Disclaimer: Still don't own anything you recognize, but I won't give up. I'll have Dennis before I die, you mark my words!
A/N: This chapter was originally a part of Chapter 4, but then I realized it was way too long and cut it into two. Thanks again for all the awesome reviews, I feel so special! And don't forget to check out Dark Castle Survivor, coming soon to the Movie Crossovers section!
Chapter 5: The First Ghost
By the time the crew reached their destination, a deserted cemetery on top of a hill, it was full dark. Each of the crew and Dennis were handed a clear waterproof jacket and a pair of odd-looking glasses.
Turning the specs over in his hand, Dennis looked up at Kriticos. Dennis wore glasses sometimes, when he was reading and when he was tired or stressed. But none of the other people there wore any seeing apparatus; either that or they preferred contacts.
"What are these for?" he asked Kriticos.
"Spectral viewers," the old man replied, pulling his own pair out of his breast pocket, "They allow living souls to see those who have died."
"Uh huh…"
Glasses that allowed you to see ghosts? This job was getting stranger and stranger by the second!
Quickly donning the specs, Dennis glanced around the cemetery. No ghosts popped out, which left him a bit relieved. Now that he was actually here, in this dark, dismal cemetery, preparing to catch a ghost, it didn't seem like such a good idea.
It had begun to rain harder, and the ground was muddy and slick.
Just then, a loud revving sound was heard, and a huge truck came barreling around the corner and up the hill to the graveyard. It ground to a stop, and the crew began to gather around it, unloading equipment the likes of which Dennis had never seen before. He made to follow, but Kriticos held out his hand to stop him.
"You'll be staying with me, Mr. Rafkin," he said, "You're to pinpoint the exact location of the spirit."
"How do I do that?" Dennis asked, "I usually have to wait for the ghost to come to me before I can sense it."
Kriticos dug around in his pocket for a second, finally pulling out a piece of paper and handing it to Dennis.
Taking it, Dennis squinted through the dark and rain to see it. It appeared to be a photocopy. It had a lot of squiggly writing on it that looked a lot like the writing from the office. Latin, then. Maybe even spells, who knew? And in the center of the page was an illustration of a young-looking child with a hole in its forehead.
Dennis glanced up at Kriticos, making a face.
"Lovely. How will this help me exactly?"
"You remember the vision you had earlier? Of the small boy?"
"Yeah." Dennis wasn't liking where this was going.
"That's the ghost that we're looking for. His name is – was – Billy Michaels. He was quite obsessed with the boyish game of Cowboys and Indians. His most prized possession was his authentic bow and arrow, and one day he got careless and fired it straight into the air…well, you can imagine what happened."
"Oh."
Dennis hadn't counted on hunting the ghosts of little boys. That was just a bit creepy. Like Sixth Sense stuff. Creepy.
"Now Mr. Rafkin, Billy was buried over here," Kriticos pointed to the left, "Let's start there."
Suddenly reluctant to go any nearer to the grave of this kid, Dennis forced himself to act cool as he trudged over to where a plain rectangular headstone poked out of the muddy grass under a large birch tree. Its inscription said:
"Billy Michaels
1954-1963
To our beloved son
Taken from us so young"
Dennis gulped as he stared from the picture to the tombstone and back again. Suddenly the spectral viewers didn't seem like such a great idea; he wasn't sure he wanted to see the ghost of this poor little kid. Even less sure that he wanted to catch him and put him in a box.
Just then, Dennis felt something brush his sleeve. He snapped his head to elbow height, expecting little Billy Michaels to tugging at his sleeve, but saw nothing.
Sighing with relief, he shook his head. He was getting paranoid.
Then he saw it. Sticking out from the grass a few inches from his foot was the feathery shaft of an arrow.
Dennis' blood ran cold, but before he could utter a sound he was driven to his knees by pain.
*A little kid sitting in front of an old fashioned TV, watching a western movie. The same little kid in his front yard, playing cowboys and Indians with his friend. Oh wow, a real bow and arrow! Drawing back the string. I wonder if I can shoot it straight up, like they do in the movies. Twang, wow, look at it fly! Flash, climbing, tree, dead branches, dark graveyard, an ambush*
Dennis opened his eyes in time to see another arrow come flying down from above to land next to his knee. At least the kid couldn't aim right.
Letting instinct guide him, Dennis did the first thing he could think of: rolled.
