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“This is, without a doubt, going to be the greatest case I have ever judged in my entire career.”
Ted frowned over the top of his menu at Marshall, whose solemn expression told him he was being completely serious. “Did you get that child custody case you were shooting for.”
“No, this is even more important. It could change the afterlife of the person who’s petitioning me forever.”
Ted stared at him, confused. “Afterlife?”
Proudly, Marshall leaned back in his chair. “I’m going to decide Screamy’s Haunted City Versus The Langer Family!”
“Oh my God!” Ted said. “That’s that case that’s been on the news. They think they saw a ghost last Halloween and they’re suing for emotional damages.”
“It is!” and then Marshall grinned. “This could make or break my legal career. And it’ll definitely make or break me as the leader of the New York Cryptozological Society!”
“That sounds like a terrible disease.”
“Not only is it not a disease, it’s New York’s only club for people who believe in magical creatures and ghosts.”
“Point,” Ted said, “isn’t your impartiality seriously compromised by this? Seriously seriously?”
Marshall paused and gasped. “Ted. Nothing matters more to me than fairness. Except for my son and maybe my Nessie tooth.”
“Don’t let Lily hear that,” Ted said. They both knew how much Lily meant to him; he didn’t need to rank her, when she ranked above even his reputation.
“I’ll listen to all of the evidence, and if I think they’re lying I’ll rule in favor of the ghost house. I’m not the kind of guy who just lets justice go unserved.”
“Speaking of getting served, have you seen our waiter?”
Marshall searched for him. “He just…disappeared. This could be the start of something big…”
“Marshall!”
“I know you don’t remember it, but I happen to remember three sandwich-loving, Fierro-driving, mystery seeking twenty year olds who used to hang around in smelly vans together…”
“That was one weekend,” Ted reminded him. “Lily lost her art history essay on campus during a windy day and you both thought that the tree monsters got to it. The groundskeeper found it. It’s not like it was a big thing.”
“It was a big thing to me! That was one of the best weekends of my life!”
“Aww, really?”
“Yep! So don’t remind me how unrealistic my dream life is, Ted!”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Ted. “Let me go find the waitress.”
“But you’ll penetrate the mystery!” Yelled Marshall.
“Oh my God, there’s nothing mysterious about it – he’s right over there arguing with a woman who thinks he put too much wine sauce on her pork cutlet.”
The waiter looked up. “Did you guys like, need something?”
“Water, please,” said Marshall.
“I’ll take a big glass of milk and a nap. A nice, long, deep nap,” said Ted.
“We don’t sell naps, dude,” said the waiter.
“THAT’S NOT THE POINT OF MY QUESTION!” Ted yelled.
Marshall laughed. “Which one of us is overreacting now?”
Ted said nothing, and grumbled as the waiter rushed off to put their order in.
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Two weeks later, Marshall was sitting behind the bench and listening intently to opening arguments. The plaintiffs thought they had a solid case; after all, the Langers had lost their jobs, had suffered from stomach and nervous troubles. Didn’t that mean they deserved some sort of money for their suffering?
On the other hand, Screamy’s Haunted City claimed that they had video evidence that the Langers were falsifying their claims. Marshall watched in silence as they held up a picture of a dummy in a ghost outfit; they were going to claim that the ghost the had seen was simply an illusion, a haunted house effect gone sideways.
“…And that is why I’ll prove that these two are nothing but frauds!” The lawyer for Screamy's slammed his fist into his open palm for extra emphasis.
“Objection!” shouted the Langer’s lawyer, a scrawny guy with a terrible toupee and a neon-colored suit. “Leading the jury!”
“Sustained,” said Marshall, staring blankly at the objecting attorney’s toupee. “Plaintiffs, call your first witness.”
They called the female half of the Langer family. Marshall listened intently to her testimony, his chin propped up in his hand. It was pretty clear to him that she believed what she was saying. Then the cross-examination happened. Could she be sure of what she’d seen? Did she want to check and reassure herself that yes, this was what she meant, this was what she was had seen? There was a suggestion of witness-leading from the Langer's lawyer, but he overruled; he really did want to know how well she could see the spirit she claimed to have seen from the proper distance.
