Flipping Haunted Houses For Fun And Profit! "Pilot Chapter, Part 2"

Here is part 2 of the pilot chapter, now renamed with the new story title. Once I'm sure there's not going to be a part 3, I'll delete this and the other one and combine them into one chapter. In the meantime, enjoy!

Commuting with only rubber sandals on was an experience Loren didn’t want to repeat. Harmony had to pay for everything since they were doing to get his wallet back, which he’d thanked her and apologized for in equal turns. Thankfully, they’d gotten onto a geepee that still had some open spaces along the pair of long benches that ran its length, so they were able to sit mostly comfortably. Well, he was comfortable. Harmony was sweating like crazy because not a lot of air was coming in through the windows behind them and muttering about cutting her hair to stay cool, the same way she had every summer they’d grown up together.

He had yet to see her with actually short hair, and that included the summer when they'd been nine, when she'd been trying to be a tomboy and kept wearing shorts and shirts.

They got off when they reached the corner nearest to his new and soon to be former apartment. It was a pleasant enough walk, which meant they were occasionally passed through the smells of garage that seemed to have permeated the very cement. Given that it had been ten years since local garbage laws had been put in place to prevent huge mounds of trash from just being dumped on the sidewalks, it spoke of just how much of it had seeped into the cement that the odors still lingered years.

His apartment was an old one, seven stories high and about twenty-four apartments per floor. The first floor was mostly little businesses like a convenience store, an internet (gaming) café, a laundromat, a drug store, and even a small massage parlor. While it was hardly new and shiny, the frontage was clean, relatively secure, and at the back there was a small gym and swimming pool that someone had been using for a child's birthday party when Loren had come here to sign the lease.

They had a security guard in the lobby to keep people from just using the stairs or elevator,  but fortunately he was the same one from yesterday, and he remembered Loren being a new resident. They were through to the residential part of the apartment with an admonition to not forget their residential ID, which Lorne just smiled nodded at before they were through and he was leading Harmony to the old elevators. Fortunately, it was an older elevator that you didn't need some kind of ID card to use, which was why the guard was there in the first place.

"Not the worst place I've ever seen," Harmony commented as she checked on a nearby pair of trashcans. "At least it's clean, so less likelihood of rats. Pretty good neighborhood too. What floor are you on?"

Loren shrugged as he watched the numbers on the pair of elevators count downward. "Fourth. Which now that I think about it is slightly ominous."

"Eh, it's probably just a coincidence. Unless someone is making up some kind of ritual to help make the programing for the Spiritualism and maybe Flame, numbers like that don't matter," Harmony said dismissively.

"I'll take your word for it," Loren said. "We didn't really mention rituals in alcha-pharma, except the old songs they used to use to time how much flame you needed to apply to pasteurize milk and things like that."

One of the elevators arrived, the doors sliding side to reveal the occupants, a pair of purple-skinned eyeless payatin women that loom at least a foot and a half over the two of them. The two women were chatting casually, their lips politely concealing their saw-like, triangular teeth. Though it was hard to tell their ages—payatin, humans and oni aged differently, and he was only familiar with the payatin he'd seen on TV—they both had hairstyles that reminded him of his grandmother—the old-fashioned dresses made him think that too—so maybe they were of a comparative age despite the smooth skin on their faces. One of the two glanced towards them, the smooth and blank skin where eyes would be on a human or oni somehow still registering their presence, and gave them a a polite nod. The two walked off, both pulling along a wheeled trolley bag—exactly the same kind his grandmathor had, actually—with one of their tentacles.

They stepped into the now-vacant elevator, Loren pressing the floor number on the panel.

"All right," Harmony said once the doors were closed. "Here's the plan. When we get there, we're going to check if the neighbors are in. The hallway's defined boundaries should keep my magic contained, but better to make sure we're not bothering anyone. It's a weekday, so there shouldn't be anyone around, but it's only polite to check."

He gave her a look. "What?"

"Look… have you ever been around a Symbol while they're Symbolized?"

