Demon Bound

Winter flat wearing their good hats and shoes, carrying their boxes of musty hand-me-downs, had told him,
God helps those who help themselves.
A grand fucking joke if he’d ever heard one.
    The graveyard around the church was what drew Jack to the place. Overgrown with shaggy weeds, toothy gravestones poking every which way from the dirt, right up to the edges of the church wall, the place seethed with spirit energy. A grotesque of life, a mockery of the feeling he got in a crowded tube or shoving along Oxford Street at holiday time.
    Teeming ghosts meant at least one chatty soul in the mix, and Jack drew out his spirit heart over a likely-looking grave. The name was nearly washed from the limestone from forty years of winter rain and year-round wind howling off the moor, but Jack brushed the moss away and spoke it loud.
    “Jonathan Lovett.”
    The spirit heart began to spin instantly. The ghosts in the churchyard, bound by the iron fence, were bored and restless and any hint of magic drew them in like flies on flayed skin.
    Jonathan Lovett, plump and serious in life, appeared in a blue uniform and peaked cap that didn’t entirely hide a gaping black dent full of hair and brains in his ethereal skull. “Yes? You want something, boy?”
    Jack grimaced. A bloody prison guard. Just his luck.
    “Thought maybe you could help a bloke with a bit of knowledge,” Jack said. Lovett’s face crinkled.
    “I’ll have you know I don’t care for Northerners. One of ’em stove my skull in, winter of 1966. A thrice-damned Geordie.”
    “Can’t imagine why he’d want to go and do a thing like that,” Jack muttered. “Anyway, I hail from Manchester, so we’ve nothing to fuss about.”
    Lovett huffed. His cheeks rippled, like he was made out of sail cloth. “I suppose. Get on with it.”
    Jack let the chain of the spirit heart twine in his fingers, but he kept it between himself and the spirit. Even cordial ghosts could turn. The mage who thought they couldn’t was the mage who had a spirit reach into his chest and stop his heart like a cheap watch.
    “You know a house, about twelve miles from here as the crow flies?” Jack asked Lovett. “The Naughton estate?”
    Lovett shivered. “I certainly do, and I wouldn’t go up that lane if you paid me.”
    “Oh?” Jack feigned disinterest. “And why is that?”
    “When I was . . . how d’you say . . .” The spirit chewed on its lower lip.
    “Alive?” Jack prompted.
    Lovett twitched his cuffs in irritation. “Yes, well. All sorts of stories about the place back then. Sacrifices, naked dancing about bonfires, screams in the night. Old women around town said Aleister Crowley himself came and stayed for a summer, long way back. Said the crops died and the virgins of the village got themselves in a family way, down to the girl. Not to be crude, you understand.”
    “I think me heart can take it,” Jack said. Aside from the tick of the spirit heart and the whistle of the wind, the only sound was his breath and the rustle and hiss of ghosts at the edges of his mind. They didn’t like Lovett getting all the attention. Jack had to finish with Lovett before their attention turned to demands.
    “After . . .” Lovett shivered, tucking his several chins down into the collar of his uniform. “After I got into this state, I didn’t wander far from the churchyard. That Naughton place is cold, and the moors will blow you all to pieces, scatter you every which way. There’s a bad thing in those groomed gardens and fancy turrets, my son. Hungry, howling, and cold.”
    “Cold?” Jack thought of the sucking quiet that surrounded the house—when it wasn’t trying to drown him in a wellspring of the Black. “Second time you’ve said cold. Cold how?”
    “Ice cold and rotten,” Lovett murmured. “Spreading out black fingers, feeling in the dark for anything it can catch. All knotted up in the bones of that house, that cold. Such an awful feeling. Burns, it’s so cold.”
    Jack’s skin prickled in sympathy, even though he was shielded from the wind by the wall of the church.
    “Didn’t used to be this way.” Lovett sighed, his form flickering like dirt on celluloid. “But now there’s badness gathered there, and blackness. And the cold, always the cold.”
    Jack stopped the spirit heart, metal running cool and dimpled under his fingertip. “Much obliged, Officer Lovett.”
    “Wait!” Lovett wavered, losing cohesion as Jack’s spell spun to a stop. “My wife