Adam had taken a beating from the mewlips so he took George and the professor to the hospital while the rest of us went back to the Wicker Stop for a cup of tea and to get cleaned up. And then it was morning and time to start baking again.
The sisters were back, talking about a construction site on the edge of town. It's been abandoned since I got here, but things were starting up again. Apparently there were some protests against it, and Robin went to take a look. I finished my shift at the Wicker Stop, then went home for a shower and a nap. Michael said he was going to play video games, so I joined him for a bit and then finally got a decent night's sleep.
Next morning, trouble was back. Someone had died at the construction site, and that was after one of their digging machines completely sinking into the ground. Robin said it seemed to be what Adam would call Weird Bollocks. Plus there were two girls that he recognised from the protests who'd dropped by the Wicker Stop that morning and had a weird conversation. I didn't catch much of it - I think my aura put them off talking around me - but there seemed to be some connection with that morning's death.
Robin paid another visit to the site, and confirmed there was definitely something weird about the death, and also abnormal amounts of moss. It was another of those things we were going to have to investigate, lest the vicar start blaming it all on demons again. I thought moss demons seemed pretty unlikely. Although...hold that thought.
Michael wanted to visit the library and this time Robin and me went with him. Mrs Longbottom the librarian seemed very nice, and got me some books on local folklore which I'm rapidly realising is essential reading for someone in my position. She was able to fill us all in on some local details. The construction site was abandoned years ago after a lot of accidents and equipment damage made it financially unviable, but there were also protests about building on the swamp at the time. One of the protesters was the mother of one of the current protesters, Gillian. She died a couple of years ago, and it sounded like Gillian was trying to continue her legacy.
One person who never got mentioned was Gillian's dad. At this point I wasn't ruling out the possibility that he was some kind of swamp monster. I read a comic once where there was a swamp monster who had a romantic entanglement with a human woman, but unfortunately ended up having to leave town before I found out any more. The others seemed to think that was just a thing in a comic though. We couldn't find anything about it in the folklore books.
One thing we did learn from Mrs Longbottom was that Gillian's mum had a large collection of books on folklore and the occult, more even than the library, and we decided that might be worth a look. Michael couldn't get hold of Gillian's exact address but did find out what street she lived on.
I got on the back of Robin's motorbike and Michael started pedaling. He still managed to get there before us somehow, just in time to spot the car belonging to Gillian's friend leaving one of the houses. Michael followed her, while Robin and me took a look at the house.
It was a three storey building with one of those half basement things at the bottom, split in two. Gillian's home was the upper two floors. We took the stairs up to the front door, looked through the window and saw Gillian lying asleep on a sofa. A perfect opportunity to look around undetected. We went around the back.
The basement flat looked a bit odd. Unoccupied, but not entirely unused. It felt off, so we went in. Which is to say, Robin picked the lock but we ended up cracking the class in the patio door in the process. Not great for the whole undetected thing. But we were in.
Most of the furniture was covered in dust sheets, but the dining table was covered in paperwork. We looked through it, finding yet more folklore stuff - and then I saw something that made me reconsider the whole moss demons thing. Arcane texts. Spells. A summoning circle. The kind of thing you recognise when you grow up demonic.
We checked the master bedroom to see if anyone had been sleeping here. The bed was still under dust covers, but we did find a bookshelf. Books on folklore, will-o'th-wisp, sprites, runes...and three spaces in the dust where books had obviously been removed. It was all adding up to one thing. Trouble.
Then we heard the sound of Gillian starting to move around upstairs. Time to be elsewhere. We quickly took photos of what we'd found and legged it out of there. We'd left it a bit late, and I realised the only way I was getting away without Gillian spotting me was to go up. Which means Robin has now seen my wings. And Gillian has seen the back of his head, as he tripped over something while looking at me and didn't quite get out before she came outside. I might have some explaining to do.
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