He tucked and rolled out from under the tree, observing that Kriticos had already retreated and was eyeing the tree like an art critic would appraise a particularly rare painting. Following the old man's gaze and trying to ignore the steady aching in his head, Dennis saw something he had seen so many times before and yet had not really seen: a ghost.
Billy Michaels hung by his knees in a childlike fashion from the lower branches of the birch. He was wearing a plaid shirt and brown pants. He had a feather strapped to his head, right below the shaft of an arrow that protruded from a bloody wound under his hair. And he was aiming a ghostly bow and arrow right at Dennis!
Frozen in place, Dennis knelt there on the grass. Time stood still for an instant and faintly, Dennis could hear somebody yelling.
Then, without warning, something caught him blindside and pushed him face-first down into the mud, knocking the wind out of him. His head exploded with pain and sparks of light danced in front of his eyes, accompanied by visions. For a minute he thought he had been hit and was dying. But then his senses returned and he realized that somebody was on top of him!
Gritting his teeth against the pain and fighting back the visions of a redheaded little girl getting shouted at by some random adult, he managed to get enough air into his lungs to shout, "Get off of me!"
The person's dead weight rolled off of him, and after a minute, Dennis was able to shake off enough of the pain to sit up on his elbows and glare at the person who had fallen on him. Who else? Ailis O'Shea.
"What is it with you?" he wheezed.
She was on all fours in the mud, glaring right back at him
"I'm sorry," she replied sweetly, "I don't know what came over me. What was I thinking, SAVING YOUR ASS!?"
She shouted the last part, but over her shrieking, Dennis could hear some strange chanting sound.
Without acknowledging her indignation, Dennis narrowed his eyes.
"What's that?"
Ailis stopped huffing for a moment to squint and listen.
"That? Those are the summoning spells," she said disdainfully, "You know, the ones to lure the ghost into the cube?"
She said that like it should have been obvious, which, at any other time in any other circumstance, it would have been.
"Oh, right," he said, getting up in time to see the doors of the large containment cube slide soundlessly shut on their charge, whom it seemed had just moseyed on in. Great.
Ailis rose beside him, her blue jeans and plastic jacket completely caked with mud. Looking down at herself, she winced. When she looked over at Dennis she smirked. He looked down and realized he was covered head to toe in slimy mud.
"Since it doesn't seem I'm going to get a 'thank you'," Alis snarled, "I guess I'll go get cleaned up."
"Yeah," Dennis said, knowing that was probably the wrong thing to say, but after a near-death encounter he wasn't really in the greatest of moods. "Yeah, you do that."
Now that the adrenaline and terror were draining out of his system, Dennis realized that his ankle was sore. He had probably twisted it when he had rolled out from under the tree. Shifting his weight off of it, he massaged his diaphragm with the heel of one mud-slick hand and wiped his running nose with the other, leaving a smear across his face.
'Attractive,' he thought grimly.
He limped his way over to where the crew and Kriticos had gathered around to gawk at their capture, completely oblivious to his plight. Kriticos turned, a big, boyish grin on his face, and beckoned Dennis over.
"Look, Mr. Rafkin," he said impatiently, waving Dennis over to look into to the interior of the cube, where Billy was hunched into a pout, staring out at them all. "Incredible, isn't it?"
Dennis didn't understand what was so marvelous about the kid, considering he had tried to kill him. He was more worried about getting back to the hotel and getting out of his wet, muddy clothes.
He turned back to Kriticos to find the old man peering at him.
"Are you alright, Mr. Rafkin?"
"Alright? Sure. It's not like almost getting harpooned by some ghost kid's arrow doesn't happen to me everyday or anything."
He tried but couldn't succeed at getting the bitterness out of his voice. It kinda hurt that nobody had even noticed he had almost died.
Kriticos frowned.
"The boy shot at you?"
"Almost," Ailis said, coming up behind the two men, "And if it hadn't been for me you would have had two arrowed ghosts on your hands."
Kriticos looked back and forth between the two for a minute, then at the cube, where the kid still stood with a malignant pout on his face.
"Well," Kriticos said slowly after a few moments, "I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Rafkin. I knew, of course, that this spirit was a bit…violent, but I never thought that he would attempt on the lives of any of the crew. I really don't know what to say other than I'm ever so sorry, and thank you, Ms. O'Shea, for making sure I still have a psychic to help me."
