Calypso Slaves - Ghost Story

A few months' worth of entries in, Cassie reached about a half-dozen missing pages. The imprint left on lower pages was practically unreadable two pages past where something was originally written, but Cassie could still make out fragments of the very last page torn out. From what she could make out, Annette was both scared and excited about some guy. The text on the page Cassie was trying to read imprints on was all ciphered, which made the plaintext imprints slightly easier to read, but there were still large chunks missing from the passages. Cassie was able to find a name, though.

The man she was meeting was Edward Lyon. One of the Lyons, Echoshire's governing courtier family, assigned by the plutocratic Lockheart family to oversee the day-to-day operations of the small town. They acted as police chiefs and judges and city councilors, occasionally exchanging a family member with one of the other major courtier families, so that a Lyon would run off to be a councilor for Ashen Grove and one of Ashen Grove's Townsend family would be sent to be a judge in return, or whatever. You couldn't get any more powerful than that as a courtier.

Cassie ran the first few ciphered words through one of the simple ciphers she knew, and almost immediately cracked it. It was a basic Caesarian cipher, favorite of twelve-year olds trying to keep their little sister from reading their secrets since time immemorial and outdated as any kind of serious encryption for millennia. Cassie didn't need scratch paper to crack this one, since she had most of the shifts memorized, although it did reduce her wpm by rather a lot. There was pretty blatant documentation of Mictlan, here, including a lengthy description on the different types of ghosts that seemed like it was only a few iterations away from the Encyclopedia Mortuis description. Probably someone had a copy of at least that passage, and told Annette, and Annette recorded it as close to word-for-word as she could remember. And maybe the someone who told her was Edward Lyon.

Later pages used the Templar cipher, although it took Cassie a minute to figure out it was a slightly altered version of it, but since the alterations only made it simpler, it wasn't any harder to translate. Discussions of Mictlan continued, including some descriptions of basic necromancy, though it was all theoretical rather than practical. Annette wrote feverishly about how surely somewhere in all this lore about death must be the secret to extending life.

The last two pages with any writing on them faced one another and just had the name "Michelle" written in angry script all across them. This craft diary didn't have lined paper to begin with, so the text had always been a bit sloppy and irregular, but now there wasn't even any attempt to make it line up. It was more like Annette just wrote the first couple in a fit of rage and then obsessively filled in every blank space left. Cassie doubted Annette was alive when she wrote those last two pages.

"This is the diary of a girl named Annette Alvarez," Cassie said. "She was studying necromancy under Edward Lyon, but then she was shoved off the school by Michelle Hoffman back in 2359. Annette was afraid of heights, and Michelle was part of some prank over it. There was supposed to be one of those big skydiving cushions to catch her, but Michelle forgot to double check which side of the school she was on before she shoved. Annette landed on her head, neck snapped."

"That's not a poltergeist, that's one wraith," Jack said, "and no way all this damage is the result of one wraith, I don't care if she was some cultist apprentice. And why is this wraith so fucking bad at picking targets, anyway? Cases of mistaken identity in wraith vengeance quests happen, but this poltergeist has killed like twelve people. That fits the profile for an insane, unled poltergeist better than a wraith-led one."

"I don't think she is picking targets. Annette died in 2356. Michelle died later that year. The disappearances in the school didn't even start until 2359," Cassie said.

"I've never heard of a ghost murdering people for revenge after they already had their revenge," Jack said.

"Michelle died pretty far outside the range of the poltergeist's current haunt. Annette might've been more mobile on her own, but Michelle also might've just legit killed herself out of guilt," Cassie said, "I mean, these two were friends. Annette mentioned going to Michelle's birthday party early in the diary, they had a great time. I'm positive Michelle didn't mean to hurt her, I wouldn't be surprised if she really did kill herself. Maybe Annette still wants revenge."

"Annette knows how Mictlan works, doesn't she?" Jack said, "so as soon as she heard Michelle died, and I can't imagine the school wouldn't have been buzzing about it, Annette would've known to go find her in Mictlan. That girl probably got dropped off every tall building in Mictlan's Echoshire for her entire short existence as a wraith."

"Maybe something to do with Lyon? Why'd he start teaching her in the first place?" Cassie asked.

