Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Rene Gav ❯ The Case of an Oikomanic ( Chapter 2 )

By: Dix JL

Summary: Rene has a business going; he helps strayed souls and haunted mortals, but he is no angel.

A/N: And today I’ll introduce to you Lucius Hoax. When I thought to name this wonderful character, the only word that came through mind was ‘luscious’, hence the name.
Oikomania: Abnormal desire to be at home





The Case of an Oikomanic




The heat outside, from the window of his car, crackled. The air conditioner started to sweat, and its downpour pooled on the dirty carpet of the car. The sedan gave out a pathetic clanking sound every now and then as if begging him to kill it eventually.

A hitchhiker was waiting on the side of the road, and Rene had no plan whatsoever to give him a lift until his car decided at that moment it was overheated.

The stranger grinned at him as he stepped out of his car. Opening the hood of the car, he stepped back as the steam hit him on the face.

“Hello, need any help?” The stranger started toward him.

“No.” Rene took out a bottle of water from his car and poured some of it against his slightly burned fingers.

“You know, considering this is a dessert, I would suggest you not to do that; you might never know where you could get any water ration on this road.”

Rene drank from his bottle and then threw the bottle back inside the car.

“My name’s Joe.”

Rene squinted as he looked up at the stranger. The man was big. “Isn’t everybody’s?”

“Yes, I must admit that my name’s quite common, but that’s me. I am indeed a common man with a common name,” Joe elucidated amiably.

Rene nodded as he looked at the austere sight around him.

“So where’re you heading, stranger?”

Rene threw a brief glance at him and then squatted down on the side of the road. “Name’s Rene, and I’m heading straight.”

“What a coincidence. I’m heading straight myself, wherever the road would take me. Mind giving me a ride?”

“Can’t right now,” Rene pointed at his car.

“I don’t mind waiting.” Joe squatted down next to him, “Can use the company too. It seems both of us do, right?”

Waiting for no reply, Joe continued to talk, “Tell me, Rene. Do you believe in destiny? I guess you can’t care less, right? Well, I used to be like you too until one day it came back to get me.”

“I used to work as a real estate agent, you see, and I was real good at it as well. There were times when in one day I sold five houses. And real estate business wasn’t exactly easy, you know. Not many people were fond of insistent realtor sniffing around their properties. All those years of selling so many damn houses, I never had any ounce of idea what I was selling. You see, houses aren’t like things, merchandise that one sells in stores. Houses have histories; they have wound marks, emotional stains. The energy inside a house lives.”

Rene smiled. If there was one thing he knew, then it was about energy.

“They’re just like us human.” Joe stopped for a moment, searching his company’s face for affirmation. He caught Rene’s gaze and held it for a moment, emphasizing his point. Rene nodded for him to continue.

“Anyway, I sold houses.” A shudder ran through Joe’s hand. He held his trembling hand with another, wiling it to go away. “You know, it never affected me like this before in broad daylight. This vast, bleak desert must’ve some kind of an affect on me.”

“I sold houses, and that in turn made me like some kind of slave handler, I suppose.” A restraint laugh coming out of him, “But I never got to have one. A house, I meant. And after seeing all that happy couples closing the deals and entering their new domain with some kind of indescribable feeling of fresh hope, I guessed I decided that I wanted that too. So, as soon as I scraped up the money for a nice house and left a few for a real nice life, I proposed to a girl and got what I thought I wanted.”

“The house was magnificent, a two-story single-family home, almost two hundred years of age. Of course some remodeling had been done for a couple of times. Yet, when you walked inside this house you felt thrown back in times. My wife had never taken a liking to that house. She felt as if there was something inside that didn’t want her there. She was a sensitive person, you see. I myself, of course, had heard of some places that were haunted and stuff, but I really wouldn’t mind if it was the case by ours. In fact, I thought it might raise the historic value of the house, and I know from my field there are some people out there looking for this kind of properties.”

“The moment I stepped foot in the house, I felt comfortable in it. It was as if something wanted me to stay, welcoming me back home. I walked through every room of the house feeling belonged, like a real master of the domicile.”

“We had no neighbors in the near distance, so it was only my wife and I in the middle of the lone road. She complained to me about this, of course, but I just wanted the house so much that I pretty much ignored her complaint.”

“So we moved in. In only a few days it seemed that we had everything nicely settled. Having to put things away we didn’t want, I wandered to the cellar. As I stepped into it, I couldn’t believe my eyes at the abundance of stuffs that were put in that dingy room. Most of them were pretty high in value. There were some artworks, antique household’s goods, leather-bounded, collectable books, antique doll. But one that I liked the most was a crystal chandelier, covered with dirty white rag, laid there on the floor.”

