[Because it's weirdly relevant: it's canon that Jake and Rachel's family is Jewish, Marco's mom and Tobias's mom are Christian, Ax practices an andalite religion, and Cassie's unknown.]
• «Welp,» Tobias says, as soon as the translucent figure materializes. «I always knew the sins of my past would come back to haunt me.»
- “Egotistical much?” Marco asks, morphing fast as he backs away from the floating woman. “For all we know they’re the sins of my past.”
- The figure’s mouth falls open. Far further than any mouth should be able to open. She emits a noise that sounds like what would happen if a human tried to imitate a Howler.
- «Yep,» Rachel says, «Definitely Marco’s sins.»
- The figure opens her mouth even further, and now she’s sucking at the air of the room.
- «Everybody,» Jake says, «Run!»
• Half an hour later Jake stares at the foyer wall, rubbing the back of his head. “So all the doors and windows disappeared,” he says, “And every time you bash a hole in the wall it heals back over. So…”
- Everyone waits for the end to that sentence. And waits. Maintaining eye contact with Rachel, Marco points at Ax. He holds up three fingers, then two, then one.
- “Ax?” Jake says, right on cue.
- «Yes, Prince Jake?» Ax says wearily, as unsurprised as Marco.
- “How do you get out of a building with no doors, windows, or permeable walls?”
- «Is this not a human dwelling, Prince Jake?»
- Jake sighs. “Yeah. It is.”
- They continue staring in glum silence at the wall Jake bashed through. The wall that resealed itself, while a rhino was still smashing it, and then... ejected him. («Like a sphincter rejecting a foreign object!» Ax said, before Marco forbade him from ever speaking words again.)
- Marco holds up one finger, because—
- “Ax?” Jake says again. “Do you know of any semi-invisible, semi-untouchable aliens?”
- Ax looks at Jake. «I believe that was a human upstairs, Prince Jake. An oddly mutated one, but she was wearing clothing.»
- “Then...” Jake turns to look at the wall some more.
- “Hey, Tobias?” Marco says.
- «Yeah,» Tobias says, «I know.»
- “Next time you hear bloodcurdling screams coming from inside an abandoned building—”
- «I know.»
- “Don’t tell the rest of us. Just keep right on flying.”
- «I know, Marco.»
• They divide into two groups of three, because it’ll be faster than searching the house together. Jake balks at the idea of splitting up at all, but they want out of here sooner rather than later. Turns out there's not much to find. The house looks like a pretty standard McMansion built and then abandoned in the 1970s, brown wallpaper and speckled floors. There are bits of furniture too broken-down to bother hauling away, appliances in the kitchen, supplies left over from where someone got halfway through painting the living room, and that’s about it. No food. No bedding. No weapons.
• As soon as he reaches the kitchen, Marco yanks up the handle on the sink. There are several juddering groans and a thud, but water spurts out of the faucet.
- Cassie looks over and winces. “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”
- «It is flowing,» Ax points out.
- “Yeah,” Cassie says, “but it’s probably full of e.coli and rust and—”
- WHAM. All the cabinet doors slam open at once. WHAM WHAM WHAM. They swing open and then shut with wall-rattling force, the WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM growing unbearably loud.
- “CUT IT OUT!” Marco bellows over the din. This of course does nothing.
- WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM The linoleum floor beads, then bubbles, with red. Blood rising up, as if through pores in human skin. The smell is overwhelming, meat and metal and rot.
- “Gross!” Marco says. At least that’s what Cassie thinks he says; it’s lost in the cacophony. He’s holding two of the cabinet doors shut, which isn’t doing much good.
- Ax minces across the floor, hooves slipping, and shuts off the sink. The moment he does, the room falls silent. No further blood bubbles from the floor, but what’s there doesn’t disappear either.
- “Gross,” Marco groans again. “But good thinking, Ax-Man.”
- «Let us hope it didn’t occur in any other rooms,» Ax says. «This is indeed disgusting.»
- Cassie winces in sympathy. They might all be barefoot, but at least she and Marco don’t eat by walking.
• Night falls, and still they have no luck at getting out of the house. Jake drags the couch cushions onto the floor, Marco pulls over one of the dropcloths to use as a makeshift blanket, and they do their best to settle down.
- “Tobias and Cassie on first watch,” Jake says, “then me and Ax, then Marco and Rachel. Okay?”
- “How come I have to be with Marco and not Cassie?” Rachel demands.
- “We’ve been over this. You two just egg each other on.”
