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kineticpassion · 2 years

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A Solid Foundation

Rating: T | 4.7k words

Original Fiction; Short Story; Horror; wlw; haunting; witchcraft (see tags for more, well, tags)

What makes a house a home?

Is it by ensuring that you will haunt the place when you die?

Read under the cut or on Reddit

As she parked the jeep in front of the shell of what would be their new home, Lisa turned towards her partner. Jesse was fast asleep with their feet tucked diagonally under the seat and their head resting on the window with the help of a light blue travel pillow.

It hadn't been that long of a drive, three hours, but it was enough for Jesse to zone out. Thankfully, Lisa was perfectly capable of navigating and entertaining herself via Bluetooth.

Jesse awoke to the gentle caress of Lisa's hand across their cheek. Blinking back sleep, Jesse sat up blearily and looked out the windshield at the wooden framing and half-finished walls before turning to face Lisa.

"Remind me why I agreed to sneak into our own home construction site in the middle of the night with you?"

"To cement ourselves into it as solidly as the foundation of our relationship. To truly claim it as our own."

Lisa turned and opened her door as Jesse rolled their eyes.

Both of them had practiced some form of spiritualism at different points in their lives. Lisa was the one who was still into it, much more than Jesse had ever been.

Jesse had never objected to cleansing a new place. Believing it would help is what made it work in the first place; that's what gives it power. Mainly, it would do no harm and made Lisa feel better, so there was no reason for Jesse to be weary of it.

This was different.

When Lisa first proposed the spell, Jesse was understandably skeptical for many reasons, not the least of which being that the shady website it came from had labeled it “black magic.” Not white, not gray, black. Lisa had jokingly called Jesse racist for bringing that up, and Jesse just rolled their eyes, running a hand through their curly black hair in a mixture of nervousness and mild frustration. “You know what I mean, Lisa.”

Lisa turned and took Jesse by the hands and looked them in the eyes with a serious gaze. “You said you’d always be mine, right?” Jesse nodded; Lisa smiled. “And I will always be yours. And this new house will always be ours. It’s a forever home. That’s why I want to do something special to bond us with it. I want to honor how special this is for you, and for us.”

Jesse teared up. Lisa had a way of doing that to them. Before Lisa, Jesse had never had a place where they truly felt at home and free to be themselves; not just because of jumping from foster home to foster home, but also because of privacy, agency, love, and acceptance.

What makes a house a home? For Jesse and Lisa, it was about love and making their new place all their own. Besides, being more of a skeptic, what harm could a silly little ritual do if it’s only meant to cement their relationship and the making of their new home together?

*Don't try this at home.*

Lisa scoffed at the warning as she pulled up the spell on her phone. Why else would anyone be on this page if not to try it? She knew it was a standard CYA disclaimer, but who was OP kidding?

After double checking their little bundles of sage and compact dirt wrapped in twine interwoven with strings of their hair, Lisa lit the match and held it over the candle until the wick caught alight.

Snuffing the match out safely, she took a deep breath, relaxing her body and centering her mind.

As Lisa began to say the words, Jesse noticed an unnerving shift in the air. It was like the shadows were leaning in to listen, darkening around the edges of the candlelight. It felt unnaturally quiet, like a forest sensing the approach of a predator.

Lisa moved and Jesse shook their head to clear it, rubbing the goosebumps on their arms. I’m just creeping myself out for no reason.

Lisa handed Jesse their bundle. “Remember, just like we practiced.” Jesse nodded. Together, they reached forward and touched the tips of their bundles to the candle flame. The sage lit, but the slightly moist dirt kept it under control, if not a little smellier. Lisa spun in a slow counter clockwise circle, letting the dark smoke rise up from her bundle. Jesse followed suit. Once they completed the circle and met again in the middle, they touched the tips of their bundles together and held them above the candle. The smoke united into one plume for a moment before they leaned forward and blew their bundles, and the candle, out.

“Now let’s dip these in water before we slip them into the foundation under the walls.” Lisa grinned impishly; “don’t want to accidentally burn the house down before it's even built.”

