MARMADUKE
Marmaduke meets me, Sam, Mitch, Heather and Ollie outside a café on the corner of High Petergate.
“All right, mate?” I ask as he crooks one of his crutches under his elbow to shake my hand. “How was the coast?”
“Cold and damp,” Marmaduke chuckles. He’s got a prominent jaw under ruddy cheeks, his fuzz of strawberry blonde hair messy in contrast to his neat, finely made clothes, linens gleaming white. In life, his family had plenty of brass.
It’s cold out, so we head inside for our chat. The café door has a shallow step. I lift the front wheel of my chair on to it and pull myself forward using the door frame, jarring my finger enough to make me grit my teeth. Using my chair with a broken finger is hard, but my stumps are too sore for me to wear my prostheses today.
Mum nearly hit the roof when I went home yesterday with a pencil taped to my hand. She had Dad drive me to the out of hours clinic to have a proper splint put on. Heather didn’t say anything, but I could hear the “I told you so” all the way across town. The nurse who saw to me said we did a bang-up job of the temporary splint, so I don’t know why everyone’s making such a fuss.
Inside the café there are marble tabletops, green walls hung with old prints, and a long glass fronted counter full of scotch eggs and quiche. We settle by the window, pushing two of the free tables together to make room on the end for my wheelchair.
“Would you like to order now or would you prefer to wait?” the waiter asks, eyeing the supposedly empty seats where the ghosts are sitting.
“Oh, we’re all here,” says Sam with his polite-but-firm smile.
Hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows for Ollie. Heather and Sam are on coffee. I go for orange juice. Mitch grabs a croissant and a brew. I ask Marmaduke what he fancies and he seems kind of startled, eyeing the waiter with concern. To his credit, the lad doesn’t seem fussed that Sam’s asking invisible people how they want their coffee, which makes for a nice change. Marmaduke orders a fancy herbal tea.
It seems daft to order ghosts anything, it’s not like they can drink it. But they can smell the steam, enjoy the warmth of the mugs and feel like they’re part of the living world again, even just for a moment. That matters.
Marmaduke’s crutches are getting in the way, so I offer to lay them on the floor behind him. Even though I’ve used Villiers’ rapier plenty of times I marvel every time I touch a manifested object.
“My thanks, Charlie.” Marmaduke settles into his chair. “Might I see the likeness thou hath made of this foul shade?”
Sam flips through the sketchbook he brought. From the page, the shadow entity is a jumble of charcoal smoke, skeletal limbs and angry eyes. Marmaduke is quiet a full minute, assessing, then he clears his throat.
“On the edge of Loch Assynt in the Highlands, the local souls tell stories of a long dispute between two families, the Murdochs and the Budges. Although both were loyal to the same clan, they could not settle their differences. When the young Murdoch heir was murdered, accusations were levelled upon a hot-headed Budge. He was acquitted, but is then said to have boasted of the deed, not knowing the boy’s mother was a powerful witch.”
Marmaduke motions to Sam’s sketch. “She called forth an abomination of bone and shadow and sent it out to slaughter every Budge for miles.” He pauses for effect. “Even the children.”
Bone and shadow?
“Does this thing have a name?” I ask.
“They called it a wraith. It climbs inside the living flesh of a person, breaking their body and consuming their soul until they no longer exist in either life or afterlife.”
Wraith. The word echoes somewhere deep inside me, raising the hair on my arms.
The scratches around JD and Sadie’s mouths – from spectral claws as the shadow ghost climbed inside them. No wonder their throats and tongues were torn up. Snapped ribs, shattered bones, melted organs. I shudder and the café seems smaller somehow, no longer safe and cosy. I check the exits.
Ollie whistles. “Even the dead have ghost stories to tell.”
“Surely tis mere legend,” says Marmaduke.
“Tell that to JD and Sadie Sudarma up in the mortuary.” Heather’s forehead creases with worry. “No ghost should be able to hurt them, but it did.”
A tray bangs the edge of our table, startling me. The waiter mutters an apology. Mitch helps him serve drinks to the empty seats.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waiter asks.
Adjusting his cryptolenses, Mitch flashes him his winning smile. “That’s everything, thanks.”
The lad’s cheeks flush pink. I gulp my orange juice to hide my smirk. Yeah, Mitch looks proper fit in glasses, and he isn’t even flirting, he’s just being Mitch. When he turns on the charm he’s got his own kind of magic.
