Fictitious 52 #2

This week's story plays to my weaknesses in much the way last week's plays to my strength. I've always been more interested in, and, I think, better at writing, character pieces. Stories where what's happening isn't important outside of how it's affecting and developing the characters in the story. "Off Duty" was certainly that kind of story, I think.

This week's story, "Cursed?", is me working on my ability to write events, as well as descriptive text. The main character doesn't even have a name, in fact.

On top of that it's written in past tense. Or, rather, I tried to write it in past tense and defaulted back to present several times along the way. I corrected a lot of those, but I know some are still present. It's something else I need to work on.

Anyways, hit the jump for the next story.

 He chomped on the end of the oddly colored, unlit cigar in his mouth. They don't quite understand it. They find it odd, even. But they don't question him. His habits don't really matter, as long as he can do the job they've hired him for. Who knows, maybe it helps him out.

“So, how long has it been going on,” he asked, speech slightly distorted from speaking around the obstruction.

The office was dark, brown, and leathery. All words that could be used to describe its owner. It was an old fashioned place, with an old fashioned decor. The walls were wood paneled, the carpet was short and some rusty color streaked with black. The furniture is sparse for such a large place, just a desk with a revolving chair behind it and two seats in front of it. The seats were deep, with arms almost as high as their backs, made more noticeable by the way anyone who sat in them would sink into the cushions. It was in one of these seats that Laura sat, squeezing her husband, Jason's, hand.

“Two years,” she replied.

“Hm.”

“Is... is that strange,” asked Jason after the man's simple grunt.

“Not that it's been going on for two years. Just that you came here this quick.”

“Umm... we're sorry if that's bad. We can... we can just...”

“Nah, Mrs. Archer. It's fine, more'n fine 'nfact. Quicker it's dealt with, easier it is to deal with. Most times, though, 's not usually what happens.”

“What usually happens?”

“What usually happens is that someone abandons the place. No one lives there for a good ten or twenty years and weird things start happening. After that, people start trying to live there, despite the stories, weird things happen to them. That cycle repeats for a few decades then one of two things happen. Someone calls one of us to deal with it, or no one does anything and it spreads to the rest of the damn town within the century.” He waited a few moments before he tossed in “Skeptics annoy the hell outta me. Make the job harder than it need be.”

The Archers listened, nodding their heads.

“So it's a good thing we came to you when we did?”

“Better'n if you'd have waited, at least.”

“So you'll take the job?”

“Hold up, before I can tell you that I'll need some specifics”

“Well, we bought the place...”

---

He puffed on the still unlit cigar, his breath turning visible on the cold air, making it look as if he were actually smoking. Despite the fact that it's early August, it is freezing in the vicinity of the house, a sure sign of the supernatural. He pulls his black bomber jacket closed and zips it up. The worn leather and white fur-lining the best tools in his arsenal, having faced the unnatural elements time and again and coming victorious. He lowered his trilby and approached the door. Before he had taken three steps up the driveway he was blasted with a strong burst of wind, as if the house knew what it was he was there to do.

The situation was abnormal in many ways. The house was not a mansion sitting on its own at the end of a street, casting its long shadow across the town. It was a simple town house at the end of a row. Four floors counting the basement and attic. The curse was a young one, having only been in effect for two years, but it felt much stronger. And while it was entirely possible he was imagining it, his experience told him otherwise. He wasn't some fresh-faced rookie who'd found himself a magic book and decided he could be a curse breaker. He was a battle-hardened veteran. This situation was seeming less straightforward by the minute.

He held his hat to his head, put his shoulder to the wind, and pressed on to the door. He reached out and grasped the knob, he could feel the heat drain from it, a rookie would be burned by the cold here, but not him. That's what the gloves were for. He turned the knob and the door flew open. The house knew it couldn't keep him out, so it might as well let him in on its own terms.

He stepped forward and the door immediately slamed behind him. He didn't need to bother to check in order to know that it had sealed itself shut. He wouldn't be leaving until he completed his mission, the house decided it was finished with him, or the house simply finished him.

He looked around, his experienced eyes sensitive enough to detect the energies that course through a cursed home once he had crossed the threshold. In a house with a decade's worth of being cursed, they would be subtle electricity-like crackles of yellow, sparking from the walls and furniture every now and then. What he saw in this home, however, confirmed his earlier thoughts. The house was powerful, too powerful. Purple energy flowed constantly through everything. Like ripples in a pond, except the source of the ripple could not be located.

Of course it couldn't, lord forbid this job turned out as easy as it first looked like it would be.

