Velma stood sceptically with her hands in the pockets of her orange denim jacket, leaning back on her heels. It looked suspiciously nice for a place that was going to take so much as a haunted tinderbox off her hand, let alone a demon-possessed piece of wood bigger than she was.

The sign declared the shop, in golden text, to be MacKinnon’s Antiques, and it was probably the cleanest front she’d ever seen for any antique shop – stuck in the middle of a closed-down hairdresser and a keycutter’s, there was a noticeable divide on either side of the property, where Mr MacKinnon apparently washed the walls down with a pressure washer in perfectly straight lines. The terracotta brick, which was neat and symmetrical, was dazzlingly clean, and there were pots of flowers along the windowsill, as well as a red and yellow bench underneath the window.

The window display – a hand-written sign in the corner, made in a flowing but forthright script, declared that items in the window would go on sale the second Friday of every month – was made up of three of the most intricate dolls’ houses Velma had ever seen, each one of them lovingly furnished in different styles, the walls papered, the floors carpeted or set with tiny tile. The dolls were all involved in an elaborate wedding ceremony, the bride and groom stood on the balcony of the central doll’s house, overlooking plenty of other individual dolls, each kitted out in formalwear.

None of them looked frightening, or haunted. Each had surprisingly non-creepy features, and it looked… normal.

The whole thing was less than normal, she supposed – no normal antique shop was this well-kept and clean, with strawberries growing from the window baskets and not so much as a smudge on one of the windows, let alone a speck of dirt or a bit of chipped paint. And that was normal normal antique shops – not normal antique shops that bought and sold cursed and enchanted objects.

She couldn’t see anything past the display, because there was wooden backing on the stage that made up the front window, lined in deep red fabric, and the glass on the window only showed the little porch, where there was another door, and two wooden stands to set umbrellas and coats on.

The opening hours declared that the shop was closed on Mondays, but the OPEN sign was turned to face outward, and all the lights were on: when she tried the door, it opened freely.

Perhaps it was wrong of her, to be suspicious.

It couldn’t be helped: she was a suspicious person.

The door into the porch didn’t make a sound, but the inner door creaked ominously, and Velma stood sceptically on the threshold as it squealed shut behind her, surveying the room. This was more like it.

Great, towering shelves went off in every direction, disappearing into the ill-lit corners of the shop proper, each one of them filled to the brim with stacks of thick, dusty books and dozens upon dozens of ornaments and pieces of glassware: as her gaze flitted over one of the closest shelves, the eyes of various ceramic horrors seemed to stare back at her, and she made eye contact with a particularly upsetting china toad, twisting her mouth at the sight of it.

When she took a step forward, a thick cloud of dust rose up into the air, the plume coming as high as her hip, and she couldn’t help but wrinkle her nose.

At the walls, more shelves were interspersed with ancient pieces of antique furniture, each of them caked with yet more dust and other indeterminate sorts of grime, some of them with rusty-red stains that were unmistakably blood. Her eye was caught by a crystalline lamp, tall and made seemingly of hundreds of interlocking pieces, which emanated a sickly yellow glow. She had to force herself to turn her head away, feeling her skin crawl, and she moved forward, ignoring the clouds of dust as she made her way further into the shop.

There was no desk in sight, no till, not even a little sign like you usually saw in big shops like this one, pointing you in the right direction. The shelves seemed to go on endlessly, down one corridor, until a full-length mirror in the middle of the way forced her to turn right, and then a glass cabinet forced a left. The shelves and towering furniture seemed endless, and that numb-prickle sensation of reality not being quite right was settling over her skin as she went further into the labyrinthine turns that led nowhere.

Was it a test?

It wasn’t unheard of, she knew, for some magical businesses, especially fae-owned ones, to test new people before they worked with them, to make sure they were up to standard, but she’d never seen anything like this – it was normally just putting an object in someone’s hands and seeing if they could tell it wasn’t really cursed. Aunt Ginchiyo had tried it a few times with her, but this? This was new.

“Mr MacKinnon?” she called out, but heard no answer. Her voice seemed to echo unnaturally in the space.

