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Shot 14 Summary: 100 years after the death of Valerie Gray, a couple of punks try to graffiti her statue. Something stops them. Genre: Horror/Supernatural. Two-part Halloween special!


Deliverance

Shot 14: The Haunting Part 1


Some said the 100-year-old statue of Valerie Gray was haunted or possessed. It was very cold within a ten foot radius and icy to the touch no matter the time of year. Weeds never grew at the feet of it. Birds never perched on its shoulders. Some visitors and tourists said they felt unwelcome there, while others stated that it just made them very sad and lonely, even if they had been laughing only moments before.

It had become something of a great tourist attraction, not only because Valerie Gray had perhaps single-handedly saved the world, but also because no one believed the effects of her statue until they felt it themselves.

The concrete statue itself was imposing. Nearly eight-feet tall and on a pedestal, the figure of Valerie stood straight-backed and tight-lipped, standing at attention. Her signature blaster rested in a holster on her hip, and her fingers were curled around it, as if ready to draw and shoot. Her eyes stared out into the vast horizon and looked not entirely as if they were searching for one Dan Phantom.

Some people said that the chilly presence was Valerie herself, still protecting them from the threat of dangerous ghosts. Others said that if Valerie's presence was chilled and unwelcoming, then her ghost was no protecting spirit. It made for a great debate, if not an uneasy one. But no one, not even the skeptics, had ever been endangered by the statue's strange affect, and no one dared to suggest bringing ghost hunters to exorcise the memorial of the greatest ghost hunter of all.

So the statue remained.

As the decades passed, history classes from high schools and colleges began to pilgrimage to Valerie's final resting place and statue. And on one autumn day, Casper High took a field trip to Valerie's final resting place and statue for a Modern History class.

"And here we are," the teacher droned on to his history class, motioning for them to stand around the memorial. He was a descendent of one Mr. Lancer, an infamous teacher back in the day who had actually taught Valerie Gray in class. The descendant by himself was nearly legendary for it. "The memorial for Valerie Gray, the Ghost Slayer and Military Commander of the Amity Park Resistance. She upheld the status as commander for five years upon her eighteenth birthday, and Amity Park thrived under her watch. She was known for singlehandedly opposing Phantom and subduing him. According to first-hand reports, the final battle lasted two days straight. Phantom faded out after attacking Commander Gray with the last of his energy, and she died shortly of injuries sustained in that fight. Next month will mark the one-hundredth anniversary of her death and, subsequently, our freedom from the reign of the dreaded Phantom."

Of the students who stood in the crowd, most of them looked upon the statue in awe. Some of them were perhaps even a bit fearful to tread near the marble slab in front of the statue that outlined the Commander's final resting place, only six feet under from where they stood. Some tourists had previously cast lilies and roses upon it. Legend was that Valerie had loved flowers but had never received any in life.

But one of the students gazed upon the statue and the flowers with a dark smirk. He was a tall boy for fourteen years old, and ideas were swimming in his rebellious head.

He wanted to make a statement that no one would forget.


Later that night, the teenage boy and his friend snuck into the courtyard, spray cans of black paint in their hands. They were snickering as they stood at the foot of the statue, staring up at the near eight-foot imposing figure.

"So I don't think she really did anything," the first boy said, tilting his head. "I mean, she had a nice rack, but she looks kinda ugly. That hair is freakin' insane. Like she stuck it in an old light socket."

Valerie Gray's ringlet hair was jumbled about her face and neck in thick locks, a few strands artistically lifting up. Perhaps to some it was beautiful, but others in the past had compared it to Medusa hair. It made people avoid looking straight into the statue's eyes, just in case.

Punk 2 laughed. "Yeah, man. All that talk about combat prowess? Ten to one, Phantom just liked her rack, and that's why she lasted so long. Whaddya bet?"

The first punk nodded, although he didn't laugh. "There's this whole conspiracy site about it. They say the last fight was staged and that neither of them really died. A couple of statements from people said it was too hard to tell where Gray had been hit and whether Phantom really did fade out. They're saying they faked it cause they were having an affair."

"You kidding me?" Punk 2 asked, eyebrows raising. "Man, I was just joking. You serious? Who the hell would think those two would be together, ever? She hunted him before he went ape shit."

