The House Without Its Ghosts

When the last one is exorcised, the house cries for a week. Faucets drip with oily ooze and the downstairs mudsink fills to the brim with cloudy water.
Everything is so lonely and loud and open now. Everything hurts with the sting of cleansing fire. The swish of sheets being pulled off boxes, the creak of realtors walking through the living room, the tap-tap-tap of a sign being hammered into the gravel-grass front garden: For Immediate Renovation.
There was a ghost in the garden, once. And a ghost in the living room, a ghost in the light sockets, even a ghost in the mudsink, which is why the house has never turned on the mudsink before. That particular ghost was a lost little thing from the 1840s. It would have been a crime to drown it.
Priests come by daily. They carry bundles of sweet dried lavender, which they light and leave smoking in the windows to purify the place. The house cringes and caves in on itself, a shelf collapsing in the upper attic from sheer stress.
One of the priests, warded with gloves and goggles, brings a long pole topped with a nozzle, thin tubes dangling from it like strangling vines. He narrows his eyes at the soft blue mold that carpets the upstairs bedrooms. That mold has been a century in the making, not that he would know. It took so much time and care to grow.
The pole extends, and a fine mist of bleach sprays across the floor. The house moans in pain, a wail that shakes dust from the walls, a cry that leaves fracture-lines in the window glass.
Wonderful rotten wood is torn up and replaced. Old carpets, rich with ghost-footprints, are scrubbed till they are sterile, awful and bright. Wallpaper is ripped away. Railings are revarnished. The long-dead kitchen flowers are thrown in the trash.
The house sobs even harder when that happens. Those kitchen petals once held the ghost of a loyal little bumblebee.
Soon, the pipes are replaced, and the house does not even have the decency of tears. No longer do the taps drip with odd-colored liquids. No longer can rot creep comfortingly through the walls. There is no way for the house to reassure its ghosts that they are loved, that they lie safe in the embrace of something that will always need and know them.
Now, there are no more wails and tears and groans. The doors stand open, window-curtains twisting in the breeze, new glass windows filled with mindless light. The gravel-grass front garden has been planted with plastic pansies. Even the bees know to take a wide berth.
Now, everything works as it’s supposed to. The house is anything but a grave.

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C. C. Rayne is a writer, actor, and creator based on the East Coast of the USA. An avid lover of all things weird and discontented, C. C.'s work seeks to blend the magical with the mundane. You can find more of C. C.'s work (current and upcoming) in Soft Star Magazine, bloodbathhate magazine, Eye to the Telescope, Spiritus Mundi Review, and Word West Revue.