Work Text:
“In here!”
Joey races through a darkened doorway, only for it to slam behind him with a rattling thud.
“Joey!”
Whirling around with a gasp, Joey clutches the heavy book to his chest, wide eyes darting to every corner of the room. Full of shadows and cobwebs, like the rest of this stupid place. The floorboards groan as he backs slowly away from the door.
The handle shakes, but doesn’t give. Shawn curses from the other side, and then there’s a harder blow, a foot or a fist.
A sharp, hard gust of wind shoots past Joey, making him yell. The window is closed, and it’s meant to still be summer, but the wind is icy. It drags his hair over his face, tangling and tugging as if fingers are running through it. He spins around in panic, trying to shake it off. Could have sworn he heard a laughing voice carrying past.
It fades with the wind. The door is still rattling.
“Joey! Talk to me!”
Joey opens his mouth, but gets no further. Something warm and slick drizzles onto his upper lip, oozes and slips its way onto his tongue.
Blood.
A second, heavy drop dribbles onto his forehead. As it slides down his face, almost creeping into his eye, he looks slowly up, lips parted in dread. A weeping crimson pentagram seeps out of the ceiling above him. He swallows.
The cascade begins.
The looming droplets conglomerate and fall, heavy, one by one by one, faster, trailing sticky hands down through his hair, coating his cheeks as he stands, frozen beneath it. He cries out, tensing with the shock like he’s stepped into a freezing shower.
Blood. There’s blood, crawling over his skin, hot, repulsive, soaking…
Fuck this.
Unsticking himself, he darts forward, lunging for the door handle–
It flies inwards. The hard edge of splintery wood clocks him around the face before he can even brace, and then he’s landing on his ass with a concerning creaking and bending of the floorboards under him.
Blinking away the sudden burst of stars, he finds Shawn towering over him, lowering his foot. There’s a boot print on the now-swinging door.
Shawn’s eyes bulge.
“Fuck, man.”
Joey looks down. Red blood shines from his knuckles, tight around the book. He’s sure his hands be shaking right now if he wasn’t clinging so tight.
“I think we can get out this way…” Paul appears in the doorway. It takes less than a second before his expression resembles Shawn’s. “Holy shit, Joe.”
“I’m good,” Joey says, a little breathless. He staggers to his feet. Pushes his sodden hair off his face, but his hand is just as covered in the blood.
“It still there?” Shawn cranes his head around the room, though he doesn’t cross the threshold.
Joey glances behind him. Where the pentagram had bled from the ceiling, there’s only a singed outline. Might have been there before, he doesn’t know.
“Think we’re good. Let’s go.”
Joey treads towards the door, and Paul reaches out, hand landing on his shoulder to pull him closer as he reaches them.
A second later, he’s hissing, hand jumping back.
Joey turns to him. Paul cradles one hand in the other, running a palm over his knuckles. When he moves it aside, the three of them stare.
“What the fuck,” Paul whispers.
He holds out his trembling hand. Three, harsh lines stick out on his skin, like an animal has torn at it. As they watch, red blood beads up in the divots. One spills over and rolls down to his wrist.
Shawn grips the straps of his backpack tighter, looking around.
“Where’s the fucking exit?”
“Yeah, uh, this way, I think.”
Clutching his hand, Paul nods further down the hall. Joey doesn’t wait to be told twice, barging between them and marching the way Paul said. The others aren’t far behind, trainers smudging the drops of blood which leak from the ends of Joey’s hair, marking their trail through the house.
“This was a bad idea…” he hears Paul mutter.
“You won’t say that when we get out and you can tell everyone you got a demon scratch,” Joey says.
Paul just huffs weakly.
They’re almost at the next door. There better fucking be a staircase they can use. It stands ajar, but he can’t see through the shadows beyond it–
The door slams shut, and Joey freezes, two steps away from it. A second bang rings from his right, but the moment he turns to it, the door to his left is slamming too, and then they all are, right the way up the dark hallway, bang bang bang bang bang, each one blocking out more light. All they have now is the sun eking around the cracks in the rotten roof timbers.
Hardly daring breathe, Joey stares down the hall. The other end is lost in blackness, but they already tried that way.
Paul pushes past him.
“It was this way, I’m telling you–”
He yanks open the door. The moment he steps inside, his foot is gone from under him. It’s like he’s slipped, only there’s nothing there but shadows. He lands heavily at Joey’s feet, but before he can even think about helping Paul up, his friend shifts further away with a yelp. It’s one, quick movement, his body dragging through the dust on the floor. Like someone’s pulling him.
