Work Text:
The spraypaint made a satisfying sound as Sam drew its path along the cracked concrete wall. It formed a sloped green line, culminating in a swirl that she finished with a pleased flourish. Despite being illuminated only by a heavy-duty hardware store flashlight, the piece was really coming along.
“Hey, can you do that again?” Tucker asked, holding up his mic. He was sitting on some overturned crates with an elaborate technological setup, half-buried between his laptop and his recording equipment, soundboard and microphone wires. “That same sound. I feel like I can get it even crispier.”
Sam rolled her eyes and turned to him, folding her arms. “I can’t just do it again. The line’s done.”
Green on black so far, and now she was done with the green. Her piece depicted a skull painted large enough to fill up most of the wall. Weaving in and out of the eyeholes and mouth were vivid vines, slowly burying bones. Perfectly eco-goth, the earth reclaiming everything eventually. Now she just needed to add flowers.
“Maybe you could do another, identical line? Also, by the way, I feel like Mr. Bones over there would be happy with even more greenery. Just my unbiased opinion.”
“You can’t name my metaphor Mr. Bones.”
“Just did. C’mon, please? If this is gonna be the best debut noise album on this side of YouTube, the noises need to be, like, actually noisy.”
“You have plenty of noises. Are you sure this isn’t going to be like your foray into techno?”
“That was simply ahead of its time.” (It got 50 listens, a solid 44 of which were from Sam and Tucker themselves. Mostly Tucker.) “This one’s gonna be my breakout hit. You’ll see.”
“I feel like the noise people can tell you still mostly listen to pop. They can smell the mainstream on you, dude.”
“I’m diversifying my listening tastes,” Tucker said, offended.
Sam smiled to herself then picked up a canister of light purple spraypaint, shook it, uncapped it, and sprayed in short, rhythmic bursts. The vines bloomed more the longer she painted. She paused for a moment, wondering if the effect was a little too optimistic, but Tucker frantically waved his hands, so she rolled her eyes and continued. Mr. Bones, so to speak, would be a nice pollination spot for fictional painted bees.
It suited the location. Just on the edge of town, the old lab had been abandoned for around twenty years. Something must’ve happened to get it decommissioned, then its owners never sold it and never came back. Eventually, the forest had slowly started to reclaim it, along with the local community of graffiti writers—though, honestly, not as many as Sam would’ve expected, considering there were still blank walls available at all. She’d cased the place before bringing Tucker here, then asked a writer friend about it just in case there was a good reason to avoid it. Noxious substances or something. (It had been a lab, after all.)
The guy had shrugged and suggested it could be haunted. It’s got a weird vibe, that’s all. Not my kind of place.
As if Sam was going to pass up a canvas like this because of ghosts. Not that she was confident they were fake—she considered herself somewhat ghost-agnostic—but because she didn’t see any reason to fear them, real or not. At seventeen, she’d been doing this for a couple years, and figured by now that dead people probably couldn’t do more damage than alive ones could.
In any case, she’d opted to bring Tucker along. He was chatty enough to fill the ominous silences, at least when he wasn’t stopping to record all the sounds of the place—though they weren’t very noisy in the first place, hence his reliance on the spraypaint to keep his music from sounding like a Halloween movie soundtrack.
Among the sounds he’d recorded were: spraypaint sounds, a drip that neither of them could locate the origin of, the distant hoot of an owl, the whistling noise the wind made through the broken windows, the CLANG of an old pipe (tripped over by accident, repeated purposely afterwards), and a pervasive, recurring static.
It was the static that frustrated Tucker. His tech was mostly secondhand, but he’d fixed it up well enough that it should be working perfectly, or at least that was what he insisted to a dubious Sam. Either his things had gotten broken on the bike ride here, despite his meticulous efforts to keep his bag sufficiently padded, or something in here was causing the sound.
“Fuck,” Tucker muttered, after playing back the last few bursts of paint sounds.
“What?”
“It’s happening again,” he groaned, pressing his headphones to his ears as if the pressure would make them work better. “What’s with this place? It’s not like it’s got any power. There’s nothing here that should be causing interference, I can’t even hear anything weird without these headphones, and yet! My beautiful recordings, soiled. What gives?”
An unfamiliar voice spoke up.
“Maybe it’s the ghosts?”
Sam jumped, and Tucker sure wanted to, though he had enough presence of mind to not send the equipment in his lap flying. He hugged it close instead, slowly turning, wide-eyed, towards the stranger.
