Ten
When they were young, before they knew anything different, they thought they were normal.
When they were older, and learned that the dominant species of the world was markedly different from them, at least in appearance, they thought they were hideous. Freaks. An accident, doomed never to be wanted or loved.
Now, they hold a precariously-balanced dual opinion of themselves. They're proud of what they are, but they know that few humans will ever accept them.
It's like the double nature of life as a ninja. On the one hand, there's the wonderful freedom granted by honed athleticism. But on the other hand, there's the terrible imprisonment of always having to remain in the shadows.
All of these skills keep them safe, lessen their fear as they move around the margins of a world not made for them.
Still, encounters are inevitable.
Meeting a human is always a harrowing experience. Now, though, they understand that it's even worse for the human. Meeting a known danger is one thing. Being confronted with something you didn't even know existed is another thing entirely.
They debate, sometimes, how they can best avoid causing humans to panic. What they can say that will keep a person calm.
Whether it's better not to speak at all.
The debates always go unresolved. They just don't know enough about how humans think.
"... chel ... chela ..."
Mike wakes up.
"... ichol ..."
He realizes it isn't his name the voice is saying.
"Nicholas..."
"You're not real," he says. "There's a rational explanation."
He feels a touch on his head. "Wake up, Nicky."
"I'm awake!" he cries, flailing at the air. "I'm awake..."
The weight on the bed shifts back. "You're not Nick..." Hands on his shoulders, then his neck. "Who are you? What are you doing to my son?"
"Nothing!" Mike tries to break the invisible hold. "Leave me alone!"
"Get out!" the voice shouts.
He passes into unconsciousness.
Mike fights to win.
He goes low, sweeps Raph's feet from under him, then pounces, bringing all his weight into a crushing blow aimed at Raph's head.
He deflects at the last instant.
"Yield!" Raph shouts.
They roll to their feet.
Raph sketches the required bow, then wipes his wrist across his forehead. "What the hell, Mike?"
Mike glares at them all. "You guys can believe me or not," he says, "but this place is freakin' haunted. Some invisible guy tried to strangle me last night." He moves to the edge of the practice area. "I'm not messing around."
They stare at him.
"Dismissed," Splinter says, though they've barely been practicing for half an hour. "Michelangelo..."
Mike stays behind after his brothers have left.
Splinter is silent for a moment. Then he says, "Do you truly believe this place is haunted?"
Mike lowers his head. "I thought about what you told me," he says. "But I can't come up with a better explanation. I mean..." He begins enumerating on his fingers. "Things die and decay faster than they should. Things disappear. I heard footsteps. I heard voices. Someone's been talking to me at night..." He glances at the doorway and makes a noise of frustration. "They won't believe me, will they?"
Splinter smiles wryly and puts a hand on Michelangelo's shoulder. "My son... do not jump to conclusions."
Mike doesn't say anything, when he goes in to breakfast, but he challenges them with his eyes.
"I believe you," Leo says.
"Don't patronize me," Mike says.
"No," Leo says. "Really. I -" He rubs his snout, thinking how to explain. "I see energy, now, when I meditate. And -" He glances at Master Splinter. "There's something here."
Mike looks at Splinter. "Why didn't you say anything?"
"You are thinking that this energy is unusual and noteworthy," Splinter says. "That is not true. I saw it, but I did not think it any more worth mentioning than many other things in our home." His eyes flicker to each of them. "It seems I was mistaken."
"I don't believe a word of it," Don says. "Get a grip, guys. You can't shout supernatural every time you lose something or see a funny light." He clears his place. "I have work to do."
"Guess we know where he stands," Raph says, after Don has left.
"You don't believe me either," Mike says.
"I dunno yet," Raph says. "Convince me."
Don sits in his alcove, fitting parts together, making a receiver for his Trackers.
This is all clearly nonsense. No matter how many times Splinter lectures him on opening his third eye, he does not believe in spooks.
He believes that meditation promotes physical health and increases mental discipline. He does not believe that it grants psychic powers.
That answers Leo and Splinter's assertions. As for Mike... well, he always has been afraid of the dark.
Maybe he'll sleep in Mike's room tonight.
Just to prove there's nothing there.
The skin on their hands is thick and calloused, but the straw still slices stinging marks into their palms.
Leo shuffles the hay around with his feet, trying to get it to spread evenly.
"So," Mike says, breaking the tie on another bale. "Is there anything else really important you haven't told us yet?"
Leo pauses in his work. "I told Master Splinter, and he said pretty much the same thing he said this morning."
"Oh," Mike says. "Well, that makes it okay."
Leo looks hard at him, trying to read this strange, surly Michelangelo. "Do you really want me to tell you every probably-insignificant detail of my life?"
Mike stretches the tie between his hands, pulling until it breaks again, then throwing the pieces to the floor. "I don't know," he says. "I don't know anything anymore."
