A Final Confrontation

or alternatively: The Situation Gets Out of Hand(s)

"Kwan? Really?" Sam was watching both him and the empty air in front of him with wide, wary eyes.

"It's the only thing that makes sense!" Tucker proceeded to enumerate his more logical reasons for coming to this conclusion. "Plus, Amber kinda told me, and it...sounds right, I guess."

"I—but I mean—I've known Kwan. For like, eight years, since we were little kids, I just...how?"

"I guess you said it before, that's what people always say in interviews and stuff. 'He was such a normal guy,' and all that. God…."

"But why is he doing this? What would prompt a random high school kid who's always been—well, not mean, at least, to stab or bludgeon multiple people to death?! There's his mom, yeah, but plenty of people lose people to violent crime, and they don't…I mean, Technus I understand, but Amber? Your cousin?"

Tucker shuddered. He was still struggling to reframe the library attack in his mind to accommodate the fact that he knew the person who'd attacked him. He supposed that connection was why the guy hadn't just shanked him and been done with it. "Well, there's this ritual he's doing, we can't forget that. So either he's seriously, 500% off his rocker, or he thinks the ritual, like, justifies it somehow. Right?"

Sam sighed long and hard and pinched the bridge of her nose. Then she moved her thumb and finger up to press into the hollows under her brow bone, the heavy-duty headache reliever. "Right, the ritual. So we're essentially back where we were before, right? Same plan, find the ritual and interrupt it?"

"Yeah, so we still need to go to Amber's apartment or the field where they found Technus."

"Any idea which? Last time this happened, your nightmare sense led us right to it."

Tucker held still for a moment and felt as hard as he could. Unsurprisingly, this accomplished nothing. "No supernatural urges, I just...feel like we're missing something. You do too, right?" He mentally shook himself. They didn't have time for this, they so didn't have time for this. "The field is closer, it's that one near school, down Borden."

Sam was tapping her agitation out on the handlebars of her bicycle. One, two, three taps. Stop. "What about the school itself?"

Tucker started. "Casper?"

"You know, Danny was always upchucking ghosts in the closet."

Ding. "...That would be more recent paranormal stuff happening than either of the other places, right? And not a crime scene, so…."

"So should we try there first?"

Tucker retrieved his bike from the asphalt, wheeling it in a wide semicircle to face the right direction and slinging a leg over the seat. "Lead the way." He winced as he started pedaling and heard a quiet shush-squeal of metal rubbing on metal: Something had gotten bent out of alignment on the wheels.

The moon was cold, and the pedals were heavy, and the grating sound mingled with Tucker's own breath in his ears. Their surroundings held perfectly still as they passed; they rode onward through a silent, unwavering night.

~(*0*)~

The chain on the school fence was broken, the gate listing sideways as it hung ajar. Kwan didn't seem to be worried about being noticed. They rode right through, then left their bikes lying mournfully at the bottom of the stairs so they could sprint up to the main entrance. The right front door of the school was cracked open too, although it was unclear how Kwan had gotten through that one. Inside, it was totally dark.

They paused just inside, panting, long enough for Tucker to attempt to call the police while Sam called Tucker's parents. Neither of the calls went through; it appeared that the ritual was already underway and interfering with their cell service. Or it could have been completely unrelated—the service at Casper kind of sucked even on good days.

"Should we ride back down the road to call?" Tucker started to whisper to Sam, but she was already stuffing her phone in her jacket pocket and taking off down the hallway. Tucker swore under his breath and started after her, trying not to blink after losing some of his night vision to the light of his phone screen. If there was ever a time when he needed to see in the dark, it was now.

Their feet pounded dully on the old, thin carpets as blacks became greys and greys became lighter greys, to the point where Tucker could see details like the shapes of posters on the walls without too much difficulty, though he still couldn't read them.

