by Willow Mason
“The path takes up again over there,” Jared said, pointing to a dilapidated trough drying to cracks in the summer sun. “And I wouldn’t mind cutting through the woods on an angle to reach the stream earlier. This trek has me parched.”
My throat was dry too but the thought of drinking from a stream that close to a cemetery hurt worse than being thirsty. “You can run ahead if you want. Catch me back up on the track.”
He didn’t need a formal invitation, taking off through the undergrowth and dropping to all fours so he soon disappeared. Only the dry crackle of leaves and brush let me know he was still close by.
“All this effort to see a place that’ll probably give me nightmares,” I grumbled to myself as my ankle twisted on a stump that turned out to be half-rotted. “I hope there’s something there worth seeing.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I could snatch them back. Already today I’d seen an infuriated dead man trashing his fiancé’s house and observed her shaking grief. In no way, shape, or form did I need to be greeted at the cemetery by anything but a nice meandering trail of undisturbed headstones and overgrown plots.
“I thought you were staying back home to keep an eye on our guest.”
Having worked retail for numerous years, I couldn’t agree but I sympathised with the sentiment. Paisley might have a flowing print vibe for a name, but she was a Karen by nature.
“Hopefully, once word gets out about her predicament, some kind soul will volunteer to take over her care.”
A good idea and one I silently swore adherence to.
“Why would someone hide a cemetery out here?” I paused to catch my breath again, turning in a half-circle to look back the way we’d come. “Was grave robbing a large problem a century ago?”
“Just so long as it’s only the smell you’re getting. If you track stains through the house, you’re cleaning them up.”
“A broomstick would certainly come in handy right now.”
A crashing noise from our right-hand side announced Jared’s return. Annalisa gave a light hiss as he sauntered onto the track, mouth agape with joy, bounding forward with enthusiasm to meet us.
“Did the stream have more than water in it?” I asked with a laugh as he shook his hair out, still grinning. “You seem to have far too much energy for a walk to a cemetery.”
“Right. Yeah.” He pulled a solemn expression into place. “That better?”
She was right. The hinges squeaked but a splash of darkness against their dark charcoal hue showed where oil had been applied. Inside, the grass was tall—somewhere close to four inches high—but still retained the pattern of mower tracks across it. The lack of dandelions and clover indicated somebody tended to the weeding, even if not on the regular.
I entered with Jared following close behind. The circular layout of the stones was the only significant difference I could see between this plot and others I’d visited in the past. Well, that, and the fact this was on my land.
“Do you think everyone buried here is a witch?” I knelt and tried to read the words on one headstone but even brushing a thick coating of lichen away didn’t lend any clarity.
“This guy has the same name as my new pack leader,” Jared exclaimed, sniffing around the sides of a plot covered in wildflowers. The dozen different varieties all offset each other so well, I suspected they’d been planted by design rather than randomly sprouting on the grave. “Hederman. It’s not common enough to be anything but a relative.”
I stalked the rest of the plots, trying to find connections. Although there were a few Milchtraps buried, I couldn’t read their first or middle names clearly enough to place them.
“We need to come back here with some weedkiller and try to work out who everyone is.”
“I recognise this one well enough,” Jared called out, standing by a newer grave located at the far side of the grounds. “Isn’t this the fellow that decided to go roaring past me this morning?”
Annalisa and I rushed to his side, and I bent to rub my thumb across the engraving. “Andrew Pike Darby. I think we’ve found our man.”
Following her gaze, I saw the pile of fresh blooms torn apart into a thousand different pieces.
“Looks like somebody got angry,” I mused, prodding the bundled stalks in search of a card, and coming up empty.
“Somebody or something,” Jared added, pointing to a patch of dark ground where the grass had been torn out by the roots. Even on close inspection, I couldn’t tell whether the action had come from above or below.
“I hope this doesn’t mean we’ve got zombies on the loose.”
He bared his teeth. “If you’re so smart, work out which signs belong to rampaging poltergeists and what is natural wear and tear.”
The panther roamed around the cemetery, rubbing against stones and iron posts, before sloping back to join us.
Before Jared could retort, I knelt behind Andrew’s grave, trying to get a different view of the site, bruising my knee on a stone. It was embedded in the earth behind his neighbour’s grave and I picked it up, intending to toss it outside the gate so no one else would injure themselves.
Instead, I held onto it, my thumb tracing a pattern engraved on the surface. The object was dark—jet or onyx—with a bird etched on one side and a Latin inscription on the other. In ultione victoria.
Annalisa translated,
“Lovely.” I stood up, my knees cracking. “Nothing like a good spot of vengeance to start your morning.” A clear spot on the headstone was in the same shape as the black stone. As I moved to replace it, my fingers tingled and went numb, the amulet dropping to the ground and disappearing in the long grass.
