August 29, 2023

The first time Nathan came over to Jamie's house, he'd been quite surprised to see that, despite the wacky architecture and Jamie's chaotic disposition, the space looked rather tidy and neat. He soon learnt that this tidiness can flourish almost entirely thanks to two factors: the efforts of the housekeeper Jamie employs and the fact the YouTuber mostly dwells in her basement when she doesn't have other places to be.

The basement is where Jamie records and works on her videos—where Witchcraft Wednesday's magic happens, so to say—and it matches Nathan's earliest expectations in that it exists in a state of perpetual disarray. If he had to describe it in a single adjective, he'd settle for 'hurricane-ravaged'.

Essentially, Nathan thinks as he follows Jamie down to the basement, if there was a scientist working at NASA, and that scientist had moderate to severe ADHD combined with a strong interest in things like medieval alchemy, creepy urban legends and TikTok witch cults, then that scientist's office would bear a pretty close resemblance to Jamie's workspace.

The room is dominated by a desk in the corner displaying a huge PC surrounded by tech: cameras, microphones and lighting equipment, all looking so expensive Nathan treads around the set-up with unmatched caution. The rest of the studio is cluttered, leaving not a single piece of bare wall in sight.

There's a big bookcase full of colourful file folders, shiny awards and framed photographs. Strange knick-knacks accumulated over years of making all sorts of videos seemingly migrate across the room at will, each object carrying with it a story Nathan knows Jamie can regale from memory without blinking twice. A messy evidence board still shows a thorough analysis of a peculiar vanishing case covered in a video from way back in January, as well as a stray vegetable soup recipe that probably doesn't belong on that board, but Nathan's been meaning to copy it and try to make the dish someday regardless.

As baffling as this space is, though, Nathan supposes it's cozy in its own way. It's pleasant, it's unique, it has character, and it makes him feels at home.

Only the frogs still take some getting used to.

"Jamie," he begins as he stops in the doorway, raising his eyebrows at the little amphibian hopping slowly in his direction; Jamie herself merely spared it an amused glance before advancing further into her studio. "Think it could be a good idea to put that frog back outside before we talk or what?"

Jamie looks back at the frog. Shrugs. "It can wait. It's not like he's going anywhere. I'll catch him later." She moves to an open window and closes it. "Should've closed this a little earlier."

There's a little pond at the far end of Jamie's backyard, home to a small colony of frogs and toads. Occasionally, individuals of the neighbouring species will tumble down the window well and, should Jamie have left her window open for ventilation purposes, merrily apply themselves to home invasion. Though Jamie could solve this issue pretty easily by installing a cover of sorts, she seems to find these little visitors far too entertaining to be bothered by them. In fact, she recently found a way to turn the frogs into a source of revenue by pointing a camera at the window, all to keep real-time track of the amount of frogs making their way into her studio at any given moment.

("You wouldn't monetize a frog," Nathan had said in disbelief when Jamie first pitched this idea to him, and in response, she'd turned around and done just that. And, somehow, it works. 'Live Frog Cam' makes Jamie's audience go buckwild. Nathan's never before seen Twitch stream chats blow up with so many excited exclamations of 'Frog!!!', 'froggy...', 'FORG :D' and every possible variation and misspelling inbetween.

It's madness. It's brilliance. The line is truly very thin.)

"Guess you get to stay for now, then," Nathan mutters under his breath to the ribbity little cash machine. Ever since he had conversations with a bobcat, talking to animals doesn't strike him as all that odd anymore. Unlike Jinx back in the day, however, this frog doesn't react to him, continuing on its way undisturbed. Nathan wonders what it would've had to say if he and Jamie still had magic to translate its language.

As if by some miracle, after filling her studio with that sheer abundance of stuff, Jamie still scrounged enough space to fit a small blue couch and a coffee table inside. Nathan sits down and places the box of donuts he brought with him from work on the table. It's hard to find something to buy for someone who can afford everything while making minimum wage yourself, but Jamie always looks so overjoyed at being on the receiving end of donuts that Nathan justifies the purchase every time without any trouble. Totally worth it.

"So I've gotten pretty curious about this PowerPoint-worthy Venetian mystery location of yours over the past few days," Nathan says, opening the donut box. "If you're ready to tell me about it, I'm all ears."

