Act Fifteen: Monologuing
Spooky Bones had always thought the absolute best of his grandfather. Raised from a young age to not only believe, but understand the world beyond what he saw, Spooks never once doubted the old man’s sanity. Even as a toddler, Buried Bones would read him the most accurate, true-to-source fables, legends, and fairy tales he could find, in a rather successful bid to encourage not only an interest, but a sort of fearful respect of the supernatural world. Buried saw it with a kind of reverence, after a lifetime of personal experience, and never once took his abilities for granted. He had, at one time, been afraid of them. That much is certain. Yet he never, ever, let himself become complacent.
Bones’ mother, Summer Lullaby, had quite a hard time believing the ‘family way’ the Bones’ lived in. Her fiancee’, Bone Marrow, had warned her early and often that staying with him meant taking a dive into the deep end of the unnatural. She had, at first, thought it a running joke, as Buried ran a mortuary in his later years, and Marrow was a forensic medical examiner for the county. She’d always thought of their strange and fancifully dark banter as ‘gallows humor’. Marrow, however, was (and is) a good man, and refused to let himself marry someone who didn’t understand what she was getting into.
She still hasn’t forgiven him for leading her blindfolded into a room with a gumberoo, no matter how well-behaved it had been.
After she had come to terms with the existence of an entire world she couldn’t explain, she’d done her best to keep her normal life separate, which wasn’t too terribly difficult. Given that she didn’t share her husband’s penchant for attracting the strange and unnatural, and had a much more difficult time finding it, even when she was brave or irritated enough to go looking, it was few and far between that she needed to worry about any kind of crossover.
That is, until her son was born. In fact, even before Spooky Bones saw light for the first time, she had started seeing the world much as her husband and father-in-law did. Of course, it terrified her, and as an expectant mother, she did everything she could to learn how to protect herself and her family. Her immediate solution was to try to sever their connection to the Bones’ family legacy, moving away, changing jobs, and leaving behind everything of her in-laws’ that might leave the door open for anything dangerous or unexplainable.
This didn’t last long, as Spooky’s birth was heralded by a whole host of strange and unusual events, much to the distress of his mother. Marrow, of course, had lived with such phenomena his whole life, and did his best to ease his wife’s mind and soul, trying valiantly to show her that not everything inhuman was dangerous. In fact, it was thanks to these efforts that later attempts to keep his father’s legacy in tact had any success at all.
Spooky himself had never feared the unnatural world around him. Unlike Buried’s parents, Spooks grew up in a house where the weird and wild were commonplace. At least, more than usual. They didn’t exactly sit down to dinner with vampires, but very, very few other children could tell you what a Raven Mocker was at such a young age. At first, he’d thought it perfectly normal. Raised in a family that considered ghosts and goblins as facts instead of fictions, it was quite a few years before Spooky started to understand exactly how different his life was from others. Of course, he’d never considered it a bad thing.
That is, until he turned ten years old.
It wasn’t one of those ‘on your tenth birthday’ prophetic situations. In fact, besides hitting double digits faster than his parents were expecting (no parent expects their child to grow up as fast as they do, of course), it wouldn’t have been very different from any other year. Until his grandfather died. Buried Bones had lived to a ripe old age, and his death wasn’t a sudden, unexpected affair, but a death in the family is foreign territory to any ten-year old, no matter how many ghosts they’ve talked to.
For the longest time, Spooks looked for his grandfather’s spirit. Always the quiet sort, even before his old man’s death, it took his parents a while to understand what he was doing. Eventually, though, his father sat him down and explained that not everyone who dies leaves their spirit behind. He did his best to explain that his grandfather had lived a happy life, and didn’t have any regrets. There was nothing he felt unfinished in his life, and thus had moved on. Of course, telling a ten-year old that his favorite person in the world was not only dead, but didn’t see fit to stay around long enough to have a word with him for a minute or two, went about as well as you’d think.
His first reaction was to become, if possible, even more withdrawn. Even his usual outlets and conversation partners, whoever and whatever they were, noticed him grow quieter and quieter. Everyone chalked it up to mourning, which it was. The problem was, however, that the members of the Bones family didn’t even mourn like others. Spooks spent all of his time reading his uncle’s journals, his notes, trying to understand hide or hair of them. This would eventually lead to Summer’s adamant insistence that the journals be disposed of completely (a fight we know by now she lost, for a variety of reasons), but in the meantime, his parents simply assumed he was trying to be as close to his grandfather as possible.
Close, in this case, unfortunately meant looking for a way to talk to him, no matter where he’d landed himself in the afterlife. Spooky read on and on, focusing all of his effort on finding a way to contact the old man, to just have one last conversation with him, even if he only got to ask a handful of the millions of questions floating through his ten-year old brain. Finally, he’d found what he thought was a perfect answer: a simple ritual to speak to someone on the other side of the veil. He was so sure, as any child would be, that he had everything in order.
