‘What are we looking for, exactly?’ I asked Ben as we walked with Tilly past the hedge, through the gate, and into Hucknall cemetery. It was larger than the one Thomas haunted, and much more open.
In the distance, a church sat on the hill, a few cars parked beside it.
Ben crouched down in front of a gravestone. ‘This is where Goodfellow was buried. I thought if we could take a look at his grave, it might tell us about how he got out, which might give us information on how to stop him. Or at least, more about who he actually was.’ He stood up, examining the next gravestone.
Tilly watched him, waiting to keep walking.
‘While I like the idea, this is going to take forever. There are hundreds of graves her, and some of them are easier to read than others,’ I squinted through my sunglasses at the grassy graveyard in front of us. Usually, it was a quiet and peaceful place to walk the dog. Right now, it held an insurmountable task. ‘It looks like most of the ones around here are more modern. We need to go farther back to get to the old ones.’
Ben stood up. ‘How can you tell?’
‘These are all shiny. The ones over there look older and more matte.’ I pointed to the far side of the cemetery.
‘Good call.’ He slipped his hand into mine and the three of us walked around the edge of the cemetery, occasionally stopping to examine something that looked older. There was one gravestone that had fallen over and a tree had grown over it, which showed just how old some of the graves were. And how nature will always win in the end.
We got to the centre of the graveyard, where a path took us to a central area with a few trees, or to the left where more graves and the church sat. The older graves looked to be in front of us, so we kept going towards the tree.
‘These dates are much more what we’re looking for,’ said Ben. He wiped his glasses on the edge of his coat, then put them back on. ‘This one is 1847!’
Something just ahead caught my eye. I gravitated to it, Tilly trotting along beside me. A few of the graves looked recently disturbed. Some of the headstones were smashed or lying down, and the stone that had been placed to cover the grave itself was smashed. It had once been covered in moss, showing how old it was. The top of one of them had a raven on top. The bottom of it was disturbed, but the raven was not. The name on it? Dr Randolph Goodfellow.
‘Found it,’ I said.
Ben walked over to us. ‘That’s a unique design.’
‘You don’t think it’s…twee?’ I lowered an eyebrow.
Ben lowered one back at me. ‘You’re just being cynical.’
‘The guy’s a serial killer!’ I waved my arms in the air, causing my sunglasses to move slightly on my face and expose me to the bright, orange sun as it set over the cemetery. Usually, it’d be pretty. When my head wanted to explode, it was painful. Could I get blackout sunglasses? How many things would I walk into wearing those? Would it be better than living with this headache?
‘They didn’t know that. They thought he was doing the right thing.’
I snorted.
‘They could only go based on the information they had at the time, the same as we are now,’ said Ben.
‘Or, they were desperate, so they let him get away with things because they had no other choice.’
‘Possible. But you’re definitely also being cynical.’ He crouched down to examine the grave. ‘It looks like the grave cover was disturbed recently.’
‘Great.’
The graves surrounding it had had their gravestones and covers smashed, too. It looked like too much of a mess for someone to have intentionally disturbed Goodfellow’s grave. I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. ‘Do you think he was freed by accident? Some idiot teenagers or drunks smashing up graves for a laugh?’
‘Sad, but probable.’ He stood up, shaking his head.
*
We got back from the cemetery feeling deflated. While it was interesting to see Goodfellow’s grave, all we’d confirmed was that someone disturbed a bunch of graves, meaning he was likely freed accidentally on purpose by a disrespectful idiot. Oh, if only they knew what they’d done. None of what we’d found had told us anything new or given us information on how to stop him.
I sat in front of the TV. It wasn’t long before Ben, Edie, Fadil, and Tilly joined me. Thomas stayed upstairs, playing with Spectre. I think he liked having another being he could interact with.
It felt like the rest of us were sharing in our frustrations by turning our tired brains off. I had the TV on quiet, and still wore my sunglasses, but the closed captions were on so everyone could follow along even if it was too quiet for them to hear it properly.
During one of the commercial breaks, Javi bounced into the living room, gradually becoming more opaque as he materialised. ‘Guess what guess what guess what?’ He had that excited child air about him that I’d always loved. It always brightened my day.
Except today. Today, it was jarring and I wanted to punch him. We were talking life and death and he was acting like we were off to a theme park. It wasn’t like his afterlife had been short on excitement.
