A/N: I can't believe I've kept up a weekly update schedule this long! Hooray for me, but next week's may be delayed because of Real Life, jobness, and less writing time.
In other news, I'm glad that Lydia came across as creepy. I have a hard time writing proper horror with Beej, he never wants to cooperate. Also, don't worry - Juno will still show up later, but I figure she can't be the only caseworker. As for Doomie, I decided that instead of retconning the nickname into something cooler for a grown man to use, I'd just hang a lampshade on it.
5: A Very Bad Day All Around
Lydia sprawled in the red leather seat of the Beetle, propping her feet up on the dashboard. In barely the blink of her eye the stars flew across the sky and gave way to the first rays of dawn peeking over the trees.
She held up her right hand to watch the sun rise through it. For the hundredth time, she examined the mark on her wrist and the flush slowly creeping back down out of her fingertips. Pink and blue and host of living colors stood out starkly against the rest of her milk white skin. She knew from experience that it should have faded completely by now. Seriously, what was going on?
Tucking her hand back into the overlong sleeve of her stolen plaid shirt, she huddled into the ghostly fabric. It wasn't the right kind of warmth, but Adam could spare it for a little while. That one jolt of living heat had made everything else feel cold, even the light of the sun as she drank it in to recharge.
Of all the dumbass, rookie mistakes! She'd managed to coexist with the living, breathing Maitlands for...how long had it even been? Five years, maybe ten? But at their best she'd never felt such vibrant energy coming from them. Maybe it was because she'd left them alone, maybe it was because she was deteriorating, losing her cohesion, wasting away, going cuckoo being stuck in this stupid hill...
Any minute now the bureaucrats would make up their pencil-pushing minds and she'd be getting a citation or -
"So I hear you had another little incident with the living last night."
- a visit from her caseworker.
In a choppy, fake old-man accent he continued, "Eat hundred souls, then you demon become."
Shifting to one side, she leveled a dreary stare at the slim Asian graduate student in a bloodstained lab coat leaning against the car door. "Cut the bullshit, Osamu. How would I even get a hundred souls up here?"
He bent down to look at her over the thick plastic rims of his coke bottle glasses, raising an eyebrow. "I see you've been thinking about it, though." Eying the plaid shirt disapprovingly, he added, " The Maitlands would never see it coming."
She rearranged her scarf to cover more of the, frankly embarrassing, plaid pattern. "I was going to give it back."
"And I'm here, that's three. After that, you could probably make it down to the bridge, and absorb Mr. Coolidge. How far away is the cemetery from here? How close is a hospital? I bet there are some ghosts there."
"For god's sake, are you trying to talk me into it, or out of it?" she cried.
"I'm not your friend. I'm not here to hold your hand. If you fuck up your afterlife, that's your problem."
Grabbing his lapels, she yanked him down to her level. "If I took what's left of your life force, I think it would be your problem too, asshole," she hissed. "Do you want to end up in the Lost Souls Room?"
He peeled her fingers off his coat one by one with a put-upon expression. "At least I wouldn't have to do paperwork anymore. I thought I was done with advising arrogant little know-it-all punks when I hit that pavement. File for the proper fiend license, take a poltergeist correspondence course, do whatever the hell you want, start eating bugs a la Renfield for all I care, but - " He paused significantly.
"But?" she prompted.
"Leave the breather alone."
"There won't be another 'incident', but straight-up haunting is perfectly legal! I want him out of the house!"
"Fantastic. Let the Maitlands do it. They care more about the house than you do."
She bolted upright. "The Maitlands? ! You've gotta be kidding. Those amateurs couldn't scare a fly away!"
Perching on top of the car door, he took off his glasses and pointed at her with them. "Listen, kid. This isn't coming from me. I've given up on you. You're a lost cause. You'll never fucking straighten up and act like a human being. I would've just jotted out a memo saying 'shame on you,' only using fewer words. This is an order from higher up. They don't want you messing around with Benjamin Joos."
"Why?" she asked suspiciously, laying her other hand over her flushed fingers hidden in a plaid cuff.
"You know why. The dead can't go around killing the living! It's chaos, and more than that, it causes so much goddamn paperwork."
"I'm not going to kill him!"
"Oh, you'll just suck his essence out through his chest, and the heart attack will be a coincidence."
"It was an accident!"
"Keep telling yourself that. All I know is, the Department of Destiny is telling you to lay off or bad things happen, such as me having to fill out all the forms for karmic entanglement. There are 337 of them! You know the fate whackos have to do everything in...quint-plicate...there isn't even a word for it. Paperwork, times five." His voice got very quiet and intense, his almond-shaped eyes narrowed into angry slits. "Don't do this to me, Lydia. Think of all the paperwork."
She slouched back down in the seat. "Hmph."
He invaded her personal space until she looked him in the eye. "Stay away from Joos," he enunciated very clearly. Then he was gone.
She kicked the stick shift out of park with the oversized combat boots she'd lifted from the other male resident of the house, whom she was apparently supposed to avoid now. The car lurched in place against the wooden blocks under its back wheels.
