School was out and anyone who was anyone was at someone’s graduation, except Peter because he wasn’t and hadn’t been anyone since first grade.
He was in good company because Ned and MJ weren’t anyone either and no one’s summer internships started for two weeks. Even Mr. Stark assigned him the important task to ‘live a little, damnit’ and banned him from the lab until further notice.
It was excruciating. The end of May and early June was a slow time for vigilantes in NYC. People tended to hold off their various types of trafficking and murder until the first heat wave of the season. Even Double D had been going home early over the last couple weeks.
The lull naturally resulted in Peter and the gang congregating on the floor in MJ’s living room under the new fan and binge-watching ghost hunters.
“Can the Spidey Sense pick up ghosts?” Ned asked during a commercial break.
“No. Obviously. Spiders can’t sense shit that’s not real,” MJ pointed out irritably. She’d spent the last two episodes trying to work out why all the ghosts the hunters were pissing off were white Victorian women.
“That’s not true, dogs bark at ghosts all the time,” Ned countered. MJ offered him a complicated expression which conveyed annoyance, skepticism, and boredom all at once.
“Yeah, if ghosts existed, then dogs would probably bark at them,” she decided to go with, “But given that they don’t, and that dogs are stupid, it seems pretty safe to say that dogs don’t bark at ghosts.”
“Dogs aren’t stupid, they’ve just got different priorities.”
“I mean, sure, whatever, but they’d still have to believe in ghosts to see them.”
Ned was offended.
“You don’t have to believe in ghosts to see them, Michelle. That’s literally what these shows are about.”
“No, these shows are about a bunch of dumbass white guys with too much time and too much money playing off of cultural anxiety over—"
Peter tuned them out and thought about it.
“The Spidey Sense doesn’t actually care about logic,” he interrupted, “It freaked out once because the shampoo was in the wrong place on the shelf.”
This got the other twos’ attention.
“Woah. The Spidey Sense has OCD?” Ned asked. Michelle threw a pillow at him.
“Does Peter have OCD, Ned? No. No, he does not.”
“We should test it,” Ned declared.
“Its OCD?” Peter asked absently. The show had come back on and one of the guys was dragging a chair to the middle of a room to antagonize its former owner. Michelle re-appropriated the pillow she’d thrown at Ned so she could beat Peter with it.
“If the Spidey Sense could sense ghosts, then it should constantly be going off,” MJ said once she was satisfied that Peter had been sufficiently punished.
“It kind of always is,” Peter said, rubbing at the rugburn on his cheek.
Both MJ and Ned whipped their heads back to him.
“Dude, we have to test it,” Ned said. MJ huffed and returned to her phone. “C’mon. Please, please, please. Just like one time?”
Peter thought about Mr. Stark telling him to be responsible with his powers. Then he thought about Wade recruiting Double D to time how long it took his hand to heal after he stabbed it with a knife. And then he remembered Double D agreeing to it even though he couldn’t read the stopwatch.
Stupider things had been done, he decided, and it’s not like a little ghost hunting was going to hurt anyone.
“Sure,” he told Ned with a grin, “Let’s go catch a ghost.”
They (Michelle was coerced by way of not having anything else to do and needing to fill the important role of team skeptic) decided to go ghost hunting that Friday night.
This determined, they needed someone and somewhere to ghost hunt, so they did a little research. It didn’t take long to find a place.
There was a condemned building down by the warehouses next to the river which, according to people online, had once been a chapel.
Two girls’ bodies had been found there fifty-odd years ago; both their arms and throats had been slashed. According to old police reports, they’d been best friends with a third girl, but that girl had mysteriously disappeared. The police suspected that she’d been kidnapped, but other ghost hunters suggested that the first two girls had murdered her and tried to cover it up. Reports described a falling out between the remaining girls. It was unclear whether they’d killed each other or had encountered someone else at the chapel who had killed them.
Regardless, it was pretty clear that the chapel was haunted even before those girls had gotten there. There were sightings of a World War II army chaplain who wandered up and down the halls weeping, as well as a woman in a mourning gown, who was allegedly distraught over her dead son. People heard whispering and wailing. One gal said she’d been shoved and her boyfriend scratched.
MJ said it sounded like a horror show. Ned said it was perfect.
Peter happened to let slip to Wade that he was going ghost hunting that weekend when he went on patrol that night.
“Why?” Wade asked, uncharacteristically uneasy. Peter was surprised, he would have thought Wade fantasized about being a Ghostbuster.