- “Plus,” Marco pipes up, “we all know you can’t be with Tobias because the fastest way to get yourself killed in a horror movie is to—”
- «Ask yourself, Marco,» Tobias says, silky-smooth, «Just how much you actually want to finish that sentence.»
- “Who, me? I wasn’t saying anything!”
• They’re all awakened in the middle of the night by a horrible smell, so eye-wateringly putrid that Rachel’s pretty sure she’d throw up if they’d eaten last night.
- “What fresh hell is this?” Marco says.
- «It went after Cassie!» Tobias shouts. «That stupid invisible thing grabbed her by the ankle and dragged her into the basement!»
- “And now it’s trying to kill the rest of us with stench?” Rachel says. She’s already starting to morph — oh gross, the smell is even worse with bear nose — as she speaks.
- «Um. That smell is me.» Cassie comes waddling up the basement stairs. The small, fluffy, black-and-white version of Cassie.
- “You sprayed it?” Jake asks. It comes out muffled; he’s holding his nose. “And that worked?”
- «Yeah. It was the first idea that came to mind, but...» Cassie waves her tail, and they all flinch. «Seems like whatever this thing is, it still has its sense of smell.»
- “Okay.” Jake yawns, and then grimaces as he inhales the scent. “Okay, we can use this. Rest of the night, we do one person in skunk morph per team. Yeah?”
- “Roger that.” Marco salutes. At no point has he made any effort to disentangle himself from his dropcloth cocoon. “G’night.”
- Given the miasma of the place, no one gets much sleep that night.
• The following morning, they’re all awakened by the sound of Rachel’s mother’s voice, calling to them from upstairs. “Rachel!” it screams. “Rachel, please! Help me!”
- Jake rolls over, eyes half-open. “No way in hell is Aunt Naomi coming out to a nasty-ass half-rotted building.”
- “We know,” Rachel groans. “Now will it shut up?”
• Mapping the house as themselves did no good. Cassie comes up with the idea of mapping the house as bats, which is both more successful, and less so.
- «Is it just me, or does that wall look like it’s in a different place than it sounds like it is?» Rachel asks, hanging from the door frame to glare down the hall.
- «It’s not just you,» Tobias reports grimly.
- «And...» She fires another burst of clicks. «Hang on, the invisible person is back!»
- There follows a brief and extremely frustrating fight that consists of Rachel and Tobias dive-bombing the woman they can echolocate but not see, only to pass through her every time. She does not appear to notice she has bats flying through her head, which adds insult to injury.
• Everyone is bored, and hungry. A swarm of evil rats comes out of the attic. Now everyone but Tobias is bored and hungry.
• That afternoon, Marco is the next person who gets grabbed. Rather than trying to morph fast while getting dragged around by the ankle — he isn’t Cassie — he tries the next-best thing. And what do you know, the ghost goes screaming off into the ether the moment he does.
- “So you... yelled ‘Sa ngalan ng diyos,’” Jake repeats. “And it let you go. And then...”
- Marco holds up his two wooden paint stirrers, in the same position he used before: one vertical, one held at a horizontal slightly above the middle of the other. He is so lucky he got grabbed in the living room. “Corpse breath didn’t like this one bit.”
- «Huh,» Tobias says. «Solid idea, actually.»
- “The water!” Cassie snaps her fingers. “Yesterday, it freaked out as soon as there was moving water, but it didn’t care about any of the still water!”
- «I do not understand,» Ax says, staring at Marco’s hands. «Ghosts are known to be frightened of the letter T?»
- “Um, it’s a human religion,” Jake says. “And they use two pieces of crossed wood as their symbol.”
- «I see. In that case, I believe you should explain human theology to me, so that I can better appreciate the context.»
- All five human Animorphs look at each other. No one speaks.
- “Don't worry about it,” Jake says.
- «Marco,» Tobias says, «You think you could bless some of that water? You know, make it holy?»
- “Ha!” Rachel says. "Marco, making things holy."
- «We are trapped in here.» Ax shifts in position, looking around at all of them. «And it seems you all know more than I do about the nature of this being. If my life is threatened by this entity, as I believe it is, then I think I have a right to know.»
- “You have a point.” Jake sighs. “Okay, so. Two thousand years ago, there was this rabbi named Jesus... Do you know what a rabbi is?”
- «I do not.»
- Jake’s next sigh is, if possible, even heavier. “Okay, so ten thousand years before that rabbi, there was this guy called Abraham...”
• Forty-five minutes later...
- «So, Prince Jake, this cross is used as a threat? To suggest that one’s enemies will be killed in the same manner as this Jesus, if they’re not careful?»
