PART 3: DEMON IN PARADISE
Everyone’s face dropped.
“Pest control ever get around to checking your place out?” Hud asked.
Cecelia shook her head, eyes wide.
“No need for concern,” Riscraven said, scanning the walls. “These Nomex uniforms offer a high degree of protection against ectoplasmic substances.”
Cecelia considered her flimsy outfit and Hud glanced at his own tattered coveralls.
“I guess you’re okay then,” Hud told the Ghostbuster.
“Maybe we should head to my lounge,” Cecelia suggested. “It never goes there. I think it’s afraid of my indigenous artefacts.”
“Thinking demons care about religious or totemic cultural paraphernalia is a human conceit,” Riscraven dismissed, pursuing the sounds in the room with his PKE meter. “A misconception propagated by pop culture. A ghost might care if it was religious in life.”
It was hard to define why Cecelia was bothered by this. Perhaps she’d found comfort in believing the pieces from her culture held power, that they were more than beautiful relics.
“Learn that from an app?” Hud asked the Ghostbuster.
“From study,” Riscraven said. The silver wings of the PKE meter flew to their limit, and the device beeped wildly. Gaping at the results, he uttered, “Reponere Furantur.”
“But you said it had to recharge before it struck again,” Cecelia said, heart racing. She retreated from the walls and edged up against Hud. Somehow, having him there was reassuring.
“Exactly,” Riscraven said. “Hence why this is so—”
“Interesting?” Hud proposed.
“Indeed,” Riscraven said, sliding the active meter into its holster. “I’m going to get my pack and a trap from the car.” He headed for the stairs.
“What do we do if it returns while you’re gone?” Cecelia asked.
“It can’t have replenished entirely,” Riscraven said as he descended the staircase. “Not in the brief window it’s been away.”
“All good,” Hud said and pulled his CNW. “I’ve got just the condom to bag this ugly dick.” He flicked a silver switch near the handle. The bass and whine of the unit powering up filled the room.
“Wait!” Riscraven exclaimed. He was halfway down the stairs and started heading back their way. “Not a chance; you aren’t licensed to use that and will cause more damage than you already have. Switch it o—”
The tapping on the bedroom walls rushed to the stairwell like a speeding drum roll. A loud timpani pounded directly behind the stunned Ghostbuster.
“Get your gear!” Cecelia shouted at him.
“Okay, but—” He never finished. A purple and pink blur materialised from the wall at his rear, the demon corporealising, arms out, claws landing heavily upon Riscraven’s shoulders. Clutching the Ghostbuster tightly, it raced him up the remaining stairs. Riscraven’s legs were bent behind him, and his feet dragged into each step as he was propelled towards Hud and Cecelia.
The violence of the attack caused a horrified mask to stretch across Riscraven’s face. Instinctively, Hud put an arm around Cecelia (whether to support or for support, she didn’t know), and they braced for impact.
A hair’s breadth from them, Riscraven halted as if he’d hit an invisible wall. Above him, the demon’s face leered, eyes crackling with red electricity. The thing spanned nearly six-and-a-half feet from the top of its head to the bottom of its flared lower torso. Absent a lower jaw, the impression was of a hungry predator with a gaping maw.
“Do… something…” the Ghostbuster begged.
“Get back,” Hud told Cecelia, moving her away and taking aim. Before he could fire, the demon’s tongue whipped from its sticky, purplish throat and curled around the Ghostbuster’s face. Hud tried to get a clear shot without hitting the man, but Spitswapper kept shifting position, making this impossible.
“It’s… starting to—” A gargling noise usurped Riscraven’s speech. Slime seeped at the corners of his eyes, trickling down his cheeks like tears. The demon’s tongue widened. Soon, hardly any part of the Ghostbuster’s face was visible.
“Shoot!” Cecelia pleaded.
“I’ll hit Gene!” Hud said, thwarted wherever he aimed as if the demon could anticipate every new area targeted.
“Let him go!” Cecelia shouted and lunged forward, grabbing Riscraven by the waist and trying to pry him free. Meanwhile, Riscraven’s eyes, practically all that remained visible of him beneath the thick, slimy tongue, rolled back and presented purely white. There was a sick gurgling noise, and the Ghostbuster began to throb and contort like a blow-up doll being inflated and deflated in alternating breaths.
“Try to keep him in place and keep your head low!” Hud shouted to her, trying to flank Spitswapper before it could pivot and re-shield itself with Riscraven.
“It’s too fast!” Cecelia shouted.
“Go left!” Hud shouted, to which Cecelia, confused and panicked, yanked Riscraven right.
“Perfect!” Hud said, predicting her mistake and darting the other way to secure a target zone. He pressed a button on the wand and unleashed an orange and blue stream of particles at the demon’s side. Roaring with rage, Spitswapper unfurled its vile tongue and dropped Riscraven at Cecelia’s feet.
Stepping over the Ghostbuster like a man possessed, Hud advanced, proton stream tearing long and sparking strips from the walls and ceiling as he chased Spitswapper out the room and into the hallway. Even over the loud CNW, Cecelia heard Hud shouting, “Damn you to hell!” until the veiny creature had struck and vanished through the wall. Hud was a few steps down the stairs after it before Cecelia’s voice stopped him.
“Call an ambulance!”
“But the demon—”
“Gene’s still alive, but not for long!” she shrieked, holding the Ghostbuster on his side in the recovery position, a technique learned in first aid training. A trickle of slime dribbled from Riscraven’s mouth, but a finger probe suggested no blockage. She turned him onto his back, rechecked his mouth and peered as far down his throat as possible. Nothing was visible. If nothing obstructed his airways, why wasn’t he breathing? How long could a heart keep pumping without oxygen? She tilted his head and breathed into his mouth twice, suddenly fearing that if there was something in his throat, this might be worsening the blockage.
Practice drills during first aid training had made her feel competent. Under the stress of a real situation, she didn’t know what else to do.
“I don’t have a phone!” she heard Hud shout from the staircase. “Use the two-way on his shoulder!”
“It’s shorted out because of the slime!” she said.
“How about your phone?” Hud said, still from the stairs.
Cecelia’s adrenalin skyrocketed; she couldn’t remember where it was. Too much required her attention. Focussing purely on Riscraven, she watched for any rise or fall of his chest.
Nothing.
An idea struck her. She located the Ghostbuster’s car keys and threw them in Hud’s direction. “See if there’s another two-way in his Ecto,” she said, rechecking Riscraven’s neck for a pulse. Miraculously, despite him not breathing, his heart remained strong.
She heard Hud race down the stairs, knock the chairs holding the front door closed out the way, and exit.
Monitoring the prone Ghostbuster felt like eternity. Worse was contemplating the demon’s return. Having reappeared tonight when it was supposedly unable to opened the possibility of a third attack. What would she do then?
“…way too long,” Cecelia heard Hud say as he re-entered her apartment. “And there’s nothing else you can do until then?” He grunted as he bound up the stairs, scraping against the wall as he came.
Cecelia leaned over Riscraven to check his vitals. Regularly, she’d turn him to his side and try to scoop out whatever was lodged in his throat—presumably more slime—but hardly a trickle ever came out.
“Tell them I can’t get the slime out and it’s clogging his airways!” she told Hud as he entered her bedroom. “I don’t think I should give more breaths.”
Hud waved her away as if she was making it hard for him to hear the person on the walkie-talkie. He dropped a ghost trap by the bathroom door and Gene’s Proton Pack by the opposite wall. “Just hurry,” he said into the two-way, turning a nob that cut the communication with a brief crackle.
“Why didn’t you tell them?” she demanded.
Hud leaned over Riscraven and searched his pockets until he located the man’s cell phone. He held it up to Cecelia and placed it on the carpet beside her.
“Shit,” she said and flushed red. Considering how often the Ghostbuster had used it, she felt stupid for forgetting and guilty for the implications to Riscraven’s life.
“Slipped my mind, too,” Hud said and inspected Riscraven closely. Then he sat back on his haunches and muttered, “Huh,” with a measure of awe.
“He’s going to die!”
“They said as long as one of us keeps contact with him,” Hud scrutinised Cecelia’s positioning to ensure this was happening, “he’ll live.”
“Contact how? What do we need to do?”
“Just touch him. Even a toe is enough.”
“That makes no sense!” Despite feeling her fingers on Riscraven’s pulse, she felt the need to ensure they were definitely on him.
“Does anything about this make sense?” Hud asked.
“Are they sending someone to help?” she queried. “We can’t sit like this all night. What if that thing returns?”
Hud nodded and filled her in. “Another Ghostbusters unit is on its way, but being that the closest branch to us is in Brisbane and currently working another job, it probably won’t reach us for hours.”
“Hours!”
“Let’s keep this on,” Hud asked, examining the PKE meter in Riscraven’s belt. It hummed and buzzed steadily but was otherwise still. “It’ll warn us if that thing comes back without signalling its arrival on the walls first.” He sat against the wall opposite her, a few feet away. “We’ll take shifts maintaining contact with him. Use your foot; you’ll need your hands free if dick appears.”
