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Flipping Haunted Houses For Fun And Profit! 1.06 - The Bright Little House
🕑 Added 2024-10-18 04:00:18 +0000 UTC“Hey, you okay, Lor?” Harmony asked as they sat in Steve’s car.
Loren clutched at his backpack, reminding himself he had two bottles of oil in there. Also his lunch and a change of clothes, but he wasn’t going to use those for fuel unless he was really desperate. “I’m fine.”
“You sure? We might be a facing another ghost, and they might not be as nice and reasonable as Sara. It’s all right to be a little nervous. You’ve only got two weeks of self-defense courses under your belt. I might have quit in the middle of it, but I did go through army training. Steve went through the same and didn’t quit, and Malory spent years as part of that Sect in Qinzhoutown, so she could take care of herself.”
Wait, Malory had what? Wasn’t she their age? But Harmony was still talking.
“Look, you’re the new guy, all right? Just stick with me and keep your eyes open. This is on the job training for you, so all you need to do is keep calm and don’t set anything on fire. Right, Steve?”
He glanced towards the front, and saw Steve glancing at him through the rear-view mirror. The older man nodded. “She’s right, Loren. Just hang back, watch and listen. If you notice anything, tell Harmony since I’ll be speaking to the homeowner. We’re not going to be trying to do anything big on this trip. This is just a meet and greet to get a sense of the property. If the haunting is active and violent enough it goes after us in the middle of the day while we’re just visiting… well, we’ll wait for the owner to drop the price then come back with vigilants. So relax, all right?”
The Flame mage let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, nodding fervently. “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now, if the worst happens, just fall back on your self-defense. Harmony tells me you’ve got a Flamecraft that lets you see ghosts?”
Loren nodded, then realized Steve was keeping his eyes on the road. “Yeah, I’ve been working on it so I don’t have to keep using ghost candles.”
“Well, just light that one and start fire-punching if something bad happens, and you’ll be just fine.” Steve said. “If anything, it’s Harmony you have to worry about.”
That made him blink, straightening in his seat. “What?”
“Well, you, me and Steve are mages,” Malory said, one of her tentacles gesturing helpfully to illustrate. “All we need to do to use magic is to draw it out of our souls and will it to happen. Harmony is a Symbol. If she wants to use magic, she needs to Symbolize, and that means getting into the right state of mind and heart. And she’s a despair, so…” Two shoulders and four tentacles shrugged.
“There, now you have a socially acceptable manly reason to woman up and represent,” Harmony said, giving him a pat on the shoulder that was definitely meant to be condescending. “Reach deep inside yourself and draw upon the strength you need to protect this helpless woman.”
“You’re an ass, Hari.”
“Yeah, mine is great, isn’t it?”
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Loren had never been in this particular subdivision, but he’d passed it practically everyday of his life since home was nearby in one of the other subdivisions in the area. Though from the looks of things, the home owner’s association wasn’t as active here: the streets were clearly the original ones that had been poured 40 years ago, and there were cracks and potholes from where the ground underneath had settled.
Despite that, it wasn’t a poor neighborhood. He had seen a lot of new car models mixed in with old ones that looked to be very well maintained when they were driving in, the streets were clean, and there were no piles of garbage in the few vacant lots. The sidewalks tended to be full of garbage cans, decorative planters, flower pots, or simply just overgrowth, but that was fairly normal for these subdivisions. Any foot traffic was more likely to be on the roads than the sidewalks anyway. If he didn’t know the area in front of the subdivision’s gat tended to flood when it rained too hard, he’d have thought it looked like a nice place to live.
“So you two know the area?” Steve said as they all got out of the car in front of the house.
“Only along the main road,” Harmony said. “Loren and I grew in a subdivision a bit further out, but we’ve never been in this particular one before. Sorry.”
Loren had been expecting something rundown and old, overgrown with creepers that reach up to the roof, a yard that was overgrown, rusty metalwork, damaged windows, and eaves that were falling off with rot.
Instead, the little house was in one of the bedroom communities well outside the city of Selurong and closer to the city of Kamansi. It was a one-floor affair, painted a pastel pink and green that vaguely reminded him of the decorations of his elementary school. While there was an iron fence around the property, thorny bougainvilleas provided the real barrier, privacy wall and decoration around the house. A relatively new SUV was in the little driveway.
Honestly, it looked far from what he thought a haunted house would be. Where was the disrepair? The overgrown garden, the rusty gates, the dark and shrouded windows? The house looked lovingly well-maintained, and looked good to stand for another ten or twenty years. Even the roof looked recently painted.
“Are we in the right place?” Loren couldn’t help asking.
“It’s the right number,” Steve said, pointing at the number on the gate. “And think those are the homeowners coming out to greet us.”
