SATURDAY

Tump yanked on the handle of his suitcase, cursing when it bounced and refused again to be pulled over the edge of the curb.

He'd bought the thing just two years ago anticipating that he would be using it on tarmac and smooth paved road, but here only the few ancient streets radiating out from the town square were properly maintained and without cracks liable to destroy a wheel. The majority of the population who lived outside of the central district had to make do with a century old cobblestone and cracking asphalt, and as he was currently experiencing, extremely discriminatory curb heights.

A bored looking calico cat came strolling up the street and cast an aloof glance at him before walking on, disinterested.

He had been stuck in the midst of a group of senior citizens for the better part of his train journey, and his already not so stellar mood had grown darker and darker every time one of them said the word 'rain'. Maybe they had known each other so long that they had completely run out of things to talk about that couldn't be summed up in bite sized hourly updates.

The last thing he wanted to do was break the handle or god forbid a wheel, so Tump sighed and heaved his luggage up awkwardly by its sides instead, finally overcoming the first obstacle his old home town had thought to throw at him. Without a doubt there would be more: it was the kind of town that was built for certain people and certain people only. His aunt and he had moved as far away as they could afford to when he was barely 15 because it had been becoming increasingly clear that neither of them could stay much longer without suffocating.

As though the heavens themselves were mocking him, the day the prodigal son returned to quaint and quiet Lake End was bright and beautiful with nary a cloud in sight.

Tump's suitcase rattled over the Abbots' polished stone garden path and brushed against the colourful heads of flowers leaning over the edges of their beds to see what all the fuss was about. It was a beautifully maintained garden, positively picturesque, and he selfishly despised its creator for finding such fertile ground here, where there had been nothing for him but gravel in the scrapes on his knees and the judgemental glares of adults. In his memory, the garden belonging to Rin's house was a perpetually yellowing expanse of grass, shaded only by a single ailing pear tree and the house itself: a lone gnomon whose enormous shadow moved unerringly over the lawn as they whiled away the hours.
The red speckled stone the porch was fashioned from clashed with the colour of the path; the effect enhanced by the ornamented clay pots to either side of the door which held plants too fussy to be allowed to grow in the ground.

Tump rang the doorbell and attempted to smile, then when that failed not to scowl. The Abbots could likely guess that he didn't want to be here, but he didn't have to make them uncomfortable too.

It was Rin's mother who answered the door, bright eyed and lively as he remembered her. She extended a hand as though to shake his, but quickly changed direction to grip his arm instead.

"Hey Miss Abbot," he intoned dutifully, and they executed the typical rituals of reacquaintance as he was ushered in and shed his trainers in the entryway.

Barely a minute later, he found himself at the kitchen table with a slice of plum crumble in front of him. Like many women of her age, Miss Abbot was socially insulated by her padded cell of marital bliss and desperate for someone new to talk to. Thus, Tump learned of the new barbershop which had opened behind the city hall, of Marianne finally disbanding her book club, and of the terrible fate which had befallen Anne's pink hydrangea bushes down the road after the recent rains.
The cake was good so he sat patiently, making inquisitive sounds at the appropriate times and stuffing his face. He'd not had time to eat more than a sandwich this morning.

The early afternoon sun glinted off the fake marble countertop they sat at and revealed the dust dancing over the collection of marmalade glasses on the windowsill. The layout of the house was familiar to him still, but the kitchen looked to have been redone entirely in white and wood print, replacing an outdated monstrosity of gaudy powder blue. It was a good change.
There had once been a teal dogbed in the corner, but its owner had long since passed away and not been replaced.

A noise from upstairs made them both look up, and Tump caught the eye of Rin Abbot, standing by the banister in a yellow sundress and looking down into the kitchen. When he waved at her tentatively she nodded back.
Her mother called for her to join them at the table, but she rushed past and out the door with an absentminded excuse and not a sideways glance. Tump watched her hasten down the path to the street through the kitchen window until she disappeared behind the neighbour's hedge. They had been best friends once, but he had unknowingly disbanded that friendship when he left.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

The Abbots had a dinner date for the evening, so Tump was shown to the multiple aluminium foil covered casserole dishes in the fridge. Although she had already done so over the phone, Miss Abbot apologized profusely for their rudeness even as her husband and daughter began throwing unsubtle glances at the clock that hung in the entryway.

Mister Abbot was not a man of strong convictions, but friendly enough. Unlike his wife Tump hadn't really known him as a kid because his commute to work had been so long he'd left too early and returned too late for his daughter's friends to encounter him much outside of birthday parties. Nevertheless, he remembered Tump well enough, asking after his aunt as he hauled his suitcase upstairs.
He had sort of hoped that no one would remember him, but clearly it was not to be.

Once they'd left, Tump tried his luck with the microwave. His reheated baked pasta came out a little dry, but it tasted good anyway. He hadn't brought much to do other than his phone and a diary, so once restlessness seized him he resolved to explore the house.
There was an assortment of postcards and photos pinned to the fridge, almost painfully cliché. His and Silicia's fridge at home served as a canvas for his aunt to show off her novelty magnet collection, but neither of them had ever gotten a postcard, let alone felt like looking at their own stupidly grinning faces every time they wanted a snack.

Just as it always had, a curtain in the back of the kitchen hid a nook with the basement door and assorted cleaning supplies. It had been an awful place to hide because of all of the dust, but he could recall Alec wedging himself behind the vacuum there once anyway. It had taken the seeker an eternity to find him that day, because none of them even wanted to touch the curtain. There had been a cobweb in his hair when he'd finally emerged, and his mother had scolded him badly for getting his shirt dirty. Despite that, he'd held that victory over their heads for weeks.

The living room looked much like he remembered it, although the tv had been updated to a flat screen and the sagging brown couches looked even saggier and browner. The bathroom, too, had barely changed at all, and the upstairs hallway especially looked like it had been pulled straight out of his memory. The most significant difference was that he was now viewing it all from a higher angle.
It was uncomfortable being here again, in the living ghost of the meagre parts of his childhood that had been good. Although it made him feel worse, he tried very hard to be a stranger here. Returning always seemed to carry the possibility of staying - and Tump would not be staying.

To distract himself (or out of obligation, if anyone asked) he called Silicia. She picked up almost immediately, sounding a bit tired but happy to hear from him.

"Yes," he reassured, "I got here just fine."

"I'm glad - you know I was worried with the recent weather."

Tump nodded and sat back down at the kitchen table. Sitting in the living room alone didn't seem appealing.
"I actually did pass a few flooded areas, yeah. Not too bad here, though. Most of the town is high enough up, I guess."

"And the Abbots? Are they being nice to you?"

"They've always been nice to me Si, you can stop worrying. Are they being nice to you at your conference?"

"Honestly no," she admitted with a pained laugh, "the schedule is a real drag and the mattress is so soft I can barely catch a wink."

"The perfect recipe for sleeping through the day's events," Tump remarked with a smile. They both knew the reason she couldn't sleep really had nothing to do with her hotel bed. His aunt had taken off for Madrid two days before his own departure, where she would be giving a lecture on design guidelines for educational tools on behalf of her think tank. She would rock the presentation, of course, but had always been kind of an overthinker.

When she started recapping the talks she'd heard so far Tump made his way upstairs to start unpacking. The Abbots' spare room might as well have been a hotel room for how welcomingly plain it was, with a white Ikea closet and bed frame and little paintings of flowers on the wall. Most of the room was taken up by the bed, so that once open, his suitcase neatly blocked the way through to the window.
It was no matter. He drifted off that night to the sound of insects chirping outside and slept like a rock.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

SUNDAY

He was woken bright and early on Sunday morning by Miss Abbot knocking on his door to call him to breakfast. Tump allowed himself a moment of self pity before he got up to endure the important social event known as a family breakfast.

Practically the second he sat down at the table, Miss Abbot was putting a plate of hot toast and scrambled eggs in front of him.

"Did you sleep well?" she asked cheerfully, swinging herself back down into her own seat.

Tump nodded and reached for the butter.

"Much quieter than the big city, I bet," she continued, a wide smile on her face. Rin exchanged a loaded look with her father that her mother didn't seem to notice. Tump did, but he had no idea what it meant.

"You don't have any obligations until tomorrow, right? Maybe you should go visit Cris. I'm sure he'll be eager to see you again."

Tump looked up from his toast, eyebrows raised. He seriously doubted Cris wanted anything to do with him, but hell, he was there anyway. Might as well start picking at old wounds now instead of later.

"What about you, dear?" Miss Abbot was asking before he could reply.

Rin, chewing, shook her head, then put a hand in front of her mouth before she spoke.
"I have plans already."

Though she didn't scold her, the slight twist of her mother's lips made her disapproval plain.

"The library again?"

Her daughter stared her down as though daring her to push her on it. It positively stank of teenage rebellion.