Jesse shuddered involuntarily. It was kind of chilly, after all. They carefully dropped their bundles into the space in the framing which would become the walls of their new home. Lisa crouched down and got her hands dirty to make sure the small bundles would blend in and stay hidden. The builders had started framing, but the concrete was not technically fully cured. They could already walk on it, though. The window of opportunity to do this was less than a week, so Lisa had planned this carefully. She took the small bucket of Quickcrete that she’d mixed when they arrived, and poured it carefully over the bundles. With a metal spatula, she smoothed out the top so that the concrete under this small section of the wall was even. She breathed out one last sigh of energy and intent, with her palms open and faced down over the spot, before she stood and wiped her hands off on her jeans, and then winced because she’d just smeared small traces of concrete on herself. “Now let’s go back to that apartment we’re in for now. I’m not going to call it ‘home’ anymore.”

“Yeah, let’s go home.” Jesse chuckled when Lisa playfully punched their arm in response. Leaving the tension of whatever that was behind them in the dark, Jesse focused on the brightness of their future.

It had been two years since the tragic car accident. Jesse and Lisa’s ashes had been scattered at sea. Jesse’s niece Agatha knew that was what they had wanted, and she’d stood up to both Jesse and Lisa’s families about that. It was the least she could do for them. Jesse’s parents had been especially difficult however; but that was to be expected. They had neglected Jesse in every sense and at every turn, even after death.

“She deserves a proper burial.”

“Oh, so now you’re worried about what they deserve? You never treated them with the respect they deserved when they were still alive.” Jesse’s parents had the audacity to look affronted, scandalized even, but Agatha pressed on. “Even now that they’re dead you still don’t have the decency to honor their memory the way they would have wanted. You are actively insulting their memory by continuing to misgender them. You don’t deserve to have a say in this.”

Thanks to Jesse and Lisa’s foresight in having a will, that was that. As one of the few members of the family who Jesse even stayed in contact with, Agatha wasn’t surprised that they’d named her the executor of their will. The sale of the house had been the last step for Agatha to close the estate. It had seen some minor wear and tear over the years, but overall they had kept their home well-maintained.

In the will, Lisa and Jesse had instructed her to sell it to a couple who needed a home as much as Jesse had. So when Justice and Alice came for a tour and put in their offer, Agatha knew she had found a winner.

The first few weeks were exciting for both of them; especially for Justice since it meant that she had finally moved away from her hometown. She was determined that this new home would be her sanctuary.

They had been surprised that they managed to beat out the real estate investors who surely must have been bidding on the place. At closing, the seller told them she had been instructed by the previous owners, her late aunts, to sell the house to a couple - not to a company. It was heartwarming to be in such a cozy place and knowing it had been lovingly built by good people.

They could almost feel the love there, as though it was a part of the house. And maybe it always will be, she thought. Justice believed that houses had character; she also believed in cooking with love. Alice wasn’t as good of a cook, but she did bake with love too. The smell of freshly-baked cinnamon rolls added to the lovely vibe.

Alice and Justice hadn’t been there long, but the house already felt like a loving home.

One night, when Justice awoke from a nonsense nightmare about her family, something felt - off. She got up to use the bathroom, but could not shake the feeling that there was something going on downstairs in the living room. There hadn’t been any sounds, but there was an unmistakable presence.

It’s 3am and I’m just creeping myself out. I do not need to wake Alice over this.

Justice took a deep breath and went downstairs just to prove to herself that there was nothing wrong. She thought of it as a brave mission and psyched herself up for the challenge.

Halfway down the steps, she failed her mission. There was a faint smell that she couldn’t quite identify, and that set her on alert again. She went down the rest of the steps more cautiously, and grabbed the first makeshift weapon she could find - an umbrella from the stand next to the stairs. She turned right, away from the front door, and followed the scent to the living room, umbrella up and at the ready.

But, of course, there was no one there. The smell, however, had gotten stronger, and now Justice could identify it as a strange combination of sage and burnt hair. She immediately started checking outlets and looking under furniture. Thankfully Alice hadn’t left her straightener on - that had been Justice’s first thought - that society’s pressure to conform to a certain aesthetic would cause them to accidentally burn their house down. The situation had started out creepy, but the burning smell had sent her into crisis aversion mode. The wax warmer was off, there were no burning candles, and there was nothing in the fireplace. Try as she might, and she did look everywhere, exhaustively, Justice could not find the source of the smell. So, despite the windows all being closed, she decided it had to have been coming from outside.

Now that she had determined there was no fire to put out, and the heat of the adrenaline died down, the situation was suddenly cold and creepy again. Or at least, Justice realized that it was chilly. It must have been chilly this entire time, and she hadn’t noticed because she was so focused on finding what was making that smell. She shook it off, pausing by the landing to adjust the thermostat before heading back to bed. As Justice got back under the blankets, she thought they may need to call a technician to check out the central heating.

