Bad mud (Joss, Teagan, Kenzie)

[officiallybeige.insanejournal.com]

Wrenched from sleep by a crash of thunder and a creature clawing at his leg, Joss hollered in surprise.

The world came into focus, out of the black of deep and dreamless sleep; Teagan’s face all pale as the moon. It was her hand, not that of some animal, on his leg, and the thunder was the dragging metal screech of the van door as she rolled it open.

“Wake up,” she gasped, her eyes wild and wide. “We have to go.”

The sun had set while he was sleeping; outside the world glowed of orange streetlights. The van still sat in the carpark near the library, where Teagan had been reading until the bog man materialised through the wall, his face a nightmare of wide gaping jaws, his teeth black, his throat black, his sunken eyes black. She’d screamed so loudly everyone in the library had looked at her, and many had stood, but she’d thrown her book at him (at the wall) and run, as fast as she could, toward the safety of the van. Towards the escape of the van.

“Up!” she cried, as Joss was not (could not) claw himself out of his sleep fast enough for her.

Kenzie had been with him as he slept, drifting like fog in the back of the van, but as Joss scrambled off the mattress and stumbled out into the car park, Kenzie and Teagan reunited.

“He’s found me,” Teagan pulled Joss’s wrist toward the driver’s door. “We have to go.”

Who? Joss though. Someone from home? Matt? Leon? Davis? Who was he. It was only when the bog man came rushing toward him, all gaping mouth and cavernous throat, and Joss saw his reflection in the window, that he yelped in cold fear and bolted toward the driver’s door.

Oh, Joss can see him perfectly, Kenzie snarked bitterly in Teagan’s head. This did detract from the horror of the situation (she was chanting “drive drive drive” in panicked whispers) but not enough.

“What the fuck was that?” Joss slammed his foot down onto reverse and pulled out of the carpark, looking around wildly for the ghost, for that demon, for that thing oh jesus what the fuck was it?

“Bog man,” Teagan clutched at the dashboard, leaning forward like that would make the car go faster. “Followed us.”

“Followed… Jesus fucking half a mammoth on a…” Joss let Teagan’s imagination fill in the rest of his sentence as he concentrated on turning the van as sharply as possible to get it out onto the main road.

There was traffic around, human people driving human cars on a double laned road, and soon they were moving at a decent speed, putting as much distance as possible between the ghost and them. Joss’s hands were shaking violently with the adrenaline, but if he gripped the wheel hard enough he couldn’t tell. “Can you out drive a ghost?” he asked, his voice as shaken as his hands.

No, thought Teagan. “I hope so,” said Teagan, on the verge of tears. She’d seen a flash of the ghost in the rear view mirror, and after that she’d refused to look.

Joss kept searching the mirrors, though. That face; he’d never seen anything like it before and he couldn’t close his eyes like Teagan. That was his second bit of real and tangible proof that something happened after you died. Kenzie herself was proof of one way, but that thing, that horror, was another.

How many hundreds of years… Joss felt sick even wondering.

That thing was nothing like Kenzie, who was a person, a real person, not… not a gaping mouth roaring toward him, not finger bones reflected in a window, not pointed hungry teeth. Joss shuddered all over, not even his grip on the wheel could stop that one.

Could Kenzie be that, in a hundred years? Could- Joss stopped himself thinking. No she wouldn’t be. No.

Just no.

Teagan’s arms were braced against the dashboard, locked and straight, her head was dropped between her shoulder blades as she gasped in breath and shook it out. “The van smells of mud, Joss,” she whispered. “It smells of bad mud.”

Joss couldn’t smell anything. “It’s just in your head,” he said, although it clearly, definitely wasn’t. “It’s okay. We’re driving. Maybe it’s like… running water. Maybe driving is protective. Maybe it’ll confuse it. And we’ll just keep driving, Teagan. We’ll keep going.” We can head for Aberdeen, he thought. There was no justification for this, other than they’d been happy there once. And Merry was there. And it was far. And it was a destination.

The other destination was home but he’d ruled that out of his head so often it didn’t even occur to him right now.

Gotta keep moving, just gotta keep moving.

In Teagan’s head Kenzie was no help. She was frantic. He wants me dead! she kept saying, half convinced that the ghost was Patrick Ravensdale. He wants me dead!

You are dead! Teagan reminded her, yelling at her. Yelling inside her head was getting easier.

Shut up! Kenzie’s voice echoed, like it was ricocheting off the inside of her skull. It did that when she was upset, or when she wanted something real bad. He wants me to stay dead, stay dead with him forever in the bog. He wants us all with him, forever in the bog.
Teagan had no way of knowing if this was true, if Kenzie knew this somehow, or if she was just scared. She could have asked – but she wouldn’t.

Ridiculous, she thought. A medium and a ghost, scared of another ghost. But it didn’t matter if it was ridiculous, it was true. Teagan was not ready for ghosts. Maybe Teagan would never be ready for ghosts. She wasn’t going to think about it – for now she grabbed the map from the glove box and tried to read street signs as they sped past them.

They were lost – till she spotted a sign that said University and, with a triumphant squeak, matched it up with the map. “I found us!” she was close to crying. “Brownlow, that’s us there! If you take the next right it might get us out…” she tried to follow the route with her finger, but it was difficult, as the streetlights kept flashing shadows over the pages, and the writing was tiny, and – fuck it. She let the map drop from her lap and twisted in her seat to reach into the back and find her phone –

But the smell was thicker back there and something cold touched her arm. Teagan jolted back into the front seat and set her eyes straight ahead. The reek of dead mud thick in her nostrils. She could barely breathe through it. She was going to be sick.

“Teagan?” Joss asked, voice thin. “Intersection. Where now?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Tegan. “North, go North.” She covered her mouth and her nose with her hands, so she didn’t have to smell it.

“Teagan I have no idea which way we’re facing,” Joss told her, continuing to drive straight ahead because that was a good a North as any.

Teagan squeaked. Voiceless. Terrified. Joss looked over at her, startled. She was white, whiter than normal, frozen, staring straight ahead. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I can’t move my legs,” Teagan whispered. “My legs… cold… it’s like I’m sitting in mud…”

“Nuh uh, Teagan. Stay with me.” Joss said, as Teagan began to dig, dig through nothing, slamming her clawed hands against nothing – except it filled him with horror when he realised her hands were coming in contact with something, as if something was filling up the van, was up to her waist, was creeping up her chest. “Stay with me,” he kept telling her.

“Kenzie? Kenzie can you help? Kenzie! Help her!” he yelled, as Teagan started to scream at the top of her lungs.

She screamed and she screamed as the mud rose to claim her, its icy weight pushing against her stomach now. Kenzie was screaming get out get out but she didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to stop it, wasn’t thinking… was thinking of Pat, holding her down. Was thinking of death, over and over.

“KENZIE!” Joss screamed, and Teagan lunged sideways, and grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt.

Even if Joss had seen the lamp post, he wouldn’t have been able to turn in time.