“We didn’t see this one, yet, did we?” Juniper asked, motioning to the closed door.
“Oh, you know this house is so large, I must have missed this one. Yes, this is one of the three bedrooms. It’s a little smaller than the other ones,” she said, reaching for the doorknob. Juniper hadn’t actually anticipated her showing them the room without giving some sort of excuse about it. Maybe she had been assuming the worst.
It was so faint that she thought she might have imagined it, but she thought she saw Fern’s hand shake on the doorknob. Juniper felt nothing as the door opened, but she saw Dana tilt her head to the side like a dog who heard something just out of range of a human’s detection.
Keeping in mind Dana’s reaction as well as her earlier comment, Juniper stepped into the bedroom. It was simple, compared to the rest of the house. The bookshelves were cheap, ugly wood filled with basic, mundane paperbacks that all looked like they’d been through six thrift stores before coming to rest there. The carpet was stained and discolored, and missing patches in a lot of spots. The walls were freshly painted, but Juniper could see immediately that many, many holes and marks had been patched up and painted over recently.
It was also the brightest room in the house.
“Wow! Who turned on the sun?” Dana asked playfully, shielding her eyes.
“This room needs a little more... care, than the rest of the house, as you can see,” Fern said, lips pursed in a tight line. She still stood with one foot in the room and the other on the threshold, gripping tightly to the doorknob. She was clearly on edge about something, but Juniper hadn’t picked up on it yet. There had been some oddities to the house, and more than a normal amount of damage, but still... the cost to repair the house enough to live in it would still be less than most of the other places she had been looking at. Juniper didn’t understand why no one would want this gorgeous h-
The hair on the back of Juniper’s neck stood on end.
Her eyes settled on the last piece of furniture in the room that she hadn’t taken in yet, the one right in front of her. A simple bed in a worn, basic pine frame sits under a window. The pane has scratches on it, and the curtains have tears in them. The state of the linens on the bed is no better, with the torn up blankets and pillow leaking stuffing.
Underneath the bed, there is nothing but a string of strip lighting on the underside, going around to all four corners. At least, nothing her eyes can see.
But Juniper feels it staring at her. Even if she weren’t a witch, she would feel it. She stares in disbelief, squinting her eyes and turning her head from side to side, but the new angles don’t give her any novel information. She swallows hard and takes a step back, not breaking her unblinking gaze.
“Thank you for your time today,” Juniper says. She speaks in the quiet, steady voice that her mother had always used when speaking with frightened animals. Among her many endeavors, she’d run a wildlife rehabilitation center out of the large barn on their property. She hadn’t done much magic revolving around animals, but she could speak in a way that they always understood she didn’t mean any harm, but she wouldn’t tolerate any funny business.
She takes another step back until she has one foot out of the room. She braces one hand on the doorframe and instinctively reaches out and grabs Dana’s shoulder with her other. Dana has on a brave face, but she is trembling under Juniper’s touch.
“I’m not ready to put in an offer just yet, but I’ll get back to you in the next few days to let you know what I decide.” She kept up the even tone in her voice, channeling all her focus into it.
The three of them stepped out and Fern closed the door as quietly as a mother closing the nursery door so as not to wake a sleeping child.
The three of them shared a look of understanding and Juniper disliked the woman much less than she initially had. She hadn’t hid anything, not really. She knew it would be uncovered, as it was every time. The room had a sort of magnetism to it. She had probably saved it for last hoping if just the right savvy witch came along, they might square their shoulders and say “I’ll take it.”
But Juniper was rattled. She’d stared death in the face, the slow, sick kind, and this was somehow almost as bad. It wasn’t a ghost, that much she knew. It hadn’t even felt like a presence. It had felt like...
“-nothing,” Dana exclaimed, waving her arms emphatically. She grabbed the handle above the passenger side car door, shaking her head. “It felt like nothing! Like... like there was a space that was somehow emptier than empty. It’s like when you try to drink water in a dream and you just get thirstier. Or, or when you’re going down the stairs in the dark to get a midnight snack and you step too hard because you think there’s one more step than there is.”
Juniper ran her hands nervously over the steering wheel, watching the sunset in the rearview mirror as they headed back to drop Dana off at her house before Juniper would head home. She was staying at her childhood home, no, -her sister Natalie’s home, now, she always made sure to remind her of that- she was staying there until she could take her inheritance money and get her own place. Natalie had always taken their mother’s side in everything, and it had put a rift between them towards the end.
“Those are some weird analogies, but yeah, I agree.”
Juniper took a swig of her water and tried to clear her mind by focusing on the road. She tried to get it out of her mind, tried not to think about the phrase she’d heard uttered in the back of her mind as she’d left. It had been said in her own voice- the voice she used when she was reading a book silently, just thinking.
‘You’ll be back’, it had said. No, no she wouldn’t. She was never going back to that fucking house even if Fern called her up and told her they found a box of gold bars in the basement and they’d throw that in too if she signed the paperwork today.
“We felt the same thing, right?” Dana asked. “Just a profound sense of...”
“-nothing,” Juniper reiterated. She clenched her jaw and changed lanes, trying to shake the fear that she might see something in the backseat when she looked in the rearview mirror.
Dana tapped her chin thoughtfully. “You know, my mom had this book of creatures. It was really spooky, but I was super into it as a kid. There was this one entry that always got me so creeped out that I couldn’t sleep. It was just called ‘The Empty,’” she said, putting air quotes around the phrase for emphasis. “The book said-”
Juniper cut her off. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. I- I don’t want to think about that house. It’s off the table. We’ll find somewhere else.”
“But June! Come on, that house was freaking awesome. You would still have so much money leftover. You could probably just pay someone to get rid of the thing!”
Juniper let the silence drag on. She got off at the one exit that led to Dana’s town.
“I’m going to keep looking.”
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