Renovator’s Heaven [Renovator's Hell Remix]

by Amra Pajalic

“Look at these ornate cornices,” Kirsty, his wife’s best friend and their real estate agent, pointed out the verandah. They were getting a sneak peak inspection before the property went on the market.

“Nice,” Lisa, his wife said, looking down the street. Her sole interest was location, location, location, and this was one of the best streets in the suburb.

“Why is the property on the market?” he asked Kirsty as she unlocked the front door.

“The owner retired.”

He was in the kitchen when he felt Lisa standing beside him. “This is handmade,” he said, running his hands over the kitchen cupboard doors lined in Baltic tongue and groove. He looked up, but he was alone.

The garage had brackets running up the walls, stacked with pine boards and Edwardian windows in the corner.

“All this will be disposed of before the house goes on the market,” Kirsty said.

“You can use these to finish renovations,” Lisa whispered.

He smiled, internally wincing. He hated renovating. Whenever he started out a home project it never came off the way he imagined it.

Kirsty left them in the backyard to deliberate. “It’s perfect,” Lisa said, her smile brimming with excitement as she squeezed his arm.

“I’m not sure if it’s us,” he remembered the creeping sensation while he’d inspected the house. “Don’t you like the modern look more?”

“Yes, but we can rip out all the traditional fittings.”

He hesitated, looking at the house behind them. On the surface the house was perfect for them. It met all the check-boxes on their wish-list, but there was something not quite right.

“Don’t you like it?” Lisa took hold of his hand.

Seeing the disappointment on her face he couldn’t take away her joy. Anyway what could he say?

“You’re right,” he put his arm around her shoulders and led her back inside. “It’s perfect.”

It began on the day they moved in. At first it was so small he barely noticed it. He put his Coke on the windowsill in the living room. When he went to take a drink, he found the bottle in the kitchen. He assumed Lisa had taken a sip and moved it.

But as days passed, his unease deepened. Things would move when he was alone in the house. He felt a malevolent presence following him from room to room, watching over as he undertook any repair job. His tools would short-circuit every time he used them. When he asked Lisa if she felt anything strange, she smiled, like he was a child telling a tall tale.

He was setting up the ladder to fix the television antenna disturbed by high winds when a neighbour walked past. After they exchanged hellos the neighbour lingered.

“Be careful on the ladder,” the neighbour said. “That’s how the previous owner found his end.”

After the neighbour left he took the ladder back to the shed. When Lisa turned on the TV and the reception was still off, he lied and said he’d attempted to fix it. The next day he went through the local paper looking for an antenna repair man.

He saw an advertisement for a medium claiming to dispose of problem spirits. He cut it out and placed it in his wallet.

That night the dreams started. There was a shadowy presence standing over his bed. He’d try to move, but an invisible force held him down. He woke gasping for breath, his muscles atrophied and taking minutes to respond to his commands.

He got in touch with the medium. Pretending to leave for work, he drove around the corner, called in sick and returned home after Lisa left.

When the medium entered the house her eyes fluttered. “I feel the chill of a recent death and the heat of an unsettled spirit.”

She lit candles and formed a circle, claiming a purification ceremony would force the spirit to leave. “The ceremony will only work if you believe,” she sat cross-legged on the floor.

He joined her, goosepimples rising on his skin as the candles fluttered. He felt the familiar malevolent presence beside him. A force gripped him, squeezing his body so he couldn’t breathe. He tried to scream, but no sound came out. A veil descended between him and the house as if he was looking through the world under water.

“Much better,” his voice said, but he didn’t think the words. He tried to ask the medium what had happened, but his mouth didn’t respond.

After the medium left he walked through the house examining the shody workmanship from his amateur attempts at renovation. He collected the power tools and tossed them in the skip out the back.

“You can’t use a machine for detail like that - you’ve got to do it all by hand.”

The Renovator’s Hell Remix by Amra Pajalic is licensed under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licence. It is a derivative work of Cate Kennedy’s CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licensed story. The original is available at http://www.remixmylit.com/storiesremixes/catekennedy/. For details on how you can reuse the original and this remix see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/