“If his dick appears?” she shouted.
“Not his,” Hud told her, indicating Riscraven. “I meant Spitswapper.”
“Just call it that or the demon!” she admonished, jumpy and dubious of the cavalier way they were to care for the unconscious Ghostbuster. “I need to know if his pulse drops; otherwise, I won’t know to start CPR.”
“Long as one of us is touching him,” Hud said, “he’ll stay comatose until the med unit arrives. Lady I spoke with assured me. This is a supernatural issue; don’t expect logic.”
Cecelia scanned Riscraven’s body regardless, a habit from first aid training. Constantly leaning over him was stiffening her shoulder. Reluctant as she was to concede, she carefully shifted her weight and dug a foot beneath Riscraven’s torso. This allowed her to stretch and lean against the wall facing Hud. Most of her hair had slipped from the bun, so she finally shook it all free. The wavy black strands cascaded past her shoulders, catching Hud’s attention. He pretended not to notice.
“If we hadn’t detached him from that thing as quickly as we did,” Hud stated and finished the statement with a finger across his neck.
While Cecelia processed this, Hud crawled over and brought the Proton Pack and trap closer to them. Visibly debating whether to give her the CNW or the pack, he ultimately gave her the smaller unit. “Be careful with this. It was a gift.”
The scaled-down Particle Thrower was light and scarcely the length of her forearm. Thin in depth, its shape was triangular, somewhat evocative of a paper airplane. The buttons on the handle were labelled but too ambiguous for the weapon to be turned on or fired intuitively. Cecelia opened her mouth to query them when a noise interrupted her.
“My bad,” Hud said and patted his stomach.
Cecelia eased back down. As her panic receded, she remembered the reward she’d offered Hud for fixing her door. “There’s pizza in the fridge,” she said. “Half a bottle of Pepsi, too. Have as much as you want.”
Hud thought about it. “I’m not thrilled at the idea of Spits returning for you while I’m down there.”
“You’re right,” she said, dragging Hud’s leg over to rest on Riscraven. “If it’s gonna come back for me, it’ll probably appear up here.” She got to her feet, stretched her back some more and turned to the doorway.
“Don’t,” he pleaded, obviously uncomfortable at her leaving without his protection. “I’ve gone longer without food.”
“Back in a sec.”
“Wait!”
She paused again.
“If you need to use the CNW,” Hud said, “flick the Activate switch on the left. Aim the nozzle at your target and push Intensify. Then hold on. It’s not as powerful as a full-sized Neutrona Wand but it still kicks when it fires.”
“And Gene made it sound so difficult,” she said, winking in a way that felt very Hud and hurrying to the kitchen. Choosing fruit, cold pizza and a soft drink, she wondered what had made her behave flirtatiously. This wasn’t the occasion for frivolities, nor was Hud her type. Perhaps if he was employed, had a haircut and took a shave…
She was in her room again within two minutes.
“No glasses?” Hud asked while she lowered herself, and the food, to the carpet. The apple and mandarin she’d been balancing on the pizza box rolled off and in his direction as though telekinetically summoned.
“It’s all yours,” Cecelia said, swapping Riscraven-contact duty with him.
It took Hud a moment to accept this, and then he nodded in thanks. “Not everyone is so generous,” he said, eagerly opening the grease-stained box and grabbing the first pizza slice his fingers connected with. “I’ll try not to spill on your carpet.”
As if an identical thought struck them, they examined the eviscerated walls and the mirror shards decorating her nearby bathroom floor. “Probably wouldn’t notice if you did,” Cecelia remarked.
“Fair,” Hud said, and the pair actually smiled. It turned into a laugh. The shared absurdity of what they were going through and that they’d be laughing about it made it harder to stop.
“If you didn’t laugh, right?” Cecelia said through persistent fits of giggles.
Hud nodded and started to settle. “Plus, I ran out of tears years ago.”
Cecelia was still catching her breath from the giggle-fit when the weight of his words sank in. Quickly, the atmosphere turned sombre and she again wondered about Hud’s past. Perhaps if she tactfully asked him about it, he’d open up.
Evidently, he was simultaneously pondering her. After his third slice of pizza, he asked about her ex. “If it’s still raw,” he said, “we don’t need to discuss it.”
“Not raw,” she half-lied. “We only dated a few months. Ending it was my decision.”
“Doesn’t mean it was painless,” he observed, a little too astutely.
With a hint of emotion that betrayed the half-lie, she revealed how the mysterious noises in the house weren’t the reason they’d split. Rather, it was Eric’s inability to hear her or support her feelings.
“Valid,” Hud said. “Communication is key. Only works when it’s both ways.”
“Exactly,” she said, surprised at Hud’s sensitivity. It was an opportune moment to ask him about his past.
Again, he spoke before she could. “Is Cecelia a common indigenous name?”
“Oh.” Surprised again. “No.”
“My school didn’t spend much time on first nationers,” he added, taking a swig from the Pepsi bottle.
No schools did, Cecelia thought. It didn’t help that the indigenous community comprised less than four per cent of the country’s population. All this made it easy for the non-indigenous populace to pretend the land’s original inhabitants didn’t exist. “First nation is a white person’s label,” she said. Then, to reassure him, she added, “It’s fine. The label comes from a good place, even if it’s kind of been forced upon us.”
“Is there something you prefer?” Hud asked, and because she knew he was also coming from a good place, she resisted the urge to simply say fellow human beings.
“Indigenous is fine,” Cecelia said and watched him relax. “Anyway, I was named after my great nan’s sister—not an indigenous Australian but a South Sea Islander. Her mum came from Vanuatu.”
“Vanuatu?” he asked, hunching forward to listen carefully.”
“We were brought over as blackbirding.”
Hud’s expression was blank with ignorance.
“A term for what slavers did,” she explained. “Kidnapping was easier for them than cutting sugarcane themselves.”
“You say it so matter-of-factly.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t get mad sometimes. Or just sad. Wish I could say Dad’s ancestry fared better. My indigenous side comes from him, from the Gurang tribe. You’d know their land as Bundaberg.”
Hud silently processed this data. The uneaten slice of pizza in his hand drooped until it was about to fall. “How did he get the surname Winterst—”
“My turn for the next question.”
Beneath his shaggy beard, Cecelia saw Hud’s lips purse. “Why am I homeless?”
It was such an obvious question; she wasn’t shocked he’d guessed. “You can tell me it’s none of my business.”
He shoved the flaccid slice of pizza into his mouth and picked up the final piece from the box. “You think I was fired like Gene said?”
His intuition was so accurate it made her face redden. Hoping to add some levity, she said, “Probably for your terrible aim.”
“Gene didn’t imply that.”
“Err…” A grin parted her lips, a terrible habit that occurred whenever she was nervous, embarrassed, and unsure how to handle it.
“Sensitive,” Hud said, turning her smile into a nervous giggle.
“Sorry, it’s not funny.” The more she tried to restrain it, the worse it got.
“It’s fine; it was a fair shot.” He raised his eyebrows in anticipation of her reaction. “Not a pun person?”
His good humour settled her. “Is that why you’re mad at the Ghostbusters?” she asked.
Like someone needing a swig of booze for courage, Hud swung the Pepsi to his lips. The motion was too quick, and the drink frothed and spurted into his mouth. He coughed and tried to play it off as nothing, struggling for breath. He wiped the brown liquid from his beard and carefully brushed sticky strands of hair behind his ears. His eyes were watery when he cleared his throat and looked at her. “Smooth,” he croaked.
Again, they shared a laugh, but a twisted smile lingered on Hud’s face. It was pained and bitter. “Lenora was always fearless,” he said. “My wife,” he clarified.
Like the power had been cut, Cecelia’s mirth vanished. His wife?
Hud chuckled, a humourless sound. “Bloody stubborn, that woman. Probably why she suited the job so well. You remind me of her, which sounds like a come-on, but I’m serious.”
“Bloody stubborn isn’t the come-on you think it is,” she said.
“Call it determined, then.”
“Better,” she agreed. “Lenora is a Ghostbuster, too?”
“She was the Ghostbuster,” he clarified, reflecting a moment. He leaned forward to check Cecelia’s foot remained connected to Riscraven and then settled back against the wall. “Sydney had the first Australian branch, converted from the Woollahra Fire Station. They’re always converted fire stations, you know.”
Having seen Ectomobiles driving out of enough of them in ads or on the news, Cecelia nodded.
“We were super familiar with GBHQ. Woollahra Public School—where we met in grade three—was across from it on Forth Street. Lenora was fascinated by the place. All emergency services, actually. Even at eight-years-old, she wanted to help people. This urge made more sense to me as we got older because of how her dad treated her. That man…” he drifted off into a personal reverie that set his face grim. “Some people are dealt shitty cards with the families they’re born into.”
Family was a core facet of indigenous culture, and because Cecelia had enjoyed an idyllic upbringing, she couldn’t personally relate. However, she had read and seen enough online to intellectually understand.
“He was abusive?” she asked.
