Arachne’s Thursday morning exorcism
Date: 2025-06-19 11:06
(Arachne’s Thursday morning exorcism)
[Thu Jun 19 2025]
Brunswick Cemetery/span
It is morning/span, about 78F(25C) degrees, and the sky is covered by dark grey stormclouds. The mist is heaviest At Birch and Washington/span
The morning air hangs thick with humidity as Arachne approaches the cemetery gates, where yellow police tape flutters in the breeze like tattered prayer flags. Detective Rodriguez stands near the entrance, his usually pressed uniform wrinkled from what appears to be a sleepless night. He looks up as she arrives, relief evident in his tired eyes.
“Thank God you’re here,” he says, lifting the tape for her to duck under. “We’ve got something that doesn’t make sense, and the brass is breathing down my neck for answers.” He gestures toward the cemetery’s interior, where several officers move between the headstones with careful, measured steps.
Two graves lie open like wounds in the earth – one clearly fresh with overturned soil and wilted funeral flowers scattered nearby, the other older with weathered edges and a partially collapsed headstone reading “Catherine Marsh 1932-1952.” Between them, chalk outlines mark where groundskeeper Marcus Webb’s body was discovered at dawn, his work uniform torn and stained dark.
“Webb’s been working here fifteen years, never had so much as a parking ticket,” Rodriguez continues, pulling out a worn notebook. “But here’s the thing – the fresh grave belongs to Evelyn Marsh, buried five days ago after a heart attack. Her casket’s empty, Arachne. Completely empty. And Webb…” He pauses, running a hand through his graying hair. “The coroner says the wounds on his throat were made by human fingernails, but they’re deep enough to have severed his carotid artery.”
A cool breeze stirs the mist that clings to the lower areas of the cemetery, carrying with it the faint scent of disturbed earth and something else – something that makes the hair on the back of one’s neck stand up.
Hobbling over, Elliot pulls himself via his crutches, as fast as he can, panting a little from the exertion. “Pleasant to… … see you here, Miss Fairchild-Montrose.”
Arachne steps through the police tape without hesitation, the soft rustle of her coat brushing against the wrought iron as she surveys the scene with cool, calculating precision. Her eyes settle first on the older grave, then the newer one, before drifting to the chalk outlines with an expression more curious than disturbed. “Human fingernails?” sh repeats softly, looking up at Detective Rodriguez. She crouches beside the upturned soil and reaches out to gently touch the damp earth. “No blood left in the body, no signs of struggle… and no corpse in the coffin.” She straightens slowly, the faintest frown creasing her brow. “Either someone buried a lie, or the dead are getting creative with bargaining for life after death as wights and vampires.”
Detective Rodriguez nods grimly at Arachne’s observations, then turns as Elliot approaches. “Mr. Thorne, good timing. We need all the expertise we can get on this one.” He gestures toward the disturbed graves with obvious discomfort.
As Arachne examines the soil more closely, her fingers detect something unusual in the earth – small fragments of what appears to be glass or crystal, glinting faintly in the overcast light. The pieces are scattered around both grave sites, too small and numerous to be coincidental debris.
Near Catherine Marsh’s weathered headstone, Officer Chen waves them over. “Detective, you need to see this,” she calls out, pointing to deep gouges carved into the granite marker itself. The scratches form a rough pattern – not random damage, but deliberate marks that spiral inward toward the center of the stone.
From the older grave comes the sound of something metallic clinking against stone. A junior officer peers into the disturbed earth and calls out, “There’s something down here that’s not supposed to be.” His voice carries an edge of unease as he illuminates the grave’s interior with his flashlight, revealing the corner of what appears to be an ornate wooden jewelry box, partially buried beneath decades of settled soil.
The mist continues to swirl around their ankles, and somewhere in the distance, a church bell tolls the quarter hour. The temperature seems to drop several degrees despite the morning sun struggling through the storm clouds above.
