A Hunting Party
or alternatively: Problems Develop Rapidly in Sequence
Tucker, Sam, and Danny were awoken on the morning of Sunday the 13th by a high-pitched scream from outside the house. Such things were not uncommon lately, so Sam was about to roll over and try to get to sleep again when she noticed that Tucker, on the ground to her right, was sitting up and fully alert, head turned unerringly in the direction of the sound. Like a supernatural bloodhound.
Slowly, Sam sat up as well. "Tucker? What's wrong?"
"My nightmare senses are not happy."
Oh. She edged forward cautiously. "Well, yeah, but they haven't really been happy this whole time, right? I thought you were starting to get used to it."
"Nah, this is different. Uh. I think someone just died."
"Shit!" Sam slid out of her sleeping bag and stood, kicking two of the pillows that had been underneath it askew in her haste. "Mr. Foley?" she called in the general direction of the upper story.
"Tucker! Sam! You guys okay?" Mr. Foley's bass voice was accompanied by the sound of footsteps on the stairs, until at length he appeared in the doorway that led from the living room into the stairwell, looking rumpled but alert. After they'd accidentally let slip about the thing in the gym, Mr. Foley had insisted on sleeping in one of the upstairs rooms to be between the gym and the kids below. After this announcement, Danny had quietly drifted upstairs with his sleeping bag and a few blankets, to sleep between the gym and Mr. Foley. Sam had caught a glimpse of Tucker's face when he'd realized this; she was pretty sure that in that moment, Tucker had finally begun to consider Danny one of his best friends.
All this mainly served to explain why Danny was coming from behind Mr. Foley when he blew past all three of them and headed straight for the front entryway with a dark look on his face. Sam hurried after him, Tucker hesitated but followed after Sam, and Mr. Foley went with Tucker, calling surprised, cautionary admonishments the whole way.
~(*0*)~
Tucker rounded the corner of the Mansons' front wall and immediately turned around and went back to stand with Sam, who'd just done the same thing. Yep, that's a corpse. Mr. Foley made an involuntary noise of surprise and disgust upon turning the corner, but stayed there, with his back visible but his face obscured by the wall, pulling out his phone to call 911. The young woman who'd screamed–looked familiar, wasn't she a senior at Casper?–was still standing on the sidewalk a few feet beyond him, with her hands over her mouth and her eyes wide.
It was a clear but cold morning, the sky a sickly shade of aqua green (although was it Tucker's imagination, or was it slightly less green than it used to be?). The chill bit through the relatively thin fabric of Tucker's long-sleeved sleep shirt and pajama pants, but he was more preoccupied with the odd realization that the idea of a body–especially the nebulous phantom image that had hung in his mind's eye in the dark tunnels under the mall–was actually significantly more upsetting than the real thing. Sure, he'd only seen it for a moment and was happy to stay over here and never see it again, but he didn't feel overwhelmed by fear or disgust. Maybe slightly queasy. Sam looked about the same. Then again, it made sense that they were somewhat better off than the girl who'd discovered it; ever since hearing her scream and taking stock of the electricity zinging up Tucker's spine, they'd been more or less expecting something like this.
Tucker figured they should do something for the senior girl; she looked like she might be in shock or something, and it would probably be helpful to at least get her to stop staring at the body. Carefully avoiding looking left, Tucker sidled up to her and tried to get her attention. "Um. Hey. Excuse me?" When that didn't work, he edged around to get in her line of sight, blocking her view of the scene that now lay behind him. It was hard not to be hyperaware of what he had his back to, especially since his joints were still sparking and twitching occasionally with low-level animal dread (he half expected the...owner of the body, or their shade at least, to show up any minute now; was his nightmare sense supposed to be a murder sense as well?). "Excuse me?"
He was relieved when her facial muscles slackened after a moment and her eyes focused on him; he was less relieved when then she seemed to become even more horrified. "Oh my god," she exclaimed, voice wavering. "What the hell did you people do?!"
"Um. What?" Tucker was so surprised that he briefly forgot that he was supposed to sound soothing. It didn't seem to matter to the girl, though–she started backing up down the sidewalk, stumbling a little, without taking her eyes off of him and Sam. "Hey, sorry, I understand you're freaked out, but I think you need to stay until the police arrive–"
"Not much they can do, actually," announced Danny's voice from behind Tucker. "Ghost did it." The senior girl's panicked attention shifted to somewhere over Tucker's left shoulder.
Oh. Great. Danny had been chilling in the side yard with the body this whole time, hadn't he? Tucker wasted a few seconds on attempting to telepathically scream "BE NORMAL FOR ONCE!" into Danny's head. He did not succeed.
Luckily, Tucker's dad got off the phone with the 911 operator just then and managed to catch the second part of Danny's statement. He abruptly took charge. "Tucker, Sam, Danny. Go back inside and reinforce the salt lines. Especially around the gym." His voice softened. "Miss, you can go inside with them or wait with me for the police. Are you alright? Did you see what happened here?"
The appearance of an authoritative adult finally shocked the girl out of whatever trance-like state she had been in. "Uh. I'm–I'm fine, no. I didn't–I just found him like this." At the mention of the body she brought her hand up to her mouth again, eyes welling up with tears.
Seeing the danger signs, Mr. Foley coaxed her into sitting down on the curb, facing away from the body, and began the process of asking her name and getting in contact with her parents. He caught Tucker's eye over her shoulder and jerked his head to the left, and Tucker realized with a start that they hadn't followed his first directions. He caught Sam's elbow, ignoring her questioning glance (Ghost nearby?–I don't know), and they both jogged to catch up with Danny, who had somehow managed to pass them without their noticing and was already through the front gate, heading back in toward the house. "What now?" Sam asked, slowing to a walk as they drew up behind him.