"What do you want to do?" Leo asks.
"I don't know!" Mike shouts, pacing to the far side of the room. "I thought you were going away to get your head together, to be the leader again. I thought you were going to come back and, y'know, lead! You tell me what to do!"
Leo crosses to where Mike had been standing, drops to one knee, and picks up the broken pieces of plastic ribbon. "I don't know what you guys want from me," he says softly. "You tell me you have everything under control, you tell me to give you more space, then you tell me to make decisions for you… I'm trying to listen but it doesn't make any sense! I want to fix things but I can't!"
"Then who's going to?" Mike shouts. He slams his fist against the wall. "I can't live like this, Leo..."
"You shouldn't have to." Leo rises, goes to his brother, puts a hand on his shoulder. "We'll fix it. Together. I promise."
He passes the receiver over the Trackers, and the numbers spin wildly.
He's triple-checked everything. These readings just don't make sense.
He scoops up the Trackers, goes outside the screen, and casts the little devices across the Lair like a handful of dice.
Raph looks up from cranking the generator. "Those better not be explosives."
Don doesn't answer. He serpentines across the room, pacing slowly and watching the receiver's display intently.
There it goes again. The numbers indicating distance to the target decrease in an orderly fashion, until he gets within grabbing distance. Then the counter suddenly shoots up to 1000.
Why 1000?
He bends and collects the Trackers, picking them up like loose change.
Back to the drawing board.
Leo works on the training post, trying to get the wheels to fit together so they will spin easily without flying off the base.
Next to him, Splinter is weaving, Mike is edging the mats so they won't unravel, and Raph is reinforcing the top of the sandbag so the weight of it against the chain won't rip it apart.
Don comes out of his alcove, seizes Leo's wrist, and presses small things into his palm. "Hide these," he instructs.
"Hide them where?" Leo asks.
"The general idea," Don says, "is that I don't know where."
Leo blinks, nods, and disappears.
Don stalks around the Lair, waving the receiver like a dowsing rod.
Even though he swapped out the computer chip for one cannibalized from a completely different console, he's still getting the same problem. 30, 20, 10 ... 1000.
He supposes it works, after a fashion.
It's just damned annoying.
Mike jumps down from Raph's shoulders and gives the newly-hung bag an experimental kick.
"Hey," Raph complains. "I got dibs."
Mike backs off and lets Raph christen the bag with a few punches.
"So," Raph says, executing a jump kick. "What happened in the access tunnel?"
"Nothing," Mike says. "There was nothing there."
Raph catches the bag on the backswing and stills it. "You really keep getting attacked by invisible stuff?"
Mike stares steadily at his brother's back. "Yeah."
Raph turns around and matches the gaze. "Ghosts are trying to kill you."
"You still don't believe me," Mike says.
"Yes or no, Mike?" Raph says.
"Yes."
"Okay," Raph says. "I believe you." He turns and takes another whack at the bag, then leaves it swinging and goes to the doorway. He seems to feel that more explanation is required, so he pauses and says, "You're a nutball, but you're not a liar and you're not completely deluded. If you believe it, I believe it."
Then he goes out.
Mike takes a deep breath.
Only one left.
Mike thinks about how to convince Don, and watches the bag swing.
Its arc never seems to diminish.
Don may be intellectually obstinate, always putting the burden of proof on the opposing theory, but sandbags that defy the laws of physics certainly ought to count as evidence of ghosts.
Mike knows that, as soon as he turns his back, the bag will stop swinging.
He sidles to the door and sticks his head out, keeping his eyes turned into the room. "Donnie?"
"Busy," Don calls back.
"You really gotta see this -"
"Busy," Don calls again, more emphatically.
Mike sighs. He watches the bag a while longer. Then he goes to see what else he can help with.
There's an awful lot of creepy stuff happening around here. Sooner or later, Don will have to see some of it.
It turns out to be 'sooner', and it happens like this.
The lights go off.
"What?" Don shouts. "What am I missing?" They hear him turning the crank furiously, then pounding on the generator. "Work!"
The lights go on.
Don is standing there with a crazed expression on his face.
"Dude," Mike says. "You're getting scary."
"I have not yet begun to get scary," Don says darkly, and dives into the guts of the machine.
Don extracts himself from the generator, and points at it menacingly. "Don't you dare -"
The lights go off.
"For the love of -!"
Don and the generator engage in a loud and violent struggle.
The lights go on.
Don is standing there with a loose wire in his hand.
"Um," says Raph. "Where are we drawing power from, right now?"
"We're not," says Don.
They all look around, very slowly.
"Still think I'm crazy?" Mike says.
"Still don't believe in ghosts," Don says. "But beginning to wonder why this place was abandoned."
In short order, Don has brought back his computer from sleep mode, accessed the archives of the New York Times, and run a search for articles related to municipal wastewater treatment facilities. He clicks rapidly through several before finding one that seems relevant.