“It’s not like there’s anything better to do,” Peter said with a shrug, “Besides, it’ll be fun. Ned’ll have fun.”
“Ain’t we got enough trouble with the living?” Wade prodded.
Peter looked at him quizzically.
“Do you believe in ghosts, Wade?” he asked.
“I die how many times a week, Spidey? I’m like somewhere between a ghost and a zombie. And mine isn’t even the weirdest mutation I’ve heard of. There’s lots of shit in the world we can’t explain.”
Wade paused and listened to the city for a moment. Then a wide grin stretched across his face under the mask.
“Hey, you know who is really into all that ghost-hunting shit?”
Peter was taken aback by the sudden turn around.
“Hawkeye?” he guessed. Wade laughed.
“No, try again.”
“Dr. Banner? Thor? I feel like Thor would get really into it.” Wade snickered.
“Nah, kid. Red’s BFF.”
“Mr. Nelson?”
Wade hopped down from his perch on the storage container and joined Peter on the edge of the roof. He sat on his hands and squirmed in delight.
“Him and Red’s other best friend, the gal, are way into it. Red was bitching the other day that they keep trying to recruit him to go with them ‘cause he’d pick up more than their recording equipment; says he’s running out of excuses to not go.”
Peter needed a minute.
“Is Double D afraid of ghosts?” he asked. Wade hummed.
“I don’t know if I would say afraid,” he drawled, “I think I would go with something more along the lines of ‘absolutely petrified,’ if you’re picking up what I’m puttin’ down.”
He waggled his eyebrows.
Peter got it. And it was the best idea he’d heard in his entire life.
“We have to get Mr. Nelson to come with us,” he decided.
He offered this plan to the gang and Michelle (who was extremely fond of Mr. Nelson after her internship last summer) said that if Mr. Nelson came then she would raise her willingness to participate from 45% to 60%.
Peter offered her the possibility of seeing Double D lose his shit over a ghost and she told him that if that happened, she’d clear all his debts to her.
Peter had never called upon Mr. Nelson at his work because he worked in a much more professional, expensive place than Double D, but MJ grabbed him and Ned and dragged them through the door like she owned the place. She explained that she’d left a message with Mr. Nelson’s office secretary saying that they were going to stop by for a minute. She brought a cup of coffee with them to soften Mr. Nelson if he needed it.
The secretary walked them to Mr. Nelson’s office where he was completing a mountain of paperwork. She tapped on the window and he looked up and smiled and waved her in.
“Miss Jones and friends are here to see you,” she said.
“Oh sure, send ‘em on in,” Mr. Nelson told her. He sounded happy to see them.
MJ dragged them in behind her.
“We brought you coffee,” she announced, “And a proposal.”
Mr. Nelson raised an eyebrow and gestured for them to sit. Peter had never seen him in lawyer-mode before. His blue suit and tie suited the glass walls of his office and the precarious piles of paper on his desk.
Mr. Nelson, he realized, was probably the kind of lawyer people dreamed about having. He felt a little awkward coming into such a professional space to offer him the opportunity to go ghost hunting with a load of dorky teenagers.
Mr. Nelson folded his hands and leaned his chin on them. He didn’t touch the coffee.
“Let’s start with the proposal,” he said amicably.
“A little birdie told us you’re really into ghosts,” MJ replied. Mr. Nelson gave nothing away.
“Which little birdie was that?” he asked kindly.
“Irrelevant,” MJ declared, “We’re going ghost hunting on Friday, do you want to come?”
Mr. Nelson kept up his poker face. Or maybe it was his ‘you are stupid children’ face. It was hard to tell how it was going down with him. He reached over and opened his phone as if to look at the time.
“You guys wouldn’t happen to be going to the haunted chapel by the docks would you?” he asked smoothly.
Peter’s Spidey Sense perked up. He exchanged a look with Ned to make sure they were hearing the same thing.
“You’ve heard of it?” MJ asked.
Mr. Nelson slammed a hand on the table.
“You guys can’t go there on Friday; Karen and I already staked it out. We’ve been planning this for weeks.”
Ah.
Well, good to know DP’s information was reliable.
“Consider this,” Michelle bargained, placing her elbows on Mr. Nelson’s desk, then folding her hands and leaning on her chin like he had earlier, “We could merge our teams into one giant ghost-hunting operation.”
Mr. Nelson squinted at her.