Finally making the decision to turn back toward the door, she shifted on her heel, but where she should have seen another corridor of shelves, she saw only one, right in front of her, and it was so high as to reach up toward the ceiling, touching its grey surface.

She surveyed the objects on the shelves, each one buried under a film of filth and grime. At eye level, there were a series of ugly little goblin statues, and under the dirt she could barely make out their features, except for the eyes that glinted in the suddenly low light.

When she turned her head, another shelf loomed up on her left, another on her right, and behind her—

“Mr MacKinnon!” she shouted again, with more urgency this time, but her voice sounded muffled and muted this time, as though she’d called the name into a pillow instead of a room full of hard, wooden objects.

In front of her was an armoire. It was almost eight feet tall, she supposed, which left a decent gap between the top of it and the ceiling, unlike the bookshelves on her other three sides, but there was something about it she didn’t like, didn’t want to get closer to. It was made of an ebony wood so dark as to be almost completely black, and it was easily six feet across. It looked solid. It looked huge in a way she’d never seen an armoire before – it was gargantuan in the way unnatural things were, when they had more space inside than they should have.

Glancing to each side, she steeled herself, gritting her teeth: she’d have to climb one of the filthy shelves and then climb over the top of the armoire. Even if she couldn’t get down the other side, she’d be able to call out from there.

She couldn’t tear her gaze away from it. The slight gap between its two doors was darker than dark should be, and now and then the doors would shift minutely, as though the armoire was, well…

As though it were breathing.

It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

A movement caught the corner of her eye, one that made her hands clench into automatic fists, and she brought them up closer to her face, to keep whatever it was from striking at her there.

It was only a tiny flicker, a dark jump of sudden, shifting air, again at her side, and she moved quickly to face it, but that left the armoire behind her.

She could feel it behind her. Looming. She could feel it, this great, monstrous thing, but she didn’t let herself flinch as she heard the slow, bonechilling creak of the armoire’s doors opening behind her. It was so loud it made her ears ache, her eyes fluttering closed for a moment, and she felt the back of her neck and the hair on her arms come out in goosepimples as she stood in place, rooted to the spot, scarcely daring even to breathe.

The armoire, impossibly – and yet not at all unexpectedly – let out a draught.

She could feel it at her nape, brushing over the gooseflesh there and at the back of her bob. Her eyes closed more tightly as she took in a long, slow inhalation, and then she turned to face it.

The doors were open wide, and just as she had suspected, the armoire appeared infinitely, unfathomably big. It could have swallowed Velma five times over, five thousand times over – it could have swallowed England, could have swallowed the world.

And then the figure inside it leaned out.

It was a great mass of shadow, so tall and so wide and so big that her head spun just trying to take in the sight of it, and when it lunged it fell on top of her with a weight unimaginable, forcing a wheezing sound from her chest as she hit the floor.

The shadows engulfed her, swallowing her whole as she tried to struggle, but she wasn’t able to even breathe, the pressure coming down so hard on her chest it felt like her ribs were liable to crack. Her shoulders pinned, it was a struggle to move her arms through the mass of impossible black, her teeth creaking she was clenching her jaw so hard, and she choked out a noise, breathlessly, trying to kick, trying to get her now burning hands on it—

“What do you think you’re doing?” cut a voice through the endless dark. It was a nice voice – older, rich-sounding, and distinctly Scottish, a highlands accent.

The mass of shadows dissipated like smoke, and Velma saw only a few wisps of it rush away from her. Little fragments of shadow, each scarcely bigger than her fist, went skittering across the floor and away from her at speed, more of them seeming to pop out of bare air to join the swarm. They rushed to the feet of a man who was looking down at them with his hands on his hips and a frown on his face.

The big armoire was gone, as were all the shelves that had hemmed her in, and now she sat up, coughing as she stared, disbelieving, at her surroundings.

This shop was nothing like the one she had entered.

Bright and airy, with a surprisingly lofty ceiling, it was probably the least cluttered antique shop she had ever been in. Pieces of furniture were organised in neat, even rows, apparently displayed in a loose colour order, and each piece had a clear label written on it in the same beautiful, simple script that was displayed in the window.

