14 – Mundanity Feels Especially Dull After Exciting Events

“Morning, Mom,” Erika said, failing to fight off a yawn.

Leah, fake or not, could put on an intense glare when she wanted. “Out all weekend. No calls. Texts ignored. Do you know how worried I was?”

Probably would have been a whole lot more worried if you knew what I was up to, Erika thought as she rolled her eyes.

That was the wrong move. A familiar look of anger crossed Leah’s face. That pinch of her lips and that slight twist of her mouth to the side, it was exactly as it always had been. “Then you show up here for breakfast like nothing happened?”

“Well, got a little hungry,” Erika said, picking up a slice of toast. “And a shower. God, I needed a shower. And mouthwash. Used up a whole bottle of mouthwash and still feel like it wasn’t enough.”

That admission put a confused look on Leah’s face. It quickly shifted to a disappointed frown. “Please don’t turn out like me, Erika.”

“I wasn’t sucking dicks, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Leah’s hands shifted to her hips. Back to disappointment. “Then what were you doing?”

Erika shook her head. She couldn’t exactly say that she had been out with the Ghostbusters. A month ago, back when everything had still been normal, she might have bragged about it, but even then, probably not. It was one of those things that the old Leah would have been worried about—anything abnormal, especially around other people, was cause for a lecture.

But now, it was too close to everything.

Erika and the ghost hunters never ended up heading out to the Old St. Patrick’s Church. After all the excitement with the ghosts and both Sofia and Erika’s exposure to ectoplasm, everyone had spent the night at the arcade. Sofia and Erika had been hooked up to an EKG machine and had to sit around being observed, just in case there were lingering effects. A few other medical tests, all administered by Anna, came back clean enough considering the circumstances.

It was a bit of a disappointment that Erika hadn’t found an opportunity to corner Sofia alone and ask a few questions about what exact church she had been talking about, but she had gotten her phone number. The text Erika sent was, so far, unread.

Lucky for Erika, Carter stepped out into the dining room before she had to come up with an actual excuse.

“While I’d love to stay and get yelled at over nothing some more,” Erika said, grabbing her keys and bag, “wouldn’t want Cart to be late to school.” She quickly finished off the last of her toast and hopped to her feet.

“Florence Erika Walker.”

Erika paused at the door, frowning over her shoulder. Carter was already out, not having said so much as a good morning to Leah.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Erika asked, watching the corners of Leah’s eyes.

“Ghosts?” she asked. She looked confused. She looked surprised.

“Never mind,” Erika said, turning away. She couldn’t get an honest read on fake-Leah’s emotions. “Just something I’ve been into lately, watching those paranormal history shows. See ya!”

“Wait—”

Erika didn’t. She was out the door, in her truck, and down the street. Leah didn’t rush outside to try to stop her, so whatever else she wanted to yell about clearly wasn’t important.

“Did you find anything out?” Carter asked, staring out the window.

“Yes and no. It’s… I don’t even know,” she said, pulling over a short distance out of their subdivision. She glanced at the digital clock on her truck’s radio. “Can you get us a… half an hour?”

Carter pulled out his pocket watch and stared at its face. The second hand continued to tick around the clock, but it never quite made it to the next number. “One-thousand nine-hundred ninety-four… One-thousand nine-hundred ninety-three…”

“Great,” Erika opened her bag and pulled out the tall bottle of top-shelf whiskey. It had probably been meant for display rather than selling. After looking up the brand, she discovered that a bottle like this would have cost upwards of a thousand dollars. Even with her having effectively free, unlimited funding, she couldn’t have justified that cost. She doubted anyone visiting that worn-down pub would have been able to justify it either.

Carter stared at the bottle as she set it on the armrest between their seats. Slowly, he looked up to meet her eyes. “I’m too young to drink.”

“I know, I—”

“You’re too young to drink.”

Erika shot him a flat look. “Do you want to hear the story or not?” she asked after a moment.

Carter stared a moment longer. “Yes.”

“Alright. No interruptions,” she said as she started going over everything that happened during her busy weekend. From the archives and its strange guardians to the hunters and their little seance problem. She even went back a bit, explaining fully the contents of those emails she saw and exactly why she had been following Leah-not-Leah out to The Church in the first place.

Carter sat, listening without interrupting, just as Erika asked.

“Then I came home and brushed my teeth for an hour straight. I think they’re still stained a little black. Luckily, it is mostly on the backside. Hard to see when I just smile, but opening my mouth too wide and looking too close makes it more obvious.” Erika resisted the temptation to check in the rearview mirror. “I hope it goes away. Rick wasn’t all that certain.”

