#All Our Yesterdays | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

foundtherightwords · 7 months

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Come, You Spirits

Pairing: Ralph (Timewasters) x OFC (Thu from "All Our Yesterdays")

Summary: Stuck in the past (again) and bored during the Ghost Festival, Ralph and Thu decide to check out the most haunted building in Hanoi, with unexpected consequences.

Warnings: none, just a brief mention of a murder and some general spooky stuff.

Word count: 4.6k

A/N: This is both my submission for the JQ Spookathon (yes, I've decided to participate after all! Thank you to @palomahasenteredthechat for hosting and all the mods!) and a soft continuation of my Ralph fic, "All Our Yesterdays" (if you haven't read it, that's OK. I tried to make this a standalone.) I've never written horror before, so here's something on the silly side instead. Plus, out of all of Joe's characters (other than Eddie), I feel that Ralph is most suited to a spooky story, and when Ralph is concerned, everything takes a silly turn for me.

As with "All Our Yesterdays", this is based on an actual urban legend of Hanoi and the location is real (see the photo at the end). The title is a quote from "Macbeth" too.

"You want to do what?" Thu asked, thinking she'd misheard Ralph over the flapping of the bamboo fan she was using to dry her hair. There was a power cut, and she was already sweating despite having just showered.

"Check out that haunted building you told me about," Ralph repeated.

Right, so she hadn't misheard him then. "OK... why?"

Ralph shrugged. "It's something to do," he said. "We've eaten at every possible street vendor in the Old Quarter, we've seen every sight there is to see—I know you take pride in Hanoi being traditional, but when it hasn't changed much since sixty years ago, there's not much left to do."

"That still doesn't explain why you want to see a haunted house."

"Isn't it the Ghost Festival today? Shouldn't we do something to celebrate?"

"Our Ghost Festival is not Halloween!"

"You said it was the day all the souls are released from the Underworld to visit Earth. That sounds like Halloween to me."

"Yeah, but we're supposed to be avoiding spirits, not searching for them!"

"Ah, that's no fun," Ralph sighed. He picked up a paper with a listless hand and threw it down again.

"And anyway, we did go to the mausoleum to see Uncle Ho's mummified body," Thu pointed out. "That wasn't macabre enough for you?" The trip to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, a rite of passage for every school kid in Hanoi, had been less of a success than Thu had expected. Ralph had treated it less like a curious relic of Vietnam's past and more like a carnival sideshow.

"No," now he said. "It was just... weird. It's not even real!"

"Oh, like you'd know!"

"You seriously believe that they can preserve a body that well?"

"Why not? The Soviets did it with Lenin."

"Have you seen that one?"

"... No."

"Well, I bet that's not real either."

Thu could tell they were in for another pointless bickering session, which had been happening with increasing frequency lately. Time traveling tends to do that to you, especially when it is as unpredictable as time traveling with Homeless Pete. No matter how in love you are with one another, it can be stressful when you keep ending up in different times throughout history, without warning. And this particular period hit a little close to home—in 1991 Hanoi, with her birth just six years away, Thu ran the risk of running into her parents and experiencing her own version of Back to the Future. She and Ralph had managed to find a place to stay on the other side of town, away from her parents' university, but the strain was getting to her.

Thu knew she should be thankful they had landed in peacetime—if it had been close to either of the wars, the suspicion on Ralph would make it impossible for them to stay. And they had managed to avoid the worst of the 1980s economic crisis as well—she still remembered too clearly her parents' half-humorous, half-painful stories about standing in line for hours to get their meager rations, the mortal fear of losing one's ration book, the stress of hoarding any product you could get your hands on. At least all of that was behind them now. But on a night like this, it was hard to feel grateful. The August air was muggy, the power was out for the third time that week, and the smoke from the burning of joss paper for the Ghost Festival only made the heat more unbearable. No wonder Ralph was feeling restless.

Still, she wished she hadn't told Ralph about that haunted building. They lived just down the road and had come across it while trudging around searching for Homeless Pete, who had disappeared yet again. Built in the Eastern Bloc style, all gray concrete and sharp corners, it squatted on an intersection like some scowling monstrosity, already exuding an air of inhospitality and menace despite being newly constructed.

"That's going to be the most famous haunted building in Hanoi," Thu said without thinking, pointing at it.

"Going to? What happens?" Ralph asked curiously.

Thu told him about how the building was meant to be the new Bulgarian Embassy, but was never put to use for some reason and was left empty over the next thirty years. "And in Vietnam, whenever a house is abandoned, it is said to be haunted," she said. "They say it was built on top of a cemetery or a hospital morgue, and people often hear strange noises or crying inside. The usual urban legend stuff. And then there was the murder—"

"What murder?" Ralph's eyes opened wide with fascination.

