Chapter Text
It had been a relatively slow and boring day so far, so when the phone rang for the first time at 3:45pm, Richie wasted no time in answering it.
“You’ve reached Spirits & Such - Richie Tozier, licensed Psychic, speaking and at your service!” he said animatedly into the phone. “We deal with ghosts, ghouls, phantoms, poltergeists, and more! How can I help you?”
Silence came from the other end. Richie’s good mood deflated slightly at the thought that this might just be a prank call- he’d been getting a lot of those lately. He decided that he’d give the caller another five seconds before hanging up, annoyed that they’d wasted his time. Five… four… three… two…
“Um… hello.”
Richie brightened. “Hello, sir!” he said, leaning back in his chair and propping his legs up on his desk. “What can I do you for?”
The man on the line let out a sigh, almost as though he was the one being troubled by this conversation… even though he had called Richie. “Well, I don’t usually believe in this sort of thing,” the man said firmly, which was a common conversation preface that Richie had heard from many clients who didn’t want to be seen as ‘crazy’ . “But, recently, there have been… things going on in my house. I’ve tried to explain it, I-I’ve tried to convince myself that it’s just my imagination, but now, I…” The man took a long breath. “I think I’m being haunted.” The last part came out as almost a mumble, as though he was embarrassed to be saying it.
“Well, sir,” Richie said, balancing the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he reached into his desk drawer for a pad of paper and a pen, “you’ve contacted the right person! I’ve dealt with all kinds of supernatural entities- from ghosts to ghouls, from goblins to zombies- you name it, I’ve taken care of it!”
“Uh, right,” the man on the phone said, not quite sounding as confident in Richie as his other clients usually did.
“Now, I just have a few questions, if you don’t mind,” Richie said, using his teeth to open his pen before spitting the cap across the room. “When did the haunting start?”
“Well, I first noticed that things were… off, about a month ago,” the man said.
“And can you describe for me what exactly you’ve been experiencing?” Richie said, scribbling down the words 1 month down onto the paper in front of him.
“It started off with just small things, so I wasn’t really concerned,” the man said. “My lights flickered occasionally, faucets leaked. And I would hear… these scratching noises at night, almost like something was in the walls. But when I called an electrician, a plumber, and even an exterminator, they didn’t find anything. I just assumed that they were shit at their jobs, because it was obvious that something was going on.”
“I see…” Richie said, copying down these points in his notebook. He wasn’t at all surprised- they were all the most common problems that people came to him with.
“So I tried to take it into my own hands,” the man on the phone continued, “but that didn’t fucking work either. I replaced all the lightbulbs that were acting up, didn’t make a difference. I set up rat traps, but all they seemed to catch were bugs. Eventually I gave up, I figured that it was just the house getting old, that there was nothing really I could do about it. And I’d just started to feel alright with that, and accept that, but…”
When the man trailed off, and remained silent, Richie took a pause from doodling a cartoon ghost in the corner of his notepad, and gave his full attention back to the call. “Sir?” he prompted.
Another uncomfortable-sounding sigh came through the line, before the man spoke up again. “About a week later, things got worse,” the man said, and Richie could hear some strain in his voice. He sounded tired, fed up. Like he was about to snap. “Books that I haven’t touched in years were suddenly off my shelves and on my coffee table. Multiple times, I left something on the kitchen table, and it would get knocked over, or… or I’d find it across the room. Doors that I’m positive I closed and locked, I would find them open- and no, I’m not just ‘forgetful’ , so don’t even fucking suggest it.”
Richie made a face that he never would have dared make had he been in a face-to-face meeting with a client, but that was fair game over the phone. Richie understood that fear and stress could mess with a person’s temper, but he had never been able to understand why some clients felt the need to be so rude to the person they were coming to for help. “Of course not, sir,” Richie said, trying to sound helpful and not condescending. “Anything else?”
“There are also these… noises.”
“Yes, yes,” Richie said, referring back to the notes he had written. “Scratching noises, correct?”
“Well, yeah, that’s what I said,” the man said, almost sounding annoyed that he had to repeat himself. “But, lately I’ve also been hearing… what kind of sounds like footsteps. I live alone, and I don’t have any pets, but it definitely sounds like somebody is walking around my house at night. And… fucking hell, I can’t believe I’m saying this…” the man added in a grumbled groan, and from the way he spoke Richie could almost envision him on the phone with his head in his hands. “But, last night… there was something in my house. I saw it.”
“It?” Richie repeated.
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t a person,” the man said. “It was more like… I don’t know, a shadow? And it wasn’t mine- I’m not stupid, I know what my own fucking shadow looks like, and that thing was not it. But… I don’t know. It disappeared quickly, so I didn’t get a good look at it.”
Richie nodded thoughtfully, even though the man couldn’t see him, and wrote down one more thing into his notebook: Hallucinations. “Well, sir, it seems to me that you absolutely have a ghost on your hands,” he said in the most reassuring voice he could put on. “But don’t you worry- you’ve made the right choice in contacting Spirits & Such! I’ll get this ghost out of your hair in no time at all.”
There was a second of hesitation, before the man replied. “So… you believe me?” he asked. He sounded a bit unimpressed- Richie wondered if he had been expecting a response that didn’t feed into the ‘ghost’ idea. The man didn’t quite sound like he fully believed in the paranormal either, and maybe he had been hoping that Richie would be able to ease his mind of that silly idea and give him a rational, realistic answer to all of this.
Well, if he wanted an honest response, Spirits & Such was the wrong place to call.
“Of course I do!” Richie lied. “It is my job, after all. Now, just a few final things before we move on: what is your address?”
“29 Neibolt Street.” Richie scribbled it down.
“Fantastic. Next- I assume that you’d like to deal with this as quickly as possible, yes? If so, then you’re in luck- I’m available today at five o’clock, if that would work for you.”
There was a brief moment’s pause, before the man spoke up again. “You’re available as soon as an hour after a customer calls?” he asked, his tone sounding more critical than curious. “You have pretty good reviews online- I would have expected you to be… busier.”
