White Noise 4

WARNING: This is the author’s note version of the story, with MAJOR spoilers.  You can and WILL know the ‘who-dun-it’ mystery before everyone else if you read this.  To read the non-spoiler version, go to my fanfiction site.

—<4>—<4>—

White Noise
Chapter 4

-Tuesday, August 20, 2013-

—<4>—<4>—

—Sam—

Samantha Manson slung her purple backpack on the ground next to the door in the hospital room, ignoring the clanking sounds her stash of ghost hunting equipment made.  For a long moment, she stared at the number next to the room: 248  She’d been in a lot of these hospital rooms over the past few years.  Many of them had been while visiting the Fentons or Tucker.  Sometimes, it had been her lying in the bed.  This one, she’d never been in before. This chapter was set up to be really Sam-heavy, and to start to break into more of the history and what’s up with her.  You’ll get some major clues as to Sam’s past, and I’ll fill you in at the end of the chapter, promise.

Walking through the door, the place was a near carbon-copy of every other room in the hospital.  A sterile bed with a person swaddled inside, IVs dripping, a computer monitor blinking with ever-changing numbers, and a small TV set locked onto a PBS station showing some sort of round-table talk show.  The room stank of disinfectants and glowed harshly under the fluorescent lights.

“Frank?” she called softly, eyeing the person on the bed.  Trapped in a hospital gown instead of the starched white suit, he seemed oddly human.  His brown hair was disheveled instead of neatly slicked back, and the seemingly ever-present sunglasses were gone.  He also seemed to be sleeping.  Agent F is an OC, I suppose, but the agents on the show are extremely not described.  So I consider him a real character from the show, but I have some extreme leeway in his character – I even gave him hair.  Agent F is actually a character that was meant to show up in ‘Fentonless’, should I ever get that far is to write it.  ‘Fentonless’, ‘Real Life’, and ‘White Noise’ all exist in the same-ish universe.

She was about to turn around and walk away when the man rolled his head her way and let his eyes flicker open.  Dark blue.  She’d never noticed the color of his eyes before, through the sunglasses.  “Ms. Manson,” he said, his voice raspy and broken, “it’s Agent F, please.”  The guy has been fired from the government, if you remember from previous notes, and hasn’t confessed that yet.  He’s kind of a stickler for the title until then, attempting to hide who is really is.

Sam shrugged and continued into the room, clasping her hands behind her back as she strolled up to the side of his bed.  “Whatever you say, Agent F.”  She laced as much sarcasm into her voice as possible.  Jazz and Tucker and the adult Fentons had grown bizarrely fond of the strange government looney.  Sam didn’t quite understand the feeling.  While she hated him much less than the rest of the government… perhaps she even liked him, now and then, in the stand-off-ish way one ‘likes’ a stranger fighting for the common good… he was still a government man dressed in white and swamped in secrets.

Secrets people had died because of.  And he was still keeping them - she knew it, deep down in her heart.  Remember, without Danny in the picture, ‘Million Dollar Ghost’ went a lot different.  In this universe, the GiW still show up, except without Vlad’s prompting of a reward on Danny’s head.  They’re instead searching for the skeleton key, only they don’t tell anyone.  Through their mismanagement and secrets, they end up releasing the behemoth – the monster that swallowed Vlad in the episode – and several innocent people die before it’s sent back.  This was one of the main turning points in the Fenton’s quest to get ghosts recognized.  It’s hard to ignore one that’s a hundred feet long and hovering over downtown.  It’s unknown whether or not they got the key.  Sam has held a grudge ever since.

There was a sigh and the eyes closed again.  “What do you want?”

“Ember.”  

A twitch.  Some might call it a terrified flinch, although Sam held just enough respect for this lone government wacko to hold back on the internal commentary.  He had left his agency and compatriots to stay in this God-forsaken town and attempt to protect the people he’d sworn to serve, despite his orders to the contrary.  Sam had to give him something for that, if nothing else.

“Why do you persist in giving them names?” the man asked.

Sam arched an eyebrow.  “You really want me to call her Ghost X3564D9?”  The numbers mean nothing.