The truth, however, was that not only did he have the wrong ritual, as was expected of his level of experience, but the ritual he’d decided to use, he’d done so incorrectly. The night of the ritual was something out of a nightmare. Of a nightmare. Hiding himself in the far side of the attic, Spooks had gathered everything he’d needed for the spell. There was nothing out of the ordinary, at least to him, about the components: no blood, no sacrifice. Simply some rare flowers and some strange writings, which Spooks had become accustomed to.
Which also meant that there was no reason for his parents to suspect anything, right up to the moment when they heard their son screaming at the top of his voice, two stories up, over a television. When they finally reached him, after taking the stairs three at a time and breaking down the (unlocked) attic door, all they found was Spooky crying on the floor, surrounded by a whirlwind of papers and flower petals, and a crackle of energy on the air.
Spooky was blind for a year afterward, and all he would tell anyone about what he saw was that he’d ‘seen the true monsters of the world’. Besides his family, only three people in the world knew this story.
Two of which were watching him trying to hold his eyes open as he fought off a growing wave of fatigue. “So,” Twilight said after a few minutes, having drawn up a handful of charms, which had been stapled to the desk around them. Spooks had asked for nails, but the desk’s usefulness as a supply closet had run dry after the ink. “Setting aside the fact that you happen to have a book with just the right spell to ward off a bunch of possessed lantern head things, and that you happened to have just the religious relic to make it work, and wildly ignoring the reality of the situation I’m in that I can say any of that without a hint of sarcasm-”
“Little bit of sarcasm,” Treble noted, stapling a charm precariously close to the edge of the barrier. A lantern pushed against the invisible force, and came within half a foot of his hands, which he snapped back rather quickly.
“I would like to know how exactly you know onmyodo magic and Buddhist mantras,” Twilight snapped, her hand shaking in frustration over the last charm, which she moved away from the pen so as not to accidentally poke a hole in it. Like she had the previous one. She’d made a few attempts at this last charm, and in her frustration, was running out of paper. And patience.
Spooks sat up a little further, propping his weary head against the desk. “It’s a long story.”
Twilight looked around her with a sense of indignation. “Does it look like we’re going anywhere anytime soon?!” she hissed.
Treble and Dusty traded glances as Spooky heaved a sigh. “Look, I’ve seen… things. Monsters and maladies the likes of which drive people mad just by existing. After… after my grandfather died, my mother was adamant that we separate everything of my family’s strange and unnatural legacy from our lives. But even before then I’d started learning how to protect myself. My father, my grandfather, they taught themselves how to live with our gifts. And at first, that’s what I did. But when my grandfather died, I learned the hard way that not everything out there is just as afraid of us as we are of it. So I taught myself to fight. Onmyodo charms are just the tip of the iceberg. And truth be told, there’s an entire host of spells and wards in that book that could have saved us. But that mantra was the only one I had the materials for. We’re lucky there’s something here more effective than a ballpoint pen, or even this warding magic would be little more than five minutes’ rest after I pass out. So to answer your question, Miss Sparkle,” Spooks added, with a rare edge in his voice, “I would think you could be spending less time questioning my training and more time finishing the goddamn spell.”
Treble and Dusty had both edged slowly away from their friend, quietly convening in the corner as Twilight shrunk away from the slim teen, who now seemed like the largest person in the room. “...sorry,” Twilight muttered, more than slightly belittled. She finished the last ward with a steady hand, and stapled it herself to the desk behind her. Even though there were no outward signs of the magic at work, she swore she felt a slight breeze around her.
Dusty looked back and forth between them, deciding that the moment of tension had passed, and crawled back to sit next to Bones. At least, he was going to, until he felt a hitch in the floor underneath his hand. He pressed on it curiously, and felt a bit of give. “Um, Treble?”
“Yeah?” DT replied.
“Got a flashlight?”
His only answer at first was a bit of rustling as Treble checked the surprising amount of pockets about him. Of course, there was a rather large, heavy flashlight in the bag, but it was on the other side of Twilight and Spooks, and at the moment Dusty would have rather crawled under an electric fence, and figured he’d have about as much luck asking one for help. Feeling a light tap on his shoulder, he reached around and grabbed the small keychain light Treble handed him.
There was still light in the library, of course, thanks to the glowing heads, but the barrier kept them far enough at bay that even with their intensified glare, they did little more than provide enough light for Twilight to write by (with no lack of grumbling). So Dusty needed all the help he could get in trying to find a small hitch in a large floor. Of course, after a few passes with the flashlight, he located it again. Then swore in a quiet, frustrated string. “Well, the good news is we don’t have to sit around waiting for the second barrier to fall.”
