Page 4 of Heart, Haunt, Havoc
He tried again, flexing his fingers inward, closing his eyes, centering his energy, and reached for presence, for magic, for displacement.
There, he thought.Yes, there you are.
When Colin opened his eyes, his breath hitched, and he found himself confronted. Knife-like bone pressed hard against thin skin, bending the creature’s flesh like a curtain over rod iron. The apparition he’d seen on the staircase stood before him, lips sawed away, pulled back to expose receding gums and square teeth. Its eyes were pits, caving inward toward pale muscle and bloodless tissue. Hair stringed in mangled patches from its skull, and its knobby, girlish fingers hovered like a marionette above his hand.
I see.
“Man of God,” the spirit croaked, “do you find me wanting?”
Colin lifted his free hand and made the sign of the cross in front of its forehead.
“I find you damned,” he whispered.
When the creature touched Colin’s palm, he seized its icy fingers and squeezed, wrenching it through the shared space wheretheremetelsewhere. He curled his hand around its narrow throat. His knuckles buckled inward, cutting away a long-spent life. Things like this never ended quickly—unfinished things, angry things. But Colin had the touch, the sense, the profound ability to communicate with restless, vengeful horrors. For twenty-seven years he’d communicated with the dead. For five years he’d called it a business. For six years he’d tried to earn his way back into God’s good graces.
If God existed, of course.
“Prince of the Heavenly Host, I ask you to guide this child,” Colin said. In his grasp, the creature howled. “Michael, protector, Saint in the Armory, deliver this soul as you see fit. Take this ruin and make it new.”
The creature belched smoke, screeching and writhing, reaching for the ceiling, for an impossibly bright light that poured through the windows. Ink burned, etched into the milky skin beneath Colin’s sweater, and he watched the ghoul disintegrate. The release always hurt. Sending a spirit into the arms of next—whatevernextmay be—felt like clipping a bone with a scalpel.
He winced as the creature jerked and spasmed, peeling away into a cloud of rapidly dissolving ash. Once it was gone and its strangled death-cries faded, Colin swayed on his feet, listening to the house hold its breath.
“Aim your grievances at me,” he said, clearing his chalky throat. “I’m here to cut you away from this place—somewhere you’re not meant to be. Force my hand, and it will hurt. Go willingly, and I’ll extract you as gently as possible. But the homeowner is not the exorcist in this equation. Truthfully, I wouldn’t call myself that either.” He let his shoulders go heavy and sighed at the tense ceiling. Something, a few things, turned their eyes on him, watching from their hidden spots in the hollow walls and rusted keyholes. “But it is what it is, and I am what I am.”
Colin rarely opened a case with a violent departure, but he needed this house to understand. He needed the beings who had crammed themselves into the wood and tile and cement and shingles to see what he could do. And now that they’d witnessed him, he needed to capture them.
As his muscles slowly unwound, he went to work arranging cameras in the corner of each room. Tested battery life, line-of-sight, movement detection, night vision, and temperature gauges. Made notes about gear placement and sketched a rough depiction of the creature he’d released. Probably a ghoulish watermark from a long-ago life, perhaps a vindictive ghost looking for revenge. Either way, he’d felt its unwillingness to leave and wondered about the rest of the obscure things caged in the house.
Excavation might prove to be difficult, he thought.What’s keeping them here?
Once the cameras were live, Colin tested their connection to his laptop, sitting propped open and humming on the coffee table. He hadn’t noticed the sun sinking low, sending shards of pink and orange across the sky, until Bishop opened the front door, and a pastel kaleidoscope haloed their shoulders. Hours had come and gone, eaten by Colin’s over-analytical tendencies—fixing this, installing that, feeling for energetic spikes, and listening to the house splinter through an exhale. Time had been stolen, somehow. Altered. He blinked, taken aback, and cleared his throat.
“I’ve fixed the cameras. Two in the living room, one in the kitchen, two others—one wide-angle, one zoom—on the staircase, one in the hallway, each guest room, and your bedroom,” Colin said. He pointed to the closed door across the room. “And the basement, of course. There’s all-weather equipment in the backyard, angled toward the slider.”
Bishop pawed through a plastic bag, setting white takeout boxes on the counter one by one.
“My bedroom,” they said, raspy and unsure. “That’s necessary?”
“Typically, yes. I can remove them if you’d like, but I assume you’ve experienced peculiarities there as well?”
“Peculiarities,” they muttered, nodding as they plated rice, curry, and charred naan. They shot him a curious look. “Are you always thisformal…? Because you can say ghost or haunting or… or, fuck, I don’t know,poltergeist.”
“Would you prefer—”
“Oh myGod.”
“Thisdoeshappen to be my business, Bishop. Forgive me for being polite,” he snapped. Heat rushed into his face, surely blotching his fair complexion. He’d never been badgered by a client before. Not about formality, at least.
Bishop set his plate on the table next to his laptop along with his tea, snapped the cap off of a cold beer and set that down as well. They tipped their head, smiling slyly.
“Forgive me for beingfuckingpolite.” Colin rested the bottle against his mouth. “Better?”
“Much,” Bishop said, and swung their legs over the bench seat across from him. “Can I ask how you got into… this?”
“It’s not a complicated story. I heard the dead, I saw the dead, I began to communicate with the dead. Things spiraled from there. Once I realized I wasn’t speaking exclusively with ghosts, I started researching the occult, and, well…” He shrugged, forking jasmine rice into his mouth. That wasn’t the whole truth, but it was true enough. “Here I am.”
“Here you are,” Bishop said, matter-of-factly. “You look young. I mean, I assumed you were young, but you make it sound like you’ve been at this for—”
