When the two girls reached the old librarian's house, they were shocked to see that the house, although located outside the city, looked exactly like the one the Johnson family lived in. It was an exact copy of that house.
"Claire, this house looks just like the Johnsons'… but it looks older. Which means this one must have been constructed before that house," Lily said, astonished.
"But it's also possible that when the Johnsons bought their house, the owner had it freshly painted before selling it. Anyway, let's go inside and meet G.G. ma'am. Maybe she can give us the answers we've been looking for."
Determined to find their answers, the two girls stepped out of the car and walked to the old librarian's door, ringing the doorbell. After ringing for quite a while, they finally heard footsteps approaching. Then suddenly, the sound of the door unlocking echoed.
"Who are you, and whom have you come to meet?" a woman around 60–70 years old asked as she opened the door.
"Is she the old librarian?" Lily whispered into Claire's ear.
"No, she's someone else." Claire whispered back, then spoke to the woman who had opened the door. "My name is Claire, and this is my friend Lily. We've come to meet librarian G.G. ma'am."
Hearing Claire's words, the woman shut the door loudly right in their faces without saying a single word.
"Looks like G.G. ma'am doesn't like meeting people. I don't think we're going to get any information here. Let's just go back," Lily said, turning around to leave.
But just then, the door opened again, and the same woman gestured for them to come inside.
"Both of you sit here. G.G. will be here soon," the woman said, motioning for them to take a seat.
"Looks like they don't get many guests here… everything is decorated in a very old-fashioned way," Lily murmured, sitting on the couch and scanning the room with curious eyes.
Meanwhile, at home, Stephanie and Cindy had just finished all their chores and sat down when a call came from the police station.
"Is this Cindy? We've sent your father's dead body to the church. Now you can proceed with the funeral. And the belongings we seized from him have also been sent to your house by parcel," the police officer said, ending the call without waiting for Cindy's response.
"I really don't like these police officers. They have no manners when it comes to talking to ordinary people," Cindy said angrily as she put down the phone receiver.
"No problem, Cindy. I agree with you… but listen, never say such things in front of Claire. Otherwise she'll feel bad because her father was also in the police," Stephanie said, trying to calm Cindy down.
Meanwhile, Claire and Lily had been waiting for G.G. ma'am for quite a while. After almost twenty minutes, they finally saw G.G. ma'am coming down the stairs.
"Finally, she's here. This is the old librarian I met that day in the library—G.G. ma'am," Claire whispered to Lily, her eyes fixed on her.
"I knew your search for answers would bring you to my doorstep eventually. But I did not expect you to arrive this soon," G.G. ma'am said as she slowly sat down on the couch nearby.
"So that means you are Garcie Gunway," Claire replied without looking surprised.
"But isn't your age supposed to be around thirty-one? How do you look like someone in her fifties or sixties?" Lily asked, eyeing G.G. from head to toe.
Hearing Lily's question, G.G.—Garcie Gunway—took a long breath before speaking. "Some of our mistakes change our very existence. People may say we should forget the past, but the truth is that the past always changes the present. So yes… I believe 'Past Always Matters.' My past also never left me. Anyway, you must have come here to learn about the history of the Johnson family."
"Thank God we don't have to explain everything from the beginning. By the way, if you already knew everything, then why didn't you ever try to help the Johnson family?" Claire asked, looking straight at Garcie's face.
Just then, Lily's eyes fell on a crystal ball kept in a corner of the room—the kind usually used by fortune tellers or practitioners of dark magic. But she said nothing for now, nor did she mention it to Claire.
"Because even helping comes with a price… and I am paying that price by losing my age, bit by bit, after helping another family long ago," Garcie answered calmly.
"I don't understand anything you're saying. Please tell us everything from the very beginning… from when you were born in 1994, because I know the story only up to that point."
"Oh, alright then. I will tell you everything that happened after that. I cannot help the Johnson family myself… but if you wish to help them, then I will support you. But first, you must make me a promise," Garcie said, staring intently at Claire.
"A promise? What kind of promise?" Lily asked, confused.
But Claire replied in a single breath, "Whatever you want—I'll do it. Because I promised Cindy that I will protect her family at any cost."
Hearing this, Garcie finally began her story. She warned Claire and Lily in a stern voice that they must not interrupt her while she spoke.
