Shovelful after shovel full of soft, damp earth flew past her hips as she dug, sweat dripping from her whole body, the moon sinking in the sky, preparing to make way for sunrise, her deadline.

As a woman of science, Maddie did all she could to make sense of the strange rituals and mysterious techniques of the ghost hunters that had come before her. For the most part, she'd been met with success. But sometimes, rituals that had lasted for millennia weren't for mortal minds to understand, and unfortunately, she just didn't have a big enough sample size to conduct proper research.

She'd been digging for hours now, a grave, six feet long, six feet wide, six feet deep. All the number theory in the world had yet to give her a satisfactory explanation as to why 666, of all numbers, had such power over monsters. It was the number of the devil. Everyone knew that.

Revelations called for he who has understanding to calculate the number of the beast, a number of man, which is 666. But why? It was the sum of all the numbers on a roulette wheel, a double triangle number, as well as the sum of the squares of the first seven prime numbers. Many believed it corresponded with the name of someone who would come to bring the world to an end. It contrasted the holy sevens—perhaps symbolic of falling short of eternal life (certainly ironic, considering the circumstances), but scientifically, Maddie could find no reason why a number should mean rapture, let alone this one specifically.

Yet she knew five feet deep would never do, nor seven feet long.

These were facts, as surely as the roman numeral for 666 contained exactly one of each symbol with a value of less than one thousand, in descending order. As surely as barium or copper sulfate could make candles burn green. As surely as silver had the highest thermal conductivity of any metal. And as surely as there was a ghost living under her roof.

Maddie had to face the facts: one of her kids was dead now—a ghost, a monster—and it was her duty to destroy it before it killed the rest of her family. But first, she needed to figure out which one of the kids was dead.

She'd laid a trap back at the house, and left. It was all the investigation she needed. Only one of her children would be captured, and once she'd finished digging, she would return to find which one. Which one of her children had died, and was possessed by a ghostly imposter. As soon as the grave was ready, she'd return home to find one of her children sleeping safely in bed, and the other trapped beneath an ectoplasmic containment shield of her own design, unable to escape.

Her digging slowed.

The facts being as they were, she didn't want this. Even knowing the truth, she wished she could ignore it, delude herself into believing both her children were still alive, and her family was safe from supernatural dangers. More than anything, she wished she didn't have to be digging a grave north of a church, six feet long, six feet wide, six feet deep, for a child, her child, who would be far too small to fill it.

As the moon sunk below the hills, she finished.

Heart weighing her down like it never had before, Maddie Fenton returned home.

She'd told no one of what she'd discovered. She'd told no one what she planned to do about it. Her husband didn't even know her passion for paranormal science stemmed from a background in the occult, a distasteful duty her parents had tried to pass off on her and her sister, thought both girls had escaped that life after their parents lives ended in it.

A deep breath filled her lungs and stuck there as she forced herself to open the front door. Step after heavy step brought her to the kitchen on leaden legs.

"Mom!" a surprised voice greeted.

Danny. A pained expression warped her features and she swallowed back the urge to sob as she finally released her breath, her whole body trembling.

"I uh... I don't know why, but you're ghost trap must've malfunctioned or something, because it went off and now I can't get out, even though obviously I'm not a ghost." Danny rushed through his explanation, the lie coming so easily to him, his breathing didn't even change, completely unfazed. "I just came down for a glass of water, and suddenly, I smacked right into a glowing green wall. I guess this one still needs some fine tuning."

"Danny..." she breathed, blinking back tears.

"Uh... are you... okay? Mom?" He asked, sounding worried. The ghost possessing her son was pretending to be worried about her. Shameless, disgusting creature that it was, it was trying to appeal to her emotions. "You're... you're covered in dirt, what were you doing? Why are you just coming home, it's after 4 am?"

"Quiet, ghost!" she snapped, eyes nonetheless stinging behind her safety goggles. His... its eyes widened, and its mouth snapped shut as the creature possessing her son's corpse realized she meant business.