The eyes peered back at her.  There was pain locked inside them.  Sam – having been at the receiving end of the treatment before – knew the bone-deep psychological ache the more powerful ghosts could give.  She didn’t comment on it, though.  

“Giving them names gives them more power over you,” he told her stiffly.

“Sweet,” Sam muttered, “how’s that working for you?”

Agent F let an annoyed noise out of his throat.  “Can we get to the point, Ms. Manson?”

“How did you know she was in the community center?”

“I didn’t.”  The man smoothed a wrinkle out of the bed sheets, looking, in that moment, quite a bit older than his twenty-eight years.  “I was there for… other reasons.”  He was at a dating help seminar, FYI.

Sam’s eyes narrowed.  The Fentons had been largely unable to figure out how to track the weaker ghosts and those that were just passing through, using so little energy they didn’t set off anything but the most sensitive trackers.  Ember – one of the few ghosts able to change her energy output drastically based on her environment – was a real bugger to track.  And one of the ones that could cause the most damage once she got going.  The fact that Agent F had found her before Ember set off the alarms had been interesting.  It seemed, though, that it had simply been luck to find the two in the same place.  Unless…  

She eyed him distrustfully a moment before giving a mental sigh.  She knew she wasn’t going to be able to pry secrets out of the agent, and not due to a lack of trying on her part.  So she changed topics.  “You heard about the boy at the grocery store.”

Agent F’s hands went still.  “Yes.”  He glanced up at her.  “Have you found concrete evidence that it was a ghost?  The news is still reporting that it was a shooting…”

Shaking her head, Sam looked away and focused on the TV.  Pictures of video games were being shown, the men around the table gesturing wildly as they talked.  “All the evidence was gone by the time the Fentons arrived.  As far as I know, the police are calling it a homicide, rather than a ghost attack.  They’ve even got a suspect.”  She was quite a moment.  “How about the girl yesterday?”

“What girl?”  Sam could hear the tension in his voice.

“She was possessed at the park yesterday,” Sam said softly, finally looking back at the government agent, “and dead before the ghost let go of her.”  The man was pale and very still.  “They’re calling it a medical emergency.  Cardiac arrest.  Unfortunate happenstance.”

The man’s hands curled into fists, white-knuckled in the sheets.  The skin around his eyes wrinkled as his eyes narrowed.  “Let me guess,” he said, his voice tight with anger.  “No evidence of a ghost?”

Sam shook her head.  “Nothing concrete.  None of the sensors were picking anything up by the time the Fentons arrived.”

“So it’s a serial killer with an ability to disappear.”

Sam winced at the bluntness of the words.  “I-”

Struggling into a sitting position, his face white with pain, Agent F reached out and grabbed Sam’s hand.  It was warm and bony.  “You need to get the Fentons to start gathering evidence.  It’s going to attack again, and we need to figure out the pattern.”

“Nobody thinks its ghosts-“ Sam tried to pull her hand out from his grasp.  She wasn’t fond of being touched.  

“Nobody thought it was ghosts three years ago either,” the man pressed, his fingers tightening around her hand.  “And we got them to believe.”

“The Fentons did that before…”  Sam retrieved her hand, clasping them behind her.  

Agent F nodded as he collapsed back against the pillows, eyes closing most of the way.  “And we’ll do it again,” he said firmly.

Sam hummed, not sure if she quite agreed with him or not.  People had started to believe them about ghosts existing, but it was a long way from believing in ghosts to believing in ghostly serial killers.  She stood there, shifting her weight from foot to foot, her eyes trailing back to the TV screen.  Images of Doom 3 were playing.  Video games were easier to think about than potential serial killers.  Oh, poor dear.  This is a murder mystery.  You have a serial killer, for sure.  Just… who is it?

“Did you want something else?”

“Yeah…”  She walked over to her backpack and grabbed the small gift that had been tucked inside.  It was wrapped with some of Mr. Fenton’s somewhat-famous ghost wrapping paper.  If it were dark enough, the paper even glowed.  Sam handed it over, snorting slightly at the way the man’s hair stood up slightly from the electrical charge of the paper.  The FDA is fighting them over a patent and production rights.  They’re not convinced it won’t cause cancer due to slight radioactivity. “Mrs. Fenton wanted me to give this to you.”

