Page 88 of Purrfectly Haunted

James laughs. "And you look wretched, big guy. But nothing a few meals won't fix. You also really need a haircut and a good shave."

I feel myself blushing, out of all things. Old habits die hard.

Behind him, one of the two people lets out a sob halfway to a laugh. It's a woman. Two women, actually. Lana's hair is shorter now, cut in a wavy bob, and Shirley's is blue instead of purple.

If my mind is making them up, it sure has a lot of imagination. But it wouldn't be the first time I'm experiencing fractured realities.

One of the cats, Pearl, walks closer and meows. Tears immediately rise to my eyes, unstoppable. I want to bury my face in her fur. I can't remember the last time I felt the warmth of another living creature. Probably James on that fateful night when we thought we could take on the monster in the basement.

To my surprise, James picks her up in his arms and kisses the top of her head. "Don't get too close. Be patient."

She meows again and headbutts his face.

That, out of everything, makes me doubt this reality. James, cuddling with a cat?

"Don't look so shocked," he says with a chuckle. "She grew on me. She was relentless in her affection."

"What—"

But I'm cut short by the monster taking over. I almost forgot he was here, lurking under my skin like a parasite. We are now sharing control over my body, and my skin feels too tight as we fight for dominance. My arms shake, and that's when I realise I'm chained to the floor.

What?

I look around wildly, back arching. This isn't a figment of my imagination. I'm back in the basement of Lynch Hostel, and I was captured. I'm lying at the centre of a circle carved in the concrete, and it's glowing faintly.

My eyes find James again, and I whisper his name. He has a pained look on his face.

"I know, love," he says. "We're going to save you. Just hang in there."

A fierce hope blooms in my chest. They came for me, I realise. My friends. My lover. They didn't forget me.

"Releeeeeaaaaaseee meeeee," the monster roars with my voice.

James crouches in front of us. "Release you? Sure. We'll release you back to hell where you belong." Then he looks at the others over his shoulder and adds, "Let's begin."

twenty-three

Deliverance

JAMES

My composure is barely hanging on by a thread. Seeing Ewan, hearing him, the real him, feels like a punch in the gut. I've missed him so much and for so long, it turned into a shard buried in my heart, and now that it has been yanked out, it feels like I'm bleeding all over the floor. All I want is to walk over the salt circle, hug him, and never let him go.

But I can't. He's not free of the ghost. The stencils barely contain what used to be Earl Lynch, and we're lucky he didn't wake up before being chained.

Lana and Shirley help me light the candles around the circle. We have a protocol to evict ghosts. We tried it twice before to expel spirits from hosts, though none as powerful as this one. It's a combination of spells and herbs and anything that can have an effect on the dead. We don't have the earl's remains, and that complicates things, but Lana managed to track down a few of his belongings left in the house, plus his journal. Shirley placed them in a large crucible to be burned.

Ewan convulses on the floor, veins popping and chains rattling, and I wish I could make it stop.

"Let's do this." I offer my hands to Shirley and Lana, and we form a tight circle around him. "No matter what you see and what he says, keep chanting. He'll try to stop us, but we need to go through with it."

Both women nod. I can feel their hands shaking in mine. The cats pace around us, eyes glowing. Last year it would have creeped me out, but now I feel safer with them by my side. The candles flare, and I know it's the house's way of telling us she's ready.

We start chanting. Poems from classical literature about death, burial hymns and laments, Wiccan spells and Greek prayers. We combined them all. Some appear to work better than others depending of the ghost. I still don't understand the mechanics of the veil, but death seems to be a very personal experience, even as it is an universal one. Ghosts of children, for example, tend to ignore complicated prayers, but recoil when they are told tales of darkness and solitude. Their fears are simple ones.

Earl Lynch, as a practitioner of the occult, appears to hate reminders that we are nothing after death, I realise as I quote Epicurus. "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not."

The ghost pulls on his chains, bending Ewan's body to the point of breaking.