The Old Ghost
She’s starting to think of it as real, this demon of legend, like a living thing she’s searching for in the dark corners of the city. Isabel sits back on the heels of her well-worn travel boots, letting her skirts fall around her and bringing the arm not holding the lantern in toward her chest. It’s cold, and the wind blows freely through the open aperture of the lighthouse. On the positive side, however, the temperature keeps the body from reeking after what looks like a couple of hours since death.
Some of the cuts are encrusted in blood. In other places, the split flesh lies cleanly open, the edges gray. The wounds have been applied with painstaking care before and after the unfortunate man died. Here on the cliff overlooking where the river flows out to the northern sea, there would have been plenty of time to work without interruption. As the constables are milling about aimlessly, rather than lining up the people of the River District to be questioned, Isabel guesses there aren’t any witnesses.
Not any living ones, anyway.
She stands and hands the lantern back to the young officer, who looks only marginally less green as he stands awkwardly by the window, giving the body a wide berth.
“What’s his name?” Isabel asks.
The constable shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He takes a trembling breath. “The keeper used to be old Bexley, but he gave up the post when his wife died.”
So this is the lighthouse keeper. That makes sense; it would be much harder to drag someone up here without being seen than to attack the man who already lived here. He was perhaps fifty years old, and even in death, his stature suggests a life of physical labor. Perhaps an injury led him to this relatively gentle occupation. There’s a pile of canvas sheets in one corner of the room—old sails, perhaps, used to cover the window or prevent leaks in between repairs to the roof—and Isabel takes one and covers the body with it.
Knowing his name would make the ritual easier. Isabel can try to summon up the man’s ghost without it, but there’s no telling what or who else might be hanging around the old lighthouse, unwilling or unable to pass through the new-moon door to the other world. She thinks for one terrible, irrational second that she might make contact with Essash-poleth if she rings the bell, but that would be impossible. Even if the Lord of Pestilence had ever existed, the Luminous Codex had specified exactly what it took to summon him. The diagram in miniature, carved on the lighthouse keeper’s brow with many of its sigils left out, would do nothing.
The circle does have enough detail that Isabel is certain that its ghastly artist had more than a passing familiarity with the Codex. She can assume nothing, but the garish brutality and the symbolism are clear echoes of the scene in the Shell District. Would she even be able to talk to this spirit, or would it be like that of Mikhail Ranseberg, damaged and incoherent?
In any case, her job would be much easier with a name.
Isabel goes downstairs, to the keeper’s apartment on the first floor. It’s separated from the landing by only a sharp-cornered doorway—the only door is the one that leads outside. She opens it, and in the light from the harbor and the lantern-bearing constables moving around the base of the lighthouse, it looks whole and unharmed. It has not been forced, either by the police or the murderer.
Was it someone he knew?
The apartment itself tells a different story. It’s a single room, with a fireplace gone cold. The chair has been pulled from the small table and set to face the hearth. It’s draped with ropes and splattered with blood. The tools plied upon the poor keeper are nowhere to be seen, and Isabel tries not to imagine what they might look like.
The table is on its side, close by the bed, which is no longer perpendicular to the wall. Its heavy wooden frame has been pushed to an odd angle. There was something of a struggle, after the assailant had come inside. The wound on the back of the keeper’s head told Isabel how that had probably ended.
A chest at the foot of the bed, knocked somewhat out of place by the movement of the bed frame, holds the keeper’s few belongings. Isabel opens it slowly. This is not the first time she’s had to go through the worldly possessions of the deceased, and it won’t be the last. It must be done respectfully, her teachers insisted again and again, and one must never remove anything unless it’s absolutely necessary. Doing otherwise would undermine the trust of the living in the church of Ondir; or, worse, it could anger a lingering ghost.
The chest contains only a change of clothes, a few tools—woodworking tools, for repairs to the building, and far too blunt for the work done by the murderer—and a small strongbox with a lock. It jingles with the sound of coins as Isabel picks it up. She sets it back in its place beside the keeper’s spare pair of shoes.
She hasn’t found any identifying documents. There are no books in this room, no letters, not even a note. The keeper was, by all evidence, illiterate.
Isabel sighs. She should have thought of the possibility.
Back upstairs, then, to where the body lies in the cold light room. The constable has gone. His duties to secure the crime scene aside, it’s probably better that he isn’t here. If Isabel contacts another damaged spirit—and it’s still hard to imagine the possibility, even though she’s done it once already—it would not be a pleasant thing to witness. She’s also been told to keep the state of Mikhail’s soul a secret.
She takes bell, book, and candle from her satchel, along with a stub of chalk. It leaves dusty residue on her fingers as she turns it around in one hand, hesitating. It’s the first time she’s felt this trepidation since her first attempts as a young apprentice. What if something goes wrong?
Waiting isn’t going to help. The constabulary can only find the living witnesses, and there isn’t another Sentinel for miles around.
The chalk scrapes against the floorboards, leaving behind a gritty mix of sediment and rock salt. She encircles the body as a precaution: should the spirit she summons be whole and angry, this will keep it from reanimating the corpse. The circle is then divided into twelve segments, like the face of a clock, and the sigils of the twelve once-known realms of the netherworld inscribed at each mark. After years of practice, the circle is nearly perfect, the segments exactly equal.
Next is the candle. It burns steadily even in the draft from the aperture. Isabel puts out all the other lights, except for the mirrored lanterns in the window—she doesn’t know whether the murderer lit them as part of the grotesque display, or if they were needed to guide ships into the harbor, and she doesn’t want to risk it. It’s dark enough in this room for her purposes. She places the candle inside the circle beside the first sigil, a short distance from the body’s head.
