Chapter Text
Jack Robinson lived in a world peopled with demons. Some of them were figurative. Some of them, like the one he was staring at right now, which was rattling the surface of the mirror in which it was trapped, were quite literal. He smirked, just slightly, as the spectral haunt bared teeth and fangs at his collar and the silver cross in his right hand. He had read the creature the rites. Time to lock it away. With a final sprinkle of holy water over the hand mirror, the demonic thing shrank back until he could safely grasp its prison and hurl it to the ground with a smash. Then, and only then, did he turn back to the frightened parishioners who had called in one of Melbourne’s few, but most successful exorcists, and give them a businesslike nod. “It’s gone. Your home is safe now,” he said. The spirit that had been infesting the walls and windows of this run-down flat, centering its attention on the ceramic urn the inhabitants had been using as a wash pitcher, was now safely locked away, and he was preparing to throw away the key. Carefully, meticulously, he began packing up his kit. Salt. Incense. Phial of holy water, mostly unused. Cross in its red velvet case. Bible carefully tied together with silver cord. His stole, rolled neatly like a bandage. The homeowners watched him in reverent silence, pausing only to hand him a casket they had filled with the shards and frame of the broken mirror, buried in consecrated earth and sprinkled with more salt. He packed that away too – he had plenty of safe places to bury the rubbish and keep the minion away from the Earth. Overall, a successful job. He made his way out the door and began down the creaking stairs, hearing the sounds of their neighbors beginning to stream into their flat once more, now that the previous resident had been officially evicted.
It was not a well-off part of town, but they had still insisted on paying him something, which rankled a bit. He didn’t think it was right to take money from desperate people – it was the Church that paid his wages. But salt wasn’t terribly expensive, and it had been an easy exorcism, if such a thing existed. He shrugged his shoulders, mostly satisfied, and was about to take the turn for the third staircase when the smell of sage drifted across his nose. Smudging? Odd. Curiously, he poked his head around the corridor wall, wondering where such a thing would be coming from. The scent was stronger this direction, and as he walked, he was beginning to hear banging and a strange rushing of trapped wind. Then, a teakettle whistle, and a female voice speaking. As he reached the door and lifted his hand to knock, everything fell silent. Then, there was a sudden roar and a woman's shout. The door crashed open into his head, and everything went black.
The first thing Miss Fisher noticed, once she had gotten the ghost back under control and managed to get the person out from under the door, was that the man she had rescued was a priest. The second thing she noticed was that he was remarkably good-looking – that collar did wonders for his cheekbones, and his black smock contrasted nicely with the curly brown hair that had come unslicked when the spirit had attempted to escape by blowing the flat door off its hinges. She’d had the foresight to place a few spirit bottles at the threshold, so the only real damage had been the poor man’s head. “Dot!” she called over her shoulder. “Make a note – the spirit bottles with poppyseeds worked as repellants, but they were not able to capture this one while it was angry.” Carefully, she probed the man’s forehead, looking to see if there was anything to the blood seeping from under his hairline. It was a minor cut though, nothing more. A few gentle presses with her neatly-manicured nails drew a groan and a flicker of lovely eyelashes from him, and a few moments later, his eyes opened and uncrossed. “Are you awake? Can you hear me?” She searched his face carefully, wondering if the spirit might have splintered into him (unlikely, but possible). But bright gray eyes focused on her face, then narrowed as he came aware of where he was.
“Who are you, and what just happened,” he demanded, struggling to focus. Phryne fought an inappropriate chuckle. She did like a man who cut to the chase.
“I’m very sorry Father, you were assaulted by a ghost that I was in the process of capturing.” She smiled at him winsomely, hoping he wouldn’t be too angry about the bump on his head. And indeed, he did soften slightly, for a moment. Then his brows knit again.
“Another spirit here? Not related to the one I just evicted, I hope.” She sat back on her heels and helped him to sit up, through he waved her hands away as she attempted to straighten his cassock. Pity “And what do you mean, that you were in the process of capturing?”
“Just as I said,” she replied, with a gesture behind her. For the first time, he took stock of the flat where they were sitting, and realized its shabby walls were festooned with all manner of demon/ghost/spirit/faery-detecting-and-catching paraphernalia, seeming to have their source in a large trunk in the center of the room, surrounded with a salt ring and bearing the name Hon. Phryne Fisher. The few sticks of furniture in the room held more spirit bottles, candles, inscribed wax tablets, various bundles of plant life, and other, less-identifiable odds and ends. “I’m a paranormal investigator and evictions expert. Just arrived from England a few weeks ago. I barely had time to get my things out of shipment and into my new house before I became thoroughly embroiled in the spirit world around here. Nobody mentioned the absolute profusion of spectral entities – if Mac had, I would most certainly have come back sooner.”
“And this demon, is it still loose in here?” He was still feeling a little woozy, but if he was going to have to get out the cross and incense again, better do it quickly.
