Samara didn't hang about when it came to making her presence felt. Elizabeth put up a wall of ice, which slowed her down while she melted her way through it, which meant I had time to throw one of my tiny demons at her, which dug into her quite effectively. Eddie finished her off by hosing her down with one of the holy water supersoakers.
We needed another look at the house. Or rather, at the tree at the back of the house, which was bad enough. The whole area seemed to have a spooky aura, which was making everything very dark and cold. I was thinking about my next move when something happened to Michael. I couldn't see what was doing it, but something had him by the throat and was trying to choke him.
I ignored Elizabeth telling me to give him the kiss of life, and told the entity exactly what I thought of it in the infernal tongue. Not a permanent solution, but enough to make it go away for a bit. While the others looked around, I decided to try something riskier and look into the past to find out what really happened here.
I saw Ann Deltrose carrying a squirming cloth wrapped bundle, forcing it into a wooden box in a grave. Then flames erupting from the box, engulfing both of them. She'd never got the chance to use that rope. I let the vision go, but Samara had other ideas. It was a brief battle of will, and I managed to evict her pretty fast, but not fast enough to stop her using my claws to shred Michael's jacket. That could have been very nasty.
Michael had found the grave site. Adam got some shovels from the van, and we started digging. Burning the remains would have been our usual approach, but we were pretty sure it wouldn't help here. Salt and holy water was the way to go. We found Ann's bones first, and Michael spread out his ripped clothes to rest them on.
But unsurprisingly, Samara wasn't going to make this easy for us. Michael pulled out his weird knife. I threw another demon, then went in with my claws. But it was Eddie who finished her off, with some kind of magic I'd never seen before, which seemed to surprise him as much as everyone else.
We finished digging, and scattered salt and holy water over the remains, and gradually the spooky aura lifted and it was a bright sunny afternoon once more. The scouts were going to be able to have their bonfire after all.
We all needed some time off after that, which largely consisted of going to work, but that didn't mean things were peaceful. Tornadoes aren't exactly uncommon in the UK, but they're usually further south, pretty small, and don't usually do much beyond dislodging a few roof tiles, so having a whole bunch of them in the Lake District was definitely weird, especially when one destroyed a RoadChef services, and a bunch of people were injured. Between that and Eddie and Michael reporting on a lot of demonic portents, we were going to have to investigate.
Investigation wasn't easy though, as the police weren't our local police, and weren't letting anyone near the place. We had another option though. A woman called Martha had claimed to have been stabbed during the tornado and was in the hospital. I was pretty sure I could charm my way into getting us a chat with her.
I overdid it again, and now one of the nurses is my best friend and I'll be taking in a basket of scones for the staff to share. But we got in, and Martha was very happy to have someone believe her. She'd been plunged into darkness, and she hadn't been alone. It had lasted for hours - much longer than the time that had passed in the outside world.
We knew what we were dealing with now. It had happened before and it was called the Darkness. And not the fun kind.
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