Richie channeled his annoyance through pressing his pen harder against the pad of paper, as he wondered who the hell this guy thought he was. “Sudden cancellation,” he said as politely as he could. “So, does five work?”
“I end work at five,” the man said. “Make it five-thirty.”
“Wonderful,” Richie said- though it would have been more wonderful had the man remembered his manners- and looked over at the empty daily schedule on his calendar, quickly writing down Appt- 5:30pm. “After all, the sooner we can get rid of this ghost, the better, Mr…” Richie trailed off, only realizing now, at the end of their call, that he hadn’t even asked for his new client’s name.
“Kaspbrak,” the man finished for him. “Eddie Kaspbrak.”
“Alrighty then, Mr. Kaspbrak,” Richie said, flipping his notebook shut and leaning even further back in his chair. “I will be seeing you tonight at five-thirty!”
Mr. Kaspbrak said something that almost sounded like a thank you before he hung up, though he practically mumbled it, and it didn’t sound very grateful. Richie placed the phone back onto the receiver, and despite his new client’s attitude, Richie was in a significantly better mood than he had been in when he first answered the call. Even though his new client sounded like a real piece of work, at least he was getting hired in the first place.
Despite the business he had started, Spirits & Such, a sort of exterminator service dedicated to getting rid of the paranormal… Richie Tozier didn’t believe in the paranormal. He didn’t believe in ghosts, or ghouls, or phantoms, or poltergeists, and he certainly did not believe in goblins or zombies, either.
But, other people did, and that was enough for Richie.
He had taken on his first “exorcism” not too long after he had moved into his first real apartment after college, and met his next door neighbour: an elderly lady who was convinced that her apartment was haunted. After Richie had gotten caught in the elevator with her one day, she had begged him to come over and take a look. Richie was sure that all the signs of a “haunting” that she was complaining about were probably just the side effects of her brain getting old, but it was clearly causing her distress, so Richie agreed.
The first thing he had noticed after stepping foot in the apartment was the scratching. Richie knew right away what it was- definitely rats. He remembered the sound from the time a family of rodents had made themselves comfortable in the attic of Richie’s childhood home, directly above his bedroom. He had listened to those very scratching noises for three weeks before an exterminator finally came to remove them.
But, of course, he didn’t tell his elderly neighbour that. She was so convinced that it was a ghost, that Richie had a feeling she wouldn’t have even believed him if he tried to tell her otherwise. So, he set her up in her living room with some tea and told her to stay there, before locating the rat that had been hiding out in her kitchen pantry. It wasn’t hard to capture the thing, but in an attempt to both ease the old woman’s mind as well as entertain himself, he used some pots and pans to make a few banging noises here and there, recited some strange-sounding incantation that he remembered hearing in a horror movie, and even imitated a ghostly voice being exorcised to tie it all together.
When he told the old lady that he had gotten rid of the ghost and she realized that the scratching sounds had in fact stopped, the relief on her face as she thanked him was enough to make Richie glad that he had stopped and helped her… but it was the fifty dollars that she pressed into his hand that sparked an idea in his mind.
A part of Richie felt bad for taking that much money from an old lady, but he had been in between jobs at the moment and could use all the extra cash he could get. It was as he walked back to his own apartment fifty dollars richer, though, that he realized there were probably a lot of people out there similar to his neighbour- people who do believe in the paranormal, and who are scared enough of it to pay whatever it takes to protect themselves from it.
Less than a month later, Richie was celebrating the grand opening of his new business: Spirits & Such Consultation Office: The One-Stop-Shop for Getting Rid of the Paranormal!
Now… was it the most honest business venture? No, but Richie was okay with that. After all, it’s not like he was really scamming people, contrary to what the few friends who knew the truth about his job told him. He really did help people- he fixed the faulty wiring that caused their lights to flicker; he repaired the air conditioning that caused cold spots throughout the house; he fixed creaky floorboards and old hinges that caused doors to swing open by themselves; he got rid of unwanted animals and insects that made strange noises in the house. But most importantly, he put his clients’ minds at ease, and if they wanted to believe that Richie was getting rid of ghosts, who was he to correct them? At the end of the day, his customers were left happy and he was getting paid, so Richie didn’t see the problem with it.
Richie took another look at his notes from his phone call consultation with Eddie Kaspbrak. He had ticked off all the standard criteria that all of Richie’s clients came to him with: flickering lights, leaking pipes, strange noises. Richie could deal with that. The claim of misplaced items and open doors were also relatively common- Richie found that once people started believing that there was a ghost in their house, they became much more prone to blaming their forgetfulness on the paranormal. Even the final thing that Eddie had reported- seeing a ghost- didn’t concern Richie all too much. While most of the ghost sightings came from his older clients, and over the phone Eddie Kaspbrak had sounded like he was probably around Richie’s age, the mind was still a powerful thing, and Richie knew that stress-induced hallucinations didn’t have an age limit.
He checked the time on his wristwatch- 3:51pm. Perfect, he thought, getting up from his chair and stretching out his back. Just enough time .
Richie didn’t actually have a sudden cancellation in his schedule- admittedly, business had been rather slow the past few weeks, and today wasn’t the first day that he had no appointments booked. He could have suggested going over to Mr. Kaspbrak’s house right away, but Richie hadn’t wanted to seem that desperate for work (and, Mr. Kaspbrak had made it quite clear that he wasn’t available himself until later). Besides, he was starting to get hungry, and his favourite place to grab a late lunch was a twenty-minute walk away.
He grabbed his jacket off the coat rack, and loudly announced to the office that he was heading out. Stanley Uris poked his head out of the doorway from his own little office, his eyebrows pulled together. “I thought you didn’t have any appointments today,” he said.
“Just got an emergency house call,” Richie said, shrugging on his coat and grabbing his duffel bag full of all his tools. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Wish me luck against the ghosts!”
Stanley only rolled his eyes, and instead of wishing luck, he just reminded Richie not to leave his bag of tools at the client’s house again.
