The Witch Hunt (Jonny Roberts Series Book 3)

by Alexander Lound

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Unless there’s somebody out there who’s cunning enough to frame someone else for a murder, what would be a double murder, and get away with it for twenty years, then I guess not.”

  Aaron chewed his lip. “Maybe it’s time to contact Samantha, tell her everything we’ve found. Hopefully, she can answer all our questions. If we can jog her memory enough, that is.”

  12

  “It looks exactly the same as in the photograph,” said Aaron, as his car idled outside Greenacres. He turned off the ignition. “Is that your stepsister’s car?”

  He nodded towards the little Ford Fiesta, parked in the driveway. I’d been telling Aaron about Zara during the drive. “She’s not my stepsister,” I began. “And yes, she’s in. Looks like Bella’s still out, though. Like I said, she shouldn’t be back until later this afternoon.”

  “Cool. So Zara knows about us, but doesn’t believe us?”

  “Yeah. She wants proof.”

  Aaron grinned. “Well, if she wants proof, then let’s give it to her.”

  As we walked through the front door, I wondered how Zara would react to experiencing her first séance. To hearing Samantha’s voice coming from Aaron’s mouth; seeing his stone-grey eyes; the darkness shifting and shimmering around us.

  But I also should have considered how seeing Aaron in her house might have made her react. Because as soon as she rushed downstairs and laid eyes on him, she jumped.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Zara, relax,” I said. “This is Aaron. Aaron, this is Zara.”

  Zara eyed Aaron narrowly. Aaron put out a hand. “Aaron Wright, medium and paranormal expert, at your service.”

  Reluctantly, Zara put out her hand, too, and shook Aaron’s. “Zara,” she blurted. “Suppose you’re helping Jonny with Mum?”

  “Absolutely. We’ve discovered a lot about this spirit already.”

  “In fact, we even have a name.” I stepped forward. “Samantha Lowry. She lived in this house about twenty years ago, before she was kidnapped and burned alive at Devil’s Lake. Did they tell you that when you bought the place?”

  “What? No. You’re joking, right?”

  “No joke,” said Aaron. “And they wouldn’t have told you. Not exactly a selling point, is it?”

  Aaron turned away from Zara, and looked to the dining table through the open kitchen door. As soon as his eyes lit up, I knew what he was going to say. That the same surface that had provided a family meal, a board games night, was now going to be used for a séance.

  “Ah, perfect,” said Aaron, gesturing to the table. “Zara, I don’t suppose you have any candles?”

  Zara looked to me, her mouth twisting cruelly. “Jonny knows where the candles are. Don’t you, Jonny?”

  I sighed while Aaron said, “Jonny, be a good lad and find us some candles. Meanwhile, I’m going to fill-in Zara about how she’s going to help us with the séance.”

  Walking into the living room, I heard Zara say, “Séance? What séance?” Then they moved into the kitchen, their voices becoming muffled.

  When I re-joined them, three of the decorative candles in my hand, they were both sat at the table. Aaron was doing something with the salt and pepper pot. It took me a moment to realise that he was explaining what was happening to Bella. I half-expected to see Zara smirking, laughing off what Aaron was saying. But, as she shuffled in her chair, I learned that having someone support my claims was making her a little uneasy.

  “But this is all just rubbish, right? My mum is mentally ill. Anyone can see that. You’re telling me that if we get rid of this spirit, then she’ll be absolutely fine?”

  Aaron spoke calmly. “I can’t tell you with absolute certainty. But I can tell you that it’s extremely likely, yes.”

  Zara sniggered, tried to laugh it off. But her body language told me she was feeling anything but humour. “Well, until you give me proof that what you’re saying is true . . .”

  There was a flicker of a smile in the corners of Aaron’s mouth. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll give you your proof. Though I warn you, what’s seen cannot be unseen, if you get my drift.”

