Act Twenty-Two: Flashback and Fast-Forward
The boys had all heard the story. Spooky losing his grandfather. The endless nights diving into stack after stack of almost incomprehensible notes, searching for answers. The long conversations with his father about their family’s gift, and curse. What could have been a self-destructive, implosive pattern that might have led Bones who-knows-where in life.
The ritual itself was, in some ways, a legend. More like a fable, really. It was a cautionary tale of the dangers of magic best left alone, of desperation and arcane arts being a recipe for disaster, and the ever-important lesson that the universe was so much bigger than they ever thought it could be, and almost none of it good. None of the other boys, however, had any idea of what it was Spooky had actually seen. He was purposefully vague, as he explained it, because it was not only impossible to describe what he’d seen with the limited vocabulary he possessed. This coming from a mid who knew at least three languages. They weren’t sure.
“Oh… kay...” Dusty said slowly. “So, all we need to do is keep this book out of the big creepy’s reach and we’re solid, right?”
Rubble, to his credit, only rolled his eyes a little. “Sure. Then we can just stay in this supernatural lockdown until the heat death of the universe playing keepaway for all eternity in a madhouse run by an all-powerful crazy-ass inmate.”
“You know,” Dusty sighed, “I know you’re just being a sarcastic ass, but you really know how to just flash-flood a guy’s parade.”
“You’re welcome,” Rubble chidded, although a little hollowly. “So, let’s talk endgame. We know the basic layout now, which is more than we had half an hour ago, and to be honest, more than we usually have going into anything. Which is usually the part where the big bad does something horrible that almost kills us all and racks up our hospital bills again.”
Treble rifled back and forth through the near incomprehensible book. “So, you said this book was written in both Latin and the language of the dead? Does that mean they drudged up the guys the witches killed and interrogated them, then used that to write out countermeasures?”
Spooky blinked at his friend. “Yes, actually. That’s exactly what it means. How did you know?”
DT shrugged. “It’s what I’d do if I could talk to the dead. Well, in that specific scenario, anyway. S here’s my thought for the day, and then I’m probably tapped out till the next grand adventure we stumble into: we’ve got the dead kids this family has killed. We have the book. We even have this weird kinda-cool spirit running defense on our behalf on the other side. And we’re still stuck here with a homicidal ghostly maniac. Mr. Song, apparently, wants us to burn this book. So we need to, at the very least, keep it safe. Ideally, there’s a way to counter the ritual spell in here that he doesn’t want us to find. Which probably means more reading.”
“Are you, I don’t know, going to get to your thought any time soon?” Dusty asked with an edge to his voice. Answers or not, he was still surrounded by dead kids.
Treble gave him an annoyed glare. “My thought,” Treble grunted, “Is that maybe we just let the big guy think we burned the book, and then when he makes his move to break down the garden gate, we hit him with whatever we got?”
Spooks nodded appreciatively. “Yeah, that could work. Set a trap for him in his own house? I mean, we know where this whole thing is gonna go down, right? The big sigil in the house in the middle of the courtyard. We could probably just booby-trap the house Ghostbusters style and throw him in a box or something.”
“That would be a fantastic idea,” said a deep, unsettling voice, “If I hadn’t heard every word you boys just said.”
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“Oh, bitch,” growled Tide, staring in the direction of the kitchen. The girls all gave her concerned looks. “You ladies might want to hurry to the kitchen. Your boys are going to need some help, little as it may be.”
“Hey!” Indigo protested, only to be shut down with a disapproving look from Tide.
“You have no supernatural experience, an assortment of injuries, and truth be told, aren’t exactly the most physically capable people in the house. Granted, Spooks and Treble are somewhere at the bottom of the list, but you aren’t beating them out by much. Not where it counts. Injuries included, of course. That booby trap in the basement wasn’t exactly fair play,” she added, almost as an afterthought.
“You think?” Raven barked, her headache surging again.
Tide waved dismissively at her. “Not my fault, and not the problem right now. Seriously. Kitchen, boys, get.” When the girls hesitated, even for a second, she added, “GO!” in a voice much more in line with what you’d expect an angry ghost to use. Glass in picture frames shattered as Tide chased them out of the room and down the hall to rejoin the others.
Getting into the kitchen was easy. Finding a place to stand, however, was another matter entirely. The mass of small, dead bodies in disfiguring poses aside, the boys took up a good chunk of the far side of the room, and the rather disturbing ghostly presence floating in the dead center of the room seemed to take up much more space than he should, by virtue of sheer aura.