Jamie remains standing in the middle of the room, looking slightly guilty. "Okay, I didn't have time left to make an actual PowerPoint," she confesses, which is kind of a shame, for Jamie always turns slideshows into veritable works of art Nathan loves to see. "Or rather, I wanted to get started on it earlier today and somehow ended up playing Among Us for hours instead, so... Sorry. But I think we can make do without it! The place we're talking about is an island in the Venetian Lagoon called Poveglia. Do you have any prior knowledge about it?"

Nathan barely even knows in what part of Italy Venice is located (somewhere near Sicily, right?), let alone which islands can be found around it. "Uh... No, I've never heard of a place with that name."

"It's an island with a fascinating, but also a really dark history, so it's considered super haunted." Jamie wanders over to her bookcase, eyes roving over her file folders while she tries to determine which one she needs. "The original inhabitants left it behind when they fled from war way back in the fourteenth century, but the Venetians put it back to good use some five hundred years later. It became a customs checkpoint, but it would be turned into a quarantine station for sick people soon after, and that's what it was for over twenty years. It mostly confined plague victims who were pretty much there just to die and be buried in plague pits. Mass graves."

Nathan's hand, which had been moving to grab a donut, stills in mid-air. The colourful pastries suddenly don't look all that appetizing anymore. "...I have an instant newfound appreciation for the COVID pandemic quarantine methods. That's brutal."

Jamie laughs. "Oh, it gets even better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it." She snatches a turquoise folder off the shelf, which must contain her notes on Poveglia. Nathan, truth be told, hasn't yet figured out how Jamie's colour-coding system works. He just doesn't understand why Poveglia should go in turquoise, American folklore in yellow, and why demon classifications and obscure horror movie reviews should sit together in bubblegum pink of all things. He asked Jamie about it multiple times and each answer he received only left him more confused. But as long as the system makes sense to the person it's supposed to make sense to, he sees no reason to complain about it.

"In the 1920s, the buildings on Poveglia were converted into a psychiatric hospital," Jamie continues, placing her folder next to the donut box and sifting through the files. "It goes without saying that some pretty unspeakable stuff must've gone down in that facility. There's this urban legend about a mad doctor experimenting on his patients around that time, torturing them and doing lobotomies and such. The ghosts on the island are said to have driven him to madness. He killed himself by jumping off a bell tower."

A side effect of visiting and talking about dark places like these for a living, Nathan has long since noted, is a desensitization of sorts. Jamie relays all this information as if she's discussing getting her nails done rather than a gruesome island of death.

"I imagine that hospital must've been closed for a good while by now, right?"

"Yeah. It was turned into a nursing home for the elderly a few years before the authorities closed it permanently in 1968. The island's been abandoned ever since. There have been a few projects and initiatives attempting to revitalize it, but all of those ended up abandoned, too."

Jamie finds the documents she needs, handing the notes over to Nathan for evaluation—copied quotes, compiled sources, a crude timeline and printed photos. Nathan's more of a pictures than a words kind of guy, so he skips all the written scribbles and focuses on flipping through the visuals. Aerial photographs depict what appears to be a perfectly innocuous, even pretty island, with charming old buildings surrounded by lush woodland and fields. Close-ups taken inside the buildings, however, reveal a grimmer reality: derelict, near-empty rooms in the process of being conquered by vegetation, gloomy and forlorn.

"Lovely place for a picnic," Nathan comments, picking up a donut for real this time; diminished appetite or not, it's simply impossible to ignore enticing sweet snacks when they're right in front of him. "Does it get many visitors?"

Jamie shrugs, putting her hands in her pockets. "It's sort of illegal to go there."

Of course it is.

"Poveglia is state property," Jamie elaborates, "and the Italian government officially prohibits visits. Some people say that's because it's so haunted and because of the unmarked mass graves, while others claim it's just because those old ruins are a safety hazard. But yeah, it's forbidden. Certainly doesn't stop everyone from trying to get there, though."

Of course it doesn't.

"There are easy ways to get to Poveglia illegally if you're willing to do the legwork. It's only fifteen minutes from the Lido island by boat. Securing the boat itself and not getting caught by any authorities would be the hardest parts of the whole ordeal. The rest is basically a piece of cake."

Nathan takes a bite from his donut. "You've already researched how to trespass as smoothly as possible."

"Hey, I don't want to trespass," Jamie defends, which Nathan would've found hard to believe based on his own past experiences with her if she didn't look so damn serious while saying this. "I like going the legal route for filming. I love going the legal route for filming. Going through the official channels occasionally opens doors I wouldn't even know about otherwise, and I can get fascinating interviews or other relevant information out of it. It's great."

"But that approach doesn't work for Poveglia?"