Stan “the Man” Uris was Richie’s oldest friend from childhood, as well as his reluctant business partner. Though he didn’t quite agree with everything Richie was doing in this little semi-shady business of his, he couldn’t deny that at the end of the day, Richie was helping people- whether that be by actually fixing up their homes, or just by talking to them and easing their state of mind. Stanley also knew that there was no way Richie would be able to run a business on his own, no matter how motivated he was, and he didn’t exactly want to see his friend’s dreams crash and burn, so he offered his help with the behind-the-scenes work, while Richie proceeded as the face of the company ( only after Richie agreed to the conditions that if Spirits & Such ever got sued, that Stan would have no part in it). And despite a lot of the complaining that Stanley did, as well as the fact that he called Richie a “conman” more often than a “businessman”, Richie was still thankful to have him around.
Stanley’s refusal to wish Richie luck as he left the building may have offended Richie, had he been on his way to fight an actual ghost. But this was just a routine job, the kind that Richie had done hundreds of times before in the near decade he’d been running Spirits & Such for, so he knew that he didn’t really need much extra luck.
Oh, how he would come to change his mind about that in due time.
By the time Richie was finishing up with his very-late-lunch-early-dinner, it was just about time for him to be heading over to 29 Neibolt Street. He knew a general idea of where the house was, as he had visited multiple houses around that neighborhood before- all the homes in that part of town were getting old, and time hadn’t been kind to them, so Richie couldn’t blame the residents for their imaginations running wild when it came to the idea of ghosts.
The house of 29 Neibolt Street looked similar to the rest of the houses on the street, though Richie had to admit, this one seemed like its owner was putting in a little more effort to make the place look nicer. The lawn was nicely cut, and there was a small bed of flowers in the garden in front of the porch. The infrastructure of the building was clearly old, but the exterior seemed to have gotten a recent paint job, making it look a lot livelier than its neighbours. A nice car even sat in the driveway, which had Richie wondering what this Mr. Kasprak did for a living as he walked up the front steps and rang the doorbell.
Richie wasn’t quite sure what exactly he was expecting from Eddie Kaspbrak… but the man who answered the door was not it.
Most of Richie’s clientele consisted of older people whose minds weren’t as sharp as they used to be, naive young adults who were a little too into horror movies, or die-hard conspiracy theorists who wore tinfoil hats and believed that the world was going to end any day- those people built up a majority of not only the believers of the paranormal, but those who were willing to admit to believing in the paranormal.
Not to judge a book by its cover, but Eddie Kaspbrak didn’t look like he fell into any of those categories. He also didn’t quite fit the image that Richie had created in his mind of the man who had been so hostile to him on the phone earlier.
If Richie had to guess, he would say that Eddie was- as he had initially thought after speaking to him- in his late twenties or maybe even his early thirties, close to Richie himself in age. He wore a nice and expensive-looking suit, which Richie thought accurately matched the nice and expensive-looking car out front. His suit looked like it had been designed perfectly for Eddie Kaspbrak and Eddie Kaspbrak only, not a crease or fold out of place, and his hair was neatly combed and styled.
But what caught- and held- Richie’s attention most of all, what left him standing at the door unable to speak for a few seconds too long, was that Eddie Kaspbrak was very, very, very attractive.
He was frowning- his dark eyebrows knitted together and his mouth pulled down in almost a pout , for fuck’s sake- which maybe should have turned Richie off, but for some reason, it very much did not. When he moved to cross his arms over his chest, Richie could see his suit strain slightly against his arms, giving some definition to the flexed muscle underneath. Eddie had his gaze set straight ahead, and though the glare he was giving Richie was cold, his eyes were a warm brown, brightened by the late afternoon sun, and Richie couldn’t pull himself to look away.
Richie had long ago memorized a speech that he gave to all his clients when he first showed up for his appointments, but as he stood at the door of the house at 29 Neibolt Street, he seemed to have forgotten that speech for the first time. The words had completely slipped from his mind, and had been replaced by only the image of-
“Are you Richie Tozier?”
Eddie Kaspbrak’s familiar voice brought Richie back to reality in an instant, and the unimpressed tone in which he asked his question made Richie momentarily forget about Eddie’s looks and instead remember his attitude from their earlier phone call.
He stood a little straighter, hoping that his face wasn’t as red as it felt, and put on the most professional smile he could. “That I am!” he said. “And you’re Mr. Kaspbrak?” Eddie gave Richie a quick once-over before firmly nodding, and Richie tried his best not to let the way Eddie’s eyes had trailed over him distract him and make him forget his speech, again. “Well, we thank you again for getting in touch! I’m sure this has been a distressing time for you, but not to worry! I’m here and at your service to help you get rid of this… problem, once and for all!” Richie made sure to carefully omit the name of his business, as well as the exact details of the ‘problem’ ; from the way Eddie had acted over the phone, Richie assumed he wasn’t the kind of guy who wanted it announced to the entire neighborhood that he thought there was a ghost in his house. Besides, Richie already got the feeling that Eddie didn’t like him very much, and he didn’t want to make things any worse.
Eddie continued to look at Richie with disapproval on his face, as though he was silently critiquing him, but Richie could also pick up a slight shine of nervousness and concern in his eyes. Richie wondered if it was because of the ghost, or maybe because of Richie’s strangely excited attitude about dealing with said ghost. He was clearly fastidious and critical, but Richie hoped not so much that he could see through this scam.
After apparently deciding that he did, in fact, want to continue on with this service, he took a step back and opened his door wider. “You’re five minutes late,” was all he said as he welcomed ( well, Richie wasn’t sure if ‘welcomed’ was quite the right word ) Richie inside and closed the door behind him.
“Apologies,” Richie said without much sincerity. “I was dealing with a particularly nasty and stubborn spirit in the appointment before this one, and I ran a bit over time- you know how it is.”
Eddie only responded with a faint nod of his head, but he didn’t try to argue, so Richie felt satisfied enough with his quick lie, and began to look around. The house appeared to be well-taken care of, like a lot of effort had gone into decorating it and keeping it clean. Richie wondered if Eddie had done it himself, or if he was one of those people who hired someone to come in and set up their home and subsequently clean it for him.
Either way- it didn’t look like the typical image of a “haunted house”.
