“You’re not going to stand there and tell me there’s no such thing as ghosts,” Kyle said, just the hint of a smile twitching the corner of his mouth.

“No, what I said was the house ain’t haunted.” Guy looked at the old wooden house on its stone foundation without a hint of trepidation. “No reason for a ghost to hang around this dump.”

“That doesn’t make the reports invalid,” Kyle pointed out. There had been trees – or something resembling them – growing around the house at some point, but now they stood leafless and bare. All the house lacked to provide the perfect set for a Halloween horror movie was a bat winging its way across one of the three full moons in the sky and perhaps a couple of headstones in the front yard.

“Haunted house,” Guy muttered. “You ask me, I think the locals just have a collectively overactive imagination.”

“I never thought I’d hear you use words of more than two syllables to tell me someone was making shit up,” Kyle said, amused.

“Ah, shut up.” The flashlight in Guy’s hand slid into a lantern on a pole, high enough off the ground to light the entire area. Kyle forbore from pointing out that the moons provided enough light to see by; it was an odd yellowish green and it made him uneasy. The house had been isolated to begin with, in the foothills of a very impressive mountain range, but as the rumors of ghosts grew, the neighbors had pulled out one by one. Now there was nothing around for miles.

“It could be a ghost.”

“Yeah, well, in that case they sent the wrong Lanterns. I ain’t the one as talks to the dead.”

“Saarek has his own duties. Besides, I thought you liked being the big bad Lantern playing hero at the eleventh hour.”

The look Guy gave him was eloquent enough for full minutes of monologue. Kyle just grinned back shamelessly. “I could always go back for the beer lube.”

“Ha,” Guy snorted. “Do you see anything down there?”

“No, but neither did anyone else until they’d gotten inside the house.” The ring wasn’t giving him information on anything out of the ordinary – there was nothing moving inside the structure or out. “Did you notice the lack of wildlife?”

“Maybe this mudball ain’t got any.” The lantern on the pole split into three, each on the back of a giant mouse. They scampered ahead of Guy, light dimming slightly as they got farther away.

Kyle shook his head. “No, see, there are small mammals out there, and there’s something alive in the hills.”

“Don’t look at me,” Guy said after a moment. “Maybe they just don’t live here.” He paused. “It’s not the mythical ghost,” he added when Kyle just stared at him.

“We’re not going to find it by standing around,” Kyle said, as if he wasn’t the one who’d been dragging his feet to begin with.

The house was no warmer inside than the stiff breeze rushing down from the hills had been, a whistling noise slipping through cracks that didn’t seem to actually exist. It was Earth-like, almost recognizable furniture in almost normal rooms. What looked like a wood stove dominated the kitchen, but a stack of wood just inside the doorway showed no signs of recent use. Kyle opened the stove and started to build a fire.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s cold,” Kyle said.

“It ain’t that cold. Besides, we don’t know what’s in the rest of this place.”

“We scanned the house,” Kyle said, with the air of a reasonable man ostentatiously displaying patience. “There’s nothing here.”

“We’ll see,” Guy said. “I’m gonna check it out.”

“See you back here in a few.” Kyle poked at the logs, which were arranged completely wrong. He’d never get the fire going like that, not without using the ring to ignite it. Guy left him to it.

The gray stone foundation rose halfway up the thin walls of the first floor, relegating the windows to the vicinity of the ceiling and keeping the floor in shadow. Dust covered the windowsills and sparkled in the moonlight. Guy ringed a flashlight and swept the beam across each of the four rooms, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Chairs and a table, a couch, a desk, shelves of books, and a few unrecognizable carvings decorated each room in turn. Guy didn’t notice until he’d reached the stairs that there were no signs of cobwebs; sometimes he thought that no matter where in the galaxy he went, there were spiders. Most planets had something strongly resembling arachnids and their webs, and when they’d landed, this one had been no exception. He’d clearly seen the three-inch eight-legged bastard and scanned it to make sure.

“Nothing on the ground floor,” he called back to Kyle.

“Okay,” Kyle replied, and something thudded to the floor. Guy started towards the kitchen again, but a voluminous flood of cursing told him what had happened.