Removing the wrapping as quickly as possible – and touching it as little as possible – the man dropped the slightly radioactive paper to the ground and gave it a dubious look.  “If you’d just take that back to them…”

Sam nodded, grabbing it and fussing out some of the folds as the man opened the small box and inspected the contents.  

“Tell them thank you,” he said, picking out a piece of fudge and turning it over and over before popping it into his mouth.  “Although why they insist on chocolate, I still don’t understand.”

“Mrs. Fenton got it from some book she was reading.  Chocolate helping cure a lot of the things ghosts do to you.”  She reached over and plucked a small bit of chocolate from the box and chewed on it. And I got it from ‘Harry Potter’.  What are Dementors if not ghosts?

The government agent put the box aside, his face serious.  “I should be out late tonight, perhaps tomorrow morning.  With this thing on the loose, I’ll stop by and we’ll try to get the new radar system working-”

This time it was Sam’s turn to twitch.  Twitch, mind you.  

Agent F frowned and tipped his head slightly to the side.  His eyes narrowed.

“About the new radar system,” Sam said, not able to actually look at him.  “It exploded.”

The man was still.  “Exploded?”  His voice was quiet.

“Just some of it,” Sam said.  “A small computer part.  The control system.” Due to a small explosive set under the computer.

“I see,” he said softly, looking away.  “I’ll see what happened when I get there, I suppose.”  His shoulders had drooped.  There were new wrinkles forming along his brow.  “But we’ll have to get it going quickly - hopefully before our ghost can strike again.”

Between the Fentons and what Frank could wheedle out of the government, that new radar system had been an expensive but very promising new piece of technology.  It would have nearly doubled the accuracy of their radar and increased the overall sensitivity of the tracking network by just over a quarter.  The explosion had set their online date back by almost a month.  In actuality, Frank has been paying for it out of his savings and his ‘family money’ – which is now completely gone.  The government, having fired him, has washed their hands of his ideas.

“Yeah, I suppose,” Sam parroted, trying not to study the man’s defeated posture too hard.  Agent F was one of those few people who had real moral principles and stood up for them and refused to back down.  Sam didn’t always agree with his principles, but she admired his choice to stick by them come Hell or high water.  It was hard to see him, looking rather broken.  “It’s not so bad.  Just one piece, right?”

The wrinkles around his lips deepened.  “Right.”  His voice was soft.

Sam stood there for a moment more, fiddling with the wrapping paper.  It crinkled in her grasp.  The sound of the TV, still on the PBS station, momentarily flooded the room.  “I think I’ll go, then,” she said into the silence when the man seemed content to stare at the bland landscape photograph on the wall.

He nodded, more of twitch of his head that anything, still quiet.  

Sam waited a beat, then turned and grabbed her backpack, nearly fleeing from the room.  Hospital smells and sounds assaulted her has she slipped down the hallways, took the stairs instead of wait for the elevator, and then was out the door and onto the street.  By the time she reached the safety of the sidewalk, she was nearly at a run.  Her bag hit her back in a steady, rhythmic pattern as she made her way down the street towards home, her thoughts dark and stormy.

—<4>—<4>—

—Danny—

Danny sat in the park on top of the hill, watching the clouds pass by overhead.  It was quite a cloudy day - there were far more clouds than open blue sky.  Most people liked sunny days, with the warmth of the sun and the shining colors and vibrant smells of a summer day.  Danny much preferred the clouds. And rain.  I like rain.

According to the news he’d listened to last night, a little girl had died in the park.  Based on the pictures they’d shown of the flashing ambulance lights, Danny knew it was close to this hill.  As his eyes watched a particularly gray cloud slide past, Danny felt out with his senses for the trace left over by her death.

