Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: The Listener

[froodle]

It’s half past four in the morning, and in the quiet of her parent’s sleeping house, behind the gloom of heavy curtains drawn tight against the ambient light from the street, Melanie Monroe is listening. She wears soft rubber ear plugs to block out the steady hum of the air conditioning and the intermittent buzzing of the out-dated refrigerator downstairs. Instead, her head is filled with the gentle susurration of blood moving through her veins, accompanied by the steady beat of her stolen heart.

She curls up beneath the soft, sweet-smelling mass of the patchwork quilt she’s had since she was small, and the rustle and rasp of skin on fabric drowns out the world. These are the times she can hear him best, whispering to her through the long dark. His voice echoes through the four hollow chambers of the heart the doctors scavenged from his broken body, thrums along her arteries and flashes lightning fast and fire bright across her nerve endings.

He tells her about the new world that opened to him, about riding the crashing waves of living thought and emotion, how human minds have jagged peaks and murky depths that swoop and curl like the world’s best roller-coaster. Marshall dreams in grainy flickering sepia, he whispers, and the two of them laugh to think that even in dreams, he’s the star of his own low-budget documentary. Simon’s dreams are technicolour bright, the saturation turned up so high that he holds up the faded memory of a hand to shield eyes he no longer has.

The milkmen dream red and white and cacophonous screaming, and the weird old fat guy on Marshall’s paper route has a head full of smoke and lasers and dazzling sequinned explosions. Radford dreams of a thousand faces, none of them his own, of rope and musty basements and a constant buzzing anxiety. Sergeant Knight’s dreams are gleaming monochrome and the images march by in neat rows, the flotsam and jetsam of the day forced into regimented order through the sheer will of a disciplined mind.

The things that look like garbage men don’t dream at all, though their image stalks the dreams of a red-headed girl three streets over who wakes pale and sweating and muffling her screams into pink ruffled pillows. The Unkind Ones dream of puppies and pocket money returned to grateful owners, and of winding ribbons of blacktop that stretch away towards the horizon. A hirsute nanny on the edge of town dreams the same thing every night, dark eyes and a solemn mouth topped with honey blonde hair and a beret, a vast face that fills the sky and looms god-like over all of creation.

Chisel’s dreams are disappointingly pedestrian, appointments and deadlines missed or looming, flight, unexpected nudity, set against a lead-grey backdrop of impenetrable density and un-climbable smoothness. It’s the sort of suspiciously average display of dreaming that Marshall would want to know about, but the potential awkwardness of that conversation makes her palms clammy and her insides squirm with all the unspoken things that lie between the three of them.

The girl on the hill, all alone since the death of her aunt, looked up at him with dreaming eyes and smiled and offered him a home, and as he fled in terror, the whispering dead filled his head with their noise. In the bright light of the following morning, Melanie had stood across the street from the large white house for hours without ever getting up the nerve to ring the doorbell.

She’d seen the girl on the hill later that week, sharing a corner booth at the World o’ Stuff with a tall blonde and a truly enormous stack of newspapers. The girl had spotted her as she walked to the ice-cream counter and continued to sneak quizzical peeks at Melanie until she’d gotten uncomfortable and changed her order to take-out. As she passed the red vinyl booths, the girl had opened her mouth to speak, but Melanie had feigned deafness and hurried past.

Afterwards, embarrassed and angry at herself, she’d compensated by sneaking into the abandoned headquarters of the Canine Arrest Team and getting chased halfway across Eerie by a couple of enraged beagles. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost the Pitbull Surfers keychain off her backpack and so far even the best efforts of Eerie’s most notorious biker gang had failed to turn it up. The voice in her blood assures her that it doesn’t matter, that Tod McNulty can order her another one from the back pages of the official Pitbull Surfers fan magazine if it really bothers her, but Melanie feels the loss like a hole in her brand-new heart.

