Chapter 16 - The Lair of the Ghost.
Brian led an unresisting GhostBoy upstairs to his bathroom, sat the boy down on the closed toilet and then peeled away the afghan the boy was still holding around him. Brian had already used the damp kitchen towel to wipe away most of the grime on the kid’s face, and he had been happy to note that there didn’t seem to be any visible injuries other than the one gash. That one had long since stopped bleeding, which was reassuring. But Brian still wanted to clean it off better and bandage it. First, though, they both desperately needed a shower to get rid of the smoke and dirt from the fire.
After turning on the tap in the shower so the water would get hot, Brian tossed his bloody and smoke-grimed shirt into the laundry basket then stipped off his jeans as well. Next, he moved towards his seemingly catatonic ghost. However, when he touched the boy’s shoulder, intending to help him to his feet, Justin suddenly became animated and flinched away from him.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Ghost,” Brian insisted, just a little sharply because he was tired. “You need to get in here and get a shower - I have to bandage your fucking head and it doesn’t make any sense to do it until after you've showered. And since you seem to have hit your head hard enough to knock yourself out, I'm not leaving you in here alone. If you fall again, you really WILL have to go to the hospital. So, enough of the theatrics, okay? Let's just get in, get showered and get you in bed so I don't have to worry about you conking out again.”
For about two seconds it looked like Justin was going to argue with him, even though the kid seemed almost as tuckered out as Brian. He frowned up at Brian, snorted out a huff of breath but there just wasn't enough fight left in him. His shoulders slumping, the GhostBoy shrugged and pulled both the dark blue tee and the royal blue plaid button down shirts he’d been wearing off as one. When he looked around, apparently wondering where to put his clothing, Brian grabbed it and threw it in the laundry basket with his own stuff. Then Justin slowly stood up and, carefully avoiding Brian’s eye, shucked off the worn chinos he’d been wearing, adding those to the rest of the dirty laundry.
Brian nodded, ignoring the shy stance the boy had assumed, as if turning partially aside would block Brian’s view of the boy in his all together. The kid was too fucking cute. To distract them both, Brian directed his attention to the shower, reached a hand under the spray to test the temperature, and then adjusted the tap. Justin moved closer, sliding the glass shower door open wider so he could pass by without actually touching Brian, but right as he was about to lift his leg to step over the side of the tub, he wobbled a bit. Brian grabbed the boy’s shoulder to steady him.
“I can do it,” the irate ghost yipped.
“Great. Go for it,” Brian acceded, stepping back with a half bowed head and a sweeping gesture, inviting the younger man to precede him.
Justin managed to step over the edge of the tub and into the water, but then had to reach out and brace one hand against the tile wall again as a wave of dizziness swept over him. Brian was only a step behind him though, and had one strong arm wrapped around the boy’s slim waist before Justin could fall. The young man sighed, leaning back against the firm chest supporting him and surrendered to the combination of his own weakness and Brian’s implacable presence.
After that, the showering went pretty well. Brian mostly just stood there providing a reassuring back drop that Justin could lean against when needed. The ghost boy seemed more tired than anything, so Brian wasn’t too worried about the slight dizzy spells, but he still intended to keep a close eye on the kid. He would have been happier if Justin would allow himself to be seen by a doctor, but since that didn’t seem like it would be happening anytime soon, this was the best Brian could do.
Handing a loofah filled with shower gel to the young man, Brian noticed that there were some blackened burn marks on the boy’s hand. He grabbed the hand, pulling the fingers around so he could examine the wounds more closely. They didn’t look bad, but would probably be painful.
“What happened?” Brian questioned, releasing the hand he was holding and turning instead to pick up the bottle of shampoo.
“I got a shock when I touched the teapot,” Justin answered then leaned back accommodatingly so Brian could massage the shampoo into his hair. “It’s no big deal. But I was so surprised when it happened that I kinda jumped backwards, tripped over my own big feet and then knocked my head against a shelf when I fell. My head hurts a lot more than my hand.”
“Yeah, this gash is pretty big, although it doesn’t look deep,” Brian commented as he gently rinsed the shampoo out of the thick blond tresses, taking care not to touch the long scrape that was starting to ooze a little now that he’d washed away the dirt and clotted blood. “I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if you did have a mild concussion. You sure you don’t want to get a doctor to look at this?”
“I’m sure. I’ll be fine,” Justin rushed to assure his protector.