"No, because you've never brought it up." He'd read things from the internet of course, and sometimes his parents would announce something they're read, but Loren knew how those were. Given some of the absurd claims made about Flame even after he'd told them it wasn't possible—like how reading my Flame-light would cause nearsightedness—he assumed the same things were true of the other kinds of magic as well. "I've read some stuff, but…"

"Yeah… Well, the important takeaway right now is that when we're Symbolized, we tend to radiate the emotion we're a Symbol of. Defined boundaries can muffle it, depending on how strong the threshold is, but apartments tend to be iffy about that, so if I'm going to do this, it would be best if there wasn't anyone around. If there's no one around, then this'll be easy. Well, easier. "

"What exactly would we be doing?"

"Oh, that part's simple. I Symbolize outside of your apartment and we open the door so I can get in. I'll try to isolate you from the effects of my aura, but I'm not sure how good that will be, Do you know how to protect your mind from external influence?"

"Just the basics I learned from the classes I had to attend when I first ignited my Flame," he admitted. He wasn't really sure how effective those basics were, though.

Harmony gave him a blank look. "Last-minute defense against keres influence?"

"Yeah…"

"Well, better than nothing. Hopefully between that and my trying to not influence you, you'll have a mostly clear head. Right, one I symbolize and get inside the apartment, I'll hold the ghost down and keep them from interfering. I'm not sure I'll be able to tell you when it's time to go in, so after I go in first, count to ten before following me." Harmony paused thoughtfully as the elevator stopped and they stepped out. "Make it fifteen. Once that's done, run in—run, since I don't know how long you'll remain unaffected—grab your stuff and get out. Don't linger. We won't have time for a second trip."

Loren eyed him. "Do you deal with holding down a lot of ghosts at that job of yours?"

Harmony waggled her hand. "Not as a regular thing. Me holding them down like that tends to get them riled up and harder to deal with the way we usually would. Mostly I do research, run papers, help with running our ScryVids channel, help with cleaning up the houses… regular work stuff. Which room is yours?"

"409," he said, pointing around the corner to the right. Now that they were on the same floor as the apartment, nervousness was starting to trickle into him.

A warm had rested on his shoulder. "Hey, relax. If you start running hot, the ghost might feel you coming."

That made Loren pause as anxiety gently wrapped bony fingers around his heart, cupping it gently. "Can they do that?"

 Harmony shrugged. "Who knows? Let's not risk it. Deep breaths. Calm down. No magic until you're ready. Now help me knock on some doors."

As quietly as they could, they knocked on the doors of the apartments on either side of 409, as well as the ones that were one over. Harmony handled checking on the apartments on the other side of 409, in case ghost was watching through the peephole. It felt strangely like trying to sneak up on the apartment, which… well, was pretty much what they were trying to do. No one answered their knocks, which made sense since the seventh floor help primarily studio-type, one- or two-person apartments—if the dimensions of his own was anything to go by—who probably had to be at work to just barely afford their apart—

"Hey, shouldn't you be at work?" Loren said suddenly as Harmony walked towards him, her knocks going similarly unanswered.

She shrugged. "I took a day off. Helping you get this all mixed might be a while."

He winced. "Sorry."

"Eh, what are friends for. Besides, either you cancel your lease, in which case I've gotten a lead on an apartment the boss might be interested in, and a commission because you're picking from our listings next, or you decide to keep the place hire us to flip it for you."

Loren stared at her. "Keep it? Why would I want to do that?"

Harmony held up a finger. "Hold that thought until after we get your stuff back. Remember, quick in and out. Just grab the important stuff. Got it?"

Right. best not to get distracted right now. He nodded.

"All right. Start protecting your head. When you're ready, give me thumbs up. I'll symbolize, you open the door, I'll go in, count, then you."

"Got it. Wait, why am I the one opening the door?"

"Because I won't be able to. You'll see."

He supposed he would.

