Chapter Three: The Other Side
"Cuz the world might do me in/It's alright cuz I'm with friends…"
– Mystery Skulls, Ghost
"You're an intelligent guy, Spike. I'm sure if you were to open up, you would be able to do whatever you set your mind to!" Jazz exclaimed.
She and the aforementioned high school junior sat in the catacombs of the library. The heavily tattooed guy slouched in his chair, a painted fingernail resting on The Myth of Sisyphus. He gave a noncommittal grunt.
Her phone rang out of the blue, a jaunty tune muffled in the depths of her backpack. She jolted in surprise. Jazz plunged her hand into the bag, pulling it out and checking the ID.
Tucker. She parsed her lips. Jazz had kept his number after a brief stint in tutoring at Casper High – but the tutoring ended a while ago, so why was he calling her now?
She gave an apologetic look towards Spike. "Hold on, I need to get this." She took her bag, and stepped into the empty halls of the building.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Jazz? We have an emergency. I don't know what to do and he's barely breathing and-" The voice she heard was in a serious panic, tripping over words in an attempt to get it out all at once.
"Okay, slow down. What happened?" She asked.
"There was an accident down in your parent's lab. The portal exploded and I think Danny's seriously hurt and –"
Jazz's stomach dropped. She clenched the phone tight, no longer quite able to hear what Tucker was rambling. She quickly collected her thoughts together and shifted into leadership mode.
"Wait right there – I'm heading over right now. Watch over him and call 9-1-1 if he gets any worse!" Jazz said in a commanding tone.
After Tucker affirmed what she said, Jazz hanged up, her knuckles white as she continued to hold her phone in a tight squeeze. Angry tears arose in her eyes.
"I knew it. I knew their insanity would hurt him some day," she muttered.
Jazz rushed back to the study hall, nothing feeling as real as it did a minute ago.
Spike looked up to look at her, his face as expressionless as ever. Jazz tried to smile a little. "I – I have to go, but I'll see you next week?" Jazz said.
Spike only grunted in response.
"Thanks." She said. She shoved the books into her bag, and ran out of the library to the parking lot where her pink convertible rested. Her hands trembled as she placed the key into the ignition.
She remembered when she saw Danny for the first time, a two-year-old girl gazing down at a sleeping infant in his crib. Her parents looked with her, weariness and love resting in their frames. "You're going to be a good big sister and help look after him, right?" her mother asked.
"I will," Jazz promised.
As they grew up, she found herself keeping that promise over the years. She tried to protect him from bullies, from people making fun of their parent's profession. She even fought off their parent's cooking when it came to life and attacked them.
She grew into the steady adult figure he needed, as bit by bit their mother and father became distant, carried away by the current of their research.
It wasn't like her parents had been negligent on purpose -she knew that - but there was something about their fascination with ghosts that left something… lacking.
Like they had more time for monsters than their living, breathing family.
Still, she never thought of her parents as the kind of people who would let their children get hurt. No matter what they did, no matter how many insane ideas they had, they always put their children's safety first. That hadn't changed… until today.
As her car pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street, she tried to figure out exactly what she needed to do to ensure that this would never happen again.
When Danny awoke with a gasp, the first thing he realized was that something felt wrong.
He couldn't place his finger on it, couldn't understand the sense of nothing within his structure. His left hand clutched at the tiles, making a feel for something tangible, something to anchor him to the real world.
Two familiar faces swam above him, their appearances blurred out in the harsh red of the Fenton emergency light. He blinked - their faces submerged to the surface.
Their mouths were open in shock, shoulders tense and rigid. He noticed them relax the minute his eyes went open – but only by a little.
Their reaction to him felt far worse than his pain.
''How - how long have I been out,?' Danny wheezed. He eased up, proceeding to rub one of his eyes while the other opened to look at them.
'About twenty minutes, dude,' Tucker explained. He exchanged an uneasy glance with Sam. 'So, uh, how're you feeling?' Tucker visibly winced after asking.
'Shocked,' Danny chuckled. His voice sounded off, a reverberation shadowing his words. His eyes flicked in confusion.
Tucker relaxed his shoulders. 'Dude, that's a terrible joke.'
'Ha-ha, I know.' Danny got up, rubbing the back of his neck as he frowned. 'In all seriousness though I feel… weird.' He placed a hand across his chest. 'I - ' His face went deathly pale. He held out his arms. Black sleeves, white gloves. He looked down – the entire suit had completely reversed, a photonegative of itself.
'Okay, what happened to my suit?' He looked between the two of them, a nervous laughter escaping. He turned to Tucker. 'Not funny Tuck. What did you do with it?'
Tucker raised his arms in defense. 'I didn't do anything with it man - you were like that when you -' He hesitated. Again, the nervous glance with Sam.
