Who: Mike & Noah What: Museum times Where: Point Pleasant Museum When: Wednesday afternoon, 10/25 Status: Complete
Mike didn’t mind taking a late shift at the museum. He hadn’t really been up that late the night before, though the night had definitely been stranger than he expected. With the way Jules Cooper had thanked him it was like he’d done some super heroic deed when all he’d really done was give her a ride home. Anyone who wouldn’t do that with a girl who woke up barefoot in the middle of the road was some kind of an assclown but he still felt good about it. Especially the part where he hadn’t been going too fast and had seen her in time, that was a good one.
The museum was slow on this particular Wednesday afternoon, tourist season was slowly dying down but they wanted to keep it open as much as possible and that included the little cafeteria. Mike ended up tidying the place idly while listening to an audiobook, pulling the headphones out whenever someone happened to stumble in. Three so far over the span of two hours. This day was already rocking.
The fourth customer got his attention because unlike the elderly couple and the professor looking dude from earlier this one was young. He was also black - which in a town like Point Pleasant actually got people’s attention - and tall. Mostly Mike noticed because he was hot and hot people always pinged his interest. He pulled his headphone out and paused his book, giving the guy a friendly smile as he came closer. “Hey there, can I help you?”
Noah had been outside the museum to meet up for the witch tour and had a made a note to come back later to see the rest of it. He had been to his fair share of museums and “museums”, the latter of which fell into the category of roadside attractions more than anything. It had been a little surprising Point Pleasant even had one, though the town had been around a long time and had enough witch history that it kind of made sense.
Wandering through the museum, stopping to read the informational placards along the way, still didn’t take too terrible long. He hadn’t been sleeping great, so he was in need of another coffee by the time he was done. There was a cafe he had passed on the way in, so he detoured there. No one else was around aside from the employee working there--a tall, cute, white guy who looked vaguely familiar, though Noah was confident they hadn’t met before. He smiled easily back. “Hi, yes. Can I get the largest latte you have to offer, please?”
"Coming right up," Mike said as he went about making said latte. If Noah wanted a really good one he'd have to go to Joyland but the coffee at the museum wasn't bad either. "New in town or just passing through?" Mike asked since it was hard to tell with people. Point Pleasant wasn't really a place people passed through but they got their share of weekend tourists and there were still some people left in town after the witch festival. Mike didn't remember seeing this guy at any of the booths but he hadn't exactly talked to everyone there.
“Thanks.” Noah had been to Joyland enough that his order was recognizable to Alex, which was somewhere between nice and a little embarrassing, given that Noah hadn’t been in town that long. “Passing through. Sort of. My friend and I will probably be here a couple more weeks. We’re from Chicago, but he knows--knew--a guy from here who went missing, so we came to check that out,” he said. Given other people’s reactions when Noah had talked to them--hell, even the alert that went out a few days ago--, he had rapidly gathered that a missing person wasn’t anything too unusual for here; he’d been having a weird week with the other half of what they came to look into, so he didn’t get into it. “Have you lived here a while?”
"Since I can remember," Mike said since born and raised didn't quite apply. He'd frowned a little at the bit about the missing person and it probably said a lot about Point Pleasant that he wasn't sure who they meant. If it was recent then it was Danny Valiant, the radio host, and it did sound like it was a recent case so it was a fair assumption to make. "Didn't know Valiant though, if that's who you're looking for." He gave Noah a sympathetic smile and set the latte down on the counter. "That'll be three fifty."
“Yeah, that’s him. I didn’t know him very well, but my friend Magnus talked to him a lot online. I’m mostly here for moral support, research Googling, and checking out the sights,” Noah said, unable to keep the sarcastic inflection from the word ‘sights’, though he followed it with an apologetic smile. He was still logic-ing his way through the weird shadows at the cemetery. “Thanks.” Noah pulled out his wallet to pay for the latte, before picking it up and taking a sip. “This is good.” It was fine as far as lattes went, but he needed it more than usual and the guy who made it was cute. “What’re you listening to?” he asked, glancing at the headphones.
