Spooked
"Heads up," Briggs announces, sitting on the coffee table. "Charlie and Paige are holed up in Chuck's room, plotting this week's festivities."
Mike looks up from his laptop and frowns at the horrified expression on Johnny's face and DJ's scowl, which seems more pronounced than it was before Briggs walked in. "What's this week?"
"Halloween." Johnny fakes a shudder, accompanied by a real groan, and Briggs and Jakes nod along.
"I would have thought you liked Halloween."
"I do!" Johnny protests. "I like the way Halloween is supposed to be with the candy and the pumpkins and the half-naked women. But those two are a walking horror show!"
From the other end other couch, with his hands over his eyes, Jakes nods. "Every year, they want us to dress up and we say no. So every year, they unleash holy hell on this house until we agree to do what they want."
"What, like pranks?" Mike chuckles. "They can't be that bad."
Briggs shakes his head. "Don't test them, Michael. Do what I do and surrender early. I just did, and they're letting me be a nice, simple hockey player."
Johnny snorts. "You just wait. Knowing them, you're gonna be impaled on your stick."
Johnny knows what's coming and it makes him very…uncomfortable. He gets a little tense, okay?
So they usually try to put him out of his misery early on and take him out first.
They're all carving pumpkins at the kitchen table when Paige approaches him from behind, and he flinches. She notices and laughs, and he scowls at himself as she hefts his pumpkin into her arms to take it to the counter.
"You good, Johnny?" she asks, twirling a knife in her fingers. She jabs it into the top of his pumpkin, sawing the top off it so he'll be able to clean it out. "You seem a little jittery."
Mike is looking at him like he wants to laugh, and Johnny narrows his eyes. "Don't even! Just don't. You don't know what they're like on Halloween! Last year, they painted a freakin' bloody scar on my stomach while I was sleeping. I thought someone jacked my liver or some other messed up shit!"
"Technically Charlie did the makeup," Paige says, putting his pumpkin down in front of him. "I just poked you with a safety pin so it stung when you woke up."
"Inspired," Charlie compliments, without looking up from her carving.
"Yeah, because that matters." Johnny scoffs and plunges his hand into his pumpkin without looking. He pauses when he doesn't feel the wet, slimy consistency of pumpkin guts and instead feels…
Ghost white, he jerks his hand out fast, knocking the pumpkin onto the floor.
Paige drops an empty trash can over the wreckage to contain the horde of cockroaches trying to escape from the orange mess.
"I'll wear whatever you want, okay?!" he yells, before whirling to point at Mike. "You see?! You see what kind of freaky shit they pull?! And now, I don't even have a pumpkin."
"There's an extra in my room," Paige promises.
Head buried in her arms and face red from laughter, Charlie looks up and says, "We kind of anticipated this."
As he goes to retrieve it, he can hear Mike telling Paige it how nice (nice?) it was to get him another pumpkin.
"We can be very nice, Mike," she says cheerfully. "We can also be very mean."
"You don't scare me."
Bad move, Mikey.
Whereas Johnny walks around in a constant state of paranoia this time of year, Jakes just figures it's going to happen eventually, so he may as well go about his business until it does.
So it's really his own fault that he doesn't see it coming.
He drops his keys on the dresser, flicks the overhead light on, and then promptly turns it back off and walks out, breathing heavily. Resting his hands on his knees, he closes his eyes and tries to get his heartbeat back under control.
"I hate you," he says simply, listening to the cackling in the dark.
Briggs sighs and tugs his rubber clown mask down until it's dangling from his neck. "Sorry about this, man. I didn't want to, but Paige was all excited, and Charlie was…Charlie."
"Did you seem him jump?" Charlie demands through her laughter, doubled over with her forehead pressed to Paige's side. Paige is clutching her stomach, balanced on the arm of Charlie's chair but close to laughing herself off onto the floor
"Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up. DJ doesn't like clowns," Jakes grumbles, yanking Paul's mask off and making a face at it before flinging it into the hall. "What am I looking at here? Werewolf? Zombie?"
