I hadn’t even been aware that I had fallen asleep, but the slight jabbing pain in my back was more than enough to make me acutely aware of it. I sat up groggily, rubbing my back where it hurt. It didn’t seem like the skin was broken at least, but more like I had been laying on something. I felt behind me in the dark and felt a long slender item. I couldn’t tell what it felt like by touch alone. I stood up slowly, something about the whole situation still feeling off. I was shaky, probably due to blood loss, and I was no longer in a bed, but rather sprawled out on the floor. I still seemed to be in the same room that I had gone to sleep in, but it seemed off that they would remove the bed with me still sleeping in it.

I shuffled to the door, being careful to not bump into anything that would cause me to fall - what I felt relatively okay at the moment, I didn’t want to test myself against another injury. On the other hand, I thought, if I did manage to injure myself, maybe my nurses would come back. Would be fun, but not worth the risk. I flicked the light, turning to look back toward the room.

The room was back to the way it had been the day before - the bed and wardrobe had been removed, replaced with the old desk and bookshelf that my grandfather had supplied. It made no sense - despite having to move all of the furniture silently so as to not wake me up, I had also attempted to move the bookshelf a few days ago, and I had found it too heavy for me to lift. Unless a group of women’s power lifters had stumbled upon the house, them being able to move it in such a fashion seemed unlikely.

I looked down at the object in my hand. It was the trim paint brush I had been using when I first fell. I didn’t remember having picked it up when we left the room, but I must have done it subconsciously. I stuck it back into my back pocket and looked around - nothing appeared to have been disturbed at all. In fact, there was still a thin layer of dust on parts of the bookshelf that I had not yet gotten a chance to clean. My handprints were still clearly visible from where I had grabbed it in an attempt to move it, but there were no other markings to be found.

I jumped at the sound of movement from the other side of the room, but when I turned, I saw that it was just Duke stretching, happy to see me awake. “Hey buddy,” I said, offering him my hand, and he greatly came to be pet. “Did you have an exciting night?” Duke wagged his tail at me, and for the millionth time, I wished that he could talk so that he could tell me where he had been. While it wasn’t like him to not be hanging around me, I guessed that it wasn’t that unusual for him to be in a room with someone else , especially if they were doing something in the kitchen. I think he would drop me like a bad habit if someone gave him a piece of chicken. Either way, he didn’t appear to still be locked up, and I supposed that’s what mattered.

I walked out of the room and to the entryway where I had fallen. It was back to the gray color that it had been before - must have been some weird trick of the light, I thought. But then, I looked at the floor, and I saw the spilled paint can that had attempted to end my life the night before. The light blue coloring was spilled in a ring right next to the ladder I had been standing on. Surprisingly, though, there didn’t appear to be any blood on the floor, so my only other option didn’t make any sense - this wasn’t all just a bad dream, because I definitely did not scrub the blood off the floor in a haze. I went over to the spot where I thought I had fallen and touched the floor. The carpet did in fact still feel a little damp, as though it had been freshly washed.

Duke approached the carpet and smelled the area, letting out a low whine as he did so. “Duke, what do you think is going on here?” I asked him. Obviously, he was silent, but I had a feeling that he knew.

___________________

“So you cleaned the blood up yourself and just forgot about it? Must have been one hell of a head wound.” My friend, Charlie, reclined on a plastic tote that I had yet to unpack, using another box as a footrest. He was a tall man who looked like he’d hardly slept an hour in the last year, and knowing him, that was probably accurate. He took a long drink from his beer, eyes closed as though he was trying to gather all of his thoughts. He took an extra beat of silence before he responded. “Are you absolutely sure you’re not just craving a nice grippy sock vacation? Let me tell you, they’ve got this great new place down the road -”

“I’m not crazy, Charlie, I know what I saw.” I took a long drink of my beer as well - I knew you weren’t supposed to drink much after a head injury, but I’d let it heal for a day, and frankly after everything, I felt like I needed it. “Or at least what I think I saw. Maybe I had a concussion that was making me hallucinate, and maybe I just didn’t bleed all that bad.”

“I have never seen a head wound that didn’t make the person look like they were going to bleed out in a few seconds. But maybe you’re right - frankly, you’re just lucky that you’re still alive, so I would expect you to see some hallucinations. Maybe the grim reaper took pity on you and helped clean up?”

