It was a mistake to have thought that Matt would let anyone carve pumpkins in peace. And nobody could complain because Foggy had warned them before accepting the invite on team Daredevil’s behalf.
“He will be weird about it,” Foggy had told May skeptically over Peter and MJ and Ned’s heads, standing in the doorway of his apartment in normal people clothes. And that was fine. Beyond fine. The three of them hadn’t been able to process anything that had happened since the second he’d opened the door anyways because his hair.
It was.
It was gone.
It was.
“I’m into the new do, by the way,” May said in the masterful way adults were able to address that shit without being rude as hell.
Foggy smiled at her and ran his fingers through the short (short!!) hair on the sides of his head.
“Thanks, Matt hates it and is refusing to sign any docs with me until I promise to grow it out, so.”
“Oh,” May cooed, “What kind of docs?”
Wait.
Peter shared wide-eyed looks with the other two. He could not make himself attend Matt and Foggy’s wedding. He could not. He had too much respect for the two of them to willingly bear witness to Matt sobbing his eyes out at the altar over how beautiful life was.
“For Nelson, Murdock and Page,” Foggy announced lightly but proudly.
That. Okay, Peter hadn’t expected that. May made a delighted noise and slapped his arm.
“You let him charm you back into that, Mr. Nelson? What else is he gonna charm you into, huh?”
The horrifying wedding. MJ gripped Peter’s wrist in her distress.
Foggy laughed.
“Well, it was me who wrote it out and Kare who’s been screaming it from the mountaintops. Matty’s actually dealing with some pretty intense, uh, personal shit right now. I don’t think he thinks it’s real.”
May arranged her face into an expression of concern.
“Oh no,” she said, “Is he alright? Does he need help?”
Foggy snickered.
“Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but the problem he’s currently experiencing is an abundance of help and support that he does not know how to cope with. Anyways, we’ll see you on Halloween!”
Wade was basically the embodiment of Halloween on a day-to-day basis and so accepted the invite May held out to him with enormous trepidation.
“I don’t do pumpkins,” he said simply.
Lies. He was obsessed with pumpkin heads. He’d bought two weird statues of horrifying pumpkin headed creatures on ebay the night before last, while he was sitting right next to Peter.
“Oh? Why not?” May prodded.
“Waste of food,” he said mechanically.
“Well, whatever is left, we try to make into pie,” she explained. Wade was unmoved.
“You shouldn’t eat those monstrosities,” he argued, “Full of chemicals and shit.”
Peter gave him a meaningful look from Ned’s shoulder. He raised an eyebrow in challenge.
“Did you have other plans then?” May bubbled politely.
Peter could see Wade concocting some as they spoke so that he could put the kibosh on the whole thing before it got too far and he agreed to something which might be good, wholesome fun.
“My buddy’s putting on a horror house thing at his bar,” he lied out his ass. “Told him I’d help with the clean up.”
“Perfect,” May chirped, “We’ll be done at ten at the latest.”
Wade grimaced. She put the little card in his hand and patted it. He flinched back and narrowed his eyes at her.
“Red’s coming,” Peter told him, “And he’s got a new secret. Foggy isn’t telling us what it is.”
Wade perked up like a hunting dog and then caught himself in the act and cleared his throat.
“If I do come, it’ll be as safety tech only,” he grumbled, “You guys can’t give Red a knife, what’s wrong with you? Christ. If he ain’t stab one of y’all with it, he’s gonna stab himself.”
He dismissed them with flapping hands and took his moaning with him behind the slammed door.
Matt apparently loved the smell of pumpkin and wanted people to stab pumpkins to make the nice smell, but he would not stand for the rending of their flesh beyond that. Bad noise, bad noise, he claimed. If you looked away from your pumpkin for more than two seconds, he’d try to steal it and hide it under his chair with the small collection of baby pumpkins he’d picked out of May’s fall decorations while they’d all been distracted.
Foggy told him on multiple occasions that they could all see what he was doing, Matthew. There were holes in the bottom of that chair. But alas. The man would not be stopped.
Wade arrived (begrudgingly) in time to rescue MJ’s half-carved monstrosity from where Matt had stowed it lovingly in the very top kitchen cupboard that no one, not even Uncle Ben, had ever been able to comfortably reach.
