Chapter Text
This October, Huey thought, was shaping up to be the weirdest one yet.
October was never a normal month in McDuck Manor by any stretch of the word. On the Duck family’s first year here, Webby had woken them all up at midnight on October first to decorate for Halloween. The next year, Dewey had gotten back at her by setting up a skeleton rigged to swing at her bedroom door when she opened it. That month had devolved into a series of pranks between practically everyone in the house. Even uncle Scrooge got into a few scraps with water balloons here and there. Huey was the only one who wanted no part of it, but he was still caught in the crossfire several times.
This year, he hadn’t been quite sure what to expect. So, just to be safe, on October first at midnight, he put on earmuffs, buried himself in his bed, and refused to let his nine-hour sleep schedule be disturbed.
And it wasn’t. He had awoken to a completely normal household. Nothing on fire, nobody crying, and no destruction of property.
That would be weird on a normal day of the year.
But, as with any semblance of peace in the McDuck household, it didn’t last very long.
That afternoon, when Huey walked into his room to get some personal reading done, the lights had begun to flicker on and off.
“Very funny, Dewey,” he deadpanned. As he settled in the beanbag chair with his book, though, the lights continued to flicker. He groaned. “I have important things to do, you know. Can’t you bother Webby instead?”
The lights flickered even more.
Huey covered his eyes. “DEWEY!” He shouted up at the ceiling, exasperated, and suddenly the lights stopped flickering.
And then, inexplicably, Dewey called back from the end of the hallway.
Huey was willing to brush that incident off. After all, he always liked to quote once as happenstance, twice as a coincidence, and three times as a pattern. One weird flickering light was pretty mundane, anyways.
But the next day, when he was in the kitchen, Huey heard the sink start to run. He poked his head out of the cupboard for a moment to see who it was.
There was nobody at the sink.
Confused, he stepped out of the cupboard and stared at the running sink. The water began to turn on and off in bursts. Not Morse code (Huey made sure of that), just seemingly random on-and-off sprays of water.
He stood dumbfounded, trying to figure out a way for this to be possible. The handle of the sink wasn’t even turning, and he doubted either of his brothers were smart or dedicated enough to figure out the plumbing just for a Halloween prank. A sudden chill descended on the room, and he shivered.
Then he heard soft footsteps that stopped abruptly behind him. “What’s that?” Louie asked nonchalantly.
“I don’t know,” Huey muttered, “and that’s the worst part.” He stared at the sink that continued to turn on and off, on and off. It was a horrible sound.
“...Alright, Flockrates,” Louie replied sarcastically. “Now move, will you? I’ve got a pudding cup in the fridge I can’t let Dewey find.”
Okay, well, fine. Weird lights and weirder sink activities, whatever. Twice is just a coincidence. Everything was chill.
On October 3, things became not chill. That evening, Huey made the mistake of stepping into the living room where Louie and Dewey sat watching Ottoman Empire .
The second Huey’s foot touched the floor, the TV let out a shriek of static. The screen stuttered, switched between ten different channels, then turned itself off.
“Aw, c’mon,” Louie complained. “Are you sitting on the remote?”
“No. I haven’t moved in half an hour,” Dewey insisted.
As Louie turned to fix him with a glare, he caught Huey in the corner of his eye. He turned to look at Huey’s shocked face, then back at the TV, then back at Huey. He paused, searching for the right words. “Huey, you’ve got some weird shit going on,” he said aptly.
Huey watched as the TV turned itself back on, then began rapidly changing channels again. “I know.”
His faith in the idea that it could be a prank from someone in the family was beginning to wane. In an attempt to hold onto it, he cornered Dewey and Louie after dinner that night and forced them to answer a volley of questions. Louie pretty transparently had no plans for Halloween pranks unless someone crossed him first, so Huey let him go after a few questions. Dewey he spent a little longer on before he finally admitted that he had a huge prank he was mounting up to, one that would, in his words, “absolutely destroy Webby”. Huey let him go as well, left with only one more person to ask before he had to accept the idea that was beginning to seem like the most likely scenario.
“Webby?” He knocked on her door, notepad in hand. “Can I talk to you about something?”
There was a moment’s pause, and then the door eased open a crack. Webby peered out at him. “Did Dewey put you up to this?”
“No?” Huey replied.
“Good. I would know if you were lying to me.” She pulled the door open and ushered Huey inside, shutting it behind him quietly.
Her room was strewn with devices that seemed capable of destruction far beyond the scale of a Halloween prank, but that wasn’t Huey’s focus. He nudged a flamethrower aside and sat down on the edge of her bed, pulling out a pen from under his hat.
