Beware the Manor House
Title: Beware the Manor House (7/?)
Rating: PG to R
Pairing: Dom/Billy, others implied
Warnings: AU, angst, horror, ghosts, implied murder, violence, scary imagery, etc. This is sort of, but not really, a death fic. Suffice it to say, major characters are no longer living and as such, are in fact dead. But in the spirit of whodunnit and AU, it really doesn’t matter much. M’kay? Just trust me.
Summary: Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.
A/N: There is mention of a recently deceased and rather beloved actor in this chapter.
“What did she say… Billy?”
The recorder played the voice again between them in the dim booth of a pizza parlor.
“So you’re telling me there are two ghosts there?” Billy asked again, mopping marinara from his calzone off the table with a napkin. “You couldn’t have told me this earlier?”
“I didn’t know,” she said, pushing her half eaten pasta away. “Obviously one is enormously stronger than the other. And the anger there is very strong, Bill. You should know by now that a negative energy will do anything to overpower a positive one.”
“Right, and I how should know this?” Billy scoffed, “In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a bit shite as a ghosthunter and also, not in tune with random energies and planetary alignments like some people.”
“Obviously. This is nothing to do with either,” she said patiently, “It’s basic physics at this point. More negative energy will overwhelm and trap a positive in a space, and vice versa.”
“I’m a plumber, Cate. All I know about physics is that Newton sat under the wrong tree.” He sat back into the cushioned booth, “That doesn’t explain what happened. What I saw in that coach house. It doesn’t explain why he let me in his room, but tried to kill me outside of it.”
“Doesn’t it?” she asked, “I had no idea your Dominic was there until I got far too close,” she shivered, drawing her cardigan closer. “I could only feel the other, the angry one.”
“And Dom isn’t angry?” Billy asked, “I would be if someone had murdered me. At least let a bloke finish putting his clothes on.”
“He might have been once, sure,” she said, gazing at the recorder from which Dom’s voice had emanated, “The energy in that room is different. Wistful, almost. And betrayed too, but nothing like the other one.”
Billy shifted his soda back and forth on the table thoughtfully. “Do you think it’s something else? Like a… I don’t know, an elemental, or something.” He squirmed around the idea, uncomfortable with the notion of accepting the weirder bits of paranormal stuff he didn’t quite buy into.
“No… no,” she shook her head, gazing out into space. “It doesn’t feel like that, he’s human. A man so completely consumed with vengeance that there’s little human left of him.”
She sat thinking, her chin propped on one slim hand while Billy finished his calzone, starving now that he had his appetite back. The idea that there were two ghosts only made him more frustrated, and annoyed he hadn’t parsed it out sooner himself. It was an amateur mistake to make. And it did little to explain the events of the last few days anyway. He couldn’t separate which ghost he was dealing with at any given time.
“None of this makes sense,” he griped, shaking his head, “People have been in and out of there far more often than just me and Holm. I mean, the place has been fully wired for electricity, and that long after Dom’s time. It has indoor plumbing, and a yellow toilet straight out of 1972. That coach house has been turned from a barn into a fancy garage. Dom and this other fucker didn’t stop anyone from modernizing the place.”
“If you had all the time in the world, what would you do with it?” she merely shrugged, “They may feel bound to the place, but they aren’t always against or even conscious the goings-on there. Sometimes they sleep, like we do.”
“Everyone knows restorations make them act up,” he argued, “They don’t like it when their world is changed, especially their home.”
“That isn’t always true, or none of the ancient buildings in the world would have survived to this day. People have lived and died in nearly every old house in this country, whether they owned it or not.”
“It’s Monaghan’s name on the deed, though, look,” he shuffled through the papers, finding the property deeds and the article about the murder to show her. “His father had the house built in 1874. If Dom died there in 1888, then he spent at least… fourteen years there. I’d wager that was most of his memorable life; the man I saw couldn’t have been much more than twenty.”
“But you don’t know that this other man didn’t also own the place,” she countered. “Someone owned that land before they did, and someone owns it now. They may not even be from the same time period, Billy. And anyway, I don’t believe your Dominic would have kicked up as much fuss over changes as the other,” she picked up the recorder, “He seems curious about the world after his own time. You said he likes electricity.”
“But I didn’t find any other records of ownership. I didn’t even find any record of another death at the place, even though there was some bastard swinging above my head in that barn,” Billy scrubbed his hand through his hair, remembering the vision, though it turned his now full stomach. “His clothes… they were Victorian clothes. He was wearing a grey… frock coat. His hair was wet. He wore a waistcoat and a cravat, one of those poofy white neckties, you know, but it was all covered in blood.” He saw it in his minds-eye, dribbling from slack fingers and old-fashioned cuffs of the hanged man, a glint of silver beneath syrupy red. “He wore a ring.”
