Chapter 10: Demolition Planning
The frustration was a physical ache between his shoulder blades. Elias stood in the kitchen, staring at the same loaf of bread he’d sliced hours ago, the same shadowy forms drifting at the periphery of his vision. The grand, terrifying discovery in the basement had shrunk into a simple, maddening problem: concrete. He was a writer, not a demolition expert. His most powerful tool was a metaphor, and you couldn’t bludgeon Victorian engineering to death with a well-turned phrase.
“So, what’s the plan, boss?” Moonbeam asked, materializing by the icebox. Her attempt at casualness was undercut by the way her form flickered, charged with the nervous energy from their basement expedition.
“The plan is I need a sledgehammer. A big one. And a crowbar. Maybe a jackhammer,” Elias said, running a hand down his face. “Which means I need to hire someone. Which means I need money I don’t have.”
The probate lawyer’s voice was a fresh echo in his mind, calm and final. The estate’s liquid assets are currently frozen, Mr. Thorne. He knew she had access to some cash to cover expenses, but he also didn't know if he could trust Rachel. Did she serve Tamya, or someone else? Or something else?
“Can’t you just… write a check?” Jezebel purred, slinking out of the pantry. She seemed drawn to his agitation like a shark to chum. “Or perhaps win a poker game? I knew a fabulous cardsharp in ’26. I could teach you his tricks.” She winked, her green eyes glinting. “Of course, he ended up with a knife in his back, but the principle is sound.”
“The principle is I’m broke,” Elias snapped, his patience thinning. “All my uncle’s money is just… gone. Or being guarded by a dragon I’m trying to avoid.”
He leaned heavily on the marble counter, the cold seeping through his sleeves. Bringing in an outsider felt like a catastrophic risk. How would he explain the permanent chill, the whispering walls, the occasional phantom hand passing through a contractor’s tool belt? They’d either think he was insane or flee, spreading stories that would make the house unsellable forever. He was trapped between a rock and a hard place, and the rock was several feet thick and hidden in his basement.
“I have to do it myself,” he muttered, more to himself than to them. The statement hung in the air, pathetic and absurd.
A new voice, crisp and oddly formal, cut through the kitchen’s gloom. “That would be inadvisable without a proper structural assessment.”
Elias jumped. A man was coalescing near the grand fireplace, his form struggling to maintain solidity. He flickered in and out, a human-shaped television losing signal. He was dressed in a military-style jacket, though of no era Elias could immediately place, and his hair was cut with severe precision. His face was all sharp angles and focused intensity.
Moonbeam floated closer. “Elias, this is Eddie. He doesn’t come out much.”
“Eddie Kovacek,” the spirit said, his voice crackling with static. He snapped a sharp, ghostly salute that half-dissolved his arm. “First Engineer Battalion. You’re planning to attack the foundation?”
“Attack is a strong word,” Elias said, recovering from his start. “I’m more… aggressively investigating it.”
Eddie’s form solidified a degree, his eyes scanning Elias with a technician’s dispassionate gaze. “The concrete in the sub-basement is aggregate mix, high-silica content. Typical for the 1890s. Dense. You swing a sledgehammer at it without knowing where the rebar is, or where the main load-bearing columns are, you’ll bring the third-floor gallery down on your head. Sir.”
The “sir” was automatic, devoid of respect. It was a statement of fact.
“Right. Okay. So, no sledgehammer.” Elias felt a fresh wave of helplessness. “You’re an engineer?”
“Was,” Eddie corrected, his gaze drifting to the wall as if he could see the blueprints layered within it. “Built bridges, fortifications. Demolished a few, too. That setup down there… it’s not just plumbing. It’s a containment system. The primary intake valve you found is the key, but it’s the downstream distribution network that’s the real problem. It’s threaded through the main structural supports. It’s why your uncle poured all that new concrete. He wasn’t just hiding it; he was reinforcing the house around it. It’s a symbiotic relationship. You hurt one, you hurt the other.”
The genius of his uncle’s malice settled over Elias, cold and heavy. Alistair hadn’t just built a prison; he’d woven the locks into the very fabric of the building. Freeing the ghosts meant potentially destroying the house. It was a devil’s bargain.
“So, what? I’m just supposed to leave it?” The defeat in his own voice sickened him.
“Negative,” Eddie said, his form flickering again. He pointed a shimmering finger toward the window, toward the overgrown grounds. “The system needs maintenance. Alistair wasn’t a young man. He didn’t do all that work himself. There’s a toolshed. West of the garden. Hasn’t been opened in years. But the equipment should be there. You’ll need a star drill, a heavy hammer. It’s slow work. Manual. But precise. We can pinpoint a weak spot. Bypass the main conduit.”
