The Night Has Loops and Layers

or alternatively: Some Casual B&E

Between them, Sam and Danny made a deep dent in Tucker's Lucky Charms supply that morning. They sat around the kitchen table, crunching in peaceful silence as buttery 8 a.m. sunlight burnished all the wood surfaces to a deep yellow-gold. Tucker's spine was still twitching slightly when he least expected it, a nausea-inducing jangling feeling, but the warmth of morning and companionship had mostly teased the tightness out from between his shoulder blades.

"I'm gonna get so many cavities," Sam complained around a mouthful of oat milk. It was a sad reality that Tucker's pantry and fridge had come to reflect her tastes almost as much as his own. "I didn't brush my teeth last night, and now this. Plus, I've never flossed once in my life."

"It might help if you didn't pick extra marshmallows out of the bag for your cereal," Danny needled. Sam shoved him, but her hands passed through his shoulder and she almost tipped out of her chair. She ended up shaking them out, grimacing, as Danny snickered behind his spoon.

"That feels awful when you do that. Like pins and needles but like…oilier." Sam looked up in abject horror. "Tucker, is that what your psychic thingy feels like all the time?!"

"Nah, it's different things for different people. And it's pretty much stopped registering Danny unless he does something super weird," he added with a reassuring smile at the paranormal abomination in question. Danny's returning smile was warmer than usual, closer to containing a normal number of teeth. Heh, adorable.

"Tucker, is my blue folder down there?" called his mom from upstairs, accompanied by the sounds of slammed drawers and generic rummaging. Tucker's dad had gotten home from a work dinner at 9:30 the night before and left again for his commute before Tucker had even woken up, though he'd managed to leave a smiley face post-it note on Tucker's forehead utilizing what he termed his "ninja dad skills." Apparently Sam had already been awake, though, and he'd made her an extra cup of coffee. (She was a huge fan of Maurice Foley's.)

Danny scanned the kitchen. "It's on the counter, Mrs. Foley!"

"Thanks!" More banging and shifting from overhead. Angela Foley was usually terrifyingly organized and an incorruptibly calming presence, but today she was running late. And when she was late, all hell broke loose.

Sam waited until she'd grabbed her folder and clacked out the door in her business pumps before bringing up the topic they'd been avoiding since the night before. "Okay, we need to figure out what we're doing next. As soon as possible. Before whatever's coming…comes. Personally, I think we should experiment with activating Tucker's psychic thingy."

Tucker winced. "Do I get a vote?"

"Can we at least go home and practice basic hygiene first?" Danny put in. "No one has ever devised a winning battle strategy with morning breath. That's a direct quote from The Art of War."

"I wholeheartedly agree. Please stop breathing into the clean, fresh air of my kitchen and general vicinity." Tucker wrinkled his nose. "And I actually can't do today; I have to visit my cousin. Can we meet up tomorrow at Nasty Burger?"

Danny immediately looked uncomfortable at the mention of Tucker's cousin. Which Tucker might have felt bad about, except that that was the intended effect of the lie and the triumph overwhelmed the guilt. However, it was more 50/50 whether or not Sam was insensitive enough to point out that he didn't really need allday to visit his cousin. Tucker held his breath. "Nasty Burger doesn't open until, like, four on Sundays. Can't we go somewhere for lunch tomorrow instead?" Sam objected. Yes!

Tucker did understand the need for haste. But he was tired, okay? Just one rest day. What could it hurt?

As for the location: "Sam, think about it. This could be the end times." Tucker started regretting that joke and what it acknowledged about halfway through, and his voice wavered a bit on the final phrase. He reinforced his smile and forged on even more cheerily to the end. "Are you really prepared to risk never again tasting the magnificence that is Nasty Burger?"

Sam rolled her eyes but acquiesced. They sold a mean stuffed portobello.

"Uh...is that the burger place on Via Coltello? That's pretty close to my house, and my mom is out and my dad should be in the basement all day if we want to walk there after," Danny offered.

"Oh." Tucker didn't know why he was surprised, but he supposed this confirmed it: Danny was really in this with them now. Whole-hog. "Yeah, sure! Let's do that." Then the actual import of Danny's question hit him. "Wait, hoooold up, you haven't been to Nasty Burger yet?!"

Sam shook her head and tsk-ed. "That is a travesty."

"Dude, you haven't lived until you've had their fries! And the shakes, like, dude..." The conversation continued in this vein for…well, some time.