"I think–Tuck, did you sense any ghosts nearby?"
"No, nothing out of the ordinary."
"There you go, then. I'm killing the thing in the gym."
"You think it...?" Sam trailed off.
"Yeah, I waited too long."
"Didn't we wait because it's probably really dangerous and possibly going to kill you? All the way? Dead?" Tucker interposed.
"I mean, so are a lot of things. I was mostly being lazy," Danny offered with a humorless chuckle. There was some pep in his step, though. Tucker didn't love that.
"Well, if it…y'know, killed that guy, then we have to get rid of it," Sam decided, abruptly switching sides to the one that promised violence.
To his own dismay, Tucker couldn't exactly bring himself to disagree, especially when the corner of Danny's mouth was stretching slyly sideways like that. The guy clearly needed to work off some ghost mojo immediately. But if they were going to do this, they had to do it smart. "Okay, then here's the plan. We're making sure it's in the house and then salting it in. We're not letting it anywhere near my dad and that girl out there, not to mention anyone else who happens to stroll by."
Sam considered it. "Sounds good," she said with only a slight waver in her voice. Danny shrugged assent. They kept walking.
They were halfway up the stairs when Sam stopped short. "Wait. Okay, we need slightly more of a plan."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, good point," Tucker agreed nervously, stopping between two steps and leaning against the wall. "Okay. I'm assuming Danny, as the least likely to, y'know, uhh perish horribly, is doing the luring inside, right?"
"Or violent herding, hopefully, but yeah, sure. Actually, I don't really see why I shouldn't just do this on my own?" He frowned.
Darn it. Tucker had thought the combination of Sam's steamrolling skills and his own blithe avoidance of unfavorable discussion topics had allowed them to fast-forward past this whole mess, but it seemed Danny had regained some presence of mind. "'Cause it'll be a lot easier for you to fight off an angry poltergeist while keeping it away from a few people, or, like, one area, than for you to fight off an angry poltergeist while drawing a very precise unbroken line with salt in a particular area, right?"
Danny was forced to concede that point. "Okay, fine, but do we really need both of you in here? Can't one of you draw the line? Preferably the faster one?"
"Nope," Sam said resolutely. "We're doing it together. Better chance of success." She glared directly into Danny's eyes, daring him to put up a fight.
So it was settled, then. "I'll go grab the salt!" Tucker volunteered, vaguely wondering why they'd gone halfway upstairs without it, when it was their only necessary prop and the kitchen was on the first floor. He skidded to a stop in front of the Mansons' pantry, across from and just beyond the big black fridge, and snatched the cylindrical cardboard container of kosher salt from the top shelf. It was worryingly light. Salt was almost impossible to obtain in Amity right now, flying off supermarket shelves as soon as the hazmat guys could shepherd a shipment in, and for the first time Tucker found himself wishing they'd been a bit less careful in reinforcing the house's wards. They'd already gone through a full container of iodine salt and another mostly full kosher box brought over from the Foleys' place.
When he'd pounded back up to their place on the stairs Sam and Danny were no longer in a staring contest, so he assumed Danny had given in and the plan was set in stone. Danny would fight, Tucker would pour, and Sam would watch his back while he was doing it, making sure he dodged anything that needed to be dodged. Wordlessly, they continued up the stairs. They stopped in a pressed-together clump in front of the closed door to the gym. Something rustled on the other side.
Tucker flipped down the little metal spout on the salt canister like a man cocking a pump-action shotgun. The air around Danny rippled and distorted, and he was replaced by something not quite there and yet completely terrifying. Sam just kind of scowled.
Then Tucker kicked apart the salt line in front of the door and they rushed in with a furious yell.
…
It was Schulker.
...
Well, of course it was Schulker. Tucker didn't know why, but it somehow made sense to him. He didn't let himself hesitate any longer over the revelation, only noting the poltergeist's position–squatting down on the polished floor in the room's rightmost corner, a very hunter-lying-in-ambush-esquepose–before he and Sam sprinted to the far wall, the one with the big westward-facing windows.
It felt like there was lightning in the air, crackling and screaming, and it only made the too-hard pounding of Tucker's heart even worse. It was physically painful to turn his focus away from the confrontation happening on the right side of the room, but he managed it, and began his salt line with trembling fingers in the left back corner. He just had to line this one wall, 15 feet or so across. He wasn't even doing the hard part.
Speaking of which, he heard first a gasp from Sam, who stood behind him with her hand clenched on his shoulder and her leg pressed against his side, and then Schulker's voice, barely audible over the roar of the invisible lightning, which made it seem as if the room contained a raging windstorm even though the air, if he focused on how it felt on his skin, was actually still.
Still in his crouch, he began stepping to the right, shaking out the salt on the floor below the windows as his pulse pounded in his ears. He felt Sam move with him. There was the sound-sensation of the lightning storm, and there was also a high, inhuman keening sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. If he tried to actually listen to it, it became inaudible, slipping out of reach. Could Sam hear any of this? And he'd gotten distracted and the salt had formed a small pile, unnecessarily thick and wasteful. He attempted to spread it along to the right with his left hand's fingers, cursing how the sticky grains clung to them. Focus!
"So you kids got tired of our little standoff, then," Schulker teased, voice raspy with static and dipping at odd moments into a lower register. He didn't sound at all put off by the fact that, from what Tucker understood, Danny was furiously attacking him right now, having rushed right in without pausing to chat. "Can't blame ya, I was gettin' bored as well. It have anything to do with the early morning snack I left outside? I been told my table manners aren't all that refined."