The only thing that seemed out of place was a patch of wall in the living room, covered up by a small tarp taped to the wallpaper. Richie approached it, and saw the tarp move slightly, as though there was a breeze blowing against it. He looked over his shoulder to Eddie, who was trailing behind him cautiously. “What’s this for?” he asked, pointing his thumb towards the tarp.
The question seemed to only put Eddie in a worse mood. He walked over to the tarp, pursing his lips firmly as he carefully peeled the tape off from one of the corners and lifted the tarp to reveal what was underneath: a broken window.
Richie leaned down to get a closer look, frowning. “What happened?” he asked, looking at the jagged pattern of broken glass that was left attached to the windowsill.
“What does it matter?” Eddie snapped. “You’re not here to fix my broken window, you’re here to deal with the-” He cut off suddenly, as though he still didn’t want to admit out loud to the idea of a ghost.
“Well, before I deal with anything, I need to do a full assessment of this place, and everything that’s happening in it, to know exactly what I’m dealing with,” Richie said. “So, if this is just a regular broken window, got shattered by some kid’s rogue baseball, that’s fine. But if something else happened… I need to know about it.” He didn’t really, but now Richie’s curiosity about the broken window had been set off by Eddie’s defensiveness, and he wanted to know more.
Eddie looked over to the window once more, staring down at the loose corner flapping slightly from the soft breeze outside. Judging by Eddie’s hesitancy to speak, Richie assumed that maybe the window had broken in an embarrassing way, and that Eddie wasn’t as good at thinking of a quick lie as Richie was- but then, he let out a deep sigh. “Last night, in the middle of the night, I got woken up to the sound of glass shattering,” he said, but he didn’t sound happy about it. “My first thought was that someone was breaking in, so I went downstairs, but no one was there.”
Richie raised his eyebrows. “You thought someone was breaking into your house, and your first instinct is to go confront them?”
Eddie scowled. “I keep a baseball bat upstairs,” he said, and Richie didn’t try to argue any further. “Anyways, I started to look around, because clearly somebody had done this, and I wasn’t going to let the person who broke my fucking window get away with it if I could help it, but… there was nothing . And I moved quickly, there was no way somebody would have been able to break the window and get far enough away on foot by the time I got downstairs, and even if they had a- a fucking… getaway driver, or some shit like that, I would have heard a car driving away, but there was nothing .”
That was really all the details that Richie needed, and he was about to start with the next part of his prepared speech, but it seemed as though talking about this was getting Eddie fired up, and he wasn’t finished with his rant. “So I thought, maybe it was an animal,” he said bitterly. “You know, a bird accidentally flying into the window, or something like that. Maybe it was going fast enough to break the class, but then just flew away again before I came down. That made sense, because fucking what else could have possibly happened? So I went to check my security cameras, and…” He faltered on his words, and then instead of explaining further, he pulled out his phone. He furiously tapped on the screen a few times, then shoved the phone in Richie’s face, and pressed play on a video.
It was a camera feed of Eddie’s front lawn, the side of his house visible on the side of the screen. The time in the corner of the screen read 3:04am , and the footage was layered with static and slightly difficult to see. Richie almost asked exactly what he was supposed to be looking at… when it happened.
The window shattered. Glass flew across the lawn, and for a moment Richie thought it was strange that the glass fragments moved in a way that made it seem like the window had been broken from the inside , but he quickly looked past it. After all, he was no physicist.
After the video finished playing, Eddie quickly tucked the phone back into the inside pocket of his jacket, almost as though he was embarrassed about it. “See?” he grumbled. “Fucking nothing there, it just… it was like it broke on its own. Which, I know , sounds fucking stupid, but… what the hell else was I supposed to think? And it was in the middle of the night, so it’s not like I could do anything about it then. So I just put the tarp up, but just as I was about to go back to bed, I… I saw…”
Eddie trailed off, but something about his expression was different. There was still that anger, that hostility, that frustration, but for the first time since Richie had first arrived at the house, there was also fear.
Richie waited for Eddie to complete his sentence, but when he remained silent, Richie decided to do it for him. “...the ghost?” he finished.
Eddie winced, closing his eyes and bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I know, I fucking know,” he huffed, irritation obvious in his voice. “I know that it sounds stupid, because of course it does- this is fucking ghosts I’m talking about, I know how it sounds. But I swear, I saw something, and I know that it fucking broke my window. ”
“The shadow?” Richie said, remembering what Eddie had said earlier on the phone.
Eddie lowered his hand from his face. There were faint marks on either side of his nose from where his fingernails had dug into the skin. Exhaustion rimmed his eyes, and Richie wondered if all of this had been keeping him up at night. He gave a slight nod, taking a deep breath to regain his composure after that little outburst. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I guess- that’s what it looked like. I just know that it wasn’t a real person, because when I looked at it, it… disappeared.” Richie opened his mouth to respond, but before he could Eddie pointed an accusatory finger at him. “And do not even try suggesting that I was hallucinating, or sleepwalking, or dreaming, or whatever the fuck else. Because I wasn’t.”
Richie raised his hands in front of him innocently. “Mr. Kaspbrak, I think you’re forgetting who exactly I am,” he said with a light chuckle. “My entire business is about getting rid of ghosts- you don’t have to try so hard to convince me about this. I believe you.” He didn’t, but of course he wasn’t going to tell Eddie that. He’d go out of business if he started telling his clients the truth, and Richie had bills to pay.
And, besides… as rude as Eddie had been to him, Richie still felt bad for him. The stress was clearly taking a toll on him, and this broken window incident hadn’t made things any better.
The most likely explanations to Richie were that A: Eddie’s bird theory was right, but his cameras just weren’t good enough to pick up on such a fast-moving thing in the dark, or B: there were some messed up kids in the neighborhood who thought that throwing something through Eddie’s window would be a funny prank, and they had enough sense to stand out of view of the security cameras. On top of all the other “strange” occurrences going on in his home, that incident along with the fact that the window-breaking had happened in the middle of the night while Eddie definitely had probably still been half-asleep, it basically confirmed to Richie that the stress of all of this was really getting to Eddie, and even going as far as to make the poor guy see things that weren’t there.