Joey doesn’t think. He drops the book and lunges forwards, catching Paul’s hand just as the next tug comes. Joey’s boots jolt forwards, etching their own lines in the dust, but he digs them in, floorboards bowing and groaning as he desperately tries to clutch Paul’s wrist between his slippery fingers.
Then Shawn is at his side, the three of them playing tug of war with whatever force lurks beyond that door. There’s nothing but heavy breathing and the scrabbling of their feet on the floor until finally, Paul comes free.
Together, they stagger backwards, Paul emerging from the thick shadows with his legs kicking, trying to strike out at whatever invisible thing is there. He’s panting as he scrambles to his feet, backing away from the gaping, empty doorway.
“Fucking hell,” Joey breathes.
He steps closer to the others without meaning to. In the fresh silence, his heart thuds loud in his ears. A shuffling step and a warmth at his back tell him the others are doing the same.
“If we get out of here, I’m gonna kill you,” Shawn hisses, and Joey knows it’s directed at him.
He breathes in, but before he can reply, the hallway explodes with noise. He literally jumps, and Paul does the same, because their shoulders crash in the air, and then he’s planting his feet on the floor, raising his fists as if that’s going to help.
Wind rushes to meet his face again. All down the length of the hall, the doors are banging open and shut, like the house itself is trying to shake them out.
Maybe it is. Joey stumbles against Shawn, whose frantic hands steady him in the chaos.
Dust trickles from the ceiling as the tremors increase, the slamming doors ringing in the narrow space, casting them in rapidly flickering light and shade.
“Fuck this!” Shawn calls over the din. “Let’s just go for a window!”
Jumping from a window hadn’t been in any of their plans for tonight, but no one sticks around to argue. The lot of them pile at the nearest door. As Joey backs towards it, his wild eyes fall on the book.
He dives for it, choking on a stream of falling dust. Dropping to his knees, he wraps the bulky tome in his arms again, the crashing cacophony of doors growing louder in his ears.
Something yanks him back by the collar, feet sweeping clean off the ground. He’s flung into a room. It lets go and he’s spinning around, but it’s only Shawn. He pushes Joey into the space, shoves the door closed with a decisive palm.
Silence falls. It’s so sudden, so steep that it’s almost dizzying. The echoes still whirl through Joey’s skull.
“Right. Window,” Shawn pants, stomping past.
Trying to catch his breath, Joey follows dazedly.
A shot like a bullet stops them. Joey’s eyes shoot up. A small, dark shape drops from the other side of the glass in a shower of feathers.
A second bird dives at it before he can register what’s happening. A third, and suddenly a shower of the ominous missiles are spraying across the glass like bullets, clattering the cracked panes threateningly.
The three of them pull each other down – Joey doesn’t know who he’s grabbed, or who grabs him, but then they’re falling against the base of the wall, pressing themselves below the thundering window.
It puts them facing the door opposite. Right above it, through the pale, cracked plaster and fouled paint, a shape is forming. It seeps out in beaded drops right before their eyes, bleeding into one another to form slow, broad lines. It’s red, just like the pentagram from before.
DIE.
Joey’s breath sticks in his throat.
“You said that ritual was bullshit, man!” Shawn seethes. “You fucking summoned a demon!”
“I didn’t mean to!” Joey defends.
The window explodes inwards. Joey throws his hands up as shards rain down over them, stinging nicks and cuts pricking over his skin. Paul is clutching him, hiding his face in Joey’s blood-soaked hair, his fingers digging into Joey’s arm in terror.
“Jesus– fuck–” Shawn gasps from his other side. “Find something else in that stupid fucking book of yours! Doesn’t it say how to send it back?”
The last of the glass crashes to the floor. Joey emerges from behind his arms, shaking himself and sending a few more shards clanking to the ground. His fingers are already busy trying to pry open the pages. They’re glued at the edges with blood, the same that’s now congealing on Joey’s skin, making him shiver as it clings to him, cold in the howling air from outside.
“Okay, uh…” He rifles through the pages, uncaring when they crinkle and fold under his fingers. He runs a fingertip along the cryptic lines of text, leaving lines of red behind. “Shit!” He rips it open to a new page in his panic. “This just has shit for more summonings, man–”
Words jam in his throat as a sudden blot lands on the page. Red, again. Blood, again. Looking up, he finds Paul and Shawn’s eyes both fixed on the ceiling.