Another shadow crossed Hud’s face. “It was bad,” he said, shaking off the private recollection. “So you might have thought that her old man being bumped off by a connected bookie when she was fifteen was a win.”
Considering the death of a parent as a positive thing was difficult to empathise with. She’d be devastated if anything happened to any relative.
“It was for a while,” Hud continued. “Until the prick reappeared four years later. The Ghostbusters came, zapped and trapped him and,” he slapped his hands together. “Lenora had found her calling.”
It made sense, though why Hud took issue with the profession remained mysterious.
“We married a year later,” Hud said. “She was twenty, still a cadet. Any job in emergency services is a serious commitment—I’d reconciled already—but I wasn’t prepared for how much of her it would consume. Studying for her PhD and on-the-job training meant I saw Lenora most when I’d be working a site and Ecto tore past. Even if it was a block away, the siren screamed her proximity.”
“Site?”
“I was a tradie on my way to managing a crew,” he said, almost like it didn’t matter. “And I was proud of her, you know? She was helping people like she’d always wanted to.”
“You should have been proud.”
“I said I was,” he snapped, though his ire passed quickly. “But there’s more to life than work.”
No arguments from Cecelia there. Her job at the bank was not a passion. It earned her enough to pay her bills and enjoy hot showers. It wasn’t the added responsibility that deterred her from promotions; it was the extra hours she’d be expected to work, tilting her work-life balance in the wrong direction. So she could imagine how sharing life with someone career-dedicated like Lenora might cause conflict and, from where it seemed his story was headed, divorce.
“Were you still together when you moved here?”
“I moved here for her,” he stated. “We’d been living in Kings Cross in a one-bedroom apartment—”
“She wasn’t required to live at the station?”
His head jerked back like the question was crazy. “Nobody does that anymore. Although,” he seemed to reconsider, “our place was less than ten minutes’ drive to the Woollahra Station, and that convenience meant she practically did live there.” He took a deep breath. “Which is how we’d lived until I’d had enough.”
“Divorce,” Cecelia stated.
“What? No, I confessed how I felt and asked her to switch roles to something less intensive.”
“Oh, I assumed—”
“We’d known each other since we were eight. I can still,” he closed his eyes, “picture her at every year of her life, starting from then.” Opening his eyes, he said, “You don’t leap from that kind of bond to divorce without fighting to stay together.”
“I’m sorry, I just… because divorce is so common, I must have…” She waved the words away. “Terrible assumption.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, making her feel doubly awful. “Communication, remember—super important. I should have communicated my feelings sooner. The downside to knowing someone so long is that you can rest the relationship on cruise control and expect it to take care of itself.”
“Why didn’t you speak up sooner?” Cecelia asked, not an accusation; she was curious.
“Lenora was following her calling. I couldn’t ask her to give that up. Instead, I sussed out if there was another role in the company that might be equally fulfilling and return time to us. Incredibly,” he rolled his eyes, “she’d already been considering a move to R and D: a nine-to-five role with advancement opportunities that would pay better than fieldwork.”
“That’s great,” Cecelia remarked, still unsure where the problem lurked.
From how Hud’s face sank, the revelation was coming. “Before that, we didn’t speak much about her work—not her career prospects; never specific cases. I could have asked, but resenting how much it occupied her, I didn’t want to waste more time talking about it.”
“Were you ever worried about her?”
“About the job being dangerous?”
Cecelia nodded.
“Lenora was capable, and because she didn’t worry, I didn’t. Might sound weird, but I always figured the reason she was so cool with it was because compared to her old man, fighting ghosts was easy.” He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, and when he opened them, they were adrift in memory. “She applied for R and D and got it. The week before the transfer, she’d been working a gig at a massage parlour off Hall Street—super close to the beach.” He swallowed. “That last week of fieldwork, I got funny about it for the first time. Started asking if she’d ever had close calls—scary incidents. She said something interesting; at the time, I wondered if it was simply to appease me. She said: ‘The existence of ghosts isn’t scary but reassuring. People have speculated about life after death for millennia. But since the late twentieth century, we’ve had confirmation of an afterlife.’ That comforted her.”
Ghosts and Ghostbusting had always existed in Cecelia’s lifetime, so this philosophy was odd to consider. “I suppose for kind people,” she mused, “an afterlife is a nice thought.”
“There’s nothing nice about death,” Hud said, flat and cold. “Not for those left behind.”
Cecelia felt a need to swallow, but her mouth was dry. Suddenly, she understood where this tale was headed.
“When she reached the massage parlour on Hall Street,” Hud continued, “it was late. Only the manager, who had been closing up, remained on site. He was irate that nobody came the night before when the thing he’d called about had presented itself. But the Ghostbusters were busy and understaffed and… anyway. It was considered a non-urgent routine investigation, which once identified as legitimately supernatural—from all this gear,” Hud said and pointed to the Sniffer and PKE meter still attached to Gene’s prone body, “would be revisited the next day by the paranormal forensic unit. So Lenora investigated. The entity appeared. She fired at it with her CNW, but the thing didn’t stay corporeal long and flew off before she could hit it.” Hud reached for the Pepsi and found it empty. His brow furrowed, and Cecelia knew it had nothing to do with the drink.
“That night, I’d conked out on the couch in the lounge around eleven and never heard Lenora come home. Whenever this happened, she’d wake me after her shower and bring me to bed. So I was confused when I woke the following day still on the couch.
“I found her in our ensuite when I went to use the toilet the following morning. She was bloated and slick with pink slime. The way she looked,” again he clenched his eyes shut; his voice cracked. “You’d think she’d drowned. I prepared to do CPR, knowing that it was already too late but refusing to believe it. As I leant over her I heard tapping on the walls. It travelled around the bathroom like the patter of invisible legs. The demon appeared behind me. Before I could react it flew off. Tearing out the house after it, I caught its trail, a red blur headed toward the ocean. It was too fast to chase, but what could I do, anyway? I didn’t even know how to turn the damn CNW on back then.”
“I’m so sorry,” Cecelia said, genuinely heartbroken.
“Before calling the cops and the Ghostbusters, I hid her CNW and told them it was missing. Nobody was catching that thing but me. I also requested her uniform, which I was allowed to keep, provided the nametag and no-ghost logo were stripped. Impersonating a Ghostbuster is a federal crime,” he advised.
To Cecelia, this made sense, given the rule applied to all other natural emergency service agents. “And they ripped holes in her uniform when they removed them?”
Embarrassment washed over Hud’s face; his fingers pulled loosely at the tattered fabric. “I probably should have let them do it,” he said and swallowed hard. “But after receiving condolences instead of useful info from the Ghostbusters in her unit, I was pissed off and wanted them to know it. Might have made a slight spectacle of myself in the branch when I threw the torn pieces at them.”
It was hard for Cecelia to criticize Hud’s behaviour, considering what had motivated it.
“Another item I kept,” Hud confessed, “was Lenora’s two-way. Similar to a police scanner, you can pick up incoming calls, reports and ghost sightings. It let me track anything I heard that fit Spitswapper’s description. This was when I learned its name, by the way,” he added as an aside. “Problem was, the damn thing was always gone before I reached it. More often than not, it came and went so quickly that even the field agents missed it. Forensic units would come for samples later, but I didn’t stick around for that. Studying it was not my goal.”
“It might have helped you catch it?” Cecelia speculated.
Hud shrugged his shoulders. “It didn’t help the Ghostbusters. And so weeks went by, and I grew desperate. Work was less important than vengeance, and finally, the contractor I worked for gave me a choice: return or be replaced. Guess what I chose?”
“And you chased the thing here?”
He nodded. “It’s taken me nearly five years to find it.”
“Something doesn’t make sense,” Cecelia said. “You said you were chasing it through the Ghostbusters scanner. But until tonight’s attack, I’d never reported it. And I did that after you burst in.”
“Nah, I haven’t been able to use the scanner since I sold my car,” Hud answered, as if this was no big deal. “Where would I charge it?”
“But then, how did you know it was here?”
“Fate, if you believe that sort of thing. Coincidence is probably more likely. Let me go back,” he said, waving the air like erasing words on a whiteboard. “After I left my job, I sold whatever was in the apartment, cancelled the lease and lived out of my car. I had savings for food. And petrol, needed to follow where the scanner sent me. On the nights with no reports matching the demon, I conducted long-range patrols, focussing around the massage parlour and the streets between Kings Cross and Bondi—any place I knew it’d been. I’d been showering at one of the rinse ports at Bondi the night it burst out of the water, meters from where I’d parked. Three nights in a row, I waited at that spot on the beach, spying it spring from the water and soar off in the same direction. By then, I’d sussed out how to use the CNW, even came close to tagging the thing once. It’s not that CNWs are tough to aim; that veiny dick is just so hard to hit.”
“You never called the Ghostbusters to help?”
“Call on what? I had no phone.”
“You had a two-way.”
“Using that would have revealed that I had it.”
“So you allowed it to go on rampaging?” Cecelia’s anger flared and caused Hud to jolt up in surprise. “Who knows how many more could have been killed? It could have killed me!”
