Unfinished Basement

August brings the Sunday Morning Transport another amazing line up, with stories by A.R. Capetta, Lauren Teffeau, Leslie What, and David Bowles. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

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For August’s first, free story, A.R. Capetta brings us a rather unusual real estate search, with particularly spooky listings… ~ Julian and Fran, August 4, 2024

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Unfinished Basement

by A. R. Capetta

2 Bedroom, 2 Bath, Full Kitchen, Semi-Furnished, 2 ghosts, Private Staircase, Balconette

“Maybe they’re nice ghosts,” Oak said, fighting the dimness of the coffee shop to get a good look at the listing’s strangely framed photos. A series of aerial shots of a four-poster bed. A fully centered half-dead spider plant in a picture window. A shot of the crease where two walls met.

“I don’t know if we should apply principles of niceness to ghosts,” Kar said, scrolling past a listing with four ghosts. Four? Was it a family? Also, for that price? “It seems unfair in some weird way.”

“Yes. I’m weird. Not the person who is arguing about changing our entire methods for understanding people just because they’re dead people.” Oak snatched her phone away from Kar, who simply took theirs out of a back pocket and started a parallel search with the same geographical parameters and a slightly higher price point. They were going to have to spend the max if they didn’t want to end up as the sad, eternal babysitters of someone else’s spider plants. (There was no getting around the ghosts.)

Kar and Oak were the only two in the coffee shop on a Saturday. There wasn’t even an employee to make lattes, just a carafe and a sign that said, Take Some Coffee, Pay What You Can, Leave the Canister or I’ll Haunt the Shit Out of You.

“Let’s go see this one, just to say we tried,” Oak said, brandishing her phone, the screen spiderwebbed with cracks.

3 Bedrooms, 2 Bathrooms, Soaking Tub, Modern Kitchen, Fully Renovated, Fenced Yard, Off-Street Parking, Mountain Views, Balconette, Hardwood Floors, Utilities Included, Everything New, 1 ghost

It was in their price range. There were better photos this time, attractively lit, showing off viable human living spaces.

“Absolutely not,” Kar said.

“Because it’s on the other side of the river?” Oak asked.

“Because it’s a red flag parade.” Kar slammed the bad coffee down to make it good for something—emphasis. Sloshy punctuation.

Oak gave a misty sigh. “Okay, I know it’s a long listing but . . .”

That was one of the foremost signs that something was wrong with a place. When a home played host to very bad ghosts, the rental companies would try to overwhelm you with the good stuff up front. So by the time you got around to the ghost, you were thinking, this could work.

(There was also the fact that they capitalized Every Single Word Except ghost, which was meant as a form of distraction but actually made it feel as if spirits were whispering around on soft feet, slipping through the cracks of the listings.)

“Okay, how about this one?” Oak asked tentatively as they left the coffee shop, abandoning it just like they’d left behind the pretense that this was a date. They were house hunting now—and hunting was never quite the same thing as romance, no matter what the company. Or the quarry.

2-Bedroom Duplex, 1 1/2 Bath, Private Driveway and Entrance, 2 (minor) ghosts, Garden, Working Fireplace, Ample Storage

“Well?” Oak asked as they walked back toward the bike rack, across the only intersection in town with a light that still worked. Nobody was out driving. “What do you think?”

There was no legal obligation to mention when ghosts were under the age of eighteen, and yet a lot of the listings did. Waifs, they were called. The living people who grew attached to them were Guardians. The living people who ran away from them were shit out of luck because you would not get your deposit back.

“Bookmark it,” Kar said. “We can come back to that later.”

This was the fourth listing with (minor) ghosts that Oak had pointed out in the last week.

Did she want kids, was that why she was attracted to apartments that already had them? Or did her nonchalance about departed children signal the exact opposite? Did Kar want to put their relationship through the do-we-want-to-try talk when the dwindling world meant things like sperm banks had mostly vanished? What would one even look like, a canister left out on the counter?

Kar reached the far side of the intersection—alone.

“Oak?” Kar said.

She had drifted to a stop, phone held up to her face. A blush screeched onto her cheeks, and Kar couldn’t tell if Oak had gotten embarrassed or excited or scared or . . . what. It wasn’t any of her usual blushes. Kar pulled her to the sidewalk as an actual car blew by, honking and honking and honking.

“Grab the bikes,” Oak said. “We’re late for an open house.”

3 bedrooms (1 is small), 2 bathrooms, modern kitchen, gas heat, big yard, unfinished basement, no ghosts

Kar and Oak walked through the front hallway—was this a foyer? sort of boxy, with an overhead light—to find a lonely real estate agent arranging a few pieces of fruit in a bowl on the kitchen island. Orange, orange, banana.