“What like the guys on tv?”
Michelle waved dismissively.
“No, not like them, they’re idiots and we have in our presence two enhanced morons with built-in ghost-sensing devices.”
Mr. Nelson considered this for several long moments. He tapped two fingers against the desk, then gave Michelle a wide grin.
“I love the way you think,” he told her fondly. “Karen and I have been trying to get Matt to come with us for months. Let me call Kare and make sure she’s down. I’m pretty sure she will be.”
Michelle didn’t move from her power stance on the desk.
“Will you bring Mr. Murdock?” she asked evenly.
Mr. Nelson’s smile got a little shark-y. Peter suddenly realized that he and Double D had more in common than he thought.
“But of course,” he said.
Peter and MJ and Ned met up after dinner on Friday and headed down to Hell’s Kitchen where Mr. Nelson (“Foggy, goddamnit. Call me Foggy.”) said he and his friend would meet them.
MJ verified the day before that Mr.—Foggy’s friend was Karen Page. The Karen Page. The one from The Bulletin who was a badass. Collectively, they decided that, if they got nothing else from the night, they’d get to meet the incredible Karen Page and watch her harass Double D. Peter and MJ explained to Ned that the second part was the more important and rewarding of the two.
They showed up at the cross-street about a mile away from the chapel and waited a few minutes before Peter saw Foggy and The Karen Page waving at them from down the block. They each had a firm hand on Double D’s left and right elbows. He walked with the air of one being walked towards a firing squad. That is, prepared to fucking gun it at any second.
MJ made a tiny, involuntary sound of joy. Peter struggled not to smile too hard.
When Double D’s trio met their own, Peter realized that Foggy and Karen absolutely meant serious business. They each had a backpack stuffed with ghost-hunting equipment. His own trio had only brought cell phones and flashlights, but Karen and Foggy waved them off and told them that that was fine, they’d brought the extra stuff just in case something exciting happened.
“We asked Matty if he wanted to get some holy water from his priest, but he wasn’t going for it,” Foggy said, like he was a little disappointed.
“Can I safe-word out of this?” Matt interjected.
“No,” Both Foggy and Karen told him. He shrank in and continued to look profoundly unhappy. MJ vibrated with delight. Peter thrummed a little, too. Ned was more than a little concerned for their health.
“Okay, so we should wait for it to get a little darker,” Karen told them.
“By the time we get there, it’ll be about sunset,” Foggy thought out loud. “If it’s a big place, then we could go in, but if it’s pretty small then we’ll wait. There’s a pet cemetery around there which might be fun.”
“Or we could not?” Matt offered hopefully.
Foggy patted his arm.
“You’re so cute, Matty. Don’t worry, I won’t let any dead poodles hurt you.”
Peter was delighted to find that terror made Double D kind of submissive; instead of snapping back a witty retort, he groaned and buried his face into the back of Foggy’s shoulder.
“Can I please safe-word out of this?” he pleaded.
“No,” Karen said firmly, “You said you’d do one and if it’s not this one, then it’s the Winchester House.”
Matt made a noise like a dying man into Foggy’s shoulder. No doubt, the architecture alone made the Winchester House hell on earth for him.
“But it’s a chapel,” he whined.
“It’s fine, you’re more Catholic than anyone I know,” Karen chirped, prying him out of Foggy’s shoulder and starting to guide/drag him in the direction of their destination. “God loves you, He’ll protect you.”
“God hates me and you are all proof.” Matt grumbled.
The chapel was a death trap, Peter could totally see why it was condemned. Part of the roof was falling in and one of the walls was crumbling. Weeds grew in the cracks around its flagstones and all of its windows were boarded up and graffitied over.
Its decay was beautiful in the orange light, although enjoying that beauty was hard with Matt swearing under his breathe at the back of their group.
Foggy helpfully described it to him with Karen offering her insight along the way.
“Looks like someone’s had to patch the walls a few times over the years; they all used different colors of concrete,” Foggy said.
“Totally looks like someone hid a body in the walls and tried to cover it up,” Karen said.
Peter suspected that MJ was a little in love with Karen. He’d never seen her sustain a smile for this long before.
Matt covered his ears as best as he could without letting go of Foggy’s arm. He ended up threading his left one through Foggy’s elbow, which forced him to stoop a little awkwardly, but Peter had the feeling that this was part of the plan since it practically put him in Foggy’s arms. Peter made a mental note to report all such details back to Wade in Matt’s presence.
