Jill walked through one hallway after another, her bare feet almost silent on the dusty carpet. She passed a row of stained glass windows, red and orange that shimmered like fire as she moved; past a working cannon, complete with piles of powder and ammunition; past a collapsed gallery full of torn painting canvases; and finally out into a central courtyard.

It had eight sides, evenly spaced, all with doors leading back into the castle. In the very centre was a keep, a final fortress against any invader who managed to breach the outer walls. Between the two were paths with stone paving, leading between terraces with gardens, gravestones, fountains, and nude statues. The sky was indigo, dotted with stars and the full moon; the terraces were strewn with lanterns, pools of light in the darkness.

She ignored everything else and went straight for the keep. It had a heavy oak door with a brass knocker shaped like a grinning skull. Occult symbols carved into it and the frame. She pushed at the door, and it swung open easily.

Inside was a high-vaulted room. Near the centre, further from the door, was a plain marble altar, large enough to serve as an extremely uncomfortable bed. Around the walls were wooden pedestals, sitting photos on stands, vases with flowers, and hundreds of candles, enough to brightly illuminate the entire room. The floor was paved with wide granite blocks; the walls were tiled, all subtly different shades of light grey, so as to form geometric patterns; and the ceiling was given over to a giant stained glass wasp.

Jill stood at the threshold, clenching a fist. Presently, she spoke. “Do you want a closer look?”

Behind her, Sue and Jason jumped. They exchanged guilty, panicked looks, then shrugged and came forward out of the shadows.

“Is this some sort of miniature cathedral?” Sue asked.

“Maybe,” Jill said. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for a while now, but I still don’t really know. I’m seventy-five percent sure it means doom, though. It could have been coincidences.” She looked up at the ceiling, the image of the wasp. “But it probably wasn’t.”

“What are you talking about?” Sue asked. “What was coincidences?” She leaned forward and squinted, but Jill was standing in the doorway. “Who are those photos of?”

Jill thought for a few moments. “Sometime tonight, there’s going to be a disaster,” she said. She stepped backward, letting Sue in. Jason stayed at the threshold, looking from one girl to the other. “Someone here is going to do something they shouldn’t, and cause or fail to prevent some sort of catastrophe. I don’t know the details, but you and your friends, or any of you who survive long enough, will need shelter.”

Sue was only half-listening, instead focusing on the photos. “Hey, these are all of Lottie. These are – what are you, a stalker? These can’t be legal. She’s not even dressed in this one.”

Jason’s eyebrows had been rising steadily while Jill talked, but at this, he pushed past her into the shrine to look over Sue’s shoulder.

“They’re not mine,” Jill said, then, without pausing, “When that happens, you must not come here.”

“Put a pin in that,” Jason said. “This is a five-star stalker shrine, and you’re not surprised at all. You’ve seen this before. Who made it?”

“I don’t know her name,” Jill said. “The one who made it, not Charlotte. I’ve run into her a few times, though. We aren’t friends.” Her face was unreadable.

“Well, what do you know about her?” he asked. “What does she look like, where was she last time …”

She blinked slowly. “If you’re thinking of trying to arrest her, I wouldn’t,” she said. “None of you stands a chance against her.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Sue said. “What, is she a pro martial artist or something?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Jill said. She turned to leave. “All you need to know is that, when whatever it is that’s going to go wrong goes wrong, you don’t come here, and at all costs, you don’t let Charlotte here. There’s a place in the catacombs that’s safe. There are heavy doors, and it’s even got abjurations against malevolent spirits.”

“Are we going there now?” Sue asked. She and Jason moved to the keep doorway.

“You might as well go over there,” Jill said, “to make sure you know your way around and can guide Charlotte there when the time comes. You’ll probably be in a hurry then. You can access it through the plum wine cellar on the east side. I don’t have time to take you there, though. I need to prepare for the encounter with the ‘stalker’.”

With that, she walked off, her bare feet padding against the paving stones or rustling on the grass. Once she was out of sight, Michelle hurried to the keep.

“You were supposed to tail her, not talk to her,” she said.