The reason curses generally take so long to be noticed is that it is very difficult, bordering on impossible, to curse an entire home. Instead, whoever laid the curse will leave the curse in a specific item within the house. Over the years, the curse will spread out, first effecting nearby items, then the room, then the floor, then the house. It is difficult for a curse to cross the barrier of the home to infect an entire town. Even then, a curse can still be broken the same way as it always could have, the only change being in how much dangerous terrain the curse breaker need cross in order to succeed.

And so, his task was a simple one. Somewhere in this house, on one of the four floors, could be found whatever item had been cursed in the first place to cause this mess. Theoretically this should be easy, he had, after all, succeeded in scouring entire mansions that had been cursed for centuries. This was a two year old curse on a simple town home. But he didn't like it, things had already proven themselves to not be what they seemed. The house was far more powerful than a two year old curse should allow it to be. A two year old curse shouldn't have even spread to the full house. Something was wrong, but standing around thinking about it wasn't going to get anything done. People, in general, aren't very original. In his experience cursed objects tend to be 'hidden' in either the basement or attic about eight times out of ten. The most efficient way to approach this, then was either from the top down, or the bottom up. Since he was already on the ground floor, he decided to start in the basement.

---

It wasn't too long before he encountered his first obstacle, it was a classic. Once he'd gone halfway down the stairs to the basement it suddenly became much less than halfway. Every step he took seemed to extend the stairwell by another three. He'd dealt with this many times before, and the solution was simple enough. He had gone down twelve steps before the house tried to stop him. There were twelve left to go down before he was on the basement floor. He did some counting in his head, braced himself, and leaped forward.

“3... 2...” he counted to himself, hitting the ground at zero. He didn't have time to rest, however, as he took another leap to, this time to his right. The carpet runner he would otherwise have been standing on was jerked from its position. He rolled forward as a flower pot crashed into the wall, taking a path through the spot where his head had been.

Breathing a little harder than usual, he stood back up. He straightened his trilby, and looked around his surroundings.

“You're powerful,” he said around the cigar. “Not too original though.” At the same time he was berating the house, he berated himself. He was getting old, there was a time he would have been able to manage that without missing a beat. This pause in his movement would never have happened. He would have kept on with the mission, but he needed the rest now. It was a good thing, then, that he didn't smoke, or else he'd have been in even worse shape.

Once he'd caught his breath, he was on the move again. The basement was small, consisting of three rooms. A bathroom, a laundry room, and a den, with a corridor connecting all three. That was where he'd landed, the narrow, white walled corridor. The flower pot had flown in from the den, and he'd rolled forward into the laundry room. The room was cavernous, dark with a high ceiling. The light worked, thankfully. With it on, he could see the contents of the room. The energy flow here was the same as in the rest of the house, nothing stood out to him as the source of a curse. Still, it was a cluttered place, boxes lying everywhere. It was entirely possible that whatever the source was, it was here, but he didn't think so. When he closed his eyes, taking his sight out of the equation and letting himself simply feel the energies surrounding him, he could feel no difference between here and anywhere else he'd thus far been.

It wasn't a perfect technique, not in just anyone's hands. However, not many of his techniques were. He had no magic, he relied only on years of experience and the senses any person is born with if only they'd hone them as finely as he had. In this case, the closer he found himself to the source of a curse, the sharper the energy would feel. Most wouldn't notice this, but for him, it was painful. It damaged anyone that was too close, but he had trained himself to feel it. To see such energy, one would have to be looking at the item that was its source. So when he didn't feel the energy attacking his body, he decided to move on.

The bathroom was equally devoid of the source. The faucet bled, the mirror cracked when he looked in it, and something seemed to be gazing at him out of the hole in the wall. But no source, and therefore no need to linger.

The den was small. Technically it had more useable space the laundry room, but the high ceiling made it seem larger. The room was wider than it was long at a ratio of about eighteen to twelve, which made it seem even more closed than it otherwise would have. A bookshelf was built into one wall, with several smaller wooden ones scattered about. There was a large table tucked into the corner, wooden edges with a glass top and a brass stand. A ratty green sofa rests along the back wall, a shelf above it. The carpet is thick and that usual ordinary cream-tan color.

Besides the furniture, the room is empty, he doesn't need to do any more than look for the source. Nothing gives off a different kind of energy than the type permeating the rest of the house. It would seem that the basement is clean.

---

Back on the first floor he sees the door outside is open, inviting.

“Thanks for the offer, but no. Think I'll be seeing this one through.”