At length, the two guests departed into a sunny suburban morning. The last Tucker saw of them was Sam peeling out and Danny in the passenger seat clearly holding on for dear half-life. His spine twinged again as he carried dishes a little too quickly to the sink.

~(*0*)~

Despite the unease peeking over his shoulder, nothing much happened for the rest of Saturday. Tucker watched Netflix, ate dinner, slept with a light on. Got up late the next day. Ate breakfast. Napped. He was glad his parents were home, and even volunteered to help his mom with a few chores.

Tension headaches came and went. The unease never really left.

And that, though he would never admit it (unless it was somehow for comedic effect), was why at 5 p.m. on Sunday the 30th, Tucker had been waiting by his bike on the sidewalk outside Nasty Burger for fifteen minutes already.

Sam showed up two minutes late in a fresh black t-shirt and high-waisted jeans, grinning at him and swinging her keys on their lanyard. "Where's Danny?"

And wasn't that the question of the hour.

The day so far had been a sunny one, with a vague lingering fall heat cut by a chilly breeze. The sun was off to the left, and white sun-circles gleamed on the hoods of parked trucks and anything painted shiny. Nasty Burger was an establishment with a thing for chrome, so various surfaces blinded them as they waited under the huge red-and-yellow copyright violation of a sign.

Sam texted the groupchat. No answer. They leaned against the bike rack and made small talk, and took turns glancing both ways down the street. A mom walked by with two little girls in brightly-colored sundresses. A gaggle of teenagers Tucker vaguely recognized from school piled into a brown Ford Ranger. The bright spots of sunlight slipped lower, elongating and caressing unshadowed license plate frames, and a young guy in the red Nasty Burger uniform shirt stepped outside and started wiping down the windows.

At 5:25, Tucker and Sam exchanged confused looks, walked inside, and ordered. Sam complained as they walked to a booth about how irresponsible Danny was: Not only was he a half hour late, but he'd also probably let his phone go dead. Tucker weakly agreed.

By 6:21, the blue of the sky had faded and dimmed to a light periwinkle, interrupted only by the patch of glowing peach-and-tangerine tacked up behind western rooftops. They'd finished their burgers and now sat idly in the booth, staring at the window with their greasy paper-lined trays in front of them and ignoring the pointed stares of an increasingly irate waitress. Traffic outside had dwindled to only the occasional car, about half of them with headlights lit.

They left at 7:03. The group chat on Sam's phone was filled with stacked blue bubbles. Danny never showed.

"I'm sure there's a reason," Tucker reasoned, weakly, as they hovered in the sidewalk space between Tucker's bike and Sam's car. The sun had set, and the light shining out through the Nasty Burger's front windows teased their silhouettes. "I mean, his parents probably took his phone or something. And wouldn't let him go out. I mean, we don't really know them, they could be like that. Or! Wait! He's probably fighting a ghost!" That was actually a really plausible answer, and Tucker felt a little dumb for not thinking of it sooner. To be fair, it wasn't the most common excuse.

Then again, it also wasn't the most…reassuring one.

"Oh, yeah!" Sam smiled, but it quickly wavered. "Or hey, maybe he just decided last-minute not to come. He did say he's not big on planning. Usually just kinda jumps into things." She toed at a seam in the sidewalk.

There was mutual silence.

"Well," Tucker declared to the world at large, "it can't hurt to check, right?"

"Yeah, we have to yell at him if he flaked."

"Totally. Maybe we can guilt him into letting us raid his fridge or something."

"Foley, I like the way you think."

They wrestled Tucker's bike into the considerable trunk of Sam's Maserati Levante and headed for Danny's address, which Sam had helpfully added to his contact in her phone after the first time they'd stalked him (that time, they'd drawn upon this year's school directory. Mrs. Manson hoarded those things).

It was darker once they got into the residential area. No street lights here; Tucker used the flashlight on his phone to navigate them up the driveway. Sam knocked. Then again, more forcefully. No response. "Danny did say his dad would be in the basement. Maybe he didn't hear…?"

Finally, after about ten minutes of bruised knuckles and semi-embarrassed yelling, Tucker was forced to turn to Sam, balling up his beret in one hand and running the other sheepishly over his hair. "Dude, I…gotta get home by eight. Should we try again in the morning?"

"Yeah, let's." Something about the quiet street made the false bravado in their voices sound not so brave and especially loud.

"Was there a landline number in your mom's directory?"

"One way to find out."

The ride to Tucker's house was quiet. The street lights were tall and lean, and half broken.