Loren stood against the wall between apartment doors, trying to stay out of sight of 409’s peep hole, while Harmony stood opposite him on the other side of the door. Closing his eyes, he felt the heat of his Flame, and pulled it up towards his head. He felt actual flames flicker on his cheek before he suppressed it, not letting any of the magic leak out inefficiently.

As he’d said, it was a simple, basic defense, a means of making it harder to be influenced by the keres if he happened to find himself drawing their unfortunate attention. He wrapped his head, in Flame, which would both interfere with any external energy flowing into his brain—he had been warned not to do this if he was getting an MRI or any other sort of medical instrument scan—and saturate his brain with his own magic, diluting any existing external influence, and eventually cleansing them. It was the simplest defense possible, inelegant and not very effective, but also something easily done when one’s thinking was already compromised because it was the equivalent of dunking one’s head in water. Not a longterm solution, but enough for a quick moment of clarity… maybe.

After checking to make sure his head wasn’t on fire, Loren gave Harmony a nod. “Ready,” he said quietly.

She nodded back, then took a deep breath and closed her own eyes as she began to take slow breaths. Sometimes she'd pause, breaking the calming rhythm as Harmony tried to get into the right state of mind, or at least Loren assumed so. He wondered what she was thinking of. Something hopeful? Something to make herself angry? Was she praying? Reminding herself of what she believed in? Thinking of the people she loved? Or was she…

Across from him, Harmony shuddered, and the air around her seemed to darken. Her knees shook, her breathing starting to get shallow and panting. A blackness that seemed to glow seemed to cover her body, somehow standing out against the dark—

For a moment, Loren thought Harmony had become naked, even as all he could see was a dark, vaguely purple-tinted outline that seemed to… shimmer? And then that moment was gone, and Harmony was collapsing to her knees. She was wearing something white, a garment that replaced the clothes she’d been wearing as shapes on the floor around her began to writhe…

Three things happened at once.

The first thing was that on seeing his friend stumble, Loren instinctively moved to try to catch her.

The second thing that happened was that what felt like a giant pillow slammed into him from above, causing him to abort his own move as he caught himself from stumbling and falling to his knees as well. He felt like he’d been awake for more than twenty-four hours, his head fuzzy with lack of sleep and every thought needing to be carefully focused on and paid attention to.

…why bother… there was nothing he could do… it was too hard, the only thing to do was give up… they were going to fail…

With an effort, Loren poured more flame around his head, and the intrusive thoughts and feelings lessened, though not quite disappearing. The weight seemed to persist, however, and it was a struggle to straighten his legs.

The third thing that happened was that the door to 409 suddenly opened by itself, the knob rotating sharply and the door swinging open so violently it hit the wall.. He barely mustered the energy to turn his head and face it. The room was brightly lit as hot sunlight streamed in through the windows, reflecting on the linoleum tile floors the color of spilled coffee stains and white-painted walls. He could see the rubber sandals he had been wearing last around the apartment yesterday on the floor at the foot of the bed, his laptop bag on resting on a large plastic chest full of his clothes…

There was a sudden pressure on his arm as a cold breeze wrapped over his limb, and he stumbled again as he felt a force start to pull him into 409—

“No!”

The word was a wail, a cry, a plea, and a growl, pulling Loren’s attention back towards Harmony. She was face-down on the ground now, and for some reason her back was crisscrossed with thin, dull purple chains that seemed to have sprouted from the floor. Her arms were stretched out toward him, and she crawled across the floor on all fours with surprising alacrity, chains tinkling almost musically as they dragged behind her. With a sound like a sob, more chains suddenly sprouted up from the floor, and began to wrap around the air next to Loren. The chains that began to define a shape. There was a leg… a torso… a chain shot up practically next to his arm and wrapped around air, defining the shape of an invisible forearm.

He felt the pressure and cold wrapped around his arm loosen, and Loren pulled himself from, stumbling back from the open door. With another sob, Harmony crawled past him with a tinkling of loose chains, and the shape in the air stumbled back. The floor under Harmony was dark as dirty motor oil and writhing, chains emerging from the ground like corpses rising from the grave as she pushed herself up and did a sort of violent belly-flop toward the wrapped chains in the air, and they skidded back to the sound of heavy chains dragging on the ground.