I swept my hand through the stalks a few times but couldn’t locate it again. The pins and needles in my fingertips evaporated, and I rubbed them against my jeans to rid them of the last of the sensation.
“Beyond the flowers, there’s nothing here,” Jared said, his voice tinged with disappointment. “And they might have been torn apart by a passing animal with a distaste for floral arrangements.
His statement coincided with a text message from Patrick. “Our dentist clients want us to come down,” I read aloud. “Their day’s gone from bad to worse.”
A dark bird swooped down to land on Andrew’s gravestone, cleaning its beak on the edge of the stone. Or sharpening it.
I shuddered, the attack from yesterday still fresh in my mind. When we walked out of the gate and picked up the trail, I kept my hands up to protect my head.
Chapter Six
“These original fittings are rather lovely,” I excl
aimed, touching my finger to a brass fixture securing an old-fashioned gaslight to the brick wall. “Is this the inside or the outside of a house?”
“It was originally the outside,” Wes said, more animated than I’d seen him since our arrival. “When the extension was added, the builders didn’t want to take down the entire supporting wall of the house, so the exit became just another door inside the house.” He sighed and ran his hand over the rough bricks. “It’s so authentic.”
“So authentic,” his partner Jac called out, coming over and nodding to a framed poster hanging a foot farther along the wall. “Just like this piece. It’s my favourite.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “When it sells, I’ll be ecstatic for the new owner, of course, but…” He sighed again.
“We have far too many like that,” Wes agreed. “One of these days, we’ll get to focus on decorating our place, then we won’t have that horrible wrench when we need to let something go.”
“So difficult.”
“I must say, I’m not feeling any sense of sadness at all.” With a smile, I disengaged from the pair and wandered farther afield. “Does it take a while to arrive?”
“Oh, you don’t need to hunt it down if that’s what you’re asking.” Wes shook his head, staring out the front window at the passing pedestrians for a moment before striding to the counter where he pulled out a binder. “When we became certain something supernatural was going on, we kept a note of each occurrence. To see if we could sort the pattern out for ourselves.”
“Don’t be modest,” Jac said as Wes flicked through the pages. “That was all you. If it had been left up to me, I would’ve fled the area and never come back.”
“The feeling gets that bad, does it?”
I asked to keep the flow of words going but already knew the answer. Nobody goes to the trouble of investigating the paranormal—investing real money—on a whim. Unless they’re like that. I glanced at the pair, scanning them again from head to toe. No, they didn’t seem like that sort of person.
“We spent a literal fortune doing this place up,” Wes said as he pulled pages out and arranged them in a new order. “Literally a fortune. I said halfway through, we’d be better off financially if we just pulled the whole place down and built again from scratch, didn’t I say that?”
“You said that.” Jac moved to the entrance and checked the sign facing the street read open. “You said that a lot.”
“Business is slow?”
Wes nodded at me before spinning the binder around so I could read it. “Here’s the first occurrence after we thought something weird was going on.”
I bent over the text, scanning the detailed notes, my mind filtering out the flamboyant adjectives to arrive at the staler facts. When Patrick came closer, I twisted it around for him to see but he shook his head. “I’ve already read them, the first time I came.”
Each entry boiled down to a recognisable pattern. A feeling of dread would overtake the occupants of the store, something that dissipated immediately upon leaving. This would build and open into an overwhelming sense of loss and regret.
“That’s the worst bit,” Wes said, stabbing his finger at the page. “Like I don’t spend enough time at three in the morning reconsidering every bad choice I’ve made in my life. Doing it again out here in the real world is not necessary.”
“You know, we thought the insurance might cover some of our out-of-pocket expenses if we could prove something bad is happening.” Jac fiddled with a button on his shirt sleeve. “If we get backing that we’re not just making it up, we might be able to emerge from this horrible trial with something.”
I kept my eyes fastened to the pages, avoiding Patrick’s eye. Insurance companies might be fond of advertising that they covered damage from unusual sources, but I couldn’t imagine a scenario where they’d pay out a claim for loss of profits due to paranormal activity.
“That doesn’t even matter.” Wes folded his arms across his chest and tapped one foot on the floor. “If we can clear up the awful atmosphere inside this place, our customers will come back, and we can make money exactly how we planned. By having good taste and expertise in all the things that make a home feel good.”
“Did you feel it?” I asked Patrick when we excused ourselves from the main store to scope out the storage rooms and staff kitchenette out back.