Oak had sworn the open house would be swamped. That they’d never stand a chance. Not with the money they made.

“Oh!” the agent said brightly. “I’m Savannah.”

She kept arranging the fruit, not quite satisfied.

Kar and Oak looked around, waiting for other couples to emerge, smiling and saying, we’ll take it.

No one was there, not even to see a ghostless house. Most real estate agents existed in a state of panicked desperation—so few people left, compared to the old numbers. So many houses and apartments to fill. Most people, once they got used to their places, and the ghosts lodged in them, showed no real interest in leaving. Nobody wanted to start the nervous dance of a new haunting.

“So, what do you think?” Savannah asked. She was the calmest Kar had seen a person wearing a business suit in years. Possibly, ever.

“I want to see the basement,” Oak said, planting her elbows on the kitchen island.

Not the bedrooms, not the bathrooms, not how big the advertised big yard was. “The basement?” Savannah asked, pulling the words taut. “You’re sure that’s where you want to start?” She pivoted to Kar. “What about you?”

Oak was the one who knew about water pressure, who tapped confidently at walls to locate studs. She was the one who knew how to take care of a house, and yet people slid the forms toward Kar. The more overtly masculine one. With everything vanishing, somehow this behavior never did.

“I want to start wherever you want,” Kar said to Oak, cutting Savannah out of the conversation casually, definitively.

Oak headed for the door that led to descending stairs. Kar tossed and then pocketed one of the oranges for good measure.

This petty triumph faded into a cold mist as Kar went down to the unfinished basement. These stairs were too narrow, too steep. They led down to a space with concrete floors and flowered curtains and a mini fridge stuffed under the stairs, furtively.

“Someone liked it down here,” Oak said with a trickle of indulgence.

Someone had been living down here.

A slightly molded armchair in the corner seemed to agree with that assessment. It rocked a bit, like nodding.

Kar thought, ghost ghost ghost.

But that was just Oak passing behind it, accidentally kicking it into motion.

“Ha,” Oak said. “If this is the worst the house has to offer, I don’t need to see the rest.”

“We’ll take it,” Kar yelled up the stairs, the words ringing against concrete and coming back to haunt them.

Oak and Kar moved into the house—their house—less than a week later. They had keys and a truckful of furniture and the solemn intention of having sex in every room before they decided where the furniture went.

They stitched together possessions from separate apartments. They had too much stuff, and not nearly enough. Some rooms were full to bursting. Some stood empty, strewn with drop cloths, like old photos of palaces in the off-season.

It was a luxury of space, a richness of space, a surfeit of light.

They spent entire days in bed. They forgot the colors of the walls in their old apartments, forgot the habits of their old ghosts. Kar took fewer and fewer hours at work, even though the house needed more money than they expected.

At first all they wanted was to be home, as if the more time they sank into this place, the more it truly belonged to them.

It started with the kitchen sink.

Kar found themself there, seemingly always.

How could they be at the sink so often? How could the sink always be dripping?

And Oak was in the basement, which was fine, because Kar did not want to help strip it, did not want to rip out grubby acoustic ceiling tiles, which seemed to be the order of the day. Kar brought Oak a glass of unsweetened iced tea and Oak smiled but then looked away mindlessly, forgetting to say thank you.

A streak of cold moved through Kar, a bolt of disgust.

They hated the basement, they hated everything in the basement.

Which was unfortunate, because Oak was in the basement, and they could not seem to unpick that fact from the rest. They climbed the stairs, refusing to look back. By the time they got to the sink, there were twice as many dishes as before.

They owned too many glasses.

Kar smashed a few against the sink’s metal side. Almost-pretty sounds of breaking helped distract from the thud thud thud of tiles below. Kar did not care when their arms came up from the water laced in shallow cuts, cobwebbed in blood.

It took Kar months to realize that the basement was not just being gutted but renovated.

“You have to tell me if you’re doing a big . . . project thing,” Kar said. They were both sleeping in the second bedroom that night, rotating because they could. It was one of the mostly empty rooms, with restless curtains and a blanket nest on the floor.

“Why should I tell you?” Oak asked. “You told me you didn’t want to talk about anything house-shaped.”

“No, I don’t want to be roped into any major house projects. That’s different.”

“What do you think having a house means?” Oak asked.

“Watching you be handy, giving you drinks, rubbing you down?” Kar said, even though their mind was giving a much less adorable answer.

Space. Light. Time. Emptiness.

Oak flipped onto her side. Propped her pointed chin on a palm. “It could be such a good place, don’t you think, if we just . . .” And then she listed seventy things that could happen to the basement to make it better, even though it was undeniably the worst part of the house, even though the house was undeniably great except for the basement.