Brian decided not to push it as long as the kid didn’t get any worse. Now that the wound was cleaned off, he could see that it wasn’t too terribly bad. He knew from personal experience that head injuries tended to bleed a lot, so it wasn't surprising how alarming the injury had seemed at first. But he planned to look up the symptoms of concussion on the internet later, just to be safe.
Turning off the water, Brian stepped out of the shower, reached for a towel, quickly dried himself off and then was there with a second towel before his charge started to climb out after him. Justin shook his head at the overly-solicitous actions, but took the towel, nonetheless. He even let Brian guide him back over to his seat on the toilet lid without protest. Next, Brian dug his first aid kit out from under the sink and began to apply ointment to the gash, with a large gauze pad taped over that.
Somewhere in the process of all this, Brian’s towel came unraveled from around his lean hips and slithered down to his feet. Since Brian wasn’t the least bit bashful or uncomfortable with nudity, he just ignored it and carried on with his bandaging. As soon as his patient was seen to, though, he stepped back, surveying his work as well as the subject.
“That should do for now. You still feeling dizzy?” He asked his patient.
Justin shook his head ‘no’.
Brian bent down to look more closely into the kid’s eyes, checking to see if one pupil was larger than the other, but all he saw was a pair of perfect blue.
Brian stood up, reassured for the moment. “How many dicks do you see?” he asked jokingly, waggling his hips in front of the boy’s face provocatively.
“Two,” the little ghost answered with an impish glint in his gaze. “One really big one, dancing around and asking me stupid questions, and that little one hanging between your legs.”
“Ouch,” Brian complained, even though he was smiling back at the kid with an equally large grin, happy to see the kid was well enough to tease him back. “See if I ever bandage your broken head again, Ghost.” They both chuckled amiably. “Okay then, I guess your sense of humor wasn't injured. But until I'm sure you won't topple over again, you're going to stay put in bed while I go get us something to eat. Let's go.”
Brian held his hand out to assist his ghost to his feet. Justin accepted the help and then preceded his host out of the bathroom. But when he turned towards the bedroom door, obviously intent on leaving the room, Brian grabbed his wrist to waylay him.
“Where are you going?”
“You said I had to stay in bed, so I was going to my bed . . .” the boy answered matter-of-factly.
“No. You're not going back down to that hole,” Brian insisted, grabbing hold of the younger man's shoulders and physically directing the smaller body back towards Brian's own large, king-sized platform bed. “It's probably still all smoky and shit down there. You'd suffocate. Besides, I can't keep an eye on you all the way down in the fucking basement. Nope. You're staying right here for the time being.”
“That's silly, Brian. I'm perfectly fine . . .”
“Don't argue with me, Justin.” Brian stood there, arms crossed over his chest, his body blocking the kid’s escape, looking determined and immovable. “You only have two choices: you stay here where I can watch you, or I take you to a doctor to get officially checked out. Which will it be?”
“But, I . . .”
“Me or a doctor?” Brian repeated stubbornly.
When Justin's shoulders slumped, he knew he'd won. Brian slipped an arm around the youth’s slender shoulders and guided him to the bed, pulling back the covers for his guest and waiting patiently while Justin pulled off his own towel and then climbed in. Brian even made a show of obsequiously tucking the duvet around the boy and fluffing the pillow. That earned him a little, nervous huff of laughter from the patient.
“Good. Now, you stay put. I'm going to get us something to eat, but I'll be right back,” Brian ordered as he quickly pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt.
With one last look back at his compliant little ghost - who was lying quietly, tucked up under the covers and looking incredibly adorable, even though Brian could kick himself for thinking such a lesbianic thing - the big control freak hurried out of the room and down the stairs to the kitchen.
After a long day of construction work followed by the drama of the electrical fire and then his nursing of the twinkie-ghost, Brian was starving. The kid must be hungry too, since he'd been hiding from the electrician all day and therefore hadn’t come out for food. Brian wasn't sure about the kitchen’s power situation or the possibility of another short, though, so he didn't want to risk the microwave or the oven to cook anything. He decided to just go with sandwiches, which took no time at all to assemble. In concession to the fact that it was a chilly night and they'd been through a lot, however, he decided to use the gas stove just long enough to heat some water and make two cups of the instant hot cocoa he had on hand for when Gus visited. After all the stress and exercise he'd had that day, even Brian wasn't going to bother about the calories for once, plus it would double as dessert. So, that decided, Brian filled the kettle with tap water and put it on the burner to heat.