It turned out she could – and the sheet that the Haunted City's lawyer claimed she had seen was not the ghost-shaped thing she claimed to have witnessed.
“It looked all furry. Like Alf on a drug bender.”
“All right,” said Marshall thoughtfully, before allowing her to step down. Could ghosts be anything other than a fuzzy, half-existing thing? He’d have to spend a little time considering this in the privacy of his chamber.
After he called Lily during her lunch break at the Captain’s. But that would be after the next witness was called.
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Marshall fell asleep on the couch with Marvin in his arms and Daisy in her bouncy chair before Lily came through the front door. Through bleary eyes he noticed how exhausted she looked as she picked up Marvin and transferred him to his carry cot.
“How was your day?” she whispered, moving Daisy to her bassinette.
“Really weird,” he said. Extending his arms to Lily, she squirmed into his embrace and was cradled between him and the floor on the sofa, shoes and full face of make-up be damned.
“Why weird?” she asked.
“Well, you know the case I’m doing. I have no idea who’s telling the truth so far, and I’m not sure if I want to know.”
“Marshall, you’re the best judge in the world. I know you’ll have the right answer if you really pay attention to what they’re saying.” He kissed her between the eyes for saying so. “And you’re one-third of the Ghost Squashers. You can do anything.”
“I tried to remind Ted of how cool that was!” He exclaimed. “But he said that we solved one case and broke up.”
“We did. He got really into Sherlock Holmes for a couple of months, remember?”
“I still have the monocle he used that Halloween,” said Marshall. “I definitely remember. But we were a great team. Sometimes I wish we could just go back and be detectives.”
“I love you, sweetie,” Lily said, nestling deeper into his arms. He could feel her relaxing, realized she was starting to fall asleep in his grip, and felt a fond rush of fondness for her for the millionth time that week. “But I’m not going to give up art just to sit in a smelly van with Ted while he worries about helping Tracy with her finals.”
“That’d be the fourth thing Ted would complain about.” He was amazed at the level of cheer he felt. “After the food and the music but before the bumps in the road.” He loved the guy but it was true.
“I think our traveling days are behind us until Daisy’s two.” Navigating Venice with two small children had been difficult; with another on the way it seemed incredibly impossible.
“Maybe I’ll have to judge something in Spain,” he said.
“Maybe,” she agreed. Then she was dozing in his arms, and Marshall gladly followed her along into the blissful world of rest and dreams.
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The next day brought reams of taped evidence. Screamy’s Haunted City had security cameras everywhere, and there were plenty mounted in the area where the Langers had claimed their haunting took place. Marshall studied the footage carefully. On one there was a distinct blur that Mister Langer reacted to with great fright. The lawyer for Screamy’s enhanced it until it seemed to show the image in a better light – could it have been a mouse? Marshall had to lean all the way forward in his own seat to make out even a shadow of what was dancing across the screen. If he didn’t figure out how to fix this, he’d be stuck trying to guess what the guy was so afraid of.
They called Mister Langer to the stand next – he insisted that the ghost-shaped thing he saw was an actual ghost. Marshall had to stop the Langer's attorney twice to make sure he wasn’t being deceived by his own vision.
So it was possible that Mister Langer had hurt himself freaking out, and that his reaction was a hundred percent the fault of his own panic. All of the mental effects could’ve been psychosomatic, and the result of the belief that they’d really seen a ghost. But what if? What if…
What if it was a real ghost? Marshall couldn’t discount the possibility entirely. It was a hundred percent a possibility that the hairy, large ghost they insisted they’d seen was in fact not the mouse at all.
Marshall wished he’d taken a drink before showing up for this mediation. Or maybe browsed his favorite cryptid message board. Either had a way of calming him easily down and helping him think. He wanted to be as fair as humanly possible but it was a beastly hard thing to do when you’re stuck being the only impartial person in the room.
Next on the docket was Ronnie, an employee who’d walked the Langers through the house and claimed that he hadn’t seen any ghosts either.
The nervous-looking teenager was led through a series of softball questions by the defense, and a rather sharp series of questions by the plaintiffs' lawyer. Was he often lazy on the job? Often high? Marshall sustained that objection. If he hadn’t loved sandwiches in his college years then he wouldn’t be the man who was sitting on that very bench that day.