“Were you following us following her?” Jason asked, as he and Sue left the shrine. “This is getting ridiculous.”

Michelle waved this aside. “What did she say?”

“Something about a disaster coming, and that we should hide in some catacombs,” Sue said. “She –”

“She’s insane,” Jason interrupted. “Horror movie insane, and either she or her even crazier friend, who’s probably imaginary, is criminally obsessed with Charlotte. We need to go back to the others and barricade ourselves in, or even better, just nope out of here altogether.”

“She might have been faking it, trying to scare us away from the treasure,” Michelle said.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Sue. “Either way, she’s just one person.”

“I think it matters a lot, actually,” Jason said, his voice rising. “And I don’t think this ‘treasure’ is –”

Michelle shushed him. “Keep your voice down. Look, maybe she’s starkers, maybe not, but we can cover both bases. You two go back and warn the others to be on guard, then keep exploring. Stay in pairs. I’ll keep watching her.”

Stolen story; please report.

“Were you not joking with that Scooby Doo reference earlier?” Jason asked. “Because splitting up is not a good idea right now.”

“Stop whining and move it,” she hissed. “Shoot, which way did she go …” And she jogged out into the courtyard, hesitated, and took the same path Jill had.

“Oh, wonderful,” Jason said, running his hands through his hair, “this is exactly how every horror story since ever started.”

“No, it isn’t,” Sue said, walking off, motioning him to follow. “Jill’s a weirdo; that doesn’t make her a serial killer.”

“She says, half an hour after being told that the previous owner of this castle was brutally murdered. The only treasure is going to be her severed head collection.” He blinked. “Uh, I think we’ve been turned around. This isn’t the way we came in from. I don’t recognise any of these statues.”

“No, I know exactly where we are,” Sue said. They were at one of the eight doorways leading back into the castle. She pointed to the top, where they could just make out the letter E in the dark. “East wing. The plum wine cellar can’t be far.”

“Oh you have got to be joking,” he said.

“Michelle wanted us to look for treasure,” she said, pushing the door open, “and where better than somewhere that that Jill girl obviously thinks is important?”

“My personal plan A was to warn Charlotte that that Jill girl had a ten-year stalker shrine of her,” he said. “You know, like Michelle just said to do.”

“Michelle only said that because she didn’t have enough time to think it through,” Sue replied. “Roger is with Lottie. If Jill tries anything, he’ll stop her.”

“… You still want to cast that magic spell,” he realised. She said nothing. “Sue …”

She stopped, sighed, and turned to face him. “Okay. You got me. I don’t really care about the treasure, if there even is any.”

“Neither do I,” he said, “but Charlotte might be in real danger. That’s got to take priority.”

“I can’t explain it properly,” said Sue, “but this is really important to me. You’re not wrong, and if you want to go back, I won’t blame you. I can probably do this on my own. But …”

“I promised I’d help you,” he said. “Besides, I don’t want to leave you on your own somewhere Jill might come back to, and I kind of don’t want to go off by myself either. Just promise me, you’ll be as quick as you can, and after we’re done here, we’ll go straight back to Charlotte?”

“Cross my heart,” she said, drawing an x over it with her finger. She dimpled up at him. “Now let’s find that cellar.”

This part of the castle was in bad shape. There were mould spots all over the walls, holes in the floorboards, and water stains everywhere. Sue led Jason into another pantry, this one with flour scattered across the floor; they flinched as swarms of moths rose in response to their footsteps and lights, then they pressed on. Past this was a Roman-style bathhouse, with a wide pool through the centre of the room, too dark to see the bottom even with their torches.

“Hey, Sue,” Jason whispered. “This isn’t really a castle, is it?”

She automatically shook her head, then said, “No. Or at least, not just a castle, not according to my research. Castles were supposed to be fortresses against raiders. An army comes along that you can’t beat, you lock yourself and everything valuable inside the castle, and wait for them to go away, right? This one could theoretically be used for that, but there weren’t any raiders in the time and place it was built. It was supposed to be a sort of occult radio tower, used for espionage. You build magically resonant architecture, put a few dozen espers there, and you have something that works sort of like a spy satellite. It can scry on anywhere within hundreds or even thousands of kilometres, and do all sorts of other magical information gathering.”