The scene is set. Now for the other players, she says to herself, and prays that the gods will smile on her this time.
She’s memorized all the rituals, but she opens the book to the correct page out of habit, and muffles the bell against her chest. A quiver of energy, far fainter than the smell of the sea from the lighthouse window, hangs in the air.
Please let this work.
The bell’s tone is clear and resonant. It drowns out the voices of the constables on the hillside below, the din of the River District, and the sea beating against the cliff.
“Wandering soul, child of Isra,” Isabel begins, “before you stands the gate of bone. Lay down your burdens, leave your toils, turn away from the bright world and its many sorrows. I am the servant of the lord of the gates, and I call you home on his behalf. Speak with me a while, before you embark on your last journey.”
All is silent. Magic thrums in the room like a taut string, and the shadows deepen, making the flame and the white chalk circle look glaringly bright. Isabel doesn’t dare to breathe.
Movement near the window catches her eye. She looks, and sees the dim bluish shadow of a hunched figure beside the window. As she watches, the shape strengthens and becomes clearer: it’s an old man, dressed in plain clothes, his wispy beard trailing through the air. He holds what appears to be an old-fashioned sulfur match up to the lanterns, and the flames tremble in their glass cages. That done, he turns toward the aperture, gazing out to sea.
He’s a ghost, and an old one, barely clinging to the world. His presence is faint. This is not the spirit of the murdered man.
“Can you hear me?” Isabel asks.
The ghost turns his weathered face toward her. She can see the casement and the sky through his form, but he is whole and calm.
“There’s a man here,” she continues, reaching out and pulling the canvas back from the corpse’s face. “Do you recognize him?”
“The new lighthouse keeper’s not diligent enough,” the ghost says, looking back over his shoulder at the window. “The ships will wreck.”
He is the old ghost of an old man. He could be referring to the unfortunate victim here, or to his own successor, gone a hundred years or more ago, or any lighthouse keeper in between.
“There’s been a lot of people coming in and out of here, since you’ve been at this post,” Isabel says. “There was someone else just a short time ago. Someone let them in the door, and then they hurt this man. Did you see? Do you remember?”
The ghost tries to turn, but the ritual is set, and he is bound here for the moment. “The keeper is responsible for the door. Can’t be letting just anyone in. The keeper watches the door.”
And he opened the door for his murderer. “That person would have come up here, maybe opened the window. Did you see?” Isabel asks again.
“Strangers’re not supposed to touch the light,” says the ghost. He gives a grunt of effort and tries to walk back toward the stairs.
“That’s right. A stranger touched it. What did they look like?”
Another grunt. “Black robes. Hood. Didn’t see his face.”
Isabel frowns. That doesn’t really help her. “Do you remember anything else?”
The ghost manages a half turn, back to the lanterns, and reaches out with his long match again. “Bright light,” he says. “Downstairs, a bright light.”
Magic, Isabel guesses. Has to be. Though it doesn’t seem like it did much.
There’s a sense of tension, of a tether pulled too tight. The spirit is resisting her with a powerful will. Despite his faded manifestation, he’s strong enough to have kept up his duties for decades, maybe a century or more, resisting the tidal current of death.
She rings the bell once more, calling his attention back. “Your labors have ended,” she recites through the echo. “Others shall take up your charge. It is time for you to go home. The path is dark, but I have placed a light to show you the way. Go now through the door of the new moon, and be at peace in the world beyond worlds.”
The ghost walks forward, his steady gaze looking ahead. He crosses the room, entering the circle and walking over the body without disturbing either. As he nears the candle, he is harder and harder to see, the faint glow of his shape obscured by the bright flame. He reaches out with one hand, and then he is gone.
The tension eases, and the shadows fall back. The light from the mirrored lamps fills almost half the room. Isabel puts out the candle and sets it aside to cool. She’ll sweep up the circle later, when she’s ready to take the body to the blue field. For now, there has to be something that she’s missed, some clue as to whom this black-robed stranger was.
She goes back down to the apartment and searches again, picking up the table and chairs, poking through the ashes of the fireplace, turning aside the bedclothes. She sets the lantern on the floor and gets down on her hands and knees, her face to the worn boards.
There.
Something catches the lamplight from under the bed, by the post that’s still against the wall. It takes a few tries, and she has to lie prone and put her right shoulder fully underneath the bed frame to reach it, but she manages to catch it between her fingers. It’s smooth and round, with a divot on two opposite sides.
Isabel sits up and holds the object up to the light. It wasn’t a pair of indentations she felt, but a hole that goes all the way through: it’s a bead, made of wood and coated in shiny crimson lacquer. The shape is a perfect sphere, and there is only the tiniest superficial crack in the finish—it was made by a diligent craftsman.
She’s certain she hasn’t seen anything else like it in the room. The keeper likely couldn’t afford anything so fine. It must have belonged to his attacker.
But why would a murderer in a black robe have something like this? It’s a beautiful thing, at such odds with blood-magic and the summoning of demons.
Isabel gets to her feet. It’s late, and she’s tired, and she still has to get the constables to wrap up the body for her to take it to Brother Risoven’s chapel. Even if they’ve found some witnesses, she should still try to summon up the most recent lighthouse keeper.
She hopes that he will be able to answer her questions. She’s seen the alternative, and she prays she won’t see it again.
Thanks for reading! There will be more next week. If you can’t wait (and my posting schedule these days isn’t exactly regular), there are more things to read under the Stories and Modules tabs above.
Space Whales Press 
2 thoughts on “The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Seven”