A black-haired boy in a white t-shirt, a red, unzipped hoodie, and dirt-stained blue jeans stood by the stairs to the basement level, leaning against the doorframe. It was hard to see his face in the darkness, though he seemed vaguely amused by their surprise. His eyes glinted in the indirect light of the flashlight.
“Who the hell are you?” Sam asked, moving closer to Tucker and keeping her hand tight around the purple spraypaint. She knew it could be a good weapon in a pinch. Though this guy seemed kinda twiggy, and not any older than them, so maybe a good punch would do.
“Just some guy,” he said with a shrug. “Here to appreciate the arts, I guess. I like your painting.”
He didn’t seem like a writer. Didn’t have any paint canisters, to start with. Sam narrowed her eyes.
“Thanks,” she said stiffly.
She glanced down at Tucker, who had abruptly pulled off his headphones with an expression that was not only startled, but baffled, too. Slowly, he put them back on, as if listening for something. Sam wondered if the strange boy noticed him hitting record.
“...But is that really why you’re here?” He looked more like an urban explorer, if anything, though Sam couldn’t see a camera. Sure, you could just explore for the hell of it, but you’d usually bring a camera, wouldn’t you? Maybe it just wasn’t all that visible. “Are you recording or something?”
“Nope,” the boy said. “I’m not gonna rat you out, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
He took a few steps forward, hands lifted in a gesture of peace.
“I’m Danny. Danny Fenton. Now if the cops show up, you can just blame it all on me. Does that help?”
Something felt vaguely familiar about the name, though Sam couldn’t place it. Still, she lowered her paint can. There was something unsettling about the kid, but she had to admit that she couldn’t really see any way he’d be a threat to her. They outnumbered him, after all. Worst case scenario, they could shove him over then run.
“Call me Spider,” Sam said. She usually signed her works with a spider in the corner. Maybe he wouldn’t tell anyone—she was starting to suspect he was just a runaway, sleeping here or something—but she wasn’t dumb enough to give her real name while actively doing something technically illegal.
Tucker blinked then glared at her. “You didn’t tell me I needed a cool name,” he hissed.
“You don’t.”
“Yeah, well. I’m… Uh… FryerTuck.”
That was his username in Doomed. Sam dragged her hand down her face.
“Tuck?” Danny repeated.
“Shit.”
“Whatever,” Sam huffed. “This is stupid, anyway. We were just leaving, right? So we’ll get out of your way.”
She turned to sign the piece with a little purple spider, then capped the paint and shoved it in her bag. Tucker was holding a hand over one of his headphones, frowning, before moving to start putting his equipment away. When they looked up, Danny was standing a little bit closer.
“Wait,” he said.
“Jeez, you’re quiet on your feet,” Sam muttered, willing herself not to flinch.
“Sorry.” Danny rubbed anxiously at his arm. “It’s just—Look. I don’t know a lot of people, not anymore. And you guys seem alright, so can you just… help me with something? It’ll be quick, promise.”
“If you need food, I can just give you a few bucks.”
He shook his head. “Not that. I… lost something in here. Haven’t been able to find it, no matter how many times I come back. You have a pretty good flashlight. Could you help me look?”
Sam hesitated. The more she looked at him, the more harmless he seemed. He seemed scared, almost. Worried.
Lonely, maybe.
If he lived here, he must be pretty short on friends. Something in Sam’s chest twisted at the thought.
“Well… I guess we have time—”
Tucker grabbed her hand. “Hey, Sam, uh… Can I talk to you?”
“Uh…”
“Alone?”
Sam looked at Danny, who was staring at her apprehensively, then at Tucker, who was doing the same.
“...Yeah, okay. Sorry, uh… Can you give us a second?”
Danny’s mouth twisted slightly. “Sure. No rush.”
He stepped back through the door he’d come from, disappearing into the darkened hallway.
Tucker had been grinning awkwardly, though his face fell to match the fear in his eyes as soon as the stranger was out of sight.
“I was recording that,” he whispered. “You wanna know what it sounded like?”
“What? Seriously, Tucker? You’re worried about the noises right now?”
Tucker huffed, pressing the headphones to her ear. “Just listen.”
Are you recording or something? Her own voice was there on the recording pretty plainly. But where she remembered Danny speaking next—
—pure static. Loud enough to hurt.