Sam texted a few minutes later. No one had answered the land line.

~(*0*)~

"Tucker? Baby? You need to wake up."

It took Tucker a few bleary seconds to register his surroundings. His mom was standing over him in his dim room, which was lit only by a small lamp turned toward the wall on the corner of his desk furthest from his head (probably a fire hazard). "Ugh. I'm up." His nearest pager (Denise) displayed the time: 1:03 a.m. Shit. He pushed himself upright. "What's wrong?"

His mom was in pajamas, her face drawn in tight lines. She was holding a phone absently a few inches from her ear. "I've got him, Maddie. Tucker, it's Mrs. Fenton, your friend Danny's mom? She wants to know if you've seen him."

His stomach slid downward to somewhere around his knees. "He…" Shit. Again. Should he cover for Danny, knowing what he did about his secret supernatural skirmishes? His paranormal pugilism? His–

This was not the time for alliteration. Or withholding information. Danny had been missing for at least eight hours. This was the time to be…

...well, terrified.

~(*0*)~

He snuck out the door at 2:15, the layers of regular human nervousness and paranormal dread in his lungs now topped with a fine sprinkling of guilt: This was the exact opposite of what his mom had wanted when she'd trusted him to be home by eight. But his mom was asleep, having finally gotten back to bed after fifteen minutes of coordinating with the Fentons and Mansons, the former of whom honestly, to Tucker's mind, didn't seem nearly freaked out enough for this situation.

"It's worrying, but Danny is a bit irresponsible when it comes to keeping us apprised," Maddie Fenton had reasoned tinnily over speakerphone, sounding perturbed but far from frantic. Tucker's mom had frowned at the table. "He's been gone like this before, back in Chicago. Even overnight, and he always comes back. It's just–it seemed like he was doing better here." She'd exhaled noisily. "The police?! No, we'll hold off–I mean, he's a teenager. I don't think there's any call for that yet."

If the marbles rolling around in his gut had anything to say about it, there was definitely call for that. But Danny hadn't even been missing twelve hours.

So it fell to Tucker, Sam, and Tucker's gag reflex, the heroes no city deserved.

Tucker's apartment building was relatively small–two families and two couples–and it faced a quiet street rather than forming part of a more extensive apartment complex. Tucker sat on the sidewalk in the dim moonlight, framed by beige stucco walls.

Sam pulled up with a (muted) screech and swung open her door. She leaned out. "Okay, psychic boy. Where to?"

Tucker didn't hesitate. "Left." Because really, why would he hesitate? His bones had been itching to run since yesterday; he'd just never noticed where to. Apparently, left.

He clambered into the car, and together they followed the yellow line out into the dark.

~(*0*)~

The tingles in Tucker's vertebrae led them to the Westside Mall.

It was eerie, being here all alone. They parked in front of the main entrance, around which the larger restaurants tended to congregate. The lights strung up between upper-level railings weren't lit, and all the stores were closed, several with metal shutters or bars pulled down over their windows and doors. Police tape shifted limply on the ground around a corner, reminding them that while the threat of the killer may have felt omnipresent in Amity these past few weeks, this was one place where they actually knew the killer had been: This was where Schulker's body had been found. Specifically in the dumpster behind the Pins and Needles Bowling Alley, where a lot of kids from their school worked over the summer. Where they'd made some of their best childhood memories, of gutterballs and buffalo wings and uncomfortable leather shoes. Something more than the pinball machine was broken now.

Tucker faltered, eyeing the shadows further into the mall proper. The Westside Mall was set up like a long, twisted U that opened to the front parking lot, with a double layer of stores on each side enclosing a large courtyard with one modern-ish fountain and some scattered metal tables. If you followed the courtyard inward from the main entrance, you would wind around a few bends before reaching a larger enclosed portion with locked front doors and huge glass windows. This was the white marble area, where smaller stores stacked on top of each other, linked by implacable escalators. Tucker wasn't sure if it was actual psychic-icity or just plain wishful thinking that led him not into the enclosed courtyard full of corners but instead to the left, around the side of the building where the police tape slithered like a toppled flag. Either way he was relieved not to be forcing himself yet into that new type of darkness; just peering into the courtyard had his knees knocking like a woodpecker on meth.

Their eyes had adjusted even with Sam's headlights dying behind them, so they ventured to the left without a light. They walked gingerly. Spoke little.

The Pins and Needles was, of course, locked.

Sam cursed. "Well, what did we expect, I guess." She pitched her voice low, focus drifting.

