On the edge where the city was creeping into the fields, two cars drove along a road that had been freshly paved probably no longer than a season past. They passed along several sites of carefully marked and roped off lots. A handful of them were active construction sites, laying the foundation or raising the skeletal framework of a house to be. In other cases the materials had been delivered and lay stacked in weather-proofed containers waiting for a crew to be assigned. In one or two places, a building stood nearly complete but the cars drove past these up to the only house within sight that lay entirely complete. They pulled side by side into the driveway as people exited them. A tall and thin woman smiled as she stepped out of the small, cube-like black car and waved to the two people stepping out of the silver four-door car.
"Mark, Erica, I you're pleased with the way the house turned out. I think you chose one of the best of our floorplans." Her silver-grey hair was neatly kept and lay against her sandy-bark skin as she smiled broader than her face seemed able to fit.
"It's beautiful, Pepper." The speaker was a plump, round woman not much older than twenty, certainly no more than twenty-five. Beside was a similarly young man with a healthy but soft face and a pair of round glasses that slipped down his nose until he pushed it back up.
"So, it's ready for the furniture and everything?"
"That's right, by the time you're married and back from your honeymoon, the movers will have delivered all the furniture and everything else. Then you can move things around as you want at the pace you want.
"Two floors and a basement, right?" the young man asked.
"And six bedrooms on the second floor," Pepper confirmed. "You must be planning a large family."
"For now it's guest rooms," Erica said.
"Yeah, we don't have any plans for children or more partners yet." Mark added. "But it's a hope for the future."
"Worse comes to worse we get offices and they stay guest rooms."
"I'm sure everything will come off fine," Pepper said with a smile as she stepped to the side. "Congratulations. You're officially homeowners..."
She stepped off the driveway onto the lawn and stumbled slightly, looking down at the slightly squishy feeling that came from her foot stepping onto the grass.
"Looks like we better go around to the paving stones, I don't think the turf has taken to the ground yet."
She didn't look down to see the sticky crimson fluid that oozed out of the edges of the turf square she had stepped on.
--------
"Hello, Aunt Tess, what's up?"
"Hey, Kylie, I was wondering if you might drive me out to that new development. New Signika."
"I guess, what's over there?"
"A haunted house of course. What else?"
"A haunted..." there was a long suffering sigh as Kylie shook her head. "Fine, I suppose you have all the gear you need?"
"Everything but a car, that's right. So bring that, I can carry everything else into it."
Ten minutes later and Tess Richter was sitting beside Kylie in her car as they drove out past the neighborhoods they were familiar with and into the lots of New Signika. There were a few more finished houses and quite a few more in various stages of construction, but it was still very much a place that was in between being one thing and another. That Liminal edge between settled and fallow.
Coming up to the house, they found a silver four-door car in the driveway and the two stepped out. Something prickled at Kylie's worries and she found herself wandering to the gated fence as Tess walked up the door and knocked on it, listening to the sound of clattering from within the house.
"Hello, just... just go away."
"I'm hear about the post on the forum, you were talking about troubles?" Tess said as the door partially opened to reveal a nervous and wide-eyed young woman staring at her through the crack in the door.
"Wha...what are you talking about?"
"Listen there was a forum post about this house, with pictures and everything saying you were having a haunting. I'm very much an expert in this sort of thing."
"You...you are? An expert."
"Absolutely, my niece and I have absolutely dealt with at least one strange phenomena already and we absolutely survived it, as is obvious."
Kylie meanwhile leaned down to see a weird sort of glowing purple light. And then there was a clatter from the yard as the gate slammed open, clearly driven by wind and knocking Kylie back on her ass into the squishy soft lawn. She reached down and came up with a leather bound handle in her hands and a slick covering of blood all over her hands.
"Aunt Tess!"
The nervous round woman stepped out, leaving the door open behind her, and walked across to see where the noise was coming from. "What are you doing over there?!"
"What am I... why is there blood in your lawn?"
As Kylie Brown and the young homeowner argued, Tess Richter slipped into the house and walked back to see the source of the clattering sound before. She walked past a wide living room and to the kitchen in the back of the first floor and saw the entire contents of the kitchen scattered about the floor. She had long enough to take in the absolute mess.
Standing up, she looked around seeing swirls of purplish letters all about the room, and grabbed a jar and started trying to scrape the purplish letters into the jar. She almost managed it before it shook free and then all the clattered item lifted up as the house shook like it was the center of an earthquake. A spoon launched itself forward, slamming into her forehead and the jar clattered back, unleashing most of the letters back into the world. Though she managed to keep one of the letters in the jar.
Outside, Kylie rushed past Erica and shook at the door only to find it locked. While shaking at the door and trying to force it open, she missed it as the porch light started flashing wildly, up until it burst into a blinding light.
