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Spook_Me Ficathon: Ghost Stories in the Van
I finished my ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spook_me ficathon story! \o/ This is the first time I haven't dropped out since the very first year, 2006. (And even in that case, it took me almost a year after the deadline to finish my story.) This year I did it ON TIME for once. Also, this is one of my rare attempts to write actual horror.
Title: Ghost Stories in the Van
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: 10,500
Summary: During a stakeout on Halloween night, the team entertain themselves by telling ghost stories. No season five spoilers.
Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1019793/chapters/2028281
1. Clinton
"Bingo!" Neal said, holding up his card.
Diana looked up, frowning, from the handful of paper strips that she was using to call out bingo squares. They'd used a stack of blank authorization forms to make the bingo cards and the paper number tags. "You've won three in a row. You're cheating somehow."
"You can't cheat at bingo," Neal said.
Jones looked up from his own card. "If anyone can do it, Caffrey can do it."
"Peter," Neal appealed to a higher authority.
Peter glanced over. He was taking a turn on the monitors, earphones sitting askew on his head so that he could hear what was going on in the van. "Did you cheat?" he asked directly. "Yes or no."
"Cheating is such a loaded word ..."
"I knew it," Diana said. She gathered the strips in a crumpled handful and dropped them in the wastebasket, along with her bingo card.
"I don't think we actually need all of us in the van tonight," Neal said hopefully.
"Nice try," Peter said. "You're staying. It's good for you. Builds character."
Neal slumped back in his chair. "It's Halloween. You're making us sit in the van on Halloween."
"Somewhere to be?" Peter asked, eyes sharp and bright.
"Parties," Neal said vaguely. "And whatever."
"Because watching twenty-two-year-olds in tacky costumes bump and grind is totally your kind of scene," Jones said.
Neal looked as if he was considering not answering; then, playing idly with his hat, he said, "June has a haunted house every year. Last year I helped out."
There was a brief silence. Peter broke it. "There'll be other years," he said gently.
Neal made a noncommittal noise.
"Every year," Peter added, looking like the admission was being dragged out of him with pliers, "El and I dress up and hand out candy to the neighborhood kids. Kinda regret missing it this year."
This perked up Neal, as it was no doubt meant to. "You dress up? Are there pictures?"
"No," Peter said.
"I think he's right, boss," Diana said. "Pictures or it didn't happen."
Peter, struggling to keep a smile off his face, pointed at each of them in turn. "It didn't happen, as far as all of you are concerned."
"What happens in the van," Jones said, "stays in the van."
There was a brief silence during which everyone gazed at the monitors, which showed a lonely dark street. A wind lifted some scraps of trash, pushing them along the street. The digital clock on the monitors ticked over 10 p.m.
"Any of you guys have any good ghost stories?" Peter asked at last.
"Are you ten?" Neal said, predictably.
Peter looked defensive. "Hey, when I was a kid we'd go out camping by the lake and scare the pants off each other with ghost stories. I have a million of 'em."
The other three traded wary looks. "It was the seventies," Diana said. "They had to do something to entertain themselves."
"Someone come up with something quick," Neal said plaintively.
Jones cleared his throat. "I have something, actually. It's a story I've never told anyone before."
Now it Peter, Neal, and Diana who looked at each other. "Is this an actual story, or the setup for a ghost story?" Diana asked.
"This really happened," Jones said. "It was a few years ago when I was working late. You guys want to hear it or not?"
Neal raised a hand. "I vote yes."
A smile flickered around the corners of Peter's mouth. "Sure, go ahead."
Jones cleared his throat. "Okay, so this was shortly after I came to work for the New York White Collar office and met you, Peter."
***
I was new in town, fresh out of the Navy and Quantico. I'm a Baltimore kid, born and raised. Came up to New York a few times on weekends with my buddies, but I didn't know the city well, and I didn't really know anyone here.
Working for White Collar was a good gig, though. I liked the work and I've always been good with computers, so like we all do, I ended up working late a lot. Sometimes I'd be there after everyone else had gone home.
This was one of those nights.
You guys have probably all worked in White Collar long enough to know how the building gets at night. Like any big office building, there's that sense of emptiness after hours, like there's too much space for the walls or something. During the day it's so busy you really just concentrate on your own office space, but at night, you can hear what's going on elsewhere on your floor, and even on other floors.
I'd turned off most of the overhead lights and I was the only person there, sitting alone at my desk in a pool of light from my desk lamp, when I heard the floor above me creak.
That's pretty silly, right? I mean, we have those hanging ceilings. There's a lot of space in there. Even if someone was walking around upstairs -- hell, if a whole herd of buffalo were walking around upstairs -- you wouldn't be able to hear it.
But I heard it plain as day, just like the way the floor creaks in a cheap apartment building whenever the neighbors move around upstairs. And it caught my attention. I stopped, took my hands off the keyboard, and looked up at the ceiling. And I heard it again, a little farther along, a distinct floorboard creak.
I got up and stood looking up. I told myself, don't be ridiculous, Clinton. It's just heating and cooling, in a building this big, transmitting stress along the building's frame. It's not like you could actually hear someone walking around up there.
But then it came again, just a little farther along, and this time there was a sound kind of like something dragging. Like, I guess, a chair scraping along the floor? I don't know. I just know that it was pretty clear, but I know you can't hear what goes on in the upstairs offices. I was just a new guy, but I'd been here long enough to know that for certain.
I held my breath and listened. Mostly I heard the usual sounds of the building at night: the compressor in the refrigerated drinks machine out in the hall, the janitor's vacuum somewhere else in our floor, and the soft pinging of the building's heating system.
When a soft thump came from somewhere above me, I jumped.
Maybe it was just that things were quiet enough the sound transmitted better than I'd realized. It was possible that you could always hear it that well, and I'd just never noticed because there was never anyone on the floor above us. I tried to remember what actually was on the floor above us. Twenty-six was Evidence, I did know that, and twenty-three was Organized Crime. But I really didn't have a clue what went on on the twenty-second floor.
... Okay, I can see you guys laughing. Yeah, you know, and I know now, that it's record-keeping and storage up there. But I didn't know that then, right? And anyway, I'm not sure if knowing it would have helped, because what, exactly, were they doing up there at nine p.m. to make that much noise? Dragging boxes around? Okay, I can come up with some ideas. But I'd worked late a lot, and I'd never heard that before.
I climbed the stairs to the hall outside Peter's office, because it got me closer to the ceiling, and listened. I heard the creaking again, but farther away this time. I listened carefully. It did sound like footsteps, but there was something just a little off about the cadence of them, like someone was taking extra long steps, or had really long legs. My dad was a big guy, and I know what his footsteps always sounded like outside my bedroom, and if these were actually the footsteps of some guy, then he must have been a lot bigger than Dad. Like, NBA basketball player big.
Actually, if I were going to guess, I'd have to say those footsteps sounded like they belonged to someone eight or nine feet tall. Of course that's impossible, so let's say it was a big, really heavy guy walking slowly.
Anyway, I heard the creaking head over toward the elevator, and then I heard the elevator go ding -- and you know you can hear that, especially at night, when the doors open on floors near ours. Okay, no big. Except I didn't hear the elevator move on.
I was still curious. FBI agent, right? I investigate things for a living. I stood there for a little while, and all was still and silent up top, so I headed down the stairs to see what was going on with the elevator. On the way by my desk, I grabbed my weapon and shrugged into the shoulder harness, just in case.
The first thing I saw when I stepped out the glass doors into the hall is just the elevator doors shut, the elevator readouts showing they're on other floors, like you'd expect. One elevator was down on 4. The other ...
Well, that's weird. It's showing 21.5.
Yeah, I see that look, Peter. I know there's no floor 21.5. But I was a new guy then, you know? I was pretty sure the floors were in integers. But I wasn't absolutely, swearing-on-a-Bible certain. And that is what it said, sure as I'm sitting here in this van tonight. I've never seen it read that before or since. In fact -- and I looked into this later, you better believe I did -- there's not actually a spot for decimals on the elevator displays.
But that night, it said 21.5.
I stared at that for a while, and then I pushed the button to bring the elevator to this floor.
That elevator didn't move. It was the other one that did, coming up from 4 to open just as pretty as you please on 21.
Huh, thought I, and I got in. The buttons were like normal, just integers, the next one up being 22, and I wondered if maybe that floor 21.5 was some kind of men-in-black thing. Like how some places have sub-basement floors you can't access without a special key.
I pushed 22 anyway. The elevator went up and stopped, and I found myself holding my breath as the doors opened, my hand touching my gun. They opened on a lobby a lot like ours -- well, if you've ever been up to 22, you know what it looks like. All the lights in the offices were off, but the lights in the elevator lobby were still on, like normal. I stepped out and the elevator doors closed behind me. The other one was still sitting on 21.5.
I walked around a bit, just to reassure myself that no one was up here. There wasn't anyone, but I had the weirdest feeling that --
Okay, this sounds kind of crazy, I know. But when I was growing up in Baltimore, I used to run all over the city, exploring. We actually lived in a pretty good neighborhood, but a lot of parts of town were not so good, and as a teenager who was into urban exploration, I got this sense when I wasn't alone in a place. It's hard to describe; it's just this feeling, this kind of pressure ... yeah, I see Caffrey nodding along. He knows what I'm talking about. And I know the rest of you have probably done sweeps through a building that's supposed to be empty, but actually there's someone hiding in there -- yeah, see, you get this sixth sense that you're not alone. And I was getting it real strong that night.
The thing is, there was no reason -- no legitimate reason -- that anyone would be up there. It's the FBI building; you have to go through the metal detectors and security and all to get in. It's not like anyone could just wander in off the street. And all the lights on that floor were off. The offices, the corridors, they were all dark. As I walked around, I'd turn the lights on, and every time I got this hot prickling tense feeling, like when the lights came on, I was going to see -- I don't know. Someone standing in front of me, maybe, just far enough away that you couldn't see them 'til the lights lit them up and they jumped up like a pop-up in Hogan's Alley back at Quantico.
And you know what a maze that place is, all those hallways and little storage rooms. I wandered around for I don't know how long -- turning lights on and off, feeling sillier by the minute, but I still couldn't shake that skin-crawly feeling that I wasn't alone.
You listen to your instincts in this job. You guys know that.
I was poking around through another empty room when I heard the elevator go ding, unmistakably on my floor.
Well, that's interesting, though I. Back I went, hurrying to the hallway outside the office where I was looking around, hoping to see who'd come up. Probably the janitor, but I was jumpy enough to have my weapon out -- and it was stupid, there was nothing to be jumpy about, but I just wanted to be certain, you know? I poked my head out into the hallway. It's that long one off the rooms where they keep the pre-computer Missing Persons records, and you know how you can look all the way down and see into the elevator lobby? Well, I leaned out just in time to catch a glimpse...
I don't know what the hell I caught a glimpse of.
Movement, that's mostly what I remember seeing. Something went from the bright elevator lobby -- you know you can't see the elevator doors from that angle -- really fast into the dark hallway off to the right. From the way it had to hunch down to fit, it had to be nine feet tall at least, and it was really slim so it didn't cast much of a shadow, and it was gray. Like, a pale ash gray. I couldn't get a good look, just enough to know that it didn't move right, and there was something about it that was all stretched out. My main impressions were "gray" and "wrong", and then it was gone.
I stood there for a minute just staring and trying to make what I'd just seen fit anything I knew about. It was a probie come up to look up a file he'd forgotten, I told myself.
Then I got to thinking about how all those corridors loop around and hook up with each other, and how dark that corridor was where I was standing. The far end was completely lost in shadows. You couldn't see a thing down there.
I don't mind telling you that I must've set a land speed record for getting back to that nice bright elevator lobby. One of the elevators was back down on 10, and the other, the one that had been on 21.5 before, was sitting on 22. I hit the button and the doors opened as nice as you please.
