Scooby Doo and the Sounder's Swedish Meatball Specter Mystery (3/3)
For the first time since they’ve started this charade, Mike feels something other than irritation and annoyance. He’s worried about Erik, worried that some weirdo in a bed sheet and mask who has spend the last week living in IKEA has kidnapped one of his best friends. Mannapped… or maybe the ghost doesn’t realize Daphne is Erik, and therefore a man. Man-dressed-as-a-woman-napped. Diction aside, Erik is gone and Roger is having a breakdown.
“What if he kills Daphne?” Roger’s eyes are large and his arms flailing and he paces.
“He’s not going to kill Erik,” Mike says. “Maybe slap his ass or something, but come on- he steals meatballs, he doesn’t murder people.”
“Not yet,” Brad murmurs under his breath and Mile turns to glare at him.
“Listen gang, hypothesizing won’t get us anywhere.” Jeff says his first logical thing all day. “We need to find Daphne and solve the mystery.”
“If you were a ghost and you wanted to tie Daphne up, where would you hide her?” Brad poses, stroking his chin as if he had a beard.
“The beds?” Roger ventures a guess.
“Not where you’d tied him up, you perv,” Mike grumbles.
“I agree with Shaggy.” Jeff has gone back to twirling his ascot and Mike wonders if he’s in the middle of a nightmare.
Before Mike can scream in frustration, Pain Machine starts to back from across the warehouse. In the confusion, the small dog has managed to become separated and they rush to the howling animal. They find him sitting on a display chair, purple headband in his mouth.
“Good boy!” Jeff exclaims, planting a kiss on the yawning dog. “Find Daphne!”
Jumping down from the seat, Pain Machine puts his nose to the ground. Sniffing and wandering into the warehouse, the rest of them slowly follow behind the dog, through the short cuts, and back to the showroom. The store is deserted, the few customers and employees that were there had disappeared after the Specter’s last appearance. Mike finds it decidedly odd that the store has emptied out, yet no one has asked them to leave. It’s creepy- a large empty warehouse. Mike swears that the furniture is moving, but he knows it’s all in his head. He’s ready to run at any minute- he doesn’t want to be remembered as the guy dressed up as Scrappy Doo who was murdered in an IKEA.
“Daphne!” Jeff shouts, making Mike jump. “Daphne, where are you?”
Silence.
“ERIK?” It’s only the second time Roger has used Erik’s real name all day. “Erik, I’m going to find you.”
“mmmmpppppfffffhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!”
A muffled cry comes from another room and Roger is darting toward it faster than Mile has ever seen him run. He’s running so fast that they rest of them lose sight of him and must follow Pain Machine.
“Christ on a pogo stick,” Mike mutters under his breath when they finally do.
Erik’s been tied to the post on a bed, and while Roger has removed Erik’s blindfold and gag, Erik’s arms are still tied behind him and bound to the post.
“While… we’re… here… we should… take advantage… of the… situation,” Roger is telling Erik between frantic kisses.
Brad and Jeff coo as if it’s romantic- Mike feels like he just walked onto the set of a bad porn. Before things can become NC-17 rated, Mike steps in.
“It’s against the law to fornicate in public and if you get caught, you’ll get thrown into jail and we’ll never solve the mystery.” They ignore him. “And you won’t be able to play in the next game.”
That catches their attention and they reluctantly pull apart. Well, Roger pulls away as Erik is still bound to the bed. Going around to the other side, Brad unties Erik’s hands.
“A basketball net?” Jeff says as Brad holds it up.
“Hmm…” Brad muses as he looks at the net- at least they assume that’s what he looks like when he’s thinking as it’s a rare occurrence. “I think… I think I know who is doing this.”
“You mean it’s not a ghost?” Mike is feeling snarky. “Well color me surprised.”
“What color is surprised?” Brad asks and Mike rolls his eyes.
