Page 49 of Giving Up The Ghost
OSCAR
“Oscar!”
I fairly lunged for Julian and Ezra, catching myself before I could knock Julian over. I leaned into his embrace for a long moment before pulling away and gesturing at the cellar door. “Charlotte’s down there. She’s?—”
“She’s trying to scam you,” Ezra said, voice snapping in anger. In a clipped, sharp tone, he told me about what he and Julian had found while we were gone. “I haven’t had a chance to try and ring Nadine yet,” he added. From below us came the sound of something breaking, something heavy falling, then a shrill, bitter scream, a string of French that ended in a roar and another crash. “What the hell?—”
I shook my head. “I can only make out a few words, but she said something about liars,please, and deserving something.” I took a few steps towards the cellar door.What if she’s hurt herself? What if she is destroying everything?I was loathe to admit to myself that I was prioritizing the possible destruction of the boxes over her possible injuries, but the thought of those precious contents being obliterated in a fit of pique made me nauseated and anxious. “I need to stop her…”
Julia tugged on my arm, pulling me a few steps towards him. “We should leave,” he murmured urgently. “Oscar, she tried to kill Ezra last night. She’s lying about, fuck, everything probably. We’re not safe here.“
Another crash made us all look back towards the cellar. Her wordless shouts and screams were raw, tearing sounds. She was crying, angry… And I didn’t want to wait and find out what she was capable of now. “Let’s go.”
We didn’t go far, just to the car of all places. “We can go into the village, and send someone back to help her,” Julian suggested. “It’s not ideal but letting her destroy the house and maybe hurt herself… I don’t like her, but I don’t want her to accidentally kill herself or something.”
Ezra huffed, his fingers flexing on the steering wheel like he wanted to just bulldoze through the gate and not look back. “I think we should just get the fuck out of dodge. We know she’s been up to some shit, but no authorities will do a damn thing about it unless they have evidence.”
“What is she doing in there? How,” I added, pinning Julian down with a gaze, “how do you figure she’s involved with the murders?”
“I think she was the one to request the meetings with the mediums before they died,” he responded promptly. “The only one who has survived so far is Heinrich, but he was out of the country when she tried to set something up with him.”
“It… it could be a coincidence,” I said weakly, knowing full well it was too damn much of one to be just a fluke. One medium dying after a meeting with Charlotte? A sad situation for sure. Two dying? Three? Four? It was a pattern. And the sympathetic expression on Julian’s face told me he was thinking the same thing and was just too kind to say it aloud, letting me work through it on my own. “And the odds of us being believed taking this to any authorities, hovers close to nil. Once you start mentioning mediums, ghosts, the paranormal…”
“Might as well tell them Spider-Man just declared himself king of England and is having tea with Abraham Lincoln.” Ezra sighed.
We all three stared back at the house. The glint of light on the silvery stone caught my eye and I turned to Julian. “You said this is a trap...”
He grabbed his phone and, thumbs flying, pulled up an article he’d had bookmarked. “Here. I was looking at this a while back and had forgotten about it, honestly, since it’s never come up for us. Well, until now,” he chuckled weakly, humorlessly. “There’s been some research in the parapsych field about quartz and granite. Some research has suggested there are certain minerals associated with what they called anchored or pinioned hauntings, ghosts tied to a specific location. The research was inconclusive, but there was a bit of a footnote about some burials in New England, in Maine specifically, where the deceased were considered to have some evil powers or something and were buried using a local stone as a grave liner because it was said to entrap spirits.” He looked up, offering me a weak smile that barely hid his research-based excitement. “And the way your relatives are buried using the stone here, and the house was rebuilt with the stone, and it was used as an inlay in specifically the basement and around doors and windows suggests a similar thinking at play here.”
“Why would my ancestors want to build a place that trapped the spirits?” I mused, a string of hurt in my words. “It’s not what we do.”
Julian sighed. “How do you know?” At my indignant squawk, he reached back to lay a hand atop mine on the seat. “It’s not whatyoudo. Or your grandparents, or your parents. But before them? Do you know?”
“Grandmere taught me some family history,” I said slowly. “She… She taught me the traditional methods we use. Except the scrying mirrors, and the pendulums. Grandfather taught me that, when I was a boy. They fought about it,” I remembered. “And I taught myself the automatic writing. And some of the other things I do.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “How I release spirits. How to call them, if they want to come…”
“But she avoided things she didn’t like,” Ezra said flatly. “I remember sitting there while she lectured you, Oz. Scolding you for beingtoo familiarwith the spirits at the townhouse. Making you practice how to keep a stoic face andact professional, Oscar!”
I stared at the house, my heart sinking even further than it had been sitting if that was even possible. “Why would we do that,” I whispered to myself. “Make a house that holds them back?”
“Or maybe,” Julian offered, “it was to protect them.”
“What?” Ezra and I both spoke together, giving Julian matching confused looks.
“What do you do when you love something?” he said softly, turning to look up at the house. “You protect it. Didn’t the original house burn down?”
“The first two did, yes,” I murmured.
“An unfriendly village that’s more religious than not at the time, your relatives being buried outside of the consecrated ground or transported or executed, sometimes all three, because they can see and speak to spirits.” Julian shrugged. “Maybe, whichever one of your ancestors builtthishouse, did it to keep their family safe.”
“Their dead family,” Ezra whispered. “Shit. Seriously?”
“It’s just a thought. Maybe they weren’t trying to trap them so much as protect them. Some misguided sense of duty and care…” He frowned, pausing mid-thought. “And it’s entirely possible that Charlotte knew this and is using it to her advantage.”
“Why would she want to trap ghosts?” Ezra demanded. “They’re not fucking Pokémon.”
Oh shit.I sat back, fingers stealing to my lips as pieces began to click together with a sickening clarity. “Clothilde could teach the first ones,” I muttered. “Charlotte’s been trying to find a teacher…”
“What?” Julian craned his neck to look at me, his stern mouth crimped in concern. “Oscar, are you having some sort of an episode here?”