Before anything worse than a glare could come of the situation, Mister Abbot spoke over his wife and daughter to address Tump.
"Shall I take you? I'm headed downtown to Henry's in a bit anyway."

"That would be great," Tump agreed.
The scrambled eggs were a bit runny, but well seasoned.

"Cris is training to take over his dad's shop, these days. Good at it, I hear."

His ears perked up at that. He'd never taken either of the Fletcher boys for the type to hold down a regular job.
"Really? I never thought he'd want that."

"After Alec got into a fancy college his father practically made him," said Miss Abbot, elated at the chance to dredge up old gossip for someone who had missed it the first time around.

"Pansy, dear," her husband chided, "you're making it sound like he forced him; he offered and Cris said yes. That is all there was to it."

Tump nodded and disagreed. Cris had always been possessive, and taking over his father's business sounded exactly like something he couldn't refuse - no matter how he felt about the actual business. A more interesting question was how Alec felt about that.

The rest of breakfast passed in relative quiet, and then Mister Abbot was ushering him out and to a bulky silver car. It could have easily seated 7 people, and all the compartments in the doors were stuffed full. A mostly empty water bottle tumbled out and over his foot as he strapped himself in.
Halfway through adjusting himself into his seat, he thoughtlessly turned his face to the car window only to find that he was being watched. Tump froze abruptly. The creature was a large heron; its strong yellow beak hanging slightly open, ruffled grey feathers outlining a powerful neck. It was standing on the curb, not moving a muscle, one rigid orange eye fixed on him.
Staring into its face, he got the eerie sense that the animal saw him and comprehended that he was just as sentient as it was.

The odd moment was broken when Mister Abbot gracelessly dropped into the driver's seat and loudly shut the door behind himself. When Tump looked back, the bird had lost interest.

Mister Abbot turned the key in the ignition and the radio sprang to life, tuned to some local pop channel. He hurriedly turned down the volume like he was ashamed to have been caught listening to something slightly louder than the background music of a department store.
The drive was fairly uneventful - Tump turned his face away from the window and small talked. It was the performance of his life.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Mister Abbot stopped to let him out in front of Fletcher's on Lake Street and wished him a nice day. The shop looked as it had when he'd last set foot into it; with slightly confusing signage and windows overflowing with a myriad of things he didn't know the names for. They mostly sold tools, screws, work gloves and the like, but also a rich array of chocolate bars, newspapers, hobby paraphernalia and kitchenware. Even as the nearby supermarkets increasingly ate into its market share, old Fletcher's personal connection to the locals kept the place afloat - or so Mister Abbot said.

A small bell chimed as Tump tentatively pushed the door open, and at the counter a guy about his age looked up from his phone. His eyes widened with recognition, then slitted, then widened again. The years had turned his girly jawline handsome and imbued him with some fashion sense, but his slumped posture looked just as it had at 14.

"Hey," Tump said awkwardly.

"Well damn. Look who's back."
Cris leaned forward on the counter, leering at him with a mixture of resentment and - pleasure? Why was he smiling?

Tump walked up to the counter doing his best not to bump into any displays and took a seat on the barstool by the counter magazine rack as Cris' nod indicated.

"I'm here because we're redoing the house," he volunteered. His personal business had probably made it two towns over by now, but he could see in his estranged childhood friend's eyes that he would appreciate hearing it from him.
"Should only take a week or so."

"Hm," Cris said, propping his chin up on one fist and eyeing Tump like he was deciding what to do with his impromptu visitor.
"Picked a good week. Probably no more rainstorms until the end of the month."

"Yeah," he agreed, "I was actually supposed to be here last week, but..."

"Hard to redo a roof in pouring rain," Cris finished for him.

A beat of unfortunate silence passed between them. They didn't use to have problems like this, but they were severely out of practice in talking to each other after all these years.

"I hear you'll be taking over Fletcher's?" Tump asked eventually. The inside of the shop was joyously unfamiliar to him, mostly because of how limited and unpleasant his experiences with Cris' and Alec's family had been back then.
He'd sat on this stool before, but it had all smelled different in that time.

Cris tipped his chair back, pillowing his head against his hands casually, and fixed his eyes on the ceiling.

"Yep. Someone has to."

"You didn't want to?"

He frowned, looking puzzled like he'd never thought about it. That made Tump smile - it was an expression Cris often wore in his memory. His thoughts didn't always follow the same lines others' did.

"Suppose," he finally said.
"Had to be me since Alec did a T----"- his eyes flicked down again to see if the hit had landed. It had.

"Tump," Tump corrected icily.

"Yeah, yeah."

He got up, ready to walk out, but Cris tipped forward quickly to take his wrist.
"Woah there. Calm down, it's not a big deal. You are who you say you are and all that, man."

Tump pulled free from his grasp but sat back down.

"We're all still angry at you, but for what it's worth, I'm glad you're here."

That was a level of honesty Tump frankly hadn't anticipated. He rewarded it by pulling a grimace and dropping the issue.

"I'm not staying," he said, unsure of the reaction the declaration would provoke.

Cris laughed.
"I would have been surprised!"

"Don't you like it here?"

"Eh," Cris said vaguely. "I've never lived anywhere else."
Pensively, he scratched at a scab on the side of his neck. Then a thought seemed to strike him.

"Hey, how busy are you tomorrow night?"

"Not very?" Tump ventured, eyebrows twitching up in suspicion. As a kid he had devotedly practiced raising only one of them in the mirror, but he'd never been able to produce a difference greater than a few millimeters.

"Well, when are they done at the house usually? You're staying with Rin aren't you?"

"Uh," he said, himself wondering when they would be done. "Probably around six?"

Cris' head tilted from side to side as he thought, until finally he unceremoniously concluded, "yeah, that'll do."

"Do for what?"

"You'll see, you'll see. Have some patience, boyo."

He grimaced again, but Cris didn't seem to care.

"In the meantime, can I interest you in the newest model of fishing rod we just got in? Brilliant grip. Couldn't break it if you tried to pole vault with it."

Tump rolled his eyes and let himself be distracted.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Before he knew it, Tump had spent nearly the whole day in Fletcher's, occasionally being introduced to the customers who came in. They were the only shop around that was open on Sundays, so the things people came to buy ranged from worrying to comical.

He'd just gotten up to excuse himself because he'd have to be back at the Abbots' for dinner, when Cris stopped him again.

"Have you been to see Lia yet?" he asked a bit too brightly, like it was something vital he'd only just remembered. Tump couldn't really see the urgency in it.

"No?"

Cris bit his lip.
"Be careful with her, yeah? Just because you became a guy for her doesn't mean she's not still super pissed at you," he said with what seemed like genuine concern. Tump's jaw hit the floor.

"I didn't- What?"

"Sorry," Cris backpedalled immediately, "I didn't know if you were still into her-"

"No, what? No! I didn't become... What the fuck Cris?"

Cris shrugged and rolled his eyes like he wasn't bothered in the least by Tump staring at him like he'd grown another head.

"I'm just trying to help man."

"God," Tump said, running a tired hand down his face. "Fuck you, man."

When Cris threw a chocolate bar at him, he ducked out the door, still absolutely bewildered. How was he even supposed to react to something like that? Was that what they all thought? Oh god.

Unlike the inside of his head, Lake street was quiet that Sunday evening. The flat land and low houses of the town meant the sun remained visible for a long time, and its light glinted off discarded candy wrappers between the cobblestones and gaudy iridescent garden decor and fell right into Tump's eyes.
If he continued down to the far end of Lake street, it would faithfully take him to the lake for which it and the whole town were named. He shuddered involuntarily and turned into Mulberry road. If he never laid eyes on the damn lake again it would be too soon.

He'd learned to swim there.

(the water weighing him down, Tump gasped as he went under, his shoes soaked heavy, a hand cruelly digging into his scalp, the silt thrown up by the struggle stinging in his eyes, an ever increasing burning in his lungs-)

As guilty as he might have felt for leaving his friends behind, Tump would never apologize for letting Silicia take him away from this place.

As the worn down cobble transitioned into a red brick road, he looked up to see a gap in the line of single-family houses that stood edge to edge along every street here like perfect teeth. The small property was bordered by literal white picket fences, but itself held only an overgrown meadow of wild grasses and stinging nettles. He was taken aback to realize that beyond it, what looked like an unending mosaic of orange was actually the sky reflecting off of flooded fields.
Suddenly he understood far more intimately why everyone wanted to talk about the weather here: despite all modernity and technology, they were at its mercy.

He frowned and walked on, finally passing the dying hydrangea Rin's mother had mentioned yesterday. The pink petals were still green in some places, but in others were turning a soggy brown like they were rotting right off the stem. Gross.

The two crows which sat on the roof of the Abbots' house watched him interestedly as Tump followed the alluring scent of frying aromatics into the kitchen, where Miss Abbot commanded him to go freshen up before dinner.