  Aaron put his hand out for the candles, and I passed them over. He said, “Zara, it’s really simple. We place the candles in the middle of the table, and light them. Then, we draw all the curtains. We make it as dark in this room as we can. Spirits, you see, live in a place called Limbo. Or at least they do before they go to the after-life. It’s a filling of total darkness, between the bread of light.” I raised an eyebrow. Aaron smiled. “By offering a bright light in the darkness, they will come to us. And when they do, the spirit will speak through my mouth.” It was Zara’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “As I understand it, Samantha inhabits this house. It shouldn’t take long for her spirit to come to me.”

  “And when the spirit talks . . . through you . . . what should we do?” said Zara.

  “Leave that to Jonny. As a medium himself, he’ll know exactly what to do.”

  “Zara, if anything bad happens, we blow out the candles and turn on the lights, understood?” I said to her. She nodded.

  “And if you do that, the spirit will leave me,” said Aaron. “I’m too powerful in the light for a spirit to control me. I have too much energy.”

  “Energy? What?” said Zara. She raised a hand to her head.

  Aaron sniggered. “It’s a learning curve. Just try to keep up, and do what Jonny tells you, and you’ll be fine. Right now, we need to make this house as dark as we can.”

  Zara and I wandered around the house, closing the curtains, while Aaron lit the candles. As Zara closed the living room curtains, she turned to me, her eyes narrowed. “So, how the hell did you meet this guy? Isn’t he about twice your age?”

  “More than twice.” I sighed as I pulled one of the curtains. “But he’s an expert and, without him, I don’t know where I’d be. Probably in some asylum or something.”

  Zara snorted. “Well, as far as I know, you might both belong in an asylum. I’m still yet to see any proof of this ghost. And all that talk from your friend back there about Limbo, energies and whatever, all sounded like bullshit to me.”

  I tensed a little at Zara’s comments, before blurting, “Well, you can think what you want. Because you’ll get your proof. Don’t worry.”

  We returned to the kitchen to find three candles placed in a triangle in the centre of the table, their flickering flames producing a faint glow around the now dark room, occasionally casting objects in gloom, then light. Aaron was still sat at the table, his cowboy hat hiding his face in shadow. Though he looked to us as we came in, the candle flames glinting in his eyes, as if he were a villain from the Wild West.

  “Take a seat,” he said, ushering us to the table. Scraping my chair across the floor, I caught Zara’s eye. She was smirking, her unease gone, and clearly thought this was some stupid joke. I smiled internally. I looked forward to seeing that smirk wiped off her face.

  Aaron pointed to the corner of the room. “I put my phone on record, so we can listen back to everything the spirit says. Jonny, you know what to do, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. Well, without further ado. Zara, Jonny, I need you to raise your hands.” We followed Aaron’s instructions. “Now, I need you to form a circle with me. That’s it. While we form a circle, Zara, our energies combine. We make a bigger spirit magnet, if you will. We only break the circle if we want the spirit to leave. Understand?”

  Zara was still smirking. “Oh, I understand.” Meanwhile, she deliberately squashed my fingers with her baseball mitt of a hand, before giving me a sideways look. Why couldn’t she take this seriously, at the very least?

  “Good. Now, repeat after me. ‘Spirits of the past, move among us. Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.’”

  It took Zara a few tries before it rolled off her tongue. I picked it up immediately, already knowing the saying from my previous séances. Eventually, the kitchen was fill
ed with a chorus of the saying. It crept through the darkness, searched for the spirits beyond. Calling to them. Beckoning.

  “Spirits of the past, move among us. Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.”

  The candlelight licked the walls, coaxed the darkness. Zara and Aaron’s hands tingled against mine, the vibrations of our voices travelling through our bodies. We must have repeated the saying some ten or fifteen times, before Aaron finally stopped. For a moment, Zara and I continued, until we noticed that the noise level had dropped by a third, and Aaron was gazing into the near-distance.

  “Come,” Aaron said, his voice cutting the air. “I see you over there. Come and speak with us. Tell us your troubles.”

  Zara turned to the wall that Aaron was staring into. It was then that I noticed something in her eyes, that I realised that she was feeling what I was feeling. The tingling sensation on the back of her neck. The shivers running along her arms. The feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I noticed that she wasn’t smirking anymore, that her smile had twisted into a frown.