Peter didn’t know how the fuck they’d missed it and how the fuck Matt had managed to get it up there in allegedly plain sight. He squinted at the guy taking his scolding from Foggy without remorse.
Had Matt gotten more ninja-y lately? Or was Peter imagining that?
Wade told Foggy he’d handle it and addressed Matt with a judgmental huff.
“Redthew,” he said. “That was not very Christian of you.”
“This is not a very Christian holiday,” Matt replied. Which was absolutely fair, as far as Peter was concerned.
“It can become one,” Wade offered. Matt perked up.
“Say more.”
The others had stopped their carving (except Karen, she was a woman on a mission over there with her stencil) to see how this played out.
“Have you ever seen The Conjuring?” Wade asked. Foggy made a fierce expression and turned away from the two of them to contain himself.
“No, I don’t see things. Is it a movie?”
“It’s a ghost story,” Wade told him. Matt cocked his head in interest. Wade smirked at him. “Catholics do ghost stories right?”
Matt nodded.
“The—we used to tell them to each other where I used to live,” he said. “But ghost stories always end the same, you know.”
Wade kept grinning.
“Do tell, Redthew.”
Matt gave him a put out look. It did not escape Peter’s notice that he hadn’t tried to steal a pumpkin for a whole five minutes. Wade was truly a miracle worker sometimes.
“Someone gets possessed by the devil and everyone always calls the priest and then becomes a nun or a beggar or goes to hell for their sins.”
That was.
A very specific kind of ending.
May stared at Foggy with huge concerned eyes, then turned said owl eyes onto the kids. Karen had stopped her carving to suppress her giggles into her sleeve. Wade snorted.
“Was this Catholic school? Was this what y’all told each other at Catholic school?”
Matt shrugged.
“We didn’t have TV,” he said.
Wade’s smile was edging into manic. He 100% intended to make a fucking night of this.
“Nah, that’s perfect. Here, pal. Lemme tell you about The Conjuring.”
Matt was unimpressed by the version of The Conjuring that Wade told, even though everyone else had slowly abandoned the pumpkins so that they could hug themselves and search around the corners of the room more effectively. Wade had a gift for story-telling and he took artistic license to make that shit even more gory and horrifying than it already was. MJ refused to put her feet on the floor, even as she loudly proclaimed that ghosts weren’t real.
Matt maintained that it wasn’t scary entirely because it wasn’t plausible.
“You can’t do an exorcism if you’re not a priest,” he argued. Vehement that this was the most unrealistic part of the story.
Wade sniffed at him.
“Can to. The Church said he could.”
“The Church would never do that.”
“Well, excuse me, Cardinal.”
“I’m not even a good Catholic, Wade, you’re insulting my people.”
Foggy broke them up by vociferously admiring the progress Karen was making on her vomiting gourd. They all rallied around this artistic monument for a bit. May decided that everyone needed to drink hot cider and Matt waited, kindly and politely, until everyone was holding a drink and nervously giggling about the silliness that was The Conjuring.
“You wanna hear something actually scary?” he prompted to sudden silence.
“Bitch, we don’t got time for your life story,” Karen pointed out literally with her carving knife. Matt gave her a brilliant smile with all of his stupidly straight, white teeth.
“It’s an orphanage story,” he offered. Karen slapped the knife down and stared at him with full intensity.
“Go on,” she said.
Peter referred to MJ and Ned for how to react to this. They both shook their heads at him. MJ pulled her feet back up with her on the couch. Foggy smiled and carried on carefully shaving away the outer skin of his pumpkin.
“The fuck is an orphanage story?” Wade asked on the room’s majority’s behalf. Matt turned his devil’s smile onto him.
“Better than yours,” he said.
Peter felt like he’d learned more about Matt in the last thirty seconds than he had in the entire year that he’d known him. MJ’s jaw dropped enough that it clicked when she snapped it closed and Ned, well Ned was evidently writing Matt’s story into his next DnD campaign.
Matt had demurely held one of his stolen mini pumpkins in his lap while he leaned forward smugly on his elbow.
“When I was ten, my dad was murdered after a fight. We didn’t have any folks willing to take me, so I was sent to live in the Catholic orphanage associated with my church,” he said casually, as if that wasn’t the start of an actual horror story.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Wade snapped.
Matt chuckled.