Spooks gave him a sideways glare that could have shrunk a dragon into a gecko. “And what, exactly, is the bad news?”
Dusty, to his credit, had decided well ahead of time that the floor was a much better place to stare than his friend’s face, and thus only slightly felt the searing gaze as it nearly lit his overly-gelled hair on fire. “You’re gonna have to do some walking. And maybe climbing.”
Treble looked over Dusty’s shoulder to see exactly where he was going with this, and sighed in disbelief. “You’ve got to be shitting me. A trapdoor?! We’ve been sitting on a fucking exit for the last fucking hour?!”
Twilight looked down at the tiny circle of light, then up at the boys, then back to the floor. “I want it on the record that I have never hated anyone or anything as much as I have everything about this right now.”
“Noted,” Spooks drawled with a low groan as he rolled over on his side, blearily dragging himself to all fours. “Now can someone open the damn door so I can climb into whatever hole we’re sitting on top of and go. The fuck. To sleep.”
Dusty flinched as Spooks’ normally calm demeanor devolved in his exhaustion to an uncharacteristic (and disconcertingly accurate) imitation of Rubble’s general outlook on life. “I got it,” he groaned, and lifted the trapdoor.
----------------------------
The door ended up leading them to a ladder, which led to a tunnel, which led to, almost insultingly, a smaller library. Actually, to call it a library would actually be an insult in and of itself to the grand display of bibliophilia above their heads. It was more like one of the many sitting rooms in the house, with a single chair in the center of a circular series of bookshelves. It was more like a private collection than anything else, made only more suspicious by the series of chains and thick glass protecting them.
Spooks had commandeered the only chair, and had passed out in almost seconds, while Twilight had sat on the angled ladder, somewhat uncomfortably. Dusty and Treble, however, had no such intentions of staying still. The former had immediately taken to looking for another secret door or passage, in case something else awful and flammable decided to rear its ugly head. The latter, in contrast, had taken to picking locks and breaking glass, digging through this secret, locked up book collection for anything more relevant than a cookbook. “You would THINK,” Treble barked, as he tugged a rather impressive iron chain off of one shelf, “That SOMEONE,” he added, throwing it aside, “would have thought to put their OWN WARDS up in a library full of magical tomes and old-ass religious texts! Especially if it sat on a room like THIS,” he finished loudly, ramming the sturdy lock on the glass door with a practiced shoulder.
“Oh sure,” Dusty grunted, patting the floor and baseboards like they were hiding drugs, “But where’s the fun in that?!”
Twilight just held her head in her hands. “What the hell is wrong with this place?” she muttered. “I just… I just wanted to do some research. Maybe find like, a woman’s ghost at the top of the stairs. Get some okay-ish readings. I mean, this is the first time I’ve even gotten to USE most of that equipment. How did this go from some stupid overnight field trip to hiding in secret basement rooms from exploding kid’s skulls?”
Treble gave her a sympathetic look. “Honestly, I don’t have an answer from you. That’s the problem with what we do. We never know how bad it is until it IS that bad. There’s not really an early warning system for this kind of thing. At least, not one we’ve found that works. Oh, there are all kinds of talismans and stuff that are supposed to ward of evil spirits and foretell misfortune, but they’re about as likely to tell you that your fridge is going to die as point out the monster hiding in your basement. Magic and spiritualism is mix-and-matching at its worst, most of the time. That’s one of the reasons we even keep that journal Spooks pulled out. And even then not everything in there works on everything out there,” he jabbed a thumb at the trapdoor to punctuate his sentence.
Twilight rolled her head in frustration. Her hair was a mess, her ponytail long forgotten. Dark circles had painted themselves under her eyes, almost as prominent as the ones Spooky was wearing. Of course, he almost always looked like that. “What are you even doing here, anyway?” she asked wearily.
“What do you mean? You’re the one that wanted to tag along on our ghost hunt. We’re getting paid for this,” Treble pointed out.
“Not that,” she said dismissively. “This. You, in particular. How did you even get wrapped up in this insanity, anyway? From all the horror stories you’ve told me, I’d think there would be easier methods of self-harm available. And don’t give me that PR bullshit. I mean yeah, you talk fast and sometimes say the right things, and are either brave or stupid enough to go first in a darkened hallway, but what do you even DO?”
Treble gave her an appraising look, as if sizing her up and determining what kind of answer he felt she deserved. Eventually, he turned to Dusty, who had taken to sniffing around the base of Spooks’ chair. It was a testament to the small boy’s exhaustion that he didn’t wake up, even after being tilted a good two feet in the air, and dropped carelessly back. He even seemed to snore louder afterward, somehow. “Dusty, you got some insight into our little lady’s line of inquiry?”