“Tho- wh-?” Elliot wonders as he stumbles upon the crime scene, blinking over at the Detective who has called him by the wrong name. “Elliot Harrington, Mister Harrington,” he decidedly corrects the man, still wheezing from rushing over. Those pouty lips of his twitch and twist into a small frown and, listening to Arachne, he glances around the grisly scene in confusion. “I fear, crime scenes aren’t my expertise by far, but… I can certainly assist however I am capable of doing so?”
Arachne glances up as Elliot approaches, her expression unreadable save for the faint lift at the corner of her mouth. “Mister Harrington, I’m glad to see you’re not letting your crutches hold you back from investigating matters of interest. You’re just in time,” she murmurs, already drawing a thin silver pin from the hem of her coat and dragging its point in a subtle circle at her feet. With a practiced flick of her wrist, she presses the sigil into the damp earth, the lines glowing faintly for a breath before vanishing, completing a ward against unseen influences and magic, one strong enough to shield herself and Elliot, as long as he stays in her area. Rising smoothly, she moves to investigate the junior officer’s find, snapping on a pair of latex glovesv as she knees beside the disturbed soil, exposing the jewelry box with interest.
“E.M.” The material is stained with grave dirt and something darker.
The church bell tolls again, its sound seeming to echo longer than it should in the heavy air.
“Perhaps let it be proof of my perseverance, Miss Fairchild-Montrose,” Elliot coos over towards Arachne, decidedly crutching his way over towards the sigil drawn, staying relatively close towards the ritualist drawing it. “What’s happening so far? Clawing at a tomb-stone… disturbed earth? I must’ve missed something, can you give me the summary, ma’am?”
Detective Rodriguez corrects himself with an apologetic nod to Elliot. “Sorry, Mr. Harrington. Long night.” He gestures toward the scene as Arachne carefully lifts the jewelry box from Catherine’s grave, its brass hinges creaking with age.
“Short version,” Rodriguez explains to Elliot, “Marcus Webb, our groundskeeper, found dead at dawn. Evelyn Marsh’s grave – buried five days ago – is empty. Her casket’s gone too. Catherine Marsh’s grave from 1952 has been disturbed, and Webb died from what look like fingernail wounds to the throat.”
As Arachne opens the jewelry box, the interior reveals a depression in faded velvet where something oval-shaped once rested. The fabric shows the clear outline of a locket, but the space is empty. More of those glass fragments glitter in the box’s corners.
Officer Chen approaches from the headstone, holding an evidence bag. “Detective, these markings on Catherine’s stone – they’re not random scratches. Look.” She shows them a rubbing she’s made of the spiral pattern. The gouges form a crude but recognizable symbol – a scrying eye surrounded by reaching hands.
The mist thickens noticeably around the two disturbed graves, and several officers unconsciously step back from the area. One mutters something about the temperature dropping, pulling his jacket tighter despite the morning’s warmth.
“There’s something else,” Rodriguez adds quietly. “Webb’s body… there wasn’t much blood at the scene. Not nearly enough for wounds that deep.”
Detective Rodriguez corrects himself with a tired nod. “Apologies, Mr. Harrington. Long night.” He gestures toward the scene as Arachne carefully lifts the jewelry box from Catherine’s grave, the ornate silver hinges creaking with age.
“Short version,” Rodriguez explains to Elliot, “Evelyn Marsh was buried five days ago. Last night, groundskeeper Marcus Webb found her grave empty and her clawing her way into this older grave – her sister Catherine’s from 1952. Webb tried to stop what he thought was grave robbing, but she killed him with her bare hands. Then she vanished.”
As Arachne opens the jewelry box, the hinges protest with a sound like grinding teeth. Inside, pressed into faded velvet, is the clear impression where a locket once lay – but the space is empty. However, scattered throughout the box are more of those glass fragments, these ones larger and more reflective, catching what little light filters through the storm clouds.
Officer Chen approaches from the headstone, holding an evidence bag. “The scratches on Catherine’s marker aren’t random,” she reports. “They’re some kind of symbol – looks almost like a compass rose, but with too many points. And there’s something else.” She pauses, glancing between the investigators. “The scratches are fresh. Made recently, but the stone around them shows decades of weathering.”
The mist seems to pulse gently around Arachne’s protective ward, as if testing its boundaries.