The sight of the kettle brought to mind the melted electric teapot downstairs in his ghost’s lair. He assumed that Shanti had already taken care of things down there and made sure everything was unplugged, but Brian still felt like he should make sure. He'd really been too distracted earlier to worry about that stuff, but now that he had a minute to spare, Brian figured he'd better check on it one more time. So, leaving the kettle to do its thing, he dug a flashlight out of the kitchen junk drawer and headed down to the basement.
Before he was even halfway down the stairs, the acrid smoky odor hit him. It was so bad that, when he flipped on the overhead light, he could actually see a layer of smoky air hovering along the ceiling above his head. And, on top of everything else, there was the chemical tang of Shanti’s fire extinguisher. Yeah, there was no way the kid could have slept down here. It was going to take forever to get that smell out, he mused, planning to leave the garage door open all the next day to try and air the space.
Downstairs, everything looked about the way they’d left it earlier. Pushing aside the remnants of the broken door, Brian flipped on his flashlight so he could see what he was doing and then climbed through the hatch into the crawl space area. It took him a minute to adjust to the dim interior, but then Brian began to look around himself and take in exactly what he was seeing.
This hole really was just as horrible as he’d thought.
The space itself was only about three meters square with a low ceiling to boot. The walls on three sides were the bare cement of the house’s foundation and on the fourth side was rough brickwork between wooden support beams that looked like they had been put in after the crawl space had been dug out in order to bear the load of the far corner of the house. There was bare wooden framing that had been erected along all these walls, as if there had once been an intention of plastering or drywalling the space to make it habitable, but the job had never been finished. The ceiling consisted of the bare joists supporting the house’s main floor. The floor was dry, hard-packed dirt.
In the farthest corner, there was an extra cutout space about half a meter deeper than the wall next to it, which appeared to extend up beyond the ceiling of the crawl space. Brian flashed his light in that direction and could see aluminum venting affixed to the wall, disappearing through an opening in the ceiling, and realized that must be the ventilation shaft his pal Andy had hypothesized might be hiding behind the walls of the kitchen and bedroom. Climbing up alongside the venting, there were wooden slats installed between the wooden joists creating a ladder of sorts. That was probably how the boy was getting around the house without being seen. Brian looked up the shaft and could see faint outlines of light leaking through the walls above. He smiled at the resourcefulness of the kid, not to mention his athletic skills in negotiating that insubstantial looking ladder.
It looked like Justin had used other scraps of the same waste wood he’d used for his ladder to build himself shelves along all the walls, fitting the shelving in between the bare framing studs to make the best use of the small space that he could. All the shelves were heaped with the day-to-day items the boy needed, along with nick-knacks and other personal stuff. There was a large wooden trunk, probably used for more storage, at the foot of a small twin-sized bed set up along the right-hand wall. There was also one chair sitting next to a rickety old card table in the back left corner. The only other remarkable fixtures in the tiny space were a toilet and a small, free-standing sink installed to the left of the hatchway door. That was it. There wasn’t much more that could have been fit in the tiny room, so that was the extent of his ghost’s accommodations.
To make matters worse, there was basically no light in the tiny cell of a room. Since it was underground, there were obviously no windows. The only light source Brian could see would have been the two lamps - one on the table in the back left corner where the fire had started and the other, newer one, that Brian had recently purchased, on a shelf over the bed. Those small lamps wouldn’t have lit up much though, and the light wouldn’t have reached up the boy’s ventilation shaft escape route. The only electrical outlet in the room was an unenclosed electrical socket just to the left of the doorway. Justin had obviously been using the old electrical extension cord hooked into that outlet - the one that had shorted - to power whatever he needed, but it was still dark and dank and creepy.
Despite how horrible Brian found this pit, Justin had clearly tried to make the best of things in his dungeon space. The small twin bed was neatly made and covered with a beautiful quilt. The shelves lining the walls with all his personal stuff and clothing were tidy and organized. Wherever there wasn’t a shelf, the studs had been decorated with pictures, including photographs and many of the kid’s own drawings. Brian was glad to note that the small fire hadn’t damaged too many of these drawings or any of the other personal stuff. Except for the old card table, the ruined teapot and one small sketch pad that had been sitting on the little table, nothing else was burned. It was good that they got there when they did, though, because the piles of books on the shelf next to the table and the fluttering pictures hanging all over the walls would have gone up like tinder as soon as they caught.