As I got in, I caught this glimpse -- okay, it was just out of the corner of my eye. You know how the back of the elevators are sort of mirrored, but not really? It's reflective, but you can't really see anything in there. Well, I saw something move in that reflection, and it was moving really fucking fast, and it was coming my way, a pale blur rushing from the dark depths of the offices on the 22nd floor straight towards the elevator lobby.
And then the doors closed.
I hit the first floor button. Hard.
I still had that feeling, though, that I'm not alone feeling. I had it really bad. But, you know, I'm in an elevator that's eight feet across, and it's brightly lit and heading down, and there's not a lot of places to hide, you know? I looked all around and even checked out my reflection in the polished back wall and there's seriously nothing there, which means my instincts are fucking with me and everything is fine.
By the time the doors opened on the first floor, all brightly lit with the usual nighttime security guards hanging out, I'd calmed down a bit. This was stupid, I was a trained FBI agent and a Navy man, and here I was acting like a freshman college student being taken on a snipe hunt. I wandered over and said hi to the security guards. They said hi back, and was I working late, and we shot the breeze a little. Then I said I knew this was a stupid question, but was there a floor 21.5 in the building?
They laughed and said no, of course not.
Then I told them I'd thought maybe I'd heard someone moving around while I was up there, and I wanted to check the security footage. So they said sure, and called up the camera shots for me. There's me in the elevator lobby on 21, there's me getting out on 22, and a couple angles of me poking around on 22 checking things out, like I said.
So I asked them to call up the camera footage for the elevator. You guys know how the camera is angled down so you can't see the buttons or what floor it's on. So it was impossible to tell exactly what the elevator had been doing, but we could see it sitting on one floor for awhile, then it goes to another floor and sits there for a while. Then I see myself get in.
Nothing in between? No passengers in the elevator at all? I scroll back. Nothing. So I watched myself ride down. And then I caught some movement. Not me. Something else.
I looked close. It's just me standing in the elevator, looking a little freaked out. I see myself look around wildly like I remember doing. And there's my reflection in the polished wall behind me, looking around just like I remembered.
But there's something else. I remember really clearly seeing my own reflection and it was the only reflection there -- obviously it was. There was nothing else in the elevator to reflect at all. But on the security footage, there's something else moving in the polished back wall, something that isn't me. I can't get a good look at it, because the security camera image is pretty grainy and also, that wall just doesn't reflect really well. But it's definitely in the elevator with me. Like, standing a little behind me, looming over me. And it's really thin, and one hell of a lot taller than me. And as I watch, it starts to raise one of those long, long arms, coming up, slow and boneless like it's unhinged at the shoulder. Right behind me.
Then the doors open and I get out, and there's nothing behind me, nothing at all.
2. Diana
There was a silence when Jones finished. Then Neal said, "I'm never working late again and no one can make me."
Diana said, "Bullshit."
"Had me going for a minute, though," Peter said. "I know how it gets when you're in the office after hours. It is creepy. You start jumping at shadows."
"No one else has ever heard those creaks in the ceiling?" Jones asked. "I've heard them other times, you know. I just never went and tried to check it out again, because Mrs. Jones didn't raise a fool. Also, I tend to use the left-hand elevator now, rather than the right one."
There was another brief silence, all of them clearly contemplating mysterious late-night building sounds. Then Diana said again, "Bullshit."
Peter blew out a breath and grinned. "How about you? No ghost stories of your own? No big old haunted houses in the family?"
Diana snorted. "Not even one."
"None of your nannies told you creepy stories at night?" Neal asked, picking up the thread of the gentle teasing.
"Well ..." Diana's expression turned reflective, looking inward. "There is one thing I remember." She looked up again, her eyes sharp. "What happens in the van --"
"Stays in the van," Jones said.
Diana smiled, and there was a strange edge to it. "I'll tell you a story my nanny once told me."
***
When I was a little girl, my parents didn't put me to bed. I didn't actually see them much. We had nannies and au pairs for that.
We also moved around a lot, and I went through a lot of nannies because not many of them were willing to move with us. But I figure it was good for me. They were interesting people, my nannies. They spoke a lot of languages and I picked up little bits of each one. I also had a bodyguard named Charlie, but he came and went, and he wasn't with us in the time I'm going to tell you about.
This happened one year when we lived for six months or so in the Ukraine. I was about seven or eight, I guess.
That year, my family rented a really amazing house on the edge of a small wood. The whole place was like something out of a fairy tale, or at least it seemed like it to me at the time. It was a big rambling structure of heavy timbers and stone, located on the edge of what seemed to me like a forest. It was really just a park with an industrial city located right on the other side. But to me at the time, it seemed like something straight out of the Ice Age. There were huge old trees dripping with moss, and it was easy to imagine aurochs hiding behind them, the big old oxen of ancient Europe, or wolves with long legs and sharp teeth. I would wander around in the edge of the woods, and sometimes I'd find old abandoned ruins half-covered with moss and tree roots, the remains of farmhouses and an old cemetery that probably went with the big house. I was never scared. It was all fascinating to me.
I loved the house and the forest. And I also loved my nanny, who had come from one of the small towns in the area to take care of me. Her name was Miss Olga Shevchenko. Most of my nannies up to that point had been older women, but Olga was quite young, barely out of her teens. Her eyes were very sad, and she was beautiful, with long dark braids. There was something a little old-fashioned about her. I didn't know it at the time, but I think now, looking back on it, that Olga was my first crush.
At night, she used to pull the covers up around me and then she would sit on the edge of my bed and tell me stories. I loved running wild in the woods, but I also loved those storytelling times at night, because Olga knew the best stories.
"This is an old story that my mother used to tell me when I was your age," she would say, and then, in her strongly accented English, she would tell me about witches and mysterious little houses in the woods, about snow maidens and foxes and angels.
One night as she tucked me in, the moon coming through the window shone on the tears on her cheeks.
"What's wrong?" I asked her.
Olga looked away, but I was a very curious and persistent child -- shut up, Caffrey -- and I kept pushing until she agreed to tell me.
"The full moon makes me think of my friend Hanna, that's all."
I still remember lying in bed that night, curled up beneath the covers, warm and safe because Olga would keep night terrors away from me. She sat on the end of my bed and told me a story that she had never told before. I didn't know at the time, but this was the last story that Olga would ever tell me, because afterwards I told my mother about it and everything changed.
When she was a young woman, Olga said, she was good friends with another young woman in her home town. The two women were the same age and had grown up together. They were very close and everyone said they were like sisters. Hanna had long golden braids, where Olga had long dark braids, and Hanna was very beautiful.
There was also a young man named Anatoly who lived nearby. He courted both women, and though Olga loved him as a friend, she was not interested. She only had eyes for her friend, you see.
After a time, Olga's parents determined that she was to marry this young man.
"People still do that?" I interrupted her to ask.
"They did when I was a girl," she said.
Hanna was very angry, because she loved Anatoly herself. And Olga was heartbroken. She had lost the young lady she loved, and although she cared for Anatoly very dearly, she did not wish to marry him.
Because she loved them both as she did, she thought that she would arrange it so that Hanna and Anatoly could marry each other, and then they would all be happy.
Tucked beneath the covers, I listened quietly. I wanted very badly for them to all be happy, and because Olga's eyes were so sad, I had a terrible feeling that they would not be happy at all.
"Do you remember that place you like to play in the woods?" Olga interrupted her own story to ask.
"Which one?" I asked sleepily.
"The one with the gravestones."
I did remember. It was behind our house and down a little overgrown path in the woods. Some children might've been afraid, but I thought it was nice. There was a spring with a ruined chapel and a little cemetery next to it. Some of the gravestones were overgrown with moss, while others were newer.
"That's where Hanna is buried," Olga said, and I peeked out from under the covers again. I was startled and sad to hear that Hanna had died. I almost felt like I'd gotten to know her, Olga spoke of her so eloquently.
"What happened to her?"
Olga drew a long breath. It was clear to me, even at that age, that she had never talked to anyone about this.
"I told Hanna to meet me in the woods," she said. "Near that spring where you like so much to play. The moon was full that night, so I thought she should have light to see by. And I hurried to meet her that night. It was winter, the air sharp and clear. I was going to tell her that I did not love Anatoly, and the way was free for her to marry him. Deep in my heart, I fancied I might tell her of my own love for her, but my conviction was not so strong then."
I shivered beneath my covers, imagining the scene. When I peeked out, I saw Olga sitting on the end of my bed, slim and straight in the moonlight. She idly stroked one of her braids, a nervous mannerism that she had.
"It was very cold when I got there, and I waited for her. And waited, my breath frosty in the air .... And waited, long into the night. But Hanna never came. There was no moon that night, you see, as I had hoped. Though the moon was full, the clouds covered it. And I learned that her horse had fallen in the darkness as she rode to meet me. She was thrown from its back and broke her neck."
"She should have taken a car instead," I said, sure of myself as children are -- I said shut up, Caffrey.
Olga laughed softly and sadly. "If only her family had one then! But no, she died in the darkness and was buried there beside the spring, where I had waited for her. Anatoly was broken-hearted, blaming me for Hanna's death. He moved away to find work, but he died laboring on a farm. His body was brought home to be buried beside Hanna's." She raised her hand to touch her face, where her tears glistened in the moonlight. "And then I was alone."
"I'm sorry," I said, sitting up in bed. Her distress hurt me deeply. "Is that why you came to work for us?"
Her head moved in what might be a nod. "I promised that I would stay near them forever, so that they would never be lonely." She turned away from me, weeping in the moonlight.
I rose from my bed and tried to hug her, but she pulled away, weeping inconsolably.
So I ran downstairs. This was really unusual for me -- I didn't usually go looking for my parents like that. But it was so sad, and I wanted to tell them about Olga's problem so that they could fix it, if possible. At that age, I thought my parents could fix anything, even death.
I ran through the house in my nightgown, and found my parents in my father's study, sitting with a middle-aged woman I'd never seen before. They were clearly having a late-evening visit; there were little coffee cups around.
"Mother," I cried, and ran up to her. I babbled out something about Olga. I was afraid she'd be angry, but I really wanted her to know so that she could find Olga's girlfriend's grave by the spring and make everything all right for her.
"Darling," she said, and patted my shoulder. My mother was never one for casual displays of affection. "I'm glad you came down."
"Olga --" I said.
"You mean Miss Shevchenko," my mother corrected me sternly.
"Yes ma'am," I said, "Miss Shevchenko, but --"
"You've come down just in time to meet her," my mother said, and turned to the middle-aged woman, who smiled at me. "This is your new nanny, my dear. This is Miss Olga Shevchenko."
"But," I said. I stared at this woman, who I had never seen before in my life. "Who's been my nanny since we moved here?" I asked my mother, thinking of the woman who always tucked me in and sat on the end of my bed to tell me stories at night.
"Miss Shevchenko was unavoidably delayed," my mother told me. "You've had no nanny these past weeks. You know that."
--
Note: Diana's ghost story is adapted from an incident in the book Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick, and also draws some inspiration from one of my spook-me Tarot prompts.
3. Peter
Jones shivered and moved a little closer to the van's heating vents. It did seem somewhat colder when Diana had stopped talking.
"Is that really how it happened?" Neal asked her.
She lifted a shoulder in a small shrug. "I was seven. Kids have active imaginations. Maybe it's something I read in a book somewhere, or something that someone read to me."
There was another little silence, everyone coming back to reality from that place of frozen forests and big drafty houses that Diana had conjured. Then Peter shook himself a bit, and turned a look of challenge on Neal. "I think it's your turn now."
Neal raised his eyebrows. "Me? Aren't you the one who said you have a million of them?"
"Caffrey's right, boss," Diana said. "I think the gauntlet's been thrown. Let's hear one of those scary summer-camp stories."
