AWAKEN ; benny weir [2]

sixteen

Beginning their weekly movie night rituals, Ethan, Benny, and Ellie would always break off from one another right after school for an hour before heading to Ethan's place. This way, they could take a bite to eat or get some chores done before they spent several hours together on Friday nights. It had been like this for years.

Walking through his front door, Benny dumped his messenger bag onto the kitchen table. He immediately began to shuffle through the cabinets for snacks, as most teenage boys would do right home from school.
"Hey, Grandma! What's for...?"

Benny didn't notice the absence of his grandmother before he shouted to the empty house. 
"...Dinner? Grandma?"
No answer. Checking the calendar on the fridge, he finally spotted the date on the dry erase board. It was the third week of October.
"Ugh... bingo match."

Whining to the unoccupied kitchen, he swung open the refrigerator door for a soda before he heard something booming next to his ear.
BAM.

"—GAH!"

Benny bawled at the sound of the TV's remote controller slamming against the wall. It had flown right by his head.
He watched it wobble back and forth on the ground, whipping himself around the kitchen in a circle to spot the culprit, but he was alone as he thought.

"What the...?" Benny thought aloud. "Grandma, if this is one of your pranks again—!"

—CRASH!
The vase that sat atop the hallway table had flung itself into the kitchen, smashing against the wall beside Benny and falling to the floor in pieces. What the hell was happening?
"Grandma? Ellie? Who's screwing with me?!"

Another vase flew across the kitchen, this time almost hitting Benny if he hadn't ducked in time.
"That is IT!"

Benny hurried himself into the hallway to get to the bottom of the chaos but looked to see... absolutely no one.
He held up one of his magical hands in defense, forcing the purple colour to rise out just in case.
"Ethan and Ellie, if you're in cahoots with each other, I swear to Vader—!"

The terrifying view of a black silhouette stumped Benny's warning as it slowly make its way from room to room across the hallway. Floating itself from bedroom to bedroom, Benny gulped at the sudden strike of fear at the unidentified presence.
"Awh... shit nuggets."

The entity slowly disappeared into the other room, leaving the mage to gawk at the sight.
"...Who the hell put a ghost in my house?"

------------

"Eth, it's been twenty minutes."
Ellie sighed as she collapsed back onto Ethan's living room couch, throwing her arms up in the arm in confusion. "Benny is never this late."

"Yeah, he's usually like five minutes late," Ethan joked. 

"Wanna go over there?" Ellie suggested. 

Chuckling at Ethan's shrug in response, the two lifted themselves off the couch and out the front door to venture to Ms. Weir's home.

"Isn't tonight Ms. Weir's bingo night, too?" Ethan mentioned, walking down the sidewalk.
"If it is, then Benny probably died of starvation," Ellie laughed. 

Unbothered to knock on the front door, the two let themselves in and couldn't stop their faces from contorting to puzzlement.
It looked like someone had robbed the place with the furniture strewn across the floor and the broken objects dispersed everywhere.
"The hell...?"

"Did he black out again?" Ethan questioned.
"T-There wasn't a reason for him to black out, was there?" Ellie asked.

"GUYS!"
Ethan and Ellie both heard Benny's voice from the magic room in the basement. The two bolted down the stairs and found the mage standing in the middle of the room with a hockey stick in his hands, aiming it at the air.

"What the hell happened?" Ellie cried, gazing around the room to find broken glasses and ingredients spread spontaneously on the floor. 

"Okay, you're both gonna think I'm crazy," Benny began. "But... I think there's a ghost in my house."

With a second of recognition, Ethan and Ellie took a concerned glance to one another... before bursting into mocking laughter.
"AHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
"Oh, my god! I'm gonna vomit; that's so funny!"

"WHAT?!" Benny shrieked. "Guys, I'm serious!"

"Dude, the last ghost we dealt with possessed a car," Ethan chuckled, collecting himself. "You probably just blacked out."

"If I blacked out, then how do you explain the weird shadowy thingy I saw, huh?" Benny argued, desperately pointing the hockey stick around the room. "It threw shit at me!"

"B, a ghost doesn't have any reason to come in here," Ellie insisted, taking the hockey stick out of his hands. "It was probably just one of those weird fever-dreams people get when they get knocked out. No big deal."

"But- all the... what about the— what?"
Benny gave up on speaking English properly, as he could barely process what Ethan and Ellie were telling him. Did they seriously not believe him?

"Don't sweat it, we can just rain check on movie night," Ethan assured. "Ellie and I will leave you with this cool mess you made."

"Yeah, you might wanna get started," Ellie added. "Your grandma will kill you if she sees her house like this."

After standing on her toes and giving him a peck on the cheek, Ethan and Ellie stepped out of the magic room and left the house, leaving Benny to bask in the mess he made.

"I just want to say... that I really hate ghosts!" he yelled to the air.

——————

Benny grumbled as he continued to pick up all the broken pieces of furniture that laid around his grandmother's home. He hated doing chores, but the fact that this was his fault made it so much worse.
As he shoved the filled trash bag into the bin, an idea popped into the mage's head.

"Wait a minute," he spoke to himself.
He jumped towards the messenger bag that still laid on the kitchen table and removed the spellbook.
"Maybe there's a spell in here that could get rid of this thing for me, so I don't have to do jack shit—!"

Benny couldn't keep that idea for much longer, since his sentence was interrupted by the spellbook flying out of his hands and across the house, landing into the (now ghost-infested) hallway.
"Oh my god, ghost. Eat my ass!"

Zipping his bag up in frustration, Benny turned back to the hallway to see the black haze that he had seen just moments ago standing before him. It didn't quite look like a silhouette, but it had a... shape?
"What do you even want, ghost dude?"

The shadow said nothing, but had a knack for making its aggression known.
A collection of vases and jars floated into the hallway, assembling themselves behind the ghostly figure as Benny widened his eyes in worry.
"...Uh oh."

The objects began to hurl themselves at Benny, leading the mage to desperately try to shield himself with his arms. Turning his hands into fists, he thrusted his arms forward and forced the trinkets to stop mid-air with his magic, shattering onto the floor.
"Oh my god, that was awesome!"

Compelling his palms to shine, Benny began to blast the being before him. The rays of raw magic kept missing the ghost with every dodge and weave it performed. This ghost was faster than he thought.
Benny only stopped firing at the shadow when a low growl was expelling from its being.
"Uh... we can talk about it—?"

The wooden stool that sat itself at the kitchen counter suddenly sprang into the air, flinging itself from the kitchen right into Benny's kneecap.
"—GAH, SHIT!"
He collapsed to the carpet, holding his leg in anguish as he winced at the sudden pain. Fuck, this was bad.

Benny didn't even notice the ghost disappearing since he was winced face-first into the floor. He didn't even hear the sound of his grandmother opening the front door and walking into the hallway, gawking at the state of her home.

"Benjamin! Why is my house a wreck?"

"Could you at least think about me first...?"