"Have you seen him since...?" Alan asked, breaking the long silence hanging like a thick curtain between them. He glanced at his watch then at Lena again, his voice disturbing her reverie.

He had been observing her, puzzled by her quiet thoughtfulness. His eyes kept strolling to Lena from the screen of his computer, he couldn't focus on doing what he was supposed to be doing-- replying to all the comments and emails their ghost-hunting team received after posting their last video on an online video sharing platform. Thousands of their followers saw it overnight and the comments seemed infinite. Like every year, people were going crazy about ghost sightings this close to Halloween.

Finally, Alan forced himself to tear his gaze off his friend and typed another reply. His friend... He would have made her so much more than a friend and a colleague, if only she let him. But Lena only had eyes for Josh, the last piece of their ghost hunting trio, ever since the three of them met in the first year of university, a few years ago. And Josh... was Josh. For some reason unknown even to Alan, he refused to see in Lena anything more than a friend. It was typical of him to disappear without a trace for a couple of days each time they finished working on a case. Lena had nothing to worry about, but she just would not listen to him.

Lena sighed and shook her head in response to his question. She pulled her gaze off the window of their office, Alan's sitting room, sprinkled with cold, late October rain, meeting her friend's eyes.

"Josh called me when he got back yesterday. He was supposed to come over for dinner but then he changed his mind at the last moment." She shrugged. "You know him, he's always so... distant this time of the year."

Alan nodded. They were all 'sensitive' and could perceive paranormal activity, but Josh was the only true medium, the gifted one. The weeks close to Halloween, when paranormal occurrences were always stronger and more frequent, he was never quite himself.

Lena shivered and reached for the cardigan hanging on the back of her chair before she started taking another of her cameras apart, cleaning its parts, then reassembling it to keep both her fingers and her mind busy. The night vision infrared camera was a great piece of technology capable of taking pictures even in complete darkness, capturing paranormal entities.

She was the photographer and the presenter, the face and the voice of their team, like Alan was the cameraman and the gadget specialist, and Josh their location seeker and medium.

They both turned to the door the moment it opened, letting Josh enter the office.

"What? Did something happen?" He asked, looking from Lena's relieved expression to Josh, who smiled, shaking his head.

"See? You had nothing to worry about. Told ya..." Alan told Lena, but she did not hear him, her whole attention was on Josh.

"You did not sleep again." Lena muttered in a sigh, observing the dark rings under his eyes.

"I did. An hour, maybe two..."

For him, during this time of the year it was normal. As Halloween approached, Josh could feel the door between the realms of the dead and the living opening, letting those from the other side seep back into this world. Some were so strong that they could move between the worlds whenever they wanted to, but most of them had to  wait for Halloween, and a few days around.

Josh smiled at his two best friends warmly. No one ever wanted to believe him until he met Lena and Alan, in the first year of parapsychology. They had never separated since and now, nearly four years after their graduation, their three person ghost hunting agency was a blooming business, their income coming mainly from one of the television channels turning their adventures into a reality show, and a magazine popular nationwide buying their photographs and articles.

"We have a new case. I got this email yesterday and I spent the night researching the town and the surrounding area."

He handed a sheet of paper and a couple of pictures to Lena, then sat down to his computer placed on the table opposite of hers, while she read the printed email silently, passing the photographs to Alan.

"Will-o'-the-wisps." Alan said the moment he looked at one of the pictures. "Light blue flames appearing at the level of the ground caused by combustion of methane and phosphine due to the decomposition of organic remains. There's nothing paranormal about those..."

"Maybe." Josh agreed, the swift pitter-patter of his fingers flying over the keyboard, hardly touching it, obliterating momentarily that caused by the rain landing on the window pane. "The small town where these pictures were taken is surrounded by marshes, heathland and a swamp forest which would support your theory. There is a pond and an ancient cemetery near the place where the photographs were taken too. But it all gets more interesting when you read a little about the town."

Lena walked over to him, unable to resist her curiosity. Placing her hand on Josh's shoulder, giving it a little, unconscious squeeze as if she wanted to make sure that he was really back, she started reading the information he found even as it appeared on the screen.

Alan, watching the two from his place, shook his head as he noticed how Josh closed his eyes and inhaled deeply when Lena's hand rested on his shoulder, leaning into her touch ever so slightly. He was sure that Josh loved her as much as she loved him. What on earth was holding his friend back, was beyond him.

"What does it say?" Alan asked, banishing his thoughts, when he saw them exchanging glances.

"This article talks about disappearances. Quite a few, spread over many years. At least one person a year is reported missing in this town, and they always disappear close to Halloween."

