Chapter Text
With Caitlin and Iris in both sets of comms, Hartley and Cisco slowly edged toward the phantasms, while also trying to keep people from hurting one another in their haste to leave their homes.
“Okay,” said Iris. “Real talk, I have no idea what to do about ghosts that doesn’t stem from movies.”
“Me neither,” said Cisco. “But Har-, I mean Piper here says they look incorporeal for the moment, so hopefully they won’t cause too much damage before we stop them.”
“That makes sense from the readings I’m getting here,” Caitlin said. “I can see the ghosts from cameras and stuff, but there isn’t any thermal, electromagnetic or even radioactive sign that they even exists on the scans.”
“Weird,” said Hartley. “I’m gonna shoot at them. Low frequency, high intensity. That worked on the Time Wraith.”
“Remember when we called them Dementors?” Cisco said fondly. “When we realised you were just as big a nerd as us, just with a jerky layer on top?”
“Don’t remind me,” Hartley replied as he lined up a shot in the middle of the crowd of ghosts. “That was the beginning of the end of having you respect me as a figure of importance.”
“Yeah, but it started us becoming friends with you,” said Iris.
Cisco opened his mouth to say something else, but it was drowned out by the hum of the Pied Piper’s gloves shooting a wave of sound at the ghosts. It passed right through them, rippling them as it did, until it ran into a wall.
Vibe and the Piper exchanged a look, then cautiously moved closer to the unperturbed ghosts until Cisco could reach out and touch one. Which he did.
The ghost didn’t even move, and Cisco’s hand passed right through it the same way Hartley’s beam had.
“Weird.”
Hartley nodded his agreement, then turned to survey the rest of the area. “This part of Chubbuck looks pretty evacuated. I don’t think the ghosts will cause trouble, or they even can, but I say we lay some electromagnetic charges around them and then continue forward.”
Cisco nodded back at Hartley and rummaged around his costume before pulling out some blinking devices.
“You carry electromagnetic charges around on your person?”
“Hey, we’re using them aren’t we?”
Hartley didn’t dignify Cisco with a response.
They cautiously continued down the street until the terse silence was broken by an unworldly screech.
From a side road emerged an inhuman creature. Ashen-faced, with fangs curving toward their chin, the monster loped toward the two superheroes with impossible speed.
Before Hartley could properly register what was even happening, he was being pulled behind Cisco, who was facing the vampiric beast head-on while holding Hartley away from it.
Time slowed as the vampire lunged for Cisco. He scrunched his eyes up. His grip on Hartley’s arm tightened. Hartley looked back toward Cisco and felt a strange sense of adrenalised calm. His gloves hung slack on his hands as the creature bridged the last few inches between them and their prey.
And then promptly fell right through them and continued on its path.
Both men stood dumbfounded for a moment.
“That’s not normal for vampires, is it?”
“No.” Cisco didn’t seem willing to expand on his point. His chest was still heaving and his grip on Hartley hadn’t loosened, only shifted to his hand.
Hartley fell against Cisco’s side and tried to collect himself. He was used to being in life-threatening situations when he wore his costume, but there was something about having Dracula coming after you that garnered a reaction common street thugs didn’t.
The two stood there almost wrapped around each other for a time, until an awkward cough in their earpieces jolted them apart.
“Okay, so as far as I can tell, all these things around you aren’t actually there,” Caitlin said. “Like, the ghosts could be explained on not having any readings, but that isn’t explainable.”
“And it actually makes sense,” Iris added. “I mean, there isn’t a lot of property damage, and all the stuff that is there looks like it could have been made in self-defence by people trying not to get eaten.”
Hartley swallowed in an attempt to make his voice sound normal.
“So you’re telling me that all this is just some crazy shared hallucination?”
“Something like that,” Iris replied.
Cisco was muttering under his breath about Gotham seeming less crazy than Central City.
“So, press on?” Hartley asked. “I mean, this has to be coming from somewhere nearby, right?”
“Right,” said Iris. “I’ll see if I can scan for weird heat signatures or something around you. Be back in a moment.”
The comm sets both turned off, leaving Hartley and Cisco alone again.
“So, vampires, huh?”
“Yeah.” Cisco replied. “I’m just disappointed that we weren’t attacked by the sparkly ones. We had to deal with Nosferatu on steroids.”
“Yeah.” Hartley was staring intently at the ground near his shoes, rather than Cisco.
“You were going to let it bite you instead of me.”
Cisco’s head whipped around to Hartley, who was still refusing to look up. “I mean, yeah of course I was. I wasn’t going to let you die on me like that.” There was an awkward pause as Cisco coughed slightly.
“I mean, vampire Hartley would take the brooding levels to a whole new world of unbearableness. I was saving myself from that just as much as I was saving you.”
They were back into comfortable teasing territory. Hartley finally turned to Cisco and smiled. “Well thank goodness you weren’t forced to deal with my dark, brooding nature. Especially if I didn’t even sparkle.”
Cisco grinned back. “Right.” Cisco opened his mouth like he was about to say something, but the burst from both comm units drowned him out.
“Okay, guys I’m seeing something weird about a block down and to the east of you,” said Iris. “You should be able to see some weird stuff there, it’s the source of all this stuff so it probably looks like a tacky haunted house.”
“Copy that,” Hartley said, then started toward the co-ordinates Iris mentioned. “Let’s go, Vibe.”
Cisco’s step faltered imperceptibly, before he pasted a grin on his face. “Let’s do this, Piper. This guy is no match for our Halloween spirit!”
Both heroes marched down the street, Hartley checking for people still trapped in their houses, while Cisco vibed any potential threats. By the time they got to the house, Cisco’s optimism had waned somewhat, and Hartley was barely paying attention to when a werewolf would try to bite him in half, or some damp horse whinnied insistently beside him.
The house would have been obvious, even without Iris and Caitlin suggesting where it was when the men looked at it. It seemed to ripple in the night sky like a fire, and mythical creatures were striding out the front door every few moments. Also, noticeably, while all the other houses in Chubbuck were stereotypically suburban, this one rose above them by a story and had far more Gothic architecture.
“Alright, so the house seems to have more electronics inside than the outside spectres,” Caitlin said. “We’ll keep an eye on things here and help you through, but be careful.”
Piper and Vibe nodded to each other as the door creaked open ominously, inviting them in.
As soon as they crossed the threshold, Hartley heard a fizzle from his earpiece. “Caitlin?”
There was no response.
“Iris? Wally? Can you guys hear me?”
Cisco repeated Hartley’s actions with his own communicator to the same conclusion.
“The house must have some field around it to keep out communicative devices,” said Hartley. “Because my hearing aids are still working fine.”
“Same with my goggles, ” Cisco replied. “So we just need to go through the spooky haunted house with no tech support. No big deal.” Even as he said it, Cisco found himself standing closer to Hartley than he had been when they first entered the house. Hartley didn’t seem to mind at all, even shifting infinitesimally closer.
But it didn’t change the fact that they were on their own.