Flipping Haunted Houses For Fun And Profit!

Maybe he should have paid more attention to Harmony’s flowchart.

Loren watched as Steve carefully used the key to unlock Apartment 409. He and Harmony stayed well away from the door lest the ghost react. The spiritualist cautiously opened the door, looking inside. Next to him, Malory moved the ghost candle to let its flame shine into the apartment, the unnaturally white flame burning steadily as Loren kept it alight with his own. Did they see the ghost?

Actually, could Malory see the ghost? Payatin saw with magic and perceived darkness rather than light, so was the candle any help at all?

It was a passing thought as Steve gestured that he and Harmony could approach. Warily, he waited for Harmony to walk in front of him before he moved. That got him a withering look from his best friend. “Really?” she dryly.

“Look, the ghost manhandled me, and you manhandled the ghost. I think that shows who can handle themselves and who’s in danger.”

She rolled her eyes, but led the way into the apartment, casually looking around. Loren noted how she made sure to look up, specifically directly above the inside of the door. He looked there as well, warily glancing into the bathroom.

He need not have bothered. The ghost was lying on his bed.

Loren froze, but the white outline didn’t stir, simply remaining where it was sunning itself in the light coming in through the windows. The ghost seemed incomplete, with only the parts of its body that faced the ghost candle visible, giving the ghost a dismembered appearance or like some kind of game asset that hadn’t loaded in properly and was flickering.

It was the clearest view he’d had of the ghost, and the first time he’d see her with a mind that wasn’t fogged with sleepiness, terror, or induced despair. The ghost was barefoot and wearing only an oversized shirt of the sort that reminded him of sleepwear, showing shallow but feminine curves. Though height was a little difficult to discern because they were lying down, Loren got the feeling she was a shorter than he was…

“Don’t stare, it’s rude,” Harmony all but hissed in a low voice into his ear, tugging him away. Loren tore his gaze from the source of his recent sleepless nights, managing to keep enough presence of mind to be careful of his step. “Stand here in the bathroom where she can’t see you. I’ll signal when you can dramatically come out.”

The words ‘So it’s supposed to be dramatic?’ were ready to come out of his mouth before he turned it to ash and just nodded. He moved into the shadow of the bathroom, still fueling the ghost candle’s flame. Steve had taken a cloth from the box he had been carrying and had wiped the built-in kitchen counter while Malory pulled out a small white plate. She set down the ghost candle in its little glass holder down next to the plate as Steve pulled out the red and gold tin Loren had seen earlier. When the Spiritualist opened the lid, Loren caught a glimpse of golden-brown mooncakes. Using a tissue, Steve picked one up and set it on the plate, and why were they about to start snacking in his haunted apartment?

As Loren watched, Steve pulled outa little saucer with a strange dimple in the middle—oh! He knew what those were now. Loren nodded as an incense stick was drawn from the red and gold box, which he finally recognized as one of those they got sold around the Moon of the Dead and the Day of the Dead. He’d seen them in passing when he and his family went out to the cemetery where his uncle was buried. He had never learned what they were officially called, but they contained food and incense that had venecite mixed into it, meant to be offerings to ghosts and spirits… and therefore completely wasted in the cemetery, because they usually had neither. Almost no one buried in a cemetery had actually died there, he knew that much.

Steve lit the incense stick on the ghost candle, and Loren had to remove his claim from the new flame kindled so he didn’t accidentally interfere with the incense. A scent quickly began to rise, a thick and almost cloying perfume that would have been rather nice if it wasn’t so intense. He could feel his nose start to tingle, and he could feel the magic impregnating the incense from the venecite that had been mixed into it. It was always strange feeling magic that had been fueled by venecite, the way it was so like Flame but somehow formless and cold. It was something he’d worked with before in his laboratory classes since venecite was the only medium that could be used to imbue magic into a substance without the participation of a mage, and the fact that it could be used raw meant it was commonly applied in all forms of alchemy. In this instance, that alchemy was mixing incense and cooking.

He heard Steve clap three times before reciting the words of a common childhood chant to politely ask for the attention and pardon of spirits. As it was for children, the wording was kept simple. “Excuse me, coming through. Excuse me, coming through. Sorry for disturbing you.” Very simple words, forming simple phrases that children could repeat until they lost all meaning and became a blur of sound. “Oh, kind spirit, we present to you an offering. Should it please you, kindly accept this and speak with us, that you may offer us your wisdom.”

There was no sound, no rush of air. Between one blink and the next, the pale form of the ghost was at the counter. Loren barely managed to step back deeper into the bathroom, even as Harmony nonchalantly stepped between him and the ghost. Fortunately, the ghost didn’t turn towards him, her attention focused on the incense stick and mooncake on the plate next to it. The ghost was moving her head like she was sniffing, and her face…

In her reflection in the bathroom mirror, the ghost candle made her face seem like a mask hanging in the air, and it was a mask of longing. A ghostly hand reached for the incense, waving as if trying to waft the smell towards her. The incense smoke didn’t stir, the thin streams not enough to set off the smoke alarm as the scent dispersed to fill the room, but the ghost seem to be trying to inhale as much of the smoke as she could.

She looked like she was crying.