Cate nodded, a shudder going through her. “I saw.”
Her input pulled Billy out of his thoughts. “You said the negative energy trapped the positive, but it isn’t like that,” he said, trying to work this sticky point out, “Dominic brought me into his room after I saw that in the coach house. And he appeared to me first in the parlor. Nothing stopped him coming out of his own space. It’s not as if he’s trapped in just that room.”
“How do you know who you saw? How do you know which is which?”
Billy blinked, seeing that brief vision of the ghost in the parlor, reliving what he felt, what his mind generated when the ghost showed him the stain on the floor, touched him in the bedroom.
“No… that was him, it was Dom.”
“How are you certain?” she asked.
He shrugged and shook his head. “I just know. I looked him in the eye when he… I just feel it. Is that wrong?”
Cate smiled, putting her hand over his on the table. “Intuition is the closest thing to the Sight most people have. You should listen.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, you’re here, you can tell the difference.”
“No. I’m not staying,” Cate shook her head firmly. “I can’t go near that place again. I only came to be sure you were okay.”
“What, you couldn’t tell from afar?” he snapped, “Your spidey sense didn’t work it out?”
“I was torn out of my bed to see you covered in blood and looking like you might get trampled by a nightmare,” she drilled him with an icy cold look. “And then you were unconscious for hours and nothing I tried woke you. Don’t you dare get your independent shut-in pedestal out now, Billy. I was worried sick.”
Billy was taken aback, if only for a moment. “But I need your help. You can talk to them, you can-“
“I can’t!” she cut him off sharply enough that nearby patrons glanced up. She picked up a spoon and stirred her tea, lowering her voice, “You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t,” he sat back, betrayed, “Explain.”
“My mind is like a gateway between here and there,” she said, “I can’t help what I am, Billy, I can’t shut it out. People like me are vulnerable.”
“What? So, if Patrick Swayze jumps into your body the whole world would fall in?” he chuffed at the ridiculousness.
She laughed hotly back. “If Patrick Swayze jumped into my body I’d be fine. If your Dominic did, I’d probably be fine. But if this other did, this hateful, awful man,” her voice quavered at the thought, “Mind you, most human spirits wouldn’t do that, the idea of using a body that’s already occupied is as abominable as filling a corpse, and they have moral limits the same as they did when they lived. But one could do it. If their intent is foul enough, they’d stoop to anything, same as in life. He could use me against you.”
Billy studied her face, putting it all together, “He could make you hurt me.”
She nodded, giving a great sigh and looking out the dark window of the pizza parlor at the traffic. “This entity, I think he used all his considerable strength to show you what you saw this morning, to pull you into that other place. He will have used the time to build back up.”
“I think he already has, if he nearly managed to throw me down the stairs just now. It must have been him then, not Dom.” Billy connected the dots, “That will be why I couldn’t get up there before, why he didn’t stop Dom getting me into his room that time, because he’d weakened himself by pulling me into the past? Oi, maybe it’s the other way around?” he speculated, “Maybe Dominic’s room is a refuge, where this other ghost can’t go?”
“Maybe. The rules they work out between themselves aren’t set in stone, they can be as individual as they are. Anyway, I’m sorry, but I can’t go back there,” she shook her head at him, “And you shouldn’t either.”
“Bugger that,” he said vehemently, “This is personal now. Dom wants to talk to me, he wants me to see the truth. He called me by name, Cate, I heard his voice. And this other thing is hellbent on keeping him from doing that. It might be the only way to get the both of them to move on, which is the whole point, really. It’s what Holm is paying me half a year’s salary to do, isn’t it?”
“Billy,” she said with the exasperated patience of a parent, “Some souls don’t move on because they simply never wanted to leave.”
He didn’t have a witty retort for that. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t spent enough time wondering why ghosts existed at all, why they’d stick around whether they’d lived a long full life and died naturally or had it viciously cut short, why they’d hang about over relatives lives even though they couldn’t really be there. Maybe it was just the opposite of what anyone believed. Maybe there was no moving on. Maybe people died and were simply there, a soul without a wrapper. Maybe the less they cared about staying, the farther apart they drifted from the shape and the heart they used to fill.
“Do you remember when we were children?”
Billy nodded absently before he processed her words and doubled back, “What?”
“We would play together, you and I,” she said, her voice quiet and faraway.
“I don’t think so,” he said, confused. “I thought you grew up in Melbourne.”
She turned her bright eyes on him. “I did. But I came to visit you, every day for a time, when we were very young.”
