AN: ...
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The darkness was… warm.
Like… a cozy warmth that left the air feeling neutral and stagnant.
…
…
He realized he was still… existent, so there's that.
…
He also realized he could also hear a faint note fuzzily floating by him.
…
He just realized he still had eyes, too.
Hesitantly, he peeked them open, only to squeeze them shut again.
Everything was awash with a bright, white light.
…
…
Holy shit, either somebody seriously fucked up his "afterlife paperwork" and he's in Heaven or Hell's a lot nicer than people make it out to be.
…
"Max!"
A faint voice.
And familiar.
Like…
Like…
"MAX!"
"Ooofffuck!" The air was driven out of him with an 'oof'-turned-curse as something landed on his gut. His eyes flew open and rapidly adjusted against the white light. That something turned out to be a familiar seafoam green.
"Ma'am, I warned you-"
"Sorry, sorry! She won't do it again!"
That voice; Gwen?!
The weight was lifted off of him.
That faint note got more distinct with each passing second as the telltale beeping of a heart monitor.
Wha-?
"A-am I in a hospital?" He croaked.
The world started coming into focus. The white blurs became sterile ceilings and walls under a glaring fluorescent light fixture. Heart monitors, IV bags, and other devices were wired up to his body under the covers of a little bed. Some colorful decorations were here and there suggesting it might be the children's wing.
In front of him, he saw a couple figures; most recognizably, Gwen and Nikki. Or rather, Gwen holding Nikki to keep her from scampering out and about. Beside them was a Latina woman in her 40's wearing a doctor's coat, glaring crossly at the other two.
"Yes, you are, young man." The doctor answered, "Now please stay still while I look over you. And you ma'am need to keep her under control."
"Got it," Gwen replied weakly.
"I… I don't understand-"
"Memory loss is a common side-effect," The doctor replied, propping open an eyelid to shine a penlight right in his pupil. He angrily swatted it away before she moved on to other tests.
"You were in an accident-" Gwen started.
"No, no, I remember that! Falling down a hill and hitting my head. What I'm talking about is… y'know…" Max hedged.
"What, Max?"
…
…
"Dying."
The doctor and Gwen both stood upright at that. Nikki stopped squirming to stare worriedly at her friend.
"Max… I…"
"Out of body experiences, hallucinations, and possible delusions aren't uncommon, either," The doctor replied authoritatively. "Max, do you feel like you were dead, as in felt like you experienced your body shutting down or like you were floating above your body and viewing yourself? Or do you feel like you are dead, as in you believe you are currently dead, undead, or something similar?"
"What?! No!" Max shook his head vehemently, "I'm not a f*cking nutcase, so don't treat me like one!"
"Max, she's trying to help. And those are serious questions. Cotard's syndrome isn't a joke," Gwen soothed.
The boy huffed, "No… I… I remember being a ghost, but I was still at camp. And this went on for days where I was just going around camp haunting and doing ghost stuff and nobody found my body."
The adults seemed to relax.
"Vivid dreams," The doctor affirmed.
"Max, you ran off yesterday," Gwen emphasized. "David found you out in the woods that evening, out cold. We got you to the hospital and you've been here since. I actually arranged a visit-day for the other campers so they could leave get-well presents they made this morning. And so I could give David a break back to camp."
She glared down at Nikki, "Though they were supposed to wait in the visitor's lounge and come in one at a time."
"Hey! I am just one person." Nikki defended. "We heard a nurse say Max was starting to wake up! We couldn't stay there!"
"Wait, 'we'?" Gwen asked, suspiciously.
Nikki winced, but pretended she didn't here otherwise, "Me and Neil made an elaborate plan to distract all the nurses and doctors while we snuck over. We had everything we needed; a joy buzzer, a cantaloupe, a 9V battery, and somebody's prosthetic leg."
"Huh, a McGuffin-meets-Rocket-Racoon?" Max said, impressed.
"Worked like a charm!"
"Oh, shit, what did you two do?' Gwen asked, eyes drifting into a mile-long stare.
"Oh, yeah! Neil should be here any-"
"…wwwwwaaaAAAAAAAHHHHH! Oof!"
A white blur flew through the room's door and smashed against the wall with a thump. Space Kid slowly rode the wheelchair as it gently rolled backwards. It stopped just in front of his bed.
"Hiya, Max!" Kid waved.
…
…
"Wrong Neil," Nikki said pointedly. "He was just part of the distraction."
Just then the door slammed open once again.
"Amazing work, Doctor Werbenjagermanjensen!"