When he’d started learning to deal with his strange talents, he’d kept stumbling over what he could only described as holes left in the world.  Strange voids of nothingless that nobody could see but him, locked in place in the air.  They were somehow large enough for a person to pass through and small enough that a fly couldn’t fit through at the same time.  They glowed brighter than the sun, yet were the darkest of blacks.  They were there and not, somehow, visible only from certain directions at certain times.  It made Danny’s head hurt to think about them too much.

It wasn’t until he’d seen someone die on one of his doctor visits that he understood what he was seeing.  The holes were left in the places people died.  Their souls fled this world onto the next, ripping the fabric of reality as they clawed their way to a world beyond this one.  Danny had watched that day, fascinated, as the path to the afterlife formed in front of his eyes, uncaring about the broken corpse lying on the stretcher.  

Since then, he’d kept looking for them.  Something deep inside of him - the thing that was lightning and ice and dark instincts and everything and nothing at once - grabbed onto the idea of a doorway to beyond.  Every time he found one, he would stare into its depths, trying to make out what lay past the threshold.  He’d never seen anything.  Perhaps, he thought, it was because he wasn’t properly dead.  Maybe the secrets of the dead were nothing but darkness to the living.  Or, perhaps, it was simply the wrong door.  He had to find the one he fit through - his doorway.  The ghost portals are the doorways.  And the doors in the ghost zone of the show.  Danny’s doorway is the one in the Fenton basement.  In this universe, it was Danny’s death that created the portal and turned it on.  Without the sacrifice Danny made, the portal couldn’t have opened.  It would have just fizzled, like it did when the Fentons first tried.  It takes the creation of a ghost to make a doorway to the afterlife.  Fortunately for Danny, the creation of the portal also managed to save his life.  A unique anomaly.

But still he searched.  And still he stared.  The thing inside of him knew that one day, they’d find the doorway that would lead them back through.  They just had to look.  And wait.  And be patient.

If there was one thing the dark lightning inside of him knew, it was patience.  Eternal, empty patience.

The cloud overhead moved on, casting a ray of light down onto the park.  It was like a herald from God, stretching out a finger to point to a spot somewhat down the hill and to the right.  Danny gazed in that direction, his eyes unfocused.  And he saw it.  The shimmering, blinding darkness.

His body moved as if in a trance, walking forwards until he was within arms reach of the doorway.  His eyes burned from the light.  This doorway was larger than most - it seemed to reach to the tops of the trees at times, only to shrink to the size of a dandelion just when Danny had properly focused on it.  It twisted and misted, barely visible, as Danny struggled to look at it without actually looking at it.

There was something wrong with it.  A ring of dark light was wrapped around the doorway.  He’d never seen anything like it, and he’d tracked down dozens and dozens of doorways.  Danny slowly reached out a hand, his eyes focused off to the side, and tapped the ring with a finger. Oooh… what’s with the dark ring of light?

Red eyes flashed in the darkness as the ring bit him.  Hint.  So a hint.  So obvious I shouldn’t even have to say it.  HINT!

Danny yelped and pulled his hand back, staring at the twin pinpricks on his finger.  Blood was welling up and dribbling down his finger.  “Ow,” he muttered, sticking his finger into his mouth and sucking on it momentarily.  When his gaze tracked back to where the doorway was, it was no longer visible.  He could still feel it - a subtle pressure and coldness - but it was hiding from him.

“That was interesting,” he muttered, wandering back up the hill, then down the other side towards home.  He needed to get cleaned up and head to work.  “I wonder what that was.”  

—<4>—<4>—

—Sam—

Sam didn’t go home like she’d originally planned.  Her feet had taken her to the front door, only to take her past and on down the street.  Somewhere along the line, she’d sent a text message to her parents informing them that she’d eat out tonight, and then she walked herself to the small park only a mile from her home.

It had a swing set and a slide and a broken teeter-totter.  Sam sat in one of the swings, slowly rocking herself forwards and back, squinting into the setting sun.  It was one of those evenings – one of the ones where being alone was better than being with other people.  Especially if those people were going to either ignore you or criticize your every move and not understand that there were things in this world more important than social ladders and looking perfect.  ”Those people” are her parents.