Billy stared at her, something odd running through his head. It was as if a thought fired and couldn’t quite reach the end of its thread, a memory that was long lost. “What do you mean?”
“Children are only a step away from the doors, Billy. We come to this world innocent of the limitations of humanity. We believe in faeries and monsters under the bed and Santa Claus because no one has told us not to. We can remember our past lives. We are convinced that if we jump off a swing at the top of its arch, we can fly.” She smiled and took his hand, “We have imaginary friends.”
“No,” Billy shook his head, even as heat sprang to his eyes and a little girl with white-blond hair and bright, bright eyes flitted through his memory like a butterfly. “That’s… not possible.”
“You understand very little about possibility, Billy,” she murmured. “I used to bring you flowers in your wintertime. You tried to give them to your mother, but she couldn’t see, and one day she shouted at you to stop it. She said you were frightening her. I left you alone after that. Eventually I lost the ability to think myself so far away, as everyone does.”
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes to push out the sting, the rush of fleeting memories from a lifetime ago giving him a headache. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“You weren’t to know,” she shrugged, “You told me to leave you be, Billy, but now you’ve gone and stuck your foot into the other side. You’ve been there now, against your will. You believed as children do while you were there, and that’s what he wanted. The door you shut so firmly is open again. I warned you.”
“Aye, so you said,” he mopped his face with his hands and sighed, “If you’ve got any more mindfucks in store for me, now would be a good time, eh? While you’ve got all my bloody defenses are down.”
She lay her hand over his again, “No. Not from me, anyway. You just be careful. Or take my advice and leave it alone. Give Holm his money back and come home.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
She stood, gathered her coat and purse and cupped his cheek tenderly before sweeping out of the pizzeria without another word. He watched her Mini pull from the carpark and vanish down the road. “Why do you never say goodbye?” he wondered aloud.
He poured over the rest of his papers, finding absolutely nothing to further what he already knew, drinking refills until the pizza parlor was closing and the manager not-so-graciously escorted him to the exit to lock him out.
It was one in the morning when he pulled back up at the manor, wide awake now, having slept the daylight away. He glanced up at Dominic’s window as he got out of the van, finding it dark, the place looking old and unassuming and completely devoid of life, or non-life, as the case might be.
“All right,” he murmured, pulling the keys to the house from his pocket.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rating: PG to R
Pairing: Dom/Billy, others implied
Warnings: AU, angst, horror, ghosts, implied murder, violence, scary imagery, etc. This is sort of, but not really, a death fic. Suffice it to say, major characters are no longer living and as such, are in fact dead. But in the spirit of whodunnit and AU, it really doesn’t matter much. M’kay? Just trust me.
Summary: Everybody has a hobby. Some people have an obsession.
A/N: There is mention of a recently deceased and rather beloved actor in this chapter.
“What did she say… Billy?”
The recorder played the voice again between them in the dim booth of a pizza parlor.
“So you’re telling me there are two ghosts there?” Billy asked again, mopping marinara from his calzone off the table with a napkin. “You couldn’t have told me this earlier?”
“I didn’t know,” she said, pushing her half eaten pasta away. “Obviously one is enormously stronger than the other. And the anger there is very strong, Bill. You should know by now that a negative energy will do anything to overpower a positive one.”
“Right, and I how should know this?” Billy scoffed, “In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a bit shite as a ghosthunter and also, not in tune with random energies and planetary alignments like some people.”
“Obviously. This is nothing to do with either,” she said patiently, “It’s basic physics at this point. More negative energy will overwhelm and trap a positive in a space, and vice versa.”
“I’m a plumber, Cate. All I know about physics is that Newton sat under the wrong tree.” He sat back into the cushioned booth, “That doesn’t explain what happened. What I saw in that coach house. It doesn’t explain why he let me in his room, but tried to kill me outside of it.”
“Doesn’t it?” she asked, “I had no idea your Dominic was there until I got far too close,” she shivered, drawing her cardigan closer. “I could only feel the other, the angry one.”
“And Dom isn’t angry?” Billy asked, “I would be if someone had murdered me. At least let a bloke finish putting his clothes on.”
“He might have been once, sure,” she said, gazing at the recorder from which Dom’s voice had emanated, “The energy in that room is different. Wistful, almost. And betrayed too, but nothing like the other one.”
Billy shifted his soda back and forth on the table thoughtfully. “Do you think it’s something else? Like a… I don’t know, an elemental, or something.” He squirmed around the idea, uncomfortable with the notion of accepting the weirder bits of paranormal stuff he didn’t quite buy into.
