The ghost, with its mouth stitched shut, did not smile coyly or grin cruelly, nor did it frown grimly, nor make much of any expression at all. It looked straight ahead with intense concern, like a child locked onto a television program of utmost interest, eyes and body unmoving, save for its slow, smooth drift forward, consuming ever more hallway.

... That's what people in front of it saw. Mako, on the other hand, saw nothing in the hall until he had unwittingly stepped through the specter.

The ghost paused behind the frozen shark. Without shifting its gaze, it stretched forth its ghastly white arms and set them gently, frigidly on his shoulders.

It began to lift him off the ground. It drew him toward its face. Its mouth was stitched shut; its eyes gaped emptily.

One began to gape more than the other. Inky black, the single circle of the ghost's right eye stretched wider... wider... and wider, until it was three times Mako's head, and caused a hideous, bulbous projection in the otherwise smooth form of the ghost's "head."

It ever so slowly ingested Mako through its immense, dilated eye. Its surface shimmered like the surface of a dark pond as the shark disappeared from view. It moved forward again.

With all the door-slamming and screaming and yelling going on, Rock felt ever more pressure to get the situation resolved immediately. He thus let his flashlight beam lead the way, sweeping it in front of him with no less emphasis and desperation than a child with a pretend flashlightsaber—and for good reason, as the first thing it fell on, the huge specter, virtually split in half with a foggy "poof" as soon as the piercingly bright light struck it.

But there was no shark left behind, and Rock didn't know to look for one. The nearby shower room door shut with a vicious bang, however; the laughter that followed clearly indicated it was by someone up to no good.

"The generator's in the basement!" Rock shouted to whosoever among the living would dare listen. Was it a call for assistance, or a general service announcement? Hard to say, but he was soon wresting with the shower room door. With little patience for the struggle, he breached the door with a single well-placed kick after only a couple seconds of fighting the handle. Before he disappeared inside, though, he shouted one more thing:

"Nobody freak out! They're not that dangerous if you just keep calm!"

How much was "that" dangerous, though? That phrasing left a little of wiggle room for general danger-levels.

Any efforts towards keeping calm were almost immediately hindered by another bizarre event in the series of bizarre events already occurred. The music, which had tailed away momentarily, came back in full force.

With the music, the almost indescribable happened.

Boos, everywhere. They drifted through the air on unseen odd currents, their faces locked in rigid, hysterical smiles. Their grins went from ear to ear, their eyes bugged out of their heads.

With very little attention to the physical structure of the house, they drifted through wood and concrete. Their faces jutted up through the floorboards. Their eyes showed out of every metre of the ceiling.

Where rock's lamp shone, they vanished—becoming shadows on the walls or strange discolourations on nearby pieces of furniture that provided shade from rock's lamp, but as soon as the light moved away, they were there again, and there was no way anyone could ever shine the lamp at every ghost at once.

Moving without emotion save the insane rictus plastered all over their face, they perceived the situation, and began forming whirling, glowing cordons, hemming the other members of the house in and separating any abandoned emergency lamps from the ones who had dropped or forgotten them.

A similar situation evolved in the Rec room.

Only one boo appeared there.

One giant boo.

The far wall of the reck room, furthest from the Griffin and the Mole, slowly morphed, and changed into one. Giant. Face. It had eyes almost a metre cross, teeth longer than either of their arms. The huge, distorted visage pulsed and twitched as it expanded, bigger and bigger, stretching across the ceiling as it grew.

Abruptly, a ghost appeared, in front of Ace, at eye level. It's saucer eyes stared into Ace's with vapid glee.

Its mouth gaped as it mouthed unintelligible nothings, and it began to grab at the cat's fur and ears as if it was a child trying to get a new toy.

OOC: Rapid-fire response!

Dropping her shield for just the instant she needed to to pull Mako inside (which, to an unfocused eye, might have just looked like a momentary pulse), she promptly grimaced at whatever was on her hands, and wiped it on the seat of her pants.

"Yeah, no prob," groaned the increasingly frizzy-furred monkey, as she edged uncomfortably towards the hissing, spitting walls of the electrified sphere. "Just... try not to touch me, 'kay?"

The house was in complete and total havoc and chaos, bursting at the seams with grinning faces, fiery eyes, stitched mouths, inky stares, floating objects, distorted music, fearsome images and reflections, and every other bit of mass antagonism the horde of ghosts could throw at them.

Just when it seemed it couldn't get much worse, though, there was a loud rattle; the ground shook, and the music stopped (complete with vinyl record zzzzip). All the ghosts fell silent; indistinct murmurs passed throughout the building, while those burning eyes darted to and fro in anxiety, and their giant, frozen grins very nearly rotated in their rigidness to huge, upside-down frowns.

These were the small fish; even the "big" boo of the other room soon faded through a wall and retreated. Just as soon as the haunting had begun, it ended... or, at least, the first wave ended.

The emergency lights scattered through the rooms flickered; it slowly became easier to see in the building, but in a very cold, unnatural sort of way, as if there was some sort of harsh, bluish, glowing vapor permeating the air. Then came another resonant thud. The hallway began to contort, and the very structure of the building became muddled and confusing, as the air blurred and distorted, and the main room morphed and rotated itself so that the front door was directly in line with the hallway, which suddenly seemed... immensely long. All of the doors, including the one to the rec room, flung wide open for all to see—all except those who were heading into the basement, for better or worse.

The front door looked as if it was twenty feet tall, and the ceiling warped upward to accommodate it. Locks on the front door began to click and clack; one by one, bolts turned themselves, latches came undone, chains feel free, and the crossbar dropped to the ground.

The door creaked open, and fell limply from its hinges with a crisp slap of metal on concrete. A tall, dark figure scraped its way in, dragging its feet dully behind it. Its long coat made it hard to make out its body. A shrill, metallic noise, caught between a grinder and nails on a chalkboard, accompanied it as it pulled a bent, rusty section of spike-topped, wrought-iron fence behind it in its right hand. The trailing, snaking mess of old graveyard fencing was too long to see the end of, vanishing somewhere out in the inky black night.

The figure's head, a half-decayed jack-o-lantern, lit bright, and the hood it wore blew off with a strong whip of the icy-cold wind. Straw scattered all about, while it raised an appendage that looked more like a rake with long, gnarled, rusty tines than a hand with fingers.

It hurled the length of iron ahead; the fencing screamed through the structure, spinning and spiraling, ripping and tearing at the floor, ceiling, and walls, with sparks, splinters, and dusty drywall spewing every which direction on its fast-flying journey down the hall, speeding at Ace, Sheff, and ultimately Caz and Jack at the end of the line, with what looked like every intent to slice through the lot of them.