Goodbye Gus
It was Gus. He had snuck in the front door, as Sylvester Gainsborough III had predicted. The four ghouls had stood-by invisibly as Gus sped into the dusty library, roughly pushed aside the encyclopaedias and reached for the box holding the Wembley British Bulldog Revolver.
At the last second, Arthur appeared in front of Gus and pocketed it.
"Do you know what the souls of a vampire's victims can do?" he asked Gus shortly. "Have you ever ran into this trouble as an expert in the bloodsucker's idea of haute-cuisine?
Gus looked around to see himself surrounded by the long dead teenagers.
"How . . .long have you been here?" Gus said, with a sneer.
"We were released from our bonds" said Laura. "By the appearance of Ethan Morgan . . . a seer of extraordinary ethics and ability."
"Do you believe" Gus said oilily "that I will be intimidated by the spectres of a vampire's past dining experiences?"
"You're right-handed?" asked Tim cooly. "Never mind, I can see you are."
That teenage ghoul disappeared and was replaced by a white light. Tim flew though Gus severing his right-arm and crumbling the arm to dust.
Tim reappeared, watching Gus double over with pain and didn't show any emotion.
"We know you played with your food" said Sylvester Gainsborough III icily. "You made a career out of it."
Gus screamed and fled, the ghouls behind. Up through the house, to the attic where Gus expected to find his friend and ally.
Vampires travelled faster than ghouls, but unlike them couldn't travel through solid objects. When Gus sped up the spiral stairs and crashed into them, Benny and Rory were sent sprawled against the walls of the cupola, with the wind knocked out of them. The one-armed Gus had fallen back down the stairs and was lying flat on his back.
Ethan had been pushed into the door and tripped out into the rain, aside the stake topped by the lightning rod. Ethan grabbed it and went down the spiral stairs, followed by the still panting Benny and Rory.
Gus opened his eyes to see the three geeks standing there above him, beneath the cupola; Ethan with stake in hand.
"Don't . . . don't kill me, please!" he begged.
Ethan hadn't expected this. He had never had a vampire beg for his "life." For a moment he was taken aback, and looked at the equally surprised Benny and Rory. But then Ethan remembered Gus wasn't technically alive and what he was. And Gus wasn't an exception to the "vampires are evil" rule; unlike Sarah, Rory and Erica had been the two years they were under the bloodsucker's curse.
"Did anyone at your vampire restaurant beg you to spare their lives?" asked Ethan coldly, as he held the stake above Gus.
"You . . . were there" said Gus evasively.
"Answer the dude" said Benny.
"Yeah!" echoed Rory, as he shook a couple more worms from his ears.
"All the time" said Gus. "The fear from the adrenaline added to the flavour. If you three would give being an immortal a chance . . . ."
"No way" said Benny.
"Nuh-uh" said Rory.
"Sorry" said Ethan sardonically. "This entree is lean but healthy. He's not interested in bloodsucking . . . neither are any of his friends interested forced into bloodsucking.
"Lean but healthy" said Gus, fearfully remembering when he had said those words, and now realizing that there would be no reprieve for him.
"That's what you told Sarah I was the night we went to your restaurant" said Ethan. "Lean but healthy. I guess you weren't only a restauranteur, but a food critic too."
And without another moment's delay, Ethan staked Gus and let the vampire gourmet burn into ashes before their eyes.
The three boys shared a first bump.
"Way'd it go" said Rory. "But that pleading was as gnarly as these worms-in-my-ears."
"He was a vamp" said Benny defensively, but he too was unnerved by Gus begging for his life.
"I had to remember how evil he was" Ethan said, as he was sweating. "I mean . . . you're killing something that kills innocent people."
"Yeah" said Benny, clapping his hand on Ethan's shoulder. "It's lucky they don't usually . . . . FIRE!"
In burning up, Gus had done something else the three had also never seen before. He set the wooden flooring and the tonnes of debris in the attic on fire. Before their eyes, boxes and bric-a-brac started to burn. The fire raged across dryrot and ancient wallpaper as they stared helplessly. It was already too late to go down the hall. Ethan, Benny and Rory fled up the spiral staircase which started to burn after them. Out they went from the cupola, onto the widow's walk barely ahead of the flames.
They fled with their shirts covering their mouths, as that toxic smoke wasn't only danger to asthmatic Rory but Benny and Ethan as well.
The three fled across the walk as quickly as they could in the rain, trying to get as far as they could from the fire.
Colby's collection was burning up rapidly, and the rest of the house wouldn't be far behind. The thunderstorm had stopped, but the heavy rain continued leaving Ethan, Benny and Rory to hope the fire would be put out in the storm. But the floorboards beneath them was already getting warm. Steam was rising from the roof in places. And a crash below told them that somewhere the heavily-burdened third storey had fallen onto the second storey in the no longer perfectly preserved home.