They were halfway to the janitor's closet already—this was a much shorter trip than the journey through the tunnels in the Westside Mall. Darkness turned the familiar hallways somewhat alien, but not unrecognizable. They had just passed Tucker's French classroom. They just had to turn that corner and the janitor's closet would be in sight. Shit, were they doing this? He wasn't ready! They turned the corner. The janitor's closet was now only twenty feet away, with its door propped wide open; faint blue light spilled out of it and softly illuminated the opposite wall. Beyond that stood a hulking rectangular shape—the shelving unit from inside? But there was no time to ponder because Sam wasn't stopping and his feet weren't stopping and suddenly they were standing in the doorway of the closet, in full view of whatever was inside.

In the first split second of frozen mutual discovery, Tucker was able to take in more than he would have expected.

The interior looked significantly bigger without the shelving unit or jumble of mops and brooms. Danny was standing on the right side of the closet, looking mostly fine and mostly human—no gaping wounds, and only a little bit blurry around the edges—but hunched over with one arm out in front of him. Kwan, in the back left corner, glanced up at them with startled eyes. He looked incongruously normal. A cell phone lay facedown by his feet with its flashlight on, throwing foreground details into stark relief while bloating their shadows into huge dark balloons on the ceiling and walls.

The next split second gave all four people the chance to deliver on their first real reaction.

Danny looked up at them.

Kwan said, "What?"

Tucker registered that the floor of the closet was covered in dark markings—a summoning circle centered on Danny, creating the barrier he was supporting himself against with one arm. But the lighting was wrong for paint, were the runes...gouged into the floor?

And Sam, for her first reaction, dashed through the doorway and straight for Danny, aiming to pull him out before Kwan could fully process their arrival. This was not a terrible plan: Using the element of surprise to extract the hostage before the aggressor realized they even needed a hostage did make sense. However, it was still a really bad plan for multiple reasons. For one thing, they had no idea what weapons Kwan had or what the floor carvings did besides summon things. For another thing, could Danny really be considered a hostage in this scenario? As in, could he genuinely be killed when he could just decide to become incorporeal at any moment? Could Kwan do it with magic somehow?

The most important reason this was a bad plan, however, was that Danny was trapped in a summoning circle intangible to anything or anyone but him, so when Sam grabbed his arm and tried to pull him out of the room at full tilt, the result was that he hit an invisible wall and stopped moving abruptly with a surprised "Oof—eurgh!" and Sam fell back hardinto the wall on her own momentum as his weight was ripped out of her hands.

The spike in Tucker's terror at the thunk and yelp of her hitting the wall very nearly drowned out the outraged exclamation in the back of his mind of isn't she supposed to be the witch here?!

Tucker hesitated in the doorway as Sam groaned and began pulling herself to her feet just inside to Tucker's right, and Kwan was finally shocked into action. He hurriedly, clumsily pulled something from the pocket of his bulky jacket. Knife. Shit. "I'll kill him!"

"You step in this circle and I'll fucking eviscerate you," Danny stated with zero hesitation in that half-staticky voice, sounding much more angry than afraid. Kwan took what was probably an accidental step back before refocusing. He switched the knife between his hands, almost dropping it in the process, and then placed his free hand on the invisible barrier. "I'll fry him, I mean!"

At this, Danny looked a little more put out.

"Kwan, what are you doing?" Tucker kept his voice as calm and flat as possible, choosing his words carefully and slowly. "You know us, okay? We don't want to hurt you, we just wanna understand what this is for."

Kwan gave him a look like "Isn't it obvious?" "I'm bringing back my mom."

~(*0*)~

Step very carefully, Tucker Foley.

"…Kwan, your mom's…passed away, isn't she?"

The bluish light from the downed phone flickered once. Kwan replied in a surprisingly earnest tone. "Yeah, I'm not stupid, I know. But the thing is, if ghosts and magic and shit are real, then there's no real reason why I can't bring her back, right?"

