Part 2 of 2! We pick up with David and Daniel and a pissed off house ghost…
“My laptop is dead,” Daniel said. “I plugged it in last night, it was supposedly charging all night…”
“That’s weird. You don’t think it’s related to…”
“To my charging cable?” Daniel stopped David from going down that well-trodden track. “Yes, David, that must be it,” he said giving David a look to halt further discussion. “Is your cord in the office? Can you grab it?”
David sighed. “Sure. Yes. Absolutely.” He crossed to the office doorway and let out a scream.
“What?!”
David had retreated back across the family room. “Rattlesnake!”
“What the hell?”
“In there!” David pointed to the office. “Fucker is coiled and , and…” he shook his fist.
“Rattling?”
“Yes! What do we do?!” he sat heavily on the leather couch and reached for a throw pillow as a shield.
Daniel strode across the floor to the door.
“Daniel, no!”
“Nothing,” he said looking into the room. “There’s nothing in here.”
“What if it’s hiding. Daniel! Don’t go in–“ but it was too late. Daniel disappeared inside the room. David clutched the pillow tightly.
“No snake,” Daniel said as he came out, annoyance plain on his face. “Except for this,” he shook the snarled laptop charging cable. “Would it kill you to wind a cable up?”
“Daniel, there was a snake in there.”
“David…”
“And this morning the water in the bathroom turned on by itself. And last night that picture your niece painted fell off the wall. And the day before that…”
“David, enough!”
“Daniel, you almost died Monday night.”
Daniel sat down on the couch. “I didn’t die. My CPAP machine malfunctioned. There was a tremor the other night. The sink is ancient. And the snake… your imagination,” he said calmly, putting his arm around David.
David rested his head against Daniel’s chest. “I didn’t make that up, Daniel. We angered the–“
“Don’t say it, David.”
“You can’t pretend this is all coincidence.”
“You’re right.”
David picked his head up and looked quizzically at Daniel.
“You’re right,” he said and abruptly stood up. He cleared his throat dramatically. “Okay ghost, we know you’re here,” he called loudly.
“Domovoi.”
“Okay, Domovoi?” he looked at David who nodded. “We know you’re here. But this is our house now, not yours. You can’t scare us!”
“No!” David said. “That’s just it, it’s our house, but it’s his too. He’s angry we’re disturbing it.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. “Sorry, Domovoi, I misspoke. Yes, it’s our house, but it’s your house too. Certainly we can get along, okay?” He looked around the room as if expecting an answer.
“We’re sorry about the renovation!” David called into the silence.
“Uh, sure,” Daniel agreed. “But we’re still finishing it,” he said looking pointedly at David.
“As long as you’re okay with that, Domovoi!” David amended.
“David?” Daniel whispered. “What are you doing? We’re not going to stop the remodel…”
“No, sure,” David whispered back. “But the Domovoi has to feel a part of this.”
“A part of it?” Daniel whispered back. “How do we do that?”
“There’s…” he waved his hands wildly, “Some ritual or something.”
Daniel mimicked David’s wild gesticulation. “Is this the international gesture for ‘ritual’?”
David scowled at him.
“Look, Domovoi, we’re all in this together. Can we work together?”
The front door exploded inward as a torrent of wind howled through the doorway with a roar, blasting David and Daniel. The wind died abruptly, and the only noise was the door swinging on its hinges as David and Daniel stared dumbfounded.
“So,” Daniel said, “That’s a no?”
The knocking kept them up all night.
David could hear Daniel’s breathing shift to sleep breathing and he himself started to drift off… Loud rapping in the office, erratic in intensity, it seemed to roam around the room from corner to corner. They looked at each other.
The knocking stopped.
David sighed. Daniel rolled over.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK from the ceiling above them as if an orangutan was bouncing around in the attic and furiously wanted to break through and onto their bed.
“For fuck’s sake!” Daniel said climbing out of bed. He started getting dressed.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going… somewhere. Leaving here for the night!”
The knocking stopped.
“It stopped.”
“For now!”
“Maybe for real?”
“You really think so?”
“Daniel don’t go. I don’t want to be alone.”
Daniel stopped tying his shoe. He turned to look at David’s panicked eyes. He undressed and climbed back into bed. David lay his head on his chest.
The knocking started in the kitchen.
Daniel stroked David’s hair as they both lay awake for the rest of the night.
When the first sunlight backlit the curtains, Daniel opened his eyes. He realized the knocking had to have stopped at some point and they both finally fell into exhausted sleep.
“Mmm?” David stirred.
“I guess we did get a little sleep.”
David settled down onto his pillow as Daniel started to get out of bed. “Where are you going?” he asked sleepily.
“Bathroom.”
“Oh.” He heard Daniel’s footsteps out of the room, across the family room to the bathroom. He heard the door open. Pause. He heard the door close again, and Daniel’s footsteps back across the floor. “Problem?”
“The bathroom is full of bees.”
“Bees?”
“Bees.”
David hurried out of bed and to the bathroom door. Hand on the knob, he opened the door slowly. A ray of sunlight illuminated the small bathroom and shone on hundreds of thousands of bees blanketing every surface, their collective buzz an aural assault. He shut the door with a little slam. He crossed back to the bedroom and started to get dressed. “Let’s go.”
They didn’t come back for two months.
By that point the contractors finished the remodel that was supposed to take three weeks. Daniel and David took turns nightly listening to the litany of troubles on the jobsite: tools malfunctioning, concrete refusing to dry, a healthy redwood fell across the yard, barely missed the house but crushed the foreman’s Ford F-250. The lead contractor arrived early one morning and was chased off the site by a honest-to-god grizzly bear. His guys didn’t believe it. Daniel and David did.
But eventually the addition was completed, and David and Daniel arrived in the middle of the day. The house was quiet as the contractor showed them the new bathroom and laundry room. The work looked great and they were smiles all around. David and Daniel shared a knowing look when the contractor said goodbye and practically ran to his truck.
They closed the front door and walked to the kitchen. David opened the cloth grocery bag he had sat on the counter. Daniel took the French baguette from Costeaux bakery in Healdsburg and set it carefully on the new slate floor directly in front of the gleaming six burner Wolf range. David knelt down and opened the glass bottle of Strauss milk and poured it into a china bowl with a delicate blue and gold net pattern that the man in the antique store assured them came from Czarist Russia. Daniel set a matching plate down and emptied a small bag of sweet-smelling pipe tobacco.
He straightened up and stood at the edge of the kitchen staring at the offering. Taking David’s hand, Daniel spoke quietly, kindly. “Domovoi, we make this offering to you. We’re both sorry to disturb the house and to imply that you were anything other than a welcome member of this household.” He smiled at David who smiled back at him.
“We’re not the old Russian family, Domovoi,” David added. “But… we hope to earn your trust again.”
The house creaked loudly. And then it settled. David and Daniel both felt the house at peace.
Daniel sighed. “I’m so relieved,” he said. “I didn’t want to steal one of the neighbor’s chickens to sacrifice…”
“Right?” David agreed. “’Hi, we’re your new gay neighbors. Don’t mind us, we just have to perform an animal sacrifice to appease the angry house ghost.’”
“That would have been super awkward…”
“Domovoi,” David addressed the air, “I will make my signature fried chicken! That’s so much better than some bloody bird carcass!”
One of the burners on the stove burst to high flame.
“Well, uh, not tonight. But soon!”