It’s not just a pentagram this time. The whole ceiling is riddled with spidery lines of blood, pooling and dripping in a slow, ominous rainfall. Joey shivers.
“Maybe they figured anyone stupid enough to try one should have to live with the consequences,” Shawn says, teeth gritted.
A desperate sigh ripping from his throat, Joey turns back to the book with fresh panic.
“Not helpful, dude,” he grumbles.
“We’re gonna fucking die in here!” Paul frets.
Joey tears over another page, breath coming rapidly as his eyes race across the words.
“Wait! Wait, okay.”
Both of the others turn to him, but he keeps his eyes fixed on the book. Carefully reads out some words he doesn’t understand, trying to fit his mouth around the letters right.
He gets to the end and stops. Looks up. The three of them run their eyes slowly over the room – the cracked wood, the dust, the drops of blood disappearing through the gaps in the floor. No one dares move, only their quiet breaths dancing in the air between them.
An ungodly screech comes from somewhere below them, the wall itself shuddering at their backs. Joey’s hands fly out, gripping the guys either side of him. He doesn’t care about the handprints he’ll leave; they’re all sullied with some degree of blood. The broken glass clinks on the floor, a couple more pieces slipping down from the window ledge to dust their hair.
The noise subsides a moment later, but Joey reckons he can still feel it grating through his bones. The walls fall still, but the three of them don’t move from their huddle.
“What did you do?”
Shawn sounds angrier, if that’s possible.
Joey lets out a shaky breath.
“It says Beleth is, like, the enemy of Malphas, so I figured–”
“You summoned another one? That’s your solution?!”
“Hey, has it or has it not stopped raining blood in here?”
The others peer upwards, and sure enough, the ceiling is back to how it was before. No sign of the gory leaking from moments ago, even though streaks of evidence paint their skin.
“So they’re…” Paul sounds dazed. As he trails off, a roar and a thud sound from somewhere in the bowels of the house. “…fighting?”
“Fighting each other, and not us,” Joey confirms. “Good enough?”
“Fucking hell,” Shawn groans.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Paul says.
“We don’t even have to break the window ourselves!” Joey tries, laughing nervously as he climbs to his feet.
Shawn shoots him a glare, and Joey decides he may not have been kidding about killing him once they’re out of here.
He hops onto the window ledge first. They’re only a floor up. He hadn’t expected that; they’ve been running all over this stupid place trying to get out, but after the ritual, all the staircases only led into endless black pits.
The ground below him now is thick with late-summer leaves, so he lowers himself until he’s hanging by his fingertips, and drops to the floor.
The landing is soft, but his trembling legs can’t keep him up. He rolls ungracefully over and falls on his back. Paul is the next to thump down beside him, then Shawn, last.
“Not far enough,” Shawn says, brushing himself off. “We’re leaving this fucking place behind.”
It’s only when Joey drags himself up that he spots the nauseating pile of dead sparrows, heaped at the base of the wall.
They trek through the woodland in a kind of shell-shocked silence. The book weighs heavy in Joey’s arms until he thinks he won’t be able to hold it much longer, his bones hollow-feeling, light and shaky.
“Well, if that place wasn’t already haunted, it definitely is now,” Paul says, when they come within sight of the clearing that leads to the road.
“I can’t believe I talked you guys into that,” Joey says.
Shawn whacks him on the back of the head. He only winces a little. Wonders whether his earlier knock will leave him bleeding even after they wash this off.
They get to the edge of the treeline and sink down. Shawn chucks his backpack in front of him with a clank of the paint cans inside.
“So much for the bones you collected, dude,” Paul commiserates, but Shawn only scoffs.
“They can fucking keep them. We are never trying that again.”
He scrubs his hands over his face, leaving a light smear of blood over his forehead.
Joey isn’t faring so well on the blood front.
“My mum’s not gonna let me in the house like this.”
Paul turns to eye him.
“My mum would have a heart attack if she saw you right now. Looks like you’re either bleeding out, or you murdered someone.”
“You nearly did fucking murder us,” Shawn huffs. His eyes flick over Joey irritably and he sighs deeper. Joey’s drenched in blood, shivering, hair sticking to his face.
Shawn rolls his eyes.
“Fucking fine. I can hose you down in the yard. And that book's getting it, too.”