"Favourite Haunts", Part Two // Short story
“So where exactly are we travelling at warp speed towards?”
Danny clung on grimly to his seatbelt, and focused on keeping his lunch where it belonged.
“New Road Secondary School,” replied Lorelei absent-mindedly, turning a corner so sharply that Danny was almost sent straight through the windscreen.
“And why are we travelling at warp speed towards New Road Secondary School?” Lorelei wouldn’t exactly be considered the World’s Safest Driver on a regular basis, but today she was really pulling out all the stops. They’d been driving for roughly ten minutes and they’d already nearly run over two old ladies and three cats. Lorelei was eighteen, so old enough to legally drive, but Danny sometimes wondered how on earth she’d ever managed to get her license.
“Didn’t anyone brief you before we left HQ?” she asked, as they turned onto the motorway. At least this was a stretch of straight road, Danny thought in relief. Perhaps he’d stop feeling sick.
“No,” he said. “I just got told that there was a situation and that this would be a good case to be my first ever mission, and got shoved into a car.” Now that he thought about it, this was pretty exciting. His first ever mission! He’d been training towards this for years, doing hundreds and hundreds of training simulations, honing his skills. But he’d always been told he was too young to go on a proper mission, which he felt was highly unfair; Lorelei had been going on real missions since she was about twelve. But then again, Lorelei was a special case, in every sense of the word.
“This probably is a good case to be your first ever mission,” acknowledged Lorelei. “There’s not much risk involved.”
“You mean, this ghost isn’t dangerous?” Danny felt somewhat hopeful, but confused; if the ghost wasn’t dangerous, why were they zooming along at such a frantic speed?
“Not as dangerous as a lot of others,” said Lorelei. “All she does is kill people.”
“All she does?” Danny was aghast.
“Believe me, there are ghosts that do much worse than that,” said Lorelei, sounding completely calm. “I’ve come across some that…”
Danny held up a hand. “Okay, okay. I’m not sure I want to know.”
“You probably don’t,” agreed Lorelei.
“So who is this ghost?” asked Danny.
“Elizabeth Maud Chapman,” said Lorelei. “Known as Maudie while she was alive. Student at New Road Secondary School in 1957. Committed suicide there that same year, when she was twelve years old.”
“And what’s her deal, exactly? What does she do?”
“We’re not entirely sure, but we assume she’s some kind of energy-stealing ghost. So far, she’s killed two people, both students at the school – we never managed to get there in time to catch her. The first victim was in 1977, the second in 1997. She seems to claim one victim, then vanish completely for twenty years. And the last time she showed up was twenty years ago.”
They’d pulled out of the motorway, and were now tearing down smaller roads again. Danny started feeling slightly sick again.
“As you might expect, we’ve been monitoring the school closely all this year,” Lorelei continued. “Checking for any rise in energy levels. It’d been quiet so far – until about twenty minutes ago. Energy levels suddenly spiked from zero to off the charts. There’s no doubt that there’s ghost activity there. And we need to get there in time to catch Maudie, or all she’ll do is kill someone else and disappear for another twenty years.”
They’d arrived in front of the school. Lorelei brought the car to a screeching stop – on a double-yellow, Danny noted – and looked at him. “Got the cage?”
“Yep.” Danny patted the container at his hip. “Ready to go.”
“Then let’s get moving.” They both got out of the car, and started walking cautiously towards the school’s front entrance. Danny felt a thrill of excitement amidst the apprehension he was suddenly feeling. This was a very important moment.
They entered the school. It seemed completely deserted; Danny couldn’t hear a sound.
“Where is she?” he asked in a hushed voice. “I can’t hear anyone.”
“We’ll just have to look around,” replied Lorelei. “But it should be pretty obvious soon enough.”
Right on cue, a scream ripped through the air towards them.
Without saying a word, they both broke into a run, following the sound.
Kara’s head was spinning so violently, she felt like she was about to throw up. All her strength was slowly being sapped away, leaving her feeling nauseous and jittery and teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. She wanted to scream again, to yell for help, but she no longer had the energy to. All she managed was a pathetic little whimper.