Against the walls were the shelves that had reached up to the ceiling, but they were now very sparsely decorated, each item with a clear gap around it, as if the ornaments themselves demanded a certain modicum of personal space.

“And what have you got to say for yourself?”

“I—”

“Not you, young lady,” said Hamish MacKinnon. “I’ll get to you in a moment.”

The man was short, fat, and he wore a sky blue jumper over a shirt and tie. His shoes – brown ankle boots with neat broguing – were polished to a finish. His hair was a blond muss about his head, loosely combed back from his face but not quite staying in place, and he looked sternly over a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, his hands on his hips, down at his feet.

They seemed more solid, now, the things that had been wisps of shadow. There were dozens of them at the man’s feet, stacked on top of each other, stumbling and wrestling for their places, and she stared at them, at their tiny bodies and their spiny heads, at their little legs and their little arms.

They were making… noise.

It wasn’t at all like speech, but more like the buzzing you might hear when too near to a wasps’ nest, though this sound was higher in pitch, and different noises seemed to overlap one another. Many of the little monsters were gesturing with their arms, of which they each had four apiece, hopping up and down, and a lot of them were gesturing with their wings, as well, which had joints that reminded Velma of a bat, but the leathery skin of them was more like a cockroach.

“It is Monday,” the man said finally, in a tone of declaration, looking away from the little demons and back to Velma on the floor.  Striding past her, stepping over the monsters on the ground, he made his way to the door, which opened with a cheerful tinkle of a bell.

The bell was new.

“Are those alastora?” Velma asked as the man locked the front door, and she looked at them as they kept buzzing and crawling over one another. “I’ve only ever seen them in collections.”

“Who, young lady, might you be?” the man asked, tone arch, even as he bent over at the middle, encouraging the alastora to jump up and into his arms. They rushed to crawl up his arms, using his sleeves as handholds, and they hung off of him, a handful of them trying to climb into his shirt collar.

“I’m Ginchiyo Kuroda’s niece,” Velma said, pushing herself off her palms and getting to her feet.

His irritation seemed to bleed away slightly at that, and he looked at her appraisingly, his face a blank mask, before he said, “You would be Mei, I suppose?”

“Velma.”

“Velma,” he repeated, as though he had never heard the name before, and had no desire to hear it again. She concentrated on wiping the dust off her skirt and her cardigan, her jacket, but it had all faded away – the wood floors of this shop were perfectly polished, and it didn’t look as though there were a single speck of dirt in the whole place.

“You’re Hamish MacKinnon?” He gave a curt nod, and she asked, “Where is it you’re from? Inverness?”

“Good ear on you,” he remarked quietly, idly letting one of the alastora crawl over his palms. “I’m from a small village that’s now since gone, but I grew up near to Aviemore. Is there a reason you’re breaking into my shop at this time of the afternoon?”

“I didn’t break in,” Velma said sharply. “It was completely different, a second ago – it was dark and all but fucking labyrinthine, and them wee demons of yours fell right on fucking top of me!”

“Is that so?” Hamish asked, but he was looking at the demon between his palms, not at Velma, and once more the chattering started, all of the alastora complaining and defending themselves – at least, Velma could only assume – as Hamish frowned down at them, shaking his head. “Hm, well,” he said, finally, glancing to Velma with an expression of distaste still on his face. “As I said, young lady, on Mondays, we are closed.”

“But, Mr MacKinnon—”

“I do not know what your aunt has taught you about good business, young lady,” MacKinnon began, but Velma interrupted him, taking a step toward him that made the alastora scatter, a few of them rushing out from under her feet.

“Mr MacKinnon, I believe I have a demon-infested block of wood in my car, and with all due respect, my aunt wouldn’t have recommended you if she didn’t think you were a good person to call on. I am sorry to impose on you, but I can’t really play a game with this thing. When I walked up the garden path of this woman’s house, the ground bled, and it’s been torturing her with all kinds of hallucinations. If I can’t rely on your expertise, Mr MacKinnon, would you be so kind as to offer an alternative in the vicinity?”

