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When Jyn climbed in the the van and heard the song from the radio, she sent up a howl to rival Wolfman Jack's. "No! No. Switch it. Switch the fucking station. Bad enough I'm coming along on this, you can't make me listen to Top 40."
"This is the only station that comes in clearly on the back roads," Kay said, pulling out of her apartment complex with a slight screech of tires.
"Then play a fucking 8 track, do I have to think of everything?" She pointed at the radio, where Paul Anka was crooning to some poor girl having his baby. "If you make me listen to that slop, someone's going out the window. Might be me, might not."
"Oh, and I suppose your hooligan music is better?"
"Hooligan? You sound like my gran." She dug a Black Sabbath cartridge out of her bag and shook it at Kay in the rearview mirror. "This is music. That's just pap."
"That is noise," Kay said disdainfully.
"Better than - "
"Nkay," Cassian broke in. He spit out the penlight he was holding in his mouth. "Okay, okay. Kay, either change the station or let Jyn pick something out of your collection."
Jyn looked down at the crate of 8-tracks under the driver's seat, neatly arranged and alphabetized. Without reading the titles or artists, she knew the situation was dire.
She looked up again and met Kay's eyes in the rearview mirror. A silent, seething agreement was reached.
Kay switched off the radio.
"Okay," Cassian muttered, going back to the map spread over the dashboard. "Kay, have you got the route? You need it again?"
"I've memorized the route, thank you very much," Kay said haughtily.
If Jyn could have come up with a new snarky remark for that, she would have. But Kay always memorized the route, and her snark had lost its bite. She saved it for other topics.
She was strictly not allowed to smoke in Kay's van - weirdo - so Jyn crossed her arms on the back of the bench seat, leaning forward. "What've you found this time?"
Cassian turned his head toward her. This close, she could smell his cologne. "Scarif House," he said. "Built about 1870, abandoned by the original family in the 20s after six people died in one night."
"Shit," she commented.
"It's been through several more owners in the past fifty years, but nobody's ever managed to move in successfully."
"What's chased them away?" Other than the suspicious deaths.
He rummaged in a fat accordion folder and handed back a fistful of newspaper clippings. She dug her lighter out of her jeans and flipped through them by its flickering light.
Strange lights, cold drafts, eerie noises. Your standard haunted-house package. Apparently scary enough to chase off seven different owners.
She paused at one report of recurrent bloody nightmares. Bodies in the bathtub, filled with gore instead of bubbles. Disembodied heads drifting through the halls. Screams in the night. That was new. The woman claimed to be psychic, so maybe it was on the level.
No wonder Cassian wanted to see it.
"Do not light those on fire," Cassian and Kay said at the same time, for different reasons.
With both hands occupied, she couldn't flip the bird, but she shot a sneer toward the front seats. Still, she kept the lighter well away from the paper. Cassian spent half his paycheck making copies of old newspapers.
The last clipping was a copy of an ancient article on the gruesome murders in Scarif House. She scanned it. Five men, one woman, all dead in a mess of blood and viscera on the same night in 1924. Police searched but found nothing. Murders still unsolved.
"Fifty years ago tonight," she said, staring holes in Cassian's neck.
"What better time?"
She flicked the lighter off. "You have a really strange definition of 'better time,' Andor."
They stopped to pick up Bodhi Rook, the fourth member of their unlikely crew, and he climbed in. "Is that where we're going tonight?" he asked, sliding in next to Jyn, his cords scraping against the naugahyde seat.
Jyn passed him some of the clippings. He angled them toward the light of a streetlight as they paused at a red. "Gruesome murders," he sighed. "Why is it always gruesome murders?"
"Because nobody ever became a ghost who died peacefully in their bed surrounded by friends and family," Jyn said caustically.
"True," Kay said, "in that nobody ever became a ghost, period."
Jyn made an anatomically impossible suggestion, and then added, "If this is some old asshole in a sheet again, trying to drive down the price so he can buy it to build a ski resort or some shit, I'm never coming on one of these again."
"You always say that and you never follow through," Kay said.
"I actually prefer when it's some old asshole in a sheet," Bodhi said peaceably. "Better than actual ghosts."
"Ghosts do not exist," Kay said.
Jyn snorted.
"Ghosts haven't been proven to exist," Cassian said. "Yet."
"They exist all right," Jyn said. "That's why I come along, to kick their ectoplasmic asses." She bumped the toe of her Doc Martens against the woven bag next to her feet. Salt, holy water, iron, and when all else failed, her trusty lighter.
"Which service hasn't been required," Kay said, "because they don't exist." He turned off the main road and onto a dirt road that rattled the van and everyone in it.
Jyn raised her voice to be heard. "Just for that, pal, I'm going to let you get possessed. See how you like spitting up pea soup and crab-walking backward up stairs."
"That's demons," Bodhi said helpfully. "Like the movie."
"Another thing that doesn't exist," Kay said.
While they squabbled, Cassian flicked through his beloved notebook and the clippings, the penlight back in his mouth. When they got there, he'd be beyond prepared, ready to tell them what had happened and where.
When they pulled up in front of the house nearly an hour later, Jyn hopped out to get a good look.
The house loomed over their heads, dark and decrepit. Several window were broken out, shutters dangled, and the wraparound porch was more holes than boards. Something creaked in the wind, and off in the woods, a bird screeched.
It certainly looked fucking haunted. Almost too perfectly.
She dug in her bag for her cigarettes and her lighter, and took a deep drag, staring at the house with narrowed eyes.
The guys were around back of the van, unloading the equipment. Kay put his head around the door. "Aren't you the bra-burning feminist? You could help."
She flipped him off. "I've got my equipment," she said, slapping the bag at her hip. "You're the ones who need all that technology."
Cassian came forward with a milk crate full of the gadgets that he always brought along, hoping to record something. "What do you think?" he asked.
She looked back up at the house, and thought, It's like a haunted house from a movie.
In her years with Saw, she'd tangled with a lot of ghosts. She'd even seen some running around with this crew, although never where Kay or Cassian could get a glimpse. Which was too bad, because she wanted to prove Kay wrong, almost as much as she wanted to prove Cassian right.
She hadn't seen many ghosts in such a precisely haunted-looking location, though, and that set her bullshit meter off.
She met Cassian's eyes again. His were full of hope and anticipation. Maybe this time, they said. Maybe this time it won't be some old asshole in a sheet trying to drive the price down.
"Maybe," she said. "Let's get in there and see."
"That's the spirit," he said, grinning.
She suppressed the urge to grin back. He hoisted his crate and started toward the front door.
"Can't believe you dragged me into this again," she grumbled at his back.
"You're so full of shit," Bodhi said, stepping up next to her with his own crate of tech.
She narrowed her eyes at him.
"You'd do anything for him," Bodhi said. "Everyone knows it, too."
Jyn felt her face go hot. "Shut up, Bodes."
He grinned, unoffended, and headed in Cassian's wake.
She glared up at the house. "If this is some old asshole in a sheet again, I swear I'm going to break both his legs."
FINIS