The room began to spin. Danny placed his head in his hands, groaning. Within his peripheral vision, he noticed a few lines of grey. He pulled his bangs down – not grey. White.
'What happened to me?' he whispered.
They took a few steps back, as if he were a cornered dog about to bite them at a moment's notice.
He stared at his hands, fingers trembling. 'What happened after I - after I went in…'
Sam stepped forward, a show of determination. Her face, however, could not mask the fear rising up her spine. 'After you got in, we heard a small click - and then…' Her voice faltered.
'There was a great big flash.' Tucker finished.
Danny's breathing stopped. He could recall snippets - the light, the sparks, the screaming, the burning... He stumbled forward. Sam ran over to catch him. He phased through her, a few wisps dissolving into the air. They froze. His pupils contracted into pinpricks.
'Wha-?' He looked behind him. A few splinters of mist disappeared from her hands.
'We think you're some sort of –' she stammered - but he couldn't hear anything else, rabbit-fire beats bursting in his ears. He ran to the mirror, not noticing his foot passing through the shattered light bulbs on the tiles. He almost fell upon the laboratory mirror, his hands splayed across the glass.
A stranger stared back at him.
Clenching his teeth upon his delayed recognition of himself, he glanced up at his hair. The color had completely drained from it.
After all, fear had a way of making the hair go white.
"It's okay, it's okay – I can just dye it back to normal, no one will ever notice…" he thought.
Something exploded in his skull. He squeezed his eyes tight, his hands trailing down the mirror. He closed his fists. When the pain subsided moments later, he opened his eyes again – only to meet with a gaze inhuman.
Danny backed away from the reflection. 'That's not – that's not possible…'
A door slammed open above them.
"Kids! We're home!" Jack's voice boomed.
Footsteps echoed down the hall upstairs.
Danny jumped, his hands rising as if to defend from an imminent attack. He turned back to his friends, trying to ignore how they scuffled away from him, or how painfully bright the lab had become.
'I can't let them see me like this!' He exclaimed.
Despite how much he was shaking, Tucker couldn't help but raise an eyebrow. "Why not? Maybe they could help-"
Danny glared. "Hello? They're ghost hunters. And I look like a –" He paused upon the sound of the basement door opening. He stepped back, his voice squeaking in panic. "Hide me!"
Sam ran over and opened the cabinet full of Hazmat suits. 'In here, quick!'
Tucker shoved Danny in, slamming the closet door behind him.
'What's going on down there?' Jack ran down, waving a ray gun in his hands. When he saw them, he lowered the gun, narrowing his eyes. 'What the heck are you kids doing here?'
Sam bit her lip. 'We were… uh….'
'Looking at this cool stuff?' Tucker added hopefully.
Maddie pinched the bridge of her nose. "Didn't Danny tell you you're not supposed to be down here? What if -" She looked up, her attention immediately upon the swirling green radiating out of the portal. She nudged her husband in the ribs. "Jack, are you seeing this?"
Jack looked up, and started blinking in disbelief. "It works?" He dropped the gun, his fists pumping up and down in childhood glee. "The Fenton portal works! Haha, I knew it!"
Maddie thrust a fist into her open hand. "It must have been a delay in the hardware after all!"
She turned to the two teenagers. "But Danny's still in big trouble. Speaking of which–" she glanced around the lab, "-where is he?"
Sam looked up to the left of the ceiling. "He said he needed to… go to the bathroom?"
"Well, when he comes out, tell him he's grounded." Maddie turned to Jack and beamed. "We should get our notes out of the car. This is so exciting!"
Jack raised his arm, as if to run. "You said it babe!" Both parents ran up the stairs, leaving Sam and Tucker alone in the lab.
"Quick, let's get Danny out of here before they come back." Sam said. They ran over to the cabinet.
"Hey, it's safe to come out now," Sam announced, opening the door as she did so. She squinted, her eyes trailing the hangers of identical Hazmat suits. She shoved them to one side, revealing nothing but an empty space at the back of the cabinet.
Danny was gone.
Upon being shoved into the cabinet by Tucker, Danny found himself rising through the closet, up the ground, and out of the other side of the wall. He stumbled onto the concrete, feet catching onto the ground.
He blinked, not quite understanding what happened.
Darkness shrouded the walls of the ally way, a tinge of sunlight highlighting the bricks behind him.
His entire body felt like static, akin to his foot falling asleep. He stretched out his arms in confusion and glanced down. His entire body had gone translucent, a few motes of light fading from his right leg.
Before he could even think, a white aura materialized around his figure, delineating his body from the environment around him.