The three held onto the balustrades as the roof warped and slanted in response to this violation of the house's integrity. There were some more crashes as the three heard several windows shatter.
"We're not going to survive unless we get off this roof" said Ethan.
"Floating spell coming up, dudes" said Benny, expertly cracking his knuckles.
Ethan and Rory closed their eyes in anticipation of floating haphazardly up in the air.
But before Benny could say anything, the three were lifted off their feet and slowly lowered down and far away from the burning house. Beyond the edge of the property, aside the fence and on the sidewalk along Primrose Path to be exact.
"That was awesome" said Ethan, he and Rory both giving Benny high-fives. "Your Grandmother Evelyn couldn't have done it any better."
"Guys" said Benny sheepishly. "I didn't do anything."
"Then it must have been the . . . ." started Ethan.
"We did it" said Laura.
The four spirits reappeared, but this time there was something different about them. Rory and Benny had to squint to see them, as they were now see-through. But their grisly look at the time they died was gone. Instead, with the major exception that they were transparent, the four looked normal. Their pupils were back and Laura's lips had moved when she spoke.
To Ethan, they weren't even transparent and looked like four nineteen or twenty somethings that had just casually walked down the sidewalk . . . in a rainstorm.
"Look at you guys" said Benny cheerfully, "you're back to being normal-dead. You're no longer ghouls."
"We know" said Sylvester Gainsborough III. "It is ever a relief!"
His voice was no longer hoarse, and was now sounded friendly.
"And we owe it all to you three" said Laura. "Don't let anyone call you milksops, because with what you do that's the last thing to describe you."
"Believe it or not" said Arthur, leaning against a hedge, "we were considered the bees knees in our time. But we'd have run away screaming if we ever ran into ghosts, ghouls or vampires."
"We would have too" Ethan observed. "Just two years ago."
The group heard a crash, and looked towards the burning house. The witch's hat cupola had just fallen down.
"That's the best thing that can happen to the place" said Arthur, with a shrug. "The place died when the market crashed and Old Man Flood shot himself."
"You wouldn't believe how much fun we had as kids in that house" said Tim with a sigh. "I should have begged my father to give Colby a chance. He could have stayed with us."
"He made his bed" said Sylvester Gainsborough III. "It's sad, but he made his choice. Colby's sister and the chauffer lived a full life and none too bad. Children and grandchildren. That's more than I can say for Colby. Or for us."
"Maybe Benny can bring you back to life" volunteered Rory abruptly, as he continued to shake worms from his ears. "Benny's grandma . . . his grandma in Whitechapel . . . has this potion to bring things back from the dead."
"No fracking way" Ethan objected. "Don't you remember what happened? Those animals brought back from the dead got possessed by demons."
"It could work" said Benny carefully. "Those animals' souls had moved on. These guys souls are right here. All we have to do is find where they're buried, bring them back to life. Oh yeah, and then we have to take them to Whitechapel to get their dark energy drained in case they come back as vampires."
"Calm down, fellas" said Laura. "We're not interested."
She was echoed by the three other ghosts.
"But thanks anyways" said Tim. "When you're dead . . . you know it's time to move on."
"You'll understand what we mean someday" said Sylvester Gainsborough III. "And I hope it isn't for a long time. Hey, do you guys mind if we shake hands? This fist-bump and low-five thing is foreign to us?"
Ethan, Benny and Rory duly shook hands with the spirits of the three young men, who promptly disappeared after saying a last goodbye.
For her part, Laura kissed the three boys on the cheeks before she left. Benny and Rory were each okay with it, even with her being a ghost and all!
Ethan hesitated. Laura assured Ethan that Sarah wouldn't mind.
"How do you know about Sarah?" he asked.
"You know a lot when it's time to move on" said Laura. "And, in a way, I'm very happy it took so long. I learned never, ever to dismiss people as riff-raff. Goodbye!"
And with that, she too was gone.
Ethan, Benny and Rory decided that they needed to get out of the area . . . fast. A vacant, burning house suggested arson and the three couldn't say the fire was set by a dead vampire. They weren't too far from the Rosedale Subway Station, and that's where they headed.
It was past three o'clock in the morning, the last worm had dropped out of Rory's ear, and now the three were in a great mood knowing they had conquered the three vamps and their plans to make Toronto home of a new vampire council.
They were wrong. Harlow had merely been blasted off the tower by the shock of the lightning bolt. He had fallen into the ravine at the edge of the property and been temporarily knocked out by the crash. Rory, of all people, was right. Vampires couldn't be electrocuted.
Ethan and Benny had managed to get their "geekdoms" mixed up. A mistake Rory had narrowly avoided, only through remembrance of his sucky time as a vamp. Vampires didn't follow the logical scientific rules that . . . as math and science geeks . . . Ethan, Benny and Rory loved. Supernatural, natural and sci-fi were three different things.
And with Harlow, they still had an angry and powerful vampire on their trail. And Harlow knew that his enemies would be taking the subway.
