hauntedbostonrpg | Into the Breach

Entry tags:

elijah,
jules

Into the Breach

Elijah Harris stood at the foot of a concrete staircase and looked up. The two-story building, a brick row house in one of Boston’s gentrified neighborhoods, awaited a gut and renovation that would bring it into the current century and secure its owner a premium in rental income. But first the previous tenant had to go.

He was told the house still smelled like the old woman’s decaying corpse, which sat in her armchair for a good month before anybody noticed her overstuffed mailbox and called 9-1-1. The buyer practically stole the place at auction, a decision he might have second-guessed if he'd known that the spirit of Mabel Grizzard hadn't 'gone into the light' when it was suggested to her.

Wearing a black jumpsuit and boots, a neon-green GHC logo emblazoned on the back, Eli hefted his gear-laden pack onto his shoulders and took a deep breath. Time for a pep talk.

"You can do this. You're from DC! You've seen more fucked up shit than this." Still, as he mounted the steps and stuck the key in the door, Eli knew he was supposed to have back-up for situations like this. But back-up required coworkers, and Bev Bathstone couldn't lift a GHC tech-pack if her life depended on it.

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The chatter on the police scanner Jules kept in her home office said that a badly decomposed body had been found in a soon-to-be renovated house. Gentrification meant older tenants usually ended up being bought out, but apparently this was one case where the developers hadn't gotten around to opening their wallets.

She knew it was probably going to be pretty ripe in there, at least unless the ambulance crew had thought to open some windows. Even chilly winter air was better than the leftover stink of a dead body.

There wasn't much of a yard, but the gate at the back of the house had been left unlocked. Her Timberlands made noise on the thin grass as she approached the single door in the back, then tried the lock. The knob resisted at first, stiff from disuse, and then Jules put her shoulder into it, and the door opened with a creak and a squeak.

Reserach for the blog meant getting out there, and depending on how attached Ms. Grizzard had been to her home, she might still be in residence.

Elijah eased into the front door and left it open behind him. The electrical switch on the wall didn’t yield any helpful results; it looked like the power company hadn’t gotten a last check. He switched on a headlamp and found himself staring at a narrow corridor and a wooden staircase. The walls were covered in old, floral paper from the house’s last redecoration in the 1950s. Dust hung in the air.

The smell temporarily stunned his senses, but it caught up to him soon enough. “God!” Eli’s eyes watered. He waved a hand in the air and went to a window in the living room, which took some muscle to open. The cold air made him feel better, even if it didn’t do much.

He saw an old couch with fabric sagging underneath it, a coffee table with magazines, a fireplace mantle with framed photographs, and a grandfather clock in the corner. A large shape in the corner had a sheet draped overtop; Eli took it for the death chair. Why hadn’t they tossed it?

Creeeaaaak…

The floorboards overhead creaked and thumped. The hair on the back of his neck stood at attention. "Uh oh. Shit just got real," he mumbled to himself, because it seemed like the kind of thing he'd say to a partner, if he ever got one.
He took the nozzle from his pack and aimed it ahead of him as he began to mount the stairs.

It was the kind of smell that got up your nose and then settled in at the back of your throat, making itself comfortable for a while, and Jules covered her nose and mouth with one hand as the other tugged a bandanna from her back pocket and tied it over the lower half of her face. It only helped marginally, but once she managed to force open the window over the kitchen sink, a breeze wafted in.

The linoleum was cracked and stained in places, and buckled near where the kitchen table used to be. She found the buckle because she almost tripped over it, and she cursed under her breath. The paint had been yellow once, but it had clearly been some time since it had seen a fresh coat.

The living room was silent and empty, and she studied the white sheet-draped lump in the corner. Probably where the old lady died, likely with a sizable dent in the middle of the cushion. She wondered briefly about surviving relatives who might come to claim heirlooms or items of sentimental value. Ma had a grandfather clock like the one in the opposite corner, one she'd gotten from her own mother.

The stairs leading upstairs were narrow and dusty. The electricity had already been shut off, and Jules extracted a flashlight from her utility belt. The beam cut through the gloom.