Tucker stuffed his hands in the front pocket of his hoodie, hunching inward. "I'm pretty sure we need to go in here."

"How sure?"

"Uhh, like a good 70 percent? 75?" He grinned unconvincingly. "60?"

Sam glared. Tucker found this line of questioning unproductive. He pulled out his PDA and fiddled with it idly. "I could try my hand against the security system, but I don't like my chances if we don't know the model." So maybe Tucker had done some…research…into the practical implications of black hat hacking in his youth. Sue him; he was a teenage boy who'd watched too many action movies. And, furthermore, he felt that the fact that they were in this situation now pretty much entitled him to an "I told you so" on that count. However, the main thing he'd learned from that research was that while hacking a security system with the right tools wasn't all that hard, hacking this sort of security system with very little information and even less time was basically asking for a prison sentence (and possibly a spot on an FBI watchlist if they checked the rest of his internet history and learned what other skills he'd picked up).

They both spent a good forty seconds staring at the front door and frowning. This was actually an impressive feat, given how much it was killing Tucker not to look behind him.

"It doesn't have another entrance, right?" Tucker attempted to confirm with Sam. The bowling alley was part of the mall proper, specifically taking up the northwest corner of its extensive floor plan. As such, it only had two freestanding walls, and adjoined a pizza place on one side and a boutique on the other. "Maybe a window…?"

"Wait." Sam held up one hand, absolutely still, scowling ferociously. "Something's bothering me. What is–" She trailed off, squinting, though her pupils were blown wide like a cat's in the dark. "Where's the alley?"

"Uh...it's a bowling…? Alley? I think they call them that because of the lanes…?"

"Nonono, that's not what I meant." Her brow crinkled further. "Schulker's body was found in the dumpster behind the Pins and Needles Bowling Alley, right? But where's the dumpster? There's no alley behind it because it's part of the mall. Where would they even put a dumpster?"

"Maybe there's, like, a communal dumpster for this part of the mall?"

"Yeah, but then why would they say 'behind the Pins and Needles'? 'Behind' would have to mean either where we're standing or inside the mall, somehow, and they wouldn't want customers just wandering around and seeing their dumpster. There has to be some sort of extra space, somewhere where only the employees would have to deal with it…."

The metaphorical timer dinged, the lightbulb lit, and Tucker's heart slipped up his throat. Sam's hand was still hovering next to him. He grabbed it in a tight grip.

"Sam. The tunnels."

~(*0*)~

The fourteenth door they tried, the one near the mall bathrooms with the wall of art deco tiles (classy, but missing a few), wasn't locked. Sam's lock-picking skills weren't quite up to the task of opening a door protecting actual merchandise rather than school cleaning supplies, so they'd been forced to venture deeper and deeper into the mall–that awful courtyard, Tucker had known that the prospect of avoiding it was too good to be true–trying promising-looking doors as they went. Someone had tried to lock this one, but hadn't turned the key all the way, probably in a hurry, and a little jiggling of the handle opened before them their very own personal portal into the void.

Tucker whistled, a short expression of awe and disbelief. Sam evidently concurred. "Wow, that's dark."

Slowly, they stepped in. Slowly, they closed the door.

Slowly, they began to walk.

The ovals of pale light cast by their phone flashlights should have been comforting, but all they really did was make Tucker dearly regret playing any horror game ever. However, unlike horror game protagonists, Tucker and Sam did have a few things going for them. First of all, these half-built passageways were by no means a maze, as long as you weren't actively trying to get lost. Since they weren't in that more complex marble-columns portion of the mall, there were also fewer branches to be taken into account, and their target was conveniently located in the northwest corner of the mall: Sam had checked on her phone's compass before entering. And hey, at least it wasn't grimy.

Now, Sam kept the compass app open and the phone level with the ground, letting the flashlight illuminate the floor a few steps in front of them. Tucker, in turn, aimed his light forward, dimly illuminating concrete beams and plywood walls and, inevitably, the black rectangle promising a continuance of the tunnel when the light was not strong enough to reach the end. Sweat dampened the back of Tucker's shirt. His breath came short and fast and as quiet as possible. Neither of them twisted to shine a light on the space they'd left behind; there was an unspoken agreement that seeing whether it was empty or not would just make it worse. But they listened. As hard as they could, they listened to the hallways behind.

In this manner, the solemn two-person cavalcade of soft tapping footsteps–still two people, four footsteps, yep, yep–wended its way a sweaty eternity and three heart-pounding blind turns later into the final, correct stretch of passageway.

