Danny Phantom: Chapter One
The Bag
On a dark night several years in the past, a young boy stood atop a hill just outside of the city borders- a place that no one who lived in the city particularly liked to visit. Those who dared step foot within its gate would feel a sudden unnerving chill, especially on quiet nights where the only company in the lifeless fields were the grey rocks poking out of the ground like drowning men futilely grasping at air. With a grunt and a sob, Danny hoisted a large, stretched- thin- plastic trash bag up and over his shoulder, stumbling from both the weight of the contents and the growing hollow pit in his stomach.
The boy raised a hand to cover his bile- filled mouth. The elastic sliding up against his back was sickeningly warm compared to the cold winds of the empty field. Static energy flowed through his unkempt hair, raising it up like eerie moonlit veins in the body of the night sky, and staring down from the mound, the joint silhouette of Danny and the bag began to descend. His sneakers sunk into the mud, the tips of his toes dampening from the fog-covered ground, wet with morning dew. The bag lost heat fast as it jostled around. It was impossible to ignore, but the boy kept moving even as the contents shifted, each poke invading his wretched imagination.
Danny's imagination was incapable of coming up with anything more horrific than the truth; this was something he knew. So the boy decided to try to visualize taking out the trash. He closed his eyes. He was taking out the garbage in the early morning. It was fall, so it was dark, windy and damp, and the garbage truck would be coming around the corner at any moment to prove him right.
The grass below was actually just wet concrete and there totally wasn't a body slung over his shoulder, scorched beyond recognition, and already starting to rot. There wasn't a corpse rolling around in the sack, and the thing poking Danny between the shoulder blades definitely wasn't a bony elbow or melting kneecap. The repetitive clunking right in his ears absolutely was not exposed bone slamming against the base of a shovel- no. It was merely waste, because that was not a body. It couldn't be a body. It shouldn't be a body. In fact, it was impossible for it to be a body.
The person that this vessel had once belonged to was very much alive and very much freaking out.
Danny emerged from the hill's shadow and entered onto a wide, open field. He abandoned the ocean of jagged stones cutting through the skin of the Earth, for the secluded forested area; the section of the graveyard no one visited any longer sprinkled with old, corroded limestone plaques holding names lost to time. The burial ground for the bag. As he passed by a particularly large statue of an angel, grimy and covered in inch- thick moss at the base, he sensed movement from behind the nearby bushes, sending a fresh wave of panic through his body.
"What the hell, Tucker!"
"Guys…?"
"Danny!" The two teenagers momentarily forgot their disagreement as Danny broke through the bushes and into the small clearing.
"Don't scare us like that!" Tucker exclaimed in a hushed tone.
Sam sent Tucker a malicious look. "Danny… Are you okay?"
She knew by the way he looked and the context of the occasion that the unspoken answer was 'no,' but asking the question brought a sense of grounding normalcy. While the words spoken had no true meaning, they were essential to shedding accumulated panic. It was like that for all of them, because the three teens hiding in the thick, ancient graveyard bushes had just witnessed something so terrible that it would scar all of them for life and potentially even their afterlife. Something that shouldn't have even been possible; something so grotesque that when any of the group closed their eyes for too long, they could still see the flash of light burnt into their vision, the radioactive rays scorching their eyes like a laser, and could hear the screams of agony that ripped into their souls more brutal than any knife and shot deeper than any gun.
"I'm fine," Danny answered in uncertainty.
Sam hated to see Danny this way. Despite his attempts at holding his composure, Sam could see the tears welling up in his eyes. His continual attempts to maintain control were failing, and right now, it was all he had for comfort besides willing friends. He wore a wistful, far-away expression in his eyes, as if he wanted a hug although he generally believed they were awkward and smothering. But the worst part was he was like this because of her and the stupid dare.
Danny fell into her arms, staring blankly into the dark forest beyond. Tucker joined, encompassing the duo with his clammy, skinny arms.
As the hug died, Danny's eyes fell on the large pit his best friends had been digging. It was already a few feet deep. Two grimy shovels lay off to the right stuck in the pile of mud from the trench. His legs felt weaker.
"This is- it's so wrong, guys, I mean…"
"Yeah."
"I hate to be that person, but when should we, you know, t- talk… about it?" Sam asked as she gripped the grimy handle of one of the shovels.
"I don't know. Not tonight."