All the while, the girl with no eyes stood in front of her, still holding her wrist in her ice-cold grip, her face fixed into a smile like some grotesque mask.
What felt like the last of Kara’s energy was yanked away from her. She crumpled to her knees, burying her face in her free hand. She fought to stay conscious, but she slowly felt herself slipping into oblivion. This is the end, she thought numbly. This is the moment I die. It no longer even frightened her; she was too tired, too drained, to feel any type of fear…
Voices suddenly rang through the air towards her. A boy’s voice. “Holy crap, there she is!”
A girl’s voice, clear and commanding. “You can’t freeze now, Danny! Quick! We have to catch her before she kills that poor girl!”
Running footsteps came towards Kara. She opened her eyes a fraction. Her vision was still spinning, but she could just about make out the shapes of two people tearing down the hallway towards her.
With a jolt, she suddenly realised that Maudie was no longer gripping her wrist; she must have let go when the strangers arrived. She was now standing a few feet away from Kara, and her face was twisted into a horrifying scowl. “How dare you interrupt me?” she snapped, in her high-pitched little-girl voice. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
The two people – a boy and a girl, she could see now, both about her own age – stepped around Kara, towards Maudie. The red-haired boy was holding a small, bright pink box, about the size of a paperback book; the tall, dark-haired girl was holding a long, slender object, which she pointed at Maudie. For a moment Kara thought it was a gun, but then she realised that it couldn’t be; it was too thin.
“Get the cage ready, quick!” yelled the girl.
The boy fumbled with the catch on the box, snapping the lid open. “I’m ready!”
The girl levelled the long object at Maudie, and seemed to hit a button on it. The little girl’s blank eyes had widened in fear and anger. “No,” she hissed, and her voice had a guttural edge to it; it no longer sounded quite human. “No, you wouldn’t dare –”
But her figure was going blurry, Kara saw, losing solidity, slowly dissolving into nothingness. Kara watched open-mouthed as what had looked like a little girl turned into a white, shapeless mass, hanging in mid-air in front of her.
The dark-haired girl pressed another button on her object, and the mass was quickly sucked into it. The boy held out the cage, and the girl expelled the white shape into it, before the boy swiftly snapped the lid shut again.
“Phew,” said the boy, wiping sweat from his forehead. “We did it! We caught her! Oh my God, I can’t believe it was that easy!” He sounded slightly hysterical.
“It wasn’t a dangerous ghost,” said the girl calmly, tucking the long object into her belt. “I knew it would be straightforward.” She looked towards Kara. “Are you okay there?”
Kara tried to stand up, but her knees buckled under her and she collapsed back down. The world was whizzing around her again. She wanted to say something, ask these people who they were, ask what in the hell Maudie had been, but her consciousness was slipping away from her again, and this time she gave way to oblivion.
“Is she going to be okay?”
Kara heard the boy’s voice faintly, as if it was coming from the end of a long tunnel.
“She’ll be fine,” she heard the girl reply. “She just needs to rest and get her energy back.”
Kara’s eyes snapped open. The world gave a lurch, but it was nowhere near as bad as it had been before. She was sitting on a chair in a dimly-lit classroom, the two teenagers who had saved her peering anxiously down at her.
“What… what happened?” she stammered. “What on Earth is going on? Who the hell are you?”
“My name’s Danny,” said the red-haired boy. “This is Lorelei. We…” he paused. “We hunt down creatures like the one out there.”
“Who was that?” asked Kara in a shaky voice. “Who was that girl?”
“Not who, but what,” said Lorelei grimly. “And I’m afraid we can’t tell you much. It’s need to know. You’ll be fine now; we got here in time before any real damage could have been done. Just go home and forget this ever happened.”
“Go home and forget this ever happened?” echoed Kara in disbelief. “I can’t just do that! I almost died! I need to know who that girl was!” She knew she sounded hysterical, but she didn’t care.
Danny looked uncomfortable. “She does sort of deserve to be told what happened.”
Lorelei sighed. “Fine. I guess there’s no way to make her forget this.”
“Was… was that a ghost?” asked Kara, voicing the question that had been whirling through her brain since the appearance of Maudie.