We. The word landed differently coming from Eddie. It wasn’t Moonbeam’s hope or Jezebel’s game. It was a tactical assessment.
“You’ll help?” Elias asked.
Eddie’s image stabilized, his eyes meeting Elias’s with unwavering focus. “It’s an engineering problem. I solve problems.” He glanced at Colin, who had been a silent, solid presence in the corner since they’d returned from the basement. Colin gave a single, grim nod of agreement.
Before Elias could respond, the two spirits faded, their forms dissolving into the dark hallway that led to the garden door. Just like that, he had a command team.
Moonbeam let out a soft sigh. “Eddie’s very… direct.”
Jezebel rolled her eyes, draping herself over a kitchen chair. “Oh, wonderful. A ghostly infantryman. I’m sure he’s a riot at parties.” She fixed her gaze on Elias, a slow, hungry smile spreading across her lips. “While the boys are playing with their tools, you look tense, darling. All that thinking is so draining. I know better ways to burn off energy.”
Her presence washed over him, a wave of phantom warmth and the scent of gin and jazz. The part of him that was lonely, that was stretched thin and desperate for any kind of release, stirred. It would be so easy to let go, to lose himself in her chaotic, numbing embrace. To feel something other than this crushing responsibility.
He looked from her tempting smile to Moonbeam’s anxious hope. He thought of Colin’s silent warning and Eddie’s crisp, logical assessment. He was the nexus. The only one who could touch the physical world. The only one who could swing a hammer.
“Another time, Jezebel,” he said, his voice firmer than he expected. He pushed off from the counter. “I’ve got a toolshed to find.”
He walked out of the kitchen, leaving the scent of burnt coffee and temptation behind him. The cool, damp air of the hallway was a relief. Through the grimy window of the back door, he could see two faint, shimmering outlines in the overgrown twilight, waiting for him by a small, dilapidated structure half-swallowed by ivy. The first, real step was right outside.
The first, real step was right outside.
The overgrown grass soaked his jeans immediately, the cold damp seeping through to his skin as he crunched across the gravel path. Eddie and Colin were already at the shed, their forms wavering like heat haze over asphalt. The small structure leaned dangerously, its wood weathered to a soft silver and choked by thick ivy that seemed to be the only thing holding it upright.
“Lock’s rusted shut,” Elias said, jiggling the heavy padlock. It didn’t move.
Colin simply reached out, his large hand passing through the metal hasp. There was a sharp, metallic crack, and the lock fell to the ground, cleaved clean through as if by an invisible bolt cutter. Colin’s form flickered violently with the effort.
“Show-off,” Elias muttered, pulling the door open. It groaned on hinges that hadn't moved in a decade.
The inside was a tomb for forgotten labor, smelling of dry rot, old gasoline, and metal. Moonbeams of dust-filled light cut through the gaps in the walls, illuminating a chaotic museum of tools. A massive, cast-iron bench press stood in the center, its screw thick with rust. Elias felt a wave of overwhelming inadequacy.
“This is a lot of… stuff.”
“Focus,” Eddie snapped, his voice already fraying at the edges. He pointed a translucent finger. “The star drill. There, on the wall. And the drilling hammer beside it. That’s your primary.”
Elias grabbed the heavy, star-shaped steel bit. It was colder than the air, its business end dulled with age. The hammer he lifted next felt like it was made of solid lead. His arms protested just holding it.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. This is medieval.”
“It’s precise,” Eddie countered, his image beginning to transparent. “You’ll need the wrecking bar too. The long one. For leverage.”
Colin, growing fainter, gestured urgently toward a corner piled with cobwebs. A monstrous, six-foot iron bar lay there, looking less like a tool and more like a weapon for a giant. Elias’s heart sank. This was going to be impossible.
“What’s happening to you guys?” Moonbeam asked from the doorway, her own light dimming. She hugged herself, a shiver running through her form. “It feels like… taffy. Pulling.”
“The house,” Eddie said, his words becoming distant, layered with static. “We can’t… go far. Or for long.”
His form dissolved into a shimmer, then vanished completely. Colin met Elias’s eyes for a brief second, his stern face etched with a final, unspoken instruction to be careful, before he too was gone, sucked back into the mansion’s gravitational pull.
Moonbeam lingered a moment longer. “I've...I'd never wandered out this far. I didn't know... It’s calling. I have to…” She didn’t finish, her form stretching unnaturally backward before snapping out of existence like a cut film reel.