"Well ... all right." Peter's gaze turned reflective, and he leaned back against the bank of equipment. Jones quietly took the headset from him, taking over on the monitors so Peter could talk. "This isn't something I heard, though. This is something that actually happened to me, the summer I was fifteen."
***
I grew up upstate, in a little town outside Syracuse called Thomasboro. Pretty typical small town, really. We had a downtown with a Dairy Queen and a burger place, we had a bunch of fields and some woods and a lake.
We also had the Johnson house, which was the local haunted house. It was a pretty creepy place, sitting all by itself on this overgrown piece of land about a mile from where I lived, directly between me and the high school, which meant I had to bike past it all the time. My mom said there was an old man living there when she was a kid, but he kept to himself and never talked to anybody in town, and there were rumors about him. She wouldn't tell me the rumors, but I heard from other kids at school that people said the guy had killed his wife and kids with an axe, and buried the bodies in the house and then just kept living there for years and years until finally he had a heart attack. When the ambulance came and got him, they found the body of the wife, but they never found the kids, and people say they're still buried there. The wife was supposed to come back on full-moon nights, walking around the house looking for her lost children.
Typical small-town stuff, in other words. But there wasn't much to do in a town the size of ours, and so it came to be a rite of passage for the older kids to spend a night in the house. Full moons were best, especially in the winter, when it was bitter cold and the leafless branches of the trees rattled in the wind.
Some of the kids who'd done it laughed it off and said they didn't see anything, it was just an old house with graffiti on the walls and beer cans in the corners. But some kids said they'd seen really creepy stuff, floating lights and places in the house that were hot or cold, or made you feel really heavy or lifted your hair with static electricity. And some of them wouldn't talk about it at all.
Anyway, the summer I was fifteen, my good buddy Dave and I decided to do it. We didn't tell our parents because we figured they'd tell us not to. Technically, even though no one lived in the house, it was trespassing and we could get in trouble for it. Yeah, Neal, I see the look on your face. I was a fifteen-year-old kid. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
That night it was me, Dave, and Dave's younger cousin Leroy. Dave was a good guy. He and I had been friends since the second grade. Leroy was only twelve, and a three-year age difference might as well be twenty when you're a kid, but we let Leroy go along on a lot of our adventures because he was one of those wild, scrappy kids who will do literally anything. It didn't matter if it was eating bugs on a stupid dare or just doing something dangerous for kicks, but Leroy was always up for it. The staff at the emergency room up in Syracuse knew him by name -- that's what kind of kid Leroy was.
Reminds me of someone else I know, come to think of it.
Anyway, it was just supposed to be me and Dave, but when I showed up on my bike at the meeting place around the corner from the house, Dave and Leroy were both waiting for me. "Yeah," Dave said. "I know." Turned out Leroy had run away from summer camp -- again. He was always doing that. His parents would pack him off in the hopes that he'd been someone else's problem for a couple of weeks, but he'd get bored inside two days and tired of all the rules, so he'd run away. Usually he wanted Dave or me to hide him, which of course didn't work because it's not like they don't do head counts at camp, and then they'd call Leroy's parents and his parents called our parents, and then we were in trouble too.
Like I said, reminds me of someone I know.
Anyway, Dave couldn't ditch Leroy without Leroy telling on us, so when Leroy turned up after running away again, Dave had to bring him along. Leroy was riding double on Dave's bike because Leroy's bike was back at his parents' house.
"He could come in handy," Dave pointed out to me as we pedaled along. "He's not afraid of anything. That's going to come in useful tonight."
Boy, we didn't know the half of it yet.
So we pedaled toward the house in the dark. It was a full moon, we'd made sure of that because there was no point in spending the night in a haunted house if you never saw any ghosts. But it had rained earlier in the night and we could only glimpse the moon occasionally as clouds passed over it. It was still summer and should've been warm, but the rain had sucked all the heat out of the air and pretty soon we were all three shivering. Leroy kept complaining about it: his hands were cold, his ears were cold, his feet were cold. Finally Dave gave Leroy his hat to shut him up. "Next time you decide to run away, bring a jacket," Dave told him.
We pulled up outside the Johnson house and put our kickstands down. The moon picked that moment to come out from behind the clouds and the whole scene really did look like something out of a horror movie. It was a big old house, probably a farmhouse once, before the fields got sold off to make subdivisions. But it was still sitting on about an acre or so of land, totally overgrown now. You could see the house pretty clearly, although there was ivy going up the sides and a tree in front of it, but the only way to get there was to follow the deer paths through the brush. They'd been widened and beaten down by town kids sneaking out to the house, of course.
Dave and I had gone up to the house a couple of times, always in broad daylight, to peek inside. It really wasn't anything special, just an old house that had most of its windows broken out. But -- I can't really explain this -- there was always something creepy about it anyway. I spent a lot of time in the woods when I was a kid, out playing with my dog or hunting squirrels, things like that. And the woods up there are always very alive. There are birds and squirrels in the trees, rabbits running off through the underbrush. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you'd see foxes and deer and things.
But the yard of the old Johnson house wasn't like that. It was always very hushed. The times Dave and I went up to look in, that's mostly what I remember, how incredibly quiet it was. It seemed like even the noise of the traffic on the highway was muffled when you were standing at the house. It felt like you were wearing earmuffs. I know it was probably just because the brush and the trees blocked out sound, but it was damned creepy.
Standing there looking at the house in the moonlight, with the broken windows like dark eyes staring at us, I got the feeling that maybe we were making a really big mistake.
But then Leroy, being Leroy, said "Come on!" and started wading into the brush, making an awful racket. We ran after him, partly to stop him from getting to the house before we did, and partly because -- well, I guess we wanted to make him be quiet. It seemed like making a lot of noise wasn't a good idea. Like it might attract the attention of something we didn't want to attract.
I know it's silly. We were there to see ghosts, after all. But now that we were actually here, we found ourselves wanting to be quiet, talking softly, that sort of thing.
Because of the rain, everything was covered with water, and Leroy was soaked to the skin when we caught up to him. By the time we got to the house, we all were. And it was really cold here. I could swear the temperature dropped ten degrees between our bikes and the house.
"How do we get in?" Leroy asked in a piercing whisper.
It wasn't hard. The windows on the ground floor had been boarded up at one time, but some of the boards were pried away and you could see where other kids had gone in and out. We got out our flashlights -- Leroy didn't have one, so we told him to stay behind us -- and then we crawled into the house.
It was eerie, but mostly in the way that dark, empty old houses always are. I remember I could smell mold really strong. The moon lit up the yard, but it was absolutely pitch-black inside. We shone our flashlights around. Most of the furniture was still in place, but water had gotten in and everything was covered with mold and moss.
You know what I didn't see, though, and I didn't pick up on this 'til I was thinking about it a long time later: cobwebs. And there were no signs of mice or squirrel nests, no rodent chew-marks on the woodwork.
But I didn't think about that at the time, because the house was plenty creepy enough to keep my mind busy. We were standing in the living room, judging by the rotting couch and chairs. There was a staircase going up to darkness, and a door standing open, hanging on its hinges, with utter blackness beyond. A few dead leaves were scattered on the floor from seasons past, blown in through the window.
Leroy landed on the floor behind us with a thump. We both jumped; we'd almost forgotten about him. "Now what?" he asked. Dave's too-large hat was pulled down over his ears, almost hiding his eyes.
"Explore, I guess," Dave said.
We wandered around downstairs, through the kitchen and then into a bathroom with a big claw-foot tub and a puddle of stinking rust-colored water in the toilet. The floorboards sagged and creaked under our feet, and I remember thinking that tetanus was probably a bigger risk than ghosts. We also began to see more signs of other people who'd been here before us: JOE LOVES NANCY written on the wall, a charred place where someone had made a fire -- an actual campfire, for God's sake, right on the kitchen floor -- and occasional scattered Pepsi and beer cans.
These signs of human presence were reassuring, in a way, but at the same time it also made me a little bit angry. This had been somebody's home at one time, and maybe it had just been some weird old guy who might have murdered his whole family, but it was still his house.
Also, the house made noise, creaks and pops and little settling noises. Of course, like my rational brain kept telling me, all old houses do, especially when people are walking around in them. Sometimes, though, I thought I could hear a faint echo of the creaking of the floorboards under our feet, like someone else was walking in the house too, but was using our noise for cover: taking a step when we took a step, that kind of thing. It was hard to tell, though, with all of us making enough noise to -- not literally, I hope -- raise the dead. A couple of times, I got the other two to stop so I could listen, and I swear the creaking noises went on for just a second or two longer: CREAK CREAK CREAK, we went, and then there was a faint answering ...creak that lagged just a little too long to be an echo.
When a loud creak came from the floorboards directly above us, Dave and I both just about jumped out of our skin. We clutched each other's arms and pointed our flashlights at the ceiling, then at the gaping dark doorway of the kitchen. And then Dave whispered, "Where's Leroy?"
We looked at each other, and I could see we were thinking the same thing: God damn it, this is typical Leroy. That kid had no common sense at all. At least now we knew what was creaking around upstairs.
Luckily we'd all gotten wet and muddy crawling through the brush, so when I shone my flashlight around, I could see all of our wet tracks in the light. It was hard at first to pick out Leroy's, but then we found a set of wet tracks going up the stairs, which clearly wasn't either me or Dave.
"I guess there's no point in being here without seeing the whole place, right?" Dave whispered.
"I can't believe he's running around up there without a flashlight," I whispered back. We were both standing still now, so we should've been able to hear Leroy moving around, but now there was nothing at all. That heavy silence was back, the same one I'd noticed on other trips to the house, like cotton wool had come down over your ears. In its own way, it was even creepier than the oddly echoing creaking had been, like we'd been entirely cut off from the outside world. There was a part of me that wanted to run and look out the window just to make sure the yard and the moon and the road were still there.
"I believe it," Dave muttered. "This is Leroy we're talking about."
I realized as we began to climb the stairs that this adventure had stopped being fun. I don't know why, because nothing openly weird had happened to us yet, but I guess it was the difference between going upstairs because we wanted to, and going upstairs because we had to. Up to that point, we'd been in control. We could leave anytime we wanted. But this was the point when it started feeling like we were losing control of the situation. Now something else was leading us around.
The stairs creaked and sagged badly under our feet. My flashlight illuminated a broken step -- I was going first -- so I pointed it out to Dave in silence. The higher we climbed, the less we wanted to talk. It really didn't feel good, being up here. I told myself it was just the nervousness of knowing we were on the second floor of a very unstable building made out of rotten wood, but it was more than that, I think. I couldn't help remembering the second-floor windows, the ones that hadn't been boarded up, but were broken out anyway. Watching us on the road, like eyes.
How do windows on the second floor get broken out, anyway?
Maybe by people trying to escape.
At the top of the stairs was a hallway with a damp, moldering carpet. The smell of mold and decay was even stronger up here. And, as I reached the top of the stairs and shone my flashlight down the hall, I caught a glimpse of movement. Just for a moment: as my flashlight swung across the hallway, it lit up something down the hall, something person-sized. But when I shone it back, there was nothing there. The hall stretched empty all the way down, with Leroy's wet footsteps gleaming in my flashlight beam until they were too far away to make out.
Thank God we know Leroy's up here, I thought, because I'd be screaming my head off right now if that weren't the case. As it was, my heart was trying to leap out of my chest.
"What?" Dave asked tensely from behind me. I'd stopped, blocking the stairs.
"I saw him," I said, and raised my voice. "Hey, Leroy? Come on, stop dicking around."
Remember how I said earlier that I'd gotten the feeling making loud noises around the house wasn't a good idea?
As I called Leroy's name, there came a sudden, shattering crash from downstairs, like an entire rack of windows had been knocked over. Except there wasn't an intact pane of glass left in the whole house.