When she picked out the young man on the second or third step, the skin on her forearms broke out into goosebumps, and she took an instinctive step back even as she saw that he cast a shadow. 'Human' didn't necessarily mean 'not dangerous' if the spirit of the former owner was still lingering here.

"Aaaahhh!"

Eli jumped as the flashlight blinded him. His heel missed the step and the significant weight of his tech-pack tipped him backwards. He half-ran, half-fell down the few steps he had managed to climb. His elbow slammed into the stair post cap.

"What the fuck?" He blocked his eyes and tried to make out the intruder's features, his own headlamp doing battle with her flashlight. He saw a white face and blonde hair, but not much else.

Edited 2016-01-31 02:45 (UTC)

"Jesus!"

The guy was wearing a heavy backpack of some sort, and when he overbalanced and fell backwards Jules leapt backwards several steps herself, the beam of the flashlight zig zagging wildly over the walls and then the ceiling as she nearly fumbled it.

"Get that Goddamn thing out of my face."

She wouldn't have cursed, except the miner's hat or whatever the hell it was was blinding her, and what was he wearing on his back? Her first thought had been 'squatter', because she saw the homeless guys in the parks and loitering in the subway stations when it was really cold. But it was too heavy for that.

"You okay?" Her heart was still going a mile a minute, even if the goosebumps had subsided. But at least the rush of adrenaline had taken her mind off of the stink.

Eli popped the elastic band holding his headlamp onto the top of his head so it illuminated the ceiling instead of her face.

"Hey, unlike you, I'm actually supposed to be here!" he said, flexing his elbow to make sure he still had one. He went into his pocket and dangled the keychain in the air. "I don't think this old lady had anything you want to steal, so if you don't mind..." He pointed at the door.

His heart was hammering. He didn't realize how freaked out he was by the prospect of old Mabel until this woman had shown up.

"Son..."

Jules said it in a milder voice, because although she couldn't really see him because her vision was still impeded by little dancing dots, his voice indicated that he was half her age if he was a day. She'd led guys his age in the field, both on maneuvers and on that project that had started her on this path, and her first instinct was to pull rank on him.

Then she made herself remember that she had no rank to pull, and besides, she really wasn't supposed to be here. It rather begged the question as to what his purpose was, because that top-heavy backpack didn't look like it had been issued by the city. The blonde cleared her throat, modulated her tone.

"I doubt you got that from Public Works," she said, pointing at the apparatus on his back with her free hand. She had a gun, a .38 snub-nose in an ankle holster, but if his pulse rate was anything like hers right now, she didn't need to take that route either. She wondered if, on the chance that the ex-resident was still hovering around here, the old gal was laughing her invisible ass off at them.

"Look," she said after another minute. "I'm just...doing some recon. For a project I'm working on. Just because I don't have a key, that doesn't make me a thief."

Son? Like he was a kid? Elijah breathed out slowly. His elbow hurt too bad to be offended right now. There were only so many things to which he could direct his attention.

"Oh. You're interested in the place," he concluded, a small nod as he looked around. "No offense. I doubt it looks any better in the daylight."

Now how to handle this?

"Look. I'm an exterminator. The guy who bought this joint wants us to clear it out before his crew comes in to demo next week. You mind if I do my job? I need the paycheck. Come back in like... Fifteen minutes."

"If the smell's anything to go by, they might have to burn the place down, then blow up the ashes."

But she was getting used to it, sort of. Or maybe her olfactory sense had shut down in self-defense. Jules wondered wryly if a cigarette after this wouldn't make her forget the odor.

"I'm not planning to interfere," she said, waving at the room in general. "I'm sure there's termites and rats and God only knows what else hiding in the walls. You might even find a raccoon or two."

From upstairs, in the darkness beyond the staircase, there was a short series of creaks, then a scrape-scrape-scrape sound. The back of the blonde's neck tightened up as she peered into the dimness. She eyed Backpack with a wary sort of amusement.

"Or maybe even something bigger."

Depends on how you define bigger, he thought. As in philosophically, or..?

As Elijah regripped the nozzle, he was torn. On the one hand, he’d have a hard time keeping this operation private with a witness in the house. The guy who bought the place would be pissed if word of this got out. On the other hand, ghosts freaked him the hell out. Company was company.

