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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT A SéANCE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA?

J oe was successful in his search for candles. So many candles in such bright abundance that one might think he was enjoying the affair. Joe was an experienced ghost-chatterer, though. And Percy imagined ghosts probably made a nice change from the usual demon possessions that priests were wont to deal with.

Thankfully, there was no sign of a demon in the house. The occasional religious artefact sat upright and undisturbed. The dust, as Percy had pointed out, kept no prints. Movements in the house cast no shadows, and more damning still, as bad as the whole place stank, there wasn’t a hint of sulphur. Every interference with their exploration since arrival had been perfectly poltergeist-like.

Filling himself up with every such fact and reassurance he could conjure, Percy ripped his knife out of the floorboards, having carved the well-known characters, digits and words of a ouija board straight into the wood. For this, he received a loud tsk, and was forced to reiterate to his betrothed that the house would be ashes before long.

Sad as that was.

It was a piece of history, after all. A gorgeous one. But a cruel and relentlessly murderous one. Even the art historian in him was resolved: houses that repeatedly kill have to go, aesthetics be damned. And if the John Constable painting went up with it? It was simply the price they had to pay.

Of course, a few choice and non-cloying antique items had been quietly wrapped in a nearby throw for easy removal, should a quick dash from the premises be required.

While these and more preparations were being seen to by Percy, Joe had, in addition to the candles, found several glasses in the kitchen and lined them up in a row on the floor. When he dropped down next to Percy, their knees touching, a frisson of barely repressible excitement bubbled behind Joe’s pathetically hidden smile, and they both felt the nostalgic thrill of that first stupid teenage séance.

More or less.

Percy, by the time he was sweet on that one particular girl who didn’t have the faintest idea about how to truly pull a séance off, was too-thoroughly versed in supernatural evil to be very concerned when she suggested the idea at a slumber party. He logically knew the thing wouldn’t work, and it didn’t, but until it was over, there was that background, ‘what if?’ A touch of fear that Mandy might murder them all that night, just like his older brother had murdered his nanny that one time. It was a different trepidation to the kind the other participants felt, but there was that similar something simmering away. Fear, but only a controlled touch of it, which quickly dissipated.

Mandy had used Scrabble letters for the board, and it quickly became apparent she and her friend had planned and rigged the game with no other purpose than to have the ‘spirit’ find out if Percy liked her too.

Joe’s first séance experience was nothing alike, yet totally alike. The village graveyard had always been rumoured to be haunted, and happy to be anywhere but at home, Joe had snuck out of his bedroom window after dark, as he often did, to smoke cigarettes with other kids who also hated to be at home. They were an ill-matched group drawn together mostly out of loneliness and agreement about what they didn’t like rather than any shared interests, but it was company and relative peace.

Out of sheer boredom, they had gone to the graveyard, set up a makeshift board in the caretaker’s shed, and the séance worked . It worked like magic, which it really was, to Joe and to the rest of them.

First contact with the other side.

The first real proof of life after death.

Joe returned again and again, sometimes alone, sometimes with the others. Good things came through, bad things came through, but things came through, and from that very first séance, Joe’s life was changed and set, irrevocably, on the path that found him in Scotland that afternoon, next to the love of his life, about to do something that had always, to him, been a positive experience, even when it wasn’t.

Percy and Joe, both of them, were physically warded against demon possession. Ghosts don’t possess people—not without their permission anyway—so they weren’t worried about that. Thus, both were lulled into a sadly misplaced sense of confidence.

Joe’s index finger touched the glass. Percy’s index finger touched the glass.

“Are there any spirits with us today?” Joe commenced. He received a lightly contemptuous glower from Percy for the effort. “What?”

“We know there are spirits here. They’ve been throwing things at us since we arrived.”

“Yes, but?—”

“They’re going to think you don’t know how to do a séance and you’ll lose all credibility.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t realise the desperate murdered undead were quite so judgemental.”

“They’ve probably had a lot of time to think this sort of thing over.”

The glass had, by this time, meandered unnoticed to YES.

Joe let out a sigh so heavy it disturbed the surrounding dust. “Are there any spirits with us today who would like to communicate with us via this incredibly professionally made spirit board my smug associate has so skilfully erected?”

With a shove of his shoulder into Joe’s, “There’s no need to be snarky about it.”

Joe fixed Percy with a cool eye, which Percy met with an amused challenge, and neither noticed the movement of the glass away from and back to YES. “You want to talk about snarky?”

“I want to kiss you.” And Percy leaned across before Joe could argue, both adoring the other’s smile they felt beneath their lips. Meanwhile, the glass slipped from under their fingers, went flying across the room, and smashed against the wall, raining a thousand tiny shards into a puff of cremated dead.

“Homophobic ghosts?” asked Percy, watching the brown cloud settle.

“You are such a shit,” Joe mumbled. He grabbed the next glass and plonked it down, putting his séance voice back on. “Is there anyone in the room right now who would like to communicate with us via this here spirit board?”

The glass slid to YES.

