After Twelve joins the team the paranormal things they are experiencing are way more present and powerful. Charles’ teammates convince him that he needs to fix things with Twelve, so he answers her unanswered question about why he’s a ghost hunter, by showing her Dickens’ journal. It’s the missing piece of research that she needs to uncover the history of the last legitimate ghost buster, which she explains via a cool animated history (ala Deathly Hallows).
This clergyman was buried with his journal in England, but his tomb was raided and the journal was lost. Until it appeared years later in a collection of books purchased by the Library at Oxford collage, where it was auctioned off to a historian who sold it to its most previous owner, who purchased it off Ebay and currently resides in an old abandoned Subway in NY.
In the next scene they’re pulling up to a boarded-up Subway sandwich restaurant. Inside the counter is glowing and coated in purple slime (and obvious throw-back to the ectoplasm). But one of the other team Ghost Hunter members reveals that it’s just a phosphorescent fungus that grows on the lettuce. One of them is scanning the area for EMP, and it leads them to the manager’s office they find a collection of creepy things (clown dolls, Ouija Boards, a coin operated fortune telling machine, really anything that’s ever been haunted), and they find the cleric’s journal behind the glass of the fortune teller. As Charles slowly reaches into machine the eyes light up and the mouth opens, giving the audience a jump-scare, but Charles is not alarmed. Someone has just plugged in the machine. As they leave with the book, Twelve is the last to leave the room and she grabs the scary clown doll.
Twelve reads the cleric’s journal and it reveals the key to exorcising ghosts is in using the rites of their belief, and that the Ghost Club was stymied by a new kind of ghost that resulted from the industrial revolution where people started to have religious beliefs about science and technology. The best they were able to do is trap the spirits in human replicas where they are only able to affect a barely perceptible rise in spooky levels. Twelve starts applying this information to makes the ghost hunting team much more effective and triggers a montage which shows that they get better at detecting paranormal activity, and exorcising ghosts, but it also shows Twelve’s collection of creepy objects growing.
The climax of the movie is the disappearance of Twelve. When Charles goes to her apartment there are two burned girls playing hopscotch out front singing an eerie rhyme. Everything in the apartment appears much creepier than the first time we were there. Every step he takes in her house is creaky, until he realizes he just needs to walk faster, and it becomes comical instead. All the paintings in the place seem to watch him. In her room all the dolls are slumped over and appear to be sad, as their glassy eyes stare up toward a trapdoor in the ceiling leading up to the attic.
Charles wanders around the attic fighting cobwebs and checking out a number of creepy objects until he finds another tiny door in the wall, leading out to a toolshed filled with sharp, rusty tools. In the middle of the floor is a trapdoor which leads down into a dark cellar. As Charles touches the bottom step the door slams shut. He is non-pulsed and pushes his way past creepy, dusty jars filled with animal parts and Blair Witch-like wooden effigies. The sound of crying can be heard and he follows it to a circle of candles. In the center of it is Twelve in a tub filled with bloody water.
Charles approaches her cautiously. Her eyes are closed and she is at peace. He starts to speak words of pain, of regret, of morning and she startles, screams, and curses at him for scaring her. “What are you doing in here?”
The scene suddenly shifts and he’s standing in her bathroom. She’s still in the tub, but instead of blood it’s filled with bubbles. He apologizes, hurries out of the room and closes the door. Through it he yells, “You haven’t shown up to work in a while, I was worried about you.”
“I’m fine, they’re taking care of me. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Who’s taking care of you?”
But there is only silence, and eventually the sound of the bathtub drain sucking air, then slurping up something else. He calls out her name a few time and gets no reply. Opening the door the tub is empty except for a mass of wet hair around the drain. He looks around the room, but there’s no where she could have gone. He looks under the claw foot tub and the drain pipe is bent in the shape of a human head as if the pipe is swallowing her like an anaconda.
“Girlfriend problems?” A voice asks, and looking up he sees a black man in a strange, steampunky costume standing in the door to the bathroom. After Charles demands to know who he is and how he got there, the new character introduces himself as Jasper Henry. The only surviving member of an ancient line of ghost busters, which started long, long before Charles Dickens ever joined the Ghost Club.
He goes on to explain that Charles girlfriend is a collector. All this time you thought they thought they were getting rid of ghosts, Twelve was capturing and collecting them, and their weak parapsychic energy has amplified. Charles invites Jasper to join his ghost hunter team, but he just shakes his head, how about you join MY ghost bustin’ team.
“I want producer credit.”
“Let start with getting your girlfriend back alive.”
“Ghosts can’t effect solid matter. Poltergeists don’t exist. She’s fine wherever she is.”
“The first part is true; they can’t effect solid matter, but they can trick your mind into believing whatever they want, and one of their favorite tricks is convincing your brain to stop breathing. You ever have a dream where you couldn’t breathe and couldn’t cry out for help? You ever heard of SIDS?”
“That’s messed up.”
Jasper leads Charles outside. The creepy burned twins start walking up to them and Jasper flicks his wrist and a ball of flame burst to life just outside his fingertips. They run away crying.
Charles says, “Dude, that wasn’t cool.”
Jasper looks back to the girls and sees them next door, running into the outstretched arms of the neighbor. “Sorry… I thought they were ghosts.”
Jasper outfits Charles with a bunch of equipment in his van and they go through the house shoot-em-up style blasting ghost and rescue the girl, who hates him for killing all of her ghost friends and destroying thousands of dollars’ worth of haunted memorabilia.
THE END
(Cue theme song written by Ray Parker Jr.)
I’ve always known that some of the things I write for RFF are better than others, but this was the first time that after I put out part one that I felt bad about it, and considered taking it down entirely. Just the way it half-heartedly straddles the line between a story, and a description. I wrote finding myself holding back in some ways, being totally serious at some points, and just fudging it at others. I’m not sure what to do with all that. I think I’m still going to post part II anyway and hope it doesn’t turn away first time readers, (my other stuff is better I promise) or worse, that it becomes my Clockwork Orange.
BONUS CONTENT!! Jokes I couldn't fit into the script:
Something about the purple slime in the Subway either "Also likes to Eat Fresh." Or "Eat Flesh."
Someone says to the fortune teller machine: "I wish I was Big!" and Charles says, "You know they make this little blue pill that can help you with that."
In the scene when the tub swallows Twelve: Something about how hair is always getting stuck in the drain.
UPDATE!! 2-12-15
Sometimes funny little things happen which I take as divine affirmations that I'm on the right track. Jung called them synchronicities... well actually he called them
Synchronizität
. I'm not a religious person, but the feeling I get when I experience synchronicity is the same eerie tingle I get from d
éjà vu.
So yesterday, I published this very post, you've read it so you know what happens there, and last night I had to drive 2 hours to this meeting that I was hemming and hawing about whether I should go to or not, but when I arrive, it's in this weird cabin in the woods. We're all seated around a wood stove and there's all this stuff hanging from the ceiling. Like funny craft store chotchkies, not like animals in jars. And the walls are covered with things that eschew category, as if this were a showroom for that kind of restaurant that puts weird shit on their walls to make it quaint. It's not of course this is the result of the haphazard process of collecting. Anyway, I'm sitting down with these folks, eating some cold potluck, and what do I see across the room?
She is totally the sort of doll that Twelve would have collected!
Unfortunately the owner of the house wasn't there, otherwise I would have asked him the story about her.
Also, it's hard to tell from the picture, but that's not just red fabric over her chest, it's actually hollowed out. And I think it's also worth noting that while this is a creepy thing to have in ones house, I didn't get the sense that Midnight Moon was haunted.