“Ghost, not demon, and no, it’s safely away,” she replied, standing up and offering him a hand. He took it and stood, clearly still dubious, but relieved. “I made extensive notes before I started the capture process, but of course, I’m still refining my methods. You’re Father Robinson, aren’t you?”
“How did you know?” Jack rubbed the back of his neck. His head was aching, his eyes were squinting reflexively at the light, and he wasn’t sure he trusted that this strange woman knew what she was doing. He didn’t like it when amateurs tried to dabble in his line of work. They tended to get hurt. Or, he amended, finding another drop of blood on his fingertips, they tended to get him hurt.
“The collar was the first clue,” she said, beginning to move around the room, collecting things. “This was the second,” she added, handing his battered black suitcase to him, prayer beads wrapped neatly around the handle. “I could smell consecrated earth from even inside your case.”
“And the third?”
“I did my research,” Phryne replied with another smile, one that was equal parts scarlet satisfaction and dimpled intelligence. “There are only a few exorcists working in this city, legitimate ones, I mean, and of those, you’re the only Anglican priest.”
“Well, I suppose that’s true,” he said, grudgingly. He gave her another searching look, and he could swear she preened just slightly.
“Actually,” she said, her voice taking on a thoughtful tone, “I’d been meaning to pay you a visit. I have a friend who could use the help of a priest.”
“You’ve been here less than a month and already found someone who needs an exorcist?” Jack was amused now. This Fisher woman looked like she attracted trouble, from the toes of her shining white Mary-Janes to her immaculate creamy trousers and fashionably-cut violet satin tunic, to the tip of the peacock feather in her equally-purple cloche. She looked like she sought it out when it didn’t find her, in fact. And she could smell consecrated earth, which was a sure mark of the spiritually-sensitive. Of course she had found trouble.
“Not…. Not exactly.” She turned to look through the doorway behind her, to an apparently empty room. “Dot? Dot, please do come out. Dot, I promise, the Father won’t hurt you.” With a faint fizzing noise and another teakettle whistle, the phantasmal shape of a young woman in a sensible brown cardigan and pink dress appeared in the room with them. The colors of her were faded, as if she had been left in the sun too long, but they shifted back and forth as various parts of her solidified and dissolved again. At Jack's astonished goggle, she waved shyly.
“Say hello, Dot, this is Father Jack Robinson. Father, this is Dot.”
Jack staggered backward into the chair behind him, sitting down with an undignified thump that blew a cloud of dust into the air. “A ghost? Your friend is a ghost? You made friends with a ghost. Of course you did.”
“Companion, actually.” The ghostly woman folded her hands benignly, then, spotting the cross on his case, suddenly grew excited, waving her hands at Phryne eagerly. “Oh, she’s remembered something, I think!” Phryne rummaged in the trunk for a moment and pulled out a pencil and notebook, which she laid down, open, on the end table in the corner. “She’ll need a few moments, but she’s getting better at physical interactions with the world. She can’t talk, sadly, though she can make some convincing-sounding murmurs and a fizz like a kettle.”
“Of course,” Jack replied. His head throbbed again. What was that he had said to himself, about this being a simple job? He took that back. He would have preferred a much angrier demon. Maybe even several. The young woman’s wispy face took on a worried expression as she floated towards him, pen hovering where her hand would have been, were she solid. “If she’s a named soul and not something metaphysical pretending, I can shrive her, if that’s what she needs.”
“That’s part of the problem, I’m afraid,” replied Miss Fisher. She was packing things away in her trunk and sweeping up salt as she spoke, while the ghost labored once more over the notebook in the corner. “Whenever she tries to write out her name, she just leaves, well, a dot on the paper. So, in absence of a full name, I’ve dubbed her Dot, and hopefully that will serve for the time being.” She folded away another roll of herbs and walked to where the ghost was floating, a hopeful expression visible on her face through the back of her spectral head. Jack scrubbed his eyes tiredly. He needed to get back to the church and explain to his acolyte where he’d been. There was no telephone receiver that he could see here, and it was going to be a long wait for a tram. Phryne, bent over the notebook, suddenly straightened with a satisfied look on her face and snapped the book shut.
“Father Robinson,” she said, and he looked up. “Would you happen to need a lift back to your church? I have a car and more than enough room. And I could use a hand getting my luggage down the stairs.”
“You have a vehicle?” Perhaps things could be salvaged. Granted, he wasn’t likely to make good time back into the city, given the usual tentativeness that newcomers had with Melbourne’s roads, but it would be faster than waiting a half-hour or more for the next, likely-unreliable, tram.
“Oh yes,” said Phryne Fisher, with a look that was far more mischievous than he was comfortable with. “It’s a lovely little thing. Hispano-Suiza. Very reliable. We can get you there.” It was only when he was already placing his suitcase in the backseat, next to a strapped-in jar that looked suspiciously like a burial urn, that it registered that he hadn’t heard the last word that was usually in that sentence. “Safely” had been worryingly absent from her promise of taking him to where he needed to go.