As it turns out, that smell had been only the beginning.

The chill in the air came back almost every night. Alice reasoned that the house must be drafty. It was only two decades old, so it really shouldn’t be, but there was no other explanation.

And, there was no explanation at all for the whispers.

Both Alice and Justice had woken up on different occasions to the sound of whispering in the walls.

The first time Alice heard it, she thought Justice was murmuring in her sleep, until she realized it was two distinct voices. Suddenly she found herself fully awake for the rest of that night. Having heard Alice’s description, Justice woke up more prepared the first time she heard it, and traced the sound to the walls.

The house was a standalone, so the noisy neighbor explanation wouldn’t work here. But, it had to be from radio waves vibrating the pipes or something. Justice had to rationalize it somehow. After a few months, however, it became harder and harder to brush off. After a particularly rough and whispery night, Alice started venting in the kitchen in the hopes of figuring something out. Justice tried to hear her out, but she also refused to be paranoid in their own home.

“There’s no way this house is haunted. It’s only had one owner - well one couple. I mean, it’s only about twenty years old.” Justice had to be the voice of reason here and was doing her best to calm Alice down.

“Yeah, and they’re dead. They built this house, lived in it, and now they’re dead.” Alice gestured emphatically as she paced through the kitchen, looking at the patterns in the laminate floor as if she might find answers there.

“But they didn’t die in the house.”

“They died before their time though. They were just shy of fifty.”

“Their niece said they were happy though; and they were even prepared with a will and everything.” Justice stopped picking at the edge of the table and started picking at her nails instead, speaking more calmly. “I mean, we don’t know their lives, but, accident or not, this doesn’t really scream unfinished business to me, Alice.”

Alice stopped pacing and looked up at Justice with wide green eyes. “What if there’s something else holding them here? Something connecting them to the house?” Now her hands stopped too. “What if it isn’t them at all? What if there’s, like, some ancient burial ground, or a murder victim, under the house?”

Justice walked over and put an arm around Alice, steadying her. “Why don’t we cleanse the house?” Alice looked up at Justice, a mirror of the fondness in her gaze. They hugged tightly and resolved to do something about it. Alice in the hope that it would fix things, and Justice in the hope that it would comfort Alice.

Alice lit a circle of candles in the kitchen and used them to light a bundle of sage which she carried around, billowing its fragrant smoke throughout the house.

The smell jolted a memory from Justice’s mind, of that night, a few weeks after they moved in, when she smelled sage and burnt hair, but couldn’t find the source anywhere. She started to wonder. She’d have to ask Alice’s opinion, since she knew more about this kind of thing; but, the goal of this ritual was to calm Alice down, so it could wait until she was done.

It was less drafty that night, and seeing Alice visibly calmer, Justice really allowed herself to relax into the soft, warm bedding.

That tranquility made the thud that woke them from a dead sleep all the more jarring. They both jolted upright in their bed, scrambling in their startled state until their hands found each other’s. Justice squeezed Alice’s hand to hide her own fear, though it probably showed on her face as they looked towards each other.

Objects moving. That’s an escalation. Alice was puzzling over this as they got out of bed. But I just cleansed the house…. Then it hit her and she nearly facepalmed were it not for the sudden urgency to keep quiet. She reached over and took Justice by the arm, making a quiet “shhhhhh” signal before whispering. “I think someone’s broken into the house.”

Alice grabbed her katana from the wall display and took the lead as they approached the bedroom door. Although not fully sharp, it was a real blade; so it would have to do as a weapon for now. Gingerly, she reached for the doorknob and held it for a moment, silently counting to three and steeling herself before yanking the door open to an empty hallway.

Huffing a small sigh of temporary relief, Justice grabbed her solid wood elf figure to use as a bludgeon if necessary. At one foot tall, he had some heft and sharp edges to him that would hopefully pack a solid punch. Together, they slowly crept up the hallway at a kind of diagonal, backs partially to each other to see more and be less exposed.

Once they made it downstairs without any unwelcome sights, sounds, or smells, the tension in their shoulders had eased just enough that the rest of the walkthrough felt like more of a formality than anything else. Just a trip to see what had fallen off of a shelf somewhere.

They stepped into the living room and Justice screamed. Alice immediately whipped around to see what she was looking at, leaving their backs exposed. It wasn’t an intruder. Well, at least, not a human one.