They were greeted by the worst smell in the world.

"Oh my god." San broke the silence by gagging. Tucker could barely breathe even through his mouth. "What the fuck is that?"

Tucker held one sleeve up in front of his nose and jerkily panned the flashlight (don't look back, don't look back) over the extremely pungent space ahead. There were two nondescript metal doors here: one straight in front of them, where the hallway dead-ended, and one on the right. Their goal. Hopefully. The walls were that same plywood, looking a bit grimier and worse for wear here than elsewhere, and there were four sort of rusty-looking dark rectangles on the grey floor that denoted—oh, there was a dumpster here.

A dumpster with a—oh my god, oh my god, have I ever smelled a—what does it smell—it wouldn't have been long enough for Danny to—would it…? Tucker almost retched, his mind swirling with horrible possibilities and his senses overwhelmed by that horrible smell. He was beyond terrified and nauseated and oh my god I can't do this.

He jumped and staggered away several feet when a warm hand fell on his shoulder. "Tucker! Tucker! It's just the dumpster, okay? There was just a dumpster here, okay? Although why the hell anyone would put a dumpster indoors like this—they should be, they should be sued for p—for employee health risks—anyway, anyway, we can get out, okay? We can get out!" The oval of light focused on the side door shrunk and brightened, to the size of a stained glass window, to the size of a dinner plate, as Sam approached it. Tucker had put his back to the wall, gasping, and but almost subconsciously his trembling hand held up his phone to illuminate her as, holding his gaze with equally wild eyes, Sam wrenched down with a burst of manic energy on the handle of the door on the right.

Moonlight spilled onto the floor of the hallway.

Without looking at each other, without any semblance of caution or dignity whatsoever, Tucker and Sam almost tumbled over each other as they sprinted out of the tunnels and slammed the door as hard as they could on whatever lay behind.

…

…

"Shit. Shit. Shiiitttt." There was a strange hitch in Sam's voice at the end. Tucker looked over from where he sat with his back up against the door to see Sam in much the same position, scrunched into a ball with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her breath hitched again, and then she made a noise like a sob. "Oh my god. Oh my god. That was the worst thing I've ever done."

It took a moment for Tucker to think up around his violently pounding heart and tingling limbs and realize she really was crying. He hadn't seen Sam cry in quite a while, probably not since they were both very small. Now, above her sharp elbow and the slanted angle of her arm, he could see that her cheek was shiny with tears. His own breath was hitching as well, although it was a sort of dry terror, and as of yet no tears fell.

Following from that insight, he vaguely realized that his breathing was too loud, too much and much too fast; the overabundance of oxygen was making him lightheaded. He donated a fraction of his consciousness toward bringing it back under control. His eyes were still watching Sam, and the biggest part of his brain currently active registered another thing he definitely wanted to be doing right now, and then puzzled slowly through how to go about it. In the process, he registered with some vague surprise that he did, in fact, possess limbs. Four of them. Feeling like he was moving underwater, he planted his hands and scooched to the right, and then clumsily, awkwardly, quickly reached over and around his best friend and hugged her shoulders tight.

She was warm, noticed the biggest part of his brain. He let himself fall forward into that unquestionable fact: she was warm. Like a synchronized swimming team, the disparate pieces of his consciousness began to drift back into formation as he closed his eyes and just squeezed.

The hitching of her breath began to slow down.

At length, Tucker was cognizant enough to notice that her shoulders were really rather boney, weren't they. One pressed into his chest at a weird angle, catching him under the collarbone with that odd specific pain of a compressed blood vessel. He shifted, and she shifted with him, one arm sliding behind him until she was hugging him back, a little less tightly, hand fisted in his sweatshirt and twisting it in a way that would probably stretch it out. They sat in warm silence for another minute, and Tucker lifted his head partially to get her hair away from his mouth and partially to survey their new surroundings.

The bowling alley was one big open room. The glass door that had unfortunately been locked earlier was opposite them, with the big glass windows all spread out around it letting in that light that had seemed so little before and seemed such a breathtaking, incomparable radiance now. To their right scrolled out the long row of bowling lanes, twelve in total, their polished golden wood greyed in the night but just as lovely. A significant distance in front of them, maybe 20 feet beyond the ends of the lanes, was the counter behind which bored high school students waited to hand out bowling shoes; the system of large cubbyholes behind that displayed the shoes themselves, organized by size.

