My Unhaunted Life (Maybe)

The first thing Oliver Fairchild did on his first real morning as a resident of Rot Gut City was lie very still and stare at the ceiling and try to decide if the crack above him was structurally concerning or just atmospheric. He decided it was atmospheric. He was choosing to decide that.

The ceiling of his new bedroom was a patchwork of old plaster and older wood, stained by a century of damp and decorated with cobwebs that had been there long enough to be considered original features. A thin bar of silver moonlight cut through the gap in the shutters, one of which hung at an angle that suggested it had given up on its original purpose and was simply doing its best. The air smelled of dust and cold stone and something faintly herbal that he hadn't been able to identify yet and had decided to consider pleasant until proven otherwise.He was alive. He was horizontal. Nothing was trying to kill him.

Oliver finally sat up.

This was his house. The Bone Lord had given it to him as a reward for services rendered, which was a sentence that would have been complete gibberish to him fourteen months ago and now felt almost ordinary. It sat at the edge of Rot Gut's residential quarter, wedged between two taller buildings that leaned toward each other overhead like old friends sharing a secret. Three rooms downstairs, two up. A fireplace that worked after a fashion. A small garden in the back that was currently a rectangle of determined dirt and weeds that scared him. A front door that locked, which was more than he'd had for most of his time in the Breach Between.

He dressed, ran a hand through his hair in a gesture that accomplished nothing, and made his way downstairs to find something resembling breakfast. The kitchen was a generous term for the small room at the back , it had a hearth, a heavy wooden table, and a collection of shelving that held the supplies Nina, the local tavern owner, had brought yesterday evening in a sack she had described as "essentials," most of which he couldn't identify and one of which had moved on its own twice. He'd put that one outside. It had come back in sometime in the night.

Breakfast could wait. Maybe Nina could make him something that was at least edible. Oliver turned around to find his boots but they were gone.

What the hell?Oliver looked at the spot where he had very clearly left his boots the night before , beside the door, as any sensible person left their boots , and found only the flagstone floor and a faint impression in the dust where the boots had been. He checked behind the door. Under the table. In the small alcove that he was using as a coat area until he built actual hooks. The boots were nowhere to be seen.

He stood in his socked feet in the middle of his kitchen and thought carefully about this.Lilith had mentioned a ghost, hadn’t she? She had phrased it the way one mentioned a damp corner or a stiff hinge, something to be aware of, not something to worry about. There may be a resident spirit, the succubus had said. Oliver had interpreted this as there probably wasn't a ghost and Lilith just enjoyed saying unsettling things like she was want to do. He was revising that interpretation.

It took a few more minutes but he finally found them. On the roof. This required him to lean out of the upstairs window at a significant angle, which was an adventure in itself given that the window latch was not entirely committed to its job. The boots were sitting neatly on the slant of the roof tiles, side by side, toes pointing toward the street below. They had not fallen there. They had been placed.

"Alright," Oliver said, to the house in general. "Point taken."

He retrieved the boots. He didn't ask what the point was. He suspected he would figure it out eventually.

***

The kettle had not boiled because he hadn't properly lit the hearth, which led to another fifteen minutes of Oliver crouching in front of the fireplace with the flint and striker that had come with the house, quietly renegotiating his opinion of himself as a competent adult. He'd survived the Elderlight Conflux. He'd driven a chronal shard into the Mirror Seed. He could light a fire. He could absolutely light a fire.

On the sixth attempt, something caught. He sat back on his heels, breathing through his nose, and watched the small flame assert itself against the kindling with the grim determination of something that had better things to do.

When he stood up and turned around, there was a cup on the table.

He was certain, he was nearly certain, that the cup had not been there before. It was a wide, squat ceramic thing with a small chip in the handle, filled with something dark and steaming that smelled of something spiced and earthy that he didn't have a name for but that his brain immediately categorized as good. There was no one in the kitchen. The back door was closed. The front door was closed.

Oliver sat down, wrapped his hands around the cup, and took a careful sip.

It was very good, actually.

"Thank you," he said, to the kitchen.

The fire in the hearth, which had been threatening to go out, steadied and burned a little brighter. Oliver drank his mystery tea and spent the morning taking stock.