"I've been trying to get a permit to film on the island for months now, but whoever's reviewing my requests just keeps shutting me down. And if they're not doing that, they're referring me to other people who can shut me down. So guess what, it's their loss now. There comes a time in every young woman's life where she has to decide if she really wants to let the Italian government stand between her and her dreams, and I say fuck the government."

Nathan's pretty sure most young women in Morales don't have personal beef with the government of Italy, but Jamie does have more experience with that than he himself could ever have, so he can't point that out and feel good about it. "I guess that's fair," he says instead, because he can't condemn a bit of lawbreaking without being a hypocrite, either, especially not when it comes to victimless crimes. "But... They don't have those rules for no reason, Jamie. I'm not saying they shouldn't be broken, but that prohibition serves some purpose. And with those rules as strict as they are, I'm kind of wondering how many people actually died there."

Jamie finally finds enough tranquility within herself to sit down next to him. She helps herself to a donut, too. "There aren't any confirmed counts, but there are estimates. Nat Geo says it's over a hundred thousand. Atlas Obscura says hundred and sixty thousand, and also that fifty percent of the island's soil may consist of human remains. No clue where they're getting all those numbers, though, so they could all be bullshit."

Bullshit or not, it's still enough to get Nathan to choke on his donut. "Jesus fucking Christ, that's a lot."

Jamie nods gravely. "I said Poveglia was an interesting place. Not that it was a pleasant or a fun one."

It clearly isn't. Nathan gets his breathing under control again. "I think I'm starting to see why Stella doesn't like the thought of you going there."

Perhaps the chances of anything bad happening to Poveglia's illicit visitors are pretty slim, but Nathan's always been prone to concern. He remembers that sorcery and spirits are real, remembers all the dangerous things Bishop Nikulasson and his magic book were capable of, and the memory of a peculiar supernatural encounter with a not-deer days ago still sits fresh in his mind. He knows there's next to nothing he could say to make Jamie give up on her plan; once she has her mind set on something, she'll mulishly stick it out to the very end without a moment's hesitation.

But he also knows he'd never forgive himself if something awful were to happen her. Something he might've been able to prevent if he'd only been there to help and protect her.

Thus, Nathan may fear and dislike the sound of Poveglia as much as he wants, but if Jamie's serious about visiting it, he isn't about to sit back in their hotel room and twiddle his thumbs worrying himself sick while waiting for her to return. If she's going, so is he. A hundred thousand ghosts be damned.

"Trust me, it's not the numbers making Stella so fussy about this." Jamie moves as if to stand up again, but manages to stop herself in time. Now she just sits there all tense, frowning at her donut's red frosting. "Because if we're going to be talking numbers, I'm statistically much more likely to perish in a car accident than I am to die on Poveglia."

Nathan knows how Jamie drives, so that's fair.

"Anyway," Jamie continues with a grimace, "the deal with Stella is simply that she's convinced herself I'm some sort of reckless idiot who's always just one random life choice away from killing herself by accident." She pauses. "That would probably be a pretty accurate assessment of me if it weren't for the fact it's been twenty-four years and I'm not dead yet."

Nathan intends to keep it that way. "So you're sure Stella's just overestimating the risks and underestimating you."

"Yes." Jamie bites into her donut as if it wronged her somehow. "And come on, Nate, you'd realise that too if you stopped to think about it. This isn't the first time I'm visiting a supposedly haunted place with horrible stories chasing it around. Far from it. And I can tell you from experience that most of those places I've been to were just slightly eerie locations where nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to me. Even the few spots with bad vibes that did convince me there may have been something paranormal going on didn't mean bad news. The only time I got somewhat hurt in any of them, it was because I tripped over my shoelaces. Nothing to write home about."

"Hm..."

"And if that doesn't convince you, let's throw in some more numbers." Staying seated proves to be too hard after all, for Jamie stands up and starts pacing around the room as if it helps her get her thoughts in order. "The battlefield at Gettysburg is said to be one of the most haunted places in America, right? Over fifty thousand Civil War casualties. But when I filmed there, the most paranormal thing I encountered were a couple strange shadows that most certainly weren't enough to prove the presence of ghosts. I didn't get hurt, and the same goes for the millions of tourists who visit the place annually. Why should Poveglia be a different story?"

Though the Venetian island still gives Nathan the creeps, he really doesn't have a good counterargument for any of this. It's solid logic with a firm foundation in facts and relevant personal experience. Magic may be real, not-deer may roam the woods and the dead on Poveglia may linger, but none of that has to mean visiting the island spells out danger by default. Nathan's objections, in the end, are born from little but fear and paranoia.