Protruding from the base of the wall near the doorway, and slowly creeping upwards like ivy, was a tangled mass of sage and hair. A bed and trail of dirt behind the pulsating vines anchored them to the wall. The mass was relatively small; less than a foot across, with the tallest points only about ten inches up the wall. But since she could see it moving and stretching ever so slowly upward, Justice could tell it was growing at an unnatural rate, slow though that may still be.

“What the fuck is that?!” Alice exclaimed and pinched the bridge of her nose, dropping her sword in the process. Justice was just speechless. This close to the wall, she could smell the growths. It was the same smell from that night, not long after they moved in. She’d had a sign so early on and ignored it.

Justice was so absorbed in that train of thought that she almost didn’t notice the vase on the floor across the room. It had been on the center of the mantle, but now it was shattered on the ground.

“You were right, Alice.” She turned to face her wife; her serious and apologetic tone almost eclipsing the bizarre scene behind her. “I tried to rationalize this away from the beginning and I missed all of the signs.” Justice looked down and shook her head. “A few weeks after we bought this house, I woke up to the smell of sage and burning hair in the middle of the night. I thought it was your straightener or something, but I couldn’t find the source of the smell. So then I assumed it was coming from outside. I never thought it could be coming from the walls.”

The more Justice talked, the faster the vines behind her grew. They climbed the wall, up to waist height now, and Alice’s eyes widened. Justice continued her apology, none the wiser to the scene expanding behind her. “Then, when I realized the whispers were coming from the walls, I still assumed there was an outside source. But now, I realize…” The vines were now up to shoulder height and started to grow outward from the wall, expanding slowly towards them. Alice gasped in horror. “Yes.” Justice said. “Whatever is happening here, it’s coming from the walls. It’s in the walls, Alice. It has to be. It - ”

Alice, speechless though she was, sprung into action. She put her hands on Justice’s shoulders and pulled her towards her chest, just in time to avoid the longest vine and causing Justice to drop her wooden elf in the process. Its prey having slipped out of its reach, the vine wilted down a bit, losing its stiffness and slowly sinking towards the floor.

The structure of vines had expanded about a foot into the room. The longest one that had almost touched Justice looked weaker than the rest, strained by the stretch. It landed on the ground and embedded itself into the natural wood floor, recovering quickly and expanding tiny tendrils in several directions, spreading the growth of sage and hair onto the flooring.

Alice did the only thing she could think to do. She retrieved her sword from the floor behind her, grateful that the other wall hadn’t also grown arms and claimed the sword for its own. She lunged forward and gave the longest vine a whack, slicing through it and disconnecting it from the wall of origin.

The smell of burnt hair and sage intensified to something putrid. It was the olfactory equivalent of a shrill screech of pain. The severed vine darkened and shriveled to mud and goo, most of which oozed down between the floorboards into the foundation. The rest of the vines retreated towards the wall, leaning back towards it like most plants would towards the sun. The wall must have been its source, after all. The vines continued growing upward; steadily rising higher and higher.

“Whatever this is,” Alice said between heavy breaths, “it has some kind of foundation in sage. So it’s no wonder a sage cleansing didn’t help. It looks like it made it worse actually.”

“You think?!” Now Justice found herself lashing out at Alice’s suddenly calm and analytical tone in the face of a very real, very solid, and rapidly growing danger which had almost latched onto her. While Alice’s calmness under pressure is an objectively good trait for survival, Justice, who saw herself as a level-headed skeptic, found her own inability to stay calm especially frustrating.

Then, something occurred to her. “It’s trying to expand right? It looks like it wants to climb all over the wall, and it tried to spread across the floor.”

“And,” Alice added, “it started growing faster when you talked about us buying and moving into the house.”

“So, what this - whatever this is - is trying to claim the house for itself?”

“It’s about ownership.” Alice nodded thoughtfully. Not sagely. Justice was not about to try making that joke; not right now.

“Well chopping the vines clearly won’t stop it from growing.”

“No; we’ll have to kill it at the root.” Alice leaned her sword down on an armchair away from the wall. She wasn’t about to risk leaving it where the vines could get to it easily. “Man, I wish I had a flamethrower instead of a katana.”

“So we could burn the whole house down? Like in a ‘if we can’t have it then nobody will’ style?” Justice couldn’t resist bringing out the sarcasm afterall.

“No, but do you have a better idea?” Alice was taking the bait now, stagnating from her train of thought. “‘Kill it with fire’ is a pretty solid principle if you ask me. Also, it’s sage and hair. It already smells like it's been burnt before. So maybe we can burn it off.”