“Are you the one pulling all of these weird pranks on me?” He began.
“What? No, of course not,” Webby said, kneeling next to a miniature trebuchet and inspecting the joints. “Why would I?”
“Well, they only happen to me, and they started at the beginning of this month, so I thought it was possible one of you wanted to forcibly drag me into your October games,” he explained. It sounded a little stupid when he said it aloud.
Webby glanced up at him, kindness in her eyes. “Well, what happens?” Huey related to her the odd events that had transpired over the past few days, including the unusual chill he had felt in the kitchen. Webby frowned. “That sounds like a gh-”
“I know,” Huey cut her off. “But I was kind of hoping it wasn’t. Last time McDuck Manor was haunted, I got chased with an axe.” He grimaced at the memory. “And this one seems a lot more…”
“Malicious?”
Huey nodded. “It would be really annoying to deal with.”
“Well, I can promise you it isn’t me,” Webby said, standing up. “I swear on my friendship bracelet!” She held up her arm, emphasizing the small colorful braid tied around her wrist.
Huey raised his eyebrows. That was about the best swear of truth you could get from Webby. “Alright.” He stood, making his way to the door. “Thank you.”
She opened the door for him. “Also, if you do find a ghost, and you want help, I want in,” she grinned.
“Will do,” Huey smiled back.
Out of other options, Huey walked across the manor to his room, pulling out his most trustworthy guide to consult on this matter. The Junior Woodchuck Guidebook certainly would have the answers to this. He crossed his fingers as he turned to the page labeled ‘GHOSTS’, the one he had filled with annotations in the margins (answers obtained from a reluctant Duckworth) and sticky notes detailing his experiences.
“Okay,” he muttered under his breath, running a finger down the page. “‘Ghosts can range anywhere from a harmless spirit to a vengeful spectre’,” he read aloud to himself in the empty hallway. “‘Symptoms of a haunting can include: noises in the middle of the night, electronic devices glitching or being otherwise tampered with, high levels of EMF radiation, a cold chill throughout the location’…” he trailed off. Yep, this was definitely a ghost he was dealing with. Which was fine , really, just … unexpected. Huey didn’t like being blindsided like this.
Well, McDuck Manor was being haunted! Big deal! They had a ghost living there already, what was one more?
Huey stuffed the Guidebook back under his hat, taking a deep breath to calm his nerves. It was okay. He had the answers now, and answers were comforting to him.
He opened the door to his room, finding Dewey and Louie already in bed on their phones. Louie was absorbed in something on his screen, but Dewey looked up and gave Huey a wave.
Huey returned the greeting and climbed up the ladder to his top bunk, quietly pulling back the covers and getting himself into a sleeping position. He closed his eyes, surprisingly tired after all of that detective work, and waited for sleep to take him.
Except , he thought suddenly, McDuck Manor isn’t what’s being haunted. It’s me.
Huey jolted awake to a buzzing sound right next to his ear. He sat up so quickly that he only narrowly avoided hitting his head on the ceiling. With tired movements, he groped in the darkness for the source of the noise, finally feeling his hand land on the cold screen of his phone next to his pillow.
He pulled the phone to his face and squinted at it. The clock read 3:30 A.M. ( The witching hour , he thought groggily,) and the display showed that an alarm was going off. Huey didn’t remember setting an alarm for three in the morning.
He also definitely didn’t remember setting an alarm with the name ‘GO OUTSIDE’.
It took a second to connect the dots. He huffed and rolled his eyes when he realized - it was the ghost again.
As quietly as possible, Huey extricated himself from his bed and climbed down the ladder, checking both of the other bunks on his way down to make sure his brothers hadn’t been awoken by the alarm. They were both sound asleep.
This ghost stuff was starting to just be irritating. If it wanted to face him then and now, Huey would happily oblige just to get it over with. He was a bit nervous, sure - his legs shook a little as he touched the ground - but that came with every adventure. With every thing , really. He was anxious a lot.
Glancing around the room, Huey ran through his mental catalogue of weapons that were effective against ghosts. His eye caught a small stuffed elephant that he suspected belonged to Dewey, and he tucked it under his arm. Some ghosts are lost children .
One weapon was good, but two weapons was even better. He grabbed a water bottle from the nightstand. Some ghosts can be melted with water, weirdly enough .