Mister Abbot had returned by the time the kitchen table had been set, the beginnings of a sunburn reddening his nose and cheekbones.

"Did you enjoy the sunshine, kids?" he asked boisterously, and Tump had to stifle a laugh into his hand.
Miss Abbot, however, took him completely seriously, and disapprovingly remarked that judging by their complexions, 'the kids' had probably spent all day inside.

"Guilty as charged," Tump said when it didn't seem like Rin would deign to reply at all.

"Cris makes for a better shopkeep than I ever could have imagined."

"Oh, doesn't he!" Miss Abbot agreed enthusiastically, heaping pasta onto her husband's plate. "Having a proper job has been good for him, that little rapscallion."

"So what do you do these days, when you're not supervising construction sites?" Mister Abbot asked.

Tump could feel Rin's eyes on him and hoped he wasn't suspiciously reddening. He'd really rather not talk about it actually.

"I'm uh, I'm studying IT."

"IT!" Miss Abbot exclaimed and he ducked his head. "It's a gathering of academics under my roof."

Mister Abbot, who did something important in finance, laughed awkwardly. Before an uncomfortable silence could descend, Tump gathered himself to ask: "What are you doing now, Rin?"

She blinked at him in surprise.
"I'm working under Doctor Ndara until I can afford to study to be a vet myself someday."

Her mother beamed at her with pride and Tump allowed himself a tentative smile.

"That's great," he said, and broke off mid comment about her being good with animals when the lights suddenly died.

"Oh- not again!" said Miss Abbot over the groans of her family.

"Does this happen often?"

"More often than not, recently," Rin volunteered and her father hummed in agreement.
"It's an old house."

"Is it?" Tump inquired doubtfully. Like every house on Mulberry road, it didn't look like it had been built much earlier than the 60s, which by house standards really wasn't very old at all.

"Old enough," said Rin, just as the lights flickered back on. Behind her the fridge resumed its steady hum.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Tump was much less tired that night, so he lay awake a long time listening to the wind rustling through the trees behind the house and the crows screaming at each other outside. He'd almost drifted off when an odd noise joined the cacophony: it sounded like furniture being rearranged, or perhaps the beams in the roof dragging against each other. When he blinked his eyes open again at the noises, a faint warm glow from the front garden lured him to the window.

Rin was sitting on the stone bench in the corner, a gas lantern next to her and a book in her lap. After blearily watching the wind toy with her dark hair for a moment as she read, oblivious, Tump decided that he was too tired to wonder about what she was doing and went back to bed. It wasn't his business anyway what people did in their own gardens.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

MONDAY

He got up bright and early on Monday morning and was intercepted in the hallway by Miss Abbot in a floral bathrobe, who informed him that he could find the lunch she'd packed for him on the kitchen table. Then she disappeared back into the master bedroom - Tump reflected that she must have heard him leave his room. The upstairs floors were surprisingly creaky, much more so than he remembered them being. He supposed the house really was aging.

It was nice to have something very clear to do. The morning was beautiful, sparrows chirping in the hedges and dew shining in the grass. And Tump had nearly a full day of no awkward encounters with his past ahead of him to look forward to.
His feet knew their way, steering him steadily towards the house he'd grown up in. It was clothed half in scaffolding and half in the dust and muck the construction had kicked up. The front garden was littered with metal rods of differing lengths, hefty paint cans and torn up fleece, and a loose sheet of left over insulation material sat in the gravel path up to the door, fat with rainwater like a giant sponge.

Tump picked his way through and bravely unlocked the front door. There was nothing to fear: the house he stepped into was a different one altogether from the one he'd grown up in. All furniture and decor had been cleared out, the screw holes in the walls smoothed over and the doors replaced.
Experimentally, he opened the living room window. It obeyed without protest, its shiny new hinges perfectly fitted and the chips in the frame gone. The transformation was almost like magic, although it had left very noticeable debris behind as evidence of the labour that had gone into giving a clean slate to this haunted house.
He wiped his hands on his jeans and went to wait outside for the workers to arrive, humming a pop song he'd heard on the radio yesterday.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Rin's parents were drinking wine on the bench in the front garden when he returned in the evening, hungry and with dust in his hair.
They gestured for him to head on in as he passed, winking conspiratorially. Tump frowned, but the mystery was cleared up as soon as he opened the door.

There was a low but steady murmuring coming from the livingroom. When he peeked in from the hallway, he found at least half a dozen Lake End residents about his and Rin's age arranged in a circle on the carpet, humming.
At first the whole image baffled him so much that he struggled to catalogue the details; They were all holding hands, and some of them had their eyes closed as though concentrating very hard. Multiple candles had been lit in the centre of the ring, a few of them slim ones that fit into actual candelabras, but most short and squat like scented candles, those arranged on dinner plates. Before Rin's folded legs sat an open book and a huge carton of salt along with a spoon, presumably for measuring it out.

Tump was granted only a moment to stare in astonishment before his entrance was noticed, and Cris broke the circle as he jumped to his feet.
"Tumpy-man, there you are. I was starting to worry you wouldn't show!"

Rin opened her eyes slowly to regard him where he was still fidgeting in the door frame, looking like she'd just been woken from a trance.

"What... is this?" Tump asked weakly.

"A seance," Rin said evenly. She threw Cris a quelling look, and he obediently retook his place in the circle, placing his hands back in those of his neighbours.

"You may join us if you'd like."

"Uh," Tump faltered, "I was going to..."
He gestured helplessly to the kitchen behind him and Rin nodded, solemn and imperious.

"There is a cake on the counter. Cut yourself a slice and come sit with us."

For lack of any better ideas, Tump ran a hand through his ruined hair and did exactly as she'd said. It was sheet cake, with a layer of custard and sweet, soft pear slices on top.

He settled gingerly into the space they had made for him in the circle and let his gaze wander over the gathered participants.

"Alright. Once again, let us breathe together," Rin instructed, leading by example. It struck Tump as surreal to see everyone clearly taking this so seriously - after just a few breaths, an odd mood seemed to come over them. As the others' postures relaxed, Tump felt only more and more uncomfortable. That was silly, because he didn't believe in this stuff at all.
By the time Rin spoke again, she and him were the only people in the circle with their eyes still open.

"Lend me your energy," she breathed, and Tump imagined that she might have made a good cult leader in the 70s.
Then people around him began to hum again, and he had to tap into previously unseen reserves of self-control to stop himself from bursting out laughing. If nothing else, that functioned as distraction from the feeling of invisible eyes burning into his back.

"Are you here with us?"

Upstairs, an open window rattled in the draft. Everyone but him flinched, but no one spoke. Then the light flicked off, and Tump started to feel a bit queasy. The sugary aftertaste of the few bites of cake he'd gotten the chance to eat before he'd joined the seance seemed to stick his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

"I'll take that as a yes," said Rin under her breath, then louder, "we mean you no harm. We only want to talk to you."

The lights went back on with the slight crackle of electrical discharge, and a few people blinked their eyes open, looking around as though disoriented by where they found themselves. As far as Tump could tell though, nothing had changed. If the electrical failing was, as he'd been assured yesterday, a fairly common occurrence, then even the timing of this was easily dismissed. They were just playing children's games.

"Why are you in this house?"

This time Rin sounded more forceful, accusing instead of politely asking. The house was silent except for the incessant buzz of electricity and the wind tangling in the decor outside the livingroom window.
Across from him, Lia caught his eye, her face calm and unreadible as ever.

"Leave!" Rin yelled suddenly, and they all jerked apart in the same instant as the front door flew open, its handle cracking loudly against the brick accent wall of the entryway. Their ring of connected hands had been broken, and the magic of the moment with it. The feeling of unease lifted from Tump's shoulders as an evening breeze blew the sounds of the outside world into the house; birdsong, rustling leaves, quiet conversation and distant traffic.

He noticed that Rin was staring at him with her eyebrows all scrunched together.
"I must not have closed it properly," Tump suggested, because he didn't feel like he had anything to apologize for. Around him, the others picked themselves up off the floor as Rin shut the book with a very final thump.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

"So," Tump asked over his second plate of dinner cake, "a seance. Why?"
Most of the people Rin had gathered for her paranormal evening entertainment had left, and it was only the both of them, Lia, and a friend of Rin's called Erik who remained. Together they were absolutely decimating Miss Abbot's sheet cake.

Rin looked at him like he was stupid, and answered the obvious thing.
"The house is haunted."

"The house is haunted," Tump repeated wryly.
"Right. Sure it is."

"Take this seriously," hissed Lia, who was the absolute last person he had expected that from.

"Fine. Let's pretend I agree with your underlying assumptions here - what makes you think talking to it will improve the situation?"

"Well, what do you suggest we do? This is a delicate matter. We can't jump directly to violence without even attempting a peaceful solution," Rin bit out.