It was afraid of him, he knew. There was no reason for the curse to let him out now. But curses don't become afraid. Curses aren't sentient. They're like programming left behind in a home to carry out the directions of whoever left it. Either the person who laid this curse in the first place was fairly brilliant, planning for the possibility of someone capable of breaking their curse and trying to convince them to leave, which was unlikely, or something was even more amiss than he'd thought.

The ground floor had a living room, dining room, and a kitchen. He hadn't felt anything here the first time, so he doubted he would now. Still, he would check. Starting with the kitchen.

Upon having both feet firmly on the sand colored tiles he felt them give way. As he walked, he felt himself begin to sink. The entire floor had become quicksand. Well, the entire floor seemed to have become quicksand. In reality it was simply the house again, doing its best to defend itself. Regardless of this, it was still deadly. In these situations, all that matters is what your mind believes. The greatest weapon of any cursed residence is not what they can do physically, but the damage they can inflect on the mind.

Of course, he was prepared. At about waist's depth he took a hard chomp on his cigar, releasing from its end some sort of black liquid. It set fire to his tongue and burned all the way down when he swallowed it. The burning hit his stomach and then branched out through his nervous system, racing outwards until, finally, reaching his brain. The pain was like napalm. He groaned in agony, placing a palm against his head and pressing down hard.

After a few seconds, the pain cleared up. He inhaled deeply and blinked away the reflexive tears. No matter how many times he's done that, he's never gotten used to it. But that was the point. He's standing now in the middle of the kitchen, on top of the tiles.

There was a time he would carry the liquid on him in a flask, but he'd learned his lesson. Carrying a flask came with risks that didn't apply to a cigar. It was harder to remove the cigar from his person, for one, and for another it was much easier to get the liquid into his system.

“Amateur.”

---

The ground floor failed to bare fruit, and so now he climbed the stairs to the second. The curtains over the windows blew mysteriously, despite the windows themselves being closed. It didn't attempt the infinite stairs trick again, he was obviously too clever for it. It allowed him upstairs mostly undisturbed.

There were three rooms, as well as one hall way closet. The doors to the bathroom and two smaller rooms stood wide open, he could easily see inside of them. And so he chose to enter the master bedroom first, the only room with a closed door. He opened it and stepped across one more threshold, catching a reflection of himself in the mirror on the dresser across from it before looking around. To his right is a large closet that he'd have to investigate, and to his left, a king size bed and... there it was, sitting on the bed. Not some cursed item, no. Sitting on the king sized bed was a translucent woman, hair and clothing floating around her as if she were submerged.

It didn't make any sense to him with the information he had. This shouldn't be what was going on. He'd suspected, but hadn't been given any reason to believe it was the case. There was no cursed item here. This house wasn't cursed. Actually, these facts made things make significantly more sense. No wonder a curse so powerful, that had spread so fast, hadn't managed to proceed further. This was no curse. This was a haunting.

She turned to him, realizing his presence. Her face cracks, her eyes become empty and black. She shrieks at him.

He was not prepared for this.

---

Jason and Laura Archer waited in the office for the man they'd hired to deal with their problem. He'd told them to be there at nine o' clock pm. It was currently nine forty-five. He was late, and they were worried.

It was another five minutes before the office door swung open and he stumbled in. He looked like hell. His bomber jacket was torn, his left eye was swollen, and he seemed to have lost his hat.

“Damn amateurs.”

The couple watched him as he walked behind his desk and threw away the cigar in his mouth. He pulled up his chair and opened a drawer. He rummaged in there for a bit before pulling out a new cigar and placing it where the previous one was. They remained silent until he ws ready to speak.

“The good news, I'm cuttin' my fee in half.”

“Why,” Laura asks.

Jason adds “So the curse is broken?”

“I'm cuttin' my fee in half because that's my consultant's fee. And that wasn't no curse.”

“Consultant's fee?”

“Someone decided to hire some idiot amateur ghost hunters to deal with a haunting from the eighteen twenties. Not in your house, mind. Quite a distance away. Point bein', thankfully, they didn't make the mistake most amateurs do and destroy her. But they didn't help her pass on either. They just sent her away. And she wound up in your house.”

“And you got rid of her?”

“Ghost hunting ain't my thing, which is why I'm cutting my fee. Nothing I can do about a ghost. I can recommend you a good firm, but that's all I can do.”

“Umm, sure?”

The Archers paid his fee and he directed them to some friends who'd been dealing with ghosts almost as long as he'd been doing curses. I had been a long day, and he was tired. He would have to get his jacket patched up, and he'd need a new hat entirely. This whole mess had been far more trouble than it was actually worth.

“Damn amateurs.”