"Check out the site, man. It's got testimonies from people who lived back then. Said it was weird that Phantom would do stuff just to get her attention, and then they'd fly off for the rest of the day, and Valerie would come back without any injuries at all. They said that before the final fight, Valerie acted strange, like she was hiding something. Some of the guys who tried to hit on her even 'mysteriously disappeared.' So Phantom destroyed most of the world, yeah, but Valerie wasn't a freakin' war general. She was just some slut in a cat suit."

"…You're telling me built a statue to Phantom's fuck buddy?"

"Damn straight," Punk 1 nodded. "Biggest conspiracy ever. Which is why we gotta ruin this statue. We're doing a public service. We're educating the town about what really happened." His nose scrunched as he stared at the statue. "I ain't gonna keep worshipping a bitch."

Punk 2 looked at the statue almost with more respect. "Are you kidding me? I mean, she'd have to have some serious skills in bed if she got Phantom to stop destroying places." He touched her leg. "Think about it, man. Think about it. She must have had him whipped. We're remembering her for all the wrong reasons."

Punk 1 rolled his eyes. "Phantom still destroyed stuff while they were fucking. Didn't mean anything to him. The whole 'final fight' was probably Valerie's idea, cause she couldn't keep her secret up anymore."

His friend challenged, "Then where are they now? If your conspiracy site's so right, wouldn't he still be here, destroying stuff? Why did he stop killing everything the day Valerie 'died'?"

Punk 1 shrugged. "Well, they rebuilt the Shield stronger, right? Site says Phantom must have learned how to cloak his own ecto-signature. He could be anywhere in the world. Especially since Valerie would be way dead by now."

"That is…freaking terrifying, dude. Don't ever say that again." Punk 2 patted Valerie's leg again. "I'm very content with the idea that they eloped, and then he got sad when she died and…faded out or something."

The teenage mastermind frowned. "Look, Phantom could just be lying low until the town takes the Shield down, and they're already talking about taking it down for the one-hundredth anniversary. The mayor says it's not worth the cost for how pointless it is." He shook the spray can with a grimace. "We gotta wake people up. We gotta save the world and stop worshipping a whore in a cat suit. Phantom wants us to think he's gone so that we'll all be dumb and defenseless when he strikes next."

"Oh, yeah? And when's that?"

His gaze darkened. "The site says he'll strike on the night of the one-hundredth anniversary, man. You heard Lancer. That's next month. And they're gonna freakin' take down the barrier if we don't do anything."

The teenage boy grabbed the flowers off the marble slab marking Valerie's grave. He tore the petals off the roses and stomped on the stems. "Gotta send people a message to stop worshipping a traitor," he said. He leaned down and grabbed one of the numerous cans of black spray paint from his open backpack. "You ready to make it rain?"

Punk 2 still looked somewhat smitten by Valerie's statue. "Yeah, I'm just remembering what it looked like." He paused for a second, trying to understand what it really could have been that Phantom saw attractive in this woman. "Okay, I'm good. Let's wreck it." The first boy threw him a can of spray paint, and he grabbed it from the air. "So what are you thinking we should do? Beard and mustache?"

"Well, that's a good start. And maybe we should add a Phantom symbol right on the crotch. You know, drive the truth home."

Punk 2 laughed. "Sick."

The single streetlamp along the sidewalk flickered a bit.

Suddenly, the lines of the statue darkened, its natural shadows creeping out against the already inky black of the night and the single streetlamp. An inhale of breath covered the small area with fog.

Punks 1 and 2 were entirely unaware. They had their backs turned as they opened up cans and snickered to each other, also pulling out keys to scratch messages into the marble slab.

The bushes and trees around them began to rot, their leaves shrinking and crumbling into dust. The ground beneath them shook, and the two boys lost their balance and fell on their butts, eyes wide. Their spray cans thumped to the grass, which felt ashy and dead beneath them.

"What the—?"

In the shadows, the face of Valerie Gray looked wildly twisted, her expression marred with great hatred. Her eyes seemed to emanate the silver light of the moon.

"Holy shit," Punk 1 breathed. "You seeing what I'm seeing?" He looked dazed by the light in its eyes, suddenly fearful that the rumors of the statue's Medusa status were true. Valerie's hair looked an awful lot like snakes against the moonlight.

