Gravity Rises (S2)

NMS: Part Six

The Northwests built their mansion over a graveyard.

Mabel backed slowly away from the stone pieces — the gravestone pieces — until she was off the dirt floor. She wiped her hands on her jeans, hoping against hope she wouldn't be cursed just for touching the shattered gravestones. Then again, Gideon was already cursed, so maybe it'd rubbed off on her just from being around him.

"Oh, come on, Pines, the ghosts don't care about you." Gideon's face was partly in shadow, since the amulet was under his chin, but Mabel could still see him roll his eyes at her.

"You built your mansion over a graveyard?" she demanded. "You bulldozed over someone's resting place? No wonder you're haunted! You're standing six feet above a dead body!"

Gideon took a casual step away from the gravestones. "I didn't build over anyone," he said, moving towards her. "This mansion was built a few centuries before I was even born."

"Yeah, well, now your whole family is cursed," Mabel shot back, "so it doesn't really matter. It's a wonder the ghosts haven't tried to kill you before. You said you had a sort of treaty with them?"

"Yeah. They wouldn't bother us, and we'd stop trying to exorcise them."

"No wonder they didn't finish construction in here," Mabel mused. "The haunting was probably so bad that they had to just block it off and build around it. And they can't leave the mansion, because their resting place is here, and you defaced it."

"My great-great grandfather defaced it," Gideon corrected.

"And for some reason they haven't moved on to the next life. . . and you trying to exorcise them with your amulet was like trying to push them against a screen door. It didn't do anything, but it hurt. But brute force can't fix their problem." She frowned. "And apparently they think killing you can."

Gideon raised an eyebrow. "Can it?"

"This is serious!" Mabel said. "You — your family — you're torturing these souls every day just because you decided their graveyard was good real estate! And then you try to banish them from their own resting place because they annoy you! Do you know how — how — "

She stopped, clenching and unclenching her fists, trying to force back tears. She didn't say what she was really thinking: Do you know how scary it is to be a trapped ghost?

Then it hit her.

"This," she said, her voice quiet with horror. "This is why you didn't want me to talk to them. You didn't want me to know about this place."

"What?" Gideon said. "No. I had no idea about this room, or that the mansion was over a graveyard."

She glared at him. "Yeah, right."

"I didn't! My parents told me to exorcise these ghosts, so I tried, and when it didn't work, I made a truce with them. Then everything was fine until they decided to rampage again. I did not know about the graveyard. Otherwise I wouldn't have just tried 'brute force,' as you put it."

There it was again. That tone that said, I obviously know a million times more about ghosts than you do. Mabel hated it. She wanted to punch a wall, stomp her foot, push Gideon into the dirt. You have no idea! she wanted to scream. You have no idea what I've been through!

"You obviously don't believe me," Gideon said, sounding disgusted. "I'm not just another Northwest, Mabel. I wouldn't trap a bunch of ghosts just because I wanted the land their graves were in. Do you really think so poorly of me?"

She was shaking too badly to answer, so she just glared. His callous words, mixed with being trapped, mixed with being trapped in a graveyard — it was building up in her entire body. It was too much.