"And how come we have never heard about this place before?" Alan asked.

"Most of those who vanish are tourists, careless hikers underestimating the dangers of the area, who supposedly get lost in the marshes. That makes it easy to explain for the authorities. But there were some locals, too." Lena explained to Alan before turning back to Josh, "Who sent you the pictures?"

"A local teenage girl. She and her friends spent a night in a half-crumbled mansion situated at the outskirts of the town. As a dare, no doubt. They got pretty scared when they saw these 'flames' through the window. She claims that they glided up from the surface of a small pond spreading at the end of the house's enormous garden. The girls took a few pictures but then panicked when one of them got into a sort of a trance and wanted to follow the lights. She only snapped out of it when they dragged her back home. She refuses to talk about what happened but her friends are worried that she'll go back alone... "

"And we are to 'send the ghosts back where they come from before they'll take Stella away, like they did with all the other people.'" Lena read from the email she was still holding. "Ok. We must go. I'm not sure that this is really the case for us, maybe they have invented it all... but we can't let these girls get into trouble, right? They have asked for help..."

"Exactly." Josh said, placing his hand on hers, still resting on his shoulder, and squeezing it.

Alan smiled as he noticed. Something was... suddenly different about Josh and he liked how this change made Lena glow... Still, he pretended not to have seen anything as he sighed, "And where is this place? Knowing you, it's somewhere at the back of beyond..."

"Lakewood. A town of some one thousand eight hundred souls, situated precisely three hundred and twenty five miles north-east from here." Josh said, checking the details on his computer.

"That's far." Alan said, his eyes flickering between Josh and Lena. "Even if we leave right now, we won't get there before midnight. Have you at least booked our accommodation?"

"No need. We will stay a couple of nights in the house where the girls took these pictures. According to them it's an 'ancient, half-crumbled, abandoned, haunted mansion'. We will need our sleeping bags..."

"Let's go. I'll get our things." Lena said, her voice betraying her excitement, as she rushed out of the office. There, in the corridor, was a wardrobe containing their luggage, all packed and ready for occasions like these.

"Well, you never cease to surprise us." Alan smiled at Josh once they were alone. "Are you... all right?" He added, hinting at the sudden change he could perceive in his friend.

"Great." Josh said, returning his smile before he let his eyes drop back to the screen of his computer. "Let me just reply to the girls. I'm sure they'll be relieved to know that we will be with them tonight."

°•°•°

It was still raining while Josh steered the car out of the thick traffic of the city patiently, accelerating as he eased into the smooth, fast-flowing stream of vehicles moving along the motorway.

Lena, sitting in the passenger seat next to him kept shooting inconspicuous glances in his direction, and so did Alan from the back seat, where he was going through a box filled with his ghost-hunting equipment. The change within their friend puzzled them both, it was too apparent to ignore.

"Where did you go?" Lena asked, hinting at his three days long unexplained absence, when he caught her observing him.

"Home. Finally. It's been so long..." Josh replied, surprising her.

Josh had never talked about his home with either of them, but they both sensed that he had a good reason for that. Something... that made Josh the man he was now, something that filled his blue eyes with sadness and melancholy not commonly found in someone so young, must have happened there, a long time ago. Lena put her hand on his thigh unconsciously, in an attempt to soothe him, letting him know that he did not need to talk about it.

Josh glanced at her again, smiling, appreciating her acceptance and understanding, her patience. But he was finally ready to talk. "It is a town in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by forests on one side and sea on the other, as small as Lakewood. My father passed away years ago and mom does not live there any longer. There's no one left there for me, even the few friends I had as a child had moved away. Still, I'm happy that I went back..."

He looked directly in Lena's eyes for a moment, as if he was debating with himself if he should tell her everything right now, but he decided against it when he met Alan's curious gaze in the rear-view mirror. He wasn't as ready as he had thought, not yet. Josh turned on the radio and they drove in silence for a good while, before they slipped into a conversation about their new case.

They swapped seats after they had stopped for lunch and a much needed coffee in the early afternoon. It was Alan's turn to drive and Josh sat at the back. Lena joined him, and soon she was leaning into him, lulled to sleep by the monotonous hum of the car's engine and the whoosh of the passing cars sending the water left behind by the rain flying off their wheels noisily. Josh wasn't the only one who did not sleep enough the previous night. Lena never slept well when he vanished without a word.

Josh moved a stray strand of her dark-blond hair away from her face as her head slid into a more comfortable position against his shoulder, catching Alan's raised eyebrow look in the rear-view mirror.

"Don't say anything." He whispered the warning. Josh knew that his behaviour must have been more than confusing for his friends, Lena especially, in the past, but now he was ready to make everything up to them. To her. If only she let him.