Tump was about to say 'you are out of your goddamned mind', but Erik cut in before he could.

"Maybe tonight really was a sign that we need to take more drastic measures. I mean if it won't talk to us, what other options remain?"

Tump pushed his glasses up to rub at his eyes. He hadn't actually slept that well last night and it was catching up to him.

"He's right," Lia determined, and when Rin nodded her acquiescence added, "we'll smudge the house tomorrow."

At that point he couldn't hold his peace on this insanity any longer, so he hurried upstairs and dialled Silicia's number before he said something that would make the rest of his week here even more painfully awkward.

Although he hated to acknowledge it, that night the house seemed unsettled, like something in the foundations had shifted with their stupid attempt at poking their noses into things they didn't understand. He twisted and turned for what seemed like an eternity, feeling almost feverishly warm and sweating in the tangle of his borrowed sheets. The night air drifting lazily in through the window barely succeeded in cooling his skin superficially, and he found rest only once he'd given in and rolled onto the unused side of the bed. There he finally fell asleep sprawled out with only a foot and an elbow still under his blanket.

His dreams were not kind to him, replaying moments from the day and his memory and stirring them up with a good dose of unreality. He was woken by the first rays of sun falling into the room, rolled over back onto his pillow, and thankfully got a few more hours of actually restful sleep.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

TUESDAY

Tump and the Abbots had a pleasantly uneventful morning, and his good mood lasted up until the late afternoon, when, without warning, someone tapped him on the shoulder. He had settled on a stack of boxes which held as yet unused tiles to watch the new roof take shape, and had felt quite confident that everyone he didn't want to see at the moment would be busy until evening.
As Tump craned his head back now, he felt a jolt of maybe-panic, maybe-excitement go through him when he saw that it was Lia standing behind him.
She was wearing a cardigan over a soft looking black and white striped t-shirt, gleaming oxfords and a long wool skirt, which made her look very proper, and older than she really was. By comparison, he felt like an unkempt teenager in his scuffed up jorts and faded flannel button up.

"Hey," she said, her voice smooth yet utterly devoid of recognizable tone. She'd always talked like that, without any tone at all outside of rare outbursts of emotion. Her blankness made her the perfect canvas for strangers to project onto, and scarily good at directing conversations, leaving you to realize only after the fact that she had told you absolutely nothing. It was why the old ladies at church bakesales had liked her so much more than the rest of them. Maybe that was why she was dressed like she was trying to blend in with them.
Tump had been close enough to her once to arrogantly presume to be able to tell what Lia was thinking. He'd fallen for it: his own version of her. Although to be fair, for the longest time she hadn't bothered to correct him either.
Now, he was very nearly a stranger again, looking up into her beautiful, blank face with not a clue as to what went on behind it.

"Lia," he said, embarrassed at how much his voice revealed in just that single word.

She sat down beside him gingerly, brushed her hands down her long skirt and turned to watch the construction work as he watched her.

"How are you finding being back in Lake End?" she asked finally - only once he'd already become certain he'd have to be the one to break the silence.

Tump breathed out a weak laugh.
"Honestly? It sucks. But not as badly as I imagined it might."

"So, you don't regret leaving us."
Out of left field as it was, she delivered it in the same tone she did everything; even, melodic, like communication was a mere mechanical consideration. And still Tump would have bet his life and everything he owned that he was reading that minute wrinkle in her nose correctly: she was angry. He'd not seen the expression many times, but those times had been memorable enough that he was sure.
(Or maybe the accuracy of his recollection was just skewed by the amount of attention he used to give her most insignificant of tells.)

His teeth caught on a small scar on his bottom lip when he bit it. What an unfair thing to make him say.
"I had to. I can't regret it."

Lia folded her hands in her lap and nodded, not looking at him. The corner of her mouth twitched down, so quickly that he couldn't be sure he hadn't imagined it.

"I thought I'd never see you again," she said quietly, and he looked down at the dust slowly but surely turning his sneakers grey in shame. She nearly hadn't ever seen him again - if it hadn't been for the timing of that conference, Silicia would have been the one to come supervise the whole of the renovation process.

"I'm sorry."

She shook her head.
"You aren't."

She must have imagined having this conversation with him dozens of times, maybe hundreds, so many that she was talking to herself more than to him.

When she turned to him, there was a complicated mask on her face; her brows drawn and eyes narrowed but her mouth almost imperceptibly quirked up. He didn't have to guess this time, because he remembered it just as well as the anger, could recall it like a perfect photograph in his mind. It was pain.
She had looked at him like this when he'd come to visit her after schooldays her stomach aches had made her sit out, and whenever he stuck a plaster on her hurt knee. Once when he'd been coughing up water and she bile.

When he tipped forward to hug her, she didn't resist, just rested her chin on his shoulder and breathed out a sigh.

"There was no other way," Tump said into her hair, "You guys are the only part of Lake End I ever missed, but it was then or never. You have to understand that."

"You could have written to me," Lia complained, unabashedly petulant, and he smiled sadly.

"Yeah. I should have."

But he hadn't. There was no way to explain it now, no way to make his frantic need to sever all ties to this place that he could find in himself sound palatable. He'd had to cut the jagged pieces of his home town out of his head and sterilize the wound so he could function again.
The phantom ache dogged him still, although medication and therapy and not living in fucking Lake End helped.

She nodded. He nodded. They pulled apart, and Lia turned away again. Tump was near paralyzed by the fear that she would get up now and ironically, he would never see her again. Even if, in his heart of hearts, he still wanted them all in his life, how would they even fit into it, now?
Did it even matter what he wanted when the space he'd left behind was already so filled with everyone's memories of him that he couldn't have wedged himself in if he tried?

"You don't need to write to me anymore."

Tump flinched like he'd been struck, but the serene expression was back on Lia's face as she stood and put a hand on his shoulder.

"And I haven't forgiven you either," she continued undeterred, "but I've made peace with it. No need to reopen old wounds."

Cris' warning had not prepared him for a goodbye in the least.
Lia stepped ably over the piled up tiles and left the same way she'd come, quietly and quickly. Tump shoved two knuckles in between his teeth and bit down until he could trust himself again not to howl in agony like a wounded animal.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Lia's words left behind an itchy restlessness in Tump's muscles that grew and grew, until finally the construction workers were almost done for the day and he could wait no longer. He jumped up and cast around for something to busy himself with - raking muck and debris from the cobbled walkway that ran along the side of the house would do.
Grasses and as yet unidentifiable tree saplings had sprouted up from between the stones and gathered dead plant matter around them like little dunes. When he attacked them, their bottom layers turned out to still be moist, even after more than four days of no precipitation; cold and rotting like the whole damn town.

Tump hooked the rake's teeth into the cracks between the stones and worked off as much energy as he had the time to.

Even then, her pained face wouldn't leave him, bouncing around his skull like a DVD screensaver. Quite against his will, Tump found himself envisioning his future self once he got back home: very likely nothing would feel very good for a while. He would tell Silicia more with his silence than his words, and experience a moment of fear every time his phone rang. His therapist would probably insist he keep in contact with whoever would still talk to him by the end of the week. He wasn't really sure if he wanted that, and even less so if they would. Was he not a constant reminder of Lake End's ghastliness to them as they were to him? In their shoes, he would have been sure to never talk to himself again.
Lia had relieved him of any obligation to keep in contact, but did that mean she didn't want him to call, or that she didn't want him to call out of pity? It might be too vulnerable a gesture for him to stomach attempting without the pretense of social duty which she had just elegantly withdrawn.

Somehow he managed to drag himself back to the Abbots' home even as his thoughts surely began to manifest in a visible dark cloud around his head.

Tump looked around for witnesses before he paused on the front step to compose himself. When he finally opened the door, he was met with a cloying herbal smell intense enough to immediately give him a headache. One hand over his nose and mouth, he hurried into the living room to open the windows as wide as they would open before shuffling into the kitchen where Rin and her mother were chatting by the stove.

Miss Abbot turned to beam at him, nearly flicking a few burning hot bits of bell pepper out of the pan as she kept stirring without looking.

"You're early today! Dinner's almost ready dear, you can already go wash up."

"Just in time for family gossip hour," said Rin. She was leaning against the counter and turning over a little beige kitchen timer in her hands whose slight rattle was barely audible under the hissing of the vegetables in the pan.

"Rin," her mother admonished her, "I was only-"

"-Warning me again about what a suspicious individual my boss is, I know," Rin finished her sentence with an eyeroll, although Tump caught her smiling as he turned a chair around to sit facing them.

"Suspicious?" he asked, at the same time that Miss Abbot made a sputtering protest.

"Her choice of life partner is..." and Rin made a dramatic sweeping gesture, "highly questionable."

"He is just an odd pick."

"Sure. But they've been married for years now, so maybe it's time to adjust your view of reality instead of still suspecting Doctor Ndara of having a split personality."

