“Jeremy!” Jesse exclaimed once he’d registered what exactly he was looking at; three spiderlings staring up at him from within his backpack. “And Mason and Charlotte!”
Siobhan covered her mouth in shock. “Oh my god.”
“Those are some huge spiders,” Noah noted.
“You-How-Wh-” His brain struggled to process.
“Jeremy and Mason snuck into your bag,” Charlotte unhelpfully informed him.
“What are you doing here?!”
“I told you we weren’t tired yet,” Jeremy said. “We wanted to stay up longer and play. But then we overheard you talking about leaving so we decided to come too.”
Charlotte put some distance between herself and her brothers. “They decided to come. I saw them sneaking into your backpack and I tried to stop them, but you had already left.”
Alicia crouched down to get a better look. “Aww, are these the kids you guys are babysitting? Cynthia’s children?”
“There’s nothing ‘aww’ about them. We’re taking you three home right now.”
“But we just got here!” Jeremy protested. “Aren’t we supposed to be looking for a ghost? We could help you find him.”
Jesse gritted his teeth as he realized that they must have been eavesdropping on them the entire time. Just what else did they hear?
“Absolutely not. We’re leaving.”
The three spiderlings turned to Siobhan for her permission, but she shook her head. “He’s right, you’re going home and straight to bed.”
They then looked over to Noah and Alicia for help, and it was at that moment that Jesse realized that while he and Siobhan had come straight from Gravewood and were still in their monster disguises, the two of them weren’t.
“Hey, are you two-” Jeremy started.
“Going home, right now!” He slung the backpack over his shoulder and marched to the front door as quickly, and non-suspiciously, as he could, but when he tried the knob, he found it locked. “What the-”
“Bad word!” Charlotte stopped him from finishing the thought.
“It’s locked,” he informed the others. Did it lock itself behind them after they entered? But that didn’t make any sense.
“Here, let me.” Alicia nudged him out of the way to pick the lock, but no matter how much she fiddled with it, it remained stubbornly locked.
“My turn.” Siobhan pulled out her spellbook and recited a familiar incantation; the Incantation of Unlocking.
After she was done, he tried the door again. Still locked.
She held up her hands. “Okay, I know I did it perfectly this time. There’s something weird going on here.”
“Maybe Waylor doesn’t want us to leave,” Noah suggested.
The thought sent a chill down Jesse’s spine. If he was right, they now found themselves trapped in a haunted house at the mercy of a dangerous spirit with no idea what he wanted from them. Nothing good could come from this.
The spiderlings had a different perspective.
“Does this mean we don’t have to go back home yet?” Jeremy asked.
“New plan,” Jesse decided. “Find the spirit’s source, destroy it, and then get you three back to Gravewood as soon as possible.”
“Yay, we’re ghost busters!”
“No, we’re ghost busters. You are just going to watch and stay out of our way so you don’t get into any more trouble.”
“No fair, we want to help. Right guys?” Jeremy looked to his siblings for back up.
Mason nodded eagerly while Charlotte told them, “We promise we won’t get in your way.”
“Listen-”
“Jesse, can I?” Alicia stood in front of the spiderlings to get their attention. “This is a very dangerous mission we’re on, the ghost here isn’t like the Abernathy’s that you know. He could hurt you. But, if you really want to help us, there is something important that you can do.”
She pointed over at the salt circle that Siobhan had made earlier. “Do you see that circle? If you’re up for it, we need you to guard it for us. It’s super important that this circle remains protected. Think you can handle it?”
“You bet we can!” Jeremy tried to look more responsible by drawing himself up to full height, which was only about three inches. “No ghost is going to get past us.”
“But to protect the circle, you have to stay in it for the whole time we’re here,” she warned.
“The whole time?” Charlotte asked.
“Don’t worry, Noah is going to stay with you guys.”
“I am?”