Arachne lifts the jewelry box from the disturbed grave with slow precision, holding it steady as her gaze sharpens. She studies it, attuning her senses to try and detect a lingering trace of arcane presence, honing in on it. The absence of the locket is noted with a quiet hum, but it’s the spreading mist that draws her eyes next. “Are you able to properly defend yourself?” she asks sidelong of Elliot, a trace of concern shadowing her gray eyes, before she closes the lid carefully and passes it over to the officer bagging evidence before approaching the headstone of Catherine Marsh. Once glance at the rubbing and her lisp purse, immediately drawing her phone out to snap photos of the carving, finger flying over the screen fo her phone to access the Hand’s internal encrypted symbol index. While the database cross-references the scrying eye encircled by grasping hands, she steps back to Elliot, “Can you see anything in the fog, Mister HGarrington? Anything that doesb’t belong?”
a 1923 report from Salem about a “hedge witch” named Constance Marsh who died under suspicious circumstances, a 1952 incident report about “unusual circumstances” surrounding Catherine Marsh’s death, and a modern entry from 2019 about Evelyn Marsh being treated for “severe nightmares and claims of supernatural visitation.”
Elliot’s enhanced perception cuts through the thickening mist like a blade. What he sees makes his breath catch – translucent figures moving between the headstones, all women, all bearing a striking family resemblance. They drift toward the disturbed graves with purposeful movements, their forms becoming more solid with each step. At their center walks a figure in a burial dress, dirt still clinging to the fabric, carrying something that glints silver in her pale hands.
“Detective,” Officer Chen calls out urgently from near the cemetery’s far edge, “we’ve got movement in the mist. Multiple contacts, but they’re not showing up on thermal.”
The temperature drops another ten degrees in the span of seconds. Several officers’ radios crackle with static, and the distant sound of church bells seems to be coming from directly beneath their feet.
“No apologies needed, detective,” Elliot generously forgives Detective Rodriguez slowly extending his crutches so he can stoop over to gaze at the grave. Commenting faintly, he wonders “Her disappearance, if she was an Arcanist, could’ve been the work of a ritual to shadow-walk. Or something completely different, and she’s somehow… a spirit affecting the physical plane? An anomaly, surely, but, this city is ripe full of anomalies.” Fingers, his, gingerly brush against the clawed markings on the grave, eyes slanting, and the towering fellow wrinkles his nose. “Why claw the grave though? Logic would dictate that Evelyn did this, and, I’m not exactly sure what sort of ritual or magic she did to the body to make it disappear too… and, in all honesty, I’m not sure what the entire purpose would be. However, I do wonder if it was a wight or vampire trying to make another wight.” Eyes lift, and Elliot perceives something that causes him to pause. “I’m good with spears, but unless I snap my crutch again, I fear that I’m well out of options. Unless one of the officers would be so kind to lend me a pistol? Not sure these ghosts can be hit by the physical though, and I’m not too enthusiastic about trying to figure that out.”
“The mirror… must be… whole…”
The locket in her hands begins to emit a low, thrumming sound that seems to resonate in everyone’s bones.
Detective Rodriguez’s hand moves instinctively to his service weapon as Elliot describes what he’s seeing, though his expression shows the frustration of a man trying to fight an enemy he can’t perceive. “Ghosts don’t usually kill people with their fingernails,” he mutters, but draws his pistol anyway, offering it grip-first to Elliot. “Standard issue Glock. Fifteen rounds.”
Arachne’s phone chimes softly with search results just as the spectral figures Elliot described begin to materialize for everyone present. The officers step back in alarm as translucent women in period dress from different eras drift between the headstones – a woman in 1920s attire, another in 1950s funeral clothes, and others spanning decades of fashion.
At their center, Evelyn Marsh becomes visible to all, her burial dress torn and stained with grave soil. The silver locket in her hands pulses with an inner light that seems to draw the other spirits toward her like moths to flame. Her eyes, once brown according to her obituary photo, now gleam with an unnatural silver that matches the locket’s glow.