- “Uh-huh.”
• Ninety minutes after that...
- «Hey Marco,» Tobias says in private thought-speak. They’re watching Jake mime the sign of the cross, backward, for Ax. «Weren’t you raised Catholic?»
- “Mum’s the word,” Marco whispers.
• Two hours after that...
- «This Jesus was only famous for the manner of his death?»
- “Uh, no!” Jake holds up a finger as it comes to him. “He’s also famous for being born.”
- «Ah.» There’s a definite skeptical note to Ax’s voice.
- Jake is aware he’s not doing a very good job of this, thank you, but he doesn’t see anyone else volunteering. “See, he was born during a census — the Romans wanted to count all the Jewish people — and his parents couldn’t get a hotel room, so his mom had to go outside and give birth under a pine tree. And now every year, Christians cut down pine trees and reenact Jesus’s birth under them inside their own homes.”
- «Could we perhaps... perform this ritual?» Ax says.
- “I dunno, I’ve only ever seen one of these trees at Marco’s...” Jake stops talking. He turns, slowly, to where Marco is cleaning his nails as he watches from across the room.
- “No, no, don’t stop now!” Marco calls.
- "I'm gonna kill you," Jake promises. "Slowly."
- «Hey, Ax,» Tobias says suddenly. «You know that time we caught that Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon?»
- «Yes.»
- «We’re in a Buffy episode, Ax-Man. This house runs on Buffy rules.»
- «Of course!» Ax throws up his hands. «Finally, it makes sense.»
- “You couldn’t have said that four hours ago?” Jake demands.
- Tobias ruffles his feathers. «Nope.»
• Another night passes. This one doesn’t have any abduction attempts, possibly because they’ve taken to having teams of one bat and one skunk apiece on watch. Possibly because the ghost opts to spend the entire night groaning and skittering and banging pipes.
• Possibly because this night, the ghost tries a different voice. With different results. “Marco,” it gets as far as calling, “Marco, this is—”
- Jake is on his feet and half-morphed before consciousness sets in. Ax and Tobias have already shot out of the room, talons and tail-blade at the ready, and Rachel is still morphing.
- “Just the ghost,” Cassie says, trying to catch her breath. “It’s just the ghost.”
- «Fuck.» Tobias glides back into the room and lands on the couch, every feather standing on end. «Fuck. If it could not do that EVER AGAIN—»
- “Shhh!” Marco says. And then he raises his voice, yelling toward the ceiling. “Gosh, we sure enjoyed that, and we’d love to hear it again! It didn’t even slightly cause any of us to pee our pants because we thought Visser One had found us here, no siree!”
- “Does reverse psychology work on ghosts?” Rachel whispers. No one has an answer.
• The following morning, they’re all officially in hangry-land. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum!” Marco shouts. Which causes the floor to start shaking, plaster dust raining down on them and unearthly groans coming from the basement. That’s something, at least. “Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús!”
- “Okay,” Jake yells, “Now!”
- "Right to left!" Tobias reminds them. "Right to left!"
- As one, they dip their paintbrushes into the bucket Ax unsealed, and rush to the nearest wall. Each of them paints a long downward stroke against the wallpaper, and then a shorter stroke across, right to left. They keep going until Marco shouts “y en la hora de mortis nostrae. Amen!”
- Tobias, Cassie, and Jake step aside from their ragged line of crosses. Ax rushes the wall, Rachel thundering half a step behind. Ax impacts it tail-first, slashing hard and gouging huge chunks out of the plaster. As soon as there’s a hole, Rachel rams it with her giant elephant head and shoves for all she’s worth.
- “Marco!” Jake shouts; the wall is starting to close.
- “Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum!” Marco shouts. “Um, um, post hoc ergo propter hoc! Illegitimi non carborundum! Shit!”
- The wall has snapped shut, severing the end of Rachel’s trunk and both her tusks. With a bellow of pain she staggers back, gushing blood onto the floor.
- “Rachel, demorph!” Jake shouts.
- She does. They’re left staring at a maddeningly intact plaster wall. There’s a long pause, and then a phlegmy glug-glug noise as blood starts to flow over the wallpaper to cover up the crosses.
• At some point the issue of drinking tap water came and went; they’ve all chugged the stuff to try and keep their stomachs full. Marco gets one of the walls bleeding again and puts a mug at the bottom, trying to collect enough to make Dinuguan.
- “How hard can it be?” he asks, marching into the kitchen.
- “Don’t eat that,” Jake says wearily, not looking up from what he’s doing on the kitchen floor. “You don’t know where it’s been.”
