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Conan doesn’t really like telling scary stories.
Honestly, his life is enough like a horror film (or maybe a buddy cop movie when Hattori’s in town) that he doesn’t really feel the need to augment that by actively seeking out material .
But apparently the Detective Boys don’t feel the same.
They’re having a slumber party at Agasa-hakase’s house, because they’re six and they can still get away with multi-gender sleep-overs and sleeping in dog piles on the floor. Honestly, Conan’s pretty chuffed about that. He’d been a little reluctant at first, but the power of three six-year-olds and their tears had overwhelmed him. Also, wherever he moved, they just followed him and flopped down on top of him, so he just kind of...gave up.
(It was nice to have friends who didn’t care about how many dead bodies he ran into. Before the Detective Boys, he’d really only had Ran and Sonoko, and maybe a couple of soccer players he was friendly with, but...they’d more tolerated his corpse magnet curse than anything else. They didn’t seek him out the way the Detective Boys do, shied away from touching him because what if the curse rubbed off on them?
Conan doesn’t blame them.)
It’s one of those nights, one when Haibara’s actually deigned to join them, when they haven’t had a case that day, when everyone’s just a little bit restless, when Ayumi says, “Hey, let’s tell scary stories!”
Genta and Mitsuhiko practically jump over each other trying to agree first, and Conan just watches them with a slight smile. He’s in a good mood tonight, since he hadn’t had to deal with a dead body or small children messing up the crime scene, so he wouldn’t mind listening, maybe even telling one of his own.
Besides, the Detective Boys’ “scary” stories usually turn out to be hilarious to anyone over the age of ten.
He makes eye contact with Haibara, and she shrugs, smiling slightly. “I have no objections,” she says.
“Yay!” Ayumi exclaims., and then she, Genta, and Mitsuhiko move to arrange themselves in a half circle facing Conan and Haibara. “Wait, who gets to start?”
Genta volunteers himself, narrowly beating out Mitsuhiko. He looks squarely in the eyes of everyone in the room, then ruins the tense moment by eating a handful of popcorn. “I’m gonna tell you the scariest story in the history of time,” he says, still chewing.
“Right now, I would say that your manners are the scary part of this story,” Haibara mutters under her breath, and Conan bites back a snicker.
Genta swallows, and then says, “Once upon a time, there was a boy named - uh, Kenta! And he was very hungry. He was always very very hungry. So hungry he could eat the entire world - ” He holds his arms up to make a circle over his head. “And there was only one thing that would fill him up!”
“What was it?” Ayumi urges.
Genta smirks. It doesn’t look quite right on his face - he’s probably trying to imitate Conan. “One day, he went to the store,” he continues, completely ignoring Ayumi, who pouts. “And they were out of eel, so Gen - uh, Kenta went on a rampage and ate the entire world, and his stomach grew so big that he exploded. Ka-pow! The end.”
See? Hilarious.
Mitsuhiko clears his throat. “That wasn’t a very good story, Genta-kun,” he says.
Ayumi nods. “Yeah, that sucked, Genta-kun!”
Genta scowls at her. “Fine, then you do better!”
Mitsuhiko gets an uncharacteristically devious expression on his face, and that’s one he definitely copied from Conan. “...Conan-kun usually doesn’t participate in these things,” he says. “Why don’t we ask him, instead?”
Conan wants to wipe an imaginary tear from his eye. He’s taught them so well.
Easily distracted, Genta agrees: “Yeah, Conan, tell us a story!”
“A spooooooky story!” Ayumi adds, waving her fingers to add to the effect.
Conan feels a smirk threatening the corners of his mouth, but he bites down on it. “Are you sure?” he asks.
“Yeah!” comes the answer in surround sound.
Conan shrugs. “Fine, I’ll do it. Just this once, though.”
Under the cover of the other three cheering, Haibara hisses directly into his ear, “You’re going to give them nightmares , Edogawa-kun.”
Conan stares at her for a long moment. “Haibara, they see corpses on a fairly regular basis. A spooky story isn’t going to traumatize them more than that.”
Haibara looks away and folds her arms, which is Haibara for I guess you’re right but I’m not about to admit that out loud.
Fair.
Conan clears his throat, and suddenly he has three pairs of eyes on him, followed by a reluctant fourth. “This is a true story,” he begins. “It was a dark and stormy night - ”
Mitsuhiko cuts him off. “But that’s boring , Conan-kun!”
Conan rolls his eyes. “Do you want me to tell the story or not?
Silence.
“ It was a dark and stormy night. And on that dark and stormy night, there was a woman alone in her house. That woman’s name was Mary, and she was waiting for someone.”
He stifles a grin at Haibara’s sharp intake of breath.