“Um,” said Danny, “the short answer is, yes. That was a ghost. But it’s not as simple as that. Real-life ghosts aren’t the way most people think they are.”
“They’re not the spirits of dead people who have come back,” explained Lorelei. She seemed to always speak in the same cool, collected, casual tones, no matter what she was saying. There was an air of cold calm about her that Kara found somewhat unnerving, especially given the circumstances. “They’re malign creatures that have no form of their own, so they take the shape of dead people – especially people who have died in a particularly violent or traumatic way – and go around wreaking havoc.”
“We don’t know where they come from,” continued Danny. “They just show up sometimes. The agency I work for monitors them, and if they get too strong or dangerous, we hunt them down and catch them.” He patted the cage he was still holding.
“Ghosts…” Kara whispered. Her mind was spinning. “Ghosts are real.” She couldn’t quite take it in. Her mind was desperately trying to come up with an alternate solution. Maybe she’d imagined it all, she thought. Maybe she was dreaming, right now. Maybe she was so tired, she’d started hallucinating. But then she looked up at Danny and Lorelei, and realised that this was real.
“Right, we’ve already explained everything,” said Lorelei crisply. “We should get going. We’ve still got a lot of work to do.” She glanced at Kara. “Go home, get some rest. You need it.”
Kara nodded numbly, and stared as the others left the classroom, Danny giving her an awkward wave as he left.
She stayed sitting in her chair for a long time after that, staring at the wall in front of her, trying to wrap her head around it all. Every instinct told her that what had happened to her this afternoon was impossible. It was insane. It shouldn’t have happened.
But it had. As she looked around the quiet, dark classroom, she felt a prickle of unease. She didn’t want to spend any more time alone in this silent, empty school.
Grabbing up her bags, she tore out of the school and ran all the way back home.
Danny clung on grimly to his seatbelt, and focused on keeping his lunch where it belonged.
“New Road Secondary School,” replied Lorelei absent-mindedly, turning a corner so sharply that Danny was almost sent straight through the windscreen.
“And why are we travelling at warp speed towards New Road Secondary School?” Lorelei wouldn’t exactly be considered the World’s Safest Driver on a regular basis, but today she was really pulling out all the stops. They’d been driving for roughly ten minutes and they’d already nearly run over two old ladies and three cats. Lorelei was eighteen, so old enough to legally drive, but Danny sometimes wondered how on earth she’d ever managed to get her license.
“Didn’t anyone brief you before we left HQ?” she asked, as they turned onto the motorway. At least this was a stretch of straight road, Danny thought in relief. Perhaps he’d stop feeling sick.
“No,” he said. “I just got told that there was a situation and that this would be a good case to be my first ever mission, and got shoved into a car.” Now that he thought about it, this was pretty exciting. His first ever mission! He’d been training towards this for years, doing hundreds and hundreds of training simulations, honing his skills. But he’d always been told he was too young to go on a proper mission, which he felt was highly unfair; Lorelei had been going on real missions since she was about twelve. But then again, Lorelei was a special case, in every sense of the word.
“This probably is a good case to be your first ever mission,” acknowledged Lorelei. “There’s not much risk involved.”
“You mean, this ghost isn’t dangerous?” Danny felt somewhat hopeful, but confused; if the ghost wasn’t dangerous, why were they zooming along at such a frantic speed?
“Not as dangerous as a lot of others,” said Lorelei. “All she does is kill people.”
“All she does?” Danny was aghast.
“Believe me, there are ghosts that do much worse than that,” said Lorelei, sounding completely calm. “I’ve come across some that…”
Danny held up a hand. “Okay, okay. I’m not sure I want to know.”
“You probably don’t,” agreed Lorelei.
“So who is this ghost?” asked Danny.
“Elizabeth Maud Chapman,” said Lorelei. “Known as Maudie while she was alive. Student at New Road Secondary School in 1957. Committed suicide there that same year, when she was twelve years old.”
“And what’s her deal, exactly? What does she do?”
