The House, Part Five

"I can't find any way in," said Chris, staring at the tower. "That's what's making me crazy about all this."

"Why does that bother you?" asked Rebecca. 

"Because... well... they keep intruding on us." Chris searched her face, looking for some answering desire, some spark of agreement. "I'd like to walk in on them for a change, see how they live."

"Chris," said Rebecca. "You saw Rachel. You know that might be a really bad idea."

Chris sighed. "I suppose."

"Let them be," she said. "They're not doing us or anyone else any harm -- not that we know of. They just haunt the house, and it seems like they need someone to own it. Or they like it better when someone does, anyway."

"And that's us," said Chris.

"That's us."

Chris looked the tower over one more time. "I guess I can live with that," he said. 

He started to turn away, but a sudden spark of light caught his eye. There was an open door -- a section of brick had swung out from the tower. Standing in the doorway, lit from behind, was the man in the heavy coat, with his beard and his hood and his glasses. "Do you really want to see?" he asked. 

"As much as we can stand," Rebecca said carefully. "No more. I know it isn't always... safe."

The man nodded.  "This much will be," he said. "You have my word."

Rebecca glanced at Chris, who looked back at her and reached for her hand. "Ridiculously haunted," he said. 

"Ridiculously," she echoed, and pulled him forward. 

They stepped inside, and the tower closed behind them.

The House, Part Four

Chis flinched awake in the middle of the night, cold to his bones with the certainty that something was in the room with them. He waited for a moment, then threw himself upright, shoving out from under the covers so suddenly that he staggered. He turned back, looking through the darkness...

There was soft, brushing sound and a shadow was flowing out through the doorway, close to the floor and almost invisible in the darkness. It narrowed as it went, and then was gone. For a moment, he considered chasing after it, but in the event he couldn't move. He was frozen in place: by shock, by fear, or just by not being as fully awake as he suddenly felt. His mind wanted to move, but his body wasn't ready. 

Had the door been open like that? He thought it had. This was their house, after all. They should be safe in it.

He crossed the room, closed the door, and locked it. 

Even so, it took him a long time to go back to sleep.

* * *

He was sitting at his desk, looking over investments on his computer when heard the soft creak of the mirror opening at the bottom of the stairs. Someone knocked gently against the wooden wall of the staircase, and then called up: "Excuse me? Are you the new owner?"

Chris was out from behind the antique desk and down the stairs in a heartbeat, pressing forward as a worn-looking man stepped back. 

The intruder was dressed in a rumpled, antique suit: dark slacks, neatly-polished shoes, a dark jacket over a white shirt with a collar that reached across his throat to button on one side. His right hand was bare, but his left hand was covered with a sort of shapeless mitten. "Owner?" he asked, deferentially. 

"What is it you want?" asked Chris, studying him. He didn't look like a ghost; he looked like solid flesh. "What are you doing here?"

"My wife asked me to apologize--" The man swallowed. "--for last night. She forgot we weren't sleeping in that room anymore, and she was afraid she..." 

After a brief pause, Chris asked: "Scared the shit out of me?"

The man nodded dolefully. "Just so." 

Chris reached out, more curious than anything, and grasped the man's shoulder. "Who are you people?"

"We come with the house," the man answered, and his arm shivered under Chris's hand, moving all on its own, and hissed. 

Chris snatched his hand back as if it had been burned, and started to open his mouth before he realized that the hissing was coming from the hand hidden beneath the shapeless mitten. He closed his mouth, swallowed, and then asked, "You were sleeping in our -- in that room?"

The man nodded. "We get restless, sometimes. We wouldn't leave the grounds, of course, but a little chance to step out..." He shook his head. "Well. Hard to resist."

Chris examined and discarded a half-dozen responses, then asked: "So why didn't you say anything?"

"It's your house," said the man. "The two of you are the owners. We thought you'd stay in the master bedroom, but if you prefer that one--" 

"Wait," said Chris. "That's not the master bedroom?"

"Oh," said the man. "Oh my, no. Do you... do you want me to show you the master bedroom?" 