"When I was born in 1994, my mother and my father Samuel were living in the same house where the Johnson family lives now. This house of mine stands on the last piece of land my mother had left after losing all of her father's property. My father was a very good and simple man. He always helped everyone, and our family was happy… but my mother, Diana, was not who she pretended to be. My mother practiced dark magic, and she wanted to bring back the soul of her lover, Nicolson, through rebirth."
Just then, Claire cut Garcie off mid-story and blurted out, "I already knew that the spirit belonged to Nicolson."
"I told you no one will interrupt me. This is your first and last mistake. If you interrupt my story again, I won't tell you anything," Garcie said to Claire, giving her an angry look.
Realizing her mistake, Claire apologized and quietly sat down, then requested Garcie to continue the story.
Garcie continued, "To revive Nicolson's spirit, my mother needed a vessel, and for that reason she married my father, Samuel. But my mother was an extremely lustful woman who couldn't control her desire for physical intimacy. That's why she made love to my father every night. She also had sexual relations with many other men besides my father, which my father Samuel didn't know about. Whenever there was a holiday at my school and I was at home while my father went to work, my mother would call men from the neighborhood and have loud sex with them in the house. I was very young at that time, so I didn't understand why different men came home every day when my father wasn't there, and why they would take my mother into the bedroom and close the door behind them. After those men left, my mother would give me some money and warn me not to tell anything to my father.
One day, I saw a man named 'Marc' get into an argument with my mother while he was in the room with her. Suddenly, my mother opened the door and came out of the room. She took the gun hanging on the wall and shot Marc, killing him instantly. She then buried his body in the backyard behind the house. Later, when I turned sixteen, my mother told me that Marc had tried to force anal sex on her, and despite her refusal, he pushed his penis not into her pussy but into her anus. My mother had become extremely angry, because although she had slept with many men, she did anal sex only with Nicolson.
I had already begun to hate my mother as I grew old enough to understand that she was betraying my father. One day, during a lunar eclipse, there was a special moment when a spirit could be summoned to earth and revived by placing it inside a living human body. I was fourteen years old at that time. That night, when I, my father Samuel, and my mother Diana were all sleeping, I suddenly heard my father scream. Terrified, I rushed to my parents' room, but the sight before me made my eyes widen in shock. My mother was sitting on my father's chest, trying to suffocate him with a pillow. I ran to save him, but before I could reach them, my father took his last breath.
Watching my father's murder made my blood boil, and I attacked my mother. But she kicked me hard, causing me to fall and hit my head on the wall, and I lost consciousness. When I regained consciousness, my mother had already begun her black-magic ritual. She had drawn a star on the ground with my father Samuel's body placed in the center. She was sitting in front of it, muttering strange latin words.
Then, a sound like a thunderous detonation ripped through the air, and in the very next moment, my father sat bolt upright where he lay. Overwhelmed with happiness at seeing him alive, I started struggling against the ropes—my mother had bound me tightly so I couldn't interfere with her ritual. But all my joy vanished in the blink of an eye, for within my father's body resided not his own soul, but Nicolson's. I began to hurl curses at my mother, yet she remained utterly unaffected. Overjoyed to see her lover resurrected, she embraced Nicolson.
Nicolson, too, was ecstatic to be alive again. He wrapped her in his arms, and they began to kiss passionately. Before my very eyes, they tore off each other's clothes. My mother then sat down over Nicolson's face, and he plunged his tongue into her wet pussy, intensely licking it. My mother was so utterly shameless; she felt no trace of modesty performing such acts directly in front of her own daughter, whose father's life she had taken just moments ago. After he finished pleasuring her, she mounted Nicolson's penis, and the two completely merged into one another.
The whole chamber began to resonate with my mother's moans, and her heated breaths raised the room's temperature. Having satisfied their lust, Nicolson and my mother collapsed there, naked on the floor. It was then I heard Nicolson tell her how happy he was that she truly loved him and had brought him back to life. Hearing his words, an idea struck me: why not turn Nicolson against my mother?
Thinking quickly, I told Nicolson that after his death, my mother had not only had relations with my father, Samual, but also with many other men in town, betraying both my father and him. It happened exactly as I had planned. My words enraged Nicolson, and he turned on my mother, demanding to know if what I was saying was true. My mother tried desperately to lie, but when Nicolson grabbed her by the throat, she confessed to her deception. To push Nicolson's fury further, I revealed that Mother had even had anal sex with a man named Mark, despite promising Nicolson that she would only reserve that intimacy for him.