"Shut up," growled a voice with a timbre midway between the roar of a buzz saw and the onslaught of a thousand mosquitoes, completely unrecognizable as belonging to Danny Fenton. There were a number of wet-sounding thumps, and the keening noise grew louder. Tucker took another crab-walking step to the right; he was about a third of the way across and breathing much harder than the exercise warranted. Something big hit the wall to his left with enough force to shatter one of the huge mirrors and bury itself a foot or so in the plaster and wood underneath. Sam yelped, a wavering note terminating at a painfully high pitch, as shards of mirror gouged small valleys in her flesh. Angled as she was to protect Tucker, she took the brunt, and he only squeaked and squeezed his eyes shut reflexively as one stray shard glanced off his cheek and another bloodied his knuckle. Whatever–whoever?–had been thrown into the wall was already gone by the time he looked, and so he refocused on the salt line, moving faster as he sensed the centerpoint of the turmoil move behind him and to his right, whirling around the room rapidly.
Halfway across. His thighs burned. He sucked the blood off his knuckle and kept going.
~(*0*)~
Sam wasn't certain exactly what she was looking at, here. Turned out the general vibe of a fight between two ghosts fell somewhere near the intersection between unutterably terrifying and completely incomprehensible.
A good amount of the time she wasn't actually certain if they were still in the room. The door had been slamming open and shut wildly since this thing began, which could mean they were going in and out, chasing each other at incredible speeds throughout the whole house, or could just be a thing that happened with ghosts. The fighters themselves were completely silent, so her ears couldn't help her resolve that question. Occasionally she would catch a glimpse, for a second or two, of two human figures, one in camo and one mostly shadow. They weren't so much visibly moving as leaving afterimages, like a bad flipbook. Their periodic appearances kept her tensed to run and only controlling the impulse through an immense exertion of will. Three or four times she saw huge, ambiguous smears of indeterminate color, against the ceiling or on the floor or halfway through the nearest wall or too close too close too close, visible only long enough for her to register that the figures they contained were very much not human, and not long enough for her to decide upon their actual shape. Craters appeared in the walls, cracks raced along the ceiling, shards of mirror glass embedded themselves too fast to follow in surfaces they logically had no business penetrating. The second mirror exploded, then the third, and all this in what appeared to Sam's eyes to be an empty gym. The light flickered wildly every few moments, which was improbable considering they hadn't turned on the electric lights and were relying on what came in the windows. Sam curled forward, attempting to cover her neck and face with her arms, unable to stop her eyes from tracking every tiny movement. She could feel her pulse in her ears and a sickening panic in her stomach. Still, when she felt Tucker move, she moved with him. They were only a few feet from the opposite wall. Three feet. Two feet. One.
And then Tucker said in a very small, very watery voice, "Sam?"
"Yeah?"
"I think I'm out of salt."
Sam's guts crawled.
"Can you help me spread it out? What's already down there?"
"Yeah!" she squeaked, hating the pitch of it. "Yeah, should I get more from earlier on the line?"
"Ea–yeah. Yeah." He was already kneeling to look at the line more closely, feverishly pushing individual grains forward in groups of four or five.
It wasn't like she could actually do much to protect him, anyway. From the moment they'd entered the room, she'd been weighed down by the horrifying conviction that his battle was beyond her comprehension, much less her abilities. Beyond her mortal ken, as pretentious-goth-phase Sam probably would have said it. God, she couldn't die now; she'd only just become a person she liked.
Her shoes crunched glass shards into the wood as she ran back to the middle of the room and squatted over the line. It was thicker here, and got progressively thinner as it neared Tucker's end of the room–clearly he'd become more and more conservative with the salt as he felt his container getting lighter. Her chest heated with a pulse of new unease when she spotted a place where a glass shard had actually parted the line, and she quickly pushed salt back together, keeping a weather eye out for other such spots as she thinned the line with her pointer and middle fingers. The best method seemed to be scooping up the separated grains into her other hand, a task complicated by the way they stuck to her fingers when she tried to deposit them in her palm. The panic and frustration made her want to scream.
It felt like hours focused entirely on her miniscule task and her beating heart before she finally had a good enough reservoir of salt in her palm to dash back over to Tucker. He'd managed to extend the line, perilously thin, to just five inches short of the wall. Not bothering with delicacy, Sam dumped her small handful into the middle of that remaining space, pushing grains off her palm with her other fingers as Tucker began sliding them into a linear formation with the sides of his hands. They moved faster, frantically, bumping into each others hands–
And then, all of a sudden, it was done.
And its efficacy was proven when something hurtled into that barrier only to rebound with a vibrating thud-clanggggg and a sense of immense force. The cause of the disturbance became visible as it slowed down, rolling across the floor and stopping about three quarters of the way back across the room: It was Danny. Or ghost-Danny, anyway, and it was hard to tell, but Sam didn't think he was doing so hot. His luminance was wavery, and some of his composite shadows seemed to be pooling off of him and onto the floor. But he still pushed himself to his feet pretty quickly.
"Guys?" came the staticky tinfoil-shredding voice out of the long slit mouth. "Tactical retreat."
Which was all the impetus it took for Tucker and Sam to do what they'd wanted to do this whole time and run like hell.
~(*0*)~
There was a flash of white light just before they crossed the front door's threshold, and then they were outside and Danny was with them, sweaty, bleeding black from his mouth and nose, and cradling his left arm protectively against his torso. He looked exhausted. "What the hell is wrong with that guy?! He literally won't fucking die!" he complained loudly. A few weeks ago, Tucker didn't think he would've been able to detect the note of panic under the exaggerated irritation.