The venom all but dripped from every word, and although Mr MacKinnon was far from a tall man – he was only about five feet and four – she was taller, meaning that for once she had to down at his face, his plump, scowling face.

The scowl—

Faded, just slightly, as she looked at him.

“A demon?” MacKinnon repeated, somewhat crisply. “And what elements of its taxonomy would drive you to that conclusion?”

“Well, it was— It was black, with scales, four legs, glowing eyes, kind of came out of the wood, and it… It started off in some ceramic things, and then when she smashed them, it put itself in the footboard, which tells me that it needs some kind of tether, that it can’t just exist freely. Based on the fact that it chose her bed, I believe it was somehow, uh, feeding on her.”

“Ms Kuroda,” MacKinnon said, sounding like he was on that strange edge between patient and impatient that reminded her of her teachers at school, “you say this was a demon. Mammalia or Insecta?”

“Reptilia.”

“And the species? The family? The order, even?”

Velma was silent. She had learned the most basic taxonomies when she was a little girl – Ginchiyo had said she didn’t put that much store by them, but Aunt Kimi had always been very dead set on them learning proper taxonomy and classification. She said it was important, when it came to filling out the paperwork on pest control, but Ginchiyo had never filled out much paperwork as far as Velma was aware, and she didn’t know that she expected to herself. 

Mr MacKinnon looked down at her, his pale eyes surprisingly severe behind the round, golden frames of his glasses, and then he walked across the room to the twin doors.

“That’s yours, I suppose?” he asked. “The rather clean little Ka?”

She didn’t know whether or not she was imagining the hint of approval in his voice.

“Uh, yeah. I’ll grab the board.”

MacKinnon didn’t step outside. He remained inside the dual protection of the two doors as Velma popped the boot and pulled out the board, holding it loosely under one arm. It was a heavy wood, but she was used to handling far heavier objects than this, and she carried it back into the shop, carefully stepping over the numerous alastora that rushed to mill about her feet as she set it, as MacKinnon wordlessly directed, onto the surface of his desk, face up.

MacKinnon pushed his glasses further up his nose as he stepped forward to examine it, holding his hands very neatly, almost primly, over it. The snakeish coils carved into the wood once more seemed to swim before Velma’s eyes, and she watched, dry-mouthed, as MacKinnon’s palms glowed a very soft blue, his eyes taking on the same sheen of concentrated magic.

It was the sort of thing she couldn’t do herself, but she wished she could.

Her own magic, the holy fire, was something she’d been born with, that she’d been able to do even as a very young child, albeit in a very clumsy way compared to now – it was magic that had been passed down from her mother’s side, and Aunt Ginchiyo had always been very pleased with it, had said how useful it would be in this sort of work.

It could only do a few things, though.

She could protect herself with it, of course, and attack with it; she could use it for a certain invulnerability to fire; she could take the taint out of things, could cauterise wounds or disinfect metal, but…

What MacKinnon was doing?

That was more refined magic, used for a specific purpose, not just an element being channelled in a particular direction. MacKinnon’s expression was blank as the coils shifted and moved on the wood, making Velma feel slightly nauseated at the sight of them, turning her head away.

She only looked back when Mr MacKinnon started talking in a language she didn’t know – it was an Indian language, she thought, but not Hindi and not Tamil, and yet the serpentine monster sitting on top of the headboard, its clawed hands neatly folded in its lap, apparently knew it well. It spoke very fast, and Velma could see the concentration on MacKinnon’s face, could hear the slight uncertainty in his voice as he did his best to communicate with it, to follow what it said.

It seemed much smaller now than it had earlier.

Small, maybe the same size as a ferret, and curled up as it was, sitting on its haunches with its body leaned forward, it seemed even smaller than that. If she could ascribe a tone to its voice, which was a quiet hiss, it would be… miserable.

MacKinnon and the demon talked back and forth for some time, MacKinnon’s responses slightly stunted as he did his best, gesticulating, but after a few minutes, he nodded his head and stepped away, picking up the receiver of the mustard-coloured rotary telephone on his desk and dialling in a number.