Silence rushed in, deeper and more profound than any he’d felt inside. He was utterly alone in the yard, the weight of the tools in his hands a tangible anchor to a task that suddenly felt monumentally stupid. The house loomed behind him, its windows dark and watchful.
“Right,” he said to the empty air. “One trip at a time.”
The first journey back was the worst. The star drill and hammer were bad enough, their weight making his shoulders scream by the time he stumbled back into the kitchen and dropped them on the floor with a deafcling crash that echoed through the silent house. He stood there, panting, his breath pluming in the cold air.
The wrecking bar was a special kind of hell. He had to drag it, the iron screeching a protest against the gravel path, leaving a scar in the earth. Heavier than anything he’d ever lifted, it felt like moving a coffin. By the time he got it through the door, his back was a single, solid knot of pain.
He made two more trips for smaller items Eddie had pointed out: a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters and a crowbar that felt light by comparison. Each return to the silent, watching house felt like a minor defeat. The spirits were absent, pulled back into the walls, leaving him to do the grunt work alone.
When the last tool was finally piled in the kitchen, a sad heap of archaic iron, the light outside had softened into a pale, mid-afternoon gray. He leaned against the doorframe, soaked in sweat and shivering from the cold, his muscles trembling with a fine, exhausted vibration.
He stared at the pile, then at the dark mouth of the hallway that led to the basement stairs. Getting this mass of metal down those narrow, slick steps was a problem for a future version of himself, one with a forklift and a complete disregard for his own spinal health.
His stomach growled, a hollow, insistent sound. The forgotten loaf of bread on the counter suddenly looked like a five-star meal.
“Screw it,” he breathed, pushing himself upright. The tools could wait. The basement could wait. He’d worry about moving a mountain of iron after he got some lunch.
He stumbled back into the kitchen, his muscles screaming a chorus of complaints with every movement. The room was colder than he’d left it, the air sharp with a new, watchful stillness. Jezebel was there, leaning against the counter as if she’d been waiting. Beside her, the woman from earlier hovered, her form no longer just a shapeless smudge of shadow.
She had definition now—the suggestion of slender shoulders, the faint curve of a neck, a haze of dark hair around a face that was still an impressionistic blur. She was coalescing, pulled into sharper focus by the simple, forgotten act of being offered bread.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Jezebel drawled, her eyes raking over his sweaty, disheveled state. “And here I thought you’d run off to join a circus. You have the physique for it, all ropes and bones.”
“Ha,” Elias grunted, heading straight for the loaf of bread. “Where are the others? Moonbeam? Colin and Eddie just… vanished outside.”
Jezebel waved a dismissive hand, the gesture elegant and utterly bored. “Oh, they exhausted themselves with all that gallivanting in the fresh air. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to go out there, to resist the pull. It will be hours before they can hold a conversation again. They’re scattered to the drafts, poor dears.” She glanced at the faint woman beside her. “Some of us are better at conserving our strength. Or had less to expend in the first place.”
Elias looked at the gathering spirit, a cold knot tightening in his stomach. Their very presence was a finite resource, siphoned and managed by the house. His uncle’s ledger wasn’t just notes; it was a manual for a battery farm. He pulled out a knife and sawed off two thick slices of bread, the action feeling mundane and profoundly strange under their silent observation.
“So, what’s the verdict, handyman?” Jezebel asked, drifting closer as he searched for a pan. “Are we to be freed by the might of your newfound arsenal?”
“The verdict is that your former landlord was a paranoid engineering genius with a sadistic streak,” he said, finding a skillet and slapping it onto the stove. “Eddie says if I swing a hammer wrong, I bring the whole place down. So, no pressure.”
He focused on the simple, physical task of making food. The gas ignited with a soft whump, a real and comforting flame. He dropped a pat of butter into the pan, the sizzle a tiny explosion of normalcy in the unnerving quiet. The two spirits watched him, one with predatory interest, the other with a desperate, silent hunger that had nothing to do with the bread now toasting in the pan.
The scent of browning butter filled the room, a warm, earthly counterpoint to the pervasive smells of dust and decay. It was the most human thing that had happened in the house all day. Jezebel inhaled deeply, a mockery of pleasure on her face. “Oh, I do miss that. The sheer… grease of it all.”
Elias flipped the toast, not looking at her. “You could always try to possess me. Make me cook you a five-course meal.”
“Tempting,” she purred. “But I’d rather have you conscious for the fun parts.”
The faint woman shifted, a rustle of unsettled energy. Her form solidified just enough for Elias to see the dark pools of her eyes within the haze of her face, fixed on the toast. She was remembering, too. He plated the two slices, golden brown and glistening. He pushed one plate toward Jezebel, who laughed, a sound like breaking glass.
