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My name is Marshall Teller. I knew moving back to Eerie, Indiana after college and dedicating my life to investigating the forces of weirdness on a professional basis with my trusted associate Simon Holmes and my other associate Dash X would be difficult. What I didn't know was that moving in with them would be the biggest challenge I had ever faced...
I. Mars, Dash, and Simon: A Very Moving Tale
Simon had finally located the box with the towels and was thinking that, after a day of hauling furniture up to the second floor, a shower was sounding pretty good. He'd just realized that nobody had actually remembered to buy a shower curtain yet, and had decided to opt for a bath instead, when there was a knock at the door.
"I got it," he yelled to no one he expected to be paying attention at the moment, and answered it himself.
Marshall's parents stood in the doorway. Edgar Teller was holding a large box, while Marilyn was brandishing a camera. She snapped a photo, then embraced Simon in a tight hug before his eyes had time to clear from the flash.
"We wanted to stop by and drop off your housewarming present," said Edgar, handing Simon the box. "It's a coffee maker."
Simon smiled. "Thanks, Mr. Teller," he said. "This is very cool!" And it was, even though there were people in the place who clearly didn't need access to caffeine. Ever.
"Come on in and sit down," he said, gesturing toward a sofa he realized too late was still almost entirely covered with his action figure collection.
"I just wanted to get some pictures of your new place," said Marilyn, as the Tellers walked in. She took a few more of Simon in the living room as he smiled and tried not to look embarrassed at the general state of things. The she moved down the hall, opened a door, and took another photo. "Oh, this is so exciting!" she said.
Simon wasn't sure what was particularly exciting--let alone worth capturing on film--about the inside of the linen closet, but he appreciated her enthusiasm. His parents had yet to ask for a forwarding address.
"You boys are so grown up now," she continued. "Your first real adult apartment and your own business! Marshall won't let me come into the office when you're open yet, though. He's worried that having his mother around will undermine his professionalism or something."
"Speaking of which, where is...?" began Edgar.
As if on cue, the door to the master bedroom slammed open.
"Oh boy," muttered Simon.
A grey-haired figure emerged. "I think the problem is someone has too much stuff to keep track of it all by himself!" he shouted back into the room.
"No, the problem is someone let Dash help pack!" A second figure, taller, with chin-length brown hair, rushed out and stormed up to the first, stopping only when he was standing close enough that they were practically nose-to-nose.
"Mars!" his father called cheerfully, but Marshall was too far gone to even notice they had company.
"Yeah, and what's wrong with the way I pack, Teller?" asked Dash.
Marshall stuck a finger in Dash's face. "Item: You put my entire occult library in a box meant to hold a refrigerator and expected me to haul it up the stairs. Item: You packed my bowling ball on top of my New York Giants commemorative plates--and didn't even bother with bubble wrap, I might add--meaning now I have a really awesome collection of New York Giants commemorative shards. Item: There are thirty-seven boxes in our bedroom labeled "Stuff." The whole point of labeling is so we'd know which stuff we put in which box. A concept that you completely failed to grasp no matter how many times I explained it to you!"
They glared at each other for a long moment.
"Yeah, well, see if I ever do you a favor again, Teller," Dash muttered, finally breaking away and stalking off in the direction of the kitchen.
"Yeah, well, since your favors seem to involve destroying everything I own, I don't need 'em!" Marshall yelled after him.
"Um, Mars..." Simon said.
Marshall finally turned around. "Oh!" he said. Then, "Dad! When did you get here?"
"Not that long ago," said Edgar Teller. "How are you settling in?"
"We're...um...we're adjusting," said Marshall. "Sorry it's kind of a mess in here."
"They brought us a coffee maker," said Simon.
"Really?'" said Mars. "Thanks! I could use some coffee."
Simons shook his head.
"Oh, there you are!" said Marilyn, emerging from the back bedroom. "I'm just getting some pictures of your new place."
"You know, Mom, it'll look much better once we've actually had time to unpack and stuff," said Marshall, either not bothering to hide his embarrassment or not doing a very good job of it. "Maybe get these boxes out of your way, get that big pile of underwear off the bedroom floor..."
"Well, I'll just have to come back and take another set, then. Now let me get one of both of you together!" She held the camera up while Mars and Simon posed with their arms around each other's shoulders and smiled.
"Now, let's get one with you two and Dash..." Marilyn began.
There was a loud crash from the direction of the kitchen.
"What was that?!" Marshall yelled.
"I don't know!" came Dash's voice from the same general direction.
"What do you mean you don't know?!"
"I mean, what's a chupacabra footprint when it's intact?"
Marshall cradled his face in his hands. "I'm going to kill him," he muttered. "Simon, we need to figure out what we're going to do about one-third of the rent from now on, because I'm seriously going to kill him. Excuse me for a second." He ran back to the kitchen shouting, "DASH!"
The Tellers and Simon listened to the escalating sound of raised voices, finally punctuated by Marshall's "You know what? New house rule: You don't touch anything of mine. Ever again!"
"You know, Marilyn, maybe we should leave and let the boys get some work done," said Edgar.
"No, really..." Simon began.
"No! Anything means anything, Dash!" came from the kitchen.
"I think you're right," said Marilyn. She looked at her watch. "We do have dinner reservations to keep. Do you want to come with us, Simon? We're meeting Syndi for Swedish chicken."
"No, that's okay, Mrs. Teller," said Simon.
"Are you sure?" she asked.
Simon stifled a yawn. "I think I need a bath and some sleep first," he said. "Besides, they've been at this for a few hours now. They're gonna run out of energy pretty soon."