The alastora, for the most part, were milling about his feet, and as she watched, one of them clambered up his leg, grabbing at the fabric with its little claws until it reached his belly. Almost absentmindedly, he picked it up around the middle and brought it up to his breast, cradling it against his chest as he spoke on the phone.

She only knew some very basic phrases in Hindi, but she knew enough to understand “thank you” and goodbye as MacKinnon finished up on the phone, and then said a few more words to the demon.

It padded forward on the footboard, its black scales shifting under the light, and MacKinnon reached out with the hand that wasn’t cradling the alastor, stroking his thumb over the top of its rounded head.

“Would you be so good as to carry this upstairs for me, Ms Kuroda?”

“Yeah, Mr MacKinnon, of course,” she said as the demon clambered to coil around Hamish’s other hand, and she picked up the strangely plain wood. It felt lighter, now, although not by a huge amount, and she let MacKinnon lead her up a flight of stairs and into what would more accurately be called a workshop, rather than an office.

Against the wide windows, which did not open, she saw a lathe and a few workbenches, a multitude of carpentry tools hanging from a custom-made trellis on the side wall. Some of them she recognised, but others were specialist tools she’d not seen before, and MacKinnon had to call her back to concentration, to get her to place the footboard neatly against the wall. Setting the demon on a countertop, Mr MacKinnon flicked on a kettle and reached into a small fridge on the side. It was only a tiny kitchenette, with the minifridge, the kettle, and a toaster, but he took a Tupperware box of some sort of raw meat, pouring a heaping pile of it into a bowl and setting it down.

The alastor in his other hand immediately tried to leap toward it, but MacKinnon kept it in a loose grip so that it couldn’t struggle free, setting the bowl before the new demon and saying a little more before he came back toward Velma, gesturing for her to go down into the shop again.

“What language was that?” she asked as she descended the narrow stairs, the bare boards of which were scratched all over, wood splintering at the edges of the skirting, although they were very clean. Her mind was awash with visions of the alastora pouring down them claws first, and she doubted very much that the vision in question was at all inaccurate.

“Marathi,” MacKinnon said. “A language I do not have a great command of, least of all when it comes to such a strong regional dialect, but we got by. It is not a demon, Ms Kuroda – class Anima, order Consera, family Domicilia.”

Velma watched MacKinnon as he stepped toward his desk again, idly setting the alastor in his hand onto his shoulder as he leaned to make a note in his ledger.

“A house spirit?” Velma asked, and MacKinnon glanced up at her.

Once more, the disapproval in his face didn’t disappear, but it did fade slightly, and he gave a slight inclination of his head. “With so ill a command of the spirit’s language, I cannot make a determination of its genus, let alone its species – there are a hundred variations of domicilium native to the state of Goa alone, but it is indeed a house spirit. I’ve contacted a couple I know from Sattari who will come to better communicate with it – I expect they will take it into their employ, as I’ve never known many anima to begin the process of repatriation if they can find suitable lodgings wherever they’ve ended up.”

“But isn’t it— Isn’t it dangerous?” Velma asked, and MacKinnon seemed genuinely surprised by the question, his blond brows knitting together.

“Dangerous?” he repeated. “What ever do you mean?”

“Mr MacKinnon, the house I went into… It had made every corridor dark and foreboding, and this lady has been having more than just nightmares – she’s lost weight, her hair’s been thinning, she’s been feeling weaker and weaker.”

“Oh, for—” MacKinnon said, crossing his arms tightly over his chest and staring at her. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Velma said, unable to keep her own hackles from rising in retort, “but house spirits aren’t meant to feed on those in the households they’re connected to.”

“And what else was it supposed to feed on? This woman gave it nothing – no honour, no prayer, no kitchen scraps, even—”

“She’s a mundie! And if this thing feeds on one person, it’s going to be corrupted, it—”

“Corrupted,” MacKinnon repeated, scoffing. “I’ve never heard such poppycock in all my life. A house spirit, Ms Kuroda, cannot be “corrupted” into anything. There is no such thing as corruption of a spirit or demon – you cannot hold them to your ridiculous ideas of purity or corruption. They are… Well, they are not dissimilar to animals. They eat when they are hungry – if no food is offered to them, they will take what they need. This animus is thin, weak, it took the smallest amount it could manage from this woman despite her being its only option for sustenance. In a proper home, given proper food to eat, it will be a perfect protector of the home and hearth.”