Indigo skid to a stop, as Raven and Twilight stumbled to a halt at the doorway, not really having a place to stand amidst the riffraff. “Um, what the hell?!” Indigo demanded, getting a good look at the scene before, and around, her.
Spooky glanced past the rather large ghostly old man with a nonchalant expression. “Fill you in later,” he said simply.
“No, Tide pretty much did a great job of that about five minutes ago,” Twilight explained.
“Excuse me,” said the apparition, in a rather stern voice.
“Tide?” Rubble asked, raising both eyebrows.
“Ghost of the girl we burned. Very grateful. Kind of rude. Also rather intelligent. She explained quite a lot, actually,” Inkwell said, a little less nonchalantly than Bones, all the while keeping her eyes on the somewhat irate spirit.
“Excuse me,” the ghost said again, much more sternly.
“There is no excuse for you,” Treble interjected. “I mean, that’s nice and all, and the kids here are rather helpful, but I feel like we have bigger problems.”
Setting aside Treble’s childish insult, the ghost puffed up his chest. “Indeed, I am-”
“Mr. Song, blah blah blah,” said Indigo dismissively. “Yeah, I know. Door’s still locked, lotta zombies, portal into some god-awful superdimension-”
“All of which is my doing, Mr. Song interjected aggressively. “Now, if you don’t mind-”
“Yes yes we’re all very proud, our little Casper is all grown up,” Dusty sniped. “Look, can we just get to the part where we grass this ass? Also, I don’t think the Tenebrae is a superdimension. I think that’s a different thing entirely? Is that right?” he asked Spooks.
Who nodded with half a smile. “Yeah, that’s right. The Tenebrae is more like an elemental plane of creation. Superdimensions are either formed by the assimilation of multiple universes into a single, functioning universe, or created out of a mutation in the origin process that makes it basically way bigger than it should be, much more expansive, and more dangerous. I’ve really only ever encountered one, indirectly.”
“ENOUGH WITH THE SCIENCE LESSON!” Song bellowed, a great zephyr overtaking the room. Even the zombies were thrown about a little as the boys and girls had trouble holding their ground. At this point, Raven and Indigo had decided full well to pay attention to the increasingly angry spirit, Twilight was scrambling like mad to find anything on her person with which to record these phenomena, and the boys…
“So what, the Tenebrae is like a primordial pile of whatever that just happens to take up a whole dimension?” Treble asked, straightening his tie and hair.
Spooks shrugged, not bothering with his appearance, which now made him look like someone went into a wind tunnel and saw their parents doing it: wide-eyed, hair everywhere, and generally pale. SO really, the only difference was the hair. “Kind of? There’s not like, a textbook on this kind of thing. There’s not even really an accepted theory as to how it functions. The only reason we know it does what it does is there have been some people stupid enough to go in, and other people crazy enough to translate for them when they came back out.”
At this point, Song had had enough. His ethereal form surged towards the group of boys, and dove for the text, which Treble gripped tighter and held to his chest. The ghost didn’t get within more than a few feet, as the book pulsed with an invisible, yet perceptible, energy. Like the distortion that comes off a hot car hood in the summer, only more violent. With a disturbing scream, he lurched backwards, as if he’d been burned.
Spooks rolled his eyes. “Oh, sure, yes, each for the holy text specifically designed to counter the exact magic holding you here. Good job, boss,” he deadpanned.
Rubble snorted loudly. “I thought you were supposed to be like… threatening? We’ve literally seen much worse in the janitor’s closet at our school.”
Twilight shuddered. “Please don’t talk about that.”
“Right… sorry.”
Song looked at the book, then the boys. “The book might be shielded, but you all are NOT,” he declared triumphantly, lunging towards Rubble.
If any of the boys had a plan for what was going to happen next, they obviously didn’t act on it fast enough. Treble did make an effort to move the book between them, but Song wasn’t held back by the same laws of physics, and moved with impossible speed, reaching deep into Rubble’s chest. For the first time, the boys actually looked concerned, and a little embarrassed at their dismissal of Song’s presence.
Rubble’s body lurched, shook and went rigid, as if he was having a seizure, until it finally went limp as Song pulled out a glowing teal orb. “You see, children!” Song bragged. “How easy it is to just pluck the life out of one of you?! You are simply bags of meat with energy inside! More than enough o make up for tha measly morsel you stole from me!”
Treble and Dusty looked on in horror as Song brought what was presumably Rubble’s soul to his mouth, which widened horribly.
Then Spooks yelled something in a dead man’s tongue, and the ball lurched.