Miss Abbot shook her head disapprovingly, and transferred the contents of the pan into a blender with a practiced hand.

After she had thus created a thick red sauce, her daughter took the seat across from Tump and filled him in. It seemed that not even their relatively fraught relationship could dim an Abbot's inborn delight at relaying gossip.

"A few years ago, Doctor Ndara married local thorn in the community's side Oscar Cooper. Huge scandal. Since then mum has beem trying to figure out if he's blackmailing her, or if she's only been pretending to us to be a nice, respectable woman all along."

"Oscar Cooper?" Tump repeated, baffled. He could only very vaguely recall the man's face, but he did remember vividly how in elementary school they'd been actually, officially warned about bugging Mr. Cooper after he had chased around some kid with a broom, leaving bloody scratches on his back and arms when he caught up to him. He'd allegedly only shown his victim mercy when a neighbour intervened. That was probably an exaggeration, but either way the general opinion of Mr. Cooper was so deeply unflattering that he felt a spontaneous sympathy for Miss Abbot's argument.

"Yup. She brings him to church events sometimes. Everyone is still super awkward about it, too."

"The man is an incorrigible grump," said Miss Abbot, now heating something in the microwave that had rested under aluminium foil on the counter.

"He's a miserable old bastard," Rin corrected, then ducked her head at the scathing look her mother sent her.

"Hush. You keep an eye on the pasta, Rin, I'm going to go fetch your father."

Miss Abbot lay her apron over the back of her chair and left them to their fates. Across the table, Rin met his gaze and raised her eyebrows emphatically, making no move to get up and check the stove.

"So, are they really such a mysterious match?"

"Eh," she said, "it's pretty simple honestly. He's nice to her."

"Just to no one else?"

"Yep."

The timer went off, and Rin hurried over to drain the pasta over the sink as he began to tap his fingers on the table top.

"You really did end up smudging the house," Tump noted, à propos of nothing, because showing interest in people's delusions was generally seen as a friendly gesture and he was beginning to feel the shame of the house guest with no chores of his own.

Rin turned to make a face at him.

"Total bust. Nothing happened."

"Well, something happened," Tump argued cheekily as Rin sat the pasta down on the dinner table, "the whole house reeks of sage."

Rin's lips twisted, but she didn't immediately rebuke him because her attention was drawn by a drop of water falling audibly into the sink.

He watched her fiddle with the faucet, but the slow drip was unaffected by Rin's attempts to close it.

"Should anything happen though? I always thought smudging was more of a long term solution, like getting a better antivirus."

Without warning or preamble, Rin kicked the sink. The previous direction of the conversation was promptly forgotten when instead of stopping, the size and frequency of drops escaping the faucet noticeably increased.

"Maybe you shouldn't-" Tump said, hopelessly, as Rin growled and kicked the sink again. This time the water flow increased to a steady trickle, and she angrily turned the knobs this way and that to no avail.

Again she kicked it, putting her ear up to the faucet this time, and again, the water stream increased in volume. Tump stood to have a closer look as well.

"It sounds like..." Rin trailed off, a mulish frown on her face as she tilted her head, then gave it another kick.
Yet more water sputtered out, and whatever she thought the noise was, Tump could hear it now, too. It sounded like the pipes were wailing, maybe in pain, maybe in anger.

"I don't think this is helping," Tump tried again when Rin swung her leg back in preparation for a fifth kick, and this time enough water gushed forth to get them both with the spray as it bounced off a used dish floating in the sink. The basin was dangerously full.
It was starting to overflow and run down the door of the cabinet beneath the sink in thin rivulets when Miss Abbot returned, her husband a few steps behind.

Both Rin and Tump - although the latter was technically completely innocent - turned like they had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Miss Abbot's frown only deepened as she assessed the situation, then she strode over and, with full confidence, yanked the knobs around once clockwise. The flow obediently stopped, and the sink drained easily and quickly when she lifted the plate that had been blocking the drain, her narrowed eyes fixing on her daughter.

Dinner that evening was awkward for new and exciting reasons, and as he ate his mushy pasta Tump's thoughts kept circling around the confidence with which Miss Abbot had acted. Maybe there was something up with the house, but it was something so mundane she was simply used to it. That was a more pleasant topic to ruminate on than Lia's opinion of him at the very least.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

In his dreams, the unceasing sound of running water swelled until it made up his whole world, until it swept him up and caught him in its undertow like a great beast swallowing him whole. Tump choked and struggled, for far longer than any person could have feasibly survived it, blindly twitching away from the unidentifiable things that his hands brushed up against as he flailed, completely losing any sense of direction in the process.
There was a chorus of voices all around him, but he couldn't concentrate enough to make out what even one of them was saying.
All he knew was that he was drowning, and when his eyes shot open in the stinging water, Rin was right there above him, perched like a bird on a lone chimney which poked out of the flood and staring down at him with a frown. Although he reached for her help desperately, almost at once the water began sucking him down again, and the last thing he registered as the surface of it closed back over his head was Rin's face turning away from him.

It was this image which lingered behind his eyes like a perfect nonsensical photograph when Tump shook himself awake in the middle of the night.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

WEDNESDAY

Miss Abbot had no time to cook breakfast on wednesday morning, so the family gathered to sleepily shovel bland off-brand cereal into their mouths and each eat a slice or two of fruit to keep the pretense of a healthy diet alive. Tump couldn't shake the feeling that the house was too quiet, although it was probably just the lingering effect of last night's nightmare.
Since she too was headed into town, Rin's mother offered to walk him part of the way to his construction site. He wasn't thrilled by the idea, but could muster no polite argument against it.

The morning was cooler than he'd expected, likely due to the mist in the air that wafted into town from the surrounding fields and clung to the hedges lining the street. The dark shapes of crows hung in the trees along Mulberry Road like rain drops. When Tump involuntarily shivered a bit, Miss Abbot squinted up into the sky grimly, like she was keeping watch for another endless front of tall heavy rainclouds come to drown them - but it was just the same lifeless blue-grey as it had been the day before. Summer itself cowered.

"God willing it'll clear up later today," she remarked, stepping onto the garden path, and half turned as if checking whether he was following.
Tump shoved his hands into his pockets with an affirmative hum - he wasn't too keen on yet another conversation about the weather.

The nonspecific malaise he'd woken up with left him finally as they cleared the front gate.

"Hey," he began tentatively as they fell into step on the sidewalk, "can I ask you something?"

Miss Abbot looked at him expectantly. Tump hoped his harmless smile was convincing.
"Do you believe what Rin is saying? About the house, I mean?"

She scowled before she could reign the expression in, then averted her eyes. Tump sensed that he'd clearly broken one of the very important rules in her internal codex of polite society protocols, but what use would there be to backing down now?
The smile felt less and less natural the longer he held it, but nonetheless he endured bravely until she had worked out a response.

Eventually, Miss Abbot sighed.
"My daughter has a tendency to approach problems with an... unhelpful attitude."

"Ghosts are unhelpful?" Tump pushed. She gave him a quick reproachful look but continued, her voice lowered as though they were likely to be overheard. Barely anyone was out on the streets, and those who were were tiredly stumbling to their cars juggling bags and coffee cups or busy hurrying their kids into the backseat. No one even looked at them as they passed.

"Our house is not haunted," Miss Abbot said emphatically, "if that's what you're asking. There is no such thing."

"Then what's going on?"

"Nothing is going on. Rin is building this all up in her mind because she needs an adventure, and apparently she's already swept you up in it." The sentence ended abruptly, like she'd only just stopped herself from saying 'again'.

Tump looked over at the swarms of birds circling over the sodden fields outside of town as they passed by the empty property. He agreed, of course - there was no such thing as ghosts, ergo the house could not be haunted. Yet undeniably, Rin had gotten to him, convinced him there was a connection between all the odd, and maybe even the not so odd, occurrences at the Abbot family home.

His thoughts were interrupted when, more tenderly, Miss Abbot went on: "I grew up in that house. I've cleaned it and fixed it up with my own hands and it's been a part of me my entire life, only Rin can't seem to see it that way. It's just a house to her."

As her last sentence hung in the air between them uncomfortably, they turned the corner and stepped onto Lake street, where they stopped. Tump pressed his lips together and clenched his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

"Could you talk to her?"

She said it with such genuine openness that he had nodded before he'd even thought it through. For just the blink of an eye he saw Rin's mother in a completely different light: Irrevocably tied to this place since birth, barely keeping her boredom at bay with the quaint, acceptable hobbies of a suburban housewife, and now fearing the loss of her daughter, whom she could neither understand nor truly make herself understood to.
After he blinked the vision was gone, leaving the afterimage of pity.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Over the course of the day a million possible conversations he could have with Rin played out in Tump's mind, most of them as unrealistic as they would be ultimately fruitless. He'd just dismissed a particularly silly notion about how he might broach the topic of rural exodus, when in the street behind him someone called out his deadname.
Tump turned slowly, hoping to assure himself he wasn't the person being addressed, and was disappointed. Old lady Bauer had stopped on the curb in front of the house, looking up at him with a wide smile as her mangey old terrier peed on the low hedge separating the property from the street.