He tore his eyes away from his body, his head caught in a dulled daze. He spotted his parent's RV from the alleyway, their figures carrying out a large folder of papers from the trunk. Another wave of terror arose in his chest.
As if by instinct, the static feeling he felt sank deeper. In the corner of his eye, he could see his hands, his arms, and his legs dissolve completely out of sight. There was nothing of him left within the shadows.
He realized in an instant that this was clearly a nightmare. Granted, a realistic dream, but a dream nonetheless.
He clenched his fists, attempting to will himself back into reality. He re-appeared in an instant. He crouched down, a determined look on his face.
"Well, if I'm lucidly dreaming, at least I can fly, right?" Danny thought.
He floated up with a start, his legs unknowingly merging into a ghostly flagellum. Danny raised his arms, mimicking the multitude of superhero comics he used to read as a kid. He could feel his stomach drop as he lurched into the air. A sense of joy arose in his throat.
That was until he unintentionally flipped over, his head facing the ground. He saw the ghostly tail waving in his vision. "Where did my legs go?" Danny cried out loud.
He tried to render them apart, envisioning them as two instead of one. His legs slid out, white boots remerging from the gray.
A faint feeling came upon him, and heavy and sick, he collapsed back onto the ground. His head hit the cement with a heavy clunk. Stars shattered over his eyes. He stared at the blue sky, blackness coming into his vision.
The last thing he saw was a white arc that burst from his chest, the light split into two. He noticed a sense of heaviness come upon him again, his air pipe working overdrive to force air into his lungs – a straw forcing a raging hurricane down his neck.
As he slipped out of consciousness, the last sounds he heard were a sudden cry in the distance, and the sound of sprinting footsteps.
Jazz was the first to come across the crumpled form of her brother. His white t-shirt was matted in mud, the red circle on it almost like blood upon his chest. A Lichtenberg scar stretched angry across his index finger and his forearm.
"Danny, are you okay?" Jazz cried, her hands tapping hard against his shoulder. His black hair covered his face, his bruised eyes completely shut. Specks of dried red rested upon his fingers. If she looked closer, she would have noticed some subtle shades of emerald amidst the rust of blood.
Jazz dropped down, her fingers upon his neck. She could feel a pulse, faint, but still there. She stood up, and sprinted into the house. "Mom? Dad? I think Danny's hurt!"
Her parents rushed out of the kitchen; panic arising in their faces. A blueprint of the portal rested in Jack's hands.
"Where is he?" Maddie shouted.
"Outside! Hurry!" Jazz answered, and with that turned back to the outside of the house.
Jack and Maddie followed her outside, until they came across their son. Jack crouched down, cradling the boy in his arms. The map fell out of his hands. The mark on Danny's arm had already begun to disappear from view, a white line subtle against his skin.
"Sweetheart, can you hear me?" Maddie said, crouching down beside Jack. Danny's breathing deepened, his chest visibly waxing and waning. She turned to her husband. "We need to take him to a hospital!"
Jack nodded, standing up with Danny still in his arms.
A few moments later, Sam and Tucker ran out of the house, just in time to witness the chaos before them. Maddie had already started up the car, with Jack carrying his son from the ally way and into the back of the RV.
Tucker raised an eyebrow when he saw how normal Danny looked again.
Jazz followed behind her father, a furious look storming across her face. A flood of words built up in her like a dam, threatening to burst into a tirade of accusations and concerns. She knew it was neither the time nor place for it though – Danny's life was on the line, and there wasn't any time to waste. She slammed the car door closed as she got in.
After securing Danny in the back, his father travelled to the front of the car. Before going in though, Jack turned to Tucker and Sam.
"We'll let you know how he's doing," he said. Noticing the looks across their faces, he tried to give a hopeful expression.
"Don't worry – he's a Fenton. He'll be fine in no time!" Jack exclaimed. He went back into the car. Black gloves clutched hard on the steering wheel.
The RV practically lifted as it took off, dust trails kicked up as the treadmills sped towards the hospital. It was far faster than an ambulance – especially since the driver ignored all red lights, speed rules, and fire hydrants in the best of times.
Tucker turned to Sam. "Tell me I'm not crazy. You don't think the closet had a secret entrance to the back alley, do you?"
Sam placed a finger to her lip in concentration. "I doubt it, but I can't really figure out how he got on the other side… unless…" She shook her head. That was impossible. He would have had to walked through the wall in order to…
She stopped, remembering how he looked when he got out of the portal.
She glanced at Tucker. It was clear from his expression that the same thought had crossed his mind.
An awkward pause floated in the air between them. They looked away from each other.
"He'll be fine," Tucker said, a little uncertainty creeping into his voice.
"Yeah," Sam replied.
They continued to stare down the road, long after the RV faded out of view.