“That would make as much sense as any other explanation.” We’d be sitting there for a good hour as I explained the story to him (leaving out some of the more graphic details - Charlie didn’t need to know every detail about my apparent wet dreams). We were trying hard to come up with anything that would make the situation make sense. So far, the best we’d come up with was a group of women robbers mixed with me being in a different room than I thought. While that didn’t seem wholly likely to me, it seemed a far better option than any of the others.

The wind howled outside, and Charlie turned to look at it. “Better get that fixed before the winter comes, or else it’s going to be freezing in here.”

“It already is sometimes,” I admitted. “Not sure if the air conditioning is broken or what, but sometimes you’ll just be walking around and all of a sudden you’ll feel some freezing air on your neck.”

Charlie chuckled. “Well, maybe you’ve got yourself a ghost problem, then. You ever hear old stories from your grandpa about how a group of ghost girls came and sucked his dick?”

I laughed along with him. “You know, for some reason, that just isn’t the kind of story that gets passed around at family holidays. Not sure why.”

“I mean, it’d beat talking to some of my relatives about politics, so I’d be all for it. But it does make a lot of sense when you come to think about it. The group of people you don’t know who happen to know every detail about the house, the cold spots, the noises, some busty chick being attracted to you - the only explanations are hallucinations or ghosts, and hallucinations don’t clean up after themselves. Not sure ghosts would, either, but there’s probably a higher probability.”

“True, but out of those options, only one of them is actually real,” I reminded him. “Besides, if this place was haunted, don’t you think that someone would have noticed something in all the time that the family stayed here?”

“You just said that you don’t know if they did,” he said, gesturing at me with the ti of this bottle before taking another long swig. “As far as we know, all of your cousins saw a ghost every day they were here and just nobody thought to bring it up.”

“Dude, my dad grew up in this house. If it were haunted, don’t you think he would have at least talked about it at some point? Or, at the very least, that he would believe in ghosts by this point.”

“People believe what they want to believe. Sometimes, proof can be staring them straight in the eyes and they’ll be too stubborn to notice it. You see it all the time - there’s still people who think lizardmen command the earth, after all.”

“I don’t know if disbelief if ghosts and believing in lizard people is really on the same level,” I reminded him.

“It might be, depending on how much ghost pussy he was getting. I would vote for you calling him to ask. Worst case scenario, he has no idea what you’re talking about. Best case scenario, we confirm that the house is super haunted and we can go from there.”

“Alright, fine, that’s not as terrible as most of your ideas,” I joked. I pulled out my phone and typed in my father’s number.

___________

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“So anyway,” my father said, after about a half hour of talking about everything from sports to health to his day to day life, “what’s new with you over there? How has the old house been treating you?”

“Actually, that’s what I called to talk to you about.” I pulled the phone away from my ear and turned on speaker so that Charlie could hear the conversation as well - he seemed to have been plenty happy to just hang out and sip his beer in relative silence, but I think he was just as curious about the situation as I was. “I’ve got all of my stuff moved over here, and I’ve been working on getting some of the renovations done, but I was curious - in all the years that you’ve lived here, and all the times we’ve visited grandpa, did you ever notice anything weird?”

“Well, you know, I would imagine that some of the contractors that your grandparents hired weren’t probably strictly speaking above board. Back when they were growing up, there weren’t as many large companies that were doing the construction, so they would often just have to go by word of mouth. They were also big fans of using a handshake rather than a contract, which I told them several times is not the way that things are done anymore, but when they’d had such good luck every other time, I can’t blame them for continuing on. But they definitely did some things that weren’t regulation with that house - I remember one time they were trying to paint on the wall across from the staircase by using two ladders and a board to make a sawhorse, and then they propped another ladder on top of that. Luckily I was around that day, because I put a stop to that at once. I’d imagine that some of that handiwork is still present in the house, though. That alone should be a good enough reason for you to want to hire out electricians - a lot of that house is in great condition, but there are definitely going to be some parts that are held up with bubble gum and good thoughts, and I don’t want you to be getting on the wrong end of one of those.”

“No, dad, that’s not exactly what I meant, although it’s nice to have a heads up about that, and if you know of any areas in particular that need work because of that, please let me know and I will get them looked at. But more of what I mean is, have you ever noticed anything that you couldn’t explain happening in the house?”