“No… no,” she shook her head, gazing out into space. “It doesn’t feel like that, he’s human. A man so completely consumed with vengeance that there’s little human left of him.”
She sat thinking, her chin propped on one slim hand while Billy finished his calzone, starving now that he had his appetite back. The idea that there were two ghosts only made him more frustrated, and annoyed he hadn’t parsed it out sooner himself. It was an amateur mistake to make. And it did little to explain the events of the last few days anyway. He couldn’t separate which ghost he was dealing with at any given time.
“None of this makes sense,” he griped, shaking his head, “People have been in and out of there far more often than just me and Holm. I mean, the place has been fully wired for electricity, and that long after Dom’s time. It has indoor plumbing, and a yellow toilet straight out of 1972. That coach house has been turned from a barn into a fancy garage. Dom and this other fucker didn’t stop anyone from modernizing the place.”
“If you had all the time in the world, what would you do with it?” she merely shrugged, “They may feel bound to the place, but they aren’t always against or even conscious the goings-on there. Sometimes they sleep, like we do.”
“Everyone knows restorations make them act up,” he argued, “They don’t like it when their world is changed, especially their home.”
“That isn’t always true, or none of the ancient buildings in the world would have survived to this day. People have lived and died in nearly every old house in this country, whether they owned it or not.”
“It’s Monaghan’s name on the deed, though, look,” he shuffled through the papers, finding the property deeds and the article about the murder to show her. “His father had the house built in 1874. If Dom died there in 1888, then he spent at least… fourteen years there. I’d wager that was most of his memorable life; the man I saw couldn’t have been much more than twenty.”
“But you don’t know that this other man didn’t also own the place,” she countered. “Someone owned that land before they did, and someone owns it now. They may not even be from the same time period, Billy. And anyway, I don’t believe your Dominic would have kicked up as much fuss over changes as the other,” she picked up the recorder, “He seems curious about the world after his own time. You said he likes electricity.”
“But I didn’t find any other records of ownership. I didn’t even find any record of another death at the place, even though there was some bastard swinging above my head in that barn,” Billy scrubbed his hand through his hair, remembering the vision, though it turned his now full stomach. “His clothes… they were Victorian clothes. He was wearing a grey… frock coat. His hair was wet. He wore a waistcoat and a cravat, one of those poofy white neckties, you know, but it was all covered in blood.” He saw it in his minds-eye, dribbling from slack fingers and old-fashioned cuffs of the hanged man, a glint of silver beneath syrupy red. “He wore a ring.”
Cate nodded, a shudder going through her. “I saw.”
Her input pulled Billy out of his thoughts. “You said the negative energy trapped the positive, but it isn’t like that,” he said, trying to work this sticky point out, “Dominic brought me into his room after I saw that in the coach house. And he appeared to me first in the parlor. Nothing stopped him coming out of his own space. It’s not as if he’s trapped in just that room.”
“How do you know who you saw? How do you know which is which?”
Billy blinked, seeing that brief vision of the ghost in the parlor, reliving what he felt, what his mind generated when the ghost showed him the stain on the floor, touched him in the bedroom.
“No… that was him, it was Dom.”
“How are you certain?” she asked.
He shrugged and shook his head. “I just know. I looked him in the eye when he… I just feel it. Is that wrong?”
Cate smiled, putting her hand over his on the table. “Intuition is the closest thing to the Sight most people have. You should listen.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, you’re here, you can tell the difference.”
“No. I’m not staying,” Cate shook her head firmly. “I can’t go near that place again. I only came to be sure you were okay.”
“What, you couldn’t tell from afar?” he snapped, “Your spidey sense didn’t work it out?”
“I was torn out of my bed to see you covered in blood and looking like you might get trampled by a nightmare,” she drilled him with an icy cold look. “And then you were unconscious for hours and nothing I tried woke you. Don’t you dare get your independent shut-in pedestal out now, Billy. I was worried sick.”
Billy was taken aback, if only for a moment. “But I need your help. You can talk to them, you can-“
“I can’t!” she cut him off sharply enough that nearby patrons glanced up. She picked up a spoon and stirred her tea, lowering her voice, “You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t,” he sat back, betrayed, “Explain.”
“My mind is like a gateway between here and there,” she said, “I can’t help what I am, Billy, I can’t shut it out. People like me are vulnerable.”
“What? So, if Patrick Swayze jumps into your body the whole world would fall in?” he chuffed at the ridiculousness.
She laughed hotly back. “If Patrick Swayze jumped into my body I’d be fine. If your Dominic did, I’d probably be fine. But if this other did, this hateful, awful man,” her voice quavered at the thought, “Mind you, most human spirits wouldn’t do that, the idea of using a body that’s already occupied is as abominable as filling a corpse, and they have moral limits the same as they did when they lived. But one could do it. If their intent is foul enough, they’d stoop to anything, same as in life. He could use me against you.”