"Audio book," Mike replied, fiddling with the headphones hanging around his neck. "Duma Key, spooky stuff." He widened his eyes dramatically before grinning. "No witches though, I don't think. Were you guys in town for the festival?" There had been plenty of sights to be seen there though of course it was old hat to Mike who'd lost interest in the whole thing when he hit his teens. They got plenty of travelers coming through who enjoyed it and he had to admit sometimes there were fun things involved. This year he'd only been there because of work and it hadn't looked like he was missing anything new and exciting. Save for maybe that preacher guy protesting at the gate, that had been something.
Noah grinned in return. “Yeah, we checked out the festival. Had an 'authentic seance', went on the late night witch tour, ate too much funnel cake. It was a good time." They'd also sort of taunted a supposed witch into giving them ugly sunglasses, but that didn't feel like it was worth mentioning. "Does it change from year to year, or is it the sort of thing when you go once, you've pretty much got the hang of the whole thing?" he asked. It was kind of hard to imagine that it was the sort of thing that had much variety, but sometimes people could try. "The religious protest seemed very within the Puritanical spirit, but I assumed that wasn't a modern update for part of the festival."
"It was pretty standard," Mike replied. "The protest was new though, pretty sure it was not scripted. That guy has a church downtown, something Redeemer Fellowship." Sounded ominous enough but most religion sounded like bullshit to Mike. "How did the seance go? Did you get any long lost relatives telling you where to find Danny Valiant?" His disbelief in the whole thing was palpable, a wry smile curling his lips.
“Sounds like the showy sort of church that would stage a protest, though my immortal soul’s been going to hell long before I went to a witch festival,” Noah said, grinning. “We didn’t get any ghosts so useful as that. Just some guy named George telling us he had found peace at last, now that we had thrown twenty dollars into the garbage.” It hadn’t exactly been that, but it was about as real as Noah expected, which was to say: not at all. Reading the disbelief in the other guy’s tone was a relief; Noah felt like he kept running into people who sincerely bought into the whole thing. “So you’re not a believer that Point Pleasant is haunted by at least thirty ghosts?”
"Nah, at least forty-two," Mike quipped and then shook his head. "If one day some scientists come along and bring evidence or at the very least acceptable theories? I'll consider it. It all makes for good stories but I don't understand why people would want that fiction to be reality." He already liked this guy and his smirk said as much. "So you coughed up twenty bucks and they couldn't even pretend it was someone you know? That's some shitty cold reading."
Noah laughed. “Yeah, can you believe it? Madam Fatima could have at least summoned up the ghost of my long lost great uncle to warn me of my untimely demise due to deep fried dough.” He grinned wide, since he was enjoying their conversation. "Or drummed up someone more interesting from the forty-one other ghosts hanging around. I’m in agreement with you. I enjoy ghost stories and the cheap thrill that comes with a good one more than the average person, but there’s no truth to it and it’d be pretty morbid if there were. Though admittedly the rumors about Point Pleasant were a bonus draw for coming here.”
"Well, a lot of the stories behind those rumors are true," Mike said and he could absolutely understand the appeal. It was a small town with a very dark history and dark, difficult woods where people went missing all the damn time. It only made sense that there were stories about it, though it made more sense when people didn't have the internet. Now there were so many ways to reveal a hoax for what it really was and people still believed in all this crap. "Ghosts or not, we do have some creepy real life shit happening here and it doesn't have to be supernatural to be creepy." He often found himself in this position, telling people the stories he knew since people came to the museum for information and were thirsty for more by the time they came to the cafeteria.
“Yeah, people are fucked up and terrifying enough in their own right as it is. No special powers needed.” Noah knew that the violent death aspect--whether by murder, accident, or suicide--from which could spring forth wild rumors often held some truth to it. He had little doubt that the ways in which the Point Pleasant six had died was in any way fabricated, nor any of the other bloody stories he had come across so far. That people disappeared in Point Pleasant at an alarming rate was also abundantly clear, even in the amount of time Noah had started researching. He and Magnus still needed to hash out an angle for their next debunking video for their channel, but the wealth of information meant it took some extra time. “Got a creepy real life thing you wouldn’t mind telling me?” he asked. He was curious, more than anything, though wouldn’t be pushy about it if the guy declined.