“Alright,” Foggy said, drawing everyone into a circle. “Let’s have some ground rules. Rule One: the buddy system is in full effect from here on out. No one wanders off on their own. Rule Two: if there is someone squatting in there, we will be respectful and leave. Rule Three: Flashlights on at all times unless collectively agreed otherwise. Rule Four: Do not pick up anything from the ground, I don’t know if ya’ll are up on your shots and I’m not responsible for anyone getting tetanus or worse. Kare, do we have any more rules?”
“Rules suck, let’s go,” Karen said.
The Spidey Sense freaked the fuck out the second Peter set foot in the door. It skipped the pins and needles and ripped up and down his spine in full-blown panic.
“Uh,” he said. MJ and Ned looked back at him. The others couldn’t cross the threshold with him the in the way.
“You okay?” Ned asked. He took a deep, steadying breath, then nodded and managed to force himself to move out of the doorway.
“Oh hell no,” Matt swore behind him, just barely past the first step. Peter was comforted that he wasn’t the only one.
“You guys are better than any equipment,” Karen sighed dreamily.
It was cooler inside than it was outside the building, despite the summer heat and lack of ventilation. Foggy noted that that might have to do with the building being made out of concrete. It was surprisingly wet inside, like a pipe was broken. There was water sitting around the edges of the bottom floor, reflecting the flashlights and the tiny beams of streetlights peaking through the boards in the windows. It smelled like rot. The intensity of the Spidey Sense was starting to make his heart race.
That was obviously doing nothing to help poor Matt who could hear everyone’s heartbeats and appeared to be doing his damnedest to contain a meltdown. He did this by being very pale and tucking that arm of his around Foggy’s elbow even closer, more like a faint Victorian lady than a blind man with a guide.
And even that didn’t seem to be helping him much because he kept tilting his head and twitching and flinching.
“Whatcha hear, boy?” Karen whispered. Matt shot her a nasty look in the dark and shuffled closer to Foggy who huffed out a laugh.
“A bad fucking idea,” Matt ground out in her direction. MJ laughed out loud. It made Peter leap a foot into the air. The noise of him landing made Matt finch. All of their shuffling echoed in the room.
It wasn’t a large space, about the size of a big classroom with a staircase leading up to a loft-like extension above. The old pews were still there. The first four rows closest to the altar were neat and aligned, but they got more and more skewed as they moved back. The last two rows were smashed into each other; the last two on the left had been knocked over onto their side. There was an empty space on the wall where a cross had once stood; the cross was gone but its silhouette remained in the grime on the once-white-washed wall.
Foggy described this all to Matt, even though he kept trying to shush him.
“Buddy, I don’t get it, you fought a guy with a sledgehammer and a stun gun the other day,” Foggy griped.
“Yeah, I fought him. You can’t fight ghosts,” Matt snapped back.
Peter shivered at the reminder. The Spidey Sense was getting a little painful in his lower back. He walked down the aisle to where MJ was examining the improvised cross. These was dust on the floor and torn scraps of paper. Mice, Peter thought. Ned was trying his luck peeking under the pews.
“How’s the Spidey Sense?” MJ asked Peter without pausing in her scrutiny.
“Not great,” he told her. “Although I can’t tell if that means there’s a used needle around here or if there’s, you know, disturbed spirits.”
A sound like a foot dragging on a piece of paper shut them all up. Peter and MJ shone their flashlights over to Ned to see if he’d been the one who made the noise. He held his hands up and shook his head; they turned to Matt and Foggy but saw both of them looking up. Karen was missing.
“Kare,” Foggy said to the room, “You are breaking Rule One.”
“Fuck your rules,” Karen’s voice echoed from a hallway to the right of the altar that Peter hadn’t noticed. He blamed it on the lack of light.
He and MJ and Ned went to join her in investigating that room. Foggy dragged Matt the opposite direction towards the staircase.
Karen had found a set of three offices. They were old and trashed, with paper and office supplies strewn all over them. Someone had definitely spent some time sleeping in one of them. Some clothes and an old sleeping bag were gathering dust behind the desk Ned and Peter found in the second office. The Spidey Sense jolted at the sight of a set of keys and an outdated cell phone.
Why would you leave your keys and cell phone when you left your squat?
He whispered this to Ned and Ned gave it a concerned eyebrow.
“Maybe they got caught here and had to leave in a hurry?” he suggested. They shared a look and Peter knew they were on the same page. Hopefully, whoever had left was chased out by cops, not ghosts.