"Uh, I dunno what's happening, man." The friend began to scoot away. "But that statue just freakin'—"

Suddenly flashes of memories that were not theirs invaded their vision.

From a far distance, they saw Valerie Gray, her body burnt and bleeding out. She was laughing and crying on the cratered dirt of a nearly destroyed Amity Park, her proud battle suit destroyed. Her wild hair was matted with blood, her limbs shaking. A dead blaster rested near her hand.

.

An older man, one arm missing, dropped down beside the woman and began to cry. "Valerie! Hold on. J-just hold on." It was Damien Gray, her father. Others, several medical doctors, began to drop down next to the woman, shoving the father out of the way. "Baby girl, please!"

The medics began to tear her battle suit open, but their bodies hid her ruined one. Their voices were hushed, quickly trying to staunch her bleeding.

"—Stress fractures in the neck—"

"—Heart stalling; need an AED, stat."

"Third-degree burns; left lung collapsed with—"

Valerie's head leaned sideways. "H-he gone?" she rasped, eyes rolling.

One of the medics said, "Confirmed. Dead hit on Phantom. His signature is fading out."

"G-g…" Her voice gurgled. "G-good." Then her vibrant eyes dulled into mist. Her body relaxed into the blood-soaked dirt.

.

Punks 1 and 2 suddenly dropped out of the memory, their eyes wide and burning with tears of horror. Whether it took seconds or hours—they didn't know. They looked at each other but did not see much. Their minds were ripped to pieces with the emotional weight of the memory, which carried with it a dark and alien sentience.

And to their horror, the realized the memory could not have been Valerie's, as the eyes they had seen her die through were from a far distance.

They began to back away from the statue on their hands, scooting away in a disjointed terror. "Shit," Punk 1 whispered, eyes wide. "Shit, we're—it's—"

"—true, man! Fucking haunted," Punk 2 cried. "Oh man, we gonna die!"

Dark mist began to collect at the foot of the statue, filling in together with a hiss not unlike that of a snake. It warped and twisted and glowed.

Then in manifested into a body. And they froze.

The face, the body, the cape was unmistakable. After several years of seeing his picture, they could not deny that the being before them was not only a ghost somehow existing underneath the barrier of Amity Park—but it was also Dan Phantom. He looked exactly as he had 100 year ago.

Phantom's eyes were as red as blood. "You insects," he hissed in absolute fury. "You ungrateful, insignificant worms." He grabbed their throats and squeezed just enough for them to understand that he was real, that this was all real, and that they were about to die. "You are undeserving of life!"

He was hellish and demonic, his fangs glinting in the moonlight, his breath a snowstorm that chilled to the bones.

Punk 1 was frozen, completely shell-shocked, his eyes bulging.

"You dare to insult your superior?" Phantom snarled. "You dare to stomp on her grave and deface her statue? You would corrupt my own past with a love affair?"

Before either one of them could plead for their lives, Phantom cut them off. "I showed you my memory," he said, voice rumbling like thunder, "so that you will never question it again. Valerie fought me for two days straight. She kept begging for backup, and none came to help because they were afraid. Only Valerie dared to stop me. Only Valerie was strong enough to last. How fitting that your worthless species cannot seem to grasp even the simplest truth."

Punk 2 cried, voice cracking in fear, "But s-she…She k-killed you! How're you still here?" He grabbed desperately at Phantom's fingers, trying to pry them off. For a ghostly being, he was incredibly physical and unmoving as steel.

Phantom's eyes darkened. "I've been regenerating since that day," he breathed, a maniacal smile twitching his lips. "And she's kept me locked under her damn statue. But today she finally saw her own folly. She saw how unworthy you are of her protection." He squeezed their necks tighter, and they gasped. "So she let me go to punish you. And you've no idea how long one hundred years pulls at you when you just wanna…kill something."

They trembled under his aura and power. Punk 2 nearly passed out, his legs shaking. The mastermind boy simply stared in total shell-shock.

Then Phantom stopped, his red eyes tightening in irritation. His neck craned sideways, and he looked as if he were listening to someone speaking. For a time, only the wind whistled. Then he looked back at them. "But she won't let me kill you," he grumbled. "Or maim you. Or anything fun. Which is truly a waste."

He released them, and they fell to the rotted grass, gasping.

