Page 2 of Purrfectly Haunted

“Aye.” He clears his throat. “Ewan—Ewan Hamilton. And you’re James Sato, right?” He has a Scottish accent. A local, then.

“Right. I don’t need a partner for this job, but the boss said something about doing a PR stunt, so here you are. Try not to mess this up for the both of us.”

Again, I expect him to square off with me, but he just remains expressionless. “Alright.”

The house looms in front of us, imposing and quite frankly alluring for a supposed haunted building. There are people dancing behind one window, others running in and out of the main entrance, laughter spilling out of the open door, and Halloween decorations visible even from outside. The sign hanging above the street says in bold pink letters: Lynch Hostel. A metal-work cutout of a cat balances in the wind.

I push through the door and Ewan follows me.

We step into another world entirely. The entry hall is vast, with a shining crystal chandelier high above our heads and sprawling stairs rising to the upper floors of the house. But the luxury ends there. The marble floors are covered by mismatched carpets, and the hall has been transformed into a lounge area, with couches and chairs of different styles. A crowd of people are playing cards around a coffee table, luggage stacked by their sides. Suits of armour line the walls, but someone dressed them up with funny hats and scarves. One is even wearing nipple patches over its chest plate.

A modern reception desk has been added to the right side of the entry hall. A young woman with purple hair sits behind it, petting a fat calico cat who is napping by her keyboard. Her eyes widen slightly and she blushes as they travel over Ewan’s massive frame.

“Hi! Welcome to Lynch Hostel. What can I do ye for?” she says to him.

I scowl. I’m not used to being ignored.

I clear my throat. “We’re the ExorSquad team you requested.”

“Oh! For real?”

I keep my expression neutral, which means my resting bitch face must be on full display. “Yes. For real.”

“I wasn’t sure if you guys were the real deal. You aren’t scammers, are you?” she asks with a laugh.

I say nothing. I might need this job right now but I’m not stooping so low as to offer an obvious lie. Ghosts, really? The first job I did for ExorSquad last week was absurd. They sent me to the penthouse of a rich widow who was certain her dead husband was haunting her shoe closet. I had to pretend to wave around the fancy-looking equipment the company gave me, reading the energy in the room or whatever. There was no ghost, obviously. I made up some bullshit about her husband disliking her shopping addiction and pretended he’d moved on to the other side. The boss wasn’t happy—he called my ghost hunt anti-climatic.

The silence stretches, and the receptionist stands up abruptly. “Come get me if anyone’s at the counter,” she says to the calico cat. The cat, surprisingly, opens its eyes for brief moment, as if listening attentively, then it offers her a slow blink. To us, she adds, “Follow me, please. I’ll take you to Lana.”

The purple-haired receptionist walks in front of us with, in my opinion, more sway in her hips than necessary. I glance at my new teammate, wondering if he’s susceptible to her charms, but I find him still looking at the cat with a fond smile on his face.

She leads us up the stairs and to the upper floors. On the way, we meet another cat, a gray tabby. It watches us, perched on a banister. Ewan pets it gently as he walks by, but I give it a wide berth. I can feel its eyes on my back. Cats are uncanny, and they give me the creeps.

The rest of the hostel is pretty much in the same vein as the main hall, full of antiquities and mismatched decor, giving the impression that we walked into the home of maximalist wizard and their interior design partner.

The door to the office on the second floor is wide open, and the receptionist leaves us with a wink after knocking.

Lana Lynch, the hostel owner and our client, welcomes us with a bright smile. Like her home, she’s... a lot. She has carrot-orange curls, gold-rimmed glasses, sparkly eyeshadow, and a long, green dress. She could be somewhere between her thirties and early forties.

“You must be my ghosts experts!” she squeals with an American accent. “We’ve been expecting you. Such a relief, I’m at my wits end.”

She walks around her massive mahogany desk and that’s when I notice another cat sitting on top of it like an alabaster statue. Its heterochromatic eyes—blue and green—are on us, unblinking. The tip of its right ear is missing. A shiver slithers down my spine. How many cats are there?

“Yes, Ma’am,” Ewan says when I fail to answer.

“Oh, please, call me Lana.” She giggles. “Sit, I’ll explain everything. Tea?”

“That’d be great, thank you,” I say, finally tearing my eyes away from the white cat. Its fur is glowing green from the banker’s lamp on the desk.

Lana closes the door of her office with a flourish as we both get swallowed alive by the two massive leather chairs in front of her desk. Moments later, she places two cups of tea—with cats on them, I can sense a pattern—in front of us. There is a large window behind her, framed in stained glass, showing dusk falling over Edinburgh’s skyline. Her office looks like it would fit in a prestigious university such as Cambridge or Oxford, with the great bookshelves along the walls and the expensive-looking wooden furniture.

“So, you’re my ghosts experts,”’ she repeats after sitting down. We just nod. “I’ll be honest, I feel terrible. These ghosts have been haunting this house long before I inherited it, who am I to evict them from the property? But they have become restless as of late, and are causing damage to the house. I can’t let it go on any longer. The hostel is doing great, but not great enough to throw money at it every week. This is an old building, and the list of repairs grows longer every year even without having poltergeists add to it.”

“Poltergeists?” I say.

“Yes. Mr. Pickett informed me that they’re the kind of ghosts I seem to have here? Spirits who can cause physical disturbances. Throwing objects, breaking things...”

I know what a poltergeist is, I just didn’t expect such a bonkers job. I’m not sure I’m a good enough actor to pretend to fight off imaginary evil ghosts. I want to share a glance with my new teammate, wondering if maybe he can be of help here, but Ewan is staring at Lana, white as a sheet.