He placed a hand on Ailis' shoulder and nodded to Dennis, then turned to the rest of the crew and raised his voice.
"Alright everyone, let's get this packed up and make our exit. It's getting late and we have to get the cube down to the storage facility I have arranged for it. You three-" Kriticos pointed out three men Dennis didn't know by name, "You get the cube into the truck. You," he pointed out some more, "pack up the rest of the equipment. You," he pointed to the guy called Ian, "You wait until they've finished and drive the truck back to the storage facility I've arranged for. Is that clear?"
After a few nods and 'uh huh's, Kriticos turned back to Dennis and Ailis.
"You two will return to the hotel with me and rest. We're moving out tomorrow at eight."
"What?" Dennis yelped, "Eight? In the morning? Where are we going?"
"To get the next ghost, Mr. Rafkin," Kriticos said, as if talking to a small child, "I told you we were on a very tight schedule."
With that, the old man turned and beckoned them towards the vehicle that he had driven from the hotel, a large black Lincoln. Probably a rental, Dennis thought blearily as he followed Kriticos toward it. It looked like a hearse.
When Kriticos motioned for him and Ailis to get in, Dennis balked.
"We're kinda…er…muddy." Understatement of the year. "Don't the rental people frown on that?"
Kriticos shrugged.
"Mr. Rafkin, when you pay the rental people as much as I did for this ancient piece of junk, they don't tend to complain about the condition it comes back in."
Dennis stood there stunned for a moment, contemplating just how wealthy Kriticos was, then shrugged and levered his long legs into the backseat, cringing instinctually when his wet butt hit the seat with a soft squelching sound.
Ailis swung in on the opposite side, and Kriticos settled himself in the front passenger seat. To Dennis' surprise, there was a driver already in place. He must have been sitting there the entire time, because he wasn't wet or muddy.
Wondering if this guy came with the car or if he was one of the crew, Dennis sat upright to get as little mud on the seat as humanly possible in his position. The driver, a balding man in his late thirties, gunned the engine and made a slippery turn in the muddy grass before motoring down the hill.
Glancing over at Ailis, Dennis saw her slumped forward in he seat, also trying very hard not to get mud on the soft black upholstery. She turned to look at him and their eyes met for a second before she turned away to look out her window at the lit-up suburbs they were driving through.
Dennis turned away as well, but not before being overwhelmed with a sense of sadness that he could swear hadn't come from him. Was it his powers, in tune with her emotions? Shaking his head a bit to clear it, Dennis stared blearily out his own window, watching the drops of rain merge with each other on the glass, wondering what it must be like to be so close to something you became one.
Dennis had learned very early that he couldn't be like the rest of the guys his age. He couldn't be intimate with women, he couldn't even touch them. Wouldn't if he could, because he didn't really tend to like women. In his experience, women were either nasty, cruel creatures that had stayed away from him or had sat muttering and laughing harshly at him, not even bothering to hide their ridicule. Or worse, there were the girls who simpered, thinking that talking to him out of pity would make things better and that they'd be heroes for just taking the time to talk to poor, fucked-up Dennis. No, women were complications he tended to avoid.
Oh, sometimes when he woke up in the middle of the night, he would be overcome with sadness and loneliness. But in the daytime when he was sane and he had the emotional shields in place to protect him from everyday ridicule, he never had a problem.
And besides, he thought bitterly, women never seemed all that interested in him, either. Oh, there was that girl from the library the other day, who had probably been begging for an excuse to forget her miserable life for a minute. That was different. Nobody really cared enough about him to go after him seriously. And who could blame them? He had so much emotional baggage they would be crushed by it.
A vision of Ailis popped into his mind. Stepping out of the crowd and holding out her hand to shake his. Being the only one there to notice he was about to get shot and saving him. And then he had been rude to her.
Mentally smacking himself on the head, Dennis figured he should apologize at the first opportunity. He snuck another peek at Ailis. She was still staring out the window, caught up in her own thoughts.
'No,' he told himself firmly, 'I am NOT attracted to Ailis. Not at all. Ailis is irritating, and bitter, and catty. No, I am definitely NOT interested.'
Feeling a little better, Dennis realized they had pulled up at the hotel.
He popped the door open and squelched out, cringing. The seat was probably ruined. Reaching into his pocket, he clutched his pill bottle. He sighed and, without waiting for Ailis or Kriticos, made his way through the rain to the hotel.