A/N: Leaving a little note here because I'm trying to be better at responding to reviews, but if you don't sign in and then ask me questions I can't reply and stuff. (Think I got back to everyone else, though?) I still love the reviews, so cheers to you! Okay, haunting time!

4: Get Out While the Getting's Good

"How dare he!" Barbara shouted, pacing back and forth in the attic. "He's turned our dining room into some kind of man cave! He keeps smoking in the house! There are beer bottles everywhere and he's knocking holes in the wall and...!"

Her face crumpled and Adam folded her into his arms, saying, "I know. I don't like it either. But it's only been one day!"

Lydia was curled up on the sofa in the corner, curiously poking at the screen of a flat electronic device the size of her palm. "I don't want to say I told you so," she said. "But this is why I told you to hide everything you really cared about."

"We tried," Adam protested.

"But everything we could put up here is just mementos, our photos, things that we could move. This is our house that he's destroying!" Barbara cried.

Adam added, "We can't hide our whole house."

Lydia knew that they really couldn't help it. The house was their anchor. That didn't make their attachment less annoying. The much older ghost sighed a little but didn't say anything, and the beep bop boop music drifted through the echoing rafters.

"Lydia. Lydia!"

She looked up.

He asked, "Can we? Hide our house?"

"Not really." She was turning the thing around and around in her hands. It looked like she had been playing a game with little green pigs and angry birds. With a wicked gleam in her eye, she said, "We only have one option."

"And...what is that?" Adam asked naively.

"You guys are such Luddites. It's his cell phone." A playful smile pulled up one corner of her mouth.

"No, he means, what should we do? But...while we're on the subject, when did you take that? I thought we were going to just watch until we know - "

"That we hate his guts?" Lydia interrupted Barbara. She looked very seriously at each of them in turn. "Adam. Barbara. It's time to put up or shut up. We're going to make him leave, of course."

"How? I know you think he's different, but no one else can see us. Not Jane, not the movers, not anyone!"

Sometimes they were adorably clueless, but this was just dense. "By scaring him mostly dead. Duh. And we'll start," she said holding up the phone, "with this."

The Maitlands exchanged uneasy glances, speaking to each other without words. "...Mostly dead?" Adam ventured.

"Yeah," Lydia said matter-of-factly. "All dead and we'd never get rid of him."

-SCENE BREAK-

Snores reverberated from the mound of sheets piled on a mattress without a frame.

Lydia floated over the chaotic mess of clothes on the floor. Leaning down to put the cell phone on the milk crate beside the makeshift bed, she had to stop, frowning. Just as she cleared enough room among the magazines, cups, junk food wrappers, and other assorted debris to put it down, a hand clamped onto her wrist.

Startled, she went intangible, dropping the phone and sliding out of the iron grip. The device fell on the floor with a crack.

"You better not have broken it," Benjamin growled in a sleep-roughened voice. He had the phone in his hand a second later. When the screen lit up in the darkened room it nearly blinded him. In an incredulous voice he read the message flashing across it over and over. "Get. Out."

He peered at her from under sardonic blonde eyebrows at where she lingered, her other hand rubbing the wrist he was sure he'd had a firm hold on.

His skin had been deliciously warm. Warmer than she remembered anything being in a long time. It made her...hungry.

"That the best you could do?" he asked. After a slow perusal of the way bending strained the buttons over her chest, he tacked on, "Sweetheart."

Caught off guard, Lydia blurted out the first thing that came to mind. "I thought it was pretty good, considering I've never even seen a smart phone in person before."

"Uh...huh. Really," he said with a little mocking headshake. He was pushing and tapping on it to try to clear the slightly cracked screen. Brow furrowing when nothing worked, he snarled, "What the hell'd you do?!"

Shrugging, she drifted a little closer to get a better view. Her hand slowly reached out without her volition, her fingers clenching and unclenching. Even from a foot away she could feel the heat radiating off him. "Hit it with my mojo," she said absently.

He slapped her hand away. Or tried to, because the strike passed straight through. Staring at her wide-eyed in the silver glow of his cell phone, he finally noticed something and stuttered out, "You - the fuck! You're fucking floating!"

"No shit, Sherlock," she retorted. Her black gaze never wavering from his, she tilted her head to the side and stuck her fingers through his ribs to feel his racing heart skip a beat.

That's when Barbara hissed through the cracked-open door, "What's taking so long?" Leaning into the room, she gasped and exclaimed, "Lydia! What are you doing?!"

The ghost in question jerked her hand out guiltily and fled through the floor, leaving Benjamin to stare in shuddering bewilderment at the innocuous-looking woman crouched in the doorway. They made eye contact.

Pointing at herself, she haltingly said, "You can see me?"

"What the fuck?" he shouted, clutching at his aching chest.

Barbara scrambled to her feet and glared at him. "We're ghosts! And we want you out of our house! So watch your language, mister!"

He slumped back against his pillow nest and said weakly, "Fuck me."

"I'll have you know I'm married!" She slammed the door shut behind her as she left.

Warily, he surveyed his bedroom, moving just his eyes. The only thing that was out of place was his phone, which had gone missing earlier that day. Looking at it again, he saw that the 'get out, get out' that flashed across it continuously was now moving faster and faster.

The message suddenly dissolved into pixilated noise and strangely, he could see a tiny figure that seemed to be shuffling out of the distance in the middle of the screen. As it got closer, the figure resolved into a bloody and mangled girl with long black hair straggling over her face and a torn black dress. Her bare feet left bright red footprints behind her.

The phone started sparking and smoking.

The girl pressed her hands on the screen and bent it outwards, trying to climb out. Locking fawn brown eyes with him, she mouthed two silent words. Get. Out.

The phone burst into unholy purple flames.

With a girlish shriek he dropped it on the mattress and groped around for something to put it out. Seizing a half-full cup nearby, he dumped the contents on the fire and nearly jumped out of his skin when the beer exploded in a foot-high pillar of light and heat.

"Aw, fuck!"

Finally he grabbed a pillow and smothered the blaze. Cautiously lifting the pillow, he was relieved to find the phone was a mass of distorted, blackened wreckage, because that meant it was not still on fire. With a scowl, he let the pillow fall back over the mess.

Well. That seemed to be it for tonight. Color him impressed. Utterly exhausted, he rolled over and went back to sleep.

-SCENE BREAK-

Stomping up the stairs, Barbara burst into the attic.

Adam turned around from messing with his model, trying to arrange enough room in the crowded space so that he could work on it. "How'd it go?"

"That...!" She spluttered. "That man is a pervert! He had Lydia's hand down his shirt! And...and..."

"So he saw you two?"

"Yes!"

"Huh." Doing a few mental calculations, Adam hesitantly asked, "Are you sure you don't mean he had his hand down...?"

"No! Lydia had her hand down his robe. And he said..." She went over and whispered into Adam's ear.

"I see." He took off his glasses and started polishing them, a hard look in his eye. "I think it's time we took matters into our own hands."