Oh. Tucker...didn't actually know enough about magic to really respond to that. Luckily, Sam was here. She cleared her throat, straightening up very carefully while keeping her open hands in view. "Listen to me. Kwan? If you've done any research at all, you know that anything that says it can bring back your mom is lying to you. If actually, fully, no-consequences bringing back the dead was a thing people could do, we would all already be doing it."

He vigorously shook his head. Tucker realized with some faint hope that he was opening up his body language, turning toward them. "No, that's the thing, I wasn't contacted by some demon or something, okay? I got instructions. And I know they work. I saw it."

Sam went very still and tense in his peripheral vision. "...You saw someone come back from the other side?"

"I swear I did." Kwan's voice was already thick and heavy as he began, "It was only like a week after Mom—" His voice broke, and he paused for a moment before continuing, softer. "I came home from a Fourth of July party late, really drunk. My dad wasn't home. And he was there, the–the guy that k-killed Mom, in the middle of her living room. Waving a knife around.He didn't notice me.

"So I'm watching, kinda confused, and this guy reaches out and cuts the air in the middle of the summoning circle he's got on the ground, and it makes a rift right there!

"And–and I wouldn't have knownwho he was, obviously, except Mom's familiar was just sitting there on the stairs above him. Looking at him, e-expectantly. And all of a sudden I knew it was him, who did it. So I–" He took a deep, shuddering breath. "I grabbed the bat we keep by the door and I–" He broke off again, fist drifting compulsively to his mouth. When he spoke again, his voice sounded slightly choked, and tightly controlled. "But just before he...just before the rift closed, I saw a hand reach out of the portal. A human hand.

"And then there was this paper he had out on the ground." With jerky movements, Kwan pulled a folded, crumpled piece of printer paper out of his back pocket. Tense on his feet, Tucker considered tackling him while his hand was off the summoning barrier, and a glance at Sam told him she was thinking the same thing. But they likely wouldn't accomplish much with Kwan armed, and even if he weren't they might do little more than knock the wind out of him. He had at least four inches on both of them. Before either could decide to make a move, Kwan was brandishing the unfolded paper and the moment had passed. Tucker squinted; at this distance it looked a little bit like a printout of an online recipe.

"It's instructions. For bringing someone back. All you gotta do is…is make an exchange."

Well, shit. There it was, then.

The air was starting to hum, that horribly familiar electrical feeling from the ghost fight in Sam's house trickling upward through Tucker's veins. A glance at his watch told him it was 2:57 p.m. Three minutes to the witching hour. How far along was the ritual, and did it have to happen exactly at three? Should they rush or stall? Shit, he didn't know how to rush!

"Okay, well, you already made all three sacrifices, right?" Sam picked up the conversational thread, apparently having made the same blind man's calculation. "You don't need to hurt Danny, you don't need to hurt anyone else!"

Oh no, Sam, that was not a deescalating tone. Kwan's response was just a touch more hysterical than the last, and his body closed back off as he turned threateningly toward the barrier. "Yeah, sure, I wouldn't need him if I hadn't lost the fucking portal knife! That was your fault, Tucker, the police got it when you interrupted me at the library."

At that, Tucker couldn't quite manage a deescalating tone either. "You were stabbing my cousin!"

"And that doesn't give you the right to do this to Danny, he never did shit to you!" Sam piled on.

"He's a fucking death portal, he's been portalling here like twice a week for months, he'll be fine!" They were all yelling now. (Except, conspicuously, Danny, who was sitting with his head between his knees and looking very, very queasy. Damn it.) "Shit. Shit, why am I–I don't have to make excuses to you! I barely even know you!"

"Are you fucking—it's because you feel guilty!" Tucker yelled over the persistent, intensifying hum of nearness to the other side.

"I don't, I—no, okay?!" Kwan finally swung back around to face them, clearly struggling to articulate what he wanted to say with tears dripping from his chin. "What have I done that's made things worse? Technus and Skulker were both murderers, the world is better off without them! That's not even like a question, they were gonna kill more innocent people! And Amber's...I mean, she's the one who gave Kelsey those bad pills, she was–it wasn't a seizure, it wasn't, we all knew it."

