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“I’m sorry for not telling you what really happened.” Danny’s voice shakes as he talks. “But I was just so scared.”
“We both were.” Jazz says, holding onto his hand. She was there when the accident happened, and the only one to try and convince him to reveal what went on to their parents, but she was just as scared as he was.
His parents look at him, hardly blinking, then look at each other. They stay locked in eyesight with each other for a few moments, long and silent.
Then his mother rushes up and hugs him tightly. His father, shortly after.
“We love you so much.” his mom whispers, hugging him tighter. He nearly cries right then and there with how sad she sounds.
“We love you.” his father echoes, letting go of him to hug Jazz instead. She isn’t expecting it, but returns the hug instantly.
“We love you both.” his mother repeats.
Jazz was the one who told him that he shouldn’t let this secret eat him up inside like it was going to. And maybe she was right. Maybe it would be better this way, with his parents accepting him.
Something lingered sourly in the air, though. Something that convinced his aching heart that they never could accept him. It would break his heart to think about it more, so he shuts out the thought as best he could from then on.
Because they never said anything but ‘I love you’.
The next few days pass by with only empty glances in the mirror and whispers behind his back. His parents stay up late into the night, far past when he himself should be sleeping. He can’t make out what they are saying, but all they do is talk.
He longs for a time when the night would be filled with sounds of metal on metal, scraping and scratching the walls and floors in the basement. This suffocating silence only choked at his throat, threatening to kill him again.
He doesn’t dare to ask what they’re doing. He knows his parents would only be more secretive. They would only hide whatever they have planned better. While pacing quietly up and down the halls, he swears he hears the words ‘torture’. His heart stops when he hears his mother echo the word.
He had always hoped. He had always prayed that Jazz was right when she told him that they loved him. He had always tried to believe them when they said that they loved him.
It was pointless if none of it was true. Their words, his hope, and Jazz’s trust.
But being a cowardly, selfish young boy, he had already prepared for this. After all, he still had friends he had faith in.
“I know they’re planning something.” he told the two of them, hoping they would listen.
Sam pauses, scanning his face for any traces of humor. She looks over at Tucker, as he was doing the same. When she looks back at him with the saddest eyes, his hands stop shaking for just a second.
“What do you think we can do about that?” Sam asks, after a long silence.
Danny’s heart feels like it has stopped again. “You don’t believe me.”
“We do.” Tucker says, grabbing onto his shoulders tightly and shaking him gently. “But we’re asking you what we can do to help.”
“I- I don’t know.” Danny admits, voice cracking. “I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“I know.” Sam says, confidently, yet with a solemn tone. She walks to her closet door, slides it open, and pulls out a large backpack, dark blue with thick straps.
“What’s that?” Danny finds himself asking, just as Tucker lowers his arms again.
“It’s called a grab-bag. If I ever need to run away I take this with me.” she shakes it gently, rattling something inside. “It’s full of food, clothes, some money, a first aid kit, and plenty of water.”
Tucker gasps softly, looking back to Danny, already in tears again “And we’re going to make you one, too.”
With a few sobs on Danny’s part and a few hugs on theirs, they pool together resources from each of their houses.
Sam has plenty of spare money, as well as a loaded bus pass. Tucker has plenty of clothes that fit Danny, along with several granola bar boxes from his kitchen cabinet. And Danny steals a portion of a med kit from his house to put in his old middle school backpack.
“Another thing we can do.” Sam adds, stuffing the last of the supplies into the bag and zipping it up. “Is daily check in’s.”
“Like a day-care?” Tucker jokes.
“Hush, this is important.” Sam motions for him to stop talking with her hand. “Every six hours I’m going to send you a text. It can be something like ‘Did you do the science homework yet?’ or ‘Have you seen my jacket?’. But if you don’t respond to it within an hour, then Tucker and I are going to come to your house and check on you.”
“And if I’m not there?” he asks. “If I go missing?”
“If we see the bag not there, then we’ll know that something went wrong, but you’re safe somewhere far away.” she smiles. “If not, we’ll search the whole world to find you.”
He misses the days where waking up to silence was a good thing, but those times had long passed. He sits up, taking note of the absence of the breakfast smell his parents made every Saturday while he and Jazz were still asleep.
