Warm-up mini fic. Consider this a doodle.
The Fentons were selling their house for pennies.
The “For Sale” sign out front was easily missed against the ostentatious display of the op center, and the “FENTON” sign, and the Fenton RV. Or perhaps, all that made it more noticeable. It bolstered the weird and unsettling mundanity of a standard-issue For Sale sign dictating the fate of a house so indescribably odd.
It took only a few curious gossips to find the listing, and to spread the news further when the listing asked for hardly a fifth of standard asking price. Real estate agents weighed in on town facebook pages that, yes, this was abysmally low. Others rationalized it. “It’s only natural. Those house modifications have killed the resale value. The basement is uninhabitable according to the listing. They’re selling an extreme fixer-upper.”
And when the house did not sell in the first week, the price dipped again. And when rumors spread that the house owners were responsible for the town’s ghost blight, the price dipped once again. Then nearly overnight, the op-center vanished, and the FENTON sign disappeared from sight. The Fentons were, if nothing else, impressive engineers, capable of undoing a lifetime’s work in a weekend. Soon after, the listing sold.
The buyer, Peter, was looking for fixer-uppers to flip and rent. He knew about the Amity Park rumors, but if the renting market proved stale for the fear of ghosts, he knew the airbnb market would thrive with curious tourists, so the property was a safe bet regardless.
He met the family once, in the house, when he came to inspect it and sign paperwork if he was satisfied. The husband was perhaps the biggest man Peter had ever seen, portly yet rock solid, clad head to toe in neon orange. The wife matched him in jumpsuits, a powder blue one. Their daughter seemed normal, though she and Peter only exchanged a handful of words.
“Where are you folks headed once this place is sold?” Peter asked, cordially, eyes flitting between the contract before him and the couple seated across the table.
“Westward, a bit. Um, Maddie’s got a sister out there. We’re trying to be closer to family.”
Peter nodded. “Always good to have family around.” He glanced in the daughter’s direction. “Are you excited to be moving closer to your aunt?”
The daughter met his gaze, level. “I’m not going with them, actually.”
“Oh?” Peter asked. “Headed to college? That would make sense.”
“I’m a rising senior,” the girl answered.
“Jazz is—” the mother, Maddie, cut in. “It’s well, it’s about to be her senior year of high school. Hard time to switch schools, you know? She’s going to be renting a place nearby so she can finish school here.”
“Oh? First time living all on your own?” Peter asked, initialing a page of the contract.
“I’m 17. It’s not that weird.”
“Never said it was. I remember my first place pretty fondly. It’s an exciting milestone, don’t waste it!”
Peter initialed another page. He spun the document back to the Fentons to sign as well.
“Well, I really like the place, is what I’ve got to say. The newly redone flooring on this floor was a perk I wasn’t expecting, can’t have been cheap. You still managed to keep the price amazing though. Don’t worry about the dings and scratches – I’ve got the art of fixing up places down to a science. I’ll take a crack at the basement too.”
“We’d rather you didn’t,” Maddie answered.
Peter waved her off. “I know it was some kind of lab, yeah? You won’t be liable if I say, spill acid on myself or dunk myself in radiation or, whatever you had going on down there. We can go over that clause of the contract again if you want. Ghosts, right?”
“If I can’t hack it, I’ll seal up the basement for good. But I won’t know until I try. Seriously, don’t worry.”
The Fentons signed the final page, and flipped the contract back around to Peter. He pulled an envelope from his coat – a check made out with the full amount. No loan needed. No mortgage. Their asking price was practically pocket change.
The daughter excused herself from the room.
The Fenton basement had fewer wonders than Peter was expecting.
He swung a flashlight around, as the bulb hanging overhead had been cut from the main power supply. Most everything had been cleared out, leaving a room hollowed out. His feet clicked across the metal floor. Walls of bolted steel rose high on all four sides. On the opposite wall, the scars of heavy bolting remained, along with the smoky stain of something huge, and geometric, no longer bolted to the wall.
He swung his beam wide, across every which wall beveling with bloated shadows, until he pinned the electrical panel.
It took some tampering, and some patience, because something had physically demolished the box before him. Peter knew his way around basic house wiring, so it took only a few experimental adjustments until he threw the breaker, and the industrial light overhead clunked to life.
Peter turned, surveying the mouse cage of pure, uninterrupted steel sheeting, bolted together wall to wall, across the floor, across the ceiling. It was an impressive expanse of space, and under the proper flood lighting Peter could make out the deeper shadowy stains of where industrial cabinets used to be affixed to the floors, the walls. He was staring into the burnt out afterimage of what, he could only conjecture, had once been an impressive scientific facility.
It wasn’t above being carpeted and turned into a rec room.
Peter paused, his eyes training to the back corner near the octagonal imprint left in the wall. Something seemed amiss, something with color, popping bright against a display of pure ash and silver.
Peter stepped forward, flashlight still pointed though it served little use now. The space took shape – a rectangular impression on the floor, about as large as a twin bed, formed a negative image. The rectangle was spotlessly clean, silver and shiny, as though recently cleaned and polished and recleaned and repolished.
It was the edges of the rectangle, the spatters of space stretching beyond it, that held Peter’s attention.
Green, verging toward a rusty brown, splattered the floor. He stepped closer, and knelt, and stared at the pattern. Like a dropped vial of green chemicals that shattered and spattered the floors, the neighboring wall. Like radioactive spill left to eat into the floor. Peter thought back to his radioactive quip, and wondered if he should perhaps back away.
He set a nail to one of the stains and scratched at it. It would not lift. It would not budge. He swung the flashlight beam, and he found the stains glittered, and then dulled where they edged closer to rust.
And it was the rust that confused Peter the most. That copper color, like pennies, that morphed away from the green. It wasn’t uniform. It did not eat away symmetrically at the edges of the stains. Instead it spattered, and dragged, and molded from droplets to long streaks dragging across the floor like chalk dust on a blackboard.
Peter followed them. The streaking ended. Beyond that, he caught a single droplet speckled into the floor a foot away. Another, when he swung his beam. And another. He followed them, one by one, tracing them back to the basement stairs, up, up, up, up.
At the top of the stairs, the trail vanished. The brand new hardwood flooring that stretched through the whole first floor was immaculate.