There was a loud, grating scrape and one of the gals started coughing and it scared the shit out of him and Ned. They abandoned the office to see what MJ and Karen were up to.
Peter was rapidly realizing that Karen was a glutton for punishment. She’d gone into the second office, the only one on the other side of the hall. The flashlight showed him that she’d dragged a bookcase away from the wall and was crouched over the trash that had previously lived under it, picking through it with one of the old books. Unsatisfied with this, she start to try to yank open the drawers of the dented filing cabinet.
Spotting Peter, she gestured to them hopefully. So apparently she’d heard about the super-strength. He obliged and gave the middle one a pull. It screeched like a banshee.
“Whoever did that, can you not?” Matt’s nervous voice echoed from a distance.
Karen didn’t bother with a response, she was already digging through paperwork.
“Receipts,” she said grumpily. She looked up and shone her flashlight towards the ceiling. It was peeling with paint and a dark water stain stretched across it. It sagged in under the weight of a ceiling fan. Karen frowned at it, so Peter and Ned and MJ shone their lights on it too to try to see what she was looking at.
The Spidey Sense sent a particularly painful arch of electricity up his spine and he gasped just as a sound echoed through the room.
Peter put a hand over his mouth.
The sound echoed again.
“Is that water?” Karen asked softly. MJ moved around to the other side of the upended desk and tried to look at the other side of the ceiling fan.
“Yeah,” she confirmed, “It’s dripping.”
The droplet echoed.
Ned pointed his light into the hollow formed by the upturned desk and, sure enough, there in the middle of it was a pool of water.
That in itself was fine, but what was slightly off-putting was the fact that the pool was contained by a white porcelain bowl. It wasn’t close to overflowing, there was a good two inches left before the water touched the rim. There wasn’t any sediment floating in it or sitting at the bottom. All four of them looked at each other.
“Let’s have a chat,” Karen said in a low voice. “On the count of three, turn off your lights. I’ll do the talking.”
Peter’s gut twisted, but he obediently flicked his switch off on three. His heartbeat tried to compensate for his sudden disorientation by increasing to double-time. There were no windows in the offices. A crack in the wall let in a tiny sliver of the streetlight outside.
“Hello? Is there anyone in here?” Karen asked the room. Her voice echoed. The Spidey Sense gathered at the small of Peter’s back and hummed.
“Hi, is there anyone there?” Karen tried again, “We’re just having a look around. Heard someone died here, that’s pretty creepy.”
She paused. The room settled. The water dripped.
“Does this water bother you?” Karen asked after about twenty seconds, “Is that why you put the bowl there?”
There was a crash.
They all gasped and went rigid.
“Sorry, that was us,” Foggy’s voice shouted from what sounded like directly above them. “We found a closet and the door fell in.”
They all sighed out the breath they hadn’t realized they’d been holding.
“Hey Fog?” Karen shouted back up. She flicked on her flashlight and the Peter and Ned followed suit. “You see any water up there?”
There was quiet and then creaking. Then the sound of footsteps above them.
“No, no water,” Foggy called. “What’s that? Oh, Matt says there’s water stuck between the floors.”
There was a thud, then a yelp followed by the sound of debris rattling down between insulation between the walls.
“You guys okay?” Karen shouted. There were scraping noises.
“Foggy?” She called.
There was murmuring, but no answer. She looked at the rest of them.
“Okay, so looks like we’re going upstairs.”
Upstairs looked a lot like downstairs except there was old upholstered furniture by the windows. The ubiquitous torn paper decorated the floor. A collection of books and old CDs was scattered under one of the windows.
The upstairs ceiling sagged in around two ceiling fans, one directly over the pews and another further out in the ceiling over the pews downstairs. Peter shone his light towards the corner and found the closet Matt and Foggy had been investigating. The door was in bad shape; it had no handle and looked like someone had put a fist through the top left of it. Matt or Foggy had leaned it carefully on the wall perpendicular to the closet.
There was a rod in the closet for hanging up clothes with two lonely wire hangers and one plastic one on it. There were a few dusty soft kids’ toys sitting in the bottom of the space in a plastic tub.
“Foggy?” Michelle called, “Matt?”
“Mr. Nelson?” Ned echoed.
They heard the drip of water and looked towards the ceiling fan. There was no water there nor any container to catch it in under it. The Spidey Sense didn’t like that.