Charlie glances at her partner in crime, waits for confirmation, and nods when she gets it. "Scarecrow."
"A dead one," Paige adds.
Could be worse, he guesses. "Scarecrows are made of hay. They're all dead."
Paige shrugs. "Yeah, but they usually start out that way."
That's…a disturbing visual. He doesn't want to think too much about the full implications of that.
"Get out of my room," he says instead. "And burn that damn mask."
Mike's a little underwhelmed when he hears the inhuman howling coming from Paige's room. He's been expecting something big, and really, this is all they've got? He rolls his eyes and continues into his own room.
But then he hears glass breaking and turns around just in time to see the shadow of something huge with pointed ears through the frosted glass. It pounces, Paige shrieks, and Mike runs for her door, hands grasping wildly at his waist for his gun.
It's not there, but he charges in anyway, throwing the door back so hard that he can practically hear it denting the wall.
Paige sits on the bed, completely unharmed and smiling widely. "Hi, Mike."
Breathing out a long rush of air, he relaxes against her desk. "Hi, Paige."
Johnny, dressed in a puffy winter coat and a headband adorned with leopard-print cat ears, scowls. "Am I done here?"
"Good boy," Paige confirms.
Charlie passes him in the doorway and smiles, reaching up to pet his ears. She hands Mike his gun back, and he tries not to think about how she got it.
"I wanted to cover her in fake blood and make it look like she got murdered in her sleep, but Paige wouldn't go along with it," she explains, though she doesn't look too upset with the plan they actually went through with.
Paige shrugs. "I don't know, it just seemed a little too…plausible."
"Thanks," Mike says weakly because yeah, that would have been a little much.
He's not sure he can put up with this every year.
"I look ridiculous," Mike complains.
"You don't," Paige protests, touching up the chalk in her hair with a few more streaks of white. "You look like a zombie gladiator."
"A zombie gladiator is a ridiculous thing to look like."
She shrugs. "Don't let Charlie hear you. She picked it."
"She's busy keeping Johnny from scaring the trick-or-treaters." Mike nods towards the door, where Charlie is smiling kindly at little girl who is curiously running a finger along the intricate spider web patterns wound around Charlie's arms. The design is copied over every inch of exposed skin, disappearing under the edges of her silky black dress. Next to her, Johnny has gotten a little too into his mad scientist costume and is cackling madly, rubbing his hands together.
Briggs and Jakes are watching TV, standing behind the couch to avoid getting fake blood on the cushions. (Johnny had been right, they did want to make it look like he'd been stabbed by his own hockey stick, but decided that wasn't feasible for driving purposes.)
Looking down at his own half-bare chest, Mike gives her a skeptical look. "Yeah, Charlie picked it."
Paige rolls her eyes, giving him a good look at the dark circles under them, painted a darker shade of grey on her already matte grey face. He'll give her this, she does look like a ghost. White dress and pale gray limbs that appear to be almost…
"Are you glowing?" he asks.
"Glow in the dark paint," she confirms. "We go all out for Halloween, Mike."
"Alright, kids!" Charlie announces cheerfully, clapping her hands together. The door is closed, so she must mean them. "Let's go! I'm only 60% sure the paint I slathered all over Paige is nontoxic, so we should probably be quick."
They fall in line behind her, and Johnny nudges him with his oversized, glass beaker. "Mike, you got something blue all over your neck."
Briggs hears their conversation and turns curiously, flipping up his facemask for a better look. "Hey Chuck," he says casually, grinning over his shoulder at them. "You did a good job with P's makeup. She really looks dead. Like, I don't know, her oxygen levels are low or something-"
"Everybody in the car," Paige orders loudly. "You don't want to be the one that makes us late, you've seen what we can do."
"Oh, I'm terrified," Mike teases, when they're the last ones left in the house. Paige grins and uses a fingernail to scrape some of the blue lipstick off his neck.