The warm mass shifted again beside him; looking down, he saw that Sam was also examining her surroundings, cheeks dry again, though some of her eye makeup was smeared down and sideways. She shrugged off his arms as she stood up, shakily. Tucker decided reluctantly to follow suit, leaning a good portion of his weight against the door for support. His hands still shook, but at some point when he hadn't been paying attention, he'd gone back to breathing normally.

"Heh. I almost wanna say that was too easy," Tucker joked ruefully. It was an attempt, anyway. Sam snorted and shoved him, even though the joke definitely didn't deserve that much of a reaction. This was why she was his favorite.

Somewhat reluctantly, Tucker began to wander up the narrow avenue between the leftmost bowling lane and the wall. Sam took a more direct route toward the center of the room by stepping carefully over gutters and across the lanes themselves.

"Don't slip," he warned her in a low voice, amused just a little bit. Seriously, where were litigation-shy employees when you needed them. She waved him off, turning to survey everything more effectively.

"Tucker? I'm not seeing any idiot teenagers. Or, uh, s–ssserial killers." She stumbled a bit on the phrase. "…Are we in the right place?"

He focused inward on that out-of-place feeling again, past the floating feeling, past the dread, past the residue of terror.

It was warm. "Yes," he replied with absolute confidence. "We're in the right place."

He ambled farther out into the area. Getting warmer. Turning in a slow circle, he counted doors. First was the door they'd come in from, sitting innocuous as anything. (He had to fight the sudden strong stomach-clenching urge to block it with something heavy.) There was the cheerfully transparent door to the outside, showing sidewalk and moonlight (and being shown, he realized with a start followed quickly by a rush relief, by the room's only security camera. Since they hadn't entered through it, they almost definitely hadn't been filmed). There was a swinging door on the wall to his right that logically led into the kitchen of the adjoining pizza place–the kitchen that provided the alley's pizza and buffalo wings. The third door looked a lot like the door to the system of tunnels, and it was located in a mirror of that door's position, on the other side of the lanes. Tucker remembered that the plywood passageway had kind of curved around something as they'd gotten close to the end of their journey. The bathroom, maybe?

He pointed it out quietly to Sam, and padded out around the lanes in that direction. Sam, crossing them more directly if nerve-wrackingly squeakily, arrived first and waited for him beside it, attempting to look diffident and largely failing. She was too tense, and her shirt had come half-untucked from her jeans. "This one, you think?"

Tucker did think. They considered the door.

It wasn't as bad as turning a corner in the flashlight-illuminated emergency passageways. That had been furiously, relentlessly dreadful, the process of shining their lights forward and around and then forcing their heads inch by inch around as well, almost overwhelmed by the utter dread of having no idea what could be on the other side (a man standing, a man running, that mask running oh my god don't think don't think), but knowing that once they saw it, there would be no way they could unsee. Still, even in the moonlight, a closed door always holds a degree of awful mystery. The comparison between the two situations actually reminded Tucker of his phone flashlight, which was still on and angled behind him on the ground as he absently held it in one dangling hand. He checked the time: 3:23, September 30th. (There was something about that date, wasn't there…?) He swallowed and readjusted his grip purposefully; there was no crack under the door, but whatever lay behind it would be dark, most likely.

Sam saw his expression. Her jaw tightened as her eyes communicated a grim soft understanding, and she wrapped black-tipped fingers around the handle.

She pulled it like ripping off a bandaid.

And then swore as they both lurched back a step, blinking. It turned out the moonlight wasn't nearly as bright as they'd thought it was, because they were instantly blinded by the light streaming out of the small, empty space. (Tucker's mind shied away from the word "hallway.") Tucker forced himself to inspect it even as his eyes twinged painfully, adjusting. Two red doors bearing the ubiquitous symbols for "men" and "women" stood set into the white wall on the right (bathrooms and premonitions, bad associations, bad associations…). On the left was a plainer brown door labeled "EMPLOYEES ONLY." The two fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling buzzed cheerily. Someone had left them on.

"...Huh." Sam stared.

Tucker glanced over his shoulder. The sudden influx of light had had another effect: suddenly, the bowling alley looked a lot darker. Rather hurriedly, he stepped inside beside her and shut the door. They examined their options.

Great, now they had to open another door. "Left?" Sam asked him, raising an eyebrow.

"Left," he confirmed. No more bathrooms, not if he could avoid them.

They repeated their nervous choreography from before.

And then freaked out in unison.

"Danny!"

