after year. Nobody will buy it, and nobody is brave enough to tear it down. So you will take my ten thousand dollars for this place, because I am the only person who is ever going to pay you anything at all for it. And really? You knew that going in.”
“I... shall consult with my superiors, but I believe your offer to be... I believe it will be accepted. I... I feel, that...” She squeaked. She looked like she might cry.
Awwwwww, poor thing, I might have been a little hard on her. “You seem a bit ill, miss. Perhaps you should get some fresh air. I'll show myself out. After all, barring a few papers to sign and a few checks clearing, this is my house now, right? Why don't you go outside, take a walk? In fact, take the rest of the day off, you've earned it. I'll see you in your office tomorrow to finalize things.”
“Yes, yes, thank you...” she muttered, practically sprinting out the door. I listened to her footsteps, heard the door open, and heard it slam shut with way too much force. Yeah, I was too hard on the poor thing. I'll work on that for the future.
Regardless, I tried really hard not to grin. Crying real-estate agent aside, that had gone perfectly. “And now it's just you and me, isn't it chief?” I said to the empty house.
Right on cue, a cold wind howled through the house, despite all the windows being firmly shut. A creaking could be heard in the attic, which I had personally seen was empty during the tour.
I smiled. Nothing pisses them off like smiling when they're trying to be intimidating. “Heh, so even that little bit of nervousness on the cute redhead's part was enough to wake you up? You are a nasty one, Harry, to be up and moving so fast. I admit: Never seen one get up to no good with that much pep. You are a darn impressive spook.
“But tell me, do I feel scared? At all?” I asked. “Or do I feel like I'm gonna go get some very nice salt and some assorted powders and liquids and such from my car, do a little chanting, light some candles, and exorcise your ass? You tell me. Oh, wait, you can't, you're not powerful enough to speak actual words yet, because I am not afraid of you at all and you can't feed on my emotions. Haha, my mistake. Well, you just wait here, and maybe try to get some chains rattling. That always adds to the ambiance for when I throw your type out like yesterday's trash. I'll be back in a few minutes to kick you out of my house.”
I should probably give you an explanation, huh? You look confused.
For starters, Mr. Colin Fitzpatrick is not my name. My name is Eric Margrave, but that doesn't sound Irish, and when you're buying a house from a real-estate company owned by an Irish-American and staffed mainly by Irish-American workers (like the lovely Ms. O'Conner), it pays to sound like you might be a little bit Irish yourself, and a good fake ID goes a long way. Also, I can't use my real name for most things, on account of the possibility that certain law enforcement agencies have me on certain watch-lists, even though I swear to God that all of the people who died in those cases were either not my fault, or some kinda shape-shifting monstrosity that just coincidentally happened to look human or turn back into a human when it died. Or both.
Oh, and the house? Totally was haunted.
A lot of them are, really. Most ghosts are pretty benign. But Harcourt 'Harry' Stanfield (One of New York's finest old businessmen, as Ms. O'Conner had put it.) had been a bastard in life, a genuine robber-baron whose death toll from unsafe factories and unsavory business practices had probably been in the hundreds. It made sense, then, that he would still be a bastard in death, and the unsavory fate of anyone who moved into his old house showed nicely that was indeed the case.
Luckily, he was also a ghost, and limited by a ghost's rules. Ghosts are just bundles of emotion and left-over life energy from when a particularly strong-willed person dies, and as such they have little power to affect the physical world unless we allow them to. They feed on our emotions, see? The more we feel about them, most especially the more we fear them, the closer they can get to the real, physical universe. Hollywood actually has a decent grasp on your common murderous spectre: they start very small, tiny things, a gust of wind, a creaking floorboard. Building up the fear. Then as the people in the house get more and more scared, the ghost gets stronger, and stronger, and the manifestations get darker, and darker, until boom! Amityville.
Stay more than a week or two in a house with a hostile ghost, and you'd have wasps swarming in your mattress and blood running from the faucets before you knew it. Try to stay after that, and the house was very probably gonna end up with a new ghost.