"Well he's a—" Sam started, still breathing hard.
"Yeah, yeah, he's a ghost, you know what I mean!"
"No, I was gonna say he's a wechuge."
Danny frowned. (He wasn't breathing hard, which irked Tucker slightly.) "But he's not a wechuge, he's a ghost."
"Can you...not be both?" Tucker put in cautiously. He was speaking in a low voice; it felt weird to be having this conversation out in the open, in the filtered sunlight of Sam's manicured green front yard.
"Well, I—he said before it was a contract, didn't he?" Sam frowned. "Actually—that was weird, now that I'm thinking about it. There wasn't anything online about making a contract, per se, to be a wechuge. It usually isn't...voluntary, I think?"
Which raised a lot of questions. Tucker absentmindedly chewed a scab off his lip. "So is that actually what he is? Or was?"
"There's a lot of things out there that like making deals. And you should never believe at face value that something is what it says it is," Danny noted darkly.
Sam coughed. "Okay, but—okay. Regardless. Whatever he really was, we were working off the theory that the killer targets people with contracts 'cause death breaks them, and when you break them that releases energy. So now that he's dead, any contract he had should be broken."
"Sam, that wasn't really a theory, that was just you spitballing wildly."
"Tucker! Constructivity!"
"Fine, fine! We're brainstorming. So your theory and Danny's–horrible spooky intuition?–both say he's not a wechuge anymore. Because he's a ghost. Danny, my friend, I'm almost afraid to ask: How do you usually kill a ghost?"
Danny frowned. "Well, okay. So the weaker ones you can get rid of just by targeting the vital areas they had when they were alive. Like, you stab it through the heart, and it'll just sort of move on, even though logically it doesn't need a heart to exist. The hard ones to kill are—" He paused, and his eyes widened. "The hard ones to kill, the ones you really just have to completely obliterate, are the ones that understand that they aren't human."
Sam made a horrified noise. "And Schulker wasn't human even when he was alive. He's used to it."
It was tempting to give into despairing silence here, but no. No, this was good, they were finally starting to understand things! Tucker bounced on the balls of his feet, full of nervous energy, and shook out his hands. "So wait, it's like the mind-over-matter principle again. Right, Sam? How you think what you can do in the occult is governed by belief?"
She met his urgent gaze with equal intensity. "You're right, it's sort of the same thing—!"
"So if the usual ghost-obliteration isn't working, how do we make Schulker believe you've killed him? He thinks of himself as a wechuge, so what kills a wechuge?"
Sam already had her phone out. Danny groaned and slapped his forehead dramatically as Tucker's brainstem did that ping thing. "Seriously? Wait, that's so obvious. We didn't even need to go into all the technicalities about contracts and beliefs and whatever, that literally should've been our first thought."
"But isn't it better to know why something works than to just sort of hope it works by accident?" Sam questioned absently, squinting close to her phone screen and rapidly scrolling.
"We don't know anything, we're wildly guessing and I'm gonna have to go back in there and just sort of hope our wild guesses actually kill that thing," Danny grumbled.
Tucker offered him a lopsided smile. "Danny. Constructivity."
"Ugh." But he looked more energized and was smiling too, if a bit wryly. And it was barely even disturbing.
While Sam stepped away to research, another thought occurred to Tucker, and he tapped Danny, who was turned slightly and glaring fixedly at the house, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Dude. Is there–like, a–a reason Schulker has been hanging out in the gym, where we summoned him before?"
Danny took a moment to notice him, and another to register the question. "Um. Yeah, actually. That's another area where movies and books and stuff are pretty on the mark–when you do things like that, then there's less separation between this side and the other side in that place for a while. I don't wanna say 'the barrier's thinner' 'cuz that's, like, not really accurate, but it's definitely sort of charged afterward. That's...probably also why I got summoned to that back area in the mall where they found Schulker's body–because they probably did some ritual or killed him there, and that primed the area for more supernatural stuff. Increased the chances of a successful summoning."
"Hmm."
"Why'd you ask?"
"Oh. I guess it just seemed weird. Weird situation all around."
"Heh. Yep."
Sam turned back into the conversation just then, still looking at her phone. "Okay, so this sucks. Apparently we have to get him into a fire and keep him there. Overnight."
"Overnight? Seriously?" Tucker couldn't believe this. "Okay, that's–okay, what does that mean though? It's morning right now! Do we need to keep him there for like, twelve hours, or do we have to wait for nighttime and then another twelve hours, just?! Why?!"
"I guess I could...just keep trying to obliterate him?" Danny offered, sounding a little overwhelmed and completely dead on his feet. (Heh.)
"Do you, uh. Think there's a good chance that would work?"
"Um. Like sixty-forty."
"Any other ideas?"
Sam crossed her arms, shifting her weight. "We could summon a bunch of other ghosts to fight him."
Danny groaned. "But I just ate."
"Yeah, also, I think the last thing this situation needs is more ghosts. Danny, any ghost friends who are already here who could help?"
"Nope. None who can fight stuff."
The back of Tucker's mind said, Heh. Not popular among poltergeists. He ignored it.
There was a moment of silence, and then Danny hissed through his teeth. "Oh, yeah! I almost forgot! I don't know about where to like, make a fire, but if we have to lure him somewhere, Tucker's bait."
"What?"
"He was totally targeting you. In the house. Maybe it's a psychic thing. But if we want him to go somewhere, just, like. Run there."
Tucker's stomach flipped. "...Ah. Great. ...So what do we do once we have him in a place?"
Another thinking pause.
"Well, rope's obviously not going to work," Sam reasoned slowly. "He's incorporeal. Also, I'm assuming we're all thinking of the downstairs fireplace, right? The oven can't be big enough, and I don't know if it would work anyway."