And sure, maybe Eddie was being a bit more of an asshole than was necessary, but Richie thought that if he was having these delusions of being haunted, that he’d probably be cranky as well.
Eddie lowered his hand, maybe realizing that he hadn’t needed to get so heated, as he went back to crossing his arms over his chest and he avoided Richie’s eyes. “Right,” he said, his voice softer and his face less red as he calmed down. Then, after a moment’s thought, he quickly added, “Sorry.”
It didn’t sound very sincere, but Richie didn’t care all too much. All he cared about was getting paid for this job, and that wasn’t going to happen if he and Eddie just kept standing around chatting. He set his bag of tools down on the ground, which landed with a heavy thud , and he clapped his hands together as he took another look around the house. “Well, then!” he announced, putting back on his charismatic salesman voice he had spent years perfecting. “I think I’ve seen everything I need to see- there’s no point in wasting any more of your time, so I’ll get to work, if you don’t mind!”
“Is there anything I need to do?” Eddie asked, though he didn’t sound very eager to help. He looked down at the bag on the floor, and Richie quickly kicked it behind himself- the last thing he wanted was for Eddie to open it up and see what was actually inside.
“Nope! All I need you to do, sir, is to keep yourself safe!” Richie told him, waving his hands to point finger guns and shoot a smile at him. “See, it was important for me to know about the window, because when a ghost moves on to destruction, that means that it’s getting more powerful- and more dangerous. The exorcism I’ll have to perform is foolproof, but it might get a little messy, and I don’t want you getting caught in the crossfire. Would you mind leaving the house for, let’s say, an hour? That should be plenty of time for me to get rid of this little problem.”
At first, Eddie didn’t seem too excited to be leaving Richie alone in his house- Richie could tell that from the look on his face- but he didn’t argue any further as he grabbed his coat and keys and headed out the door. Richie went to take another look at the broken window, wondering if he would be able to board up the big hole within the next hour, when the sound of Eddie’s footsteps stopped just at the door. He cleared his throat, but in a way that was obviously he wasn’t really trying to clear his throat, but rather to catch Richie’s attention. When he looked over at Eddie, he saw his client standing half-in-half-out of the door, his hand gripping the doorknob, and looking everywhere except at Richie.
“Good luck,” Eddie mumbled after a second of silence. He was acting as though he was being forced to say it, despite no one but himself being the one forcing him to do so. He didn’t wait for Richie’s response, and quickly marched out the door, closing it firmly behind him.
Richie let out a curt laugh. You could at least try to make it seem like you don’t want me to die, he thought. He waited until he heard the sound of a car door slamming shut, followed by a revving engine, growing quieter and quieter as Eddie sped away from his supposed haunted house.
Now that he was alone, Richie could finally get to business and do what he did best.
He got straight to work in doing a sweep of the first floor, checking in the kitchen and living room and every little closet he came across. He went upstairs next, looking in the bathroom and three different bedrooms, and after he finished up with his initial investigation, Richie came to the professional opinion that… Eddie Kaspbrak’s house was completely normal.
On one hand, he was glad for the normalcy, but it did strike Richie as a little strange that he didn’t experience any of the occurrences that Eddie had described. Usually when he went to visit a client, their issues were blatantly obvious- he could immediately hear the pitter-pattering of mice in the walls, or see their droppings in the corners of the room. He could usually hear the dull buzzing that came from a fusebox in need of fixing. He often could feel the chill of a broken air conditioning unit as soon as he walked into the house.
But Eddie’s house was different. There really seemed to be nothing wrong at all. Which, Richie supposed, wasn’t a bad thing, but he figured that if these issues were bothering a man, who clearly did not believe in ghosts, enough to contact Spirits & Such, then they must have been nearly constant , driving him insane. Richie supposed he must have been wrong. Maybe Eddie just had thin patience.
That wasn’t to say that the house was… perfect. Richie didn’t quite know how to describe it, how to put it exactly into words, but there was a slight eeriness in the air around him that did have him instinctively checking over his shoulder every so often. Richie was sure some of Eddie’s paranoia had just rubbed off on him. It knew that it was nothing.
After a full sweep of both main floors of the house and the basement turned up nothing suspicious, Richie still had about thirty minutes until Eddie’s return. He decided to do some work anyways, figuring that even if nothing was wrong , he could still find some things to fix, and finally opened up his tool bag, which contained hammers and wrenches and boxes of lightbulbs and all of his other supplies that he used for all his other clients. Richie walked through the house again, finding lightbulbs that were even slightly dimmer than the others and replacing them. He tightened the screws on every single door hinge and oiled them up to stop them from squeaking. He did want to help fix Eddie’s window, but he just didn’t have the tools for it. He checked under the sinks in both the bathroom and the kitchen, looking for any leaks and tightening anything he could. He couldn’t hear any scratching in the walls, but he set some of his extra-strength rat traps down in the basement anyways, ignoring the fact that Eddie seemed to have already put some down and caught nothing with them.
A few minutes before six-thirty, Richie heard the sound of the front door unlocking from upstairs. Taking that as his cue that his job was done, he began to head up from the basement. A few stairs short from the top, he paused, to quickly ruffle his hair, knock his glasses askew, and dishevel his clothes- he found that his clients were often generous with their tips if he put on this little act.
When he emerged from the basement, he found Eddie standing in the doorway, looking around nervously, until his eyes landed on Richie; Richie had a hard time deciding if the look Eddie was giving him was surprised, nervous, or relieved. “Is… everything okay?” he asked as Richie approached him, seeming like he wasn’t too sure whether he was in for good or bad news.
Richie put on his widest smile and gave a big thumbs up with both hands. “That was a tough spirit you had there, Mr. Kaspbrak, but I’m happy to tell you that your home is now free of the paranormal,” he announced. “Now, for the next course of action- will you be paying with card or cash?”
_________________________
Richie always slept well the night of a job.
He fell asleep that night to the happy thoughts of his success with 29 Neibolt House, and had a wonderful dream about the new things he would buy if the money kept rolling in like this. He woke up the next morning in a fabulous mood, which was rare for him and his night owl tendencies, and kept up that attitude while he made breakfast, picked out his outfit for the day, and walked to work… all the way until 10:03am, when his desk phone rang just three minutes after he walked into the office.
