“This doesn’t look good!” Maddie shouted over the thump of the song’s bass.
“Is he dying?” Zack asked.
“Wait for it!” I said.
In the song, Ken was telling Barbie they should go party and the screeching chorus looped again.
The glowing redness died.
The white scars the crosses left behind faded.
Then, with a great belch, a noxious yellow cloud erupted from Marcus’s mouth. The spirit poured out like vomit.
“Grab it!” I shouted.
“Shit!” Zack said.
I don’t know what it was, whether he was too drunk or just entranced by the song, but he hadn’t been ready with his ghost catcher.
The yellow cloud that was Xaluney ping-ponged off the wall, like a fly stuck inside of a house, looking for a way out of this hot box called the indoors. Either that or die belly-up on the windowsill. Good thing Walker, Angelina, or Stephanie weren’t in here with us, otherwise Xaluney would’ve found a new human to call home.
If you’re wondering, an entity like Xaluney wouldn’t go for the likes of one of us. We are trained in the art of ghost and monster hunting, and Xaluney no doubt sensed that. Kind of like if a ball of flame searched out a great vat of ice water to hide in.
I reached for the ghost catcher jar, which was currently poised on the edge of the bed. Too bad Marcus was coming back to his own and having a pretty hefty panic attack. His girth rocked the bedsprings and sent the jar toppling over. Right off the bed.
The floor was hardwood, not carpet, which meant the jar would likely shatter and we’d be out of luck.
I cringed, already hearing the terrible noise of breaking glass. Closed my eyes.
It never came.
“Barbie Girl” gave way to a Nickelback song I didn’t know the name of. It played much too loudly, giving this whole scene a surreal, nightmarish quality.
Then, when I opened my eyes I saw Maddie gripping the jar with white knuckles.
She screwed the lid off and wound up the apparatus on the base. A great fire-like glow came from within, eating away the shadows of the room, blasting the lingering chill into oblivion.
The little yellow cloud zigged, it zagged, and then it found its way into the jar with a noise like a baseball thumping into a catcher’s mitt. It was so intense, in fact, that Maddie was driven back into the dresser opposite the foot of the bed. There, perched much too closely to the edge, was a 32 inch flat screen TV. It tottered, it teetered, and it fell forward. The plastic casing shattered. The base flew off, skittered under the bed somewhere.
“Well, shit,” Zack said as him and I rushed over to Maddie. She was red-faced, eyes wide. “Are you okay, babe?”
“Ouch,” she said. “And what did I say about calling me babe?”
“That you’re not a talking pig, like the movie,” Zack said dully.
We helped her up.
“Exactly,” she said.
“The lid!” I shouted. “Where’s the lid?”
“Why am I tied up?” Marcus said. In my mad scramble for the ghost catcher’s lid, I gave Marcus a look that said, Don’t worry, then the old man said to me, “And why are my nipples so sore?”
I found the lid right next to his bare foot.
Then, like a Frisbee, I threw it.
It sailed through the air in slow motion.
“Heads-up!” I shouted.
Zack did the complete opposite of what heads-up meant. He actually lifted his head up and looked in the direction from which I threw the jar’s top—
Clunk!
That was the sound that filled the room when the lid hit Zack’s forehead.
“Ow! What the hell, Abe?” Zack yelled.
“Grab it!” Maddie said. She held her hand over the immense heat coming from the ghost catcher. Inside, the gaseous yellow cloud was swirling around and around the bright light.
Zack shook off the daze that had overtook him and bent down, picked up the lid, then secured it atop of the jar.
“Oh, thank God!” Maddie said.
She set the jar down on the floor and sighed upward, a stream of air blew hair that had been loosed from her tight ponytail out of her face.
“Let’s never do that again,” she said. “Next time let’s have the lid ready.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“Can you turn that crap off?” Maddie asked Zack.
“Nickelback, crap?” Zack said. “You are getting closer and closer to being single, my dear.”
She rolled her eyes.
Zack rubbed at a red line just above his eyebrows then turned the music off.
“Ohh,” Marcus moaned, as if he were suffering from a great bellyache, “what happened?”
“You were just possessed,” Zack said. “No big deal.”
Marcus stared at us with his hard, flinty eyes. After a moment, he said, “Possessed?” and he burst out laughing.
I just shrugged.
The old man continued laughing as I went and got the others downstairs. Angelina burst into the room and hugged her husband.
Out in the hallway, over the sounds of Angelina’s lips smacking all over Marcus’s face, Walker and Stephanie stared at the jar of yellow gas Maddie held in her hand.
“That’s it?” Walker asked.
“Yep,” I said, “that’s it.”
“That’s an evil spirit?” Stephanie echoed.
“In the flesh—well, you know what I mean,” I said.
“That’s not…not what I expected,” Walker said.
“There’s a lot that isn’t what we expect,” Maddie said. She shrugged, which was usually my job. “That’s just life.”
Not long after this meeting in the hallway, Walker and Stephanie went into the room, where Marcus now sat on the edge of the bed, untied and with a shirt on, and they began questioning him. I don’t think it was for official police business or anything like that. I think it was just out of sheer curiosity.