Chris' mind lurched, and he had a powerful sense that reality was spinning away from him. "Show me," he said, trying to assert some sense of control. 

So the man did.

* * *

"There's another secret door?" asked Rebecca. 

"Of course there is," said Chris. "Look at this house. Look at the guy who built it. We could live in this place for years, for decades, and not know all its secrets." He paused. "Do you want to see the real master bedroom?"

"Of course," said Rebecca. She'd signed on for a ridiculously haunted house; she wasn't about to back down now.

* * *

It wasn't a bedroom; it was a suite. It was a closet, in the Shakespearean sense. The false wall on the second floor opened onto a brief antechamber, with a larger room beyond it set with shelves and a writing desk and a gaming table; off to the left was the master bedroom, with a pair of closets large enough to qualify as rooms themselves, while off to the right was the master bathroom, rich and luxurious.

"Did the realtor know about this?" asked Rebecca, looking at the sheer size of the sunken marble bathtub. "If she did, they didn't charge us nearly enough." 

"She probably didn't," Chris said. "I doubt most realtors wander through potential sales properties trying to turn porphyry busts in their wall niches."

"Well, no, probably not." Rebecca looked around, grinning helplessly. 

"So are you okay with us moving in here? And maybe leaving the other bedroom to... um... the butler? And his wife?"

"The one you said slithered out of our room in the middle of the night last night?"

Chris nodded slowly. "He said they wouldn't come in here -- any of them. Sacrosanct, he said."

"That..." Rebecca swallowed. "That sounds pretty good. Especially if they won't stay out of the rest of the house."

Having spent the better part of three days thinking about how to evict unwanted guests that he couldn't even find, Chris said: "I don't think we could really drive them out. They know this place better than we do. And we did kind of ask for this."

"So we make peace with the ghosts?" asked Rebecca. 

"They aren't ghosts, exactly," Chris said. His fingers still remembered the feel of strange flesh beneath a linen jacket. "But they aren't exactly people, either. That's why none of them can own the house, I think."

"All right." Rebecca nodded firmly. "I mean, they've been decent enough, in their way."

"Yeah," said Chris. "The next time one of them turns up, we can let them know."

* * *

"So does this mean we can be friends?" asked the little girl's voice from behind them. 

Rebecca reached her left hand out and grabbed the back of Chris' neck to keep him from looking around. With her right hand, she found the remote and paused the movie. "Hello, Rachel," she said. 

"Hello," said Rachel. 

"I don't know," said Rebecca, and Chris tipped his head in a subliminal nod. "I don't know if I can be friends with somebody I can't look at."

"Well... all right," said the child's voice. "Let me put myself together." There was a brief pause, and a sense of the air pressure changing. Then the voice said, "It should be okay now." 

Rebecca turned her head, looking back over he shoulder. Rachel sat there, a little girl who was very well put together, with only a hint of darkness leaking from the cracks. Her skin was porcelain, her eyes were flat black ovals, and she was covered with a grayish hint of a dress; but she was still a little girl. "It's good to meet you, Rachel. Properly, I mean."

"Does that mean I can stay?" the girl asked. 

Chris exchanged a glance with Rebecca, and Rebecca nodded. "If you like," Chris said. "Sit and watch with us, but try not to interrupt. And if you feel like you have to come apart, move behind us so we don't see, okay?"

"Okay," said the girl, sounding excited. 

Rebecca turned her head forward and started the movie again.

Part Five

The House, Part Three

Rebecca was trying to work on an advertising layout when she heard a soft giggle behind her. "Is someone there?" she called, so wrapped up in her work that for a moment it didn't really register that she was supposed to be the only one in the house. Chris had gone into town to run some errands, leaving her free to focus on the project. 

A child's voice said, "Mama said we shouldn't talk to you, but I think it'll be okay as long as you don't look at us."

Rebecca's concentration suddenly broke, and she sat back in her chair. "What happens if I look at you?" she asked warily.