He grew slightly annoyed, but tried not to let it spoil his mood too much. After all, ten o’clock was Spirits & Such’s official start time, but still- Richie always hated having to get to work right when he got to work. He reached for the phone while settling down into his chair, but before he could even jump into his memorized phone greeting, the caller beat him to it.
“I want my money back.”
Richie recognized the voice immediately- which caused dread to start filling up his stomach along with the words the caller had said. “Uh- excuse me?”
“I want my money back,” Eddie Kaspbrak said, clearly enunciating each word. He sounded like he was resisting himself, like he was trying his best to stay calm. “I paid you one hundred and eighty dollars to get rid of that stupid ghost- and you fucking didn’t.”
Richie wasn’t a complete stranger to these kinds of calls. Oftentimes, his clients were so dead set in their way of thinking that there was a ghost in their house, that even after one of Richie’s visits, they still found ways to convince themselves that they were being haunted. “I apologize if you’re unsatisfied with my service, Mr. Kaspbrak-”
“Are you kidding me?” Eddie said, doing a worse job at keeping his emotions under control. This phone call was definitely not as friendly as their first one. “Unsatisfied, that- that is a gross understatement to how I’m feeling- especially considering I almost got killed by the fucking thing!”
Richie suddenly sat up straight in his chair, leaning his elbows against his desk and giving his full attention to the call. “Wait, what?”
“Thanks to your incompetence and your lies, I nearly got killed,” Eddie spat. “So either you can come back to my house and get rid of this thing properly, or you can give me a refund so I can put the money towards moving out of this fucking house .”
Richie thought things over trying to come to a decision while still trying to fully understand what Eddie had said. When he finally spoke into the phone again, he wasn’t even very confident in his answer, but he began to worry that Eddie would completely lose his temper if he had to wait for a response any longer. “I’m sorry that our service was not up to your standard!” Richie said in his best customer service voice. “Of course, we can definitely book a follow-up appointment to take a look at what I missed. Does…” Richie opened up his calendar and had a flip through it. “... tomorrow at six work?”
“What? Did you not understand the part where I said I nearly fucking died? ” Eddie said firmly. “No- you need to come now.”
“Sir, I have other-”
“Please.”
Richie was thrown off-guard at the sudden switch in Eddie’s voice. Though he had only said a single word, Richie could hear that it was rich with just one emotion: fear . He needed help.
Richie took another look at his calendar. His first appointment was at ten-thirty, and was a consultation- one with a man he had spoken to on the phone the other day; they had arranged to meet in person about the man’s troubles, because he thought that “the ghosts were listening through the phone” . It would be a pain to cancel and reschedule, but…
Standing up from his chair and stretching the phone cord as far as it could go, Richie balanced the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he began gathering his things. “I can be there in fifteen minutes, does that work for you?”
If he wasn’t mistaken, Richie thought he might have heard a soft sigh of relief on their other end of the call. “Yes,” Eddie said, back to his firm and sharp tone. “Don’t be late this time.”
And with that, without a thank you or goodbye, their call ended.
Richie placed the phone back on the receiver, and less than five minutes after he had walked into work, he was heading right back out, calling over his shoulder to tell Stanley to cancel his first appointment.
Stan rolled his chair out of his own office, looking over to Richie with a frown on his face. “Why?” he asked.
Richie picked up his tool bag from underneath his desk and threw it over his shoulder. “Emergency visit,” he said simply.
“Another one?” Richie didn’t blame Stanley for sounding surprised- business had been getting slower and slower as of late. After all, Spirits & Such wasn’t exactly a household name, and their services weren’t exactly essential.
“Same one as yesterday,” Richie explained. “Apparently, this guy really believes in ghosts. I won’t be too long. Want me to bring back lunch?”
“Choose something good this time,” Stanley told him, shuddering as he rolled back into his office, remembering the time Richie had brought back lunch from a weird new sandwich place in town and they both ended up with food poisoning. Despite that happening over a year earlier, Stanley never let Richie forget that mistake.
Richie gave an affirmative nod as he left, but as he left the building, the thought of what he was going to have for lunch was the last thing on his mind.
Under regular circumstances, Richie probably would have just given Eddie the refund and left it at that. He had done it before with other customers, clients who said that Richie ‘hadn’t done a good enough job’ at getting rid of their ghosts, when in reality it was just that Richie couldn’t do anything about the fact that their house was old and creaky. Richie never saw these types of calls and accusations as a very big deal, but there was one thing about this particular one that was bothering him.
What had Eddie meant by he had almost gotten killed?
Richie’s intrigue for what was going on in the house at 29 Neibolt Street, as well as with the homeowner, was only growing.
He arrived at the house seventeen minutes later, and hoped that Eddie wasn’t keeping time. Despite the warm and sunny weather the day before, the sky had now turned gloomy and clouded, and a chilly breeze blew around him that made Richie glad he picked up his warmer coat that morning.
The outside of 29 Neibolt looked the same ( Richie had to admit- judging from the way Eddie had reacted over the phone, a part of him thought that maybe the house had burnt down or something of the sorts) , even with Eddie’s expensive car sitting in the driveway. Richie made his way up to the front door again, bracing himself for what he was about to walk into, but before he could even knock, he heard the sound of a car door opening from behind him.
He turned, and to both his surprise and confusion, he watched as Eddie got out of the driver’s seat of his car. Richie hadn’t even seen him sitting in there as he had walked past the car, and for a split second he found some amusement at the thought of Eddie taking refuge in his car to hide from this “ghost”... but that quickly disappeared when he took a good look at Eddie himself.
