“But who are you? I’m not signing anything until I know everything about all of you. All,” I emphasize just to be sure they hear it.

The spirit sighs, leaning back in the chair. Except the back of the chair now sticks out of his chest that I’m now noticing is nothing more than a reddish-purple glob. “Well,” he ponders for a moment, “okay. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you.”

He begins a gruesome tale of betrayal, murder, and a startling amount of unnecessary death. I can feel my skin getting stiff and cold, almost as if I was dying as well. At one point, I have to rush to the sink to throw up. The acid burns through my nose and at the back of my throat. I hear an aggravated voice in the background grumble, “There goes the muffin I baked for you. Why is it my muffin she vomits.”

Gradually, the horror story comes to an end. I won’t relay it to you as you most definitely will have nightmares for the rest of your life if you heard it. All you need to know is this: every spirit in the room is a mass murderer and, coincidentally, was murdered by someone else in the room. The loose thread of the last remaining person is because the last victim inflicted a curse as they lay dying. The killer died from rapid onset rectal prolapse. I don’t want to describe it. I don’t recommend looking it up either.

As I sit in the midst of evil, I’m not sure how to react. “What do you want from me?” I ask.

“We want your life force.”

“Hard pass. Nice try, though.” I stand up from my chair and staccatically maneuver between the spirits. It can be deadly to pass through one and I’d rather not risk it.

But what the dark leader says next makes me stop dead in my tracks. Pun intended.

“We’ll make you rich and take care of you lavishly. You won’t die as long as we keep it up.”

From where I’m standing I can see into my shabby bedroom. The bed is still just a mattress on the floor, the blanket I’ve been using doesn’t cover my full height. I turn to assess the living room. There’s nothing to assess. No furniture. Nothing.

Exasperated, I finally choke out a response. “Ahh, fine.”

And that’s the story of how I became a pampered queen who never had to leave her home. Not that the spirits would let me, anyway.

I am so incredibly broke. Like, genuinely. It’s unreal. So when I came across an ad for cheaper rent than I’ve seen anywhere else, I jumped on the opportunity. I called the landlord immediately. It rang a few times before picking up.

“Pear St. apartments, this is Dave.” I expected more, something along the lines of, “How can I help you?” or “What can I do for you?” But no. His tone matched his low effort speech, too. It was gruff and lazy, drawling like he had been drinking since 8am. For a moment, I was reconsidering, but that quickly disappeared when the rent price popped into my head again.

“Hi, sir. I’d like to apply for an apartment.”

So that’s where I am now. I didn’t look at the place much online because I really didn’t care. But now that I’m standing in front of it, I wish I had. I insert the key into the rusty lock and try to turn it. The key snaps. I blink a few times at the key-head on the ground a few feet away.

Click

I turn back to the lock and see that it turned seemingly on its own. “Maybe some kind of delay?” I muse. I step through the crumbling doorway and am met by the smell of mildew and wild animals. “Ah, fuck….” It’ll take a while to clean all of this. I take another step forward and reach behind me to give the door a push to close it. It’s not there.

SLAM

“Um, okay.” I don’t know what else to say, it must be a draft. A window to the left is open. Oh. Not anymore. It slams shut so hard that the glass shatters. I guess I might as well start cleaning now.

It takes hours to get all the trash out of the small one bed, one bath, apartment. I duct tape a towel over the broken window to keep the crisp, autumn air out. There’s a quaint, brick fireplace opposite the broken window. When I have enough crumpled news papers and other flammable materials, I start a small fire. Luckily, there were pieces of plywood strewn around the house. I kneel in front of it and rub my hands together before holding them out to the fire. I can feel my stiff fingers thawing when a cold gust of air strikes down the chimney. When I open my eyes, I can see light ashes on my eyelashes and I can feel it just a bit in my nose. I sneeze before sticking my head in a bit to look up the chute. There’s no way the wind should have been able to do that.

I light another fire, careful this time to set up a protective barrier between the fire and my wonderfully dilapidated home. A single spark could set the whole place aflame.

The sun went down hours ago, so I get the mattress out of the back of my truck and drag it into the house on its side. I push it to the bedroom and let it fall with a thump. An identical sound echos from the other side of the house. I’m too tired to care, however, so I just collapse on the mattress and curl up to sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll start the repairs.

The sun rises around 6am and I get up with it. I don’t sleep until around 10pm and I continue this routine for the next two weeks. The whole place is new by the time I’m done with it. The only problem is: weird stuff kept happening. The entirety of the two weeks, there would be some kind of irregular sound or wind or the feeling of someone’s hands on me, around my neck, every day without fail. I had increasingly terrifying nightmares that shook me away at all hours of the night in a cold sweat. I am choosing to blame it on all the work I’m doing. I’m just exhausted. I have to, because the other option is so much more complicated.

I’ll be honest, my abuelita is a mystic; that is to say, she entertains the devil and his underlings. This includes all the spirits of the dead. So the second I touched the door knob, I knew the place was haunted. Horrific scenes flashed before my eyes. My stomach clenched but I just brushed it off. That’s how I continued to respond to the paranormal happenings. And I would have continued like that if things had remained the same.

But they didn’t.

One morning, about a week in, I woke up to a fresh brewed cup of tea with a hint of lemon and a single mint leaf, just the way I like it. I stared at it for so long, it ended up cold. Finally, I just snatched the cup and downed it as quickly as possible. If it was poisoned in any way, it’d better be a quick death. But nothing happened. In fact, the tea was delicious.

It‘s little things like the morning tea that keeps happening since. No more of the creepy noises and chills. I find some kind of meal at breakfast, lunch, and dinner and somehow it’s always food that I love. The apartment seems to clean itself as I haven’t dusted or swept since repairing whatever it is. It even feels like the insulation got better.

It’s been three weeks since I moved in. I’m sitting at my new kitchen table, nose deep in a delicate journal kept by my abuelita. I always refused to open it, not because of shame but simply because I knew what it was and I didn’t want to continue the practice. But as I’m reading through the legible parts, my interest and amazement only grows. If what she wrote is true, then she made multiple contracts with spirits, demons, and once even the devil himself. Or so she says. She did hint that it might have just been an archdemon. But still.

I get to the back of the journal and sit frozen in shock. I feel like I just opened a third eye. Suddenly, the pages fly to the right and the cover follows, effectively closing it. My head shoots up and I stare at a grotesque form in front of me. It’s impossible to continue ignoring them.

A slimy voice slithers into my ears and a chill runs down my body. “So, you are admitting you can see us.”

I gulp, looking around the room at the bodies missing arms, legs, heads, faces; there’s even one that is a single leg with a scarred head perched on top. I look for the rest of it, but I suppose there’s a reason it doesn’t have it on them. I turn back to the apparent spokesperson sitting across from me. I nod.

“Good,” he continues. As he speaks, I pay close attention to his features. His left cheek is missing so I see his teeth and facial muscles. The right eye keeps slipping out of its socket so he blinks a lot to keep it in place. The skin itself is a sickly green, like what you would expect from a long dead person. “We would like to sign a contract. With you.” His words interrupt my thoughts.

“W-what do you mean?” I stammer. “I’m not a mystic, I can’t do that.” I think the spirit is grinning, but it’s hard to tell with only half his mouth. It very well could be a sneer.

“You don’t have to be one. You will work just fine because you have your grandmother’s blood,” he nods to the closed journal, “running through your veins. You read it, so you know now. You know how to sign a contract.”