A Grave Situation, page 1
part #2 of The Infernal Artefacts Trilogy Series
A Grave Situation
The Infernal Artefacts Trilogy
Book Two
by A.A. Albright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © A.A. Albright 2022
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
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Website: https://aaalbright.com
Table of Contents
1. A Grave Situation
2. Ghost Logic
3. The Overseer
4. Cary
5. Corny Autumn Conversations
6. Love’s Old Dream
7. The Spirit Subdued
8. Smashing Turnips
9. Snake in the Grass
10. Pauline on Pause
11. My Last Week and One Day on Earth
12. With a Capital L
13. The Mysterious Mind of Angelica
14. Heroes and Halfwits
15. Page Four Hundred and Five
16. Awakenings
17. Babbling and Biceps
18. Family, Freedom and Flowers
19. Life’s Too Short For Playing it Cool
20. Lies Make Baby Sprites Cry
21. Shining Bright
22. Gravely Mistaken
23. The Secondary Lock
Books by A.A. Albright
1. A Grave Situation
I walked down from my flat and into my shop, still in my pyjamas, with my cat trotting behind me. She was far too sprightly for five o’clock in the morning.
‘Why are you getting up with me for this delivery?’ I asked. ‘You normally like to sleep in until breakfast time.’
‘No reason.’
I didn’t question her any further. Although she would flatly deny it, I knew Cleo was just as worried as I was. There had been a recent attempt on my life and, although the criminal was now in Witchfield Prison, things in the enclave just didn’t feel right.
‘Oh, Holy Hecate!’ My hand flew to my chest as I arrived in the shop to find that my assistant was already there. ‘Fiona, what are you doing here at five in the morning?’
Fiona shook her head and sighed. ‘I told you I was going to open up for the delivery so you could get some sleep. Remember? You were standing right there when I said it.’
‘Oh.’ I scratched my head. ‘I really don’t remember that.’
Fiona laughed. ‘Well, clearly not. But now that I’m here, you might as well get back to bed.’
I studied her for a moment. Fiona was possibly the most eager assistant anyone has ever had, and there was no doubt she was excellent at the job, but I was never sure how I felt about leaving her alone in the building. Although I had ambitions that my shop would one day sell nothing but healing wands, I knew that those hopes were futile. In the Samhain Street enclave, the other items I sold – necromancy supplies – were far more popular. The goods in the shop were dangerous in the wrong hands, and there were even more dangerous magical objects stored in the many basements beneath us.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Fiona, or that I didn’t like her, it was just that, well … I didn’t trust her or like her nearly as much as I wished I could. Like me, she was a Cackler – a witch who was bound to protect the enclave from dormant but deadly demons. But unlike me, she actually enjoyed being stuck here; she was also overly interested in the necromancy business, when as far as I was concerned, this shop was something I would gladly give up if I could.
‘Um …’ I began. ‘I think that … well …’ I was just about to come up with an excellent excuse as to why I couldn’t leave her alone (honestly, I was), when the doorbell rang.
Fiona checked her watch. ‘He’s five minutes early.’
Through the door’s glass panel, I could already see that this wasn’t the delivery man – the man who brought us the latest in necromancy-related fiction was a strange, small man with black-rimmed glasses and a constant cough. The person standing at my door was a curvy woman in her forties, with pale skin and dark hair. The effect was striking, and the woman was someone I knew very well. It was Dolly, the owner of my favourite café.
Dolly was a woman who could make even the dullest corner of the enclave seem bright. But this morning, she wasn’t full of her usual good cheer.
I wasn’t so full of good cheer myself – not unless she happened to have brought a bucket of coffee along with her.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked, blinking at her as I opened the door. ‘It’s five o’clock in the morning. It’s still dark outside.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry, I really am,’ Dolly said as she followed me inside. ‘But it’s about Turnip Tom.’
I felt my stomach churn. Only a few days ago I’d heard of the death of Tom Turner, also known as Turnip Tom, a local witch who sold turnips for carving into Jack O’Lanterns every Halloween. I’d known the man for so many years. The enclave wouldn’t be the same without him. The funeral had taken place yesterday, and I was still feeling a little down about it.
‘Does Pauline need any help with anything? Is she all right?’ I experienced a wash of sadness as I asked about Tom’s wife, Pauline. ‘Good goddess, it’s such a shame what happened to him.’
‘A shame?’ Dolly gave a shrug. ‘Well, I’ve a lot of better words for it than that. Creepy. Disturbing. A sign that, once again, our enclave is in the thrall of something dark.’
‘Huh?’ I gave her my full attention. I suspected there was something very wrong in the enclave too, but so far only my cat agreed with me. ‘He died of a heart attack. Didn’t he? Are you saying you think there was something else involved in his death?’
‘I don’t know about his death,’ said Dolly. ‘But there was certainly something sinister about the fact that his grave’s been robbed.’
While I went into full-on gaping mode, Dolly took a seat on my shop’s one and only bone-free chair, an old wooden piece I’d dragged up from one of the basements. ‘I was turning on the ovens this morning when I saw lights over at the Unhallowed Ground.’