"Isn't the upstairs fireplace bigger?"
"Wait," Danny interrupted whatever Sam was going to say (probably something about stairs and Tucker's stamina, possibly about that time he got thrown off of an elliptical machine). "Is the fireplace back in the wall? Like a niche?"
Tucker caught his meaning a split second later. "Oh, damn, we can salt him in!" he burst out, suddenly elated. "...Oh, damn. We're out of salt."
A moment of silent despair. And then Sam smacked her forehead, audibly.
"Oh my god, we're so stupid!" She locked eyes with him and said, with a growing grin and perhaps more passion and gravity than the sentence had ever before merited, "We can literally just borrow salt from the neighbors."
~(*0*)~
The ensuing encounter with the aging Mrs. Crawford next door was, in a word, awkward. For one thing, they were all in pajamas and extremely sweaty, and one of their number currently looked like he'd been gnawed on by a rabid dog. However, Mrs. Crawford did have a mostly full box of salt, and she liked kids enough not to want them to be eaten by ghosts. They left her house seven minutes later with a small tupperware about a quarter filled with fine-ground salt and snuck back into the front yard.Amity's extremely thinly stretched and depleted police force still hadn't managed to send someone for the body, so Mr. Foley was still waiting in the side yard. They took a few deep breaths and ran back inside the house just as Mr. Foley's voice drifted faintly over the fence: "Tucker…?"
Schulker met them in the entryway. Danny instantly transformed and shoved himself to the front. "Gotta say, kids, this is pretty...eh, what's the word, cushy for a trap." He grinned, gums showing.
He didn't look much better than Danny, if that meant anything. His clothes were badly torn and the camouflage pattern was obscured in large swathes by the same dark, ichorous substance that ran from his nose and covered most of his chin. He might have been missing a few fingers. He'd always looked fairly solid during summonings, but then he rushed forward in that horrible nerve-jolting flipbook style he and Danny had used while fighting, and he seemed to be visible for longer between flickers.
Then there was, again, no time for idle observations, and Sam and Tucker were sprinting pell-mell into the living room while the lights began flickering wildly behind them.
~(*0*)~
In the end, it took them fifteen whole minutes to manhandle Schulker into the fireplace. Twice, Danny managed to throw or shove him in but Tucker was unable to close the small remaining gap in the salt line before he could slip out again. It was fifteen minutes of blood-churning frustration and intoxicating adrenaline, and Sam holding on firmly to her best friend's arm and watching as his eyes tracked back and forth, following things she couldn't see as more than the occasional blur. She wondered what it looked like. From his tense body language and occasional flinch, she thought maybe she didn't want to know.
On the third try, though, Danny managed to yell a warning right before kicking (?) or otherwise propelling Schulker through two walls and into the fireplace. Tucker, panting and sporting a gash in his left shoulder that Danny hadn't been able to prevent, closed the gap with salt the instant after Schulker rebounded off of the back of the fireplace–an outside wall, and therefore warded as long as salt lined all the windows and doors. From Sam's perspective, what happened was that Tucker dumped salt onto the brickwork of an empty fireplace, there was a terrible impact, and then all of the sudden Schulker was just there, in the fireplace, as huge as at the first summoning and not nearly as self-possessed.
She didn't look at him. A strange, nauseating frequency became audible, perhaps just in Sam's head, making her ears ring as she held tight with her furiously trembling fingers and attempted to light a match.
Her first scrape along the matchbox failed when, his task accomplished, Tucker sprinted back a couple of steps, dragging Sam with him. Danny–where was Danny? Tucker was speaking. Screaming, practically. "So tell us who it was!"
The fuzzy ringing in her ears grew worse, and Sam realized Schulker was probably talking as well. She couldn't make out his features, either–upon a frantic second look (the match broke against the matchbox when she looked away from it), she realized couldn't make out much of anything. Her brain refused to process it as anything other than a man wearing fatigues, but she knew that wasn't what she was seeing.
"Well then who was the fucking first one then? In Chicago?" Tucker again, low and grating. More pseudo-silence. He laughed once, a very unhappy sound tinged with mania. "Oh, spare me–Technus?"
Sam struck the new match, and it lit.
"So what's he gonna do now, you fucki–you piece of shit, he's got three, you can't just–Sam!" That last part was a high yelp, as the thing in the fireplace surged against the invisible wall locking it in, making the whole house seem to shake on its foundations. The whining in her brain rose to a fever pitch, so high and loud that it hurt to exist, it hurt to think, but she didn't need to think–she had–
–match–hand–
–running–forward–not overthesaltboundary–paper–
–dropmatch–heady–beating–
–too light, snuffing–falling–
Sam threw herself backward as the fireplace erupted in flame.
There was that horrible, broken-glass screech, louder than a thousand woodchippers, and it went on and on until Sam realized it was gone and had been for minutes, had maybe only sounded for seconds or maybe hadn't happened in the first place. A piece of hair was stuck to her cheek, gross and sweaty. She was sitting back on her bruised tailbone, supported by her elbows as her hands clenched into fists so tight it hurt to force her fingers free.
With an enormous effort of will, she forced herself to look at the fireplace. And–
Well. Heh. There was still something there, at least. It looked like a burned-up effigy, withered and twisted and blackened with soot but vaguely human-shaped, bulging in places it wasn't supposed to be. There wasn't enough space in the fireplace for this emaciated cinder to lie flat, so it was leaned partway against the invisible barrier of the salt line. A cheerful, tidy fire crackled steadily around it. The half-fused fingers twitched, and Sam fought a bubble of laughter rising up her throat from somewhere under her ribcage.