  I nearly grinned. But then I noticed that Aaron’s eyes, normally the colour of coffee, had turned a sickly grey colour, as if the whites of his eyes had bled into his irises. His face had slackened, his normally red lips now a limp, milky white. When Zara turned back to Aaron to see this, I felt her arm stiffen. Her enormous hand grip mine tighter, and this time not as a joke.

  “Is he—”

  Zara only had the chance to utter these two words. For when Aaron let out the blood-curdling, ear-piercing scream, a desperate, guttural cry, there was no more room for anything else.

  I wanted to pull away, to cover my ears. I looked to Aaron’s mouth, an open zero, his tongue flapping. Zara recoiled, rocking backwards on her chair. She closed her eyes, grimaced. For a second, I felt her hand leaving mine. I gripped it tighter. I couldn’t let her break the circle.

  When the scream finally ended, it felt as if my ears were bleeding. But, sensing my opportunity to speak, I barely heard myself say, “Am I speaking to the ghost of Greenacres? The ghost that I talked to yesterday?”

  For a moment, Aaron’s closed mouth remained pursed. I wondered if the ghost that had screamed had left. But eventually Aaron said, in a slow, quiet drawl, “Yes, you are ‒ but ‒ what is this? What’s happening to me?”

  I glanced to Zara, looking for any signs of her previous humour. I found none. She was staring at Aaron, her eyes wide. Her mouth hanging open. Her face white.

  I looked back to Aaron. I tried to picture Samantha Lowry in my head, so that it at least felt like I was speaking to a seventeen-year-old girl, rather than a thirty-something man. “You’re talking through my friend. You’ve . . . possessed him, in a way. We’ve come back because we said we’d help you. Do you remember our conversation? I told you that I’d try to figure out what happened to you?”

  “Yes. Yes. I remember. You said you’d help me. You said you’d find out what happened to me. Oh, but this is weird. So, so weird.”

  I smiled. “I know it’s weird, but it’s okay. You and he are perfectly safe. And I did find out what happened to you. Or, at least, I think I did ‒ Samantha.”

  I stared into Aaron’s icy eyes. After a time, he finally mouthed, “Samantha,” as if the spirit were trying out the name.

  “Yes. Samantha Lowry. Is that your name?”

  “Yes . . . my name . . . Samantha Lowry . . . Samantha Lowry! That was it! That was my name!”

  “Is your name,” I said.

  “Oh my. Thank you so much. I remember now. It’s coming back to me. Samantha Lowry. Yes, that was my name. And my parents, what was it . . . Jessica Lowry? Ben Lowry? My mum and dad.”

  I grinned. “I think you’re right. I remember those names, from the article!”

  “From the article? You mean to say that something was written about me?”

  “Oh yes.” For a time, the chill in the air had disappeared, and the shivers down my back had vanished. But now, I noticed Zara’s sweaty palm pressed into mine once again, I saw the darkness shifting around the room and, lastly, I remembered Samantha’s dreadful story.

  “Did it say what happened to me?”

  “Yes, it did.” I swallowed. Wondered how she might take this news. After all, she’d been living a lie for goodness knows how long. I knew only too well how it felt to have your entire perception of self changed in an instant. I braced myself. “And there were some important details, Samantha. You were never a witch. You only died twenty years ago. What’s more, you were a seventeen-year-old girl.”

  “A seventeen-year-old girl?” The way she said this was as if she were looking at her spectral form, perhaps only noticing herself for the first time. “And only twenty years ago? But ‒ I’ve been here for hundreds of years. They burned me because I was a witch.”

  I shook my head firmly. “No, they never burned you because you were a witch. You’re confused, Samantha. You were burned alive, yes, but not because you were a witch. You were burned at a place called Devil’s Lake.”

  “Devil’s Lake . . .”

  “Yes. It’s a place where many witches were burned, too. My friend, Aaron, who you’re speaking through right now, he has a theory. He’s an expert on ghosts, you see. He thinks that your spirit, your energy, and most importantly of all, your memories, have been morphed with the spirits of the witches that roam the lake.”