"Nothing that's not public knowledge," Mike replied. "If you're looking for real life creepiness I'd recommend reading old news on the Cooperdale Tunnels. Some weird things have happened there including a serial killer and someone just snapping and killing her friend. People think it's cursed or haunted and if I believed in that shit I'd think so too." He might not believe in that shit but he still thought it was a good idea to stay away from that place. There was a bad vibe there, whatever the hell that meant.
“Curses sometimes seem like they’d be easier to accept than that people are just shitty, but I still can’t really believe in it, either. So, I’ll check it out. I’ve read some of the paper archives that are online, but that only goes so far back,” Noah said. “I’ve been meaning to get to the library anyway.” Reading up on real life murders was an interesting, if morbid, hobby at any rate, and tended to be something Noah ended up doing a lot of. Taking another sip of his latte, he then asked, “Is Halloween night a big deal around here?”
"This place is Halloween crazy," Mike said with a nod. "It's like a last ditch effort to have fun before it gets cold and shitty. The weekend is mostly parties and such but Halloween itself will have some event in town and a party at Dragonfly. Plenty to do." He looked Noah up and narrowed one eye, then smiled. "I'm Mike by the way." They'd done a lot of talking so maybe introductions were in order.
“Noah,” he said, smiling warmly back at Mike and offering his hand that wasn’t holding a latte to shake. “That’s good to know, since I’m pretty sure otherwise my friend would make us wander the streets for candy since we settled on costumes. Is Dragonfly a… club?” It was kind of hard to imagine Point Pleasant having one of those, but maybe it did. They had passed what looked like a strip joint not that far away on their drive into town, so who knew.
"Nah, it's a bar but I've seen people dancing there," Mike replied. "It's a great place, great atmosphere, I think you'd like it." He had been wanting to ask if Noah had a costume in mind but that answered his question already so he tilted his head curiously and sized him up, trying to quietly guess to himself what sort of things he might like. "What are you guys going as?"
“I’ll definitely try to check it out.” It wasn't as though they had firm Halloween plans and Mike seemed cool, so Noah was willing to take his recommendation. “I’m going as Horatio to my friend’s Hamlet. It was my alternative to his insistence of Bill and Ted,” Noah said, flashing Mike a grin, assessing him in return. “What about you? Will you be there in costume?”
"Yup," Mike replied and he could well imagine those costumes would be hot but it also sounded a little bit like Noah's friend might be more than just a friend if they were coordinating their costumes like that. "My friends found some Mad Hatter costume at the Halloween store so I'll have a sort of a steampunk hatter costume - unless I manage to trash it on Saturday. My band's got a gig in Sanford so we're all dressing up."
Whatever Magnus was to Noah and if it went beyond friendship was the kind of thing he never examined too closely. The coordinating costumes never felt like anything other than a tradition they had somehow fallen into. Noah quirked an eyebrow as he considered. “That sounds kinda hot,” he said without thinking about it; how Mike would react to being called hot by another guy, even offhand, was impossible to predict so Noah just moved on quickly. “Are you a steampunk sort of band like Voltaire or Abney Park?” It was kind of a specific genre, but one Noah was into in high school. “Or some other type of music?”
Steampunk anything was kinda hot so Mike didn't question it though he did grin and take at least part of the statement as a compliment. "Nah, we mostly play whatever music we find that none of us hates so it's pretty random." They really had different tastes in music and Mike was pretty sure they'd never have been in a band together if they weren't such close friends. "We're just dressing up for Halloween. Our drummer's a demon, our singer's Elvira and I'm the Hatter." He made a sweeping hand gesture though he didn't quite bow. "Mostly rock. I take it you're actually into steampunk stuff, huh?"