"Some woman stabbed her lover in his car right outside the back gate. In the early 2000s, I think. They say his ghost still lingers around."

"Wizard!"

Thu didn't share Ralph's enthusiasm. She didn't really believe in ghosts, but like most Vietnamese people, she had a healthy respect for the supernatural and avoided it when she could. Ralph had no such hang-ups, apparently. And now he wanted to check out the place! On Ghost Festival of all night!

"It's not really haunted, you know," she said, hoping to dissuade him. "Those stories are just made up by junkies and criminals, so they have a place to hang out."

"But you said those rumors only started after the building was abandoned," Ralph pointed out, and Thu silently cursed his memory. "So why was it abandoned in the first place?"

"It's probably just due to some bureaucratic crap."

"Where's your sense of adventure?"

"Let me get this straight," she said, rubbing her eyes. "We're stuck thirty years in the past with no IDs, and you want to sneak into an embassy to see if it's haunted, all because you're bored?"

"Yes," Ralph said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

"No. We are not doing that."

"Please?" He was practically pouting and batting his eyelashes at her, like freaking Betty Boop.

"Stop making that face. You know I can't resist that face."

"It's history!"

Thu sighed. Their apartment was cramped, and the fried fish that the family next door was having for dinner did not smell so great. Perhaps some fresh air would do them good. This was a time when you could still get fresh air simply by walking outside, without having to worry about pollution or traffic, so she might as well take advantage of it.

"Sometimes I do worry about your sense of self-preservation, you know," she said, getting up to find her shoes.

"Come on, that's what you love about me." Ralph grinned and gave her a kiss as she passed him.

***

They walked. Usually, during a power cut like this, they would meet plenty of people and families with kids all along the street, trying to cool down in the night air. That night, however, the street was deserted. The only person they saw was a scrawny student trying to read a book under a street lamp. Clearly, the night of the Ghost Festival was no time to be outside. And even if anyone had ventured out, the stifling, humid air would offer little relief. They really needed some rain soon.

"I'm afraid this isn't the vibe you're looking for," Thu said. "It's too hot to be spooky."

"That helps though." Ralph, always determined to make the best of every situation, pointed at the fat full moon shining languidly over the darkened street.

Just a few minutes later, they reached the embassy building. The place was surrounded by a tall iron fence, sharp points piercing the moonlit sky. The wan light of the street lamps gave the concrete blocks a blotchy, moldy look, and when combined with the scraggly bushes around its courtyard and the leftover building material, the building looked old, ruined, abandoned even before it was inhabited. A giant banyan tree by the main entrance spread its twisted branches over the flat rooftop, its roots hanging down like a curtain, dark leaves rustling menacingly although there wasn't a breath of wind.

The sight of that tree gave Thu pause.

"What's wrong?" Ralph asked.

"They should have done something about that tree," she said slowly.

"Why?"

"A banyan tree, especially one this ancient, is usually home to spirits and ghosts," Thu explained, "but cutting it down will anger the spirits, so people often set up some sort of a shrine or an altar on the tree for them. There's no shrine here. Not even some rice and salt for the lonely spirits." She dug in her bag and found a packet of puffed rice, one of many she'd bought earlier that day as offerings for the Ghost Festival, and scattered the grains over the tree root. To do it right, there should be some incense as well, but she was sure the spirits would find the rice just fine.

Ralph gave her a sidelong glance. "I thought you didn't believe in ghosts."

"I don't."

"Then are you trying to frighten me?"

A corner of Thu's mouth lifted up. "Is it working?"

"Not a chance." Ralph walked around the back. "Come on."

The back was more of the same, sinister walkways leading deeper into the building, eerie shadows that seemed to appear just out of the corner of one's eyes, furniture piled up waiting to be moved in, creating all sorts of odd shapes. An empty swimming pool gleamed pale under the moonlight.

"OK, we've checked it out," Thu said. "There is no ghost or spirit to be found here. Are you happy now?"

There was no answer. She looked around, but Ralph was no longer by her side. He was at the back gate, unwinding the chain holding the gate shut. There was no lock. Shit.

"Ralph, stop! Come back here!" she called, trying to keep her voice low, but it was too late. He had slipped through the gate and disappeared into the murky depth of the building.

Shit, shit, shit. Ralph had always been game for anything, and he was right to say it was what she loved most about him—his endless passion, his ever-present optimism. But she was sure that, having spent time in an Indochinese prison, he would be more careful about putting himself at risk of getting arrested again.

