19. Hell hath no fury like an irate cat
nineteen
Hell hath no fury like an irate cat
JAMES
One year later.
September 24th
Broken glass crunches under my boots and the sound echoes down the dark corridor. Goosebumps pebble my skin as a cold breeze travels through the abandoned hospital. Pearl meows from my shoulder, her head poking out of my backpack.
“I know,” I say to her. “I feel it.”
This place is haunted alright. After a year of intense ghost hunting, I know how to recognise the signs without needing unreliable devices. There's this something in the air when a powerful entity is nearby. The fabric of the world shivers as they mess up with the veil.
Pearl meows again and I feel her wiggle.
“Stay in the bag. There’s broken glass everywhere you’re going to hurt your toe beans.”
She headbutts the side of my face, purring. Pearl is a spicy little shit, but so am I. We’re a match made in heaven, against all odds. Ewan will be flabbergasted when we finally find him.
In the days after we lost him, when I was jagged and angry, Pearl took it as her mission to become such a menace that I couldn’t brood in peace.
She followed me in the bathroom, slept on my chest every night in the narrow room that I occupied alone since Ewan’s disappearance, kept pushing my glass off the table when I fell into a bottle.
Back then, we had no tracks to follow, and I was lost at sea. She kept me afloat.
It’s a miracle Lana and Shirley didn’t kick my grumpy ass out of the hostel. But then again, they weren’t much better. Tragedy has a way of sharpening you at the edges. And losing Ewan is a tragedy and we all blame ourselves for it. Earl Lynch took him, and we could do nothing to stop him.
The first weeks after Ewan's disappearance were the worst. We didn’t know if he was even alive or if his body was rotting in a ditch somewhere. I could barely sleep, because every time I closed my eyes, I saw him dead.
But help came from an unexpected origin: ghosts from all over the UK started visiting us at the hostel a few weeks after Ewan’s disappearance.
The house, it seems, sits right at the frontier with the veil and bends the rules of hauntings.
And the ghosts had things to say. Many of them were scared, as what they called a revenant was roaming the country, devouring entities.
A tall revenant with chestnut hair. It was all it took for hope to bloom, and for us to start hunting him down.
Pearl turns her attention to our left, and I follow her gaze. Her senses are sharper than mine. I take the stairwell leading up to the first floor. The ground is littered with trash and dirt.
As we reach the upper floor, I finally hear it: sobs and whispers. I walk through a long hallway and find the poltergeists in one of the abandoned rooms. She’s wearing a nurse uniform, covered in blood, and when she looks up at us, her mascara has left dark streaks on her cheeks.
She perks up, and a strange smile splits her face in two. “Yes? Do you need help?”
How freaky must it be when people doing urbex find her in the empty hospital? Ghosts used to spook me, too. Now they’re my bread and butter.
“Why are you crying?” I ask.
Over the past year I learned that it’s much easier to get something out of a ghost if you ask about them.
They’re usually caught in a loop of their own suffering, and trying to get something out of them that isn’t related to their situation can be quite a challenge.
Only older entities gain some sort of coherence.
The Lady in Red being one of them. She still haunts Lynch Hostel, and lets say she wasn’t happy with us after what went down in the basement on that fateful day.
“They’re all gone,” the nurse says.
“Who?”
She cocks her head to the side, like an owl. “My patients.”
“Where have they gone to?” I have a feeling that I know what happened to her patients.
She whimpers. “He ate them all.”
“He?”
She shakes her head, eyes unfocused. Then when they find me again, she smiles wide. “Hello. What can I do to help?”
I sigh. “You were telling me about the man who ate your patients.”
She recoils. “My... my poor patients...” She hugs her chest and floats through the wall and to the other room.
I hurry to follow.
I knew we were probably too late again, Earl Lynch is always a step ahead, but we’re getting close. If we can guess his next destination, we can finally find him.
The revenant’s feeding times have increased.
A year ago, he used to hunt down other entities only once a week, and his trail was hard to follow.
Nowadays, whispers of his hunger reach us almost daily through the veil.
We don’t know if he’s simply a glutton, or if he needs to eat more often to maintain his hold on Ewan’s body.
We’re also unsure of Ewan’s health. What does a year of invasion done to him? Is he suffering, locked inside his own body? During my short possession, in what feels like a lifetime ago, I was aware of every second, and it left me cold to the bone.
