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Danny comes out of the accident relatively unscathed. Well, no, he’s probably got some fried nerves, and definitely has some singed hair, and he doesn’t know when this extreme clumsiness will go away, but as far as accidents in a science lab tend to go, he got off pretty easy.
He doesn’t tell anyone about the accident. Not his parents, who’ll one-hundred-percent ground him until he gets into college, not his friends, on the off chance they let something slip (a secret is best kept with only one person after all), and definitely not Jazz, who’ll fuss over him and then tell their parents anyway.
That should be the end of it. His parents are happy, the portal is working, and Danny doesn’t get grounded for messing around where he shouldn’t be. Case closed, happily ever after, the end, everyone can just move on with their life now and Danny can just bury this incident into the confines of his mind with little to no consequences.
Except…
Well, the memory problems are concerning, but at least he isn’t dead.
There’s an essay due for English class tomorrow and Danny still hasn’t started. He sits down, pulls out a couple sheets of loose-leaf paper from his binder (because Mr. Lancer insists that all their essays be handwritten,) and sets a timer for two hours on his clock. The clock flashes at him—5:30 P.M. — in bright red, blocky colors.
The first sentence comes easy enough—
Danny wakes up.
His hands are shaking and he feels weirdly cold.
The clock flashes 10:30 P.M.
He still only has one sentence.
These…blackouts, or whatever they are, have been happening more and more. It used to just be once a week, but now it’s practically everyday and they’re getting longer and longer. Danny can’t figure heads or tails of what’s causing it to happen, and for some odd reason no one seems to realize that he’s blacking out?
Sam and Tucker just say that he spaces out sometimes and then suddenly excuses himself to go to the bathroom or just flat out bails on their plans. But Danny doesn’t remember any of that happening. Not at all.
He starts keeping track of the times he’s blacking out in a notebook.
After a few weeks he realizes that every incident almost neatly lines up with when there’s a ghost attack.
(It’s…a coincidence. It’s definitely a coincidence.)
Danny wakes up at the edge of the forest.
He doesn’t remember how he got there.
He was— he was just walking home from school a second ago.
Why are his clothes so dirty? It’s like he’s been rolling around in the dirt or something.
“Yo, Danny, what happened to your hands?”
Danny startles awake. He’s in front of his locker at school, the small mirror inside reflecting the deep shadows under his eyes making his already sickly looking skin look even worse. The watch he’s taken to wearing everywhere says it’s 7:20 A.M., meaning first period hasn’t started yet.
Tucker waves his hands in front of Danny’s face. “Hello? Earth to Danny, anyone in there?”
Danny quickly shakes his head. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
Tucker drew his brows together in concern. “Your hands, Danny. They look terrible, what did you do to them?”
He looks down at his hands and sees scratches and cuts along the palm that weren’t there before and dirt caked beneath his chipped fingernails.
It’s like he’s been clawing at something in the dirt.
“I…don’t know.”
The ghost attacks are only increasing, or so Danny hears. He still hasn’t actually seen a ghost but the entire town bears the scars of these attacks.
He learns that there’s a few ghost hunting groups that are active—his parents among them—but only one is actually effective. Ironically, it’s another ghost. The media calls him Inviso-bill (which is stupid), but everyone at Casper High just refers to him as the Ghost Boy.
No one knows his actual name. The Ghost Boy disappears from the fight as quickly as he arrives, and the few videos or photos that people manage to capture all turn out blurry or become corrupted in some way.
He seems friendly from what Sam and Tucker say, though his parents just grumble and call the Ghost Boy a menace. Maybe it’d be worth it to try and find this guy and see if he has any clue as to what’s going on with Danny.
It’s in the middle of sorting out his laundry that he finds it: a receipt from the local hardware store showing that he purchased a shovel.
He searches the house from top to bottom but can’t find a shovel anywhere.
His mom slides a note from the school across the table to him. Danny only catches a few words, truancy and missed classes being some of them.
“Danny,” Mom says in that soft saccharine voice that toes the line between concern and disappointment. Her hands cover his and it's only now that Danny realizes how cold his skin is. “Is there something you want to tell us? Are you having trouble at school?”
He doesn’t know what to say. What can he say? That he doesn’t remember skipping? That all he remembers is stepping inside the building and then waking up someplace else.
“My gosh, Danny, you look terrible.” Jazz puts her hand on his forehead, feeling for a temperature. “You don’t have a fever but your skin feels freezing! Maybe you should stay home today.”
Mom and Dad are quick to agree, thoughts of all his previous absences at school far from their minds, and usher Danny off to bed with some hot chicken soup and ten different blankets.