“Try not to knock over the woodpile,” he added.

“Oh, shut up,” Kyle said, just loudly enough to be heard. Guy chuckled and made his way upstairs.

The stairs were less than sturdy, age and rot no doubt playing a part in destabilizing a structure that didn’t look as if it had been particularly well-constructed to begin with. The dust was thick in the air, and Guy sneezed more than once before he reached the top. The stairway opened up onto a single room, roof supported by a series of shadowy columns. Moonlight poured into the room from every side, bathing it in strips of silver and black. Nothing moved among the columns, nothing but the dust motes drifting through the air. Guy shone his flashlight into the peaked roof, but only shadows fled the beam of green light.

“Nothing,” he said when he returned to the kitchen, but Kyle wasn’t there. The fire burned merrily in the wood stove, and a pot of water was just starting to boil. Guy frowned at it. “Kyle?”

For a brief moment, the moonlight drowned out the firelight, and Guy heard a rushing noise from above. The house shook, a steady sustained rumble growing louder by the second, and he doused the fire before rushing outside. As soon as he cleared the doorway, the sound and motion both ceased. Firelight flickered from inside again, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Kyle!”

Cursing, he turned to the ring for Kyle’s location, but the ring only returned an error message. Guy smacked it. “Now,” he growled at it, pushing futilely at the door.

“Guy!” The door opened too suddenly for him to react, and he stumbled to land heavily on the dusty wooden floor. “There you are.”

Kyle stood over him, something that looked far too much like a smirk plastered over his face.

“There I am? Where were you?” Guy stood and dusted himself off, the very epitome of dignity.

“I was right here. How’d you get outside? Are the windows upstairs open?”

“I came through here and you weren’t. What’s with the water?”

“What water?”

“The pot of –“ Guy broke off. There was nothing on top of the wood stove. “Oh, I get it. Nice.”

“What?” Kyle’s face was a little too clueless, even if he wasn’t going to admit to his prank. Guy nodded.

“So where’s this ghost? I got nothing here. Upstairs is empty, so’s the house.”

“I guess we wait.” Kyle poked at the fire with a constructed stick. “If it doesn’t show up, then…” He shrugged.

Midnight – or what passed for it – came and went with nothing other than steadily brightening moonlight; the second and largest of the planet’s three satellites had reached its zenith by the time Kyle suggested flipping for watches for the rest of the night. Guy lost, which was fine by him. He’d gotten plenty of sleep the night before. It didn’t take long before Kyle’s breathing evened out, and Guy was tempted to shake a bucket of water over him, or at least utter a bloodcurdling howl, but he restrained himself. There would be time for pranks later.

The third moon rose higher as the first moon dropped nearly to the horizon; they were distinctly different colors, and the light they cast was irregular. The third moon’s greenish cast had barely enough blue to avoid the label of yellow, while the second moon was almost pink. Guy paced the kitchen, listening to the silence in the rest of the house and wondering if the area got any precipitation. The stars were clearly visible, although dim, and nothing blocked the lunar light.

“No rain tonight,” he muttered to himself, and got up to walk through the rest of the house again. The ground floor remained unchanged, dust thick on the floor and in the air, but a yellowish light was faintly visible at the top of the stairs. Frowning, Guy moved quietly upwards. The light was too steady to be a candle and too warm to have come from any of the moons, but he hadn’t seen any signs of electricity. “Anyone there?” he asked softly, although the ring clearly showed no signs of life.

The yellow light flicked out as soon as the first syllable cleared his throat, leaving the upper floor pitch black. A quick glance downstairs showed him that moonlight still shone into the windows there, but when he looked back up the stairs, the columns were visible in the dark.

“Fucking ghosts,” he muttered. Just to make sure there was absolutely nothing up there, Guy walked around every single column. Twice. He left lanterns hanging in the rafters, banishing every hint of a shadow and pouring warm green light down the stairs. He was nearly back in the kitchen when a high-pitched shriek froze his heart and he dove through the door.

Kyle was crouched against the far wall, hands raised protectively and construct armor covering every inch of skin. Guy could see absolutely no evidence of an actual threat.