Those emotions may keep him alive, but they shouldn't impede his rational judgment. And rationally, wandering around some ruins with a camera isn't even close to the most threatening situation either he or Jamie has been in.

Nathan shoves his last bite of donut into his mouth. "This is really important to you, isn't it?"

"Incredibly important." Jamie's eyes shine as she continues her restless trek through the studio. "I've been thinking about the deer footage, and it's good, but it's not good enough for a proper comeback. Don't get me wrong, I like sitting here playing scary video games and dissing bad horror movies, but that's not all I want to do with my channel for the rest of its days. I want to continue covering interesting incidents and places and people, and if I'm going to do that, I need my audience to trust me to talk about those things again. And I'm just done with the 'slow and steady' approach. I need something really impressive and fascinating to remind my audience why they liked that aspect of my content in the first place. Something that speaks to people's imagination, no bullshit, no lies, just verifiable information and nuanced analysis and a place so dark nobody could possibly lose interest in whatever I have to say about it."

"Moving speech." Nathan ponders whether or not to grab another donut, deciding against it only when he remembers doing so would equal an extra hour in the gym. "I guess Poveglia could be a breakthrough."

"It's not could be. It's will be." Jamie finishes her own donut. "The timing couldn't be better. If we're going to Venice in October, we could have an awesome video ready to go by the time Halloween and Día de los Muertos roll around. Perfect moment to draw some attention to a spooky place and remember the people who lost their lives in it. All it'll take is spending an afternoon and a night on Poveglia with the camera, some editing, and there we go, we're golden."

When put like that, the whole endeavour really does sound like it won't be a big deal. Nathan vows to try and be a little less of a doomsayer and more open to what's probably going to be an interesting experience, slightly morbid at most.

"If that's all and it means so much to you, I've got your back," he tells Jamie. "Just don't forget we should take some time to simply enjoy Venice, too."

Jamie lights up, flashing him that one special smile that makes everything in the world feel right. "With two whole weeks at our disposal? Easy." She makes her way back to the couch, dropping down next to Nathan again and pulling out her phone. "Speaking of the vacation aspect... Remember how Stella said I got to pick where we'll stay?"

Nathan nods. "Yeah."

"It's technically still your turn." Jamie unlocks her phone and holds it out to Nathan, who dutifully accepts the device. "And if we're sticking with that system, it's only fair you get to choose. If you want to, of course."

In those two amazing weeks spent roadtripping around Iceland together, hiking and whale-watching and debating whether or not to try and taste fermented shark (not recommended), Nathan and Jamie agreed they'd take turns picking accommodations. The method added a fun element of surprise to the trip for them both. Jamie picked their final hotel in Reykjavik, so she's right. It is Nathan's turn.

"I don't mind," Nathan says as he opens Jamie's booking app, because it can't be that hard, right? Most of the accommodations he picked in Iceland suited their needs just fine. "Any special requests?"

Jamie shrugs. "Nah, surprise me. Just make sure it's affordable and..." she pauses, distracted. "...You have frosting in your stubble."

Nathan, who never was all that great at switching subjects mid-sentence, blinks like an idiot. "What?"

"Donut frosting." Jamie moves her hand in the direction of his stubble, an almost instinctive reaction to wipe it clean. Nathan's mind blanks and his soul almost leaves his touch-starved body.

A piercing scream from upstairs resounds through the house.

Jamie pulls away from him and gets off the couch so fast it's honestly impressive. "Did you leave the door open when you entered? Because I think my housekeeper just met that poor little frog."

Nathan's still reeling from almost-but-not-quite getting some skin-on-skin contact, so it takes him a few seconds to get his thoughts in order and formulate a coherent reply. He's pretty sure he's still blinking far too much and seriously, seriously, cursed be all the frogs in the goddamn land.

"That... might be the case?"

"Then I should probably go save them from each other. Sorry, back in a sec!" Jamie rushes off, yelling some apologies, reminders to keep calm and promises of a salary raise to her housekeeper upstairs. Nathan stays where he is, frozen in place, baffled once more that eccentric as all hell is apparently his type.

Anyway. Frog catching in progress. Jamie will be back soon.

Nathan removes the frosting from his facial hair himself and turns back to the booking app, determined to get his head back in the game and find a place to stay in Venice while the deals are still good and the options plentiful. Best not to wait for too long, because time always does seem to fly.

October isn't so far away.