Harmony looked over her shoulder towards him, and he almost stumbled back again. Her eyes… like a shark's, soulless and black and infinitely deep. Hair like a curtain, lank and oily falling down in locks. And her face… it was Perfectly symmetrical, with all the little minor imperfections that made it a real face removed, leaving something fit for a beautiful doll. If he hadn't known who he was looking at…

"Go!" she wailed, and Loren shook his head. He rushed into the room, his footsteps heavy and tiring as he scooped up his own footwear—they felt strangely weighty on his fingers—and throwing them out the door, where they fell a little short, just barely hitting Harmony.

Despite the bright, hot sunlight, the air in the room was cool as he looked around for what was important. He scrambled to his bed and grabbed his phone, which for some reason was in the middle of the mattress instead of next to his pillow. His laptop bag was where he'd left it on top of a plastic storage bin full of his clothes,  the zipper partly open, but a glance showed his computer was still inside. He slung that over his shoulder, then after a brief pause grabbed the jeans he'd been wearing yesterday that had been lying next to the laptop bag, holding it to his chest. His wallet was heavy in the front pocket as well as another bump on the other side.

The giant pillow pressing down on him was slowly getting bigger, more forceful, and he stumbled again as the intrusive thoughts came to him once more. Sending more flame towards his head to clear it again—he could see a little tongue of flame on the end of his nose—Loren noted it wasn't as effective as before. That… was probably a bad sign.

For the second time, he ran for the door of the apartment, each step feeling like he was carrying a heavy backpack and had a toddler hugging each leg. His eyes darted around for chains wrapped around nothing as he carefully moved around Harmony as quickly as he could.

His step faltered as he found himself facing the open door of the bathroom.

The lights inside were off, the room's only illumination coming from what little light was reflecting off the white walls of the kitchen. In the gloom, he saw the ghost. If he hadn't seen the face in his mirror last night, he'd have thought this was just a trick of the light, random chance arranging the shadow he cast and the light glinting off the bathroom tiles to form a face and shape in the middle of where several of Harmony's chains were wrapped around air.

Shadows that suggested dark hair framed what might have been white glints reflecting off tiles or might have been a face. Pale shapes hinted at arms and leg amidst the wrapped chains, and there was a baggy, flickering shape of shadows and implied lines that might have been a nightdress or an oversized shirt. The only thing Loren could say for sure was that the ghost he thought he was seeing was human, since there were no shapes suggesting the distinctive horns of an oni, or the tentacles of the payatin. The shape of the ghost implied it had fallen on its back with head and shoulders resting on the tile wall, weighed down by the chains that crossed over its torso, limbs splayed wide as if it had tried to catch itself from a fall or was trying to rise and was failing.

The face was indistinct, but for a moment, Loren felt like he was meeting someone's eyes.

He wrenched away his gaze and ran, kicking the rubber sandals he'd thrown out ahead of him as he did so.

As he stumbled out apartment 409, he heard a sound began it rise. It seemed distant, with strange echoes like it was coming from the far end of a long hallway, a stuttering cry that rose and didn't stop. He turned, thinking it was Harmony again, but she was already turning towards him, still crawling on the ground. Pulling herself along the floor, she made her way towards him, and he resisted the urge to step back. The chains on her back had formed a net, and every movement  dragged strands and strands and strands of it along the ground. A few chains trailed behind her to the open door of the bathroom, and they were shaking as if whatever they held was struggling.

"Close it!" Harmony wailed in a voice that made his heart break, filling the shattered pieces with tears—

He shook his head as Harmony repeated herself, stepping over her—and being unable to not step on the hem of her white dress—and managing to grab the doorknob. Loren pulled it to close the door, and was surprised when it didn't try to resist him. the door swung easily, and he actually stumbled back to get out of its way. He expected the door to catch on the chains on the floor that Harmony was trailing behind her, and was mildly surprised that the chains somehow managed to fit in the narrow gap between the door and the floor. At the last second, he reached around the door for the doorknob on the other side and depressed the lock before pulling the door shut.