The newspapers were mostly ash, by now, but the logs behind them, half underneath the body, had caught, and promised to keep the fire steady and enthusiastic for at least another four hours or so. Sam experienced the impulse to add insult to injury. She stumbled to her feet, walked to the set of switches by the nearest doorway, and turned on the gas. The fire flared blue and gnawed on the silent figure with a touch more hunger.
She stared at the fire for another moment, then turned with a slight swaying motion to where her best friend was still sitting on the ground. Tucker blinked, met her eyes, and, despite his obvious exhaustion, grinned sideways.
"We are...so cool," he informed her tiredly.
~(*0*)~
When they had collected themselves sufficiently through a combination of self-congratulation, compartmentalization, and very careful breathing, they went in search of the muscle of their team. They didn't have to search any further than the next room opposite the fireplace. Danny was sitting on the ground, back to human, leaning his whole body weight against the living room-facing wall with an expression of dazed relief. He tried to say something when he saw them and immediately coughed, that oozing black stuff flecking out of his mouth and onto the greenish-brown carpet. Extremely toxic, probably. Radioactive, maybe. He cleared his throat with a fist in front of his mouth and tried again. "That fucker french toast yet?"
A few more heartbeats, processing. "I would've gone with french fries, but yeah." Tucker laughed tremulously. "It seems like he can't get out. He's still there, but he's not moving. And he's getting weaker as he's burning–I can see it," he added, eyes flicking nervously back in the direction of the fireplace. He'd allowed the wall to separate him from it. Sam had stayed in the doorway, never letting her eyes shift for more than an instant off of the shrinking corpse rapidly immolating in her parents' fireplace. It was so incongruous that it almost felt fitting.
"I...trust that significantly less far than I threw it," Danny responded, smiling slightly. "Take it in shifts?"
"I call first nap," Tucker consented, sliding to the floor beside Danny, who very clearly should not be taking the first watch either. Sam didn't mind; she didn't think she would be able to take her eyes off the fireplace anyway. They should really do something about Tucker's shoulder, not to mention Danny's...everything, but they were teenagers. Procrastination was their thing. If Tucker didn't mind sleeping on the ground in the Mansons' secondary reception area with his pajama shirt soaked through with blood and pasted to his skin, then Sam wouldn't deprive him of that luxury.
Quietly, as quietly as the burning gas issuing industriously from the pipes around the charred corpse in her parents' fireplace, Sam slipped back into the living room. She settled down for a long, unblinking wait.
~(*0*)~
The daylight passed away in eight shifts.
Mr. Foley came and went, successfully kept from Schulker's remains by Sam and Tucker. When he first made it back into the house, they caught him just before he could enter the living room and managed to redirect him to the kitchen with pleas of trauma-induced hunger that could only be satisfied by a famous Foley-formulated grilled cheese. Tucker had by that point changed his shirt, after allowing Sam to wipe his scratches clumsily with alcohol wipes and bandage his shoulder in an inexpert imitation of a Youtube video she pulled up on her phone. Danny had been the one to declare that the injury probably didn't warrant stitches. Neither of them had asked how he knew.
Sam got her sea legs back, Tucker hugged and distracted his dad, Danny watched videos on Sam's phone while his charged, and they all took shifts watching the form in the fireplace crackle and distend. It was peaceful, somehow. It was mesmerizing, in a way. The torturous buildup of tension accrued since the portal's first opening had been discharged all at once, in one insane morning's expenditure of energy, and if Tucker was right, then they had two whole weeks until they really had to deal with this stuff again. Until Halloween, when the killer did whatever it was they'd ruined three souls to achieve. And it was definitely three. The current killer had been confirmed the second killer, and Schulker had said Nikolai Technus was the first. ("So victim number four really was killer number one," Sam summed up, closing her eyes to enjoy the sensation as that slotted into place and things made just a little more sense. "That's why the first three victims never showed up. Their murders had already been avenged.") If the rule of three meant even half as much in the occult as everything Sam had ever heard or read had suggested it did, he wouldn't kill again. Shouldn't do anything until Halloween. Two weeks are a long time, for a teenager with a due date.
An hour before sunset, it occurred to Tucker to inform his dad that they were now truly, totally, definitively out of salt. Which was–bad, in the current circumstances. Mr. Foley reluctantly left to grab some from the Foley apartment, since stores remained almost definitely sold out. Sam, Tucker, and Danny didn't begrudge him this absence, or his use of the Foleys' car, the only car at the house that wasn't almost out of gas. After all, they were out of danger, basically, right? Would be for two weeks.
As near as they could figure later, Danny was on his second shift, ninth overall, when the first people started arriving.
~(*0*)~
Somehow, there were nearly forty of them by the time Tucker noticed, a murmuring, milling mass on the Mansons' front lawn and driveway. Maybe fifty. Maybe more. Every time he snuck a glimpse, Tucker saw more faces he recognized, faces from school, but unfamiliar faces, too. Parents, perhaps. Older friends. Dash was there, and Star, and the guy with the patterned shirts, and the girl with the box braids. Amity Park, scared and angry.
Tucker figured they'd more or less found out who threw the brick.
He called his dad for this one, and his mom. Murderous ghosts were one thing; this was a whole different animal, right here. Maybe the worst part was, after the ordeal this morning Tucker found he was too tired to even feel scared properly. Instead of making it to his head, the feeling just kind of curdled and soured in his stomach, compressed to a few measly dribbles by the weariness that settled over it like the lead weight in an experiment on liquid displacement. Mom and Dad told them to sit tight, and not to answer the door or show themselves through the windows. They told him they'd called the police, but given the force's response time to the body this morning they weren't likely to get there for a few hours. They told him a lot of the roads were shut down, making it hard to navigate, but they were on their way as fast as possible.
