A/N: This is the epilogue/one shot the whole story was based on... I started this months ago, but stopped writing it because I didn't know where I was going. So I did a one shot, based on what I had started. If I hadn't written the story, I would have published this as a stand alone story. As it is, it serves as the epilogue. Thanks for reading!

THE HOUSE

Epilogue

The black haired man stood on the overgrown path, surrounded by trees and bushes. His feet sunk a little in the grassy underground, making hard to see indents in the dirt. The warm air surrounded him like a blanket, and not so much as a breeze was there to cool his face. In that stillness, he could hear insects buzzing, a distant bird chirping, the occasional car going by on the road behind him.

"Green," he thought, as his blue eyes scanned the advancing forest, "Everything is so green."

It seemed inappropriate for some reason. The place should be black and dead, nothing should be able to grow there. But there it was, the forest was reclaiming the property, and in fact, the only way to recognize that something had once been there was the big iron gate behind him, pushed out of it's hinges by his supernatural strength nobody suspected he still had.

The house was gone, so completely as if it never existed, but the foundations were still there, hidden underneath the vegetation. He could feel it. Closing his eyes, he started to probe his surroundings, feeling the grass, the undergrowth, every leaf of every tree. And the blackened stone of the cellar that was still there, it's entrance blocked by rubble. Entombing his friend.

He didn't want to go any further, but he couldn't stop now. He saw his heightened senses as a curse, always feeling every detail of what was around him, distracting him, overwhelming him, unless he numbed them with any sedative he could lay his hands on. Still, he wished he had had that ability before entering the house, six years ago. They would never have entered if he had been able to sense even a fraction of what he was detecting now.

"Yeah, keep telling yourself that," he muttered.

The things that seemed to important then had all faded away. Looking back on it, the Dumpty Humpty concert they didn't see after all, homework, fighting ghosts, his slipping grades... he had realized the unimportance of it all only after that disastrous night. Of course he had felt something from that house, and so had his friends. It didn't take a genius to figure out that he was responsible for Tucker's death as much as he had killed Kwan.

He always tried to avoid thinking about Kwan, but the memory of the blackened corpse was never far from his mind. Unlike Dash, who remembered nothing, the events from that night were etched into his mind, forever there, only a fleeting thought away from a terrifyingly real flashback. Dash, he thought, was the lucky one, even if he would never play football ever again, or even leave the mental institute he was in.

Brain damage. Even though Danny didn't show it, and in fact nobody believed it, he was damaged too. There was a presence inside of him, something that was nibbling at his ghost form, something that could be seen only from the corner of his eyes, mumbling, whispering in his mind. He could never make out what it was saying though. Part of the house was always with him.

Once set out, his senses were difficult to pull back in, and when he touched the solid back stone of the remains of the house he plunged right through, entering the cellar in all it's unnatural vastness. Of course it was dark there, pitch dark, any normal person walking around there wouldn't have been able to see anything at all. He wasn't a normal person, or even physically there, so he could see perfectly well. He pulled himself together for a bit, assuming a mist like form, concentrating on being in the cellar and nowhere else.

The house sensed his presence too, it seemed to welcome him in like a friendly grandmother, come on in son, I have tea and cookies. He suppressed a shudder and ignored her, but still going in deeper and deeper, until he had found what he was looking for. He had never wanted to do it in the past six years, always postponing it, but this was his last chance. So he had made sure he was sober and off any drugs, knowing he'd need his wits about him. The house could still catch him.

The... remains were laying in a corner, pressed against the wall, his clothes barely recognizable as such, his red beret still on his head. Next to him was his backpack with all his precious technology, which hadn't saved him. Danny studied him in a detached way, one of the advantages of leaving his body. He didn't feel so much then, his emotions seemed to be bound to his body somehow. Unfortunately he couldn't do it often, as it drained him completely. He'd probably be in bed for days after this.