Her words hit home, and Hud winced as if in pain. “I wasn’t in the best headspace when Lenora died,” he said. “And spending so much time since then solo, well, you can lose sight of the bigger picture.”
“That doesn’t make it better,” she said, unsatisfied.
“I know,” he said, sounding genuine. “This is not an excuse, but reporting it after the third night wouldn’t have mattered. Spits didn’t appear again in that location. Must have been fed up with me shooting at it.”
“Get to the part where you tracked it here.”
He nodded, probably happy to move past his selfish motivations. “Right, well, I still had my car and the two-way in Sydney. After weeks without any hint of the veiny di—” his face flushed and he corrected, “demon, I picked up a conversation where a Ghostbuster was assigned something closely resembling it. The fieldworker had encountered Spits before and figured he was being sent after it. The dispatch operator shut his theory down. Queensland branches were now logging reports of it, most recently at the Gold Coast.”
“And that’s all it took for you to drive here?”
“What else did I have? Soon after arriving, I ran out of savings, and without money for petrol, I sold the car and started living at Surfers Paradise, on the beach.”
“So you couldn’t travel or track it?”
Hud flushed with embarrassment. “It wasn’t the most thought-out plan. Free-2-Rent scooters were useful, but searching was a crap shoot. From a year of sightings in and around Sydney, I knew it probably needed the ocean to hide in. So I made a home near a large sand dune where I could be sheltered from one side. Found a golf umbrella I could adjust to shield me from the others. I’d travel the Surfer’s shoreline every night, hoping to catch sight of it and praying it didn’t migrate again. I’d sleep with the CNW wrapped in a plastic bag and buried beneath me so nobody would see and try to steal it. Did this for four years before my gamble paid off.”
“Four years,” Cecelia marvelled. “I’m amazed you never gave up.”
“Revenge is a powerful motivator.”
“And you chased it to my home?”
“Essentially. Though, that was a mission in itself. Something else I’d gleaned from months scanning on the two-way was the demon is a creature of habit. It identifies a target, travelling between them and whatever section of the ocean is most convenient, back and forth along the same route. It harasses its target until it rejects them or chooses to hone in. For my wife, Spitswapper was charged enough and honed quickly. Luckily for you it took longer to decide, and I had the chance to follow it a little further during each expedition, until I finally spied its destination: your townhouse.”
“You’ve put a lot of work into this,” Cecelia acknowledged. “And I might have considered myself lucky if you had a flipping ghost trap!”
Hud paused. “When you say it like that, it sounds like a waste of four years.”
“You think?”
Dismissing her reprimand with a shake of his head, he lifted the rectangular trap by its handle and said, “Or was it?”
Cecelia groaned and rolled her eyes. “You give too much credit to coincidence.”
“Or is it fate?”
“We going to have this debate?”
Near Cecelia’s knee came an increased intensity of beeps and the tiny hum of gears. Her eyes landed on the rising wings of the PKE meter. The accompanying rhythm of the lights increased in tandem with the elevation of the wings.
Patter patter patter; the noise tearing up the walls.
“It can’t be,” Cecelia muttered, anxiety climbing. She squeezed her foot further beneath Riscraven’s torso to better secure contact and collected the CNW off the carpet, cradling it tightly.
“This demon sure has the hots for you,” Hud said, gazing around the room for signs of it.
Cecelia flicked the silver switch on her weapon labelled Activate. The wand powered up with a resonant ding.
“Push the Intensify button to shoot,” Hud reminded her as he hurriedly strapped on the full-size Proton Pack. He fossicked around the Neutrona Wand until he’d hit the relevant switches. It hummed to life and blinked.
“Flanking this thing is going to be tough with you immobilised,” Hud said, brows furrowed in thought. “I’ll try and push it between us when it corporealises. Soon as one of our streams snares it, the other cuts theirs off and throws the trap.” He placed the yellow-and-black-topped unit beside her leg and held up the pedal connected to it via a thick black cord. “Stamp on this once to open it and a second time to suck the demon inside.”
“Okay,” she said, heart pounding in her ears.
Hud stood and followed the taps around the room. “Shit, also,” he said and turned back to her. “Couple things I learned from eavesdropping on the two-way: we cannot cross our streams. And don’t look at the trap when it opens.”
“Okay,” Cecelia repeated, bleary-eyed from the late hour and the situation’s intensity. What if that thing latched onto her again and succeeded this time? Seeing it attack Gene worsened the thought, and she hoped she’d remember the instructions needed to detain Spitswapper and prevent her slimy demise.
“You’ve got this,” Hud said when he noticed her trembling. “We’ve got the tools.”
“If only we had the talent,” Cecelia said, giggling nervously. Feeling confident was tough with their invisible enemy menacing around the room.
Hud stalked the noise, wand at the ready. The longer this went on, the worse Cecelia’s anxiety grew. She was sweating and almost hit the Intensify button when the tapping loudened. As if sensing her fear, the demon circled her location, entering the ensuite she sat across and drumming on the tiles. As if this wasn’t nerve-racking enough, the mirror shards began sliding around the floor, and it was soon apparent the demon might launch them like flying daggers.
“Let’s minimise the threats,” Hud said and tried to balance the askew door closed. Too damaged from when he’d kicked it open earlier, it kept tilting off its hinges. “Slide away from the doorway,” he told Cecelia as he worked on sealing it. “Just in case it—argh!”
He lifted the heavy wood like a shield as the collected mirror blades shot at him. A hail of breaking glass crashed and echoed inside the room, and Hud bravely clung to the door to jam it against the doorway.
“Bloody hell,” he stated when the ensuite was shut enough. He checked his fingers for cuts. “Any get through?” he asked Cecelia.
Jacked with energy, she doubted she’d have felt it if any had. With the nose of her CNW pointed at the bathroom door, she scanned herself and shook her head. Hud, meanwhile, had backed away from the door, pointing his larger Neutrona Wand in its direction.
“If we get lucky, it’ll appear right there,” he said, the words no sooner from him than the door rattled with a violent pounding. The noise jumped to the adjacent wall and danced along the roof.
More excruciating minutes passed while Hud trailed the bumping thuds around the room. During his third lap, he paused and frowned. “It stopped.”
Cecelia held her breath. Could they have outlasted Spitswapper? If it had lost its stamina, it’d finally need to retreat to the ocean and recharge.
Hud was on the other side of her bed when Cecelia saw the purplish tongue apparate in the reflection of the window. It had scarcely uncurled when the rest of the pulsing monster materialised behind it. Cleverly, the demon angled its arrival so that the long-haired man prevented a clean shot from her.
“Duck!” Cecelia screamed, and Hud reflexively obeyed her. Pressing the Intensify button caused an orange and blue proton stream to rocket from the wand’s tip, juddering Cecelia’s arm and making it difficult to hold the CNW straight.
Spitswapper anticipated the blast and darted sideways, causing the electric bolt to smash through the window and into the night air.
The demon remained fully visible when it targeted Cecelia, its maw widening and tongue whipping straight at her.
Without thinking, she fired her CNW again. The demon pivoted. The stream missed, but Hud’s own entered from the other side and pushed the monster back towards her.
Flicking her stream sideways connected it with the demon. She shouted with triumph as it ensnared the beast, the noise as the proton streams spewed from the two weapons deafening inside the small room. Focussed on keeping the demon in place, she didn’t notice when Hud cut his stream and crawled her way to grab the Muon Trap. She was only aware of it when the black and yellow striped twin gates at the trap’s top sprang wide, and a white glow burst forth.
Blazing colours splashed the room more vibrantly than a nightclub dancefloor.
Foot raised above the pedal, Hud’s face was alive with emotion. Without the bright flashing lights, Cecelia suspected he would look equally wild. The moment he’d been waiting years for was upon him: justice for his wife and revenge against the demon that had derailed his life. Madness converted to triumph as the purple and pink veined demon, writhing within Cecelia’s proton lasso, twisted to look at him. Electricity sparked and crackled from its vicious red eyes.
Grinning, Hud shouted, “You’ll get no pleasure from this box, dick!” Down slammed his foot on the pedal, and an extra intense torrent of light rocketed from the trap, which whined as it dragged the demon into it. Cecelia remembered to stop shooting and did so just in time, turning away until the howl of the demon ceased and the blinding brilliance in front of her had darkened. A quiet beeping noise emitted from the trap and it started to smoke.
Hud walked over and nudged it with his bare foot. Tendrils of blue electricity zapped him. “Shit!” he shouted and hopped on the spot.
Cecelia laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. “You were this close,” she said, thumb and index finger held a centimetre apart, “to being cool.”
“Suppose you think you’ve earned bragging rights because you saved me?” Hud said, flinching through the lingering pain of an electric shock.
With pride, Cecelia realised she had saved him. A second passed between them, and Hud smiled, radiating gratitude for what they’d experienced together and how she’d validated his sacrifices.
Those damn kind eyes, she thought.
“Am I a ghost?” a weak voice gurgled from the carpet.
The Ghostbuster was moving.
To be conlcuded in: EPILOGUE
Everyone’s face dropped.
