Chapter Text
The decrepit wooden box hit the counter with a hearty thud.
Marcy eyed it with scrutiny, dark emeralds flitting over the once-intricate carvings of the old thing, its dilapidated form gone from pristine to shapeless over years of misuse and carelessness. The ravenette turned her gaze upwards once more, meeting the eyes of the jacket-clad man standing across from her at the other side of the counter, and let a wry smile snarl along her face at the vain prospect that this might be a joke.
"This isn't the pawn shop, dude." Marcy said in a tone somewhere between a chuckle and a snark. The man across from her lifted a gloved hand to slick his hair back, seemingly unphased nor undeterred by her exhausted humor, and in one motion he'd singlehandedly killed any hope in Marcy that maybe she wouldn't have to give this guy a quote for a wooden hunk o' shit.
"I promise, it's worth having in your store." The man spoke in a deep voice. Despite the tall, broad appearance, he did not seem an ominous or mysterious figure- especially not to the tired summer job worker who faced him across the counter- but regardless still spoke with few words and seemed standoffish at best. He laid one gloved hand on the lid of the dilapidated music box, patting it gently. "I found this buried out in the woods outside town while I was bird hunting. I'm sure you folks can spin some ghost story for it."
"We spin ghost stories for things people will buy. I'm pretty sure if I open this all I'll find is a rotting mouse."
"No, it'd smell worse if that was the case." The man answered so plainly that Marcy nearly burst out laughing at how genuinely he seemed to interpret her remark. The ravenette sighed, standing up straight and fidgeting with a lock of her dark hair as she spoke.
"Look, it's way too broken for me to do anything with. You have to do more convincing than that before I hand over even a cent of my parents' business money for this thing."
"Uh, how about this?" The man turned it around, revealing one of the more intact carvings along the back face of the chest. A plethora of cartoony ghosts were etched into the wooden surface like a school of fish, all their faces in the classic wide-eyed surprised look. They flew upwards along the weathered wood, leading the viewer's eye to the top of the box, where three ghosts swirled around a matching three divets in the lid of the box. Intricate, detailed, but still caked in dirt and probably some animal shit or something. "Look, some wood polish and sanding and this thing will be worth sellin', kid, I just haven't had the time to do it myself."
"Why do you want this gone so badly?"
"I'm leaving town late tonight. I was just staying here for a week or two to explore the forests and whatnot. I'm selling everything that I don't care to fit in my car, and that includes this odd little trinket." The man's voice rippled with a more lighthearted chuckle, the cadence of it laced with something beyond exhausted.
"Leaving town just in time to scam some kid working her summer job and get away with it, huh?" Marcy managed her own chuckle in response, but it was more sour than the other had been.
"Look, you don't have to charge me much for it, kiddo. I just want it gone, and I'm right sure you folks can drum up something from some hairbrained tourist that'll come in here."
Marcy sighed as the last fences in her brain were broken through, hands moving below the wooden counter. She pulled on one of the plethora of drawers labelled in scrawled handwriting, plucking a form from the selected drawer before slamming it shut again and splaying the paper along the counter's surface, alongside one of those golf course pencils. "Alright, name and stuff here. We'll buy it for fifteen even."
"Fifteen!?"
"My parents would kill me if I bought this hunk of junk for any more than that." Marcy grimaced. "Plus, you said yourself we'd need wood polish and sandpaper and a neat ghost story just to get this thing sold, so... take it or leave it, dude."
If there was any more protests to be made, it didn't leave the stranger's mouth. He took the pencil up and began filling out the form confirming he wished to sell the box while Marcy opened up the cash register and counted out the money to fork over to the guy. The rest of the transaction, which by now had become as good as muscle memory to Marcy, went along as smoothly and easily as any other time she'd done it during her time working for the shop, and soon the jacket-wrapped man was headed out the front door, muttering a pleasure doing business over his shoulder before his dark form disappeared into the daylight outside.
Marcy turned back to the box, squinting at it once more before hefting it into her hands, letting her fingers find every etched intricacy along it's coarse, wooden surface. "It is... interesting..." She murmured under her breath, words folded around by the silence of the yet-unopened shop. Whatever this was, it had clearly been the pride of someone's craft during it's life in a bygone era, origins now lost to time and stolen by it's time in the earth. It made her wonder what could have happened to bring this box from caring, meticulously working hands to the forbidding forest grave wherein it was found. Temptation tugged at her easily-fascinated mind to undo the dirty brass latch and peer inside, but despite her curiosity, the idea of finding something rotten inside was enough to dull her interest for now. With a sigh, she set the box down on a shelf behind the counter where nobody would mess with it, picked up a broom, and began opening up shop in time with the rising sun.
Ghoulish Mortals. It was an incredibly on-the-nose name, but that was what worked when you were a roadside attraction slash horror-themed gift shop. The place was set in a small, podunk town named Blyndeff. The town sat adjacent to an interstate freeway, and several tourist traps had sprung up to seize opportunity, all of them with different gimmicks to draw in motorist travellers along the route. Ghoulish Mortals was not one such tourist attraction itself, but it gladly leeched off the popularity of the places around here that did boast such a title, bringing fistfuls of money itching to be given away to a niche gimmick shop that would surely wither in any other environment. The delicate ecosystem of eating from tourist's wallets, Marcy supposed.
