There should be a word, a single word, for my level of incredulous gobsmacking flabbergastedness.

Aunt Tanja – the one who helped me come to terms with my talent, the one who knew so much about the dark corners of our family history and of ghost hunting in general, the one who didn’t mind giving me a whack behind the ear when I fumbled a simple ghost easing – was here?

She disappeared five years ago, after a really badly judged experiment in phasmaturgy, which took her way beyond any human reaches. It came so soon after Carl dying and Mum leaving that it nearly broke my father.

And here she was, as the result of a bloody ritual by a murderous cult who’d legged it just as she appeared?

‘Are you sure it’s her?’ Rani had her sword at the ready and she was still scanning our surroundings for threats.

Coming out of my shock was like swimming up from the bottom of a mine shaft filled with porridge. ‘With all the gonzo stuff we’ve seen in the last few months,’ I said, ‘I’m not going that far. Looks like her, but how?’

Rani inspected and cleaned her sword before sheathing it, then she stood gazing at the spot that had, until recently, held a foaming-at-the-mouth nasty with a big knife, plus two unfortunate murder victims dripping their life away.

‘You’re hurt?’ I asked her.

‘No.’

‘Something’s up, though.’

She took her time answering. ‘I’ve never killed anybody before,’ she said finally.

Ah. ‘You killed some of them? Definitely?’

‘Two, very definitely. A couple more maybe.’

‘You need to sit down?’

‘Not a good time or place for that.’

‘Look, they were going to kill us, for sure. It was self-defence.’

‘Perhaps. In the end, I still took their lives.’ She shivered a little. ‘You didn’t see any ghosts cast off because of it, did you?’

I’d hadn’t exactly been on the lookout, but she didn’t want to hear that. ‘Nope.’

‘That’s a relief.’

She took Aunt Tanja’s legs, and when I had her arms we lifted. Rani could have carried her all by herself, but I’m not sure if she was totally on the ball right now. That frown, and the way she was biting her lip. Self-possession and Rani usually go hand in hand and right now she was acting more like someone who was shaken down to her bones.

‘The Company of the Righteous puts us through all sorts of simulations to get us ready for this moment,’ she said as we shuffled away, ‘but they always said that when it comes, the reality would be something else altogether.’

‘I don’t know if anyone can be prepared for this.’

‘I didn’t even think, not while they were attacking. It was automatic.’

‘See? There wasn’t anything you could do.’ I was the one going backwards, but Rani didn’t warn me about the column I nearly ran into. I eased around it. ‘They weren’t holding back.’

‘My self-defence was a particularly rugged expression of self-defence, wasn’t it? No question about that.’

She wasn’t babbling. Not quite. ‘It was proportional. They were going to kill us both.’

‘I know. That was clear from what that woman said. Still, if I’d camineered after that lunge, changing the line of attack …’

‘Easy there. You’ve slipped into technical swordy talk and lost me.’ Glancing over my shoulder I caught sight of a pile of rusty chain that was itching to trip me, and I steered us to one side of it. ‘Look, does the Company of the Righteous offer counselling for you guys when this happens?’

‘No. We were explicitly told that members of the Company don’t suffer from PTSD.’

‘That’s a giant chunk of denial right there.’

‘I didn’t question it at the time. The Company of the Righteous was different, better. We were made for such things.’

‘If you weren’t affected by something like this, you wouldn’t be the sort of person I’d like to be friends with.’

‘Thanks, Anton.’

‘Look, if you need to talk about it anytime, you know I’m around.’ Time to change the subject? The noiseless geyser of light. The cold fire. The pitiful bodies dangling from the chains. That chalk circle and the blood. Creating those rotting ghosts or shaping them? ‘You heard of zombie ghosts before?’

‘Never,’ Rani said. ‘Whoever these Trespassers are, they’re dealing with high-level ghastliness.’

We reached the door we’d come in by, Tanja slung between us and breathing steadily but otherwise unmoving. Nearby were the remains of the burned-out office, and on the other side of the ashes was a squatter camp. At some time or other, it must have been reasonably comfortable. The squatters had made little cubicles for privacy, and while most of them were cardboard, some had upgraded to plywood. All of them had little canopies made from plastic sheeting, which pointed to the factory roof not being in top condition. Now, I accept that I’m a pretty sheltered sort of guy, and I probably would have mistaken the place for a rubbish dump if I’d been walking past. The blankets were soiled, the sleeping bags were mostly torn and muddy, clothes were all over the place. Magazines and books were underfoot, swollen and musty from the damp. It was pretty gamey, like wet dog on a bad day, but it was overlaid with the tang of burned timber and the smell of blood that I was never, ever going to forget.

But pulled apart and ransacked though it was, this place had been occupied recently.

My pendant started buzzing and I jumped. Nothing like before, which had actually left bruises on my chest; this time it was soft and gentle and even. ‘You feel it too?’ I whispered to Rani.

