/These are Egon’s thoughts./
*These are Ray’s or Winston’s thoughts.*
>These are Derek’s thoughts.<
-These are the demons’ thoughts.-
[These are Maxwell’s thoughts.]
The symphony trilled into the higher registers, the piccolo of light showcasing the beautiful softwood of the desolate pews. The bass of the cello followed the shadows into the corners, the first signs of decay seeming to echo the church's sorrow at being abandoned.
Sightless eyes turned skyward, a cold marble statue kept vigil behind the altar, her hands held out beseechingly to eternity. Her fingers curved, holding the still air gently as the chiseled, serene smile greeted the emptiness with acceptance. A golden chain with a small heart-shaped locket hung from the statue’s right hand, having stopped swinging long ago.
The door creaked opened, the first sound to disturb the reverent stillness in months. Four pairs of combat boots clumped across the dusty floor, causing clouds of dust to rise up and dissipate silently.
A small mouse, who had risked venturing out from under its nest under one of the pews, had been scouring the floor for long-gone crumbs when the sounds came. Dark, beady eyes looked upward, taking in the unfamiliar black boots and rising further to see that the giant invaders wore similar clothes, differing only in color. It twitched its nose once, breathing in the oddest smell it could remember. No, these were new creatures. Creatures who didn’t belong here. The rodent let out a timid squeak.
“Huh?” One of them looked down. He had auburn hair that looked finger-combed, and had large brown eyes like the mouse’s. The giant bent down on one knee to get a closer look at the mouse. “Oh, wow.”
“What is it, Ray?” Another giant spoke, this one being the tallest with a deep voice.
“I found a mouse, Egon,” Ray flashed a grin to the other giant and reached out his hand to the small rodent slowly. “Hey, there, little guy.” When the mouse shrunk away, Ray turned his open palm to it. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna hurt ya.”
“Ray, I don’t think you wanna do that,” the third giant warned him, green eyes darting wearily around the hall and keeping a firm grip on his weapon. He absently pushed a lock of dark brown hair out of his eyes as he scoured the shadows.
“Yeah, man,” the last one, a tall man with dark skin and a lighter colored uniform, agreed. “You don’t know where that thing’s been.”
“Well, it’s gotta be something if there’s a mouse living in a church. Especially given the fact that it’s been deserted for a while,” Ray replied. He turned back to the rodent to see it sniff his hand warily and cautiously make its way up one of the fingers and into the red-haired man’s palm. Ray grinned at the other three. “See? It likes me.”
“Yeah, sure,” the green-eyed man snorted. “When it bites you and gives you the bubonic plague, don’t come crying to me about it, all right?”
“Actually, that statement is inaccurate, Peter,” the deep-voiced one told the dark-haired man. “The bubonic plague wasn’t spread by the rats.”
Peter frowned. “What?”
“It was spread by the fleas that lived *on* the rats.” Egon finished with a dry smile.
Peter rolled his eyes. “Picky, picky, picky.”
“What’s the meter say, Egon?” Ray asked the tallest one. Now that the mouse was slowly being lifted off of the ground as Ray got to his feet, it could see that Egon had bright blond hair and bespectacled blue eyes.
Egon’s brow furrowed as he studied the beeping device. “It’s reading twelve Class Threes.”
“Twelve?” Winston’s eyebrows rose. “You sure, man?”
Egon’s frown deepened as he fiddled with some of the knobs and switches. “I believe so. However, there appears to be a stronger reading…”
“Where?” Peter stepped past a row of pews and turned around, thrower held at the ready as his eyes scanned the ceiling.
“Coming from…” Egon turned slowly until the meter’s beeping increased sharply. “There!”
“You mean the statue?” Winston asked.
Egon glanced up and took a few steps toward the sculpture. The beeping got louder. “Yes.”
“Let’s go check-YEOW!” Ray yelped as the mouse he was holding in his hand abruptly bit him on the thumb. Trying to shake out the pain, the mouse tumbled out of his hands. With an indignant squeak, it landed on one of the pews and skittered away into the shadows.
“Ray?” Winston turned as soon as he heard the surprised yelp.
“I’m okay.” Ray gritted his teeth together. “The mouse bit me is all.” He glanced down at the spot where the mouse had bitten him. There was a tiny spot of blood.
“I told you not to touch it, Tex.” Peter shook his head.
“Peter, if you don’t mind, can we get back to the statue?” Ray said as he shook his hand. As he took a step forward, his leg sharply twisted, causing him to stumble and crash into the back of Winston’s proton pack.
The black man turned to look at him with a bit more concern. “Ray, you okay, man?”
