So..sorry for the late update guys. Despite your helpful comments I am still not much closer to finding out what exactly this woman is. I mean, the obvious choice (highly sexual vibes, long white teeth, pale skin) would be vampire but I definitely saw her have a reflection in the several elevators we had been riding in. And she freely walks around in the sun , so doesn’t that disqualify werewolf as well? I loved reading horror when I was younger, but my knowledge is somewhat rusty.

I was busy with trying to find Miss Lamia a new flat- in fact, our last flat -seeing ended just 2 hours ago. One would think it is not that hard to find a flat or a house where the only demand is a storage room, yes? Turns out it bloody is, when your customer walks into said storage room, spends minutes in there doing God knows what only to emerge with an apologetic smile saying the apartment doesn’t suit them! Not even a hint of what exactly is wrong, just “I don’t like it, find something else”.

Those last days were filled with flat-seeings to the brim. And they all went by on the same schedule: I would never actually SEE her come up to me, one moment she was nowhere in sight and the next one she was standing right next to me. We would walk in, I would have to assure her it is okay for her to enter said apartment or house and she would immediately march for the storage room, tell me she doesn’t wish to be disturbed and stay there for even longer periods of time. I mean, I wouldn’t even mind , it gave me time to scroll the Internet (the world is going to shit and we have the front seats) or have a quick lunch or generally unwind, were it not for the sounds that would emerge from said closed storage rooms.

Oh yes, did I mention that the storage rooms also would need to have a door you can lock beside yourself? Every time she would turn the key and I made one half-assed attempt of me to ask her not to do that, because if there would be an emergency someone would have to break down the door. She just laughed at me. I just let her do her thing. But I stopped eating during her…seances so to say. The noises that I hear in the best case make me uneasy and in the worst case make me barf.

Do you remember her the first storage room she locked herself in? The slurping, murmuring and crying? Her repertoire steadily expands. I heard dry-heaving, retching, squelching and some very badly suppressed laughter. I heard deranged cackling, more of that damned slurping and..ehr, at some point I am very sure orgasmic moans. And every time she would reappear from the storage room looking like a damned Cosmo cover model, not a stroke out of line of her make-up, sensuality made flesh and ask for a new apartment-seeing - or storage room seeing, since she was NEVER interested in any other part of all the apartments we have been to. And aside from busted light bulbs the storage rooms looked exactly the same before she entered. Every damn time.

She wasn’t interested in attics, or basements or sheds. No, it had to be a storage room with no other exit, no window and a door you could lock. In some she spent 5 minutes. In another, her longest stay was an hour. Out of desperation, I led her to a flat where all the walls were broken down and hinted that she could build or let us build for her TEN storage rooms in there if she so desired. She plain out refused to enter and demanded to see a new house. And the house I led her to after that one..oh boy, did she get upset.

It was a tiny cottage of two floors with a small garden and a fenced-in backyard. Just imagine or google tiny cottage and you get a pretty accurate depiction. An elderly couple lived there before passing away and their children put it up for sale. Belongings of the couple still weren’t completely removed so several biblical and religious knickknacks were piled in boxes before the door. I wasn’t aware of this, but Lamias face turned into a snarl and she spat before the door, claiming she is highly offended (oh great..) by me taking her to a house of worship. Again, it wasn’t a church, just a house with religious symbols. But she refused to enter. And she also wouldn’t move in to a house near a church or a mosque or a synagogue. Anything religious or spiritual in general highly offended her, as I learned. She would snarl at something as innocent as a dreamcatcher and frown at amulets.

And today was the last flat-seeing we had.

See, I was slowly getting desperate and running out of homes and flats to show her. So I decided to show her our dead-weight home. Every rental agency had one of these. Houses no one wants to stay in, for whatever reason there might be. But this one I was actually understanding to a degree. It was at the end of an uninhabited street leading to bumfuck nowhere, with the nearest convenience store 5 kilometers away and the nearest police station 10. In the past there was a sparse grove surrounding it, but due to years of neglect and the recent heatwaves everything withered away, dead trees scratching and poking at the sky like clawed hands. And..I am not sure if it is true, but the rumor goes that the woman who lived there last killed and ate her sister. So there was a certain aura around the building that made you feel disgusted and unwanted there. Our rental agency didn’t do much in terms of renovation, just painted the walls and replaced the broken windows. The wooden floors creaked with every step, the doors jammed and the only furniture standing there was sparse and belonging to the last tenant. A table and 2 chairs in the kitchen and a bed upstairs. That’s it. No phone line, no electricity, no running water, no internet- the house was taken off those services years ago. Nobody wanted to live there. And the area itself was sketchy, abandoned houses with a lot of squatters and drug addicts hanging around, desperate humans in the pangs of addiction, every morale eroded through drugs - and yet the fact that none of them wanted to go near that building should tell you enough.

I was scared to leave my car unsupervised in that area for fear of it being stolen. So I had a colleague come with me. His name is Adrian and he is new, actually. An intern, if you want to be precise. You know how it goes in companies- the interns get dropped on one unlucky worker and are their problem from then. Adrian wasn’t a problem though. He was helpful, eager to learn the few meager salesman tricks I could show him and very innovative when it came to solving problems. He somehow knew when to speak and when to be silent, but the silence was never uncomfortable. He was one of the few men you enjoy the silence with. It was his idea to show Lamia this house actually when I complained I was running of possible homes. And..well, I admit his good looks alone would have caught my eye in any other situation.

And Lamia’s too. From the second she approached us (in her usual unnerving matter of just appearing in front of you) she practically devoured the poor man with her eyes. As we went up the stairs and I unlocked the door, Adrian went in first but I hung back and I swear I saw her lick her lips as she watched him from behind.

Inside, it was business as usual. We invited her to enter, Lamia marched straight for the storage room, I spared myself the usual salesmen talk of any potential the house has, or the great location (which it didn’t have) and just sat down while Adrian stared bewildered at the locked door of the storage.

“Its just her thing” I remarked “Just wait till she is done”.

She was done really quickly, actually. After only one minute in the storage room she came out, her smile beaming and exclaimed “I want this house!”. And while I was stupidly blinking at her, Adrian was already nodding and smiling, pulling out the paperwork for her to sign. I couldn’t believe it. Our first sale.

The entire procedure did not take longer than 10 minutes but I was happy when I was outside, getting in the car and driving away from this wretched place. Call me squeamish, but I tried to avoid touching anything in that house.

“I am just as relieved as you are” I heard Adrian say “Happy to be away from her, actually. She is..unsettling”.

I chuckled “Wouldn’t you be flattered? This woman was basically undressing you with her eyes!”

He gently elbowed me “She looks like the type who doesn’t stop the undressing once the clothes are off”.

I hear myself grin at his joke, a tired laugh melting away the tension and the aversion of this place and this horrible woman we had to deal with. As Adrian smiles back at me, I feel reminded of my days back in school when I used to skip classes with my then best friend, how he dared me to climb the apple tree in the neighbor’s garden and sneak some fruits down for us. That same smile of a mischievous young boy is shining at me now, from the eyes of a grown man who didn’t let his inner child die.

He pets the signed lease in the folder “Up for celebrating our first sale as colleagues?”.

I shake my head “I am driving”.

Another one of those charming grins “Tell you what. How about we park your car at a convenient place for you and have one glass of sparkled wine? Just one!”

I stare at the traffic. I feel that I have to wash away the disgust of dealing with this creepy woman and the house. And I feel that I have the cause of celebrating my first sale, becoming a “proper real estate agent”.

“Why not?” I hear myself say. “Just one”.

This site is open source. Improve this page.

yessleep