She gestured at the vibrating bracelet on her wrist. ‘It’s somewhere near.’

The Weeper was in the corner of the factory, wedged in as if it was trying to get away. Which was stupid as it could have oozed through the walls thanks to it ghostliness, but no one ever claimed ghosts were geniuses.

‘Can you hold Tanja?’ I asked Rani. ‘Please?’

She gave the surroundings another quick scan. ‘Do we have time for this?’

‘It’s our job.’

Even if it wasn’t going to attack, a Weeper could be dangerous – like all ghosts. Since they can ooze through solid objects, they can flow into us. If they seep into a limb, at best it goes numb for some time. If they push into your body or head, it’s potentially fatal, a full system shutdown. Every ghost hunter has experienced this at one time or another – it’s one of the many hazards of the job. Sometimes it’s a hostile act, but other times it seems to be inadvertent, accidental even, as if ghosts don’t truly realise we’re here.

I crouched, coming level with it in all its misty huddledness. Its sobs were audible and heart-wrenching. ‘It’s okay,’ I said softly. ‘It’s nearly over.’

Slowly, it became more substantial, losing that murky aspect that lots of ghosts like to take on, and I was looking at a kid.

Kapow.

The ghosts of kids always choke me up. And to make matters more trying, ever since some dramatic encounters a couple of months ago, I seemed to almost be attracting the ghosts of children like an unearthly Pied Piper of Hamelin.

See? I don’t get all my references from pop culture.

With the ghosts of children, it can be hard to pin down the era they come from using their clothes for clues. For a fair chunk of the twentieth century, kids’ clothes were pretty much the same – shapeless pinafores/dresses for girls, shorts and a shirt for boys. This ghost was a boy, complete with scabby knees and worn-out boots. He completed the urchin look with a cloth cap that was pulled down low on his forehead. Ninteeen twenties? Thirties?

‘Easy now,’ I whispered. He lifted his head and looked at me with tear-filled eyes.

I rocked on my heels, nearly falling backwards. When I say ‘he looked at me’, that’s what I mean – he looked at me, and ghosts don’t do usually that. They haunt us, drain our vitality, make a mess of us, but they don’t look us in the eyes.

It had happened to me once, a couple of months ago, which, when I think about it, was a completely over-the-top, dramatic and personally challenging time. I helped a ghost, and it helped Rani and me escape from a particularly murderous bunch of Trespassers. That ghost and I had shared something, communicating in a vague but valuable way that was as unsettling as all get-out.

So I was a bit heebie-jeebied by this intense gaze when, to make things worse, the Weeper reached out for me.

It was only because of my previous experience that I didn’t scramble away screaming, ‘No touching!’ Bluth style. After a moment’s hesitation, he laid his fingers on my hand. That’s all – a light pressure, not an intrusion. It was as if a door had opened and now I was communicating with a ghost.

Again, this isn’t standard. Lots of arguments are out there in ghost theoretician land about the intelligence levels of ghosts and the hands-up majority seems to agree that in the intelligence stakes, ghosts rank somewhere between a loaf of bread and that green algae you scrape off the inside of your fish tank.

Some maverick theoreticians – a wild bunch, that, outstanding fun at parties – think that ghosts have some remnant of intelligence, shreds extracted from the life that spawned them. And some even wilder bods claim that we can communicate with them. Tanja was one of these freethinking individuals, and it was an experiment in that area that saw her vanishing, disappearing forever – or so we thought, until now.

But here was a ghost making the first move in communicating, which is something I’d never heard of. He wanted to let me know what he had seen – something that repulsed him at an intensely basic level – and this sickening scene only added to his desire to move on.

To move on. To depart. To be dispatched and leave this place forever. It was my job, and the job of every Marin with the ghost sight, to ease the passage of ghosts. It didn’t matter how I was feeling, I had a responsibility, especially when a ghost was pleading with me for release.

I reached into his chest, twisted and he was gone in a cascade of memory fragments. Sore feet, the far-off call of a currawong, the grinding unpleasantness of sand in shoes.

Rani cradled Tanja in one arm and hauled me to my feet with her free hand. If I leaned on her a bit longer than was strictly necessary, it was because she was leaning back on me. We were both suffering the aftermath of a horrible encounter, with the blood and the violence, the ghosts and the phasmaturgy and our own starring role in it all. ‘What went on there?’ she asked.

‘Those bad guys burst in and grabbed some people from the squatter camp. Peggy and Egon. They chained them up and went to work.’

‘The ghost saw it and told you?’

‘Showed me, more like. And he was appalled.’

I took Tanja’s legs and by the time we reached the car I was nearly stumbling with exhaustion.

Bao threw open the driver’s side door when we were near. Seconds later, we were burning rubber while I praised the good engineers of Aston Martin and their commitment to quality acceleration.