Vic may have overdone it on the sugar.
The back of the hearse made it look like he planned start his own bakery tomorrow, rather than spending the day overseeing students who didn't know a sheet of staff paper from a printer calibration page. It towered over everything, and it would be quite inconvenient to haul it all through the windows of his new-old abode.
Worse, a downpour had begun, and while that sort of weather was normally his favorite, wet bags of sugar were useless. Given how well the sweets had worked to protect his instruments, and given he was starting to come around to this deeply disturbing, fledgling belief in the paranormal, he wasn't about to lose protection-from-ghost supplies. It would be a crime to leave the stringed instruments to fend for themselves.
So he backed the car as close as he could, then trudged through the side garden to open the unlocked window. Mud scraped along the sill, water dripped down the ruched wallpaper and textured paint of the sitting room, and the hardwood caught evidence of the path he took. From the sitting room to the iron maiden behind the front door, backwards then, the great hulking ironwork dragged to sit in front of the hallway. Then a wide curve around it, until the muddied prints came to rest in the doorway.
The cross-breeze from the doorway and window scattered his sheet music to a litany of curses, but that wasn't the crescendo of this endeavor.
No, he'd parked too blasted close. Opening the back of the hearse was impossible from this angle.
Victrus brushed back damp, dark locks and tugged on his trench coat to straighten it from the adventurous home entry procedure. If all this trouble had merely been for a maybe-ghost, he wouldn't have gone to the effort. But whatever, or more probably whoever, had taken to obsessively cleaning his things could not be denied existence--and was already in the house. Also, his own groceries were a necessity that had his stomach grumbling.
The resulting dance took multiple trips back through the window until he'd arranged the vehicle and the awning over the house entryway and the wide-swinging door on the back of the hearse was anchored against the siding, a series of umbrellas tied together and stretched over the whole exposed mess to keep several enormous bags of sugar from the elements. He lugged everything inside, his own bagged groceries dumped atop the now extensively muddied boards, plastic bags marring footprints.
Sugar made it all the way to the kitchen table, safely dry and enclosed in a towering heap of enormous paper bags. After parking the car and closing the window and door to the house once more, he lit the requisite amount of candles and spent the afternoon filling the pantry. All remained in their commercial-sized bags save one, which he broke down into smaller containers. Less portion control, more ease of space, but anyway one sliced it, far too much effort for a ghost. It was worth it.
"For the strings," he reminded himself again. "Certain things simply must be done."
Vic stepped back, appraising the closet as it barely closed. Taken altogether, it was enough sugar to kill a dozen diabetics.
One fell swoop. Poor souls.
With the half pound he'd left out the night before, and given the resulting note, he was quite sure his ghost was not so afflicted. Or perhaps...it had been. Hence the cravings. Could a ghost be killed twice?
Recalling the note sent his eyes to the grand piano, and Victrus cursed anew at the damp and muddied pages spread across the floor. Retrieving them one by one, he carried the dripping stack through the house until he stood in front of the laundry room. It was a rather large room, for laundry. Not like the modern apartments with a tiny closet where one machine could be stacked atop the other. No, this was a room designed for washing, scrubbing, ironing, folding, and drying. Large industrial sinks in the corner gleamed like the rest of the house after his co-habiter got to it. Two long cords crisscrossed the room, hung from one wall to its opposite and laden with clothespins.
That would do. That would do nicely. He fastened the edges of his papers to the strings, clipping the corners up to hang the music to dry. It wasn't until he got to the middle of the stack that he saw the brief message.
Vic frowned. Aaaaaand now he had to explain his methods to an entity that, before his aunt had passed, he'd believed to be a mere popular culture explanation for things that go bump in the night.
Again.
But first, the ice cream that was probably melting all over the entry!
By the time he'd finished hanging the music to dry and put away the groceries, he sank to the floor in front of the pantry and swiped his arm across his forehead. Exhausting, this, the housekeeping and pandering to supposed supernatural houseguests. He was too tired to do more than flip over the grocery receipt and scribble a quick note--this time not constrained by measured stanzas of sheet music. Quite enough physical activity for one day--if not the week. And yet, there was practice to be had, a disastrous floor that even he could not in good conscience leave in its present state nor leave cups of sugar amid the muddied steps, lesson plans to sort for his students........
He dozed off to this far too extensive list of should-do's, damp trench coat balled underneath his head, long legs sprawled over the kitchen tile and under what would assuredly be a healthy dripping of wax, and a crumpled receipt draped across his fingers with words scrawled across the back in black ink:
"Polish is shiny but naught but a mask. It strips identity. Prevents the baring of soul. And the wrong strings rob them of voice. Would that you or I"
The rest lay smudged beneath his thumb, save for the words "cream" and "fridge".
Dreams come in a size too big so we can grow into them.
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