“Well, I couldn’t explain the train of thought that went into using two ladders as a prop for the others, I tell you what.”

“No, Dad,” I started, but Charlie held up his hand to cut me off.

“Hi, Mr. Marshall,” he said.

“Why, it’s Charlie! Good to hear from you! How have your parents been? I haven’t seen them in forever - you should tell them to stop on by the house so we can have a cup of coffee.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell them that, sir, and they’re doing well. Now, what I think Brian was trying to ask was whether you had seen anything in the house that defied what we would consider normal in the realm of physics. Say, things falling off the shelves with no explanation, or cold spots in places with no ventilation, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, you want to know if it’s haunted? Brian, I thought you’d grown out of that silly sort of stuff ages ago!”

I blushed slightly - part of me did think that even considering ghosts was foolish when it was almost certainly just because I had hit my head and was having some sort of side effects from that. But concussions can only cause so many things - I’m pretty sure, even with a bad head wound, I would have remembered cleaning up blood. At the very least, I know that stuff stains, and that carpet is spotless, so I would have had to look it up, and my search history verified that I had not. “I know, Dad, it seems like a really silly question. But can you just play along for a minute? There’s been some weird stuff that’s been happening, and I want to know if I’m the only one it’s been happening to, or if it’s just something that’s weird about this house.”

“Well, I can tell you what, like I said, there are some weird things about that house, but I’m guessing you’re just hearing a couple of noises and jumping to conclusions. You used to do that all the time when you went over there as a small child - you’d run off into a corner of the house and then come back and tell us that you saw something, and your grandfather would just joke along, because we’d rather have you be a bit scared of the house than wandering off too far and getting yourself into trouble. But you never were too scared about it, you always thought it was funny, and we thought it was adorable. Do you remember that at all, or were you too young for that?”

I tried to think back - I remembered coming over here a lot as a small child, because both of my parents had full time jobs, and my grandfather and whatever other family members were hanging around the house at the time were always the best daycare that two young parents could afford. I remembered playing around in all of the different rooms, trying to find something, because as a child, the house reminded me of something that I would have seen on Scooby Doo - small children don’t usually get free reign to roam around larger houses. But as far as I could remember, I never actually saw anything, nor did I tell anyone that I did. “No, I unfortunately don’t remember that part.”

“Oh, sure, you were pretty young, it would be easy to forget. But us adults would be having some coffee in the foyer, and you would come running in like a bat out of hell to tell us that there were people in the house. The first few times, we did go look, but we never did find anything. Eventually, we stopped going to look unless you were very insistent on it - as your grandpa always said, that house was too far out of town at that time, nobody would come out there looking for things. Yeah, there were the occasional cold spots, but it’s an old house - insulation has gotten so much better since that time, and I’m betting that if it’s like a lot of the old houses over here, the insulation got installed much later, and they only put it in the areas of the house that were easy to get to. If a wall has too much permanent decoration on it, there’s no contractor who wouldn’t charge hundreds just to tear it down and put it back up again, and while you may want to look into it so you’re not as cold in the winter, I’m sure it wasn’t the first thing on everyone’s minds at the time. That house had gone through a few owners, and not everybody tried to take care of it as well as your grandpa did.”

“Okay,” Charlie interjected so as to keep him from starting to ramble on about a different subject. That was the thing with me dad - if someone like Charlie wasn’t there to keep him on track, the subject of conversation was bound to change at random. Not a bad thing for most normal conversation, but not the best when you were trying to get information out of him. “So we do have confirmed cold spots in the house, although those are probably due more to construction codes than they are to anything paranormal. Have you ever seen anything getting knocked over on its own, or anything go missing and then return later?”

“Of course! Who hasn’t seen that sort of thing? There’s a slight breeze, and things will get knocked off the walls. I know just the other day, your mother was hanging up some pictures and one apparently was a little unsteady and fell down after she had moved on. An annoying circumstance, but not that unusual.”

“That’s fair,” I agreed. “Although in this instance, the largest thing I’ve seen fallen has been a paint can.”

“A paint can? Wow, that’s a bit heavy to be taken by the wind. But I would assume that some of the floors in that place are a bit unsteady, so maybe it just hit a rough spot.”