"Why did I find you and Jeanette? Why did Jeanette go find the scoobies? Helping hands are hard to come by. Maybe he just wanted someone for a synchronized ritual halfway across the county," Jack said.

"We're on the wrong track anyway," Cassie said, "you said it yourself, on her own Annette is one wraith. The only reason she's on a rampage now is because she has a poltergeist to throw around. And that poltergeist has got to be the only reason she's still sustaining herself. So where did the-" but once she'd spelled it out, it was obvious. "Fuck, she made it herself. Of course, because she's a Mictlan occultist."

"She made a poltergeist out of people she murdered and now she's feeding on it? Is that possible?" Jack asked.

"It's happened before," Cassie said, "it's in the Encyclopedia Mortuis."

"How come the poltergeist doesn't turn on her?" Jack asked.

"She must have some way of marking targets for the geist. Some way of making all the others think that the target is Annette," Cassie said. "Wisps aren't very hard to fool, and with the mob psychology poltergeists run on, you only need to fool a few and the rest will follow." She was beginning to stray into how she planned on pacifying the thing, though, and she wasn't sure if she trusted Jack enough to share those details with him. If he was working with the cult, and that was the simplest explanation for how the cult set up Cassie to be their cat's paw, then he might tie up a loose end if he knew when she would be in Mictlan, another dimension where he wouldn't have to bother hiding the body.

But wasn't this kind of paranoia exactly what had gotten under Cassie's skin with Amber? Maybe she was being unfair to Jack. Or maybe she'd been unfair to Amber. "Then we need to find out how she's marking targets and use it against her," Jack said.

"The book might have something to do with it. If Annette asked for her diary back before killing them, the wisps might remember her as the person who owns the book. Then when new victims show up carrying the book, she can get the poltergeist after them," Cassie said.

"If the poltergeist kills someone for carrying the book, Annette would be hard-pressed to get the book from them before they died. Especially without getting the poltergeist redirected to her," Jack said.

"She doesn't need new victims to associate the book with their death once the poltergeist is already formed," Cassie said, "poltergeists can suck any wisp into its gestalt. She uses the ghosts of the people she killed personally to start an attack on whoever's carrying the book, and the rest of the geist follows on autopilot."

"Possible," Jack said, "but it could be a million other things. Maybe the victims all have the same hairstyle and color, or maybe they share a similar facial structure, or maybe they were all wearing similar looking clothes."

"We can rule out that last one," Cassie said, "Neil said that janitors, teachers, and students were all victims. Janitors have different uniforms from students."

"You get my point, though. The list of potential targeting methods is endless," Jack said.

"But the book is something Annette can control more easily, and we know it's related somehow. It can't be a coincidence that so many of the victims have been reading her diary," Cassie said. "It might not be a guarantee but I definitely think it's probable."

"That's...That's a fair point," Jack said, "so I guess what it comes down to is, do you absolutely need to get rid of this poltergeist?"

"It's going to keep killing people if I don't," Cassie said.

"If you end up dead, it'll keep killing people anyway," Jack said.

"I have to try," Cassie said.

Jack sighed. "Someday your hero act is gonna get you killed. I hope I'm not around to see it," he said, "I'll meet you at the school's east entrance in an hour, need to get some things together before then."

"Jack, why are you helping me?" Cassie asked.

"Why do I need a specific reason?" Jack asked.

It's not like he hadn't helped her a million times before, and vice-versa. And how else was Jack supposed to prove he was trustworthy if Cassie wouldn't trust him enough to help her with anything? "I...I'll see you there," Cassie said.

The school itself contained a Mictlan well, which was no surprise since it was the haunt of a poltergeist. Getting through the doors this time would be no harder than the last, and the haunt wouldn't have time to pick up strength if they went directly to the well, a darkened janitor's closet, and performed the ritual to get into Mictlan. Reaching Mictlan wouldn't be a problem.

Cassie waited for Jack at the edge of the parking lot. When he arrived, he arrived with a heavy pack and Amber. "Why is she here?" Cassie asked, "this isn't safe for her."

"Is that the excuse you're going with?" Amber asked.

"Amber," Jack said with a look. She fell silent. "I don't like operating with less than three. Hell, three is pretty low for confronting a poltergeist. Amber's by far the most committed of the scoobies."