The distant wail cut off, muffled by the door..

For a moment, Loren just stood there, the doorknob in hand, staring at the closed door. Then he heard the tinkling of chains.

"Back."

Loren let go of the door, stepping back until he hit the opposite wall. Chains began weaving back and forth across the door, somehow anchoring from the frame to the door and the frame again. It almost looked like a joke out of a cartoon, with a silly number of chains securing it—

The doorknob turned, and something inside the apartment tried to wrench the door open. The chains all went taut, keeping the door from opening.

"Need to go…" Harmony said, and with visible effort, she laboriously started pushing herself off the ground. Sitting up, Loren finally got a clear view of what she was wearing. Rather than a uniform white dress, she could make out what looked like pale white patterns of stitching and very short ruffles, all so pale they blended with the dress itself. wide sleeves ended in what looked like airy lace cuffs that gave the impression the merely faded—no, wait, the sleeves did in fact simply fade away. What he had at first thought was pale skin on her hands turned out to be some king of very tight glove that went up her arms and disappeared into her sleeves.

Before he could check if her feet were covered the same way, Harmony was getting her legs under her and pushing herself up to her feet. In mid-motion, the elaborate cape of chains on her back fell away and the air around her darkened again as the white dress vanished, and for a seemingly timeless moment Loren was staring at the purple-tinted outline before that vanished as well and Harmony was wearing her normal clothes again. He glanced towards the door, but the chains were still in place, still keeping the door shut as the something—as the ghost—tried to pull it open.

"We need to hurry," Harmony said, sounding a little out of it. "Now that I've changed back, the chains aren't going to last for long. let's get out of range of pulling pulled into the door." She scooped up his rubber sandals. "You can put your pants on and stick these in your laptop bag in front of the elevator."

One of the chains on the door popped off and disappeared.

The two of them looked at each other, then turned and ran.

––––––––––––––––––

Loren was vaguely annoyed they weren't stopped by security as the left the building. He remembered two security cameras in the hallways of the seventh floor, but whoever was watching it—if someone as watching it—apparently hadn't seen fit to consider their behavior out in the hall suspicious. The two were mostly silent as they made their way back to Harmony's aunt's house, mostly so he could return the sandals he'd borrowed. It was late afternoon by the time they got back, and the sun's heat was starting to wane just a little.

"Thanks," Loren said as soon as they were inside the house. He took a moment to switch out the borrowed sandals he was wearing for his own as Harmony made her way to an electric fan and parked herself in front of it.

"You're welcome," she said, her voice reverberating as she spoke directly into the fan's stream. "You feeling okay? No aftereffects? My aura can be a little hard for people to shake off the first time."

"I'm good," he assured her. For a moment he hesitated, then pressed on. "So… you're a Symbol of Despair?"

"Yeah…" she said with a sigh. "Now you know why I don't really use it that much. Getting into the right mood… well, it sucks. I'm not a naturally Byronic emo 'everything is terrible as expected, woe to us all, source: me' kind of person." She turned and gave him a sardonic smile. "It's also part of the reason I dropped out of army training. One of my training modules learning how to consistently Symbolize on command and… well, it made me feel terrible. Not that the rest was any picnic, but I could have handled it if I didn't have to do the Symbolism training module too. Doing both… well, I had to drop out."

"I'm sorry, Hari," he said as he took his laptop bag off his shoulder. What else could he say? When they were kids she was the one who'd always wanted to be a vigilant, something that must have seemed finally doable when she'd awakened her Symbolism. Joining the army had been part of her plan so she could have the necessary experience to apply and actually be a viable applicant for the organization.

"Eh, it's fine," she said, waving the matter aside. "It's like being an astronaut: eventually, you realize you can't become one and do something else." They'd both wanted to be astronauts back when they'd been six.

