Chapter Text
The house itself was an old, decrepit Queen Anne-style mansion. It had probably been nice once, but the windows were boarded up from the outside. Part of the domed and multi-gabled roof looked as though it had sunken in. There were plants covering it, vines and weeds creeping up the pillars on the porch that hadn’t been broken. The parts of the exterior that weren’t shrouded by greenery were covered in graffiti. Stupid shit that teens thought was edgy and provocative, like inverted pentagrams and other demonic symbols, or things like “turn back” very poorly made to look like it was supposed to be written in dripping blood. It’s not like there was much to do in Amity Park, anyway.
The smell of rotting wood and old paint hit Danny’s nose the minute he entered the clearing where this house was, only slightly dampened by the onslaught of the rain. He’d tried to form a ghost shield as a sort of umbrella, but funnily enough rain tended to slip through otherworldly radiation as if it weren’t even there. In a sense, it wasn’t, but Danny wasn’t one to really get into the physics of ghost shit. That was more of his parents’ and arch enemy’s forte. Also the GIW. But whatever. Danny told himself later that he definitely, for sure would’ve investigated the clearing if it wasn’t for the rain, but he really wouldn’t have. Not for very long, anyway. The rain only made his potential, ultra-quick look around the clearing something he didn’t do at all. Danny rushed through the mud, hood over his head, creaking up the rotten stairs and onto the porch. He was soaking wet and he jiggled the old doorknob, trying to get in. It was locked. Danny just stood there, shivering, staring at the old door for about a minute before smacking himself on the forehead. He always hated when he forgot that his being half-dead had gifted him with powers like, you know, being able to walk through walls. And doors. He wasn’t limited to walls. Doors were just walls with hinges in any case, and he phased through it as easily as any wall. Since he didn’t have a weakness to doors specifically. Phasing through the door also got the water off of him, and save for his clammy hands and the puddle of water in the foyer, there was little to no sign that he’d ever been soaked to the bone.
The smell of dust and decay was even stronger inside the house. The foyer seemed bigger than it should, the shadows stretching like long spindly fingers, barely illuminated by whatever overcast light managed to filter in through the boarded up, dusty window. Danny pulled a flashlight from his jacket pocket, hoping that the battery hadn’t died in the rain. He’d had to shake it, tap it a couple times, but it turned on. Somehow the tiny beam of light, instead of being a comfort, made the whole place more eerie. There wasn’t much in the foyer, just a table with an old Tiffany glass lamp and a staircase leading up. The long carpet trailing towards the back of the house was moth-eaten and covered in old, dead moss. There were plants growing up through the floorboards, along with a few mushrooms. But even the faint traces of colour seemed… greyer than they should’ve been. The floors, the wainscotting, the rug, the flocked wallpaper on the walls… it was so faded and old that it seemed like what Danny assumed to have been rich, dark colours of wood and arsenic-coloured emerald green looked almost as though they had been drained of colour. Like some colour draining vampire had taken to them. He could hear the rain outside, hammering on the roof, almost like it was trapping him in. Danny took a shuddering breath, steeling himself and then being annoyed that he felt he had to steel himself. He was half-ghost, he fought ghosts all the time. Why should he be scared of some empty house? Flynn hadn’t been scared of it. But he’d also never come out. Maybe Danny should’ve been more scared.
The entire house seemed to creak as Danny took his first step into what felt like a dusty, squeezing abyss. He hung his jacket up on the rotting railing of the staircase, deciding to investigate the living room first. Old houses like these often had two living rooms, only separated by sliding wooden panels. There wasn’t really anything in these rooms, just old, cold fireplaces and ratty sofas that were probably made of velvet. There wasn’t anything notable in the dining room, either. More of the same rotting and dusty furniture and plaster ceiling medallions swollen with water. Danny made his way into the kitchen, where there was, again, nothing of note except for the basement door. Danny creaked it open and instantly decided he would not be going down there anytime soon. The jagged stone steps and his flashlight beam seemed to be devoured by the oppressive darkness. The longer he looked at it, the more it seemed like the void was a real, solid entity, creeping up those cruel-looking stairs and his flashlight beam. But it had to have been an illusion, because when he blinked the darkness hadn’t moved at all. He shut the basement door, deciding to make his way upstairs instead.