“100% true,” he said, “How do you think I’m as fucked up as I am, huh? Bounced between there and a few foster homes ‘til I was about fifteen, then got flagged by social services as the highest of high-risks and they stopped trying to place me and just let me stay at the orphanage until college. Didn’t need a transition home, thankfully.”
“Jesus, Red.”
“Oh, honey,” May breathed with her hand over her heart.
“S’alright, isn’t a novel story for people where we’re from.”
It wasn’t alright. Not even a little. Peter’s heart felt weird and so many of Matt’s strange, standoffish behaviors made sense now. The no touching rule. The refusal to get the armor fixed until it was falling to bits. The way he couldn’t make emotions into sentences as quickly as he could make law into arguments.
“Spare me your fucking pity,” he said icily to the room, “You’re gonna need it for yourselves. This is just context for the shit I’m about to tell you.”
He set the pumpkin on the counter and picked up his mug of cider. He smoothed a thumb over the handle.
“St. Agnes’s was the place. I was beyond fucked when I got there, so basically just the same as everyone else. The nuns there brought my sensei in after the first month or so to help control my ‘behaviors,’ but he wasn’t there all the time. Usually had me up at four, then left me be from about twelve to ten, then came back for night training. So during that middle bit, I was your average blind, orphan kid, bumping into walls, flunking out of school, doing the Lord’s work—chores. We called it the Lord’s work because that’s what the nuns called it. We alternated them, but the older kids obviously got first pick, which meant us young’uns or new schmucks got the grunt work. Polishing pews, sweeping corridors, tooth-brushing the bathroom. You know, the exciting stuff.”
“Well, that’s an aesthetic,” Wade noted. “Sounds like some 1950s bullshit.”
Matt laughed.
“We’re Catholic, half of the religion is aesthetic. And yeah, actually. Our church was old as hell. Built in the twenties—our orphanage in ’28. It was so fucking cold, man, no money to retrofit anything. There were maybe thirty of us at any one time and we were always getting in trouble for pushing beds together and putting clothes on the radiators. This kid, Amy—she was maybe five when I was twelve—got it in her head that we were besties and used to break into the boys’ dorms to crawl into bed with me ‘cause she was so cold and I was the one who got her Hail Marys for breaking the rules. No justice in the world, I’m telling you.”
“Anyways, the point here is that I got stuck doing laundry with this big kid, Heath, when I was eleven. And Heath was like, massive. A massive dick but also like six foot at fourteen you know, one of them. So we’re doing this laundry and I’m about the size and shape of a starved mouse and I’m literally falling into this machine, and I kick over this bucket, right? And Heath freaks out and hauls my ass out of this machine, puts me on the sink and tells me not to move.”
Peter couldn’t tell if this was a good memory or a bad one for Matt given his giggling. Although, with context, Peter was starting to understand his weird dark humor. He glanced back and saw that he wasn’t the only one enraptured by Matt’s story. Even Foggy didn’t seem to have heard this one before and was sitting, cross-legged and quiet, resting his chin on his palm.
“So, naturally, I’m falling over myself with apologies at this point,” Matt continued, “’Cause I’ve already endured eight hours of having my ass beat in the basement and really don’t need fucking Heath and his bad attitude adding insult to injury. But he just says, real tight, ‘Nah, man. It’s fine. Why don’t you go stand in the hall?’ Which was nonsense. You stand in the hall without a broom in your hands and someone, somewhere was gonna see you and tell one of the Sisters, and you were gonna get your knuckles done in or like, two million Hail Marys for disobedience and idleness. So I was like ‘no, it’s fine. What did I spill?’”
“Now, this was before I was great at picking things out, so all I knew was that it was kinda minerally and salty. And I also knew that Heath didn’t want to tell me; his heartbeat was all over the place. He lied. Said it was a bucket of detergent and said that he was gonna go get one of the Sisters to see how to clean it up. Which again, made no fucking sense. Detergent’s detergent. You just scoop it back in and move on with your day, and anyways, we didn’t keep buckets of detergent lying around. That’s the kind of thing our toddlers would have gotten their hands in. We only had those gallon things with the spigots on them or the dry stuff in the boxes.”
“But Heath was exactly 19 inches taller than me, so I was like, alright, I guess, I’ll wait here? But he was not letting that happen either. He just picked me up and dropped me outside the door and told me to stay there, don’t move, while he thunders off to go get Sister Molly.”
