The Keep

5. Ghosts of the Keep

The fifteenth Master of the Keep, Callum Gillivray, was not married. He invented too much of his time in business expansions and adventures, and cared too little about everything else.

Having a seat in the Ministry's International Magical Trading Standards Body, Callum roamed the colonial world and expanded Poison Master's Apothecary business internationally.

He spent most of his time overseas, fathered many, but give his name to one: Ayu Gillivray, his daughter from a Dutch East Indies woman.

However, Callum was never truly a father to Ayu. She was, like any other children Callum fathered, a squib. Callum acknowledged Ayu as his daughter only because he decided to spend the remaining of his life in the ease and comfort of the Dutch East Indie's southern sun, and could do with some companion.

And the southern sun agreed to him, Callum lived a long and healthy life to his two hundreds. He lived long enough to meet his Muggle-born great-grandson, Abhyasa Gillivray, and to raise him to be the successor of the Keep.

Abe Gillivray, as his great-grandfather called him, had very contracting features to the Gillivray men, which were long-faced, scrawny looking, extremely pale, and outstandingly tall. Blessed with the blood of the tropic, Abe was strong-jawed, yet soft-eyed, tall and sturdy, yet soft-spoken.

With Abe's brilliant wit and bewildering exoticism, witches of all age fell to his feet. As it turned out, beauty could easily obliviate people's mind off of horrendous things like 'Ekrizdis' descendants' and 'Gillivray's blood-curse'. Abe married Euphrailde Lestrange, the one his great-grandfather suggested, but he didn't care much about her or their family.

At the time, the Gillivrays have had many properties laying across the country and the world. While Euphrailde and her children chose to live in their townhouse in London, Abe chose to live in their most recluse property: Ekrizdis Keep.

In colonial Dutch East Indies' Java, where Abe grew up, magical community lived among the non-magical instead of excluding themselves in hiding (probably because the non-existence of witch-hunting). The Javanese magical community was generally well-received while also feared due to the culture's high spiritual respect.

While very much lacking in his spiritual respect, little Abe has grown his high respect for the 'spirits'. He has always been terribly fascinated by ghosts. All of his childhood friends were ghosts. This may have to do with how no other children, not even his own siblings, would play with him because of his 'weirdness'.

Abe found safety and comfort around ghosts, surrounded himself with them, and as he grew up, dedicated his life to study them. Abe even managed for himself to be employed by Ministry of Magic's Department of Mysteries, so that he could gain the resources of the Death Chamber to further his study.

Abe's study turned darker when he lost his son, Bharata 'Barry' Gillivray to the Nerve-Wrecking Flu, the family's blood-curse, at the age of four.

Grieving for the time he didn't spend with his son, Abe was relentlessly researching and experimenting for ways to derive Barry's ghost. In these experiments, not only did Abe brought Barry's body to the Keep, he has also pursued many other bodies.

In the end, Abe filled the Keep with mountains of bodies of recently deceased men and women of all ages. He acquired them through corpse-buying, and through murders.

In random and rare occasions when Abe somehow succeeded to 'wake' some ghosts up, almost none of them wanted to stay and cooperate. To prevent them from leaving, Abe charmed the Keep to bind every ghost contained within.

This Ghost-Binding Charm was an  extremely potent charm. Abe has included Javanese old magic within them, which was the signature of Abe Gillivray's genius.

While Abe hasn't found success in his attempt to 'wake' Barry, Barry's sister, Asa, fell to the same illness and died within thirty minutes of her high fever.

Abe lost himself in the battering of grief.

In his madness, Abe found a way to determine his own faith after death: to become a ghost, so that he can roam the spirit world to look for his children's ghosts. And then he proceeded to kill himself.

What Abe has forgotten in the midst of his heartbreak was, that to his own charm, the Keep would never let him out.

The Ministry of Magic's Spirit Division spent months fighting the Keep in their attempt to help the ghosts Abe Gillivray kept within. They fought against ravens and gargoyles, snarling-shrubs and thumping-trunks, snake-stairs and enchanted fire-dragons that burst themselves from the hearth. And the worst of it all was the maze, the never-ending maze. It has killed three officers in dehydration.

But even when the Spirit Division has managed to tackle the Keep, they were still faced with Abe Gillivray's extremely potent Ghost-Binding Charm. It took another month before the Spirit Division finally managed to temporarily disenchant Abe's powerful Ghost-Binding Charm from the Keep.

The Spirit Division managed to find better placements for Abe's ghost victims. And as for Abe himself, the Spirit Division saw that it was fit to leave him within the jail of his own making as proper punishment for his inhumane crimes.

It was said that Abe Gillivray's lifeworks have laid new and stoic foundation to the studies done within Death Chamber (some were about the detailed and systematic working of the Veil). His books and researches were to be kept forever within the Death Chamber, as they were too dangerous for a layman to read (several books could extremely sway the readers to end their lives just by opening them).

Another precious inheritance Abe left was his looks. Almost all of his descendants kept parts of his exotic beauty alive. This has been working tremendously well to repair the dangerous thinning of the family's lineage.

Whatever horror the Gillivray name brings that wealth could not compare, beauty can, apparently. Despite of the ongoing devastation of still-births, everlasting sickness, and children deaths, the Gillivrays never find themselves short on marriage proposals ever again.

However, Abe Gillivray's most well-known lifework has to be his Ghost-Binding Charm. To this day, it still bound and kept every ghost that has entered the Keep.

The Gillivrays themselves would later found Abe's abominable charm to be wondrously useful, because their dead has always had high probability to become ghosts (which was understandable enough, as they were a clan of highly-ambitious, unhappy personalities).

The Gillivray ghosts liked to haunt their enemies, the properties where they lived, the laboratories where they worked, but their most favorite one was: to haunt their descendants, so that they will pertain the glory of the family name.

Indubitably, the ghosts have caused the Gillivrays to be one of the loyal customers of the Spirit Division. Until Logan Gillivray put an end to this cumbersome family nightmares.

*Picture used in this chapter is credited to https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/363173157443579875/