Never gazing into the depths of the bag, Danny grabbed his shovel and began to dig so fast it seemed vengeful, all the while forcing images of the corpse into the back of his head where they couldn't hurt him. The more hands he had digging, the faster he could leave the eerie graveyard and forget about all of this. Or at least try.
The rest of the digging passed in silence except for the sounds of shovels hitting the ground and flinging it into a slowly- growing pile. Once the hole was deep enough to get stuck in if they weren't careful, Danny tossed his shovel away with a final thump. The sky was a slightly lighter shade now, and Sam could see that at some point, the monotony of the digging had lowered Dany's guard and allowed for a few tears to slip past his defenses and dry on his muddy face.
"Sam, Tucker… You should go now."
"But Danny-"
"I said you should leave, Sam," Danny said in a surprisingly menacing tone.
Sam stared at him for a moment then reached over and seized Tucker by the arm, leading him away from the mound that would soon be part of the body's not- so- final resting place. As she moved over to the bush that Danny had emerged from earlier, she looked over her shoulder and whispered. "Danny, I'm so sorry."
He heard her but did not respond. Danny was buried in contemplation, and nothing she could say, even if it was an accident, could ever make up for what had occurred. She was the one who had challenged him to enter the machine, and when he refused, she had kept on pushing. She hadn't really declared him a coward, but she had definitely suggested it. It was a joke, and she had never truly meant it, but it was still difficult to deal with the idea that someone he called a friend—someone that he trusted—would contribute to this mess in such a cruel way… would bring him to this mockery of death and then try to shoulder the blame herself; without bearing in mind that maybe, to Danny, seeing her do that would bring him even more pain than sharing the burden.
Danny did not hold her responsible for the accident. He was only angry for what she had said to him before, which kept resurfacing in his mind. Besides, Sam had no way of knowing what would happen. Only Danny had been warned of the risks. He blamed himself for agreeing to the challenge, for disbelieving his parents, and for underestimating the danger. Because he was stupid, he was to blame; it was his fault that he had turned into a freak of nature, some zombie or ghost burying his own former body.
As soon as he no longer heard any rustling in the trees and bushes of the thick forest, Danny lifted the bag and once again felt the body sink to the bottom in a collapsed heap of decimated muscle tissue and shattered bones. He shuddered, forcing out images of the rotted flesh which vaguely constituted a replica of his face, but still kept up his facade of collectiveness even though no one was around- mainly as an assurance to himself. He lowered the bag into the semi- rectangular hole in the ground slowly as if it were a proper burial, and made sure that the thing- the corpse- was laid out in such a way that it looked like it was in a peaceful sleep under the plastic.
After hours of not knowing exactly what had happened to him in the machine, Danny finally took it upon himself to check. He moved his hand to the side of his neck, felt around, and waited. And after a few frightening minutes, he found it- a faint pulse. It was slow, slower than what should be normal especially for someone so anxious and distraught, but at least it was there. It was comforting to know that he was alive- or at least not quite so dead.
"Since this is technically a funeral- my funeral- I guess I should say something…" Danny trailed off and looked off at the sky to try and find the right words, like a silent prayer for guidance. Then he started again. "I never thought that something like this could or would ever happen to me, but it really did. After this, I don't think I'll ever be the same; in a way, I guess that makes the old me actually dead. I'm going into the unknown here, down a path I don't recognize- one that I'm not so sure anyone else has gone down before. And I'm scared. Terrified, actually. But I think I'll take whatever happened to me as a second chance- a chance to be a better me, one I can be proud of- even if I really am a freak like Dash calls me."
He spent thirty minutes filling in the hole. He did it fast. Each foot of dirt between him and the body, made forgetting it closer to a possibility. It was making him uncomfortable and squeamish, and the rapidly rising sun wasn't helping. The more light there was, the easier people could see into the forest. And there was something about light now that just seemed so unnerving, something about it that made him feel weak and exposed. Maybe it was because of the accident. Maybe it was something else. He wiped some sweat from his brow and went to find some dead branches and vines- anything to hide the new grave from anyone curious enough to peer into the forest of forgotten souls. Once it was sufficiently covered, Danny squatted down and whispered something to the grave.
With that, he turned his back on the thing that was once himself and trudged back out to the cemetery gate. He never looked back. Though he never did forget about it. Sometimes, he could even feel the corpse down in its trench, the sensation of slowly degrading flesh itching the skin of the blasphemous half- ghost.
"Goodbye."