by The house was waiting, and I don’t say that lightly. A great, soaring construct of dark stone and heavy wood, bristling with chimneys and begrimed windows, it crouched there like a spider awaiting the approach of dinner.
I felt watched by a hundred eyes.
Zareen halted first. And if the Scary Lady’s too intimidated to proceed, then the rest of us sure as hell aren’t going anywhere. We stopped as a group, and stared up at the place with collective unease.
Finally, Zareen shook her head. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘This is all too obvious.’
‘Too… obvious?’ Jay echoed.
‘Look at it.’ She made a dramatic, disgusted gesture at the terrible house. ‘It could have been taken from a textbook on haunted houses. Even the Addams Family had more subtlety than this.’
‘You do have a point, except I’m fairly sure I’m not getting it,’ I said.
‘The point.’ Zareen considered. ‘Exactly. What is the point of it? I’d say it’s being operated by people who’d like to be left alone, and we’re supposed to be too scared to go in. But then all they had to do was hide. Even I might never have realised this was here.’ She took a few steps forward, visibly squaring up to the house. ‘Instead, they’ve rolled out a red carpet leading straight to the door, which means we’re supposed to go in, but for no purpose we’re likely to enjoy.’
A fell gust of wind swept up at her words and howled through the clearing, freezing me to my bones. I began to shiver.
‘So,’ I said, slowly. ‘Are you saying we go in, or not?’
‘I’m saying…’ Zareen lifted her voice, and screamed into the wind, ‘Challenge accepted, bitches!’
She went forward with the unstoppable stride of a general at the head of an invincible army (which we weren’t, but I didn’t feel like telling her that). The damned door swung slowly open as she approached, complete with a terrible, wrenching groan. There was a light behind it, but not the welcoming kind.
Zareen, unfazed, stepped over the threshold.
I’m both pleased and sorry to say that the rest of us were right behind her.
The door — or more rightly doors, for they were enormous double doors of iron-hinged oak — swung shut behind us, with a boom that echoed through the house.
Jay, behind me, tested the handles. ‘Locked,’ he confirmed.
‘Well,’ I said cheerfully. ‘We’re in for it now.’
‘Hello?’ Zareen yelled. The word echoed and echoed, the sounds taking far too long to fade.
Indira and Emellana were silent, alert, looking around. So was I.
The hallway was huge and empty. Completely empty. The dark stone walls were unplastered and unadorned, the floor of near-black oak boards was bare, and there wasn’t a lick of furniture. An enormous staircase wound its way up to a higher floor, bare of carpets but lined with ornate iron-wrought banisters. Passageways opened off the hallway on either side, leading into dark places I didn’t really want to go into.
I couldn’t see where the light was coming from. We should have been shrouded in total darkness; there were no lamps, no sconces, no chandelier. But a strange glow came from somewhere; just enough for us to see where we were going, nowhere near enough for us to feel comfortable.
Good times.
‘All right, we’ll have to do this the fun way,’ said Zareen, brightly, but with a brittle note to the words. I fervently hoped she was as well recovered as Milady seemed to think she was. Nothing about this house was going to be easy.
I watched as the whites of her eyes filled in with black and, shuddering, looked away. I’ve seen that happen a few times before. I’m getting used to it by now. Sort of.
Everyone seemed to judge it best not to rush the Scary Lady, so we waited in uneasy silence while Zareen did… whatever it is that Zareen does when her eyes turn into twin pools of fathomless shadow.
At length she said: ‘Well, we’ve got company.’
‘Figured,’ said Jay tightly.
‘Quite a lot of it. In fact, I’d say the whole damned village is hanging around out here.’
‘Any idea why?’ I put in.
‘They aren’t talking.’
‘Hey,’ I said, more loudly. ‘You wanted us to come here, well, we’re here. And we’re not here to cause anyone any harm, but we are rather busy. So tell us what you want, and maybe we can make some kind of arrangement.’
Zareen sighed. ‘Far as I can judge, we have a host of silent spirits and a few… ringleaders.’
‘These ringleaders are controlling the others?’ Emellana asked.
‘I believe so. They’re certainly running this little show. But they won’t speak to me directly.’
A door to the left of the hallway creaked as it swung open.
‘That’s clear enough,’ said Jay.
‘Too clear,’ said I. ‘We’re not playing this game.’
‘Ves,’ Zareen hissed in a whisper. ‘If you think I can exorcise this many spirits then please, get your head out of the clouds.’
‘So we are playing this game.’
‘For now.’
Emellana sat down in the middle of the hall, which was brave of her, because the place was bone-chillingly cold and that stone floor had to be freezing. She placed both her hands palm-flat against the floor, eyes closed. I wasn’t particularly surprised when she presently said: ‘A lot has occurred here. Most of it would fall within the realms of Zareen’s particular arts, I would judge.’
‘Yes,’ said Zareen tightly. ‘Lots of very bad things.’
If I was parsing that correctly, Zareen and Emellana were implying that the departed inhabitants of the former village of Silvessen were still in residence in this ancient wreck of a house, but was that by their own volition or not? Were they the captives of these ringleaders Zareen spoke of, or were we dealing with a swarm of ghosts all in horrible league with one another?
Questions, questions.
I eyed the door that had opened in dreadful invitation. Whatever lurked beyond it lay sunk in impenetrable shadow.
‘Okay.’ I sat down in the middle of the floor and opened my bag, emptying it of one last item of special interest. The plastic wrapping crackled promisingly as I spread it open, revealing a hoard of treasure.
‘Ves?’ said Jay, doing his befuddled-face with the eyebrows. ‘What are we doing?’
‘Council of war,’ I answered. ‘Please, join me.’