Sam pushed the headphones away, shaken. “What was that?”
Tucker stared out the open doorway. Beyond the glow of the flashlight, it was dark enough that you couldn’t see anything at all. Not the opposite wall, and certainly not Danny, who was nothing more than a shape against it.
“I don’t know,” he whispered.
Sam followed his gaze for a moment, before shaking her head, willing away the goosebumps that had formed down her arms.
“Okay, this is stupid,” she whispered back, hoping it was quiet enough that Danny wouldn’t hear. “He’s just some kid. We can help him find his whatever-he-lost then get the hell out of here.”
“We’re still helping him?”
“I said I would. I’m not gonna go back on that. It’d be a dick move, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, sure. And while we’re at it, let’s buy that house together, you know, the one the serial killer lived in? It’s such a great price, so full of personality, and we can just put a rug over all the old bloodstains in the wood!”
“Tucker.”
“I’m just saying, if one of us is gonna be the one that dies first in the horror movie, I am not letting it be me.”
Sam rolled her eyes, then shouldered her bag and started moving towards the door. “You’re just making the whole thing sound cooler, you know. Did you forget I’m goth?”
Tucker let out a long-suffering groan, but pulled his bag over his shoulder as well. “If I have to run, I’m not coming back for you.”
“And the earth will retake me, just like Mr. Bones.”
When they made it to the hallway, Danny was nowhere to be seen. Sam looked around, shining her flashlight, until she noticed something in the corner of her vision. Something glowing a sickly shade of green.
She swung the flashlight, and Danny, who had been standing at the bottom of the stairs below, flinched to cover his eyes.
“Jeez, watch where you’re pointing that thing!” he exclaimed, voice cracking in a way that was entirely nonthreatening.
Sam relaxed, lowering the flashlight.
“Sorry. We’re coming down.”
Tucker glared at her, but the two made their way down side by side, anyway.
The stairs creaked as they walked, announcing their presence to the place in a way Danny seemed to be able to avoid doing. Sam supposed it made sense—if you were living on the run, you had to learn how to be quiet. As she passed by, she noticed something she hadn’t on her way up. Faded outlines making rectangular ghosts along the wall, tiny holes where nails used to be. Maybe photos had been hanging there once. It seemed like an odd detail for a lab, more suited to somewhere lived-in.
Danny was standing with his arms crossed, eyes fixed on an old football some other teenage trespasser must have left on the floor. He glanced back at them every so often, before looking away. He seemed dorkier the longer Sam looked at him.
She put her hands on her hips, projecting extra confidence if only to make Tucker feel better about the whole thing. “Okay, so. We’re gonna help you, but you have to tell us what you’re looking for, first. I’m not searching for some unidentified thing.”
“Oh, yeah. Uh.” Danny rubbed the back of his neck, looking a little embarrassed. “It’s my thermos.”
Huh. Sam blinked. Maybe he really was just hungry.
“A thermos? Really?” Tucker frowned. “What’s in it?”
“It’s empty right now. It’s more about… Well. It was from my parents.” Danny fidgeted with a drawstring on his hoodie, repeatedly wrapping it around his pointer finger before letting it fall. If he was avoiding looking at them before, he was doing it even more now. “Things were kind of weird between us before I… y’know. I’d really hate to lose it now.”
“Oh.” The knot of apprehension in Sam’s stomach loosened, replaced with something else. “Well, alright. Shouldn’t be too hard to find, right, Tucker?”
Tucker hesitated for a moment, then sighed. “...Yeah. I guess we can help out.”
It was still hard to see his face without shining the flashlight directly at him, but Sam could make out Danny’s sheepish smile in the darkness.
“Thanks. I owe you one.”
He gestured for them to follow him, then disappeared into one of the adjoining rooms.
Sam’s flashlight illuminated the room as she entered it, revealing an overturned table and an open, powered-off fridge stained with a green substance Sam could only assume was some kind of mold or algae. The floor had been tiled once, though many of them were cracked and broken by now. Maybe it had been a break room. Danny was crouched down to look under the overturned furniture, mostly blocking him from view.
“Hey, so…” As Sam swept her light around the room, she kept finding herself drawn back to Danny. “Aside from finding your stuff, is there anything we can do to help you? Like… more permanently? I know a couple youth shelters back in town, if you wanted their numbers. They might have some space.”
Danny looked up, then let out a soft laugh, shaking his head.