Like saving people’s lives.  Helping keep the Earth from becoming disgustingly uninhabitable.  Rescuing innocent animals from torture.  Tracking down ghosts and sending them back to where they belong.  Wasn’t that a far more noble cause than simply being popular and rich?  She was doing things.  Real things.  Is it?  What do you think?

Her backpack dropped to the ground and her head tilted to the side to rest against the dirty chain.  Almost instantly, her hair caught in the chain and started to pull.  She let out a sigh, but didn’t reach up to untangle it.

Beyond the creak of the swings and the chirping of small things in the grass, Sam found herself in silence.  It was peaceful.  The emptiness curled up through her and settled everything floating around in her head.  She could see the boy, cradled in his mother’s arms, blood everywhere and eyes gazing into death.  She could see the little girl, her pale skin already cold with death before her body stopped moving, her father desperately pleading with ambulance workers to bring her back to life.  Frank’s pale face, filled determination despite the pain Ember had caused him, knowing beyond a doubt that the new radar system would be able to prevent more deaths.

Regret and frustration clawed at her chest, making tears swarm into her eyes.  Her fingers wrapped tightly around the chains.  “Little kids died.”  The clouds breezed by overhead, unmoved by her soft words.  “And if we had that radar, we’d be able to track down who was killing them.”

The wind didn’t answer.

“Nobody else would have to die.”  The swing set creaked in agreement as Sam closed her eyes and allowed the pain of her emotions to swamp her for a long few moments.  “You know what, Agent F?” she whispered into the sunset, knowing the man was two miles away and not able to hear.  “It was my fault.  You worked for months, raised almost a million dollars for this thing, and I’m the one that broke it.” She planted the small explosive that took out the control computer.  She had to.  Why?

Just voicing it aloud did something.  The claws of guilt blunted, their grasp slightly less painful.  The wind whispered a silent question.

“I had to,” she said harshly.  Sitting up abruptly – losing a few strands of hair to the chain in the process – she pushed herself out of the swing and stalked away from it.  A few trees near the edge of the park loomed tall and dark, their uppermost leaves burning with the sun’s red light.  She spun around, staring at the swings as if the swing set were the thing she was speaking to.  “Don’t you see, I had to.”  Her fingers clenched into fists.  “I didn’t know…  I didn’t think kids were going to die…  Not…  I didn’t…”

Settling to crouch on her heels, Sam held her hands in front of her face.  Darkness curled inside of her.  It crackled and burned.  When she closed her eyes, she could see it.

In the abyss, a tiny flare of green.  Like a seed, it burst into life and started to grow.  It climbed higher and higher, twining around invisible branches, leaves and flowers sprouting.  A rose.

Her eyes drifted open.  Little sparkles of the purest green curled around her in the darkness like fireflies.  On her hands, her fingertips were glowing.

“I had to,” she whispered to the nothingness.  “I can’t let them know…”  

Yes, I promised to let you know.  Now I will.

Remember, there’s no Danny.  So when Undergrowth (plant ghost) attacks early in year three – about a year before Danny arrives from California – there’s no Phantom to save the day.  Sam is captured, enslaved, used… and eventually freed by a very lucky Agent F working with Tucker and Jazz.  Few people remember the ordeal, and Sam claims she doesn’t either.  But she does.  

And Undergrowth’s possession permanently affected her – gave her something very similar to ghost powers.  Not at all to the strength Danny has them.  Not enough to turn her into a ghost at all.  But enough to start to affect the world, and her.  Her fingernails perpetually glow green, forcing her to paint them with dark colors of fingernail polish nearly nightly (the energy eats the paint away).  She’s hidden her abilities, confused and lost and scared, from everyone.  She has little control over it.  Even though she’s a Goth and Independent and a Loner… ghost powers are beyond the scope of what she can deal with.  

When she started learning the abilities of the new radar system, she knew one little slip up and she’d set off the alarm.  The Fentons would know.  She knows how the Fentons feel about ghosts, and the Fentons are more her family than her parents are.  It would destroy her to lose the love and respect of the Fenton family.  So she broke the machine in a desperate bid for a few more months of hiding, not fully realizing lives were at stake.

Get it?  Got it?  Good.