While sitting around, letting Anna poke and prod her with their medical equipment, Erika had been browsing through Rick’s wiki for everything on seances, Seance Spirits, and ectoplasm. They had distressingly little on the latter.

“That’s the cursed bottle?” Carter said, leaning well away from where Erika set it.

“Yeah. I was wondering if you could tamper with it a bit to make it go back to when it was unusual.”

“Why?”

“Well…” Erika frowned to herself. It seemed like such a good idea before. Now, she wasn’t sure she could adequately answer that question. “Because it was strange?”

“You want to vomit ectoplasm again?”

“Absolutely not.”

He tilted his head to one side. “Then why?”

Erika folded her arms over her chest, frowning. Without a word, she picked up the bottle and shoved it back into her pack. “Fine. You don’t get to see.”

“And throw up tar and oil? I’ll live.”

“You’re missing out.”

“I’ll live,” Carter said again. “But… what do we do? Do we confront Mo—The Fixer?”

Erika considered for a long moment, frowning to herself. Slowly, she shook her head. “Not yet. I’m getting bad vibes about the old church,” she said, frowning. “Having seen the ghost hunters in action, I’m not sure they’d make it out of there, at least not without me showing off things we’re not supposed to show off.”

Even if Sofia hadn’t been talking about The Church when she mentioned making an enemy of them, she still had a point.

“But there is at least one more thing I want to try before we do anything… irreversible. It’s going to take a bit of setup, though, so I’ll get on that today. We’ll do this one together.”

“Is it dangerous?” Carter asked without hesitation.

“Didn’t seem like it. But at least I know who I’m gonna call if it turns out that way.” Erika gave him a wink, but Carter just stared blankly. He probably didn’t get what she was talking about. She reached over, patting him on the shoulder. Carter tried to shy away, but there wasn’t much room in Erika’s cramped truck. “Come on. Let’s get you to school.”

---

Erika scanned the high school cafeteria, spotted Daniel, and grinned a little. He was alone for the moment, likely waiting for his friends to grab their food. That was perfect. She would have a precious few moments to speak with Daniel before his lack of willingness to discuss his family business around normal people kicked in.

She hurried across the cafeteria.

“Yo!” she called out as she got close. “Just stopped by to chat about me and your dad going out together.”

Daniel, mid-sip from a water bottle, promptly started coughing and sputtering. Erika reached over and lightly patted his back.

“You,” he started, grinding out the word the moment he could manage. Unfortunately, he couldn’t manage anything further before he slipped into another short coughing fit.

Erika just grinned. It was a little mean, but considering his comment about her mother when she brought Erika’s wallet to school, she felt fair was fair. “What’s the matter?” she asked, grin widening. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Don’t say it like that,” he coughed out right after his first proper gasp of air in a few moments.

“You alright there?” Erika asked, growing a little concerned.

“Yeah,” Daniel said, still trying to clear his throat but no longer outright coughing. “Yeah. Just wasn’t expecting that.”

“Yes, well, we had quite the spirited time together,” Erika said, smiling again. Under other circumstances, she would have given him a moment to recover. At the moment, she could see his friends standing in the food line. “He tell you about what happened?”

“No? I try not to get involved with that stuff…” He trailed off, frowning at Erika. “I take it you think you saw something happen?”

“Oh yeah. Had a vision after grabbing a cursed bottle of whiskey, vomited black bile everywhere, and then saw an Ouija board move on its own.” Erika ticked each event off on her fingers. “I honestly can’t believe you’re some kind of skeptic if anything like that happens on the regular. You said your dad took you on some outings?”

Daniel stared, gaze flat. “You were drinking?”

“No.” Erika paused. “Yes. But the vomit and vision came before. I mostly used the alcohol to rinse that tar out of my mouth.”

That stare continued. Erika could see his thoughts written on his face.

“No. I wasn’t hallucinating,” she said before he had a chance to ask. “But I don’t expect you to believe a random account like this, so I was thinking, why not try it for ourselves?”

“What?”

“Just a little seance. Tonight. Maybe tomorrow if I can’t get what I need soon enough.”

Daniel, elbows on the table, ran his fingers through his short brown hair. “My dad would kill me if he knew.”

“Consider it like this: I’m going to do a seance. I can do it alone and have no help or supervision, or I can do it with you and have the oversight of someone who has trained to deal with these kinds of things.”

“Trained is an excessively loaded word,” he said with a small shake of his head. “Why aren’t you doing this with the others?”

“Your dad’s ghost hunting buddies?” Erika said, just to be clear. “I asked one little question of the ghost and they all jumped down my throat about it. Somehow, I doubt they’d be all that thrilled to help summon another one for a few more questions.”

“That…” Daniel sighed. “That makes sense.”