With a slurring of seasons, six months passed, then a year. They celebrated their anniversary in the house with a tiny cake, a single upright candle. They smiled at each other and snapped photos in the kitchen. Kar sent the photos to Oak’s cracked phone because they didn’t have anyone else to share them with.

“We’re so lucky we found this place,” Oak said.

“Right,” Kar said.

They still felt lucky to have a house without ghosts. They just wanted living in this house to get a little easier. Having no dead people piled up in the corners of their lives was supposed to make things easier.

Oak took a second slice of cake down to the basement.

Oak was always in the basement.

Kar stood at the top of the stairs, inhaling the smell of Oak, twined with a subtle mold that never reached the vanishing point, no matter how many hours a day they ran the dehumidifier. The basement was checkered with furniture now, but it didn’t look like a home. It looked like a bunker with a love seat.

“Have you finished it yet?” Kar asked, and it was meant to be a bad joke, but it twisted like a leg going out from under them on the stairs. Twisted and turned mean.

“I don’t think I want to finish,” Oak said quietly but solidly. “Because then I’ll have to come back upstairs.”

“What’s wrong with upstairs?” Kar asked.

“You’re there and you’re just . . . angry,” Oak said. “All the time.”

“I’m angry? I’m angry?”

Kar didn’t feel like they were angry, not unless they were standing at the sink and there were a thousand dishes in it. They didn’t feel, after a year of living in this house, like they were anything or anyone at all.

Two towns away, Savannah pecked at new listings, lining up the utilities, adding a little flourish to the amenities. Her reading glasses perched low on her nose. Her robe slipped off her shoulder, and she felt the rush of static as it climbed back up.

“Don’t you think you’re obsessing, Sav?” asked Jacks, a ghost whose touch was light and softly prickled.

“Come to bed,” said Juniper, whose voice had always reminded Savannah of chilled gin. Icy and floral.

“I just don’t want anyone to think there’s anything wrong with these places,” Savannah said.

“There isn’t,” said Tillie, shy and softhearted, who left messages in the steam on the bathroom mirror. “Come to bed.”

There were six ghosts in Savannah’s house. They all loved her very much, and she loved them back, and it was easy, because with dead people you knew exactly what you were getting.

Savannah finished off her listings and her open bottle of white at the same time. The problem wasn’t the new condo on Spring Street or the studio on Moonlight Terrace. She prided herself on solid properties, always had, even when the housing market and the rental market had melted down and queasily recombined. Many people in her field were evolving underhanded techniques to play matchmaker to untenable hauntings, which she simply wouldn’t stoop to. All of that niggled at Savannah, but it didn’t keep her up at night. She still felt guilty after putting a couple in that one place, the one where nobody had ever taken their last breath, but that didn’t mean nothing lingered.

Things that wouldn’t die could be much more dangerous than things that did.

Kar kept making dinner every night, even when Oak no longer came upstairs to eat it. They left the food on a tray by the basement door and Oak snatched it without saying a thing. In some obscure form of protest, Kar refused to clean the dishes, now permanently encrusted with food and piled like an architectural nightmare in the sink.

When they got near the sink, they got so angry they could barely see, red pushing behind their eyes until they nearly blacked out. And while they were like that, trying to ignore the feeling long enough to get a plate clean enough to heap more potatoes and bloody meat on it—Oak’s request—a submerged steak knife cut their hand so badly that shocked gasps poured out. And blood.

The blood speckled the dishwater, seamed through its grayness.

Kar kept getting hurt. Oak kept getting farther and farther away.

Kar slumped to the ground. They were bleeding a lot. Hands did that, right? They were going to be okay, right?

Vaguely, they wondered if ambulances still existed. Not that Kar could afford one if they did.

That’s when an email came in.

From Savannah, a single line: stay out of the basement.

Kar’s hand was leaking watery red over the phone screen. But it didn’t matter. Oak needed to see this.

They banged on the door with their unsliced hand. Pushed at the knob, but that did nothing. Shoved with a shoulder and felt something rumble out of place.

“Did you barricade yourself?” Kar shouted through the door, down the stairs.

“Did you try to break down the door rather than wait?” came Oak’s blunt and ready reply.

“This isn’t us,” Kar said.

And then, over and over, until the phrasing rotted away and revealed the truth. “This isn’t us.”

They went over to the sink. A viciously upset feeling slashed into them. They wanted to pick up that steak knife. They wanted to use it on—their skin, any skin, it didn’t matter, nothing mattered.

They stepped away and it receded.