I shivered. The Unhallowed Ground was Samhain Street’s cemetery.
‘Lights?’ said Fiona, looking up from the shelf she was dusting. Why was she always so busy? ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
Dolly gave Fiona an irritated glance, said, ‘Gee, really?’ and turned back to me. ‘I went over to investigate, and I found poor Pauline crying at Tom’s grave while a few others were running off into the darkness. I didn’t get a good look at them. But there were three of them, and they were carrying something large between them. When I got to Tom’s grave, I found it dug up, and his coffin empty. Pauline had just gotten there a few minutes earlier and caught them in the act, but she couldn’t stop them. They stole Tom’s body, Ned. Can you believe it?’
I propped myself up against the shop counter, feeling dizzy at the news. ‘Grave robbers? Actual grave robbers? That’s … well, that’s strange even for Samhain Street. What did the Wayfarers have to say about it?’
I shouldn’t have been surprised when Dolly only snorted in response. The Wayfarers might not be the worst supernatural police force we’d ever had, but they were still the law, and therefore an unpopular entity in the Samhain Street enclave.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You haven’t told them.’
‘Well, duh. I took Pauline home and made her some strong tea, and we had a good long chat about it. We want this crime solved, Ned, which is why I came here instead of going to that lot.’
My eyes drifted towards a shelf behind my counter. It was a not-so-secret door, leading through to the office of my friends Katy Kramer and Hamish Rhodes, the enclave’s most trusted private investigators. ‘You know Katy’s still away, right? And Hamish isn’t working investigations right now. I don’t know if he’ll ever come back.’
It hurt to say it, but it was probably true – Hamish was clearly enjoying his return to teaching at the wizarding college. Between that and the inventing work he was (secretly) doing for the Wayfarers, I couldn’t see how he’d ever find the time for detective work again.
‘Oh, I know those two aren’t here. But you can help, can’t you? You and your ghost-talking skills. Tom’s ghost should be hanging around the graveyard, or maybe it’s at home with Pauline. You can have a chat with him.’
‘You know, I already told Pauline that I didn’t see him at his funeral,’ I pointed out. ‘He could have passed on. Most people do.’
Dolly gave me a plaintive stare. ‘Oh, Ned, I know that. But you’re the only chance we’ve got of catching who did this to him. Grave robbing is dark. You and I have both been around this enclave long enough to know that it’s not the kind of thing people do here. Many of us are criminals, sure. Some of us sell dodgy gear or run sketchy bars – heck, I’ve even got a giant spider baking my muffins. But grave robbing’s not in our nature. And when you consider what happened only a few days ago with the Foul Factory and Alison …’
I nodded worriedly. Alison Fouler, a local factory owner, was responsible for the aforementioned attempt on my life. She had admitted to the murder of her boyfriend before trying to kill me, too. Not long after she was imprisoned, her factory burned down in an Inferno spell, leaving nothing but scorched earth behind. The
When you added in the fact that there was a prophecy which predicted I was going to die very soon, it had all left me feeling more than a little bit jittery. I wasn’t sure that anything was truly rectified, not even with Alison in jail. What if the grave robbery was somehow connected to it all?
‘Okay, I’ll see what I can do,’ I told Dolly. ‘I suppose that even if I can’t find Tom’s ghost, there ought to be a few other ghosts at the cemetery willing to talk to me. They might have seen the robbery in progress.’ I glanced at Fiona, who had carried on quietly dusting while Dolly and I talked. ‘Can you look after this place for a little while?’
‘Of course,’ Fiona assured me. ‘This is a grave situation, isn’t it? You’d better go straight away.’
Cleo looked up from the cushion she was lying upon and snorted. ‘Good one. Bad timing, though.’
Fiona’s face flushed as she realised what she’d said. ‘I didn’t mean to make a joke. I just meant that it is a grave situation. As in serious. You go and see if you can track down Tom’s ghost, and I’ll look after the shop.’
It didn’t seem like there was any other alternative, so I said, ‘Okay, then. Thanks. I’ll just go and get changed first.’
2. Ghost Logic
Dolly headed back to open up her café while I journeyed to Tom’s grave alone. I’d only just been to the funeral a few days earlier, so I knew the way. It wasn’t far from my father’s grave, and I gazed at his headstone as I passed, hoping that this would be the time when he’d make himself visible. Never once, in the nineteen years since he’d passed, had my father’s ghost come to me.
Today was no different.
But, while neither my dad nor Tom were making an appearance, there were hundreds of ghosts in the cemetery who were only too happy to talk.
I turned to one of the ghosts, Gary, who recently told me he didn’t want to pass on until he’d seen That Stick Is Mine! topple the Call of the Wild from the number one spot.
‘You know That Stick Is Mine! got to number one this week with I Hate Psychic Doorbells, right?’ I informed him.
‘I know. But the Call of the Wild don’t have anything new in the charts right now, so it doesn’t count.’
‘Ah.’ Ghost logic. ‘Well, seeing as you’re all clustered around Tom’s open grave, I’m guessing you know what’s up, right? Did you see anything?’ I asked.