“Uh. You might want to stay down here,” he said, “Because of the chemicals.” The biohazard symbol on is tech-pack made the lie plausible.

He adjusted his headlamp and ascended the steps, half-expecting the spirit to peep over the banister. There were three bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom at the end of the hall. The noises had come from the front of the house, so he turned in that direction and crept towards the wooden door, which stood ajar. Up here, the smell was worse. It wasn’t the body turning this place into Funkytown after all.

“Mrs. Grizzard,” he mumbled, placing his hand on the door, “It’s time to move out. Think about it.” Eli crossed the threshold and saw a four-poster bed, an old wash stand, and a row of slippers on the floor. “New tenants changing the wallpaper, tearing up your kitchen cabinets. You don’t want to see that.”

The blonde shook her head at Backpack's retreating figure as he started up the stairs, and she took another of those slow breaths before slowly following in his wake. Fancy equipment or not, he looked like a real visitation might make him go sailing back downstairs ass-over-teakettle. Still, that he'd start to the second floor alone gave him a slight edge.

If she saw...her? It? Whatever. If the departed Ms. Grizzard had died in her sleep, she might be confused if her spirit had remained behind. Depending on how attached to the house she'd been in life, Backpack could be about to get himself in trouble.

Her flashlight beam heralded her approach, and she saw the young man step into the smaller confines near the end of the hall. The stench was terrible, and she made a mental note to look into protective gear online. A gas mask would have been delightful right about now.

"What was the cause of death?"

Her voice was low, which was absurd because they were the only ones there. but there was a darker shadow near the closet door, one that was just kind of.....there. If it was a product of her imagination, one created by the lack of light, that was one thing.

But if not...

"What the... Woman! Why are you following me?"

Elijah had one hand on the charge-up button on his gear, and the other was frozen in its task of pulling a small containment unit free. The pack had gone through a few incarnations since its invention, he was told, and was now leaner, meaner, yet somehow only slightly less heavy. "Are you some kind of GHC groupie?"

The room temperature dropped by a couple of degrees.

"This is some serious shit--!"

The closet door opened and slammed against the wall. Housecoats and nightgowns flew into the air, leaving the wire hangers swinging on the rod. A bathrobe wrapped itself around Eli's neck.

The quilt flew off the bed and took on a vaguely human shape as it lunged for the blonde woman.

She gave Backpack a look that might have turned into a scowl had the closet not suddenly burst open, because groupie? Really? It would have been laughable if it wasn't so absurd.

And then the quilt was flying at her, sailing about half a foot above the floor, and she didn't have time to think about anything else. The thing was a very pale blue, she could just barely see the color in the dimness. It's been washed about a thousand times, was what flashed across her brain as she dropped the flashlight. The room was cold and getting colder.

As the cloth came down over her head, Jules bunched it into one hand and started trying to pull it off. The absence of fear wasn't bravery. She'd discovered that the first time she'd seen the still-unidentified apparition, her first witnessing of a visitation. Bravery was when you were piss-your-pants scared and still tried to stand up straight. The quilt was still over her head and shoulders, obscuring her vision.

"Ms. Grizzard?"

The temperature was still dropping. It looked like the former tenant was determined to hang out for a little while longer.

“Gahhk!” He couldn’t breathe. Oh dear god, he couldn’t breathe.

Elijah found the end of the bathrobe and hurriedly unwound the fabric before something effed up happened, like it knotted and became a noose. Damn if he was getting choked out by an eighty-seven-year-old dead woman. He flung the robe on the floor, a pocket full of butterscotch candies emptying itself on the hardwoods.

Eli aimed his weapon at the quilt-wearing spirit. “I... did not appreciate that!” He charged it up and got ready to fire. “Man, I don’t even feel bad about putting you in containment.”

Just as he was about to squeeze the trigger, the flashlight on the floor illuminated a pair of shoes. Since when did ghosts wear shoes?

Oh shit. That wasn’t the spirit, that was the blonde chick! Eli got woozy thinking about how close he’d been to firing electrical energy at an actual person, but he shook it off. Where was the spirit now?

A shadow moved over the wallpaper, rattling the picture frames on the walls. He fired. The pack hummed. Mrs. Grizzard screeched and revealed herself, a pale shape all of five feet tall. He fired again, arcs of blue light crawling over the ghostly figure.

