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They say he moves silently through the night, slithering through the air with a grace that shouldn’t belong to something so wretched.
They say that his eyes are shimmering pools of toxic green, two pinprick vortexes swirling infinitely as he peers through your window at midnight.
They say you only see him when you’re going to die.
--
Dash isn’t scared of the Phantom of Amity Park. For all he cares, the Phantom isn’t even real, just the imagined creation of some dumb kids trying to make their small town seem cooler. He doesn’t read the online forums of people who have supposedly seen or even met the Phantom, he doesn’t glance around frantically as he walks home at night, and he definitely doesn’t check out his window before bed to make sure there are no glowing eyes staring back.
Dash isn’t scared of the Phantom.
Dash isn’t scared of anything. He’s 15, he’s the starting quarterback of the JV football team, and he eats twiggy nerds for breakfast. There’s no one higher on the food chain than him in Casper High’s freshman class. So why the hell should he be scared of an urban myth that hasn’t even been around for a year?
Kwan and Star talk about cryptids at their lunch table every other day, joking about the memeability of a creature that, by all accounts, could kill them with a single blast of fluorescent green fire (or so the forums say). Paulina daydreams about the Phantom being a teenage boy with a bright smile and even brighter eyes. She claims he saved her from a dragon during homecoming; Dash thinks she just got roofied by some asshole senior and hallucinated the whole event.
And Dash? He picks at his cafeteria meatloaf and half listens to all his friends theorise - what the Phantom looks like, what its ‘powers’ are, why it’s in Amity Park - while he desperately convinces himself that it’s all pretend.
On one of the few occasions that he lifts his eyes from his lunch tray, his vision drifts across the cafeteria to where Fenton and his geeky weird friends are laughing over some video on his phone. That loser’s been acting weird since school started - skipping class, getting detentions every other day, actually snapping back when Dash makes some stupid pun on his name - not to mention that whenever Dash jostles him in the hallway, a zap of static runs up his arm and steals his breath. It’s downright creepy.
But that’s nothing compared to the way Dash feels when he’s walking home alone after football practice, like he’s being watched by hundreds of eyes in every shadow he passes. Like the shadows are reaching out towards him, their tendrils almost finger-like when they snag at his hair or his clothes. Sometimes he dares a glance, and swears he sees a flash of green darting away.
His throat feels tight.
He runs home.
Maybe Dash is scared of the Phantom.
Maybe Dash is scared of things that shouldn’t be real, can’t be real. Cryptid, ghost, demon - whatever people say the Phantom is, they don’t exist. And they definitely don’t exist in a place like Amity Park.
--
Dash is walking home from football practice just past nightfall, eyes downturned and feet moving as fast as they’ll take him without running, all to avoid the creeping feeling of being watched. Every day is shorter now that it’s November, and Dash is keenly aware that each day the shadows grow, the more likely it is that one will actually get him. Maybe that’s why he notices the shadows inching closer, why he feels a shiver in his bones too severe for the 50 degree weather. Either way, he barely has time to lift his head before he is yanked into an alley.
He lands with a grunt, his knees and palms slamming into the concrete. Whoever (whatever, his mind supplies unhelpfully) pulled him must have been pretty strong - inhumanly strong. Dash realises with a sinking feeling that he’s probably about to be kidnapped, or human trafficked, or cut up into tiny pieces. There’s some kind of pulsing light in his periphery, but Dash is too caught up in worst case scenarios to look up.
Instead he stays low to the ground, eyes on his backpack that is now in front of him, still looped around his right arm. As the pulsing light grows stronger, a sickening thought comes to mind: you only see him when you’re going to die.
He doesn’t look up. He can’t look up. If he looks up, he knows what he’ll see (or rather, knows that he has no idea what he’ll see), and then he’ll die. Whether from the sheer shock of seeing the Phantom, or because the Phantom will kill him to keep itself a secret; Dash doesn’t know.
Dash doesn’t even realise that the noises he was hearing (grunts and dull thuds, and short crackles of electricity, followed by an electronic whirring, during which the light was brightest) have stopped, until a scuffed white boot appears in his line of vision. Who the hell wears white boots?
He’s looking up.
The first thing he sees are the eyes - two circles of fluorescent green, like someone had taken the world’s strongest highlighter and coloured over the pupils and irises. They cast the rest of the face into shadow, though Dash isn’t sure there is a rest of the face at all. He doesn’t realise at first that the eyes are speaking to him.
“...get it together, man.” Dash realises that there’s a mouth there too - actually a whole, youthful, face, cast into angular shadows by the glow of its eyes. “Hey, that was a nasty fall. Are you ok?”
As Dash processes this question (is he ok? He doesn’t know) and sits back on his heels, his eyes roam over the rest of what is now clearly a teenager standing in front of him.
“You’re real.”
“Uh, yeah.” The Phantom looks behind himself warily. “Are you seeing things that...aren’t real? Did you hit your head?”
“Uh, I...I don’t think so,” Dash replies slowly, starting to gather himself up. He dusts gravel off his hands as he stands; luckily he didn’t land on anything sharper. It’d be a real pain if his hands got cut up and he couldn’t play football this weekend. If he even lives to see this weekend. “Are you gonna kill me now?”
The Phantom blanches at that. “Why would I-? Y’know what, maybe I should take you to a hospital just in case.”
“But...but the Phantom kills people. People keep disappearing whenever you show up!”
“Dude, I just saved you from the thing trying to kill you.” Although it’s still difficult to see any expression past the Phantom’s eyes, Dash gets the distinct feeling he’s being judged for his stupidity. And, yeah, maybe he is being stupid about this. Surely if the Phantom was going to kill him, he would have done it as soon as he dragged Dash into the alley. Unless the Phantom is telling the truth, and there was something else, something worse than him, trying to get its spectral hands on Dash for some nefarious purpose. “Also, it’s just Phantom, no ‘the’ necessary.”
“Huh?” Dash is pulled from his quickly spiralling thoughts.
“My name. It’s just Phantom.”
“Oh. Okay.” Now that he is thoroughly distracted from the fear of dying imminently, and his eyes are starting to adjust to the dark, Dash is realising that not only is Phantom a judgmental, sassy teenager, he’s also...kind of cute? But that thought is abruptly cut off by Phantom sighing impatiently.
“Look, are you gonna be okay getting home? It’s pretty dark out,” he asks. Dash didn’t think ghosts could genuinely care about humans.
“Y-yeah, I’ll be fine,” Dash shrugs, beginning to look over his shoulder. But as soon as he turns away from Phantom, he realises just how dark it has gotten. Whatever Phantom fought off has fried all the street lights as far as Dash can see, and anything past Phantom’s radiating aura is an inky black sea. There’s not even any passing car headlights to remind Dash that Amity Park exists beyond this alley.
“You sure about that?” he hears Phantom mutter, almost smug.
“Yeah, whatever.” Dash pulls himself up to his full height, turning back to Phantom to show that he is definitely, one hundred percent, not scared of walking home. Maybe a steely look and good posture will fool his own brain too.
“Ok man, whatever you say,” Phantom says, still clearly not convinced that Dash isn’t going to go into shock the second he leaves. Then, turning, Phantom hovers slightly off the ground. The edges of his body seem to quiver, like Dash is seeing double (he doesn’t think he is), and then Phantom drifts backwards into the brick wall.
Dash shoulders his backpack, turns to begin his trek out of the alley, and realises abruptly that, when he shares this experience at school tomorrow, no one will ever believe him.