"I'm not supposed to let her get hurt," Cassie said. She was already twisting Enlil's instructions into loopholes over letting her help with the research.

"She lives in Toluca, Cassie. She's more involved than she should be whether you like it or not," Jack said.

Cassie could stamp her feet and demand she get her way. But Jack would leave, and Cassie wasn't sure she could blame him. And if Jack was only bringing Amber to help with an ambush, well...Cassie had very poor odds against a poltergeist on her own anyway.

She could always call the kill team. Annette and her wisps would be corporeal in Mictlan, and they would dissolve when hit with enough force. Like, say, from a bullet. Cassie could just get them into Mictlan using one of the wells and they could mow the poltergeist down. She'd be whipped for that. Maybe that would be worth it?

Cassie decided it wouldn't be almost immediately. She did not need to be whipped any time she wanted to accomplish anything. Enlil didn't know Toluca or Amber the way Cassie did. Just because she perhaps deserved Calypso more than she thought didn't mean that obeying Enlil's every command was wise. And just because she had fucked up one ritual didn't mean she had to run crying to Master every time a supernatural threat reared its ugly head. Maybe most people couldn't handle a poltergeist on their own, but Cassie wasn't most people. She was a certified genius and an occult prodigy. She'd accomplished plenty with only two other occultists in the past. "Alright," Cassie said, but turned to Amber and said "be careful, alright?"

"I can take care of myself," Amber said.

"What about the pack?" Cassie asked Jack, "what's in there?"

"A backup plan," Jack said.

"Meaning?" Cassie asked.

"You remember the North Grove Apartments?" Jack said. A small poltergeist had formed there when they'd tried to contact the victims of a fire there. Jack had banished them with an abjuration ritual.

"I thought you didn't have the materials to do that again?" Cassie asked.

"I scrounged some up," Jack said, "if we can't get the poltergeist to rip itself apart, we need a plan B."

"A plan B that requires each of us to be in a different place, alone, in the middle of a poltergeist's haunt," Cassie said.

"Do you have an alternative?" Jack asked.

Cassie paused to try and think of something. But she'd been trying to think of something for hours. She wasn't going to come up with some brilliant way to beat a poltergeist at no risk with only three people and a handful of ritual supplies in the next five minutes. It was Jack's way or the kill team. "I guess not. But listen, if we have to abjure it, we set up the ritual, we complete the ritual, and we all run away with tails between our legs, no bravado, alright?" She was saying it to Jack, but she meant it for Amber. She just didn't want Amber to feel confronted.

"Of course," Jack said.

Amber didn't have a gun of her own last Cassie checked, so Jack must've provided the one she had now. The three of them stepped into the school, flashlights in one hand, pistols in the other. Amber kept hers raised like she'd seen in the movies. Cassie and Jack didn't bother. There was nothing corporeal to shoot at on this side of reality. Jack's flashlight panned across a disembodied shadow. "Something there!" Amber said, pointing the gun at it.

"Don't worry about it," Cassie said.

"It won't hurt us," Jack said, "we need to keep moving."

Amber looked from Cassie to Jack, but Jack wasn't stopping so Amber followed him. The three of them crammed into the supply closet, Cassie chanted a few words, and they stepped out. The Mictlan version of the school didn't look very different. Cassie expected that if she went through lockers she'd find outdated tablets, that if she turned on the classroom blackboards they would have lesson plans dated to the last decade on them. But Toluca was a recently settled place, and most of the ghosts here could agree on what the school was supposed to look like, more or less.

Cassie wasn't quite sure when the ghosts showed up, but as the three started moving through the school's halls, they were surrounded, and the shadows weren't disembodied anymore. The dead lined the corridor and watched as they went past, students with faces disfigured by cuts, a janitor with her head caved in, someone so burnt up Cassie couldn't even identify who they might have been.

At the end of the hallway, Annette appeared, her head hanging loose from her snapped neck, and began shuffling towards them. Cassie stopped and dropped her pack to the ground, dug around for it until she found the book. "I found your diary," Cassie said, pulling it out and immediately tossing it to Annette. She caught it.