“Fogs?” Karen half-shouted.
“In here,” Foggy’s voice suddenly sounded from somewhere in the closet. They all looked back at it.
“Where?” Peter asked, leaning into the space a little more. It smelled like rotting wood.
Ned joined him and waved his flashlight around. The back wall of the closet and the wall itself were caved in. There was space behind it, like it had once been a hallway. Karen shined her light above the space and pointed out the poorly stucco-ed over edges of a door frame. She leaned over them to peek into the closet.
“Are you in the wall?” she clarified.
There was a shuffling noise, followed by a creak and a snap of wood. Then a form appeared into sight in the hole in the wall. Peter must have made a menacing face because when the form revealed itself to be Foggy, squinting in the glare of all the flashlights, he said “Hey, easy, easy. It’s just me.”
“Matty found a raccoon,” he declared proudly.
“A dead one,” Matt’s voice rectified from behind Foggy.
They all relaxed.
There was a dull thud, like a something falling onto the floor. Foggy looked behind him.
“Don’t pet it.”
“I’m not,” Matt answered irritably.
“Did you knock something over?” Foggy asked, disappearing back towards Matt’s voice to make sure.
“No, that wasn’t from up here,” Matt clarified.
“Which way did it come from?” Foggy asked. He reappeared in the hole in the wall, with an arm reaching back to guide Matt out of it. Matt ducked into view. He was covered in cobwebs and dust. Evidently the door had taken its dive right unto him. Either that, or he’d been the one who crashed through the wall.
“Downstairs, room directly under,” Matt told him.
“Human or animal?” Foggy asked. And yeah, Peter could totally see why Matt was the perfect guy to have with you on a ghost hunt.
“Can’t tell,” Matt said miserably.
“There’s no one downstairs.” Karen said excitedly.
“Well, I guess we know what that means,” Foggy sang matching her measure for measure.
“We go home?” Matt asked, clearly already knowing the answer.
“Back downstairs,” Foggy said, “Get ye, get ye.”
Foggy herded them all back down the deathtrap that was the stairs and into the chapel proper. It was even darker than before. The sound of water dripping into the pools around the edges of the room greeted them. Peter saw Ned’s breath puff out in a cloud in the florescent beam of the flashlight.
He glanced behind him and saw Matt practically vibrating out of his skin in the same direction. Whatever it was, he seemed to be able to sense (or see? Peter didn’t actually know how Double D’s powers worked) the drop in temperature more acutely than the rest of them.
Karen noticed him pressing his hands over his face to hide his horror. She lit up.
“See anything?” she asked. Matt shook his head violently. Peter pondered how hard it was to be the worst liar in existence.
“Matty,” Foggy pressed, “Use your words.”
“F-fuck you,” Matt stuttered.
“Thanks for volunteering,” Karen bubbled, she grabbed each of his elbows and manhandled him all the way to the far right-hand corner of the room, into the awkward little space sectioned off by the edge of the altar and the first row of pews. Matt punctuated the journey with stream of tiny ‘oh god’s.
Peter immediately regretted not recording it for Wade. Michelle offered him a look of deep empathy. She shook her head solemnly.
Karen was already prying open the supply cupboard in the corner by the time the others had picked their way around the pews. She stuck the flashlight in her teeth, batted Matt’s extremely concerned hands away, then set about shaking the doors into surrender.
They gave, like apparently everything else Karen Page touched, but as quickly as they opened, Matt slammed them shut.
“Dude, what gives?” Karen snapped.
“Absolutely not,” Matt told no one in particular. Karen mugged at him and made to strangle him before Foggy intervened.
“What’s inside?” he asked patiently. Ned and MJ looked to Peter, silently asking if his Spidey Sense was going off. He shrugged and shook his head.
“Wax, dirt—candles? Something floral. Perfume? It’s in a water, there’s some kind of water. Glass, glass, glass, metal—silver? Nickel? Hard to tell,” Matt was telling Foggy. It was actually pretty cool to get a rawer perspective of Matt’s senses; from the sounds of it, it was like he was constantly putting together the pieces of a thousand puzzles. MJ was intrigued.
“How can you tell?” she asked.
“There’s blood,” Matt said tightly.
The dripping water echoed in the silence. Peter shivered.
“Well, there’s only one way to know for sure,” Karen declared.
“There is not,” Matt argued. Karen bullied him out of the way into Foggy and opened the doors. All the sighted members of the party shined their flashlights into the space.
