Page 85 of Purrfectly Haunted

"We don't have the luxury of waiting, nor can you get away from the hostel. I'll be fine. I'm just going to take a quick look inside, see if Ewan was here, then quickly make my escape before the big bad inside the cave can even say boo."

"You know I love your insane optimism, but I still don't like this," Lana says.

"I'm getting close. I'll text you in an hour."

She sighs. "Be careful. Love you." Behind her, I hear Shirley say the same before I hang up.

The forest path is overgrown and littered with branches and rocks, and even with the flashlight, I can barely see where I'm walking. The darkness is thick under the trees, and moonlight barely pierces through the canopy.

After half an hour, I finally reach the fence surrounding the area. The nearby town closed it off after one too many accidents. People lost their minds while visiting the cave. They saw things, hurt each other, got lost in the dark…

Of course, we know they weren't accidents, but a powerful poltergeist haunting this place. The spirits whisper of a woman who long ago was left in this cave to die. The usual woe is me kind of story that usually turns the dead into an evil entity.

The kind of entity that Earl Lynch feeds upon.

Pearl meows frustratingly from my shoulder as I find the wire cutter in my bag to open us a path beyond the fence. The entrance to the cave waits for us on the other side, wide like an open maw and darker than an abyss.

"Why does it always have to be creepy, dark places?" I mumble. "Can't they haunt a field of flowers during a bright sunny day?"

Pearl meows again.

As if on cue, that uncanny feeling rises as we get closer to the entrance after pushing our way through the gutted fence.

"This place is haunted alright," I say.

I make sure my arsenal is ready: salt, smoke bombs, blade, some herbs, and a mind full of incantations and spells. And of course, my paranormal cat.

Here we go. I walk into the cave.

Almost immediately, I'm faced with a choice. The tunnel bends to the right or to the left. Shirley gave me a quick rundown of the events that happened here over the last century.

One teenager got lost in the cave system for two days. The local newspaper at the time called it strange, since the system isn't really vast, and the experts have mapped the entire cave. To this day, they still don't understand where he went. He swore for him it felt like a few hours at most, stuck in the dark.

A group of campers got chased by something huge in the nineties, and the authorities called it a simple mass hysteria after they found weed in their belongings.

Then follows a list of sad deaths. People who just went in the cave and never came back out alive, their bodies found later by other visitors. They closed the area off ten years ago.

Shirley couldn't find the map of the cave system online, so I'll just have to be careful.

"Which way, do you think?" I ask Pearl.

Her glowing eyes search the dark, and when she stares to the right, her hair puffs out.

"This way then." I follow the right bend. "Did I tell you I fucking hate caves? They make me claustrophobic."

She meows.

"I almost got lost in a cave when I was seven. My three older cousins took me with them, then they turned the flashlight off and bailed. I was fucking terrified. The cave wasn't big, and I managed to find my way out. I bit Sammy's hand hard enough to draw blood—he was the leader of the group. I got punished for it, my aunts were furious. But when I got home a few days later, my dad was proud of me for fighting back. He always hated my mother's side of the family. Cunts and racists, the bunch of them."

I'm blabbering now, trying to ignore the way the air around us gets colder as we walk deeper into the cave. Animal bones and trash litter the ground. I take reassurance in the fact that I have at least three flashlights and my phone on me.

At last, the tunnel widens into a large cavern and my flashlight reflects on a mirroring surface. Water. Not the best time to remember Shirley mentioning someone drowning in the cave.

I aim the light to all corners of the cavern. There are no fresh footprints in the mud but mine. Ewan was never here. We chose the wrong destination.

"Sorry to have bothered you, spirit of the cave. I'll be on my way."

It never hurts to be polite with ghosts when you want nothing to do with them. I don't have time for an exorcism right now.