Justice crouched down and watched as the last bits of goop from the severed vine seeped down towards the foundation. The mound of dirt at the base of the central vine structure swelled ever so slightly, as though it had absorbed something. The dirt at the base seemed to be growing from under the floor itself.

“Alice.” Justice rose and turned to face Alice again. “What if it isn’t in the wall at all? What if it’s in the foundation?”

Justice could practically see the lightbulb come on in Alice’s eyes. “Of course it is! It’s like some kind of foundational curse.”

“So, what, do we exorcize the foundation or something?”

Alice threw her arms wide, gesturing at the whole scene. “How can you still be like that when this thing is growing and moving right in front of you?”

“Oh, I don’t think this could be a dream anymore or anything like that.” Justice fixed a thousand-yard stare at the pulsing mass of dirt at the base of the vines as she spoke. “I just don’t think we can fix it if it's in the foundation. The house is cursed, Alice. Apparently, somehow. Or haunted, or both. I don’t know.” She threw her hands up in exasperation and let them drop, resigned. “I just know that I don’t feel like it’s something we can fix without burning the whole thing down or taking the whole thing apart. It’s like it’s embedded in the structure itself. It’s part of what made this house a home. It’s cleansing sage corrupted. It’s -”

“Justice, for a skeptic, you are a mystical genius.” The triumphant and mischievous glint in Alice’s eyes took Justice by surprise.

“I - what?”

“We fight fire with fire.” Alice walked towards the kitchen and opened the cabinets, gathering objects and ingredients quickly as she spoke. “Fight black magic with white. Whatever mark they’ve made on the foundation, we can write over it with our own - in the roof. Or, well, in the attic I mean. Maybe we can’t destroy it, but they’ll cancel each other out like magnets or a balanced equation. They’d exist in harmony. Like yin and yang.”

Alice came back with sage, mint, twine, and a few other odds and ends. She stood by the window and wrapped them up into two small bundles in the moonlight. She held a hand out towards Justice. “I need a strand of your hair, please.”

Justice carefully ripped out a single strand of her hair and passed it to Alice.

“Thank you.” Alice then ripped out a strand of her own hair, adding hers to one bundle and Justice’s to the other. She held them up in the moonlight from the window and said a few words, calling on the cleansing nature of the lunar cycle and some other stuff that flew over Justice’s head. Then she picked her lighter up off of the mantle and ran it across the top of the bundles, immediately blowing them out and turning clockwise.

Carefully bending down next to the broken vase, Alice pushed aside the scattered rose petals and touched her hands to the rose water. Gently, she dripped the rose water onto the bundles, making sure they were properly put out and squelched.

“Let’s get these babies to the roof.”

Embedding the small bundles into the exposed rafters of the attic was actually really easy. When they got back down the stairs, Justice was relieved and hopeful to see the putrid vines already shrinking down to about two feet high, and steadily receding into the foundation. The vines were decomposing into dirt to match the mound at their base; the added mass seeping down between the floorboards, until there was nothing left but a light gray stain where the dirt had been.

“So now we’ve cursed the house to be ours or?” Justice asked as they sat by the warm fireplace with mugs of tea, watching the sunrise.

“No.” Alice smiled and took a tiny sip, blowing the steam off of her mug. “We’ve blessed it as our home. An equal and opposite force to hold the foundation in balance. We are going to want to cover the rafters there with boards though, so nothing gets to the sage.”

“That’ll be our first real home-improvement project then. Finishing the attic.”

“Yep; and if we work at it, maybe we’ll have it ready in time to be a guest room for the holidays.”

Justice smiled. Alice’s family were lovely. They’d practically adopted Justice in everything but the legal sense. She was still getting used to actually wanting to see family for the holidays. But that was several months away.

The sunlight streamed through the window, glittering across the floor and walls, washing away any traces of darkness that remained, and lighting prisms from the broken glass of the vase from where it sat in the bin. In this moment, the steam from their mugs and warm light across their feet made the armchairs even more comforting, especially with her wife by her side.

For now, their focus was on finally making their house a home. It’s not about material things, or owning property. It’s about the people, the life, and the love contained within those walls - a life built on a solid foundation.

#horror #happy ending #MCD #haunting #witchcraft #wlw #enby #short story #original fiction #yes that is both happy ending and mcd. there are more than one set/generation of main characters #kineticpassion #kinetic-passion #kpyl #kp writes

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