Andy Anderson
For one second longer, those icy hands were wrapped around his neck, squeezing
tight tight tight, and he was suffocating, crumpling to the ground with the smell of blood and ozone filling his head--
And then the pressure was gone, and something was in his hair (salt?), and the world around him was lit up by bright, bright light.
Andy twisted around, struggling to see his attacker, and immediately regretted it.
The first thing he registered was the snarl. The snarl that was missing a whole lot of teeth.
Then it was the mottled-green eyes, red and puffy around the edges and a little misaligned. Curly dark hair, matted with blood and… something he didn’t want to think about.
And then he saw the gaping
hole in her forehead, and honestly, while it would be nice to play it cool and be all
macho-tough-guy-nothing-scares-me, it was pretty much only years and years of horror movies saved him from throwing up.
Then, just as quickly as she appeared, she was gone again.
Andy gasped for breath, still dizzy and struggling to stand back up. All of a sudden, Tori was beside him, bending down and whispering softly in his ear. She was patting his back.
"Andy?! Are you alright? Take deep breaths... it's okay," she whispered.
Andy shook the salt out of his hair. The salt thing had worked, then. Tori had saved him. The question was… how long would it be until the ghost came
back?“I’m fine,” he said back, his voice a little raspy from the choking and somewhat unsteady.
“That’s gonna… leave a nasty bruise. You saved me, Tori. Thanks.”He got to his feet unsteadily, and then it hit him--
That face. That horrible, terrible face. Hadn’t he… seen it before?
He had. He’d definitely seen it. He’d looked into every suicide that had ever happened at Edison High (there were quite a few), and he
recognized her. Eloise Jenkins, class of 2004.
The very girl whose death had started the haunted toilet rumor.
Hadn’t she… been cremated? He hadn’t thought that she’d left behind a ghost because her body was gone. He’d thought that maybe it was something else-- a wayward kelpie, or some other ghost. Maybe the teacher who’d jumped off the roof half a century earlier.
Not so. But if she’d been cremated, then that meant--
What was binding her to the mortal plane… it had to be here. In the bathroom… Somewhere. Andy’s mind raced.
So what was it? One of the toilets? A sink? A mirror?
It looked like the only solution to this problem was… flagrant vandalization of school property. Andy swallowed nervously. He’d never done anything like that before.
On the bright side, if they survived the situation, no one would suspect nerdy little Andy Anderson of taking a baseball bat to the school toilet. If Sidney tried to publish something like that, she'd end being a laughing stock.
After all,
everyone knew that Andy Anderson would never even
consider breaking school rules.
Well, buck up, Edison High. Andy Anderson is about to turn all your expectations upside down.He struggled to his feet, grabbing Tori’s hand and stumbling blindly towards the small pool of light from Gray's phone, around which Sidney, Gray, Eliza and Theresa all seemed to be standing.
“We’ve got to stick together!” he said urgently, interrupting their conversation. He let go of Tori to fumble in his pocket for his phone, to use as a flashlight.
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe in ghosts or not. We have to find whatever it is that the ghost is bound to, and destroy it. Point it out, and I’ll smash it, okay?”He hesitated, and then added,
“Think of it as… as a fun little exercise in vandalism. If Sidney doesn’t get pictures, no one will suspect us, anyway.”And then, suddenly, there was an icy chill behind him, like someone was blowing cool air down his neck. Everyone from the club was standing in front of him, though--
The ghost.
He didn’t hesitate, swinging the bat even as he spun around. The ghost shrieked as it hit her --had it become corporeal just to do that?-- and stumbled backwards, fading into nothingness--
Only reappear seconds later to lunge itself right at Theresa, bloody hands wrapping around the girl’s throat as it tackled her to the ground.
“Fuck,” Andy swore. The only way to get rid of this thing permanently was to destroy whatever was holding it here… and they’d probably only be able to do that if it would
stop trying to kill them for long enough to let them.
“The salt, Tori!”
Rune_Alchemist,
Ogo
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