"And my cousin?"

Kwan visibly winced at that, but then he took a steadying breath and made eye contact with Tucker, face hard as marble behind the tears. "He was only one guy. And Mom was worth more than some druggie trying to pick up drunk freshman girls at parties."

"But he was innocent!"

Kwan wasn't listening anymore. "You don't understand, Mom was such a good person! She made everyone's life better, and she still died for no! Reason!"

The hum reached a fever pitch. "She deserved a better world than the one she got. And she can still have it." He turned back toward the center of the summoning circle, apparently dismissing them.

The alarm on Tucker's phone dinged once. 3:00 a.m.

Danny made a quiet noise halfway between retching and an unidentifiable swear word and curled into an even tighter ball as something dark and difficult to focus on started to appear in the air above him.

Something suspiciously like a slit in the barrier between worlds.

Abruptly, Tucker's nightmare sense went crazy, and he pushed off the doorframe and sprinted into the hallway outside.

~(*0*)~

Tucker couldn't see straight. He couldn't even think straight. His every nerve and neuron was consumed with the deeper-than-instinctual need to not let whatever was on the other side of that portal near him or anyone he loved. How could he stop it? How the fuck did they close the portal now?

Widdershins? Did he need a lemon? He would've laughed if he hadn't needed all his breath for hyperventilating. About ten feet down the hallway it got a bit easier to breathe, though not much, and he was able to not only stop and actually register what was around him again. He searched wildly for inspiration.

Wall, wainscotting, corkboard, carpet. Thumbtacks? It was harder to see in the dark after a few minutes depending on Kwan's phone flashlight. Other wall, other wall—

The hatchet! There was a fireman's hatchet in the case on the other wall.

He could try to use the firehose to blast Kwan away from the summoning circle, possibly break a few ribs and incapacitate him, but he wasn't sure if the hose actually turned on automatically when the glass was broken or if the fire department had to turn on the water. Plus, he had only a vague idea how to wield a firehose and would probably hurt himself or Sam as well as Kwan. Better bet was the hatchet; he'd never used one of those as a weapon either, but it was pretty self-explanatory, wasn't it?

Oh, god, wait, could he actually kill a guy?! Maybe he could bluff. Anyway, whether he ended up using the hatchet or not, breaking the glass would almost certainly set off the fire alarm and notify the authorities. Not that the authorities could do much against what was coming, but it was still a priority in this situation, Danny's secret notwithstanding. Okay. Tucker had a plan, sort of.

He approached the red-lined glass case. There didn't seem to be one of those mallet things that were usually attached to "break in case of emergency" boxes. How did people do this in movies?

Tucker tore off his sweatshirt, wrapped it around his fist, and punched the glass.

And abruptly stumbled back, cradling his hand with a hiss, because damn that was painful! The glass glinted mockingly. Tucker kicked it.

The glass shattered, and immediately an alarm rang out deafeningly loud from the school loudspeakers, one of those layered whooping and jangling ones that resonated horribly with the omnipresent humming. The glass was probably designed to shatter blunt, not sharp, but Tucker kept his sweatshirt over his hand as he shoved shards out of the way and reached in to grab the hatchet.

And then stood there in the darkness, panting. He had a weapon. Now what?

…He didn't have an answer to that. Oh. They were all going to die, weren't they?

There was a twinge of sickness in Tucker's gut.

"Oh, honey. Would you like some gravy with that?"

Tucker turned around slowly. The lunch lady was standing behind him.

~(*0*)~

Kwan watched with a heartbreakingly hopeful smile as four pale, trembling fingers wrapped themselves around the edge of the rift.

Then, on the other side, four more.

Then four more.

A grasping hand, identical to the others, pushed through to the wrist. Kwan stumbled back with nervous eyes as the rift was filled with twitching fingers.

"…Mom?"