"You will remember her wit as the only reason for your life. And you will tell no one of me," he demanded, "or I'll tear tribute from your throat."

Punk 1 and Punk 2 scrambled away, screaming and crying, minds blitzing in fear.

Phantom floated and watched in solid satisfaction, fangs bared in an angry smirk. Then he turned to Valerie's statue, the anger bleeding out of his powerful shoulders. He looked almost depressed.

For a time, he said nothing. He waited for all signs of life to disappear from the park, for the cries of the boys to fade off into the night.

Then his face truly faltered. He waved his hand out to the air in accusation.

"….And you died for this?" he said to the statue. "You died for these people who are willing to deface you for the hell of it?" He ran his hand through his fire hair. He snarled suddenly, eyes lighting a near orange. "They called you a whore and a bitch." He began to pace, and he laughed bitterly. "They called us fuck buddies. The rumors get better every year, Valerie! You should be here to laugh at them with me!"

But when the statue did nothing, even his depression gave way to total sadness.

In truth, Dan could have flown from the radius of Valerie's memorial with little trouble and destroyed Amity Park anytime, as neither Valerie's casket nor statue held sentient power over him. But he'd entered that final fight with the idea that he would truly fade out—that perhaps Valerie, if she were worthy, could end his misery. He had grown tired of dominating a world already broken by him, where everyone but Valerie cowered in his wake. It had no longer been fun, and he had felt listless and purposeless in the wake of that realization.

But there was no escaping the path he'd set for himself, and so he knew the only way to end it all was to go out in a flame of glory. To fight to the end.

Perhaps to Valerie, that fight wasn't staged, but for him it was. And everything was perfect and his power core was fading out and he wanted to maintain his image as the unrelenting monster and so he had shot at her with that final blast—

—And for the first time in her life, Valerie had misgauged it to the worst degree and bore its full brunt. Perhaps she'd been too exhausted to think clearly. The shock of watching her die kept his own destabilizing spirit in a strange limbo.

He had not intended to kill her. He had intended to die by her hand in a worthy fight. And as he began to regenerate without a final death blow, the realization that he was stuck in existence without a worthy opponent to end him morphed into depression, then obsession. His only meaning in existence remained in this small memorial to the past sacrifice of Valerie Gray.

"Look what we've become," he whispered, voice rough, mouth set with pain. "No one in Amity Park is strong enough to destroy me, and I'm stuck inside this damn Shield with you. And now you've got me playing bodyguard! This is sick, Valerie! Wake up and end this!"

The eyes of the state seemed to stare into his soul. The lips twitched up in dry amusement. You? Protect me?

Dan blinked in surprise. Then it was gone—the statue's expression was cold and hard and very much unmoving. It wasn't the first time he'd hallucinated like this, and it bothered him that he no longer knew what was reality or fantasy.

At times, he had even imagined—or had he imagined it?—that his ghost sense was triggering around Valerie's memorial. It was a faint sensation, like a tickle in the back of his mind. But nothing was ever there.

In an attempt to distract himself, he blasted the fallen spray cans out of existence, grimacing. "You're driving me crazy," he complained. "I keep thinking you're coming back, and you never do. It's screwing with my senses."

He then kneeled down, collecting the ruined flowers that the two boys had thrown about and stomped on. He had not allowed the flowers to rot like the trees and bushes around the area, but it seemed there was still nothing to save. He lifted one of the day lilies that he'd seen a small girl lay at the feet of Valerie's statue, and he stared at its now-broken stem and ripped petals. "Those damn kids," he growled, pained. "Look what they did!" He tried to correct the flower's brokenness, but it was dead and ugly. With a sudden, overwhelming hatred, he flung it into the distance with a cry of anger. He snarled, "I'll kill them if they show their faces here again."

The statue seemed to shift at that, the moonlight striking it just right for the eyes to look as though they were slanted downwards at him. Something in the gaze of that statue made it feel like she really was watching him. And disapproving of him, as if Valerie were saying, They're just kids.

He felt its stare, and glared back at the statue. "What? I left your precious and adoring fans alive. Don't look at me like that. They were saying we were together." He huffed to hide the strange discomfort and longing he felt. "They deserved a good kick in the ass for that. As if I'd fuck you."

