‘Niamh?’
‘Thomas! Oh my god, we’ve been so worried about you!’
He hovered a few feet away, but didn’t look like his usual self. While he was usually translucent, today he was barely visible. He looked shaken, too. As if something – or someone – had really spooked him.
I shifted over on the sofa, as if he’d be able to sit beside me. ‘What’s wrong?’
Thomas floated over, hovering in the vacant spot on the sofa. Tilly trotted in from the kitchen and sat between us. She was too tired from her walk to get excited, but she did seem to like Thomas’s presence. Spectre floated in through the wall, settling at Thomas’s feet.
‘I got your message from Gwendoline. I’m sorry I worried you.’ He stared into his hands, rubbing them together. I’d never seen him nervous before. It concerned me.
Although he’d never said why, I always assumed he rarely left the graveyard because he felt safest staying there. It was mostly free from the living and the dead, with just a few visits at certain times of the day. Plus, it was quite serene in there. Tall trees, well-kept gravestones from the last two hundred years, a pretty church and library…what more could a ghost need?
‘I know…I know who’s been murdering people.’
Faking calm to keep him at ease, I turned to face him, tucking one of my feet underneath me and letting the other dangle over the edge of the sofa. ‘Did you know them?’
Thomas rubbed his hands together some more, then faced me. ‘We weren’t friends or anything. He was a little older than me and studying to become a doctor. His name was Dr Randolph Goodfellow.’ Talk about an ironic name. Thomas let his words hang in the air before continuing. ‘Doctors were different, back then. They didn’t know as much as they didn’t believe in germ theory, so a lot of their treatments were risky and experimental.’ Goosebumps formed on my arms. Where was Thomas going with this? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I knew that I needed to if we were ever going to stop Goodfellow. ‘He liked to experiment. I mean, a lot of surgeries back then were untested anyway, since we didn’t have anaesthesia. But he took things too far.’
‘Further than cutting people open when they’re still awake?’
Thomas shrugged. ‘You did what you had to do to stay alive. Or try to, anyway.’ He removed his flatcap, twisting it in his hands. ‘He realised that if he took someone’s life in a certain way, he could steal their power.’
‘Like…magical powers?’
Thomas nodded. ‘It was more acceptable back then, to believe. It’s only recently it’s become less mainstream.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I’m a ghost. I can eavesdrop pretty easily. And I live next to a library. I’ve got to do something all day and night.’
‘Right. Sorry. You were saying.’
Tilly stood up, walked in a circle, then lay back down with her head on my lap. I stroked her neck as her eyes flitted closed again.
‘He didn’t have powers, originally. But he learned how to harness them. It wasn’t just about powers in the way you’re thinking. There are other types of power, too: intelligence, beauty, strength, humour, things like that. He discovered he could acquire them in the same way he took magical powers. So he did.’
‘How many powers did he take?’ Forewarned was forearmed, and all that.
‘I don’t know,’ said Thomas. ‘He was difficult to take down, though. It took a witch and a necromancer working together to do it. Whatever happened in there, the house burned down, taking him and his pet raven, Branwen, with him.’ He had a pet raven? Why did anything even surprise me anymore? ‘They were buried together in the cemetery by the park.’
Of course someone who was well respected in the area would’ve been buried in a nice cemetery. Little did they realise what he was really capable of. It made me angry someone like him had done so much damage and was still seen as an upstanding member of society.
‘Why not the one by your church?’
Thomas frowned. ‘Like I care. He was away from me. That was all that mattered.’ He hesitated, as if he wanted to say something else but wasn’t sure if he should or could.
‘What is it? What aren’t you saying?’
Thomas pursed his lips. ‘This is going to sound paranoid, but…I always thought he’d come back. I don’t know why. There was just something about him that felt unfinished.’
‘Because of how the witch and necromancer took him down?’
‘Because of how powerful and determined he was.’
I shivered. Power and determination went a long way in the natural and supernatural worlds. ‘I would’ve felt the same way.’ And did about a certain someone.
A small smile traced his lips, as if knowing it wasn’t just him offered some comfort to him.
‘Do you know what the witch and necromancer did?’
‘No, I’m sorry.’ He looked down, into his flatcap, as if genuinely ashamed of himself.
I reached out, my hand hovering over his. It was the closest I could get to offering him a comforting touch. ‘Hey, it’s OK. You’ve already been a massive help.’
He seemed to perk up at that. ‘Really?’ he said, his voice full of hope.
I nodded. ‘Really. Now that we have his name, we can search the library, the internet, the archives, maybe even the Other Side, to see what comes up. We’ll have more answers in no time.’
Thomas grinned. But then it fell again. He glanced out the window, as if everything on the other side of it was out to get him.
‘What is it?’
He twisted his cap some more, looking away from me. ‘Could I stay here, please? Until he’s gone?’
‘Are you afraid of him?’
Thomas’s face tensed. ‘Terrified.’