The twisted dead, p.6
The Twisted Dead, page 6
The woman showed no reaction. Keira hunched her shoulders slightly higher to protect against the chill. “I want to help you move over. Please, show me that you understand. A nod. Anything.”
She waited. So did the woman. Keira was about to give up when a flash of light made her flinch. She turned to see Zoe holding up her camera.
“Sorry,” Zoe whispered. “Ignore me.”
Keira sighed and saw a plume of condensation leave her lips. The spirit ahead of her seemed to be growing bored. Its attention was drifting towards Dane, who stood under the medley of portraits, his head down.
“Don’t you want to move on to the next life?” Keira pressed. “I can help. Just show me what’s holding you here.”
Finally, the woman’s expression changed. A wicked smile grew, showing dark gums and two rows of narrow, pointed teeth. She drifted past Keira, eyes alight as she approached Dane.
Frustration boiled in Keira’s stomach. The woman’s answer had been more than clear. If she’d had unfinished business at one point, it was no longer any kind of priority. She didn’t want to move on. She only wanted to feed.
“Does anyone here want to be untethered from their resting place?” Keira raised her voice, desperate. “I can help you. But you have to want help.”
More ghosts had appeared while she was speaking to the woman. Grim, gaunt faces stared at her from every corner of the room. Keira turned, meeting each gaze in turn. Everywhere she looked, she met the same expressions: disdainful, derisive. Cold, thin smiles sent her heart racing. They were laughing at her.
“Fine,” Keira muttered. She rolled up the sleeves on her bug-eyed cat sweater. “Fine, we’ll do this the hard way.”
In her brief stint as Blighty Graveyard’s groundskeeper, Keira had found three ways to get rid of trapped ghosts. The first, resolving their unfinished business, was the most complicated but also the kindest to the spirits.
Almost universally, Keira found herself pitying the dead. Many of them had spent decades or even centuries shackled to their resting places, bound there by some heartsick wish or twist of fate they could no longer resolve. When possible, Keira tried to give them closure. They had waited so long for it, it felt cruel to deny them their final wishes.
She felt no such pity for the spirits of Crispin Manor. They didn’t care about being trapped. Their sole purpose was to cause suffering, and as she stared at the figures around her, she realised not a single one of them showed any hint of remorse or shame.
And Keira, in turn, was certain she wouldn’t feel even a shred of remorse if she forcefully eradicated them.
Dane took a half step back as Keira approached him. “Hold still,” she said, and he obediently froze. She picked her target: the woman who had disregarded Keira’s offer of help. She had bitten Dane’s upper arm and hung to him as she fed.
Keira focussed on the centre of the woman’s chest. The ghosts were made up of something not unlike fog. When Keira strained, she could see a point inside the spirit’s chest, close to her heart, where the brightness seemed more condensed.
She knew what she would find there. A delicate, tangled thread. Every spirit had one; it was their life essence, the thing that tethered them to earth. And Keira’s gifting allowed her to untangle it…if she could just get ahold of one of its loose ends.
Reaching into the spirit’s body felt like plunging her hand into freezing water. Keira grit her teeth. Her questing fingers felt electricity course along their tips. The woman’s energy was stronger than any of the normal spirits Keira had encountered in her graveyard, most likely because she’d been feeding from a human.
Keira could visualise the threads. They tangled into a ball only slightly larger than a marble. Her fingers found a loose end, but holding it felt like trying to pinch a fragment of shattered glass. Sharp. Aching.
The woman finally reacted, lifting her head from Dane’s arm. Her lips pulled back into a snarl, exposing a seemingly endless black pit ringed by the awful sharpened teeth.
The chill was spreading up Keira’s arm. Her fingers burned from touching the hissing electricity that coursed through the threads.
She tightened her hold, then pulled.
Sparks of pain ran along Keira’s arm, like she was touching a high-voltage fence. The woman convulsed. She clamped both hands over her chest—over the ball of thread—trying to shield it.