The house had good bones, (he chuckled at himself for that pun), Oliver was choosing to believe this despite the evidence of the ceiling crack, but it had been empty for a long time and it showed. The shutters needed re-hinging, or at minimum a conversation about their structural responsibilities. The back room floor had a soft spot near the window that he was currently avoiding and planning to continue avoiding until he could do something about it. Several of the shelves were slightly too close together to be useful. The garden was bleak.

He made a list. He found a stub of pencil in his jacket pocket and a scrap of something that might have been paper and wrote things down in the margins of what turned out to be a partial receipt from the Wailing Clam. The list grew. He started a second column. He looked at the list and felt the mild existential weight of home ownership settle on him with a sigh that could have come from him or possibly from the house itself.

He was staring at the soft spot in the floor, calculating whether he could simply put a rug over it indefinitely, when he heard the front door open. He had locked the front door.

"Trophy! I'm here!" The voice called and strutting in the room, wearing shorts that were too short and a t-shirt that did very little to stay on, was the succubus that started the whole thing.

"Don't panic. It's just me. Not a puddle of water!" Lilith said with a cackle.

Oliver pinched the bridge of his nose. “For the last time. I’m not scared of water.”

“You suuureee?” she drawled with a grin on her pretty face.

"How did you get in?" Oliver asked ignoring her obvious baited question.

"The lock has a particular personality," she said, appearing in the kitchen doorway in a flurry of dark fabric and bat wings. She was carrying an enormous armful of things, draped fabrics, small objects, what appeared to be a framed something that she was holding at an angle that prevented him from seeing what was in it. Her wings were doing the complicated work of helping her balance, which meant they were doing a great deal of flapping. "I've known it for years. We have an understanding."

"The lock and I are going to have a different understanding."

"Trophy." She said it with the patient fondness of someone explaining something obvious to someone they were very fond of despite their obvious limits. "You live in Rot Gut now. Everything has a personality. The sooner you accept that, the easier your life will be." She set her armful down on the kitchen table with a series of sounds that ranged from thud to clink to one noise he couldn't identify at all, and beamed at him. "I brought things."

"I can see that."

"For the house. To make it less..." She looked around the kitchen with an expression that was trying very hard to be diplomatic. "...accurate."

"Accurate?"

"To its current emotional state."

Oliver looked at his kitchen. He looked at Lilith. "What is its current emotional state?"

She tilted her head and considered it with genuine seriousness. "'I have given up but I am too tired to collapse.' That's what it feels like." She nudged one of the items on the table toward him , a square of deep red fabric, heavily embroidered, the kind of thing that belonged on a wall or possibly an altar. "This will help."

Oliver had learned several things about Lilith across the course of their acquaintance, and one of them was that her taste in décor could be generously described as committed. She liked things that had weight and presence and a slight sense of impending ceremony. This was not surprising, given that she had spent most of her life in a basement that she had furnished herself. What was surprising was that she was always slightly hurt when her contributions weren't received with enthusiasm, which made navigating the situation require a careful touch.

"Where would you put that one?" he asked, which was not agreement but could be mistaken for interest.

She brightened. "There." She pointed at the wall beside the fireplace with the certainty of someone who had already decided this an hour ago. "The color will warm the whole room."

Oliver looked at the wall. He looked at the fabric. It was very red. Very, very red. "It's possible," he said carefully.

Lilith crossed to the wall and held the fabric up against it, glancing over her shoulder for his reaction.

While she wasn't looking, something on the kitchen table moved.

Oliver registered it in his peripheral vision , a small, dark shift, like a shadow that briefly forgot to be attached to anything. The framed object Lilith had brought slid approximately four inches to the left. The piece of embroidered fabric that had been folded beside it flipped over so its reverse side, which was significantly less embroidered and considerably more practical-looking, faced up.Oliver looked at it.  He looked at where the shadow had been.

He looked back at the wall, where Lilith was still holding the red fabric and waiting for his verdict."Maybe," he said, "we try it in the other room first. See how it feels."

***

They spent two hours doing this.

Lilith would produce something from her pile, explain exactly where it should go and why, and position it with the confidence of someone who had been thinking about this house's décor for considerably longer than Oliver had owned it. Oliver would murmur something noncommittal. And then, with the reliability of weather, something would shift.

