side', or 'the place next door'). Even fewer knew the whole story, the one involving the Fentons' only son. The truth of it was that most people didn't care how the first portal opened and when the time came a year or so later, the second, or the third and so on... They didn't care how over a span of three years the amount of supernatural occurrences had tripled.
The story of Amity Park is the story of human adaptability. A question comes to mind of just how a town literally plagued by ghosts spilling forth from glowing rips in inter-dimensional fabric could keep working. The simple answer: it adapted.
Slowly but surely, the town became used to its newfound uniqueness. Certainly many left, but just as certainly others came to take their place. Amity Park became a tourist attraction of sorts, bringing on gawkers, sight-seers, skeptics, and investigators of the unearthly.
Samantha, of course, knew nothing of any of this. She didn't know about the constant struggle to keep the city going even as more and more of it fell apart from frequent ghost attacks. She didn't know about the portals. What she did know was that a ghost was attacking her, and with no experience fighting ghosts (and with nothing but a towel on) she couldn't be much help to Tucker, who was left fending the assailant off on his own.
"Your left!" she cried helplessly from where she huddled in the corner. Tucker dodged to his right, a hair's breadth away from being caught in the swing of the ghost's powerful claws.
Claws. Samantha thought they looked more like knives. The sort you'd use to go hacking through the jungle, or whatever. The ghost had the form of a giant bear… type thing (its tail might have been too long but it certainly wasn't a cat), and five of those knives extended from each paw. It hadn't spoken a word yet (Samantha wondered if ghost animals could speak) and it seemed to have no other goal beyond destroying her parents' bathroom, and possibly eating Tucker as an added bonus.
He'd saved her when the ceiling came down, a huge chunk of wood and plaster and dry wall simply falling in, splashing bathwater everywhere, and even crushing the tile in a few places. The curtain ring falling first had startled her, missing her toes by centimeters, and when the rest fell through he'd shoved her out of the way just in time. Horrified she'd turned to see if he'd been hurt for his efforts, crushed beneath the settling debris, and when she saw him standing atop it completely unruffled it occurred to her that he could probably go through things, and also that she should ask him who he was, and why she knew his name.
Then the eyes had appeared above, red, glowing, narrowed like a hunter's. It had leapt down nimbly as a lion (but it was definitely a bear, even lions couldn't be that big, could they?) and attacked, letting out unearthly shrieks and roars all the way. In the back of her mind Samantha wondered why it couldn't have just come through the ceiling like Tucker had gone through the debris, but obviously didn't have the opportunity to ask. More than anything she was afraid for Tucker, and also noting again that she was caught amidst an extremely weird situation and was not in the least weirded out.
She gave a small cry when Tucker dove at the creature headfirst: she was sure it was going to catch him in its claws and rip him apart, and hardly dared watch. But at the last moment he disappeared altogether. The ghost was just as confused as she was, and for a moment quieted. Its front paws, which had remained in the air swinging wildly at Tucker, slid gradually to the floor. It turned its head one way, sniffing. It turned its head the other way, and saw Samantha.
Closing her eyes seemed the only thing to do, so she didn't see when Tucker reappeared again suddenly. But she heard his triumphant laugh, and looked just in time to see him shooting what looked like a beam of green light right into the creature's face. He caught it completely off guard, and with a startled roar it tumbled backwards.
It's feline face (Well maybe it was a sort of cat. A Big Cat.) seemed to have burnt (it was literally steaming), and it crossed its red eyes to get a better look.
"Good thing I actually remembered this for once," said Tucker, pulling out the cylinder she'd noticed earlier, uncapping it and aiming it at the ghost. To her surprise a jet of intense blue light shot out from the end. It looked like light, but encircled the bear-lion like liquid, contorting, pulling, and somehow, amazingly, forcing the beast inside the cylinder. Tucker was grinning. He blew across the top as if it were a smoking gun and slammed the cap back on top.
"Oh yeah!" he cried, "That's right, FIFTY THREE on my own, baby!"
"Is that a thermos?" Samantha asked from her position still in the corner. Tucker cut the robotic victory dance he'd begun short and turned to stare at her. Clearly he'd forgotten she was there at all.
"I mean," Samantha clarified, "That you put like soup in?"
Slowly Tucker's gaze dropped to the object in his hands. "I… I guess so…" He looked back to her. She was wet, and shivering slightly though she didn't seem to notice, and there were bits of ceiling plaster caught in her hair and one on her nose. "Look, Sam," he said, "What are you even doing here?"
She was thrown off by the sudden cold change in his tone. "This is my house," she told him, annoyed, and got the same unwelcome feeling she had when she'd said it to herself earlier. "What are you doing here?"
"I always come here," he said, immediately defensive. "It's on my usual route. Ghosts like it here, for whatever reason, and I come to make sure they're not stirring up trouble. I guess today was my lucky day." He almost smiled again at that. He really did seem quite happy about getting to defeat the bear-lion. Samantha supposed she would have congratulated him or at least thanked him if not for his sudden attitude.
Arms crossed firmly over her chest, she took a few steps forward and jerked her head toward the door. "Well, I guess you can leave now."
Tucker looked almost as if he were about to laugh, but the look was quickly replaced by a deep frown. Samantha found it unsettling. It made him look so old. And while she'd for whatever reason presumed he was the same age as she, she supposed a ghost could really be hundreds of years old and you would never know.
"And leave you here?" he asked her incredulously, "Yeah right. There could be more of them, and then what would you do?" Before she could reply (and she didn't really know what to say: she certainly couldn't deal with one of those things on her own) Tucker's gaze flickered to the clock on the wall—slightly at a tilt after the upheaval but intact and still presumably showing the right time.
"Crap!" Tucker hissed, "I'm supposed to meet Danny and Val in seven minutes. This is so uncool, they're gonna kill me!"
Samantha thought this was a rather ridiculous phrase to use, given what he was, but a name popped into her head and she asked him, "Danny? Like Danny Phantom?"
He rolled his eyes. "No, the other Danny we know. Jeez, it's like you don't—" his eyes widened. "Sam… what are you doing here?"
She glowered, about to inform him that she did in fact sort of live there, but before she could he waved a hand, brushing away his own question. "Whatever, we'll talk later. Right now I've got to go, and I guess you'll just have to come with me." He reached a hand out to her expectantly, and for a moment she stared at it, wondering just what it was he wanted her to do.
"Tucker," she deadpanned, "Do you think I could find something to wear first?"
He looked again as if he'd be blushing, dropping his hand to his side and muttering, "Oh, uh, right. Sure."
Amity Park was turning out to be nothing like Samantha had imagined.
To be continued…
Post A/N: Well there you have it. I'm sure that was all very confusing, and believe me I sympathize, but you're just going to have to wait until the next chapter to find out what's going on! See you there!
(Super thanks to bluename, cariadiorarua, kpfan72491, xX-Silver-and-cold-Xx, KHFREAK14, look for the girl with the…, and Orlandoroxmysox!)
NEXT TIME: One word: Danny.