There’s a grinding rumble from outside, the hiss of pneumatic brakes and the heavy thud of booted feet on concrete. It’s trash pickup day and the things that look like garbage men have come to sweep away all the things that have no place in the daylight world. Melanie tingles with trepidation, and she doesn’t know if it’s her own, or that of the voice that hums through her veins, or empathy with that unknown girl waking with a start and scrambling for her watch in the middle of the night.

Devon falls quiet, as though even the secret, silent speech in the privacy of their shared brain is too dangerous when the garbage men are near. On the street, metal cans crash and grate as a week’s worth of refuse are fed into the steadily champing jaws at the back of the dustcart. Melanie pulls the quilt over her head, BF Skinner Junior High’s black-clad daredevil hiding like a child beneath the bedclothes when a monster comes to call, and squeezes her eyes shut.

When the truck eventually pulls away from the sidewalk, he’s gone, back to the dark and hidden spaces in the heart that links them together. Melanie rolls onto her back, staring at the smooth magnolia-white paint of her bedroom ceiling. She feels very alone.

Further up the street, the garbage truck rumbles on, and Melanie makes a decision.

Swinging her legs out of bed, she slides her feet into battered sneakers too large for her and grabs a black denim jacket from the back of a creaky computer chair with a seat that no longer adjusts and one wheel permanently locked in place. She scribbles a note to her parents, in case they wake up before she returns, and pockets a handful of crumpled dollar bills.

Three streets away, a girl with red hair and a jacket that glitters with thrift-store brooches is reaching for the baseball bat she keeps beneath her mattress. Melanie is going to find her, and offer to buy her breakfast, and for the price of a milkshake and a stack of pancakes there’ll be someone she can talk to about Eerie, someone whose voice exists outside of her own head, someone who isn’t wearing a golden heart on a chain under his Giants sweatshirt and looking at her as though she’s simultaneously hung the moon and drop-kicked his puppy.

That’s the plan, anyway, and Melanie Monroe shimmies out of her bedroom window and down the white-painted trellis. There’s a shovel leaning against the wall beside the kitchen door, and she reaches out as she passes, snatches it up without thinking.

Her pulse throbs, propelled by her second-hand heart, and she hums to drown out the noise.






Janet

A Ghost in Pink by froodle; Janet's family during the year she was Lost

Jogging by froodle, in which Janet Donner adapts to life in regular Eerie

Plans by froodle, in which Janet Donner deals with Daylight Savings Time yet again

DST by froodle, in which there is a lighthouse

Figurehead by froodle, in which Lake Eerie's ghost pirates encounter the lighthouse





The Andrea/Marisea Series

Marys by froodle, in which Mary C. Carter takes on her new role

The Microwave by froodle, in which Andrea Fantucci returns to Eerie after a considerable absense

The Eldritch Abomination in the Room by froodle, in which the microwave is most definitely not discussed

Twelve Sleeps! by froodle, in which Andrea does not enjoy Christmas shopping

Mirror by froodle, in which Mary C. Carter does some housework

Invitiation by froodle, in which Mary C. Carter makes use of Marshall's well-honed delivery boy skills

Figurehead by froodle, in which Lake Eerie's ghost pirates encounter the lighthouse

Awakening by froodle, in which Marisea must confront an unhappy spectre at an unreasonable hour

4.57pm by froodle, in which Mary C. Carter waits for a bus






The Children

Eventide by froodle, in which the sun goes down, and Eerie's lost children gather

Milk by froodle, in which Marshall develops a completely cromulent fear of milk trucks

Whistle by froodle, in which Steve Konkalewski is unhappy about the way things turned out...

Three by froodle, in which Marshall and Devon discuss video games in a cemetary

Marys by froodle, in which Mary C. Carter takes on her new role

A Story About Devon Wilde by froodle. Devon Wilde walked through the Eerie Cemetery, and his feet made no sound on the gravel pathways.

Disguises by froodle, in which Marshall goes to visit Devon Wilde

Lillian by froodle, in which Marilyn's mother has concerns