I'm not ashamed to say that Dave and I both screamed. As the echoes of our shrieks died away, the silence in the house got -- I don't know how to put this. Have you ever been in a summer storm, when the storm hasn't quite broken yet, but you can feel it sitting on top of you, that hot heavy feeling? It was like that. Or maybe more like the way that, when you have a fever, everything seems to press in on you. Nothing had moved, but it felt like the walls were bulging inward, pressing against us. The air felt too heavy and thick to breath.
Dave and I were pressed against each other, shoulder to shoulder.
"Something fell over," Dave whispered. "This whole place is really unstable."
"Yeah," I whispered back. "That's gotta be it."
The only thing that kept us from running down the stairs, out of the house, and not stopping 'til we were home was knowing that Dave's kid cousin was up here somewhere. The first few steps forward were the hardest. The upstairs was more of a mess than the downstairs, maybe because it was more exposed to the elements without the windows being boarded up. Rotting wallpaper hung like strips of torn skin in our flashlight beams, and the ceiling sagged in great bulging swoops above us. Worst of all were the doorways to the bedrooms. There were four of them, two on each side of the hallway, and they were black as pitch 'til our flashlight beams shone in. Even then, the flashlights could only light up a little patch of the darkness inside, giving us strangely disjointed impressions of ragged curtains and rotting bedspreads. It looked like everything in the rooms had been left in place, even down to clothing hanging in closets and a shelf of mildewed dolls whose blank eyes glittered in the flashlight beams like animals' eyes.
"No graffiti up here," Dave murmured.
He was right. The upstairs wasn't trashed like the downstairs. Maybe because fewer people came up here. Maybe because even the town punks didn't have the nerve to mess with this part of the house.
Tightly wound as we were, we still made it all the way to the end of the hallway without incident. There was a window here, though I hadn't been able to tell from the other end of the hall because a tree had grown over it, blocking the light. My flashlight lit up shards of glass on the windowsill and the floor. Some of the tree branches had grown inside, giving me the feeling that the tree was trying to crawl through the window, that maybe it had broken the window trying to get in.
Dave and I hadn't been out of physical contact with each other the whole time, and this was still the case. Now his shoulder jerked against mine, his flashlight beam skittering crazily over the walls, and he gasped.
"What?" I said, spinning around and shining my flashlight down the hall. "What, what?"
"I saw -- I thought I saw --" He took a deep breath and said, "I saw Leroy at the top of the stairs. Had to be him. Which means the little jerk is going back downstairs, and we can too."
I didn't like the quaver in his voice, but I really loved the idea of getting out of the house. Unfortunately this meant we had to walk down the hall with all those gaping black doorways at our back. We both kept spinning around, waving our flashlights across the walls and ceiling and floor. And the echo effect was back: take a step, hear the creak, and then another creak just a little delayed.
Going downstairs was the worst, because slowly the hallway vanished from view, one doorway at a time. And that meant anything could come out of those doorways. I became aware of the sound of a voice murmuring softly, very close to me. It was Dave, saying Hail Marys under his breath. By the time we got to the bottom of the stairs, I'd joined him.
At this point neither of us dared turn our backs on the darkness anymore, so without having to discuss it, we lined up back to back and crabwalked across the floor. We hadn't gone very far before I stepped on a rotten board and it yielded under my foot with a rending dry crack. I flung myself backward and Dave grabbed my arm. Nervously we both aimed our flashlights down. The board had given way about six inches, revealing only darkness beneath. Cold, dank air breathed up through the gap, stirring my hair. By now I'd almost gotten used to the mold smell, but this had a different smell altogether, earthy and decayed, with the faintest hint of the sweetish smell of rotting meat.
We'd both frozen, no longer moving, and in that still, unnatural quiet, the whisper of movement came to us clearly -- not from below, but from above. Something was moving in the hallway at the top of the stairs.
It was about fifteen feet to the window, and I swear we covered it at a single leap. In the window, we had a brief traffic jam, and then we were spilling out into the wet brush of the overgrown yard.
"Leroy's probably back at the bikes," Dave said, his teeth chattering. "Little jerk probably doubled back and has been laughing himself silly."
But he wasn't at the bikes. We both turned and looked back at the house, half-hidden behind its screen of trees. I was looking all over the place, not wanting to take my eyes off any part of the house, and I thought I caught a glimpse of movement at one of the upstairs windows, but when I looked back it was blank and dark as before.
"We can't leave Leroy in there," Dave said.
"I know," I said.
But neither one of us could bring ourselves to go back into the yard. I've never in my life felt fear that powerful. I hated myself for it, but my fear of that place was like a physical force, locking up my muscles and turning my legs to water.
Finally we had to admit that it was time to get the adults involved. We didn't know how to tell our parents that we'd lost Leroy, especially when we weren't supposed to have him in the first place. But the only other option was to flounder around in the darkness looking for him ourselves. And it was still possible that he'd given up on us and gone home. That seemed like a Leroy thing to do.
Finally we pedaled home, exhausted and freaked out and miserable, mentally rehearsing our excuses. We went to Dave's house because it was closer.
What we didn't expect was to find all the lights on and cars in the driveway. We slowed to a stop and looked at each other. Dave's parents must've woke up, realized that he'd snuck out and called the cavalry. Which meant we were both in trouble. I thought about just sneaking away and heading home, but Dave was a good friend and I didn't think it was fair to leave him to face the music alone. Besides, we were both pretty worried about Leroy by now.
As soon as we stepped inside, Dave's mother came out of nowhere and flung her arms around him, leaves and mud and all.
No one was mad at us for being gone. It turned out they hadn't even noticed. The problem was something else entirely.
Leroy never ran away from summer camp.
Leroy's mom, who was Dave's mom's sister, had gotten a call from the summer camp people that night, right around the time I was crawling out my window and just about the time that Dave found Leroy lurking around under his window, wanting to go with him on his latest adventure.
What the summer camp people told Leroy's mom was that when they'd counted the boys in the cabins that night, they'd come up one short, and the missing one was Leroy, of course. At first the counselors were just plain mad, but before calling his parents to tell them he'd run off again, they did a sweep of the whole area, the cabins and the docks and the edge of the little lake where our summer camp was.
That's where they found him.
Leroy was never a strong swimmer, which didn't stop him from trying, of course, because that's the kind of kid Leroy was. The kids had been playing in the lake that afternoon, and they figured that once everyone went back to the cabins, Leroy sneaked back down to the lake to swim by himself. He got in over his head, and there wasn't anybody to help him.
Dave and I told our parents that we'd gone to the Johnson house, and got grounded for it -- and we deserved it. But we never told anybody else about Leroy being with us that night. Because he couldn't have been. And we never talked about it again. But whenever we had to bike past the Johnson house, we'd pedal extra fast and we wouldn't look at it or at each other.
And I think we were both wondering the same thing: If Leroy was dead, then WHAT was with us that night?
It was years later that Dave told me one more thing he'd never mentioned at the time. Remember how he gave Leroy his hat because Leroy was cold? Well, he got the hat back. Two days later, he went up to his room after dinner, opened the door and there it was, on his bed, right on his pillow. And it was soaking wet.
--
Note: Some of the inspiration for Peter's chapter was drawn from my other Tarot card prompt.
4. Neal
Jones whistled. "Remind me never, ever to go camping with you."
"Caffrey's turn now," Diana said.
Neal raised a hand. "Sorry to disappoint, but I haven't got anything."
"Aw, c'mon," Peter said. "You? Not a single ghost story anywhere? You never robbed a haunted house or stole cursed jewels?"
Neal smiled. "Hey, if you want stories about alleged thefts and hypothetical narrow escapes, I'm your guy. I'm not much of a ghost story guy, though."
Peter studied him; Neal smiled back blandly. Finally Peter yawned and looked at his watch. "You know, guys, I think we might be out of time for ghost stories anyway. It's starting to look like the meet's been called off tonight. I say we go home and get some sleep."
"And maybe get in on some of that Halloween action for those of us who have social lives," Jones said.
Diana elbowed him. "So now who's looking for the twenty-something bump-and-grind?"
"Me? Hell no. I'm going home and get some sleep."
Jones volunteered to drop off Diana and drive the van back to the employee parking garage. Peter's car was parked around the corner, and he offered Neal a ride home.
They drove uptown in a sleepy, companionable silence. Neal sagged wearily back into his seat and basked in the warm air blasting from the car's vents.
Most of the big Halloween parties had been the previous weekend, but there were still plenty of costumed revelers out on the streets. It was not even midnight yet. Once they got away from downtown Manhattan, it was quieter.
Peter didn't speak until he pulled up in front of June's; then he said, "Sorry about making you miss your haunted house."
Neal shrugged. "Like you said, there'll be other years."
Peter nodded, and gave Neal another of his long looks. "You know," he said quietly, "you can talk to me anytime. If you need to."
"I know," Neal said, not quite meeting his eyes. He opened his door.
"See you at work tomorrow," Peter said.
"Good night, Peter."
June's house was dark and silent. The trappings of the haunted house had already been cleaned up for the most part, although his shoes crunched on pumpkin-shaped glitter, and there was still crepe-paper swag hanging on the railing of the stairs.
Neal opened his door, reached for the light switch, and hesitated.
"No lights," the voice he'd expected said quietly from the bed.
He closed the door. In darkness lit only by the city's glow striping the room, he toed off his shoes and began to unbutton his shirt.
"You're late."
"I had to work," he said, knowing that it sounded like an excuse.
"We only have this one night, until next year." On the bed, she sat up. In the darkness all he could see was the pale blur of her face, framed by long dark hair. "Unless this is the year you'll come back with me."
Neal sat down beside her on the bed. Even up close, she was still hard to make out, and when her hand settled on his arm, it was very cold. The faintest smell of smoke and burning jet fuel clung to her, a subtle but pervasive perfume that made his head ache.
"I don't know," he said. "There are things here I'd miss."
"Prison," she said, and kissed him. Her lips were cold as ice. "A prison by any other name is still a prison."
"I know," Neal whispered, as her fingers sank, ice-cold, into the skin of his arm, pulling him down onto the bed with mingled pleasure and pain.
"It's still a long time until dawn," she murmured against his mouth, through her cold, cold lips. "I still have time to change your mind."
~
One more note: I don't usually like to leave author's notes with an "official" interpretation of the story, but I worried when I wrote this that the final scene might be construed as Kate-bashing. I like Kate and really, truly do not intend this story to reflect negatively on her character. However, it is a ghost story; ghosts follow different rules and have different priorities than the living!
spook_me ficathon story! \o/ This is the first time I haven't dropped out since the very first year, 2006. (And even in that case, it took me almost a year after the deadline to finish my story.) This year I did it ON TIME for once. Also, this is one of my rare attempts to write actual horror.Title: Ghost Stories in the Van
Fandom: White Collar
Word Count: 10,500
Summary: During a stakeout on Halloween night, the team entertain themselves by telling ghost stories. No season five spoilers.
Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1019793/chapters/2028281
1. Clinton
"Bingo!" Neal said, holding up his card.
Diana looked up, frowning, from the handful of paper strips that she was using to call out bingo squares. They'd used a stack of blank authorization forms to make the bingo cards and the paper number tags. "You've won three in a row. You're cheating somehow."
"You can't cheat at bingo," Neal said.
Jones looked up from his own card. "If anyone can do it, Caffrey can do it."
"Peter," Neal appealed to a higher authority.
Peter glanced over. He was taking a turn on the monitors, earphones sitting askew on his head so that he could hear what was going on in the van. "Did you cheat?" he asked directly. "Yes or no."
"Cheating is such a loaded word ..."
"I knew it," Diana said. She gathered the strips in a crumpled handful and dropped them in the wastebasket, along with her bingo card.
"I don't think we actually need all of us in the van tonight," Neal said hopefully.
"Nice try," Peter said. "You're staying. It's good for you. Builds character."