Keira pulled harder. The thread refused to untangle. An uncomfortable numbness spread along her arm, and she realised the ghost was sapping her energy.
Sweat beaded across her skin. Each breath came thin and stuttering. Distantly, she thought she heard Mason say something, but the words came through muddy and vague.
“Let…go…” she hissed.
The woman’s mouth stretched wide. She was howling, even though the noise was inaudible to Keira. She convulsed backward, trying to escape Keira’s grip. The thread slid a fraction before the spectre redoubled her grip over it. She was fighting to prevent it from unravelling.
“Keira.” Mason’s voice came through again, sharp with alarm. It broke her concentration. She let go of the thread and staggered back. Mason caught her before she could collapse to the floor, his arms wrapping under hers and folding around her. “Easy,” he said. “Just breathe.”
She felt achingly, uncomfortably weak. Her legs didn’t want to carry her weight, so she leaned back against Mason, grateful at how warm and solid he was.
“Here,” Mason said, adjusting his grip on her to press one hand to the back of her neck. “You can take energy from me, right? Borrow some now. I don’t mind.”
Keira wasn’t sure she even had the strength to answer, but she opened herself to his touch. A soft, steady flow of energy came through where their skin connected. She felt it spreading through her limbs and took a deep, stuttering breath. “Thanks.”
“You want some of mine too?” Zoe asked. She fired off another photo before waving a hand in Keira’s direction. “I have plenty to spare.”
“I think I’m good for now.” Keira pushed away from Mason and was relieved that her legs seemed prepared to carry her again. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed it so far. I picked a stubborn ghost.”
“Did it work?” Zoe asked. “Is the spirit gone?”
Keira pulled her second sight open again. The woman stood barely four paces away from her. The earlier dignity had vanished; she now stood with her legs wide, her hands flexed into clawlike shapes at her side. Her face had contorted, lines forming around her mouth and eyes and nose as she snarled.
“No,” Keira said, and felt frustration bite into her. “She’s still here.”
Dane stayed with his back to the wall of portraits, hunched with his arms folded across his chest. Figures continued to move about him, ghosts releasing their hold on him and drifting away, and others moving in to take their place. Worry flickered in his eyes. “I am sorry,” he said. “I did not realise it was so taxing for you.”
“That’s the thing: it normally isn’t.” Keira swiped the back of her hand across her forehead to clear off the cold sweat that had built there. Even after drawing from Mason’s energy, she still felt breathless. “When they’re ready to go, it’s as easy as opening a door. These ones don’t want it to be easy, though.”
The woman slowly drew back into herself, the ferocity in her expression fading into cold resentment. She kept her eyes focussed on Keira as she began to move back towards Dane.
Anger burned in the pit of Keira’s stomach. Even after coming so close to being untethered, the woman still only cared about feeding. She felt no qualms about it, even though Dane was the last of her family line. She was willing to drain him until there was nothing left.
Keira knew of one final way to get rid of ghosts. She’d only done it once before: with the dark spectre in the graveyard.
She could push her energy into the ghost, feeding it faster than it was prepared for. If she could push enough energy into it, she could overload it. It would swell and swell and swell until it couldn’t contain any more and burst.
The idea of doing that to the ghosts around Dane was incredibly appealing. If they wanted to feed, well, let them have more than they could contain.
Keira flexed her hands at her sides. As badly as she wanted to see the spirits burst at their seams, she knew she wasn’t able to make it happen. She’d lost almost all of her energy doing it to the shade in the graveyard. That had only been a few days before, and she was still building her way back to feeling normal. She wasn’t strong enough to eradicate even one of the spirits around her. Especially now.
One of the spirits—an older, stooped man—left his hold on Dane. He drifted away, and Keira half expected him to fade back into the aether, only he didn’t. He turned towards Mason.
“No.” Keira took a sharp breath as she watched the ghost’s bone-thin arms thread around Mason. “Don’t.”
