A/N: Sorry, would have had this up yesterday but my email was playing crazy and stuff. This is pretty much the last bit of 'set-up' before the main event.

3: Voices in the Attic

"Adam, come quick! There's someone coming up the drive," Barbara fluttered her hand at him.

Adam hurriedly waded through the extremely cluttered attic to reach the window on the other side. "Is it a family moving in?"

"I don't know," she said, her mouth pinched.

They peered out.

"What kind of person drives a lime green...what kind of car is that? A Beetle?"

"That's a lot of tools. Do you think he's just a repairman? There's no furniture."

"Should we go down?"

"Maybe we should wait for Lydia."

At that they shared a mutually exasperated look, which turned to surprise as Lydia popped up behind them. The black-clad specter tapped a finger on her mouth thoughtfully, then opened her mouth to speak. Nothing came out and the silence stretched on and on, twanging on Adam and Barbara's taut nerves.

Was this how one of Lydia's strange fugue states began? After she disappeared for days at a time, occasionally they would stumble across her motionless somewhere in the house. She might be holed up in a corner on the ceiling watching a spider spin a web. Several times they'd caught her sitting with a dripped-dry ink pen poised over a splotched piece of paper, halfway through writing a word. In the latter case, a faked cough or a footstep was enough to jolt her into vanishing the work in progress.

She wasn't blinking, she wasn't breathing. They inched closer through the towers of junk and Barbara motioned for Adam to do something. He shrugged and held up his hands helplessly, then pointed at his wife to indicate that she should do whatever it was. Silently arguing, they examined the youthful face staring off into the distance.

Just as they were starting to really worry, Lydia finally said, "I think he saw me."

-SCENE BREAK-

The inside of the place was barren. Stripped. They'd taken everything that wasn't nailed down and then come back with a pry bar. That was okay. Benjamin had a feeling the government's rented lackeys had been doing the word of interior design a favor. The previous occupants had been into wallpaper in a big way. Must've been some estate sale, ha.

What remained was livable. That's the best that could be said for it.

He might get a tarp and some cans of paint to decorate the place, and by that he meant he would arrange them like he was going to paint and tell anyone that asked that he was in the middle of a renovation.

Setting his duffle down last, he decided to inspect the ole place. The floor plan wasn't terribly defensible. Too many damn windows, too many damn doors. And - seriously? No damn cable hookups? No antenna on the roof, no dish... The hell, did they not watch TV? How did they survive without internet? What, were they still using a dial-up modem and their phone line? What kinda jerk-offs had lived here?

Shaking his head, he pulled out a pack and lit up. Taking a soothing drag, he wandered upstairs. As he set foot on the landing, scuffling and weird noises erupted from the ceiling. Aw shit, were there fuckin' raccoons in the attic, too? He'd been told it was locked, sealed off. So much for that.

This was gonna take a lotta work.

Dammit.