For a while the ghost just stood there, seemingly breathing in the scent of the venecite-infused incense. This seemed to be the reaction Harmony and the others were looking for. His best friend looked relieved, though still wary, while Steve seemed cautiously optimistic. Malory… well, Loren was willing to admit that he wasn’t very good at reading payatin expressions. Without eyes, they mostly emoted through head tilt and the body language of their tentacles—or so he had heard—and he was at the wrong angle to read both. The only thing he could tell was that Malory’s tentacles looked loose and relaxed, and he wasn’t sure if that was real or her feigning casualness.

Steve abruptly clapped his hands again, startling Loren. From the flicker of motion in the mirror’s reflection, it had startled the ghost as well. “Excuse me, coming through. Excuse me, coming through. Sorry for disturbing you,” he repeated. Had the spiritualist done something to make himself more noticeable? Loren knew only the grade school basics of spiritual mechanics, so he thought it was possible, but he couldn’t say for sure. “Would you like to try the mooncake? It’s very sweet and spicy.”

The memory of bean paste, brown sugar, cinnamon, pepper and salted duck egg came to Loren’s mind from the one time he’d ever tried ghost food—it had been the day after the Day of the Dead, and traditionally they ate the ghost food since the spirits had already partaken of its essence—a revolting mix of such intensity that he’d never tried it again, but the ghost actually seemed to perk up at the notion, turning it’s gaze towards the mooncake eagerly. In the light of the ghost candle, the mooncake seemed to have a strange, pale glow about it

One ghostly hand reached for the mooncake—and Loren heard the ghost wail in despair as its hand simply went through it. The wail tapered off as the ghost drew back her hand and a misshapen mass of spiritform in her grip. It was an amorphous blob that could have been… well, anything, really.

Standing across from her, Malory clapped loudly, though she didn’t bother with the chant. Instead, when the ghost looked towards her, the payatin mimed raising a hand to her wide-open mouth and chewing something. The gesture showed far too many triangular, saw-like teeth that made the little boy who’d watched that shark movie at an impressionable age nervous, but he was a grown up now and was above such silly and borderline racist things, so there!

The ghost tentatively raised the spiritform blob to her mouth, and—

A moan that was almost pornographic filled the room as the ghost’s entire body shuddered, one hand clamping over her mouth as if trying to prevent something from escaping. It was doing nothing to muffle her voice, which continued to fill the room as her ghost proceeded to writhe in the air, feet kicking wildly and causing her shirt to flap about as if she were underwater. Loren watched with an almost voyeuristic feeling as she thrashed and rolled about in the air in throes that—

The ghost’s shirt abruptly disappeared, and for a moment there was only a pale form that abruptly vanished as Malory put her hand between the ghost and the ghost candle. The sound of the moaning started to fluctuate, dipping and rising as parts of the ghost flickered in and out of view. She seemed to be thrashing in the air, and her moans seemed to equal parts ecstasy and pain.

Loren supposed eating a mass of spiritform that tasted strongly of bean paste, brown sugar, cinnamon, pepper and salted duck egg could do that to you, especially if you hadn’t tasted anything in… however long it had been since the woman the ghost was based on had died. It was a part of the alchemy of cooking when you used venecite, the crystalized magic imbuing things with a spiritual presence, and thus creating spiritform that contained flavor and, in the case of the incense, scents. Had the mooncake been freshly baked, the incense would not have been necessary.

It was some time before the moaning finally began to abate, its tone changing from pleasure—or pain—to loss. Loren saw a ghostly hand reach towards the mooncake and pulling out another spiritform blob. The second blob was noticeably smaller than the one before, but the ghost’s reaction was still just as extreme. This time Malory didn’t wait for the ghost’s shirt to disappear before putting her hand in front of the ghost candle, and everyone had to spend an awkward little while pretending not to hear the ghost thoroughly enjoying herself—or in agony from the pepper and cinnamon. It was still hard to tell which.

The third time the ghost had reached for the mooncake, the blob of the spiritform was so small Loren couldn’t see it in her hands, although it still went straight to the ghost’s mouth. Though to be honest, he’d stopped watching at that point, just sitting on the closed lid of the toilet and repeating what he could remember of Harmony’s flowchart to try and distract himself from the sounds being made. The moaning terminated far more quickly, and when the ghost reached for the mooncake again, she let out a cry of distress as her clutches brought out nothing. The venecite in the food had been expended.

As the ghost stared at the food on the plate—and Loren hastily got to his feet—Steve brought his hands together for a third time, drawing the ghost’s attention towards him. “Excuse me, coming through. Excuse me, coming through. Sorry for disturbing you,” the Spiritualist said. In the light of the ghost candle, Loren saw a glow around the older man, and realized his body was sheathed in a shell of spiritform. “Hello, Miss. Are you Sara Dalisay?”

The ghost recoiled at being so directly addressed. Her mouth moved, and a moment later, Loren heard her voice. “You can see me?” Despite the words not being properly in synch with the ghost’s lip movements—did ghost candles have input lag?—the longing from her was obvious.

“Yes, Miss. We can see you. Are you Sara Dalisay?”

No tears ran down her face, but the expression on her face was tearful as the ghost—Dalisay—nodded.

Gently, Steve said, “Sara—may I call you Sara? Sara… do you know you’re a ghost?”

Despite floating in the air—Loren couldn’t see her feet, the ghost candle’s light blocked by the counter—Dalisay seemed to slump, as if something that had been holding her up, some wall she’d been leaning on, was taken from her. Hands rising to cover her face, she wailed.