“Yes.” He pulled open a drawer, revealing a pile of odds and ends that might come in handy someday. When he pushed it back into place, the wood screamed against its frame, making me shiver. “It was awful. Worse than they’ve described. I felt…”
He trailed off but the haunted expression on his face told me enough. “Perhaps I should leave this one with you and focus on Pru’s dilemma. Since you can’t see Andrew.”
Patrick frowned and stopped fiddling with the old kettle, built long before anyone invented a system whereby they turned themselves off. “We’re partners. We should be working these cases together. I don’t like to think of you confronting whatever that thing was this morning, alone.”
“I won’t be alone,” I said, so quickly that Patrick’s frown grew deeper. “Jared can come along as muscle, though since Andrew can’t be physically restrained, we’ll each be as useless as the other.”
Patrick folded his arms and leant against the bench. “Is this your way of getting your boyfriend on the payroll?”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my ex. And I never said anything about paying him.”
“So this person who doesn’t have a relationship with you any longer is happy to tag along while you’re working and doesn’t expect a cent in return?”
Well, okay. It sounded silly put like that. For a few seconds, I grappled with how to phrase the idea so it didn’t seem absurd, but gave up with a shrug of frustration. “We can’t both be in two places at once.”
“And we can’t grab random members of the community and deputise them into our business whenever we have more than one client on the go. That’s ridiculous. I used to juggle half a dozen customers at a time back home.”
My brain shut down the urge to correct his usage of the word customers. Freaks who thought every creak in their house was a monster and every person with a card deck was a fortune-teller didn’t count as clientele in my book.
Of course, as I’d discovered, Briarton had so many supernatural greeblies and gooblies—my official terms—that we’d never be short of genuine offers.
“Quick! It’s happening.”
The fear in Wes’s voice clicked us both into gear and we ran into the store. Nothing to see, no matter which way I turned, but the feeling…
Oh. Nope.
The skin on my lower back tingled, sending a wave of shivers dancing up the bones of my spine.
“Can you see anything?” Patrick whispered. “Is something there?”
He held out one of his contraptions, using the microphone to scan the air for any sound not perceptible to our ears.
I couldn’t see anything, but a good portion of that might be down to the fact I had my eyes squeezed shut. After forcing the lids open, the shop had the same number of occupants as before.
Good. I mean, not good because my skin was still trying to crawl off my body and find a place of safety, but better than having an angry poltergeist yelling in my face.
The dread grew more intense, coming in waves that dragged me deeper into a sea of despair. The inevitability of something horrendous happening caught me off guard. It took the vague thoughts of what could occur, always playing somewhere in my mind, and amplified the negative outcomes a thousand-fold until I couldn’t imagine the possibility of anything tinged with even the slightest hue of good.
My life was worthless. An orphan. Alone. I’d regained my powers too late to learn how to use them properly. They’d wither again and die, this time not from preplanning but ineptitude leading into neglect.
I might as well give up now. How pointless was it to try knowing that eventually, probably sooner rather than later, I’d fai
l?
Better to give my life away now than to suffer the years of declining expectation until it became a gift to end it and die.
“Woah. Make it stop.” I lifted a hand to my cheek and felt the tears cascading down.
Across from me, Patrick’s shoulders were curling inwards. Wes and Jac clung to each other, their faces turned away lest the other should see and agree with their self-disgust.
“Is it always this bad?”
Wes seemed grateful for the opportunity to talk and fill his mind with something other than the oppressing spirit stealing away everyone’s hopes and dreams. “It varies. This is a bad one but there was an occasion last week where I genuinely thought I’d rather kill myself on the spot than suffer the intake of another breath.”
He shuddered, reaching for Jac with his free hand, then letting it drop to his side as another wave of crippling self-doubt flooded the room. “We should burn it to the ground. Whatever is causing this can’t be allowed to continue.”
“What if that just sets it free?”
Jac’s words made me feel physically ill. Or was that because my mind threw up the image of my teenage self walking around high school half the day before realising her period had arrived and everyone around knew it before her?
“I can’t…” With a huge gasp, I threw myself toward the front door, half of me desperate to leave the store and the other half just desperate to leave the whole planet. Never come back. What was the use?
My hand closed on the doorknob just as the emotion swamping me altered. A rush of poignancy hit me. Then the sweet sorrow of loss.
Memories swept into my mind and out of it, so fast I couldn’t capture them fully. They left behind them a wave of nostalgia and regret that hauled at my chest until it ached too much to breathe.
Sadness. That’s what the pair had gabbled over the phone when they first requested our help. They’d said that everyone inside the store kept being sad for no reason.
This wasn’t sad. This went out through the pit of deepest despair and came out the other side with miles left on the clock. This was ravenous to peckish, burning fury to upset.