dixiehellcat | That Which Lies Hidden, a Ghost Adventures fic, 2/10?

That Which Lies Hidden, a Ghost Adventures fic, chapter 2

Rated R for language, smut and whumpage. This applies to the whole story, as I just noticed I didn't put a rating on chapter 1...better go correct that. I guess. lol

Again, I owe every word you read here to xXTailo-Lives-OnXx and the marvelous WIP, The Other Side. (link to chapter 1 is on the notes to chapter 1 of this one) This story is inspired by it, but is not set in the same world as it, or the same 'verse as the other fic I'm currently posting, Worlds Collide.

This chapter contains a little bad language, and a LOT of whumpage. I apologize in advance, and wish to assure all my fellow deviants that I love all the GAC dearly. Honest, I didn't know any of this happened till Nick told me & I wrote it down. (Those of you who write know what I mean. Sometimes you just listen to the characters and take notes.) Oh, and I do not own the GAC, sad to say. I suppose I sort of own Claire, but really she owns herself too. :-D

Comments coveted!

2 The address was a storage facility across town. I parked beside a big black Jeep, a sweet enough ride that I had to stop and admire it as I got out of my car.

"That was Zak's. I spotted it on a used car lot and recognized it right away." A little stalkerish, I thought, but held my peace. The man who spoke stood in the open doorway of one unit; he was lanky with dark good looks. His hair, mustache and beard were close cropped and neat, and he wore dark jeans and an open necked shirt. When he took a step forward to introduce himself as Nick Groff, I noticed the wedding ring on the left hand he extended to me, and the cane he gripped in his right hand and leaned on to support himself. I took his hand and introduced myself. "C'mon in."

I followed him into the unit, trying to figure out where I'd seen him before. It took a moment for my eyes to shift from the bright Vegas sun to the dimness indoors, and another moment for me to register what I was seeing. Just inside the door stood a life-sized cardboard cutout of three men: Nick, a burly man who also looked familiar, and front and center—Zak? It can't be. The figure wore black, a tight t-shirt and baggy fatigue pants, and stood with arms folded and a small, supremely confident smile on his face. My hand was halfway to his face before I pulled it back with an effort. The Ghost Adventures title and the words CAN YOU HANDLE THE LOCKDOWN? were boldly printed across the bottom. "It was him. Him, and you—"

"And Aaron Goodwin." Nick nodded toward the third figure. "The Ghost Adventures Crew. We traveled all over the country—hell, all over the world—chasing evidence of the paranormal."

Now that my eyes were fully adjusted to the change in light, I could see the small unit was packed with boxes and equipment cases, containers for cameras and coils of wiring. "So it wasn't a show? Fiction, I mean, acting—"

"No!" Nick's dark eyes burned. ""Never. We explained, debunked, everything we could; we exposed fakes when we caught them. We never lied. Not even that last night…lies were told about that night, the night it all ended, but not by us."

My eyes were drawn back to that face, Zak's face, but not Zak as I had ever seen him, not with that crooked and almost cocky smile. "What happened?" I whispered.

Nick limped across the room and sat down on a stack of boxes, propping his cane beside him. "It was almost two years ago," he began. "We were doing the last lockdown of the season, at an old boarding house in Kansas. A boarder back in the 50s killed the family who lived there, and no one had been able to move in since without leaving in fear. We set up our gear, got ourselves locked in and went to work. Everything was going smoothly, just another day at the office. The boarder lived in a garret apartment and Zak wanted to spend more time there. The plan was, Aaron & I would lock him in, give him fifteen minutes or so to make contact and then come in. He'd been goofing on Aaron though, the way we all goofed on each other, threatening to lock him in the root cellar where some of the bodies were found. So Aaron wanted to get him back—he said, let's tell him the lock's jammed, or we can't find the key or something, for a minute. Not out of meanness, Aaron never had a mean bone in his body. Just, he wanted to make Zak pee his pants, you know?

"So we did it, and Zak saw right through it. Oh well, we were busted. Only then, the door really wouldn't open. Aaron tried, then I sent him down the steps—there were six or seven steps from the third floor landing up to the garret door, and it was only wide enough for one person. I lit the space up and kept working with the key, but it wouldn't budge, and Zak was starting to freak. I could hear it in his voice, as hard as he tried to cover it. 'Guys, come on, get me outta here, please, I'm getting a really bad feeling…'" Nick's voice failed, and he covered his lower face with his hands for a moment. "I can still hear him, calling out to us for help," he said, his eyes bleak. "And then, nothing. I yelled, but he didn't answer, and we really panicked then.

"Finally I got the lock to open, halfway expecting to find Zak passed out on the floor inside. But as soon as the lock caught he—the door opened outward, and he must have been right on the other side. He hit it hard, and I fell down the stairs. Shattered this—" Nick lifted his right foot—"and burst my eardrum when my head hit. He came down the steps—I remember feeling him grab my shirt, trying to break my fall I thought, till he slugged me. Aaron went for him, to get him off me—he's got a couple of inches and a lot of pounds on Zak, but Zak beat him down like a rag doll, knocked him down, and kicked him.

