Page 81 of Purrfectly Haunted

“I know,” I say to her. “I feel it.”

This place is haunted alright. After a year of intense ghost hunting, I know how to recognise the signs without needing unreliable devices. There's this something in the air when a powerful entity is nearby. The fabric of the world shivers as they mess up with the veil.

Pearl meows again and I feel her wiggle.

“Stay in the bag. There’s broken glass everywhere you’re going to hurt your toe beans.”

She headbutts the side of my face, purring. Pearl is a spicy little shit, but so am I. We’re a match made in heaven, against all odds. Ewan will be flabbergasted when we finally find him.

In the days after we lost him, when I was jagged and angry, Pearl took it as her mission to become such a menace that I couldn’t brood in peace. She followed me in the bathroom, slept on my chest every night in the narrow room that I occupied alone since Ewan’s disappearance, kept pushing my glass off the table when I fell into a bottle. Back then, we had no tracks to follow, and I was lost at sea. She kept me afloat.

It’s a miracle Lana and Shirley didn’t kick my grumpy ass out of the hostel. But then again, they weren’t much better. Tragedy has a way of sharpening you at the edges. And losing Ewan is a tragedy and we all blame ourselves for it. Earl Lynch took him, and we could do nothing to stop him.

The first weeks after Ewan's disappearance were the worst. We didn’t know if he was even alive or if his body was rotting in a ditch somewhere. I could barely sleep, because every time I closed my eyes, I saw him dead.

But help came from an unexpected origin: ghosts from all over the UK started visiting us at the hostel a few weeks after Ewan’s disappearance. The house, it seems, sits right at the frontier with the veil and bends the rules of hauntings. And the ghosts had things to say. Many of them were scared, as what they called a revenant was roaming the country, devouring entities. A tall revenant with chestnut hair. It was all it took for hope to bloom, and for us to start hunting him down.

Pearl turns her attention to our left, and I follow her gaze. Her senses are sharper than mine. I take the stairwell leading up to the first floor. The ground is littered with trash and dirt.

As we reach the upper floor, I finally hear it: sobs and whispers. I walk through a long hallway and find the poltergeists in one of the abandoned rooms. She’s wearing a nurse uniform, covered in blood, and when she looks up at us, her mascara has left dark streaks on her cheeks.

She perks up, and a strange smile splits her face in two. “Yes? Do you need help?”

How freaky must it be when people doing urbex find her in the empty hospital? Ghosts used to spook me, too. Now they’re my bread and butter.

“Why are you crying?” I ask.

Over the past year I learned that it’s much easier to get something out of a ghost if you ask about them. They’re usually caught in a loop of their own suffering, and trying to get something out of them that isn’t related to their situation can be quite a challenge. Only older entities gain some sort of coherence. The Lady in Red being one of them. She still haunts Lynch Hostel, and lets say she wasn’t happy with us after what went down in the basement on that fateful day.

“They’re all gone,” the nurse says.

“Who?”

She cocks her head to the side, like an owl. “My patients.”

“Where have they gone to?” I have a feeling that I know what happened to her patients.

She whimpers. “He ate them all.”

“He?”

She shakes her head, eyes unfocused. Then when they find me again, she smiles wide. “Hello. What can I do to help?”

I sigh. “You were telling me about the man who ate your patients.”

She recoils. “My... my poor patients...” She hugs her chest and floats through the wall and to the other room.

I hurry to follow.

I knew we were probably too late again, Earl Lynch is always a step ahead, but we’re getting close. If we can guess his next destination, we can finally find him.

The revenant’s feeding times have increased. A year ago, he used to hunt down other entities only once a week, and his trail was hard to follow. Nowadays, whispers of his hunger reach us almost daily through the veil. We don’t know if he’s simply a glutton, or if he needs to eat more often to maintain his hold on Ewan’s body.

We’re also unsure of Ewan’s health. What does a year of invasion done to him? Is he suffering, locked inside his own body? During my short possession, in what feels like a lifetime ago, I was aware of every second, and it left me cold to the bone.

I hold the memory of that night close to my heart. Ewan and I shared so little time together, but the memories haunt me more than any spirit.

Ewan was kindness and joy and laughter, and I failed him. That night, as the guilt ate me whole, I swore I’d find him, no matter how long it took. I’m still holding on to that promise, tooth and nail.