The slight, involuntary, tension that tightened Noah’s shoulders dissipated when Mike seemed to not mind that comment. He huffed a laugh that was directed at himself. “I went through a phase in high school, though those were the only two bands I remember off the top of my head, so I went with it on the off-chance it would be at all impressive,” he said wryly, then grinned at Mike. “So that makes you the… bassist?” Noah hazarded as a guess, since it was probably either that or guitarist, if they mostly did rock, and as the tiebreaker he went with the one he liked more. “What’s the name of your band?”
Most people guessed guitar so Mike was pleasantly surprised when Noah accurately guessed the bass, nodding at him with a grin. "The Drowsy Getaway. It was supposed to be a sleepy little indie band but uh... Vicky's a screamer." She wasn't really a screamer but boy could she belt out those rock songs. "I play bass and keyboards, depending on what we're playing, we mostly do cover songs. Here..." He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and fished out one of the few remaining cards with the band's info on it to hand it to Noah. It included his email but if Noah wanted to email him then that was just cool. "We've got some stuff up on facebook."
Noah looked at the card, then set his latte down so he could pull his wallet back out and tuck the card inside so he didn't lose it. “That sounds cool--I admittedly have no musical talent whatsoever. I'll take a look later,” he said, smiling at Mike. Noah intended to. It'd give him a reason to email. He picked his drink back up, which he was maybe inhaling less fast than usual to linger over talking. “So, what kind of music do you like? Scream-y rock, sleepy indie, or another yet to be disclosed category?” he asked, since Mike had mentioned having to find songs he and the other band members didn't hate.
"Indie, alternative, sleepy or cocky," Mike replied with a little grin because that last word was fun and just a tiny bit suggestive. "I can listen to almost anything but those seem to end up as favorites. How about you?" Sometimes you could tell just by the way people dressed but Noah's clothes - at least at the moment - didn't really tell him anything. Neither did Mike's but he was at work so there was that.
Noah tended to dress fairly nondescript when he was exploring on his own in a small town. He had been in Point Pleasant a couple weeks now, but he was going to stand out anyway, so he didn't feel like adding to that without reason. “Cocky, huh?” he said, grinning at Mike for his word choice. “Kind of mood dependent. I default to a lot of indie rock or folk if I just need something to listen to, electro swing and art rock if I'm trying to get some writing or editing done,” he said.
Mike quirked a brow curiously. "What do you write?" he asked since he loved people who were artistically inclined. They didn't even really have to be good at what they did, creativity was just a fantastic personality trait and he tended to gravitated toward people like that. Maybe that was why he'd taken an instant shine to Alex the writer, even if he had no idea what his writing style was like.
“Professionally, a lot of book reviews, the occasional op-ed, and a couple short stories. The last is what I like most. I’ve done a lot of short horror fiction, since those kinds of movies and books are what I’ve consumed since forever. Once I get an idea, it’s like I can’t not write it, if that makes any sense,” Noah said. He still had a lot of ways he could improve, but writing was something of an obsession. “My friend and I also have a paranormal debunking YouTube channel that we threw together as a hobby in college, but have been doing for a few years now. I do the scripting for that so it isn’t just us talking out of our asses for forty-five minutes. Though there’s still a lot of that.”
That all sounded kind of awesome and Mike was particularly interested in the videos Noah mentioned. "I know you're here for your missing buddy but if you want to make videos about Point Pleasant there's plenty of stories that need debunking. What's the name of your channel?" It was interesting yes, but Mike was also a little shallow and he never minded watching a pretty face and maybe Noah's friend was cute too.
“Beyond the Hoax. I can email you the link?” Noah offered. He had cards for their channel, but they didn't contain his personal info and part of him was too lazy to dig them out. He smiled at Mike. “And we have noticed there's a lot here that's got potential, which contributed to our decision to come. We just need to pick an angle to start from that won't lead to the police yelling at us for trespassing,” he said, since that had already happened and he still felt lucky that it hadn't been more than that, so he didn't necessarily want to push it.
"Some of the spookiest places aren't off limits to the public," Mike told him after agreeing to the email. He just hoped Noah wouldn't forget but he made a mental note of the name just in case he would. "Like the tunnel, which by the way? I won't go in there, even if I don't believe in ghosts. That place feels weird." He laughed it off but it was true, something about the Cooperdale Tunnel always made his skin crawl. "You should check it out, see if there's some high pitched sounds or something there fucking with my inner ear, yeah?"
