[Fanfiction] "Phantasmagoria"
Title: Phantasmagoria
Rating: T
Characters: Puerto Rico (Manny), Fem!Cuba (Ivelis), the building manager (NPC!)
Prompt: A ghost story for Creep Week on tumblr.
It was a transition Emmanuel was still getting used to.
San Juan, for all its hustle and bustle, was not Manhattan. And Manhattan was like no other place on earth.
The exorbitant rent was also something he was getting used to.
"Now, between you and me," the building manager said in a manner just slightly too personal to be professional, "this place is about the best you can do. Not bad rent for an elementary school teacher and fairly close to the school anyway! When you think about it, it's really a steal-"
"So what's the catch?" Manny asked wearily. He'd heard this particular song and dance what he would swear had been a billion times in the past month. He was ready too find a place with more pros than cons, price tag aside; he felt a bit too much like a bum, having spent the better part of three weeks sleeping on his friend's sofa. He'd like to be able to pull his own things out of storage and not wear the same clothes day in and day out, becoming the patron saint of the El Barrio's 3rd Avenue laundromat.
The building manager hesitated, which was hardly ever a good sign. Manny gave a mental sigh and waited.
"The, ah...previous tenant passed away recently," the building manager said hesitantly.
"And the people around here are really superstitious, sabes, so I've had a hell of a time trying to rent this place out."
"So someone died in here?" Manny asked, interest piqued. The older man grimaced and shook his head.
"Not in here," he explained. He strode to the window and pulled the blinds cord, sending dust motes stirring into the air and flooding the tiny living room with weak sunlight. He gave a quick nod to the nearly-finished construction project that dominated the view.
"But there's your catch number 2. That thing started going up and Rodríguez disappeared. So you get to look forward to it blocking out your view in a month or two."
"Rodríguez? That's the guy who lived here before?"
"Lady," the manager corrected him. "Ivelis Rodríguez. Pretty face, that girl. If Eva Mendez had a better-looking cousin with a bigger tits-" he made an obscene gesture over his chest with a large grin. "That would've been Rodríguez."
Manny hummed absently and took a turn around the small apartment, poking into the nooks and crannies and casually keeping an eye out for anything nasty. Like mold.
Or a body. Maybe.
Maybe he could later claim to be under duress or something, but for the moment, he was tired of searching for an apartment and this one was just as good as any of them. It also had the promise of something a little more...otherworldly than the flickering lights back at Jude's complex. His crazy psychic medium neighbor claimed it was the work of spirits; the electrician claimed it was faulty wiring from the 70s.
"So where do I sign?"
A week later had him unpacking the last of his boxes in his new apartment.
It still didn't quite feel like home, but that was part of moving into a new place. Or something like that, he figured. His mother would probably make some insinuation that it would feel more like home once he put a woman and a few babies in it.
He coughed and kicked an empty cardboard box off to the side. Women and talking to them weren't exactly a specialty of his, seeing as he seemed afflicted with chronic "Open Mouth, Insert Foot" Syndrome.
And, you know, where the hell was he supposed to meet women anyway? Dating co-workers was looked down upon, his female students were children (he shuddered reflexively), and any women he might actually come into contact with were either married, parents of his students, both, or would brain him with an oversized purse for making any sort of overture.
There were bars and pubs and everything for that sort of thing, but that was the meeting ground for weirdos and people even more lonely and desperate than him…
Manny sighed and collapsed on his sofa, after giving in to a childish need to kick off his jeans and laze (sulk) in his boxers. No good, he decided in a fit of asinine machismo. Women had a way of ruining everything, sure. He'd lose his cred or something like that.
No, women were definitely no good at all. He nodded decisively and took a swig from his glass of Ovaltine. His bachelor living would be ruined; no lounging around in his underwear if he wanted to, no microwaved TV dinners, no Ovaltine-
"…qué carajo," he moaned, slumping dejectedly and letting his head tilt over the back of the couch. Manny let out a soft exhale through his nose, opening his eyes and staring out the now upside-down window. Tangerine twilight diffused through the streaky glass in dusty patches, hitting him the eyes so that everything went hazy and indistinct. With a slight grunt, he kicked a leg over the back of the couch as well, trying to get comfortable. He needed to get blinds for that window.
