isamazed

Title: Midnight Manor
Author: isamazed
Word count: approx. 2,800
Characters: Ryan, Ditzy, Blade, Connor
Rating: T (for language)
Warnings:
Disclaimer: Primeval belongs to Impossible Pictures. I only write for fun…
Summary: There’s an anomaly in an abandoned mansion in the woods.
A/N: For the unofficial Halloween challenge in Primeval Denial. I am a bit late though, but at least I wrote it on Halloween 😉 Ditzy and Blade are fredbassett’s.
This has not been beta’ed, I am not a native speaker and some of the words are taken straight out of the dictionary – I guess the mistakes you are bound to find are just going to add a little extra shiver 😉

Fucking Halloween.

Ryan has never been one for Halloween, all the pseudo-scary bullshit just being an excuse to either get candy or drunk, depending on your age. All the people out and about just make their job more difficult. Not right now, though. He must admit that being called to an abandoned manor in the woods in the middle of the Halloween night adds a bit of spice. But Connor’s Gameboy says that there’s an anomaly inside, so that’s where they go. On Halloween, at 11.30pm.

It’s obvious that nobody’s been here for years. Half of the roof has come down and the garden is so overgrown that they actually have to dig out the machetes and cut the shrubbery and ivy back that blocks their way to the building. It’s a good thing they have Blade with them. Ryan, Ditzy and Connor just stand back and let him do his thing, occasionally swinging their own machete to keep up appearances. Blade’s grinning like a madman as he’s attacking the poor bushes.

Finally, at 10 minutes to midnight, they make it inside. The front door gives a god-awful screech as Ryan pushes it open and Connor quickly claps his hands over his ears and makes a face. Ryan signals Ditzy and Blade to step back and goes in first. The entry hall must be huge because the light of the torch attached to his rifle gets lost in the darkness a few yards in. He quickly scans the room (or as much of it as he can make out) and slowly lowers the gun. Then he turns right where he saw a light switch on the wall. He flips the ancient thing but apart from a click echoing through the night nothing happens. He sighs even though he didn’t really expect it to work. It’s still dark, no trademark glowing glass shards swirling around anywhere in sight, so they will actually have to search this death trap of a house to find the anomaly.

The others follow him inside and Blade lets out a low whistle. “Nice digs,” he says. And yeah, the house must have been amazing when it was still lived in and taken care of.

“Maybe 20 or 30 years ago,” Ryan snorts and looks at Connor expectantly.

“Back there,” comes the reply and the young man vaguely waves to the left, the side of the house that doesn’t have a roof anymore. Just their luck, Ryan thinks. They’ll have to watch every step as not to crash through the rotten floor boards.

They raise their weapons again as they make their way through the debris and weed that’s crawling through the windows and every gap available in the walls and high ceiling.

“You think Casper is home?” Ditzy grins wickedly. Ryan just rolls his eyes.

They reach the other side of the hall, and Ryan nudges the door in front of them with his foot. The thing promptly decides to give up and breaks out of its hinges, collapsing on the floor with a loud clang.

“Well done, boss,” Ditzy comments.

Ryan shoots him a glare and the medic just smirks even more. Ryan really has to teach his squad more respect for their CO.

Who is he kidding? It’s a lost cause. And Ryan doesn’t really mind if he’s honest.

They slowly walk through what once probably was a dining room given the slowly rotting furniture and heavy curtains. Connor points to a corner and Ryan has to do a doubletake before he sees the door that’s practically disappearing in the wall panelling. It turns out to be the servants’ quick access from the adjoining small cabinet full of dishes and cutlery, a lot of which has crashed down onto the floor at one point when the cupboards and shelves admitted defeat, and after that, the kitchen. A part of the ceiling and furniture of the room above it has come down and there’s a huge hole in the outside wall. There are fallen leaves and puddles everywhere. Something’s moving and they tense up for a moment, but it turns out to just be a fox that quickly flees through a broken window.

They still haven’t found the anomaly, so they decide to check the basement next. It’s the only other exit of the kitchen. Not counting the hole in the wall, that is. Ryan’s wary to split up into pairs considering the state of the building and that they don’t know if something’s gotten through the anomaly.

Ryan goes first again and this time the door to the staircase stays where it’s supposed to be – safely on its hinges. Just as he sets his foot down on the first step of the (thankfully made of stone and not rotting wood) stairs when suddenly a clock strikes and declares it midnight. Ryan jumps, because fuck, this house hasn’t had power for years. How’s there a fucking clock still striking? He promptly loses his footing and slips on the wet stairs. Just as he already sees himself tumbling down all the way into the basement, Ditzy grabs his collar and yanks him back.

He lands on his backside, closes his eyes and lets out a shuddering breath because, fuck, that was close. Falling down a stone staircase is no fun. Once his heart isn’t beating in his throat anymore, he stands up and nods his thanks to the medic.