~(*0*)~

The room contained four rolls of paper towel, six spare rolls of toilet paper, one bucket, one mop, one container of Windex, two of 409, and one crumpled body, complete with recognizable mop of messy black hair.

"Shit, Danny!" Sam hastened to her knees next to him. Tucker gave the room another wide-eyed scan before allowing himself to take his focus off of his surroundings. Danny was sprawled out on the floor on his side, one arm trapped under him in a way that would definitely have made it fall asleep if he'd been here for any significant length of time. There was no blood or anything visible on the floor, but Danny didn't move or respond in any way to the intrusion.

Scooting around behind him, Sam carefully tipped him toward her so he was mostly on his back. Tucker very nearly had that heart attack that had been threatening all night when he realized Danny wasn't breathing–but that wasn't all that unusual for Danny, actually. (God, what a sentence.) He knelt to feel at the side of his neck for a pulse: thready, but definitely there. Oh my god. Thank you. The open door behind them made it decently easy to see details, and Tucker noted that Danny's face was even whiter than usual, muscles slack. There was some sort of blotchy red discoloration around his eyes and trailing down half of his face, raw-looking like when Sam had a bad sunburn.

"Shiiiit, what's wrong with him?!" Frantic energy escaped through the cracks in Sam's vowels and the quick, pointless motions of her hands. "He's not waking up!"

Floating slightly in his head again, Tucker stared closer at Danny's face, which seemed to be down a small tunnel. There was something weird about it, wasn't there? Besides the blotchy thing…it was kind of…blurry. Indistinct. Mouth a little too wide.

Before he could put his finger on it, Sam, apparently for lack of anything better to do, shook Danny roughly by the shoulders, then pulled back abruptly with a small yelp as he jolted, face animating and screwing up in pain. Sam bumped her head on the wall behind her and then scrambled to her feet just as Danny began to hack, loudly, curling around into himself on his side again. Tucker abruptly surfaced out of his stupor. "Auhh! Danny! Danny, are you okay?!"

He didn't answer, just coughed more loudly, convulsing. Which led to his head whacking into the wall at high speed. "Shit! Sam, get his head!"

Together, they wrestled a violently retching, very cold unconscious teenager out of the supply closet and into the brightly lit entrance hall. There, Tucker hovered while Sam tried to protect Danny's head and yelled a lot. "Danny! Can you hear me? It's Sam and Tucker, we've got you! You need to tell us what's wrong!"

Tucker stood off to the side with an increasingly uncomfortable feeling of deja vu.

What comes around, goes around, and everything comes around. Tucker distantly reflected that he'd been recognizing uncomfortable repetitions and patterns all day. Maybe that was all his psychic "gift" really was: recognizing the patterns that boded disaster. They'd found Danny in the same place Schulker had been. They'd had to use the tunnels they sprinted down, the three of them, only a few weeks ago, tasting an entirely different flavor of adrenaline. The thread of this foreboding had ended at a bathroom door, with someone he cared about hurt on the ground. And thinking way back, to that day with the lunch lady when he was oh so young, he had to consider that maybe long trips down labyrinthine hallways had never, for him, ended in good places.

Because now, standing off to the side, cringing at Danny's ugly, wracking coughs with absolutely no idea how to help, Tucker thought, Gosh, this feels a lot like the start of that last summoning we did, doesn't it?

And then he processed that thought completely and screamed, "Sam, get away, I think he's gonna–!"

And then Danny choked and arched his back and the world turned green.

~(*0*)~

There was an impression of a great many things whooshing past him, and Tucker was knocked off his feet by something moving too fast to see. He scrambled backward into a wall, his entire nervous system screaming at him wrong, bad, badbadbad getawaygetaway as hurricane-force winds buffeted him even as he felt without a doubt that the air stood completely still. Someone was screaming, and he couldn't tell if it was him or–Sam! "Sam! Sam, are you okay?!" he hollered into the green, into the writhing mass of stumbling, buzzing, crawling, slithering, green static that was everywhere and nowhere and inside him and in the walls and squealing in his head and biting into the inside of his skin with a thousand slimy teeth. Rat king, said his mind, and Tucker curled up and shut his eyes and covered his ears and prayed it was a dream.

Minutes passed.

"Tucker! TUCK! Where are you?! I'm here!" came Sam's voice in response, and Tucker almost cried with relief–was he already crying? He couldn't tell–as he pulled his fingers out from too deep in his ears before rasping back, "Sam! I'm okay! What's going on?!"

"Tucker, where are you? I'm coming to you!" answered Sam's voice.

