"It took us a while to notice it happening, because at first we thought it was just someone locking the screen door. Normally we leave it open so people could get out fast, but that month, whenever I tried to go outside to tend to the garden or go to the store, I'd find the screen door latched shut. It wasn't really a hindrance, since it was easy to open, but it was annoying.

"I thought it was Danny doing it, Danny thought I was doing it, and we both though the other was just being forgetful. But one morning, Danny had unlocked the screen door so he could step out and take the car to the supermarket. He went back in because he'd realized he'd forgotten the car keys, and I heard the screen door bang shut behind him and even bounce a little. I was sitting at the kitchen, having a cup of coffee, and I handed him the keys. When he went back to the door, the screen door had been latched shut.

"At first we thought that letting the screen door bang against the frame was somehow causing the latch to pop into place, so we tried to get the door to lock by having it slam closed. It didn't happen, of course. The latch's peg needed to be raised before it would slide into the catch. Eventually, we stopped and Danny went on to the supermarket. I remembered he closed the door gently behind him, and I went back to finish my coffee.

"When I got up to work on the garden, the screen door was latched shut."

"It never happens when no one is inside the house. When I'm out in the garden and Danny is out, the screen door never latches by itself. It's only when one of us is inside that it happens."

"After that, other things started happening. The car keys started getting lost, and we kept finding them under the sofa or the chairs. Some of the plamo would be moved or even be on the floor."

"Plamo?" Steve asked.

"Oh, that's the term for all these little dears. My husband has been collecting and assembling these for longer than we've been married, so I've learned to speak his language over the years. It's one of the largest collections in the country, you know. We once had some TV people come here to interview my husband about it, and everyone once in a while a ScryVid friend of his would come over and make a video about it. It was always nice to get visitors. We'd show them around the city, and help them find some rare models from some of my husband's sources. Sometimes if he really liked them he'd give them one of the plamo from his collection to take home."

"Oh, I see. Sorry for interrupting."

"Not at all. I know first time visitors to our house are always interested in all the plamo that my husband has assembled. Originally, we were going to bring these with us when we moved. My husband had the idea of using them to make some kind of traveling display for conventions, but now… well, we'll probably bring along some favorite pieces, but the rest will have to stay here. Ah, where was I…?

"We'd start finding plamo that had fallen on the floor or otherwise moved. At first we thought it was the wind coming in through the doors. That used to happen back before my husband got better at posing them. But then we found some that had fallen off their stands where there couldn't be any wind. And then… "

"If you don't want to talk about it…"

"No, no, it's fine. It happened a few weeks ago, you see. It was hot that night, and I was sleeping alone in my bedroom. I'd opened the windows to let in the breeze to try to cool the room. I woke up in the middle of the night because I was feeling chilly, and when I looked around, the electric fan had been turned on and pointed at me. The door was also open, and the electric fan here in the living room—yes, that one—had also been dragged into the room and was plugged in and pointing at me. I didn't think anything about it at the time, but when I asked Danny about it, he said that he wasn't the one who put it there."

"That was when we started worrying. We checked all the locks and made sure we had all the keys. I had Danny look up in the ceiling to see if anyone was hiding up there, and we went through everywhere someone could be hiding, but we didn't find anything. That was when we started worrying there might have been something inside the house with us. We moved out after that and went to stay at my sister's, and went to a temple and asked a priest to cleanse and bless the house, but when he was finished he said he didn't feel any keres inside of it. We told him everything that had happened, and he told us that he didn't think whatever presence in the house meant us any harm.

"We moved back in, and besides the screen door locking, and the falling plamo figures, everything was pretty much normal. Since it seemed like the house was safe, we started looking for buyers while we packed. That's when the other things started happening."

"What things?"

"The boxes we packed would be opened and everything would be all over the floor. We tried taping them and even using duct tape and shrink wrap, but in the morning we'd find scissors and cutters that had been used to open up the boxes again. We finally had to take the boxes out of the house after packing them. Right now they're in my parents' house. After that, any cardboard box we brought into the house to pack would be torn up if we don't keep an eye on it.

"Things also started happening when we had people over who were interested in buying the house. Whole shelves of plamo would fall onto the floor, there'd be strange knocking sounds in the kitchen, and we'd find scissors and cutters on the floor. It was small things, but they disturbed people, and soon word began to spread that our house was haunted."

––––––––––––––––––

"None of that seems to be happening," Steve said, looking around at the acrylic shelves around them.

Stolen novel; please report.

"I know, but it's only a matter of—oh, there it is. Look, over there."

Everyone turned to follow the pointing finger. On the floor was a simple box cutter, its sharp blade fully extended and pointing towards the group. It was on the floor between them and the front door. The box cutter was still moving, as if someone had just dropped it.

As they looked at the still trembling box cutter, there was a crash, and they all turned to look the other way. Several of the plamo figures, including one of the larger foot-tall ones, had fallen from their acrylic shelves and were now all over the floor. Some had lost arms and plastic weapons, which all lay scattered like the aftermath of some futuristic war in miniature.

Mrs. Halili's son Danny sighed, got up, grabbed a large but shallow plastic bin and started gathering the fallen figures. He worked carefully, taking the time to return plastic weapons to molded hands and a lost limbs to joints before he picked them up and put them in the bin.