The plaintiffs entered a series of time cards into evidence that proved Ronnie had punched out briefly while the Langers were on the seventh floor – the ‘torture chamber’ where they’d seen their large, hairy ghost. As an attempt at discrediting Ronnie it was fairly decent, but it also opened up a big window for Marshall. Studying everything in his chambers, that was when Marshall noticed it – a ten minute gap of time between when Ronnie had left the Langers in the chamber alone and when he’d clocked out. That was long enough for other witnesses to have entered into the scene – and they hadn’t – and also for a fake ‘ghost’ to escape the scene. That was reasonable doubt.
It was probably a big enough window to convince the jury as well. Marshall was ready for one of them to call for a mistrial. But nothing was happening. They both wanted to win too badly.
Marshall headed to his chambers to consider the second day’s testimony. Reviewing the video he noticed it; there was a big, black, blot in the corner of the frame. If you trained your eyes on the line of sight of both Langers and the movement of the blob then one could completely understand why they had thought it was some kind of foreign object. Some kind of ghost. This opened up a huge discrepancy between their report of the creature and the creature’s physical shape. An incredibly huge one. If they couldn’t work their way free of the issue then then someone was going to end up paying some heavy fees.
But what was the blob?
Was it a leftover prop, a stray animal – or something that was even more dangerous?
Only two people could help him with this question, and only one of those two was available to him.
He called his wife’s cell phone and she answered on the first ring. “Lil,” he said, anxiety in his voice. “I need your help. Can you meet me at the courthouse when it’s lunchtime?”
“Okay – I’m going to drop the kids off with Ted and Tracy. I’ll meet you in a little bit!”
Marshall kept taking notes until his wife arrived. It was the third time he’d watched the footage, and she seemed a little surprised when he said. “Baby – WE HAVE A CRYPTID SIGHTING!”
“Really?” Bless Lily for always getting swept right up into his ideas. “Let me see!”
He replayed the footage. “A mouse wouldn’t move that fast; no dog or cat would be able to get into a haunted house that big. And how would a dog or a cat get in? They kept talking about their business standards and how important it was to them to keep a clean place. Something isn’t fitting together.”
“It isn’t. But what does that mean? What are you thinking?”
He grinned. “I have the right to run a field trip with the jury. How about I pretend that you’re on the jury…sneak in Robin and Ted and Barney…”
“You’re asking me if you want to reform the Ghost Squashers?”
“I want nothing more.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know if it’ll work – if it does you’re going to have to do a lot of lying.”
“It’s not lying, it’s just…creative truth telling!” he said.
She shook her head. “Don’t lie to yourself,” she said. “Use your insight, you know it to be true.”
He gasped. “The force of the cryptid!”
She kissed his cheek. “So what do you think?”
“I think,” he said. “You know what I’m thinking.”
She leaned into his shoulder. “Okay. If you want to bring back the Ghost Squashers, I won’t stand in your…”
He jumped up and out of his seat. “THE GHOST SQUASHERS ARE BACK, BABY!” enthused Marshall at the top of his lungs.
She winced and rubbed her ear. “And I’m happy for you.”
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Over dinner, Marshall enthusiastically explained the Ghost Squishers to Tracy, Robin and Barney. “…And we’ll crawl into the Haunted City and find out if there are really monsters or just terrible health code violations! Who’s with me?”
Ted was the only one who seemed especially reluctant. The second the word ‘adventure’ flashed before Robin’s eyes she was ready for action. Barney, too, seemed pretty excited by the idea of trying to uncover a mystery. “I have several state of the art spelunking suits,” he said, and Marshall didn’t bother to ask how he’d managed to find them.
Ted said, “The five of you can get tetanus without me.” Then he took a big, long drink of water, as if this finalized the words in some major way.
“This is disgraceful!” said Marshall. “What happened to my best friend? What happened to the guy who used to live in the ‘now’ instead of living in the ‘oh my god I’m such a total wuss, what if the mice bite me?”
“That’s a perfectly reasonable question,” Ted pointed out.
“Fine, Ted, you can live outside of the spirit of adventure.”
“Where’s your live-for-today-ness?” Tracy asked.