“We’re not entirely sure, but we assume she’s some kind of energy-stealing ghost. So far, she’s killed two people, both students at the school – we never managed to get there in time to catch her. The first victim was in 1977, the second in 1997. She seems to claim one victim, then vanish completely for twenty years. And the last time she showed up was twenty years ago.”
They’d pulled out of the motorway, and were now tearing down smaller roads again. Danny started feeling slightly sick again.
“As you might expect, we’ve been monitoring the school closely all this year,” Lorelei continued. “Checking for any rise in energy levels. It’d been quiet so far – until about twenty minutes ago. Energy levels suddenly spiked from zero to off the charts. There’s no doubt that there’s ghost activity there. And we need to get there in time to catch Maudie, or all she’ll do is kill someone else and disappear for another twenty years.”
They’d arrived in front of the school. Lorelei brought the car to a screeching stop – on a double-yellow, Danny noted – and looked at him. “Got the cage?”
“Yep.” Danny patted the container at his hip. “Ready to go.”
“Then let’s get moving.” They both got out of the car, and started walking cautiously towards the school’s front entrance. Danny felt a thrill of excitement amidst the apprehension he was suddenly feeling. This was a very important moment.
They entered the school. It seemed completely deserted; Danny couldn’t hear a sound.
“Where is she?” he asked in a hushed voice. “I can’t hear anyone.”
“We’ll just have to look around,” replied Lorelei. “But it should be pretty obvious soon enough.”
Right on cue, a scream ripped through the air towards them.
Without saying a word, they both broke into a run, following the sound.
***
Kara’s head was spinning so violently, she felt like she was about to throw up. All her strength was slowly being sapped away, leaving her feeling nauseous and jittery and teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. She wanted to scream again, to yell for help, but she no longer had the energy to. All she managed was a pathetic little whimper.
All the while, the girl with no eyes stood in front of her, still holding her wrist in her ice-cold grip, her face fixed into a smile like some grotesque mask.
What felt like the last of Kara’s energy was yanked away from her. She crumpled to her knees, burying her face in her free hand. She fought to stay conscious, but she slowly felt herself slipping into oblivion. This is the end, she thought numbly. This is the moment I die. It no longer even frightened her; she was too tired, too drained, to feel any type of fear…
Voices suddenly rang through the air towards her. A boy’s voice. “Holy crap, there she is!”
A girl’s voice, clear and commanding. “You can’t freeze now, Danny! Quick! We have to catch her before she kills that poor girl!”
Running footsteps came towards Kara. She opened her eyes a fraction. Her vision was still spinning, but she could just about make out the shapes of two people tearing down the hallway towards her.
With a jolt, she suddenly realised that Maudie was no longer gripping her wrist; she must have let go when the strangers arrived. She was now standing a few feet away from Kara, and her face was twisted into a horrifying scowl. “How dare you interrupt me?” she snapped, in her high-pitched little-girl voice. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
The two people – a boy and a girl, she could see now, both about her own age – stepped around Kara, towards Maudie. The red-haired boy was holding a small, bright pink box, about the size of a paperback book; the tall, dark-haired girl was holding a long, slender object, which she pointed at Maudie. For a moment Kara thought it was a gun, but then she realised that it couldn’t be; it was too thin.
“Get the cage ready, quick!” yelled the girl.
The boy fumbled with the catch on the box, snapping the lid open. “I’m ready!”
The girl levelled the long object at Maudie, and seemed to hit a button on it. The little girl’s blank eyes had widened in fear and anger. “No,” she hissed, and her voice had a guttural edge to it; it no longer sounded quite human. “No, you wouldn’t dare –”
But her figure was going blurry, Kara saw, losing solidity, slowly dissolving into nothingness. Kara watched open-mouthed as what had looked like a little girl turned into a white, shapeless mass, hanging in mid-air in front of her.
The dark-haired girl pressed another button on her object, and the mass was quickly sucked into it. The boy held out the cage, and the girl expelled the white shape into it, before the boy swiftly snapped the lid shut again.
“Phew,” said the boy, wiping sweat from his forehead. “We did it! We caught her! Oh my God, I can’t believe it was that easy!” He sounded slightly hysterical.
