The Gray Lady of Martyr's House (short story)

 was a free The Lucy Wilson Mysteries short story released by Candy Jar Books in 2022.

Publisher's summary
"The Gray Lady of Martyr’s House is a ghoulish short story that finds Lucy and Hobo trapped in a haunted house during the Christmas holidays."

Plot
On Christmas Eve, Lucy and Hobo have just emerged from a magical world in a wardrobe and Lucy is confused how there's a world so similar to books she used to read. Afterwards, Dame Anne Bishop contacts them for assistance: amateur mystery hunters have spotted a ghost at Martyr's House, a decommissioned UNIT facility, and now none of Bishop's operatives in the area can be contacted. With her resources stretched, she asks the kids to investigate. As Martyr's House is near to Ogmore-by-Sea, they lie to Lucy's dad that they need a lift to a friend's party.

Martyr's House seems to be deliberately designed to be scary, and Lucy and Hobo are let in by a strange hunchbacked housekeeper. The housekeeper sends them to the Librarian; on the way, they find the house without lights, paintings with eyeholes for spying with, and a door that seems to show them a room with themselves in it.

Once they find the Librarian, she's merely a woman in an old military uniform. She admits to disguising herself as the Gray Lady ghost to scare off the amateur investigators, that her trick blew a fuse, and the 'portal room' was merely done with mirrors. Martyr's House is the site of the Hard Achive, a library containing a paper copy of every file in case the world's computers go down, but the budget has been steadily cut so there's now just two staff members. The children think the Librarian is joking when she says the ghosts are there too, and she assumed they were sent to help with the problem, until a ghost pirate actually manifests.

The three flee from the ghost and find more of them all over the building, from spacemen to a white sheet trailing along. As they get further down the levels of the building, they see the books leaping off their shelves and sending energy trails into a form down below. The Librarian says this is the World Engine: alien technology recovered by UNIT, which is being used to digitise the Hard Archive quickly so it can be decommissioned faster. It can take any document and make it real, and the 'ghosts' are data leaking from the machine. Lucy realises the world in her wardrobe was part of this leakage.

A tentacled monster and a ghost in a diving suit attack from the lower levels. Lucy decides to fight back by writing stories and feeding them into the machine (Hobo takes over the writing as he can type quicker). After they write that the greatest soldiers in the world would save them, ghostly green UNIT soldiers led by a young Brigadier appear and drive off the enemy. Lucy is able to speak once more to a semblance of her grandfather before the shades send her and Hobo out, while the Librarian (whose name is revealed to be Hannah) stays behind to help the soldiers. The children escape in time to see the house sucked into a shaft of green light which then vanishes.

On Christmas Day, Dame Anne responds to Lucy's report and tells her that she never contacted her for a mission in the first place: someone had faked the message to draw the children into a trap. There had been a hard copy archive of UNIT files at Martyr's House but it had been shut down, and Hannah had died in 1977. Lucy is left shaken about what this might mean.

Hobo worries that Hannah seemed unaware she was a recreation by the World Engine, and wonders if they too are still trapped there and living in a story. Lucy dismisses the idea ("who on earth would make up my mother’s Brussel sprouts") and says they should take everything one mystery at a time.

Characters

 * Lucy Wilson
 * Hobo Kostinen
 * Dame Anne Bishop
 * Albert Wilson
 * Hannah

Worldbuilding

 * Lucy Wilson's favourite books as a kid were the Narnia series.
 * Scooby Doo references reoccur throughout the story. Conundrum Corporation mystery investigators are a parody of the Mystery Incorporated gang. Similarly, the Gray Lady being a trick using makeup, the 'supernatural' being mirrors, and paintings with eyeholes are Scooby Doo tropes. The army of ghosts are almost all taken from classic episodes of Scooby Doo. (As the World Engine makes stories real, they may be the actual cartoon characters.)
 * The hunchback housekeeper is visually modelled on Riff-Raff from and goes on to partially quote the song "Time Warp". As the World Engine makes stories real, he likely is Riff-Raff.
 * The Librarian says UNIT got the World Engine in "the '70s. Or was it the '80s?" (TV: The Sontaran Strategem)
 * Hobo twice refers to Ghostbusters.
 * The Brigadier's form calls for "five rounds rapid". (TV: The Daemons)
 * Hobo notices a statue of a woman in a toga has disappeared since they last looked at it.

Story notes

 * Hobo has an uncle who pretends to have a limp until there's somewhere he actually wants to get to.

Continuity

 * Lucy says she learned ghosts can't exist in PROSE: The Keeper of Fang Rock. She says that story happened in Easter.
 * Lucy is unaware of what a Dalek is, not understanding why a "plunger" is in the Archive's D files.
 * The events of PROSE A Little Lucy Christmas happened last Christmas.