bare bones
Written for Spooktober 2021, Prompt: Haunted. Comments and kudos would be awesome. Enjoy!
Chapter 3:
Fred arrives at the house bright and early, as always. He comes bearing coffee and donuts from the little café back in town. He unlocks the front door while balancing his cargo and lets himself inside. Shaggy is always up by the time he gets here, so he fully expects to find the other man already at work on some project or the other or at least preparing to work on something.
"Shaggy," he calls out, entering the kitchen to deposit the food and drinks. "I brought breakfast!"
No answer comes. Odd. If there's one thing he's learned about Shaggy in their time together here, it's that he loves food.
"…Shaggy?"
There is no barking from Scooby Doo, he realizes now. No sound of approaching footsteps, the house is eerily quiet, empty. He moves through the rooms and finds no sign of them. He sees no trace of either Shaggy or Scooby out back or out front and a glance at the driveway confirms that the colorful van is still parked in its usual place.
So he checks there.
And there he finds them. They're both sound asleep in the back of the vehicle.
He knocks lightly on the van's door and a moment later it slides open.
"Fred?" Shaggy blinks up at him, blinded by the early morning sunlight streaming in. He stretches, yawns, still half-asleep. "What're you doing here?"
"What are you doing here?" Fred counters, beyond confused. "There are like twelve bedrooms in that house, Shaggy, why are you sleeping out here in your shitty van?"
"Yeah, like, that place is creepy at night, okay?"
Fred offers a hand. And then he offers breakfast.
Fred leaves for town a little later than usual that evening thanks to some last minute patch work for a storm that's supposed to be rolling in. But, not long after he takes his leave, the ominous noises of the night before, the cause of their retreat to the van, start back up again. Some of them are even explainable – the staccato tap-a-tap-tap of a tree branch on the window, the gusting wind blowing the loose shutters against the siding, the pipes rattling whenever he runs the water in parts of the house where Fred hasn't yet replaced the plumbing. Others, however, are less so – the sound of shuffling footsteps on creaky, old floorboards in seemingly empty rooms, heavy doors opening and closing where no wind could be moving them. They ignore it for a long while, but then there is a new addition tonight, an eerie cackle coming from the basement. He's sure he doesn't imagine it, he sees Scooby's ears perk up at it, too, flicking this way and that until they, too, are pointed at the door to the basement.
Shaggy can't quite bring himself to move, frozen in place on the couch where he'd fallen asleep in the process of going through boxes upon boxes of old letters and files with Scooby sprawled out on the floor at this side. "You, like, wanna go sleep in the van again, Scoobs?"
An alarmingly loud crash of thunder reminds them that there is quite storm brewing out there, bringing with it whipping winds and a heavy downpour. The trip between the front porch and the van seems just as unpleasant as staying inside with the spooky soundtrack of the house.
"It's probably just all in our heads, right?"
But Scooby's still eyeing the basement door, and he lets out a low growl.
"Well, you're no help," Shaggy decides.
Luckily, despite the lengthy list of projects still on the ever growing to do list of things that need to be done to get this house into a condition that is at least debatably livable, fixing the phone lines is one thing that's already been crossed off of it. The sound of a dial tone when he picks up the phone is almost enough of a relief on its own that, for a second, he considers putting it back down and not making the call he was about to. But then the evil cackling noise comes again, closer this time, like it's working its way up the rickety basement steps, and he finds himself punching in the number.
"Hello?" A sleep-thick voice finally comes on the other end of the line in the middle of the fourth ring, and it's only then that Shaggy realizes that it's almost two in the morning and it is most definitely not a socially acceptable time to be calling anybody, let alone somebody who is technically working for him.
And suddenly he realizes that he doesn't know what to say. 'Hey, there are a lot of really scary noises and could you come back, please?' or 'hey, I know you only left like four hours ago, but would you mind driving the hour back because apparently Great Uncle Beauregard was collecting ghosts, too, on top of all the Civil War memorabilia, antique weaponry, taxidermy animals, snuffboxes, and old newspapers and while I don't know what to do with any of those things, the ghosts are definitely becoming a more pressing issue.'
"Hello?" Fred's voice comes again, tired and slightly irritated. "Who is this?"
Just as Shaggy figures out what he's going to say – he's settled on a pathetic 'sorry, wrong number' in a voice that doesn't sound like his own – there's a crash as the basement door blows open with impressive force. The evil laugh comes again, entirely too close now, and then he's running away as fast as he can, complete with panicked screams and Scooby on his heels. The phone dangles, still off the hook, the call forgotten.
They go, as per usual, back to the van. The locked doors of the colorful vehicle provide a semblance of security the sprawling plantation house does not, as does the implication that they can hop into the front and drive the hell away from here should anything even remotely spooky have followed them out. Soaked as they may be by their mad dash through the rain, they settle in for another long night.
Forty-five minutes after their hasty retreat, however, headlights come careening into view. Fred's work van speeds into the empty space beside theirs, skidding to a hard stop in the mud and Fred's already practically diving out of it, instantly drenched by the storm.
"Shaggy!" He shouts, wide awake and terrified in stark contrast to how he'd sounded on the phone just a short while ago. "Scooby-Doo! Where are you!?"
Shaggy, mystified by Fred's sudden appearance, clambers out of the van just as Fred makes it to the porch. "Here, Fred!" He calls out, and suddenly Fred is sprinting towards him, instead.
"You scared the hell out of me," Fred breathes, pulling Shaggy into a desperate hug.
Upon finally getting an explanation out of the very shaken, very reluctant Shaggy, Fred insists on calling the police to check the place out. Someone could have broken in, he reasons, after all he's heard stories about high school kids messing around on the property for years now, daring each other to knock on the door or throw rocks through the windows. And while in the midst of a storm would be an odd time for idiot kids to be messing around, he wouldn't be surprised if that turned out to be the case.
But, as late as it is, and as far out as the house is, there's no way the sheriff will come out until morning. They stay in the van as no one is willing to enter the house and there's no point in going back to town - they'd only be able to get an hour or so of sleep before they'd have to come back – so they doze off there, leaned against each other's shoulders in the front seat so they can keep watch while Scooby snores away in the back.
Just after six, there comes a knock on the window of the van, jolting them back to consciousness. They're both surprised to find the town's lone Sheriff there, impatiently waiting in the remaining drizzle of rain.
The Sheriff greets them gruffly, clearly unhappy with being dragged out here so early, but he heads in, checks the place out and comes out in one unbothered piece a short while later. "Nothin' in there," he grumbles. "Looks like the storm blew out a window in the basement, though. Maybe that's what spooked ya."
"Maybe so," Shaggy concedes, but Fred can tell that he's not convinced by that explanation. A broken window didn't explain the alleged cackling noise. "Thanks for checking."
The Sheriff leaves and they are left to brave the house once more.