“Pest control ever get around to checking your place out?” Hud asked.
Cecelia shook her head, eyes wide.
“No need for concern,” Riscraven said, scanning the walls. “These Nomex uniforms offer a high degree of protection against ectoplasmic substances.”
Cecelia considered her flimsy outfit and Hud glanced at his own tattered coveralls.
“I guess you’re okay then,” Hud told the Ghostbuster.
“Maybe we should head to my lounge,” Cecelia suggested. “It never goes there. I think it’s afraid of my indigenous artefacts.”
“Thinking demons care about religious or totemic cultural paraphernalia is a human conceit,” Riscraven dismissed, pursuing the sounds in the room with his PKE meter. “A misconception propagated by pop culture. A ghost might care if it was religious in life.”
It was hard to define why Cecelia was bothered by this. Perhaps she’d found comfort in believing the pieces from her culture held power, that they were more than beautiful relics.
“Learn that from an app?” Hud asked the Ghostbuster.
“From study,” Riscraven said. The silver wings of the PKE meter flew to their limit, and the device beeped wildly. Gaping at the results, he uttered, “Reponere Furantur.”
“But you said it had to recharge before it struck again,” Cecelia said, heart racing. She retreated from the walls and edged up against Hud. Somehow, having him there was reassuring.
“Exactly,” Riscraven said. “Hence why this is so—”
“Interesting?” Hud proposed.
“Indeed,” Riscraven said, sliding the active meter into its holster. “I’m going to get my pack and a trap from the car.” He headed for the stairs.
“What do we do if it returns while you’re gone?” Cecelia asked.
“It can’t have replenished entirely,” Riscraven said as he descended the staircase. “Not in the brief window it’s been away.”
“All good,” Hud said and pulled his CNW. “I’ve got just the condom to bag this ugly dick.” He flicked a silver switch near the handle. The bass and whine of the unit powering up filled the room.
“Wait!” Riscraven exclaimed. He was halfway down the stairs and started heading back their way. “Not a chance; you aren’t licensed to use that and will cause more damage than you already have. Switch it o—”
The tapping on the bedroom walls rushed to the stairwell like a speeding drum roll. A loud timpani pounded directly behind the stunned Ghostbuster.
“Get your gear!” Cecelia shouted at him.
“Okay, but—” He never finished. A purple and pink blur materialised from the wall at his rear, the demon corporealising, arms out, claws landing heavily upon Riscraven’s shoulders. Clutching the Ghostbuster tightly, it raced him up the remaining stairs. Riscraven’s legs were bent behind him, and his feet dragged into each step as he was propelled towards Hud and Cecelia.
The violence of the attack caused a horrified mask to stretch across Riscraven’s face. Instinctively, Hud put an arm around Cecelia (whether to support or for support, she didn’t know), and they braced for impact.
A hair’s breadth from them, Riscraven halted as if he’d hit an invisible wall. Above him, the demon’s face leered, eyes crackling with red electricity. The thing spanned nearly six-and-a-half feet from the top of its head to the bottom of its flared lower torso. Absent a lower jaw, the impression was of a hungry predator with a gaping maw.
“Do… something…” the Ghostbuster begged.
“Get back,” Hud told Cecelia, moving her away and taking aim. Before he could fire, the demon’s tongue whipped from its sticky, purplish throat and curled around the Ghostbuster’s face. Hud tried to get a clear shot without hitting the man, but Spitswapper kept shifting position, making this impossible.
“It’s… starting to—” A gargling noise usurped Riscraven’s speech. Slime seeped at the corners of his eyes, trickling down his cheeks like tears. The demon’s tongue widened. Soon, hardly any part of the Ghostbuster’s face was visible.
“Shoot!” Cecelia pleaded.
“I’ll hit Gene!” Hud said, thwarted wherever he aimed as if the demon could anticipate every new area targeted.
“Let him go!” Cecelia shouted and lunged forward, grabbing Riscraven by the waist and trying to pry him free. Meanwhile, Riscraven’s eyes, practically all that remained visible of him beneath the thick, slimy tongue, rolled back and presented purely white. There was a sick gurgling noise, and the Ghostbuster began to throb and contort like a blow-up doll being inflated and deflated in alternating breaths.
“Try to keep him in place and keep your head low!” Hud shouted to her, trying to flank Spitswapper before it could pivot and re-shield itself with Riscraven.
“It’s too fast!” Cecelia shouted.
“Go left!” Hud shouted, to which Cecelia, confused and panicked, yanked Riscraven right.
“Perfect!” Hud said, predicting her mistake and darting the other way to secure a target zone. He pressed a button on the wand and unleashed an orange and blue stream of particles at the demon’s side. Roaring with rage, Spitswapper unfurled its vile tongue and dropped Riscraven at Cecelia’s feet.
Stepping over the Ghostbuster like a man possessed, Hud advanced, proton stream tearing long and sparking strips from the walls and ceiling as he chased Spitswapper out the room and into the hallway. Even over the loud CNW, Cecelia heard Hud shouting, “Damn you to hell!” until the veiny creature had struck and vanished through the wall. Hud was a few steps down the stairs after it before Cecelia’s voice stopped him.
“Call an ambulance!”
“But the demon—”
“Gene’s still alive, but not for long!” she shrieked, holding the Ghostbuster on his side in the recovery position, a technique learned in first aid training. A trickle of slime dribbled from Riscraven’s mouth, but a finger probe suggested no blockage. She turned him onto his back, rechecked his mouth and peered as far down his throat as possible. Nothing was visible. If nothing obstructed his airways, why wasn’t he breathing? How long could a heart keep pumping without oxygen? She tilted his head and breathed into his mouth twice, suddenly fearing that if there was something in his throat, this might be worsening the blockage.
Practice drills during first aid training had made her feel competent. Under the stress of a real situation, she didn’t know what else to do.
“I don’t have a phone!” she heard Hud shout from the staircase. “Use the two-way on his shoulder!”
“It’s shorted out because of the slime!” she said.
“How about your phone?” Hud said, still from the stairs.
Cecelia’s adrenalin skyrocketed; she couldn’t remember where it was. Too much required her attention. Focussing purely on Riscraven, she watched for any rise or fall of his chest.
Nothing.
An idea struck her. She located the Ghostbuster’s car keys and threw them in Hud’s direction. “See if there’s another two-way in his Ecto,” she said, rechecking Riscraven’s neck for a pulse. Miraculously, despite him not breathing, his heart remained strong.
She heard Hud race down the stairs, knock the chairs holding the front door closed out the way, and exit.
Monitoring the prone Ghostbuster felt like eternity. Worse was contemplating the demon’s return. Having reappeared tonight when it was supposedly unable to opened the possibility of a third attack. What would she do then?
“…way too long,” Cecelia heard Hud say as he re-entered her apartment. “And there’s nothing else you can do until then?” He grunted as he bound up the stairs, scraping against the wall as he came.
Cecelia leaned over Riscraven to check his vitals. Regularly, she’d turn him to his side and try to scoop out whatever was lodged in his throat—presumably more slime—but hardly a trickle ever came out.
“Tell them I can’t get the slime out and it’s clogging his airways!” she told Hud as he entered her bedroom. “I don’t think I should give more breaths.”
Hud waved her away as if she was making it hard for him to hear the person on the walkie-talkie. He dropped a ghost trap by the bathroom door and Gene’s Proton Pack by the opposite wall. “Just hurry,” he said into the two-way, turning a nob that cut the communication with a brief crackle.
“Why didn’t you tell them?” she demanded.
Hud leaned over Riscraven and searched his pockets until he located the man’s cell phone. He held it up to Cecelia and placed it on the carpet beside her.
“Shit,” she said and flushed red. Considering how often the Ghostbuster had used it, she felt stupid for forgetting and guilty for the implications to Riscraven’s life.
“Slipped my mind, too,” Hud said and inspected Riscraven closely. Then he sat back on his haunches and muttered, “Huh,” with a measure of awe.
“He’s going to die!”
“They said as long as one of us keeps contact with him,” Hud scrutinised Cecelia’s positioning to ensure this was happening, “he’ll live.”
“Contact how? What do we need to do?”
“Just touch him. Even a toe is enough.”
“That makes no sense!” Despite feeling her fingers on Riscraven’s pulse, she felt the need to ensure they were definitely on him.
“Does anything about this make sense?” Hud asked.
“Are they sending someone to help?” she queried. “We can’t sit like this all night. What if that thing returns?”
Hud nodded and filled her in. “Another Ghostbusters unit is on its way, but being that the closest branch to us is in Brisbane and currently working another job, it probably won’t reach us for hours.”
“Hours!”
“Let’s keep this on,” Hud asked, examining the PKE meter in Riscraven’s belt. It hummed and buzzed steadily but was otherwise still. “It’ll warn us if that thing comes back without signalling its arrival on the walls first.” He sat against the wall opposite her, a few feet away. “We’ll take shifts maintaining contact with him. Use your foot; you’ll need your hands free if dick appears.”
“If his dick appears?” she shouted.
