(A/N):
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....
Meanwhile, some distance away from Forks, Jenny had travelled to Baylean Bay with her husband Kang, their son Alex, Cole Seer and Cole's mother, along with two members of the Quileute Tribe.
They had received a request concerning an old house where the occupants had reported strange noises coming from the basement, followed by the appearance of a shadowy figure that had apparently been watching the family from the darkness.
The locals had initially assumed it was nothing more than an ordinary haunting, but after a few people reported seeing the same figure standing at the bottom of the basement stairs, the case had been passed along to people who actually knew how to deal with supernatural incidents.
Fortunately, the investigation turned out to be much simpler than they had expected.
The spirit occupying the basement was powerful enough to frighten ordinary people, but against their combined experience it barely had a chance.
After determining that the spirit was tied to an old object hidden beneath the floorboards, they removed the object, separated the spirit from it and dealt with the entity without much difficulty.
Once everything was finished, the house was sealed and the family was advised not to enter the basement until the remaining spiritual residue had completely disappeared.
By late afternoon, they had packed everything into their vehicles and were preparing to head back toward Forks.
Alex was helping Kang load the remaining equipment while Jenny spoke with Cole's mother about the case, and the two Quileute members were checking that they hadn't left anything behind.
Cole stood a little away from the others, absentmindedly looking along the road while waiting for everyone to finish.
That was when he heard the distant sound of music.
At first, Cole paid no attention to it.
The familiar melody of an ice cream truck was hardly unusual, especially on a quiet road during the afternoon.
He continued watching the road, expecting an ordinary brightly painted van to appear around the corner.
Then the vehicle came into view.
Cole froze. Something about it immediately felt wrong.
To everyone else, it appeared to be an ordinary ice cream van moving slowly along the road, but the moment Cole's eyes settled on it, his supernatural senses reacted before his mind could process what he was seeing.
The cheerful colours seemed to disappear from his perception, replaced by the image of an old, heavily rusted vehicle that looked as though it had been sitting abandoned somewhere for decades.
The paint was peeling from the metal, patches of rust covered the body, and the windows appeared dark and filthy.
Cole stared at it without moving.
The others continued talking, unaware that anything unusual had happened.
Then the driver turned his head.
Cole's stomach tightened.
The man's face looked wrong.
His skin appeared unnaturally pale, his features seemed distorted by the darkness inside the vehicle, and when his eyes met Cole's, the driver smiled.
It wasn't the friendly smile of someone selling ice cream to children.
It was a slow, unsettling smile that seemed to say the driver knew exactly what Cole was seeing.
Cole couldn't look away.
The driver held his gaze for several seconds before slowly turning his attention back toward the road.
The van continued driving, its engine making a rough, uneven sound that Cole could hear even after it had passed them.
Only when the vehicle disappeared around the bend did Cole finally breathe again.
"Cole?" Jenny called from behind him.
"You alright?"
Cole didn't answer immediately.
He was still staring at the road where the van had disappeared.
Kang noticed his expression and walked over.
"What happened?"
Cole finally turned toward them, his face noticeably paler than it had been moments earlier.
"Did you see that ice cream van?"
Alex looked toward the road.
"The one that just passed?"
"Yes."
"What about it?"
Cole hesitated.
He didn't want to sound ridiculous, but what he had seen hadn't been normal, and his instincts were rarely wrong when it came to supernatural things.
"The driver looked at me."
Jenny frowned.
"So?"
Cole swallowed.
"He smiled."
There was something in the way he said those words that made everyone stop what they were doing.
One of the Quileute members looked down the road.
"Did you sense something?"
Cole nodded slowly.
"I don't know what it was, but when I looked at the van, it didn't look like an ice cream truck anymore. It looked old. Really old. Like it had been sitting there rotting for years."
Kang exchanged a serious glance with Jenny.
Alex looked back toward the road, clearly trying to see the van again, but there was nothing there anymore.
Cole remained unsettled.
He couldn't explain why, but the driver's smile had left him with the unmistakable feeling that the encounter hadn't been accidental.
The van hadn't simply passed them.
The driver had seen him.
And whatever Cole had seen when he looked at that vehicle had seen him back.
Cole's description of what he had seen made Jenny's expression change almost immediately.
She had initially assumed that perhaps Cole had simply been startled by the driver or that his supernatural senses had picked up something that the others couldn't, but the more he described the vehicle, the more uncomfortable she became.
According to Cole, the ice cream van had looked old and badly rusted, the driver had appeared almost corpse-like, and there had been something deeply wrong with the man's smile.
Yet when Jenny, Kang, Alex and Cole's mother looked down the road, none of them had seen anything unusual at all.
"There wasn't anything wrong with that van when it passed us," Jenny said slowly.
"It looked like a normal ice cream truck to me."
Cole frowned.
"I'm telling you, it wasn't normal. The moment I looked at it, everything about it changed."
Kang glanced toward the road where the vehicle had disappeared.
"Could it have been some kind of illusion? Maybe something that only you could see?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Cole replied.
"I know what I saw."
Before Jenny could respond, one of the Quileute members who had been standing nearby suddenly looked toward the road with a serious expression.
He had been quiet until then, but now he exchanged a glance with the other tribal member beside him.
"We didn't see the truck either," he said.
Cole looked at him.
"But we smelled something."
Jenny immediately turned toward him.
"What kind of smell?"
The man hesitated, as though trying to find the right words.
"Something foul. It wasn't the smell of exhaust or rotten food. It was stronger than that. It smelled like something had died and been left somewhere for a long time."
His companion nodded.
"I smelled it too. It came from the road when the truck passed. I noticed it because it didn't belong here."
Kang's expression hardened.
"So none of us actually saw what Cole saw, but you two picked up the smell?"
"That's right."
Jenny looked toward Cole again.
"And you said the driver looked directly at you?"
Cole nodded.
"He didn't just look at me. It felt like he knew I could see what the truck really was."
That was enough to make Jenny stop treating the incident as a strange coincidence.
She looked at Kang, and the two of them exchanged a silent understanding.
They had dealt with enough supernatural cases to know that something appearing ordinary to most people did not mean it actually was ordinary.
If Cole had seen a completely different version of the vehicle while the Quileute members had detected an unnatural smell, then there was almost certainly something supernatural involved.
"We should investigate," Jenny finally said.
Kang nodded. "Agreed."
Cole's mother looked toward the road with concern.
"But the van is already gone."
Jenny picked up her phone and checked the direction in which the vehicle had travelled.
"Then we follow the road and see where it went. If it really is supernatural, we might find something else along the way."
One of the Quileute members glanced at the others.
"And if that thing is dangerous?"
Jenny gave him a serious look.
"Then we don't confront it alone. We find out what we're dealing with first and contact Jojo if we need him."
Cole looked back toward the road, still unable to shake the image of the driver's face from his mind.
"There's something else," he said quietly.
Everyone turned toward him.
"When the driver smiled at me, I felt like he wasn't surprised that I could see him."
Jenny's expression became even more serious.
"Then let's find out why."
They quickly abandoned their plans to return directly to Forks and began loading their equipment back into the vehicles.
What had started as an ordinary investigation into a troublesome spirit had suddenly turned into something completely different, and none of them knew yet that the strange ice cream van they were about to follow was connected to something far more dangerous than the haunting they had just dealt with.
As their vehicles pulled away, Cole kept watching the road ahead, wondering where the strange van had gone.
Somewhere farther down the road, hidden beyond the next series of bends, an old ice cream van continued driving.
And inside it, the driver was still smiling.
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(Author's POV)
(A/N):
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