“That’s not a word,” Ted said.
“Oh yeah? Then why did you let me win scrabble with it last night?” Tracy knew. She and Ted had an easy, intimate sense of teasing between them that was somehow sweeter than anything Marshall had seen in ages.
“Because I love you dearly.” Then he said. “I will support you from a distance but I’m not going to go to that haunted house.”
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“I don’t believe you dragged me to this haunted house.”
To be fair to them all, Marshall thought to himself, he hadn’t been the one doing most of the dragging. Tracy had asked him to come play their lookout, in case Marshall’s influence managed not to grease the wheels of justice thoroughly enough. “You aren’t going inside,” Lily reminded him.
“Heh, how many times has Tracy said that?” Barney asked. “Intercourse-five?” he asked, holding up his hand – Tracy stared at him like he had five heads and – considering the uniforms they were wearing, those heavy, canvas-colored spelunking suits that he’d volunteered – he might as well have sprouted them.
“Now’s not the time,” Marshall said. As a unit, they squared their shoulders, stared down the horrors that awaited them. It was shaped like your average New York-style haunted house – they sprung up all over the city, and some of them were poorly-licensed death traps that drew teenagers in from the suburbs, each of them determined to prove they were more edgy than the last. Screamy’s was well-licensed and operated, with actual licenses at the health department for their food bar and several certificates that proved they’d met with safety requirements as set down by the letter of the law. There wasn’t anything that Marshall could do to shut them down without a warrant, and even though they wanted to blame the haunting on a long-disappeared rat issue that was ‘immediately taken care of’ according to management interviews. In fact, they had excellent reviews across the board.
He juggled the lock open. The vestibule – which was heavily decorated with fake cobwebs and witch statues leaning out to whack passers-by with their brooms – opened out into a lobby that looked exactly like an old-timey theater's snack bar. The neon behind the counter still glowed; someone was paying to keep the lights on and the experience ready for use as the trial went on. It was surprisingly clean and looked as if it was being kept in proper use.
“This is so much like Universal Studios,” said Tracy, looking around at the scene that surrounded them. It really did – it reminded Marshall of a slightly more rundown version of the Monster Café. To their immediate right was a seating area with booths and tables. Beyond that to the north was what looked like a theatre of some kind – and to the right, beside an old-fashioned elevator and a set of stairs, was a large sign that told the incoming audience that thrills and chills were just up the stairs.
“That’s where the haunted house is,” Barney said, though that was pretty obvious.
“Let’s split up – Ted and Tracy, check out the theatre. Barney and Robin, you make sure there’s no clues down here in the food court.
“I do,” Barney said. “Why do you and Lily get to have all of the fun upstairs while Robin and I feel up melted cheese?”
“Because this is my case,” said Marshall. “I need to check out the place where they said they saw their monster in person, and I don’t need a whole lot of people there. I don’t want anyone influencing my opinions.”
“Right,” Ted said, looping his arm around Tracy’s shoulder. “Come, my lady. Let me take you to the theatre.”
“Aww! It’s just like the night when we saw Chewbacca at Star Wars On Ice.”
“He deserved that standing ovation! You try to beat a Porg in a fur suit.”
With their friends scattering, Marshall and Lily took the elevator up. Automatically, he reached for Lily’s hand as they climbed to the proper floor, only the headlamps fixed to their hats giving them enough of a way to see what was occurring before them in the semi-darkness.
“We should keep following the signs,” he said. He pointed his lamp at a ‘this way to haunted house’. “Stay close to me.”
“Marshall, I’m a grown woman,” Lily sighed. “I won’t make any mistakes. I’m not about to fall through the floors or get captured or something like that.”
“You’re no Daphne,” he said. “But I’m not Fred.”
“What? You were born to be a leader!”
“Aww. I love you. You’re brighter than Velma!” he chirped.
“Aww, Marshmallow, you’re the Scooby Doobiest,” she said, and kissed his cheek. It had been a long time since they’d done something so intimate together, something that didn’t include the kids or have to be scheduled around their needs. He was incredibly grateful that one of Lily’s old teacher friends had agreed to watch them for a few hours so they could tend to the situation.
“We need to get going,” he said. Very cautiously –to the rhythm of creaking floorboards – they moved toward their destination with all speed and determination.