Noah would email Mike once he was back at Juniper. He never had trouble remembering to contact attractive people, even if Mike might only be showing polite interest. “Yeah, we can check it out. I’ll make a special note to listen for the high-pitched noises, just for you,” he said, giving Mike an amused grin. Murder places always had a creepy vibe regardless, but he and Magnus had a habit of visiting them, so it wasn't like they'd be immediately deterred. “We went to the Zinneman House on Ludlow to check it out and I guess someone called the cops on us. It just seemed like a rotting house where someone rigged the lighting on a motion sensor or something though.” And where he hallucinated some kind of gunshot sound, but it wasn't worth mentioning he had an overactive imagination when in a heightened state of anxiety.
"Seriously?" Mike said and laughed incredulously. "That place is falling apart, I didn't think anyone cared who went in there." He hadn't been there in years and he'd heard it was just getting spookier and spookier. People loved their ghost stories. "And I heard about there being lights on in there but the guy who told me was too scared to go investigate." He hadn't heard anything about motion sensors so that was interesting. "Did they go off or something?"
“Yeah. They went off when we went inside, then came back on when we went back on the porch, though motion sensors seem like a lot of trouble for a pretty lame prank, so maybe it was just shitty wiring,” Noah said, shrugging. “But who knows, one person’s decaying pile of crap is another's treasure?” His tone was sarcastic and accompanied by a rueful laugh, since it was easy to do outside of the moment. “Sometimes me existing while black is reason enough, but we were hoping the cops would have something better to do than monitor abandon houses and leave us idiots to risk falling through the floorboards on our own.”
"Hey," Mike said, raising a finger in a jokingly admonishing way. "We have one black deputy on our police force, we're woke here in Point Pleasant, thank you very much." Two technically but Mike wasn’t really keeping up with the staff at the PPPD. He knew exactly what Noah meant though, unfortunately. Maybe their cops were racist. "I wouldn't know though, I'm white and loaded so they let me get away with everything. You should bring me along next time you're trespassing."
“That makes you twice as good as a shield,” Noah said lightly. Magnus had half of that going for him. “It's kind of a fun adrenaline rush sometimes when the cops don't show up, if you did want to check out a supposedly haunted house. Other times it's a little boring. But I mean, all told, they were nice enough as cops go.” Like nothing had ended horribly, which felt like a huge hurdle, but he had still been freaked out by it since there was no way to know that until after the fact. “So I'll make sure to add ‘relatively woke’ as a positive in my TripAdvisor review of Point Pleasant,” he joked, casting Mike a grin.
"Oh I'll remind you," Mike replied. "But I might just be your lookout, wait in the car and sweet talk the cops when they swing by." He wasn't a huge fan of places like the Zimmeman house and the Cooperdale Tunnel. There didn't need to be ghosts there for it to be creepy and those places were decaying which meant they were chock full of broken glass, risky floor boards and various other things that could get a guy hurt and/or infected with something gross.
“That's probably the smarter choice, really,” Noah said. Maybe one day he and Magnus would move on from doing this, but it didn't feel like it was on the horizon. His latte was starting to cool, but he needed the caffeine so he carried on drinking it. “What's your favorite thing to do around here, fake haunted shit aside?” Noah asked. He felt like he had seen a lot of what the town had to offer, but he was curious.
"Pretty much shit I could do anywhere," Mike admitted. "Read, play video games, play music, drink too much, smoke on occasion. Sex, drugs, rock and roll and other typical things. Dragonfly's a good place to go drink, the karaoke bar is fun, both those places just have a really good vibe going. I don't know, I like fun. How about you?" Live fast, die young, make a beautiful corpse. It was a little too on the nose for him.
“I also like fun; sex, drugs, and rock and roll are all good ways to get there,” Noah said, grinning. “But yeah, mostly the same, ultimately--I read, watch bad TV and movies, and road trip to random places. Go out to parties and drink too much, sometimes to clubs for live shows or to meet people, when I’m back in Chicago.” There wasn’t really anything stopping him from doing most of that in Point Pleasant, just lack of familiarity. “Though I’ll make sure to check out the places you mentioned.”