Joe smiled, Percy watched him with a healthy touch of anxiety, and Joe asked, “Who are you?”

The glass scuffed along the old floor, scraping over the carved letters.

H E L P

Shifting forward a little, Joe spoke again. “We will. That’s why we’re here. Where are you?”

H O U S E

“Helpful,” Percy muttered.

Joe spared him a scowl, then said, “What’s your name?”

H E L P

“I can. Listen to me. I need to know where your… uh…” He broke off, unsure how to break the news of having been dismembered to the spirit.

Percy offered, “It knows, Joe.”

“Right.” Joe nodded, licked his lips, then pushed on as gently as possible. “If you’re talking to me through this board, you must know… you’re…”

“Dead, darling.”

“Hmm. Yes.” He cleared his throat. “You must know you’re dead. And I need to find your body to help you.”

H E L P

“Do you know where your body is?”

H O U S E

“Is it in the ceiling?”

H E L P

Percy leaned in close to the glass, and spoke louder than he had so far, addressing the spirit. “Who killed you?”

The glass moved smoothing and unerringly.

C L E O

That same unsettling feeling—that same something that Percy had felt earlier that afternoon—raised itself in a tingle about his shoulders and the back of his neck. “Cleo, and who else?”

“What?” Joe whispered, but the glass slid back across the floor.

C L E O

“This isn’t right,” said Percy.

But all the while, the letters were being touched by the glass, splitting Joe’s attention between Percy’s mumbled words and the board.

H E L P M E

“We will,” said Joe. “Your body. Where can we find it? Are there others?”

C O M I N G

The anxious tingle quickly transitioned to a hammering of adrenaline in Percy’s veins, and he announced. “It’s time to go. End it.”

As if by design, the entire upper level of the house gave an almighty crack, tumbling a shower of ash over everything beneath.

H E L P M E

“Goodbye.” Percy tightened his fingers to move the glass to ‘Goodbye’, only to find Joe’s grip fighting him. “We have to go. What are you doing?”

Joe shook his head. “Let her talk.”

Percy relaxed his hold as requested, allowing the increasingly swift trail of the makeshift planchette to pick out its letters, but he said softly, “It’s lying.”

“What do you mean, she’s lying?” Joe replied, eyes hard at work, reading. “You can’t know that. She’s just a girl.”

“And you can’t know it’s just a girl.”

C O M I N G P L E A S E

Another great shudder from above and a splintering of wood at the top of the staircase.

Percy’s wary eyes went to the lower portion of stairs, visible from their position.

H U R T S M E H E L P

A series of bangs flew across the walls of the room and a scream shot out from nowhere. A scream in the voice of a teenage girl.

“Fuck,” Joe whispered, then louder, “What’s coming? Where is it?”

B E A S T

Percy pulled Joe’s arm, hard, but Joe’s fingers were white with their chill grip, his eyes dark and intent, his brow deeply lined in troubled thought.

Taking a hand to his cheek, Percy tried to break Joe’s insistence. “Darling, listen to me. I don’t think Cleo did this. Not alone anyway. Whatever you’re talking to?—”

Another crash sounded on the stairs, drowning out Percy’s words. Another shower of dust hit the floor, only this accompanied by an ungodly howl from the creature below.

P L E A S E

Joe’s eyes remained on the floor, and he said, “We have to get her out.”

Another crash on the stairs, the sound of the bookcase shifting by the hole in the wall, the glass scraping.

H E L P H E L P M E H E L P

Percy’s eyes swept the empty hall, then fell on Joe’s far too stricken face, watching the frantic movement around the board, reading, always reading. “Move the glass to goodbye now, or I’ll drag you out of here without closing this séance.”

“Percy.” Finally Joe’s eyes met Percy’s. His spare hand fell on Percy’s arm and squeezed. “I’m taking her out.”

The faintest narrowing of Percy’s eyes signalled his too-slow understanding, which only hit when Joe dropped the briefest of kisses on his cheek, his slightly shaky voice saying, “Whatever happens, I trust you.”

Like lightning, Percy’s flat hand shot out and slammed against the glass, flinging it free of Joe’s grasp a millisecond after Joe uttered the fatal words: “Take me.”

Before Percy’s horrified eyes, Joe’s head flung back, eyes rolled up so far only the whites showed beneath the open, fluttering eyelids.

Percy took Joe’s face in his hands, desperately trying to calm the movement of his spasming body. “Please don’t do this. Fight it. Get it out!” Hopelessly, he slapped his hand against the unresponsive cheek. “Joe! Wake up!”

Joe stilled, eyes closed. Calm, deathly immobile, frozen in place despite the banging and the howling and the screeching of furniture and the groaning of the very walls all about them.

“Joe!” Percy shouted.

His eyes snapped open. “It’s coming.”

Percy’s strong hand took Joe by the throat and slammed him down on the floor, the furious growl from his lips hot on Joe’s. “Get out of him, or I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

The bookcase flung into a wall in the other room. The echo of wood cracking rang down the hall. With an enormous crash, the staircase fell in, as though a giant invisible foot had rammed down hard in the centre.