Of course, when the first window broke, they still weren't there yet.
From his position around the corner, Tucker imagined he could feel the gust of cold air, even though that probably wasn't physically possible on a night with no wind like that one. Danny and Sam were both with him, Danny holding both their hands in case he had to turn them invisible in a hurry; they'd finally abandoned their watch. Even if the power went out and the gas stopped running and the new logs they'd added burned down to ash, Schulker would still be stuck behind the salt line. Apparently they'd had their respite; the universe had decided it was time they faced this new trial. Woohoo.
A lone voice called through the breach, too bright and slightly accented. "Foley? Sammy? We know you're there."
Sam's hand visibly tightened in Danny's. She shot Tucker a look that said, Of course it's Paulina. I told you so.
"Why did you kill that man? Or have the ghosts do it, I guess. Outside your house, Sammy, you didn't even try to hide it?"
He shot her back a look that said, Ahaahaaaaghuhuhhgh shit. Danny caught the tail end of this look and just looked tired.
"We just want answers, Sammy. We know you're not telling us. How did this whole green sky thingy start? What's wrong with the new boy? All these people deserve to know what you're hiding from us." The manipulative bitch, she knew practically everything they knew, she'd helped them figure it out in the first place, why was she doing any of this?
"We are coming in, Sammy. Foley. Is the new boy there? He's kind of cute, for what I am pretty sure he is…."
There was the tinkle of glass shards carefully removed from a windowsill. The quiet stamp of feet on wood flooring.
Danny sighed, and said, quietly, "We're leaving." And then everything was cold and he could see–
~(*0*)~
"Woah, wait. What's wrong with Tucker?"
Their small group, linked up in a line like kindergarteners, had made it a good three blocks away from the Manson house (by going out the back door and then invisibly, intangibly phasing through a good number of fences, doghouses, and street lamps, which was a horrible sensation) before Sam noticed that there was anything wrong with Tucker. She'd been concentrating on the gross tingly feeling under her skin and walking into things without flinching or tripping or thinking about how this was the first time ever in her life that she wasn't seeing her own nose, and Danny had been concentrating on...being a ghost, she guessed, and doing the thing that made them invisible and intangible. Neither of them had broken the silence, for obvious reasons. As such, it was something of a surprise when they noticed that Tucker was stumbling along with them mechanically, eyes wide and fixed on the asphalt beneath them, mouth moving to form silent words as Danny jerked him to a delayed stop.
Danny frowned, peering closer. Well, Sam thought that was probably what happened; he was kind of hard to visually process right now. "I think he's having a weird reaction to being–what's the word, she–uh, discorporated. Because of the psychic thing?" he said in that staticky way of his.
Oh, that made sense. Wait. "Discorporated?!" Sam squeaked, suddenly very preoccupied with the nose thing after all. "I thought you said we were just invisible and intangible! Where are our bodies?!"
Danny probably looked taken aback. It was still really freaky to have him face her like that. "Uh. Well. I don't know exactly, but if you had bodies you wouldn't exactly be intangible and invisible, right? So they're probably a little–nonexistent, or something, right now. Temporarily! Once I let go you'll go right back to normal. We've totally tested this. Exhaustively."
Sam immediately snatched her hand back and was both relieved and kind of surprised by the way her nose reappeared in her field of vision. It was cold out. She took a moment to breathe, then grabbed Danny's wrist; the tingly feeling washed over her again, and goodbye nose. "Shouldn't you let go of Tucker?"
Danny glanced over his shoulder. They were on an empty street, another cul-de-sac, and by now it was fully dark. Two streetlights out of ten were working, and the three of them were under neither of those two. "We should probably get further away…?"
Sam had to concede this point, but god, the checked-out look on Tucker's face was starting to make her scared again in that visceral way she hadn't been able to become in the face of the mob. "Okay, five more minutes. The Foleys' house is that way."
Five minutes later, they were walking briskly down a major street and halfway to the Foleys' house, but there were people out, so Sam was forced to let Tucker continue to stumble and mutter. In another ten minutes, they finally got to Tucker's street, and Sam figured they might as well just go all the way at this point. As soon as they were under the lip of the roof at his front door, Sam let go of Danny's semi-tangible dead-person wrist and lightly whacked his other hand, even as he grumbled about how he was letting go anyway so they could get across the front door salt line. As soon as the contact ended, Tucker started to pitch forward, and Sam caught him under the arms just as light flashed to her right and Danny made himself human enough to open the unlocked door.
She didn't have to bear Tucker's full weight, though, because he recovered his footing almost immediately after she got a firm hold. "Tuck? Tucker? Are you–Tuck, what's up?"
"Ugh, I–what?" He looked around, confused. This close, Sam could see that his pupils were both shrinking down from a much larger size, but at different speeds.
"We're at your house, Danny got us away by dis–the invisibility thing he talked about. Paulina was at the house, you remember that, right?" She steered him inside as she talked, not that he needed much steering; the puzzled furrow in his brow smoothed out pretty quickly.
"Yeah, I remember, I just don't remember–what the hell, that felt weird, dude!" He turned an incredulous stare on Danny, then Sam. "You didn't feel that?"
It seemed like he would be fine, as long as she kept ignoring his risks of shoulder wound infection. "Uh, no, I just felt cold. It tingled."
"It was like all my–like all my senses were–and I was feeling–inverted? It was completely freaky." He absentmindedly pushed past Sam to flop on the sofa of his own couch. She followed him while Danny, looking a little guilty, moved around closing curtains. They'd left the lights off, as well. "Wait–we're at my house," Tucker noticed.