One of the hands slid out further, past the wrist, then another wrist, bending the other way….

"Kwan, that is not your mother, we cannot let that thing through!" Sam yelled, loud enough to be heard over the alarms.

"No, I didn't…I couldn't, she…." He walked backward until he hit the wall and jolted as if it had startled him.

This was not good, not good, so not good. Oh god, oh god— The whole seam in reality was lined on both sides with hands now, and they seemed to be pushing it further open.

What the fuck was this thing?! What was Samantha Manson supposed to do in the face of that?! Sam abruptly realized she was crying.

Well that just would not do at all.

Sam pulled out her phone, opened her notes app, and scrolled to the strongest protective spell she had written down.

And then she proved once and for all that she was, in fact, a real goddamn witch. (Take that, Paulina.)

~(*0*)~

It was unmistakably her, even though Tucker didn't remember what she'd looked like the last time very well. Little kids didn't tend to take in the details, already having to look so far up to see adults' faces. She was shorter than she should be, barely reaching his chin. He remembered her eyes, though. Her eyes were the same. This was a literal ghost from his past.

If Tucker could have tensed up further, he would have. She had appeared between him and the closet, backlit by the dim glow from the phone flashlight. He couldn't hear what was going on in there over the alarm. "What do you want?" he whispered as quietly as he could while still being audible, backing further down the hall.

She lifted one hand, made meaningful eye contact, and dragged her nails down the wall between them. Tucker flinched. "I want you to close the freezer door before you let all the cold air out, dear."

He stopped. Processed. Rebooted.

"You…want me to close the portal?"

She nodded, a satisfied gleam in her otherwise flat, dead eyes. Though she didn't speak loudly, somehow he had no trouble hearing her over the alarm. "Yes, dearie."

"How?!"

She reached out one pallid finger and gently tapped the blade of the hatchet.

Was she suggesting he…close it the way Kwan closed Technus' portal?

No. That couldn't be it. She protected children, right? And he—think harder. What if she wanted him to scratch out the circle itself?

Tucker had considered that, but hadn't had any way of knowing if it would work. Sam had certainly wiped out the runes to end past summonings, but you couldn't exactly erase a figure carved into cement (or more likely gross grey porcelain or something, given that Kwan had managed to carve it in the first place) the way you could a chalk drawing. "Can I scratch it off and destroy it?"

"No, we don't have meatballs; you'll have to change your order."

"…What?!"

"Order something else." She pointed behind her at the closet and raised her eyebrows.

...

Ah. Huh. That…thatcould actually work.

Tucker wouldn't say he'd learned a lot about summoning in the last few months, but there were a few practical tips he had retained. One was that, unfortunately, the runes of the Elder Futhark alphabet had a lot of common lines and were very easy to mix up.

The lunch lady's eyes were still doll-like and still, but she smiled close-mouthed, and something clicked, and for a moment Tucker had the unique, startling, somewhat unnerving feeling that he was looking at a person, with her own thoughts and feelings and a whole vast and complex inner life that he was not privy to and could never even fractionally comprehend.

He blinked. She did not. The feeling passed, as feelings tend to do.

"Thank you," Tucker said. The lunch lady smiled and stepped gracefully aside so he could trudge back into his nightmare.

~(*0*)~

Sam seemed to be okay, if kind of sweaty and very panicked. She had backed to the doorway so she could beat a quick retreat and was shouting continuously under the noise of the alarm: probably some sort of spell, possibly delaying the opening of the rift. (It could also have been just a string of increasingly creative insults. It was impossible to tell.) Kwan was still standing in the corner, apparently in some sort of shock. Danny was both there and not there simultaneously in a way that Tucker's brain both intimately understood and refused to turn into a visual image. The portal…?

He could tell, with every fiber of his being, that something was coming out if it. Anything more than that, he simply could not process. Distantly, he realized he should probably be grateful.