Erika drummed her fingers on the table, frowning as she watched Daniel’s friends near the end of the line. She was out of time unless he wanted to talk about ghosts in front of them. Not wanting to press him on it, she stood and stretched. “From your perspective, ghosts are all a hoax. So we’ll just end up sitting around, looking silly, and then you can say that you told me so.” She flashed a grin. “You got my number. Hit me up if you want in. I’ll even order pizza.”

“Why me?” he asked before she could head out.

Erika paused, thinking it over for a moment. “For supposedly being against any kind of interaction with the paranormal, Rick has surprisingly detailed seance instructions. Several different instructions, in fact, but a commonality between most is that an odd number of people is best. My brother will be there, so that means I need another from somewhere.”

“Oh…” He slumped somewhat, looking a tad disappointed.

“And,” Erika continued, “you’re not a bad guy to hang out with.”

It wasn’t even a lie to get him to come. He was nice, a bit reserved, and a bit of a dork. But he had covered for her despite that going against his nature and came out for the admittedly lame church activities so she could snoop about a bit.

Most importantly, while she had been panicking over wizards and robots pursuing her, he had offered help. As soon as she asked for help, he didn’t question her or dismiss her claims of being attacked. He simply did what he could to get her to a safe location.

Besides, with one foot already in the paranormal, he might be someone Erika could consider revealing some of the Walker family secrets to. But that was still a ways off. He couldn’t just be a good guy. She would have to trust him.

“I’ll… think about it.”

“Great!” Erika said with a grin. “See you there.”

With that, Erika turned and headed out of the cafeteria, leaving just before his friends finished piling their trays with whatever slop was being served today.

---

“I’m home, Mom,” Erika called out into the empty house.

Just in case it wasn’t so empty.

No one called a greeting in return. As expected. If false-Leah was sticking to her schedule, she would be at work for the next few hours. As with the last time she had been snooping, Erika went through the motions of someone who had simply left something behind that she needed to grab. Only when she was certain she was alone did she slip into her mother’s bedroom.

Today’s mission was a simple one. She needed something personal, something meaningful to Leah—the real Leah. Something that would draw her spirit from the afterlife.

Assuming she was there.

A seance wouldn’t work on a living person. If Leah was still around—if fake-Leah was actually real-Leah being possessed—the ritual simply wouldn’t produce any results. Of course, no results could also mean that Erika messed something up. It wasn’t conclusive.

Unless Leah’s ghost did show up.

If that happened…

“One step at a time,” Erika muttered to herself as she pulled out an old wooden jewelry box. Its drawers were locked, but that couldn’t stop her.

The real problem was finding something meaningful. Erika pulled out a thin chain necklace, a wooden bangle bracelet with a little turquoise stone embedded in it, and a pair of large hoop earrings. She wasn’t sure that she had ever seen her mother wear these things. Her mother wasn’t one for jewelry. Only on special occasions. Their grandmother’s funeral came to mind.

Did that give them meaning enough to summon a spirit? Or were they just trinkets to elevate her looks for a single day?

Erika rummaged through a few more rings, hairbands, and earrings before replacing everything where she had found it. With a frustrated frown on her face, she turned and scowled at the rest of the room. There was a picture frame on the bedside table—a younger Erika and Carter smiled in the plain frame—and a small stack of books next to it. Erika picked up the frame, studying the photo. It was from a family vacation years ago, one of the few times they had scrounged up the money to do something.

A short trip to Disneyland. Even back then, Erika still wore black lipstick, though her eyeshadow was far, far too heavy. She wouldn’t have looked out of place as a ghost in the Haunted Mansion. Carter, on the other hand, looked almost exactly the same as he did today. His short, jet-black hair that matched with the rest of the Walkers stuck out at odd angles, far less well-kempt than today’s Carter.

Leah wasn’t featured. She was the one taking the photo.

Was it meaningful? Certainly. But it didn’t feature Leah… Was that a problem?

Erika put the photo back down and looked around for a few more minutes, rummaging through some drawers, picking through old clothes, and generally coming up with nothing.

There was a trope in movies and books where a group of teens would perform a seance at parties. Generally, right before playing spin the bottle or seven minutes in heaven. Despite having been to a number of parties, Erika had never seen anyone do it. Not even an attempt. Perhaps it was an archaic thing that modern writers hadn’t quite caught up with, but Erika typically saw only three types of people at parties. The ones toking up in the bathroom, the ones trying to get into each other’s pants, and the ones just hanging out on their phones all evening.

That said, Lexie Gomez allegedly tried to summon Satan at a party that Erika hadn’t attended, so perhaps things like that still happened.

If they were at all successful, surely more people would know about them.