He walked past her to the sofa and collapsed with a sigh, putting his laptop bag down on the coffee table in front of him.. "Well, at least I have my important stuff back," he said, pulling stuff out of his jeans pockets. His wallet, his keys, his phone… they all seemed to be okay, not that the ghost was likely to have taken out the bills. What would it need the money for?

He handed Harmony a bill as she collapsed to sit down beside him, the fan now pointed towards the sofa. "Here."

"Thanks. I'll give you the change later." She leaned back and closed her eyes.

The two sat there, just enjoying the chance to rest.

 "So… what are you going to do now?" she asked.

Loren sighed. "Move back to my parents' house, look for a new place, see if I can find a way to keep from having to pay for six months of lease on an apartment I'm not going to be able to use…"

"Hmm…" Harmony said. "Now, hear me out… what if you can use the apartment?"

“How much would it cost to get rid of the ghost, though?”

“Oh, probably a lot. It takes a lot of energy and effort of try and override a ghost’s claim. It might be possible with this one, but it will depend on how long she’s been fettered to the premises.” Harmony made a dismissive gesture. “Depending on how long they lived there, how long they’ve been haunting it, and how intense what they were feeling was when they died, trying for an exorcism would be prohibitively expensive. And besides, once the building knows your apartment isn’t haunted anymore, they’ll jack up the price. You know they will.”

“So I’m screwed and out a lot of money no matter what course I take?”

“Not necessarily. There IS a way you can use the apartment, and keep the rent cheap.”

Loren raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening…”

“Now, this is a long shot right now, since what we did probably pissed her off, but what if… you and the ghost can live together?”

“Hari… if I could do that, I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Lor, last night you ran out of your apartment because you found an intruder. Today, we crashed the apartment, took your stuff and got out. At no point during that did we actually sit down and try to communicate.”

He stared at her. “Are you saying you want us to go back there and… what? Hash out being roommates?”

“No, of course not. First, we’re going to do research and find out who this was. That means talking to your neighbors to find out who had died in there, hopefully in recent memory, then once we have a name find out who they were, what they were like, speak to their friends and family if possible, find out the circumstances of their death since that would have an influence of their ghost’s personality. That would take a few days, which should hopefully let her calm down a little after I tied her up. We get a sense of her personality and use that to assess whether she’s reasonable enough to be negotiated with.”

Loren gave her a disbelieving look. “What, just like that?”

“It’s how we do it at my job,” Harmony said. “Always try talking first, since trying to exorcise them is pretty final and really pisses them off. No one wants to die, and ghosts don’t want to essentially die again, especially since the first time would have to be really emotionally traumatic to produce a ghost. And yes, sometimes we’ve had to do it after we’ve pissed them off a little, so it’s not impossible. Just… difficult.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “I’m sensing a catch here…”

“Well…” She shrugged. “Look Lor, I have a job. It just so happens my job is dealing with things like this. So… tomorrow, I think you should come with me to the office so you can talk to my boss for a free consultation about dealing with this ghost. We have the resources, the connections, the equipment and expertise to deal with this. The alternative is for me to make a list of things for you to do while you do all the research we would be doing. It’s going to take you longer since you don’t know the right people, will probably be harder, and when we go to confront the ghost it’s going to be just you and me, so if things go wrong we won’t have a fallback or support.”

“I don’t know…”

“I’ll get you the friends and family discount. You’ll be paying five thousand at worst, most likely less, and if it goes beyond that… uh, I’ll foot the rest of the bill as an early Solstice present!”

“I don’t know… can I think about it?”

“Sure. By the way, shouldn’t you be commuting back home and explaining to your parents you leased a haunted apartment?”

“So, I just talk to your boss right? Just a consultation, explain the problem, no need to pay anything yet?”

“Yup, free consultation.”

“Well… I guess that’s fine…”

“Great! I’ll ask my aunt and uncle if you can stay over tonight again. Need any spare clothes?”

“…please.”