“All right, enough silly jokes,” Elaina said. (That had been a joke?) “Is Miss Riviere up yet?” She glanced at the table—where there still sat an untouched breakfast.
Elaina usually got up earlier than either me or Riviere, and by the time I was awake, she had already made breakfast.
“Well, good morning, sleepyhead,” she’d said, looking surprisingly perky despite the early hour.
At first, I’d wanted to wait until Riviere was up to start eating—it only seemed right—but there was no telling when she would be up, and besides, performing a disenchantment took so much out of her that I thought it might be better to let her rest. What a very thoughtful employee and assistant she had! I could almost be smitten with my own brilliance.
“Do you need something with her?” I asked. It seemed to bother Elaina that she wasn’t there.
“Well, you know. I’d like to fill her in on the results of my research about this house.”
“Like what?”
“One thing I learned yesterday is that this house has had a story attached to it for a long time. Apparently, these paranormal phenomena started occurring back when the previous residents were still living here.”
“What?!” That seemed like very important information. “I’m impressed you were able to find that out.”
“Hee-hee. Do you know the secret? How I was able to find out about the previous tenants?”
“Is it because you’re so beautiful?”
“Oh, no. I just bribed the real estate agent and had them look into it.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
Armed with the information from the real estate agent, Elaina had gone to the library and looked up old newspaper articles. I could almost be smitten with a brilliance even greater than mine.
“And… Well, this is the important part, so I’d like to wait until Miss Riviere is up to talk about it.” Was she still asleep? Elaina wondered out loud. She rested her chin in her hands, looking bored.
At just that moment, the door creaked and opened on its own…or so it appeared. It was actually just Riviere, a good bit shorter than usual. “Hup!” she said as she hoisted herself into a chair. “By all means, tell me the important part,” she said.
“Well, well. Speak of the…well, you know. Good morning,” Elaina said, giving her a little wave.
Riviere looked like she was about six years old, so the I’m so serious look on her face as she said “Tell me everything about what you learned yesterday” came across as incongruously adult. It didn’t help that she was dressed in an adorable pink dress that perfectly matched her apparent age. She must have raided Carrie’s closet.
Elaina didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything.
“What?” Riviere did not look pleased.
I thought maybe I should tell her that dress looked good on her. But she was way ahead of me:
“Not a word about my appearance, please.”
“Oh, okay. It looks good on you, though,” Elaina said with a smirk.
“Ooh, you’ll pay for that…” Riviere muttered and grumbled to herself, but finally she snapped, “Make with the details, please.”
“Yep, sure.” Elaina nodded like a grown-up humoring a little kid. “Like I mentioned, these mysterious phenomena have been going on since the house’s last owners lived here.”
“Yes, I heard you,” Riviere said with a nod.
“When the previous owners were here, it seems this house was somewhat notorious. Enough that people had a nickname for it.” Elaina placed a sheet of paper on the table—a newspaper clipping. She’d gotten the library to make a copy. It was a front-page headline accompanying a photo of this house.
The headline gave the nickname Elaina had alluded to.
“People called it the Weird House.”
It was nearly seventy years ago now. A family of three had bought this house—a husband and wife and their six-year-old daughter.
When they walked through the door, they were amazed:
“What a beautiful house,” the wife said.
“Yes, it’s lovely,” agreed the husband.
They explored every corner of the place and were impressed by all of it. They didn’t make that much money between them; normally, they would never have been able to afford a place so close to the main thoroughfare.
So why had they been able to buy this one? Well, because it came with…a history.
“It sure doesn’t look like the kind of place where there would be a murder, let alone a whole series of them,” the husband said.
Indeed, some years before this family bought the house, it had been owned by a woman who committed murder. On rainy days she would get her umbrella and go for a walk around town, where she would chat up men and invite them back to her house, then strangle them in a basement room. She followed the same routine each time, entertaining herself with her killings; soon, she became known as the Rainy-Day Strangler.
In the years after the house was built, she murdered all kinds of men in that basement. Her first kill was her own boyfriend. Her last was herself. The police had worked out her MO and had her surrounded, so she went down to the basement, so full of memories for her, and hanged herself.
After the case was closed, the house was cleaned from top to bottom, then put on the market—but it turned out no one wanted a house with such a troubled and troubling past. The real estate agent kept lowering and lowering the price, but still the place wouldn’t sell.
The agent only found a buyer years later, and only after the house was listed for barely half its original price.
“We’ll just try to stay out of the basement,” the wife said.
“Yeah, good idea,” the husband agreed.
“And don’t let our little girl know what happened here. You’ll only scare her.”
“Sure, of course not.”
The case of the Rainy-Day Strangler was well and truly a bygone matter for the people of the town; this family felt a little funny buying the house, but they figured that as long as they stayed out of the basement where the murders actually took place, it would be fine.
“Daddy? Mommy? What are you talking about?” their six-year-old daughter asked.
They looked at each other, then mussed the girl’s hair.
“It’s nothing, sweetie,” her mother said.
“Won’t it be great to live in a new home?” her father asked. They smiled their best smiles for her.
“Yeah!” their daughter said, smiling back.
So began their lovely life in their new home.
Once they started living there, they discovered that even a house that was once the site of a series of horrific murders was still, on a day-to-day level, just a house.
The first few months were quite nice. They were close enough to the main avenue to make shopping easy, but far enough away that the place was quiet at night. People had mostly forgotten about the Rainy-Day Strangler by that point, so there were no unsavory rumors about their home. The three of them, in fact, lived a very pleasant life.
“We shouldn’t have worried. Turns out nothing funny happened at all,” the husband remarked.
“Yes, you’re right,” his wife said with a smile.
They lived full, happy lives without a care.
But not for very long.
“Daddy! Mommy! The ghost is being mean to me!” their daughter said out of the blue one day. “I was trying to play with my dolly, but the ghost kept laughing at me.”
The husband and wife both went pale. In the months they’d been living there, neither of them had encountered anything that could be described as a ghost.
“The, uh, the ghost, huh?” the husband said, swallowing heavily.
His wife asked hesitantly, “How long has this ghost been here, sweetie?” They both tried to smile at their daughter.
“Always,” she said as if it should have been obvious. “Since the day we moved in.”
The husband and wife were speechless, but that was nothing compared with how they felt when their daughter said, “She’s here right now.”
It was, she said, right behind Mommy and Daddy.
She was pointing at empty air.
The ghost never did anything to directly harm them, but sometimes it seemed to play pranks on their daughter.
One rainy day, their daughter said, “The ghost says she wants to go outside.”
One sunny day, their daughter said, “The ghost says she’s been friends with lots of different men.”