Now armed to the teeth with ghost weapons, Huey eased open the door to the bedroom and crept outside, stepping into the hall as quietly as possible. He padded down the carpeted hallway, ignoring how his heart was beginning to beat a little faster than normal, and into the foyer.
It was just one ghost. One ghost that had, for some reason, only been interested in messing with him. None of his family members had felt the same uneasy dread that had settled on Huey’s shoulders over the past couple of days. None of them reported any strange sightings that weren’t in Huey’s vicinity.
Why him?
Huey stepped outside and onto the porch, letting the cool night air hit him directly in the face. He clutched the stuffed animal a little closer, regretting not bringing a jacket along with him. The night sky was devoid of stars - light pollution from Duckburg - and a cloud partially obscured the moon. The wind was blowing gently, and the trees on either side of the manor waved back and forth.
The phone buzzed again in Huey’s hand. He peered at it, and his eyes widened.
‘IN THE FOREST’, it read.
Huey glanced up at the forest that surrounded the manor, parted only by a path through the trees that lead to the main road. It looked surprisingly dark at three A.M., transformed from a normal pine tree forest into something much more foreboding, almost sinister in nature. Huey didn’t want to venture anywhere near it, much less into it, but the alarm buzzed incessantly in his hand. It called to him in the way a siren called to an adventurer, or in the way gold called to Louie. It was a calling that would certainly end in disaster, but it was irresistible nonetheless.
As though compelled, Huey tramped down the front steps and towards the forest, looking at the trees that loomed high above him in the night sky. The wind was picking up speed now, and the leaves swayed back and forth, back and forth, seemingly quicker each time. It was beginning to feel almost scary, but Huey held his ground.
He stepped into the darkness of the forest, holding the water bottle, phone, and stuffed animal as though he would lose them forever if he dropped them. He moved deeper and deeper into the woods, hearing the wind whipping through all the leaves combine into one sound that began to pound on Huey’s ears with a vengeance. The darkness surrounded him as he came to a stop in a clearing.
“Alright, spirit, ghost, spectre, or poltergeist!” he called into the trees. “Whichever you prefer, what do you want from me? Wh-why am I being haunted?”
The dark of the forest seemed to pulsate as he spoke, looking as though it wanted to close in on him. Huey swallowed nervously, shifting his feet around on the grass. “I just want to talk!” He waved the stuffed elephant in the air like a symbol of peace, trying to express his intentions to the spirit. It was taking every piece of information he could recall from the JWG about contacting ghosts to keep him from running back to the manor.
The wind suddenly swelled, and the trees began to bend in towards Huey. He took a few steps back, only to hit something hard. He had backed himself against a tree. He dropped the water bottle and hurriedly turned on his phone’s flashlight, swinging it around the clearing to combat the darkness. The light revealed grass that was laid almost flat from the wind, and it cast itself just far enough into the trees for Huey to make out a figure of some kind, mostly hidden behind a tree, but with a gray arm visible.
“What do you want from me?!” He shouted into the wind, feeling the words torn from his throat and whipped into the air. “Who are you?”
Everything suddenly stopped.
The wind died down so quickly Huey wondered if it was even there to begin with. The trees returned to their normal, upright position, and the forest once again seemed to be a normal amount of dark and scary.
The phone trembled in Huey’s hand, and he quietly turned the flashlight off, sucking in deep breaths of air. Four counts in, eight counts out. Four counts in, eight counts out. He’d almost forgotten to breathe.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness again, he saw the figure move out from behind a tree and begin to approach him. It glowed faintly in the dark, and Huey could make out a rough outline. It was a relatively small ghost, about his size, and its arms hung at its sides as it approached.
With one shaking hand, Huey took the stuffed elephant from under his arm and held it out to the ghost, hoping that it was just a confused child ghost who would find comfort in the plush and leave him alone. “Here!” he cried out, shutting his eyes and turning his head away. “You can have this. Just take it and go.” The ghost was silent.
And then…
“Hi!” The voice was definitely that of a child’s, but it was one that sounded closer to Huey’s age than he had expected. “I’m Boyd. A definitely real boy!”
What?
Slowly, in disbelief, Huey opened his eyes and turned to look at the ghost before him. Now that it was close to him, he could see more details - the ghost was a scrawny parrot boy, about the same height as Huey, with gray feathers and yellow, black-pupiled eyes. He wore a light yellow shirt with a small red bowtie and tan shorts. His legs faded into transparency below the knee, and he had an overall translucent appearance that was decidedly ghostly in nature. He was extending a hand to Huey, ignoring the stuffed elephant, and smiling benignly.
