Internet has been wonky this evening.
There is a line from the Old Americans about a magical monster, and never mind that they had none: It burbled as it came! That was the coming of Charlie. The unholy amalgamation of spirit and ghost clanged and crunched like metal smashing into metal. In this form it smelled industrial, too, like one of Greater Hershey’s machines. Rubber and metal and polish and rust, all ground in and baked until hard.
This heartened me. All of that meant that the occult lure was definitely working. To arcanely define an entity is halfway to controlling it – or, in this case, destroying it.
In theory, it would all come down to timing. According to the song, Charlie would be in this station, at this time of day, and ready to receive a crab cake from his wife. Reenacting these conditions would align us arcanely, ritually making us part of the song. From there it would follow well enough: Mistress Hawes would place the crab containing the Old American nickel on the focus, symbolically paying for Charlie’s exit fare. That tacit fulfilling of the curse would weaken the occult link between the spirit and the ghost, and Gallagher and I would exploit that weakness to hammer the two entities apart. From there we would have to improvise. This was First Age spontaneous magic, after all. If people could have planned better against its manifestation, the world might not have ended seven hundred years ago.