"I'm mute as a fish." Alan grinned. "One thing only, please," he murmured. "Whatever happened to you in the last three days, I'm happy to see you like this. I'm happy for her. She lo..."

"Thanks Alan. I think I know that." Josh wrapped his arm a little tighter around the sleeping girl, careful not to wake her up. "Pass me her cardigan, will you?" He nodded towards the passenger seat where Lena had left it before. The rain had stopped but it got colder too, he mused after he wrapped it around her as well as he could without waking her up, then looked through the window into the thickening darkness separating the car from the apparently endless rows of trees growing on both sides of the road.

They reached Lakewood mere minutes before midnight. The streets of the town clinging to the only dry stretch of land between marshes and a swamp forest were deserted, most of the houses built in the centuries passed glared at them with their blind, black, lifeless windows as they drove past.

"The house we're looking for is near the old cemetery, right?" Lena asked, looking up at Josh from the map she had been studying on the screen of her phone.

They were sitting in the front seats again, Josh at the steering wheel, while Alan dozed at the back.

"Yes, on the side of the cemetery farther away from the town. We just need to drive through this part of the forest and we should be there."

Ten minutes later, reaching the end of a narrow, unpaved road, Josh parked the car in front of a tall ruin, a skeleton of what once must have been an impressive mansion.

Alan woke up the moment the car stopped moving and they all got off together.

"Wow. That's... quite something." Alan muttered looking at the house bathed in the bright moonlight, shivering. "Do we really have to sleep here?"

The night was cold. The damp air rising from the waterlogged land surrounding them found its way under the layers of their clothes in no time, chilling their skin, making Lena draw closer to Josh. He wrapped his arm over her shoulders, inhaling deeply,  welcoming the scent of wild, untamed nature reigning in this place.

"Are you scared of ghosts?" Josh replied to Alan's question teasingly, observing the old house.

They could all feel it-- the presence of something not scientifically explainable. None of them felt scared though. What was starting to worry Josh now was Lena's comfort. The house was in the worse condition he had expected it to be. It will be a long and cold night.

"We will get rooms in the town first thing in the morning." He promised. "But let us go in now."

He looked from Alan to Lena, ready to beg her forgiveness for this adventure if needed, but she only smiled, as impatient to enter the crumbling building as himself. She laced her fingers through his when he offered her his hand, letting him lead her towards the house.

The staircase ascending to the wrap-around porch was by some miracle still intact, but the porch itself looked too fragile, Josh realised, pointing the cone of light of his torch at the hole-riddled wood, before stepping on it.

"Wait, look!" Alan called them before Josh and Lena, still hand in hand, could risk crossing the porch to the entrance.

As one they turned towards his voice, then in the direction his torch was pointing to.

Two figures stepped into the silvery light of the full moon from the deep shadows pooling under the nearest trees.

"Come on the road, quick!" Josh called as he descended the stairs again, Lena in tow. "The land is not safe here, you, walking like that without a light in the woods could step off the trail in no time! What are you even doing here this late, you should be at home, fast asleep." He scolded the two girls materialising in front of them from the forest.

Under the scrutiny of Alan's torch, they did not look older than fifteen. They were too young to believe in danger, or consider the consequences of what they were doing. Josh shook his head when he noticed how their mud-covered shoes glistened menacingly, hinting at the omnipresent swamp. The girls were as young and carefree as Claire had been when... The thought came unexpected and unwelcome, making his heart skip a beat.

"We are fine, calm down Mr. Owens. We know this place better than you do, we were born here. You really came!" The two spoke over each other excitedly, then giggled, before the taller one added, "This side of the road, where the cemetery is, is safe, really."

"Are you not scared to walk across the cemetery at midnight?" Lena enquired, bemused by the awed looks they kept shooting at Josh and Alan. Apparently their ghost-hunting trio had a few fans even here.

"Which one is Stella?" Josh asked when they only shook their heads in response to Lena's question. He was curious to see the girl who wanted to follow the lights.

"Stella couldn't come tonight. Her mom works at the hospital at nights, but tonight she's off and Stella couldn't get out of the house. But she will come with us tomorrow. It's Halloween, everyone will be out."

"How about you two? Shouldn't you be at home right now?"

"We live with our grandma. She's old, and always sleeps by nine. We are out every night." The taller girl replied, while the other one, her eyes glued to Josh and Lena's joined hands, enquired, "Are you two together? Like... a couple? You didn't look so in your show."

Lena giggled while Josh shot a warning look at the grinning Alan before he said, "All right. That's it for tonight. Let me drive you back to town."

