Chapter 4: Ghosts in the Garage

The key still worked after thirteen years.

Leo stood on the front porch of his childhood home, rain dripping from his leather jacket onto weathered boards that creaked under his weight. The brass key felt heavier than it should, worn smooth by fingers that would never touch it again. Behind him, the storm raged with supernatural fury, but here—in this pocket of memory—the wind seemed to hold its breath.

The door swung open on hinges that protested with a rusty shriek. Leo stepped inside and was immediately assaulted by the smell of dust and abandonment, underlaid with something fainter—the ghost of his mother's lavender perfume, the lingering warmth of Sunday morning pancakes, the phantom echo of Sarah's laughter echoing from upstairs.

They're not ghosts, he told himself, closing the door behind him. Just memories. Just pain wearing familiar shapes.

But his Void Sight showed him otherwise. Translucent figures moved through the house like actors replaying the same scenes endlessly. There was his father, Mark, sitting in his favorite chair reading the Sunday paper, completely unaware that he was already fourteen years dead. His mother, Elena, hummed in the kitchen while preparing dinner for people who would never come home to eat it. And Sarah—God, Sarah—eighteen years old forever, curled up on the couch with a book, her dark hair falling across her face the way it had the last time he'd seen her alive.

The phantom family continued their routines, oblivious to his presence. These weren't hauntings in any traditional sense—they were imprints, emotional resonances so strong they'd carved themselves into reality itself. The house remembered love, and in remembering, it had trapped echoes of the dead.

Leo forced himself to look away from Sarah's shade and focused on the living room. Dust motes danced in air that tasted of neglect, and sheet-covered furniture crouched like sleeping animals in the dim light. Everything was exactly as he'd left it after the funerals—the closed-casket ceremonies for bodies that had never been found, rituals of grief for deaths that had never been confirmed.

The Visitor's baton pulsed against his ribs, responding to the psychic residue that saturated the house. Divine fire recognized love, even love twisted by loss and time. Leo unwrapped the weapon partially, letting its warm light spill between his fingers. The phantom family flickered and grew more solid in its glow, as if the baton were feeding them energy they'd never had before.

Sarah's ghost looked up from her book and smiled at something Leo couldn't see. For one heart-stopping moment, her eyes seemed to focus on him directly. Then she returned to her reading, the moment broken, the connection severed by the unbridgeable gap between the living and the dead.

I'm sorry, Leo whispered to her shade. I should have been here. Should have protected you.

The ghost didn't answer. It never did. But somewhere in the house's bones, he felt a response—not forgiveness, exactly, but something like understanding. Sarah had always been the kindest of them, quick to excuse others' failures even when they were unforgivable.

Leo rewrapped the baton and moved deeper into the house, his boots leaving tracks in the dust. The kitchen held more phantoms—family dinners that had never happened, birthday parties for people who would never grow older, Christmas mornings that existed only in the space between what was and what should have been.

He paused at the counter where his mother's ghost was preparing phantom food with invisible ingredients. Elena had been the heart of this house, the force that had turned four broken people into something resembling a family. She'd found Leo in the foster system at age eight—too old, too angry, too damaged by his original parents' deaths for most families to want him. But Elena had seen something worth saving, had fought through months of paperwork and home visits and psychological evaluations to bring him home.

Home. Even now, standing in its ruins, the word carried weight. This house had been his sanctuary, the first place he'd ever felt truly safe. The first place he'd learned that not all adults would hurt him, that families could be chosen as well as born, that love was something that could be given freely without expectation of return.

All of it destroyed in a single night when Mister Fulcrum had decided their happiness was somehow offensive to his sensibilities.

Leo climbed the stairs, each step a journey backward through time. Sarah's room was frozen in perfect adolescent chaos—posters of bands she'd loved, books scattered across a desk where she'd done homework for classes she'd never finish, clothes draped over a chair as if she'd just stepped out for a moment and would return any second.

Her ghost was here too, younger now, maybe fifteen, sitting cross-legged on the bed and talking animatedly to someone Leo couldn't see. Probably him, he realized. This was Sarah from before, from when their biggest worry was whether their parents would let them stay up late to watch horror movies.

Before I knew that real horror doesn't come with credits and a happy ending.

The master bedroom held the deepest shadows, the strongest echoes. His parents' phantoms moved through their nightly routine with mechanical precision—Mark setting his alarm clock, Elena brushing her hair in front of the vanity mirror, both of them performing the small rituals of a marriage that had lasted twenty-three years before ending in screams and mysteries.

Leo touched the vanity's surface, and dust came away on his fingers like grey snow. In the mirror, he saw not his own reflection but the night it had all gone wrong. Elena waking up to find Sarah's bed empty, Mark calling his name only to discover that Leo wasn't in his room either. The frantic search, the desperate phone calls, the growing certainty that something unthinkable had happened.

They'd gone to the Funhouse looking for their children. Of course they had. Where else would teenagers go on a Friday night in a town where excitement came in exactly one flavor? They'd gone looking for their kids and had found Mister Fulcrum instead.

And he'd been waiting for them. The thought carried the weight of absolute certainty. This hadn't been random, hadn't been a coincidence. Fulcrum had orchestrated the whole thing, from whatever force had compelled Leo and Sarah to sneak out that night to the trap that had been waiting at the Funhouse. He'd wanted them all there together, had needed the entire family for whatever sick purpose had driven his actions.