It smelled like rot, like the one upstairs, but there was a faint tinge of old lady’s perfume. There was a collection of melted candles inside, stacked on top of each other, and a set of small glass bowls for them to sit in. A few of them looked like they’d been used as ashtrays. One had a blue lighter in it.
The water Matt had been referring to sat inside a fancy miniature pink perfume bottle. The label was in French. This was nestled in the heel of a pair of leather shoes with a broken lace.
Some rats had made their home on the second shelf of the cupboard. Shredded paper and rat feces poured out from it. A faded navy blazer hung from the rod in the third, tall compartment.
“No blood,” Ned told Matt soothingly. It didn’t work, but the effort was kind. Matt glared and covered the lower part his face with one hand while tucking the other into Foggy’s elbow.
“Doesn’t look like anything substantial fell here,” Foggy observed, shining his light around the area outside the cupboard. “Maybe behind it?”
MJ knocked on the wall. It echoed around the room.
“Hollow,” Matt pronounced from behind his hand.
As soon as he said it a knock answered back.
They all froze. The Spidey Sense leapt up between Peter’s shoulders. MJ collected herself first and knocked again. They waited.
“Oh my god,” Ned breathed next to Peter.
The knock answered, louder this time.
Peter’s hands started shaking.
“M-Matty?” Foggy whispered.
Matt appeared to be rapidly approaching a heart attack.
"H-heartbeat," he stammered.
Peter didn't know if that was better or worse. Could ghosts replicate heartbeats?
A thud hit the wall proper, and then again. It was as if it someone was stuck on the other side.
Matt made an executive, though impulsive, decision for all of them. He ducked out from Foggy’s arm, took his arm back and geared up to put it straight through the wall. He wasn’t quite fast enough. A black fist crashed through the other side and grabbed his.
It was Wade. Of course it was Wade. The dick. The massive fucking asshole. The colossal piece of shit.
“I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU,” Matt roared as he threw himself through the collapsed wall. Foggy didn’t even try to stop him. Karen and Michelle and Ned had dissolved into unnerved giggling. Peter hand to put his hands on his knees and try to catch his breath.
“Imma put your fucking lights out,” They heard Matt threatening over Wade’s cackling.
“You shoulda seen your face, Red,” he was wheezing. It turned out he’d set up cameras earlier in the day so he could watch them on his phone the whole time.
“I’m gonna wring your fucking neck and stab you in the fucking throat.”
“You were so fucking precious,” Wade pitched his voice up and imitated Matt’s tiny ‘oh god’s from earlier.
“And when I’m done, I’m gonna drown your dumbass in the fucking Hudson. Over and over and OVER.”
“How long have you been in there?” Foggy demanded. Wade emerged from the wall with Matt pinned in a hug. It wasn’t protecting his upper ribs at all, but he didn’t appear too bothered by Matt’s concerted effort to break them. The space behind him contained boxes, it must have been a storage room at one point.
“Oh not long. Maybe ten minutes. Had to climb in through the roof, missed the landing.”
“You planned this,” Peter spat him. Wade grinned wide.
“Of course, baby boy. Ya’ll are so easy. You can’t let an opportunity like that to pass you by.”
“You said—you said,” Peter was too mad to speak.
“Ooooooo, scary ghosts, right?” He laughed loud and hard, filling the room with echoes. He wasn’t even the tiniest bit creeped out. It pissed Peter right off. “There are scarier things than ghosts in the world, Spidey. And one of them is me.”
Matt nailed him right in the balls on behalf of them all.
In punishment for his sins, they made Wade buy post-ghost-hunting ice cream for everyone. Matt stayed furious. He ordered a ridiculous Sharknado sherbet and squashed it down on top of Wade’s chocolate milkshake to ruin it. Foggy sat him on the side of the bench furthest away from Wade so he’d only murmur his murderous intent, not act on it.
In hindsight, the whole thing was hilarious.
Aunt May thought it was the funniest shit she’d heard in years and the barest mention sent her into peals of giggles for days after.
Wade made ghost noises and ‘booga-booga-booga’ fingers at Double D at every possible opportunity. Double D seethed and set about shoving him into every dumpster he could find.
A few weeks later, after finally having be granted access to Mr. Stark’s lab again, Peter received a text from a number he didn’t know.
“Wanna come with us to the pet cemetery?” It read.
It was Karen. He consulted MJ and Ned.
What the hell? They decided.