The alarm shut off suddenly, as if the speaker system had shorted out, but the hum of the otherworld was so strong in Tucker's ears that he barely noticed. He ducked back out around the doorway and took two (difficult) deep breaths. What were those runes Sam had almost gotten switched, when she'd had him check her work during their first summoning? He'd thought it was mildly interesting; he supposed the computer geek part of him just really liked languages. It was something like ehwaz, and it looked like…. God, where were ghost-augmented memory tricks when you needed them? He tried to recreate the way he'd felt when Amber's ghost had brought all those snatches of conversation back into his conscious mind.

Īsa and eiwaz! He set his teeth and pulled himself back in around the doorframe, trying his absolute hardest to ignore the portal and just search the floor.

Right...there, the one second nearest to him even, was īsa, the rune for ice or just plain "I", a single vertical line. And eiwaz was...he didn't remember what it meant, but it was the vertical line with little diagonal lines added at the top and bottom, right? Like a tilted, backwards Z. Or was it just a tilted N, with the lines on the other sides? Which would just be a forward Z. Oh god….

No, he was pretty sure they went the other way. Pretty sure.

Something juddered in the air and Sam broke off her chanting to yell an expletive over the hum.

Tucker scrambled to his knees next to the rune. He switched his grip on the hatchet, holding it near the head. The floor was gritty under his palms.

He scratched the floor, and it shrieked. Another pulse. Tucker was thrown backwards. Something cracked as his wrist bent against the wall.

Sam's chanting faltered and became shrill. She was being pushed, slowly but surely, back into a corner. Something was happening to the flesh on her upraised arms, raised to protect her face.

Again, Tucker threw himself forward.

He managed another score from the top of the rune before hitting the wall again, feet-first this time. The hatchet handle bit into his palm. Deep enough, it had to be. Right?!

All he needed was one more line. Just one more strike!

The light from the cell phone flickered and went out, plunging them into pitch darkness.

But what did that matter? Tucker was psychic.

He reached forward and scraped the edge of the hatchet as hard as he could against the floor.

And everything stopped.

~(*0*)~

Tucker lay on his stomach on the floor, soaked with sweat and breathing heavily. The room was silent except for the sound of quiet panting.

Noiselessly, the phone light flicked back on. Heart in his throat, Tucker dragged himself upright to see what he'd summoned.

Floating menacingly in the center of the circle that had just been used to tear a hole in the fabric of death itself—a circle paid for with the drying blood of three human beings, a circle that was now only one rune away from summoning something so incomprehensibly horrible that simply knowing it had the potential to exist made Tucker feel like he was about to lose his mind—yes, floating in the center of that circle was…

…a small man in overalls.

The ghost didn't say much, just stared at them all balefully for a moment before unceremoniously atomizing and drifting out the door, settling among the boxes of extra cleaning supplies shoved against the opposite wall.

…Huh.

"Huh," Sam echoed Tucker's internal monologue. She stumbled over and collapsed at Tucker's side, leaning against the wall. Her voice was hoarse. "What rune did you change it to?"

"Uh, eiwaz. What's that one mean?"

"...Wood. Or, well, actually, yew."

"Me? What about me?"

Sam punched his shoulder hard for that one. He swayed slightly.

Tucker could hear sirens in the distance. Considering how deep they were in the school building right now, emergency services had probably already arrived on campus. He reluctantly staggered to his feet. Kwan was still in the corner, looking dazed and absolutely gutted. While Tucker worked on lifting a partially conscious and now conventionally visible Danny to his feet, Sam edged forward and retrieved Kwan's knife from where it had fallen on the ground a few feet in front of him. She started to walk away, back toward Tucker. Stopped.

"Kwan?"

He looked up.

Sam's voice was quieter than Tucker had ever heard it. "I understand. What you feel, I think. What you did wasn't…wasn't right, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry."

Kwan nodded once.

The police were just coming down the hallway as Tucker, Sam, and Danny limped out of the closet, letting the door swing silently closed behind them.