“So I’m standing there twiddling my thumbs or something, and I hear people talking upstairs and kinda tune in to see what was what. And sure enough, it was Heath talking to Sister Eunice asking where Sister Molly was. And oh, Sister Molly was in the kitchen, but what could Sister Eunice help him with? And then Heath says ‘Really, super sorry, but we accidently knocked over that bucket the cops were supposed to come and fetch.’ And she, Sister Eunice, says ‘oh fuck.’”
Matt seemed to recall this with the warm-fuzzies. Peter, however, had to consciously unclench his teeth.
“Did anyone hear her?” MJ asked from the couch.
“Hell yeah, they did. They were standing right outside the kitchen. You ever heard half a convent gasp?” Matt replied. He rubbed tears from his eyes. “It was beautiful. But yeah. All the other nuns start asking a million questions like, ‘where was that thing?’ and ‘Was anyone with you?’ and ‘Thought we put it in the convent.’ And I’m here going, that is definitely blood in there. I knocked over a whole bucket of blood. How the fuck did I knock over a whole bucket of blood, this is a church?”
“And before I know it, I’m being manhandled by like four nuns who are hugging me and checking me over for stains like I’m a toddler. And I deal with this about as well as I dealt with everything leading up to that, which was by being a shithead and blurting out ‘did someone die?’ Which got the reaction that you’d expect from a load of nuns confronted with a traumatized child.”
“So I got sent out to the yard, even though it was fucking snowing at this point, to shake off my ordeal, as you do, and went about my day as normal. Except that night, fucking Connor O’Reilly comes over and interrupts my two hours of sleep before torture in the usual way—”
“What’s the usual way?” Ned piped up, fully invested and taking notes on his phone.
Matt hummed.
“I mean, you wait over someone and then grab their shoulders really fast and start shaking. Lots of potential for broken noses, so you gotta keep your head high.”
Peter felt his face crunch into a flinch and he looked over, wide-eyed, to where Foggy was shaking his head into his lap and Karen was nodding in complete understanding.
“Does that work?” Ned asked.
“Every time,” Matt assured him. “Another good way is to lift and drop the foot of the mattress.”
“Super un-Christian of y’all,” Wade noted in demented delight from the coffee table.
“Sister Maggie used to tell us that the reason we were horrible to each other was because of the Original Sin,” Matt noted offhandedly. “Then she’d offer us the choice of apologizing or being paired up in the dumbass buddy-system for the next month, which was just an illusion of choice, now that I think about it.”
“I love all these nuns,” Wade said. “Please tell me they’re all still alive so I can buy them flowers for this murder they’re covering up.”
“Wasn’t a murder,” Matt said, “It was a suicide. An attempt anyways. Like I was saying, Connor shakes me awake in the usual way and asks me what I knew about the blood in the laundry room, to which I say, ‘what’s it to you?’ But then I shut up because he’s being very un-Connor like. Hadn’t tried to knock out my teeth even once. His heartbeat sounds weird and I start to realize that he’s super upset, so I amend my earlier statement to ‘what’s wrong?’”
“He tells me that there were police officers downstairs after dinner talking to the nuns and taking this bucket with them, all wrapped in plastic. And he asks me what was in the bucket. I tell him I don’t know because I’m fucking blind, remember? Then he apologizes and leaves me alone.”
“I cannot emphasize to you how strange and upsetting that was,” Matt said, softer, “I mean. This was a kid who’d had to steal food for his siblings since he was eight. He’d been dragged into St. Agnes’s after the rest of his gang were locked away for conspiring and attempting to kill an old man. He was tough as nails. Still is, last I heard of him. He wouldn’t tell me anything more, though, even after I asked him. Just told me to go back to sleep. Which I did until my sensei got there.”
“I forgot about it for a bit, until school let out for the holidays and I could actually sleep for a minute. I got put on laundry duty again with this gal Melanie, who was sixteen and really nice. I told her I hadn’t done it for a while and she said ‘No shit, not after you found Katie’s rope.’”
“A rope?” MJ clarified.
