Rajana went to bed that night as she always did; naked and alone. Huddled up under the thick blankets, she refused to let her mind dwell on the events of the day. What was the point? She had already lived it after all, and no amount of dwelling upon it would change anything. Best to let it go. She snuggled down in the darkness, closed her eyes and let the exhaustion take her away.
She had expected five or six hours of undisturbed sleep. She had expected to wake before the first light of dawn as was her wont. She had not expected a series of crashes from the front room to disturb her hard-earned slumber.
With a sigh, she sat up. Bare feet met cold floorboards. Another crash. On the off-chance that someone had actually managed to work up the courage to burgle this supposedly haunted house, she took one of her kukri from the nightstand, wrapped a loose bedrobe around her slender frame and made her way through.
Light. Pure and blinding. She shielded her eyes from it, a frown of annoyance crossing her dusky features. Why the heck would it be so bright...?
"Get out," intoned a voice. "Get out! Get ooouuuuut!"
"What? No! You get out!" she shot back, squinting as she moved further into the room. All around her was in chaos. The few things she owned, the tools she had borrowed, the things that had been left behind by the previous occupants, were strewn across the floor. Furniture had been tipped and... were those tea leaves? Had someone spilled her tealeaves?
"You're not welcome here!"
"What else is new?" she sneered in the general direction of the voice. "I bought this place. It's mine now, so bugger off."
As her eyes adjusted further, she lowered her hand. Something hit her in the back. She turned sharply to see a spoon lying on the floor behind her. She was hit again, this time in the hip and by a tin cup. A scraping noise alerted her to the kettle being slide from the hook above the fire. She ducked just in time to avoid being hit in the head.
"Really?" she asked flatly as she moved into the centre of the room. Around her, the discarded and out of place objects began to shake and then rise, whirling all around her in a maelstrom of promised pain.
"You're a screw-up, Silver!"
"Yes," she replied easily. "I'm aware."
"A waste of breath and bone! Unloved, unlovable, unloving!"
"Well," she agreed with a shrug. "There's certainly some evidence to support that theory."
"You will die alone!"
"Read that in your crystal ball, did you?"
An angry shriek sounded then, coming from somewhere to the left. Lacking the ear on that side, her triangulation was no longer precise but it's not like the inside of her house was a wide open space anyway. She turned to see a ghostly white form resolve before her, its translucent face contorted in rage and hate.
"You destroy all that you touch!"
Folding her arms, she stood her ground, staring into the etheral eye sockets of the angry ghast. "And you are transparent, wispy around the edges and beyond ugly to look upon."
"You will never know happiness or peace! You will never have what you want!"
"Well, thank you for stating the blindingly obvious. It's much appreciated, but if you don't have a point to make, then can you at least keep quiet out here? I was trying to sleep."
She turned back toward the bedroom only to find the thing in front of her again. It screamed in her face, telling her repeatedly to leave, to run, to crawl away into a ditch and die. It moaned, it screeched, it howled.
"No," she replied calmly, raising one hand to lay her fingertips to its intangible cheek. The anger instantly turned to anguish.
"You burn!" It wailed. You buuuuurrrrrrn!"
"I know," she said softly as the thing before her writhed. It tried to pull away from her touch, but it couldn't. From the very place her skin met ether, flames crawled and crept, sliding over the spirits gaseous form. Growing. Dancing. Consuming.
"I know," she said again as it disappeared from sight. The whirlwind of items dropped suddenly to the floor. The bright light that had illuminated the area winked out, leaving her in the darkness once again. She sighed. There would be such a mess to clean in the morning! But for now, sleep.
***
When she awoke again, the sun was barely even threatening to rise. Only the faintest blush on the horizon suggested that daybreak was incoming. She stretched her lithe and compactly muscled body, slipped on her robe and padded through to the front room to begin clearing away the mess.
Sure enough there upon the floor lay the canister of tealeaves, knocked from the shelf above sometime in the night.
"Damned mice," she muttered, picking it up.