"Uh, should we help?" Harmony asked, looking awkward at watching someone cleaning up the mess.

Danny waved them off. "No, I can handle this, there's a system so that the parts don't get mixed up. The numbers need to be the same…" His voice trailed off, delicately handling the models as he slowly gathered them together.

Mrs. Halili sighed, giving them a resigned look. "Would you like to see the rest of the house?"

"If it's not too much trouble?" Steve said.

They looked around the rest of the house, although there really wasn't much to see. The kitchen was a small area next to the back door that immediately led into the dining room, with the only border being the refrigerator between the two. There was a master bedroom, and another room that contained a pair of bunk beds, with the one on top being used as storage. And in the very back, behind a narrow door in a different style from the rest of the doors in the house, set into the wall and obviously a later addition was the late Mr. Halili's modeling room.

It was a surprisingly spacious room, if it weren't for the four transparent plastic display cases that created separate aisles. There were more display cases along the walls that reached all the way up to the ceiling. Directly opposite of the door was a work desk of some sort. Instead of display cases, the desk had neat racks and drawers of equipment, some of which Loren actually recognized. Through the transparent plastic drawers, Loren saw little jars of modeling paints, little strips of increasingly fine-grit sandpaper, brushes, fine-tipped nib pens, very fine-tipped brushes… there was one of those things that combined a light with a magnifying glass on the end of a metal arm, as well as one of those visors with magnifying lenses. Just above the drawers was a row of small frames, although Loren couldn't make out what pictures were in them.

The late Mr. Halili had clearly taken his hobby very seriously.

There were far more of the foot-tall, very detailed figures on the shelves in this room, probably the ones that Mr. Halili had decided were not to be risked by displaying them in public. A few were hanging suspended with fishing line from hooks on the ceiling, posed as if fighting in the air or simply flying. The models were much more beautifully painted, looking like they were actually made of metal rather than plastic. When the light's came on, some of the display cases briefly glowed the violet of UV lights, causing some of the paints to glow brightly, making the plastic guns, swords and eyes gleam like they did in the shows the models were based on.

The ten-year-old in Loren burned with envy, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Harmony look impressed.

There was a sad, bittersweet smile on Mrs. Halili's face as she looked around the room. "This used to be a storage room, but over the years my husband improved it. I suppose it can be used as a spare bedroom."

"Do you know how big it is, ma'am?" Steve asked, examining the corners of the room.

"I think it's about…"

The number didn't mean anything to Loren—though he should probably start correcting that—as he stepped away from the room so as not to crowd the space. Danny was still picking up the models, so for the moment, the Flame mage was unobserved. Flicking his thumb up, he summoned a little tongue of ghostlight Flame and cast his gaze across the living room, kitchen, and dining area. Finding what he expected, he quickly snuffed out the Flame.

The last place they checked out was the bathroom, which was just barely not cramped. There were bottles of shampoo balanced high up on the window sill, and the showerhead was old and caked with oxidation and clearly unused, as there was a flexible showerhead hooked into the faucet underneath it. It was another thing that reminded him of his grandparents' house, although he was fairly certain this place was built well after his grandparent's.

Their tour of the outside of the house was much briefer. There was the little strip of backyard where washing lines were strung out, and a little area at the back with a washing machine. The plants there weren't as well taken care of as the front, and the ground was mostly paved over save for some strips of dirt at the edges where any rainwater was presumably supposed to drain into the ground. It was also much smaller, at only a third the size of the front yard. A lot of space was taken up by an addition to the back of the house that was the late Mr. Halili's hobby room, so the backyard had clearly been larger originally. There was a large stainless steel water tank in the corner of the back yard, for the times when there was a water shortage in the later parts of summer, though it looked like it had been there for some time.

"Does the waterpump work?" Steve asked upon seeing it.

"Oh, yes. We even have a solar panel on the roof to power it now, since we mostly just use it in summer when there's no rain," Mrs. Halili said. As if to punctuate her statement, the motor next to the tank came on, pumping water into the pressure tank it was on top of.

They left soon after that, exchanging final pleasantries with Mrs. Halili as they go into the car.

"We'll contact you soon," Steve promised, "I just need to discuss things with my partner, you see."

Mrs. Halili nodded with a resigned air. "I understand. I'll look forward to your call," she said in the tones of someone who expected to never hear from them again.

Loren fully expected then to start driving straight back to the office. Instead, when they left the subdivision and got back on the main road, Steve seemed to head straight towards a coffee shop chain that they'd passed on the way to the house. Vaguely confused, Loren followed everyone else out of the car and into the building. Steve ordered something that was coffee, whipped cream and caramel, Mallory ordered one of the fruit drinks and a muffin, and Harmony ordered something called a 'Chocolate Execution', which Loren had vetoed and downgraded to something less likely to give her diabetes while still having chocolate. She sighed but rolled with it, promising bland food revenge.

He'd ordered something that was a mix of ice, tea and apple sauce, because he was curious.

As they sat down to wait for their orders to be prepared, Steve sat and put down the notebook and pen he'd brought from the car. "All right," he said. "What do we know?"