Avery had been fifteen when his brother and his friends lured him into an abandoned house and beat the shit out of him. He’d heard rumours in the school that the old McCarthy place was haunted. Some girl swore up and down that she’d seen a white figure in the window, and she looked pretty damn convinced.
Paranormal investigation was a new interest for Avery at the time, but one he had thrown himself into whole-heartedly. He watched hours and hours of Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters, and read screeds of ghostly interactions on forums online. He’d even ordered actual EMF meters and hand-held thermometers, and found a vest that had heaps of pockets for storing things in so he could have his hands free. He’d decided on a night when his parents were out of town for a conference to go there, so they wouldn’t catch him. Xander was meant to be watching him and Hope, but it was easy enough to sneak out when his brother was in the den with the door shut and the TV blaring.
The McCarthy house was suitably creepy. It had been foreclosed on in the 2008 crash and nobody bought it, because legend said that Old Man McCarthy had lost everything, and hung himself in the basement for the repo guys to find when they came to take the property. Avery had snuck in the back door, crucifix clutched tightly, his heart thudding in his chest with excitement over his first proper ghost hunt.
“Matthew McCarthy, are you here?” he’d called, his voice a little tremulous at first. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I was to communicate. If you’re here, give me a sign.” Nothing… and then a knock from upstairs, and the lights flickered once, twice. His heart in his throat, Avery stepped carefully to the bottom of the stairs, EMF clutched in his hand. The one green light stayed steady.
“Matthew McCarthy, are you upstairs? Knock if you’re here.”
A pause, and then a definite knock thrice. Avery walked up the stairs, and one he got to the top, he fumbled with his thermometer and held it out, his hand trembling slightly.
“Please, give me a sign,” he said as he reached the master bedroom. There was a laugh from behind and he whipped around, but it wasn’t a ghost. The teen boys standing there definitely weren’t ghosts. His brother jeering at his stupid hobby had felt pretty fucking solid when he shoved Avery into the wall and hit him in the face, and between them the gang smashed everything Avery had been carrying, and shattered his dignity and his spirit and his nose besides.
He hadn’t been able to understand why nobody could just let him be. Avery hated his brother with every fibre of his being in that moment, as he limped back down the stairs, crying quietly from hurt and anger. Wiping his bloody nose on the back of his hand, he’d left that shitty place behind him and went to his old treehouse to hide out.
The treehouse had been built for the boys to play in, but by then they were all too old for it, so nobody went up except for Avery when he needed a place to hide. It had been a place of great adventure when they were small, but then Xander had gone to school and made shitty friends, and Avery was left to his own devices. As Avery looked out of the window now at the tree and the treehouse, he remembered hiding in it all night until Topher had come to look for him in the morning, finding him bloodstained and miserable. After that he’d tried to avoid Xander if at all possible, retreating further into his obsessions, turning from ghosts to extraterrestrials because that seemed like a safer outlet than walking into a trap.