It wasn't really Tucker anymore. Not his goofy, happy friend, always trying to get at date with a pretty girl, always fiddling with his PDAs, cracking jokes at the expense of his friends. Now he was just a bag of bones, almost rotted away, somehow having escaped the fire. For a brief, panicked moment Danny imagined his friend being trapped there in the cellar as the fire was blazing above him, trapped and unable to get out. But he knew that wasn't true, he had been dead already.

The house smiled at him, "Are you sure?"

He started to sweat, feeling the house close in on him. Even in it's diminished state, having been completely burnt to the ground in that intense, insanely hot ecto fueled fire, it still had power. Enough power to make him nervous. He started to pull back, but instead found himself closing in on Tucker until he was only inches from what had been his face. Tucker moved his head and turned his empty eye sockets at him, grinning. Pieces of his face were falling of him when he did that, and Danny tried to push him away, gagging.

He fell on top of Tucker, well, not really fell because he wasn't exactly there, but it felt like it. He could feel the corpse, the crushing of the brittle bones, the dampness of the rotting flesh.

"No," he thought, "Nonononono."

Mentally, he rolled away and looked up to the ceiling. The cellar seemed to waver, as it had done so many years ago and he knew he had to get out of there fast, or he would be stuck there forever, his mind in there and his body outside, comatose. A living hell.

"This was a mistake," he thought, "Sam was right. We should have just left."

It was to late for those thoughts now, but he couldn't help loosing himself in that self destructive thought train again for a moment. He was alone in that cellar, the house would eat him alive, he would be trapped there until his body withered away, and the house could take his soul. The house chuckled.

"For eternity," it said.

He felt a weight on his chest, as if the air around him was closing in on him, crushing him, pushing the life out of him. He pushed back, harder and harder, using all the energy he had left. It wasn't much. He had already used up most of it by entering the house in that way. He managed to create some room around himself, so that it at least didn't seem as if he was suffocating. But he couldn't get out.

Somewhere, his body had started walking, moving towards the house of it's own accord, as if somehow it wanted it's soul back. He could feel it moving, the muscles of his legs and arms, jerking unnaturally in a stiff walk, staggering forward through the bushes, scratching his hands, his arms, his face. He tried to reach out for it, unite with it again, and suddenly the weight of the house lifted and he was free.

"Go on," the house seemed to say, "Go ahead. Go back. To your pretty girlfriend, live happily ever after."

"She's not my girlfriend," he thought automatically, but if that was true then what was she still doing here with him, taking care of him, putting up with all his crap.

He held very still, wary of the fact that the house was letting him go just like that. There was a catch, there was always a catch, he never had a break with anything he was doing. It wouldn't just let him leave, walk out of here. It had been waiting for him for too long. And then he felt it. A creeping sensation, starting on his fingers, his hands, his arms. Something was seeping into him, a darkness, the essence of the house itself. And it had been doing that since he entered.

"NO!" he yelled, and he jerked back out of the house and slammed into his body.

Sam was getting impatient. She had been sitting in her car for thirty minutes now, waiting for Danny to finish... whatever he wanted to finish. They had argued about it for days, and she had tried to get him to change his mind, but he could be very stubborn sometimes. He had wanted to say goodbye to Tucker one last time, to get some sort of closure before they left Amity Park for good.

She sighed, and stepped out of the car, peering through the rusty gates of that cursed house. He had been standing there a moment ago. Now he was gone. Worriedly she stepped through the gate, not really wanting to, but ready to bail him out of trouble once again.

She had been taking care of him in the past few years, ever since that fateful night Tucker and Kwan died and the house burnt down. She was the last one left to him, the only one he tolerated being near him. His parents, his teachers, his doctors had all given up on him, and only Jazz tried to keep some sort of contact with him. They didn't understand, only she did, why he was the way he was. And even she didn't know why he sometimes left all of a sudden, kept them worried for days and one time even weeks, before turning up again as if nothing had happened.