The main room – which was set up like a maze, complete with large scarecrow dummies and oversized jack o’lanterns – was cordoned off into two different experiences. The “mild” version took audiences looping through the right side of the complex and the “wild” version led them leftward. Both dumped the crowd at an elevator bank and stairwells that led to the ground floor, or up a flight to the gift shop. “Do you want to split up again?”
“No - they were on the wild version,” Marshall whispered. “IF we don’t find anything on that side of the maze, we’ll double back and go through the mild side.”
Lily nodded, and, continuing to hold his hand, they made their way into the entrance of the maze – which was guarded by a very large grim reaper pointing its gnarled and well-sculpted hand in the direction of the inky void of the mysteries within.
They were then treated to a series of rooms. The first was a witch’s chamber, abandoned without the scareactor who would normally be stirring the cauldron. A ‘meow’ pierced the air as they passed her abandoned chair, and Marshall gasped and grabbed Lily’s hand.
“Sweetie, it’s just a dummy,” she pointed out – the cat was indeed standing still and motionless by the doorway, apparently set to rush ahead of the audience in a lifelike manner. There was a green plastic cauldron bubbling red-orange toned goo. Marshall stared at it curiously.
“I wonder if it makes a lot of extra noise. That could be part of the distraction- that Mister Langer said he saw.”
“Mmm,” Lily said. “The room looks clean. Next one?”
The next room was a fake Egyptian temple, complete with a casket filled with a rather menacing looking mummy that sprang open whenever anyone passed by it. Marshall did it several times just to watch the mechanism load over and over again.
“You’re going to break the spring,” scolded Lily.
“I think it’s a little sturdier than that,” Marshall said, but her expression stayed dubious. They checked out the fake pyramids and layer of gritty sand spread over the floor – everything glittered, but there was no large, hulking frightening shape.
“I think the next room is where the Langers saw the monster. Let’s go in. Slowly.” That room was set up to look like Frankenstein’s lab, and Marshall could see that the floor was done up with mock cobblestones of grey-green shades. He moved carefully against them, holding tighter to Lily’s hand.
“They said they saw the thing over there,” he said.
Lily peered where he was pointing. She didn’t seem to see anything; neither did he. What could the Langers have encountered that was so frightening?
“I’m going to go lean against that coffin,” said Lily. “I should be able to see what was in the left part of the room from there.”
“Be careful!” Marshall warned her, but she wasn’t really listening to him as she dug her chunky heels into the baseboards of the casket.
Then there was a piercing scream, and Marshall whipped in the direction of it, only to see Lily’s flailing arms and feet. “Lilypad!” he gasped in horror, as she disappeared through the trap door.
After a lot of shrieking and a thud and too much anxiety, he heard an ‘I’m OK!”
“Where did you land? Stay there, I’ll find you!”
“No, wait for me there; I’m in a ball pit! There’s a big staircase and a sign painted on the wall telling me to try again.”
“God!” he said. “I’m glad you’re okay! Keep walking until you get here. WOW.”
“What?”
“This place is awesome!”
Then something black-shrouded dropped on him from on high.
Marshall considered his fainting dead away to be a very reasonable reaction.
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“…didn’t mean to kill your friend!” an unfamiliar voice was saying.
“It doesn’t matter what you meant to do.” That was Robin’s mature, strident voice above him. “Even if you were doing it for fun, you shouldn’t just jump on top of strangers for money!”
“He’s not dead.” That was Lily. Her hand was on his pulse, and he could feel himself beating against her hand. When Marshall opened his eyes, Barney was looking down on him.
“He’s back!”
Lily squashed him in her embrace. “Hey, baby,” she said. “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” he said. “Did I bang my head on the way down?”
She shook her head. “You’re fine. You were just surprised.”
“Would you like to tell me who you are?” he pointed at the scrawny teenager arguing with Robin.
He thrust out his hand. Marshall noticed his furry werewolf suit and instantly understood what the Langers’ creature looked like. “Name’s Anthony, sir. Screamy’s hired me to act as a scare actor last season. They used to ask me to come jump down and scare people. That’s what I meant when I said I didn’t mean to land on you. I’m not supposed to land right on top of people.”