Well, there was nothing to it. She slipped through the gate after him. If the lack of a lock was anything to judge by, the place was not very well guarded, being newly built and not yet inhabited. They may be lucky and not get discovered.

She caught up with Ralph, who was strolling down the covered walkway that connected the two wings of the building, looking for all the world like he was taking his constitutional along the Thames, despite his modern-day clothes. Apparently, one can take the boy out of London but cannot take London out of the boy.

"Get out of here before you get us into trouble!" she hissed.

"Relax," Ralph said. "There's nobody here."

"And there's no ghost either," Thu said, with more conviction than she actually felt.

It wasn't simply the fear of getting arrested that made Thu jumpy. She hated to admit it, but being in this building, knowing its history—or rather, future—made her hair stand on end. She didn't believe in ghosts, she told herself. But something about those cold, gray concrete walls, those dark, tunnel-like corridors, and the sheer emptiness of it felt like there was a razor pressed to the back of her neck, making her want to stand with her back against a solid wall. She fought the urge to take Ralph's hand.

"So you have time-traveled, yet you don't believe in ghosts?" Ralph said.

"That's different," Thu muttered.

"How?"

They were now inside the main hall. The building must have its own generator—there was a naked light bulb on the ceiling, shedding its yellow light over a reception desk of cheap plywood and a floor that still hadn't been completely cleared of sand and mortar. They climbed the staircase leading to the first floor, where another bare bulb swung from the ceiling, bringing more shadows than light.

"Time travel is—is—science," Thu said lamely.

"Is that so? How does it work then?"

"It works by—by—I don't know, some wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff!"

Ralph looked blank. "What?"

Thu bit back a teasing smile. "You're probably the only Brit alive that doesn't know Doctor Who. If—when we get back to the present, we really need to sit down and watch it."

"To be fair, I was born ninety years ago—"

A heavy, drawn-out sigh echoed down the corridor, cutting him off. It was ringing clear, as though the person was standing right by them.

Ralph gripped Thu's wrist. "Did you hear that?"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake!" She shook Ralph's hand free and strode forward with long, decisive steps. "It's probably just the wind or something—"

She rounded a corner, and her heart stopped.

A figure wavered in the gloom at the end of the corridor.

Then the figure moved into the light, and Thu realized it was much, much worse than a ghost.

It was a middle-aged man, dressed like a security guard, wearing the green pith helmet of the Vietnamese army, with a baton in his hand and a startled expression on his face.

"Excuse me!" he exclaimed in Vietnamese. "Who the hell are you?"

Thu didn't know where she found the clarity of mind to stick out an arm and block Ralph, who was still hidden from view behind the corner. But block him she did, and she could hear him duck into an empty room, much to her relief.

"This is private property! It belongs to the government of Bulgaria!" the guard shouted, limping toward her. "What the hell do you think you're doing here?!"

"I'm so sorry, sir," Thu said, running up to the guard to prevent him from going further down the corridor and discovering Ralph. She decided the best course was to tell the truth—or a version of the truth anyway. "The gate was open, and I—my friends and I heard that the place is haunted, and they dared me to go inside..."

"Haunted?" The guard frowned. He had the yellow teeth and yellow fingertips of a chain smoker, and, as he got close enough to her, the breath to match as well. "I've worked here since they started constructing, never heard of no haunting."

"It's just what people say—isn't this place built on an old temple? Or was it a cemetery—"

The guard narrowed his eyes at her. "Aren't you a bit old to get up to such shenanigans?" he asked.

Thu was ready to get offended, but then she remembered that thirty years in the past, someone in her mid-twenties could very well be married and having kids already—her own parents were. "You're absolutely right, sir," she said. "I'm so sorry. I'm leaving now."

She turned to leave, but the guard put his baton up. "Hold on," he said. "Let me see your ID."

Thu's heart dropped. "I—I don't have it with me."

"Where do you live?"

"Just... down the street."

"Right, I'll go with you to get your ID then."

"No!" she exclaimed. Realizing she would not be helping her case by panicking, she tried to soften her voice. "Please. You'll get me in trouble with my parents. Please, sir. I haven't done anything. I just walked around—"

Her plea fell on deaf ears. The guard grabbed Thu's arm with vice-like fingers. "So you just admitted to trespassing. Come with me."

"Hey, you can't do this!" She tried to pull away, but his hold was too strong, despite his limp. "Do you even have the authority to detain me?"