“Mary looked at her reflection in the mirror opposite the door. She’d been having an affair with a married man - a doctor - and that day was the day she’d decided that she was going to tell his wife.”
It’s a little sad that the Detective Boys have seen enough cases to have a pretty good idea of what an affair is. They’re all nodding along, rapt.
“The doctor opened the door, and Mary didn’t turn to face him. Instead, she kept looking at him in the mirror. ‘I’m going to tell your wife,’ she said. The doctor paused just inside the doorway, still holding his briefcase. ‘Tell her what?’ he asked. ‘About the affair,’ Mary replied matter-of-factly. ‘We’ve been seeing each other for three years now, and you’ve only been married for four. Someone ought to tell her, and clearly it isn’t going to be you.’ ”
“ Burn! ” Genta whispers excitedly, and the other two shush him.
Conan grins. “The doctor reached into his briefcase and took out a scalpel. ‘Yes, you would be right about that,’ he said. ‘But she won’t be hearing about it from you, either.’ Mary didn’t even have time to turn around before the doctor attacked her eyes with the scalpel.”
Mitsuhiko gulps audibly.
“The last thing that Mary ever saw was her own reflection being murdered in the mirror by someone she loved.”
Ayumi frowns, opening her mouth to interrupt, but Conan’s not done yet. “The doctor cleaned up anything that might point to his presence at the crime scene and then left Mary lying there on the floor. But Mary wasn’t quite dead yet. She couldn’t see anything, but she blindly felt her way to the mirror, and, using her own blood, started to write her killer’s name. She died before she could finish, and to this day the case remains unsolved.”
Genta’s mouth is slightly open, Mitsuhiko is eyeing him skeptically, and Ayumi looks only mildly scared.
But Conan’s still not done.
“A hundred and fifty years later, maybe twenty years ago, the mirror was sold by Mary’s nephew to a seemingly nice family in the suburbs. Except that they had a secret.”
Suddenly he has their undivided attention again.
“The father had been involved in an accidental hit-and-run the year previously, but no one had been able to identify him or his license plate, so the case was at a standstill. The father felt guilty about it, of course, but not guilty enough to turn himself in. It had blown over at this point. Or so he thought.”
He’s gratified by a small gasp from one of them - he’s not sure who, but it doesn’t really matter.
“One day, his youngest daughter had a sleep-over with her friends, much like the one we’re having now. They played Truth or Dare, and the daughter chose ‘Dare.’ Her friend dared her to go into the bathroom and say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times, because that was supposed to summon her.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath next to him. Even Haibara’s hooked.
“Since the daughter didn’t believe in ghosts, she went into the bathroom and called Bloody Mary three times. Nothing happened, so she went back to her friends and let her father in to brush his teeth. Except, when he looks into the mirror - Mary’s mirror, his eyes are bleeding and there’s an intense pain in his head...and, standing behind him in the mirror is Mary. ‘You killed him,’ she says, and then everything goes black. Five minutes later, his older daughter finds him dead on the bathroom floor, eyes scratched out and the name of the victim of the hit-and-run written in blood on the mirror.”
Coan discreetly checks his watch. Good. Almost eleven.
“Next, the mirror is sold to a daughter who blames herself for her drug addict father’s overdose. She’s friends with the other daughter, and she calls Bloody Mary three times in front of the mirror to prove to the other daughter that Bloody Mary doesn’t exist.”
“She’s right…right?” Ayumi whispers hopefully, and Conan doesn’t laugh, though it’s a definite effort.
“Minutes later, she was dead, lying on the bathroom floor with her eyes scratched out and her father’s name scrawled on the mirror.”
Conan pauses dramatically.
“And so the mirror travels on, changing hands until no one really knows where it ended up. Mary grew in power, enough to leave her mirror and appear in front of anyone who called for her. And the only way to call her is...
“Bloody Mary,” Conan says, stifling a grin.
The others gasp, eyes wide and unblinking.
“Bloody Mary.”
They squeak in unison, curling up into themselves.
“Bloody Mary.”
Suddenly, the lights flick on.
Ayumi, Mitsuhiko, and Genta scream . Even Haibara lets out a small squeak before schooling her face.
Agasa-hakase leaps a foot in the air, squawking, over by where he’s just turned on the light switch. He’s probably only down here to fix himself a cup of tea or a snack, but instead he’d been the perfect jump scare to the story.
And Conan laughs.
Their faces.
Haibara turns on him, livid. “Did you plan that?!” she asks, voice strangled.
Conan smiles enigmatically. “How could I have?”
(Agasa-hakase always turns on the light when he gets his midnight snack. Curiously enough, his midnight snack is actually closer to eleven at night.)
Haibara stares at him for a long moment, then says finally, “...You’re the one dealing with their nightmares.”
Conan shrugs.
Worth it.