“Not my day. But why’s a freaking clock striking in here?”

The others shrug, all looking slightly disturbed. Blade takes the lead down the stairs now and Connor follows closely behind. Ryan and Ditzy wait in the kitchen for a verdict. The other two men walk down half a dozen steps and try to scan the darkness further down.

“Can’t see anything, boss. We’ll have to go all the way down,” Blade says.

Ryan heaves another sigh but before he can so much as lift his foot to follow them downstairs, the door to the stairwell snaps closed with a loud bang.

Ryan’s heart leaps and he automatically raises his rifle. But there is absolutely no one and nothing in the bloody kitchen except Ditzy and him.

“What the…?” the medic mumbles and scans the room once more with narrowed eyes.

“The wind?” Ryan suggests half-heartedly.

He takes the two steps towards the now shut door and rattles at the knob. The door doesn’t give an inch.

“Blade? Connor? You alright there?” He calls through the heavy wood. “The door’s stuck.”

“We’re okay, I’ll just pick the lock,” Blade’s voice wafts through the gap between the wood and the doorway along with the soft shine of their torches. There’s more rattling and then the sound of metal stabbing into wood and sliding on stone. “Bad luck, boss. It doesn’t budge. We’ll sweep through the basement. There’s probably another exit somewhere. They must have gotten the bloody potatoes in somewhere.”

Ryan chuckles. “Alright. Be careful. Check in every 15 minutes. We’re going to check the rest of ground floor for now.”

“Roger, boss.”

Ryan waits until the sound of Blade’s and Connor’s steps is no longer audible and turns around. Ditzy is still tense behind him, his rifle at the ready.

“I don’t like this,” the medic says.

Ryan lifts one side of his mouth unhappily and shrugs. There’s nothing they can do about it. He turns back to where they’ve come through from the dish cabinet. When he walks into the room, however, he’s not standing between old cupboards and broken China. He finds himself in a library full of half-rotten books and armchairs. He stops dead in his tracks because something is seriously wrong here.

“Correct me if I am wrong but this isn’t the room we came through in the first place, is it?” Ditzy says quietly.

“No, it’s definitely not,” Ryan grinds through a tight jaw. He turns around, but behind him the kitchen lies in darkness just as they left it. What’s going on here?

They slowly sweep the room but all they find is a rat that’s scurrying off once they catch it in their torches’ light. There’s a set of double doors on the opposite end of the room, so that’s where they go. It leads them into an honest-to-god parlour. The state of it is slightly better than the other rooms’, with the windows still intact and only a thick layer of dust on the once high-end furniture. Speaking of windows, there is a set of French doors opening up to a …

“Is that a balcony?” Ryan swallows. He steps closer and peeks through the dirty glass. He looks down onto the front garden from the first floor of the house, and sees their cars standing in the distance. If he had to guess he’d say they’re no longer in the left side of the house. “We didn’t walk up some stairs, did we?”

“Nope,” Ditzy replies, his brows drawn closely together. “Hate to say it, Ryan, but this is seriously starting to freak me out.”

Even without the actual words, the use of Ryan’s name rather than the casual ‘boss’ would give him away, the easy banter gone. Ryan can relate because yes, his stomach has just dropped as well, thank you very much.

“Let’s go back to the kitchen, maybe we can get the door to the basement open now,” he decides. He doesn’t want to risk getting lost in this fucking monstrosity of a house. They need to find the others.

Ditzy nods and they go back to the library. Ryan walks in first and hears a faint clicking sound. He whirls around, rifle at the ready, to find the door locked behind him and no Ditzy in sight. He turns back around immediately, checking for a threat but again, there’s nothing. Not even the library.

He stares into a hallway, walls lined with dirtied paintings but otherwise empty. His heart misses a beat and then thunders away. Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He turns around one more time and calls Ditzy’s name through the door that hasn’t been there a minute ago.

“I’m okay, boss. Guess, we’ll have to make it out on our own,” his team mate calls back.

“Be safe, and check in. Every 15 minutes, you hear me?”

“Roger that. You be careful, too.” There’s a knock in goodbye from Ditzy’s side of the door and then his steps fade away.

Ryan’s alone now in what he can only think of as a haunted house. Fucking anomalies.

Fucking Halloween.

He’s sweating like a pig now. He’s seriously out of his depth here. He tries to reach Blade and Connor through his radio but all he gets is static.

He closes his eyes for a second and forces himself through some slow breaths. Then he slowly makes his way through the hallway. A handful of doors part from it and in about a few yards down it opens up into a once pompous staircase. There’s a thick moth-eaten carpet beneath his boots that silences his steps. This is obviously where the owners and guests came through and not the servants.

