Laura and I didn’t know it was haunted when we moved in, of course. I’d just be reassigned to the burbs and Anna was getting to that age where we’d started discussing school districts. We were a bit hesitant since our dream neighborhood was priced far out of our range but decided hey, what’s the harm in browsing?
When we found 13 Willow Road we thought we’d hit the jackpot. Sure, it had been a while since the property had been renovated, but at that listing price? I thought I’d need to sell my soul for a deal like that.
Sorry, bad joke.
Maybe we should have been clued in by how quickly the seller agreed to our offer, on the one condition we waive the inspection. Maybe we should have been suspicious of how the neighbors seemed to go out of their way to avoid us, even pulling back up into their driveway when we passed by. But Laura and I thought we were risking a few leaky pipes and unfriendly neighbors, not, you know, the supernatural.
I’m not sure what it was that finally tipped us off. The way our produce would rot within seconds of being stored in our fridge? The murderous messages that would write themselves in the foggy bathroom mirror? The portal to the underworld that opened up in the master bedroom at 4:44am each night and filled the house with unearthly shrieks?
Whatever it was, by the time we realized, it was too late. We’d already poured our savings into the downpayment, and we’d just managed to snatch a good mortgage rate before the markets went to shit. But we were practical people. We’d managed to make it through a recession and a pandemic, we figured we could handle a haunted house.
So Laura and I threw a heavy carpet down in our bedroom, treated the bathroom mirrors with anti-fog spray every couple days, resigned ourselves to frozen veggies for a while, and sat Anna down to set some ground rules.
“Honey,” Laura started, “we live in a… special house now. So for a while we’re going to be following some special rules. No opening the door for anyone, even if they sound like Mommy and Daddy. Bedtime will still be at 9, but if you need to leave your room after that you’ll use this walkie talkie to tell us and we’ll come get you.”
I continued. “If you ever see, hear, or smell anything weird, you’ll go to Mrs. Smith’s and call us immediately.” Mrs. Smith was the next-door neighbor we’d befriended. She had a son a year older than Anna and had offered to help us out of sympathy for our plight. “Okay?”
Anna kicked her feet against the couch, mulling this over. “Okay.”
And that was that. Until Dorian.
Dorian waltzed into our lives one morning when I cut myself shaving. I cursed and moved to wipe the stray drops of blood off the porcelain only to find them gone and crimson smoke rising from the sink.
I only had time enough to curse myself again when someone cleared their throat behind me. I turned to find a middle-aged man sitting cross-legged in our bathtub. He looked a little like our accountant, if our accountant were eight feet tall and horned.
I blinked. “I’m sorry, who are you?” I asked.
The demon rattled off a long list of syllables I didn’t even try to follow. He rolled his eyes. “You summoned me and you can’t even pronounce my name? You can call me Dorian.”
“Sorry,” I apologized again. I figured it was better to stay on a demon’s good side. “I summoned you?”
Dorian narrowed his eyes. “You offered up a blood sacrifice and swore against the gods, what was I supposed to think?”
It took me a second. “When I say damn it I mean it as, you know, an expression of frustration not as an oath against the gods!” Dorian just shrugged as if to say them’s the rules.
“Daddy!” Anna called from downstairs.
“Not now, Anna!” I called back, keeping my eyes on Dorian.
“You should go check on your spawn,” Dorian suggested. “She’s about to prick her finger on an enchanted spindle.
I ran downstairs to pick Anna up just before she touched the needlepoint. “Anna!” I scolded. “What did we say about not touching strange things?” I kicked the spinning wheel across the room where it disappeared into a cloud of smoke. I looked around to find Dorian pointing at the place the wheel had been and begrudgingly thanked him.
Anna was staring up at Dorian wide-eyed. “Daddy, can we please keep him?” she pleaded.
I sighed and turned to Dorian. “Look, we’ve just moved in here and even though we’ve done all we can, clearly we can’t cover all of our bases. I don’t know what my wife and I would do if anything ever happened to Anna. What will it cost for you to keep protecting my daughter?”
Dorian considered that for a moment. “I’ll need human blood to subsist.”
“So if I prick my finger for you every couple of weeks, you’ll protect my daughter from danger?”
“Pretty much,” Dorian said. “Although I wouldn’t say no to a cheeseburger once in a while.”
So that’s the story of how my daughter got herself a pet demon.
Honestly it hasn’t been too bad living here, once we got used to it. The skylight in the attic gives it a nice airy feeling when it’s not clouded over by swarms of locusts. The dead shrubbery that keeps popping back up in our yard would be annoying but hey, they don’t make us pay HOA fees anyway.
There’s been a few close calls though, which is why I’m writing these accounts. Anna’s at that age where she learns best from stories and I want to remind her of why we follow the rules we do. And hey, if any of you are considering moving into a haunted house, now you know: living in a haunted house isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.