One day before she went to sleep, their daughter said, “The ghost says she wants us to change the air in the basement room. She says it’s a very important place.”
The more they heard, the more terrified the husband and wife became. Everything their daughter said matched what they knew of the house’s former occupant—the Rainy-Day Strangler.
They had finally bought a house! They finally had a lovely life! And now…
“The ghost always says the meanest things. Yesterday she said she was going to strangle you, Mommy and Daddy.”
Their daughter’s words became more and more worrying. Finally, the husband and wife had a discussion and agreed that they wouldn’t allow their daughter to talk about this ghost anymore.
How? Simple. The husband said to her, “Now, listen, dear. What you’re seeing is not a ghost. It’s just an illusion, a trick this house is playing on you.”
“The house is?”
“That’s right. It’s being mean because it wants to get your attention.”
“But I don’t like when people are mean to me!”
“Exactly. So do you know what you should do?”
“What, Daddy?”
“Just ignore it. Even if the house says something mean or pulls a little prank on you, don’t so much as look at it. It will stop talking to you soon.”
Then he gave her a reassuring pat on the head.
The husband and wife couldn’t see the ghost that their daughter claimed to be witnessing, so if she stopped talking about it, they could stop worrying about it. That was the motivation for trying to shut her up.
“Okay, Daddy, I understand.” The girl nodded.
For a while after that, she stopped talking about the ghost in front of her parents. Her mother and father felt better, and they hoped peace might return to the household once more.
They had made one simple miscalculation: Their daughter had only just turned six years old, and she was a kind girl, and very curious. One day she said to her parents, “I wanna make friends with the house.”
The husband and wife looked at each other. She must have come up with this idea after they told her to ignore the ghost. They didn’t want her “making friends” with the place, though. Her father frowned and asked, “Has this mean house ever listened to anything you said?”
“Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “But that’s why I went to the cathedral today and made a wish.”
“A wish?” her father asked with mounting worry.
By praying to the statue of Cururunelvia in the cathedral, a person’s wish could occasionally be granted. It would change one object in their vicinity into a sancta that would fulfill what they asked for. Everyone who lived in this land of prayer knew that.
“And what did you ask for?” the wife inquired.
Their daughter grinned happily and responded, “I wished that I could make friends with our house!”
The cathedral was capable of granting any wish of any kind.
Even one motivated purely by a child’s curiosity.
Whether by good fortune or bad, the girl’s wish was one of those that came true.
The day after she made her wish, strange things started happening in the house, and they didn’t stop. Things fell out of cupboards. Bookshelves collapsed. Chairs moved by themselves. Beds tilted and windows opened. Everything in the house suddenly seemed to have a mind of its own. It was almost as if some unseen person was playing tricks.
Or like a nightmare had become reality.
“Look, look! The house gave me this doll,” the girl said, holding up a doll her mother didn’t recognize. When she asked where her daughter had gotten it, the girl said, “The house made it for me.” That didn’t make any sense. The husband and wife were terrified once again.
Gradually, the husband started coming home from work later and later. He couldn’t stand to be in the haunted house any longer than he had to. The wife, meanwhile, grew emotionally unstable, unable to bear the idea that there was someone else there in the house when she was supposed to be alone with her daughter.
The couple began to fight all the time. They could be heard shouting late into the night, every night. Their neighbors started to worry. Rumors sprang up that the house was afflicted with strange phenomena, and then people began to remember the Rainy-Day Strangler.
The couple, they were sure, had gone insane because they had decided to live in a haunted house. People began to look at them with open curiosity, and this public exposure only took an even greater toll on the family.
The husband and wife spent every day worrying: Should they sell the house, or just stay there and live with it? The house only escalated its bizarre behavior, as if to mock them.
Day after day crept by, until finally something happened they could no longer ignore.
The father described the incident to a reporter: “It was the most awful thing. This went beyond furniture shuffling around. The house changed shape and attacked us! The walls collapsed in on us, the ceiling fell down, and the hallways twisted around so windows that should have looked outside, you could look through them and see another part of the house! You can’t imagine it!”
Having endured all the paranormal phenomena they possibly could, the family immediately fled the house. Not long after, the husband and wife divorced, with custody of their daughter going to her mother. The house they had been so pleased to buy stood vacant, and now it had a reputation as a vile place that rejected those who lived in it. For a long time, nobody did.
But time kept passing, and much like the memories of the Rainy-Day Strangler, recollections of the family’s trials gradually faded.
Which brings us, almost, to the present day.
A family bought the house—a happy husband and wife with a six-year-old daughter.
Interestingly, very much like the house’s other most recent residents.
The killer who first owned the house. The family who had bought it after that. The little girl whose wish had been granted with a prayer.
Everything Elaina was saying pointed to one fact.
“The strange things happening in this house are definitely the work of a sancta.”
And if everything she had said was true…
“Then I think we’ve been laboring under a terrible mis- understanding.”
Tiny Riviere sighed, looking very grave indeed.
We’d been searching everywhere for the sancta even as the strange phenomena occurred around us—but maybe all this time handling such objects had made us inflexible in our thinking. There were all kinds of sancta out there, capable of granting almost any wish or performing almost any miracle—more of them than the average person could conceive of.
But maybe the sancta causing the strange phenomena wasn’t in the house at all. Maybe the reason the sancta’s aura had enveloped the entire house wasn’t because of the power of the prayer behind it.
We’d already found the sancta that was causing the strange occurrences.
Riviere looked up at the ceiling and said, “This is the sancta that was doing everything all along.”
Thunk.
A single book fell from the shelf, as if to say: Yes, that’s right.
Basically, Riviere can’t do anything the day after performing a major disenchantment. Since she had inadvertently disenchanted the husband’s sancta collection yesterday, it was going to be at least another day till she could do anything like that again.
“We can disenchant the place tomorrow,” she suggested. “I think that should stop these so-called hauntings once and for all.”
Elaina and I nodded. That seemed like the smartest thing to do under the circumstances.
But still…I felt a little funny. Just the tiniest bit.
The house itself was the sancta. I understood that, and it made a lot of sense given the story we now knew. But I still couldn’t quite figure out how that caused the mysterious phenomena. The little girl prayed her prayer, her wish was granted—but why should objects in the house start moving on their own because of that? Was that the proper effect for the granting of that wish to have? I considered the matter.
Beside me, the other two were talking.
“So what do we do today? Should we get out of here for the time being?” Elaina asked.
“Good question. We have no idea what could happen in this house, so I think it might be best to go back to the store to rest for today,” Riviere replied.