LEGAL A/N: Psych and all characters belong to Steve Franks, Tagline Pictures, NBC Universal Television Studios, GEP Productions and USA Network.
4. The Ring
Henry Spencer wiped the sweat from his brow, his suede leather work gloves rubbing his face. He was standing in the middle of his side yard, raking the endless oak leaves spread out over the lawn. He glanced out beneath the rim of his black baseball cap to the pinkish sky above, seeing the sun beginning to sink behind the clouds. With a grumble, he went back to raking, knowing that he was losing the light of day.
Henry turned around and paused, slightly stunned, but unimpressed. His son stood with his hands dug into the pockets of his jeans with a cold expression on his face. Henry looked away from Shawn and minded his yard work. "Didn't expect to see you here," he unenthusiastically declared to Shawn. "What did you do this time?"
Shawn, less than amused and unprepared for his dad's cold brand of parenting, said in a strikingly serious tone, "George Romero and Sean Cunningham are dead." Henry rested momentarily again, staring down at the grass beneath his feet. With a slightly more apologetic and sympathetic tone, Shawn added, "Somebody… murdered them in their homes last night."
His father was quiet for several more seconds and as motionless as a stone. Shawn stared at his dad's back, waiting for some sort of emotional response which would never come. Henry gripped the wooden handle of the rake tighter and continued to brush the lawn clean of the leaves. Shawn, utterly confused, added, "There was a message found written on the wall of both of their homes. 'Trick or Treat, Spencer.'"
Henry gave no response. He tromped through the grass to a box of black garbage bags, ripping one from its roll.
"Did you hear what I said?" Shawn asked.
"I heard you," Henry responded with the perfect amount of indifference and lack of concern.
Shawn felt a bitter spike jab through his insides. He gritted his teeth as he glanced about the yard. "What is wrong with you?" Shawn blurted. Henry stopped and turned towards his son. "I just told you that two of your partners were murdered. You're the only thing that connects them! And you don't even care?"
"There are a lot of sick people out there, Shawn," Henry snapped. "You need to wake up to that fact of life."
"That's it?" Shawn said with bewilderment and anger. "'The facts of life?' Is that all it is to you?" He shook his head at his father with resentment. With a sigh, Henry ignored Shawn and opened the garbage bag. "You knew these men. Somebody poisons them and all you can say is 'that's the way life is?'"
At a single word in Shawn's last sentence, Henry showed the slightest pause. For a brief second, his face was stricken with contemplation, then realization. It was a fraction of a moment, but that's all the Shawn needed to recognize. Henry quickly turned away from Shawn, but it was too late. His son knew that his father was keeping something from him.
"Why don't you do yourself and the police department a favor, kid," Henry spitefully declared. "Why don't you stop worrying about this and go back to playing psychic for your buddies?"
Shawn glared at his dad's back with a burning passion fueled with misery. He wanted to knock his own father out – and it wasn't the first time in his life.
Henry turned back towards Shawn with a challenging expression. "Now if you don't mind, I'm pretty sure you have nothing else of value left to say." Shawn and Henry glared at each other threateningly, each of them waiting for a display of weakness. Shawn was the first to cave – just like always. He turned away and stomped off furiously, leaving his father behind.
Henry watched him leave in silence, and then turned back towards the setting sun. A look of worry came across his face as a cold autumn wind arched through the yard, and he gripped the plastic bag tightly.
"This is a bad idea, Shawn," Gus grumbled with strong protest. "This is still a crime scene!" Both Gus and Shawn were covered in a thick blanket of darkness as they stood outside of Sean Cunningham's house at the back door. Shawn skillfully attempted to slide Gus' credit card in between the door and frame.
"Keep your voice down," Shawn whispered as he glanced back at Gus in the moonless night. "Open your cell phone and give me some light." Frustrated, Gus pulled out his phone, opening it and shining the blue light on the lock of the door. A few moments later, the door twisted free. "Got it!" Shawn proclaimed.
"Why are we whispering?" Gus asked. "Cunningham lived alone."
"Because we're entering a house that doesn't belong to us at night. It's what you do."
"Hey," Gus complained. "I didn't want to come in here. You were the one that dragged me out of my comfortable bed."
Shawn and Gus entered the darkened, empty house silently. "Quit being a baby," Shawn snapped quietly, handing Gus back his card. Shawn glanced around the kitchen and living room, side-by-side. The thick, black, scribbled words were still visible on the white wall through the shadows: 'Trick or Treat, Spencer?'
He looked in the corner and spotted Cunningham's modest television set, a VCR sitting on top of it. "There!" Shawn pointed.
"What is this about?" Gus asked again. "Why are we here?"
"My dad knows something about what's going on," Shawn answered. "I could tell he was trying to hide it from me."
"Hide what?"
"I don't know yet. But there's a reason he told me to get off this case." He walked over to the television set and turned the VCR on.
"Maybe you should listen to him," Gus suggested.
"Why would I start doing that?" Shawn asked with a hint of bitterness.
"This is different, and you know it," Gus explained. "Your dad was a cop for years and if he thinks we're in too deep then I think we—"
Shawn cut him off with an icy tone, "I didn't ask what either of you thought."
Gus stopped in his tracks, taken aback. Shawn never talked to him like that. He crossed his arms as Shawn turned around back towards the VCR. "I'm just saying," Gus begrudgingly defended.
Shawn pressed the eject button, the VCR releasing a seemingly blank video tape. "Just what I thought," Shawn nodded. He shoved the tape back in the VCR and turned on the television set, pressing play. A black-and-white picture appeared on the screen of a hysterical woman running down the aisle of a passenger train, covered in vicious cobra snakes. "There's a tape like this in Romero's house – I checked."
"What is it?" Gus curiously asked, staring at the movie as it played out.