Mason’s eyebrows rose. He glanced at where Keira stared, even though he wasn’t able to see the spirit. “Should I be worried?”
“I said stop.” Keira moved forward. She smacked her hands through the ghost’s form, trying to buffet him away. All she felt was the ache of frost across her palms. The spirit showed no reaction.
“Do you want me to…do something?” Mason, nervous, glanced between Keira and what must have looked like empty air to him.
A sly smile appeared in the ghost’s eyes as his mouth opened to reveal rows of teeth.
“No!” Keira forced some energy into her hands as she shoved at the spirit. It worked. There was a burst of light as the figure tumbled backwards, shock and anger twisting its face.
Keira, panting, stared down at it. She stretched her hands wide, a threat: I’ll do it again.
The ghost’s lips curled. It turned away from Mason, instead drifting back to Dane.
Keira staggered back and leaned against the wall, ignoring the way the gilt frames pressed into her shoulder blades. She felt shaky and slightly queasy. She closed her eyes, unable to watch as the spectre joined his companions in their feast.
“I’m sorry, Dane,” she said. “I can’t stop them.”
“Ah.” She didn’t like the way he sounded. As though he were resigned. As though this was the outcome he had expected all along. “It was always a long shot. Thank you for trying, regardless. Will you be all right to see yourselves out?”
He was already turning away, moving towards the doors leading him deeper into the crumbling maze of a building. The shimmering spectres turned with him, closing in around him. The helpless frustration redoubled.
“No. Wait.” Keira pressed her palms into her closed eyes, rubbing at the ache forming behind them. She’d overtaxed her second sight as well. The muscles there were growing stronger, but she still wasn’t used to pulling on them for so long. “I’m not done. I just need more time. And…I’ll need to ask a favour.”
“Anything.”
Keira let her hands drop as she stared at the scene ahead of her. More than a dozen spirits had gathered in the foyer, their forms strange and eerie in the sickly light. Their faces were cold and unwelcoming, surreal echoes of the artwork above them as they stood surrounded by the portraits they had commissioned during life.
“I need to know your family tree,” Keira said. “I need to understand the people these spirits once were.”
“Research,” Zoe said, lowering her camera. Her expression held unbridled delight. “I know this whole situation is straight-up horrendous for everyone else here, but if it’s any consolation, I’m having the time of my life.”
“Great,” Keira managed. She turned to Dane. “Do you have your family tree recorded somewhere by any chance?”
A small, bitter smile pulled at the corners of his lips. “I am a part of the great Crispin family. They would have rather drowned themselves in the river than forgotten their ancestry. Follow me.”
CHAPTER NINE
Dust scattered about them as Dane unfurled a roll of parchment. It was huge, taking up most of the dark wood table in the room’s centre.
Keira, Mason, and Zoe all approached from different sides, craning to read the aged ink markings. The parchment held names, all interconnected by lines drawing out a complicated family tree. Dane placed smaller sheets of paper, a nibbed pen, and an inkwell beside it.
Zoe reached for the note-taking material. “I was going to be a pain and ask if you have any pens from the current century, but it’s hard to say no to such a slavish devotion to aesthetic. What’s the plan here, Keira?”
“We’re going to log some ghosts.” Keira folded her arms as she turned away from the table. The room was small and felt cramped with an accruement of odd trinkets. Animal skulls stared out at her from glass boxes. Silver platters, vases, and ornaments, all tarnished, shimmered inside a cabinet. An assortment of elaborately framed mirrors filled the gaps in the walls, and it left Keira with the uneasy sensation that she was being watched from every direction.
That wasn’t too far from the truth. Dane had brought a cluster of feasting ghosts into the room with him. Still more arrived, shifting through the patterned wallpaper. Cold, glittering eyes fixed Keira with hostile glares.
She took a slow breath to steady herself. “Dane, you and I are going to ID as many of these as we can. Zoe, copy down that family tree. Mark which ghosts are present. I want to know how many I’m dealing with and who they are.”