Neal slumped back in his chair. "It's Halloween. You're making us sit in the van on Halloween."
"Somewhere to be?" Peter asked, eyes sharp and bright.
"Parties," Neal said vaguely. "And whatever."
"Because watching twenty-two-year-olds in tacky costumes bump and grind is totally your kind of scene," Jones said.
Neal looked as if he was considering not answering; then, playing idly with his hat, he said, "June has a haunted house every year. Last year I helped out."
There was a brief silence. Peter broke it. "There'll be other years," he said gently.
Neal made a noncommittal noise.
"Every year," Peter added, looking like the admission was being dragged out of him with pliers, "El and I dress up and hand out candy to the neighborhood kids. Kinda regret missing it this year."
This perked up Neal, as it was no doubt meant to. "You dress up? Are there pictures?"
"No," Peter said.
"I think he's right, boss," Diana said. "Pictures or it didn't happen."
Peter, struggling to keep a smile off his face, pointed at each of them in turn. "It didn't happen, as far as all of you are concerned."
"What happens in the van," Jones said, "stays in the van."
There was a brief silence during which everyone gazed at the monitors, which showed a lonely dark street. A wind lifted some scraps of trash, pushing them along the street. The digital clock on the monitors ticked over 10 p.m.
"Any of you guys have any good ghost stories?" Peter asked at last.
"Are you ten?" Neal said, predictably.
Peter looked defensive. "Hey, when I was a kid we'd go out camping by the lake and scare the pants off each other with ghost stories. I have a million of 'em."
The other three traded wary looks. "It was the seventies," Diana said. "They had to do something to entertain themselves."
"Someone come up with something quick," Neal said plaintively.
Jones cleared his throat. "I have something, actually. It's a story I've never told anyone before."
Now it Peter, Neal, and Diana who looked at each other. "Is this an actual story, or the setup for a ghost story?" Diana asked.
"This really happened," Jones said. "It was a few years ago when I was working late. You guys want to hear it or not?"
Neal raised a hand. "I vote yes."
A smile flickered around the corners of Peter's mouth. "Sure, go ahead."
Jones cleared his throat. "Okay, so this was shortly after I came to work for the New York White Collar office and met you, Peter."
***
I was new in town, fresh out of the Navy and Quantico. I'm a Baltimore kid, born and raised. Came up to New York a few times on weekends with my buddies, but I didn't know the city well, and I didn't really know anyone here.
Working for White Collar was a good gig, though. I liked the work and I've always been good with computers, so like we all do, I ended up working late a lot. Sometimes I'd be there after everyone else had gone home.
This was one of those nights.
You guys have probably all worked in White Collar long enough to know how the building gets at night. Like any big office building, there's that sense of emptiness after hours, like there's too much space for the walls or something. During the day it's so busy you really just concentrate on your own office space, but at night, you can hear what's going on elsewhere on your floor, and even on other floors.
I'd turned off most of the overhead lights and I was the only person there, sitting alone at my desk in a pool of light from my desk lamp, when I heard the floor above me creak.
That's pretty silly, right? I mean, we have those hanging ceilings. There's a lot of space in there. Even if someone was walking around upstairs -- hell, if a whole herd of buffalo were walking around upstairs -- you wouldn't be able to hear it.
But I heard it plain as day, just like the way the floor creaks in a cheap apartment building whenever the neighbors move around upstairs. And it caught my attention. I stopped, took my hands off the keyboard, and looked up at the ceiling. And I heard it again, a little farther along, a distinct floorboard creak.
I got up and stood looking up. I told myself, don't be ridiculous, Clinton. It's just heating and cooling, in a building this big, transmitting stress along the building's frame. It's not like you could actually hear someone walking around up there.
But then it came again, just a little farther along, and this time there was a sound kind of like something dragging. Like, I guess, a chair scraping along the floor? I don't know. I just know that it was pretty clear, but I know you can't hear what goes on in the upstairs offices. I was just a new guy, but I'd been here long enough to know that for certain.
I held my breath and listened. Mostly I heard the usual sounds of the building at night: the compressor in the refrigerated drinks machine out in the hall, the janitor's vacuum somewhere else in our floor, and the soft pinging of the building's heating system.
When a soft thump came from somewhere above me, I jumped.
Maybe it was just that things were quiet enough the sound transmitted better than I'd realized. It was possible that you could always hear it that well, and I'd just never noticed because there was never anyone on the floor above us. I tried to remember what actually was on the floor above us. Twenty-six was Evidence, I did know that, and twenty-three was Organized Crime. But I really didn't have a clue what went on on the twenty-second floor.
... Okay, I can see you guys laughing. Yeah, you know, and I know now, that it's record-keeping and storage up there. But I didn't know that then, right? And anyway, I'm not sure if knowing it would have helped, because what, exactly, were they doing up there at nine p.m. to make that much noise? Dragging boxes around? Okay, I can come up with some ideas. But I'd worked late a lot, and I'd never heard that before.
I climbed the stairs to the hall outside Peter's office, because it got me closer to the ceiling, and listened. I heard the creaking again, but farther away this time. I listened carefully. It did sound like footsteps, but there was something just a little off about the cadence of them, like someone was taking extra long steps, or had really long legs. My dad was a big guy, and I know what his footsteps always sounded like outside my bedroom, and if these were actually the footsteps of some guy, then he must have been a lot bigger than Dad. Like, NBA basketball player big.
Actually, if I were going to guess, I'd have to say those footsteps sounded like they belonged to someone eight or nine feet tall. Of course that's impossible, so let's say it was a big, really heavy guy walking slowly.
Anyway, I heard the creaking head over toward the elevator, and then I heard the elevator go ding -- and you know you can hear that, especially at night, when the doors open on floors near ours. Okay, no big. Except I didn't hear the elevator move on.
I was still curious. FBI agent, right? I investigate things for a living. I stood there for a little while, and all was still and silent up top, so I headed down the stairs to see what was going on with the elevator. On the way by my desk, I grabbed my weapon and shrugged into the shoulder harness, just in case.
The first thing I saw when I stepped out the glass doors into the hall is just the elevator doors shut, the elevator readouts showing they're on other floors, like you'd expect. One elevator was down on 4. The other ...
Well, that's weird. It's showing 21.5.
Yeah, I see that look, Peter. I know there's no floor 21.5. But I was a new guy then, you know? I was pretty sure the floors were in integers. But I wasn't absolutely, swearing-on-a-Bible certain. And that is what it said, sure as I'm sitting here in this van tonight. I've never seen it read that before or since. In fact -- and I looked into this later, you better believe I did -- there's not actually a spot for decimals on the elevator displays.
But that night, it said 21.5.
I stared at that for a while, and then I pushed the button to bring the elevator to this floor.
That elevator didn't move. It was the other one that did, coming up from 4 to open just as pretty as you please on 21.
Huh, thought I, and I got in. The buttons were like normal, just integers, the next one up being 22, and I wondered if maybe that floor 21.5 was some kind of men-in-black thing. Like how some places have sub-basement floors you can't access without a special key.
I pushed 22 anyway. The elevator went up and stopped, and I found myself holding my breath as the doors opened, my hand touching my gun. They opened on a lobby a lot like ours -- well, if you've ever been up to 22, you know what it looks like. All the lights in the offices were off, but the lights in the elevator lobby were still on, like normal. I stepped out and the elevator doors closed behind me. The other one was still sitting on 21.5.
I walked around a bit, just to reassure myself that no one was up here. There wasn't anyone, but I had the weirdest feeling that --
Okay, this sounds kind of crazy, I know. But when I was growing up in Baltimore, I used to run all over the city, exploring. We actually lived in a pretty good neighborhood, but a lot of parts of town were not so good, and as a teenager who was into urban exploration, I got this sense when I wasn't alone in a place. It's hard to describe; it's just this feeling, this kind of pressure ... yeah, I see Caffrey nodding along. He knows what I'm talking about. And I know the rest of you have probably done sweeps through a building that's supposed to be empty, but actually there's someone hiding in there -- yeah, see, you get this sixth sense that you're not alone. And I was getting it real strong that night.
The thing is, there was no reason -- no legitimate reason -- that anyone would be up there. It's the FBI building; you have to go through the metal detectors and security and all to get in. It's not like anyone could just wander in off the street. And all the lights on that floor were off. The offices, the corridors, they were all dark. As I walked around, I'd turn the lights on, and every time I got this hot prickling tense feeling, like when the lights came on, I was going to see -- I don't know. Someone standing in front of me, maybe, just far enough away that you couldn't see them 'til the lights lit them up and they jumped up like a pop-up in Hogan's Alley back at Quantico.
And you know what a maze that place is, all those hallways and little storage rooms. I wandered around for I don't know how long -- turning lights on and off, feeling sillier by the minute, but I still couldn't shake that skin-crawly feeling that I wasn't alone.
You listen to your instincts in this job. You guys know that.
I was poking around through another empty room when I heard the elevator go ding, unmistakably on my floor.
Well, that's interesting, though I. Back I went, hurrying to the hallway outside the office where I was looking around, hoping to see who'd come up. Probably the janitor, but I was jumpy enough to have my weapon out -- and it was stupid, there was nothing to be jumpy about, but I just wanted to be certain, you know? I poked my head out into the hallway. It's that long one off the rooms where they keep the pre-computer Missing Persons records, and you know how you can look all the way down and see into the elevator lobby? Well, I leaned out just in time to catch a glimpse...
I don't know what the hell I caught a glimpse of.
Movement, that's mostly what I remember seeing. Something went from the bright elevator lobby -- you know you can't see the elevator doors from that angle -- really fast into the dark hallway off to the right. From the way it had to hunch down to fit, it had to be nine feet tall at least, and it was really slim so it didn't cast much of a shadow, and it was gray. Like, a pale ash gray. I couldn't get a good look, just enough to know that it didn't move right, and there was something about it that was all stretched out. My main impressions were "gray" and "wrong", and then it was gone.
I stood there for a minute just staring and trying to make what I'd just seen fit anything I knew about. It was a probie come up to look up a file he'd forgotten, I told myself.
Then I got to thinking about how all those corridors loop around and hook up with each other, and how dark that corridor was where I was standing. The far end was completely lost in shadows. You couldn't see a thing down there.
I don't mind telling you that I must've set a land speed record for getting back to that nice bright elevator lobby. One of the elevators was back down on 10, and the other, the one that had been on 21.5 before, was sitting on 22. I hit the button and the doors opened as nice as you please.
As I got in, I caught this glimpse -- okay, it was just out of the corner of my eye. You know how the back of the elevators are sort of mirrored, but not really? It's reflective, but you can't really see anything in there. Well, I saw something move in that reflection, and it was moving really fucking fast, and it was coming my way, a pale blur rushing from the dark depths of the offices on the 22nd floor straight towards the elevator lobby.
And then the doors closed.
I hit the first floor button. Hard.
I still had that feeling, though, that I'm not alone feeling. I had it really bad. But, you know, I'm in an elevator that's eight feet across, and it's brightly lit and heading down, and there's not a lot of places to hide, you know? I looked all around and even checked out my reflection in the polished back wall and there's seriously nothing there, which means my instincts are fucking with me and everything is fine.
By the time the doors opened on the first floor, all brightly lit with the usual nighttime security guards hanging out, I'd calmed down a bit. This was stupid, I was a trained FBI agent and a Navy man, and here I was acting like a freshman college student being taken on a snipe hunt. I wandered over and said hi to the security guards. They said hi back, and was I working late, and we shot the breeze a little. Then I said I knew this was a stupid question, but was there a floor 21.5 in the building?
They laughed and said no, of course not.
Then I told them I'd thought maybe I'd heard someone moving around while I was up there, and I wanted to check the security footage. So they said sure, and called up the camera shots for me. There's me in the elevator lobby on 21, there's me getting out on 22, and a couple angles of me poking around on 22 checking things out, like I said.
