section7mfu | Spooky Ray's House of Horror - Short Affair

Prompt Word - Spooky
Prompt Colour - White
Word Count - 987

Spooky Ray's House of Horror

“I find this amount of spider webs implausible,” Illya commented as he brushed the stuff away to try and clear a path.

“I'm not so sure,” Napoleon answered, a step behind and already stooping to avoid getting any of the webbing on his currently-immaculate suit. “Remember those catacombs in Gibraltar? For a moment I was sure you were going to get stuck.”

He did remember and now he came to think of it he really didn't particularly care to be reminded. “Still I feel they are overdoing the décor a little,” he said. “And also I do not believe spiders count as 'spooky'.”

“They're creating an atmosphere,” Napoleon said easily. “Lighten up and enjoy.”

Illya shot him a dark look. They were not here to 'enjoy'. They were supposed to be working, and if not for that fact he doubted it would have occurred to either of them to set foot in 'Spooky Ray's House of Horror'. But from what Laurelai Parker – a Section III courier currently recovering nicely from being both stabbed and poisoned – could remember, this was where she had hidden the microfilm. If only she could remember more precisely where.

“Ah!” He heard Napoleon cry out and turned to find his partner sprawled on the ground.

“What happened?” he asked quizzically.

“I just tripped over another corpse,” Napoleon explained, sitting up and brushing off his jacket with dismay. “You would think they'd have better lights in this place.”

“They are creating an atmosphere,” he parroted back solemnly and now it was Napoleon's turn to offer a dark look. “Check the body for microfilm.”

“Already on it, partner mine,” Napoleon said. “Shine the flashlight on it, will you?”

He did, the light playing over the dummy's rubber face. It didn't exactly look like any of the myriad corpses he'd ever seen. “You would think they would make more of an effort to have their props look realistic,” he remarked. “This place is hardly frightening otherwise.”

Napoleon laughed. “You know we get shot at most days and tortured every other week,” he pointed out. “I'm not sure we're the intended targets here.”

“Hardly every other week,” he objected. “Even assuming a very loose definition of the word 'torture' to include any kind of physical coercion, the current rate over the past twelve months is closer to once every five weeks. Between us.”

There was silence. Napoleon stopped what he was doing and stared up at him.

“With a marked increase over the summer months that I have not been able to satisfactorily explain,” he added, his brow slightly creased.

“Maybe hot weather makes THRUSH crotchety?” Napoleon suggested. “Do you have this on a graph somewhere, tovarisch?”

“I looked through our old reports, “ he said with a shrug, not really seeing the problem. “I was curious.”

“Now that's spooky,” Napoleon told him, standing up and shaking his head. “Nothing there. We'd best move on.”

They walked deeper into the haunted house, stopping to check every nook and cranny that looked like even a halfway decent hiding spot. The trouble was there was so many. It was worse than a needle in a haystack; in that situation at least you stood a reasonable chance had you thought to come prepared with a powerful magnet. Sadly in this situation a magnet would only serve to destroy the film and Mr Waverly would not thank them for that.

“Really, it's aimed at kids,” Napoleon said contemplatively, as he carefully unwrapped a mummy that Illya was relatively certain was comprised primarily of toilet paper and plaster of paris. “Kids like to be scared every now and then.”

“Hmmm.” Illya remembered being scared a lot as a child. He did not remember liking it. “I suppose you used to take younger girls to places like this so that when they were appropriately terrified you could...comfort them,” he suggested scathingly.

“Please, you wound me,” Napoleon said, before his hurt look dissolved into a grin. “When I was a kid it was the allure of the older girls that always appeared to me.”

He shook his head exasperated as he rummaged through a pit of rubber snakes. “You never change, do you?”

“Why should I?” Napoleon responded. “Come on, I know Halloween isn't celebrated in Russia, but didn't you have anything similar?”

Choking in a smoke-filled cellar, too scared to risk uncovering the door....huddled around the pitiful embers, rubbing their hands...childish voices whispering about what the Nazi's would do if they were caught, about who was dead and how much they had suffered....

“Sometimes we told scary stories around the fire,” he said and there was no pause and his voice gave nothing away and still Napoleon gazed at him sharply. He shook his head silently. No.

“When there's nothing at stake, sometimes being scared is fun,” Napoleon went on after a second. “Sometimes - “

With an unearthly screeching, a wizened figure in a white, flowing dress exploded out of a coffin and hurtled itself towards them.

Two shots rang out and the figure dropped.

Mmm. Illya glanced down at the gun in his hand, then the gun in Napoleon's hand, and then at the now-obvious dummy with the two darts embedded in its chest. “You were saying being afraid is fun?”

Napoleon crouched down by the dummy and theatrically felt for a pulse. “You know, I think it was already dead. Wait...” His expression changed and with a triumphant flourish he produced a tiny cannister. The microfilm.

“At last,” he said. “Might I suggest that we...forget....some of the details of just how we found it?”

“I won't say anything if you won't,” Napoleon said, standing up. “Come on, if you're good I'll buy you a candy apple.”

Ah. Now there was a Halloween tradition he could agree with.