“Oh no. Nuh-uh. I know better than to jump in the middle of this conversation.” When he saw the look Twilight was giving him, he elaborated, “You’re not the first person to ask that question, and probably not the last. But just like Spooky’s little tirade up there, Treble’s got his own story. And we all learned a long time ago to let each other tell our own. Besides, Treble just gets mad if I answer for him.”
“That I do,” DT chuckled.
“Then why did you ask?!”
“For fun,” Treble said simply, much to DD’s chagrin. “Listen, Twilight. If you’re serious about this… paranormal investigator thing you seem to have going on, then let me tell you you’re going to hear a lot of stories like ours. Everyone in the field’s got one. Some are more… troublesome than others. Take Spooky here. He’s got more right, responsibility, and reason to be here than the rest of us combined. But there’s certain things that he can’t do. Just like I couldn’t tell you which spell in that journal would have saved our ass in a moment’s notice, and Dusty couldn’t pronounce half of them anyway-”
“True story,” Dusty interjected, having moved on to digging around the tops of the bookcases.
“This kid couldn’t throw a punch to save his life. Believe me, he’s tried. That’s what he has Rubble for. And he’s a good kid. The kind that would never think to pick a lock or climb a fence or dig through somebody’s life story without a second thought to get answers. That’s what he has Dusty for. I feel confident that I can, at least a little, speak for the three of us when I say, we’re here for him,” Treble explained, waving a gentle hand at the sleeping boy. “Look, it’s a long story, and one I promise I’ll tell you when we get out of here. And that’s not and if. That’s a when. But I owe Spooky here my life. We all do. This kid… he’s something special. The things I’ve seen him do, it’s nothing short of amazing. And he’s given us something we didn’t have on our own. Purpose. Imagine, if you will, a world where we didn’t have to fight monsters. Where there was actually no such thing as magic and ghosts. Do you really think any of us would hang out with each other under normal circumstances?”
Twilight tilted her head in thought, her bangs falling in front of her eyes. “Not especially. I mean, Dusty and Rubble maybe, but you don’t seem like the violent type. Hell, you don’t even seem the type to really get into trouble.”
Dusty laughed out loud at that. “You obviously haven’t talked to many of the girls at our school yet.”
“Hush ye, good sir,” Treble hissed.
“You know what I mean. I’ve seen you in detention a couple of times, but you’re not exactly… him,” she gestured to Dusty, currently digging around under the ladder. She shifted a little to adjust her skirt.
“You’re right,” Treble replied. “I’m not. I can’t do the things they can. I can’t fight like Rubble, or even Dusty. I mean, he’s the one who taught me how to pick locks in the first place. Even with a name like Deep Treble I’m not really a good musician. But I do know something they don’t.”
“Which is?” Twilight pressed, sensing he wanted her to ask.
“People. Can you imagine Spooks just walking up to someone and saying ‘Hey, I think your house is haunted, can I poke around with this big bag full of stuff?’. Or Rubble, for that matter? I mean, this one would just as soon sneak into their house while their gone and perform a little Breaking and Exorcising. But people like me wouldn’t survive two minutes in a place like this without someone else throwing the punches, and people like them couldn’t even get their foot in the door without someone else to do the talking for them. So yes, I am the PR guy. I’m the guy that gets you to trust the Rubbles and Spooks and Dustys of the world so we can actually do our job and save people’s lives,” DT finished.
Twilight thought about this for a second. “Ok, I get why they keep you around, at least. But why do this to yourself at all? Why not find someone with more experience and just as good people skills? You know, someone who doesn’t need to stand in the back while everyone else does the fighting, no offense.”
“Oh, we never said he stood in the back. He likes to be front and center when shit hits the fan, if only to laugh at the bad guys when they stand in front of it,” Dusty chided. “It’s our job to make sure he doesn’t get his stupid ass killed in the process.”
“And you’re doing a fine job of it,” DT said encouragingly, earning a well-aimed middle finger from DD. “Anyway, Twilight, it’s like I said. I’m here for Spooks. I owe him a really big debt. I mean yeah, he saved my life, but we’ve all done that for each other time and time again. But he gave me something I can’t ever pay back, not really. But I’ll be damned if I don’t try.”
“Yeah,” Dusty agreed wistfully. “Rubble would tell you the same thing, actually.
Twilight looked around at all of them, rather seriously. “What?”
Treble paused for a second, before giving a meaningful look at Spooks, sound asleep and blissfully divorced from reality, if only for a moment. “A purpose.”