Angelina followed us down the steps. All the lights in the house were on. I didn’t blame her for that. Exorcisms were a scary thing.
“I can’t even begin to thank you,” Angelina said.
At the foot of the stairs, she wrapped us all up in a big hug. She smelled like ginger and some type of hair product. It was a smell that reminded me of my grandma, God rest her soul.
“How can I ever repay you?” Angelina said when we parted. She pulled a checkbook out of a nearby drawer and asked if a thousand bucks would be enough, which she said she knew was not much but was all she had.
I shook my head and waved the checkbook away. “This one’s on the house,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to take money from her. The job really wasn’t that bad.
“Yeah,” Maddie echoed, “it was no big deal.”
“Thank you! Thank you!” Angelina now kissed us all on the cheek. “Here,” she said. “Just a moment.”
She disappeared down the brightly lit corridor. Came back a few moments later with a Tupperware container full of sweets. My stomach grumbled at the sight of them.
The cheese sticks and beer had digested. It was time for a nutritious late-night snack of snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies.
So I took them graciously.
“If anything like this happens again,” I said, now pulling out a card that read Fright Squad on it and handing it to Angelina, “you give us a call. No hesitation.”
“Yeah!” Zack said. “And tell your friends!”
We left the house. Not long after us, Walker and Stephanie came out arm and arm. I held a container full of cookies in my hand, Maddie held a demonic spirit in a jar, and Zack held the boombox that saved us.
It was a very weird night, indeed. I just didn’t expect things to get weirder.
3
Watchers
“You know,” Zack said, “we probably should’ve taken Angelina up on her offer. A thousand bucks would go a long way.”
We had just gotten into the PT Cruiser.
I shrugged. “There’ll be other opportunities.”
“True,” Maddie said.
I couldn’t bring myself to take money from that nice old woman. After what she’d been through, it just wouldn’t be right. Yeah, yeah, I knew that was a terrible business model. I knew the Fright Squad was cruising for bankruptcy sooner rather than later, but I just couldn’t do it.
Maddie stuck the key into the ignition, flipped on the headlights. We were parked in the driveway, the garage in front of us. But so was something else.
It was a tall and gangly thing.
I pointed. “Do you see that?” I had to ask because it wouldn’t have been my first time seeing things. Ever since that night at Perdition Cemetery, I sometimes have a problem distinguishing the differences between waking and sleeping.
“Yeah…” Maddie said. “What the hell?”
Zack leaned forward from the backseat. “That’s…that thing ain’t human.”
Maddie flipped on the high beams. The garage was painted in brightness. Frozen, the creature stared into them. They reflected huge eyes on its face. It was hugging the side of the building.
I got out of the car slowly. Empty-handed. Realizing this, I suddenly wished I had a weapon. The thing could be dangerous. Most likely was. “Hey!” I said.
But the creature, whatever it was, didn’t want to hear the rest of what I had to say.
It turned away from the garage and took off. The trees beyond Angelina’s house rustled and the forest swallowed it up.
I got back in the car.
“What was that?” Maddie asked.
“Heck if I know,” I said. “Do you think it’s dangerous?” My mind was thinking back to Angelina, wondering if she needed a guard tonight.
“No way,” Zack said. “Probably just one of the hillbillies from the trailer park around the way.”
“Real nice,” Maddie said.
Zack shrugged. “I’m only speaking the truth, babe— Er, I mean, Maddie.”
I didn’t get a great look at the thing, but it certainly wasn’t a hillbilly from a Woodhaven trailer park. Those eyes didn’t seem human at all.
“Don’t worry,” Maddie said, probably noticing the confused look on my face, which was always there, I thought, “I’m sure whatever that was will end up finding us.”
Zack steered the conversation back to the subject of money.
“I’m just saying,” he said, “I’m gonna run out of funds soon. Probably sooner than later and I can’t go back to being a delivery driver.”
Zack was a delivery driver many moons ago when he was in the Academy. Somebody had to pay for the PT Cruiser’s car insurance, right? So he worked for a place called Midnight Snacks right off of the Akron University Campus. His weekends were nonstop deliveries to drunk students, who didn’t know what a tip was. He hated it. His boss was, in his own words, a dick, and his coworkers were always stoned.
“Next time,” I told him. “Next time we’ll get paid and we’ll split it three ways.”
“Who knows if there will even be a next time?” Zack mumbled as he settled into his seat. It wasn’t a question.
I didn’t say anything back. What could I say? He was right. Business was slim as were our contacts. In a world where people don’t want to admit that the things that go bump in the night are really out there going bump in the night, it was hard to find work as a slayer of said things.
I couldn’t exactly get out of the PT, walk up to the door, knock, and say, “Hey, Angelina, here are your cookies back. We’ve decided we’d rather have the thousand bucks instead if that’s a-okay with you.”
Nope.
So we just had to keep hoping that the opportunity for money would come in due time.
4
A Proposition
We headed back toward the apartment. Parked in the same spot outside of the building as always. But I saw something through the Cruiser’s windshield. The street had gotten increasingly darker. Around the campus, in downtown Akron no less, the place was constantly lit up to deter the sketchier types from hanging around and committing crimes. It didn’t always work, but at least I never had to fumble around for my entrance swipe card.