“Nah, don’t worry. I’m where I need to be right now. Not that there’s anything you could do to help me at this point, anyway. Nice of you to try, though.”
“What do you mean?” Tucker asked. “I mean… You’re hanging out in a place like this.”
“So are you,” Danny pointed out.
“...Got me there.”
“But there’s gotta be something, right?” Sam asked, feeling more determined now. “Your life’s not over, y’know. Whatever happened with your parents, there are people who can help you figure things out.”
Danny was quiet for a moment, then smiled ruefully and turned his face away from the light.
“I think I like you guys. Maybe we just take it one step at a time, okay?”
“...Right.” Sam sighed, then looked at Tucker, who shrugged. “Thermos first.”
They searched the room, but nothing turned up, aside from some recently discarded beer bottles, test tubes that looked about as old as the cracked tiles, and a broken old device that looked a little like a remote but even Tucker couldn’t properly identify. No thermos.
“I don’t think it’s here,” Tucker said. He’d placed his equipment bag in the corner and was crouched beside it, looking exhausted. Sam wasn’t sure what time it was anymore, but it must be pretty late. “You wanna look somewhere else?”
“Maybe,” Sam said, then sighed and looked over to Danny. “Danny?”
Danny was standing in the corner, looking out through an open doorway that somehow neither Sam nor Tucker had noticed before. The door was hanging ajar, almost off its hinges, and beyond it was nothing but an inky blackness. When Sam shone her flashlight at it, she couldn’t see anything past Danny’s back.
“Might be down here,” he said into the emptiness.
“Oh, no way,” Tucker muttered, but made his way to Sam’s side anyway. “Are you kidding me?”
“We could take a look,” Sam offered.
“Sam. No. Look at that thing. Have you seen Monster House? It’s screaming Monster House.”
“It isn’t. It doesn’t even have teeth.”
“Sam.”
Danny headed down the stairs into the dark.
Before Sam could make it more than a few steps after him, Tucker reached out and took her hand.
“Seriously, listen to me,” he said urgently. “I don’t think we should go down there.”
“What gives, Tucker?” She turned to face him. “How is this any different than spraypainting upstairs? You weren’t afraid of that. Why is this so much worse?”
“I don’t know, it’s just…” He glanced back at his bag of recording equipment, then shuddered. “It’s just this feeling. I didn’t notice it when we first got here, but something’s off. I know my tech. That sound wasn’t coming from my mic. It’s this place. It’s…”
He trailed off, staring at the empty space where Danny had just been.
Sam huffed, then pulled herself out of his grip. “Well I’m not gonna let him go down there by himself. I don’t think he has anybody else. If there really is something dangerous about this place, do you want him to have to face it alone?”
Tucker bit his lip, then sighed. “No.”
“Then c’mon.” She started walking again.
“Wait.”
Sam groaned. “What?”
“If we’re doing this, then we should at least stick together. Safety in numbers.” Tucker offered his hand once more.
She shot him a dry look. “Thought you said you weren’t gonna come back for me if we have to run?”
“I could still make good on that,” he threatened, but she knew him well enough to know it was a lie.
Sam rolled her eyes, but smiled anyway, then took his hand. Together, they walked on into the dark, a two-person chain heading down the steps to nowhere. It reminded Sam of a portal to the underworld, almost. Tucker was behind her, holding her hand, a reversed tale of Eurydice leading Orpheus down into the gloom. Or maybe she should pick a different metaphor—that one hadn’t ended so well for the people involved.
“Danny?” she called out. “Wait for us. Can you even see down there?”
There was no response.
Down below, something was glowing a faint green. She couldn’t identify what it was, or even how long the stairs were supposed to be. As she moved her flashlight to try to get a better look, however—
—the steps crumbled under her feet.
She shrieked and pitched down into the darkness, the flashlight flying from her hand and tumbling out of sight, sending light and shadows swinging violently around the space. Tucker, to his credit, managed to hold onto her, but could only delay her fall for a few desperate seconds before he was dragged down with her.
They landed in a heap on top of an old shelf, which cracked underneath them and fell to pieces, sending boxes of old surgical gloves scattering all over the floor along with Sam and Tucker themselves. With how vast the space had seemed from above, Sam was shocked they hadn’t broken any bones, but the fall had only lasted a second or so. It wasn’t as far down as it seemed.
“Holy hell,” Sam breathed, pulling herself up and quickly moving to help Tucker as well. “Are you okay?”