So I asked them to call up the camera footage for the elevator. You guys know how the camera is angled down so you can't see the buttons or what floor it's on. So it was impossible to tell exactly what the elevator had been doing, but we could see it sitting on one floor for awhile, then it goes to another floor and sits there for a while. Then I see myself get in.
Nothing in between? No passengers in the elevator at all? I scroll back. Nothing. So I watched myself ride down. And then I caught some movement. Not me. Something else.
I looked close. It's just me standing in the elevator, looking a little freaked out. I see myself look around wildly like I remember doing. And there's my reflection in the polished wall behind me, looking around just like I remembered.
But there's something else. I remember really clearly seeing my own reflection and it was the only reflection there -- obviously it was. There was nothing else in the elevator to reflect at all. But on the security footage, there's something else moving in the polished back wall, something that isn't me. I can't get a good look at it, because the security camera image is pretty grainy and also, that wall just doesn't reflect really well. But it's definitely in the elevator with me. Like, standing a little behind me, looming over me. And it's really thin, and one hell of a lot taller than me. And as I watch, it starts to raise one of those long, long arms, coming up, slow and boneless like it's unhinged at the shoulder. Right behind me.
Then the doors open and I get out, and there's nothing behind me, nothing at all.
2. Diana
There was a silence when Jones finished. Then Neal said, "I'm never working late again and no one can make me."
Diana said, "Bullshit."
"Had me going for a minute, though," Peter said. "I know how it gets when you're in the office after hours. It is creepy. You start jumping at shadows."
"No one else has ever heard those creaks in the ceiling?" Jones asked. "I've heard them other times, you know. I just never went and tried to check it out again, because Mrs. Jones didn't raise a fool. Also, I tend to use the left-hand elevator now, rather than the right one."
There was another brief silence, all of them clearly contemplating mysterious late-night building sounds. Then Diana said again, "Bullshit."
Peter blew out a breath and grinned. "How about you? No ghost stories of your own? No big old haunted houses in the family?"
Diana snorted. "Not even one."
"None of your nannies told you creepy stories at night?" Neal asked, picking up the thread of the gentle teasing.
"Well ..." Diana's expression turned reflective, looking inward. "There is one thing I remember." She looked up again, her eyes sharp. "What happens in the van --"
"Stays in the van," Jones said.
Diana smiled, and there was a strange edge to it. "I'll tell you a story my nanny once told me."
***
When I was a little girl, my parents didn't put me to bed. I didn't actually see them much. We had nannies and au pairs for that.
We also moved around a lot, and I went through a lot of nannies because not many of them were willing to move with us. But I figure it was good for me. They were interesting people, my nannies. They spoke a lot of languages and I picked up little bits of each one. I also had a bodyguard named Charlie, but he came and went, and he wasn't with us in the time I'm going to tell you about.
This happened one year when we lived for six months or so in the Ukraine. I was about seven or eight, I guess.
That year, my family rented a really amazing house on the edge of a small wood. The whole place was like something out of a fairy tale, or at least it seemed like it to me at the time. It was a big rambling structure of heavy timbers and stone, located on the edge of what seemed to me like a forest. It was really just a park with an industrial city located right on the other side. But to me at the time, it seemed like something straight out of the Ice Age. There were huge old trees dripping with moss, and it was easy to imagine aurochs hiding behind them, the big old oxen of ancient Europe, or wolves with long legs and sharp teeth. I would wander around in the edge of the woods, and sometimes I'd find old abandoned ruins half-covered with moss and tree roots, the remains of farmhouses and an old cemetery that probably went with the big house. I was never scared. It was all fascinating to me.
I loved the house and the forest. And I also loved my nanny, who had come from one of the small towns in the area to take care of me. Her name was Miss Olga Shevchenko. Most of my nannies up to that point had been older women, but Olga was quite young, barely out of her teens. Her eyes were very sad, and she was beautiful, with long dark braids. There was something a little old-fashioned about her. I didn't know it at the time, but I think now, looking back on it, that Olga was my first crush.
At night, she used to pull the covers up around me and then she would sit on the edge of my bed and tell me stories. I loved running wild in the woods, but I also loved those storytelling times at night, because Olga knew the best stories.
"This is an old story that my mother used to tell me when I was your age," she would say, and then, in her strongly accented English, she would tell me about witches and mysterious little houses in the woods, about snow maidens and foxes and angels.
One night as she tucked me in, the moon coming through the window shone on the tears on her cheeks.
"What's wrong?" I asked her.
Olga looked away, but I was a very curious and persistent child -- shut up, Caffrey -- and I kept pushing until she agreed to tell me.
"The full moon makes me think of my friend Hanna, that's all."
I still remember lying in bed that night, curled up beneath the covers, warm and safe because Olga would keep night terrors away from me. She sat on the end of my bed and told me a story that she had never told before. I didn't know at the time, but this was the last story that Olga would ever tell me, because afterwards I told my mother about it and everything changed.
When she was a young woman, Olga said, she was good friends with another young woman in her home town. The two women were the same age and had grown up together. They were very close and everyone said they were like sisters. Hanna had long golden braids, where Olga had long dark braids, and Hanna was very beautiful.
There was also a young man named Anatoly who lived nearby. He courted both women, and though Olga loved him as a friend, she was not interested. She only had eyes for her friend, you see.
After a time, Olga's parents determined that she was to marry this young man.
"People still do that?" I interrupted her to ask.
"They did when I was a girl," she said.
Hanna was very angry, because she loved Anatoly herself. And Olga was heartbroken. She had lost the young lady she loved, and although she cared for Anatoly very dearly, she did not wish to marry him.
Because she loved them both as she did, she thought that she would arrange it so that Hanna and Anatoly could marry each other, and then they would all be happy.
Tucked beneath the covers, I listened quietly. I wanted very badly for them to all be happy, and because Olga's eyes were so sad, I had a terrible feeling that they would not be happy at all.
"Do you remember that place you like to play in the woods?" Olga interrupted her own story to ask.
"Which one?" I asked sleepily.
"The one with the gravestones."
I did remember. It was behind our house and down a little overgrown path in the woods. Some children might've been afraid, but I thought it was nice. There was a spring with a ruined chapel and a little cemetery next to it. Some of the gravestones were overgrown with moss, while others were newer.
"That's where Hanna is buried," Olga said, and I peeked out from under the covers again. I was startled and sad to hear that Hanna had died. I almost felt like I'd gotten to know her, Olga spoke of her so eloquently.
"What happened to her?"
Olga drew a long breath. It was clear to me, even at that age, that she had never talked to anyone about this.
"I told Hanna to meet me in the woods," she said. "Near that spring where you like so much to play. The moon was full that night, so I thought she should have light to see by. And I hurried to meet her that night. It was winter, the air sharp and clear. I was going to tell her that I did not love Anatoly, and the way was free for her to marry him. Deep in my heart, I fancied I might tell her of my own love for her, but my conviction was not so strong then."
I shivered beneath my covers, imagining the scene. When I peeked out, I saw Olga sitting on the end of my bed, slim and straight in the moonlight. She idly stroked one of her braids, a nervous mannerism that she had.
"It was very cold when I got there, and I waited for her. And waited, my breath frosty in the air .... And waited, long into the night. But Hanna never came. There was no moon that night, you see, as I had hoped. Though the moon was full, the clouds covered it. And I learned that her horse had fallen in the darkness as she rode to meet me. She was thrown from its back and broke her neck."
"She should have taken a car instead," I said, sure of myself as children are -- I said shut up, Caffrey.
Olga laughed softly and sadly. "If only her family had one then! But no, she died in the darkness and was buried there beside the spring, where I had waited for her. Anatoly was broken-hearted, blaming me for Hanna's death. He moved away to find work, but he died laboring on a farm. His body was brought home to be buried beside Hanna's." She raised her hand to touch her face, where her tears glistened in the moonlight. "And then I was alone."
"I'm sorry," I said, sitting up in bed. Her distress hurt me deeply. "Is that why you came to work for us?"
Her head moved in what might be a nod. "I promised that I would stay near them forever, so that they would never be lonely." She turned away from me, weeping in the moonlight.
I rose from my bed and tried to hug her, but she pulled away, weeping inconsolably.
So I ran downstairs. This was really unusual for me -- I didn't usually go looking for my parents like that. But it was so sad, and I wanted to tell them about Olga's problem so that they could fix it, if possible. At that age, I thought my parents could fix anything, even death.
I ran through the house in my nightgown, and found my parents in my father's study, sitting with a middle-aged woman I'd never seen before. They were clearly having a late-evening visit; there were little coffee cups around.
"Mother," I cried, and ran up to her. I babbled out something about Olga. I was afraid she'd be angry, but I really wanted her to know so that she could find Olga's girlfriend's grave by the spring and make everything all right for her.
"Darling," she said, and patted my shoulder. My mother was never one for casual displays of affection. "I'm glad you came down."
"Olga --" I said.
"You mean Miss Shevchenko," my mother corrected me sternly.
"Yes ma'am," I said, "Miss Shevchenko, but --"
"You've come down just in time to meet her," my mother said, and turned to the middle-aged woman, who smiled at me. "This is your new nanny, my dear. This is Miss Olga Shevchenko."
"But," I said. I stared at this woman, who I had never seen before in my life. "Who's been my nanny since we moved here?" I asked my mother, thinking of the woman who always tucked me in and sat on the end of my bed to tell me stories at night.
"Miss Shevchenko was unavoidably delayed," my mother told me. "You've had no nanny these past weeks. You know that."
--
Note: Diana's ghost story is adapted from an incident in the book Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick, and also draws some inspiration from one of my spook-me Tarot prompts.
3. Peter
Jones shivered and moved a little closer to the van's heating vents. It did seem somewhat colder when Diana had stopped talking.
"Is that really how it happened?" Neal asked her.
She lifted a shoulder in a small shrug. "I was seven. Kids have active imaginations. Maybe it's something I read in a book somewhere, or something that someone read to me."
There was another little silence, everyone coming back to reality from that place of frozen forests and big drafty houses that Diana had conjured. Then Peter shook himself a bit, and turned a look of challenge on Neal. "I think it's your turn now."
Neal raised his eyebrows. "Me? Aren't you the one who said you have a million of them?"
"Caffrey's right, boss," Diana said. "I think the gauntlet's been thrown. Let's hear one of those scary summer-camp stories."
"Well ... all right." Peter's gaze turned reflective, and he leaned back against the bank of equipment. Jones quietly took the headset from him, taking over on the monitors so Peter could talk. "This isn't something I heard, though. This is something that actually happened to me, the summer I was fifteen."
***
I grew up upstate, in a little town outside Syracuse called Thomasboro. Pretty typical small town, really. We had a downtown with a Dairy Queen and a burger place, we had a bunch of fields and some woods and a lake.
We also had the Johnson house, which was the local haunted house. It was a pretty creepy place, sitting all by itself on this overgrown piece of land about a mile from where I lived, directly between me and the high school, which meant I had to bike past it all the time. My mom said there was an old man living there when she was a kid, but he kept to himself and never talked to anybody in town, and there were rumors about him. She wouldn't tell me the rumors, but I heard from other kids at school that people said the guy had killed his wife and kids with an axe, and buried the bodies in the house and then just kept living there for years and years until finally he had a heart attack. When the ambulance came and got him, they found the body of the wife, but they never found the kids, and people say they're still buried there. The wife was supposed to come back on full-moon nights, walking around the house looking for her lost children.
Typical small-town stuff, in other words. But there wasn't much to do in a town the size of ours, and so it came to be a rite of passage for the older kids to spend a night in the house. Full moons were best, especially in the winter, when it was bitter cold and the leafless branches of the trees rattled in the wind.