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This really fucking hurts, Rubble thought as Song’s hands reached into his chest. There was a flash of light, and suddenly dark. Yet he could still think. He imagined that, on some level, he was dead, but not… all the way? There was a sensation of being held tightly, uncomfortably, like a football being squeezed before a throw. Then a sound. Distant, yet familiar.
“Dad?” he asked softly.
“..es. Yes. That’d be me. Now open your eyes,” said the voice. He knew it right away as his dad.
“How… I’m pretty sure I’m dead. It’s so dark.”
“That would be because your eyes are, in fact, closed. I mean quite literally, open your eyes, dumbass.” Yeah, that was his father, alright.
He thought for a second, relatively sure that the dead didn’t have eyelids, and opened them anyway. Something he was sure wouldn’t have worked, save for the fact that his view went from pitch black to slightly gray around the edges of a white… room, maybe? And his father standing off to the side. “You know, I imagined this being a bit more… emotional, like I would have some big giant rant about how much I missed you and how pissed I am that you left, but for some reason I’m kind of drawing a blank.”
His dad shrugged. “Yeah, you get used to that. You’d be surprised how many of your emotions are chemically driven. It comes back slowly, which is why hauntings don’t usually happen right away. Or, it would in your case, but I’m hoping you don’t stick around long.”
“Question.”
“Answer,” his dad smiled.
“Right. So, as far as I know, this place where I’m at, or… was, has a tendency to trap or eat ghosts. So how am I here with you?” Rubble puzzled.
“Actually, it’s kind of the other way around. I’m there with you. Have been for a while,” he explained.
Rubble blinked. “Come again?”
“That tends to happen when you die suddenly and violently, and then someone keeps wearing the clothes you kicked off in. I’ve technically been haunting you for a couple of years now. Those weird surges of rage and all that when I first left? Kind of my fault,” his dad admitted.
The son stared at the father like a deer at headlights. “So… why the hell haven’t you said anything? How come Spooks hasn’t picked up on you at all?!”
“Because he’s not psychic, son. He just knows an impossible language. He’s got great instincts, but you and I are so much alike that if he even could sense me, he’d just think you were dialed up to 11. Which, to be fair, is kind of your default setting. And I couldn’t say anything because I’ve kind of been trapped in your head. See, technically, I’m possessing you. I mean, did you really think you’d be such an accomplished fighter so quickly without a little edge? Can’t wear a dead man’s clothes for that long and not get some on ya, son,” the old man explained.
Rubble thought about this briefly, until another thought came to him. “So… does this mean you’re gonna leave? Now that we’ve had a chance to say goodbye?”
His dad looked at him, wide-eyed, then bellowed a laugh. “Not a chance, son! I’ve been waiting for you to do something stupid just so I can help you cram your spirit back in your body and kick some ass! I died fighting a war, son, how much ‘unfinished business’ do you think I have?! Now, do us both a favor, get your ass back in your meat suit, and start wrecking some shit!” he jeered, grabbing his son by the shirt.
He threw him backwards, and Rubble felt a surge of power as he was launched back into the world of the living. Then, another lurch, as he felt something not only pushing him, but pulling. Another voice rang out to him, too. It wasn’t in a language he knew, but he understood it right away. It was Spooks, yelling at him to-
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“WAKE THE FUCK UP, RUBBLE!” Spooks shouted in plain English, which was the first sound Rubble heard as his eyes shot open. The first thing he saw was a very startled, very disturbed ghost.
“How?!” Song bellowed. “I RIPPED YOUR SOUL OUT OF YOUR BODY! HOW ARE YOU ALIVE?!”
Rubble looked around wearily at the room of relieved, confused, and angry faces. Then he felt a surge in him, and his father’s voice in his head. Now, about that ass-kicking. There was a tingling sensation in his entire body, slowly growing stronger. He gripped the arms of the wheelchair, and pushed himself up, hesitantly. When his feet hit the ground, he felt… steady. I got this, kid. You focus on the punching, I’ll keep you on your feet.
“Hey Spooks?” Rubble asked calmly.
His best friend looked up from where he was still kneeling on the floor, smiling proudly. “Yeah?”
“You said a while ago that I can’t punch ghosts, right?”
Bones nodded. “Yes. Yes I did. That’s kind of a constant in the-”
“WATCH ME TRY!” Rubble bellowed, and delivered a right cross that made his father proud. Of course, it helped that his father was doing some of the punching. The burst of energy from Rubble’s fist hitting Song in the face was brief, loud, and bright, followed immediately by the apparition flying backwards literally through the wall.
“...oh, my god,” Treble whispered in awe. “He actually punched a ghost.”