“What? What did you see?” he asked, the spiked mace he’d held in both hands fading away.

“Guy?” There was a little more tremor in that voice than should have been there, but given the probability of an actual ghost, Guy wasn’t going to give him much grief over it.

“Who else? There ain’t nothing else here.” Not much wasn’t the same as none, though.

The armor faded, leaving Kyle with a rather sheepish expression. “I thought I saw a spider.”

“A spider,” Guy said flatly and folded his arms. “You screamed like a girl for a spider.”

“I did not scream like a girl and it was huge.” Kyle hesitated. “There were cobwebs from floor to ceiling. I woke up and I couldn’t move.”

“You screamed like a girl for a nightmare,” Guy said, and started laughing. “Man, this is way better than I thought it would be.”

“It wasn’t a dream!” Kyle protested hotly. Guy pointedly looked around the cobweb-free and spiderless kitchen. “I mean…”

“Still a rookie, huh?” Guy smirked. “The house is still empty, by the way.”

“Rookie my ass,” Kyle muttered. “My watch now.”

“Sure. Then I get to see if you hallucinate anything else.” Guy made himself comfortable on a construct armchair in front of the wood stove, stretching his hands out towards the heat. The room seemed colder than it had a few moments before.

“I was not hallucinating!” Kyle had manifested a suit of armor again, albeit a much less bulky set than the one he’d had before. Guy wasn’t sure he was doing it on purpose, either, which meant that his partner was really rattled. It made it so much easier to push his buttons.

“So you were dreaming?” he asked innocently.

“Oh, shut up.” Kyle seemed to notice the armor for the first time and it faded to his normal uniform. “Shut up and go to sleep.”

Guy smirked again. “We could be doing other things.”

“I’m going upstairs to look for ghosts,” Kyle said after a moment of staring at him with an unreadable face.

“Nothing up there,” Guy called after him. Kyle pulled a face and started to inspect the rest of the first floor as well, or at least the room adjacent to the kitchen.

“Why don’t you check outside?” he shouted back.

“All sightings were in the house,” Guy said through the ring.

“See if the outside of the house matches the inside,” Kyle said, somewhat inexplicably.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m going.” It was warmer outside than inside, oddly enough, although half of it could have been atmosphere. “Fucking ghost,” Guy muttered, and promptly slipped on a patch of mud. It clung to the outside of his costume, and he brushed it off with a construct. The wet, slimy feeling didn’t go away, though. “So what am I supposed to match?” he asked.

The ring was silent, and Guy smacked it a second time. The outside of the house was perfectly normal, high windows dark and quiet. For a moment, he thought he saw a curtain fluttering on the second floor, but when he looked more closely, there was nothing. “The windows are glass and closed, you idiot,” he muttered to himself. “Yo, Kyle,” he added, boosting the transmission.

The silence from the ring was starting to get suspicious. Guy willed himself far enough off the ground to be able to see inside the windows. They were not only dark, they were opaque from the outside. He thumped one in frustration, and the entire house shook.

“I thought you said this structure was stable,” he said to the ring. It returned an error message for the second time. “Okay, that’s it. You’re going to Mogo for a tuneup.” The sound he got back could only be described as a raspberry. Guy returned to the ground, peering into the high windows on the first floor; he could see Kyle moving through the third room carrying an old-fashioned flaming torch. Guy took a moment to just watch – Kyle moved efficiently now, no wasted gestures, no melodramatics – and noticed the door on the far side of the room for the first time. His first thought was chagrin that he’d noticed something so obvious. His second was that there was no way he could have missed something that obvious – the rooms on the first floor were arranged in an arc, and any door in that particular wall would have opened straight into the back of the kitchen.

The door opened onto a hallway leading straight back, with a stairway curving down at the end of it. The hair on the back of Guy’s neck stood up at the physical impossibility. Why didn’t Kyle see how much that didn’t fit? Guy pounded on the window, but his efforts didn’t even produce a dull thud. “Kyle!” Going down that hallway was a very very bad idea, it couldn’t possibly exist and – Guy shouted again. “KYLE!”