I hold the memory of that night close to my heart. Ewan and I shared so little time together, but the memories haunt me more than any spirit.
Ewan was kindness and joy and laughter, and I failed him. That night, as the guilt ate me whole, I swore I’d find him, no matter how long it took. I’m still holding on to that promise, tooth and nail.
The nurse floats through another room, sobbing. From what we’ve gathered, this abandoned hospital used to be haunted by dozens of ghosts. Unsavoury things happened here a few decades ago. Influencers and YouTubers sometimes film videos here, attracted to the popularity of the uncanny.
But tonight the veil feels calm, as if the nurse is the only spirit left.
“Where did the man who ate your patients go?” I ask her.
She whimpers and floats away from me. “He was made of darkness contained in skin... He was ravenous... but I escaped...”
“Where?” I shout at her.
She points a shaky finger. “He went out the north entrance and walked through the forest at dawn yesterday.”
North. So he’s still following this particular Ley line and devouring all the powerful ghosts he finds on the way.
Earl Lynch’s motives are still unclear to us.
He seems to wreak havoc in the paranormal community wherever he goes, but his purpose stays murky.
Tracking him was made difficult by the fact that he only walks to his destinations, and it sometimes takes him days.
He avoids public transportation, out of confusion about the modern world or by choice, we don’t know.
And all the while, we have no idea how Ewan fares, and it’s eating me up. All we know is that possession isn’t usually deadly to the host, as long as the ghost doesn’t actively throw both of them over a cliff.
Yes, I have nightmares about that, too.
“Why the long face, sweetheart?” the nurse says to me. “What ails you?”
“A broken heart.” I sigh.
I’m about to leave when the ghost tilts her head in that unnerving manner again. In the dark, she glows faintly, like most spirits.
“I can help with that,” she says, pulling out a phantom syringe—a massive one.
Pearl hisses from her perch on my shoulder.
“Lady, you don’t want to do that,” I warn.
But the poltergeists, of course, never listen to the living.
Just as she surges forwards, I grab a salt bomb from my satchel.
These were Shirley’s idea. She bought a batch of colourful smoke bombs online, the kind used for photo shoots and birthday parties, and she tinkered with them for a few weeks until she was satisfied with the result and the bombs released their usual cloud mixed with fine salt powder.
Then she slapped ghost stickers on them and nicknamed them tough-love bombs, for some reason.
Tonight, the tough-love bomb I randomly picked is pink. I pull the pin and the smoke explodes as I throw it to the ground. The spirit is engulfed instantly, and it takes her but a second to wail and disappear.
I quickly exit the room, now filled by a pink cloud. Pearl meows angrily. The bombs always leave a fine layer of salt on her, matting her fur, and she hates it. I’ll have to brush her tonight. An experience we both despise.
“I know, I know,” I say, petting her. “I’m sorry.”
We make our way down the dusty stairwell and through the abandoned lobby. I pull my phone out.
Lana answers on the second dial tone, even though it’s two in the morning. “Rejoice! He’s still alive.”
“If I wasn’t, you’d know it. I’d haunt your ass already.”
She chuckles. “You missed the last hour’s update text. Shirley was having a small panic attack.”
“Sorry, I got sidetracked by a crazy nurse.” Every time I’m on a hunt, I try to send them updates every hour, else they worry.
“We’re on the right track, he was here last night.
He’s still following this Ley line. I need a list of all the most haunted places north of here. He’s getting hungrier by the day.”
“On it. I’ll ask the ghosties. How’s my baby doing?” she asks.
Pearl meows from my shoulder.
“Being a useless little shit, as always. I don’t know why I put up with her.”
Lana laughs. “Stop pretending, we know your heart. You love her.”
“I do,” I admit, and Pearl headbutts the side of my face.
If only I could have admitted to loving Ewan, too, before it was too late. It’s only when he was gone, and panic and anguish was all I could feel, that I realised I was already too far gone, and I was beginning to fall in love with him. To fall in love with the way he blushed, the way he smiled...
Fuck, I still miss him so much it physically hurts. I knew him for less than two weeks, and yet he’s all I could think about for the past year.
In our despair, we harassed ExorSquad to get help to find Ewan, but they ghosted us—the irony isn’t lost on me. So we took the matter into our own hands, and built our small ghost hunting business from the ground up. I went to haunted locations, hoping to find Ewan.
Lana and Shirley come with me sometimes, but they still have to manage the hostel and keep a roof over our heads.