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“Feels normal,” Pete said. “Just a dusty old house.”
“That’s bothersome,” Jack said. “Old place, shouldn’t be so quiet. Old homes, old bones. Echoes.”
“Not every place is a backdrop for Masters of Horror,” Pete said. “The Naughtons may have been happy.”
“Can you look at Sir Nicholas and honestly tell me you believe that sack of wank-leavings was ever happy, for a single moment in his life?” Jack slipped his scrying mirror from the velvet. He set it gently on the floor and pointed at his bag. “Hand me that white candle, would you?”
Pete found it and passed it across, keeping well clear of his chalk markings. Jack lit the white candle and placed it west, the direction of the dead. He set his mirror on the floor and sat, fingers on the glass.
Waited.
The Naughton house was curiously blank, like a dead station on the radio, not music, not static. Just silence, eerie in its stillness and breadth. Jack’s skin crawled all up and down his body.
“Daniel Naughton,” he said, putting a push behind the words. “Master of this house. Come to me, spirit. To the circle, you are called. Tar do mo fhuil beo.”
Pete shifted. “Where is he?”
“It’s not a summoning spell,” Jack said shortly. “Ghost summoning’s what put us here to start, luv, and I don’t fancy another Treadwell.”
“Still . . . if this is a haunting shouldn’t he be doing . . . hauntish things?” Pete glared at all the corners of the room, brow wrinkling like she could will Da
Jack took in a breath, tried again. “Daniel Naughton. Master of this house. Come, spirit. By the power of circle and crow, come.”
Rain fell, battered the windowpanes. Jack’s heart pumped blood against his ears, all of his extremities vibrating against the power of the spell. His nose detected the sticky-sweet of the incense and the tang of the galangal, and for one perfect moment, his sight and the Black were utterly silent and still.
Then the mirror in the corner shattered into ten thousand snowflakes of glass, scattering across the floor. A piece of glass kissed his cheek, a hot sting and a lick of blood.
“Bloody hell!” Pete shrieked, swiping at the scratches on her own face.
From all the corners of the room a low giggle burbled, scratchy as a needle across vinyl, mad and grating against Jack’s ears.
“Daniel Naughton,” Jack gritted. “By the power of iron and smoke. By the power of the binding words. Show yourself. And quit fucking about,” he added as the sounds of madness increased, the bulbs in the lamp overhead flickering madly.
Jack could see his own breath as the ghost crawled around the perimeter of the circle, drawn by the ritual but too strong to allow the markings to drag it down. Yet.
“Pete,” Jack said. “You try.”
She dabbed at her cheek, lined with thin deep scratches that leaked blood. “Me? I haven’t got a thing to say to the bastard ghost.”
“You’re a speaker for the magic,” Jack said. He felt his power struggling to grasp the ghost, like picking up handfuls of mud, cold and dead and futile.
The sounds rose in pitch, and more voices joined them. One by one the bulbs in the lamps blew, showering down sparks.
Jack could see his breath as he commanded Pete, “Call him! Before something gets in here and fucks me proper!”
“Daniel Naughton.” Pete drew her spine straight. Her eyes were wide and her body was strung with wire, but Jack gave her credit—her voice was sure and strong. “Master of this house. Come, spirit. Appear and be heard.”
Da
“Who speaks?” Jack demanded. This part he knew like lines in a well-rehearsed stage play. He’d done plenty of séances when he was skint, and a mage willing to commune with an unknown spirit, to risk possession and ghost sickness, was worth enough coin for a bed and a few weeks of the fix.
“Who calls from the arch of the Bleak Gates?” he said. “Tell me your name.”
You’ll know my name soon enough, crow-mage. The voice wasn’t the sibilant rasp of a fully formed ghost. It was small and high, playful in the way of a child who enjoyed killing small furry things.
In the pit of his stomach, Jack felt a twist. The twist of needing the fix and the twist of a guilty secret. If he were being honest, he’d call it fear, the same fear that came upon him in Highgate. The bastard fear that chewed him up. This voice, this crawling evil on his shoulder, wasn’t a simple poltergeist. There was something else in the house, and it had come out to play with him.
He stiffened his fingers on the mirror. He wouldn’t shake and he wouldn’t show it the fear, not an ounce. “How do you know that name?”
The giggling increased tenfold. Wouldn’t you like to know, grumpy old man.
“Tell me or I exorcise you on the spot,” Jack growled. “I don’t need a name and a lock of hair to do it, and you’re on me last nerve, cunt. Polite or otherwise.”
Pete pointed over his shoulder. “Jack.”
A spirit stood in front of the mirror, framed by jagged reflections of Jack and Pete’s faces. The spirit looked like a girl, in an old-style sailor dress, hair curled into painfully tight sausages against her scalp. Her eyes were black, bleeding hollows and she gri
You should mind your tongue, before I take a notion to cut it out.
The walls were covered in the black miasma now, the air choked with malignant strands of the Black. It spread like water stains, and Jack smelled decay as the temperature dropped, the too-sweet stench of rotted orchids.
Such a fu
She started for him, hollow eyes reaching down into the black howling depths, and Jack felt again the tug on his skull, the vortex of Black energy gathering and swelling until it threatened to burst the bonds of the circle.
“You are not welcome in this house,” Jack said. “Go. Last chance, little one.”
I belong here, the ghost snarled. We belong here. You’re the nasty trespassers.
All around the circle Jack saw more shapes, struggling to form, twisted spirit figures bathed in the same wicked-smelling magic as the little girl.
A man in a waistcoat with a dark slash across his neck that dripped blood. A woman in an apron with burns bubbling across her arms and face. A boy, tall and rangy-limbed with the first spurt of growth, legs twisted to unrecognizable sticks as he pulled himself across the floor on his hands with the sickening thud-thunk of flesh hitting wood.
Jack didn’t grace them with a look. Didn’t even grace them with a sharpening of breath. If you wanted a ghost to obey, it couldn’t see anything except your contempt and your magic. It sure as fuck couldn’t get its teeth into your roiling, rollicking panic.
Jack stared at his mirror. He said, “Pete. Salt.”
She grabbed the leather sack from his bag and tossed it to him. Jack took a handful and flung it in a careless circle. The ghosts drew back, all except the little girl.
You think that’s enough? she mewled. I’ll trim your wings, crow-mage, and chop off your feet to make my curse bags.
“Too much talk, luv,” Jack said. “And no substance.” He threw a fat handful of salt on the ghost and she melted away into nothing with a scream, like a Black-ridden garden slug.
Jack let go of the mirror, let himself slump and feel as if his strings had gotten cut. His muscles trembled and the echoes of the ghosts scraped nails through his skull. Vomit welled in the back of his throat but he breathed, fought the feeling down, and pulled his spine upright at last.