Then the clouds shifted over the moonlight, and the angles of the statue's face suddenly looked haughty. He imagined she was both agreeing with him and expressing her displeasure with his insult. Don't deny you flirted, she seemed to accuse him. If anyone's got ideas about us, it's all your fault.

Dan's nose scrunched, and he looked away, flustered that the moon could play such tricks on the statue's face. He squeezed his eyes shut. "It wasn't supposed to be like this," he said in frustration to her statue. "I shot right because you always move left. I didn't want to fade without making it look good. But now I'm still here, and you're gone. All because you didn't move left."

He inhaled shakily, a bitter laugh tightening his throat. "If you were going to manifest a ghost out of this, you would have done it by now, right? You'd still be here if you knew you didn't kill me. Right?"

The ghost paused, eyeing the statue hard, then the remains of the grass that had grown over Valerie's burial. "Don't you know," he called out in a challenge, voice broken "that I could still wreak havoc on your precious Amity Park? That I could take it over from the inside, just like those kids said?"

The wind whistled a bit as it struck the statue, and he almost expected some kind of apparition to appear before him at the challenge, blasters blazing, voice echoing in warning. Oh, Valerie would make a terrifying ghost—! She would be self-destructive and seething in hate for her own existence, probably, which would inspire her to hunt him down in perhaps an even greater battle than before.

But nothing happened.

He laughed out to hide a groan of pain, running a hand down his face. "Who am I kidding, you're just a statue. Why would you care? Why the fuck would a statue care about anything?"

He knew that the real Valerie Gray was lying six feet under the ground, wasting back into nature as human bodies did. Her burned and broken body had been disturbing enough to behold at death. He did not want to think about how she looked now, or whether the poor, wooden excuse for a coffin that she was in had rotted out, leaving her helpless to decay and insects.

Those were unsettling topics to him—to think of the wild and uncontainable Valerie Gray as a decaying body. Unaware. Helpless.

His face twisted with sadness and guilt. He looked away and said, "You weren't supposed to die like this, Valerie."

But he refused to apologize, as that was not in his prideful nature.

In an impulsive wave of emotion, he opened his palm, and from his ice core, he solidified a small sculpture of a rose. He had done this before whenever he thought she was watching. It was the least he could do for the crazy woman who had given him the best chess game he'd ever played. And who had in fact liked flowers but never got any.

He set the crystal ice rose on her marble slab. Its edges still glowed with ectoplasmic power, swirling a deep green with Dan's power. The intricate leaves soon began to drip and melt onto the slab, rolling off the sides and down into the ground of Valerie's resting place. The parched earth drank it in drop by drop.

"Come on," he begged, looking back up at the statue. "Wake up. Fight me. Say something."

The distant gaze of Valerie's statue suddenly looked softer, if not a bit amused. The wind laughed, ruffling his cape and the flickering ends of his fire hair. He closed his eyes, feeling the strains of the wind as it moved against his face. It almost felt like fingers, a voice whispering in a laugh, Revenge.

Phantom began to hope again that maybe something existed after all. That perhaps Valerie's soul—he just knew it was trapped down there in that casket, it had to be—would rise up in sentience instead of just influencing other objects. That it wasn't just all in his head.

And so he drifted back into invisibility, silently watching. Waiting.


A/N: Happy Halloween (for those of you who celebrate!) Nothing like creepy, (possessed?) statues and ghosts and stupid people getting their butt kicked by the supernatural to make you feel right at home. I really enjoyed writing this idea out, because it falls back on more traditional ideas of hauntings, insanity/paranoia, and the reality that ghosts are ageless in an aging/changing world. I also think that the conspiracy of Dan and Valerie having some kind of relationship would be something that inevitably put Valerie's reputation at stake at some point, whether true or not. To add, this marks the first time that I've tried to write something with original characters commenting on dead canon characters. Felt weird! I hope no one was offended by the crass language used in this chapter, as I felt it was appropriate for the characters and their motivations.

This particular story will be soon updated with a part 2, because I had written this story to be much longer but was unable to finalize that part for today. Is Valerie's ghost real, or is Dan just hallucinating? Are the thoughts he thinks the statue has actually his own conscience? What would Valerie as a ghost be like? O_o

If you have time, please leave me with your thoughts, opinions, and requests!