Page 21 of Love at First Fright

And the spiders. Christ, were there venomous spiders in Wiltshire? There had to be. Big ones. Ones that crawled into beds at night.

“The carpenter managed to call an ambulance,” Harrison said, his tone suggesting I should stop being so dramatic. “There are patches on the upper floor where you might get a bar or two if you’re lucky. You’ll just have to… wander around until you find them.”

Brilliant. Fantastic. Peak efficiency.

“Anyway, hopefully that won’t be necessary,” Evelyn said to Harrison. “These are trained professionals. They’ll be able to handle whatever the house throws at them.”

Trained. Professionals.

I kept my face absolutely neutral. Didn’t let even a flicker of the hysterical laughter building in my chest show on my features. Training, yes, a.k.a. listening to Ted’s PowerPoint presentation about entities and reading a handbook that literally said “Run Very Fast” as its primary strategy.

“Well.” Harrison checked his watch. “We really must go. The drive to Brighton takes two hours, and we’re already running late.” He passed me a key. “This is for the padlock on the main gate, in case you need to drive out to grab anything. There’s no delivery service here, sadly.”

“One last thing,” Evelyn said. She glanced at her husband, then back to us. “There’s a basement. We haven’t actually accessed it yet—you can walk down the stairs, but the door at the bottom is jammed shut. None of the workmen have been able to get it open.” She gave an elegant shrug. “It’s on our list of things to sort out, but with everything else…”

“The fuse box is down there,” Harrison added. “Before the sealed door. In case there’s a power cut. Watch yourself, mind—the glass case is shattered. Sharp bits everywhere. This whole bloody house is falling apart faster than we can fix it.”

Evelyn and Harrison headed for the stairs. Evelyn paused at the top, turning back to look at us with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Worry? Hope? Some combination of both?

“Be careful,” she said softly.

Then they were gone, footsteps echoing down the staircase. We heard the front door open and close. The crunch of gravel. Car doors slamming. An engine starting.

The sound faded into the distance.

Silence rushed in to fill the void. Silence that pressed against eardrums, so complete it felt physical. No traffic noise. No distant conversations. No hum of electricity or modern life.

Just old wood settling. Wind against windows. The faint drip of water somewhere.

Brad stood in the hallway, hands on his hips, surveying the corridor with the confidence of someone who actually knew what they were doing.

“Right then, Chaz.” He turned that megawatt smile on me. “Time to get to work.”

four

Charlie

The preliminary survey, as Brad called it, turned out to be eight hours of pure torture.

Not ghosts. Not flying hammers or spectral apparitions. Just Brad.

Brad with his clipboards and his meticulous room-by-room inspections and his bloody commentary on everything. Brad explaining the “proper technique” for documenting architectural anomalies. Brad demonstrating the “correct posture” for holding an EMF meter, as if there were a wrong way to grip a plastic box.

Before moving upstairs, we covered the ground floor twice. Every room catalogued. Every dusty corner examined. My handwriting had deteriorated from neat annotations to illegible scrawls that looked like a spider had died in ink.

“Here.” Brad thrust the EMF meter into my palm without warning. The device beeped, displaying a swirl of colours—green, yellow, amber. “Tell me what you’re reading.”

I stared at it. “The colours?”

“Specific frequencies, Charlie. We went over this.”

Had we? I’d zoned out somewhere around the second hour of Brad’s monologue about electromagnetic fields and their relationship to paranormal activity. Something about baseline readings and spike patterns. The words had blurred together into meaningless noise.

Brad snatched it back with a disgusted grunt and pulled out a second device—a Kestrel 5500FW Meter, according to the label. Compact, pocket-sized, covered in more buttons than seemed necessary.

“Environmental data,” he said, waving it like a wand. “Temperature, humidity, barometric pressure. Entities create disturbances. Cold spots. Atmospheric anomalies.”

He swept the device through the room—the library, though most of the shelves stood empty. The Kestrel beeped steadily. Brad’s eyes narrowed.