Ephemera & Tales

For Halloween, 2005, and for buhfly's Halloween Challenge
With thanks to turps33 for sparking off the idea, and morgaine_x and asradel for helping it come to pass. All remaining mistakes are, of course, my own.

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Every sleepless night Nick waits to take Bell out for their morning run, and every morning he makes himself wait more, until the school rush and the office rush are done. For the first time this year the air is still thick with mist: even at after-nine the far side of the road is grayed-out and the air is cool and wet and heavy. Bell lifts her head and pulls at her harness as they get closer to the park, bouncing on fallen leaves and flicking her ears tracking mist-muffled sounds.

Out on the heath Nick unbuckles her and then chases after, pulling the thick watery air into his lungs and grinning. There’s a time for thinking about everything that’s wrong with his life, but this isn’t it.

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Written for buhfly's Halloween Challenge.

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It's never been the sort of event that advertises. There were no flyers, no posters, not even a few discrete lines in a specialist magazine. The only reason I found out about it is because I have a good memory even when I'm drunk. Drunk and exceedingly well fucked, in this case, and apparently my companions of the evening – old friends but not a couple, on the lookout for new blood to play with, both well hung, and sure of what they wanted – had assumed I was too far gone to be listening. It's never been the sort of event that advertises, but apparently knowing the right name and the right shop, and being willing to drop a significant amount of cash – no credit card records please – is enough to secure an invitation. Or it was, four years ago. I doubt it's that simple any more.

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Remember remember the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

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Spending a precious weekend when both you and your boyfriend were off work cooking, cleaning and hauling wood into a neat torchable mound wouldn’t normally be high on Luke’s list of Fun Things To Do. Nonetheless, the three of them had spent all day Sunday working in the garden together, alternating grunt work with silly games and spiced cider. Nick had blown into town on Monday, hale and hearty and taking control of the kitchen as though he’d never left.

Now here they were, ears still ringing from the screamers and the firecrackers, afterburnt images of cascades and Catherine wheels on their eyelids. He was breathing in the bonfire smoke with his hands hiding from the chill air in Walker’s pockets, his lover leaning back to share body heat and the weekend’s work was well worth it.

Worth it for this moment, worth it for the hours before, passing hot drinks and thick soup around their assembled friends, watching as conversations sparked and spread, including the newcomers and welcoming old friends back again. Worth it for the ritual risking of his fingers, pulling scorched foil packets out of the ashes, and for making sure that this year Walker had every opportunity to kiss his fingertips better.

Luke leant forward a little, drawing wood smoke and Walker deep into his lungs, as he thought about the promises those talented lips had made to his sore skin, and when the next volley of explosions went off he pretended to jump just to get closer still.

cicirossi has been posting some wonderful little ghost snippets [1], and tsuki_no_bara has also added to the store, and I thought I'd jump on their bandwagon, basically. Hope you don't mind.

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Everyone agreed that the theatre was haunted. No one admitted to believing it, and in some stories it was a stage tech who'd gotten crushed by sliding flats back in the 50's and in some stories it was one of the boxes that was haunted, not back stage at all. Mostly the box stories were variations on a theme of the young heiress her lover and her fiancé. Taki told Trent that the fiancé had stabbed the lover and then had to flee Eden, leaving the heiress broken and lonely. The way Vo told it, it was a story of unrequited love, the heiress leaping from her fiancé’s arms to worship her dancer-lover with her dying breaths. Cameron had laughed then and nudged Vo in the ribs, teasing her about waiting for a rich young man to launch himself at her and they'd all smiled and reached for another handful of plain popcorn and went back to watching the movie.

When the theatre was dark and the stage full of music and rehearsal then Trent was pretty sure they were just stupid stories. When the stage was tight with excitement, waiting for curtains up, and the theatre was full of that buzz of a few hundred hushed voices then he knew they were. But when he'd crept back in after hours, sliding across the courtyard between theatre and school buildings hugging the shadows like he was tailing a snitch, when he'd been sneaking around in the mostly dark looking for places for Ru to hide out and watch them practise, there had been something. Ropes caught swinging in his torch beam backstage, odd sounds like footsteps, and an inexplicable draft in the velvet-wrapped boxes. Not that he believed the stories, which were just stories and nothing to make his heart race and his skin tingle. But there was definitely something

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[1] For example : here, here, here and here