Hands slippery-red, Kar mashed the call button. “Did you lie about this house not having ghosts?”

“Of course not.” The real estate agent had the audacity to sound a little miffed.

“Tell me about the basement before I bleed out in the sink.”

Savannah gave a wincing, guttering sigh. “How should I explain this?”

Kar thought it was a rhetorical question, but then a second voice came on, chilled and yet sweet, and very faraway. “A ghost is not always a haunting. A haunting is not always a ghost.”

Savannah, again: “I’ll be right over. Is it okay if I bring my friend?”

When Kar’s hand was stitched through with black thread and doused in antiseptic—a short cut, but a mean one—Savannah took a bundle of black candles from her purse and placed them in a perfectly spaced circle on the kitchen floor. She used the same eye for staging spaces and performing rituals, like the ones that had safely rehomed several of her favorite ghosts in her apartment.

Juniper paced back and forth through the kitchen island.

“I have to go down there,” she said. “She’ll be angry at anyone who tries to pry her out of the basement, but thankfully I’m dead so—”

Still gulping down pain, Kar nodded.

“The banishing circle is for the energy that’s keeping her trapped. I don’t think we can disperse it, but we can disrupt it. You know what to do.”

Savannah nodded.

Juniper drifted through the door and headed down. When Savannah heard the sounds of a wild struggle performed by a single person, she blew out the candle in front of her, breaking the circle. The power cut.

Candle flame transformed the kitchen with its persistent glow.

“Why did you let us live here if you knew?” Kar asked. “How did you know?”

“Juniper does a walk-through of every house, makes sure none of the hauntings are too ghastly. Working with a ghost is part of what makes me such a good real estate agent.” The luster of pride went out of her voice and she whispered, “Usually.”

“When Juniper felt what was wrong . . . ,” Kar said flatly, urging Savannah along.

“I thought it wouldn’t affect you two. You’re not like the previous occupants, the ones who hated each other so much that their behavior left a groove in this house that can’t be un-carved. They were straight and you’re . . . well. More like me. I thought the problem would bypass you entirely.”

“Bad energy is bad energy is bad energy,” Kar muttered.

The basement door opened with a timid creak.

“Why is the real estate agent on our floor?” Oak asked hazily.

“You ask about that before the ghost that came downstairs to save you?” Kar asked, running at Oak in sweet disbelief.

“And you’re sure you don’t want to leave?” Savannah asked one final time after Kar and Oak had been given a chance to reunite and sleep for a solid day. Savannah had offered the pick of her listings. She’d promised south-facing windows, friendly ghosts, prices slashed until they scraped the bones of the bare minimum.

“We didn’t get a real chance here,” Kar said.

Oak held their hand, careful with the wounded places. “We want to stay.”

“With the right rituals, I believe I can release the energy trapped by the sink,” Juniper ventured.

“We could . . . gut the basement?” Kar tried. “Brick it up?”

“I don’t think that would be enough.” Oak winced as she admitted, “I probably would have busted a door in the side of the house to get back in.”

Something about that idea—that door—pricked at Savannah’s real estate brain. “When you were first down there, how did you feel?”

“Oh. Fantastic.”

“And it was . . . an escape?” Savannah got up, already arranging bowls on the kitchen island.

By dawn, she had laid out her plan.

Savannah used the contacts she had amassed to get the work done fast, paying cash for a quick mold treatment, hauling down carpet squares, calling in a favor to get a real-life contractor to put in a side door and blow out some windows. After that, Kar and Oak descended the stairs with buckets of paint, ringed by Savannah’s ghosts to keep them safe. They let the dishes pile once more as Juniper eased the bad energy away from the sink. Then Savannah did the washing. The water was a deathly shade when she drained it, but she felt fine and entirely herself.

She went home and wrote a new listing.

1 garden room in a ghost-free house, a perfect ghost getaway. Thick pile carpet, deliriously comfortable sofa bed. Separate entrance, natural light, mini fridge always stocked with two six-packs (please leave one untouched). One high-resolution TV (sometimes gets football games from twenty years ago). Continental or full breakfast provided on a tray. Owners promise to provide a great stay and leave you completely alone. No long-term renters. Single occupancy only.

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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A. R. Capetta is an award-winning author of magic, science, weirdness, and wonder. Their novels include The Lost Coast, The Brilliant Death, and The Heartbreak Bakery. With their spouse, Cory McCarthy, they co-authored the bestselling Once & Future series. Their previous Sunday Morning Transport short story “Resurrection Highway” will be anthologized in this year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. To see more about their work, visit onceandfuturestories.com.

“Unfinished Basement,” © A.R. Capetta, 2024.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!