“Yes, because he’ll be able to let us know if you see anything. He’ll help you keep a close eye out for anything that shouldn’t be happening.” Her tone made the underlying message in her words clear: Keep an eye on the kids, don’t let them wander around again.
Noah, for his part, took the order much better than Jesse expected he would. He plopped down cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the circle. “Guess you guys are stuck with me for the night. Can I count on you to protect me?”
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“Yeah! We’ll make sure the ghost can’t hurt you.”
“My heroes.”
“Okay, we’ll be back soon,” Jesse told him. “Text us if anything weird happens.”
“You got it boss.” he gave him a mock salute, and all three spiders followed suit.
“Shall we head upstairs?” Alicia led the way out into the foyer.
Once they were out of earshot of Noah and the kids, Siobhan whispered to her, “How did you do that? I know I’m an actual witch, but that was witchcraft what you just did.”
She threw her hair back, clearly pleased. “I babysit Ashton a lot, remember? I’ve picked up a few tricks here and there.”
“You’ll need to teach us them.”
“Later. Right now, we have more pressing issues.”
Logically, Jesse had seen how big the house was from the outside, but he felt like it didn’t fully sink in until they started their search on the second floor. The staircase wound upwards in a square spiral, and from the bottom, they could see all the way up to the ceiling above the third floor. The first few rooms they looked in turned up nothing, just a few scant pieces of furniture shoved to the sides. There was no sign of the trunk the ghost had mentioned.
“Guys,” Siobhan said to get their attention, her voice small. She had just opened the door to another room, and they looked over her shoulder to see what she was staring at.
“Oh, so that’s what Joey was talking about,” Alicia said.
Jesse didn’t need to ask what she meant. The light from their phones revealed an entire room lined wall to wall with creepy ceramic dolls. They were sitting in rows on tables, sofas, whatever furniture was left over, like a never blinking audience, staring at them as they entered the room. They came in many different shapes and sizes, but all of them were made of porcelain and dressed in Victorian styled clothing.
“Uh,” Jesse cleared his throat as he looked over the horde of dolls. “Are we absolutely sure that Joseph Waylor wasn’t a serial killer in his life?” That was the only explanation he could think of for why someone would own so many dolls.
“I did find out through my research that he was a doll maker,” Siobhan said. “He must have kept most of his creations.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that fact?”
She shrugged, clearly not as put off by the dolls as he was. “It slipped my mind, we had a lot of other things going on. Besides, doll maker is one of those old timey jobs that doesn’t sound real, you know? Like a cobbler or watch maker.”
“Milkman,” Alicia supplied.
He rolled his eyes, focusing his flashlight on the furniture the dolls were sitting on. “Still no trunk. Now what are you doing?” He had turned around to find Siobhan typing on her phone.
“Sending a jumpscare to Noah. He shouldn’t get a free pass on all these creepy dolls just ‘cause he’s busy babysitting.”
“Just make sure you don’t scar the kids.”
“They’re from Gravewood,” she said dismissively. “They probably see things like this on a daily basis.”
“Are there any haunted dolls in Gravewood?”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
“I was thinking about that,” Alicia said. “The Abernathy’s told us all about ghost powers, but they didn’t mention anything about possession. If Joseph Waylor used the dolls to scare the kids at our school, did he possess them to make them move around?”
“He might have just used some sort of telekinetic ability. They did explain that more powerful ghosts and spirits can move stuff without even touching them.”
“But why though? I guess I’m just having a hard time trying to figure out what Waylor’s goal is.”
“They also said that some ghosts are too far gone,” Jesse said. “Maybe even Waylor doesn’t know what his goal is.”
“We’ll find out once we find that trunk.”
The third-floor layout was extremely similar to the second floor, the only notable difference Jesse could see being a hatch leading to an attic at the end of a hall. They likewise also found nothing of note in any of the rooms. That is, until...
