Work Text:
Harewood House is haunted, obviously. Everyone who goes there comes back with stories. They tell their tales with a breathless, excited kind of terror. The horrors they witnessed pass their smiling lips around bonfires and in locker rooms. It's like relaying the plot of a horror movie, but even better, because you lived the horror movie, and came back without a scratch.
Jackie’s cousin’s boyfriend’s sister went in there on a dare, and she heard scratching and banging from under the floorboards. Jackie tells the others this one day during fall conditioning like she herself had been there.
“So, what,” Tai asks, “she heard a racoon or something, and now she’s telling everyone she met Pennywise?”
“No, but she also heard, like, moaning!” Jackie tries, and Van can’t help but pluck the low-hanging fruit.
“In fairness to Jackie’s cousin’s boyfriend’s sister,” she says, “I’d probably also get out of there if I heard racoons fucking.”
Jackie huffs, and the conversation drifts from Harewood House to the time Animal Control pulled half a dozen racoons out of Nat’s neighbor’s trailer (“She, like, kept them as pets. Had little collars and shit for them. She was nuts, man.”). Van leans into Taissa’s side, surreptitiously running a finger up and down her wrist.
Harewood House should be haunted, anyway. It looks the part; a once-grand Victorian, shriveling in the sun. A massive oak tree stands in the front yard; so old, people say, that it was already grown long before the town was founded. Peeling paint, boarded windows, crumbling roof—the house is such a cornucopia of clichés, it’s almost charming.
It’s really the only ghost story in this town, at least that Van’s heard. It’s the only story in general. There’s not much culture in Wiskayok; it’s like it just sprung up one day, this pretty piece of sleepy suburban nothing. You could be in any suburb in the United States: same bland houses, same over-green lawns, same high school full of students desperate to be anywhere else. The town is almost surreal in its sameness.
Wiskayok, NJ has only two things that stand out: the varsity girls’ soccer team, and Harewood House.
And Harewood House is haunted, yes. But it's the safe kind of haunted. As dangerous as a horror movie, or a corn maze. A caged and muzzled monster.
So sue Van for wanting to get a little haunted. And for believing in the buddy system.
“You want to traipse around some musty old building full of rat shit and tetanus. For fun.”
“Aw, c’mon, Tai, where’s your sense of adventure?”
They’re lounging in the bed of Van’s shitty Ford, passing a bottle of Gatorade and watching the sun slip under the school roof. It’s November, the sunlight brittle and brief, giving way to the dark sooner and sooner each day. Many of the trees are already bare—thin pleading hands raised in supplication to the deep blue sky. Tai watches that sky darken, taking a swig of Gatorade before passing it to Van. Van tries to swallow down the strange, delighted rush, touching her lips to the spot where Tai’s had been. She can see the faint imprint of Tai’s lipstick on the plastic.
“I’m plenty adventurous. You of all people should know that,” Tai says, smirking. “I’m just more into doing, like, literally anything else.”
“Yeah, like what?” Van asks. “Going to Muriel’s again? Watching Thelma and Louise again? Hanging out in my truck—” pause for dramatic effect—“again?”
“Why not?” Tai asks. “We do that stuff all the time.”
“Exactly,” Van says. “We do that stuff all the time. Why not try something different? Spontaneity is important to a healthy relationship with your fuck buddy. Descartes said that.”
Taissa chuckles and rolls her eyes.
“Did he, now?”
“Yeah, in the same chapter where he said that the path to enlightenment is proving to all your dumbass friends that the haunted house isn’t actually haunted at all.”
“I don’t need to prove anything,” Tai says, but she’s smiling despite herself. “Anyone with half a brain knows that place isn’t haunted. It’s just old.”
“And how many of our teammates have half a brain?” Van asks.
“Fair point,” Tai concedes, and Van knows she’s won for once.