“I don’t think so - it had been on the stairs and unmoved for quite a bit.”

“And maybe something finally managed to move it. You’ve got a dog, maybe he got a bit excited and knocked it over. Things happen.”

I rolled my eyes, and Charlie correctly assumed that was a sign to take over. “Just to cover our bases, you said that some of the other owners didn’t take as good of care of the house as Brian’s grandpa did. Do you happen to know offhand who those owners were and what parts of the house they let go, so that we can look for other areas that need to be fixed up?” I nodded at him - he always was the one who could come up with the best questions that would keep my father on track without letting him know what we were up to. It’s a skill we had used many times in our youth, and I’m sure it was a skill that we would use many times in our adulthood as well.

“Well, I don’t know the names exactly - if you wanted to figure that out, you’d have to probably go town to the county and see if they still had records on who submitted paperwork for taxes. They could probably get you whatever information you needed. But I do know that it was built by a man who had a large family back in the mid to late 1800s. After that, it was owned by a woman who ran a brothel out of it, and then it was bought by another man who only owned it for about a year before he sold it to your grandfather. I don’t even know if the other man lived in the house, because when your grandfather bought it, it had definitely fallen into a state of disrepair, as though it had just been left to rot in that time. Not sure what the point is of buying a house just to let it fall into ruins. But, your grandfather got the house for a steal at that point. Even having to redo some of the structural work was significantly cheaper than trying to buy another house that size in the 50s. I know houses were a lot cheaper back then than they are now, but they still aren’t that cheap when you’re trying to house a minimum of 8 people at a time.”

“Can we circle back to that brothel part,” Charlie said, looking at me in the eye - it seems that we had both come up with the connection at the same time. “Do you know approximately how many people lived in the house at the time, or what their names were, or the style of the house?”

The question actually made my father pause for a moment. “You know, I was pretty young when we first moved in, so I don’t know a ton about what was happening at the time, no. Again, might be good to go to the county for that sort of thing. While I don’t think it was 100% a legally owned establishment at that time, I also think the general rule was that if it was happening out of town, no one really cared about it. They might not have all the information you’re looking for, but they might at least be able to give you a name. As for the style, I only slightly remember that - I remember the walls were blue when I was a child, but I don’t remember if they were blue when we moved in, or if that’s a choice that my father made early on. I assume that sort of information is something that has unfortunately been lost to the sands of time, although you could possibly call your aunt and ask her about it if you’re so inclined - she was older when we lived there, so she might have a better memory of it than I do.”

“Alright, thanks dad! We’ll ask around and see if we can get it figured out.”

“You let me know if you do - I think this whole ghost bullshit is ridiculous, but it would be great to learn more about the history of the house.”

We said our goodbyes, which included another twenty minute diatribe from my father about the things he saw on the news, but finally I was able to hang up. I turned toward Charlie and took a long swig of my drink. “Well, that was a bit of a dead end.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me incredulously. “Are you kidding? Sure, your dad doesn’t believe in ghosts - we came in knowing that, and we knew one conversation wasn’t about to change his mind. But we now know that there was a brothel in the house. That makes a lot of sense to me - a group of women all living in the house, eager to jump on any man that wanders in off the street. Plus, depending on the town at the time, that might have been why they were so unconcerned with head wounds. If you see enough violence around, you would probably get really used to it.”

I thought about it for a second - their outfits were different than those I had seen in old movies, but those weren’t probably super accurate. They did look super old fashioned, though, so it’s possible that that is what the standard brothel fashion had been at the times. “You’re right,” I admitted. “I still think I probably just knocked my head hard enough to come up with a whole new reality, but it wouldn’t hurt to go ask the county about it. At least then we can get a name, plus have a story to tell my dad the next time I see him.”

“That’s the spirit! Pun intended.” Charlie chugged the rest of his bottle of beer, then stood up, digging in his pockets for his keys. “I’d probably better get back - I’m late as it is, and I don’t want to keep Kevin up. We’ll go poking around the county the first thing on Monday, but if I were you, I’d take a minute to open up your mind to the possibility of spirits. Maybe you can get in contact and figure out what’s going on even faster than that. Or, more importantly, you can let the world know what a ghost pussy feels like.”