"Maybe nothing,  said the child's voice. "Or maybe you'll get very, very scared. So scared that you die."

"Ah," said Rebecca, and shivered. "Well, we don't want that."

"No, we certainly don't," said a new voice, and Rebecca startled but managed not to turn around. This voice was older, a woman's voice. "Do we, Rachel?"

The child's voice sounded abashed: "No, Mama."

"Run along then," said the woman's voice, "and leave the owners be." There was a brief pause, a shift of attention, and the the woman's voice added: "Please forgive us. I tell her not to disturb you, but Rachel is young and she doesn't listen. And we so seldom have new people here; she's very curious."

"It's okay," said Rebecca, though every hair on her body was standing on end. 

A moment later the room was empty except for herself, but it was nearly an hour before Rebecca could bring herself to start working again. It had taken a cup of chamomile, a walk around the outside of the house, and finally some meditation and deep breathing to get her settled back down. She kept worrying that she'd look around at the wrong moment, and see a child who might scare her all the way to death.

And she'd have to warn Chris, so it didn't happen to him either.

* * *

"Rachel?" Chris asked, frowning. 

"The ghosts have names," Rebecca said, and took a sip of her whiskey. A bowl of niku udon sat on the table in front of her, almost untouched. She stirred it absently, then sipped more whiskey. 

The dining room table had come with the house, and it was large enough to make eating awkward; the two of them were crowded down at one end, leaving the rest of it empty. It was made of some heavy, dark wood, and something about its weight and age suggested that it might predate the United States as a country. Despite that, it had taken only a little polish to restore. The chairs were a matched set with the table, elaborately carved and every bit as imposing.

"What if they aren't ghosts?" asked Chris. "What if there are people living in some hidden part of the house, and they're just fucking with us?" The image of a man turning to smoke and drifting away rose up behind his eyes, but he angrily shook it off. 

Rebecca shrugged. "Even if they're not ghosts, I don't think they're people."

Chris considered that as he ate. He'd gone with the tonkotsu ramen, spicy, to help help clear sinuses that were itching with late-autumn allergies. He turned to smoke and blew away... "Maybe," he grudged. 

After dinner he stalked back into the depths of the house, leaving Rebecca to finish her udon and clean the table. It wouldn't take her long, he reasoned, not for a takeout meal, and he wanted to find where these intruders were coming from, if he could.

He tried the two secret doors first. One was in the library, and opened by swinging out an entire section of shelves -- smoothly enough that none of the ancient books fell from their places. It was a ridiculously theatrical effect, one Chris had yet to tire of. The room beyond was a sort of enclosed study, with bookshelves of its own. He checked around the walls, looking for seams and tugging randomly at books, but no further doors opened. 

The second secret door was an antique mirror at the back of a long hall; he felt for the catch behind the ornate iron frame, and it swung out from its place on the wall. The staircase beyond led up to the room he'd taken for his office, a tower room with three small, stained-glass windows and another set of stairs leading up to a turret. The trap-door to the turret could be closed with a metal latch, and Chris did so; if anyone was coming across the roof, they wouldn't be able to enter here.

He continued his search, tugging at sconces and lifting paintings to look behind them, but found nothing. When he finally climbed into bed at midnight, he was frustrated to the point of foolishness.

Part Four

The House, Part two

An afternoon spent exploring, a brief talk with the real estate agent, a much longer session of getting everything settled with the bank, and the house was theirs. It was a perfectly ridiculous piece of property, and they both loved it. Now that they owned the place, their apartment seemed smotheringly small; so they packed their things and hired movers and abandoned it. Their contract wouldn't expire for another two months, but Chris was a day trader; they could afford that. 

"Where's the dust?" asked Rebecca, looking over the second-floor bedroom that they'd decided to make their own. There were dust covers on most of the furniture, but this room was clean. So was the kitchen, and the bathroom. 

"I don't know," answered Chris, lifting the covers on the bed and giving them a sniff. They smelled clean, not musty. "Maybe the agency sent over a very selective cleaning team and forgot to mention it?" It didn't seem likely. "Or maybe the ghosts are trying to make us welcome?"