"So we're lying there, bleeding, and we can hear Zak storming through the house, and crashes and bangs, and we realize, he's trashing the equipment. Aaron tried to get up…God, if he had just stayed down, if he hadn't thought he had to protect the gear. He took a couple of steps, then screamed and fell. And we both lay there till help came. Billy Tolley, a buddy of ours who did audio-visual analysis for us, was outside in a support van. He told me later that Zak kicked out a ground floor window and climbed out, came to the van and told them he was sick of the paranormal bullshit and for them to go clean up their mess. Then he walked away.

"If Aaron had just…He lost a couple of teeth, fractured his wrist and broke some ribs, but when he tried to stand up a rib punctured his lung. We almost lost him. By the time I got out of the hospital, Zak's house was on the market, his car was sold, he'd cleaned out his bank account, and dropped off the face of the earth. I didn't track him down till a few weeks ago…I gotta admit, I didn't try for the longest…and then I didn't have the nerve to call him till last night."

I realized I was holding my breath, and let it out slowly. "Surely the network didn't air that footage."

"There was no footage. Zak made damn sure of that. The official story was that Aaron and I had fallen through some rotted floorboards, and Zak went for help but was so traumatized he couldn't go on with the show. They've taken good care of us, though. I had to have several surgeries on my ankle, it was pretty fucked up; and Aaron spent nearly a month in intensive care. When he was well enough, he left Vegas. I want to find him, to let him know I'm almost off the cane…and maybe tell him I found Zak. I don't know if he'll want to know, or if I want to tell him."

Once again, I found my gaze returning to the cardboard cutout, and I searched the photo of Zak as though it were a crime scene. "What was he like, back then? Before that night?"

"Brave. Crazy. Driven. Kind of goofy. Fun to be with. He hated bullies, living or dead. If any entity hurt the innocent or the weak, he was their sworn enemy." Nick glanced at the picture, once, briefly, then looked away. "He was my friend, and a hell of a guy. Or at least I thought he was. Now I don't know if I ever even knew him." Silence fell. I looked around the space and understood it, regretting my earlier ill thoughts about Nick. This was no stalker's shrine, but a mausoleum, a final resting place for his past, his dreams and memories and friendships. I bit my lip and fought back tears. "Claire? What…what's he like now?"

"Honestly? He isn't like much of anything. He really doesn't have a personality. We live in the same apartment complex, and when I met him I thought he was the strong, silent type, still waters run deep, et cetera. But if so, they run deeper than I've ever been able to plumb. I can't even imagine the Zak you describe."

For the first time since I'd met him, Nick Groff smiled. He opened a nearby box, poked through it and extracted a small package of DVDs that he held out to me. "Here," he said. "Take these home and get acquainted with him. He's well worth your time."

+++

I took the discs home, and after supper that night I sat down to watch an episode. Seven hours later, I surfaced, breathless and shaken. Two things were for certain. One was that the Zak Bagans of those videos—intense, passionate, quick-witted, sometimes silly—bore no resemblance whatsoever to the man I knew by that name. The other was that, had I met that crusading, self-assured Zak two years ago, I suspected I would have fallen quickly and helplessly in love with him.

"It doesn't make sense!" I complained when I met Nick at the storage unit the following Saturday to return the discs after copying them. "People don't just change like that. There's no switch you flip. There has to be a reason. Do you remember Zak being really stressed out, before—before that night?"

"No more than usual. Being the team leader, he always had more on his plate than Aaron or I did, but he managed it well, as far as I could tell. I've gone over every scenario I could think of—did he have a mental breakdown, did the fear being locked in that attic make him snap, was it our fault somehow? I don't know. I do know I'd never seen him get violent before, except for one time, very briefly, during an investigation in Italy; we thought a demon tried to get into him, but he fought it off. Has he been violent around you?"

No was on my lips, till I thought of the shattered tv, and the fury that had turned Zak's green eyes almost black. "Only once. He's usually so passive. It wasn't toward me, though, directly. He—took it out on an object."

"That sounds familiar." Nick moved to some boxes stacked against one wall, and began to pull out pulverized chunks of plastic and metal, the remains of the gear the GAC had used on their last lockdown. The extent of the destruction was unnerving, considering it was caused by one man bare-handed. "Billy went through them while Aaron and I were in the hospital—a total loss, but I still kept 'em. Stupid of me, I know…Hm, this one's not in such bad shape." He lifted a small camera from the box and inspected it, and his eyes suddenly widened. "There's a memory card still in here. I thought Billy got them all."

"Where was that camera set up?" I asked. "Could there be usable images on there? And could they give us some clues as to what happened?"

Nick cut his eyes at me. "Us?" He tried to sound tough, but he was smiling a little.

'Yeah, us. I kinda have a dog in this fight too, you know."

The smile widened. I guessed it'd been a good while since he'd had a partner in crime. "All right," he said and slipped the memory card into his jeans pocket. "Then let us go find Billy."