When Lena saw how the girls exchanged unsure looks, more cautious of getting into a car with a strange man, even though he was Josh Owens himself, than walking across a cemetery, she said, "No Josh, I'll take them back."

The girls nodded, accepting Lena's offer, not giving the men a chance to argue.

"I'm Kylie, and she is my sister Lucy." The taller girl said, approaching Lena. "The house is not as bad as it looks. We usually sleep in the sitting room downstairs. We left some blankets there, and some wood, should you want to use the fireplace. There is a small bathroom next to the kitchen, and you can get all the water you need from the well. The best view of the back garden and the lights is from the bedrooms upstairs."

Alan nodded, "Well, thank you, girls. That sounds good. Just one more thing, are those lights always here?"

"There are always some lights, here and there in the woods. But we only see this many many of them around Halloween."

"Let them go home Alan, we can talk to them tomorrow. It's late." Lena urged, squeezing Josh's hand before letting it go and walking towards the girls.

They followed her to the car and sat at the back obediently.

"They are quite... something. Nothing like the city girls." Alan muttered as he and Josh watched the car disappear under the trees.

°•°•°

The men entered the house finding everything as the girls had described. While Alan brought in his box of gadgets and started setting them up, Josh laid a fire in the room where they were supposed to sleep, then fetched their sleeping bags and luggage from the car.

Lena returned just as Josh, getting nervous by her twenty minutes' long absence walked outside again to wait for her there. She filled them in quickly on what the girls told her about the town, its ghost legends, and their friend Stella on the way.

"None of the disappearances had ever seemed suspicious enough to the authorities to look deeper into the cases. The internet site we read called them disappearances, but the bodies of those missing were mostly found. It really looks like those poor hikers simply got of the trail and drowned." She mused, as she followed Alan and Josh up a creaky staircase leading to the rooms offering the view of the lights, the soles of their shoes leaving imprints in the deep layer of dust revealed by the moving lights of their torches. "I don't see how this," she waved the camera she held in one of her hands through the mould-scented air filled with paranormal presence they could all perceive, "would have anything to do with those cases."

"What exactly did they say about Stella?" Josh asked, offering her his hand to help her take two stairs at once to avoid touching the topmost, particularly threadbare step.

Lena sighed. "It's a sad story. The girl was in a car accident a year and a half ago. She survived with an injury that kept her in hospital for weeks. By the time she got out her boyfriend, who died on the spot, was buried. Gone from her life forever. She had never been quite herself since and this wasn't the first time she tried to walk into the woods following a light. But the two girls never saw her in such a state as two nights ago, the night when they sent you that email."

Josh nodded. He knew what was going on, what was wrong with Stella. He had been suffering in the same way for years.

They helped Alan to set up the rest of his equipment in an empty room situated directly above the sitting room, which provided the best view of the garden. His EMF meter and the thermographic camera only confirmed the presence of anomalies all of them could feel from the moment they entered the building. While Alan started recording the bluish lights fluctuating above the enormous garden, in the distance where the unkempt lawn they could more imagine than see in the moonlight obscured by passing clouds, Josh took a couple of pictures.

"Look." He said, enlarging one of them as well as he could.

"They are not will-o'-the-wisps. They are..." Alan muttered.

"Souls. Ghosts. Visitors from the worlds beyond our own." Josh confirmed.

No matter how many times they encountered ghosts, knowing well that most of them were innocuous, it was... disquieting. Lena shivered; they had never seen anything quite as clearly as this.

A sudden noise coming from the adjacent room startled them all.

"Josh! Wait!" Lena called after him but he was already in the corridor, the light of his torch searching for the source of the sound.

She bumped into him when he froze in the doorway of the other bedroom.

"Stella. Don't." Josh said calmly, moving to the side to let Lena see the girl perched in the broken window of the room, the sharp shards of glass mere inches from the bare skin of her arms.

The two girls had been wrong. Their friend wasn't at home.

"How do you know my name?" Stella asked, confirming Josh's guess as she looked towards them briefly, her eyes huge and shiny in the light of their torches, perfectly black just like her long hair. She shook her head, as if she was trying to get rid of their presence. "I must go to him." She added, letting go of the window frame, disappearing into the night filling the world beyond immediately.

Josh crossed the room in time to see her sliding down the time-worn roof of the wrap-around porch.

"No! You stay with Alan." He called to Lena before he dropped his torch and followed the girl out of the window, scratching his hand on a piece of glass, then down the roof.

Luckily the wood did not give way under his weight and the roof wasn't too high. Josh sighed with relief as he landed upon an incredibly soft soil.