Her parents had run and owned the place since before she was born, and Marcy's life was entwined with the odd and surreal as a result. Her childhood memories of gripping onto mothman-themed merchandise and flipping through the pages of Goosebumps books had transformed over the years into her learning the proper way to count money from a register and close up the shop on her own, and eventually such happenings morphed into her having a summer job at the age of seventeen at the family business that the rest of her family hardly showed their faces at. Marcy wasn't normally such a sassy, exhausted, tired-of-everyone's-shit type of person, but practically running the place aside from taxes tended to wear on anyone's brain.
It was better than McDonalds, at least. Probably.
Marcy flipped the sun-paled sign in front of her so the Open side now faced out onto the streets, siren-songing for visitors and locals alike to peruse the store's wares for the day. And just like that, another day of work had properly begun. The newly-purchased music box seemed to watch her with an absurdly smug aura for a dirt-stained box as she tiredly made her way to the chair behind the counter and pulled up a book, waiting for the ding of the bell at the door.
It only passed a few times before noon- that was always how it was. The rush didn't usually come until more people got on the road for long enough to reach this hole in the wall Marcy called home. There was a nice old lady who was coming by to pick up the latest installment of a ghost story series she'd come to enjoy from this place, one of the few locals Marcy ever saw around here; then there was a man in a Hawaiian shirt who spoke all too loudly and was far too energetic despite proclaiming multiple times how he'd been driving for eight hours. He'd bought a sasquatch tshirt, griped about how they didn't sell beer, and then thankfully vanished out the door again. There had been a mom in bright colors, buying all sorts of which things for her daughter in dark colors, and Marcy had gladly told the two of them about local cryptid rumors to fascinated reactions from both.
And then the fourth time the bell at the door rang, it was right at noon, and it was a girl Marcy's age.
She stood in the doorway, staring dazedly around the shelves and walls of the place. Brown, curly hair fell over her shoulders, the strays catching the sunlight streaming in from behind her, the craziest of it contained by a bandana she wore over her head. She wore a brightly-colored striped shirt with patched up overalls, and had one hand to the back of her head as her eyes nervously flitted all over the place, not even seeming to notice Marcy as she looked around at her surroundings as if searching for something she couldn't find.
Not a word spoken, but Marcy could already find herself curious about what exactly this girl's deal was.
"Welcome to Ghoulish Mortals, how can I help you?" Marcy sounded out clearly in words she'd spoken a million times. The brunette startled, her eyes finally seeming to land on Marcy and lock gazes.
Oh- you're pretty. Marcy observed offhandedly, but that wisp of a thought was swept away for now in the stream of everything else that was happening.
"Uh- I. Oh. Uhm." The other girl stammered a few times, moving forward to the counter. Her eyes finally broke away from Marcy's, instead suddenly preferring to veer around the room in a nervous daze at everything but the counterworker. Marcy cracked a light grin. "Well?"
"I'm- uh. I'm a worker? I got hired here last week- they said I started today."
Marcy's grin fell, replaced with a look of pure confusion that Anne noticed she wore before Marcy did. "Who's they?" Marcy asked.
The brunette nodded again, as if to confirm to both of them this was a sensible question. "Mr. and Mrs. Wu? The people that run this place? Are they around right now...?"
Marcy scoffed, the faintest traces of a laugh at the edge of it, leaning onto the counter and rolling her shoulders in as close of a shrug as she could get with all her weight on her arms. "They never are. You're speaking with their kid, though, and I basically do everything for them, whether I want to or not."
"... Oh. Well, uh..."
"Calm down!" Marcy chuckled, clearing the nervous fog best she could, meeting the girl's eyes again. Brown, flecked with bits of deep blue. How nice. "I think I heard my parents talking about a new hire, but I didn't think they'd actually get anyone. They don't tend to care about my stress levels all that often."
"Really? ...Glad I'm here then." The brunette startled in the silence that followed her remark, outstretching a hand awkwardly. "Anne Boonchuy. I guess we're coworkers now?"
Marcy smiled, then giggled. "Yeah, something like that! You've got a lot to learn, though." Marcy opted not for the ever-uncomfortable physical contact that handshakes brought her, instead smacking Anne's hand in a light highfive and letting the momentum spin Marcy slightly so she was facing the direction she needed to be to get up and walk around the counter. She landed herself in front of Anne, begrudgingly realizing she had to incline her neck slightly to stare up and meet the other girl's gaze. Anne stared down at her, seeming to stiffen up slightly as Marcy drew closer- maybe from being around the boss' kid? Yeah, that's probably not easy to deal with on your first day on the job. Marcy cracked another smile at the notion of ever making someone nervous by her presence, this one warmer and all reassurance. "Well, I'm Marcy Wu. Come on, I'll show you around." She waves her hand for Anne to follow her and began winding through the labyrinth of various shelves and displays that rioted like vivid plants through the jungle of the spook shop.