“Oh, darling, I can’t eat that.”
“I know,” he said, and slid the plate directly in front of the faint woman.
She didn’t move for a long moment. Then, a hand, barely more than condensed shadow, rose from her side. It hovered over the plate, trembling with the effort. He watched, his own lunch forgotten, as her fingers slowly, painstakingly, began to gain substance. They were pale and finely shaped, the nails clean. They lowered until they were almost, almost touching the warm surface of the bread.
The effort was immense. A soft, pained sigh escaped her, a whisper of exhausted breath, and her form flickered, the gained clarity threatening to dissolve. She was fighting for it, fighting to remember the feeling of holding something, of wanting something simple and good.
She was still trying, a monument to desperate will, as Elias picked up his own toast and took a bite. The crunch was deafening in the silent kitchen. The house felt like it was holding its breath, waiting to see if she would make it.
The house felt like it was holding its breath, waiting to see if she would make it.
Her shadowy fingers strained, a hair's breadth from the toast, but they couldn't bridge the final, impossible gap. A sound of pure anguish, a stifled sob, escaped her as her form began to waver and thin, the gathered substance unraveling back into mist. The toast sat there, untouched and mocking.
Elias looked from Jezebel’s horny stare, full of a bored, predatory confidence, to the other woman’s silent, crumbling desperation to be whole. The equations Tamya and Seraphina had spelled out clicked into a cold, practical understanding. The house fed on connection, on resonance. He remembered the brilliant, painful flare of Moonbeam’s entire being when he’d kissed her, a surge of power that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with life.
He understood now that his isolation was a form of starvation for them. The longer he went without any kind of communion, the fainter they would all become, too weak to even hold a shape, let alone help him tear down the walls. He wasn't ready for the depth of what Jezebel offered, not even close, but the memory of that transferred energy gave him a terrible, brilliant idea.
“Hey,” he said softly, his voice cutting through the woman’s despair. He stepped forward, ignoring Jezebel’s raised eyebrow, and held out his bare hand, palm up, an invitation. “Take it.”
The fading spirit stared at his offered hand, her dark, liquid eyes wide with a mixture of fear and a hope so sharp it was painful to witness. Her own hand, barely more than a sketch in the air, trembled as she reached for him. Her touch was like grasping winter mist, a profound cold that held the memory of warmth.
“Jezebel,” Elias said, his gaze still locked on the woman. “Come here.”
Jezebel didn’t need to be asked twice. She flowed across the room, a smile playing on her lips, intrigued by this new game. “Changing your mind, darling? I knew you’d see reason.”
“Just get closer,” he said, his heart hammering against his ribs. This was either going to be a catastrophic mistake or a moment of genuine genius.
As Jezebel leaned in, her scent of old perfume and ozone enveloping him, Elias met her halfway. He kissed her. It wasn't gentle or exploratory; it was a direct, purposeful transfer, a closing of a circuit. The effect was instantaneous and violent. A jolt of raw, vivacious energy slammed through him, a chaotic burst of sensation that was all champagne fizz and the frantic rhythm of a speakeasy band.
But he was just the conduit.
The power didn't pool inside him. It raced down his arm, through the connection of his clasped hand, and into the waiting spirit. Her gasp was a real, physical sound, a sharp intake of breath that filled new lungs. The faint, cold hand in his suddenly solidified, her grip tightening, becoming warm and solid and human.
The mist surrounding her evaporated. A woman solidified before them, stumbling back a step as if landing on unfamiliar legs. She was in her thirties, with a strong, capable frame that spoke of a life of physical labor. Her long brown hair was tied simply back, and her deep brown eyes, now clear and focused, blinked in stunned disbelief. She looked down at her own hands, turning them over, witnessing her own reality.
“I’m… here,” she whispered, her voice husky with disuse and wonder.
Jezebel, looking pleasantly surprised and a little impressed, let out a low, appreciative whistle. She circled the newly formed woman, a connoisseur appraising a fine piece of art. “Well, now,” she purred, her eyes gleaming. “Aren’t you a picture? You’re very, very pretty.”
The woman looked from Jezebel to Elias, her expression a turbulent mix of gratitude, confusion, and a dawning, fierce strength. She was finally, completely, in the room.
"Hello," Elias said, "I'm Elias. You might already know Jezebel, at least by reputation."
Jezebel swatted at his shoulder. "Hey!" she said, although he was sure she didn't mind being ribbed like that.
"M...Mary," the woman said.
"Nice to meet you, Mary," Elias replied.
He couldn't help but think that Jezebel was right. Mary was very, very pretty.