The door stuck on the uneven floor and Kyle paused to tug at it. Guy raced around the side of the building to the kitchen, flinging the door open. “Don’t go in there!” he shouted, moving as fast as humanly possible through the doorways. He would have gone through the walls if he’d thought it wouldn’t either rip the fabric of space-time or collapse the entire house.

The third room was empty and the door in the wall was gone. Guy rushed over to it, but he couldn’t even see footprints in the dust. There was nothing left. He kicked the wall where the door had been, hoping against hope to see something, but the door didn’t reappear. He hit the wall again, running his hands over it and searching for any sign of an opening. There was nothing. “I’ll burn you down,” he growled. “Give him back, damn you. Give him back!”

“Give what back?” Kyle said from the doorway, and Guy nearly climbed the wall.

“Where did you come from?” he demanded once his heart had dropped back out of his throat.

“The second floor?” Kyle gestured vaguely behind himself. “Empty, like you said.”

“You didn’t go into the hallway?” Guy thumped the wall, which remained stubbornly solid and door-less.

“What hallway?” Again, Kyle’s clueless look was a little too bland.

“I saw you. Through the window. In this room. There was a door, right here, and you opened it onto a hallway.” He sketched out the outline of the doorframe.

Kyle peered at him quizzically for a moment. “Guy, there couldn’t possibly be a hallway right there. The kitchen’s on the other side of that wall.”

“Well, I know that. I didn’t thi—never mind.” Guy gave the wall another once-over and then looked back at his partner.

“Now who’s hallucinating?” It was far too cheerful of a grin. Guy ringed a snowball and threw it. Kyle blocked it with a hastily erected shield and within a fraction of a second the room was full of snow. He scooped up a handful and lobbed it back and before he knew it, he was soaked in the snowballs he’d missed.

“Oh, that’s it,” he said, loose-packed a double handful and dove after Kyle. Twenty-three seconds of squirming later, Kyle was modifying his costume to get rid of the snow down his back.

“It’s cold,” he complained.

“Pansy,” Guy said, but the room really was freezing. He let the snow dissolve, not that it made much of a difference; Kyle had been making most of it. “Let the construct go and it’ll get warmer.”

“I’m not doing that,” Kyle said, pausing in the brushing of snow off his back. “I thought you were.”

Guy straightened, ring sparking. “Ghostly manifestations?”

“Could be.” Kyle’s uniform was back in place before Guy could blink. “Any other signs?”

A door somewhere else in the house slammed shut.

“That could be a sign,” Guy said.

“Hello?” Kyle said softly. “Are you there?”

Nothing answered him except the dripping sound of slowly melting snow.

“Hey,” Kyle said. “Look at the snow.”

Guy looked – it was snow, smooth and greenish-white. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it, and he said so.

“Where are our footprints?” Kyle asked quietly, and the hair on the back of Guy’s neck stood up again. The snow was as pristine as if it had just fallen, with no sign that the two of them had just torn it up. As soon as he really looked at it, it faded away to dust. Even the moisture in his clothes vanished. “I’d say that’s a sign of paranormal activity.”

“Ring,” Guy said, not that he expected anything out of it. To his surprise, it registered a faint energy signature emanating from somewhere beneath the floor.

“Did you notice the moonlight?” Kyle asked, and his ring confirmed that the modified solar radiation coming from each of the three satellites appeared to be acting as an amplifier to the energy signature.

“It eats it,” Guy said.

“The signal’s getting stronger. If this is a friendly ghost, it might be able to come out and talk.”

“What is this, Casper? What part of your experience leads you to assume the ghost is friendly?”

The house rumbled alarmingly, floor trembling and then shaking, tumbling the furniture across the ground. Guy lost his balance and slammed into the wall where the door had been, feeling it give way as the door opened inwards. “Kyle!” He slipped across the threshold and grabbed the doorframe, feeling it vibrate beneath his fingers.

“Hang on!” Kyle ringed a support web around the room, trying to keep the house from collapsing in on itself in its increasingly violent throes. The house responded by shuddering harder, pieces of the ceiling falling in as it tilted sideways. Guy felt his grip slipping, but the ring wouldn’t generate enough energy to pull him back through the doorway. Something grabbed his foot from behind, and he kicked down desperately.

