Chapter 8 #3
“If you’d pipe down and let us finish the story, we’ll give you all the details,” Joe gripes, and I snap my mouth closed.
Huffing, he continues, “When the spirit came through the vortex the second time, we realized we needed to learn more about… everything.” He waves a hand as though to encompass the universe.
“All of it. We couldn’t fight something we didn’t understand.
So Hattie went to the library in town to try to find out more, and the rest of us started watching the spirit to learn whatever we could. ”
“The library was mostly a dead end,” Hattie admits.
“There were very few books on spirituality, much less dark spirits. The librarian at the time was very religious and would have eliminated the section on alternative spiritualism altogether if she could.” She sniffs.
“If there’s one thing a hundred and fifty years of afterlife has taught me, it’s that we should be learning everything we possibly can. ”
“To be fair, I don’t think there are a lot of readily available books on dark spirits and vortexes. Vor…tices? Whatever. And if there are any, they possibly wouldn’t be that accurate.” Fuck knows, most of the books about being a medium aren’t.
“That’s true. Even now, with the internet, there’s a dearth of useful information.
We’ve been looking.” She sounds so tired on that last sentence.
“But while I was at the library, I did some research into why the energy at the estate has always felt so nice for us. Turns out there’s a lot of quartz in this area, which is an energy amplifier.
It’s also a stone of healing and some say purity. ”
“Which ended up being valuable information,” Joe adds. “We noticed the spirit didn’t like to leave the house much, not after we fought it off the first few times. And it absolutely wouldn’t go down to the basement.”
An image of the basement door and the memory of the creepy feeling I got when I went near it rise in my mind. I have a sudden hunch I know where he’s going with this, and I don’t like it. “Would it have had any reason to go down to the basement?”
They all smile at me in that creepy unison way I’m going to force them to stop. “I knew you were a smart boy,” Hattie says approvingly.
“We asked ourselves the very same thing.” Freddie nods once.
“And the answer was, probably not. It’s not finished down there and was only ever used for storage.
Coldstuffs and vegetables back in the days before refrigerators, and then old furniture and tools after that.
But because it’s unfinished, there are places where the bare rock is exposed. ”
I blink. “Whoa. That’s really unfinished.”
“We thought there might be a chance the spirit was avoiding the basement because of the quartz content in the foundations,” Carter says.
“There really is a lot of it around here, even in the soil. But we had to test that theory before we could implement a plan to use quartz against it. So Joe pretended to quarrel with us all and then very loudly stomped off to the basement to sulk alone. And then the rest of us pretended to go back to the manager’s house. ”
“But really we was hiding outside, waiting to see what happened,” Johnny interjects hastily. “We would never of left Joe alone like that.”
I muster up a smile for him, because not abandoning a friend to soul-death is something that should be encouraged.
“And the spirit didn’t go into the basement,” Joe confirms. “What it did do is wait at the top of the basement stairs. All day, and all that night.”
“How did you get out?” I’m kind of in awe of these ghosts right now.
“I’d stolen some quartz pieces when I was in town,” Hattie says.
“There was a woo-woo shop there at the time. Two hippies ran it. They sold candles and tie-dyed shirts and crystals, and if you knew the codeword, marijuana.” She whispers the last word.
“The shop didn’t last long, just a few years, but I only needed to steal quartz that one time, so… ” She shrugs.
Freddie picks up the story. “We had those half-dozen chunks of crystal, and we used them to herd the spirit into the basement. It was hard,” he admits.
“It didn’t want to go in there, and it fought back, tried to get away.
But finally we got it down there, where Joe had used some of the stuff left behind to chip out a hole in the rock.
We forced the spirit into the hole and blocked it up with the quartz and some more bits of rock. ”
Heaving a huge sigh, I wonder idly why I didn’t stock any alcohol when I went grocery shopping. A bottle or six of tequila would be good right now. “So there’s a dark spirit entombed in the basement?”
“Yep!” Maisie declares. “Sometimes it tries to escape, but we keep an eye on it. And the quartz weakens it a lot.”
Oh my god.
“We’re going to come back to that in a minute,” I promise, because I’m pretty sure it’s a health and safety violation for us to have a being that tries to kill people and eat their souls on the premises.
Although, silver lining, it’s unlikely the inspector will ever notice and file a report about it.
Am I getting hysterical? I feel like I might be getting hysterical.
I just wanted somewhere I could talk to ghosts without being ridiculed. Was that really so much to ask?
Clearly it came with a price tag.