"This is a section we mainly use for small stuff. Pins, charms, whatever else. If it can fit in a pocket, we keep it here, since it's in direct eyesight of the counter and nobody will try to shoplift this stuff." Marcy listed off a few other shelves as they went through, just trying to get Anne used to where to put things for each restock. She pointed out the supply closet in the back next, then gave a brief rundown of the back, though she assured Anne her job would mostly be up front. Then customers began to come in more steadily as the day progressed, and Marcy trained her through using the cash register, returns, finding certain items in the store for the lost customers, and even buying some stupid little limited edition bobblehead that a guy brought in to sell to the store.
They fell into an easy working rhythm, the two of them, working in different parts of the store in tandem and even allowing one of them to go sit down and have a rest for about five to ten minutes now and then. They figured out the radio (something that Marcy forgot how to operate almost daily) and at one point sang along to vibrant top ten hits while using the handle of a broom as a dummy microphone and horrendously messing up the lyrics of songs.
It was fun. This was fun. Marcy's job was actually fun.
By day's end, business was as successful as ever, but Marcy felt half as stressed as any other day. She leaned back in the chair behind the desk with a relieved sigh, letting a smile crack across her face for probably the first time in closing shift history.
The sound of something falling over made her startle like a cat and lean upright again, peering over the counter. "Anne?"
"Sorry, sorry! I knocked over some of these, uh..." Anne poked her head out from an aisle, holding multiple mothman plushies in her arms and regarding them all with quizzical looks. "..Bugs?"
"Wait. You don't know about mothman?" Marcy's jaw almost dropped.
"Not a big, uh... aliens person."
"Mothman's not an alien! He's a cryptid!" Marcy laughed, springing up out of her chair and rushing to the other girl's side.
"Well- I'm not that into cryptids either! I'm kind of just a, like, low budget slasher chick."
"How did you get hired here?" Marcy laughed again.
"They didn't ask me how much I knew about mothman, they asked me if I was okay with sixteen bucks an hour!" Anne laughed back.
Marcy set the last mothman plushie down in the basket that usually held them. "Oh my gosh, we have got to get you more educated. I can't believe you don't know these things! They're so fun!"
"I thought you'd hate this kind of thing."
"What? Why?"
"Well... you didn't really seem to like working here when I came in."
Marcy smiled gently. "I've grown up around this place my whole life, and it's infected every aspect of it. Just because my parents started overworking me doesn't mean it killed my interest in this stuff."
"Huh." Anne murmured, silence falling in the air between them for a moment. Then she turned back to Marcy and smiled. "Sooo... you can tell me what a mothman is, then?"
"Let's close up first." Marcy laughed, feigning a tap to the shoulder of the other girl. Physical contact with Anne still wasn't quite okay in Marcy's head yet, but they were getting there. The ravenette cast a smile at her coworker, then hurried on ahead to the back room while Anne returned to sweeping the floor of the front, and wordlessly the two of them fell into a closing routine that let them work around each other.
Dusk fell as they worked, darkness beginning to wind around them. The lights feebly fought off the worst of the dark, but they were cheap, and it was still clearly darker than it had been throughout the day.
Anne wiped down the counter, trying to force her eyes to be more used to the growing darkness. As surprisingly fun as today had been, it was still a relief to know the workday was almost over and she could go collapse on her bed soon.
She stood up straight, readjusting the bandana over her head and wiping some sweat from her brow as she finished up the final bit of her closing duties. The brunette fell back in the chair behind the counter with a sigh, granting her tired muscles a much-earned break as she leaned her head back-
-and promptly hit it against something hard on the shelf behind her.
"Ow!" She yelped, startling upright again and whirling around to find her brutal attacker. Her eyes zeroed in on some decrepit wooden music box, its dented surface caked with dry dirt.
"Huh... I dont think I noticed you before..." The Thai girl muttered as she leaned forward, picking up the curiosity in her hands and eyeing it with intrigue. Her fingers soon found grooves etched into the surface of the thing, leading her to discover whole engravings wreathed into the side of it. Soon she became aware of all the intricate carvings that whispered stories into the old wood, lost to time and the damaged state but still interesting to discover the remains of in this state.
She tilted it this way and that, inspecting it from every angle as if somehow she'd find writing on some side of it explaining in excruciating detail exactly where and when it came from. Of course, nothing like that presented itself, so finding answers was yet again up to her.
After enough time, opportunity did in fact arise. Anne's thumb found the irregularity of the brass latch first, startling her from her confounded reverie with the object. In moments, she spun it so that the little latch was facing her, raising it almost to eye level so that she could just see the glint of dull brownish metal through the film of dirt and dust (she really would have to remember to wash her hands after handling this thing) and peering at it.
It seemed like the standard little latch for a music box. For a moment, Anne hesitated, wondering if she was allowed to fiddle with the things the store bought from others this much before they'd been properly fixed up and set out for others to buy.
But, that thought didn't last a moment longer- if it needed repairs anyways (and this thing clearly did) what harm would a little more tampering do? She was just opening it.
And so, with a small hummed note of certainty at her decision, Anne's thumb flipped the latch on the music box.