Ghost's Stories, part one

"I'm telling you, there's something down there." 

Elyssa looked genuinely shaken, but Grundus just laughed. "It's a swimming pool, girl. A well-lit swimming pool. If there was anything down there, you would have seen it." 

Chris frowned as he squatted down beside them. Elyssa, still in her swimsuit and dripping wet, was sitting on one of the exercise benches; Grundus had settled beside her. He could taste her fear through the air. She looked over at him immediately. "You believe me, don't you?" 

"I believe you're scared," he said. 

"Well, I believe it's bullshit," said Grundus. "You two wait here, I'll go check it out." He stood up and crossed to the hallway door, strength and confidence in motion. Chris would have thought that the older wolf's confidence would have been the death of him -- and maybe it still would -- but from what he'd seen so far it looked like arrogance was its own reward.

Chris glanced after him, then turned and walked over to his bag. He pulled a towel out, and brought it over to Elyssa. "Here," he said. "Dry off. It's too cold to sit here wet, even for us."

Elyssa was another wolf, the only other one who'd come to the Ministry in the wake of the events at Pettibone. Chris had been avoiding her, until she'd burst into the room saying something about icy hands grabbing for her in the pool and Grundus had immediately moved to make fun of her. 

"Thanks," she said, taking the towel, and immediately started trying to dry her hair. It was auburn and cut short; she looked like she did a lot of swimming. 

"You said something tried to grab you in the pool?" 

She nodded. "I couldn't see it, but I could feel it. It didn't seem to ever quite get a grip on me, but I was in the middle of the water and if it had started to pull me down..." She shuddered. 

Chris considered that. "And there was nobody else around?" 

"I couldn't see anybody," she said. "Couldn't scent anybody either, but the pool smells so strongly of chlorine... You think one of the magi was messing with me? Why would they do that?"

Chris shrugged. His own thoughts hadn't been that specific; another person near the pool could have been conjuring the effect, or affected by it themselves, or just a witness to Elyssa's sudden panic. But since she'd brought it up... "Is there anybody who might have a reason to want to scare you like that?"

Elyssa looked thoughtful. More importantly, she looked like she'd moved past being scared and into problem-solving. "I don't think so," she said after a moment. "I mean, you never really know, but I don't think so." She sat back, and switched from toweling her hair to wrapping the towel over her bathing suit. "Maybe somebody who knew I was there at Pettibone?" she speculated, then paused. "No, that doesn't make sense. Anybody who knows I was there would know you were there too, and you spend a lot more time alone than any of the rest of us."

Chris folded that away, but she was right. Even here, the wolves were pretty social; he was the exception, and almost everybody attributed that -- rightly -- to whatever he'd gone through at Pettibone. He nodded. "Yeah, I'd expect someone like that to mess with me first."

Elyssa studied him for a moment. "I don't remember seeing you there. Were you--?"

"I was with a small group of the students," he said, "trying to keep them safe. It... didn't work out the way I'd hoped."

"Oh." She studied him a moment longer, then looked away. "I tried to sneak a few of them away. Two of them actually made it. That was... that was why the Ministry took me in."

He nodded to show that he understood. "If this wasn't one of the magi," he said, forcibly changing the topic, "then I don't know what else it might have been. Not here." It sounded like something from a ghost story, but as far as he knew ghosts couldn't persist within the Mundus. 

"Nothing!" said Grundus loudly, striding back in through the door. "There's nobody down there, and nothing tried to grab me."

"I probably just imagined it, then," said Elyssa, in a jovially artificial tone. She turned her attention back to Chris. "Chris, would you walk me back to my room?" 

"Of course," he said, and went to grab his bag.

Grundus scowled at him, but Chris just shrugged. He didn't fear the older wolf, and Grundus knew it and was bothered by it. 

Once they were out the doors, Chris said quietly: "I'll come for a late-night swim in a day or two, and see if something similar happens to me. If nothing happens, then a couple of days after that you should come back, and I'll come in just a little behind you and see what I can find."

Elyssa leaned a shoulder against him in a distinctly wolfish gesture. "Thank you," she said quietly. "It wasn't... I mean, maybe I wasn't in any danger, but..." 

Chris shrugged. "Maybe you were. We need to find out for sure, and deal with it."