"Ooh, like to use fancy words, don't we?" The guard's craggy face took on a harsh, unyielding look. "You're right. This is a police matter. I'm only detaining you until I can fetch them." Ignoring her protests, he dragged her down the corridor and threw her into a room at the very end. "And for your information, young lady, my authority is absolute here!" he said, before snapping shut the padlock at the door with a cruel click.

"Shit!" Thu said out loud. How could she have been so stupid? She should have dragged Ralph bodily out of here—no, she shouldn't have let him through the gate—no, she should never have agreed to come here in the first place!

When she first time-traveled, she had lived for six months in 1929 without any ID whatsoever, but things in 1991 were very different, and with the police getting involved, how was she going to explain herself? She could only pray that Ralph was smart enough to get out while the guard was preoccupied. She may be able to come up with some crazy story to the police to explain her lack of ID, but explaining the presence of a young Englishman who was actually born in 1904 was too much for her. She could see the headlines—"Mad Woman Claims to Come from the Future". "Mad Foreigner Claims to Come from the Past". Or worse, there would be no headlines at all. They would just get thrown into jail or a mental hospital and forgotten.

Thu looked over her jail cell, trying to figure out what to do. She was in a bathroom, lit by a bare light bulb as the rest of the building. The door was of sturdy wood, and the only window was a tiny square high up on the wall. Even if somehow she managed to wriggle through it, it was still a two-floor drop to the ground. No wind came through that window, and the room was boiling. Sticky sweat poured down her back.

A shadow passed by and stopped just outside the room, blocking out the narrow strip of light underneath the door. It was gone in an instant, followed by several more, rather like a group of children crowding each other to peer into a room. Thu pressed her ears to the door but heard nothing, no footsteps or even a rustling of clothes.

"Hello?" she whispered in Vietnamese. Receiving no answer, she switched to English. "Ralph? That you?" Still no answer, but there came that long, heavy sigh again, and the light went out.

The sweat on Thu's back turned to ice. She staggered away from the door, heart hammering, spine crawling, until she hit the wall with her back. The solid wall made her feel slightly better, though the tiles chilled her. She missed Ralph's warm arms.

She sat down on the toilet, trying to gather her wits. Some shadows, a noise, and a power cut were nothing to be so shaken up about. It was just Ralph's overactive imagination and those damned stories getting to her, that was all...

BANG!

She nearly jumped out of her skin, before realizing it was just a window on the ground floor. Probably just the wind. She took a deep breath—

BANG! BANG! BANG!

This time they came right above her, one after another, sounding too fast and uniformed to be caused by the wind. A quick glance out the window told her that the night was as still and muggy as ever.

The guard's voice came from somewhere in the bowels of the building, "Who goes there?" Thu heard a high, clear giggle, but it could be her imagination, or it could simply be from a kid playing in the street outside. This was followed by a long moment of silence, then a scream—more like a yelp, thin and far away, then silence again, ringing in her ears, endless, unbearable.

The silence was broken by running footsteps outside the corridor. Her heart in her throat, Thu cast wildly about for a weapon. She settled for the heavy porcelain cover of the toilet's water tank, though what good it would do against a ghost, she had no idea. But then again, ghosts wouldn't have footsteps, would they?

"Thu?" came Ralph's familiar voice, and the band squeezing her heart loosened, almost making her drop the cover on her foot. She scrambled to the door.

"Ralph! What happened?"

"The guard fell into the pool."

Shit. "What did you do?!"

"I didn't do anything!"

This was no time for more bickering. "He must have the keys on him," she told Ralph. "Find them and get me out of here!"

"OK. Hang on."

His footsteps receded. After what must be the longest five minutes of her life, he came back, the door was opened, and the next thing she knew, Ralph was pulling her into his arms. "Are you all right?" he asked. "I'm sorry, this was all my fault—"

Thu was so relieved she wasn't even angry with him anymore. After all, she had followed him into the building of her own volition.

"No time for apologies. Let's just get the hell out of here," she said.

Grabbing each other's hand, they ran down the corridor, down the stairs, and toward the back gate. As they passed the empty swimming pool, Thu glimpsed the dark shape of the guard lying in a heap at the bottom.

"Is he dead?" she asked, horrified.

"No. Just knocked out, I think," Ralph said. Seeing Thu slow down, he paused as well. "What are you thinking?"

Thu weighed the bunch of keys in her hand. "I have an idea," she said, motioning for Ralph to climb down into the pool with her.

They put the keys back into the guard's pocket and carried him into the bathroom where he'd locked Thu up. This way, Thu reasoned, when he woke up, the confusion would be enough to throw doubt over his story, and they would be off the hook.

