Sharika sighed, drumming her fingers impatiently on the iron gate as she waited for Alex to finish doing whatever the frig it was he was doing. From the look of it, he was just crouching by one of the tombstones and not doing much of ANYTHING...
"Alex, c'MON!" she whined. "I wanna eat!"
"No! No, be quiet! Be quiet!" he fidgeted, waving a hand frantically at her. "I gotta start over now..." He once again resumed his silence as Sharika set her jaw in annoyance and then pricked her ears, catching faint traces of mumble on the cemetary's still air but not able to make out anything coherant. She didn't like this place...it wasn't the idea that it was full of dead people because what could dead people do? It was moreso that it was quiet, it was boring, it stunk like dirt, flowers, and mold that the groundskeeper had already yelled at her for digging in. Not to mention they had been there for THREE HOURS while Alexander had wandered around with his plethora of devices, testing this and recording that.
"AL-EEEEX!" she complained again as her stomach tightened and rumbled. Even having matured, she wasn't much for patience.
The peacock sighed in aggravation, taking a deep breath as he struggled not to yell at the wild dog to please shut up and let him do this. Didn't she understand? It was a must, or who KNEW what sorts of things would follow him home? Maybe SHE was okay with ectoplasm in her morning cereal and orbs zipping around in front of the mirrors, but HE wasn't! Calming himself, he began the closing prayer a third time.
"In the name of Jesus Christ, I command all human spirits to be bound to the confines of the cemetery. I command all inhuman spirits to go where Jesus Christ tells you to go, for it is He who commands you." On earth, this prayer held more bearing as the option was only human or inhuman. Gaia, it seemed a bit muddy as humans were, by and large, a minority compared to all of the other species that called it home. However, given the options, Alex felt it better to recite an imperfect prayer than take chances altering it and having it backfire. He pauesd, waiting to see if Sharika would interrupt again. "...Amen."
There. Now they could leave. He cast one last spastic look about himself, making sure that all of the tombstones were where they belonged and that no stray spectres or skeletons were looming in his immediate vicinity, and then bolted for the gate where Sharika was waiting.
"You're such a spazzoid." she told him, not without its good nature as they began to walk back in the direction of the neighborhood. "Howcome you go to graveyards if they scare you?"
"I'm not scared!" he insisted. A wind moaned through the branches of the trees overhead, making the boughs sigh and sway as a startled little cry escaped him and made him shrink back. "I'm just careful! If you aren't careful, don't you know that's when They'll get you?"
"When who'll get you?" Sharika inquired, absently reaching up to poke a finger in one of her ears and scratch an itch. Classy.
"You know...! THEM!" he said, his eyes darting back and forth conspiritorially and his voice dropping to a whisper. "Sometimes They bug the family pets, did you know that? They put little cobweb recievers up their noses and they can hear everything that goes on in the house!" He made a hasty mental note to himself to check both Logarth and Vermatrix's noses when they got back home....it was the only way to be safe.
Sharika and Alexander didn't spend very much quality time together, which most would find odd for two people who not only lived under the same roof but were supposed to be playing at being brother and sister. Now that they had spent the day together, at Felix and Ajhira's urging, it was apparant WHY they never spent time together...they were far too different. Sharika's idea of a productive afternoon was injesting vast quantities of sugar and then burning off the resulting rush by tearing around the neighborhood and backyard like a mad woman and digging a series of ditches with Logarth. Alex, on the other hand, considered a day complete if he was able to listen to the hours of tape he'd recorded in his closet the night before and hear anything that remotely resembled a word. Same house, two different worlds.
"I'm gonna grab a drink at the corner store, you got any money?" she asked, rummaging eagerly in her pocket for a handful of change. Alex looked at her horrified.
"Don't you know what they put IN that stuff??" he asked.
"Uhh...sugar?"
"And chemicals that make rats get cancer!" he yelped. Sharika grinned. "Its not FUNNY!!"
"Okay, okay, so what did we just spend all that time in the graveyard for anyway?" she asked, watching the sun as it set beyond the distant line of trees that bordered the edge of the neighborhood. His expression shifted from one of spastic annoyance to eagerness that someone actually had asked about his studies for a change as he rummaged in the pockets of his trenchcoat to fumble out his tape recorder.