“I got you!” Kyle was clinging to his own construct for dear life and his other hand was on Guy’s wrist. Guy cleared the doorway just as it dissolved into a wall again, but the house didn’t stop shaking, and the wind outside had picked up to a dull roar.

“Outside!” he shouted over the noise. Kyle nodded, but no matter how far they got, the house’s gyrations landed them back in the center of the room. The far wall cracked down the center with a sharp report, and Guy suddenly realized that the ceiling was intact.

“You cut that out!” he shouted into the storm, planting his feet onto the floor. “I ain’t playing your game anymore.”

The opaque shield cutting the house off from the moons wasn’t easy, but Guy slammed it into place, driving it six inches into the earth at the house’s foundations and cutting off all light except the green glow of Kyle’s construct.

“Guy?” Kyle followed Guy’s pointing finger to the intact ceiling and his eyes widened. “Oh.” Indignation spread across his face. “Hey! We got punked!” The rumbling faded away to nothing, the house still and quiet. The furniture hadn’t moved more than Kyle’s now-vanishing construct could account for, and several sets of their footprints were clearly visible in the thick dust.

“Casper here ain’t really shaking the house,” Guy said, just for the sake of exposition. Let the ghost know they’d figured out its game. “It’s all illusion. I think he just likes playing pranks.”

“Salakk to Lanterns Gardner and Rayner,” came a voice through Kyle’s ring, staticky at first and then becoming clearer.

“We read you,” Kyle said. “What’s up?”

“We’ve just had communication from your assigned location. Apparently the local apparition is an interplanar being that feeds off lunar radiation. It comes out to play tricks on a regular basis.”

“Yeah?” Guy said, grabbing Kyle’s hand and talking into his ring. “Then why’d they call us with horror stories of ghosts?”

“The last time the planet’s moons were in the proper alignment, other conditions prevented its manifestation,” Salakk replied calmly. “There was no living memory, only – how would you put this – tall tales.”

“And somebody finally remembered?” Guy said, but Kyle yanked his hand away mid-sentence.

“So they don’t need us?” he asked. Blue light flickered hopefully through a doorway, illuminating giant cobwebs.

“You’re clear to return home,” Salakk said. “Report back immediately.”

“Understood,” Kyle said. “Come on, Guy.”

Guy doused the fire in the stove as they walked past. “Bye bye, Casper.” The house rumbled once again, briefly, but Guy didn’t let the shield up until they were well above the planet’s surface.

“Fucking ghosts,” he muttered again as they made tracks for Oa.

Salakk was waiting for them, to all appearances the very epitome of calm.

“I can’t believe you sent us chasing after Casper,” Guy said before he’d properly gotten both feet on the ground.

“…Casper?” Salakk said cautiously, with the air of a man unsure of really wanting the answer to his question.

“The friendly ghost,” Kyle said. “Never mind,” he added, almost on top of his own words. “So everything’s fine? No threat?”

“I did not say it wasn’t dangerous,” Salakk said after a moment’s solemn stare. “Denizens of his particular level of existence are extremely capricious. Quite outside a Lantern’s purview, I assure you.”

“Wait, that thing could have killed us?” Guy said as Kyle asked, “What about the locals?”

“It would most likely have left your bodies intact,” Salakk mused, almost absentmindedly. “Oh, don’t worry,” he added. “The local scientific community is working on a solution, but the moons are only in the appropriate alignment every hundred years or so. There is no particular urgency.”

“Fucking ghosts.”

Kyle kicked Guy’s ankle and pushed him out the door. “Let’s go, Guy. Thank you, Salakk.”

“Did they fall for it?” Kilowog poked his head around the doorframe a moment later.

“Fall for what?” Salakk asked.

“The Halloween prank? Big tradition where those two come from?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kilowog.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Kilowog muttered, but he withdrew.

“Gotcha,” Salakk whispered, allowing the smallest of smiles to hush across his face before he returned to his duties.

TBC