Javi rolled his eyes. ‘All right, if none of you are going to ask, I’ll tell you anyway. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to Millicent and Percival Hill. The witch and necromancer who took down Dr Randolph Goodfellow.’
All five of us froze, our gazes transfixed on the spots beside Javi where the two ghosts had appeared. While I’d asked Javi to try to find them, I’d always known it was a long shot. It wasn’t like the Other Side had a yellow pages or an internet he could search. Did it?
The two figures looked the picture of Victorian elegance: Percival wore a sharp suit, complete with a white waistcoat, black bowtie, and perfectly shined shoes. His hair was kept short and tidy, and his posture was so good I straightened up from my own hunched position, feeling self-conscious.
Millicent was resplendent in a green dress with a high collar and probably a perfectly fitted corset designed just for her. Her blonde hair was fixed into a neat bun, enhancing her sharp cheekbones. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ I said.
Javi continued to grin in the background, while Edie, Ben, Fadil, and I were speechless. Since we hadn’t expected Javi to find them, we hadn’t planned any questions. A great idea, I know.
‘Did Dad tell you about what’s going on?’ Edie asked, leaning towards them from her seat on the sofa.
‘Yes,’ said Percival. ‘Do you know how he was disturbed?’
‘We think someone accidentally disturbed his grave at the cemetery, but it’s hard to know for definite,’ said Ben.
Millicent frowned. ‘The only solution we could come up with at the time was to trap his spirit inside his damaged body, then trap that inside the coffin, bury it, and cover it in stone. We’d hoped it would be permanent.’
‘That sounds familiar,’ mumbled Fadil.
Edie reached out and put a hand on his arm. He patted it.
Ben glanced over at Fadil and frowned. ‘Do you mean you cast a blood curse?’
Millicent put her hand to her mouth in shock. ‘We would never!’
Oops. We hadn’t taken the decision to cast a blood curse on Dominic lightly, but having done it made me sometimes forget the level of power involved in doing it. And just how dark it was.
‘It was similar, I suppose you could say,’ said Percival. ‘A blood curse can only be cast on the living, though. And there’s no way we would’ve been able to get close enough to him to get the necessary hair or blood to perform a curse like that. So, we had to improvise. We combined necromancy and witchcraft, internal and external forces, and exploited him at his weakest, to achieve our goal.’
‘I see,’ said Ben, pushing his glasses up his nose.
‘We also trapped his raven, Branwen, with him. They had an unusual connection, so it seemed safest to eradicate the threat from her, too,’ explained Millicent. That explained the bird.
Percival shook his head. ‘We didn’t think anyone would be able to disturb him once he was buried. We covered it with a stone grave cover and a mortsafe, just in case. We never expected someone to disturb such an intricate gravesite. It was part of why we encouraged the townspeople to do something so ornate.’
‘What’s a mortsafe?’ I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
‘An iron cage placed on top of a grave to stop grave robbers,’ said Percival.
‘Lovely. Glad I asked.’ Not.
‘A lot of mortsafes have been removed or damaged,’ said Edie. Why did my daughter even know that? I didn’t want to know.
Ben removed his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. ‘Goodfellow’s didn’t have one, just a broken grave cover.’
Percival frowned. ‘Unfortunate.’
‘And now he’s angry because he was trapped for two hundred years,’ said Millicent.
‘Wouldn’t you be?’ said Percival.
‘No, I’m just plagued with anxiety and mask it well,’ said Fadil with a half-laugh.
Millicent and Percival exchanged confused looks, but didn’t say anything.
‘You don’t need to mask from us,’ said Edie, squeezing his arm.
‘I’m masking from myself,’ said Fadil.
Well. Ouch. Edie squeezed his hand. What could she say to that? Was it possible to mask how you felt from yourself? I wasn’t self-aware enough to answer that question.
‘I’m sorry, are we missing something?’ said Percival.
‘Fadil is four thousand years old,’ Javi answered. ‘Long story.’
‘Oh! My!’ Millicent covered her face, as if trying to hide her surprise.
‘So, I hate to feel like I’m rushing this fun catch up, but how did you take him down, exactly?’ I asked.
Millicent clasped her hands in front of her. ‘We broke down each of his powers, rendering him nothing more than a vulnerable, psychotic human. Then, after absorbing his life essence, we set the house on fire.’
‘Well, that’s a surefire way to get rid of someone,’ said Fadil.