Some of the kids who'd done it laughed it off and said they didn't see anything, it was just an old house with graffiti on the walls and beer cans in the corners. But some kids said they'd seen really creepy stuff, floating lights and places in the house that were hot or cold, or made you feel really heavy or lifted your hair with static electricity. And some of them wouldn't talk about it at all.
Anyway, the summer I was fifteen, my good buddy Dave and I decided to do it. We didn't tell our parents because we figured they'd tell us not to. Technically, even though no one lived in the house, it was trespassing and we could get in trouble for it. Yeah, Neal, I see the look on your face. I was a fifteen-year-old kid. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
That night it was me, Dave, and Dave's younger cousin Leroy. Dave was a good guy. He and I had been friends since the second grade. Leroy was only twelve, and a three-year age difference might as well be twenty when you're a kid, but we let Leroy go along on a lot of our adventures because he was one of those wild, scrappy kids who will do literally anything. It didn't matter if it was eating bugs on a stupid dare or just doing something dangerous for kicks, but Leroy was always up for it. The staff at the emergency room up in Syracuse knew him by name -- that's what kind of kid Leroy was.
Reminds me of someone else I know, come to think of it.
Anyway, it was just supposed to be me and Dave, but when I showed up on my bike at the meeting place around the corner from the house, Dave and Leroy were both waiting for me. "Yeah," Dave said. "I know." Turned out Leroy had run away from summer camp -- again. He was always doing that. His parents would pack him off in the hopes that he'd been someone else's problem for a couple of weeks, but he'd get bored inside two days and tired of all the rules, so he'd run away. Usually he wanted Dave or me to hide him, which of course didn't work because it's not like they don't do head counts at camp, and then they'd call Leroy's parents and his parents called our parents, and then we were in trouble too.
Like I said, reminds me of someone I know.
Anyway, Dave couldn't ditch Leroy without Leroy telling on us, so when Leroy turned up after running away again, Dave had to bring him along. Leroy was riding double on Dave's bike because Leroy's bike was back at his parents' house.
"He could come in handy," Dave pointed out to me as we pedaled along. "He's not afraid of anything. That's going to come in useful tonight."
Boy, we didn't know the half of it yet.
So we pedaled toward the house in the dark. It was a full moon, we'd made sure of that because there was no point in spending the night in a haunted house if you never saw any ghosts. But it had rained earlier in the night and we could only glimpse the moon occasionally as clouds passed over it. It was still summer and should've been warm, but the rain had sucked all the heat out of the air and pretty soon we were all three shivering. Leroy kept complaining about it: his hands were cold, his ears were cold, his feet were cold. Finally Dave gave Leroy his hat to shut him up. "Next time you decide to run away, bring a jacket," Dave told him.
We pulled up outside the Johnson house and put our kickstands down. The moon picked that moment to come out from behind the clouds and the whole scene really did look like something out of a horror movie. It was a big old house, probably a farmhouse once, before the fields got sold off to make subdivisions. But it was still sitting on about an acre or so of land, totally overgrown now. You could see the house pretty clearly, although there was ivy going up the sides and a tree in front of it, but the only way to get there was to follow the deer paths through the brush. They'd been widened and beaten down by town kids sneaking out to the house, of course.
Dave and I had gone up to the house a couple of times, always in broad daylight, to peek inside. It really wasn't anything special, just an old house that had most of its windows broken out. But -- I can't really explain this -- there was always something creepy about it anyway. I spent a lot of time in the woods when I was a kid, out playing with my dog or hunting squirrels, things like that. And the woods up there are always very alive. There are birds and squirrels in the trees, rabbits running off through the underbrush. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you'd see foxes and deer and things.
But the yard of the old Johnson house wasn't like that. It was always very hushed. The times Dave and I went up to look in, that's mostly what I remember, how incredibly quiet it was. It seemed like even the noise of the traffic on the highway was muffled when you were standing at the house. It felt like you were wearing earmuffs. I know it was probably just because the brush and the trees blocked out sound, but it was damned creepy.
Standing there looking at the house in the moonlight, with the broken windows like dark eyes staring at us, I got the feeling that maybe we were making a really big mistake.
But then Leroy, being Leroy, said "Come on!" and started wading into the brush, making an awful racket. We ran after him, partly to stop him from getting to the house before we did, and partly because -- well, I guess we wanted to make him be quiet. It seemed like making a lot of noise wasn't a good idea. Like it might attract the attention of something we didn't want to attract.
I know it's silly. We were there to see ghosts, after all. But now that we were actually here, we found ourselves wanting to be quiet, talking softly, that sort of thing.
Because of the rain, everything was covered with water, and Leroy was soaked to the skin when we caught up to him. By the time we got to the house, we all were. And it was really cold here. I could swear the temperature dropped ten degrees between our bikes and the house.
"How do we get in?" Leroy asked in a piercing whisper.
It wasn't hard. The windows on the ground floor had been boarded up at one time, but some of the boards were pried away and you could see where other kids had gone in and out. We got out our flashlights -- Leroy didn't have one, so we told him to stay behind us -- and then we crawled into the house.
It was eerie, but mostly in the way that dark, empty old houses always are. I remember I could smell mold really strong. The moon lit up the yard, but it was absolutely pitch-black inside. We shone our flashlights around. Most of the furniture was still in place, but water had gotten in and everything was covered with mold and moss.
You know what I didn't see, though, and I didn't pick up on this 'til I was thinking about it a long time later: cobwebs. And there were no signs of mice or squirrel nests, no rodent chew-marks on the woodwork.
But I didn't think about that at the time, because the house was plenty creepy enough to keep my mind busy. We were standing in the living room, judging by the rotting couch and chairs. There was a staircase going up to darkness, and a door standing open, hanging on its hinges, with utter blackness beyond. A few dead leaves were scattered on the floor from seasons past, blown in through the window.
Leroy landed on the floor behind us with a thump. We both jumped; we'd almost forgotten about him. "Now what?" he asked. Dave's too-large hat was pulled down over his ears, almost hiding his eyes.
"Explore, I guess," Dave said.
We wandered around downstairs, through the kitchen and then into a bathroom with a big claw-foot tub and a puddle of stinking rust-colored water in the toilet. The floorboards sagged and creaked under our feet, and I remember thinking that tetanus was probably a bigger risk than ghosts. We also began to see more signs of other people who'd been here before us: JOE LOVES NANCY written on the wall, a charred place where someone had made a fire -- an actual campfire, for God's sake, right on the kitchen floor -- and occasional scattered Pepsi and beer cans.
These signs of human presence were reassuring, in a way, but at the same time it also made me a little bit angry. This had been somebody's home at one time, and maybe it had just been some weird old guy who might have murdered his whole family, but it was still his house.
Also, the house made noise, creaks and pops and little settling noises. Of course, like my rational brain kept telling me, all old houses do, especially when people are walking around in them. Sometimes, though, I thought I could hear a faint echo of the creaking of the floorboards under our feet, like someone else was walking in the house too, but was using our noise for cover: taking a step when we took a step, that kind of thing. It was hard to tell, though, with all of us making enough noise to -- not literally, I hope -- raise the dead. A couple of times, I got the other two to stop so I could listen, and I swear the creaking noises went on for just a second or two longer: CREAK CREAK CREAK, we went, and then there was a faint answering ...creak that lagged just a little too long to be an echo.
When a loud creak came from the floorboards directly above us, Dave and I both just about jumped out of our skin. We clutched each other's arms and pointed our flashlights at the ceiling, then at the gaping dark doorway of the kitchen. And then Dave whispered, "Where's Leroy?"
We looked at each other, and I could see we were thinking the same thing: God damn it, this is typical Leroy. That kid had no common sense at all. At least now we knew what was creaking around upstairs.
Luckily we'd all gotten wet and muddy crawling through the brush, so when I shone my flashlight around, I could see all of our wet tracks in the light. It was hard at first to pick out Leroy's, but then we found a set of wet tracks going up the stairs, which clearly wasn't either me or Dave.
"I guess there's no point in being here without seeing the whole place, right?" Dave whispered.
"I can't believe he's running around up there without a flashlight," I whispered back. We were both standing still now, so we should've been able to hear Leroy moving around, but now there was nothing at all. That heavy silence was back, the same one I'd noticed on other trips to the house, like cotton wool had come down over your ears. In its own way, it was even creepier than the oddly echoing creaking had been, like we'd been entirely cut off from the outside world. There was a part of me that wanted to run and look out the window just to make sure the yard and the moon and the road were still there.
"I believe it," Dave muttered. "This is Leroy we're talking about."
I realized as we began to climb the stairs that this adventure had stopped being fun. I don't know why, because nothing openly weird had happened to us yet, but I guess it was the difference between going upstairs because we wanted to, and going upstairs because we had to. Up to that point, we'd been in control. We could leave anytime we wanted. But this was the point when it started feeling like we were losing control of the situation. Now something else was leading us around.
The stairs creaked and sagged badly under our feet. My flashlight illuminated a broken step -- I was going first -- so I pointed it out to Dave in silence. The higher we climbed, the less we wanted to talk. It really didn't feel good, being up here. I told myself it was just the nervousness of knowing we were on the second floor of a very unstable building made out of rotten wood, but it was more than that, I think. I couldn't help remembering the second-floor windows, the ones that hadn't been boarded up, but were broken out anyway. Watching us on the road, like eyes.
How do windows on the second floor get broken out, anyway?
Maybe by people trying to escape.
At the top of the stairs was a hallway with a damp, moldering carpet. The smell of mold and decay was even stronger up here. And, as I reached the top of the stairs and shone my flashlight down the hall, I caught a glimpse of movement. Just for a moment: as my flashlight swung across the hallway, it lit up something down the hall, something person-sized. But when I shone it back, there was nothing there. The hall stretched empty all the way down, with Leroy's wet footsteps gleaming in my flashlight beam until they were too far away to make out.
Thank God we know Leroy's up here, I thought, because I'd be screaming my head off right now if that weren't the case. As it was, my heart was trying to leap out of my chest.
"What?" Dave asked tensely from behind me. I'd stopped, blocking the stairs.
"I saw him," I said, and raised my voice. "Hey, Leroy? Come on, stop dicking around."
Remember how I said earlier that I'd gotten the feeling making loud noises around the house wasn't a good idea?
As I called Leroy's name, there came a sudden, shattering crash from downstairs, like an entire rack of windows had been knocked over. Except there wasn't an intact pane of glass left in the whole house.
I'm not ashamed to say that Dave and I both screamed. As the echoes of our shrieks died away, the silence in the house got -- I don't know how to put this. Have you ever been in a summer storm, when the storm hasn't quite broken yet, but you can feel it sitting on top of you, that hot heavy feeling? It was like that. Or maybe more like the way that, when you have a fever, everything seems to press in on you. Nothing had moved, but it felt like the walls were bulging inward, pressing against us. The air felt too heavy and thick to breath.
Dave and I were pressed against each other, shoulder to shoulder.
"Something fell over," Dave whispered. "This whole place is really unstable."
"Yeah," I whispered back. "That's gotta be it."
The only thing that kept us from running down the stairs, out of the house, and not stopping 'til we were home was knowing that Dave's kid cousin was up here somewhere. The first few steps forward were the hardest. The upstairs was more of a mess than the downstairs, maybe because it was more exposed to the elements without the windows being boarded up. Rotting wallpaper hung like strips of torn skin in our flashlight beams, and the ceiling sagged in great bulging swoops above us. Worst of all were the doorways to the bedrooms. There were four of them, two on each side of the hallway, and they were black as pitch 'til our flashlight beams shone in. Even then, the flashlights could only light up a little patch of the darkness inside, giving us strangely disjointed impressions of ragged curtains and rotting bedspreads. It looked like everything in the rooms had been left in place, even down to clothing hanging in closets and a shelf of mildewed dolls whose blank eyes glittered in the flashlight beams like animals' eyes.