And the ghost here was very, very hostile indeed. Any poor schmuck who bought this place hoping for a nice summer getaway in the countryside would most likely have been tortured to horrible death by the spirit of Mr. Stanfield, who absolutely, totally would kill a commoner for setting foot on his property, and was in fact rumored to have done so several times even before he was dead. After? Well, that story I told about the head on the chandelier wasn't exaggeration.
If you knew how to deal with ghosts, though, then this was a darn fine place to put a safe house. Plenty of room for storage, no nosy neighbors wondering why I was bringing in heavy weapons or cartons of silver bullets or bulk spices, some nice forested terrain for laying booby-traps, and a convenient and widely-believed ghost story to keep away tourists. And so cheap! It would take some fixing up, sure, but I wasn't going to actually live here more than a few days at a time, so I wouldn't have to put much money into fixing it up. And it was still a damn sight better than living out of a hotel every time I was up in New York tracking a Wendigo (Which pop up more than you'd think; more people get into cannibalism than I like to ponder.).
The world of the supernatural was dark, twisted, and more prevalent than anyone cares to talk about. But if you know how to work it, earn the right reputation among the right people, and you don't scare easy? The money is more than decent, and there's all kinda perks. I charge $200 an hour plus expenses for extermination of the vast majority of spooky thingamabobs ($250 for Wizards, Rakshasa, Djinn, Elves and Elf-related situations, and Fairies of the Unseelie court, $300 for Any Sort of Tentacled Ichor Beast from Beyond Time. Absolutely No Demons, Dragons, Demon-Dragons, Liches, Demon-Dragon-Liches, or any kind of Sentient Bread), plus expenses. Special rates negotiable for unique jobs. And I'm rarely out of work, because when people's lives are on the line and they don't fully understand why, then ninety-nine percent of the time they will pay for someone who can make the problem go away. It's not a bad life, if you know what you're doing, and I've been doing it since I was sixteen.
Hell, it just earned me a possibly million-dollar house for ten grand, and all I had to do for it was stomp all over the face of one impotent dead businessman. Pretty good deal, if you asked me.
Another chill wind blew through the house. My smile got wider.
“Okay, I'll admit it, you're pretty neat. Formless wind and ominous creaking sounds? Classic stuff, Harry, classic stuff. I mean, if this were a horror movie, and I were an unassuming middle class family whose father had just gotten a great new job that would let him buy this house, I bet my tiny blonde daughter with the big expressive eyes and quirky habits that imply she's psychic would be totally creeped out by your antics. So bravo, sir, bravo. It's really a treat to run into someone who likes to play these things old-school, you know? You don't see that much anymore, and I always get a kick out of it. I'll tell you what: I'm gonna go get my exorcism kit, and I'm gonna banish your ass straight to Hell. But I will be sure to do it respectfully. Because I respect you.” I said, starting to walk towards the front door, whistling a jaunty tune.
Things began, then, to go horribly wrong, and it was mostly due to the woman who had somehow gotten into the living room.
She was cute, in a crazy sort of way. Mid-twenties maybe, with very smooth pale skin and long, auburn hair that was piled on top of her head in an elegant coif. Nice, slender figure accentuated by an oddly formal-looking peach-colored dress that manag
ed to be both concealing and alluring, hanging off her shoulders provocatively but covering everything below them, up to and including gloves. And very big, brown eyes. Really big brown eyes. Wide as dinner plates with stark, raving, unreasonable horror brown eyes. Very pretty girl, yes. The aura she projected of a terrified rabbit kinda took away from the appeal, but very pretty.
Oooooooh, that was not good.
“Hi!” I said. “You really need to absolutely leave, please! Now!”
I tend to overuse exclamation points when I'm in danger of having my soul eaten by a ravenous phantasmal creature. Call it a personality flaw if you want, but I feel emphasis is important in cases like that.
“You... cannot... buy... this... house...” she gasped out, sheer horror making the words come slow and thick.
“Ordinarily that would be true, but I got a really good deal! Well within my finances, made everything okay, may be putting a nice herb garden in the back yard! For spices! I'll make you dinner some time! Please leave now, and do not come back without invitation!” I said. The howling wind was starting to get louder. Shit.
“It killed them... all of them, my whole family...”
“Oh