A shout rang out from the front door of the house. "Hey! What the hell are you doing to Doomie?"
And speak of the devil. This just wasn't her day.
Lydia hauled herself up to sit on top of the trunk, swinging the boots against the seat back of the front and only row. Thud thud thud. "You named your car Doomie?" she asked, her eyebrows raised and a tiny smirk playing with the corner of her mouth.
That was seriously the last straw! Benjamin had had a hell of a day so far, and it wasn't even nine o'clock. He'd woken up too fucking early with a really agonizing bruised feeling in his chest that throbbed with his heartbeat, and as if that wasn't bad enough, he'd checked under the pillow to make sure it all hadn't been a weird-ass dream. It wasn't. Not only was his phone totally caput, his new mattress had a lovely hole burnt straight through it.
After that, all he wanted was some goddamn breakfast liberally spiced with painkillers, but nooooo. Everywhere he turns around there's that Tweedle-dee from last night with her '80s perm and Tweedle-dumbass, apparently her husband. Great. Out of all the perfectly normal houses in the world, he had to go ahead and pick the actually haunted one. He'd checked, it should have been fine! No gory murders on record, not even a little old grandma passing away and getting eaten by her cats. If the former owners didn't even have the decency to pass on, why weren't they mucking around in that stupid river they drowned in, or in the cemetery with their damn bodies? He called that just plain rude.
And just to put the crappy icing on the cake of misery, how did they go about haunting the place? Ripping their damn faces off and posing like wax figures in Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors. Like he gave a shit. He tried simply ignoring the harmless morons, but then they started bickering about whether he could see them or not. Hello headache.
It turned out he didn't actually have any painkillers yet. Nor had he actually gone grocery shopping for real, substantive food yesterday. Cue throwing on enough clothes not to be arrested for indecent exposure, being frustrated by an inability to find his favorite shoes, and heading out.
Only to see the motherfucking craziest ghost he'd ever had the misfortune of running across screwing with his car. His goddamn car! Was nothing sacred? !
He stormed down the front steps.
She leapt to her feet on the back of the car and shouted, "Not one step closer or I'll scuff the paint job!" She raised one foot and threateningly aimed the steel toecap down at the trunk lid.
He skidded to a stop, swearing. "Let's not do anything rash, okay?" he pleaded. His short, disheveled golden blonde hair shone in the pale morning light, which also illuminated a much handsomer face than the twisting shadows the cell phone screen had revealed. He was also younger than she had guessed, having been fooled by the deep creases marked on his forehead and between his perpetually scowling eyebrows. Late twenties, she revised her opinion. Maybe thirty.
"What the hell, that worked?" she muttered, letting her foot fall. He sprang forward and she immediately lifted it again, higher.
Throwing up his hands, he took a step backwards. "I surrender, alright? I fucking give up! ...Are those my boots?" Slowly examining her from toe to head, he began complaining. "What kind of goddamn hobo-hipster steals a man's own footwear and uses it to hold his car hostage? Have you no shame?"
"What did you just call me? !"
"You heard me! A hobo-hipster! Plaid shirt, pretentious scarf, and squatting on my property! Do you think this is the set of 'Rent' or somethin'?"
Oh. No. He. Didn't. Her hands twisted her black lace scarf into a noose-tight rope. Out of all the things she had managed to keep from her mortal life, and there weren't many, he insults one of her scarves? "I'm going to make you wish you had never been born!" she vowed.
Considering the last time only Babs' clueless interference had saved him from who knows what, he watched in fascinated horror as inky black poured out over her brown irises. Phantom wind rippled through her hair and the stark white of her skin seemed to vibrate in and out of focus. Briefly, he considered apologizing. Nah.
Lydia roughly pushed up her sleeves and pointed her marked hand down at the Beetle, shouting something that was rendered incomprehensible by the sudden revving of the car's engine. In the midst of a dazzling explosion, what had been ordinary headlights blinked for the very first time, and what had been a bumper grinned widely.
The Dragster of Doom turned to look at Benjamin and beeped his horn demandingly, starting to roll forward. When the poor man didn't get the hint, the car tossed him into the driver's seat before taking off down the road at breakneck speed.
All that was left behind on the driveway was a forlorn lace scarf tangled around a pair of combat boots.
Having watched the scene below without even being sure what she was watching it with, she wanted to know why the car that was supposed to run him over a little bit, maybe break a leg or something, started acting like a freaking puppy-on-wheels. That was a lot less Stephen King's "Christine" and a lot more Disney's "Herbie" than she was aiming for.
What the hell just happened? She hadn't meant for the car to come alive, or animate, or whatever. She definitely hadn't meant to get pasted across the scenery as a thoroughly discorporated blob of protoplasm by the blowback of the massive surge caused by channeling her mojo through the lingering energy in her hand. If she still had the necessary organs to do so, she'd probably be having a panic attack.
She really needed to get her act together.
Fast.