A multitude of doctors grinning brightly looked down at Neil wearing a white doctor's coat fitted to himself.
The head doctor blustered again, "But then again, what else can we expect from the world's youngest Harvard Medical graduate!"
Neil shrugged, "It was nothing… I know my way around to recognize a compounded gluten-allergy-anxiety-attack."
The head-guy reached down to energetically shake his hand, "Amazing work! Absolutely brilliant! We're so honored you chose to visit today!"
The collection of doctors walked off, talking excitedly with one another, the words 'genius' and 'brilliant' popping up often.
Neil stayed behind and shrugged off the coat onto a hook before hopping into a seat beside Max.
"Sup, fuckers?"
The doctor looked taken aback, "Wait… you're the kid they've been showing around?!"
"That's right!" Neil confirmed, brightly.
…
…
The doctor looked on the verge of an apoplectic meltdown.
"Trust me, this is one of their tamer adventures," Gwen offered, neutrally. "But seriously, Neil, impersonating a doctor?"
"Well, nobody actually asked, they just kept assuming and I got handed a medical coat somewhere between all of it."
"Yeah, yeah, but I gotta ask, what the f*ck were you thinking with that name?" Max asked Neil.
The science-camper-turned-doctor shrugged, "I had to come up with something on the spot." He turned to the doctor. "Hey, what's the minimum age for medical school?"
"Well," The doctor said at last, when the last test was done. "I have good news… and bad news."
Neil, Nikki, and Space Kid looked up from their game of pogs (where the Hell they got those from, beats me) and immediately crowded around the bed.
"Ooookay," Gwen said warily, "Let's start with the good news."
"He's in perfect health."
The room let out a collective sigh, followed by whooping and cheering from the campers.
"And the bad news?"
"We're going to keep him overnight for observation." The doctor said, smiling. Gwen let out an explosive sigh of relief.
"What?! You just cleared me! What gives?" Max exclaimed.
"Sorry, kid, it's hospital policy." she shrugged. "Keeps people alive afterwards and keeps the hospital from being held liable."
Max grumbled under his breath as Nikki suddenly got a bright, starry-eyed idea.
"SLEEPOVER!"
"NO!"
Gwen shot the idea down, but the campers were now crowded around Max, blathering about everything that had happened while he was out.
They didn't notice the doctor taking Gwen aside for a quiet, solemn talk.
The next day, the doctors finally wheeled Max out to the camp-mobile and Max couldn't say he was ever happier to see the crappy half-assembled sign for Camp Campbell passing overhead.
That day was almost completely a day of rest for Max and he couldn't be happier. He sat beside the lake as everyone swam around, content to sit away from the water and any possibility of David introducing swim-lessons to his docket.
Free-time included a magic act with Harrison turning grape juice into oatmeal (déjà vu, he thought) and concluded with a play by Preston that was basically a dramatization of Max's hospitalization. Complete with a surprise visit from his "fiancé", an unscrupulous doctor out for his life insurance money, and his "identical twin brother Carlos who went missing in a bush plan accident fifteen years ago". Conveniently ignoring the fact that he was still 10.
Gwen muttered under her breath that it was about on par to her abuela's usual telenovelas.
Dinner saw everyone break out an extra set of (only slightly expired) pudding cups in his honor.
Max ate his pudding thoughtfully as a thought came to him.
"Hey, Space Kid."
"Yeah?"
"Can you see ghosts?"
"Hmm… I don't think I've ever met a ghost. Why?"
"No reason."
That evening, Max sat beside the lake quietly enjoying the serenity as the other campers kept celebrating back in the Mess Hall.
A crunch of a footfall against the stone brought his attention along the shoreline.
Coldness
A tall, dark figure stood at the end of the docks.
It was coming closer.
He couldn't breath
The scythe
Jasper
The chase
"Hey, easy, easy it's just me."
The familiar voice brought him back enough to see the stranger's flashlight shining on her face.
"G-Gwen?"
"Yeah, hey, sorry for scaring you."
"I was not scared." He retorted hotly.
"Mm-hmm," Gwen soothed, unconvinced. "Anyways, I wanted to check up on you. You weren't at the party and David noticed you sneaking out this way."
"I'm fine."
…
…
"H-hey, Gwen?"
"Yeah?"
"You ever think about dying?"
…
…
"Sometimes," She admitted, tone a little guarded. "You wanna talk about it?"
Then, the next five or ten minutes was purely Max recounting his dream. The vividness. Discovering he was a ghost. The Graveyard. The moon. The other ghosts. The haunts.