She didn't know where he went, she had tried looking for him, but of course if Danny didn't want to be found, he couldn't be found. She suspected that every now and then the onslaught on his hypersensitive senses just became too much for him. She dreaded the day he would disappear and never come back.

Even Vlad had tried to get through to him at one time, and in her desperation, she had let him, swallowing her pride and her disgust at the billionaire, telling herself that, although the guy was a creep who wanted to steal Danny's mother away and have him as his son, he still had Danny's best interests in mind. Danny's reaction had been... explosive. It had taken weeks to regain his confidence. Vlad had never shown his face again.

But now everything would change. They were leaving Amity Park, to the house she had bought with the money she had inherited from her grandmother when she turned twenty one. It was at a small lake in the middle of a forest, miles away from other houses, and more than fifteen miles away from the nearest town. She hoped he could find peace there. If only he hadn't had the stupid idea to visit the house one last time.

She pushed her way through the bushes, calling out to him while she approached the house, silently cursing him for breaking his promise not to go near it. She should have known better than to trust him, she supposed, but she had thought he would be as afraid of the place as she was. Like the first time, she could feel the darkness emanating from the place where the house had been. If only she had listened to her intuition then.

She tripped suddenly, and fell flat on her face, hitting her knee painfully on the root of a tree. Groaning in annoyance she pushed herself up, and turned around to see what it was she tripped over.

Feet.

"Danny," she gasped and crawled over to him, pushing the grass away that loomed over him as if he had been laying there a long time, face down, like an overgrown corpse. She reached his head and grabbed his shoulders, turning him on his back. Insects were crawling out of his mouth, his nose, there were holes where his eyes should be, and she couldn't make a sound as she looked into his gray face.

But then he sighed deeply and lazily opened his eyes, and to her relief she looked into his familiar blue orbs. It had been another illusion, one of the tricks the house liked doing, and it left her shaken to the core.

"Danny," she choked.

He blinked. "Hey," he said.

He pushed himself up on one arm, and smiled at her, extending his hand to wipe a stray hair out of her face. She sighed in relief.

"I thought...," she started, but he hushed her.

"Shhhh, it's OK. I'm alright. We're alright."

She hugged him briefly and he let her. Then she extended her hand and helped him up, knowing full well what he had been doing, and that it had drained him.

"Tucker?" she asked.

"Still there."

He didn't say anything more, and she knew he never would. In silence they walked back to the car, the taller Danny leaning on Sam's small frame. She helped him into the passenger seat, and taking one last look at the gate, slid into the driver's seat, started the car and drove away.

The house chuckled.

Wow, I'm done. Finally. I think I'll be leaving the dark and angsty stories alone for a while now, even I can stand only so much pain and suffering... Thinking up a horror story on a nice spring day, and actually writing it down in the middle of the night are two totally different things.

I think maybe (maybe!) there's a sequel in here somewhere. I mean, at some point somebody (Vlad?) is going to want to build a house on that spot again... :D And I didn't resolve everything. I'll do it if I can come up with a decent plot line.

As for my reviewers... thanks for taking the time to tell me what you think. You helped shape this story with your comments, questions and encouragement. You don't know how helpful you've been:

Akia Starfrost, AvatarKatara38, cordria, crazychick6692, Dannyandsamlover, Devianta (who reviewed every single chapter :), DP fan, Dpcrazy, DPFreak, Dracozombie, Dutschie (bedankt!), Em Phantom, Esme Kali Phantom, FernClaw, Jessica0, Just call me Crazzy, Lemia, libragirl93, Luiz4200, Majalo, Manyara, Me-agaisnt-the-world, onlyreviews, pearl84, Plushiemon, PrincessVictoriaAnnMacbeth, Silver Shadowbreeze, Summers Rage, Thunderstorm101, Zilleniose, Zuzanny

And in alphabetical order too. Neat huh.

Special thanks to Devianta, who convinced me to make this story a lot darker than I originally intended.

Bye, for now,

uula