Clark arose in the morning feeling like the events of the previous evening had been nothing more than a nightmare. He'd told his parents about what had happened in town once he'd gotten a quiet moment alone with them, but Martha wasn't sure he hadn't simply gotten the jitters after Jonathan's spook story. In the end, Clark decided that if Lois could go to bed- his bed, and begin snoring within two minutes of hitting the pillow, then he should be able to deal with what they'd both seen in a similar manner.
"Finished your chores so soon, Son?" Jonathan smiled and grabbed a mug of coffee before taking a seat at the table.
Clark grinned, "Well you know how it is with Lois in the house…"
"I hope your not insinuating I have trouble getting up in the morning, Smallville?" Lois jogged through the screen door and shot Clark a suitably smug look. He'd obviously expected her to still be snoozing, but she'd been out early for a change.
"No, I um…" Clark stammered, and then decided he had better things to do than spar with their house guest. "Shouldn't you be in town getting your car towed?"
Lois grabbed a piece of buttered toast and took a bite before turning to smile broadly, "Just as soon as my chauffeur is ready…" She winked and Clark groaned.
Martha looked on apologetically, "Sorry, Sweetheart, but I volunteered you for the task. We need some feed picking up from the store and I thought you wouldn't mind giving Lois a ride into town."
"Can I gag her first?" Clark quipped jovially, and took a punch from Lois for his trouble. When her fist hit something hard in his pocket she frowned.
"Hiding something in there, farmboy?"
Clark nodded mysteriously and glanced at his parents. "As a matter of fact, I am. It's something I want Chloe to take a look at." He took Lois' arm and began to gently tug her from the Kent kitchen, "That is, if madam is ever going to be ready to go into town with her chauffeur…"
Lois tossed her half eaten toast into the waste bin and just managed to grab her jacket before being jostled out of the door. In the corner, Shelby whined sympathetically and cocked his head. Even he realized that Lois and Clark made quite a couple- they just hadn't figured it out yet.
As Clark headed out of Hickory Lane in the warm morning sun, Lois couldn't help but stare at the still smashed window pane to his left. No one had spoken much about it in the Kent household, but that didn't stop her from wondering.
She twisted a lock of hair around in thought as they drove towards town, "So, any theories on why half the cars in Smallville came alive last night?"
Clark shrugged but kept his eyes on the road, "I guess it must have been something electrical…" he tried to think positively. There are no such things as ghosts!
"Electrical my as…" Lois' brow furrowed and she thankfully didn't finish her sentence. Instead, she turned in her seat as they passed the Spooner residence. "Hey, Smallville, isn't that where those jocks were messing around last night?"
Clark stole a glance and immediately slowed the truck. There was something in the field that led up to the main house- something that looked suspiciously like a body, or at the very least someone lying unconscious. "I knew they were drinking too much!" he looked in his rear view mirror and once it was safe pulled the pick up off the road.
Without waiting for Lois' approval, Clark jumped from the cab and began to run over to the prone form in the grass. Lois as always followed, and soon wished she hadn't.
Phil Gates- or what was left of him, lay face down in the mud the teens had churned up playing ball. It wasn't easy for Clark to even recognize the jock, because the body had been horrifically burned until there was nothing left but a charred and mangled corpse.
"It's Phil…" Clark turned his head away, feeling nauseated.
Lois put a hand to her mouth but still managed to ask, "How can you tell?"
Clark winced. He'd made the usual mistake of using his gifts and then opening his mouth before thinking. His x-ray vision had easily penetrated the body's outer layers to reveal metal plates on the skeleton's left femur where Gates had suffered an injury that had took him out of the game.
"I just know, okay?" Clark couldn't help being a little terse. Only hours earlier they'd seen Gates and two others drinking. If only I'd pulled over and talked some sense into them.
Lois realized she'd put her foot in it as usual and laid a hand gently on Clark's arm. "We should call the police. I'm no investigator, but we have to assume this is murder."
Clark nodded dolefully. "I left my cell phone in the truck. I'll go call them." He shot Lois a warning glance, "Don't touch anything that might be evidence."
Lois folded her arms and pulled an expression that said her stomach had been turned enough already. Satisfied, Clark began to jog back down for his phone with the idea that somehow this all had to do with the journal still lying in his pocket.
Lois kept her eyes from the blackened corpse and focused instead on the house that was only a stones throw away. There were three guys out here last night. What if the other two are dead or injured in there?
As usual, the General's daughter wasn't about to wait for help. She took one long glance at Clark talking on his cell phone and then began to run towards the house behind her. The thought never crossed her mind that dangers, or indeed the killer may wait within.