Jay was the first to do so, proving himself a staunch sidekick once again (even if he did roll his eyes a bit on the way down). He sat cross-legged at my left elbow, shrugging his shoulders in answer to his sister’s look of puzzled enquiry. Indira followed suit, and Emellana. Zareen was the last, and I didn’t rush her. She was still more nearly resembling some kind of semi-undead horror than the woman I knew, and you don’t hassle people fitting that description if you know what’s good for you.
She sat opposite me, and stared at me with those blank black eyes.
I met them squarely.
‘I hereby declare the first Semi-Recumbent Biscuit Council in session,’ I announced. ‘Please take a comestible.’
From the hoard of treasure I’d brought, Jay selected a custard cream. Indira chose a bourbon biscuit, Emellana a shortbread finger and Zareen a gingernut.
I grabbed a chocolate Hobnob.
Twenty seconds of quiet ingestion of sugar followed, after which the atmosphere of tension had somewhat eased.
‘Right,’ I proceeded. ‘We have choices. Option one: we declare this entire building Someone Else’s Problem and walk away.’
‘The doors are locked,’ Zareen reminded me.
‘Yes, but Jay has that thing where he makes fathomless voids in obstacles through which a person may safely escape, and while his personal ethics are frequently against his actually using it, I believe this occasion may prove an exception. Is that the case?’ I raised an eyebrow at Jay.
He actually paused to think about it; apparently something in him still felt like it would be wrong to make a hole in someone’s front door for his personal convenience, even if the convenience in question consisted of escaping an eldritch horror. But he nodded. ‘I could do that.’
‘But then do we test the regulator or not?’ Indira asked.
‘If we don’t,’ Emellana put in, ‘we will have wasted the time, and the opportunity. It won’t be so easy to keep sneaking out of our respective organisations without our purpose being divined.’
‘I would prefer to complete the assignment,’ I agreed. ‘Can we test it in the village without disturbing the residents of this house?’
‘That seems unethical,’ Jay argued. ‘They may no longer be alive, but they are still technically in residence. Silvessen was chosen for being, supposedly, unoccupied.’
I looked at Zareen. ‘And you don’t think we can, um, render it unoccupied.’
‘I sure as hell can’t.’ She shook her head. ‘Besides, while it pains me to sound like Jay—’
‘Thanks,’ Jay said.
‘—it’s considered unethical to perform exorcisms without either the spirit’s consent or clear cause, such as a direct threat to one’s own personal safety or that of someone else.’ She sounded like she was quoting from a health-and-safety manual, which, perhaps, she was. ‘That goes triple for mass exorcisms,’ she continued. ‘Even if I were capable of it, we can’t just vaporise all these spirits merely because they’re in our way.’
‘So we need their consent,’ I concluded. ‘Either to exorcise them, or to perform the test of the regulator while they remain in residence.’
Zareen and Jay both nodded. So did Indira.
Emellana and I remained dubious; I read doubt in her face, and she notably failed to concur with the others. No wonder. She’d spent her long lifetime travelling the world, undergoing numerous and challenging adventures in the name of magickal progress. A little problem like this wouldn’t seem like much to her, and she had probably done worse than exorcise a few cantankerous (and likely dangerous) spirits in her time.
Me, I just wanted to get the job done, and I never take well to pointless obstruction.
But Jay’s grasp of ethics is superb, and I trust him.
‘Perhaps we can attempt a negotiation,’ I suggested to Zareen. I surveyed the remains of the broken biscuit box I’d brought, through which we’d been steadily munching our way as we talked. We had several decent biscuits left, mostly intact, and even a couple of chocolate ones. ‘Might they accept two custard creams, several Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, some rich tea biscuits and a chocolate bourbon in exchange for leaving us to work in peace?’
‘Ves,’ said Zareen, ‘I know this can seem like a foreign concept to you, but these people aren’t friendly and we do actually have to take this seriously.’
Coming from the woman who’d once turned all the oak trees lining House’s driveway upside down, just for fun, that had to mean something. ‘Fair enough,’ I agreed. ‘What do they want?’
‘That seems clear,’ said Jay. ‘They want us to go through that door.’
‘Where we will doubtless encounter a nameless but horrifying doom.’
‘Bound to.’
‘All in favour?’ I proposed.
Everyone glanced at the shadowy door.
Nobody raised their hand.
‘Me neither,’ I agreed. ‘Zar, what information do you have about them?’
‘Some are human,’ she replied. ‘Or, they were in life. Some weren’t. A mixed settlement. But the ones who are running this show, they definitely aren’t. Or weren’t. Aren’t? To be honest with you, I’m not certain all of them are even dead. Technically.’
That boded ill. The kinds of non-human beings whose day-to-day business proved relevant to the School of Weird were not good news.
‘Fae?’ I prompted.
‘Glaistig,’ she replied. ‘I think. More than one.’
I searched my memory. I haven’t run into a glaistig before, but as I recall from my university days, they aren’t necessarily malevolent, though if you catch one in a bad mood then they can be very bad news. They’re usually female, usually ghostly, and always complicated.
Judging from the signs, we were dealing with the malevolent type. Possibly vengeful.
‘Still not talking?’ Jay prompted.
Zareen shook her head.
It was Emellana who polished off the last biscuit, and rose to her feet. ‘We appear to have two choices,’ she said as she hauled herself off the floor. ‘Either we find out what they want, or we leave.’
Two things nobody wanted to do.
Oh well. Life’s tough.
‘If anything happens to me,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Tell Addie I love her.’
With which words, I completed my dramatic exit by making straight for the beckoning door, and going through it.
Darkness swallowed me, and all sounds of my companions faded.
