“What? Again?”
Olivia gave the picture stand a funny look as she picked it up. It had fallen on the floor yet again. Several times today, in fact. A picture of her family that seemed to be on the ground every time she looked over.
It was a photo she’d taken with her husband and daughter shortly before moving into this house. They were all smiling happily together; it made her heart sing and filled her with longing in equal measure.
For she’d had all too few reasons to smile like that since moving here.
Her husband had to do a lot of overtime and was often late coming home. That left Olivia and her soon-to-be six-year-old daughter, Carrie, alone in the house most of the time. That wasn’t such a bad thing, except Olivia was plagued by an anxiety she couldn’t put her finger on.
Ever since they’d come here, strange things seemed to keep happening.
The first time she’d felt something might be wrong was the very day they’d moved in. She found a doll she didn’t recognize lying in the hallway. It wasn’t one she’d bought for her daughter. Left behind by the previous owner, maybe? Whatever the case, the battered old doll frightened her husband, and they threw it away that evening.
The next day, Olivia found her daughter playing house with the same doll.
Things only got more unsettling after that. Dishes fell from shelves seemingly for no reason. The couch wasn’t where they’d left it. Carrie started talking to the walls, and in the night they heard footsteps rush down the hallway.
Words went through Olivia’s mind, words she wished she could ignore: Ghostly phenomena. Poltergeists.
And then there was the family photo, toppled each time she went by. Another day, another inexplicable occurrence.
There seem to be no end in sight to the happenings. Olivia asked herself when the bright days she saw in that photograph would come back to them, and she sighed as she put the photo back on the shelf yet again.
“Hoo-hoo-hoo…”
At that moment, she thought she heard someone laughing behind her. She spun around, but there was only an empty hallway. Nobody there. She felt a chill run down her spine. Whose laughter had that been? She didn’t recognize the voice, she thought. It wasn’t Carrie. Fear, fear of some thing she couldn’t see, burgeoned in her heart.
Down the hallway, the door opened with a creak.
“Mommy?”
Her daughter, Carrie, emerged through the door. Her beloved daughter, looking perplexed and worried. She must have been disturbed by the tension on Olivia’s face. Olivia shook her head as if to push away the bad feeling in her mind and smiled at her.
“Carrie, sweetheart. Did you knock over the picture?”
Yes, that had to be it. It was just her daughter being naughty. There was no such thing as ghosts—or so Olivia kept telling herself. As she crouched there in front of her little girl, she dearly wished it was just her daughter misbehaving a little.
Carrie, though, met her mother’s eyes and shook her head, mystified. “Uh-uh. I didn’t do it.”
Of course not. Carrie was nowhere near tall enough to reach the shelf.
Well, it must be coincidence, then. Because it couldn’t be a ghost.
Olivia felt like the picture was on the floor every time she saw it, but that had to be a trick of her imagination. She shook her head, trying to make herself believe that.
That was the moment Carrie picked to say, “But you know, this house’s ghost told me something.”
“I’m sorry… What?”
Ghost? The word Olivia had been trying so hard to get out of her head came straight out of her daughter’s mouth.
Her daughter, who spent so much time talking to the walls these days.
“The ghost let me know that the picture fell down again today.”
That was it. This was the day when Olivia confronted the fact she had been trying and trying to ignore: This house was haunted.
“And that’s the story. Do you think you might be able to stop the paranormal phenomena happening in my house?”
It was several days later, and Olivia had brought her husband and daughter to a small shop on the main thoroughfare of Cururunelvia, the land of prayer. The place seemed to have every conceivable kind of merchandise for sale: umbrellas, plates, a vase, a cabinet. There was no discernible method to the madness, except that everything was antique—and almost everything in the shop had a price tag on it.
“I see. Yes, I see.” Having heard their story, the shop owner looked at them and nodded. The tea set she had put on the table with a thud seemed like it might be another item from her store’s stock.
Olivia looked at the other woman with the faint hope that she might be able to do something for them. The shop’s red-haired owner gave her a smile.
“I think you’ve got the wrong place.”
We aren’t that sort of shop.
At least she had the good grace to look apologetic.
The name of the place Olivia and her family had come to was Riviere Antiques.
“Let me make sure I understand what you’re saying,” Riviere said from her spot on the couch. “You have a ghost in your house, and you want me to do something about it? Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“And do you understand what kind of shop we are?”
“Yes.”
“I see…”
Each time she answered, the client, Olivia, nodded quickly. Riviere, however, gave a deep sigh. She didn’t seem upset so much as unsure what to do. Finally, like she was talking to a child, she said, “Okay, you see… This is Riviere Antiques. We buy and sell sancta.”
“Yes.”
“That means we don’t deal with matters like this. It’s outside our expertise, for one thing. It doesn’t sound like there’s a sancta involved, so I wouldn’t even know what to do.”
Very sorry, but we won’t be able to help.
Riviere shrugged.
Riviere Antiques dealt in sancta, objects with special powers. We bought and sold them, or otherwise held on to them for Riviere to disenchant. Ghosts? Those were for other people to deal with. Like, say…
“A spiritual medium might be better. Maybe you could try asking, you know, someone like that?” I piped up from beside Riviere, giving a quizzical tilt of my head.
“Right…,” Olivia said, looking at me. “We thought of that, too. The first thing we did was have a famous medium look at our house.”
“Really? You did?”
So this person had come and gone already?
When I asked how it went, Olivia’s answer was as simple as could be.
The medium, it seemed, had visited their house just that morning. She had looked up at it and begun to laugh. “Ahh, no way. Not this one. Impossible! No, not happening.”
“What?” Olivia had asked. What was impossible supposed to mean?
The medium had patted her on the shoulder and said, “I can’t do anything about this one.”
“I’m sorry… Are you sure there’s nothing you can do to help?”
“Like I said. Impossible.”
“I see…”
“Try someone else.”
“I…see?”
And that was it!
This was a famous spiritual medium?
“She sounds less helpful than shit on your shoe!”
“Stop that, MacMillia.” Riviere gave me a nudge.
“You can understand why we were a bit shocked,” Olivia said, her shoulders slumped. “But the fact that a famous spiritual medium threw in the towel so quickly did tell us one thing. Our family all agreed.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Riviere said at the same time.
“If a medium couldn’t deal with the problem, it suggested that whatever is happening in our home isn’t caused by a ghost.” For the space of a breath, Olivia looked at us, and then she said, “And that made me think that maybe it was some kind of sancta instead.”
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“I had exactly the same thought,” Riviere said at the same time.