Marmaduke leans into the steam rising from his posh tea, inhaling deeply. It’s in a proper pot with a strainer. The minty apple actually smells all right, way better than coffee.
There are all kind of legends in the ghost community. Like the old rumour that consuming seer flesh and blood will restore a ghost to life. It’s a load of bollocks, but it started from a kernel of truth – that possession is possible. The Hand certainly figured it out.
So there’s likely something to this ghost story too.
Breaking their bodies. Consuming their souls.
“Heather, you said JD’s soul sort of just disappeared when he died?” I ask.
She sits forward. “Yeah, it flickered like a broken light bulb for half a second and then fragmented.”
“Like Sadie’s deathloop fragmented?” Everyone looks at me.
The wraith drains them until they no longer exist in either life or afterlife.
Marmaduke looks troubled. Ollie swears under his breath. Mitch picks at his croissant, shredding it into flaky strips on the little plate as Sam says what we’re all thinking: “So, the wraith eats their souls as they die?”
Yeah, exactly right. That’s why Sadie Sudarma’s deathloop was weaker than it should be. It wasn’t a soul, it was the dregs left over after the brew is drunk. An echo of an echo, nothing of her left to save, the rest has been consumed.
“That is a fate I’d wish on no one,” says Marmaduke, leaning into the comfort of minty apple steam rising from his pot of tea.
“What does it want, then, this wraith?” asks Mitch.
Marmaduke’s voice is steady. “It was a spirit of revenge formed from the bones of the witch’s dead son. She trapped his soul, corrupting him into an instrument of death to avenge her loss. As for the shade, I know not if it feels or wants for itself.”
The tension in my chest breaks. It’s not Caleb Gates. If bones are needed to summon this thing, then I know for sure he was cremated. There wouldn’t be anything worth working with in his ashes. I can let that idea go for good.
Sam’s making notes in the margins of his sketchbook. “Did the ghosts you spoke to say anything about how the witch used bone to summon it?”
“I know not how it was called forth,” says Marmaduke. “Nor did any other. It is old knowledge.”
“Maybe they have magic bone rings, kind of like the Nazgul?” says Ollie. “You know, Ringwraiths.”
Sitting back, I cross my arms. “How can a ghost wear a ring?”
“Er … magic, obviously.”
“What are these naz gool you speak of?” asks Marmaduke.
“Fictional.” Sam downs his coffee. “We’re dealing with something real.”
“Forget how it’s summoned,” I say. “We need to know how to stop it.”
Marmaduke shakes his head. “According to the legend it will not stop until its vengeance is completed. Only when every man, woman and child of the Budge family was dead, did the wraith melt into Loch Assynt and vanish forever.”
“I don’t want to alarm anyone,” says Mitch, “but I’m pretty confident the wraith isn’t in the loch any more.”
Heather grimaces. “Maybe it’s not the same wraith. If someone found out how the Murdoch witch summoned that kind of shade then they could replicate the process.”
“The stolen bones,” I say, thinking of Professor Purcell. It makes sense. Same magic, different occultist. “Sadie must have taken those remains for the summoner. When they had what they wanted, they called the wraith to kill her so she can’t tell anyone who’s behind it.”
It couldn’t have happened exactly like that, but we’re on the right track.
“Who was she going to tell?” asks Ollie.
“Us?” says Sam. “Or more likely, The Hand. If they’re in York, maybe they’re already tracking it.”
“Viola said they’re tracking us,” I say.
Mitch has his phone out, flicking through something. “If it’s a spirit of revenge, what did JD do to make someone want him dead that badly?”
“Not just dead,” says Heather. “Destroyed both body and soul.”
Marmaduke shakes his head. “It takes an evil most foul to go against God and extinguish an immortal spirit.”
“And a lot of power, I’ll wager,” says Ollie.
“Maybe JD knew who the summoner is, so just like Sadie, he had to die,” I suggest, thinking out loud.
“I’m sure Leonie ordered in a rare book on Scottish ghost stories and folklore a few months ago.” Mitch is still scrolling his phone. “She sent me a pic of it when it came in because it was well pretty, gold on the cover and everything.”
“Coincidence?” Ollie shrugs. “Folks in York like ghosts. It’s kind of our thing.”
“Here, look.” The photo is of an open book showing an etching of a loch framed by dark spectres. On the opposite page are two broken family trees headed Budge and Murdoch. Yeah, that’s more than a coincidence.
“Can you remember the title?” asks Sam.
Standing, Mitch grabs his coat off the back of the chair. “No, but we can easily find out.”