"Are you still angry with me?" Ralph said as they made their way back to the apartment. "I won't do anything like that ever again, I promise."

"You better keep that promise," she grumbled, but when he tentatively reached for her hand, she didn't push him away.

***

For a few days afterward, Thu avoided going past the embassy, just in case the guard still remembered her face. One evening, she and Ralph were going to dinner when they found their path was taking them past the building again. There was a great bustle as workers went in and out, carrying furniture and cleaning up the leftover building material. Seeing a woman struggling with a heavy chair, Thu came over to help.

"Are the Bulgarians finally moving in?" she asked in Vietnamese.

"No," the woman replied shortly. "They're moving out."

It was then that Thu noticed the furniture was being loaded on carts and taken away. Did this have anything to do with their misadventure the other night?

"Why?" she asked the woman.

"No one wants to work here," the woman said. "The locals say it's haunted."

Startled, Thu looked back at Ralph, whose eyes were open so wide they threatened to pop out of his face. He hadn't learned much Vietnamese, but he had certainly caught the word "haunted" and understood what it meant. Có ma. Inhabited by ghosts.

"What happened?" Thu asked the woman, trying to sound casually interested.

The woman cast a look around, before dropping her voice. "On Ghost Festival, a security guard was working there alone. He said some woman showed up, telling him the place is haunted. He thought she was a trespasser and locked her up to wait for the police. Did everything by the book, right? Only she vanished! And the guard found himself locked up instead! What do you make of that?"

Thankfully, Thu didn't have to answer that, because another worker was calling to the woman irritably, "Hey, move it! Some of us want to get out of here before it gets dark, you know!"

As the woman scurried back to her work, Thu gave Ralph a brief summary of what the woman had told her.

"I guess we were the ones that started that whole haunted rumor," she said ruefully.

"Well, at least now we know why it was abandoned," Ralph replied, cheerful as ever.

Thu shook her head at him, half exasperated, half affectionate. She should really stop letting him draw her into these harebrained adventures, but it was hard to say no to those puppy eyes.

"So tell me," she said, slipping her arm through Ralph's as they continued on their way, "what did you do to that poor security guard, exactly? How did you know where the breaker was?"

"The what?"

"The electricity. You turned it off to scare the guard, didn't you?"

"I thought that was another power cut?"

She slowed her steps, puzzled. "But you did slam the shutters, right?"

"Yes, the one on the ground floor. I thought it might make a good diversion."

"And the ones on the second floor too."

"No, I didn't go on the second floor."

"But I clearly heard three slams, right above me."

"I heard those too. I thought that was you!"

Did he think she was that gullible? "Come on, Ralph. You're messing with me."

"You're messing with me! How could I have gotten from the ground floor to the second floor so quickly?"

"Right, and next you're going to tell me you didn't make the guard fall into the pool either."

"I told you I didn't! He was already there when I found him!"

Thu finally stopped and looked straight at Ralph. "What are you saying?"

"I am telling you the truth," Ralph said slowly. "All I did was slam the shutters to draw the guard away. Then I hid. I didn't see anything. I only heard giggling and panting, and the guard's scream. When I found him, he was unconscious in the pool."

They stared at each other, neither uttering a word, minds running wild with all sorts of possibilities, while a strange, oppressive feeling—not quite fear, but a vague unease—clutched at their hearts. Thu could feel the razor on the nape of her neck again. As one, she and Ralph turned to look at the building. The workers had finished and left, and the building was deserted once more, looming gray and silent in the last rays of the sun.

"Perhaps the ghosts were helping us because you gave them some puffed rice," eventually Ralph said.

"I don't believe in ghosts," Thu snapped.

"Maybe you should," Ralph said. "They believe in you."

Thu looked over her shoulder again. It could be her imagination, or it could be a trick of the dying light, but the banyan tree looked like it was winking at them.

Definitely her imagination. Maybe.

"Don't say things like that," she said, trying to shake off the crawling sensation on her back. "It sounds so creepy!"

"Sorry."

She glared at Ralph. His eyes were full of earnest concern, with no hint of the twinkle he usually had when he was teasing her.

"You're lucky you're cute, you know that?" she said.

Face brightening up, he grinned back at her. "I know."

For all her bravado, Thu's grip on Ralph's hand was tighter than usual as they walked home in the gathering dusk. Then again, perhaps that was what he was aiming for, the cheeky tosser.

#ralph penbury #ralph timewasters #ralph x ofc #all our yesterdays #joseph quinn #joseph quinn fic #jq spookathon 2023

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