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Matt told her, “Melanie realized that she’d said too much, though, and didn’t want to say anything else. But I was nothing if not a thorn in people’s side when I was a kid, so I eventually got it out of her. Katie was Connor’s cousin; the social workers were trying to find a way to get them placed together. They’d found a family who Connor really liked, but Katie didn’t want to leave the orphanage. She had some problems. The same problems I had later, actually, but hers were really bad then. The nuns told us that she was sick and she’d gone to live at the hospital for a while until she was better. And that happened a lot actually. St. Agnes’s wasn’t the kind of orphanage all the nice kids went to. All the kids who were there with me were disabled or disruptive or generally too fucked up for immediate placement. It was more like a halfway house, I guess. But yeah, Katie going to the hospital was normal and we didn’t ask any questions. Except I wasn’t that fucking dumb, so I could put together the rope with the blood to understand what had happened.”
“Turned out Katie hadn’t died,” Matt said, “But she’d put in a really solid effort. Tried to hang herself and when that didn’t work, tried to cut herself, but realized halfway that she didn’t actually want to die so she used the rope as a tourniquet. Dropped it in a bucket of water before she left for the hospital. It saved her life, believe it or not. When she actually died later that year, though, things started to get weird.”
“Wait,” Peter interrupted, “She didn’t die, but then she did?”
Matt sighed.
“Yeah, turns out those folks at her placement weren’t as nice to her as they were to Connor.”
“Well fuck, that’s horrible,” Wade decided. Matt sighed again.
“Yeah, we didn’t really need ghost stories when we had ones like that,” he admitted. Then cleared his throat, “But this is a ghost story. And Katie had never wanted to leave the orphanage to begin with, and she was sure as shit pissed that she’d been made to. Sometime between Home 3 and 4, I was back at St. Agnes’s being generally depressed and miserable and I heard this weird noise at night. Sounded like a screw turning. It was summer and the latest donation was this weird, all natural play structure thing from one of those families who had enough money to have a backyard. This same family had very kindly forgotten to provide the directions for how it was supposed to go together, and we didn’t have the internet, so a handful of kids and nuns had been trying to figure it out for a while. So I thought someone was outside trying to do something with that stuff, but then I realized it was maybe 3 in the morning.”
“And as I had an upside-down sleep schedule at that point in my life, I was very well acquainted with how St. Agnes’s was supposed to sound at 3 in the morning, and there were no screws involved. But I was also maybe half as much of a dumbass then as I am now, so I wisely decided to freak out about that very quietly in bed until morning rather than go investigate. Soon as I got up, there were rumors all over. Kids saying that all the door handles had been unscrewed in the night before and so the nuns couldn’t get into the place from the main entrance. The police were called, ‘cause the nuns suspected it was someone’s angry parents or guardians, trying to find their kids, and we had all the locks changed which sucked, by the way. Had to go through and figure out how to pick them all individually all over again. It took ages.”
Peter couldn’t help but laugh at the image of a tiny Matt, absolutely infuriated with the gall of these potential kidnappers. Fuming as he plonked himself down in front of yet another door and picked the lock until it opened, before sighing, collecting his tools and moving onto the next one.
“How did you know how to pick locks?” May asked, heating up more cider for everyone.
“The hard way,” Matt said simply. “My sensei locked me in a room with a pissed off German Sheppard and a timer. I learned pretty quick.”
Wade cackled. Foggy stared out the window with a cold expression which Peter took to mean that he very strongly disapproved of Matt’s sensei.
“Where’s your sensei now?” MJ asked, “Is he a ninja too?”
“He’s dead,” Matt said, “And I’m having a great night with no panic attacks so far, so we’re never going to mention him ever again. Anyways, All us kids knew it wasn’t anyone’s parents. All the nuns knew, too. they just didn’t want to admit it. But us little assholes had a whole lot of time and not a whole lot of entertainment, so we started concocting even more and even worse rumors to scare the younger kids. And they started whining and wailing at night, complaining that they saw such-and-such move across the room or such-and-such door closed without them touching it and we all laughed it off at first, but it turned out that we’d fucked up so bad. We’d just given Katie more ideas. I personally got locked in the laundry room once, and I swear, hand to God, that there was no one there but me. My friend Kelly and her brother Leonard put together that play structure thing and the next morning, all the swings were swinging while we were all inside.”
“And then stuff started breaking. Not just breaking, but like, exploding. Shattering. Started with plates, which we all caught shit for. Then turned into mirrors and pipes. And by that point, we were all being stupid kind to each other and begging the Sisters and the priest for Hail Marys, because we only felt safe in the church. But that all went right out the window when one of the holy water fonts cracked.”