He doesn't have to get changed out of his pajamas on a weekend, but he does. Humor him for thinking that it was better to be prepared.
Jazz wakes up just after him, questioning why he was dressed when she wasn’t while they make their way down the stairs.
He can’t find an excuse, but she seems to know without him saying a single word.
Together they walk downstairs, looking for their parents, only to come to an empty basement. And empty in terms of not just people, but everything. There were no blueprints on the walls, no wires and metal parts on the counters. Just nothing.
Most notably, the portal was shut and closed with bolts across the doors. Danny pries at them, unsure of what was happening, but found it immovable. He looks around once more.
The lab felt empty. There was so much space now that every workspace was cleaned of all traces. No ectoplasm was left on anything, not even the floors that had always been stained with a faint green. There were no flickering lights from whenever a fuse was nearly blown.
The lab feels empty. There were no sounds of work in progress or the rallying cries of ghosts from the portal. There were no faint humming sounds always coming from both the portal and unfinished weapons with open barrels.
The lab feels empty. Where were his parents’s laughter and brilliant ideas spouted at all hours? Where were the sounds of food being scarfed down when they had no time to eat? Where were his dad’s snores when they slept down here instead?
The lab felt empty.
Together he and Jazz search the house. They pry into their parent’s room for the first time in years, only to find their sheets and blankets gone. They didn’t dare to open dressers, but they didn’t have to look to know both of them are empty.
They hoist each other up into the Ops Center, only to find the same emptiness, void of any unfinished progress, as well as finished.
The control board, which supposedly allowed the Ops Center to become a blimp, was dismantled. A bare and dirty counter was all that was left, with a few holes where large buttons used to sit.
They run out to the garage, only to find the R.V gone, light skid marks where the large vehicle used to be. The smell of gas was distinct, but faint, like it had been hours since the R.V had last been here.
Confused, they trudge back to the kitchen. Jazz has the mind to check the living room one last time, though they both knew it was futile, but Danny can only sit down at the kitchen table, feeling as empty as the house.
Just as Jazz comes back, he notices a folded up piece of paper resting in the middle of the table. He reaches across the table to pick it up, unfolding it once he has it in his hands.
Jazz leans over his shoulder to read it at the same time.
“To Jazz and Danny,
By the time you read this we will be gone. We have decided that you both are more important than our work. But we are selfish enough to decide that our work is still important. Forgive us for doing so, but we will not be seeing you for a while. We cannot tell you where we have gone. Nor can we tell you what we are doing or how long we will be away.
You both know where the emergency cash is, as we have shown you. For the time that we are gone, we wish you the best of luck, though we hope you don’t need it.
We love you. Goodbye.
Mom & Dad”
By the time he had finished reading it, Jazz was wrapped around him tightly, soaking his shirt with her tears. He had frozen in place, reading and rereading the letter over and over, all the while Jazz just continued sobbing into his shoulders.
Eventually everything clicks into place.
They really did love him. But it was a dangerous love that they needed to overcome in order to leave him. In plain words, they loved him so much that he’d never see them again.
And that broke him.
When Danny reveals what really happened with the portal, instead of the white lie he told them about it suddenly turning on, neither Jack nor Maddie knew what to think. He told them that he wasn’t a full human anymore, nor was he fully ghostly. He showed them the powers he had, unstable as they were.
Of course, in the moment they were all smiles, soft words, and softer hugs. But when the kids go to bed, Maddie pulls Jack down to the basement.
She can’t think of anything to say, of course, but Jack can.
“I can’t believe it happened twice.” he says, almost a whisper.
Maddie knew what he was talking about without him having to say another word. If the same thing happened twice, even though the first one seemed to have small consequences, they were surely not isolated events.
She didn’t want to think about Vlad at the moment. She didn’t want to think about what they had done to him. Because this wasn’t about him.
It was about Danny.
“He said he was scared.” she says to Jack.
“I imagine so, considering we’re ghost hunters.” Jack laughs, but with no tinge of humor.
“He isn’t scared of ghosts.” she continues. “He’s scared of us hurting him.”
“We would never hurt him.” Jack says, taking a seat on a nearby chair, looking to the ceiling instead of at her.
“Of course not.” she agrees immediately. “But he doesn’t know that.”
