18. Charlie #3
“This is ridiculous,” Bat said, floating closer. “And he claims to be your company’s best ghost hunter?”
A snort escaped me before I could stop it.
“Is something funny?” Brad’s voice was sharp.
“No. Nothing.”
He holstered the PolterPulse and reached for his utility belt. Metal glinted in the fading daylight as he withdrew a wicked-looking knife I had no idea was in there. Had he seriously been marching around the very haunted manor with a knife that whole time?
Ice climbed up my spine. “What… what are you doing?”
The blade caught the light as Brad tested its edge against his thumb. Sharp enough to shave with, apparently.
“Blood offering,” he said, as casually as if he’d announced he was making tea.
“Excuse me?” Bat practically squeaked. “Oh, bloody hell no. Charlie, get away from him, now.”
I took a step back. “Listen, I didn’t sign up for this. There was nothing in Gerald’s contract about slicing myself open for the job.”
“Oh, please. It’s obviously not coming from you, mate.” Brad rolled his eyes. “Knowing my luck, you faint at the sight of blood.”
I opened my mouth to defend my honour, but Brad was already moving to the skeleton’s chest cavity, kneeling beside where a heart would have been. He held his left palm over the bones and drew the blade across his skin in one smooth motion.
The sharp hiss of his indrawn breath made me wince.
“I don’t like this,” Thomas said, his voice tight. “I don’t like this at all.”
Dark droplets fell steadily onto the yellowed ribs. Each drop seemed to soak into the bone, disappearing like water into sand. I watched, horribly transfixed. My stomach churned, but I kept my expression neutral. No way was I giving Brad the satisfaction of being right about the blood thing.
Brad straightened, pressing his bleeding palm against his jumpsuit. He cleared his throat and adopted what I could only describe as his professional ExorSquad Extraction Specialist voice.
“Margery Darke. By blood and bone, I compel you to manifest. Reveal yourself and answer our questions.”
Nothing happened.
“Come on, then,” Brad said, louder now. “We know you’re here. Stop pissing about and show yourself.”
The wind picked up.
Not a gentle breeze. A sudden, violent gust that sent my hair whipping across my face and made the apple tree’s branches groan overhead. The sky, which had been merely slightly cloudy, darkened to an ominous grey-black.
My pulse quickened. Even after everything I’d witnessed here, some na?ve part of me hadn’t actually expected this to work.
The wind intensified, howling now, and Brad’s carefully constructed salt circle began to blur. White grains lifted from the ground, swirling in miniature cyclones before scattering across the garden like snow.
“Oh, shit,” Bat breathed. He flew to my side, his form flickering with panic. “Charlie, we need to go. Now.”
He grabbed my arm, trying to pull me away from the grave, but his grip kept phasing in and out.
“Run!” he shouted over the wind. “Please, just run!”
Thomas and Molly had already vanished.
The skeleton began to vibrate against the earth, bones rattling like chattering teeth. Then, impossibly, the scattered pieces drew together, fusing into solid form as the frame lurched upright.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I couldn’t breathe. And I most certainly couldn’t move.
Around the standing bones, the air shimmered. A figure materialised—translucent at first, then gaining substance and fury. A woman in a tattered dark dress, her face twisted with rage and her eyes burning like coals.
When she spoke, her voice carried the weight of centuries and the promise of violence. “How dare thee disturb my rest!”
For the first time since I’d met him, Brad looked genuinely terrified—his face drained of colour as he looked to me, eyes wide with panic.
I shrugged. What did he expect me to do? Genuinely surprisingly, the ExorSquad handbook hadn’t covered Confronting Vengeful Spirits You’ve Just Dug Up.
Brad dropped to one knee in the dirt, bowing his head. “Great witch, we—”
“WITCH?”
The word exploded from Margery’s lips like thunder. The ground beneath us shuddered violently, and the apple tree’s branches thrashed overhead as if caught in a hurricane.
“I AM NOT A WITCH!”
Her voice boomed across the garden, rattling the manor’s windows. The sound reverberated in my teeth, in my bones, in every cell in my body. Oh dear.
Brad scrambled backwards on his hands and knees. “I—I meant no disrespect, I was only—”
“Shut up, Brad,” I said.
Bat’s grip on my arm intensified, his shape flickering with desperation. “Charlie, please, we have to go. She’s too strong, she’ll hurt you!”
A large part of me wanted to listen to him. To let him pull me away from here. To run out that gate and never look back.
Yet I found myself stepping forward instead, raising my hands in what I hoped was a placating gesture. “Madame Margery, we just wanted to ask you some questions. That’s all. We didn’t mean to—”
Margery’s burning gaze snapped to me, and the world exploded into pain.