The day Brad actually uses his brain and solves something will be the day Mike asks Roger and Erik if he can be their sugar baby. Erik’s flats have fallen off during this whole ordeal and Roger is sliding them back on for him. Mike thinks Erik would make a good Cinderella and Roger a good Prince Charming.
‘Oh shit, I’m becoming one of them,’ he curses himself.
“I think we need to set a trap,” Jeff proclaims as if he’s some great genius for thinking of it. “We have a Specter to catch!”
* * *
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Will you do it for two Scooby snacks?”
Brad is holding a box of ‘Scooby Snacks’. Mike has no idea where Brad has been hiding the box and he’s pretty sure they’re actually dog treats. Pain Machine and Roger are already munching on a few. Mike wrinkles his nose at Roger.
Jeff has tied tulle curtains together to form a rudimentary net. If the trap works correctly, which Mike assumes it won’t, Roger, Pain Machine, and Mike will act as bait and lure the Specter into the children’s section of IKEA. Once there, they will run up a hastily constructed ramp and Erik will pull a rope to trip the Specter, who will fall onto a bed and bounce into the crate of the plushy soccer balls. Jeff will then release the net to trap the Specter. If it works. If.
“How are we even going to lure the Specter out?” Mike grouses, slapping the dog treats away; Pain Machine quickly gobbles them up.
“Easy! We’ll pretend you found some Swedish meatballs and the Specter will chase you to try and get them back.” Jeff tells him.
He hands Mike a bag, a white pillowcase in fact, with ‘meatballs’ scribbled in it in a blue marker. Mike stares at Jeff. He thinks about putting in a transfer request. Surely the other teams in the league are saner.
“Be safe,” Erik tells them before leaning in to kiss Roger.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Mike huffs as he stomps off, Roger and Pain Machine following shortly thereafter.
* * *
“Oh Mike! That bag you have in your hands that says ‘meatballs’. Could they be Swedish meatballs?” Roger shouts over dramatically as they wander through the desks section.
“Actually, it’s a pillowcase that some deranged weirdo wrote ‘meatballs’ on. But yet, there is a good chance that it contains meatballs, because it is a Swedish tradition to put meatballs into pillowcases.” Mike’s voice is flat.
Roger stares at him blankly before saying in a stage whisper, “I don’t think its working.”
Mike rolls his eyes. Pain Machine has been sniffing around the bins and runs up to them. Scratching at Mike’s leg, Mike sees there is a pair of MLS Cup Final tickets in the dog’s mouth.
“Another clue! Let’s keeps this and show it to the others.” Roger exclaims.
He goes to turn around, but the Specter is standing right behind them. Mike huffs. He just wants to go home and sleep.
“You should have left when you had the chance!” The Specter shouts. “Now you will feel my wrath multiplied!”
Another ghost appears from behind a kitchen display, arms waving wildly. Roger scoops up Pain Machine, hooks a finger around Mike’s collar before he can wander off, and drags them into the showroom- the opposite direction from which the trap is set. Mike doesn’t say anything; they’re professional athletes and can run for hours. The Specter…. er…. Specters are probably balding, overweight nerds who have nothing better to do than pretend to haunt IKEA. They don’t shake them off though- the Specters keep up with them as they go further into the labyrinth that is IKEA.
“Quick, let’s hide here!” Roger tells Mike.
Roger grabs a lampshade and sticks it over his head. Pain Machine jumps into a crate of stuffed animals and pretends to be one of them. Mike just looks at the two of them and wonders if he’s going crazy. Or maybe he’s already crazy, in an insane asylum, and nothing that he knows to be true is true. Rolling his eyes, he grabs a lampshade and sticks it over his head.
The Specters run into the room they are in and pause, as if they don’t notice the two men standing there with lampshades over their heads pretending to be lamps. They’re about to leave the room when Pain Machine sneezes. Roger gulps and bolts from the room as the Specters round on them. This time though, they are running in the right direction and Mike isn’t surprised when Roger and Pain Machine run right into the trap. As expected, Jeff releases the net, and instead of catching the Specter, he has a man in a Shaggy costume and a Boston terrier.