"T---" she called again, at a volume which could seem casual only to someone with severe hearing loss, "it's you isn't it? Why, I recognized you immediately!"

"Tump," Tump corrected loudly, still hoping that if he didn't get up to come over she would just take the hint and leave him be. But luck was not on his side, and neither his frown nor body language seemed to bother her in the least.

Miss Bauer put her hand to her ear like she hadn't heard and waved him over. She had manned the apothecary when he'd been a child, which meant that she knew every person in Lake End old enough to ride in a stroller. He was unclear on whether that or the job had come first.
Shoulders slumping, Tump dutifully dragged himself down the short gravel path to his execution. Silicia would have been extremely proud of him if she could have seen him then.

The beaming smile briefly froze on her face before dimming considerably when he reached her. She hadn't recognized him at all, he realized, she'd just been told that he would be here. She had to be nearly blind.

"My name is Tump," he repeated, quelling the urge to self consciously cross his arms in front of his chest as she blatantly looked him up and down.

Then an idea came to him which cheered him considerably.

"You must have me confused with someone else. I don't believe we've met."

To complete the ruse he smiled at her, kindly like he thought she was going senile. She might have been, for all he knew, especially since instead of fighting him on it, Miss Bauer forced out an "excuse me" and hurried off, dragging her awful dog along behind her.

The confirmation that he looked so different now that he could hide in plain sight from his childhood neighbours buoyed him enough to make it through the day without once more falling prey to melancholy, and no one else came to bother him either.

Miss Abbot had neglected to tell him if the things her daughter interpreted as the symptoms of a haunting had always been there. That glaring omission made him suspect that was the case, or at least that she knew more about it than she let on. At that thought, he sat abruptly upright - he couldn't let this lure him into conspiracy theory think.
Tump knew well enough that perfectly mundane pieces of wood and glass produced otherworldly sounds all the time. In all likelihood, what Miss Abbot knew about the house was something of this nature: that the pipes expanded in the winter and pressed on the beams in the walls, that the rain had soaked through the roof and was messing with decades old electrical cables.

What did it take to feel like a place was a part of you, and you a part of it? The feeling of belonging she described felt so foreign to him he couldn't even imagine himself in her position. He had played inhabitant and caretaker to multiple rooms in his lifetime, but none of them had left any lasting impression on him. Maybe he had never loved a place enough to feel like a home was more than somewhere to rest, and maybe he never would.
Something else occurred to him then: was it the house Miss Abbot thought of so fondly, or the whole plot on which it stood? The whole street even, or the entirety of Lake End? What an honour to be allowed to occupy even a small guest bedroom in her world.

Rin's version of events struck him as infinitely less complicated.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Tump lay awake for a long time that night imagining how he would recount this week later, to Silicia or his friends. Every summary he could come up with felt terribly reductive, even to the point of being untruthful.
His sleep quality was not improved by having his head full of Rin's ideas about ghosts and lurking evils, either.

The room was nearly pitch black when he was woken by a noise. There was the faint groan of the floor outside, and Tump's breath stilled in his chest as the door creaked quietly open, but thankfully his nighttime visitor didn't leave him in suspense very long.

"Tump?" whispered Rin, leaning stiffly into the room without shifting her weight and risking another protest from the hallway's parquet. He sat up, and she eased the door closed behind her and came to perch on the edge of the bed.

"I'm awake," he confirmed unnecessarily, his throat rough despite his perceived sleeplessness - he had drifted off at some point without realizing.

"Where do you think that came from?"

His over tired brain struggled to make sense of her words.

"Where what came from?"

Rin's face turned sharply to look directly at him, but in the dark room and without his glasses on he could barely make out her features at all. The soft ambient light from outside highlighted the back of her hand twisted into her dark hair and just a sliver of her cheek, and he could feel more see than her leg bouncing against the side of the mattress restlessly.

"You didn't hear it?" she asked urgently. He shook his head.

"There was a..." Tump yawned while she gestured helplessly - "Well, a noise!"
They sat for a beat, perfectly still, listening to the house being silent as a grave. 'As though it had heard her and was being quiet on purpose to mess with her,' he thought with a little smile, perfectly secret in the dark.

This was the moment to finally do what he hadn't had the guts to do at dinner and talk to her like he'd been asked to.

Tump shifted to the side to make room for her and flipped up a bit of the blanket in invitation, just like they had done on sleepovers as children.

"Rin," he said softly, and didn't need to say any more because she caught on.
He waited patiently to continue only until she'd settled against the headboard next to him, her hands twisting restlessly in her lap.
"What," she demanded. She could not have sounded more childish if he had come out and told her he was about to scold her on her mother's behalf.

"Will you tell me what has you so convinced the house is haunted? And even if it were, why is that such a problem? Your mother seems to get along with it just fine, doesn't she?"

Tump shivered a bit as he waited for her reply and tucked the blanket in a bit around his sides; Rin had taken most of the space he'd been laying on, and where he was now sitting verged on uncomfortably cold.

"It doesn't like me, I think. It just sort of started... provoking me. A few weeks ago."

'This has been going on for weeks?' Tump thought and instead echoed: "Provoking you?"

His disbelief must have slipped into his voice because she tensed, but before he could try to do damage control Rin bit out - "I just need to know, okay? Even if I can't do anything about it, I need to know what is doing this."

"Okay," Tump agreed quietly, and watched her sink back into the pillows like her strings had been cut. He mirrored her posture and they stared at the slanted ceiling together, rough and light grey in the night. The moonlight threw the fuzzy shadows of the trees that lined the street onto the plaster, stretching them bizarrely.

"So what did you hear?" he asked finally.

"Creaking, I guess. It was loud enough to wake me up and," he turned to look at her as she paused, but could still only see her outline.
"It was coming from right under my bed, I think."

He couldn't suppress a surprised snort, and he was sure Rin glared at him.
"Sorry, sorry. Go on."

"Like from below. Not in my room, but below it."

"Below your room... that's the kitchen, no?"

"Yeah."

"What kind of ghost haunts the kitchen?" he whispered. She cuffed him lightly on the arm, but some of the apprehension had gone out of her finally.

"Alright," Tump decided, "Let's go check it out then."

"What, now?"

He had really expected Miss ghosts are real and dislike me personally to be a bit more open to the idea, but hey. Letting her see first hand that there were no monsters under her bed should be the easiest way to convince her to drop it.

"Now is the ideal time," he insisted, "since it was just active, and apparently isn't while everyone's awake. You want to get to the bottom of this, don't you?"

"Right," she mumbled, and slid out of the bed.

They snuck down the hallway as quietly as possible, Rin pausing to silently point out risky floorboards to him. All the while he grinned, unseen, feeling like a child playing spy games. When they reached the ground floor, she stopped as though waiting for further instructions.
Tump waved her on into the living room, where they settled in front of the tv, each with a fleece blanket over them.

"So what's the plan?"
Her voice was far quieter than it realistically needed to be, but he indulged her and matched his volume to hers.

"Now we wait. If there is another sound, it'll be louder down here and you'll be able to pinpoint exactly where it's coming from, right?"

Looking very serious, Rin nodded, and twisted to peek over the back of the sofa. As she watched the entranceway to the kitchen, Tump sank into the armchair's ample cushions and promptly fell asleep again.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

THURSDAY

When Miss Abbot found and woke them in the morning, there was a hopeful expression on her face that made Tump feel so uncomfortable he could not bring himself to have breakfast with the three of them. Instead he made a detour to the nearest bakery, a chain store with an automatic glass door and a bored young man in his twenties or thirties behind the counter.

The guy squinted at Tump like he was trying to place him, but said nothing but an informal 'morning' as he bagged his pastry and received his coins. Tump didn't recognize him - maybe he'd moved into town after they had left, bizarre as it seemed for anyone to want to live in Lake End.

The puff pastry was tightly packed and more chewy than flaky, but shitty in exactly the way he wanted. It tasted just like the ones he used to get from the bakery behind his highschool: standardized low quality dough, heated unevenly and far too sugary. He took a big bite out of the middle and smiled down at the two strips of cheap compound chocolate in the centre that hadn't even pretended to melt in the oven.

The sky above was flecked with thin wisps of clouds which were being driven steadily towards the far horizon by the same wind that kept flinging his bangs into his eyes.
That is to say, it was very nearly a beautiful day, and when he got to the house the construction workers had left a bottle of sunscreen on top of one of the boxes he often sat on. Dust had settled on the outlines of handprints and smudges that had rendered the plastic greasy all over. He would have considered appropriating some of it had it not been for the state of the bottle, but as things stood he contented himself with picking one of two boxes still in the shadow of the house.