Ray was about to say that he was when a flash of white light stopped him. The flash was gone, but as he watched in confusion, they returned at a quicker but measured pace. In seconds, all he could see was a strobe light of reality interspersed with white flashes. His legs gave out almost immediately. If it weren’t for Winston holding him up, Ray would’ve slumped to the floor. He felt his feet dragging on the floor and absently heard a voice shout his name, but his neck didn’t want to cooperate, opting instead to loll around uselessly.
“Guys?” Ray’s voice sounded like a worn out tape, the volume rapidly coming in and out of clarity. “Whash… going on?”
"Tex!" As Peter started forward, Ray sprang violently out of Winston's arms, gasping as the colors of the room shattered around him into an intense jumble of browns, reds and polka-dotted greens. Ray stood, swaying slightly as he blinked owlishly, trying to clear his vision of the painfully vivid colors.
Egon tensed, abruptly holstering his PKE meter and hurrying to Ray’s side. “Ray, we need to get you out of here.” The physicist shot a look at the other two who nodded and stood ready to get a hold of Ray in case the occultist was going to struggle. When the blond scientist turned back to look at Ray, he stopped.
Ray’s eyes were now a cold, pale blue.
“…Egon?” Ray asked with a bit of uncertainty before frowning. “Something wrong?”
Egon shook his head, shooting a glance to Peter and Winston. “Your eyes have changed from their normal color, Ray. There doesn’t seem to be anything else wrong…”
When Peter leaned forward a little to have a closer look, his eyebrows rose in surprise. “Going for the Sinatra look, Tex? I don’t really think it’s you.” He turned to Egon. “Okay, Spengs, now how the hell did that happen?”
Egon looked down at the PKE meter in his hands and fiddled with more knobs and switches as he scanned Ray. “This shows that Ray is currently possessed by the one of the Class Threes that inhabit this locale."
Winston moved closer, looking at Ray's eyes for himself. “This mean we have to pull them apart with the throwers, like we did with Peter and Watt?”
“Don't remind me,” Peter groaned. “My hair was stuck like that for a week.”
Egon scanned Ray again, thoroughly going over the results on the small screen. "It seems that whoever or whatever has possessed Ray left him in control of his faculties, so I see no reason to pull them apart...at the moment.”
Peter peered into the blue eyes. "Hey in there, can you hear me? Who are you?"
Egon let out an exaggerated sigh. "Peter..."
Peter shrugged. "Well, how else are we gonna find out?" Turning back to Ray, he was about to repeat himself when Ray gave him a pointed look, his blue eyes almost glowing.
"I am Brother Raymond," said the engineer calmly. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about me as if I weren’t here.”
"What a cowinky-dink," Peter muttered.
Egon shushed him with a nudge. Peter rolled his eyes, but remained silent. “Would you tell us more about yourself, sir? About why you’re here, for example.”
“There isn’t much to tell, really.” Ray shrugged. “I worked at this church for a year or so. Nothing especially exciting happened before Angie broke in and that young man with the gun came in…here…” Ray grew quiet, his pale blue gaze suddenly rapt on the statue, and more importantly, on the shimmer of gold that dangled from the statue’s right hand.
“Angie…?”
His feet slowly picked themselves up and started moving, but before any of his friends could stop him, he was sprinting toward the altar, jumping up on the smooth surface and grasping recklessly for the gold chain hanging from the statue’s cold fingers.
“Ray!” Peter, Egon, and Winston shouted in alarm. Ray held the chain up triumphantly, grinning widely as he displayed it to the others.
“Look! It’s Angie’s locket!” Ray bent down on the altar to sit on the sloping surface, facing the three as his legs hung over the edge awkwardly. Inspecting one of his nails with a glance, he worked it into the barely visible line on the heart’s edge. “I think this is how it opens…”
The three exchanged a worried look before slowly stepping forward, all of them with particle rifles ready. “Ray?” Peter ventured. “Are you intentionally trying to scare Uncle Peter?”
“Hmm?” Ray looked up, his eyes flashing to their brown color, with a puzzled look on his face. “You said something, Peter?”
“What are you doing?” Peter was almost relieved that the red-haired engineer could remember them, but he really didn’t like Ray’s behavior. He was almost manic with his single-minded attention on the locket.
“I gotta open the locket.” Ray looked at the psychologist with the unnatural piercing blue gaze revealing concern. He turned a little as he tried to wedge in the fingernail a bit deeper.
“What’s so important about the locket?” Winston frowned. Ray turned to him with a hurt look.
“You forgot all about her, didn’t you?” the redhead shook his head sadly. “Even with all of the reports. She was such a sweet girl, too… Angie shouldn’t be forgotten.”