"Well, at first I wanted to test the supernatural activity in the graveyard because I thought maybe it could be tied in to the disturbances I've felt in the house."
"We have disturbances?" she asked, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her jeans.
"YES! I've been telling you all but none of you will listen! How ELSE do you think all of dad's stuff got covered in shaving cream that night? Why ELSE do you think all of the cereal in the cupboard was all over the floor that one morning? Something's living in that house and its NOT HAPPY!"
"Uhhh...." well, at least his explanation sounded better than what had really happened -- she'd wanted to see how much shaving cream they COULD fit in one of those little cans and Logarth had tried to serve himself breakfast while she was busy with that.
"Anyway, I took some readings, and they were through the roof!" he went on. "So I decided while I was there, I may as well try and take some recordings too and ask the spirits why they were so restless." He held up his little silver tape recorder, a streetlight popping on just in time to illuminate it in a comically-holy way. "I'm gonna stay up late tonight and listen through them since we don't have class tomorrow."
"Kay, you can do that. I've got a party I'm supposed to go to after dinner." Alex's wings wilted a bit at this and he fell silent, as though all of his happy findings and research withered and died in the presense of something as simple as being invited to a party, which he never had been. "Izzat what you were doing when I wanted to leave?"
"Huh?"
"Making recordings." she said, unaware of his momentary upset.
"Oh!" he immediately perked up again. "No, I was trying to say the closing prayer."
"The WHAT?" Her ears pricked as she looked at him like he'd grown a second head.
"You have to!" he told her, quickening his step until he was in front of her walking backwards so he wasn't talking to the back of her head. "You have to say a prayer before you go in and before you leave so that you don't upset anything! That's what all the good ghosthunters tell you!"
"I thought prayers were for like....gods, and stuff. Not ghosts." she said, a smile creeping back onto her face. He was funny.
His face, however, remained serious.
"If you don't say a closing prayer, ANYTHING could follow you back! Ghosts, spirits, angels, maybe even demons! You have to tell them to stay, or sometimes they won't and you'll bring them home with you." He momentarily corrected his walking frontwards again as they reached the drainage ditch that bordered the first residential street of their neighborhood and the two of them clambered down the side, wading through the mess of leaves and trash, before scrambling up the opposite bank back onto the pavement.
"They'd just come home with you, huh?" Sharika asked, trying not to laugh.
"YES!"
"So you mean I could turn around right now and see a ghost with his suitcases following us back?" It may as well have been some sort of game to her, with the amount of joy she was taking from it.
"Sharika, I'm serious! Its no laughing matter if a--" he broke off, looking fixatedly at something behind her, seeming to pale beneath his lustrous feathers.
"What?" she asked, still grinning. When he didn't answer, the smile slipped a notch or two. "What? What's wrong?"
"Run." he told her, eyes growing as bit as saucers behind his glasses.
"Huh?"
"RUN!!" he repeated, turning on his heel and pounding down the pavement. Sharika continued to walk, quirking a brow at him. Geez, what a weirdo. You'd think he'd seen a--
At that moment, she chose to look over her shoulder, and immediately felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. Something had been following them. Something white...and floating that was hovering about twenty feet behind her, twisting and bobbing with the wind. Oh holy CRAPCAKES, Alex had been right...!! Feeling her hackles bristle beneath her shirt, Sharika broke into a dead run as well, easily catching up with the peacock DCorp.
"What is it??" Alex squealed.
"I dunno!" she yelled back as the two of them sprinted, panicking, up the sidewalk. "You said that prayer thingie would keep them at the graveyard!!"
"It was supposed to!!" tears were forming in his eyes from both fright and the wind that whipped at them.
Behind them, the white floating spectre kept steady pace, always remaining a solid twenty feet behind them as it drifted lazily on the buffets of wind.
"Its still THERE!" Sharika wailed, her heart beginning to pound. Her own fear was feeding off of Alex's and whipping itself into a frenzy of terror.
"We gotta get home...!" he panted raggedly as they ducked up a sidestreet. "I need...I need to bless the doorway and ward it off...!!"
"Bless the doorway?? Are you retarded or something??"
The ghost continued to follow.