He contemplates which way to pick when he hears a faint whisper. He can’t really make out the words or tell where it’s coming from. It has his heartbeat galloping nonetheless. He stops and stares, but he still can’t make out anything out of the ordinary in the hallway. He huffs. Nothing out of the ordinary, yeah.

But then there’s the whisper again and this time he can actually make out the words. And that’s when the blood in his veins turns to ice.

Because the voice is calling him.

“Ryan… Come here. Come to me, Ryan… Come to me…”

It’s barely audible but it’s clearly coming from the stairwell. Ryan can’t help but feel like he’s going to his own burial but he still slowly edges closer to the stairs, muscles coiled so tight they might snap any second now.

He’s at the top of the stairs now, but he can’t see anyone and the whisper is gone all of a sudden. He shines his torch down the open plan staircase and the light catches on something. He startles and then relaxes briefly when he realizes it’s just a dirty mirror on the wall at the base of the stairs.

It’s not for long though, because there’s the whisper again and this time it’s behind him. And it’s close.

“Ryan… Come to me… Ryan…”

He swallows a couple of times and slowly turns around.

Again, there’s just darkness behind him.

He blinks and when his eyes open again, he comes face to face with a vaguely familiar face, just a couple of inches away from his own, milky-white and see-through.

He jumps and steps back without thinking. But there’s nothing beneath his foot and that’s when he remembers that, fuck, stairs. Bloody stairs. He’s momentarily grateful that this set of stairs is covered by the half-rotten carpet, but that’s only until the back of his head hits the wooden steps hard and his neck bends to the side, straining suddenly. It’s like slow motion in a movie when he tumbles down the stairs, how he feels the sharp edges of the stairs digging into his rips and legs, the rifle harshly pressing into his soft stomach, one knee cap dislodging for the fraction of a second and then snapping back, another sharp pain as his head connects with the floor again.

Then, nothing.

+++

When he comes to, he feels a pair of hands gently holding his head. He groans and forces his eyes open slowly.

The face of the ghost swims into focus.

He snaps his eyes shut again, fights down the bile rising in his throat, and then forces himself to reopen his eyes again.

“Ryan? You with me?” The ghost asks.

He realizes now why the ghost’s face is familiar. It’s Ditzy’s face. Ditzy is the ghost.

“Wha… Wha happened?” He rasps out.

Is Ditzy dead? Is he dead himself? Is he a ghost, too? Fucking anomalies. Fucking mansion.

Fucking Halloween.

“You slipped on the stairs and fell down into the basement,” the ghost supplies. “Tell me where it hurts, boss. Do you feel warm somewhere in your upper body?” The hands leave his head and scan his tender ribcage and stomach area, carefully checking for broken bones and signs of internal damage.

Ryan blinks slowly a couple of times. Why’s the ghost checking his body? Does he even have a body anymore? Do ghosts have bodies? But they’re see-through. Nothing makes sense.

A bit of colour bleeds into the ghost’s face. And he’s more solid now, too, his skin no longer transparent.

It takes Ryan another moment but then he realizes that Ditzy’s not actually a ghost. They’re just at the foot of the stony staircase in the damp basement. There are more shadows than anything with the only source of light being their torches, but the colour of the medic’s face is distinctly nude, and not white. He’s not dead.

“Of course, I’m not dead. You’re the one who decided it was a good idea to tumble down a fucking set of stairs!” Ditzy glares. Did Ryan say that out loud?

“Yes, you did,” Ditzy confirms. Ryan groans. “Just a few more minutes and the ambulance will be here, boss.”

The medic’s hands continue to roam his body but Ryan doesn’t care at all. He’s just relieved they’re alive. Wait. What about…

“Connor? Blade? Where…?” He mumbles.

“They’re alright, boss. They are guarding the anomaly. Nothing’s come through, as far as we can tell. You just had to pull a stunt to make this more exciting.” Ditzy’s smile is tense but also cautiously relieved as it seems. No mortal wounds then. Good, he’s probably not going to turn into a ghost anytime soon.

That’s actually quite reassuring.

Knowing that, he can finally fully relax. Ditzy is still talking to him in a quiet steady voice. Ryan doesn’t listen, feels like he’s floating and decides it’s just nonsense to keep him calm.

But it’s alright, he is calm now that they’re not dead. Huh, better not dead than undead, he thinks, smiles and promptly sinks into unconsciousness again.

+++

When he wakes next, it’s to the stark light of a hospital room and the mother of all headaches.

Scratch that. His whole body hurts.

Ditzy’s face is hovering over him. He’s decidedly alive, and agitated, but wears the expression of a poltergeist when he immediately starts scolding his captain.

Ryan doesn’t care though. They’re not ghosts, they’re out of the bloody manor, and there will be many days until next Halloween. And he’ll definitely take leave on this day next year.

Fucking Halloween.

He goes back to sleep.