…Except it wasn't Sam's voice, was it? Tucker strained his ears past the screeching green static. Wasn't it a little…tinny? A little slick? A little wrong? "Tuck, tell me where you are!" it yelled again. Closer by. Tucker very nearly threw up. He jammed his fingers back in his ears, deeper, deeper, and prayed to survive.

Something was in front of him, trying to pry his arms apart. Trying to pry his fingers out of his ears with cold hands, and he wouldn't, he wouldn't open his eyes.

Something was in front of him, touching him, close enough for him to feel the radiating chill.

Tucker wouldn't open his eyes.

The hands on his arms released. It seemed to move away.

Seconds passed.

Minutes.

Something was screaming.

~(*0*)~

…

….

….

"Tucker? Tuck, it's just me. Tuck, open your eyes."

The hands on his shoulders were warm, gentle. They hovered restlessly over his fingers, his arms. "Tucker, it's Sam. You can open your eyes."

Tucker felt warm breath on his face. There were already warm tears there, and the muscles around his eyes were sore from how tightly they'd been clenched shut. But he knew he couldn't open them. That was what the thing in front of him wanted. The thing stealing Sam's voice. Oh, god, Sam–

"Tucker, listen, I swear it's me, okay? There was something in me, but I think Danny pulled it out. I'm okay now. We're okay. It's over. But he's hurt really bad, and I don't know what to do…." The voice sounded close to tears.

It's not her. It's not her. It's not her.

...

And then it let out a huff of air and growled, "Okay, this is getting ridiculous. Tucker, stop being a little bitch and look at me, you're fine!"

And that–

Okay, that sounded like Sam.

Hesitantly, Tucker opened his eyes.

Sam was on her knees in front of him, hair wild and teeth bared. Behind her was the brightly lit room from before, looking exactly the same. The lights didn't even flicker. Beyond Sam, Danny lay on the floor, once again utterly still.

"What happened," Tucker croaked.

"You think I have a fucking clue?" She laughed breathlessly once, with a note of hysteria.

Wincing, Tucker stood up and stumbled over to Danny. He seemed sort of half-conscious now, eyes partly open and tracking Tucker's movements above him, but he didn't respond to any sort of question or command.

From behind him, Sam ventured, "Maybe if we get him outside, into some fresh air…?

Tucker almost fell over for, like, the eighth time tonight. "Fresh air?! That's your one idea, he just needs fresh air?!" he squeaked, panic warring with how utterly wrung-out he felt. This must be what it was like to be a worn-out dishrag. Like those ones in the infomercial that absorbed all the water and then squeezed it right out just so it could be filled up again–a ShamWow. That was it. Tucker felt like a ShamWow for trauma.

"Fuck, heh, okay, let's just–let's just get him outside."

And that's how they ended up wrestling a limp Danny onto Tucker's back–and he wasn't ridiculously heavy but unconscious people were surprisingly hard to move, it felt like every time Sam got an arm in place and Tucker moved to take the leg the arm would slip off again over his shoulder, how did you even distribute the weight?–and making their jittery way as fast as they could across the dark bowling alley to the door they'd entered through, the tunnel door. Tucker braced for the dark, and the fear, and the smell, and gritted his teeth under the new dead weight that would make it that much harder to run. Sam speedwalked in ahead of him, pointedly not looking anywhere but straight forward. She made for the door to the right, the one that should lead outside but had been locked when they'd tried to go in before, almost two hours ago now. And all the while Tucker was thinking please, please, please, I can't go all the way back there, how will we even find the right door, please please open...

It opened easily from the inside.

Tucker almost shut down from pure disbelief. Escape, just a few feet away–actually–really?

Sam let out a whoop. "Come on, Tuck!" She sounded manic, drunk on fresh nighttime air and the outside. She held open the door and grinned at him, crazy and wide.

Tucker took a deep breath and sprinted out after her. And for a few brief seconds he didn't really care how Danny bounced on his back, or that they were in the dark and maybe immersed in the smell of a dead man, because he could see an empty parking lot and their ride home and he was so done with tonight. He was already grinning, already starting to feel so alive because it was over, probably the worst night of his life and they'd gotten him, they'd won, it was over, they were outside and alive–

Tucker made it a few steps outside the door and froze.

Just like that. His knees locked in place, and his heart dropped into his stomach and dissolved into bitter acid. He stood there, head tilted back, and god, he just wanted to cry.

September 30th. Mabon was over, and from horizon to horizon stretched a green, green sky.