"I told Mark we shouldn't have asked for help! It's mad now!"
A moment later and the door had popped open and Kylie found herself being shoved into the house and locked within. As her eyes cleared she found a strange lock that could only be opened from outside and called back into the house for her Aunt Tess. She turned about in time to see a blinking corpse shambling closer to her Aunt and shrieked, pointing.
Turning about, Tess dodged around the reaching ghost and laid eyes upon a strange mirror hanging upon the wall. It had an unsettling aura and she reached out with it to slam it down upon the shambling corpse and the whole of the specter is sucked up into the mirror, but not before the ghost could reach out to touch her and she felt herself being drained away.
"We need a second mirror!"
"Got it." Kylie rushed upstairs and searched about, grabbing a hand mirror from a restroom she was about to rush down when she noted the raw and bloody rib cage upon the floor and screamed as she rushed down to hand the mirror to Tess who immediately set about rigging the second mirror facing the first. The house started shaking again and the two stared at each other.
"We've got to go."
Wracked with pain, Tess moved forward, Kylie seeing her trouble and guiding her forward insistently. But that left them separated as the door slammed shut again just as Tess made it out. As the house continued to shake and rumble, Kylie rushed for the back door and slammed outside into a backyard that was drowning in blood. She hesitated only briefly before squishing onto the lawn and rushing for the fence.
There was a sense of something pursing her, gripping her shoulders and head as she pushed herself to leap over the gate and stumbled out to the driveway, seeing that Erica was still huddled within her silver car, lost to all sense.
"We've got to get you to the hospital, now!" Kylie shouted as Tess tossed the mirror contraption in the back.
"No, no, we need to go to the hardware store first."
"Listen..."
"There's a pharmacy there anyway."
"Fine, but then we're going to the hospital."
Rushing to the hardware store, it was clear that Tess's condition was worsening and the mirror behind them was shaking. But as they arrived, Tess rushed to the hardware store and grabbed a tub of resin, holding off the alerted staff with way more money than what she had grabbed was worth. And immediately she worked to drown the mirror in the resin. Creating a sealed layer revealing a bunch of angry purple letters and a screaming corpse.
Kylie ran into the pharmacy grabbing a first aid kit and then looking about to see corpses shivering and flickering all over the place and shambling in her direction. As she freaked out, she rushed for the door, shoulder checking one of the corpses away to head to her Aunt Tess, who was looking very on the edge.
Tess was a bit too weak to voice her confusion at why Kylie had just shoulder checked an old man, and then she was being rushed back into the car by a suddenly purple-eyed Kylie and they were rushing to the hospital. Kylie drove like a woman possessed and didn't notice it when the tire gave out and had her driving on the rim for almost six kilometers and the car rolled to a stop outside the hospital.
Sometime later, they were at Aunt Tess's house, patched up and trying to recover. Tess was analyzing the handle that Kylie had found and discovered a
mostly invisible blade, like an awl, sticking out of the handle, formed
of the same purple light as the letters. It seemed to hold no
malevolence the way the mirror did, a tool of some sort, neither evil
nor good. Her eyes and mind gleamed at the possibilities of reverse
engineering this tool into a full school of knowledge.
She was distracted when the doorbell rang and Kylie answered to reveal a Detective Constance O'Reilly outside with a notepad.
"We had a report that there was an assault at a strip mall earlier today. The description seems to point to you."
"What the..."
"You shoulder checked an old man, Kylie."
"Oh, that was real? Sorry, my Aunt was in a bad way and I was trying to get her some help quickly."
"I see, and how did she come to be in such a bad state, and why didn't you just call for an ambulance?"
Kylie took a deep breath and tried to explain the situation with as literal irrational supernatural incidents as possible. Meanwhile, Tess supplied some other information while she put forth a request on the Autumn Falls blog seeking some instructions on sealing spells and the like. The detective kept eyeing Tess as the conversation continued and it seemed clear that as much as she felt they were telling the truth, that she didn't particularly trust the woman shifting about in the back muttering poems about eternal imprisonment.
Once the detective was gone, the two set about working more, with Tess immediately setting up the ritual she was piecing together, drawing elements of the malevolent force to be trapped into the mirror permanently and forever. Over the course of the ritual, however, purple light was ripped out of Kylie's eyes, causing her to call out in pain and gripping her face, but the ritual seemed to complete as cleanly as possible, summoning a collection of other cursed items this entity had been reaching out through and clattering the mirror to the ground with a sealed monster within.
As Kylie and Tess recovered completely, word would come about Mark Calliope's body being found torn apart and Erica being taken in for a treatment with a therapist. Word would go out that the police were searching for an unknown murderer who had terrorized the young couple... but no word of ghosts or curses would ever reach the news.
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