Eddie looked rather different than he had the day before. His hair was slightly wavy and all over the place- messy, as though he hadn’t brushed it after getting out of bed. He had exchanged his expensive-looking suit for well-fitted track pants (which Richie thought was probably a little unprofessional of him for noticing, considering the circumstances, but come on- how could he not?) and a dark green sweater that had the words HANLON’S BOOKS printed on the front; it was strange, but almost comforting, to see him out of his professional suit and instead in regular clothes. His eyebrows and his mouth were both still turned down in a sharp frown as he marched up the driveway, but what captured Richie’s attention most of all, what made him realize that this wasn’t a time to be finding Eddie hiding out in his car funny or his bedhead and oversized sweater to be cute, was the bandage on Eddie’s face.
There was a big square of gauze covering Eddie’s left cheek, stuck on with medical tape and spotted with dark red. As he got closer, Richie also realized that there was some dried blood along the side of Eddie’s neck, likely having dripped down from whatever injury Eddie had sustained to his cheek, and even some on the shoulder of his sweater, as well.
When Eddie finally made it to where Richie was standing at the front door, all that Richie could bring himself to say was, “Uh… did you get hurt?”
Eddie glowered at him, crossing his arms over his chest. “I told you,” he snapped. “That thing in there almost killed me.” That didn’t really do much to answer Richie’s internal question of what the hell happened - instead, all it did was make him more confused. But before he could ask any follow ups, Eddie reached over and opened up the front door, and made things even more confusing.
The inside of the house was an absolute mess. It was such an odd sight, considering how neat and proper the place had been when Richie had last visited, less than twenty-four hours earlier. The couch that should have been in the living room was now in the kitchen, and also upside down. One of the large bookshelves had been knocked over, with all of its contents scattered across the floor. Kitchen cabinets and drawers were open, with cutlery and plates having fallen out, shattering on the floor below.
But what was strangest of all, was the assortment of knives sticking out of the kitchen wall. Five large, sharp knives protruded from the wall, as though they had been thrown against it, but they had sunken into the wall nearly all the way down to their handles. In order to get the knives that deep into the wall, they must have been thrown with extraordinary strength… probably with much more force than the regular person could muster up, Richie thought. But then Richie noticed the most chilling detail of all- one of the knives had a small splatter of blood on the white wall around it, as well as on his handle. Richie’s eyes shifted from the bloodstain on the wall, to the bandage on Eddie’s cheek, he began to put the pieces together and slowly understand Eddie’s claim of his brush with death.
“What happened?” he asked, a little breathless.
Eddie shifted uncomfortably, his eyes darting all around the room, as if he was watching out for something. “Things were fine after you left last night,” he said. His voice was still as sharp as his frown, but he spoke a little quieter than he had outside. “No noises, no problems with the lights, or anything like that. I thought it was finally over. But… this morning, I woke up, and I was getting ready for work as usual, when I heard something fall in the living room. I went to check, and it was a book from the shelf. I had the window open, so I thought it was just a gust of wind that came through and knocked it off, but then…” He glanced over nervously to the knives sticking out of the wall. “Then everything started moving. All of the books on the shelves, the plates started falling out of the cabinets, my fucking couch started moving on its own- I thought it was maybe an earthquake at first, until the fucking knives started floating, and…” Eddie hesitated, then instead of explaining further, slowly reached up and began removing the tape from his face. He winced slightly as the tape pulled off of his skin, until he had done enough to lift up the gauze and reveal what was underneath: a large, deep, bleeding cut that sliced nearly the entire length of his cheek open.
Richie felt his stomach churn at the sight of it, and even after Eddie covered it back up with the bandage. He had no idea what to make of any of this- it was more than anything he had dealt with before. All of Eddie’s previous complaints, Richie had been able to explain those with facts, with logic- even the hallucinations! Bad electrical work. Rodents and pests in the walls. Failing plumbing. Old floorboards and poor building infrastructure. An overactive imagination. That’s what Richie had been dealing with for the past seven years, that’s what Richie knew how to deal with- not fucking flying knifes that tried to stab his clients in the face. What the fuck was he supposed to do about that?!
The only even slightly possible explanation that Richie could come up with was that this Eddie Kaspbrak guy was a con artist himself. Maybe he had heard about Richie’s business and recognized the whole thing as a scam, and maybe he realized that he could make some money out of this. Maybe Eddie had planned this whole thing from the start, he made up the complaints about this so-called ghost and he staged that security camera footage and broke his own window, putting on a very good performance of acting frightened. And maybe he had created this scene himself that very morning, even going so far as to hurt himself to make things as convincing as possible, all as a ploy to eventually sue Spirits & Such for promising to get rid of a ghost that never existed, exposing Richie’s years of lies and take every penny Richie had made over all those years.
It was insane, Richie knew that, but it was the only thing that could possibly be true, the only non-ghost explanation that made even a lick of sense. It made him angry, and frankly offended, that this guy thought he could get away with something like this, that Eddie had been playing him like this. If that was the case, well, Richie wasn’t going to go down without at least trying to save his business. He rounded back on Eddie, ready to bombard him with questions to try and catch him in his own lie, but the words died in his throat when he saw the look on Eddie’s face.
Eddie was still wearing what Richie had started to think of as his ‘signature frown’ , but there was something slightly different about it. His brow was still sharply pulled down, creating slight wrinkles in his forehead, but his eyes were wide, dead set on something across the room. His lips were still pressed into a firm line, but his jaw was clenched and a vein on his neck began to grow rather prominent. Every part of him was completely still- his eyes unblinking, his chest not even moving to take a breath- except for his lips, as he quietly whispered, “Behind you.”
Richie didn’t want to look, but his body moved before he could stop himself- and when he turned around, he fully understood Eddie’s reaction.
Standing at the front door was… a ghost. A large, dark shape with the vague figure of a person, like they were surrounded by a shroud of black smoke. Richie couldn’t make out a face, or any real features, except for two burning red dots in the middle of the smoke, which Richie realized with a wave of panic might be its eyes , staring directly at him and Eddie. The floor and the walls around it began to burn, the wood and wallpaper sizzling away and creating a horrible burning smell in the house. Despite that, the room had also somehow grown terribly cold, and Richie could see both his and Eddie’s shaking breath in front of him. The ghost didn’t move. It didn’t speak. It just… stared.