Breaking into a condemned building packed to the gills with health hazards is way easier than it should be. It takes one soccer-starter kick for the ancient door to fly open, revealing a crumbling foyer beyond. Armed with work boots, flashlights and the dodgy disposable camera Van insisted on bringing along, the two girls cross the threshold.
The foyer is beautiful in its decay. Wildflowers weave between cracks in the floorboards. Spindly branches reach through the shattered windows. Vines scale the stained walls. Moonlight trickles through gaps in the ceiling, casting the hall in silver. Van lets out a little “woah,” before she can stop herself, but the embarrassment subsides when she sees that Tai is just as taken aback, if only for a moment. Then her face returns to affected boredom. She raises an eyebrow at Van.
“Not exactly Hill House, is it?” Tai asks.
“Is that the weird-ass lesbian psychodrama Shauna was going on and on about the other day?”
“The very same.” Tai shakes her head. “She’s, like, obsessed with that book. It’s almost worrying, you know?”
Van’s not really in any place to give people shit about obsessions—she can still recite Wayne’s World by heart—so she just shrugs.
“Isn’t Hill House by the same lady who did The Lottery? That shit gave me nightmares for like a year.”
“Same lady,” Tai says with a nod. “Seriously, why is all the shit they make you read in ninth grade English or whatever so fucked up? The Lottery, The Most Dangerous Game, To Build a Fire, The Yellow Wallpaper—”
“I bet there’s some crazy patterns in the wallpaper here,” Van says conspiratorially, shining her flashlight on the rotting walls. “Maybe we’ll find that lady in the walls, still trying to get out.”
“The only things in these walls are spiders and dead rats,” Tai says with a grimace.
“We’ll never know until we find out, will we?” Van asks. She tugs Tai’s sleeve. “C’mon, let’s look around.”
“I fall on a rusty nail, you’re paying my medical bills,” Tai says, but she lets Van lead her by the hand deeper into the house.
“Do you actually believe in all this stuff?”
Van looks up from the camera, where she was trying to get a shot of a wall stain that looks inexplicably like Kevin Bacon. If Kevin Bacon swallowed a hive full of bees.
They’re standing in what probably used to be a kitchen. The vague shadows of boxy appliances linger on the walls. Spiderwebs garland the corners. Dust motes dance in the moonlight.
Taissa, too, looks splendid in silver. When she catches the light, she looks like a painting, lordly but delicate. Van imagines her posing for an artist in a candlelit hall, a lifetime of secrets tucked away in a coy smile.
“What,” Van asks, “ghosts?”
“Yeah,” Tai says. Her expression is teasing, but there’s something under it Van can’t quite read.
“Taissa Audrey Turner,” Van says with feigned horror, “are you telling me that Ghostbusters isn’t a documentary?”
Taissa laughs.
“The movie where Dan Aykroyd gets blown by a ghost? Yeah, turns out that’s a work of fiction. Who woulda thought, huh?”
“Betrayed. Betrayed and bereft. Now who am I gonna call?”
“Okay, but seriously,” Tai says. “Why would you insist on coming here if you don’t believe in this stuff?”
“What, you don’t find it romantic?” Van asks, gesturing to a pile of dusty wood scrap in the corner of the room.
“Van,” Tai says, tone just on the edge of stern. “Come on. I’m just curious. Do you believe or not?”
Van tilts her head a bit to the side. Mulls it over. There’s an answer she could give—it looks like a man’s silhouette, smells like engine oil, and sounds like the corny old love song her mom can’t bear to hear anymore. It’s too raw, too misshapen, too far from the stupid jokes and easy smiles Taissa wants from her.
She’s never told Taissa about her dad. She’s never told anyone. The loss stays wedged between her molars, a toothache she can ignore most days.
Tai doesn’t need to see the ugly, aching parts of her. That’s not what this night is about.
She could lie. She could deflect with a joke again. But something in Taissa’s expression makes her want to be honest, at least a little.