Looking around her mother’s room, Erika felt she knew why most failed. Either people these days just didn’t have things with much meaning behind them or other people were unable to tell what was meaningful to the departed individual. She was stumped. What held significance enough to drag a spirit back from beyond the grave?

Erika’s eyes landed on the picture once again. It didn’t feature Leah, but it was the closest thing she could think of that fit the needed criteria.

Maybe she should have Carter sit down on the pentagram instead of off to the side. An actual living child had to have significance.

Slipping the picture, frame and all, into her bag, Erika started to leave.

She paused as she noticed the laptop. The same one that sent her off to the old church in the first place.

With a small, curious frown, she sat down, opened the laptop, and broke through the security. She wondered if there had been any further correspondence between The Fixer and The Church.

A jolt of alarm coursed through her as she read through a new email from Cross.

From: 194573902092@atommail.000

To: 4736294857493@atommail.000

Subject: Re: Re: Urgent: Possible compromise in current covers

Body:

The initial individual is likely an Outsider-class being. Noted abilities include Reality-level editing. Attempting to state too many defining attributes of the individual causes dissociation with previously stated attributes. My perfect memory allows me to cycle through them, locating disassociated bits of information and reassociating them, but attempting to inform others of more than three attributes results in information degradation. I can provide no other useful information because of this. Even in text form, with all facts laid out in front of you, you will be unable to associate all data points with the individual.

Experimentation into avoiding this ability is ongoing.

As for measures, I have contacted The Eclipse and set their resources toward tracking down this individual. Given the aforementioned traits, I do not calculate a high chance of success. The Stalker of The Puppet faction would likely have a higher chance of success. However, I was convinced against informing The Puppet of the bounty by The Emperor and The Banker. If you wish to contact The Stalker on your own, I will provide contact information free of charge as restitution for this unwarranted issue.

The second intruder, unfortunately, slipped past our already compromised security without notice until after the fact. Information is limited, but investigations are ongoing.

Once again, I apologize for this breach in security. Reality-level editing is not easy to defend against. The Banker is coming up with countermeasures to avoid a situation like this in the future.

Cross

>I’m unable to meet at the moment. Could you provide information on the individuals in question here, including what measures you have taken?

>>It is with great regret that I must inform you of a security breach in The Church. An unknown individual invaded, found records relating to The Fixer, and escaped despite my and The Banker’s attempts at capture and containment. We are taking necessary measures to apprehend this individual, including the posting of several bounties, but given the destruction of your previous covers, I felt it prudent to inform you of the situation as soon as possible. If you wish for more information on the subject, I will provide free of charge.

>>In addition, as a result of the breach in security, a second individual gained access to the archives. Access occurred shortly after and may be related to the first intruder. At the time, we were pursuing the first intruder. Nothing was missing, but evidence suggests the second individual likely retraced the first’s steps and potentially got a more thorough look at our files on you.

>>Cross

Erika, tense to the point of an ache in the back of her neck, stared.

Four things stuck out to her.

They didn’t know who she was. First and foremost, they didn’t know. Erika assumed that was related to her breaking her false identities. That was the only reason she wasn’t in a full-blown panic.

The second was more interesting on a personal level. Outsider-class being and Reality-level editing. Editing was likely just a term they were using to describe her abnormal abilities. Erika had never heard the term before. To her, the more interesting thing was what they described her as a being. An Outsider-class being was the same thing that The Fixer had been listed as in the archive. Given that The Fixer was currently posing as her mother, she wondered if there was some relation there.

She felt like she should know if she was some weird being or not. As it was, it was one more clue that she lacked the context to understand.

Thirdly… there had been a second break in? Rick mentioned driving past the place. Could that have been him? Or did someone simply realize that she had caused a commotion and used her as a distraction?

They retraced her steps. Did that mean they looked at The Fixer’s file too?

Erika wasn’t sure what that meant, and she was a little distracted by the final thing…

“I have a fucking bounty on my head.”

After Sofia’s vague quips the night before about The Church having resources and power that rendered them too dangerous to antagonize, she had been a little worried. Now, seeing the word bounty written out in plain text sent pins and needles down her spine. If she was reading this properly, The Church sent some group called The Eclipse after her.

“Fuck,” she hissed again. She pulled out her phone, snapped a picture of the email for later, then deleted the original.

Deleting it would likely alert The Fixer at some point, once they realized that Cross wasn’t getting back to them. Erika hoped to…

She didn’t know what she hoped to accomplish. Delay The Fixer finding out about her? Delay getting some creepy fuck called The Stalker set on her?

Was it too late to send The Church an apology letter?

Erika dug her fingers into her scalp. “Fuck.”