InsaneJournal

WHO: Kon and Allana
WHAT: Checking out the House of Ava Detoxing...and finding out why it was foreclosed
WHEN: Afternoon, June 11th
WHERE: About 30 minutes outside of Lawrence (by car, by Kon, like two seconds)
WARNINGS: None yet!

The house had stood, sheltered just beyond a little rise in the ground (what passed for a hill in Kansas) since 1918. Joseph Rausch, a factory owner, had built it as a summer home for his family, had laid down the thickest timbres for the oak floors, envisioning generations descended from his six children running in and out of the upstairs bedrooms and swinging near the porch on the rope swing that had long since rotted and fallen away. He’d envisioned a dynasty, but the market had crashed, and when he died of a heart attack his children sold the house and divided the profits and scattered away from Lawrence, embittered by their sudden introduction to poverty. The house, however, had been built during boom times and it lasted the way it was built to, through generation after generation of owners who had come and gone, remodeled and repaired, and then moved on again. Except for the one who hadn’t.

The two teenagers who had just landed at the top of the long, curved driveway, however, knew none of this. Allana was trying to concentrate all of her attention on bending her knees slightly during the landing so that Kon didn’t have to steady her after their seemingly instantaneous shift from the complex to their destination. It wouldn’t do, she had decided, to seem anything less than completely blasé about Kon’s eight thousand powers. Because I am a very supportive and sensitive girlfriend, she reminded herself, not at all because of anything even resembling the word pride. That would be ridiculous and petty and childish. So it is not at all the reason. Landing successfully managed with the help of Jedi reflexes she turned to look up at the house, squinting at it for a moment before abruptly turning back to Kon and picking up the stream of chatter she’d begun at the complex the moment they’d met up in the lobby. The topic then had been his school and how it was going and the infinite fascination proper earth teenagers held for her, but it was obvious to anyone who knew her that the real goal had been to avoid talking about why they were heading out to the destination they had just reached, the old house sheltered by the hill.

“So, right, it looks sturdy doesn’t it?” Allana said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, “I mean, I’d only seen it flying overhead with you, but it looks like a recent foreclosure. I don’t think it will fall in on us or anything,” while we lock someone who’s supposed to be my friend in a panic room for a process that might kill her, she thought, “while we’re inside,” she continued. “Nice and sturdy and…yes.” She gave Kon a small, crooked smile, perfectly aware of how lame her attempt at being businesslike about all this was so far, but not willing to give up the ghost just yet. “I figure we just go down to the basement and take a look around, make sure it’s as sturdy as it looks and drop off these,” she indicated the supplies in the backpack she was wearing, “and then when Sam gets back and checks it out I’ll tell Clark and my family.”

In the basement, behind the old fashioned furnace long ago rendered obsolete by modern heating and left as an inconvenient relic, something was stirring, invisible to the naked eye. The thing had been a man once, cold and alone, hitch-hiking down a country road. He’d been angry, his wife had thrown him out, he’d lost his job, and he was heading to Lawrence when the blizzard found him stranded by the side of the road, with only one house in sight just beyond a little rise in the ground. He’d broken a basement window to get in and curled up behind the furnace, waiting for it to come on, raging at the circumstances that that had led him there, and channeling all of that into the fervent need not to be disturbed and wrested from his hiding place. Just let this place be empty he’d thought as his teeth chattered. It had been. The heat had never come on and he’d frozen and the resulting spirit had chased out the house’s owners before they could even smell the corpse, tucked away behind the old furnace. Now, enough time having passed that the smell had faded, the man too had faded from human to spirit to simply a need: Just let this place be empty.

Out front, in the driveway, Allana stopped talking and raised her hand reflexively to her forehead at the sudden twinge of a headache building behind her temples. Her first thought was a quick scan of her relatives and Siri but, aside from the still-troubling emptiness where she should have felt Cade’s presence, everything seemed normal enough. It must be nerves, she decided, and took a deep breath that somehow didn’t do much to dispel them as she started up the walk to the front door.