“Okay, I think it’s officially crossed from a job into an obsession,” Jesse remarked when they found another room full of dolls. Like seriously, his mom was a vet, but their house wasn’t filled to the brim with cats and dogs. Though that would have been preferable to the room they were currently in.
“He can probably hear you, you know,” Alicia said. “He is a spirit.”
“Don’t care, it’s something he needs to hear. Maybe we should hold an intervention.”
“Let me send this to Noah as well,” Siobhan said, snapping a picture.
“Good idea. Let’s see what he thinks about all this.”
They quickly got a reply back.
Noah: Is that the same room?
Siobhan: no this guy just has a lot of dolls lol
Noah: but isn’t that the same doll from the first picture?
He sent both of the pictures back, now with crudely drawn circles from the camera’s edit feature around a certain doll in each one. Looking closely at each photo, Jesse saw that he was right; the dolls were an exact match.
He crouched down in front of the doll in question to get a better look at it. It was a rather large one, maybe around three feet tall, nestled among a bunch of smaller dolls. It didn’t have a babyface like most of the other porcelain dolls, instead looking like it might have been around Jesse’s age, just with smaller proportions. Her dark brown ringlets and ruffled black dress were a sharp contrast to her porcelain white skin, which only had a hint of color to it. A red jeweled brooch was pinned to the collar of her dress, and next to it, tied around her neck, was a tag that simply read: 1868. Now that he was looking closer, he could see similar tags around the other dolls as well. The date of their creation, perhaps?
“He must have two of the same doll,” Alicia reasoned.
“Right...” But something about the situation made him uneasy. Call him paranoid, but he had gone through enough by now to not disregard coincidence. “One sec.”
He dashed back down the stairs to the second floor, back to the first doll room, and his suspicions were confirmed when he found an empty spot where the doll should have been.
“Yeah, no, that thing’s definitely haunted,” he reported once he had returned to the girls.
“We figured that out already.” Siobhan pointed over to the row of dolls, which had a similar empty spot.
“Where-”
“We don’t know. We took our eyes off of it for a second when you left and when we turned around, poof, gone.”
“It’s got to be Waylor messing with us.”
He could see now why Joey or whatever his name was got so freaked out when he tried to spend the night here, but since he was familiar with ghosts and monsters, the whole thing left him more curious than anything. What did Joseph Waylor have to gain by toying with them like this?
“Anyway, on to the next room,” Alicia said, moving on as if they hadn't just encountered something explicitly supernatural. But to be fair, they encountered the supernatural pretty regularly.
They left the room to continue their search, and as they walked, Jesse started jotting down notes on his phone. “Some creepy stuff going on, but so far no sign of Waylor himself. I wonder if he’s keeping his distance for some reason.”
“Uh, Jesse?”
Spoke too soon. At Alicia’s whispered urging, he looked up, just in time to see the figure of a man disappear around the corner of the hallway in front of them. He only caught a glimpse of a three-piece suit and an impressive mustache before it had disappeared, but he had instantly recognized him as Joseph Waylor.
When they rounded the same corner, there was no sign of Waylor, but on the wall written in a green goopy substance was the message, GET OUT.
Siobhan wrinkled her nose as they examined it. “Ew, what is that?”
Jesse touched the letters, quickly retracting his hand when he felt a sharp sting on his fingertips. “Ectoplasm.”
He and Alicia had had to clean up a ton of the stuff on Halloween. At the time, Hank had given them gloves, so Jesse had forgotten his warning about how it stung bare skin.
“Cool.” Alicia looked like she also wanted to touch the stuff, but thought better of it.
“Ectoplasm,” Siobhan repeated. “Isn’t that the slime that ghosts are supposed to produce. What, did he like, sweat this stuff out?”
“Sounds like something we should ask the Abernathy’s some other time. Right now, I’m more concerned with the message’s content.”
“Oh, right. ‘Get out.’ Do you think the front door is unlocked now?”
“Only one way to find out.”