“A what?” May asked.
“A holy water font,” Matt repeated, “It’s like a basin at the entrance of a church you put holy water in. It is literally full of holy, so at that point all of us became fully convinced that Katie had become a demon. So, like good little Catholics, we decided that we’d brought this thing into the world by insulting the dead and started getting, uh, pretty emotional during mass. I think Father Lantom legitimately thought that we’d been afflicted by that bread germ that convinced people in Europe their villages were being invaded by witches.”
“Red, this is the best story you’ve ever told,” Wade swore over his new cup of cider. Karen turned to him with a grave nod.
“Orphanage stories are the best ones,” she said solemnly. Matt accepted the mug of cider May bumped against his knuckles and thanked her softly for it. He took a sip of it.
“Why didn’t the priest do an exorcism?” Ned asked, “I mean, if you all were that freaked out about it, why didn’t he just do it to make you all feel better?”
Matt raised an eyebrow.
“An exorcism is a really big deal, you know,” he said, “Unlike what TV will have you believe, it’s not exactly common. You can get a priest to bless your house, though. Which was what we wanted Father Lantom to do. He couldn’t though, because the orphanage was staffed and run by the convent, so he needed the Mother Superior’s approval before he got up in their space.”
“Okay, so why didn’t you guys ask the Mother Superior then?” Ned pressed.
“You know, if we’d still had Mother Clarice, then she probably would have had him do it,” Matt said, “But we had Mother Ruth and she was a terrible human being who didn’t give a shit about the orphanage. She was more interested in the convent, but no one would admit it because it would get back to her and then she’d find you.”
Peter decided that orphanages were wild.
“You guys were like Annie,” he said. Matt thought about it.
“I guess, except no dogs allowed. And the nuns weren’t drunk. The nuns were actually really nice. Sister Molly probably would have fought a bear for us. But you guys are distracting me. The point is that the Mother Superior said no on the blessing and Father Lantom wanted us to look for earthly causes before we came crying to him. So we all had to deal with ourselves as best as we could. Which just bred superstition, if I’m honest. Salt over the shoulder. Rosaries on beds. No one spoke or moved during the witching hours. We were the best-behaved troop of orphans in all Hell’s Kitchen for two whole weeks of torment and self-locking doors and footsteps, until some of the people in mass started telling Father Lantom that it had been unusually cold in the church lately. Father Lantom said they’d been heating it as normal, so he didn’t understand. But there were these guys who were adamant that it was way too cold. They and a group of their buddies were into the whole ghost hunters thing and they managed to persuade the Father to let them spend the night in the church. They didn’t find anything, of course, because Katie went home with us after Mass.”
“But Sister Eunice, the real MVP, happened to mention to them that some ‘interesting’ things were happening over across the street and they begged and pleaded with the Mother Superior to be allowed to spend the night. She agreed, but only because I’m pretty sure all the nuns were losing their damn minds alongside us kids. Those guys set up all this equipment and shit and we knew, we all just knew that Katie was going to smash it to bits, but Sister Eunice and Sister Molly and Sister Maggie told us to stay mum. And sure enough. All that shit came tumbling down at 2 in the morning. Kicked up a loud enough racket that it woke everyone in the place up. Scared us all to death and, you’ve gotta understand that at this point, the oldest kid there was seventeen. We were all bawling our eyes out. There weren’t enough nuns to settle us all down enough to get back to bed. They literally had to call the priest to say mass in the kitchen, just to retain order.”
“Mass helped you sleep?” MJ asked skeptically.
“Nothing helped us sleep,” Matt said, “Mass just made us shut up about this fucking ghost.”
“What did the ghost-hunters find?” Karen asked.
“I dunno, they got the hell out pretty quick.”
“Is Katie still there?” Peter asked. “Did she ever get exorcised?”
Matt smirked at him.
“I dunno. I went to Home 4 after that, which was awful enough that I ran away a few times. She was still there when I left for college. Breaking all the plates every couple months. Might still be there now.”
Silence.
“Well, fuck, now we gotta go check,” Wade said for everyone.
Matt was pleased to have made everyone extremely uncomfortable. He was rewarded with a pumpkin for his excellent story-telling and, thus plied, indulgently agreed to take them back to his old home so that they could investigate.
Because this was Peter’s life now. Part-time Spiderman. Part-time ghosthunter.