She reached the screen door without even breaking a sweat and paused. Something had been slammed into the wooden timbers of the house about chest high. Whatever the object was it had been sharp enough to make deep gouges in the lumber. Lois fingered the impression, imagining what the implement that caused it could do to soft human flesh. She gulped, but still pushed open the screen door with a wince.
The kitchen appeared empty at first glance, but then Lois felt something behind her. A presence that somehow made the hairs on the back of her neck began to stiffen. She wanted to whirl around but abruptly found her feet glued to the tiled floor.
Even though Lois didn't move, it didn't stop the thing behind her from falling. Lois screamed as a heavy weight suddenly dropped on her back, knocking her to the floor with its momentum.
She writhed, not realizing at first that her attacker was long dead. Eventually, she calmed somewhat and rolled over to look into the empty, charred eye sockets of Ben Steadman. He too had been burned to a crisp and all that remained recognizable was a swatch of red and yellow on his letterman's jacket.
Lois tried to push the fragile corpse from atop her, but the footballer was just too heavy even in this state. "Argh!" She yelled out in revulsion and fear, and this time there was help at hand.
Lois didn't know where he'd come from, he appeared so rapidly, but no sooner had she cried out a second time than Clark was at her side, tugging off the body like it weighed nothing.
"Lois! Are you alright?" There was genuine concern in his eyes, and it reminded her of the time she'd been left to drown in a Metropolis, only to be saved by the mysterious plaid wearing farm boy.
"I'm fine," Lois pushed up on her shoulders and puckered her nose, "which is more than I can say for jock number two…"
Clark nodded. "Sheriff Adams is on her way. She didn't believe me at first…apparently the police were inundated with calls about weird stuff last night." He looked to Steadman's body, "Why?" Was all he could ask.
Lois shook her head and scrambled back up on her feet. She brushed flecks of burnt flesh from her jacket and then stopped dead as she heard another sound. Clark had picked up on it too. He shot Lois a 'don't move' look and then carefully crept towards the door the noise was coming from. Lois couldn't know it, but Clark had already scanned behind and knew what he was up against.
Slowly, the towering teen turned the door knob and drew it back. He wasn't cautious because he was up against a killer, but because he knew an old friend had somehow been reduced to a quivering mess, hiding on the closet floor.
As the daylight hit his eyes, Spooner began to shake until his body was almost convulsing. Somehow he dared to look up, expecting death, but miraculously all he saw were the troubled eyes of Clark Kent. The sight was too much, and Spooner couldn't hold back tears any longer. He rolled to his savior's feet and wept, little knowing more death was just a few hours away when it once again became the witching hour…
Clark paced the hallway of Smallville medical center as if someone close to him was in for major surgery. There was something terribly wrong in his home town, and somehow the teen knew he didn't have long to solve the mystery.
Once Adams had shown up at the crime scene things had gotten out of hand and fast. The local Sheriff was a disbeliever in all things meteor related, and she certainly didn't buy anything supernatural either. So, when all they'd been able to get out of Spooner was a tale of unearthly spirits, Adams had been inclined to lock the terrified teen in a cell as a suspect.
Clark had intervened of course, and almost ended up in a cell alongside Spooner. Amazingly, only Lois' involvement had stopped things from spiralling out of control. Somehow, the general's daughter had talked Adam's around to letting Spooner be taken to the hospital for observation, and Clark had had to agree the jock needed some kind of help big time.
Both charred bodies had also been taken to the hospital, although Clark expected the coroner would be dealing with them by now.
"Will you stop pacing, Smallville? You're making me feel seas sick!" Lois tugged a coffee from a nearby vending machine and then stuck in more coins to buy Clark a drink. "I'm sure Chloe will be here soon with all the wall of weird evidence you need to wrap up this case."
"Well, I don't know about wall of weird material, but I am here…" Chloe Sullivan breezed into the corridor with her usual enthusiastic vigour and looked to her two friends, "So, I hear we've a new mystery on our hands?" She let her gaze stop at Clark and cocked her head slightly.
Clark finally stopped his pacing and considered showing Chloe the journal. He took a look around at the milling crowds and decided that maybe the hospital wasn't quite the place. "Something weird is going on, Chloe, and I don't think its meteor related this time."
Chloe's brow furrowed. Almost everything strange in Smallville that happened stemmed from the meteor shower. "Well, meteors or not we've got a town that freaked out last night and two dead bodies."
"Freaked out?" Lois glanced at Clark, "you mean me and farm boy weren't the only ones who got a serious case of poltergeist in the early hours?"
Chloe nodded. "When Clark called me I decided to do a little digging before I met up with you two. It seems half of Smallville were witness to some pretty spooky goings on." She tapped a folder in her left hand, "Not to mention what Spooner told the doctor in E.R. when he was brought in. All he kept babbling about were 'the people in the fog.'"