"I mean..." Rebecca swallowed. "Ghosts who help with the housecleaning are the best kind of ghosts." 

Neither of them could really complain about things being unexpectedly clean. Still, it was weird; weird, and just a little bit disturbing.

* * *

It was early evening and they were unpacking the kitchen when Rebecca shrieked. Chris dropped a metal pan, caught it briefly on his foot before it slid away across the tile floor, and then turned to look at his wife. "What--?"

She was looking out the window. "There's somebody in the back yard." 

Chris could see it too, now: a silhouette against the setting sun, one hand lowering as smoke rose from the stone pillar that stood out near the edge of the ramshackle garden. 

He considered briefly, then pulled a kitchen knife from the block and tucked it into the back of his belt. A moment later he was out the door, striding across the cobbled stone porch, approaching... 

The figure beside the pillar was dressed in a long, heavy coat, loose pants, and heavy boots. Between the thick beard, the sunglasses, and the hood of the coat, his features were virtually indistinguishable. There was a shallow metal bowl on top of the pillar -- which wasn't properly a pillar; more of a narrow pyramid with the top cut off. There were flickers of fire in the bowl, and smoke rising up from it.

"Hey!" Chris called sharply. "What are you doing in my back yard?"

The man remained still. "Burning the bones," he said, as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world. His voice was a soft baritone, his tone perfectly casual.

Chris glanced at the bowl again, and realized that no, that didn't look like bits of wood in there. "I mean, why are you here at all? This is my house, man."

"Ah," said the figure. "You're the new owner." He turned slightly, started to extend a hand. "We come with the house, you see." Then he dissolved into smoke and blew away.

The shock of it caused Chris to step back. Then he stopped, looking around. It was a neat trick, but the guy had to have gone somewhere... 

Smoke was no longer rising from the bowl. Whatever had been burning there a moment earlier, wood or bone, was gone. Chris took another step back, and then another, trying to look every direction at once. A moment later he was back in the kitchen, telling himself that this was because he needed to make sure Rebecca was safe. 

Part Three

The House, Part One

"The house was built around 1830 by an eccentric British architect named Edward Ashe. The tower is older; it shows up on the records as part of the property, but there's no record of when it was built. Ashe built his home as an expansion for the tower."

"And you think we should buy this place because...?"

"Well, I mean, for starters just look at it."

"I am looking at it. It looks the Addams Family estate and the Munsters Mansion had a baby. Is that a belfry back there?"

"Bats and all." Chris smiled, looking at Rebecca. "Okay, listen. It's out here in the middle of nowhere, but it still has running water and electricity, and we could get Cable installed. That means Internet, and that means we could work remotely. It needs a little maintenance, but the price is low enough that we could afford to have it fixed up."

Rebecca studied the place a moment longer. "Is it haunted? It looks like it should be haunted." She paused. "I'll be disappointed if it's not actually haunted."

"Ridiculously haunted," Chris assured her. He was tall and broad-shouldered and tanned, casually dressed in a polo shirt and slacks. "According to the real estate agent, even the ghosts have ghosts. Plus, it has two secret passages -- that they know of -- and there's supposed to be an entire suite of rooms hidden underground."

Rebecca -- willowy and blond and only a little shorter than her husband -- looked at the house again and grinned. "So you came all the way out here and toured this without me?" 

Chris shrugged. "I wanted to make sure it lived up to its advertising." He looked at his wife. "So, are you in?" 

She nodded. "All right. I'm in. I mean, let's get it inspected first, but if it seems solid then hell yes, let's buy the ridiculously haunted house."

"There is one more thing," Chris said easily. "It's fully furnished. I mean, we could get rid of the stuff in some of the rooms -- we might have to, to set up offices and a workout room -- but it's not just a lot of empty space that we'd have to spend money to fill."

"Oh my God," said Rebecca. "Do you have a key? I have to see this."

"As it happens," said Chris, "I do."

Part Two