‘That’s what we thought,’ said Millicent. ‘After all, taking his life essence meant he’d be too weak to do anything whether he was living or dead. Obviously, he could recharge over time, but that wouldn’t have mattered if he was still trapped. I suppose the most important thing right now is to remember that he can’t regain any powers. They have to be tied to a vessel because he wasn’t born with them. And if he does choose a vessel, he’ll be restrained by the physical limitations of that body, which could be very different to his own. Whether or not he’s figured any of that out yet…’
‘How many people he’s murdered would suggest he hasn’t yet, but he might do soon,’ I said. ‘That or he just really likes killing people.’
‘Based on what he was like when he was alive, I think it’s likely a combination of both,’ said Percival.
Well wasn’t Goodfellow shaping up to be a real ray of sunshine?
‘Do you know what powers he took last time?’ Ben asked.
‘When we defeated him, he had strength, intelligence, and witchcraft. Before he died, he was targeting a vampire, which is why we knew we had to act when we did.’
‘I’m sorry, a vampire?’ I said. As if they were real as well. Why was I even surprised by these things anymore?
Millicent and Percival exchanged knowing looks. ‘Your time is really very sheltered, isn’t it?’
Fadil scoffed. ‘Try narrow-minded.’
I glared at him, but I had to know: ‘Why would it have been bad if he was targeting a vampire?’
‘Since vampires are immortal, it would’ve given him the power to heal, which meant that we wouldn’t have been able to stop him. It would’ve completely changed our plan and made him close to invincible.’
Edie frowned. ‘Tobias said that, too.’
Millicent flinched. Was there a history there? They would’ve been from around the same era. Maybe they’d known each other. Alchemists were known for being dodgy…
I wanted to ask, but it wasn’t the time. We had bigger things to worry about.
Percival pursed his lips. ‘We were almost too late.’ He glanced at his wife as he retold the story. ‘When we arrived, he was in the middle of stealing a vampire’s powers. Because we interrupted, the vampire could escape and fully heal. I believe he’s still around now, although I doubt he’s local anymore. As we interrupted Goodfellow mid-ceremony, it also meant that he was more vulnerable, which worked to our advantage. We started by removing his active witch powers, as those were the ones that were the most likely to harm us, then, we worked on the others.’
‘Couldn’t you have drained him by taking his life essence, first?’ asked Edie.
‘That’s a nice idea in theory,’ said Millicent, ‘but the power he inherited from a witch was a forcefield, which meant that Percival’s necromancy skills wouldn’t have worked on him until he was more vulnerable. Taking him down mid-ceremony meant he couldn’t cast the shield at the same time as his magic wasn’t strong enough to multi-task.’
Ben tensed beside me. He didn’t know any other witches with his power – it wasn’t one that ran in his family – so this was probably somewhere between interesting and horrifying for him. ‘He couldn’t use the shield and steal powers at the same time?’
‘No. He wasn’t strong enough. Perhaps, if he’d had more time to hone his skills, he may have learned how to. But he wasn’t a native user, nor was the witch he acquired the power from particularly strong, which limited his capabilities,’ said Millicent.
‘Of course, he didn’t know that powers are a sliding scale and some users are more powerful than others,’ added Percival.
Millicent smirked. ‘Which worked in our favour.’
‘Very much so,’ agreed Percival, ‘because it meant he was unprepared for our powers.’
‘He thought that he’d still be able to take us on because he had the shield, but he was unaware that he wouldn’t be able to use it unless he broke the procedure he was performing on the vampire.’
‘Didn’t the procedure stop when the vampire got free?’ asked Edie.
‘No. They were still tied together until Goodfellow broke the bond, which he didn’t want to do halfway through. When he realised what we were doing, he did, but by then it was too late. He was too drained from what he’d done already, making him even more vulnerable as he hadn’t been able to recharge from someone else’s power.’
‘All right,’ said Ben, standing up and pacing around the living room, navigating furniture and ghosts. It was quite impressive how he managed it while maintaining his restless pace. ‘So what you’re saying is that right now he has no active powers, but there’s something innately powerful about his spirit, just not in the sense we’re used to.’
‘Yes,’ confirmed Percival.
‘He’s always had a strong character. A strong will,’ added Millicent.
‘And he really doesn’t like failure,’ said Percival.
‘And someone like him would construe what happened last time as a failure, which would make him angrier,’ said Fadil.
Millicent nodded.
‘Well isn’t that just great?’