Five or six of the alastora rushed over to MacKinnon at once, and he crouched down slightly, offering his arm so that they could collect in the crook of it, cramming themselves against his armpit and into the cup of his palm.

“I appreciate, young lady, that you are new in this field,” MacKinnon said, absently squeezing one of the alastora in his palm and making it release a grizzled purr of noise as it wrapped itself around his thumb. “But if you wish to step into your aunt’s place, this pseudo-Christian nonsense will really be better left by the wayside. Corrupted, indeed!”

“What do you mean, step into my aunt’s place?” Velma demanded. “Mr MacKinnon, I’m not an antiques dealer – I’m pursing my MA in art history, mundie art history. I’m going into curation.”

“You mean to say this is, as you children call it, a “side hustle”?”

Velma’s brain threatened to short-circuit at that.

“Mr MacKinnon, it’s just something I do when people need it, to earn a little extra. But it’s easier to shift secondhand books than it is to do stuff like this.”

MacKinnon looked at her so coldly that Velma’s stomach did an anxious flip, but she didn’t break his gaze, setting her own mouth into a thin scowl and staring right back at him, taking a step forward.

“Oh, I do beg your pardon, young lady,” Mr MacKinnon said darkly. “I had no idea your aunt’s mantle was so inconvenient for you to bear. Do forgive me for thinking you perhaps had some amount of ambition outside of taking up a sub-par Duffield Harding and setting it out for auction.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Velma asked. “This isn’t my aunt’s mantle – this is one house spirit.”

MacKinnon’s cold expression faltered. “You are Ginchiyo’s niece?”

“Yeah.”

“And of the two—”

“She doesn’t have two nieces. She has one niece, and one nephew – I’m the niece.”

MacKinnon stalked across the room. It was not a way of movement that suited him, round and soft as he was, but it was still somehow intimidating, giving him the air of a man ready and willing to rip out your throat, and then very neatly clean the mess away afterward.

Reaching into drawer of the desk, he drew out a piece of paper with a business card clipped to its back, drawing the card into one hand as he read aloud, “Dear Mr MacKinnon, I am announcing with immediate effect my retirement from the business that has been my occupation this past fifty-two years. I will be contactable neither via my business phone nor my email, and all of the latter communications will be forwarded to my niece, who may be able to offer some assistance. Thank you for your many years of both assistance and business partnership, and my thanks for your understanding in this matter. Yours, Ginchiyo Kuroda.”

Velma stared at him as he held out, neatly held between the two carefully manicured fingernails of his index and middle finger, the business card, and she took it from him, staring down at it.

VELMA KURODA, it read, SPECIALIST IN ARTIFACTS ENCHANTED OR CURSED.

There was a business email that matched her aunt’s, as well as a phone number she didn’t recognise, but it was the logo that gave her pause, her lips parting as she drew her thumbnail over it. It was the vague figure of a blank, human face, the only features it had the black bob and a pair of glasses, settled on a round, orange circle.

Ginchiyo’s logo had been a dark purple circle, the logo a curved dagger, drawn in the same minimalist style. They matched, despite the different colour schemes, and she set her jaw, risking a glance up to MacKinnon.

On the upside, the old man wasn’t glaring daggers at her anymore. 

“You seem very surprised,” he murmured. “I suppose she didn’t tell you she planned to refer all her business to you?”

“No,” Velma said. “But then, she didn’t tell me she was retiring, either.”

“Ah,” MacKinnon said. “Well.”

“Um, here,” Velma said, passing back the letter and the business card both and taking a step back. The alastora had apparently taken an interest in whatever had made their master so much change his tone, because they were queued up in funny little rows, staring up at her, their toothy mouths aghast, their many eyes concentrated on her. “I need to drive back down to London. I hope it all goes well with the house spirit, if it’s okay if I leave it with you.”

“Of course,” MacKinnon said, and the cheerful tinkle of the shop’s bell sounded behind her as she went back out to the car.