"Yes…?"
"Where are my parents?"
"...Oh my god," Sam responded. "They were on their way to my house…."
"I'm calling them right now," Tucker declared in a cracking voice but with new energy, already pulling out his phone.
While he did that, Danny wandered back to the couch and fell onto it just as exhaustedly as, though somehow more gracefully than, the other two had. Sam and Danny looked at each other for a minute, clearly mutually desiring not to have to talk about any of what had happened that day.
At length, Sam resigned herself to the responsibility. "...Okay, so Paulina is working with the killer, or she is the killer. Or maybe there's three, who fuckin' knows. What the hell is up with that."
Danny, without standing up, managed to slide off the couch and onto the ground. He still looked awful, and he was stabilizing his messed-up arm against his torso. "I mean. I dunno. She's your scary goth archnemesis or whatever."
Tucker, who'd just finished conversing over the phone in a low voice, chuckled at that, a bit weirdly. "Goth? Have you seen the woman's wardrobe?"
"Hey, those were some really threatening pinks."
"We're getting off topic." Sam scowled. "The point is, she's either switched sides, or she was messing with us the whole time."
Danny crossed his arms and looked to Tucker consideringly. "Well, she's against us now. Question is, does that mean she knows who the killer is?" Sam turned to Tucker too; he was the people person here.
Tucker looked confused at this bend in the conversation, and he took a moment to organize his thoughts. When he spoke, it was slow and measured. "I'm still–her reaction was weird, in the cafeteria. I just don't think she wanted to do any of this. I don't know if she's being controlled in some way? And honestly if it's connected to the murderer at all, but it's gotta be." Tucker leaned his head back slowly against the top of the back of the sofa, gazing from under heavy lids at the ceiling. A good position for musing. "I mean, essentially all she's done is redirect suspicion away from whoever actually caused the Amitypocalypse, sort of. And now everyone hates us and is super aware of us, and our main method of investigation was just getting close to people and having awkward conversations and eavesdropping, so now we can't keep...investigating...the school…."
"...Oh."
"...Shit."
They processed that. One thing was clear: They needed to have a serious and intelligent discussion about how to proceed.
~(*0*)~
"I–dude. Samantha. Love of my life. I swear, Paulina is definitely not the guy who attacked me in the library! One hundred percent certainty! Statistically speaking, I could not be more certain!" Tucker might have been going a little insane. Or maybe the ceiling really was swimming.
"Maybe you just don't want to admit that you got beat up by a 5'4" cheerleader in acrylics," Sam goaded.
"I mean, gymnastics makes you buff," Danny said consideringly. Tucker wasn't sure what his goal was; did he think he was helping?
Okay, in all honesty, Paulina probably did have a good chance against him physically if she got in quick and used her nails with maximum meanness, but she really was more of a psychological or emotional threat. And trying to make a link between the semi-comedic image of the two of them really going at each other, and his memories of the library that still woke him up in a cold sweat, was kind of brain-breaking.
"I know what I saw, though. The guy was built like a linebacker."
It had been a long three hours of completely unproductive conversation, after that little oh-crap moment before, and Tucker's parents still weren't home. He'd reached them on the phone, and apparently they'd gotten stopped at one of the hazmat suit guys' checkpoints. Once Tucker had reassured them of his safety, Mom had decided to take advantage of the delay to tell the hazmat guys–the ghost FBI?–an abridged, Danny-free version of how the greenout had started, and also to try to get them to get people dispatched to the Mansons' before the property damage could become too severe. Mom and Dad had tried to reach the ghost FBI before, despite Danny's nervous grumbling, but the guys didn't seem to have an agency phone number and were ridiculously hard to find when you actually wanted them there. Almost like some sort of...secret government organization, huh.
Anyway. The point was, they were alone in the house for the time being, sitting on the couch and getting nothing done, simultaneously so, so tired and too wired to sleep.
Tucker should end the conversation, at least; it was miserable to mull over the endless possibilities. There was no plan of action developing tonight. "Ughhhh. I don't wanna thiiiink…."
Sam leaned over and poked him hard in the ribs.
"...Too tired…my brain just got made into a ghost omelet…."
"All two brain cells, what a loss."
"Tuck, do you have wet wipes?" Danny asked, apparently also giving up.
'What, more extradimensional oozing?" He turned a gimlet eye on Danny. "Not on Mom's couch."
"I know, that's why I was asking!"
And so they settled in again, for the second time that day, to forget about murder and mayhem for a while and focusing on the possibilities of sleep. It was unlikely Paulina's mob would come here, with the police at least informed and the Tucker household boasting two responsible adult authority figures to the Manson house's zero.
And if the mob showed up, Danny could just invisible them away again. Tucker still couldn't fully comprehend what he'd experienced during that little episode. Apparently his nightmare sense did not like the sensation of him being the nightmare. But although it wasn't ideal, clearly it was efficient.
Something half-remembered from that little psychic episode stayed with him now, and it was keeping him awake even though all he currently wanted in this life was to sleep off all that cardio. It was like a shiver of anticipation, a tiny, gnawing worry.
Despite it, though, he managed to relax again. Whatever was coming, they had time to prepare. They had the resources to deal with it, probably, given how Danny had made the very serious angry mob a non-issue. They had a whole entire whopping two weeks.
At midnight, Tucker grabbed them all blankets from the hall closet.
At 1:16, Sam got up and tore off a banana, chewing it slowly and sleepily.
At exactly 2:03 a.m., Danny sat up straight, yelped "Fuck!" and, accompanied by the sound of smashing glass, blipped out of existence entirely.