Mike is so aggravated about wasting his day and embarrassing himself by running around an IKEA in a Scrappy Doo outfit that he snaps. When the Specters run into the room, he jumps on the back of the taller one. The taller one flails in an attempted to get Mike off of him, knocking into the smaller Specter. In something that only happens in movies, or Scooby Doo episodes to be more precise, the three of them fall into the bin of soccer balls they originally were supposed to fall into, and get tangled in the net next to Roger and Pain Machine.
“It worked!” Jeff exclaims, fist pumping the air. “Now we can see who is behind the Swedish Meatball Mystery!”
Jeff and Erik both reach up to remove the masks of the two Specters. There is silence for a minute before they all exclaim:
“Landon Donovan and Steve Nash?!?”
Mike blinks. What the fuck are Landon Donovan and Steve Nash doing pretending to be ghosts at an IKEA in Seattle? In fact, what the hell is going on at all?
“I think I can explain this!” Brad tells them and Mike officially decides to check into a mental help facility. “My suspicions were first aroused when we found the map of I-5 where Vancouver and LA were circled but Seattle was crossed out. When we found the video game paused with the White Caps and the Galaxy as the two teams, it made it clear that whoever the Specters were had to be from Vancouver and Los Angeles.” They stare at him blankly. “Who has the most to gain from the Sounders losing?”
“The Galaxy?” Jeff says hesitantly. There’s a pauses before he adds. “And the White Caps?”
“Exactly!” Brad says, finger in the air just like Velma. “The Sounders are the Galaxy’s biggest competition and with us gone, they wouldn’t be challenged for the MLS Cup. The White Caps are angry because they lost the Cascadia Cup to us.”
“But how did you know it was Landon and Steve?” Roger asks.
“The Rogaine and Vitamin water bottles were a huge clue,” Brad explains. “But when we found the basketball net, I knew it had to be Steve. That left either Landon or Beckham as the LA Specter, but after we found the Rogaine… well…”
Everyone looks at Landon’s receding hairline.
“We would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling Sounders!” Landon and Stevie are both scowling.
“Wait a fucking minute!” Mike shifts and wiggles until he is out of the crate. “This makes no sense. Why they hell would they come to IKEA and steal Swedish meatballs?”
“Because I can’t play without them,” Erik says as if it is the most obvious thing in the world.
“And without Erik, we won’t sell tickets to the ladies,” Roger chimes in.
“And then we wouldn’t be the most profitable club in the MLS,” Pain Machine adds.
Mike stares at Pain Machine. The room starts to spin. Nothing makes sense. Pain Machine talks? What. Why is the Scooby Doo theme song on?
* * *
Mike’s eyes snap open. For a minute he’s groggily staring around for the rest of the gang and wondering where the Specter ran off to. There’s a strange banging noise. Oh.
Mike wipes the sleep from his eyes as he sits up in his bed. The clock reads 1:48am. The headboard of Roger’s bed is slamming into the side of the shared wall between their rooms. From across the hall, Mike hears the familiar lyrics of the Scooby Doo song from Taylor’s room. Taylor must have turned on the TV to drown out…
“Oh fuck yes! Right there, like that.”
“Mmmm, you like that?”
Mike whimpers. Grabbing his pillow, he shoves it over his head. He doesn’t believer in prophetic dreams, but just in case, tomorrow he’s going to IKEA to buy Swedish meatballs so they don’t have to go anytime in the foreseeable future.
“Fucking meddling kids, haunting my life and dreams,” Mike grouses.
His phone lights up indicating a text message. Grumbling, he picks it up and opens the photo attachment from Jeff.
‘Do you like Pain Machine’s Halloween costume?!?’
Pain Machine is wearing a Scooby Doo costume.
Mike chucks his phone against Roger’s wall and wonders why God hates him.