Indeed, the door had opened, and a woman who looked to be in her fifties or sixties came out, followed by a man young enough he must have been her son. “Hi!” she called out.
“Hi,” Steve replied, giving the same friendly smile that he’d given Loren when they’d first met. “Are you Mrs. Halili? I’m Steve, we spoke on the phone?”
“Yes. You said you wanted to see the house? Come in, come in!”
Loren sort of tuned out the what they were saying to each other as he and the others followed after Steve, looking around the property. Behind the fence and bougainvilleas, there was a relatively narrow but well-maintained lawn of fine, needle-like Bermuda grass. The more he looked around, the more ordinary everything looked. It wasn’t unnerving so much as vaguely confusing.
Still, if there was a ghost, the real signs of it would be inside the house. He’d been reading up on the spiritual mechanics of ghosts ever since he started living with Sara since it seemed prudent to know what she could do, and while he had known that ghosts tended to be confined to within the walls of a building, it was only now that he really knew why. The walls, specifically the external walls of a building, were what defined the structure’s dimensions. Between that and the strong, historical and cross-cultural belief that walls were a barrier the defined and delineated ‘inside’ from ‘outside’, the psycho-reactive nature of magic had led to the external walls of a building—or in Sara’s case, an apartment—becoming an impassible spiritual barrier. It was why Sara couldn’t leave the apartment and most of her was stopped by the front door and adjoining walls, floor and ceiling despite the walls of the bathroom or the wardrobe offering no form of impediment whatsoever. There was some leeway when it came to roofs, outside balconies, porches, internal courtyards and, admittedly, gardens, but those were usually features of older houses, and seemed unlikely to apply in this particular case.
Then again, he could be wrong. He was a Flame mage who’d read something he’d found on the internet, not a Spiritualist.
The inside of the house also went against his expectations. He’d thought it would be full heavy wooden furniture, dark wood, lots of curtains… something like his grandparents house. However, everything was brightly painted in pale cream and white. All the furniture was composed of either pale wood or colorful upholstery, and emphasis seemed to be of open spaces with acrylic display racks along the walls.
It was the display cases that made them all pause. Those along the walls were built like book cases, and were transparent from all directions. On the displays were… well, little robot figurines. They were all brightly colored, and had been posed dramatically with various plastic figurine-sized weapons. Some were freestanding on their feet, while others were being held upright by little plastic stands with an arm that slotted into a hole in the back of the figures.
Instead of book cases, they had display cases. Where most people had pictures on the walls, there were display cases. Where people had some kind of image of one or more of the goddesses and the one god, there… well, there was one, which seemed to have been hand-painted with model acrylic paints. Instead of being guarded by figures of legendary Symbols from history however, there were two model robots that were far bigger than the others at around a foot tall standing guard, which… well, all right, that probably wasn’t against any sort of doctrine, but Loren’s mother would have probably looked at it in askance while still complementing the quality of the models.
It was that last that lit the candle of realization for Loren as he remembered something he’d seen years ago. It had been on TV, back when they still bothered to set them up to receive local signals instead of just using them to watch ScryVids on. There’d been a small human-interest piece that had been notable because it hadn’t involved anyone getting raped, children being found dead, people getting shot in their own driveway, neighborhoods that had fallen to disease because of keres, vigilants being accused of corruption by politicians or politicians being accused of corruption by vigilants. The news piece had been short, but had talked about a man who’d owned one of the largest collections of robot model kits in the country…
The four of them were seated on the sofa while Mrs. Halili took one of the arm chairs. “This is a very nice house,” Steve complimented. “The garden is lovely.”
“Thank you. I’ve been growing it since we first moved here thirty years ago. It only used to be against the wall on either side of the goddess grotto, but I liked the colors when they bloomed, so I started growing more of them…”
It was all Loren could do not to tune anything out. He had to remind himself he wasn’t a little kid visiting relatives anymore, he was a working adult, this was a work visit, and he was working. No getting up and looking around, no asking where the bathroom was, he had to pay attention to what Mrs. Halili was saying about the house because it might have been important. No, it was all definitely important if there was a ghost here. He did his best to listen and try to put together what he was hearing.
Apparently, the family had been planning to move to La Sablica, since their eldest son had managed to get a secure job and a house there. Mrs. Halili had gone over to get started settling in and planning how they would be moving, while her husband—her late husband, and the one Loren was fairly sure was the owner of the very large model collection—had stayed at home to start getting the house packed and had stayed over the hot summer. He had died in his sleep, suffering heatstroke in the summer heat, and had been found by a neighbor that they had asked to check on him when he had stopped answering his phone. That had been a year ago, as the move had been delayed due to funeral arrangements and having to handle other matters pertaining to her husband’s death.
The haunting had started six months later.
Comments
SCM2814
Basically Gundam without calling them Gundam
Menthewarp
Gundam? Or something else?