"Well, okay," she said. She kissed Simon on the cheek. "You just call us if you need anything. And tell Dash and Marshall we said goodbye."
"Will do, Mrs. Teller." He watched them leave, then finally went to go take his bath. Which would have gone a lot better if somebody had remembered to buy any bath soap. He'd been forced to choose between dishwashing liquid and Dash's specially-formulated-for-grey-hair shampoo.
Later, when Marilyn Teller got her pictures developed, she wondered why all the ones of the living room seemed to show a pajama-clad Simon asleep on the couch and the two older boys on the floor, surrounded by packing paper, their positions suggesting they'd passed out in the act of reaching for each other's throats.
But the eventual fate of the most unusual camera that took pictures twenty minutes into the future was another story.
II. Ghost Riders in the Kitchen
(with apologies to Gary Larson)
"Mars! Dash! Wake up! They're back!"
Marshall Teller and Gillian Anderson were investigating a cult of evil florists who were plotting to take over Eerie using plants that produced a notorious sex pollen. The two of them just been lured into the florists' cunning trap and were about to succumb ot the plants' effects when...Marshall suddenly found himself being shaken awake by a very different redhead standing at the foot of his bed.
"Whu...?" he mumbled and rubbed the sleep out of eyes. There was an ungodly noise coming from somewhere. "Simon, what is it?"
But Simon had already moved to the other side of the bed. "Dash," he said. "Wake up!"
Simon had just barely touched the grey-haired man's arm when Dash suddenly opened his eyes and sat straight up with a scream of "Not the interocitor!!!"
He sat unmoving for a few seconds, staring at nothing, before jerking to one side in a violent motion that sent him tumbling off the bed.
"What the hell?!" came from what was apparently a now fully-awake and extremely cranky Dash on the floor. "What's going on?"
"Are you okay?" Simon asked him.
"Aside from the little problem I'm having with people waking me up in the middle of the night, sure. I'm peachy. Now, what do you want? What's that noise?"
"They're back," Simon said. "C'mon."
Mars and Dash followed Simon through the house until he stopped and pointed. "Look," he said.
There was a herd of cows stampeding through the kitchen.
Ghost cows, to be specific. They came in through the wall next to the refrigerator, passed right through the island in the middle of the kitchen, then out the door, and finally through the dining room wall on the other side of the apartment. For a herd of incorporeal bovine, they were making an enormous racket.
"Well, I guess we can stop blaming that noise on the neighbors," Dash muttered.
Of course, the cows were followed by the cowboys. Three or four determined-looking men--no more solid than their quarry had been--rode by on the biggest, meanest, palest looking horses Marshall had ever seen.
He wasn't exactly terrified, until the last two riders stopped suddenly in the middle of the kitchen. Dash clamped a hand over Marshall's mouth before he could make a sound, and the three of them watched in horror as one of the cowboys slowly dismounted and walked across the floor to the fridge.
The rider's hand became solid as he opened the door, rummaged around for a bit, and emerged with two silver aluminum cans. He crossed the floor, handed one to his companion, and remounted his horse.
Without even a glance of acknowledgement towards the astonished owners, the two ghosts rode off, drinking their stolen and apparently, given the way the cans passed right through the solid wall along with the men, no-longer-quite-corporeal beverages.
"See, I told you there was something weird about how fast we keep running out of beer," said Simon.
That was when the toaster started to smoke.
The smoke poured out of the single slice slot and onto the floor, then coalesced into the figure of a man wearing a cowboy hat, duster, and improbable looking chaps.
"Wait for me!" cried the ghost of Grungy Bill, Eerie's worst bank robber. He started to run in the direction the herd had taken, then stopped, turned around, and grabbed his own can of beer from the fridge before following the ghost riders through the dining room wall.
Dash, Mars, and Simon watched him go.
"This is getting ridiculous," said Dash. "I'm going back to bed."
"Yeah," said Marshall, trying and failing to suppress a yawn. "I'll call the exorcist in the morning."
He and Simon stood in the kitchen for a moment, staring at the fridge.
"You know," Marshall said at last. "Fighting the forces of weirdness for a living is one thing, but when they start getting into a man's beer supply, they're going too far."
"What's an interocitor?" asked Simon.
Marshall shrugged.
III. The Late Show
Mars went nuclear when he found out how Dash had "accidentally" spent the rent money, but Simon understood. At the age of nineteen, he'd long ago perfected his skills when it came to not being noticed when he didn't want to be, but still had yet to master the art of going to bed at anything resembling a reasonable hour.
So there were plenty of late nights he'd walked through the living room to find Marshall's small television tuned to static and Dash X kneeling in front of it, one hand on the screen, looking lost.
If you knew nothing about your own past or where you came from, and if the only person who might ever have had some sort of answers had walked through a giant screen and out of your life ten years earlier, then, yeah, impulse buying a big screen TV large enough for a full-grown adult to crawl through did make a weird sort of sense.
Granted there were probably a few bits of alien-inspired technology required to turn the thing from a really neat way to watch the game into an intergalactic transportation device, but it had come from the World O' Stuff, and you just never knew with Mr. Radford's merchandise...
Which was why, in the end, Simon spent more nights awake in front of the television than either of his roommates. Because as soon as he'd realized the screen was big enough for something the size of Dash to get out, his imagination began assembling a catalog of all the potentially worrisome things that could get in.
Somebody had to keep an eye on things. So Simon made sure to watch television as often as possible, just in case.
Especially after Dash figured out a way to steal premium cable.