"No graffiti up here," Dave murmured.
He was right. The upstairs wasn't trashed like the downstairs. Maybe because fewer people came up here. Maybe because even the town punks didn't have the nerve to mess with this part of the house.
Tightly wound as we were, we still made it all the way to the end of the hallway without incident. There was a window here, though I hadn't been able to tell from the other end of the hall because a tree had grown over it, blocking the light. My flashlight lit up shards of glass on the windowsill and the floor. Some of the tree branches had grown inside, giving me the feeling that the tree was trying to crawl through the window, that maybe it had broken the window trying to get in.
Dave and I hadn't been out of physical contact with each other the whole time, and this was still the case. Now his shoulder jerked against mine, his flashlight beam skittering crazily over the walls, and he gasped.
"What?" I said, spinning around and shining my flashlight down the hall. "What, what?"
"I saw -- I thought I saw --" He took a deep breath and said, "I saw Leroy at the top of the stairs. Had to be him. Which means the little jerk is going back downstairs, and we can too."
I didn't like the quaver in his voice, but I really loved the idea of getting out of the house. Unfortunately this meant we had to walk down the hall with all those gaping black doorways at our back. We both kept spinning around, waving our flashlights across the walls and ceiling and floor. And the echo effect was back: take a step, hear the creak, and then another creak just a little delayed.
Going downstairs was the worst, because slowly the hallway vanished from view, one doorway at a time. And that meant anything could come out of those doorways. I became aware of the sound of a voice murmuring softly, very close to me. It was Dave, saying Hail Marys under his breath. By the time we got to the bottom of the stairs, I'd joined him.
At this point neither of us dared turn our backs on the darkness anymore, so without having to discuss it, we lined up back to back and crabwalked across the floor. We hadn't gone very far before I stepped on a rotten board and it yielded under my foot with a rending dry crack. I flung myself backward and Dave grabbed my arm. Nervously we both aimed our flashlights down. The board had given way about six inches, revealing only darkness beneath. Cold, dank air breathed up through the gap, stirring my hair. By now I'd almost gotten used to the mold smell, but this had a different smell altogether, earthy and decayed, with the faintest hint of the sweetish smell of rotting meat.
We'd both frozen, no longer moving, and in that still, unnatural quiet, the whisper of movement came to us clearly -- not from below, but from above. Something was moving in the hallway at the top of the stairs.
It was about fifteen feet to the window, and I swear we covered it at a single leap. In the window, we had a brief traffic jam, and then we were spilling out into the wet brush of the overgrown yard.
"Leroy's probably back at the bikes," Dave said, his teeth chattering. "Little jerk probably doubled back and has been laughing himself silly."
But he wasn't at the bikes. We both turned and looked back at the house, half-hidden behind its screen of trees. I was looking all over the place, not wanting to take my eyes off any part of the house, and I thought I caught a glimpse of movement at one of the upstairs windows, but when I looked back it was blank and dark as before.
"We can't leave Leroy in there," Dave said.
"I know," I said.
But neither one of us could bring ourselves to go back into the yard. I've never in my life felt fear that powerful. I hated myself for it, but my fear of that place was like a physical force, locking up my muscles and turning my legs to water.
Finally we had to admit that it was time to get the adults involved. We didn't know how to tell our parents that we'd lost Leroy, especially when we weren't supposed to have him in the first place. But the only other option was to flounder around in the darkness looking for him ourselves. And it was still possible that he'd given up on us and gone home. That seemed like a Leroy thing to do.
Finally we pedaled home, exhausted and freaked out and miserable, mentally rehearsing our excuses. We went to Dave's house because it was closer.
What we didn't expect was to find all the lights on and cars in the driveway. We slowed to a stop and looked at each other. Dave's parents must've woke up, realized that he'd snuck out and called the cavalry. Which meant we were both in trouble. I thought about just sneaking away and heading home, but Dave was a good friend and I didn't think it was fair to leave him to face the music alone. Besides, we were both pretty worried about Leroy by now.
As soon as we stepped inside, Dave's mother came out of nowhere and flung her arms around him, leaves and mud and all.
No one was mad at us for being gone. It turned out they hadn't even noticed. The problem was something else entirely.
Leroy never ran away from summer camp.
Leroy's mom, who was Dave's mom's sister, had gotten a call from the summer camp people that night, right around the time I was crawling out my window and just about the time that Dave found Leroy lurking around under his window, wanting to go with him on his latest adventure.
What the summer camp people told Leroy's mom was that when they'd counted the boys in the cabins that night, they'd come up one short, and the missing one was Leroy, of course. At first the counselors were just plain mad, but before calling his parents to tell them he'd run off again, they did a sweep of the whole area, the cabins and the docks and the edge of the little lake where our summer camp was.
That's where they found him.
Leroy was never a strong swimmer, which didn't stop him from trying, of course, because that's the kind of kid Leroy was. The kids had been playing in the lake that afternoon, and they figured that once everyone went back to the cabins, Leroy sneaked back down to the lake to swim by himself. He got in over his head, and there wasn't anybody to help him.
Dave and I told our parents that we'd gone to the Johnson house, and got grounded for it -- and we deserved it. But we never told anybody else about Leroy being with us that night. Because he couldn't have been. And we never talked about it again. But whenever we had to bike past the Johnson house, we'd pedal extra fast and we wouldn't look at it or at each other.
And I think we were both wondering the same thing: If Leroy was dead, then WHAT was with us that night?
It was years later that Dave told me one more thing he'd never mentioned at the time. Remember how he gave Leroy his hat because Leroy was cold? Well, he got the hat back. Two days later, he went up to his room after dinner, opened the door and there it was, on his bed, right on his pillow. And it was soaking wet.
--
Note: Some of the inspiration for Peter's chapter was drawn from my other Tarot card prompt.
4. Neal
Jones whistled. "Remind me never, ever to go camping with you."
"Caffrey's turn now," Diana said.
Neal raised a hand. "Sorry to disappoint, but I haven't got anything."
"Aw, c'mon," Peter said. "You? Not a single ghost story anywhere? You never robbed a haunted house or stole cursed jewels?"
Neal smiled. "Hey, if you want stories about alleged thefts and hypothetical narrow escapes, I'm your guy. I'm not much of a ghost story guy, though."
Peter studied him; Neal smiled back blandly. Finally Peter yawned and looked at his watch. "You know, guys, I think we might be out of time for ghost stories anyway. It's starting to look like the meet's been called off tonight. I say we go home and get some sleep."
"And maybe get in on some of that Halloween action for those of us who have social lives," Jones said.
Diana elbowed him. "So now who's looking for the twenty-something bump-and-grind?"
"Me? Hell no. I'm going home and get some sleep."
Jones volunteered to drop off Diana and drive the van back to the employee parking garage. Peter's car was parked around the corner, and he offered Neal a ride home.
They drove uptown in a sleepy, companionable silence. Neal sagged wearily back into his seat and basked in the warm air blasting from the car's vents.
Most of the big Halloween parties had been the previous weekend, but there were still plenty of costumed revelers out on the streets. It was not even midnight yet. Once they got away from downtown Manhattan, it was quieter.
Peter didn't speak until he pulled up in front of June's; then he said, "Sorry about making you miss your haunted house."
Neal shrugged. "Like you said, there'll be other years."
Peter nodded, and gave Neal another of his long looks. "You know," he said quietly, "you can talk to me anytime. If you need to."
"I know," Neal said, not quite meeting his eyes. He opened his door.
"See you at work tomorrow," Peter said.
"Good night, Peter."
June's house was dark and silent. The trappings of the haunted house had already been cleaned up for the most part, although his shoes crunched on pumpkin-shaped glitter, and there was still crepe-paper swag hanging on the railing of the stairs.
Neal opened his door, reached for the light switch, and hesitated.
"No lights," the voice he'd expected said quietly from the bed.
He closed the door. In darkness lit only by the city's glow striping the room, he toed off his shoes and began to unbutton his shirt.
"You're late."
"I had to work," he said, knowing that it sounded like an excuse.
"We only have this one night, until next year." On the bed, she sat up. In the darkness all he could see was the pale blur of her face, framed by long dark hair. "Unless this is the year you'll come back with me."
Neal sat down beside her on the bed. Even up close, she was still hard to make out, and when her hand settled on his arm, it was very cold. The faintest smell of smoke and burning jet fuel clung to her, a subtle but pervasive perfume that made his head ache.
"I don't know," he said. "There are things here I'd miss."
"Prison," she said, and kissed him. Her lips were cold as ice. "A prison by any other name is still a prison."
"I know," Neal whispered, as her fingers sank, ice-cold, into the skin of his arm, pulling him down onto the bed with mingled pleasure and pain.
"It's still a long time until dawn," she murmured against his mouth, through her cold, cold lips. "I still have time to change your mind."
~
One more note: I don't usually like to leave author's notes with an "official" interpretation of the story, but I worried when I wrote this that the final scene might be construed as Kate-bashing. I like Kate and really, truly do not intend this story to reflect negatively on her character. However, it is a ghost story; ghosts follow different rules and have different priorities than the living!
no subject
I consume very little horror, largely because I can't stand blood and gore. Slasher movies are right out, torture porn is even worse. But I love ghost stories. They're just the right kind of creepy and eerie for me. And these are such good ghost stories.
The "everyone tells a story" framing device is a classic for a reason (indeed there's probably a proper literary term for it, but I wasn't an English major), and you use it really well here. Indeed, I think this isn't my favorite story by you (though I love it!), and it may or may not be your best (not making any sort of judgement there), but I think it really shows your strength as a writer, though I'm not sure I could say exactly how. Maybe it's the way you keep the character voices even as they're telling their stories.
There's value in innovation and daring. However, a writer should understand their format, and I feel like you do that. Of course all the stories have to told as if they really happened. That's how it has to be.
It's funny. Almost immediately, I realized that Neal's story would have to be about Kate. He could tell some story about a haunted museum or something, but that wouldn't feel true. Of all Neal's dead, Kate's presence looms largest. And yet, I also realized that Neal's story couldn't be about Kate, because he would never leave himself bare like that. And, yes, both my thoughts were true, and you managed to resolve them. To make it work.
I didn't read the last scene as Kate bashing, though it did occur to me that others might take it that way. As you say, the dead see things differently. And I think the detail about the smoke and jet fuel nearly killed me.
no subject
This is such a weird, experimental story that I wasn't sure how much audience there would be for it. It was a lot of fun to write, though, because I do enjoy creepy horror (as opposed to gory horror) and this is also the first time that I'd written something that dealt so directly with the characters' voices. Normally I avoid first person in fanfic, but like you said, that was how the story needed to be told -- not just first person, but their actual words, with all the digressions and interjections and sentence fragments that happen when people are talking, to give that proper sense of immediacy that good ghost stories need to have.
And, yeah, I'd actually gotten about halfway through the story and was trying to figure out how to end it when I realized that Neal's story needed to be different from the others, and then the thought occurred to me to tie the whole thing together by having Peter spend the entire fic trying, subtly, to get to the heart of what's bothering him, with Neal refusing to play along.
I'm glad the final scene doesn't read as bashing to you. I was kinda worried about that, but it had to have that sense of menace, or it wouldn't have worked thematically with the rest.
no subject
I read Kate as creepy but not malicious. She isn't dragging Neal off into death, after all. She's inviting him. And if the dead see life as a prison, then why wouldn't she?
It makes me think of a ghost!Kate (though not necessarily this Kate) who's reminiscent of Laura Moon from Neil Gaiman's American Gods--violent, strange, and very, very dead, but acting from love. And it makes me want a ghost!Kate (again, not specifically the one in your story) who will tear apart anyone who would hurt Neal, because while she wants him to join her, it has to be his choice.
...Sorry, I'm feeling odd tonight. (Oh, this morning actually, by 51 minutes.)