During the house search we'd found some kind of dimensional portal, which Arthur had temporarily disabled with one of his magical wards, but we knew that wasn't going to last. Up the ladder we went into the loft, where Arthur immediately got bitten by a giant spider.
There were a lot of spiders up there, and they were big ones, with human eyes which did this thing where blinks were rippling around the attic in a kind of Mexican wave of awful. Eddie made an attempt to communicate with them, and got bitten. They didn't seem to understand either English or his polite gestures. So I pulled up a translation spell from my grimoire.
Hive minds are the absolute worst to communicate with. Voices slightly out of sync, coming from different directions - it's enough to give me a headache. I couldn't persuade them to leave, but I did get out of them that they had a queen, who was going to be out and about pretty soon, and also that we were going to be in big trouble if we didn't leave ourselves pretty quick. The others did not seem to need to be told that. I asked if they were fae, given the mention of a queen, but clearly not. They were yokai.
Outside, Eddie spotted something - an old man with a gourd shaped head, slipping away towards next door. But first we had to deal with Arthur's spider bite. Eddie and Michael had both been bitten but it didn't look too bad. Arthur looked bad. I tried laying on hands, but all I got was a bit of magical curse backlash. Which did at least tell me it was a curse.
Adam took Arthur and Eddie back to the junkyard to do some research, while Michael, Elizabeth and me followed the mysterious figure. Michael recognised it as a Nurarihyon, which he'd seen in an anime before. It had got into the neighbour's house, despite it being locked. Fortunately I could see enough through the window to teleport inside and let the others in.
We found it soon enough, leaving cracker crumbs all over the floor and heading upstairs to use all the toilet paper. I asked it if it was the kid's grandfather, just in case, but no, just another yokai. Michael distracted it, and Elizabeth and me made use of that for a magical banishing.
I tried to teleport us back to the junkyard, but must have thought of Adam at just the wrong moment, and we ended up in a heap in the back of Vanessa, which was a bit of a surprise for everyone, especially Adam.
We had the right books and gear for the kind of curse breaking magic that Arthur needed, but neither I nor Elizabeth were feeling at our best magically, so Arthur called his great aunt Gertie for some magical assistance. Gertie arrived in a chauffeur driven car, wearing a hat with a full size vulture on it, which I'm sure looked at me. I offered to assist, and frankly I nailed my part of it. Shame Gertie didn't. She got hit by even more backlash than me, getting flung across the room.
Gertie left, leaving instructions that Arthur needed to be kept close to running water. Adam made him up a camp bed in the oubliette, and I put on a disguise and teleported to the garden centre to 'borrow' a water feature. This tracked with what the research team had dug up. They had a name for the queen spider: Tsuchigumo. And being near running water was the only way we'd be able to kill it.
The next morning Arthur wasn't better, but wasn't significantly worse, so Elizabeth and me had another shot at the curse breaking. I'd really got the feel for it by now. Elizabeth found it a bit tougher, but with some help from the mystical library we managed to de-curse him enough that he was going to live long enough for us to have a shot at taking out the big spider, which was going to be the only total cure.
One thing was clear. We needed to talk to the kid again. He'd mentioned a book, and that was probably going to have all the answers we needed in it. So we went to his aunt and uncle's house again, to deliver the Switch which we'd completely failed to hand over during the previous day's excitement, and offer to take Kenji to the park for a bit. The utterly exhausted looking uncle answered the door. His wife was at work - apparently the hospital was busy with more coma cases. He was only too happy for us to take Kenji away for a bit.
Kenji wanted to play hide and seek, and I don't think we've ever had such a united chorus of "No!" before. I suggested the assault course on the adventure playground, in the hope of tiring him out a bit. Nobody was particularly keen to talk to him. How we managed to assemble six people with absolutely no skill in talking to children, I don't know. Anyway, I was forced to use my demon voice, and ended up overdoing it a bit, and now I'm Kenji's new best friend.
He told us about the book, which had belonged to his grandfather, and which he was 'given' in very much the same way as I 'borrowed' that water feature, after his death. He didn't know Japanese well enough to read it properly, but he was able to read the words out loud. So it was pretty clear that his grandfather had been a bit of an expert on yokai, and had used the book to summon them to play pranks and stuff, but Kenji had no idea what he was doing and had just opened a random portal and all sorts of awful things were coming through.
I tried to discourage him from doing things like that, saying it might be dangerous, which he argued with, saying that I wasn't dangerous. Which didn't seem to be something I should argue about, despite it being very much not true. Then he mentioned my armour, which surprised me, since I didn't think I was wearing it. I wasn't wearing it.
But we knew where the book was now, so we delivered Kenji back to his uncle who looked much better after a shower and a coffee. We reunited the kid with his Switch, and peace reigned once more.
Back at Kenji's house, Arthur used his scrying knife to take a look at the book and check for spiders. There were spiders. Spiders that looked back at him, and for a moment I thought it was all going to go a bit The Ring, but he covered the knife up quickly. I teleported in to the room, but when I looked under the bed, the book had gone. I teleported back out quick.
Another scry, and Arthur said the book was now in the under stairs cupboard, but there were a lot of spiders. This time we went in as a group, Adam bringing his shotgun, which wasn't the best idea as he accidentally shot the book and then had to explain to our police friend why he was getting reports of gunshots from Eddie's mum.
One very unpleasant spider fight later, we had the book, but we also had a massive hole in the wall where Tsuchigumo had left before we got there.
I got back in the van with Arthur, who was still feeling pretty rough, and we got to work on the book. Opening the portal was a simple matter of reading some words. Of course. Closing it was going to be a bit more involved, but we could do it. Meanwhile, the others were pursuing the spider, with instructions to call if they needed us to teleport in.
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