“Not his,” Hud told her, indicating Riscraven. “I meant Spitswapper.”
“Just call it that or the demon!” she admonished, jumpy and dubious of the cavalier way they were to care for the unconscious Ghostbuster. “I need to know if his pulse drops; otherwise, I won’t know to start CPR.”
“Long as one of us is touching him,” Hud said, “he’ll stay comatose until the med unit arrives. Lady I spoke with assured me. This is a supernatural issue; don’t expect logic.”
Cecelia scanned Riscraven’s body regardless, a habit from first aid training. Constantly leaning over him was stiffening her shoulder. Reluctant as she was to concede, she carefully shifted her weight and dug a foot beneath Riscraven’s torso. This allowed her to stretch and lean against the wall facing Hud. Most of her hair had slipped from the bun, so she finally shook it all free. The wavy black strands cascaded past her shoulders, catching Hud’s attention. He pretended not to notice.
“If we hadn’t detached him from that thing as quickly as we did,” Hud stated and finished the statement with a finger across his neck.
While Cecelia processed this, Hud crawled over and brought the Proton Pack and trap closer to them. Visibly debating whether to give her the CNW or the pack, he ultimately gave her the smaller unit. “Be careful with this. It was a gift.”
The scaled-down Particle Thrower was light and scarcely the length of her forearm. Thin in depth, its shape was triangular, somewhat evocative of a paper airplane. The buttons on the handle were labelled but too ambiguous for the weapon to be turned on or fired intuitively. Cecelia opened her mouth to query them when a noise interrupted her.
“My bad,” Hud said and patted his stomach.
Cecelia eased back down. As her panic receded, she remembered the reward she’d offered Hud for fixing her door. “There’s pizza in the fridge,” she said. “Half a bottle of Pepsi, too. Have as much as you want.”
Hud thought about it. “I’m not thrilled at the idea of Spits returning for you while I’m down there.”
“You’re right,” she said, dragging Hud’s leg over to rest on Riscraven. “If it’s gonna come back for me, it’ll probably appear up here.” She got to her feet, stretched her back some more and turned to the doorway.
“Don’t,” he pleaded, obviously uncomfortable at her leaving without his protection. “I’ve gone longer without food.”
“Back in a sec.”
“Wait!”
She paused again.
“If you need to use the CNW,” Hud said, “flick the Activate switch on the left. Aim the nozzle at your target and push Intensify. Then hold on. It’s not as powerful as a full-sized Neutrona Wand but it still kicks when it fires.”
“And Gene made it sound so difficult,” she said, winking in a way that felt very Hud and hurrying to the kitchen. Choosing fruit, cold pizza and a soft drink, she wondered what had made her behave flirtatiously. This wasn’t the occasion for frivolities, nor was Hud her type. Perhaps if he was employed, had a haircut and took a shave…
She was in her room again within two minutes.
“No glasses?” Hud asked while she lowered herself, and the food, to the carpet. The apple and mandarin she’d been balancing on the pizza box rolled off and in his direction as though telekinetically summoned.
“It’s all yours,” Cecelia said, swapping Riscraven-contact duty with him.
It took Hud a moment to accept this, and then he nodded in thanks. “Not everyone is so generous,” he said, eagerly opening the grease-stained box and grabbing the first pizza slice his fingers connected with. “I’ll try not to spill on your carpet.”
As if an identical thought struck them, they examined the eviscerated walls and the mirror shards decorating her nearby bathroom floor. “Probably wouldn’t notice if you did,” Cecelia remarked.
“Fair,” Hud said, and the pair actually smiled. It turned into a laugh. The shared absurdity of what they were going through and that they’d be laughing about it made it harder to stop.
“If you didn’t laugh, right?” Cecelia said through persistent fits of giggles.
Hud nodded and started to settle. “Plus, I ran out of tears years ago.”
Cecelia was still catching her breath from the giggle-fit when the weight of his words sank in. Quickly, the atmosphere turned sombre and she again wondered about Hud’s past. Perhaps if she tactfully asked him about it, he’d open up.
Evidently, he was simultaneously pondering her. After his third slice of pizza, he asked about her ex. “If it’s still raw,” he said, “we don’t need to discuss it.”
“Not raw,” she half-lied. “We only dated a few months. Ending it was my decision.”
“Doesn’t mean it was painless,” he observed, a little too astutely.
With a hint of emotion that betrayed the half-lie, she revealed how the mysterious noises in the house weren’t the reason they’d split. Rather, it was Eric’s inability to hear her or support her feelings.
“Valid,” Hud said. “Communication is key. Only works when it’s both ways.”
“Exactly,” she said, surprised at Hud’s sensitivity. It was an opportune moment to ask him about his past.
Again, he spoke before she could. “Is Cecelia a common indigenous name?”
“Oh.” Surprised again. “No.”
“My school didn’t spend much time on first nationers,” he added, taking a swig from the Pepsi bottle.
No schools did, Cecelia thought. It didn’t help that the indigenous community comprised less than four per cent of the country’s population. All this made it easy for the non-indigenous populace to pretend the land’s original inhabitants didn’t exist. “First nation is a white person’s label,” she said. Then, to reassure him, she added, “It’s fine. The label comes from a good place, even if it’s kind of been forced upon us.”
“Is there something you prefer?” Hud asked, and because she knew he was also coming from a good place, she resisted the urge to simply say fellow human beings.
“Indigenous is fine,” Cecelia said and watched him relax. “Anyway, I was named after my great nan’s sister—not an indigenous Australian but a South Sea Islander. Her mum came from Vanuatu.”
“Vanuatu?” he asked, hunching forward to listen carefully.”
“We were brought over as blackbirding.”
Hud’s expression was blank with ignorance.
“A term for what slavers did,” she explained. “Kidnapping was easier for them than cutting sugarcane themselves.”
“You say it so matter-of-factly.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t get mad sometimes. Or just sad. Wish I could say Dad’s ancestry fared better. My indigenous side comes from him, from the Gurang tribe. You’d know their land as Bundaberg.”
Hud silently processed this data. The uneaten slice of pizza in his hand drooped until it was about to fall. “How did he get the surname Winterst—”
“My turn for the next question.”
Beneath his shaggy beard, Cecelia saw Hud’s lips purse. “Why am I homeless?”
It was such an obvious question; she wasn’t shocked he’d guessed. “You can tell me it’s none of my business.”
He shoved the flaccid slice of pizza into his mouth and picked up the final piece from the box. “You think I was fired like Gene said?”
His intuition was so accurate it made her face redden. Hoping to add some levity, she said, “Probably for your terrible aim.”
“Gene didn’t imply that.”
“Err…” A grin parted her lips, a terrible habit that occurred whenever she was nervous, embarrassed, and unsure how to handle it.
“Sensitive,” Hud said, turning her smile into a nervous giggle.
“Sorry, it’s not funny.” The more she tried to restrain it, the worse it got.
“It’s fine; it was a fair shot.” He raised his eyebrows in anticipation of her reaction. “Not a pun person?”
His good humour settled her. “Is that why you’re mad at the Ghostbusters?” she asked.
Like someone needing a swig of booze for courage, Hud swung the Pepsi to his lips. The motion was too quick, and the drink frothed and spurted into his mouth. He coughed and tried to play it off as nothing, struggling for breath. He wiped the brown liquid from his beard and carefully brushed sticky strands of hair behind his ears. His eyes were watery when he cleared his throat and looked at her. “Smooth,” he croaked.
Again, they shared a laugh, but a twisted smile lingered on Hud’s face. It was pained and bitter. “Lenora was always fearless,” he said. “My wife,” he clarified.
Like the power had been cut, Cecelia’s mirth vanished. His wife?
Hud chuckled, a humourless sound. “Bloody stubborn, that woman. Probably why she suited the job so well. You remind me of her, which sounds like a come-on, but I’m serious.”
“Bloody stubborn isn’t the come-on you think it is,” she said.
“Call it determined, then.”
“Better,” she agreed. “Lenora is a Ghostbuster, too?”
“She was the Ghostbuster,” he clarified, reflecting a moment. He leaned forward to check Cecelia’s foot remained connected to Riscraven and then settled back against the wall. “Sydney had the first Australian branch, converted from the Woollahra Fire Station. They’re always converted fire stations, you know.”
Having seen Ectomobiles driving out of enough of them in ads or on the news, Cecelia nodded.
“We were super familiar with GBHQ. Woollahra Public School—where we met in grade three—was across from it on Forth Street. Lenora was fascinated by the place. All emergency services, actually. Even at eight-years-old, she wanted to help people. This urge made more sense to me as we got older because of how her dad treated her. That man…” he drifted off into a personal reverie that set his face grim. “Some people are dealt shitty cards with the families they’re born into.”
Family was a core facet of indigenous culture, and because Cecelia had enjoyed an idyllic upbringing, she couldn’t personally relate. However, she had read and seen enough online to intellectually understand.
“He was abusive?” she asked.
Another shadow crossed Hud’s face. “It was bad,” he said, shaking off the private recollection. “So you might have thought that her old man being bumped off by a connected bookie when she was fifteen was a win.”