The small carved figure she placed on the mantle migrated to the windowsill while Lilith's back was turned, the windowsill, Oliver had to admit, was a better position. The string of dark glass beads she wanted to hang in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen ended up draped over a hook near the ceiling that Oliver hadn't noticed before, which was actually more elegant than her original plan. The deep green curtain she brought for the front window was folded into a different configuration by the time she came back from the other room, and when she held it up, she paused, and said, "Oh, that's better actually, how did you,"

"Natural talent," Oliver said.

Lilith looked at him. He met her eyes with complete innocence. She squinted.

The ghost, for its part, was clearly making aesthetic decisions with some conviction. Oliver was developing a suspicion that it had opinions about the house that predated his arrival and was now taking the opportunity to implement them via this peculiar renovation proxy. He was not complaining. The ghost's taste was considerably more restrained than Lilith's.

He did feel slightly bad about letting Lilith believe she was making these choices. But every time he considered saying something, she would hold something up with that particular eager look and he would remember that the end result would be the same either way, and that she was, underneath all the posturing, genuinely trying to make his house feel like a home. That counted for something.It counted for quite a lot, actually.

By mid-afternoon they had reached a détente, or Lilith had reached the end of her pile and was surveying the results with her hands on her hips, her wings slightly raised in the posture he had learned meant genuine satisfaction. The kitchen looked warmer. The front room had acquired character. The small table by the window had a cloth on it that Oliver genuinely liked. And the framed thing, which turned out to be an illustration of the silver moon rendered in ink on what appeared to be bark, hung on the wall at the bottom of the stairs in a position that the ghost had, through a series of small adjustments, placed absolutely perfectly.

"There," Lilith said, with great satisfaction. "Better."

Oliver looked around the room. "Yeah," he said. "Actually yes."

She turned to look at him with an expression he didn't see very often from her, unguarded and pleased and not performing anything. Her wings settled. "I know it's not much. But it's a start.""It's a good start." He meant it.

She smiled, small and real, and then immediately covered it with the expression she used when she was about to say something with entirely too much confidence. "Of course. You have excellent taste in advisors."

"I do," Oliver agreed, because this cost him nothing and the smile had been worth it.

***

He built a proper fire as the moon began its dimming cycle toward evening, and by the time it was burning steadily the house had acquired that quality that a space gets when warmth and occupation begin to convince its bones that being inhabited is acceptable again. The soft spot in the floor was still there. The shutter was still diagonal. The ceiling crack remained a matter of interpretation. None of that felt particularly urgent right now.

Lilith was asleep in the chair by the fire.

She had been sitting sideways in the chair, she was almost always sideways in chairs, he had noticed, as though furniture was something she was trying out rather than using, and then her commentary on the fire's technique had grown slower and more infrequent, and then she had simply stopped talking mid-sentence and her head had dropped to one side and that was that. Her wings had folded down over her like a second blanket. The tip of one small horn caught the firelight.

Oliver sat on the floor near the hearth with his back against the wall. The moon-bark illustration on the wall. The dark glass beads catching light in the doorway. The ghost's mug, still on the kitchen table, that he'd washed and set out and which had been moved an inch closer to the kettle while he wasn't paying attention.

Outside, through the front window, the moonlit streets of Rot Gut City moved at their peculiar, wonderful pace. He could hear the distant sound of the market, the particular music of a place that never entirely stopped, and beneath it the quieter sounds of a city settling into its evening rhythms. Somewhere out there was Nina's tavern with its warm light and permanent smell of spiced cider and whatever she was cooking. Somewhere beyond the residential quarter, his other friend Fernwyn, the Dryad, was probably doing something purposeful with growing things. Oliver’s mind even flitted to Misty, a ghost he had met awhile ago and hadn’t seen in as much time was, presumably, floating over her lagoon.

He was here. He had chosen to be here. He had a house with a ghost that moved his boots and a chair full of sleeping succubus and a list of repairs he was not qualified to do and an entire city of impossible things outside his front door and tomorrow he would get up and it would all still be true.

Oliver Fairchild leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes and felt something he had not felt in a very long time.

Something that might, if pressed, be called content.

The fire crackled. Lilith shifted in the chair and murmured something that sounded like not the good chocolates and went back to sleep. In the kitchen, Oliver heard the dishes get moved around but he didn’t look. If the ghost wanted to do something, who was he to stop it?

The house breathed around him, quiet and warm and slightly crooked and entirely his.

He stayed there until the fire burned low, and then he built it back up, and then he stayed a little longer.