Oh no," Mike said with an incredulous laugh. "Life's too short for bad TV, unless you mean it's bad in a really entertaining way. Like it's trash but it's your trash." The rest of it sounded good though and Mike definitely wished he could go clubbing more often. Maybe they were due another road trip soon, get out of town and go dancing.
“Oh, it’s definitely from a so bad it’s entertaining angle,” Noah said. He didn’t always go out of his way to watch shows solely for mocking them, but there were some he stumbled across where things just worked out that way. “Like anything that sets itself up as providing paranormal ‘evidence’ and features some asshole offering to fight a ghost is pretty much my trash. Mostly as long as it’s not boring, I’m willing to give it a shot. Both in TV and life.”
"That sounds like it would be even more fun if you're stoned," Mike murmured with a grin and made a mental note of actually testing that theory sometime. Jack would definitely be into it, maybe Alex too even if Alex seemed to believe a lot of weird shit. "So you've debunked a lot of stuff so far? You're kinda like that guy... What's his name? James something, offered up a million bucks to anyone who can actually deliver solid proof of the supernatural and nobody's gotten that money yet."
“A fair amount. Mostly we focus on hoax videos that get around, since my friend is a film editor and a lot of it is just optical effects to varying degrees mixed in with stories that get ripped off of whatever. More cursing, fewer potential cash rewards, though,” Noah said flippantly, smiling at Mike. “Really, we just got indignant and drunk in college one night and just went from there. If you start at the beginning it’s, uh, some nonsense. It might be better if you’re stoned? The entertaining bad TV definitely is, or if you get in deep enough that you come up with your own drinking game.”
"Maybe I'll just watch the latest one first and work my way back," Mike said and it did sound reasonable that anyone's first videos sucked. He had some old songs that had sounded amazing when he was thirteen but today they just sounded like garbage. "Everything's better when you're stoned," he admitted so that wasn't saying much. "We should hang out sometime, roll a joint, watch crappy ghost hunting shows." Because why not? They might never make good on it but Mike liked meeting new people, however fleeting it might be.
“Yeah, definitely,” Noah said, smiling warmly at Mike. There was no guarantee they would actually do that, but the idea definitely appealed to him, as long as Mike didn’t mind that Noah’s stay in Point Pleasant was ultimately temporary. “Both to things being better while stoned and to hanging out,” he clarified, then laughed a little since maybe that level of specificity wasn’t necessary. “Whenever you’ve got some free time from working here and band stuff. I don’t really have much of a set schedule while we’re here.” Noah wasn’t sure how busy Mike’s days tended to be but his own varied while being fairly flexible, for the most part.
"I have a lot of free time," Mike replied. "And you've got my number so call if you ever get bored." He had no doubt Noah would keep himself busy while he was there but there were bound to be rainy and dreary days that were made for lounging at home watching TV. It was almost November and the weather wasn't going to stay nice for long.
“I will,” Noah said. He had kind of forgotten about his latte, caught up in talking, but he drained what little there was left of it. “I should probably get going for now. Let you get back to Duma Key and, uh, not take up all of your afternoon,” he said; even if there didn’t really seem to be many other people competing for Mike’s attention, Noah didn’t want to overstay.
Mike didn't mind having his time wasted but his book was also really good so he wasn't too upset to see Noah leave. He did hope he'd actually call sometime though, he had an easy vibe to him that Mike could appreciate. "Yeah, stay safe out there and hit me up if you need a lookout." He grinned and fished his phone back out of his pocket before plugging his ear with one of the earbuds.
Noah moved toward the trash to dispose of his empty cup. “Enjoy the rest of your book,” he said, flashing Mike a smile. “I’ll email you later.” Mike seemed cool and Noah would like to spend more time with him, so he was planning to hit him up. For now, he headed out of the museum cafe, glancing over his shoulder one more time before he left, and then went on with the rest of his day.