Considering the death of a parent as a positive thing was difficult to empathise with. She’d be devastated if anything happened to any relative.
“It was for a while,” Hud continued. “Until the prick reappeared four years later. The Ghostbusters came, zapped and trapped him and,” he slapped his hands together. “Lenora had found her calling.”
It made sense, though why Hud took issue with the profession remained mysterious.
“We married a year later,” Hud said. “She was twenty, still a cadet. Any job in emergency services is a serious commitment—I’d reconciled already—but I wasn’t prepared for how much of her it would consume. Studying for her PhD and on-the-job training meant I saw Lenora most when I’d be working a site and Ecto tore past. Even if it was a block away, the siren screamed her proximity.”
“Site?”
“I was a tradie on my way to managing a crew,” he said, almost like it didn’t matter. “And I was proud of her, you know? She was helping people like she’d always wanted to.”
“You should have been proud.”
“I said I was,” he snapped, though his ire passed quickly. “But there’s more to life than work.”
No arguments from Cecelia there. Her job at the bank was not a passion. It earned her enough to pay her bills and enjoy hot showers. It wasn’t the added responsibility that deterred her from promotions; it was the extra hours she’d be expected to work, tilting her work-life balance in the wrong direction. So she could imagine how sharing life with someone career-dedicated like Lenora might cause conflict and, from where it seemed his story was headed, divorce.
“Were you still together when you moved here?”
“I moved here for her,” he stated. “We’d been living in Kings Cross in a one-bedroom apartment—”
“She wasn’t required to live at the station?”
His head jerked back like the question was crazy. “Nobody does that anymore. Although,” he seemed to reconsider, “our place was less than ten minutes’ drive to the Woollahra Station, and that convenience meant she practically did live there.” He took a deep breath. “Which is how we’d lived until I’d had enough.”
“Divorce,” Cecelia stated.
“What? No, I confessed how I felt and asked her to switch roles to something less intensive.”
“Oh, I assumed—”
“We’d known each other since we were eight. I can still,” he closed his eyes, “picture her at every year of her life, starting from then.” Opening his eyes, he said, “You don’t leap from that kind of bond to divorce without fighting to stay together.”
“I’m sorry, I just… because divorce is so common, I must have…” She waved the words away. “Terrible assumption.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, making her feel doubly awful. “Communication, remember—super important. I should have communicated my feelings sooner. The downside to knowing someone so long is that you can rest the relationship on cruise control and expect it to take care of itself.”
“Why didn’t you speak up sooner?” Cecelia asked, not an accusation; she was curious.
“Lenora was following her calling. I couldn’t ask her to give that up. Instead, I sussed out if there was another role in the company that might be equally fulfilling and return time to us. Incredibly,” he rolled his eyes, “she’d already been considering a move to R and D: a nine-to-five role with advancement opportunities that would pay better than fieldwork.”
“That’s great,” Cecelia remarked, still unsure where the problem lurked.
From how Hud’s face sank, the revelation was coming. “Before that, we didn’t speak much about her work—not her career prospects; never specific cases. I could have asked, but resenting how much it occupied her, I didn’t want to waste more time talking about it.”
“Were you ever worried about her?”
“About the job being dangerous?”
Cecelia nodded.
“Lenora was capable, and because she didn’t worry, I didn’t. Might sound weird, but I always figured the reason she was so cool with it was because compared to her old man, fighting ghosts was easy.” He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, and when he opened them, they were adrift in memory. “She applied for R and D and got it. The week before the transfer, she’d been working a gig at a massage parlour off Hall Street—super close to the beach.” He swallowed. “That last week of fieldwork, I got funny about it for the first time. Started asking if she’d ever had close calls—scary incidents. She said something interesting; at the time, I wondered if it was simply to appease me. She said: ‘The existence of ghosts isn’t scary but reassuring. People have speculated about life after death for millennia. But since the late twentieth century, we’ve had confirmation of an afterlife.’ That comforted her.”
Ghosts and Ghostbusting had always existed in Cecelia’s lifetime, so this philosophy was odd to consider. “I suppose for kind people,” she mused, “an afterlife is a nice thought.”
“There’s nothing nice about death,” Hud said, flat and cold. “Not for those left behind.”
Cecelia felt a need to swallow, but her mouth was dry. Suddenly, she understood where this tale was headed.
“When she reached the massage parlour on Hall Street,” Hud continued, “it was late. Only the manager, who had been closing up, remained on site. He was irate that nobody came the night before when the thing he’d called about had presented itself. But the Ghostbusters were busy and understaffed and… anyway. It was considered a non-urgent routine investigation, which once identified as legitimately supernatural—from all this gear,” Hud said and pointed to the Sniffer and PKE meter still attached to Gene’s prone body, “would be revisited the next day by the paranormal forensic unit. So Lenora investigated. The entity appeared. She fired at it with her CNW, but the thing didn’t stay corporeal long and flew off before she could hit it.” Hud reached for the Pepsi and found it empty. His brow furrowed, and Cecelia knew it had nothing to do with the drink.
“That night, I’d conked out on the couch in the lounge around eleven and never heard Lenora come home. Whenever this happened, she’d wake me after her shower and bring me to bed. So I was confused when I woke the following day still on the couch.
“I found her in our ensuite when I went to use the toilet the following morning. She was bloated and slick with pink slime. The way she looked,” again he clenched his eyes shut; his voice cracked. “You’d think she’d drowned. I prepared to do CPR, knowing that it was already too late but refusing to believe it. As I leant over her I heard tapping on the walls. It travelled around the bathroom like the patter of invisible legs. The demon appeared behind me. Before I could react it flew off. Tearing out the house after it, I caught its trail, a red blur headed toward the ocean. It was too fast to chase, but what could I do, anyway? I didn’t even know how to turn the damn CNW on back then.”
“I’m so sorry,” Cecelia said, genuinely heartbroken.
“Before calling the cops and the Ghostbusters, I hid her CNW and told them it was missing. Nobody was catching that thing but me. I also requested her uniform, which I was allowed to keep, provided the nametag and no-ghost logo were stripped. Impersonating a Ghostbuster is a federal crime,” he advised.
To Cecelia, this made sense, given the rule applied to all other natural emergency service agents. “And they ripped holes in her uniform when they removed them?”
Embarrassment washed over Hud’s face; his fingers pulled loosely at the tattered fabric. “I probably should have let them do it,” he said and swallowed hard. “But after receiving condolences instead of useful info from the Ghostbusters in her unit, I was pissed off and wanted them to know it. Might have made a slight spectacle of myself in the branch when I threw the torn pieces at them.”
It was hard for Cecelia to criticize Hud’s behaviour, considering what had motivated it.
“Another item I kept,” Hud confessed, “was Lenora’s two-way. Similar to a police scanner, you can pick up incoming calls, reports and ghost sightings. It let me track anything I heard that fit Spitswapper’s description. This was when I learned its name, by the way,” he added as an aside. “Problem was, the damn thing was always gone before I reached it. More often than not, it came and went so quickly that even the field agents missed it. Forensic units would come for samples later, but I didn’t stick around for that. Studying it was not my goal.”
“It might have helped you catch it?” Cecelia speculated.
Hud shrugged his shoulders. “It didn’t help the Ghostbusters. And so weeks went by, and I grew desperate. Work was less important than vengeance, and finally, the contractor I worked for gave me a choice: return or be replaced. Guess what I chose?”
“And you chased the thing here?”
He nodded. “It’s taken me nearly five years to find it.”
“Something doesn’t make sense,” Cecelia said. “You said you were chasing it through the Ghostbusters scanner. But until tonight’s attack, I’d never reported it. And I did that after you burst in.”
“Nah, I haven’t been able to use the scanner since I sold my car,” Hud answered, as if this was no big deal. “Where would I charge it?”
“But then, how did you know it was here?”
“Fate, if you believe that sort of thing. Coincidence is probably more likely. Let me go back,” he said, waving the air like erasing words on a whiteboard. “After I left my job, I sold whatever was in the apartment, cancelled the lease and lived out of my car. I had savings for food. And petrol, needed to follow where the scanner sent me. On the nights with no reports matching the demon, I conducted long-range patrols, focussing around the massage parlour and the streets between Kings Cross and Bondi—any place I knew it’d been. I’d been showering at one of the rinse ports at Bondi the night it burst out of the water, meters from where I’d parked. Three nights in a row, I waited at that spot on the beach, spying it spring from the water and soar off in the same direction. By then, I’d sussed out how to use the CNW, even came close to tagging the thing once. It’s not that CNWs are tough to aim; that veiny dick is just so hard to hit.”
“You never called the Ghostbusters to help?”
“Call on what? I had no phone.”
“You had a two-way.”
“Using that would have revealed that I had it.”
“So you allowed it to go on rampaging?” Cecelia’s anger flared and caused Hud to jolt up in surprise. “Who knows how many more could have been killed? It could have killed me!”