“Ray,” Peter said in a measured tone, all the while the hackles on the back of his neck were rising. “Why don’t you tell us a bit more about Angie?”
“Angie…well, her name’s Angela, but I called her Angie.” Ray shrugged. “She was the most wonderful girl you could meet.”
“Was?” Peter pressed gently.
Ray’s expressive face fell. “She’s not here now.” He frowned a little before his face brightened. “But she will be!” The engineer grinned. “She’s been really lonely, and now that I’ve got you guys, we can help her together.”
“Help her?” Egon asked. “How?”
“Have you ever been shoved through a wall that wasn’t finished?” Ray asked curiously. “And then when you tried to get out, there was somebody on the other side, finishing the wall with bricks and mortar?” He looked irritated at the clueless looks he received. “Well, the guy on the other side built up the wall, and now Angie can’t get out and she’s already hurt her fingers trying for…gee, who knows how long.” Ray frowned, looking upwards and muttering as he tried to calculate something, but when he remembered the gold heart in his hand, he tried more fervently to get it open.
“Why do you need to open the locket?” Peter asked him.
Ray frowned, blinking once or twice owlishly before wincing in pain. One of his hands went to his head and rubbed in small circles as he spoke softly. “No, no, it’s okay. It’s okay. I know what’s wrong. I’m trying to help. I swear…” He blinked again, his eyes flickering back to their regular brown.
“It’s okay, guys. It’s a repeater.” Ray told them absently, frowning at the locket. “It has all the earmarks of one, at any rate. There’s something weird going on. The only way to start it up is to open the locket, and Raymond isn’t going to stop until it is.”
Ray looked up again to see the worried faces of his friends. “You might wanna be ready for anything. It--” He stopped, looking off into middle space for a moment, his eyes lightening back to blue, and refocused on the other three with a shudder. “It’s not pretty.”
“Ray--” Peter spoke, about to get Ray to come down from his perch on the altar.
The psychologist felt a gently restraining hand on his arm, but as he turned to tell Egon to wait, he was surprised to find it was Winston holding him back. Normally, the black man would be the first to get ready for a potentially dangerous situation, but now he looked at Ray with a disquieting awe.
“No, Pete.” Winston shook his head, turning his gaze to meet Peter’s. “There’s something … holy about this.”
“What do you expect?” Peter asked the black man bluntly. “We’re in a church.”
“Not that, man.” Winston gave him a hard look. “Whatever’s got a hold of Ray… it’s something sacred. I can feel it.”
“We don’t have time for that right now, gentlemen.” Egon said sharply, turning toward the back of the church and backing his way up the stairs to the dais where the altar stood. “Power up.”
Winston nodded and took position on the statue’s right, making sure that Ray was within easy reach. The black man could see Peter inching forward, leaning a bit against one of the pews in the front row. The rifles whined as both men turned up the juice.
“Ready?” Egon asked the other two. Peter and Winston nodded. “Ray?”
“Almost…got…it.” Ray added his left thumbnail to the job and the golden heart broke open in a shower of glitter. “Uh-oh.”
Peter threw a suspicious glance behind him. “’Uh-oh’? Whaddaya mean, ‘uh-oh’?”
“The locket snapped…” Ray answered with a guilty voice.
“Oh, great.” Peter muttered to himself. The smart-aleck was about to add something else when Egon hissed in surprise. “Look!”
All four of them turned to the entrance as one of the double doors swung open with a loud squeak and a teenage girl stepped in. She was wearing a coat that was three or four sizes too large for her with large, baggy jeans, and her dark brown hair in a French braid that trailed down her back.
“Look’s like the coast is clear, guys.” She turned to look behind her, addressing someone the four couldn’t see. “Nobody’s inside.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” returned a young man’s sarcastic voice.
“Look, if you two didn’t wanna break into a Catholic church, we coulda found a nice Protestant one, okay?” The girl snapped back, huffing her way in. “And close the door behind you.”
“You’ve really gotta lighten up, Angela,” came a new masculine voice. As the two boys came in, one tall and slender with brown hair and the other a short, wiry sort of boy with blond hair, Angela beat her arms against her coat sleeves. “It’s not the first time we’ve wanted to check out a church,” the blond continued.
“That may be, but what is with you two?” Angela frowned at the pair. “I know you’re a Presbyterian--” She pointed at the taller one, then frowned and pointed to the other one. “Or were you? Well, that doesn’t matter. If the priest here finds us, we could be arrested for--”
“Trespassing. Possibly breaking and entering,” Ray replied. At Ray’s voice, the trio yelped and spun to face him, the boys edging forward to flank the girl protectively. If they noticed that Ray was wearing a proton pack and jumpsuit, they didn’t say anything about it.