He had had to change boxes multiple times to avoid the direct sun in his eyes and was staring down the barrel of the midday sun overhead eating up all available shadow, when someone approached. He was alerted by comically cheerful whistling and turned to see Cris strolling up the gravel path to him, an obnoxious pair of aviators perched on his pointy nose.

"Howdy there, city boy!"
Cris clapped an obnoxious hand on his shoulder and dropped onto the box next to him, posing like manspreading was an olympic discipline.

"A beautiful bird told me to give you a message."

"Oh," Tump said, "and here I was thinking this was a social call."

Cris laughed and leaned back on his hands languidly. He reminded Tump a little of a cat lounging in a sunbeam.

"Imagine me tending my counter like the hardworking man I am, when in she walks. Rin! Away from her big-shot job, come to spend her lunch break with a humble shopkeep like me. Wearing her lab coat
Tump scowled at him."Get to the point, would you?"

"Killjoy. She wanted me to tell you to come home early," he finally revealed, treating Tump to an eye roll and a stuck out tongue.
"Says she has plans. You've been helping her with her ghost problem, haven't you? She looked extra serious, so I'm guessing that'll be it."

"Sure. Is that all?"

"Yep," Cris confirmed, popping the p. The conversation came to an unfortunate halt when Tump didn't volunteer another question for him to play off of, so they sat watching the last of the construction work until Cris said: "Looks like they're finishing up. You're almost gone then?"

He nodded, and obeyed when Cris held an expectant hand out for his phone.
With his number added, he winked at Tump and strolled off, hands in his pockets and an air of offensive nonchalance about him. Tump was frankly positively surprised he hadn't taken the time to have a nosy through his contacts.

"We'll talk," Cris called over his shoulder, and he couldn't find it in himself to yell 'no' after him, so Tump just waved and slid his phone back into his pocket.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Rin was loitering by the garden gate waiting for him when Tump arrived back at the Abbot's as commanded. Since his steps on the pavement were the only sound save the rustling of the wind through foliage, she heard him coming from a ways away. Shutting her book Rin flashed him a forced smile. He concluded he was probably here because no one else had been able to clear their schedule.

"So, what crime are we committing?" he asked, stopping outside the property.

Rin swung the gate open and didn't acknowledge his joke.
"Thank you for coming. We should have a bit of time before my mother comes back from the store."

He started toward the house, expecting her to follow, but Rin stayed rooted to the spot.

"Last night... you were right when you said I could hear it better from downstairs. I did."

'Oh god,' Tump thought, though he probably shouldn't have been surprised.

"I think it wasn't coming from the kitchen at all, I think it was coming-"
"From the cellar," he finished, and she looked at him with a helpless little shrug.

"So we're going to check it out now?"

Rin nodded.

"And we're out here because you don't want the house to overhear...?"
He had planned for that sentence to go on longer, but his jaw dropped and refused to articulate more words when she frowned and looked away, embarrassed. He seemed to have hit the nail on the head.

"Riiiight," Tump said, running a hand through his hair with a tired little laugh. He threw a sideways glance at the house, quaint and welcoming as it always had been. There was no reason to believe it couldn't hear them right now either, except that houses could not, as a rule, hear anything at all.

Rin drew her shoulders back and visibly rallied, but instead of admonishing him, she dismissed him.
"Thank you for coming."

"No," Tump backpaddled immediately, following as she strode up to the door confidently.
"No, I'm coming - sorry I laughed."

She didn't accept the apology, but did hold the door for him.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

They swept the curtain to the side and stepped back to let the dust cloud that escaped it settle before Rin put the cellar key in the lock. She made to turn it, but was met with resistance immediately.

A hand over his mouth, Tump leaned in to assess the problem and nearly bumped their heads together as she did the same. The lock plate was made up of ornate twists of a metal too aged to identify; a motiv mirrored in the key's head.
As Rin pulled it out to try a slightly different angle, he could tell that its blade was considerably less complex. It had a single notch in a short blade at the end and by all rights should not have been able to cause any problems as long as the keyhole wasn't packed shut.

Rin jiggled the lock. The lights blinked off and back on shortly thereafter like a warning, but she was undeterred. Next, she jammed the key in as deep as it would go, then changed her grip to apply as much force as possible. When she gave up Tump spotted the indentation of the key on her palm. The lock had not yielded an inch.

"You try?" she suggested with plainly false calm as above them the roof groaned in the wind.

Tump had no more success than she did, and after a nervous glance at the clock on the wall, she took over again. This time she pressed a shoulder against the door, and when this didn't work either she hooked the blade into the keyhole and attempted to pull the door towards herself.

The pipes in the floor began to howl, startling Tump. Rin, however, only growled, and stomped on the ground as though to tell the house to shut up. It was almost like the harder she tried, the louder the house protested. He bit his lip. That was not a very productive thought.
In the meantime Rin had braced one foot against the wall and was struggling with the door like it was actively resisting her.

She forced out what he thought was an "Almost-" through her teeth and Tump joined her when she threw her back against the door. It was wooden, and old enough that he earnestly worried they might destroy it.

Since she seemed to have given up on it, Tump took up jiggling the key in the lock as they both pushed until suddenly, the door unexpectedly gave way.
With matching yelps they both tumbled onto the basement stairs. Tump caught himself on the handrail and bent to cough up the lungful of dust he had inhaled. Here in the cellar, the pipes' complaints were deafening.
Rin, on the side where the stairwell abutted the wall, had been less lucky. He spied her a few steps down in the light that fell in through the door. Her hands and shins would surely be scraped up and bruised, but at least she hadn't fallen all the way down.

Assured of their wholeness, Tump stood. Then the door swung shut behind them and they were left abruptly in complete darkness.

"Rin," he called, way too shakily.

His arms outstretched in a zombie pose, he stumbled down until he found her shoulder. Rin clasped a strong hand around his wrist and led him back to the top of the stairs, where a fine strip of light indicated the position of the exit.
He could hear the clinking of metal as she pulled on the handle, the key still rattling in the lock on the other side, but again the door wouldn't give.
Rin's breathing was quick and audible already, and as they stood surrounded in the dark by the house's cacophony of odd noises, he too could feel his heartbeat speed up.

"Let us out, you arsehole!" Rin yelled, letting go of Tump to pound both fists against the uncaring wood. Above them, the metal hinges of a window creaked, a cabinet rattled, the floorboards groaned like tectonic plates grinding against each other.
Despite their situation, Tump couldn't quite bring himself to address his curses to the house, but he joined in on Rin's panicked flailing nonetheless when he found that the lightswitch did not respond to his pleas either.

Ramming his full weight into the door and nearly ripping the door handle off did nothing but add to the noise. It was impossible to say how long they spent like this, especially for Tump who hadn't looked at the time since he'd left the construction site.

Unlike the first time, the door did not eventually submit and open. Instead, all sound but their own struggle suddenly ceased. Then they could hear steps in the entryway and they knew what had happened.

Shopping bag still in hand, Miss Abbot opened the cellar door with ease and a bemused frown on her face, and frowned at the veritable sandstorm of dust their frantic exit swept into her kitchen.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Dinner that night was more awkward than Tump could have previously imagined. Not only was Rin's mother mad at her, she was also deeply disappointed in him, and he seemed to have been relegated from his status as a potential ally against the madness to 'too far gone to save'.

Rin's father on the other hand seemed none the wiser, and if his wife planned to clue him in at all, she didn't do it in their presence as he had half expected. Instead, she let him make awkward conversation with the two of them as they actively resisted his attempts. Miss Abbot sat at the head of the table not looking at anyone and scowling throughout the whole meal.
She did not deign to meet his eye even when Tump handed her the stack of cleared plates to put in the dishwasher.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

FRIDAY

Friday morning dawned grey and foreboding, like the storm was meaning to chase him out of Lake End. If that was what it wanted, Tump would be morr than happy to oblige. Despite the typically bright season, the lights were turned on in the kitchen and hall.

After a night's sleep, tempers had settled, and breakfast wasn't nearly as unpleasant as the last family meal had been. He and Rin kept their heads bowed and quietly buttered their toast in silence, and when she eventually got up, she made only the briefest stop beside his chair to incline her head to the front garden. He followed after the last few bites of his eggs, excusing himself from the table with a smile for Mr., and a nod to Miss Abbot.

The weather forecast had insisted that there would not be rain today, but the air was humid under a thick duvet of clouds. Rin had cautiously chosen her worn navy rain boots. As he stepped outside, he was greeted by the distant calls of a flock of birds passing overhead.

"I hope your roof is finished," Rin remarked when he had closed the door behind himself, her face tilted up to the sky as well.