He hugged his cardigan closer. Like many ghosts, Gary wore the outfit he had died in: a pair of jeans and big boots, with a That Stick Is Mine! T-shirt and a purple cardigan. ‘That’s the weird thing,’ he said. ‘I remember going to stare at my still-alive girlfriend last night. Then I remember coming back here after I saw her kissing a new bloke. Then, the next thing I remember is seeing Dolly comforting Pauline this morning while some weirdos ran away with Turnip Tom’s body, but it’s as if there was nothing in between.’
I gazed around at the other ghosts. ‘It’s the same for all of us,’ said Vicky, a girl who had died in the early nineteen nineties, and still wore the clothes she was going to the disco in the night she crashed her broom – flared jeans, cork-heeled shoes, and a crochet crop top. ‘It’s like hours of our afterlives just disappeared. It’s not the first time this has happened though.’
‘It isn’t,’ another ghost confirmed. His name was Ronald, and he’d died in the nineteen thirties. Unlike Gary and Vicky, Ronald had at least lived until a good age – he was one hundred and fifteen when he died. ‘There’ve been a few missing moments over the last few days – although none of the other graves look disturbed, so we can’t prove that’s why we’re missing time. And there was a spate of grave robberies oh … about nineteen or twenty years ago. We all lost time then too, when the graves were robbed. Whoever did it tidied up after themselves. We wouldn’t even have known anything had happened if it wasn’t for your father.’
I frowned. ‘My dad? What has he got to do with any of this?’
Ronald stepped closer to me. ‘Well, he put a stop to it last time, if I remember correctly. He never explained how – he couldn’t really, seeing as he died soon afterwards. But I just know that he ended it. I do remember him saying that someone called the Spell something was involved. Spellmaster, maybe.’
‘Spellcaster?’ I suggested, feeling slightly nauseous. Alison was the Spellcaster, or at least she said she was. She said that like me, she had a set of Infernal Artefacts at her disposal. While my job was to act as the Balance, and to use my set of artefacts to fight the Spellcaster and break their spells, Alison was intent on killing me so that she could become the One True Necromancer. But she was in jail now, so how could she have anything to do with this latest round of grave robberies?
‘Yes, that’s it precisely,’ Ronald confirmed. ‘The Spellcaster was the one your father blamed, the last time this happened. Oh, Nedina, your father was such a good egg.’
‘He was.’ My voice was breaking as I recalled the almost twelve years I had with my father. ‘Ronald, do you … have you ever seen his ghost?’
With a pitying expression, Ronald shook his head. ‘I’m ever so sorry, my dear, but I haven’t. I assume that, unlike me, your father is enjoying whatever comes next. You know that I refuse to pass over until I’ve seen a fair and just world for all.’
‘I know.’ I patted him on the shoulder. Ronald was one of those ghosts who were so stubborn that they were very nearly solid. ‘Things are pretty good in the enclaves now though, aren’t they? We’re pretty friendly with the faeries, and weredogs and wizards have equal rights. There’s even a cure for the dayturning virus.’
‘What you say is true,’ he acknowledged. ‘But I did say I want a fair and just world for all, not simply a fair and just magical world. I’m afraid things are much worse for those poor humans than ever. So you can see, I’m sure, that I cannot possibly pass over just yet.’
Ghost logic strikes again.
Vicky popped some gum (it was the same gum she’d been popping for decades now) and said, ‘Oh, give over, Ron. If you think you had a long wait for us to sort ourselves out, you’ll be waiting even longer for the humans to stop killing each other in their droves. Admit it – you’re scared of passing on.’
‘I am not!’ He took out his handkerchief and waved it in front of his face. ‘At least I’m not sticking around this graveyard just because I’m in love with a vampire and waiting for him to die. You know he could well go on forever. And he’s a famous actor. He doesn’t even know you exist.’
‘Yeah, well I still get to look at him in the meantime, don’t I?’
Before their argument got worse (it usually did), I said, ‘So what can any of you tell me? Do you think it was a memory spell or a sandman spell? Can those things even work on ghosts?’
‘Dunno.’ Vicki shrugged. ‘But I’ll tell you this, Ned. Them three who loped off with the body while poor Pauline knelt by the grave and wept – they weren’t right, so they weren’t.’
‘What do you mean by “not right”?’
‘Sort of … lumbering,’ she explained. ‘And awful pale looking. A bald bloke with sunken eyes, and a dark-haired guy. The other one I couldn’t see, because he had a hood pulled up, covering himself.’
‘What direction did they go in?’ I asked.
‘Towards the north gate.’ Gary pointed in that direction. ‘But they disappeared before they got there. They all sort of clumped together and two of them grabbed onto the other one, and then they all disappeared. I don’t know why they didn’t do that straight away. It looked like they panicked when Pauline arrived, maybe. Like they had no idea how to react.’
‘Finger-click or wand?’ I questioned. It would let me know whether the person in charge of the grave-robbing gang was a witch or a wizard.
‘We couldn’t tell,’ said Gary. ‘Sorry.’
‘You should go see the Overseer, Ned,’ Vicky suggested. ‘He knows everything that happens here.’