Huey blinked. This was the ghost that had been haunting him? Just a kid his age?
Wordlessly, he dropped the stuffed animal and took Boyd’s hand, giving it a small shake. “Hi, Boyd,” he managed through his shock. “I’m Huey.”
“Nice to meet you, Huey!” Boyd said. He floated a little closer, an eager expression on his face. “Can we be friends?”
Huey furrowed his brow. “Hold on, hold on.” He pointed a finger at the ghost. “Are you the ghost that’s been haunting me for three days?”
“Haunting?” Boyd frowned. “Is that what I was doing?”
“Yes!” Huey said, a bit exasperated. He gestured wildly. “Turning the sink on and off, setting off my alarms for no reason… what else would that be?”
Boyd shook his head. “No, I wasn’t haunting you. I just wanted to be your friend!”
Huey groaned, dragging his hands down his face. “Okay.” Wow, what an anticlimactic reveal. This whole time, he was just being messed with.
On the bright side, at least he didn’t have to worry about a ghost wanting vengeance on him any longer. It was just some lonely kid his age who had wanted a friend.
At that thought, Huey glanced back up at Boyd, who was still smiling brightly at him. “How old are you, Boyd?” he asked.
“Um…” Boyd squinted, a faraway look in his eyes. “Twelve. I think.”
Huey raised his eyebrows. Boyd really was his age. Only twelve years old and already a ghost.
…Huh. That was a little sad, actually.
“Well, what are you doing out here?” Huey probed, concerned.
“I live here! I always have.”
Huey frowned. It didn’t seem right to him that Boyd was so young and lived out here alone. Especially considering the fact that he was … well. Clearly nobody was looking out for him. It hurt Huey a little bit.
And, weirdly enough, Boyd seemed to be just like him. Huey didn’t have many friends outside of Fenton and his family, which was embarrassing enough, but he also just wasn’t good at making friends in the first place. He was too much to handle for a lot of people, and Boyd seemed to be just the same. If Huey was a ghost, he might have resorted to haunting people as well.
Huey sighed, his mind made up. “Okay, Boyd,” he said, stooping to pick up the stuffed elephant. “Here’s what we’ll do. I don’t want you to keep sleeping out here in the woods, so you can come and sleep in my house for a little bit if you want.”
Boyd’s eyes sparkled with happiness. “Really?”
“Yes, really,” Huey replied.
“And we can be friends?” Boyd asked.
“...Yeah. We can be friends.”
Boyd smiled. It was more than a little infectious, and Huey smiled back at him.
“Alright, let’s go. It’s cold out here,” Huey muttered, picking up the water bottle and heading back through the woods. Boyd floated alongside him, humming quietly to himself.
Huey tried his hardest not to think of all the ways this could go wrong. Duckworth might start a turf war with Boyd. Boyd could actually be an evil ghost in disguise. No, that one couldn’t be true. Probably. Huey had only known Boyd for a few minutes, but he was beginning to feel bad about all the judgements he had made about the nature of the haunting.
Oh, no, where was he going to put Boyd? It had to be somewhere nobody ever went, not even to clean. That ruled out all of the bedrooms and most accessible rooms. Where could he hide a ghost in a seventy-six-room mansion?
Huey eased the trapdoor open and gestured for Boyd to follow him up. Boyd floated up through the floor, and for some reason, Huey was surprised. That was probably pretty par for the course, as far as ghosts went.
Huey hefted the pillow and blanket he had tucked under his arm up into the attic, then pulled himself up with them. It had taken one very, very silent visit to the linen closet to retrieve them for Boyd, and a series of very silent attempts to get the attic trapdoor open that almost ended in a very loud disaster.
“Alright,” Huey whispered, scanning the attic for a good place to set Boyd up. He found a spot against the wall and put the pillow and blanket down there, laying them out on the hardwood floor. “You can sleep here.”
He turned back to Boyd and was suddenly met with spectral arms being thrown around his neck in an embrace. It was a weird feeling, being hugged by a ghost - Huey couldn’t feel it at all, despite seeing it happen before his very eyes. After a moment, he lifted his arms and returned the hug. It was like circling his arms around empty air.
“Thank you, Huey,” Boyd whispered. “I’ve never had a friend before.”
Huey smiled, pulling back from the hug. “Well, you do now.”
Boyd floated over to the makeshift bed, resting his head on the pillow that didn’t even crease underneath him. Huey returned to the trapdoor and started down the ladder, but paused with his head still in the attic.
“Goodnight, Boyd,” he whispered.
“Goodnight, Huey.”