"Yeah, well that must be the beer talking, because Clark and I passed those jocks last night and there was no fog out there." Lois waited for Clark to agree, but instead he looked away as if someone had suddenly slapped him across the face.
Chloe noticed his expression too. "Something wrong, Clark?"
"Just something my dad told me last night. It's probably nothing. I'll explain later." He tucked both his hands into his red jacket's pockets and made it quite clear he wasn't going to talk about it just yet. Lois would think I was nuts if I said I was considering ghosts… "So, apart from Spooner's explanation, did you find anything else out?"
Chloe grinned. "I don't have the best contacts in this hospital for nothing." She ushered them over nearer to the wall and out of the way of the crowds in the main corridor. Then, she lowered her voice as she opened up the folder in her hand. "It seems like the preliminary examinations of Gates and Steadman turned up some pretty interesting info." She flipped a page, "Neither of them actually died from the burns. Both of them have piercing wounds all over their bodies."
"Stabbed to death?" Lois whistled as she recalled the gouges in the wood near the screen door at Spooner's house.
"It gets weirder," Chloe couldn't explain the next part. Not if Clark and Lois were convinced they'd seen the jocks alive and well only hours earlier. "My 'friend' says the coroner is convinced Gates and Steadman were burned days ago. Something to do with the decomposition of the cadavers…"
"But that's impossible, Chloe!" Clark raised his voice and then quickly realized he was almost shouting, "We both saw them last night."
Lois huffed. "Typical small town medicine can't get anything right!" She began to scurry off down the corridor with one thing in mind, and Clark wasn't about to stop her. If Lois wanted to go play 'Quincy' then that left him time to finally tell Chloe more about the journal.
"Knowing Lois she just might storm the morgue…" Chloe looked over Clark's shoulder as her cousin vanished around a corner. "Do you think we should follow her?" Part of the reporter in her wanted to, but the other half had already guessed Clark wasn't going after Lois because he had something else to say.
"We can catch up in a minute, but first there's something I want to show you." Clark reached under his jacket and pulled out the aged diary from his pocket. "I found this in our attic last night, about the time all of those weird things started to happen in town."
Chloe took the small book and flipped open the cover. "Wow, talk about discovering your roots!" She read the very first entry and then looked up, "Have you read all of it?"
Clark shook his head. In all the confusion he'd read no more than Chloe just had, but that didn't stop his imagination from connecting the book to what was now happening in Smallville. "My dad told me a story last night from years ago. There was a fog involved. Some said it was an unnatural one…"
"Ugh oh," Chloe rolled her eyes, "Major spook alert, huh? Did this story explain why we're suddenly getting visitations after all these years?"
Clark looked to the floor, "No, but I have a feeling my finding the diary was somehow the catalyst. What else could it be?"
Lois could hear her cousin talking in the background as she bustled down the hospital hallway towards where the bodies of Steadman and Gates where being kept. It was all well and good Chloe looking for some supernatural answer, but Lois was convinced there had to be a more rational explanation- even here in Smallville.
"Burned days ago my foot!" She muttered under her breath as she reached an intersection in the corridor and took a left. "Have these guys even been looking at the right corpses?"
Lois stopped whining and dived into an alcove as an orderly exited the room she wanted to scope out. When he'd vanished into another corridor, she popped her head out and checked there was no one else around. Satisfied, she edged across the hallway and dived into the room before anyone could stop her.
It wasn't like she'd expected. Steadman and Gates were laid out on two separate examination tables and had only been covered by a sheet. Somehow, Lois had imagined they'd be locked up and refrigerated in body bags by now. Still, this scenario was all the better for her to have a look around.
Yeah right, like I get a kick out of looking at the dead! Lois lifted the first white sheet and scrunched up her nose in disgust at what she found. It was Steadman, the jock whose body had fallen on her in Spooner's kitchen. So, how the heck do I tell how long he's been dead? Burned is burned!
Lois glanced around to see if any paperwork had been left beside the bodies. There was a chart nearby, and she decided it warranted her scrutiny much more than the pungent corpse of one of the Smallville Crows finest. She tiptoed over and placed a hand on the chart, fully intent on reading its contents when a slithering sound caught her attention.
The noise had come from within the room, and it had sounded like something sliding across the linoleum flooring. No, not sliding, dragging… Lois' heart skipped a beat and she dared to spin around and confront what was behind her. The sight was not one she expected, and her legs became instantly frozen to the spot with fear. She screamed, even though it was not something 'the general's daughter' did very often, but then it wasn't exactly every day she got stalked by a dead man.
TBC...