Karen was vibrating with excitement, making up for Foggy’s unusual lack of it.
“Clinton’s Church is fucking creepy in the daytime, it’s probably a fucking ghoul-fest at night,” he grumbled. Matt pouted at him, insulted, and took himself and his pumpkin to the other side of Wade.
Foggy was not joking. Matt’s church was pretty creepy at night, but not half as creepy as the gates outside St. Agnes’s. Matt didn’t take them to the entrance of St. Agnes’s though, he took them instead inside the church and wandered around, sticking his head into places Peter was pretty sure were off-limits to the public. Foggy noticed his and May’s uncomfortable-ness and told them,
“He’s here all the time. They’re used to it.”
It made Peter feel a little better.
“Who’s he looking for?” May asked, pulling MJ and Ned in closer to their huddle so as to clear the doorway.
Foggy and Karen shared a look.
“Let’s call her Sister Maggie,” Karen said.
“The one in the story?” Peter asked.
“Yep, that’s the one.”
“Karen,” a woman’s voice said behind them. Wade didn’t jump, but the rest of them did. It was a nun. She was tiny. A miniscule bird woman. She could not have cleared five feet.
“Sister, we were just talking about you,” Karen said brightly. Sister Maggie raised an eyebrow.
“Why,” she asked without asking. She sounded like she didn’t and had no intention of trusting anyone with anything anytime soon. Not exactly the friendliest nun in the world.
“Aha,” Matt said, appearing out of nowhere still holding his pumpkin, “There you are. I come bearing bribes.”
Sister Maggie was not impressed. She said nothing and her eyebrow remained arched. Matt did not appear to take offense at the silence. Peter wondered if he couldn’t sense her skepticism or if he’d just become impervious to it due to long-term exposure. He squirmed through their group and held out the pumpkin. Sister Maggie looked at it, then back up at him.
“We already have some,” she said.
“Not for the kids, for you,” Matt clarified.
“What did you do to it?” Sister Maggie demanded.
“I earned it,” Matt said simply.
“And you’re giving it to me.”
“Yes, that’s how a gift works.”
“Why?”
“Kindness, Sister.”
“What do you want?”
Wade was thoroughly impressed by this tiny bird-nun. He nodded along with her questions approvingly.
“Access to the building for ten minutes?”
Sister Maggie crossed her arms.
“This better not be about Katie,” she said with a fierce look.
“Definitely about Katie,” Matt volleyed back. He shook the pumpkin at her.
“Ghosts aren’t real, Matthew.”
“How dare you. Katie’s not a ghost, she’s a demon.”
Sister Maggie sighed hard and pressed a hand to her head.
“I should have eaten you,” she said.
Foggy and Karen started dying. The rest of them, Wade included for once, were stunned. Such language? From a nun? Were all nuns like this? Had TV been lying to everyone for the last century?
“It’s okay, Sister, we all have regrets,” Matt told her brightly. He pushed the pumpkin into her arms and she accepted it in defeat.
Sister Maggie was vicious to Matt, and only to Matt. She chided and poked and prodded and accused him of a vast variety of personal faults while leading their group to the orphanage.
“The kids are out,” she said, “They will be back in half an hour and you will not tell them any stories about Katie,” she snapped, with a finger in Matt’s face. He agreed and she kept her narrowed eyes on him as she unlocked the door.
It really was a super old building. And freezing, just as Matt said.
“Katie was a real person?” Wade asked the Sister, “Murdock here hasn’t just been jerking our chains for the last couple hours?”
Sister Maggie cocked her head at Wade as though trying to place him.
“Are you Wade Wilson?” she asked. Wade went ramrod straight before forcing his body to relax.
“The one and only. Does Redthew tell you much about me?” he asked smoothly.
Wade. Wade, you cannot flirt with a nun. Inappropriate 101.
Sister Maggie gave him a once-over.
“Redthew?” she clarified.
“Ignore him, he’s a shithead,” Matt told her.
“Language.”
“Ignore him, he’s a fuckhead,” Matt amended.
She put her palm against her forehead again.
“Why are you like this?” she asked.
Peter empathized with the poor woman. He asked himself that all the time. And this lady had had to have dealt with that for at least twice as long, if not longer, as Peter had.
Matt didn’t answer her question, he’d already vanished down a hallway, so they had no choice but to follow after.