He wakes up six hours later in front of the bathroom sink, his pajamas full of dirt and grass-stains.
Danny’s hand spasms and he drops one of the beakers during his chemistry lab. One of the shards manages to cut a big line across his palm.
The nurse says it’ll probably scar.
“Danno? Where’ve you been, buddy, we were worried sick!” Dad practically carries Danny inside the house, sitting him on the sofa.
“Um…sorry, Dad. I guess I just lost track of time at the library.”
Mom’s stopped pacing around the living room, her arms are crossed, feet tapping impatiently against the plush carpet. “We’ve been calling you for hours!”
Were they? Danny reaches into his pocket and pulls out a broken cellphone. “Sorry, I, um, I accidentally dropped it earlier.”
Jack sighs, carding his fingers through Danny’s hair. “Alright, son, we’ll fix it later, ok. Just…your mom and I are worried. What with the ghost attacks and now all these bodies popping up, I think we’d feel more at ease if you just come straight back home after school ok?”
Danny blinks. “I’m sorry— bodies? What do you mean bodies?”
Apparently these bodies have been front page news in Amity Park for the past couple weeks. Well, people call them bodies but they’re mostly just skeletons. All skeletons with similar bone structure suggestive of a young male, but forensics for some reason aren’t able to date these bodies nor get a good enough DNA sample. All attempts come up corrupted in some way.
People have been looking through cold cases and missing persons reports from the last century to try and pin down the identities of these skeletons.
Freaky, sure, but it’s got nothing to do with him.
“Looks like that scar of yours went away,” Sam remarks.
Danny blinks, looking down at his smooth and unblemished hands. The scar on his palm from when he dropped that beaker isn’t there.
In fact, none of the cuts and scrapes he’s woken up to are there either. It’s like they never happened at all.
“Yeah.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Guess I’m lucky.”
He wonders if this whole thing is some kind of possession. It makes sense, doesn’t it? A ghost takes over his body, shoves his consciousness somewhere in the back of Danny’s mind in the same way Dash likes shoving people into lockers, and only lets Danny out once he’s had his fun.
But why Danny?
And why is it that no one ever notices anything wrong with how he’s acting? I mean, with the exception of the whole skipped classes and bailing on plans bit, most people think that Danny’s been acting the same as he’s always been.
He still hasn’t seen the Ghost Boy either.
Maybe Danny should just bite the bullet and ask his parents for help—
He stubs his toe against something, the dull clang of metal echoing throughout his room. There’s…a handle of some kind sticking out from underneath his bed. He gets on his knees and pulls it out.
It’s a shovel.
The head of it is caked with dirt.
Seven days after he finds the shovel, Danny wakes up inside his room. There’s dirt under his fingernails, and by this point it’s become routine to spend extra time in the bathroom checking his body for additional wounds before scrubbing it clean.
When he goes down to the living room, his parents are standing in front of the T.V. with grim looks on their faces. The normally grinning news anchor’s face is somber as the headline scrolls past the bottom of the screen: ANOTHER BODY FOUND.
This one's fresher than the ones before, apparently. According to official reports, the face of the victim is horrifically mangled, like the flesh has been melted off. The investigators could at least make out a couple distinctive traits; black hair, blue eyes, and a jagged scar running across the palm.
The police have combed through the woods and unearthed more corpses.
There’s a sinking feeling in Danny’s gut as he realizes that the number of bodies coincides with the number of times he’s blacked out.
Danny wakes up in the middle of the woods, a shovel in his hands and dirt staining his clothes. There’s a pit in front of him that’s six-feet deep, loose soil just starting to cover the distinctly body-shaped lump at the bottom.
Bile crawls up his throat and he’s quick to swallow it back down.
Run away is his first instinct, but the curiosity and anxiety that’s been gnawing at him for months demands to be sated. Against his wishes, his legs move closer to the pit, and slowly he clambers down to the very bottom. When he kneels, he tries not to step on any part that feels…fleshy.
He pushes away some of the dirt with his hands, each time slowly uncovering more and more skin. A pale torso, thin shoulders, the pale column of a neck, and then— a mangled, half-melted face with short black hair and glassy blue eyes. It’s the same as the last body.
(Maybe it’s the same as all the bodies they’ve found.)
But despite the state of the face, there’s something about it that’s awfully familiar. The answer is at the tip of Danny’s tongue, and in his intense focus he stoops low enough that he can see his own reflection in the corpse’s eyes.
Oh.
Now Danny remembers where he’s seen this face.
It’s his.