Billy studied her face, putting it all together, “He could make you hurt me.”
She nodded, giving a great sigh and looking out the dark window of the pizza parlor at the traffic. “This entity, I think he used all his considerable strength to show you what you saw this morning, to pull you into that other place. He will have used the time to build back up.”
“I think he already has, if he nearly managed to throw me down the stairs just now. It must have been him then, not Dom.” Billy connected the dots, “That will be why I couldn’t get up there before, why he didn’t stop Dom getting me into his room that time, because he’d weakened himself by pulling me into the past? Oi, maybe it’s the other way around?” he speculated, “Maybe Dominic’s room is a refuge, where this other ghost can’t go?”
“Maybe. The rules they work out between themselves aren’t set in stone, they can be as individual as they are. Anyway, I’m sorry, but I can’t go back there,” she shook her head at him, “And you shouldn’t either.”
“Bugger that,” he said vehemently, “This is personal now. Dom wants to talk to me, he wants me to see the truth. He called me by name, Cate, I heard his voice. And this other thing is hellbent on keeping him from doing that. It might be the only way to get the both of them to move on, which is the whole point, really. It’s what Holm is paying me half a year’s salary to do, isn’t it?”
“Billy,” she said with the exasperated patience of a parent, “Some souls don’t move on because they simply never wanted to leave.”
He didn’t have a witty retort for that. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t spent enough time wondering why ghosts existed at all, why they’d stick around whether they’d lived a long full life and died naturally or had it viciously cut short, why they’d hang about over relatives lives even though they couldn’t really be there. Maybe it was just the opposite of what anyone believed. Maybe there was no moving on. Maybe people died and were simply there, a soul without a wrapper. Maybe the less they cared about staying, the farther apart they drifted from the shape and the heart they used to fill.
“Do you remember when we were children?”
Billy nodded absently before he processed her words and doubled back, “What?”
“We would play together, you and I,” she said, her voice quiet and faraway.
“I don’t think so,” he said, confused. “I thought you grew up in Melbourne.”
She turned her bright eyes on him. “I did. But I came to visit you, every day for a time, when we were very young.”
Billy stared at her, something odd running through his head. It was as if a thought fired and couldn’t quite reach the end of its thread, a memory that was long lost. “What do you mean?”
“Children are only a step away from the doors, Billy. We come to this world innocent of the limitations of humanity. We believe in faeries and monsters under the bed and Santa Claus because no one has told us not to. We can remember our past lives. We are convinced that if we jump off a swing at the top of its arch, we can fly.” She smiled and took his hand, “We have imaginary friends.”
“No,” Billy shook his head, even as heat sprang to his eyes and a little girl with white-blond hair and bright, bright eyes flitted through his memory like a butterfly. “That’s… not possible.”
“You understand very little about possibility, Billy,” she murmured. “I used to bring you flowers in your wintertime. You tried to give them to your mother, but she couldn’t see, and one day she shouted at you to stop it. She said you were frightening her. I left you alone after that. Eventually I lost the ability to think myself so far away, as everyone does.”
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes to push out the sting, the rush of fleeting memories from a lifetime ago giving him a headache. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“You weren’t to know,” she shrugged, “You told me to leave you be, Billy, but now you’ve gone and stuck your foot into the other side. You’ve been there now, against your will. You believed as children do while you were there, and that’s what he wanted. The door you shut so firmly is open again. I warned you.”
“Aye, so you said,” he mopped his face with his hands and sighed, “If you’ve got any more mindfucks in store for me, now would be a good time, eh? While you’ve got all my bloody defenses are down.”
She lay her hand over his again, “No. Not from me, anyway. You just be careful. Or take my advice and leave it alone. Give Holm his money back and come home.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
She stood, gathered her coat and purse and cupped his cheek tenderly before sweeping out of the pizzeria without another word. He watched her Mini pull from the carpark and vanish down the road. “Why do you never say goodbye?” he wondered aloud.
He poured over the rest of his papers, finding absolutely nothing to further what he already knew, drinking refills until the pizza parlor was closing and the manager not-so-graciously escorted him to the exit to lock him out.
It was one in the morning when he pulled back up at the manor, wide awake now, having slept the daylight away. He glanced up at Dominic’s window as he got out of the van, finding it dark, the place looking old and unassuming and completely devoid of life, or non-life, as the case might be.
“All right,” he murmured, pulling the keys to the house from his pocket.
CHAPTER EIGHT