Or at least until that new building was finished, he guessed as his eyes slipped closed. After that, it would do the job of blocking out the sun's glare quite nicely. Besides, it wasn't like this apartment was completely terrible. The lights didn't flicker, there didn't seem to be any mysterious leaks or mold, the floor wasn't tilted or warped, and the plumbing worked astoundingly well.
(The building manager had brought that up as a casual plus, saying that he had replaced the plumbing a few years back. Manny's upstairs neighbor was a heavier guy, he informed the Puerto Rican with a too-friendly slap on the back, and Manny would be thankful for super-powered toilets in the coming months because of it. In all honestly, he felt a sort of mute horror before any kind of gratitude and had signed the lease, silent and numb.)
And also, he mused, it sort of smelled nice. The air had been fragranced with a bare touch of jasmine that had seemed to grow stronger the more he settled in. He hadn't found a source for it, like a bag of potpourri stowed away in the drawers or one of those Glade plug-ins abandoned in an outlet. But it wasn't overpowering or unpleasant. It was just there.
He exhaled through his nose again and opened his eyes slowly, squinting against the sudden assault of sunlight from the window and the woman perched on the sill, legs drawn up to her chest and staring at him with an amused quirk to her lips.
"I have to say," she drawled, voice lightly accented, "the Iron Man boxers are a nice touch, but it seems like a little too much like compensation to me."
With a startled bellow, Manny fell off the couch and hit the floor with a loud thud. He scrambled to his feet and stared with wide eyes at the woman. She canted her head to the side, smiling pleasantly. Her eyes flicked down his torso and pointedly away. Manny flushed and ducked low, keeping the couch between them.
"Oh, come on now," she chided, "I don't bite."
"Who are you?" Manny stammered. "A-and what are you doing in my apartment?"
"My apartment," she corrected him. Her legs dropped down and she bounced her heels lightly against the wall. Manny stared at her and wondered who the hell wore boots and a winter coat in the middle of August anyway.
Probably the same kind of crazy would break into someone's apartment by scaling five stories and jimmying a window open without him noticing.
"Who are you?" he demanded, his voice taking on a more aggressive tone. She made a face at him, as if he'd refused to go along with a good joke.
"Oh, you know," she said, waving her hand in lazy circles. "I heard you guys last week. 'Eva Mendez's big-titted cousin.' Not exactly what I'd call myself, but I guess it's a compliment. I've been called worse."
"Last week-"
"Ivelis Rodríguez. Pretty face, that girl. If Eva Mendez had a better-looking cousin with a bigger tits-that would've been Rodríguez."
"Rodríguez? Miss Ivelis Rodríguez?" he blurted. "Oh my God-everyone thinks you're dead, you know!"
"Yeah," she replied, lifting her hand again and rolling her eyes when he blanched at how the sunlight shone directly through it. "Kind of a bummer."
"Holy shit," he breathed. "Holy shit, you're-you're all see-through and oooooh my God, there's a dead girl in my apartment, fuck-"
"Oh no, is that a problem?" she asked mildly. "I'd hate for this whole 'deceased' thing to bother you."
"Don't be facetious!" he retorted, pointing a finger at her. "This is a crisis! There's a dead girl in my house and now everyone's going to think I killed you o algo and I'll be framed for murder and oh God, my students will think I'm the worst person to ever live and do you even have any idea what they do to guys like me in prison?!"
"Yahtzee?" she suggested lightly.
"NO!" he shouted, jumping to his feet and pulling at his hair roughly. "Guys like me get it rough in there, you know! I'm not a murderer! The worst thing I've ever done in my life was cheat on a biology exam and that was because I was hung-over and okay, maybe I was underaged and shouldn't have been drinking anyway, but this is really too much universal karma crapping on me for a tiny offense like that when people get away with literal murder-"
"Aish. Relax. Nobody's going to accuse you of murder, idiota. It's not like you have a body lying on the coffee table."
Manny peered at her from between his fingers, the thought belatedly occurring to him that corpses tended not to talk back and definitely not so sassily.
"Okay," he said slowly, sinking down to the couch to rest on his knees and look at her more closely this time. "Okay. So. Not a body. Just a dead girl's ghost in my apartment."
