(Untitled)

[gone_byebye]

Ray has had better days than this

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[tokilltherose]

There were photos falling off the bar, and Steve cursing as he tried to catch them and knocked more off. He finally managed to stop the landslide.

That just left him with a lot of photos of a creepy house to pick up off the floor and mutter about while he was doing it.

[gone_byebye]

Ray had been in the middle of getting a refill on his green stuff when that happened; he glanced down. "Need a hand there?" he asked.

[tokilltherose]

"Huh? Oh - it..." He looked over the pictures. Some had... things. But then again, this was Milliways. "Sure, if you don't mind."

They'd probably seen weirder.

"Thanks."

[gone_byebye]

"No problem," said Ray, bending over to start gathering up the extra photographs. "Huh. Doing research, or is this place yours?"

[tokilltherose]

"Uh, mine. Hopefully soon to be TechStar's, but... uh. I don't think that's going to be happening." This wasn't a good attitude for him, but he was a little stuck for it at the moment. After all, mail clerk wasn't paying really well.

[gone_byebye]

"TechStar being a company name, I take it?' said Ray. "Were they going to knock it down and just build on the property, or..."

There was a pause.

"What am I looking at in this one? I'm almost sure I saw something similar in a Russian study of photography done at the fringes of the forest of Katyn."

[tokilltherose]

"That one?" Steve looked over and... he nodded. "That looks like Emery's mom. Her... her ghost, her spirit... Whatever was left of her after the house ate her."

[gone_byebye]

"Ow." Ray wrinkles his nose. "Physically ate her, or just devoured her spirit? I've encountered a couple of spiritually dangerous pieces of architecture in my day, and one Sweeney Toddish eatery located over a weak spot known for letting hideous eldritch things through, but active devouring homes of the damned aren't that common."

[tokilltherose]

"Physically ate her, then enslaved her spirit to build on to it," said Steve. "See, here's... Here's Nick..." He brought up another picture, pointing to a spectre in another window. "I blame my grandmother."

[gone_byebye]

Ray peers at the spectre in the window. "Huh. Was she the architect, or did she just make a pact with something she shouldn't've?"

[tokilltherose]

"Grandma Ellen... We're not sure. I can tell you most of the history of the house, but nobody's sure why it eats people. She designed a lot of it after being told that she'd live as long as the house was under construction," explained Steve. "I think she might be in one of these pictures, too. The house... wants me to come back."

[gone_byebye]

"Hm. Interesting. I wonder if that has any linkage to the Winchester mansion's ghosts..." He shakes his head. "Anyway. That sounds bad. Seriously bad. That's why you're trying to sell it?"

[tokilltherose]

"Winchester...?" But Steve shook his head. "Not heard of any Winchesters. But... Yeah, it's why I'm trying to sell it. It's right in the middle of Seattle. Good location, TechStar said. And since it has a taste for my family, I don't really want it anymore. Never really wanted it."

[gone_byebye]

"As in the rifle. The widow of the founder of the Winchester company became convinced that she had to build a house for the ghosts of all the people killed by her husband's guns, to the ghosts' specifications. There are stairways that go nowhere and doors that only open onto walls. She spent the rest of her life and most of her fortune expanding the place to keep ahead of the ghosts."

At the statement, he considers the picture again. "Does it lure in random strangers, or does someone who lives there have to do that for it?"

[tokilltherose]

"Oh, uh... We didn't make guns or anything. We owned Omicron Oil. And all the staircases in Rose Red go to places. Sometimes places that weren't there before, but... places. And Grandma had a penchant for trick doors and rooms and..." Steve shook his head. "The perspective hallway. That's what ate Nick.

"As for luring people in... it does that by itself. It... gets people obsessed with it."

[gone_byebye]

"Gotcha," says Ray. "Huh. It sounds sort of like the kind of place that Eddie Dean told me about once. Have you ever had an investigator in to look at it?"