“The mirror,” Evelyn speaks, her voice carrying despite the distance, hollow and echoing as if coming from the bottom of a well. “Grandmother’s mirror calls us home. We cannot rest while it remains broken.”
The glass fragments scattered around both graves begin to vibrate and lift from the earth, hovering in the air like suspended raindrops. Officer Chen backs away as one floats past her face, its surface reflecting not the cemetery, but glimpses of other times – flashes of the same women in life, gathered around an ornate mirror in what appears to be a Victorian parlor.
a genealogy record showing the Marsh family line stretching back to Salem, with an unusual pattern – every generation has lost at least one woman to “unexplained circumstances” or “sudden death.” The most recent entry shows Evelyn Marsh, survived by no immediate family, the last of her line.
From the direction of the cemetery’s oldest section comes a sound like wind chimes, but metallic and discordant. The figure in the burial dress that Elliot spotted raises the silver object in her hands – clearly visible now as an ornate locket – and the sound intensifies.
Officer Chen backs toward the group, her breath visible in the suddenly frigid air. “Detective, whatever’s happening, it’s getting stronger. My radio’s completely dead, and I’m getting readings that don’t make sense.”
The protective ward around Arachne and Elliot begins to glow faintly, responding to the increasing supernatural pressure.
Arachne exhales sharply, scrolling through the data retrieved from the Hands database. “Three generations of Marsh women tied to supernatural unrest. Never pretty, these generational curses.” She forwards the reports to Elliot for his perusal, later. “Do you think this is a bloodline ritual or curse?” she muses, already kneeling near the graves, placing the jewelry box down between them. “Something old, threaded through grief and inheritance?” er fingers draw sharp, precise sigils in the soil, beginning the process to disrupt the spiritual convergence, woven on feeding on blood and memory. “Mister Harrington,” she calls without looking up, “prepare yourself for the worst, I cannot hold both the wards and the irtuals; choose quickly if steel or salt will be your stand.” Then, louder to the officers, her tone sharp: “Stay close if you value your lies. This is not a training exercise, ladies and gentlemen. If you drift, I cannot guarantee I can protect you.”
Shaking his head, Elliot shoos away the pistol, instead focusing on the mirror shards that vibrate and lift from the grave. “If you see that locket, Detective, try to shoot or damage that first, should these spirits be particularly uncouth. And by that, I mean violent.” A shard is selected, and trying his best, he attempt to piece together the shards of the mirrors, little by little, as the spirits close in. “You want the mirrors, spirits? I’ll help you with the mirror, if you calm down and simply remain patient and restful. No need for alarm or violence, we can give you the peace you want, if you want it from the mirror.” Further does he move, carefully, to keep aligning jagged pieces together, testing to see which piece fits together with its kinship. “I don’t know much about blood-line rituals, Miss Fairchild-Montrose, I do know, however, that anomalous spirits who do not act as spirits normally would, are rather dangerous to keep around.”
The moment Elliot begins piecing together the mirror fragments, the spectral women pause in their advance, their hollow eyes fixed on his careful work. Evelyn’s grip on the locket tightens, and the silver light pulsing from it intensifies, casting strange shadows that seem to move independently of their sources.
“Yes,” Evelyn whispers, her voice carrying across the cemetery with unnatural clarity. “Make it whole. Make us whole.” The other spirits drift closer, forming a loose circle around the group, but their movements become less aggressive, more expectant.
As Elliot fits two larger pieces together, the fragments suddenly leap from his hands, drawn by some magnetic force toward each other. The mirror begins to reconstruct itself in midair, pieces clicking into place with crystalline chimes. With each connection, the spectral women become more solid, more present.
Arachne’s disruption ritual fights against the convergence, her sigils glowing brighter as they strain to contain the mounting spiritual energy. The protective ward around them flickers like a candle in wind.
Detective Rodriguez keeps his weapon trained on Evelyn, though his hands shake slightly. “What happens when it’s complete?” he calls out.
The nearly-whole mirror hovers three feet above the ground between the graves, only a few pieces missing from its ornate silver frame. Evelyn steps forward, raising the locket. “Then grandmother can finally tell us why we must die young, why the mirror calls us back, why we cannot rest.” Her burial dress billows in a wind that touches nothing else.
