"Hey, you remember what I said last year, right? We're Zombie Boy and Ghost Boy. I'm not ever gonna leave you."
"Promise?"
"One hundred percent."
***
In which Alistair fights the monster that possessed his friend alongside his friends, while trying...
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Chapter Nine: The Haunting Of Alistair Graveswood
(The Mall Rats)
***
Alistair was falling.
He was falling down, down, down into a void. There was no end he could see as he kept plummeting, hair and clothes rippling but there was no wind. Voices whispered around him, but they were muffled, almost silent. So Alistair braced himself for the near-blinding pain, wondering where it would start at—his stomach, along his neck, maybe even his head. But no pain came, the voices of the dead stayed quiet, and as he fell, Alistair found this strange, void-like limbo... peaceful.
He closed his eyes, ready to accept this, succumbing to the fall, waiting for an end that never came.
Alistair.
Ice-cold hands grabbed Alistair right as his eyes snapped open, and he was met with the void-eyed faces of ghosts. Their mouths stretched wide open, impossibly open, shrieking howls into Alistair's ears as under it, a scratching noise, and a hundred thousand squeaking cries.
Alistair, the ghosts cried, snatching at his hair, his clothes, his skin, clawed fingers scoring into his body but leaving no trace, and Alistair tried to bat them away, yelling, "What do you want with me?! And what's that goddamned scratching?!"
Alistair, the ghosts wailed, empty eyes boring into him as the cries crescendoed into piercing shrieks. Alistair must listen. Alistair must feel. Alistair must know.
"Know what?" Alistair snapped, clapping his hands over his ears, eyes screwed shut, screaming, "Leave me ALONE!"
Alistair! the ghosts screamed. Alistair knows. Alistair must feel. Feel like us. Alistair!
"Tell me what you're saying and leave me the fuck alone!" Alistair screamed into the void, into the ghosts.
ALISTAIR! was screamed back, as Alistair gasped as a shock of cold slammed into him before pain ruptured from his chest, vision whiting from the agony now coursing through his body as his ears rang with the howls of the dead and those agonised shrieks, as under them a guttural scream cried out before quickly silencing, and in its place was an unnerving roar, and all Alistair could feel was just this pain that was now slowly freezing him inside out.
A flicker beyond the pain—a shape, monstrous and distorted in the moonlight, someone clinging to rails before being dragged into depths, hundreds of rodents flooding into this room, congregating around the writhing form of the person as something was latched onto his face, and Alistair saw the ghosts milling about, watching with dread in their eyes, before they turned to him, and in the haze of pain and what the fuck he was seeing, one was before him in an instant, hollowed eyes staring at him as the ghost touched his hazy body and the pain intensified as his vision flickered from what he was seeing back to the void, as the ghost's mouth opened and whispered, voice turning fainter as Alistair felt something reconnect and the pain was freezing him and he wanted to wake up, ringing in his ears, the last thing he heard.