…the building manager had been right about the boobs though. And the face.
"Nope," she replied cheerfully, "no body. Sorry to disappoint."
"They never found your body though. I looked it up in this newspaper before I moved in," he added warily. "You just disappeared one day after leaving work."
"They were looking in the wrong places," she said simply, as if discussing one's murder was a normal conversational topic. Manny blinked and crossed his arms.
"So-"
"I'm out there," she interrupted, pointing towards the bay. Manny's breath escaped his lungs in a loud huff.
"About 2 miles out with a concrete block tied around my foot. And you know," she continued, turning to Manny with an almost affronted expression, "the bastard used pantyhose for rope. ¡Carajo! It's nearly impossible to untie that when it's wet, but geez! How perverted!"
"So you…ah…were drowned?" Manny ventured. Ivelis snorted.
"God no. That was just insurance. Let me think…it was here," she drew a finger across her throat; Manny noticed a faint line that hadn't been visible until he really looked for it.
"And-hm, what else…" Ivelis patted her chest and stomach, seeming to count under her breath. "And…I think it was twenty seven. Maybe thirty or something."
"Twenty seven what?"
"Oh," she laughed, "that's how many times he stabbed me. Hey, is that-"
Before Manny could blink, Ivelis was gone from the window and reappeared by the coffee table, staring intently at his almost empty glass. She reached for it and swore when her hand went straight through it. With a depressed groan, she sank into a crouch and glared moodily at the glass, lower lip pushed out into a pout.
"This sucks," she muttered darkly. "I have to go and die and I'm deprived of Ovaltine in my afterlife. This completely sucks. This is no afterlife, it's hell."
"…right," Manny stood slowly and edged for the hallway that led to his bedroom. "Well, I'm just going to…go. Do something. Um. I'll be back."
"Okay," she sang as he took off down the hall at a fast walk. She tried poking at the glass with her finger and wrinkled her nose when it went through again. "Take your time!
I'll just be…yeah."
He hurried into his room and locked the door, not that it would be much of a deterrent to a ghost-but there was a myth or something, right, about not being allowed in unless they'd been invited or something.
"No no," he muttered, thudding his head against the door a few times, "that's vampires. Whatever. Same thing. Dead people."
So. Maybe he was just overexhausted from moving and had imagined a pretty (and dead) girl into his living room. She seemed so lively (for someone who was dead), and ghosts were supposed to be all…depressed and bemoaning their fate. Ivelis (the dead girl-the dead pretty girl) had just talked about it like it was a minor inconvenience, like a sudden downpour when you'd planned a picnic or something.
So he had to have made her up. He wanted to hope that exhaustion-caused imaginings about the deceased previous tenant of his apartment didn't make him into some kind of…creepy necrophiliac with delusions of grandeur or anything like that. Although if he went to a shrink just before starting his new job at the elementary school, it was bound to look sketchy to his employer.
With a groan, he let his head thump against the door again as the last rays of sunlight disappeared from his bedroom. He should probably go kick her out or something. Exorcise his delusion. It was in movies all the time and everything; you grabbed your rosary and told whatever it was that it had no power over you and it hissed and screamed and dramatic wind would blow and knock shit over (Manny winced at the thought of his security deposit), but eventually the thing would evaporate or whatever.
He couldn't afford to go crazy.
With a decisive nod, he snatched the rosary his mother had insistently shoved at him from atop his dresser (pausing to don a shirt and pants, because it just wasn't right to walk around in your underwear in front of a lady, about-to-be-exorcised figment of his imagination or not) and unlocked the door, shoving it open and throwing himself into the hallway, brandishing the rosary to ward off any unforeseen blows.
There was nothing in the hallway.
Cautiously, he crept towards the living room, peering around the corner to examine the room for end to end. It was empty. Completely empty.
Manny blinked and lowered his arm, stepping into the room.
"Miss Rodríguez?" he called, "Ivelis? You here?"
There was no reply and no indication she'd ever been there in the first place.
Suddenly, he noticed that his glass had tipped over on the coffee table and was steadily dripping the remnants of his Ovaltine onto the carpet. With a loud swear, he dashed for the kitchen and its supply of paper towels, not noticing how the scent of jasmine had gotten even stronger.