Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: "Good secrets are hard to keep."
Written for Day 2 of the 31_days October challenge. The prompt was "Good secrets are hard to keep."
He'd not intended to keep it a secret, in the beginning. The first time he'd seen Bigfoot rummaging through the neatly-bagged detritus of the Teller's Saturday brunch, he'd gone running to his parents before he'd even thought to reach for the Polaroid. By the time they followed him out to the curb, the sasquatch had already fled with their bacon rinds and pancake batter, leaving only a scattering of trash that Marilyn and Edgar had blamed on raccoons.
He'd started locking the Evidence Locker after he came home from school one day to find Syndi and two of her friends poking through it, while Syndi did unflattering impressions of her crazy little brother and his weird alien-monster-pod-people obsession. Their parents make her apologise and forbid her to go into the attic without asking Marshall's permission first, but veto him fitting a lock on the attic door. Instead, he keeps the key to the evidence locker on a chain around his neck at all times, and not even Simon has a copy.
When Marilyn comes within a hairs-breadth of joining the Cult of Foreverware, he thought his theories might finally start gaining some traction with her. Instead, every time he brings it up, she hugs him and ruffles his hair and tells him that sometimes adults find it just as difficult as kids when it came to making new friends in a strange place, and not to worry, and asks if he'd like to have Simon over for dinner.
By the time it's him and Steve and Simon facing off against a canine uprising, the concept of getting help from the Eerie police makes as much sense to him as dancing a tango on the moon. Still, it hits him like a punch in the gut when, at the height of the Harvest King debacle, he realises that some of Eerie's adults aren't oblivious to, or even complacent about, but actively complicit in the weirdness infecting his new home town.
So the Evidence Locker remains padlocked, and the attic becomes the Secret Spot, and if Simon is too young and Dash too cynical to understand exactly how betrayed he felt to discover that Eerie's town elders already knew about werewolves and were even feeding them on a regular basis, at least there are two people in the world he can share Eerie's secrets with.
Still, it's such a big secret to only split three ways, and when his college newspaper invites submissions for short stories themed around the paranormal for it's special Halloween edition, Marshall can't resist.
A week later, he's eating lunch on the lawn outside the administrative buildings when an old-fashioned patrol car covered in dozens of antennae pulls up, and Mars realises that he might not be far enough away from Eerie after all.
He'd not intended to keep it a secret, in the beginning. The first time he'd seen Bigfoot rummaging through the neatly-bagged detritus of the Teller's Saturday brunch, he'd gone running to his parents before he'd even thought to reach for the Polaroid. By the time they followed him out to the curb, the sasquatch had already fled with their bacon rinds and pancake batter, leaving only a scattering of trash that Marilyn and Edgar had blamed on raccoons.
He'd started locking the Evidence Locker after he came home from school one day to find Syndi and two of her friends poking through it, while Syndi did unflattering impressions of her crazy little brother and his weird alien-monster-pod-people obsession. Their parents make her apologise and forbid her to go into the attic without asking Marshall's permission first, but veto him fitting a lock on the attic door. Instead, he keeps the key to the evidence locker on a chain around his neck at all times, and not even Simon has a copy.
When Marilyn comes within a hairs-breadth of joining the Cult of Foreverware, he thought his theories might finally start gaining some traction with her. Instead, every time he brings it up, she hugs him and ruffles his hair and tells him that sometimes adults find it just as difficult as kids when it came to making new friends in a strange place, and not to worry, and asks if he'd like to have Simon over for dinner.
By the time it's him and Steve and Simon facing off against a canine uprising, the concept of getting help from the Eerie police makes as much sense to him as dancing a tango on the moon. Still, it hits him like a punch in the gut when, at the height of the Harvest King debacle, he realises that some of Eerie's adults aren't oblivious to, or even complacent about, but actively complicit in the weirdness infecting his new home town.
So the Evidence Locker remains padlocked, and the attic becomes the Secret Spot, and if Simon is too young and Dash too cynical to understand exactly how betrayed he felt to discover that Eerie's town elders already knew about werewolves and were even feeding them on a regular basis, at least there are two people in the world he can share Eerie's secrets with.
Still, it's such a big secret to only split three ways, and when his college newspaper invites submissions for short stories themed around the paranormal for it's special Halloween edition, Marshall can't resist.
A week later, he's eating lunch on the lawn outside the administrative buildings when an old-fashioned patrol car covered in dozens of antennae pulls up, and Mars realises that he might not be far enough away from Eerie after all.