When he pulled himself to his feet Stella was already half-way through the endless lawn.

As he ran after her, he noticed how the ground was getting increasingly muddy the closer they got to the spot Stella was heading for-- a small round pond surrounded by trees at the very end of the garden.

Finally she stopped, knee-high in a waterlogged soil, staring at one of the bluish ghosts who now stood perfectly still in front of her.

Josh could hear Lena and Alan whispering excitedly in the distance somewhere behind them, their voices reaching him on a gust of chilly wind, but he did not turn around.

As his feet sank slowly into the mud he watched the scene unfolding in front of him, illuminated by the light of the moon emerging from behind a cloud.

The ghostly apparition laid his hand on Stella cheek and the girl put her hand over his then on her own cheek as her palm passed right through the bluish light, tears running down her cheeks.

"I love you." She whispered as his ethereal lips touched her forehead, then made to follow him when he left her standing there, while he floated closer to the pond.

"Stella, no." Josh said firmly, taking a few more steps towards the girl, shoes squishing in the mud.

His voice stunned her enough to make her stop and turn around, giving Josh sufficient time to pull her in his arms.

He turned around briefly motioning to Lena and Alan to stop where they were and watch from a distance.

"I must follow him." Stella whispered, looking at the bluish flames growing weaker by the minute, but she did not struggle to free herself.

"No you don't. You know that. He does not want you to follow. He wants you to let him go."

"He came back for me." She said, now looking at Josh. Her eyes glistening with tears, looked silver in the moonlight, not pitch black as before. She was back, freed from whatever spell she had been under.

Josh sighed, "I thought so, too. About Claire." With Lena and Alan within earshot this was a good moment to finally start talking about her. "But it's not true. They keep coming back to beg us to let them go. It's us who keep them here. They know that if we followed them now, we would die... they don't want that. They... want to be set free."

"What shall I do then?" The girl whispered, voice breaking, eyes flooding with fresh tears.

"Say goodbye."

Stella took a deep breath. "I love you, Jake. I always will... I'm... so sorry..." her voice trailed off and she burst into loud sobs even as the last lights vanished, morphing into the faint moonlight.

"Well done." Josh murmured, lifting her in his arms and making his way across the muddy lawn to a safer ground closer to the house, where he left her in Lena's care.

Once Stella was sleeping in one of their sleeping bags by the fireplace, and Alan was busy watching the videos and pictures on his laptop in the next room, Josh told Lena about Claire.

The two lay wrapped around each other on top of Josh's sleeping bag, Lena's head resting on his chest as he watched the flames dancing and whispering on the hearth.

"Her name is Claire. She was my first love, my only girlfriend. The summer when she died she was only sixteen, one year younger than me." He said, pulling Lena a little closer before he continued. "We were just as brave... and reckless and silly as these girls. We lived on the coast, in a small town perched on a tall cliff. There was this old, allegedly haunted lighthouse. The two of us, and our best friend Tim, spent many nights there, always keeping to the ground floor, as the rest of the tower was locked. Until the night when we found the door leading up to the light opened. Before I found my camera in my backpack, Claire and Tim ran up..."

"Josh... you don't hav..." Lena whispered.

"It's fine. I want to tell you. I... I can still see them. 'Take a picture of me Josh,' Claire called as she saw me in the doorway. She was leaning against the iron rail surrounding the light... The next thing I knew she and Tim vanished from my view, fell into the void as the rusted metal crumbled in their hands, and were swallowed by the waves crashing against rocks deep down..."

"They found Tim's body the following day," Josh continued after a short while, "but they never found Claire. My parents were divorcing that year. The moment the formalities were settled, mom and I moved away. She thought it would help me forget. It didn't. Soon, I started seeing the blue light. Claire. And other ghosts, too. At the beginning I was convinced she came back for me, just like Stella. I was sure that she wanted me to follow her... I tried... But then I met you and realised that I was probably wrong. No matter how much I tried to fight my feelings for you, my love kept growing, and I knew that Claire only kept coming back because I failed to set her free... Finally I did it. That's why I went home."

"I love you too, Josh." Lena whispered, her voice hinting at the tears she was trying to hide.

"Thank you for waiting for me for so long." He whispered back, then kissed her.

"What shall we do now?" Lena asked, her voice barely audible over the crackling of the fire as she did not want to disturb the sleeping girl.

"We will take her home the moment she wakes up. Then we will get rooms in the town, and sleep the whole day," Josh whispered back, smiling at Lena. "We should stay here one more night-- it's Halloween, so we should make sure the kids won't get into trouble. Also, we need to make sure that Stella is coping well. And then... anything you want, Lena."