The temperature plummets further. Frost begins forming on the headstones.
“Choose quickly,” Arachne says through gritted teeth, her ritual circle sparking with contained energy. “Complete it and risk whatever truth they seek, or let me shatter it permanently and trap them in this endless cycle.”
Luka makes his way over to the group. “You guys here for the same reason we are?” Luka asks, glancing between Elliot and Arachne
Leon strides in confidently behind Luka and Pandora, his gaze sweeping the room with an expression that borders on distant, uninterested, or simply bored: stoicism clinging to him like a second skin.
Pandora bounces into the space behind Luka, glancing around his back to spot the pair he spoke to. “Ah, it’s that lady again,” Pandora glances back towards Leon to make sure he was keeping up.
Arachne doesn’t look away from her ritual, her gaze locked on the hovering mirror as her fingers weave a final sigil into the air, each stroke glowing brighter than the last. She holds onto the jewelry box in her palm, maintaining the veins of arcane energy pulsating across the soil. “I’ll let you have the fun of making the final decision, Elliot!”
Luka says “Are you searching for a corpse by any chance? We already did that one.“
Arachne is clearly, with Elliot, currently in the middle of cleaning up a crime scene turned generations-old curse as spirits of women are upon them and the police deployed on the scene. She hardly has an opportunity to afford more attention to really address Luka and the pair with him, but an edge is visible, while she works to settle undead affairs with Elliot and the police department.
Luka nods to Pandora and Leon “I think they’re handling their own matters here. We should leave them to it.” Luka remarks before turning heel “Sorry for interrupting” Luka tells them as he heads off
“Water cuts through rock over time, so I have no issues trying to give these spirits what they want, if it brings them some sort of peace,” Elliot expresses to Arachne, slowly assisting the mirror-shards in their self-reconstruction. “Better than trying to figure out how to hurt a spirit enough, or try to banish them and leave one of us near death.” It appears, the towering fellow isn’t really fixated on searching for corpses, and is instead, doing his best to assist some angry looking spirit women with a glowing silver locket.
“The mirror shows truth, but truth has a price. Each generation, one daughter must serve as anchor, keeping the family’s sins from following us beyond death. The mirror chooses who will pay.”
Evelyn’s spectral form shudders as understanding dawns in her silver eyes. “We weren’t cursed to die young,” she whispers, her voice breaking. “We were sacrificed. Grandmother bound our souls to prevent something worse from escaping.”
The mirror’s surface darkens, and for a moment, something vast and hungry presses against the glass from within – something that makes even the spirits recoil in terror.
“The binding is breaking,” Evelyn says, her form already beginning to fade as the truth sets her free. “With no more daughters to anchor it…” She looks directly at Arachne and Elliot. “Destroy it. Now. Before it’s too late.”
The locket in her hands crumbles to silver dust as the spirits of the Marsh women dissolve into peaceful light, finally able to rest. But the mirror remains, and something behind its surface grows stronger with each passing second.
Detective Rodriguez raises his weapon toward the mirror. “Tell me someone has a plan.”
The protective ward around Arachne and Elliot flickers dangerously as whatever lurks behind the glass begins to push through.
“Okay, so fix the damn mirror, or destroy it, this is the most roundabout exorcism of sorts I’ve ever attended,” Elliot complains, as he hoists a crutch up, staring at Arachne with a bit of annoyance. “Do you normally encounter spirits leading you on ghost chases, Miss Fairchild-Montrose?” Lifting his crutch, the one used on the side of his good leg, he prepared to slam the hefty thing into the mirror, already wobbling from his lack of balance.
The moment that vast, looming presence presses against the glass, Arachne drops the ritual stabilizer and immediately attempts to hone all the energies instead into destroying that mirror wholly and completely, trying to eradicate the entire matter rather than a peaceful, but dangerous negotiation. “Apologies, Mister Harrington. We’re short on time and it looks like a situation is arising behind us. We need to be prepared to move, now.”
135% of expected duration)