May stayed back to walk with the Sister.
“You’ve known Matt for some time, then,” she said. The Sister hummed.
“He came to live with us when he was ten and we haven’t been able to lock him out since,” she said.
May smiled at her.
“You two seem close.”
The Sister actually stopped walking and stared at the ceiling for a second.
“This is my penance,” she said miserably.
Wow, harsh.
Peter and MJ and Ned decided to catch up with the others.
Matt took them up a complicated set of staircases and hallways and then down an equally complicated set of both to what Peter realized was a laundry room. But instead of staying there, Matt went through it and opened an ancient door which lead to a central space filled with pews. A chapel.
He picked up a candle from one of the sides of the altar and lit it, carrying it out with him over to their circle.
Everyone in their group circled around and was quiet while he said a prayer for Kaitlin Baker and finished it with, “And I’m leaving this one out just for you, girl.” He set it on the edge of the table containing other candles, then dragged everyone else back to sit in one of the middle pews.
“I feel like I’m about to combust,” Wade whispered over May to Peter’s trio. It was hard to keep a straight face, but MJ and Ned were on a mission and Peter wasn’t going to fuck it up for them. They both kept their eyes on the candle. Peter glanced over and saw Foggy and Karen watching it curiously too. Matt had leaned on the pew in front of him, lax with confidence.
Wade poked him in the side and he swatted at him. Wade poked him in his lower ribs and was about to catch some serious shit for it when the noise of a glass shattering filled the room.
The candle Matt had lit was no more.
The red glass which had contained it had dropped right off the side of the table, somehow without managing to take any of the other ones with it. The wick had been suffocated under a piece of glass. A thin trail of smoke drifted up from it.
Sister Maggie sighed behind them and Matt whirled around to grin at her.
“Demon,” he said.
“Troubled soul,” she corrected.
Another candle crashed off the side of the table, unbidden.
Holy shit.
Even Wade had shut the fuck up and dropped his smile at that. The Spidey Sense was extremely displeased and ripped up and down Peter’s spine. Everyone besides the resident Devil on the pew had gone absolutely rigid.
“Thank you, Kaitlin,” Sister Maggie said to the room, “Let me light one for you instead.”
The candle Sister Maggie lit did not throw itself off its table. Not even while the Sister scolded Matt for disrespecting the dead and made him sweep up the glass shards and broken wax from the floor.
“She merely asks for respectful remembrance,” Sister Maggie explained, herding their group out before the kids came back. “And that is something that we can give her in return for having failed to protect her during her time with us here on this plane.”
Matt didn’t seem interested.
“Yeah, no, she tormented us for years,” he said, “If she wants respect, she’s not finding it from me. Reap what you sow and all that.”
“Forgiveness is a virtue, Matthew,” Sister Maggie said, grabbing a handful of his jacket and pulling him back so that he’d pay close attention. “Whereas rudeness is just that. Apologize.”
Matt groaned. The Sister stared at him, unmoving, until he threw up his hands and left them to go back to the chapel for a minute. She watched him go in approval.
Peter found himself awed.
“Who are you?” he asked. She glanced at him and tipped her chin up and didn’t answer.
They left St. Agnes’s just as a flood of kids wearing all sorts of costumes came rolling in. One of them stopped and threw herself around Matt’s waist, to his obvious discomfort. Another nun appeared to help him and gave him a fond pat on the shoulder before herding her flock through the doors.
For his part in introducing them to a real ghost in addition to providing a good story, Matt received another lightly stabbed pumpkin. He was thrilled enough to take it, along with his pals, home with him. Foggy assured them that he’d placed it in the center of his counter later.
Once back home himself, Peter blinked and tried to reconcile what he’d seen that evening with all the shit he’d seen on TV and in his own ghosthunting adventures.
“Honey, don’t think about it too much,” May told him as she picked seeds out of the remaining pumpkin carnage.
“But it doesn’t make sense.”
“Lots of things don’t make sense.”
“It must have been some kind of trick. He must have shaken the table or something.”
May paused with her hands buried in pumpkin guts.
“So what if he did? We wanted to see a ghost and he showed us a ghost. It was fun and it’ll be something to tell stories about later. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. It’s in the spirit of the day.”
Peter pouted and watched the little trail of trick-or-treaters outside the window.
“I guess,” he submitted.