Going upstairs in a house like this was probably one of the stupidest things he could do. They might not be stable, or there might be a rusty nail that jutted out, or some other sort of danger. But obviously Danny wouldn’t have accidentally half-killed himself in his parents’ experimental ghost portal if he didn’t constantly do stupid shit. And somehow it seemed less stupid than going into that basement. The basement in this house, not his own basement where the portal that half-killed him was. Though going into his own house’s basement had been pretty stupid as well.
There were portraits on the walls. That was the first, truly strange thing Danny noticed that couldn’t be passed off as an optical illusion. All of them looked extremely old, as old as the house itself. Yellowed, peeling, covered in a thin layer of dust. But for a house that was built in the 1880’s, some of the subjects of these paintings sure seemed… modern. A young man leaning against his motorcycle. A girl playing her electric guitar. A boy that looked like he was from the 1950’s. There were a couple portraits that didn’t seem as tied down to one specific time, like the child in the bath and the one of the mastiff, but they were like the others in that they didn’t seem like they should really be there. None of these pictures seemed like the kinds of portraits that would be hanging in a stairwell. Maybe a living room. Maybe. In fact there were only two portraits on this entire spread of them that actually looked like they should fit.
One of those portraits was a woman with long, dark hair. She was dressed in a deep purple dress. The material seemed loose and hung off of her shoulders. The woman stood next to a tree, a hopeful expression on her face. The other was easily the largest portrait, and it featured a man with long red hair, sitting alone. The portrait looked like it should have other subjects, like it was meant to be a family portrait, but there was just that man there. He had a distant, sad, almost pleading expression on his face. Like he was trapped there, frozen. But there were two things that all of the portraits had in common. The first was that all of these people seemed… familiar to Danny somehow. And the second was that they were too realistic. Almost uncomfortably so. And it wasn’t like they were actually photographs, no. Danny could see the brush strokes through the dust, the textures that wouldn’t be there if they’d been photographs or even art prints. But somehow, these pictures were just… too real. They looked more unsettlingly real than even the most detailed of photographs, the ones in which you could see every eyelash, every pore, and every imperfection. They looked too real to be paintings, and yet that’s what they were.
It was after he reached the top of the stairs that Danny heard something other than the pounding rain. Crying. A woman crying. Danny instinctively rushed to where the sound was coming from, not realising that he should’ve questioned it more. He should’ve questioned that he hadn’t heard the shifting of movement upstairs. He should’ve questioned the way his flashlight flickered. He should’ve questioned the sudden chill he got when he reached the master bedroom door.
When he opened this door, it seemed too heavy for its hinges. It made an awful sound, a repetitive, almost bouncing, snapping sound. The room was freezing, and any normal person would’ve shivered. There was a woman draped across the large, sunken bed. Her body heaved with sobs, and her long, dark hair spilled across the lumpy mattress.
“Hello? You shouldn’t be here, it’s not safe.” Danny said. The woman didn’t answer, she just kept crying.
“Do you need help? Are you okay?” Danny asked. At first the woman just continued crying, but she slowly, almost imperceptibly slowly, lifted her head.
“My baby is gone,” She said, but her voice wasn’t choked up like it should’ve been with how she’d been crying. She began to turn around to face him, again, so slow that she didn’t seem to move at all. Danny felt his entire body go cold as she did so, his bones freezing, before he left out a breath of misty air.
Oh.
The woman finished turning around. Instead of being red, her puffy eyelids were a sort of ugly, purplish bruise colour. Her eyes themselves were the reverse of what eyes should be. Solid black sclera and glowing white irises and pupils. Her neck had a similar bruised colour to her puffy eyelids.
“A new one?” She asked aloud when she saw Danny, in almost breathless amazement, like a young child being quietly excited by receiving something beyond their wildest dreams.
“A huh?” Danny was confused. Just a second ago, this woman had been almost wailing. Now she was eyeing him in a way that made him uncomfortable. Like a new toy.
“It’s been forever since I had a new one.” She said, with awe and reverence. And then Danny blinked. And everything changed.