The Haunted Traveler December 2017 Edition

Large sections of the linoleum had come unglued from the floor, pieces curled along
the edges. The outdated yellow tile had fallen away in sections from the walls too. A
stained refrigerator beckoned to him with its door open, shelves missing, mold rampant
around its gaping mouth.
Standing still, he listened to the house breathe around him, that dusty wheeze of the
old house settling. He waited to hear any telltale sign that someone was there, someone
listening, someone waiting, someone watching, but none came. He’d come across a few
squatters in his time, but they were never real stealthy and pretty harmless. Not hearing
anything, he realized that this might turn out to be the easiest three hundred he ever
made.
Dust was thick everywhere he looked, cobwebs having taken the corner of the rooms,
light fixtures like dying spider web laced sculptures watched forgotten. He felt the urge
to sneeze but managed not to.
It was funny, when he had first applied for his P.I. license, he thought he would have
exciting cases, solving crimes and helping people. The longer he did this job, the more
he realized that was all Hollywood fluff. This gig was all about wallowing through the
seedy waters of broken people’s emotional baggage. He hadn’t solved a single crime and
hadn’t helped many people at all, at least not in the way he had hoped.
He hadn’t found a lost child that the police had given up on, or a forgotten will giving
a destitute family a fortune, nothing so dramatic as that. No, instead, he managed to end
more than two dozen marriages, caught one local politician with his car in the wrong
garage so to speak, and managed to chalk up countless injuries along the way.
Walking through the first floor, peeling wall paper and piles of plaster dust were
scattered over the floors. He didn’t think any of the damage was new. It all looked so
completely covered with dust and grime, that there was no way that someone did any
of this recently. Besides, if they were going to damage the house, they would’ve spray
painted all over everything and knocked holes in the walls, not pulled up the linoleum
from the floor or tiles from the walls.
None of it made any sense.
He noticed animal tracks, either raccoon or a possum he guessed, in the dust choked
attic. It was obvious it hadn’t been opened in a long time. The door at the foot of the
steps seemed swollen in the frame and it took him a bit to open it. The stairwell was
blocked by another door that closed it off from the attic above. It was weighted by rope
threaded carefully through a series of pulleys.
It opened easy enough, the stairwell suddenly awash with putrid smells that cascaded
down from the sealed second floor. It was a single large open area, but unlike the lower
floor it had no belongings in it. Hank had expected to find boxes and old furniture, but
there was nothing.
The dusty floor however was something entirely different. Spreading out from where
he stood was a dizzying canvas of tracks. Something about it struck him odd. Hank
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