Buried Within (Lockwood & Co Fanfic)

Ghost Hunt

"Everything is simple and straightforward," Maisie thought after they went over the plan and how she would be involved, or in reality, her lack thereof involvement. "There's nothing to be scared of."

Yet this in itself was a lie, a lie Maisie told herself to come to terms with her fears. Even with Lucy in the room, she was plagued by nightmares of sleeping in the car, or trying to, with ghosts flying around. And now there was the dream of running into a house where she clearly saw a dead body in the wall, and she could never escape.

Her fears were all too real, grounded in a reality where her mother denied the existence of The Problem affecting them, their family, as it had everyone else. And while Maisie could brush those thoughts away during the middle of the day when she first agreed to the plan, this was much harder to do when the nightmare started, and she woke early in the morning, long before they would be headed out.

The time finally rolled around, and her mother was on the couch. She thought of calling out to her mother to let her know where she was going, and yet there, along with the fear of the ghosts, was, in fact, the fear of her mother stopping her from doing what she needed to do, for the chances of ever coming across an agency willing to let her tag along just to face her fears, let alone a job like her mothers where even an eccentric one like Lockwood & Co. would be able to allow her on the trip - that was never going to happen again.

And so they arrived at the place, and Maisie couldn't feel anything at first.

"That's pretty normal," Lockwood said before entering the house.

Lucy added, "Ghosts aren't active during the day, so they tend to—how to put it, keep to their own? No, that's not quite right."

"What she means is because they're only active at night, that is when we have to worry about them. They also tend to be stuck in one place because of whatever their source is, but by that, I mean their source is where they go, not anything else."

"Can a ghost have multiple sources?"

Lockwood's mouth twisted into a frown. "I'm not sure."

"There are theories about that," George said. "For example, the baby killer is said to show up wherever one of the bodies of her dead babies showed up, but is it that, or does the ghost of the baby take the form of an adult woman because that's easier to scare people, and what fuels these phenomena is the infant latching onto whatever trauma it faced in life and replicating it onto another person? Nobody has an answer to that, to be honest."

"That's an interesting thought," Maisie said.

"You'll be fine," Lockwood said, grinning ear-to-ear, which she found pretty annoying. George seemed more enjoyable to be around, which seemed a bit strange, given that he was nerdy, and there was the particular mention of his yoga activity when they first started staying at the Lockwood agency.

"Why couldn't there have been a guy more like Lucy there," Maisie thought, trying to think of something that would distract her from what kept switching from a feeling of utter joy to a sense of utter doom.

"Yes. We've got you," Lucy said. "And as we said, we'll start with the body."

"Something about you needing to look at the source, to know that you don't need to be afraid of it during the day, a source that is. That during the day, it can't harm you," George said. But then he had to add. "Well, for the most part. There are some theories...."

"George!" His fellow agents said at the same time.

And so Maisie went and looked at the body in the wall, seeing how little her other had gotten done, but then—