"Its our only chance!!" he wheezed, starting to lag behind. Sharika, in much better shape than he was, seized his arm and dragged him behind her as they sprinted the rest of the distance to the house.
The white thing followed them straight up the driveway as much yelling scrambling, and clawing ensued to get the front door open as the two of them bolted into the house and slammed the door shut.
"Jus' a minute...I gotta..." Alex was gasping, unable to finish his sentence. His eyes were bright and glittery with the look of a madman as he fumbled in his pockets before losing patience with that and tearing the trenchcoat from his back, turning it upside down and shaking it frantically, all manner of things spilling from the pockets until a small leatherbound book bounced off the toe of his shoe and skidded across the floor.
He seized it up, clutching it in his hands as though it was his very salvation and began to flip through its pages frantically until he paused, placing one shaking and juttering finger on a particular passage.
"In the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost, I command you to STOP!" he rasped through a dry and heaving throat as he pointed at the closed front door. His tail, incensed by by the threat of what was on the other side, fanned itself to its full spindly span, the long evenescent eyed feathers trembling and rattling.
"Alex...?"
"Bless this doorway, bless this home, it is watched under the eyes of the lord--"
"Alex?"
"--and you are not welcome past its threshold! Return to where you came from and do not--"
"ALEX!"
"WHAT??" he demanded, turning away to look at Sharika reproachfully. Still panting and bedraggled, she was holding something in her hands. It was a white and tattered shopping bag who's handles had become entangled with string....about twenty feet of it which looped in a mess on the floor and seemed to be stuck to the bottom of her shoe at its opposite end. For a moment, the only noise was their duet of heavy breathing.
"It was just trash..." she said quietly, the corners of her mouth twitching. "Just trash." she said again, as though explaining this to herself as well. Her mouth continued twitching until it had worked itself into another smile. Two seconds later, and she had burst into wild donkey-brays of laughter. "We--" she choked. "We ran from a SHOPPING BAG!!" Her laughter had doubled her over until she collapsed to the floor, kicking her legs and rolling like it was the funniest damn thing in the entire universe.
"Its NOT funny..." Alex growled, his face dark and his hands clenching the book in an iron grip.
"But...HAAA!! We were so scared and it was just--" she broke off in another fit of giggles and snorts.
"Stop laughing!!" he demanded, throwing the book to the floor where it met the tiles with a loud slap. "Wh-What if it wasn't, huh?? Then what??" His voice had cracked and was starting to waver as tears of embarrassment and aftershock of terror spilled down his cheeks. Somehow it just made Sharika laugh all the harder that he was THIS disappointed over the shopping bag not being a ghost and she couldn't stop herself. Her belly ached, her eyes burned, but oh GAWD, just thinking of the two of them hauling a** up the street and what it must have looked like to someone watching...!!!
"You--" she eeped out. "You--blessed the doorway to protect it from plastic bags. We'll have to get paper from now on now...!" More laughter.
Alex wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, bottom lip still trembling as he glared reproachfully at the sorry remnants of the string-entangled plastic shopping bag on the floor and then at the laughing heap of wild dog nearby. It wasn't funny. What if they'd been hurt? What if it really HAD been a ghost? He was flat-out FURIOUS at the entire situation...
....so why, then, was he biting his lip to keep from smiling? Why was he choking on a bark of laughter that desperately wanted out? The more he tried to hang onto his anger, the more it violently twisted and lurched out of his grasp. A few seconds later, he succombed, and let a barrage of tenuous giggles escape him. The fire was quickly fueled by Sharika's mirth and it wasn't long before he was laughing just as hard as she was.
"Oh, jeez..." she whimpered after nearly five more minutes of uncontrollable cackling as she wiped at her streaming eyes. "....oww..." she sat up, still grinning like a fool. "I've gotta eat something or I'm gonna puke. Whadda you want for dinner?"
"Do we have anymore corn?" he asked from where he'd been leaning heavily against the wall.
"I think you ate it all last night." Sharika replied, getting up, stretching, and heading into the kitchen. "I was just gonna nuke some hot dogs."
Alex stopped short, eyes widening. "Don't you know what they PUT in hot dogs??"
Well, if nothing else could be said for him, at least it didn't take him long to recover from falling off the wagon...
