KIT
gtg
EMMA
Dear Bruce,
Sorry it’s been a long time since I’ve written in you. Everything’s been kind of crazy since Ty sent the Ghost Sensor. Which was incredibly helpful and nice of him, and we decided even if it didn’t work we’d still tell him it did, but that didn’t turn out to matter. It definitely works. The minute we unpacked it, it started to make weird little crackles and beeps. It didn’t seem to be reacting to anything specific, more like it was reacting to the environment of the house, fussing about it like a grumpy baby.
Julian decided to use it kind of like a divining rod, following where the strongest crackles and beeps seemed to be. We spent probably an hour traipsing through the house while the Sensor made whistling sounds like an angry teakettle.
Eventually the Sensor led us to one of the upstairs hallways. There’s no furniture in it now and it looks a bitforlorn with tattered curtains hanging from the windows and an empty frame on the wall. It was also pretty eerie, standing there with the Sensor going crazy but not being able to see anything. We both looked at each other, thinking, Is there a ghost in here with us right now?
At that moment, I remembered what I’d read in Tatiana Lightwood’s diary—how she’d hidden the pages of her old diary in the wall. I went over to the wall and tapped on it. Jules immediately got that I was looking for a hollow spot and started knocking as well until we found a spot that sounded different. We both stared at it for a minute before Julian said, “Hang on.” He went downstairs and returned with a sledgehammer. He started to swing at the wall, but I stopped him. “I really think you should take your jacket off while you do this. Maybe your shirt, too.”
He obligingly stripped down to his undershirt. That’s my guy. I may have taken a picture. Pretty soon Julian had smashed through, sending plaster flying everywhere and revealing a dark hollow space behind the wall.
Julian backed off while I reached inside. I cannot tell you how many spiderwebs I touched, Bruce. It was disgusting. (It’s no Spidertown, but it turns out the Spider Suburbs are also very impressive, spider-wise.) Eventually I pulled out a bunch of old clumped together pages. I can’t help but think they are Tatiana’s old diary pages, the ones she talked about destroying, but they were so water damaged I couldn’t be sure. I was wondering if I should tell Julian about the diary—for some reason I haven’tmentioned it to him yet—when he reached into the hole and pulled out a hard wooden board engraved with letters and numbers.
“It’s a Ouija board,” he said. “Dru wanted one for Christmas last year.” He turned it over in his hands. “An old homemade one. Not the one you can buy in a mundane store.”
I’ve always thought of Ouija boards as being part of human superstition. Like palmistry, not something Shadowhunters needed to take seriously. But the Sensor was going crazy, beeping these dark red pulses that reminded me of Isabelle’s necklace.
“Should we try to use it?” I said.
Julian frowned. “I don’t know. When I was looking into getting one for Dru, I found out these things can be kind of…dangerous.”
So I’m writing this right now while lying in bed. Julian is already asleep with plaster in his hair. He looks so cute. Anyway, we decided we’d try using the Ouija board tomorrow. We’re Shadowhunters, we can deal with ghosts, right?
Goodnight, Bruce. I think I’ll read a little of Tatiana’s diary to put me to sleep. Meanwhile, enjoy the eye candy.
JULIAN
Hi Magnus,
So I know you told me to only get in touch for a “real emergency,” and I think you might have already left for vacation. But we’ve got some ghost trouble here at Chiswick House and could use a little advice. Just in writing! No need to interrupt your time away! Unless, um, you think it actually is an emergency.
Chiswick House is in awful shape in general, so it’s hard to know what’s a real problem and what’s only the results of a hundred years of neglect. Other than one small area, nobody’s touched the place since, it seems, the time of Tatiana Blackthorn.
We have some garden gnomes here doing the structural repairs and the big stuff like masonry and framing and so on. I mean, they’re not actually garden gnomes, I think they’re brownies, but they have the big pointy hats and the beards and everything. They’ve been moving slowly,but recently Kieran was here and he had a talk with the foreman (this guy named Round Tom who is not even all that round) and since then things have sped up a lot. And there is a lot less complaining about the work conditions, and a lot less disappearing for the day if the tea runs out for more than five minutes. On the other hand, they’ve started leaving little offerings around intended for “the Un-Seel Laird,” which I gather is Kieran. Not anything Kieran would want, I don’t think. A lot of acorns and pretty rocks, mostly. And the occasional portrait of Kieran in chalk, which, let me tell you, it’s a good thing they’re competent at construction because their portraiture could use some work. We’ve been keeping all the stuff in a box for him just in case.
I’m rambling, sorry. It’s just us rattling around in this giant ruin and all we want is for someone to listen to our dull stories about home renovation. But what I actually want to tell you about is the ghost.
I’m sure there are dozens of random spirits going back centuries that have some kind of faint presence in the house—Round Tom hinted as much to me—but there’s definitely a specific one actively haunting the place. We’ve had some poltergeist-y stuff. Mostly harmless pranks: vases overturned, drinks spilled, music faintly playing in the distance but originating from nowhere, weird hot spots, weird cold spots, doors slamming, doors closing very slowly on their own, doors opening on their own at various speeds. To clarify, I do NOT mean poltergeist as in the movieDru made me watch. No one has been sucked into evil dimensions or levitated (yet!). Still, it seems like we ought to try to get out ahead of this, so Emma and I have been trying to communicate with the presence directly. Whoever it is, they haven’t responded to us speaking to them, and it’s starting to feel silly to constantly talk in a friendly voice to nobody, like we have an imaginary friend. All that happens is the next morning someone has stacked all the gnomes’ hats into a hat tower and we have to convince the gnomes it wasn’t us.
Lest you think we haven’t tried smarter things than just yelling “Here, ghostie ghostie ghostie,” Tiberius sent us a device he’s been working on, like a Sensor for ghosts. I walked the halls and eventually found a spot along a random corridor where the Sensor went crazy. I busted the wall open with a sledgehammer—I feel like you would approve, although the gnomes did not—and behind the plaster, wedged between two of the beams, was a Ouija board that must go back to at least a hundred years, maybe more. There was no planchette, so we made our own out of scrap wood and furniture tacks. Maybe it was bad to use our own planchette instead of something that went with the Ouija board, I don’t know how it works, but in any event we tried the board and it went very badly.
We attempted to do things officially—Emma and I waited until midnight, we got dressed up nicely, and we went down into Spidertown (a.k.a. our cellar). There are a bunch of spooky rooms down there that look likethey’ve been used for ghost-ish business in the past. We extinguished witchlights (no electricity down there any more than it’s anywhere else), and lit lots of candles. Ghosts love candles, right? We had a bolt of black silk to sit on Emma found in a trunk. Then we positioned ourselves on either side of the board and both put our hands on the planchette.
Us:H-E-L-L-O
Nothing.
Us:W-E-M-E-A-N-N-O-H-A-R-M
The candles guttered, but most of the windows in the room are smashed, so with the usual draft from outside I’m not sure we can count it as a response.
Us:W-H-A-T-I-S-Y-O-U-R-N-A-M-E