Except now, where bright lighting should’ve been beating down on the sidewalk, it wasn’t. In this pool of darkness, I saw the bright yellow eyes again, the same ones I’d seen at the house in Woodhaven. My heartbeat sped up. The metallic taste of adrenaline filled my mouth. How could whatever that thing was get here before us? I didn’t see any cars trailing the Cruiser on the ride over here. That meant…this thing knew where I lived.
“Guys,” I said, pointing, “looks like we have company.”
“Son of a gun,” Zack said.
Maddie looked at me then at Zack. “Let’s get ‘em, yeah?”
I nodded. I was anxious. What if the thing proved more powerful than us? What if this was all a trap?
I couldn’t show just how anxious and scared I actually was. I was the leader. I had to keep my cool.
“Slowly,” I said. The others nodded and together we eased our way out of the PT Cruiser. But, unfortunately, in the darkness, the overhead light coming on blew our cover. Those two yellow eyes winked out of existence and the streetlight flickered back on with a crackle. There, the sidewalk was abandoned except for a few stray pieces of litter.
Whatever that thing had been was gone. Again.
Throughout the short walk to the apartment building, I wondered if I was going crazy. Then I realized that wouldn’t have made sense because we were all seeing that thing—whatever it had been. And it just wasn’t possible for us all to see the same illusion. Unless we had partaken in some pretty powerful ayahuasca.
Which we hadn’t.
At least not that I remembered.
We took the elevator to the sixth floor. When the doors opened on my floor, they opened onto darkness.
“What the—” I began, but the overhead lights crackled and flashed.
“Something’s not right,” Maddie said.
“Ya think?” Zack said.
My heart did a little stutter. Slayer. I was hoping he was safe. That was the only important thing.
Maddie gave Zack a dirty look, which made him apologize.
I stepped forward, leading the way onto the thin carpet. My apartment was about three-quarters of the way down the corridor. As we walked, I noticed all the other doors were shut and locked. It might’ve been late, but hardly a night went by where at least one of my neighbors wasn’t throwing a party. People coming in and out of the open doors. Most of my neighbors are college students, and one thing I learned about college students was that they were constantly drinking and gyrating their bodies while listening to music that would’ve scared a malevolent spirit right out of town. All bass and incomprehensible lyrics.
But not tonight. No stumbling students with beer-soaked clothes, no thumping, muffled bass, no distant cheering as someone sank the last cup in a game of beer pong. It was quiet. Eerily quiet.
“I don’t like this,” Zack said.
Maddie replied with, “Ya think?”
I chuckled, but it was a nervous chuckle. It was one thing when we were out and about in spooky places such as graveyards and the houses of possessed people, but when that stuff started coming into my own home, my safe haven, things were getting real messed up.
With my heart hammering, I rounded on the door to 68. No jokes of “The Sex Number” from Zack this time.
What the—?
I may have been slightly under the influence when we left, but I could’ve sworn that we locked up. I would’ve bet my life on it.
But the door was open.
“Hello?” I called. “Slayer?”
I heard something. It was Spongebob’s annoying laugh, then Slayer echoing it.
Something else trying to echo Slayer. A deep voice.
My stomach felt like it was packed with ice.
Maddie pulled a stake free from her pocket. I did the same. Stakes are
readily available, so we always had them on us no matter the job. Even though I thought it would be quite embarrassing if you saw one of us trying to stake a demon spirit. Back in the day when we were rookies that might be understandable, maybe, but not any longer.
Zack took one look at the stake and shook his head. I think he was saying with that head shake: It never ends, does it? No place is safe.
We all stood in front of the half-opened door. I think we were all scared, too. At least I was.
So I kept leaning around to try and get a better look inside, to see what we were dealing with, but all I could see was the edge of my TV and a couple of empty cups. Nothing looked different, not really. There had been no ransacking, no broken glass or cut-up cushions, and if my TV was still there—which it was, playing Spongebob Squarepants—I thought we were in pretty good shape. The TV was pretty outdated, but it was a flat screen, high-definition, all that good stuff. Not very big or anything, and I constantly found myself getting closer and closer to the screen whenever I watched things on it, like Slayer did, but I personally thought it was the perfect size for my habitual movie watching. It was hard to fall asleep after a day of fighting monsters and abominations without putting on something to numb my mind. And the television was easily the most expensive and valuable thing in my crappy apartment—aside from all the weapons Storm had sent our way, which I didn’t think anyone would have much use for unless they were starting a rival monster hunting company. The odds of that were slim to none.
These thoughts helped ease my mind. I looked at Maddie and Zack and said, “Let’s go in.”
Maddie nodded, her lips pursed and showing me she was all business, but Zack rolled his eyes so hard, they practically got a look at his brain behind them.
“Dude,” Zack said, “man up.” He stepped in front of me and pushed the door open. The hinges creaked like the hinges of a thousand doors in hundreds of haunted houses.
He took a step, but the lead foot never planted. Something stopped him from entering the inside of my apartment.
The Monster Games (Fright Squad Book 2) Page 3