"Just about. They're supposed to be done today."

She nodded and turned to regard him seriously.

"We've got to go back down there."

Tump gaped at her, but evidently his message didn't get across, because Rin was completely undeterred.

"I'm calling off work today. You should finish up your stuff and come back so we can try again."

He kicked a piece of gravel off the porch and grimaced. Like this, she reminded him almost eerily of Lia.
When he didn't reply, her eyes narrowed with thinly veiled anger and he realized that he was doing penance. And sure, maybe he had been this entire time, but her demanding it of him still made his stomach twist painfully.

"Tump," she started, but he didn't give her the chance to finish her thought.

"Yes," Tump said. "Text me when the coast is clear."

And with that he hurried back inside to brush his teeth and grab his phone. He heard the front door opening again as he reached the top of the stairs, but managed to slip out of the house without anyone engaging him.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Since the job had pretty much been finished yesterday, Tump needed to wait less than an hour to sign off on the construction. He watched as most of the mess was efficiently piled into the back of a truck, and when the crew had left, there was nowhere for him to sit but the house's front step, brilliantly smooth composite quartz under a thick layer of dust. The sentimental urge to say his goodbyes to a building he intended to never lay eyes upon again was easy to ignore now: The place he'd known as a child had been already neatly tidied away before he'd ever returned to Lake End. That was probably for the best: the buffer of time between he and it afforded him some emotional insulation.

With a tired sigh, he resigned himself to playing on his phone until Rin finally texted. As much as he wasn't looking forward to her continuing her paranormal investigation, it would be leagues better than sitting around in the middle of nowhere wishing it were already tomorrow so he could catch the first train out of here.
In the thin strip of forest that separated the property from the farmland behind it the swallows chirped in the trees; the first time their calls had been audible here over the ruckus in weeks.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

Like Rin had confirmed, the house was empty when Tump returned. She was waiting for him on the bench outfront, reading a paperback she put down when he reached the gate.

This time when he turned the key in the lock, the cellar door barely resisted their intrusion. The pipes under the kitchen floor grumbled, but they pressed on. The lightswitch, too, was kind to them, although the single bulb that lit their descent flickered concerningly.
Even though the staircase really wasn't all that long, a notable temperature difference made itself known as they went on. The cellar floor was some sort of stone or concrete, but layered so thick with dust and muck that it gave under their feet almost like earth.
They had entered a room about the size of the kitchen above; a rough grid of walkways carving through stacks of boxes and sheet-covered furniture.

It would have been peaceful down here, Tump thought, if it hadn't been for the persistent noise of the house protesting their presence all around them which seemed to grow louder the longer they walked.
At the side of the room, a corridor led off to the right which opened into a second room, but didn't have its own lighting. Even while the cellar's overall shape was likely motivated by the space constraints imposed by the nearly identical neighbouring houses' cellars, the layout struck him as rather odd. It was like the place had been designed to be as paranoia inducing as possible.

The groaning of the foundations them picked up significantly when they made it into the second room. It was long and comparatively slim, and only partially visible to them due to most of the light bulbs strung along the ceiling in a line having long burned out.
Without a smidge of hesitation, Rin produced a flashlight from the pocket of her cardigan.
(She could have warned him to keep his jacket on.)

They continued onwards, Rin moving the flashlight's beam from side to side. Tump followed with some trepidation, sweeping his gaze over what they passed as things were revealed, then swallowed again by the darkness. While the front room had mostly held things that looked to be used with some regularity - cardboard moving boxes and modern sets of drawers - this part of the cellar was host to visibly older items. He spotted several large wooden chests, framed paintings in varying states of decay and even an antique rocking horse.
He was distracted finally when Rin let out a soft gasp. They had nearly reached the end of the room, but she had stopped abruptly. He shuffled around a stack of printed tin containers and saw what had upset her: The floor was wet, the newspaper spread under antique chair legs and old sheets that hung down soaked and stained up to a discernible past waterline at about the height of her ankle.

Rin swept the beam of the flashlight upwards and the light glinted off of more water, covering the floor in a black sheen from where they stood all the way to the far wall.
They exchanged a grimace, then Tump said, "wish I'd brought rain boots too."

As they bravely trudged on, the sound of their footsteps in the deepening puddle was soon drowned out by a vibrating groan that seemed to run through the whole house. On edge as he was, Tump bit his tongue when a loud metallic clunk resounded through the cavernous darkness, quickly followed by the sound of water racing through the pipes above. More and more noises joined them, forming a horrible cacophony of howls and creaks.
The noise chased them the last few steps before it quietened almost instantly, leaving Tump with a ringing in his ears. He expected Rin to have some sort of clever remark about it, but she remained perfectly silent, and when he turned to her, he saw why. Her face looked ghostly pale in the near darkness, her eyes fixed on the wall before them and widening like she had finally come to some transcendental understanding.

There, at the very end of the room, the flashlight illuminated a sizeable crack in one of the wooden beams, splitting wood and mortar alike like a weeping gash. It was obvious at once that this was the wound through which the rain had seeped in; the wall darkened and glistening with moisture. Already mould had begun to colonize the softened wood, forming a fine, fuzzy transition zone between the part of the wall that remained too dry still and where the water must have washed it away before it could take root.
Tump tore his eyes away again to find Rin still standing transfixed, her mouth open in a little wondrous 'o'.

Above, the house growled, a low purr in its pipes that seemed to reverberate through his bones. A shiver ran down Tump's back. Certainly he had felt a slight unease in the Abbot's home all week, but it intensified now into something that was almost fear, nearly revulsion. Rin appeared alien to him all of a sudden, part of the whole abominable house's corpus, swallowed up by it now that she had seen its true face.
The quiet splash as he took a step back broke the spell over her, and Rin looked at him with a chilling solemnity and said: "I'll need to tell my mother about this."

Then she smiled at him. It creeped him out massively, but he was at once afraid of what would happen if he let on how wrong the whole situation felt to him, so he merely nodded silently. With newly confident steps, Rin led them back out of the cellar, Tump trailing behind with his shoulders hunched and his hands in fists by his sides.

As soon as they were back on ground level, Tump excused himself. He stayed in the guest bedroom until several hours later, when Miss Abbot knocked to let him know dinner was ready. He considered not going, but he was hungry, and besides, he felt as irrationally unsafe in his upstairs room as he did everywhere in the house now. As though to spook him, the ceiling light clicked off right then, and he flew to his feet and hurried downstairs.
From the outside the meal would have appeared just like every other he had sat through the last week, but throughout it Tump could not manage to shake the vague nausea that plagued him. He ended up slowly picking through his dinner while the family chatted around him, undisturbed and blind to his discomfort.

The whole time he was packing his suitcase, he expected an interruption: Rin coming up to talk, Miss or Mr. Abbot checking on him. But no one ever did; he could hear the tv running below for the rest of the evening.
Tump could not have been more glad to be leaving in the morning.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -

SATURDAY

When his alarm woke him, Tump thought that it was still night at first with how dark it was. The view outside his window was grim: Dark clouds piled high on the horizon, casting a shadow on far off meadows and forests as they slowly but unerringly crowded in around Lake End.
He made his bed, brushed his teeth and stuffed the last of his unpacked belongings into his backpack, and then it was time to face the Abbots one last time.

Tump came down the stairs dragging his luggage behind him and was greeted by Miss Abbot, deceptively normal looking. She wished him a good morning with a cheer entirely unbefitting the morning waiting outside the front door and pulled out a chair for him at the breakfast table.
Rin nodded at him, but said nothing. He was unsure where they stood now - had getting to the bottom of her haunting absolved him of his guilt? Had it been the beginning of a new friendship or a neat endpoint for their old relationship?

His breakfast tasted of barely anything at all, and he spaced out for most of it to the point that he was earnestly surprised to find his plate empty when Miss Abbot reached for it.

She and Rin drove him to the train station in near silence only made bearable by the radio's selection of cheery pop songs. They simply had nothing left to say to each other but empty platitudes, he thought. What terrible weather! What a dreary morning to begin a journey! What a long time it had been!
He thought that if anyone suggested he visit again soon, he might vomit up his breakfast on the spot.

Both Rin and her mother hugged him when his train rolled into the small red brick station, but luckily neither of them so much as instructed him to call when he'd made it home. Tump stepped on and bravely waved to the Abbots through the little window in the train door until they were out of sight, then he crumpled up the note with Rin's current phone number she had slipped him and dropped it in one of the little trash bins on the wall.

Only once Lake End had rushed past did he finally dare relax and look out the window at the flooded fields. Birds circled overhead as raindrops began to fall, drawing lines on the tempered glass that sparkled in the carriage's LED-lighting.

Lake End was a miserable little town full of miserable people. Across endless expanses of farmlands and forests the train carried him away from his childhood, his last connection to it finally severed.

- - - - 𓆦 - - - -