Nicolson's fury rocketed to the heavens. He grabbed the knife my mother had used for the sacrifice—it was lying nearby—and drove it with terrible force into her chest, right between her breasts. In her dying rage, my mother used her dark magic to wrench Nicolson's soul from my father Samual's body and send him back to Hell. Utterly furious that I had ruined her plan, she cursed me while dying: from this moment, she spat, my age would advance not by one year annually, but by two. "And that," Gracie said, suddenly falling silent, "is why, though I am only thirty-one, you see me now as a woman of sixty." She paused, as if a long-held burden had finally been lifted from her heart.
Lily and Claire were stunned after hearing everything. Whatever they had believed until now was completely overturned. Claire couldn't understand how a woman could be so cruel and merciless—how she could destroy her own happy family just to resurrect a dead lover.
"So… the spirit inside the Johnson house right now is Nicolson's?" Claire asked Garcie.
"That was exactly the misunderstanding I had too," Garcie replied. "When I first sensed a presence in that house, I thought it was Nicolson. But when my mother revived her lover's soul, it wasn't just Nicolson who returned from hell. Along with him came the spirit of 'Mark'—the man she buried in Marker Graveyard."
Garcie widened her eyes as she spoke, making both Claire and Lily freeze in place.
"Oh my God… so that lust-driven spirit isn't Nicolson at all, but that vulgar man Mark, the one who tried to force himself on your mom?" Lily asked in disbelief.
"Yes, you heard right," Garcie said. "He was obsessed with desire. And when his spirit began haunting that house, he attacked the women of every family who entered it, trapping their souls and murdering the remaining family members. By now, Mark's spirit has claimed the lives of eighteen families… and Olivia Johnson is next."
Garcie rose from her chair as she finished speaking.
"But how do we kill him? Tell us, Garcie—please!" Claire stopped her, desperate for answers.
"His remains are still buried somewhere inside that house," Garcie said, placing her foot on the first step of the stairs. "Find them. And burn them."
"You asked us to make a promise," Claire said suddenly. "You still haven't told us what that promise is."
Garcie paused, turned back, and said, "All I want is this—when you burn Mark's remains, bring me his skull. There's a ritual I need to perform on it… something that might help me break the curse my mother left on me."
"But how will the spirit be destroyed if even a part of the remains is kept aside?" Lily countered, suspicious.
Hearing this, Garcie picked up a colorful box lying nearby and handed it to Claire and Lily. "When you burn Mark's remains, gather all his ashes in this box. I'll still get what I need."
With that, she turned away without waiting for another question and walked upstairs to her room. Claire and Lily stepped out of Garcie's room soon after, the weight of her revelations still pressing heavily on their minds.
"Claire, my head is spinning," Lily said as she unlocked the car and glanced at Claire. "The story Garcie told me felt less like a haunting and more like some bizarre B-grade nonsense. And what on earth does she even want to do with Mark's ashes?"
"I have no idea either," Claire replied, sliding into the passenger seat. "But I promised her — after I cremate Mark's remains, I'll give the ashes to Garcie. For now, let's just go home. Stephanie and the others must be waiting."
Lily started the car, and they pulled out toward home.
"Claire," Lily said suddenly, as though remembering something, "I saw a crystal ball in Garcie's house. The kind people use for black magic… or for seeing the future."
"That could've belonged to Diana, Garcie's mom. She practiced dark magic, remember? It's not a big deal," Claire replied casually.
Meanwhile, back at the house, Stephanie and Cindy were sitting on the couch watching TV when Stephanie suddenly felt Cindy's hand on her thigh — unnaturally slow, deliberate, wrong. It didn't feel like Cindy at all. It felt like someone… or something trying to seduce her.
"Cindy, what are you doing?" Stephanie asked, pulling away.
"Stephanie…" Cindy said in a strange, unsettling tone. "We're alone. Alex is asleep. And Claire and Lily won't be back for a while. Don't you think we should… spend some time together?"
Her eyes were distant. Her voice wasn't hers.
"You're only fifteen," Stephanie said firmly, gently removing Cindy's hand. "This isn't appropriate. Stop."
But the next moment, Cindy's eyes turned blood-red, and she stood up abruptly.
"So you came here to save everyone?" she hissed, her voice layered with something demonic. "Let me see who saves you now… you pathetic woman."
Stephanie froze.
She knew instantly that the malevolent spirit had taken over Cindy again and with Claire and Lily still on the way to home… she would have to face this demon alone.