The Reaper.
The ending.
…
"And… and then it was all just… gone." He murmured at last. "Like… I guess the whole 'eternal nothingness' sounds pretty okay, but… in practice… it's still really scary."
"Mm-hmm," She hummed thoughtfully.
"It's just a fucking dream, though… I'm just… rrrrgh!" He growled, grabbing his hair. "It's so stupid to be so hung up on a stupid dream."
"… maybe not," Gwen added quietly. "It might've been your brain's way of telling you to hurry up and wake up."
"What do you mean?"
The counsellor looked a reluctant as she gazed across the lake as the moonlight shimmered across the lapping waves.
"I talked with the doctor after she gave you the all-clear."
…
"She said if you hadn't woken up when you did, your brain might've started… you might not have gotten out of it as good as you did… if at all."
"Y-you mean..?"
"Yeah… either it was the midnight thing or the Grim Reaper thing, one of the two, but we got really close to losing you, kiddo." She admitted.
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…
She nudged him, "Hey… I know you rag on the psych major, but I'm actually pretty good at it if you need somebody to talk to about this stuff."
She stood up and dusted off her pants. "You might want to get back in there, Preston's going to try to chug another gallon of cola, and Space Kid found more bungee chords to tie himself to the fan with."
Max sat still for a moment.
He looked up at the moon without trepidation or worry.
Squinting across the lake, he could make out a faint, glowing figure floating around Spooky Island's mansion.
The sounds of late-night drills echoed from the Woodscouts.
Lights from a slumber-party-ish event at the Flowerscouts (complete with several limousines parked out front for god-knows-what-reason) flickered across the water.
He dipped his hand in the water, relishing the coolness and the feeling of it lapping against his hand.
"Yeah, I'm coming."
It felt good to be alive.
AN: What you seriously think I'm gonna perma-death Max?
I had this in mind since I wrote this out.
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This scene, however, is the true ending afterwards and what started the whole story
The sun was settling into evening as Max walked alone down the pathway in the forest. He told everyone he just needed some alone time and David was ecstatic about him taking an interest in nature.
This path, though, held some particular importance in his mind.
He needed to test it out to be sure.
Rounding a bend, he came across a path packed into the side of a sloping hill. On one side, the hill crept upwards. The other, it sloped downwards. Go figure.
But he paused when he found a patch of crushed debris tumbling down the hill, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
Slowly and cautiously, he made his way to the base of the hill and, subsequently, the base of the trail.
The rock still sat at the bottom of it all. It was a miracle David managed to find him at all from the vantage point of the hill. The rock was almost completely obscured by trees and foliage.
He got closer, inspecting the rock itself.
It was the same, exact mossy rock he'd hit his head against. There was even a small bloodstain left against the side facing the hill.
A chilled wind blew through the clearing.
The space around him was just another overgrown, weed-infested spot of the forest. Brambles and vines and ivy choked each other out in a vegetative war with a few trees piercing the underbrush here and there.
…
None of the statues, graves, or ghosts from his dream.
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He heaved a sigh of relief. A weight of doubt and worry dropped from his mind and he felt confident that the whole dream was just that… a crazy nightmare from his concussed brain trying to tell him to wake the fuck up before it died.
"Heh," he chuckled, "Nice to know I'm not going crazy."
He turned towards the hill once more, to begin the steady climb back up-
-when he paused.
…
The stone was covered in a thick curtain of moss…
The stone… had a shape.
It was broad, slightly flat, with the eroded, faded, clumpy quality of decades, no, centuries of rain and erosion.
Brushing off the curtain of moss, he saw faded telltale divots of some kind of…
…
…some kind of writing…
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E—A RAV—S-R-FT
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He backed away, now looking at the clearing in front of him. The weeds and undergrowth hid it well in the dim light of the sunset and the lengthening shadows, but he could make out the distinct shape of harshly eroded stones. Stones too unnaturally placed. Stones too unnaturally shaped.
Stones.
Headstones.
…
He scrambled up the hill, away from the forgotten cemetery.
The chilled wind faintly threw a woman's voice, cloyingly whispering in his ear, "hurry back… hurry back~"
His hands clawed and clamored over the mess of grass along the slope until he tipped over the hillside.
Sprinting down the pathway back to the safety of camp, he swore he heard five voices harmonizing with a tone like smoothed marble.
"~So, hurry back we would like your company~"
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AN: Happy Halloween!
Sincerely yours,
~The Smiling Crow