“Got it.” Zoe was using the inkwell as though it was second nature, her hand flying across the parchment as she re-created the Crispin history. “Wow, you guys liked weird names, huh? There’s actually a Marmaduke in here.”
Keira turned back to Dane. His eyes seemed to sag at the corners, weighted down by age or tiredness, but his nod was resolute as he gave Keira the go-ahead.
She described the spirits to Dane. When he’d heard enough to identify them, he cut in with a name and a place in the family tree, and Zoe marked it down with a large asterisk.
It wasn’t fast work. Ghosts drifted in and out. Sometimes their forms overlapped as they ate from Dane, and Keira’s eyes ached as she fought to tease out details. Sometimes there weren’t enough distinguishable features to make a positive identification, and Dane would suggest two or three potential names. Zoe marked them down with a question mark.
As night grew deeper, Mason left the room, then returned a few minutes later with glasses of water and plates of food from the dining table. Otherwise, he was quiet, standing in the back if the room as he let Keira work.
“A woman in her fifties or sixties.” Keira tracked a new spirit who had entered through the closed door. “Her hair is cut with a fringe that covers her eyebrows. Long fingernails. There’s a mole on her jaw, right here.” She indicated to the spot on herself.
Dane was slumped against the opposite wall, arms folded as his back pressed into the wallpaper. His head had been down for the past twenty minutes, but he lifted it then, his lips thin and pale.
The woman’s spirit moved through the table. Long fingers wrapped around either side of Dane’s head as she bent to plunge her teeth into his throat.
As the silence stretched, Zoe glanced up, her pen poised over the replica family tree.
“Do you know her?” Keira pressed.
“Yes.” Dane sighed and let his head drop again. “Filomena. My mother.”
The frustration and anger had been a constant bubble in the pit of Keira’s stomach, but it overflowed then, burning the insides of her chest. She turned away so she wouldn’t have to watch the woman feed.
“I’ve got some good news and some bad news.” Zoe rubbed her palm into one of her eyes, inadvertently smearing ink around it. “Good news, I don’t think there’s much more to do. Bad news, that’s because we’ve basically filled in the entire family tree.”
“What?” The stream of spirits had seemed constant, but Keira had been so absorbed in watching and identifying them that she hadn’t tried to count how many passed through the room. She moved up behind Zoe and leaned over the back of her chair to examine the family tree. Almost every one of the dozens of names held a star next to it. Most of the question marks had been scratched out as the owners were identified.
“Yeah. I think the real challenge will be identifying anyone who isn’t present.”
Keira paced as she chewed that over. In her admittedly limited experience, she’d found lingering spirits were the exception, not the rule. Many of the graves in Blighty’s cemetery were unoccupied. Most people preferred to move on.
Unfinished business can cause a person to stay behind. Is it possible that a whole family is tied down by one cause?
She thought it was. Just not in the traditional sense of unfinished business.
“Dane, you said your family took a lot of pride in their legacy.”
“To a fault,” he agreed. His lip twisted in disgust. “You may have heard that kings and queens used to believe that they had a divine right to rule, that they were physically different from the commoners.”
“I’ve heard that,” Mason said. “It’s part of the cause behind major cases of inbreeding. They didn’t want too much so-called impure blood entering the family line.”
Dane flicked a hand towards the parchment. “That’s similar to how my family thought—that the family line was somehow superior. They didn’t believe they were better because of their money or their power. They thought they had money and power because they were inherently better.”
Keira remembered the case of Emma Carthage. George Crispin, the patriarch of that time, had been enraged to learn his son had had an affair with a common girl. So enraged, in fact, that he’d been prepared to go to jail for murder rather than acknowledge that the relationship had resulted in a child.
Keira ran her tongue across the back of her teeth as she examined the spirits still in the room with them. A family that believed they were more than common mortals. A family that slavishly worshipped their own heritage, their own fame, their own estate.
