“I'll take it.” As her voice cut off into silence, all I could do was stare forward at nothing in utter disbelief.

“...I'm sorry?” What the hell do you even want it for?

Violet Bauer was the polar opposite of a go-getter. Her ambitions were nonexistent, as was her drive to succeed. I couldn't even begin to fathom why she wanted that old wreck of a house. What could someone like her see in it? Was I talking to the right person?

“I said I'll take it. Am I allowed to do that?”

I couldn't really remember much about that house, but what little I recalled filled me with disgust and dread. It was something dark, squirming in the corners of my memory and reeking of rot. Her willingness to come forward and take it made that disgust creep forward again; I was filled with a sudden derisive suspicion that she was up to something. She had to be up to something. She was always up to something.

Everything about Violet Bauer made me uncomfortable. Ever since we were kids, there was just something wrong with her—like a corpse wearing human skin. Her and Lisa both; they both felt like living dead. To have someone like that in that house, after leaving it abandoned for over a decade...?

“...Ha.” I ran my hands through my hair after the call was over, rubbing the back of my neck with a grimace. “Great. Just... great.”

The phone sat silent and still. I couldn't really put my finger on what it was exactly that was making me so high-strung over this, but the feeling of discomfort was clear.

Tugging open a file cabinet, I thumbed through the folders and files searching for the inheritance documents. It was something I had been working on for years. I wanted our parents' disappearance to be set aside, for them to be declared dead and for whatever assets they had lingering around to be dispersed... so I had spent an inordinate amount of time searching for articles and messing with red tape in order to sort everything out. The benefit of all the trouble I had gone to was that, essentially, I knew everything that was possible to know about our parents and their estate.

Neither of our parents were born to a particularly prestigious background. Our mother, Laura, was born and raised in rural Colorado. Our father David, on the other hand, came from a more urban area in Nebraska. David had gotten a Bachelor's of Science in the field of pathology, and Laura had a Bachelor's of Arts in journalism and public relations. Since they were rather private and unsuccessful early on in their life, I have no idea how they met or what they were doing at the time—at some point prior to Violet and I being born, Laura was employed as a reporter for a local newspaper and David interned at a laboratory.

Their main claim to fame was the books they would write together, which would show up on the bestseller lists every now and then. From what I could gather their writing was little more than pulp fiction, but evidently it worked well enough: they retired young, and not long after they went missing.

That's where the record stops.

I did remember that, when Violet and I were both eight, our aunt Lisa took us away from our mother's family home in Colorado to live with her in the rural outskirts of Oregon. After that we never heard from them again, and Lisa died from natural causes while I was pursuing my bachelor's degree. That was it.

I had no idea what Violet had been doing after I left; I had assumed it was nothing, like it was before. No matter which way I looked at it, I couldn't quite understand what she had seen in that house. After all, I'd had it appraised at one point and the consensus was that it was worth less than the ground it stood on. The damage it had racked up from all its time unoccupied and unrepaired was in the tens of thousands, if not more, and it wasn't in a particularly desirable location.

So then, why did she want it?

“...You still here, Virgil?”

I have to admit that the sudden noise made me jump a little. I shoved the files back in my desk, flashing the speaker a weak smile. “—Michael. Sorry, I'm done now.”

“No worries. Everything work out okay?”

“...Yeah.”

“That's good, then.”

Stolen novel; please report.

Michael was my dormmate, a sluggish and cynical guy that hovered around six feet when he wasn't slouched over like a sagging tree. He was... a computer science major? Maybe? Whenever he talked about his studies I wasn't even sure he was speaking English, but he was nice to be around.

“You were gonna call your sister, right? Viola or something?” His expression was disinterested as always, not meeting my eyes or even facing in my general direction when he spoke.

“Uh... Yeah. Violet.”

“That doesn't sound very confident.”

“I mean I was calling her, she just... She threw me off balance a little is all.”

“Hmm.” Michael pulled out a textbook from the jungle of stuff shoved under his bed, flipping through the pages. “Is that so.”

“It's just—It doesn't make any sense!”

“Mm.”

“She's never showed this kind of interest in anything before, so I don't... I have no idea what she's trying to do!”

“Mhmm.”

“She acted like she didn't even remember it! I had to remind her what it was! It's not worth anything either, so what would possess her to—”

“Maybe she didn't get that it was in bad shape,” Michael interrupted, “and thought it'd be better than what she has right now?”

“But I told her it was bad!”

He shrugged. “One of the world's great mysteries, I guess. By the way, what the hell are you talking about?”

After the initial call and some other conversations relating to her acquiring the house, everything I sent to Violet went to voicemail. She had never been particularly good at staying in touch, but she'd usually pick up if I tried to call her—now, any time I tried to reach her the phone would just ring and ring. She wouldn't answer text messages or e-mails. My attempts at mailing a physical letter to her address had ended in return-to-sender. I'll admit that I can be a bit of a paranoid person, but I feel like this sort of thing would make most people uneasy.

What did I know about Violet? She was my sister, but because I had always felt so at odds with her I had never really talked to her about anything important. She was insecure and hot-tempered. She used to get into fights in middle school to the point where she was almost expelled. She was closest with Lisa, I knew that much—I couldn't really tell you why, but Lisa was the only person that she ever seemed to trust. She was reclusive and lazy as a sloth; I had to drag her out of bed at least once a week just to get her to eat something. She would cling to me one minute and swat me away the next, changing her mind on a dime.

Was that really it?

As much as I hated to admit it, I knew that I had probably been unfair to her growing up. I thought that maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could remember something that would make everything fall into place—but I really couldn't. Violet made me uncomfortable, so I avoided her. I pushed her away fervently, but couldn't bring myself to sit still when she left herself to rot in her room. The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that I couldn't really remember anything about her at all. The “Violet” I had made in my memories was two-dimensional, a cutout of the discomfort I felt being around her. Now that I was being confronted by the real deal, I felt like I had been thrown into the deep end.

“Hey.” Michael tapped me on the shoulder, handing me a glass of water. “Earth to Virgil.”

“Oh, uh... Thanks.” Bastard, you scared me again.

He stared at me for a second, contemplating. “It's still bothering you,” he said eventually. “The thing with your sister.”

I sighed. “Yeah, it is.”

“Hmm.” He sat down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. “Well, what can you do about it?”

“I don't know. She's not answering my calls—or anything else I send her, for that matter.”

“Hmm-mm.” We both sat in silence for a few moments.

“Winter break starts soon,” Michael said abruptly.

“Well, yeah... So what?”

“People leave campus during winter break, right? If she won't answer you long-distance, you can go there and talk to her in person.”

“...Oh.” Well, it's all very simple when you put it like that. “Winter break won't be starting for another few weeks, though... Is it okay for me to just wait like that?”

“If she's gonna die like that, then she's probably already dead.”

“That doesn't make any sense at all. Also, your bedside manner is absolutely horrific.”

“Mm, maybe.” He smirked, leaning back a little. “You're not thinking about it now though, right?”

“...You suck.”

“Really though, I think it'll be fine. Maybe she just doesn't have reception or something, and you'll have an opportunity to go check on her in a few weeks.”

“If you say so.” Even if I told myself that, it still felt bad. “It just makes me nervous.”

“Everything makes you nervous. Shouldn't you be worrying about finals instead?”

“Oh my god, fuck off.”