Ghost Hunter: CyberNerf (Alternative Draft)

Chapter 8

Ned's eyes were squeezed tight, and he was shaking his head to keep the terrible grating sound out of his head.

"Hey, Ned! You just locked me in this dusty old place." It was Dan's voice.

Wait! What? Dan's voice?

Ned dropped his hands from his ears. "Dan?"

"Yes, man, come on, let me through. The air in here feels like... hell, there is no air."

Dan popped the bar out of its catch and opened the little door.

"BOO!" Dan burst out and waved the baseball glove in his little brother's face. "You should've seen the look on your face!" Dan was laughing. "Pretty cool noise I made there, huh?" He held up the hammer Ned had dropped near the egress window.

Ned glared at Dan. "How did you get up here?"

"I followed you and figured out you were headed up here, so I snuck in before you. Boy, it was worth it."

Ned was too angry to say anything.

Dan stopped laughing and said, "Why did you come up here with dad's toolkit? Did he ask you to board up those cracks?"

Ned suddenly saw through the prank. He pursed his mouth as he got redder. "I came here because of the game, Dan."

"Game?"

"You don't know?" Ned spoke with sarcasm. "How could you not know about your own game?"

"Cut it out and tell me what," Dan said with an impatient smack of the glove over Ned's shoulder.

Anger mixed in with disappointment on Ned's face. "But you know what? It was awfully clever to get me up here while you shut yourself into that chest and waited."

"Listen, I know I may have gone a little too far," Dan gave a playful smack of the glove on his brother's chest. "Even though it was a great prank," Dan winked.

"So you are playing the same video game as me!"

"I'm not! I told you I don't like being in that...zone." The last word hooted out of Dan's mouth.

"You're lying. It was you who messaged me not the secret online player."

"Yeah? Well, in case you haven't thought, you need to subscribe to that silly game to be able to do anything like that." Dan jammed his hands upon his waist. "And I never had a subscription neither do I want to have one."

"Let's find out," Ned said and fished out his phone.

Dan laced his arms across his chest and waited. Ned logged into his CyberNerf account and sent a message. It hardly took more than a minute for the Neighborhood Watch to flash online and message back.

Ned looked up at Dan. Dan snapped his arms out of their crossed pose and held them open, silently asking what.

Ned nodded as if he'd made a discovery of immense importance.

"Could I have the honor of knowing what goes inside the exceptional thoughts of the ghost hunter?" Dan said. "The ghost hunter who ran for his life from a chest about to fall to pieces?"

Ned looked sheepishly at Dan. "It wasn't you."

"Thank you for believing what I tell you for once."

"But no more pranks, alright? The least you could do was leave me alone, if you can't understand what it is I'm trying to do." Ned was angry again. Can't believe I was falling for it all this time. I'm going to delete that stupid game once and for all, Ned swore to himself in a huff.

"Hey! I got a great idea!" Dan said as Ned turned away to gather the tools scattered on the attic floor.

"To do what?" Ned grumbled without looking up.

"I didn't mean to scare you out of your pants, so let's hit the backyard and have a match on the trampoline. You up for it?"

Ned paused, suddenly excited at the prospect. "You mean...?"

"Yes! Care to see who gives up back-flipping first?" Dan gave Ned a raffish grin.

"Let's do it!"

"I'll beat you on a single leg, ghost hunter!" Dan clamored as they both rushed to the trap door and freed the ladder.

"You wish!" Ned's eyes flashed as he came back at his brother and waited for Dan to let himself down.

Dan hopped off the last rung and looked up to see Ned extend a leg on to the top of the ladder. Suddenly Ned was thrown off balance. The hinges of the trap door moaned, snapping it shut like a jaw trapping prey.

Ned jumped to his feet and tried opening the trap door. "Dan! I told you no more pranks!"

Dan heard his brother wrestle with the drop-down ladder and yelled. "I didn't do it."

"It's jammed!" Ned shouted in panic.

"Stop messing around and just come down, okay?" Dan answered from below.

Ned pulled at the latch in the ladder with all his might but failed to budge it. Sweat broke over his face and he felt like a mouse fighting a trap that's already done its job.

He tried one last time and let go, panting. Wait! Something inside the attic. Had he seen something glowing in there?

He stumbled over the ladder in the narrow passage and crept up to the open knee-wall. In one corner of the attic, he saw something upright under a white sheet. Another glow throbbed under it. Ned felt his heart thudding in his ear.

It was no ghost, he finally decided. It was something solid under that sheet.

He heard voices of his father and sister below in the hallway. They were asking Dan what was going on. Soon he heard his little siblings Joan and Jeff running around calling his name.

The glow came again and before Ned knew it he was walking up to it and pulling the sheet away, revealing a mirror. He sighed with relief until it glowed once more. In that glow he saw something moving. It grew bigger with each successive glow. Ned started to retreat in rising horror as the shape became clearer. Like an inky slur swimming in water, bloating up.

His skin felt brittle and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as the thickening slur snowballed into a large, shadowy, humanoid figure which then hunkered out of the glass surface and stepped into the attic. It was covered in a long, thick hide of some kind. Two glowing dots in its head told Ned the thing was staring at him. Its oversized arms hung limp at its sides.

A big bat flew close to it and lighted near its feet. The figure stooped and touched the bat and it immediately stiffened. Its monkey-like head twitched at an unnatural angle and it painfully thrashed a black wing before tumbling on to its side. Ned knew it had died under the touch of this monster. The little pup he had seen earlier would no more be seeing its mama, Ned thought.

Whatever the thing had on its mind, having emerged from its murky resting place inside the glowing mirror, it surely wasn't going to give Ned a pat on his back and say hello. It took a step toward Ned and the only place for the ghost hunter to go now was back into the cramped passage where the trap door blocked his exit.

Ned bolted through the knee-wall and narrowly missed the lightning sweep of one seemingly sluggish arm as it tried to grab Ned.