“Great, aside from the agony of being right,” Tucker mumbled, anxiously pulling splinters from his sweater.
He was shaking a little. Sam couldn’t say she was faring any better after that.
“God.” Sam dragged her hands down her face. “At least we didn’t fall on top of Danny. Danny? Can you say something, please?”
Something moved on the other side of the room. A metallic clink, followed by something rolling to a stop in front of some unidentified rubble. As Sam retrieved the flashlight from where it had fallen nearby, Tucker went to investigate.
“Well, at least there’s that,” he muttered, nudging the thing with his foot. “Think I finally found the stupid thermos.”
The room, while large, was wildly cluttered. Shapes loomed in the darkness, unidentified piles of discarded things. As Sam swung the flashlight over to where Tucker indicated, both of them froze.
Taking up the far wall were massive blast doors, wrenched mostly ajar to reveal the yawning gap behind it. A void in the world lined in metal. If the basement door had been a creature’s mouth, this one belonged to the monster that could eat it whole. And yet, it was filled with rubble, blocked by a cave-in from the ceiling within it. But Sam and Tucker barely registered any of these details, fixated instead on the small, shattered thing caught in the flashlight’s beam like an accusation.
A small human arm poking out from underneath the rubble. Limp, broken, pale. Dead.
“Oh my god.” Tucker clapped his hand over his mouth. “That’s… Is that…?”
Something moved behind them. Two lights in the darkness, glowing green.
“Oh, good,” Danny said. “You found it for me.”
He moved past them, disturbing none of the rubble he stepped across until he was right in front of the body. He reached down, gingerly picking up the thermos and wiping the dust off of it. Then he looked up, and for a moment Sam could’ve sworn his eyes were reflective, like an animal caught on a trail camera. But then the moment passed and he was just a normal boy again, grinning like nothing was wrong here at all.
“There’s…” Sam found herself, for one of the few times in her life, entirely wordless. “Behind you.”
“Oh, yeah. Awkward.” He laughed sheepishly, like they’d just caught him singing ABBA in the shower. He laughed like they were anywhere else, like any other universe where they could’ve been normal friends sharing an inside joke. He laughed in a way that made Sam want to believe in that, like she could, if she kept her gaze away from the floor below. “The good thing is that by next month, you’ll know this was just a weird nightmare you had. It won’t be real to you anymore, and that’s… fine, I guess, if it makes you feel better. It’s how it usually goes.”
“What do you mean?” Tucker whispered, staring at his face if only so he didn’t have to look at the rubble.
“Don’t worry about it too much.” He shrugged, then smiled in a way that was warm but tinted by something else. Something sad. Lonely, maybe. “Just… Thanks, Tuck. Thanks, Sam. I really do owe you one.”
Sam wanted to say something, anything, as if there was any question that could span across everything she was thinking. Mostly, she wanted to know how he knew her name.
But then, impossibly, the lights in this dead building turned on. Only for a second, only enough to briefly blind Sam and Tucker, enough to get them to shut their eyes and step back.
By the time they were able to see again, Danny was gone.
Not sure what else to do, Sam moved forward and began pulling the rubble away from the body. Tucker moved to help. Somehow, they both knew what they were about to see. Somehow, they both knew that the corpse’s face—however coated in decay, however empty the eyes—would be familiar.
—
AMITY PARK ANGLE
Mystery Unfolds Surrounding Body of Missing Teen
October 27, 2024 - By Harriet Chin
Late last week, an anonymous police tip led to the discovery of a teenage boy’s body in the basement of an abandoned lab building formerly known as FentonWorks. The building was decommissioned in 2004 following an unspecified accident, the details of which have never been publicized, and has been sitting vacant ever since. Late Friday night, it was reported that DNA analysis had identified the body as that of missing teen Danny Fenton, son of Jack and Maddie Fenton, the building’s former owners.
The results were met with immediate scrutiny, for simple reasons: Danny Fenton was reported missing at the age of 14 in 2004, following the incident that led to the lab’s closure. The state of the body showed only weeks of decay, rather than twenty years. Further tests were ordered to attempt to determine the nature of the error and pinpoint the deceased boy’s true identity.
By Saturday morning, however, the body was reported missing.
Due to the bizarre details of the case, many have dismissed it as an elaborate hoax, though authorities have yet to determine any further information.
Jack and Maddie Fenton could not be reached for comment.