“It wasn’t a dangerous ghost,” said the girl calmly, tucking the long object into her belt. “I knew it would be straightforward.” She looked towards Kara. “Are you okay there?”
Kara tried to stand up, but her knees buckled under her and she collapsed back down. The world was whizzing around her again. She wanted to say something, ask these people who they were, ask what in the hell Maudie had been, but her consciousness was slipping away from her again, and this time she gave way to oblivion.
***
“Is she going to be okay?”
Kara heard the boy’s voice faintly, as if it was coming from the end of a long tunnel.
“She’ll be fine,” she heard the girl reply. “She just needs to rest and get her energy back.”
Kara’s eyes snapped open. The world gave a lurch, but it was nowhere near as bad as it had been before. She was sitting on a chair in a dimly-lit classroom, the two teenagers who had saved her peering anxiously down at her.
“What… what happened?” she stammered. “What on Earth is going on? Who the hell are you?”
“My name’s Danny,” said the red-haired boy. “This is Lorelei. We…” he paused. “We hunt down creatures like the one out there.”
“Who was that?” asked Kara in a shaky voice. “Who was that girl?”
“Not who, but what,” said Lorelei grimly. “And I’m afraid we can’t tell you much. It’s need to know. You’ll be fine now; we got here in time before any real damage could have been done. Just go home and forget this ever happened.”
“Go home and forget this ever happened?” echoed Kara in disbelief. “I can’t just do that! I almost died! I need to know who that girl was!” She knew she sounded hysterical, but she didn’t care.
Danny looked uncomfortable. “She does sort of deserve to be told what happened.”
Lorelei sighed. “Fine. I guess there’s no way to make her forget this.”
“Was… was that a ghost?” asked Kara, voicing the question that had been whirling through her brain since the appearance of Maudie.
“Um,” said Danny, “the short answer is, yes. That was a ghost. But it’s not as simple as that. Real-life ghosts aren’t the way most people think they are.”
“They’re not the spirits of dead people who have come back,” explained Lorelei. She seemed to always speak in the same cool, collected, casual tones, no matter what she was saying. There was an air of cold calm about her that Kara found somewhat unnerving, especially given the circumstances. “They’re malign creatures that have no form of their own, so they take the shape of dead people – especially people who have died in a particularly violent or traumatic way – and go around wreaking havoc.”
“We don’t know where they come from,” continued Danny. “They just show up sometimes. The agency I work for monitors them, and if they get too strong or dangerous, we hunt them down and catch them.” He patted the cage he was still holding.
“Ghosts…” Kara whispered. Her mind was spinning. “Ghosts are real.” She couldn’t quite take it in. Her mind was desperately trying to come up with an alternate solution. Maybe she’d imagined it all, she thought. Maybe she was dreaming, right now. Maybe she was so tired, she’d started hallucinating. But then she looked up at Danny and Lorelei, and realised that this was real.
“Right, we’ve already explained everything,” said Lorelei crisply. “We should get going. We’ve still got a lot of work to do.” She glanced at Kara. “Go home, get some rest. You need it.”
Kara nodded numbly, and stared as the others left the classroom, Danny giving her an awkward wave as he left.
She stayed sitting in her chair for a long time after that, staring at the wall in front of her, trying to wrap her head around it all. Every instinct told her that what had happened to her this afternoon was impossible. It was insane. It shouldn’t have happened.
But it had. As she looked around the quiet, dark classroom, she felt a prickle of unease. She didn’t want to spend any more time alone in this silent, empty school.
Grabbing up her bags, she tore out of the school and ran all the way back home.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this! Comment your thoughts below. I'm going away later today, so I'll probably take longer to reply to comments than usual, but I really appreciate them anyway!
-Indigo
I love the ending! This story was awesome.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much! I'm glad you thought so. :)
DeleteI have just found your blog and read both parts of this short story, I could totally imagine this being the start of some noir-esque sci-fi horror novel, and that's amazing.
ReplyDeleteI have found a good blog >:D
Hey! Thank you so much!! I'm glad you thought so. :) Thanks for stopping by! :D
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