- “If it poisons me, I’ll morph.” Marco sets the mug on the stove, peering in. It is a little coagulated. And there is a fair amount of plaster dust in there.
- “And what if you get possessed by a ghost?” Jake doesn’t look up. There’s a steady screeaa screeaa coming from his corner of the kitchen.
- “Then I’ll just...” Marco takes a second look. “Are you whittling?”
- Jake has what appears to be a pried-up metal stair riser wedged between his knees, and a wooden chair leg in both hands. He’s drawing the broken end of the leg across his makeshift file over and over, scraping curls of wood off to make a shape like a foot-long pencil. “Yep,” he says, still going.
- “...why?”
- “Tobias said Catholicism follows Buffy rules, right?” Jake holds up what is, unavoidably, a wooden stake. As in, the kind used to impale vampires.
- Marco opens his mouth, considers, and shuts it again. “Leaving that aside,” he says, “the hell do you plan on staking? The stupid invisilady is only as corporeal as she wants to be, remember? We stick that through her, she’ll just Kitty Pryde right off it.”
- “Yeah, but I figured if it’s a Catholic weapon, it might hurt her.” Jake peers up at him.
- “Jake. Forget the Buffy thing. Stakes are not Catholic.”
- “The Romans staked Jesus, didn’t they?”
- “Are you,” Marco says, “implying that Jesus was a vampire?”
- “He came back from the dead, right?” Jake asks. “Three days after telling his friends that drinking his blood was the path to immortality.”
- Marco stares. Jake stares back. “You’re fucking with me,” Marco says at last.
- “Hey, you’re the Catholic expert.” Jake's expression is wide-eyed, innocent. “You tell me.”
- “In that case we’re screwed, because I haven’t even been in a church since—” Since his mom’s funeral, but they are not getting into that right now. “Since I don’t even know when.”
- “You didn’t answer my question about Jesus being a vampire,” Jake comments, going back to his stake.
- He has sawdust on his lower lip. Sweat gleams on the bare curves of his upper arms, muscles bunching as he works. He’s beautiful. It’s an idle thought, but not a new one. Nor is it neutral. No, Marco is not a good Catholic boy, not by any stretch of imagination.
• The six of them sit on the living room floor, staring at the wall. This time Jake’s plan was solid enough: try everything that’s worked so far, all at once. Jake went bat to detect the ghost’s approach, Tobias went skunk to herd her, Ax and Rachel did their best to smash the wall, Cassie and Marco painted crosses while Marco (sticking to English this time) shouted a bunch of Hail Marys. The result was a single tantalizing glimpse of blue sky and grass, then the wall slammed shut. This time it’d taken half of Rachel’s head, along with Ax’s arms and tail; they’re both lucky to be alive. Trying again doesn’t seem like a good idea.
• «What else do you know about the human afterlife?» Ax asks dully. He’s sitting against the wall, all four legs folded under him. Cassie has never seen him sit before, not even to sleep. They’re all getting dangerously hungry, dangerously disoriented. Even Ax only knows the time down to a few minutes in either direction. The ghost can’t kill them with force — it tried turning down the temperature and they’d all morphed polar bear, it tried slamming Rachel into a wall only to have her slam it back — but it might kill them yet.
- “My parents always told me ghosts don’t exist,” Cassie says. “But at sleepaway camp, the stories I did hear were always about people who died violently, with unfinished business.”
- «Yeah,» Tobias says. «That tracks with Buffy, Goosebumps, Tales from the Crypt...»
- “They’re not supposed to exist, anyway.” Cassie leans her head back against the wall. She’s tired, can’t think straight. Maybe Tobias could catch them some dinner during the next rat plague. That wouldn’t help Ax, but...
- «Perhaps a different god,» Ax suggests. «Other than this Jesus?»
- «The other gods are only in Angel,» Tobias says. «I know it’s a spinoff of Buffy, but it’s got a different mythos.»
- «Are you certain that none of these other gods exist in reality? You were convinced of the non-existence of ghosts before this week.»
- Tobias and Cassie look at each other. And look.
- “We’re barely cobbling through on Christianity,” Cassie says at last. “Let’s save that idea for now.”
• “Another ritual.” Jake is pacing in front of where they all sit along the wall. “A full Catholic ritual, since the Catholicism is sort of working. But we do it Exorcist style, convince the ghost to go away.”
- “Dibs on not being the one to throw myself down a flight of stairs,” Rachel mutters.