Her words hit home, and Hud winced as if in pain. “I wasn’t in the best headspace when Lenora died,” he said. “And spending so much time since then solo, well, you can lose sight of the bigger picture.”
“That doesn’t make it better,” she said, unsatisfied.
“I know,” he said, sounding genuine. “This is not an excuse, but reporting it after the third night wouldn’t have mattered. Spits didn’t appear again in that location. Must have been fed up with me shooting at it.”
“Get to the part where you tracked it here.”
He nodded, probably happy to move past his selfish motivations. “Right, well, I still had my car and the two-way in Sydney. After weeks without any hint of the veiny di—” his face flushed and he corrected, “demon, I picked up a conversation where a Ghostbuster was assigned something closely resembling it. The fieldworker had encountered Spits before and figured he was being sent after it. The dispatch operator shut his theory down. Queensland branches were now logging reports of it, most recently at the Gold Coast.”
“And that’s all it took for you to drive here?”
“What else did I have? Soon after arriving, I ran out of savings, and without money for petrol, I sold the car and started living at Surfers Paradise, on the beach.”
“So you couldn’t travel or track it?”
Hud flushed with embarrassment. “It wasn’t the most thought-out plan. Free-2-Rent scooters were useful, but searching was a crap shoot. From a year of sightings in and around Sydney, I knew it probably needed the ocean to hide in. So I made a home near a large sand dune where I could be sheltered from one side. Found a golf umbrella I could adjust to shield me from the others. I’d travel the Surfer’s shoreline every night, hoping to catch sight of it and praying it didn’t migrate again. I’d sleep with the CNW wrapped in a plastic bag and buried beneath me so nobody would see and try to steal it. Did this for four years before my gamble paid off.”
“Four years,” Cecelia marvelled. “I’m amazed you never gave up.”
“Revenge is a powerful motivator.”
“And you chased it to my home?”
“Essentially. Though, that was a mission in itself. Something else I’d gleaned from months scanning on the two-way was the demon is a creature of habit. It identifies a target, travelling between them and whatever section of the ocean is most convenient, back and forth along the same route. It harasses its target until it rejects them or chooses to hone in. For my wife, Spitswapper was charged enough and honed quickly. Luckily for you it took longer to decide, and I had the chance to follow it a little further during each expedition, until I finally spied its destination: your townhouse.”
“You’ve put a lot of work into this,” Cecelia acknowledged. “And I might have considered myself lucky if you had a flipping ghost trap!”
Hud paused. “When you say it like that, it sounds like a waste of four years.”
“You think?”
Dismissing her reprimand with a shake of his head, he lifted the rectangular trap by its handle and said, “Or was it?”
Cecelia groaned and rolled her eyes. “You give too much credit to coincidence.”
“Or is it fate?”
“We going to have this debate?”
Near Cecelia’s knee came an increased intensity of beeps and the tiny hum of gears. Her eyes landed on the rising wings of the PKE meter. The accompanying rhythm of the lights increased in tandem with the elevation of the wings.
Patter patter patter; the noise tearing up the walls.
“It can’t be,” Cecelia muttered, anxiety climbing. She squeezed her foot further beneath Riscraven’s torso to better secure contact and collected the CNW off the carpet, cradling it tightly.
“This demon sure has the hots for you,” Hud said, gazing around the room for signs of it.
Cecelia flicked the silver switch on her weapon labelled Activate. The wand powered up with a resonant ding.
“Push the Intensify button to shoot,” Hud reminded her as he hurriedly strapped on the full-size Proton Pack. He fossicked around the Neutrona Wand until he’d hit the relevant switches. It hummed to life and blinked.
“Flanking this thing is going to be tough with you immobilised,” Hud said, brows furrowed in thought. “I’ll try and push it between us when it corporealises. Soon as one of our streams snares it, the other cuts theirs off and throws the trap.” He placed the yellow-and-black-topped unit beside her leg and held up the pedal connected to it via a thick black cord. “Stamp on this once to open it and a second time to suck the demon inside.”
“Okay,” she said, heart pounding in her ears.
Hud stood and followed the taps around the room. “Shit, also,” he said and turned back to her. “Couple things I learned from eavesdropping on the two-way: we cannot cross our streams. And don’t look at the trap when it opens.”
“Okay,” Cecelia repeated, bleary-eyed from the late hour and the situation’s intensity. What if that thing latched onto her again and succeeded this time? Seeing it attack Gene worsened the thought, and she hoped she’d remember the instructions needed to detain Spitswapper and prevent her slimy demise.
“You’ve got this,” Hud said when he noticed her trembling. “We’ve got the tools.”
“If only we had the talent,” Cecelia said, giggling nervously. Feeling confident was tough with their invisible enemy menacing around the room.
Hud stalked the noise, wand at the ready. The longer this went on, the worse Cecelia’s anxiety grew. She was sweating and almost hit the Intensify button when the tapping loudened. As if sensing her fear, the demon circled her location, entering the ensuite she sat across and drumming on the tiles. As if this wasn’t nerve-racking enough, the mirror shards began sliding around the floor, and it was soon apparent the demon might launch them like flying daggers.
“Let’s minimise the threats,” Hud said and tried to balance the askew door closed. Too damaged from when he’d kicked it open earlier, it kept tilting off its hinges. “Slide away from the doorway,” he told Cecelia as he worked on sealing it. “Just in case it—argh!”
He lifted the heavy wood like a shield as the collected mirror blades shot at him. A hail of breaking glass crashed and echoed inside the room, and Hud bravely clung to the door to jam it against the doorway.
“Bloody hell,” he stated when the ensuite was shut enough. He checked his fingers for cuts. “Any get through?” he asked Cecelia.
Jacked with energy, she doubted she’d have felt it if any had. With the nose of her CNW pointed at the bathroom door, she scanned herself and shook her head. Hud, meanwhile, had backed away from the door, pointing his larger Neutrona Wand in its direction.
“If we get lucky, it’ll appear right there,” he said, the words no sooner from him than the door rattled with a violent pounding. The noise jumped to the adjacent wall and danced along the roof.
More excruciating minutes passed while Hud trailed the bumping thuds around the room. During his third lap, he paused and frowned. “It stopped.”
Cecelia held her breath. Could they have outlasted Spitswapper? If it had lost its stamina, it’d finally need to retreat to the ocean and recharge.
Hud was on the other side of her bed when Cecelia saw the purplish tongue apparate in the reflection of the window. It had scarcely uncurled when the rest of the pulsing monster materialised behind it. Cleverly, the demon angled its arrival so that the long-haired man prevented a clean shot from her.
“Duck!” Cecelia screamed, and Hud reflexively obeyed her. Pressing the Intensify button caused an orange and blue proton stream to rocket from the wand’s tip, juddering Cecelia’s arm and making it difficult to hold the CNW straight.
Spitswapper anticipated the blast and darted sideways, causing the electric bolt to smash through the window and into the night air.
The demon remained fully visible when it targeted Cecelia, its maw widening and tongue whipping straight at her.
Without thinking, she fired her CNW again. The demon pivoted. The stream missed, but Hud’s own entered from the other side and pushed the monster back towards her.
Flicking her stream sideways connected it with the demon. She shouted with triumph as it ensnared the beast, the noise as the proton streams spewed from the two weapons deafening inside the small room. Focussed on keeping the demon in place, she didn’t notice when Hud cut his stream and crawled her way to grab the Muon Trap. She was only aware of it when the black and yellow striped twin gates at the trap’s top sprang wide, and a white glow burst forth.
Blazing colours splashed the room more vibrantly than a nightclub dancefloor.
Foot raised above the pedal, Hud’s face was alive with emotion. Without the bright flashing lights, Cecelia suspected he would look equally wild. The moment he’d been waiting years for was upon him: justice for his wife and revenge against the demon that had derailed his life. Madness converted to triumph as the purple and pink veined demon, writhing within Cecelia’s proton lasso, twisted to look at him. Electricity sparked and crackled from its vicious red eyes.
Grinning, Hud shouted, “You’ll get no pleasure from this box, dick!” Down slammed his foot on the pedal, and an extra intense torrent of light rocketed from the trap, which whined as it dragged the demon into it. Cecelia remembered to stop shooting and did so just in time, turning away until the howl of the demon ceased and the blinding brilliance in front of her had darkened. A quiet beeping noise emitted from the trap and it started to smoke.
Hud walked over and nudged it with his bare foot. Tendrils of blue electricity zapped him. “Shit!” he shouted and hopped on the spot.
Cecelia laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. “You were this close,” she said, thumb and index finger held a centimetre apart, “to being cool.”
“Suppose you think you’ve earned bragging rights because you saved me?” Hud said, flinching through the lingering pain of an electric shock.
With pride, Cecelia realised she had saved him. A second passed between them, and Hud smiled, radiating gratitude for what they’d experienced together and how she’d validated his sacrifices.
Those damn kind eyes, she thought.
“Am I a ghost?” a weak voice gurgled from the carpet.
The Ghostbuster was moving.
To be conlcuded in: EPILOGUE
Statistics: Posted by Xajacity — June 20th, 2024, 5:09 am