An invisible force slammed into my chest, lifting me clean off my feet and hurling me backwards towards the apple tree, and I had just enough time to think this is going to hurt before my back collided with the bark.
The impact drove every molecule of air from my lungs.
White light splintered through my vision as supernatural power pinned me against the wood, crushing my ribs, making it impossible to breathe.
My glasses flew from my face, spinning through the air before striking the small M.D. grave marker with a sharp crack.
The sound of my lenses breaking seemed ridiculously important, considering I was probably about to die.
“Charlie!” Bat’s voice cracked with terror.
A now blurry Brad whipped out the PolterPulse, the weapon humming as he aimed it at Margery. The neon-blue beam struck her dead centre.
Nothing. She didn’t even flinch.
“Leave him alone!” Bat roared, floating high to position himself between Margery and me. His form blazed brighter than I’d ever seen it, violence radiating from every translucent inch of him.
Margery’s face snapped to Bat, her expression twisting with annoyance as her gaze travelled over his leather wristbands, the stitched bat on his shirt, his choppy haircut.
“What manner of garb is this? Thou dost dress as a street urchin gone mad with coal dust. What is that upon thine eyes? Art thou ill?”
“It’s eyeliner! It’s called fashion,” Bat snapped. “At least, it was fashion for a hot second, anyway.”
“Thou art most peculiar,” she said. “Thou dost aid these grave robbers, spirit?”
“No, I didn’t aid them. In fact, I told them multiple times to leave your bones alone!” Bat shot back. “But Charlie’s innocent. You want to kill someone, kill that one, but leave Charlie out of this!”
“Innocent?” Margery laughed like breaking glass.
“Innocent,” Bat confirmed. “And so am I. I told them that you weren’t actually a witch. I told them that you were a victim.”
Margery appeared to consider this, her burning gaze fixed on Bat. “Innocent? Like me, when he drowned me in that pond?”
She gestured towards where I’d danced with Bat last night, her translucent hand trembling.
“Called me whore and witch. His two men held me beneath the water till I drew breath no more.”
Bat’s form flickered, his rage dissolving into something softer. “I’m so sorry. That’s… that’s horrific.”
Margery’s eyes snapped back to him, narrowing as she studied his face, his wound, the way his spirit flickered in and out of visibility. Her expression shifted—confusion bleeding into recognition, then something almost like fear.
“I see his mark upon thee,” she whispered.
“What?” Bat said.
“Yes. Thou art innocent,” she said. “Killed by him. Like so many others who linger here.”
Brad’s head snapped back and forth between Margery and empty air, his face a mask of bewilderment. He couldn’t see Bat, couldn’t hear half the conversation happening around him.
Bat’s form blazed brighter, confusion and panic warring across his face. “Who? Who killed me?”
“I…” Margery’s shape wavered, her eyes darting towards the manor. That fear intensified, twisting her spectral features. “I can feel him still. Locked beneath the stone and earth. He never rests. Never shall rest. Pure malice, that one. He troubles thy dwelling—not I.”
Brad latched onto this immediately, stepping closer despite the supernatural hurricane still raging around us. “Who? Who’s locked beneath—”
Margery’s head snapped towards him, madness blazing back into her coal-black eyes. When she spoke, her voice was poison and hatred distilled into sound.
“If thou dost disturb my bones again, mortal fool, I shall kill thee all. Ye can join me in this eternal torment.”
And with that, Margery vanished. Her bones tumbled to the earth in a cascade of yellowed fragments, and the supernatural force holding me against the tree released all at once.
I pitched forward, face first into the mud. Earth and decay filled my mouth as pain lanced through me. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think past the fire in my chest.
“Charlie!” Bat’s hands gripped my arm.
I pushed myself up onto my knees, spitting mud and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Everything hurt, but I was alive. Somehow.
“You’re shaking!” Bat said.
“I’m alright,” I managed.
Brad grunted from somewhere near me. “Good.”
That was it. Good. Like I’d just recovered from a minor stumble rather than nearly being murdered by a centuries-old vengeful spirit.
“We need to rebury her bones,” I said, still on my knees in the mud. My voice came out hoarse and shaky. “Now.”
For once, Brad actually agreed with me without argument. Though his method of reburying Margery’s remains was to kick the scattered bones into the grave hole like he was clearing leaves off a pavement. Hardly respectful, considering what we’d just witnessed, but I lacked the energy to protest.
My hands shook as I crawled through the mud, searching for my glasses. The golden wire frame had snapped clean in half, across the nose, one lens spider-webbed with cracks.