Leo left the bedroom and walked to the end of the hall, to the room that had been his sanctuary within a sanctuary. His childhood bedroom was smaller than he remembered, cramped and cluttered with the detritus of adolescence. But it was also the most solid room in the house, the least haunted. This was where he'd been happiest, where he'd felt most like himself instead of the broken foster kid trying to earn his place in someone else's family.

The phantom Leo wasn't here. This room held no echoes because the real Leo had never truly left it. Part of him was still that angry, damaged eight-year-old who'd learned that safety was an illusion and family was a privilege that could be revoked without warning. The man he'd become was just layers of scar tissue built around that foundational wound.

From his bedroom window, he could see the garage where his father's motorcycle waited. Mark's pride and joy, a 1967 Harley-Davidson Shovelhead that he'd restored with obsessive care. Leo had helped with the project, learning to love the smell of motor oil and the satisfaction of perfectly tuned engines. Some of his best memories were of working side by side with Mark in that garage, connected by shared purpose if not by blood.

Time to get ready.

Leo returned to the living room and opened his bag on the dusty coffee table. Inside, carefully wrapped and secured, were the tools of his trade. The Visitor's baton he'd already examined, its divine fire contained but eager. Beside it, the empty copper wire cage that had once held the witch's finger, now cold and lifeless without its chaotic occupant.

But there were other weapons, other artifacts collected during his years in the spaces between worlds. A blade forged from meteoric iron and quenched in the tears of angels—if angels actually cried, which Leo had never been able to confirm. Bullets cast from silver that had been blessed by seventeen different priests from seven different faiths, each one convinced they were helping to fight demons while never suspecting the true nature of their war.

And ammunition of a different sort: photographs of his family, worn soft by handling but still clear enough to remind him why he was here. Elena laughing at something Mark had said. Sarah making faces at the camera during a family barbecue. All four of them together at Leo's high school graduation, proud and happy and utterly unaware that they had less than two years left as a unit.

Motivation, Leo told himself. Remember what you're fighting for.

The garage was reached through a door off the kitchen, and Leo paused with his hand on the knob. Mark's ghost was probably in there, tinkering with phantom carburettors and adjusting spectral timing chains. Could Leo handle seeing his adoptive father again, even as a memory made manifest?

Only one way to find out.

The garage smelled of motor oil and old leather, exactly as it had thirteen years ago. The Shovelhead sat in the center of the space like a sleeping beast, chrome gleaming despite its long hibernation. And there was Mark's ghost, bent over the engine with a wrench in his hand, making adjustments to a machine that had been running perfectly for over a decade.

"Hey, Dad," Leo said quietly.

The phantom didn't respond, couldn't respond. But for just a moment, it seemed to pause in its work, as if some echo of the real Mark had heard his adopted son's voice and wanted to acknowledge it.

Leo approached the motorcycle with something approaching reverence. This was more than just a machine—it was a connection to the man who'd taught him that strength didn't have to mean cruelty, that power could be used to protect instead of dominate. Mark had been everything Leo's biological father hadn't: patient, kind, willing to see potential in a damaged child that no one else wanted.

I'll make you proud, Leo promised the ghost. I'll make them all pay for what they took from us.

He ran his hands over the Shovelhead's familiar curves, checking fluid levels and testing components with the expertise Mark had taught him. The bike was in perfect condition, as if it had been maintained by invisible hands all these years. Maybe it had been. Maybe love was strong enough to transcend death, to keep the things we cherished safe even when we couldn't.

The garage also held Mark's old riding gear—leather jacket, helmet, gloves worn soft by countless miles of highway. Leo stripped off his tactical vest and pulled on his father's jacket. It fit perfectly, as if it had been waiting for him all along.

Almost time.

Leo gathered his weapons and secured them about his person with practiced efficiency. The Visitor's baton went into a custom holster designed to contain its divine energies. The meteoric blade found its sheath along his spine, invisible beneath the leather jacket but ready to be drawn in a heartbeat. Holy bullets filled magazines that slotted into pouches Mark had probably intended for tools.

He was as ready as he could be, armed with artifacts that spanned the supernatural spectrum and motivated by thirteen years of carefully nurtured rage. But as he prepared to start the Shovelhead, Leo heard something that made his blood freeze in his veins.

A sound like a thousand voices moaning in unison, carried on the storm wind from the direction of town. It was answered by another moan, then another, until the night air vibrated with inhuman harmony. Through the garage's small window, Leo could see shapes moving against the storm clouds—giants, dozens of them, converging on Millbrook from every direction.

The army. Fulcrum's endgame was beginning, whatever plan he'd been building toward for thirteen years was finally ready to execute. The Funhouse would be heavily defended now, surrounded by creatures that existed only to kill and devour and drag screaming souls into the spaces between worlds.

Leo kicked the Shovelhead to life, and its engine roar was like a battle cry in the storm-torn night. Behind him, Mark's ghost looked up from its eternal tinkering and seemed to nod, as if giving its blessing to what was about to happen.

For you, Leo thought, gunning the engine. For all of you.

He rode out of the garage and into the storm, leaving the house of ghosts behind. Ahead lay Mister Fulcrum's Funhouse and whatever horrors waited in its impossible halls. But Leo was no longer the broken boy who'd been taken thirteen years ago. He was something harder now, something forged in the fires of loss and tempered in the darkness between worlds.

The hunt was about to reach its climax, and Leo Vance was riding toward it with his father's motorcycle beneath him and his family's memory burning in his heart like divine fire.