Sam put an arm around Evie’s shoulder. “I’m telling you, baby vamp, it wasn’t him.”
“It’s him,” Will said, breaking his silence at last.
The room was quiet except for the crackling of the wood as it was consumed by fire.
“Will,” Jericho said after a moment, “you’re not honestly saying that you believe a ghost is killing these people, are you?”
“Yes,” Will said, his voice hoarse.
“I mean no insult, Professor—you’ve got a swell museum going here—but there are no such things as ghosts,” Sam said.
“Sure of that, are you?” Will turned to them. The firelight cast his face in shadows. “There are doorways between this world and the world of the supernatural. Ghosts. Demonic entities. The unexplained and undefined. The mysterious. I’ve whole books and archives dedicated to it.”
“But those are just stories people tell,” Evie said. The headache was spreading out behind her eyes.
“There is no greater power on this earth than story.” Will paced the length of the room. “People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense—words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions—words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History.” Will grabbed the sheaf of newspaper clippings he kept in a stack on his desk. “This, and these”—he gestured to the library’s teeming shelves—“they’re a testament to the country’s rich supernatural history.”
“But, Will, you’re not just saying ghosts exist; you’re saying they can come back from the dead and kill,” Jericho said.
Will sank into his chair, but his foot tapped steadily against the floor. “I know. Impossible. They shouldn’t be able to….” he said more to himself than to anyone else. “I’ve been keeping watch.”
“Keeping watch over what?” Jericho asked.
The chair couldn’t contain him, and Will was again up and pacing. He swiped another handful of newspaper clippings from his desk on the way. “These. Ghost sightings. Supernatural activity. In the past year, it has escalated. Instead of a few reports here and there, there have been hundreds, something reported every day.”
“And you think it’s related to our case, that Naughty John has come back from the dead?” Evie sneaked a hand up to rub at her temple.
“I’m sure of it,” Will said. “The question is not whether John Hobbes has come back from the dead, but how and why.”
“Ghosts exist. Ghosts are real,” Evie whispered like a mantra. She looked up and saw Jericho staring at her. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Jericho said, again looking away quickly.
Will gave in and reached for a cigarette. He took several puffs before speaking again. “The parts of the body,” he said, blowing out a stream of smoke. “I think he needs to ingest them to become stronger. More corporeal. Spirit made flesh. A perversion of transubstantiation. He’s getting stronger with each killing. He’s very strong now. Soon, he’ll be unstoppable.”
Evie shuddered just thinking about it. “And then?”
“Armageddon. Literal hell on earth.”
“But he can’t really become some anti-Christ, can he?” Jericho asked.
“He believes he can become the Beast through this ritual. Belief is everything. And we don’t understand everything about what he can do. These are not the rules of our world we’re playing by here, Jericho. They’re his rules—the rules of the supernatural world.”
“So how do we stop him?” Evie asked. “How do we stop a ghost?”
“We have to meet him where he is. We have to dispatch him via his own beliefs. If the last page of the Book of the Brethren contained some sort of spell or incantation for getting rid of John Hobbes, we need to know what was on that page. And we must solve the mystery of his connection to this book. Why does it matter to him?”
Evie opened the Book of the Brethren, running her hand along the rough seam where the last page had been torn away. There were three offerings remaining: the Destruction of the Golden Idol, the Lamentation of the Widow, and the Marriage of the Beast and the Woman Clothed in the Sun. She flipped back to the previous offerings.
“The dead body found at Belmont in 1875—that had to be the third offering, the Pale Horseman Riding Death Before the Stars,” Evie said.
“And besides Ida Knowles, they found exactly ten bodies in the basement of Knowles’ End,” Jericho said.
“The ten servants of the master,” Evie said excitedly. “A laundress and a maid went missing, as did people who boarded there. They could all be considered servants. The second offering. Oh, Unc. It fits!”