“I don’t know if I, like, believe in ghosts or anything like that,” she says slowly. “I guess I just…I don’t know, like the idea. That people aren’t just…”
(She swears she sees him, sometimes.)
“…gone.”
Tai gets a soft, distant look for a moment, and then it’s gone. Van wants to ask, for an insane instant, who she’s lost. The words fizzle and die in her throat.
Tai opens her mouth to say something when a banging sounds beneath their feet.
“Oh shit!” Van yelps.
She practically leaps into Tai’s arms, the disposable camera clattering to the floor. Tai’s little noise of surprise is drowned out by scratching, hissing, snarling—
Before a tiny black-and-grey face pokes its way out from a gap in the floorboards. A raccoon turns to growl at them, its beady eyes shining in the gloom. Two baby raccoons—pint-sized and scraggly and weirdly cute—peek out from behind the big one, looking at Tai and Van with what Van can only call bewilderment.
“It was raccoons,” Van blurts out. Tai starts tugging Van’s shirtsleeve, a little frantic.
“Van, we gotta go.”
“And they were fucking—”
“Rabies, Van, they could have rabies—”
The raccoon snarls again. Van just barely has the presence of mind to grab the camera as she and Tai make their best attempt at a dignified speedwalk out.
“Well, that was lame,” Van grumbles. They’ve retreated to Taissa’s Subaru, still parked outside of Harewood House. It sits there, mocking in its rotting grandeur. The oak branches sway in the wind like a cheeky wave goodbye. So long, suckers.
Van sulks in the passenger seat, fingers interlocked with Tai’s.
“So much for spontaneity,” Tai says, but she looks more amused than irritated to have spent her time chasing wall stains and spiderwebs.
“Sorry for dragging you into that,” Van says before she can stop herself. “I guess I somehow thought it would be, I dunno, fun.”
“I had fun watching your face when the raccoon showed up,” Tai says. She kisses Van’s cheek, smirking. “Wish I’d had the camera. Anybody ever tell you you’re cute when you’re scared?”
Van scoffs.
“I wasn’t scared,” she says, giving Tai’s shoulder a light shove. “I was just, y’know, startled. Besides, you were the one who wanted to get outta there.”
“I was being health-conscious,” Tai says primly, her hand stroking Van’s jawline.
“You were running away from babies.”
“I was giving a wide berth to their pissed-off mom,” Tai replies. “You’re welcome, by the way, for not getting left behind and bit.”
“My hero,” Van drawls. She can’t stop herself from smiling, though, and Tai looks infuriatingly, intoxicatingly smug as she pulls her into a kiss.
“Here’s the deal,” Taissa says as she pulls back. “Next time we do something new, I’m picking what we try. No rusty nails, no wild animals, no nonexistent ghosts.”
“No risk of bodily harm?” Van asks with a mock pout. “Boring.”
“I don’t think you’ll find my idea boring,” Tai says. Her grin is downright wicked. “Let’s just say I’ve been wanting to try something next time we have my house to ourselves.”
Something in her tone brings a surge of heat to Van’s cheeks. She swallows.
“Oh?”
Taissa winks.
“No spoilers.”
Twenty-five years later, all that remains of Harewood House is the oak tree growing out front, huge and ageless, its autumn leaves glowing amber in the light of the setting sun. There’s an apartment complex there now, small and overpriced. The neighbor kids who live there tell each other stories.
No one talks about the crumbling manor that used to be there. The people of this town have better ghost stories now. Stories of vanished girls who came back bloody. Girls who survived and won’t say how.
(“I heard they sacrificed the weak.”)
(“I heard they ate each other alive.”)
(“I heard they went crazy and lived like animals.”)
(“I heard they sold their souls.”)
Wiskayok, NJ finally has real stories. Not dead dusty rumors about a house that was, in the end, just old and neglected. Living stories, flesh-and-blood stories, who hide all their horror behind plastered smiles and years of quiet life. Living stories who carry ghosts in their blood.
Living stories, living ghosts. Haunting every house they enter.