Chapter Text
Ohio was far more careful with the journal than Morgan was—white gloves, a pair of reading glasses perched over his nose. It looked out of place in the cheery kitchen, but then again, so did all of them. Ohio, an adventurer out of a 1981 film, Morgan, about as put together as a subway rat, Barnaby, bundled in another chunky-knit, pastel-colored sweater, and Alex. A ghost from the early nineteenth century. His coat was draped over the back of a chair, somehow, and the open wound was far more horrible in the bright mid-afternoon light.
Ohio was parsing over the pages Morgan had skipped, trying to find another way to untether Alex.
“Any luck?” The silence was broken after almost an hour by the ghost himself. Ohio shook his head.
“Nothing. Either we mess with the runes in the mausoleum—” Here, Barnaby shuddered. The two of them had gone to the mausoleum, guilted by Morgan’s dramatic exit, and found the same images as were on the diagrams on Nicholas’s desk, carved deep into the alabaster stone. Blood ran through the divots, dry and ancient. They were deep and wide, and it would take days of work to edit them at all. “—or we destroy the house. Whatever ritual Nicholas used, it was sturdy. He put a lot of time into it. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Alex sighed. “Well. Thanks for helping, anyways.”
“No,” Morgan said. “If Alex wants to pass on, he should be able to pass on. It’s well within his rights to die peacefully.”
“I-it doesn’t seem l-l-like it w-was a very peaceful death.”
Alex barked out a hollow laugh. Morgan, chain of the rosary tied around their wrist, rubbed his shoulder. He didn’t flinch, but the closeness of Nicholas’s spell did make him scowl.
“Morgan, it’s up to you,” Ohio said.
“What?”
“It’s your house. Do we figure out a way to destroy it?”
Morgan’s brow furrowed. “It’s up to Alex.”
“I don’t want to destroy your house.”
“I’ve been here for three days. I don’t know if I’m going to stay. I have an apartment, back in the city.” Alex was quiet. “I know a guy. He could get us some C4. Alex?”
“I don’t want to blow up my home,” he said finally, voice quiet. Morgan’s eyes flicked to his downcast face, then to his hand. They reached out and took it in theirs, clasped their fingers together.
“We could blow up the runes. In the mausoleum. That might work.”
“Any explosion in the mausoleum has a good chance of also destroying the bodies below it,” Ohio said. “And some of those outside. Alex’s body is really close to it. So if you have any qualms about that…”
“My parents are right next to me,” Alex said. “Closer to the mausoleum, even. I… I think the best thing to do would be for me to just… go lie down. Not get back up again. Morgan can sell the house for… a lot, probably. I don’t know about modern property values, but it’s a big place. Or you could keep it. It’s yours, Do what you want with it.”
Morgan looked around the room, eyes falling first on Ohio, in the kitchen of his dead colleague. Then Barnaby, the groundskeeper. If they sold the house, he’d be out of work and home. Finally, Alex. Who had lived there for twenty six years, and been dead there for two hundred.
“I’m not going to sell the house,” they decided. “And you shouldn’t just give up, Alex. There’s gotta be another way.”
They squeezed his hand, and he looked down at them, intertwined.
“I don’t think there is,” Ohio said.
“So… i-it was all f-for nothing.”
“Not nothing,” Alex said. “I mean, I know why I’m like this. I’ve spent two hundred years trying to figure that out.”
“I found a secret passage,” Morgan said. “I’ve always wanted to do that. And hey, you guys are the best friends I’ve ever had.”
Everyone was quiet for a second, then Ohio spoke up. “We’ve known each other for three days.”
“Okay. Yeah. Correction. You guys are the only friends I’ve ever had.”
“Th-that’s kind of s-s-sad. What about w-when you were little?”
“The only friends I’ve ever had who weren’t my siblings or my siblings' friends.”
“I’ve had better friends,” Alex said. “But then those better friends tried to kill me. So. It was great meeting you all!”
Ohio closed the book and slid it over to Morgan. “I have a class in an hour. I should go prepare.”
“I-I’ll walk you t-t-to y-y-your car,” Barnaby said, and the two left. The fluorescent light hummed, flickered, and hummed again.
“Please don’t go back to your grave,” Morgan said. “I liked getting to know you. I’d like to continue to get to know you.”
Alex smiled and tugged on their coat. “Yeah.. Okay. Maybe just a few days. You missed a couple of secret passageways on your exploration.”
“No,” Morgan said. “I was so thorough!”
“There’s one behind that painting in the foyer. A secret room in the basement. A trapdoor in the pantry that leads to a secret wine cellar.”
“Oh, I found that one.” Morgan gathered the book in their arms and led the way out of the kitchen, through the winding halls towards the library. Alex floated dutifully behind them. “I don’t drink a lot of wine.”
“I miss drinking,” Alex sighed. “And eating.”
Morgan leaned the journal on their hip and untied the rosary from their wrist. “Here,” they said, offering it to Alex. He leaned back, perturbed. “If you tie it on your wrist, you’re physical, right? For whatever reason. So maybe you can eat. And drink. I’m certainly never going to be able to consume all that wine.”
“Oh,” Alex said, and let Morgan hand him the rosary. He still didn’t like the feeling it gave him, but holding it, he could feel the heat from Morgan’s hand, the wooden floor under his boots. “Oh, thanks.”
He took a second to struggle to tie it around his wrist, the cuffs of his shirt getting in the way. Morgan reached out, helping him to tie it. They let their fingers rest against his wrist.
“You have a secret passageway to show me?”
Alex nodded, grinning. They set the journal down on an end table, and let him lead the way towards a landscape that was painted on a vertical canvas.