“We could tell him.” he says, trying to sound comforting.
“All we would ever talk about was hunting and dissecting ghosts.” she says. “Don’t you understand? He’s never going to trust us ever again.”
“And I doubt he will with all the weapons we’re still making.” Jack adds, cringing the second the words leave his mouth.
Maddie looks all around the lab, finding only more methods and weapons to hurt ghosts than she previously had ever seen. Had she always hung so gruesome things on the walls? She holds herself tighter, closing her eyes so that she doesn’t have to look anymore.
“How about we talk about this later?” Jack offers, standing up and placing a gentle kiss on her forehead. “You look like you need some sleep.”
He leads her out of the lab by hand, softly squeezing it whenever her steps falter. Gently he tucks her into bed, climbing into it shortly after. He was out in just a minute, but she could barely sleep.
All she could think about was her own son being afraid of her.
The next few days pass by in a blur. The kids go to school, as she saw them safely off, but she couldn’t remember what she did on those days.
She drove the R.V around blankly, barely a single thought in her head. She shouldn’t be so reckless with the kids in the car, but she gets them home safe. Jack makes dinner poorly, but Danny ate it up like always, if a bit more hesitantly than before.
She sees them into bed, placing a kiss on each of their foreheads when she thinks they’re asleep. Another night would be spent in the lab with her husband, though, by the way he leads her down like the night before.
Hours pass going around in circles with their conversation.
“It’s just torture having to hear him be so scared of us.” Maddie takes her head in her hands, pressing down her nails until it hurts. “Jack, he's afraid of us.”
“I know.” he soothes, holding her in his arms. “I know.”
Her hands relax into her lap. She looks up, nearly inches from his face. “We have to do something about it.”
“I know.” he says again. “But won’t we only make it worse if we try?”
“We can give up ghost hunting.” she offers, unsure of what she was saying.
“We could.” Jack says, nodding slowly. “But then what? We throw away our life’s work? We dismantle our entire house? We let the town be overrun with ghosts?”
“No. No, no, we just…” she sighed into her hands. “We have to do something.”
“We can’t just leave them alone while we go off and sell all of our work.” Jack sighs softly.
Maddie thinks for just a second. “Can’t we?”
The words spill out of her mouth before she can even think about it for a second more than she should. She should regret them, but she doesn’t.
“If we left for just a few weeks, maybe a few months, and found a buyer for all of our technology.” She keeps talking, though her mind is screaming at her to stop. “Then we could come back.”
“What about the kids?” Jack asks, blinking several times, as if to clear his head.
“They know where the emergency cash is. We have plenty of food. We pay our bills online so they wouldn’t have to worry about that.” she keeps talking. “And it would only be for a little bit.”
“A few months is more than a little bit.”
“We could come back and get normal jobs.” she continues. “Then they wouldn’t have to worry about us hurting Danny.”
Jack takes a moment to think, opening his mouth to speak, only to shut it closed again. He continues this several times, while Maddie waits patiently. If this was to work, they needed to be in agreement.
Where she went, he went. What he did, she did. There was no Jack without Maddie. There was no Maddie without Jack. It was the two of them against the world, always.
“What would we tell them?” he eventually asks, looking at her like she held all the answers to this delusional option of theirs.
And maybe she did. Maybe she was just spouting all of this out on a whim. Maybe she had planned this from the second Danny had told him the truth. Only she knew.
Together they pack up the house the second the kids go off to bed that Friday, as quietly as they can.
Maddie puts all of their work in suitcases, dusting off old family-sized ones to fit everything. She washes the counters and cleans the lab as best she can until there are no more stains. She strips the sheets from their bed and empties their dressers. And she puts everything in the R.V, stuffing it to the brim.
Jack takes down everything, starting with the portal. He powers it down, bolting it shut for good measure. He stumbles up the ladder to the Ops Center and dismantles the control room, button by button, shoving everything in trash bags for selling to scrap yards. Every bit counted.
Together the house is emptied, save for everything two teenagers needed. Jazz had always said that she was practically an adult.
With shaking hands and teary eyes, Maddie is the one to write the final letter. She keeps crying until they step into the R.V. And she keeps crying while they ride out of town.
Together, they throw themselves into the unknown, hoping that this wasn’t a mistake.