"Mom?" it asked meekly after a long moment in which neither of them moved. She was trying so hard to steel her resolve, but it almost shattered when she heard that one broken word in her son's voice. "Mom... you're scaring me... can you just let me out?"

"It was the portal incident, wasn't it?" she guessed. "My son's been dead since then, and you saw your chance when you found his corpse so near the ghost zone. I thought it had to be some kind of miracle that he survived, but he didn't, did he? You've just been wearing his corpse like a fucking jumpsuit, you sick specter!"

"Mom?" she'd never cursed in front of her kids before, and she had to remind herself that she still hadn't when she saw the surprised expression on her son's stolen face.

"You're not my son!" she spat. "You're just a monster, and if I let you stay, you'll defile the rest of my family, like you did him. So I'm getting rid of you. Soon, the sun will rise, marking the end of the third day of the Anthesteria festival, and by the time it does, you'll be gone forever."

"What? Mom, what does that even mean, what are you—" she crouched down to press a button on the trap, sucking the containment shield and the ghost inside it into a metal box that could easily fit in her purse. That clenched it. If it were anything but a ghost, that wouldn't have worked, the creature wouldn't have been able to fit in the trap. It wasn't her son.

It wasn't her son.

It couldn't be, no matter how much she wished it really was.

She took the box and drove back out to the grave, north of the church. She pushed four candles into the earth at each corner, two inches deep, and lit them, watching the copper sulfate turn the flickering flames green. She reached into her bag for the bag of seeds she'd brought, and threw them into the bottom of the grave. She poured the wine in after. Finally, she hung the trap over the edge of the grave, and pressed the release button.

Her boy—the creature wearing her boy's corpse—fell out of it, looking so very small compared to the grave she'd just put him in. She bit her tongue against the urge to ask if he was okay when he landed with a grunt at the bottom.

"What is this place?" it asked, still not revealing it's true colors, even though it had to know it wasn't fooling her. "What's going on? Mom... what's happening?" It sounded afraid. It sounded like her son.

She didn't say a word. If she spoke to it, she feared it might convince her to give in to her desperate desire to pretend everything was fine. To pretend it was her son, and her family was safe, and she really didn't have to do this. But she did have to do it.

She grabbed the shovel and tossed mound of dirt back in.

"Mom, what are you—?" the ghost wearing her son, started trying to climb out, but one of the seeds sprouted a creeping vine instantaneously which latched onto his leg and held him down. A sob wracked her chest. The ritual was working. "Hey!"

Shovelful after shovelful of soil she threw into the grave as her boy struggled against the seeds at his feet growing plants and vines and gourds and held him inside. Ignoring her son's panicking voice, pleading frantically for her to stop, for her to help him, was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do.

But her son was dead.

Everything she did tonight proved it, over and over again. Her son was dead. There was a ghost in his body. If she didn't deal with it now, it would only hurt her and her family, and her next chance to get rid of it would be Samhain, which was months away. The damage this monster could do before November didn't bear imagining.

"Please!" begged a voice so familiar it hurt, spitting out the earth she continued to pile evenly into the grave, increasing her speed to ensure she was done before sunrise. "Why are you doing this? Mom! Mom!"

"You're not my son," she finally said in a strangled voice. "You're not my son. You're not my son." She repeated it over and over, ignoring the look on his face as she forced herself the believe the words she knew to be true, but desperately hated, as she performed a ritual that made no scientific sense, but worked anyway.

If thousands of years of faith could make this nonsense work, then maybe a little faith was all she needed to summon the willpower to bury her son alive. Faith that it wasn't her son, that her real son was long dead, and that this was the only way to protect the rest of her family from the same fate.

With the monster rooted to the bottom of the grave, the soil eventually covered its head, and all Maddie could see was the shifting of the dirt that proved there was really something under there. She kept going, filling the grave all the way to the top, and when that was done, she waited.

Soon enough, the sun rose over the hills, and she sighed with relief that the long night was finally over. She leaned down to blow out the stumps that remained of the copper-infused candles she'd used for green flames, and stepped gingerly past the flowers that were already growing where she'd buried the thing.

The undead thing had been strangled by new life, and would never again see the light of day.