Hey, guys! Here's chapter 3. The beginning of this chapter is quite similar to the actual movie, but it gets different, such as I explain why the Hammer was so mad when Dennis put his face up against the glass, and I tell why the Jackal tried to take Kathy's clothes off. Enjoy, and keep on reviewing! Once again, I still own no part whatsoever of 13 Ghosts.

Chapter 3

…Elsewhere in the house…

"Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa! No! No, no, no, no, no! Where are you going? Did I say there was a petting zoo downstairs? NO! I said there are ghosts downstairs, Arthur!" Dennis Rafkin, a rather highly strung and easily worked up postcognet and touch-know yelled at single parent Arthur Kriticos, heir to a massive glass mansion built by his late Uncle Cyrus.

"What do you want me to do, Dennis? My son is missing in a house that just sealed itself up on its own!"

"I told you, the ghosts-"

"I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANYMORE ABOUT THE FREAKIN' GHOSTS!!! Now--listen to me; I will pay you whatever Cyrus may have owed you for anything, if you just help me find my son," Arthur pleaded. Dennis thought about this. He looked back at Arthur's young African-American housekeeper (Maggie) and his sixteen-year-old daughter Kathy, who both had hopeful looks on their faces. Dennis finally agreed to help them. Arthur thanked him, then tromped down the stairs followed by Kathy, Dennis, and Maggie.

"Wait a minute," said Maggie, " there are ghosts in this basement?"

"Of course in this basement!" yelled Dennis in exasperation. "If it were Old Man Sedgwick's basement down the street, I couldn't care less!" Upon finally reaching the bottom of the basement steps, Dennis instructed everyone with glasses to put them on. Besides himself, only Kathy had them, and she wouldn't put them on. Dennis rolled his eyes, and started down one of the hallways. Arthur followed, leading the two women.

"Bobby!"

"Bob-"

"-obby-" Arthur and the women were randomly shouting out the boy's name, and Dennis was getting fed up with it.

"Hey, Glass Family Robinson, you're wasting your breath; this is shatter and sound-proof glass we're surrounded by. There's no way he can hear you," Dennis explained to them. Arthur shut his mouth, looked around at the many surrounding corridors, and made a quick decision.

"Alright, this is just taking way too long. Dennis and Maggie, you go that way. Kathy, you come with me.

"Okay, Dad."

"Sure, Arthur.

"I should not be doing this,"

…Down the left corridor…

"Okay, Dennis. Let's go back to this whole ghost thing again."

"There are ghosts in this basement. They are all over the place."

"I don't see any ghosts, just some more of this wacky spell shit all over the place. Show me a ghosts, Den-"

"Well, I would, but I can't see, I don't have…the glasses!" Dennis commented in a sweetsy, sarcastic voice as he took the glasses from Maggie and put them on and looked all around. "Ah," he said as he came to a large glass cube with a strange symbol etched into it. Dennis put his face up to the glass, and WHAM! The Hammer banged on the glass as hard as he possibly could with his heavy black smith's hammer. Dennis screamed in horror as he quickly jumped away. Hah, thought the Hammer, looking at the empty bottle of Windex Window Cleaner in the corner of his cube, that'll show HIM to mess with my walls after I've spent an hour cleaning them!!!

"What?"

"These stupid ghosts! They wait for you to get your face right up against the glass, and then they go…" he gave Maggie the glasses. "Raaarrhh!!!" Maggie jumped, then proceeded to put the glasses on.

"Oh, my--oh--it's…it's a-"

"A ghost, yeah. They're everywhere. Twelve of 'em. But hey, most of 'em can't hurt us, most of 'em don't even wanna hurt us. But there are exceptions. Like this badass right here. Come on, we gotta scram." The two power-walked down another hallway until they arrived at a similar cube, which stood wide open.

"Ah, crap!" cursed Dennis, inspecting the symbol on the door. "That's the symbol of the Jackal. And if the Jackal's out I say screw the kid. We gotta get out of this basement!"

"Huh..?"

"The Jackal is the Charlie Manson of ghosts," Dennis informed her as he desperately searched for a way out.

…Down the right corridor…

"Dad," Kathy called apprehensively after her father, "what if Dennis was right? What if-"

"KATHERINE! Think about what you are saying!" There is NO such thing as ghosts!" Arthur huffed as he stomped down the glass corridor. Kathy stared at the strange pair of glasses she held in her hands. She took a long, deep breath, and put them on. It wasn't clear who saw who first, but what Kathy saw stunned her.

Clothes! thought the "Charlie Manson" of ghosts. Oh, those would look great on the Angry Princess! She'll get some clothes if it's the last thing I do! The Jackal began ripping at Kathy's shirt, trying to get it off. The girl began kicking and screaming wildly. What is she doing? thought Jack (the Jackal, of course). Arthur came racing back down the hall, only to see his daughter floating and fighting in midair! Quickly, he grabbed her legs and pulled her all the way down to the end of the corridor.

Not having realized that he'd already gotten the girl's olive green Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt, Jack chased them down the hall until out of nowhere, a short, red-haired woman clad in black leather leapt out from a corner and flung a small explosive at the ghost. As it exploded, a large glass wall with odd writing on it appeared in front of Jack. He obviously could not cross it. Every time he banged on the glass, Kathy freaked out until the woman (who introduced herself as Kalina) instructed Kathy to remove her glasses and hand them to Arthur.

Arthur gawked in frightened awe at the Jackal's chilling spectacle as Kalina explained to Arthur that his uncle Cyrus had built this place and captured the ghosts to power it--it wasn't a house; it was a machine designed and built by the devil and powered by the dead. How Cyrus created it she didn't know, but, riffling through all her stuff, she found a large book called the Ar Caanum. She told him that the machine was called the Ocularis Infernum, which was Latin for the Eye of Hell. But while Kalina showed Arthur a design of the machine, Kathy's curiosity had gotten the better of her. She had put on the glasses again a little while after Arthur had viewed the Jackal, and was now preoccupied with a different conversation.

"Wait a minute," Kathy instructed the ghost, "you just practically raped me to death, and now you want my help?!" Then, Jack explained about AP, and her whole outfitless dilemma, and Kathy became more understanding.

"Alright--you can keep the sweatshirt, and…I can even help you make her a cute skirt!"

"Really?"

"Really, really!" The two grinned at each other, and the Jack snapped his bony fingers, and the two of them disappeared.

"Kathy, can you walk?" asked Arthur, turning around to where his daughter was. "Oh, great. Just great! My daughter's gone too now!" Immediately, Kalina and Arthur ran wild, seeking his daughter out, when they heard the grid lock in another place…and the door to the Hammer's cube slid slowly open, right next to them.