Ashworth

The letter arrived one day in the group’s office. It had no return label and was badly water damaged leaving it almost unreadable. When Jack couldn’t decipher it, he handed it off to Shrimp who did her best gleaning the message from between the runs of inkwell black and iron quill pen outdated but somehow still being used to pen the piece. It was all very odd, indeed, but odd was hardly the word to describe things anymore in the field of the supernatural that Jack had found himself entangled in. Shrimp had licked the running ink, her tongue turning black with smudge from the letter before she had closed her eyes and let out a sigh, the sigh that Jack knew that she was receiving some information from the veil that he had yet to pierce as she had.

“They are lonely.” She said, her voice high pitched and strained as though something were caught in her throat.

“Don’t lick that, Shrimp, you don’t know where its been.”

She turned her blue eyes up to him, “Hm,” she wondered, “It smells near to home.”

“To the Island?”

She nodded before handing the nearly destroyed letter back to him. The envelope had disintegrated in his hands when he had opened it.

Recently they had finally scrounged enough to rent a building that had a falling apart store front that was as close to the main street of their small city that they could get in hopes that passerby would see the sign and come in with their ghostly problems. They held weekly seances in the building as lead by Shrimp with all her knowledge of the eather all around them and yet people often didn’t show up leaving the five of them alone in a room with candles and passing the time by telling each other bad jokes and about the latest kinoscope one of them had seen. Jack didn’t want to say it was boring waiting for someone to come to them, but it was. It was just as heart breaking trying to peddle his expertise to strangers, especially strangers that didn’t want to engage with the spiritual realm with a ten foot pole even though the pull of the unknown was present in everyone’s hearts.