Chapter 3
Petunia had made something of a name for herself in her home renovations, having done several houses in the past couple of years as well as the odd renovation job for extra money. The few houses she kept after renovating were under the same management as her parents' house earning her a steady income that flipping houses didn’t. She had several smaller projects on houses she intended to flip but had started to feel like she wanted a place of her own she could make just as she wanted it.
She decided on a large project to take her mind off the loneliness. She found it in an old London neighborhood: a Victorian-era townhouse in considerable disrepair. Considering the neighbors she was surprised by how cheap it was going for. Some asking around found that most who were interested in buying pulled out at the last minute, some going so far as to inform her it was haunted. A bonus is her book, a few of the other more difficult and rewarding properties she had done were also considered haunted, they tended to be the ones she hung on to.
When she bought it she looked over the contract and noticed the proceeds were going to a fund for the estate heir, whoever that might be, to be held in trust until able to claim it. Moving in had been a quick thing, using the old school trunk she was able to fit almost everything she needed in it, with one or two extra trunks that held her more expensive equipment. She understood what the previous potential buyers had meant when she stayed the first night. It felt like something was angry and hateful in the house, and that it was directed towards her in particular.
In the light of day, she noticed how difficult it was to get any sort of light into the rooms, the windows tinted with grime. After hours of scrubbing without success, she decided it would be less of a pain to just replace it. Several crashes sounded as it took more effort than she thought it would to break the windows, replacing them with plastic sheets until she could figure out what else needed to be knocked out or replaced.
Once done she started with the attic. The light from outside flooded into the not as small as it should be attic space, showing several things that she immediately decided to get rid of. Everyone left things in their homes when they sold it, and in cases like this one very little had been cleared out at all, it was practically fully furnished, a few items here and there were missing, made clear by the rare clean spots where the things used to rest. Whoever did inventory on the estate must not have cared for books or already had them and didn’t care for copies. A single wall was clean in one study where Petunia assumed some sort of tapestry must have been affixed at one time. Spots of various walls throughout the house were clean and showed where frames used to be hung for many years.
Many expensive things were left behind, which made Petunia think that whoever’s house this once was was not well-liked by their family if the things they loved enough to have in their house were left to rot with the rest of it. In fact, only a single portrait was left in the whole house. It seemed to have been made into the wall near the front door, perhaps a greeting thing, a way of showing who entered whose home they were entering. It gave Petunia an odd feeling, if a painting could be malicious then this one definitely was. She never caught it moving but could swear she felt its eyes on her whenever she walked past it.
The attic took weeks to clear out, a growing pile of junk in the kitchen: which was deemed utterly unusable due to the thick layer of grime. She slept in the garden for the first few months of her renovation. Once all the windows were replaced things did pick up, and soon she had the attic clean enough she felt comfortable enough to sleep through the night without horrible dreams of blood and screaming. The furniture she felt like she could fix up to either keep or sell was set off in one of the cleared rooms, the pile of junk she wasn’t quite sure what to do within the kitchen kept growing. A small pile of valuables, jewelry, gems, etc was slowly growing in a small box off to the side. Most of it was going to be sold to help cover the costs of this renovation. The house still felt haunted, not like how her parents' home or the other houses she had renovated felt alive but it felt like there was a malicious presence in the house with her. One that followed her around until she exited the house or went into the well-scrubbed attic. In the rooms that she had started to strip the paint off and sand down the floors, she felt a dull ache, like how a sore muscle feels when a knot is worked out.
She did not know what kind of bug was lurking in the house, she never saw it clearly but she felt it when they crawled over her or bit her in her sleep or when she tried to read by the fireplace. So she hired a pest control team and bug bombed the place. She had dealt with roach infestations before but was not quite prepared for the small black balls of smoke? that seemed to be barely alive when she entered after the bombing. Using a vacuum she picked them all up and then had to go through her sister's old books to check because she was fairly certain they were magical things if the bug bombing didn't kill them but just disoriented them. Finding them in the household charms book she soon realized most magicals just spelled them away. It took several trips to the library to find a muggle witch book that discussed cleansings that actually worked and didn't make her feel repulsed. A blood sacrifice should definitely not count as a cleansing ritual.
She kept the magical pests trapped in several glass jars, but she didn’t want to keep them trapped forever she just wanted to get rid of them. A book in the house’s library suggested a potion, and after the umpteenth cleansing ritual didn't work, though it did seem to allow more light in the house, she tried it. There were cauldrons and tools in the boxes of things she had been clearing out of the rooms. It took a couple of tries but eventually, it looked at the end like how the book described it should. The book recommended a spell to cause the potion to mist over the pests, she figured a spray bottle might work too. Plastic was a bad idea she discovered as the potion ate through it rather quickly. Stainless steel and glass worked though. Spraying the captured pests she figured it wouldn’t hurt to spray the rest of the house as a precaution. The number of things that hissed as the potion settled saw her setting up her tent once more in the garden. The next morning her body ached in ways she hadn’t known it could.