But all Percy saw was Joe’s face that now, he knew, was no longer Joe’s face. The expression was entirely wrong. The body, the movement, the very breath, all wrong and not Joe. And worse than all of it was the foul threat that slipped out of Joe’s beautiful mouth, completely unperturbed. “Kill him, then. I could use the company around here.”

Whatever the thing was—and Percy didn’t believe for a second it was the ghost of a teenage girl—it had defeated him in ten well-chosen words.

Percy’s pale and trembling hand released its lethal grip, and he turned his gaze to the moving shadows in the hall. His hand reached for Joe’s and pulled him to his feet. “Run.” But he didn’t quite trust the thing to do it, so with his dagger in one hand and his other arm linked through Joe’s, he ran, and he pulled Joe’s body with him. Through the lounge, through the entranceway, through the door and down the stairs, then through the barren and parched yard to the wall, where he shoved Joe ahead of him. “Climb. Get out of here, then leave his body.”

Without a word of argument, without even a look, the thing clambered over the table and chair and into the tree, just as nimbly as Joe would have. Percy followed close on his heels, but as he breached the wall, Joe’s feet hit the ground. He took off out of the woods, Percy’s boot slipped on a carpet of moss in his pursuit, and he fell hard on his shoulder. “Fuck!” Springing to his feet, he chased after him as he made for the lake. He sprinted in a single-minded hunt, faster than he ever had before, closer, closer, and with his whole being intent on catching up, he flung himself against Joe’s back, knocking the body to the muddy, pebbly bank in one violent collision. He wrenched Joe’s shoulder over, slammed his back to the ground, and straddled his strong torso, pinning his arms down. “You’re out. You’re free. Leave him now, or I swear I’ll find a way to make you regret it.”

Joe’s brown eyes studied Percy. They stared in the way one does when one’s gathering intelligence. Expressionless. Deep. Too deep. So deep into Percy and his soul that Percy was sure it could see how hopelessly terrified he was. How easily and completely conquered he was. He put on a good show but in truth he hadn’t the vaguest idea what he might do. He didn’t even know what he was up against. He was all alone on a lakeside by a haunted mansion with no one to help and the love of his life beneath his hands, real and tangible, and so far away from him he may as well have been dead already.

The crushing realisation brought Percy near to collapse, the fight the only thing holding him up.

Then the air was almost completely knocked out of him when the thing said, “Very well.”

“What?” he whispered.

Joe’s body went limp, and he sank a little deeper into the mud.

“Joe? Joe!” Percy’s knees crunched down into the wet gravel. He wrapped his arms around Joe, and pulled him to his chest, cradling him on the bank. “Joe? Wake up. Please.”

A soft groan. A soft groan and a sign of life that Percy felt through the tender flesh of his arms into the depth of his heart. “Joe?”

With a thick, gravelly voice, “Percy?”

Percy placed gentle fingers on his cool, clammy cheek. “Oh, my love, is it you? Are you there?”

“What…” Joe’s bewildered hand settled at his temple, and his cloudy gaze focused on Percy. He dropped his arms to the ground and sat up, taking in his surroundings. “How did we get out here?”

“You don’t remember?”

“No. There was…” He glanced back towards the black mansion. “We were doing the séance, and I…” His pretty mouth fell open, his eyes widened, and, “Oh.”

“You absolute bastard!” Percy shoved him off and climbed to his feet, making furiously for the inn.

“But— Percy! Wait!” Joe was after him, but in a half second Percy spun around.

“You fucking shit! ‘Take my head!’ That’s what you said. You said I should take your head if you ever got possessed again, and you went and fucking did it without so much as a word of discussion. You fucking— Fuck!” Joe stumbled back with the violent kiss Percy pressed against him, then Percy was gone again, wrenching a cigarette out of his pocket, lighting it, and snapping in a whirlwind of smoke, “If you ever pull that shit again, you’re dumped. I’ll break up with you on the spot. I’ll dump you, and I’ll leave you to your fate, and?—”

Joe’s hand caught his and wrenched him back around and into another kiss. Percy’s eyes remained tight shut through it, and tight shut after, the cold wind of the lake and the taste of Joe and the feeling of being all-consumingly bereft not washing away with any of it.

“I’m sorry,” said Joe.

Percy looked at him. At the living, guilty, hopeful eyes that he adored with every fibre of his being. “You’re too good. You can’t be trusted, and I’m never working with you again.”

“Okay,” said Joe. “That’s fair. But will you make me another steak?”

“No,” Percy grumbled, turning his back again, trudging in a slightly more sedate, if still incandescent manner, as he puffed on his cigarette. “You can have the bad Scottish food from now on. Because that’s what you deserve. Fish heads for every meal until we leave. Which will be tomorrow, as it goes. And I’m never doing crimes with you again. Judas.”

Joe chuckled in his warm way as he linked his fingers with Percy’s. Percy, of course, yanked his free, dramatically, but Joe only captured his hand again and touched it to his smiling lips.