He quickly made sure that the extension cord was unplugged and that there wasn’t anything else near the suspect outlet that might be flammable. Glancing around to make sure there wasn’t anything else he needed to do while he was down there, Brian noticed some of his missing tools along with a stack of some more scrap lumber sitting in the only spare floor space between the table and the toilet. From the pile of wood shavings nearby, it seemed that was what his ghost had been working on recently that had been causing so much noise during the day. There seemed to be quite a few small wooden items mixed in with the other stuff on the shelves, but Brian didn’t really have time to look at them closely right then. He made plans to come back and give his curiosity full rein sometime later.
While he was down there, Brian decided to retrieve Justin’s tablet computer and a sketch pad, so the kid would have something to do with his time after they finished their dinner. Luckily the tablet had been lying on the bed, far from the fire, and was completely undamaged. He also grabbed some of the boy's clothes, figuring he couldn’t keep his ghost naked and in bed forever, no matter how appealing that idea might be. That should be enough for the time being. The kid could come get whatever else he wanted in the morning.
Brian turned to go, noting as he neared the hatchway they’d broken through to get into the crawl space, that there were three different metal, bolt-like latches attached to the INSIDE of the door, allowing Justin to lock the space from the inside. It was no wonder that he and Andy couldn’t get the door open when they’d tried the other day. It didn’t help explain why it was that Justin insisted on staying in there, though. It seemed more like he was trying to keep people out than that he’d been kept down here against his will, which didn’t make any sense to Brian.
Brian flashed his light around so he could examine the little dungeon one more time, and he felt his guts clenching in anger. That’s what this was - a dungeon. A prison. He didn’t know why or how the kid had been relegated to this neglectful place, although he suspected the odious Craig Taylor had something to do with it and he was determined to figure out this mystery as well.
But not tonight. Tonight Brian was going to feed his ghost, ply him with hot chocolate, and then make sure the boy was comfortably tucked away in a real bed, in a real room for the rest of the night. Tonight he’d make sure Justin was more comfortable than he would have been anytime in the recent past down in that hole.
Hurrying back up the stairs, Brian quickly prepared the hot cocoa, assembled a tray with all the food and drinks, added a couple more bottles of water for later, and then carried the lot of it back up to the bedroom. He was glad to see that Justin had followed directions and was still lying safely in the bed where he’d been left. Brian hefted the tray higher, stepped right up onto the platform and then the mattress, before sinking rather gracefully - for a large man - to his haunches, without spilling a drop of the cocoa. The tray would work just fine as a makeshift table for their meal, so once Justin had scrunched up into a sitting position, they were able to set to. And judging by the way the kid tore into his sandwich, Brian had been right to assume the kid would be hungry. He was glad he’d thought to make two extra sandwiches. It looked like the boy would easily manage all three.
Neither of them was feeling very chatty, so dinner was a mostly silent affair and over fairly quickly. Afterwards, Brian insisted that Justin lie back again, and rest. Justin seemed too worn out to argue the matter and let himself be ordered around with patient resignation. Brian agreed to let the kid play on his tablet computer for a time, seeing as it wasn’t even nine pm and he couldn’t force the kid to sleep, but that was the most strenuous activity he’d allow. While Justin was occupied with that, Brian went over to the desk in the corner, inspired by his recent perusal of the boy’s dungeon to add a new scene to his novel. And that’s how the two of them spent the rest of the evening.
When Brian finally reached a stopping place, around eleven, he looked over to the bed and discovered his GhostBoy had already conked out. Justin was curled up on his side, the tablet forgotten, it’s screen faded to black on the pillow beside his head. The kid looked so young and innocent. He looked like a KID. Of course, no kid would have had to live through what Justin had apparently already lived through in his relatively short life. Was it any wonder that Brian felt so ridiculously protective towards this young man?
Carefully setting the tablet aside and crawling into bed next to the boy, Brian switched off the lamp on the nightstand.
He didn’t know what the morning would hold for him and his resident ghost. He didn’t know if he would ever figure the kid out or be able to help him. All Brian Kinney knew, was that he really did WANT to help this young man. Hopefully, in the process, he’d uncover the answer to all the mysteries surrounding the compelling blond boy who’d found his way not only into Brian’s bed, but somehow into his head, and maybe even into his heart as well.