Jules had just barely managed to pull the washed-out quilt off of her head, dropping it on the floor in a lake of fabric, and then the room was illuminated by the disco-ball effect of cobalt-blue electricity. The apparition had made itself visible, a pale figure with its mouth open in a rictus of fury. When the light hit it, it flung out an arm, dislodging one of the pictures from the wall. Thee glass broke, and the ghost shrieked as it tried to flail its way out of the binding rays.

It's real.

For a second she thought she'd said it out loud, then realized that the thought was simply very loud. It's real, it's real, it's real.... She shook her head as if to clear it. Well, sometimes really did imitate art, right?

The late Ms. Grizzard was trying to climb the wall now, see-through hands scrabbling for purchase, and Jules wished like hell that she had thought to bring her videocamera. The recently departed likely couldn't be photographed with a still camera, but videotape was a different matter. Technology always caught up, the solution to fit the problem.

The spirit's ankles had become bound by the light, and the blonde was making mental notes so as to be able to get it down on paper later. Her first visitation had been over so quickly that she hadn't had time to process it. This one was going on the record. She hoped.

An enormous amount of energy was strapped to his spine, all of it humming hard enough to make the fillings in his back teeth rattle. Trying to maintain his grip on the nozzle, Eli reached for the trap attached to his gear. The metal box, which had been marked for hazardous materials, needed to be opened and set on the ground in the vicinity of the spirit. Advances in technology meant that GHC no longer needed two employees to guide the entity into the trap, but it was a hell of a lot easier if you did have two people.

Eli had an idea. Since this woman was determined to get an eyeful, maybe she could make herself useful.

"Here!" He mock-tossed the trap in the stranger's direction, letting her know his intentions, before releasing it for real. "Pop that button on the side there... and set it on the floor. Then step way back."

He reconsidered his request and added, "Please!"

She caught it without much effort, because she'd played sports in high school and college and had only lost a few steps since then, and she found the button Backpack had indicated with her thumb and depressed it. There was an almost inaudible click, and the hinged doors opened.

Jules set the contraption down on the hardwood floor, and the late Ms. Grizzard had started to wail, her ghostly mouth opening in a circle of distress. The smal box had started to radiate a yellowish light, one that clashed with the bright blue, and the blonde took a judicious step backwards. If it was powered by something other than electricity, which seemed likely, blowback from it could be the least of her worries.

Camera next time, definitely.

Slowly, steadily, he guided the ghost into the containment unit. Mrs. Grizzard narrowed at the feet, cartoon-like, as a sort of scientific suction force pulled her into the box. Once she was inside, the lid snapped closed, loud as a mousetrap breaking the neck on a rodent.

Eli let the equipment die and his arms dropped to his sides.

It was very quiet in the house.

"I need to sit down." He sank on the side of the old, creaking mattress and sighed. "You know, I've done that... six? Yeah. Six times now." He nodded. "Never seems like a normal thing to do."

Jules was still looking at the trap, expecting it to spring open again like a Jack-in-the-box and let the ghost out. Six times. Six. Did Backpack have to rinse it out with some special kind of disinfectant after each capture?

She shook her head as if to clear it, resisted the urge to poke at the object with the toe of her shoe. The breath she took into the silence sounded loud enough to rattle the grimy windows.

"So you do this...professionally?"

Her voice sounded so normal when she spoke that she might have laughed, if not for the worry that it would turn into hysterics. Breathe, girl. The trap was glowing faintly, as if a residue had coated it in a patina. "You get hazard pay for working solo?"

"Professionally... Professionally." Elijah rubbed his right eyebrow and contemplated the question and the word itself, tasting how it felt. "Yeah. I guess? I get paid. I wouldn't call it a career. It's a job." He nodded. He was rambling. The room was cold but he still felt damp and sweaty inside the jumpsuit, mostly from the experience of encountering the ghost with a heavily charged piece of equipment tied to his back.

He sighed and stood up, going to collected the trap.

"I'm supposed to have coworkers. We're a little dry right now." His voice went higher as he admitted the truth.

"What are you really doing here?" he asked, directing the conversation her way.

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Into the Breach

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