“That all assumes that magic is real,” he observed.

“Sure,” she said complacently. “So some guy who’s into the occult does that, but it’s a larger scale than anyone has ever done before, so they didn’t realise that you need containment procedures. It’s like, smoke alarms have a bit of radioactive material in them, and they’re fine, but if you want an entire nuclear reactor, you need shielding. If you don’t have shielding, everyone gets cancer. Or in this case, goes crazy. I did my research. There’s been violent insanity in Michelle’s family line on Maurice’s side, ever since this castle’s foundation stones were laid.”

“You’re really not selling me on this,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It happened from sustained use with multiple espers. I’m planning to do a single spell, with just the two of us, and dismiss it once we’re done. Besides, you think it won’t even work.”

Past the pool was a room taken up by a giant chessboard, each square two metres across. The pieces were massive black or white stone gargoyles, scattered across the board; the game was in progress. It was hard to tell, walking among the pieces, but it looked like black was attacking the white king.

“What kind of spell are we casting, anyway?” he asked.

“Technically, it’s necromancy,” she said.

“…”

“I said technically. The -mancy suffix means you’re trying to get information out of it. Raising the dead is properly called necrourgy, but that word sounds kind of dirty so no-one ever uses it.”

“Well, as long as it’s only a technical abomination,” he said.

“It’s an old superstition that the dead know all things, because there’s no use in the gods keeping secrets from those who can’t do anything with them any more. I don’t think that’s actually true, because it relies on a whole lot of baggage about gods and the afterlife, but it is probably true that the dead at least know what they knew while they were alive. We’re going to revive a spirit, ask it how it died, and put it back where we found it.”

“Just for the record,” he said, “the next time you want to do something like this, call it a séance, not necromancy.”

Past the chess room was one full of old kilns and smashed pottery, bits of jars and statuettes. Ceramic dust crunched underfoot. In the centre was a dark orange weeping angel with its right arm broken off. Sue and Jason both gave it a wide berth.

“Where do you think Jill went?” he asked.

“What did she say, off to prepare for the stalker?” She frowned. “I don’t know what that could mean. She has a little sister, right, who her dad drove off when we got here. Maybe she’s the one who made the shrine, and Jill is waiting to tell her to get rid of it before one of us calls the cops?”

Jason considered this. “That’s … actually pretty reasonable. Kids are weird. Maybe I’ve been overreacting. What about all the stuff about an impending catastrophe?”

“Maybe she’s a psychic too,” Sue said. “She could have already used this castle to cast her own spells. It wouldn’t have to be necromancy; it could be a past or future life, or something else altogether. No idea what sort of catastrophe it could be, though, if it even applies to us. Hey, over here!”

A large pile of porcelain shards leaned against the wall. They’d passed it by without a second thought, but Sue’s light glinted off it in a weird way, and they looked closer. There was a door behind it. She tested one piece, found it was sharp, shrugged, and mule-kicked the pile; it fell to the ground, spraying porcelain across the room with a loud crash. They both winced at the noise, even though Jill already knew where they were, and they weren’t hiding from anyone else.

Sue tried the door. “Locked. I guess that the key is either in this room or nearby, or there’s a master key somewhere. Jill would know about it.”

While she spoke, Jason squinted at the door. He shrugged and rammed it with his shoulder. Rotting wood gave way like tissue paper; he crashed straight through and bounced down the stairs.

“Jeez! Jase, are you okay?”

His voice floated out of the stairwell. “I’m fine. My spine broke my fall.”

Sue carefully climbed through the opening and picked her way down a stone staircase, making sure to check everything with her flashlight before trusting it with her weight. Jason was at the bottom, rubbing his hip.

“That was dumb,” she said sternly.

“I assumed it’d be solid enough that I could stop if it broke,” he said ruefully.

She took his hand and leaned back, pulling him to his feet, then hugged him. “Idiot. Come on.”