Into the Breach

[ball_is_life]

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.

[Open to Anyone]

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[ball_is_life]

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."

[dress_blues]

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?"

[ball_is_life]

"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.