“Why didn’t Screamy's just tell us you were the creature?”
Anthony stuffed his hands into his pants. “Uh…’cause I’m fourteen. It’s kind of illegal for them to be…”
“…Employing somebody so young.” That was going to result in a fine, but it was immaterial to the Langer’s' case. “OK, so now everything makes more sense. But I do have one question – what are you doing here during the off season?”
Anthony looked a little ashamed of himself. “Um…my friends didn’t believe I was. So I’ve been taking video of me jumping on people and putting them on Youtube…”
Marshall groaned. Well, now he understood why the Langers felt so traumatized by the maze. He couldn’t find Screamy's at fault for doing what they’d always done as a business, but they’d violated labor laws, and since they hadn’t known about the prankish little addition Anthony had added to the attraction, they weren’t liable for much else.
“I have one question. How did you know we were coming here?” asked Lily.
“Oh, this guy in the grey suit found my number in info book my boss kept in the lobby. Said he wanted to make a tall guy who looked like a moose pee his pants."
Barney suddenly looked quite nervous. “Barney,” said Marshall through his teeth, “I am going to kill you. So, so slowly…”
Barney’s grin dropped a few notches. “Why? Because my super awesome joke made you want to pee your pants?”
“Because I’m trying to be professional while I try to figure out what was happening. And you are STILL dead meat. Lily, slap Barney for me.”
“Wait. What?!” shouted Barney. Lily may or may not have punched Barney instead of slapping him. “My nose!” Robin rolled her eyes and grabbed his face between her hands. Apparently Lily hadn’t done permanent damage, but Marshall wasn’t going to fault her for getting rough.
He didn’t hear Tracy coming, but he could hear her voice as she entered the room. “What was all the screaming about?” she asked. Marshall noticed her smeared lipstick and Ted’s rucked-up clothes. He’d high five him over that later. Right now he wanted to get up off of the warehouse floor and home.
“We found the Langer’s cryptid but Marshall got caught in the crossfire,” said Lily. The friends eyeballed the Marshall sadly.
“Who’s going to pick me up?” Marshall groaned. Lily scrambled to help him, and even Barney pulled him up to his feet. Marshall was already mentally writing his judgment. Screamy's was going to be fined for labor violations and Anthony was going to be out of a job. They’d have add adequate signs for the strobing lights and trap doors that weren’t mentioned on the warning sign out front. The Langer's’ case was going to be dismissed, since they sued under the wrong strictures and on top of that their trauma-causing demon was a teenager who didn’t have money to pay for their suffering. If they really were suffering psychologically he’d make sure they were provided for therapy-wise. He’d take it out of the fine he’d levy against Screamys, but that fine wouldn’t be high enough to keep Screamy's out of business. And as for Anthony….
“Uh, can I go?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not. I’m going to need you to have a deposition taken tomorrow. And as for your duty to society - let’s just say,” he said, clamping the boy’s shoulder in his grip, “there are a lot of fire trucks that need to be washed downtown…”
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Having experienced what he had experienced, Marshall decided that his inevitable ruling was as fair as it could be; five hundred dollars were awarded to the Langers for their suffering, but they would be required to pay court fees for Screamy’s lawyers; aside from the labor violation fine and the safety code violations, there would be no further legal ramifications for the company. Haunted or not, Screamy’s show had traumatized them enough to leave them out of work, but their basis for suit had been so faulty that it was ridiculous. He’d strongly considered suggesting court appointed therapy to get them back on their feet, but they were taking it independently. There wasn’t anything else he could do for them.
“Do you wish that the cryptid was real?” Lily had asked him as they washed dishes and prepared the kids’ supper.
“Nah,” he said. “Some things are better left unexplained.” He grinned. “The Ghost Squashers did kick some major butt though.”
“If you call fainting, making out and falling into a ball pit kicking butt?”
“Well, we solved the crime,” he kissed her forehead. “And I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my lovely Lilypad.”
“Aww,” she cooed. “My Marshmallow.” He was amused by the fact that all of his Scooby Doo jokes had somehow managed to turn around on him and well – influence real life. He supposed he didn’t mind being a Fred figure.
Just as long as Lily would always be his Daphne.