"It's some B-movie from the 50s," Shawn explained. "'Attack of the Killer Snakes on a Runaway Train.'"
The screen cut to a Caucasian man holding a revolver, wearing a fedora and suit standing next to a beautiful, terrified woman in a black dress on another section of the speeding train. In a distinct, masculine voice, he proclaimed, "That's it, Betty. I've had it with these snakes on this train!"
Shawn turned to Gus and explained, "What are the odds of two men who were murdered the exact same way by assumingly the same person having the same, crappy movie playing while they were discovered?" Gus stared at Shawn and turned back to the VCR as the newest clue baffled his mind as well.
Tuesday, October 28, 1986
"You cheated!" eleven-year-old Gus whined. He stood in the middle of Archie's Arcade, located conveniently between his favorite pizza shop and Granada Theater, with his best friend Shawn. The two of them were standing in front of a Sky Kid video arcade booth – Shawn carrying a sly, victorious expression while Gus pouted with disgust. Both children shouted over the noise inside the arcade of ringing bells, buzzing sounds, shooting lasers, and Europe's "The Final Countdown."
"Hey, you're just being a sore loser," Shawn shrugged with a grin. "Wanna go again and see if you can beat me this time?"
"Again?" Gus exclaimed. "That was my last quarter! I've got nothing!"
"Let's go get some more money, then," Shawn declared with excitement; he was on a roll. "Can't you ask your mom or something?"
"Uh, Shawn…"
"C'mon! Don't chicken out now! Look around for a quarter."
"Shawn, you'd better look around," Gus said with trepidation, his eyes wide as they stared over Shawn's shoulder. "I think your dad just walked in here!"
The young troublemaker's heart skipped a beat as he spun around, making eye contact with Henry the Enforcer. "Oh, no," Shawn said, letting out a small whisper as his father marched across the arcade straight to him, like an eagle zeroing in on its prey.
"Shawn!" Henry snapped.
"Dad, I can explain—"
"Be quiet!" he ordered, and if Shawn could stop the beating of his heart he would. Henry glared at Shawn with fury. "I told you to come straight home after school!" With a cold stare, he turned to Gus, "And you shouldn't be out here either! Do your parents know you're here?"
Gus' eyes slammed to the floor immediately with shame. "N-No, sir."
"Come on, both of you," Henry ordered. He took Shawn by the shoulder and led him out of the arcade as he would escort a prisoner to his cell.
As soon as the doors opened to the street outside, Shawn was hit with a gust of cold wind and dead leaves in the air. The three of them stopped momentarily at the curb as Shawn spotted a flier whipping by in the wind. It fell to the ground and was dragged across it by the gust just long enough for Shawn to read the colorful text drawn in marker, advertising the Santa Barbara Monster Mash.
Not long after, Henry pulled Shawn into the house, holding his son by the arm. They entered the living room to find it a mess, with newspapers all over the floor, coffee table, and couch, and the television set turned on to the local Santa Barbara news station. Everything seemed out of place and unkempt, and for the first time Shawn realized it had been that way for a few weeks. It was just something that never really occurred to him before.
Shawn had said anything to his father since the drive to Gus' house and the following trip home. However, now a thousand things Shawn wanted to say – half of which he'd be grounded for weeks for – were running through his mind. It was only a question of which would get him into more trouble.
"Dad," Shawn began with a bitter tone. "What's your problem?"
Henry froze in mid-step. Shawn decided that one probably wasn't the best first question to ask. "What's my problem?" Henry snapped. "I gave you an order and you disobeyed me. That sounds more like your problem."
"What do you have against Halloween?" Shawn asked. "You never were like this before."
"I don't want to hear anymore of it."
His son yanked himself out of his father's grip and stood, facing off with the tower man, staring him straight in the eyes. "You just don't want me to have a life!" Shawn protested bravely. "You want me to do nothing but go to school, be a cop, and turn out to be a big jerk like you!"
Henry stared motionlessly down at his son for what felt like hours. It was the silence that killed Shawn the most. If Henry was going to ground him or kill him or whatever, Shawn wished his father would hurry up and get it over with because the suspense was killing him. But his father said nothing. He just stared at him with coldness brewing in his eyes for more than enough time to make Shawn regret he'd said anything at all.
Finally Henry moved. He turned Shawn around, forcefully, but not violently, and moved his son into his room. Shawn glanced down at a newspaper headline shouting up at him from the floor, before he was relocated to his cell. Shawn stood in the middle of the room and looked back at Henry before he slammed the door, locking Shawn inside without a word.
It was the silence that killed him the most.
Monday, October 30, 2006
His shoulder jerked and Shawn's eyes popped open revealing the dark ceiling of his bedroom. Thirty-one-year-old Shawn Spencer shot up from his bed, sitting up with an alarmed demeanor. It was strange that he had such a vivid dream of a twenty-year-old occurrence, remembering every detail. It wasn't so strange that every detail was reviewed with bitterness and rage.
Shawn balled up his fists and pushed them into his forehead as his fury towards his father churned his stomach, sickening him. The nausea was just a side-effect of a darkness in his heart which he had held on to for a long time, one that he wished he could deny and make vanish along with the decades of bad memories that went along with it.
He looked over at the clock to find it was near 3:00am. Sleepless nights. Now he really was his dad.
The nausea all of a sudden became worse after that thought. He pushed himself out of bed and came to a stand, headed for the medicine cabinet, but froze in his steps in the middle of the room. They say in dreams, when you read something, then read it again, the message changes every time. This one didn't change. It was a clear snapshot of October 28, 1986. The headline on the newspaper which Shawn glanced at before his father locked him inside of his room for the night read 'COBRA KILLER POISONS SUMMERLAND CHILD.'
The epiphany struck him like lightning: history was coming full circle.