"Well," you begin, "I'm glad you both made it out alright. Did... you happen to find out if the red countdown changed...?"

"We never saw a striped room."

Oh.

Oh, damn. That would help explain the bad time.

"We should meet up," you state. "Have breakfast or something. I need details or I'm going to go nuts wondering what happened."

Kate chuckles, taking another puff off her cigarette. "Sure, sure. Meet me at the Back Room, I'm pretty sure this burger place has like... things that aren't burgers. And it was so damn loud last time we could've plotted a fucking bombing and nobody would've--"

She stops; you faintly hear her yell it's a figure of speech, fuck off at a random passerby before returning to the phone. "--Anyway, yeah, just meet me here so you can see this photo."

"Alright," you reply. "See you in a bit."

You pocket your cellphone. You take a deep breath.

There's one more thing you want to do before you leave--you want Kate's mom to give you a reading.

You take a moment to psych yours--

"Are you heading out, Plaire?"

nooo "Yeah," you reply most unnervously, "I'm, uh, meeting Kate at the Back Room."

"Oh!," she says with a big smile. "Tell her I said hi! Did you sleep okay last night?"

"Yeah, I--uh--" get it together doofus "H-Hey, before I go, can I ask you to... uh..."

Several seconds of making a stupid face and vaguely gesturing with your hand while you try and fail to ask in a non-awkward fashion eventually conveys the gist of your request.

"Oh, you want me to check your vibe?," she correctly guesses but jesus christ that was not the wording you were looking for, no

"Y... Yeah."

Ms. Halford approaches you. She takes your hand.

You hold your breath and try not to think. At all.

Hold it in.

Hold it iiiin.

She smiles. Hnnng.

"You're frustrated," she says. "You're overwhelmed."

She has the read. Should you take your hand back? She's still kind of holding your hand but not like, definitively. She's not taking her hand back. You catch yourself starting to look down at your hands but you stop yourself just as you start, which may have made it look like you were trying to look at her boobs but you seriously weren't and now you're worried she's going to (correctly) assume that you're some species of small pervert--

"...Incredibly pent up," she concludes, gently releasing your hand. "You need to find some way to relax or you're going to blow up."

You shake your head. "I don't have time to relax," you state dryly.

Her smile turns into more of a grin. "That must be why you and Kate get along so well--I swear she actually looks for trouble. You both need to take a break once in a while, though."

Hmm. "You didn't sense anything... weird?"

She shakes her head. "Felt perfectly normal to me."

Deep breath.

"...We shook hands when I came over the first time, didn't we?"

Ms. Halford smiles, and nods. She tugs some hair from her eyes. "Yeaaah, sorry about that. There's..." She pauses. It's one of those big I wish there was a normal way to say this but I can't find one pauses, which you have gotten intimately familiar with recently. She finally relents. "...This has always been a weird town--I mean, it's why I decided to stay here--but lately it's gotten..."

"...Weirder?"

"Yeah," she confirms, her smile having steadily drifted away. "There's people I haven't seen in years showing up like they've been in hiding or something... and a lot of faces I don't recognize? Ninelives keeps getting smaller, but..." She sort of trails off. "I know, there's no way I know what everybody in town looks like, sometimes people just go off and do different things, it's weird for me to be suspicious of strangers, buuut--"

"--And to be fair I am actually new to this town," you add, "so you weren't totally off the mark."

Heather cracks a bit of a smile. "I worry about Kate," she says. "She's always involved in something, and it always turns out to be a big something. I guess I was just making sure you weren't a vampire."

You nod. You begin to make your exit,

but something else occurs to you.

"...Speaking of weird," you begin, hiking a thumb back toward "...the bait shop?"

"They do keep some strange hours," she replies. "...But I used to keep hours like that back when I owned a bar, so I get it. It might just be some oldtimers trying to escape their wives--there's nowhere to actually fish around here."

"...Indeed." You push your glasses up a little more dramatically than you probably should have.

Or just enough. "Thanks, Ms. Halford."

"See you later, Plaire!"

The walk back to the bus stop is uneventful, aside from some big-ass birds flying overhead. You also see something roughly frog or lizard sized escape into the dirt as you walk toward it. You give the walk some hustle in an attempt to squeeze a little exercise out of it, but your jog quickly deteriorates into a power walk.

You note that the bait shop is currently closed as you pass it.

WEIRD HOURS INDEED.

On the ride back into town you finish reading your library book. You were hoping the final section would be about how to nurture your slightly sick house back to health, or maybe guide it on its bizarre journey into becoming whatever it is that a house isn't.

It is not that kind of section though.

Instead, the last portion of the book talks about things that can accelerate the madness of a house. ...Things like (just, as an example,) the improper use of magic.

Oh yeah.

Yeah buddy.

More specifically, something as simple as failing to say goodbye when using a ouija board* can leave a house exposed to psychic weirdness, further deteriorating its... psyche. Broken circles, misdrawn sigils or mispoken spells, or magic being used against its design (you're not even sure what that one means) can render a house more vulnerable to the kind of thing that freaks out houses.

*Failing to properly close a ouija board session can actually cause a LOT of problems, and the book is pretty serious about ouija board safety

So, in conclusion: helping your house would mean learning what the hell you're doing with all this dream stuff, in addition to needing more furniture. It's a shame all this magic bullshit would probably get you arrested--otherwise it'd be a pretty easy topic for videos.

Videos that you still need to make.

Preferably today.

Overwhelmed indeed.

The bus pulls up to the strip; you thank Cherry and cross the parking lot to the Back Room.

"There she is!," Marlow declares.

He slides a photograph across the counter as you approach--like, an actual photograph, out of a camera. "Found this diggin' through the ol' family pictures."

Kate points at the photo. "Check this shit out."

It appears to be a family photo, taken in a library around Halloween. It's not the library Cici works at; you can only assume it's the old library. Pictured in the photo are, in no particular order:

• A (slightly) younger Marlow Tuck, whose Halloween costume that year was a set of normal, everyday clothes--but with a plastic alien rigged to look like it was bursting out of his chest;

• What you would guess is his wife, dressed like a scarecrow;

• Their daughter, who looks like she was in her early teens when the photo was taken; she's dressed as a vampire, and

• Her little brother(?), whose costume is that of the protagonist from a shonen anime you're aware of but have never actually watched.

You're not... exactly sure what you're looking for here.

You look up at Marlow and Kate, confused; as if anticipating your reaction, Kate gestures for you to look a second time. "There's five people in that photo."

You look again.

. . .

You don't see any other people in the--

OH.

oh shit you're staring right at her

She's in the background. She doesn't really blend in but your eye is naturally drawn away from her. A tall and thin young woman with freckles and tan lines, and wild hair you would describe as... eh, maybe dirty blonde?

She appears to have realized she's been caught in the picture; she's smiling awkwardly and waving at the camera with one hand,

putting a book back on the shelf with the other.

She also has a name tag, but she's too far back and the picture quality's too poor to make out what it says.

For Halloween she was dressed as a witch. Pointy hat, the whole nine.

"That's her," Marlow remarks. "That's the old librarian."

Old feels wrong to say; she doesn't look much older than you in the photo. The previous librarian. You don't recognize her at all, and you're pretty sure you would remember this face. There's something about her eyes that you just can't quite put into words--even in this blurry photograph, her eyes convey... something, something... off.

Kate actually sums it up better than you could. "She looks like she's seen some shit, huh?"

"Yeah," you mutter.

Seen some shit indeed.