Cassie swallowed. There was no telling whether she'd guessed right, but there was only one way to find out, and she'd have to do it before Annette convinced the others to attack. That would come without warning. Annette didn't need to speak to communicate with the other ghosts of the gestalt. "You...You look like you've seen better days," Cassie said to one of the ghosts, the janitor with her head caved in. She was the one Neil told Cassie had the diary, so she knew for a fact she was one of Annette's victims.

"What's wrong?" Cassie asked, "what happened?" The ghost shied away from her. "Can you remember who did this to you?" Cassie asked. Out the corner of her eye she could see the beams of Amber and Jack's flashlights flickering a bit, the ghost hissed softly. "Can you remember what she looked like? Can you remember her face?" Cassie asked. If this person could remember anything at all, it was probably Annette's snapped neck. "Is she here?" Cassie asked. The ghost looked around the corridor until her eyes locked onto Annette.

The flashlights were flickering in and out, now. Cassie moved onto another ghost, this one holding his intestines in with one hand. Cassie had no idea if this was one of Annette's victims or a general poltergeist victim. She was just hoping to get lucky. "What about you? Can you remember what happened? Can you remember who's responsible?" Cassie asked. "Try to focus on her face. What did her face look like?" The ghost pointed a listless finger towards Annette, his eyes still locked on Cassie.

Lockers were beginning to open and slam themselves, several of the ghosts were starting to draw in around Cassie, Amber, and Jack, the flashlights flickered to life only intermittently. "Cassie, we need to run soon, be right behind me," Jack said, his hands tight on his weapon.

"Can you remember?" Cassie asked the ghost who was burnt up, "can you remember who did this to you?"

The ghost looked about in confusion, but then a shriek filled the corridor and objects from the lockers began flying out towards Cassie. "Cassie, run!" and she bolted away, doing her best to stay away from the objects the geist was hurling. She could hardly see a thing through the chaos, but she could see that the ghosts, losing coherence now into the misty half-forms as they sometimes did, were circling about one another more than Cassie and her allies. The poltergeist was fighting itself.

The three knocked over a few desks for barriers to hide behind and crouched. The shrieking went on outside unabated. "Can't we help the ones on our side?" Amber asked.

"How'll we know which is which?" Jack asked.

Amber didn't respond. Soon, the collection of pads, the cup of styluses, and other detritus on the teacher's desk began to rattle around, and then hurled itself towards them, and they ducked behind their makeshift barricade. Then the other desks began to rattle and slide across the floor towards them. "I think Annette won," Cassie said.

"Time for plan B," Jack said, pulling his pack off his back and retrieving a set of rune bones. "I'll take the skull, Amber, you take the pelvic," he handed her the pelvic bone and three of the long, skinny leg bones. "Take that to the center of the cafeteria." Jack turned to Cassie without offering any further instruction, so he must've told Amber how to arrange the bones and what to chant in advance. He was probably expecting this from the beginning. "Cassie, you can handle the rib cage?"

Cassie grabbed the rib cage with one hand, the other clutching her sidearm. A few desks bumped into the edge of their barricade. If she was going to argue, she would have to do it fast. And she knew she should. She had never performed this ritual before. She wanted to say that she could handle it. She was an occult prodigy and regularly nailed complex rituals on the first try. But if she'd been more cautious about the Hellmouth, maybe none of this would be happening. Maybe Annette would still be haunting single people for months at a time, not knocking off a victim every two days.

The blackboard came to life, a closeup of Annette's unhinged face screaming loud enough to make Cassie cover her ears. Jack fired a few shots towards the screen and it went dark, cracks sprayed across its surface. Cassie could hear the room groaning above. Bits of plaster shook down. "That ceiling's coming down!" Cassie said, picking up the rib cage.

"Run!" Jack shouted, and they sprinted for an exit. Jack and Cassie ran for the exit across from the one they'd entered from, which was closer -- they had checked for ways out as soon as they arrived. Amber ran back the way they'd come, stopped halfway, and started to follow, but Jack said "no, go!" pointing towards the door they'd first come in through, now closer to Amber. Amber sprinted for the door and the roof came crashing down.

Jack waved a hand to clear the dust from the air in front of him, coughing, and shouted "Amber, are you alright?"