Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Aftermath

[froodle]

The ground was awash with blood. It pooled in the dips and hollows of the Hitchcock mill's uneven floorboards, thick and red in the deeper spots where it coagulated, rust-brown and crumbling in the places where it had simply splattered and dried. A takeout container from the Dragon of the Black Pool restaurant spin in a slow clockwise motion, adrift on a gory tide.

Dash dropped the axe he was holding and leaned back against the wall. The back of his head knocked against the aging timbers, and when he pulled away his grey hair was crimson-stained and stank of copper.

"The library basement is looking better and better," he said. "Sad, wispy ghosts beat horror movie ghouls any day."

Moving with caution, favouring his right leg, Simon approached the reeking pile of bones and offal and, maintaining a safe distance, began snapping pictures of the carnage.

"You're gonna have to stay away from this place for a while," he said. "There's no way somebody didn't heard the fight and call the police."

"I think the old mill has had it's day," Dash agreed. "Lousy bank robbers, okay. Portal to another world providing an endless supply of soft toys, fine. Twelve foot high skinless monster chases us in here because we looked at it? I'm officially off this place."

"We didn't look at it," said Mars sharply. "You looked at it. Even after I warned you not to."

"It was growling!" said Dash. "And three times, you said, you told me you had to look at it three times before it would attack, and I only looked twice. The third time was all you, screaming and trying to take it's picture at the same time."

"It should be three looks each!" said Mars. "How was I supposed to know the rhyme meant three looks between a whole bunch of people? How do you get any scientific investigations done if the stupid folklore and the stupid monsters can't even agree on their stupid killing rituals?"

"You could ask the monsters," said Simon, stepping back in an attempt to get the whole bloody tableau in shot. "Maybe leave a note in it's lair filled with the gnawed bones of every paranormal investigator that tried to catch it before?"

Mars gave him a withering look.

"It's a Rawbones, Simon," he said. "It can't read a note, it doesn't even have eyes."

"Then how does it know when you look at it?" asked Simon, in the deadpan way of his that made it impossible to guess whether he was being serious or sarcastic.

"That's different," said Mars. "That's monster stuff, logic doesn't apply to that side of it."

Simon took another photograph.

"What are we gonna do with the... you know... the parts?" he asked. "Do you want to take something for the Evidence Locker?"

Mars made a face.

"I don't think even Foreverware could keep this thing fresh," he said, wrinkling his nose. "We've got pictures and videotape. That should be enough."

"We should get rid of the body before the cops show up," said Dash.

Mars looked around.

"I always hated this place," he said. "You suckered me into thinking I found a real ghost, then an actual real ghost tried to make me his bank-robbing sidekick, then it was the stupid dolls, and now some freak from a torture porn movie chases me through town and tries to scoop my guts out."

"And I saved you," said Dash. "Again. I don't even have monster-hunting experience like you do, and I'm better than you at it."

"You're not-"

"Like, ten times better. If it wasn't for me, you'd be monster-food by now."

Marshall scowled.

"Simon and me would have been fine if you hadn't ruined everything by looking over your shoulder like an idiot who can't follow directions."

"You'd be dead. You'd be so dead."

Simon put the camera away as their voices got louder. Staying as far away as possible from the spreading pool of blood and entrails, he edged around to the back room where Dash had hidden a small generator, scavenged from the basement of the now-abandoned Eerie Dog Pound. When he came back, he was dragging two jerrycans full of gasoline with him. The two older boys broke off the argument when the first canister was tipped on it's side with a metallic thump and the heady, noxious reek of petroleum filled the air.

"Simon..." Mars began.

"You know we can't clean up this much blood, Mars," Simon said. "We'd need a standpipe and a fireman's hose, and thanks to Syndi the entire Teller family is banned from going within twenty feet of the Eerie Fire Department. It's late, I'm tired, my leg hurts from where the Rawbones threw me against the wall, and I don't have it in me to a dig a hole big enough to contain this mess. Dash already said he's not staying here anymore; let's just burn it down and go."

"One of these days, we need to have a little talk about why your answer to everything is always to set stuff on fire," Marshall muttered, but he upended the second can and splashed it over the scattered bodyparts.

As they limped home, footsore, bruised, bleeding from cuts both large and small, they could see the conflagration as a glimmering light amidst the trees, the dry wooden timbers of the old mill catching and the flames spreading. All alone at the end of a long dirt road, the Old Hitchcock Mill burned unheeded, the pall of smoke invisible against the blue-black of the evening sky.

The following morning, when the Eerie Police Department sent a patrol car out in response to calls from residents who claimed to have seen strange lights and heard weird noises coming from that direction the previous night, there were only blackened timbers and the burnt-out husk of the old waterwheel still standing. They chalked it up to misbehaving teenagers sneaking illicit cigarettes away from their parents watchful eyes, and instituted fire safety programmes and anti-smoking campaigns in all three of Eerie's schools.

Eating a late-morning snack of grilled cheese sandwiches in the Secret Spot while he wrote up the night's adventures for posterity, Mars felt compelled to wake up Grungey Bill to tell him about the demise of his one-time hideout. He was a little worried about how the ghost would take it, but the worst bank robber east of the Mississippi proved remarkably sanguine on hearing the news. After all, he had a very nice two-slice toaster to haunt, and as the mill had been the site of his greatest, and final, failure, he wasn't too broken up at seeing it go.

Comments

[eviinsanemonkey.livejournal.com]

haha, Love it!

[froodle]

*bows*

[deifire]

ZOMG, this was awesome! Everything in it, but especially Simon.

I cannot decide, which was my favorite line:

"How do you get any scientific investigations done if the stupid folklore and the stupid monsters can't even agree on their stupid killing rituals?"

Or:

"thanks to Syndi the entire Teller family is banned from going within twenty feet of the Eerie Fire Department"

Or:

"One of these days, we need to have a little talk about why your answer to everything is always to set stuff on fire"

[froodle]

thanks! there is easily a whole range of mini fics waiting to get written about the stuff syndi gets up to off camera in her journo classes. so much misbehaviour.

I imagine gaps in the lore are as infuriating to paranormal investigators as they are to hunters on supernatural, if perhaps not quite as deadly. I totally see simon as going all "kill it with fire!!" once he reaches his weirdness quota. poor kid.