- «What other rituals are there?» Ax asks. «The one with the reenactment of childbirth doesn’t seem helpful, as Marco said that can only be done in December.» He looks at all of them. «Surely there isn’t one that reenacts his death, so—»
- “I have bad news about Passion Plays,” Marco says.
- Rachel blinks. “I have, like, nine questions.”
- “The actor playing Jesus doesn’t usually die at the end, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
- “Now I have about fifteen questions.”
- «A funeral!» Tobias blurts.
- “What?” Jake asks.
- «That’s what all the stories say,» Tobias says. «That a ghost is a dead person trapped here, because they’re supposed to be in the afterlife but aren’t! And the Greeks, the Romans, the Christians—»
- “Jewish tradition too,” Rachel confirms.
- «You have to help them move on.»
- “We don’t have a body to bury,” Jake says, but he’s looking energized for the first time all day. “And anyway it’s too late for that. What else would a funeral consist of?”
- “Last rites,” Marco says. “Assuming she really is Catholic. Then... ashes to ashes, dust to dust, forgiving of sins...”
- “You think you can do it?” Rachel asks.
- “I can make something up,” he says.
- She rubs her hands together. “Let’s do it.”
• “Hello, Homeowner!” Marco stands on the second-floor landing — well away from the stairs thanks to Rachel’s comment — holding his paint-stirrer cross in his right hand. “I’m not a priest, but I’d like to do my best to forgive you and help you make right with God.”
- She appears then, at the end of the hall. Not screaming or attacking. Just floating, her skin as dirty-white as her dress.
- “I don’t.” Marco swallows. “I don’t remember the words for Anointing, okay? But, uh, Saint Paul said the thing about how any time two people gather in the name of Jesus, that space becomes holy. So... I don’t think the words matter as much. I think what matters is trying to do the right thing, and trying to help each other.” He gives a nervous little cough, hand sweating around his paint-crusted cross. “My name’s Marco. What’s yours?”
- The specter opens her mouth. There’s a rattle, and then a hoarse whisper: “Eglantine.”
- “Eglantine, huh?” With heroic effort, Marco keeps his opinion of that name to himself. “Hello. Um, I’m not a priest, but if there is anything you’d like to confess to me so that God can hear it...”
• Marco comes down the stairs, a few minutes after they hear him start talking. He’s staring at something the rest of them can’t see, head cocked as if listening. Cassie looks at where the ghost must be, Rachel tensing beside her. But Marco holds up a hand to stop them, and then after a second beckons them on. The basement door creaks open at Marco’s approach, and he walks toward it.
- «I was afraid it was going to say that,» Tobias mutters. But he doesn’t hesitate to follow, nor do any of the others.
- Marco reaches the bottom of the stairs, and then he turns to listen to something. “There?” he asks, pointing at a spot on the wall.
- With a thud that makes them all jump, a brick drops out of the wall and onto the floor. Then another, then another. Soon there’s a hole two feet in diameter, carved out of the basement wall.
- Marco peers in, and then jumps back.
- When the others crowd close, Cassie can see there are bones inside the wall. Most of them are broken, but even assembled the body they formed must have been no more than a foot long.
- “What is that, a cat?” Jake asks, squinting at the skeleton.
- “Yeah,” Cassie lies. “It’s a cat.”
- «Guess we’ve found our sin,» Tobias murmurs.
- “W-we forgive you, Eglantine.” Marco’s voice shakes. Twice his gaze darts toward that skull, too round, sans muzzle. “We forgive you. We know that you were scared, and hurt, and that you made a terrible mistake. You felt you had no choice, and couldn’t see another way out.” Straightening, his voice gains strength. “Allow Jesus to be your shepherd. Let him bring you into grace, and to lead you to eternal rest to be one with God. May, uh, may God have mercy on your soul.”
- Marco stares at that empty spot of air for several seconds. He grabs Jake by the hand; Jake startles but doesn’t let go. Jake holds out his other hand, and Cassie takes it. Rachel slides a hand into Cassie’s, then she takes Ax’s hand in her free one, and at last Ax rests his tail blade atop Tobias’s wing.
- “We forgive you,” Marco says, and gestures for them all to join in.
- “We forgive you,” they say as one.
- “Where there is hatred, let us sow love,” Marco whispers. “Where there is injury, pardon, where there is despair, hope. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it’s in giving that we receive, it’s in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it’s in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.”
- The breeze that blows through the room is nothing like the harsh winds of before. It’s fresh, warm though it raises goosebumps on their arms. At its touch, the tiny bones dissolve into dust.
• When silence falls again, Cassie looks around. “Did it work?”
- Somewhere upstairs, a door opens.