  Aaron’s eyes seemed to stare harder into mine, as if they were burrowing for my story. “Sometimes, I see other spirits. Mostly women. They speak in strange languages, and they cry, and they beg for revenge. Some claim to have been drowned, some burned.”

  It felt as if an icy wind were blowing across the table. But all the windows were closed.

  “They are why you’re confused, Samantha. If you need proof of who you are, then I can show you. I can show you the articles.”

  “No. No. I believe you. I really do. And I can feel it in my bones . . . Who am I kidding? I don’t even have bones. But I know I’m Samantha Lowry. I just know it.”

  I nodded. Smiled. Risked a quick look to Zara. Grinned internally when I noticed her lip quivering.

  “But, if I wasn’t a witch, then why was I killed?”

  I shuffled in my seat. “That’s a good question. Do you remember Jacob Tanner?”

  What happened next was quite shocking. It was as if the air had been vacuumed from the room. Everything seemed to stop, stand still. The darkness halted shifting. But inside of me, everything happened. My heart exploded with grief. And then the feeling spread through my body, a hollow, dreadful ache.

  It took me a moment to realise that it was Samantha who was making me feel like that. Who was communicating her pain.

  “Jacob,” was all she managed to say.

  When I spoke, it was tinged with grief. “What do you remember about him?”

  “He was my . . . boyfriend. I loved him, more than anything. He meant the world to me. Oh ‒ God ‒ and I can’t even picture him. I just have this burning inside of my soul, telling me that he meant so much to me. But when I try to see him, nothing.”

  “Samantha. I’m so, so sorry to say this. But Jacob, he . . . they think it might have been him.”

  “What might have been him?”

  “Him that – burned you.”

  The room fell silent for a moment, the only sound that of my heavy heart thudding in my chest.

  “No. No. He couldn’t have.”

  “Samantha, I know it’s difficult but—”

  “No. I mean it. It can’t have been him. It wasn’t him. He loved me.”

  “Samantha, you told me that the person who killed you, loved you. Wouldn’t it make sense that it would have been Jacob? Because on that night, he went missing, too. Nobody has seen him since. Not for twenty years.”

  Aaron made some noises, reflecting Samantha’s groans and growls. Her self-frustration. She wanted to remember, but no matter how hard she tried, she simply couldn’t. “No,” she said afte
r a time. “I was his world. Okay, sometimes he had a funny way of showing it. He could be pretty nasty sometimes, if I remember rightly. But inside, he had a kind, loving heart and—Wait. Stop.”

  I wanted to offer the spirit a hand. To comfort her. If only there was some way I could. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. It’s just ‒ I’m remembering something. About that night.”

  My heart tensed. “What? What are you remembering?”

  “I’m just – I’m picturing flames. Oh my, it was so horrid. The flames licking up my body. Torching me. I can still feel it—”

  My stomach rolled. “Why are you thinking about this?”

  “Because of what I can see beyond the flames. Through them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I can – I can see a boy.”

  “A boy? Jacob?”

  “No. It couldn’t have been Jacob. Like I said, he loved me, and I really mean that. He’d never have killed me. Would never have ‒ burned me alive. And besides, I can remember now that he was ‒ busy that night. That he couldn’t see me for some reason. I feel like where he was is significant in some way ‒ but I can’t remember.”

  “It’s okay. You said you could picture a boy though?”

  “Yes, a boy.”

  “What can you see of him? Are there any significant details?”

  I leaned in closer now. Zara’s lip had stopped quivering, and even she was gawping at Aaron, fascinated by what the spirit had to say.

  “There’s only one detail that I can see.”

  “What detail is that? Maybe it’s significant?”

  “Well, it’s weird, because everything else about this person is dark, from head to foot. Not even the fire is lighting them up. But there’s one, tiny bit of detail, glinting around their neck.”

  “Around their neck?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what? What is it?”

  “It . . . it looks like a necklace. It looks like a star. Only, it’s upside-down.”

  The image clicked immediately. A pentagram. An upside-down star was a pentagram. But what sort of person would have a pentagram hanging from their neck?