"Here," he says, and begins reading. "'The Central Park water treatment plant is slated to be closed in the wake of a gas leak accident. The plant, scheduled for renovation to bring it up to date with current regulations, will instead be decommissioned and replaced with a new facility.
"'The accident, which occurred late last night, resulted in the deaths of two employees. A faulty pump allowed chlorine, commonly used in water purification systems, to escape from its tank. This gas has a noticeable odor, but is harmless at low concentrations...'
"Guys," he says. "People died here."
Splinter looks thoughtful, Mike looks shocky, Leo looks like he wants to attack something, and Raph keeps shifting between confusion, anger, and something else that Don can't quite figure out.
"That's freakin' creepy," Raph says.
"This is my fault," Leo says. "I should have -"
"Don't start that again," Don says, turning back to the screen and scanning through the rest of the article.
Mike comes and reads over his shoulder. "Chlorine..." he says slowly. "Is that the stuff they use in swimming pools?"
"Often," Don says distractedly.
"That's what I smelled in the dojo," Mike says.
Don stops scrolling. "That's impossible," he says. "All the tanks are empty now, and..." He flicks to the top of the page. "This was fourteen years ago."
"I smelled it," Mike says.
"And I sensed two presences," Splinter offers.
"It all makes a messed-up kinda sense," Raph says.
Don sits back in his chair, his hand resting on the mouse. "Fine," he says. He looks up at Mike. "You say the ghosts talk to you? Then I think it's time to talk back."
They form a huddle on the floor, sitting near the generator as though it's a campfire, even though right now it isn't generating heat or light or, apparently, anything.
Mike is stroking Klunk, largely for his own comfort, and keeps glancing nervously over his shoulder.
"'Course," Raph says, "now that we want creepy shit to happen, nothing will."
"Right," Don says dryly. "Because the ghosts can read our minds."
They lapse into silence.
"How long're we gonna wait?" Raph asks.
"For as long as we must," Splinter says.
"We're just gonna sit here all night?" Raph says.
Leo stands up. "Let's bring down the mattresses," he says. "We can camp out."
They drag out the four mattresses and push three of them together. Mike claims a spot in the middle, builds a nest of orange blankets, and buries himself in it.
Raph sits next to him. "You're not goin' to bed already?"
"Not really," Mike mumbles.
Raph contemplates the shadow-wall. "What do you think they want?"
"The ghosts?"
"Mm."
Mike thinks about it. "Not to be dead?"
"Can't give 'em that," Raph says. "What do they say to you, at night?"
"Only one," Mike says. "Only one of them talks to me. He thought I was…" Someone else. "He thought I was hurting his son." He stretches his toes against the still-stiff fabric. "Maybe they just want to be safe..."
"So... your something-like-a-nightmare...?"
"Yeah," Mike says.
Splinter makes dinner, and they have a subdued picnic on the mattresses.
Leo eats quickly, silently, and goes to the kitchen to start the dishes.
By the side of the sink is the glass from four days ago.
He sets his plate down and picks up the glass, turning it in his hand, looking for answers in its transparent curves.
He doesn't find any.
He washes it and puts it away.
Mike contemplates the narrow edge of the plywood wall.
On the side of it designated as 'behind', Don sits in his kidnapped kitchen chair, one hand wrapped around his forehead. The fingers of his other hand are twitching intermittently, and his lips are moving soundlessly.
"What, Mike?" he says after a moment.
Mike reaches out to touch the thin partition. "What's with this wall?"
Don sighs. "Yes, I know my love of privacy is offensive to you. Did you want something? This is usually the part where you drag me off to watch a movie, but we don't have a TV, so..."
Without further preamble, Mike sits on the edge of the desk and repeats, one more time, Splinter's story.
"If you want to know what I'm doing back here," Don says, "you can just ask."
"Okay," Mike says. "What are you doing?"
"Right now?" Don gestures to his computer screen, which is displaying an eclectic mix of information about water-purification technology and phenomena commonly associated with ghosts. "Trying to figure out what happened here, and what's happening here now."
"When are you going to come out?"
"When I'm done."
"You're never done."
"I didn't say you have to leave."
Mike takes that as an invitation, and sits, swinging his feet, while Don reads and thinks and talks to himself.
"Okay," Don says. He presses the little button that turns the monitor dark. "I'm done."
Raph proposes a debate over the relative merits of bedmates with cold feet versus bedmates who snore, but no one is really in the mood.
They sort out sleeping arrangements with a minimum of discussion, and settle down one against the other, their blankets making a strange test-pattern rainbow on the gray floor.
"So," Mike says. "How do we make the lights turn off?"
Don contemplates the ceiling. Then, in a loud, clear voice, he says, "Turn off the lights!"
The lights go out.