Richie wanted to bring his hands up to rub his eyes and make sure he wasn’t seeing things, but he was paralyzed with fear. For a moment, he was afraid he was going to die. That he was going to burn to death in this house. That the ghost was going to throw a knife at him. Or by means of something far worse that he couldn’t even imagine.
But… none of that happened.
It felt as though Richie had been staring at those two red dots for hours, his fingers and toes growing numb from the cold and his throat becoming scratchy from the smoke he was breathing in. It seemed as though both he and Eddie were sharing the same thought, that maybe if they stood completely still, then maybe the ghost wouldn’t notice them. Maybe they would live.
And by some strange miracle, they did.
When the wallpaper burned all the way to the ceiling, the smoldering finally stopped, and the glowing embers of the floorboards slowly began to go out. The ghost’s shadowy form seemed to briefly darken, which Richie initially and worryingly thought meant it was getting angrier- until the smoke began to fade, spreading out and dissipating into the air around it, just leaving the human-like, shadowy figure standing at the door. The shape of a silhouette body became a little more clear, the only defined features still being its glowing red eyes, but that too began to quickly disappear, and Richie only had a moment to get a good look at it… but he was certain that the ghost that had stood before him seemed almost childlike. It left him with a cold, heavy feeling in his stomach, even after the shadow had completely vanished.
Richie didn’t know what to say. He didn’t even know what to think. There were a million thoughts running through his mind- most of them questions, and all of them panicked. But, there was one thing, one idea that every worried part of him could agree on: that he needed to get himself and Eddie the fuck out of that house.
Feeling vaguely nauseous and with his entire body trembling, he managed to break himself out of his shock and turn towards the man standing beside him. “Well!” Richie said, his voice coming out more shrill- more fearful - than he had wanted it to. “Let’s discuss outside, shall we?”
Eddie didn’t hesitate to agree.
They both rushed out the front door, carefully making sure not to step on the still smoldering floorboards around the entrance. Richie marched them down to the end of the driveway, getting as far away from the house as possible just to be safe, before finally speaking, and praying that he could still muster up a convincing lie. “I feel almost embarrassed for not realizing sooner, but I see now that I’ve made a mistake!” he said. He was trying his best to keep up the cheery, salesman-esque voice he always used with clients to try and hide the fact that he had just nearly shit himself. “You see, you aren’t just dealing with a plain old ghost here- you’ve got yourself a poltergeist.”
“A poltergeist?” Eddie repeated, sounding still shaken up, but not quite fully on board with Richie’s idea. “Like… the movie?”
“I mean, we’re talking about the real-life monster that that movie was based on, but yes, like the movie,” Richie said. “And it seems to me like you’ve got a nasty one here.”
“You told me that you had a foolproof exorcism, though,” Eddie said, sounding doubtful and crossing his arms over his chest. It seemed as though he had begun to calm down from the shock of the ghost and was returning back to his skeptical, questioning ways that Richie hadn’t missed.
“Yes, but I was using a ghost exorcism,” Richie said. “I thought that we were just dealing with a particularly powerful ghost- silly me missed all the warning signs that we had something else on our hands. So it makes sense that my ghost exorcism didn’t work here.”
“But, they’re both spirits, right?” Eddie said. “So why wouldn’t it work? Are they really that different?” Even though he did sound skeptical at that explanation, Richie thought that he also maybe heard a little bit of genuine curiosity in his voice, which admittedly, did make Richie feel a little bad for making all of this up on the spot.
“Well, would you treat cancer the same way you’d treat a common cold?” Richie asked. “They’re both illnesses, yes, but how you treat them are very different. All spirits are very complex, each of them difficult to deal with in their own ways.”
Eddie thought it over for a few seconds, and Richie saw his arms, tensed and crossed over his chest, relax a little bit as he took in Richie’s words. “Oh,” he mumbled. “I guess… I guess that makes sense.” He didn’t sound too happy about it, but Richie was just thankful that he somewhat accepted the explanation. “So… does that mean you know how to get rid of it now?”
“Absolutely I do, Mr. Kaspbrak!” Richie said, even though he absolutely did not. “Now, this process will take some more time than my previous attempt- I would estimate about three days, maybe a few more.”
“Three days?”
“Oh yes. These poltergeists are much more challenging to get rid of than your typical run-of-the-mill ghost,” Richie said. “It’s a slow process, but it works. Do you have anywhere you can stay for the time being?”
Eddie let out a sigh, running a hand through his bedhead. It made his hair stick up in a way that Richie would have found adorable if he wasn’t too busy with being scared for his life. “Yeah. I’ve got a friend I can stay with. Can I go get some of my stuff first to take with me?”
“I wouldn’t recommend going back inside,” Richie said, mostly because even he had no idea what to expect from inside that house, and he didn’t want Eddie to fall victim to any more harm.
Eddie’s face fell into an expression that wasn’t quite a frown, but more of a slightly annoyed pout. “Fine,” he mumbled, but without any more complaint, began to hurry back towards his car. Richie couldn’t blame him for wanting to get out of here, a big part of him wanting to hop in the passenger’s seat and speed away with Eddie.
He watched as Eddie got into his car, and spent about thirty seconds adjusting the seat and his mirrors and the steering wheel to all the right positions, then cautiously checked around him before slowly backing out of the driveway. Except, he lined up with where Richie was standing at the curb, Eddie rolled down his window, and poked his head out. “Can you keep me updated?” he asked. Richie thought that that was a perfectly reasonable request, and was about to assure Eddie that he would try his best, until Eddie spoke again. “Just so that… so that I know you’re okay?” That surprised Richie.
Even though Eddie wouldn’t quite look directly at him, Richie smiled anyways. “Of course, sir,” he said.
Eddie gave a firm nod, then quickly rolled up his window again, though not quite fast enough to stop Richie from seeing the faint pink blush spreading across his face. Eddie continued to reverse out of the driveway, and Richie watched him follow the speed limit all the way down to the end of the road, before turning the corner, and leaving Richie standing on the street, alone.
He didn’t want to, but he knew that he couldn’t just keep standing there all day, so after a few long breaths to prepare himself, Richie forced himself to turn back around and face the house, as one thought took place at the front of his mind.
What the fuck am I going to do about this?