“I called up my wife to see all the stuff that I’ve found. At first she refused to enter the cellar, saying that it gave her the creeps and stuff, but I finally got her to come down. As I was showing her the crystal of the chandelier, she suddenly wrapped both her hands on her throat, trying to pry something from the skin of her neck. Her face turned purple, she looked like she was choking. I got her out of the room and immediately she felt better. She explained to me that before it had felt as if hands had been choking her inside that cellar. I was finding a hard time believing her, but she was really affected, she was coughing and tears were running down her eyes.”

“We then had a fight when I said that I wanted to hang that piece of chandelier in the hallway. She refused to have anything moved from that cellar and be put into any room of the house, but in the end I won our argument. Wanting nothing do with it, she retired to her room complaining headache.”

“After that I thought nothing of our fight. I’ve always thought that quarrelling was something that young couple did all the time. I never took any serious notion of her protests. It was just that we knew each other so little before we were married, and whenever she was uncomfortable with something, she never said it outright, so I could do something about it.”

“She probably had, but you refused to listen to her anyway,” Rene interrupted him.

Joe was slightly taken aback, but then he recovered and shrugged. “I probably did.”

“You did,” Rene quietly insisted.

“Okay I did.” Joe threw him an annoyed glance, “may I continue my story now?”

Rene shrugged.

“As time went by, I grew more and more attached to the house. In every free time that I could get I would be working on the house, patching every hole, polishing it some more, adding a few embellishments here and there. There was just so much works to do in it. Instead of feeling exhausted by all those work, I grew giddy whenever I got the chance to work around the property, like a man meeting his mistress.”

“Sometimes I’d find myself talking to the wall that I was painting. One day, I even found myself crying after looking at the damage at the side of the roof struck by lightning.”

“I grew attached that I didn’t even realize that I was living with someone in that house. I forgot for a moment that I was married.”

“You know how some people said they don’t even know their own partner after all. Well, for me it was literally so. After a few months living with my wife, we barely see each other. Most of it because I was so busy with my work and she had what seemed like a permanent migraine and would retire to bed early in the evening before I came home from work. Seeing she almost never left the house, at first I was worried that she could have fallen into a depression, but with time I ceased to care. I was so caught up in my work and the house that I hadn’t time for anything else.”

“But then something changed. She changed. She came up to me one day looking finer than ever and spent the entire time of the day with me. She even stood by me as I worked around the house. She never did that before.”

“I felt like I was the luckiest man in the world. I have a home I loved, a beautiful wife who cherished me. It couldn’t get any better than that.”

“But it did. After what seemed like a few months, she was pregnant with my child. I decided then and there to quit my job so that I could spend more time with my wife, our soon to be born child, and the house. What happened then seemed so fast. We had a baby girl, and she grew up so fast.”

“One day as I was putting my little girl to sleep, I remembered that we had something in the cellar that my daughter would love. It was a bisque doll, a beautiful raven-haired girl in a red satin dress. I went down to the cellar and picked up the forgotten doll lying on the floor when my eyes caught something in the corner of the room. On an oak study desk was a framed picture of a young woman. She seemed chillingly familiar that I felt a cold shudder ran through my nape. I put down the picture. My hands shook so badly that I ran out of the room and left the bisque doll still in the cellar.”

“That night the image of the woman haunted my sleep. I woke up the following morning feeling so tired. My head was like pounding, and I felt really sick.”

“My wife and my daughter were angels. They accompanied me that whole day in my room and tried their best to make me feel better. It made me realize how much I really loved them.”

“Soon that cellar incident was readily forgotten. I went back to my daily life, working around the house, spending wonderful time with my family. It was on a rainy night, I guessed, when the next incident happened. At that night my daughter suddenly cried out for me. She was probably scared by the sound of the lightning. My wife was strangely irritable when I got up to head to my daughter’s room. I could only hear part of her saying that my daughter taking up so much of my time. At that time I concluded that it was just tiny bit of jealousy speaking out of her.”

“Anyway I got to her room and comforted her. The poor thing was really scared. She then asked me to hand out her doll from the chair next to me. I reached out for the doll, and imagine my surprise when I saw that it was the bisque doll I left in the cellar. I asked my daughter where she had found the doll, and she answered me that it had always been there. It had been hers for a long time, she said. I grew ill-tempered at her answer and snapped at her to tell the truth. But she just looked at me with this frightened eyes and held her doll close to her chest. This scene disturbed me somehow. I never thought of my child before as eerie, but that was what I felt when I saw her with the doll. They looked so much alike.”

“I went back to my room feeling bothered. Just as I was about to tell my wife what had happened, I was shocked for a moment to find how similar my wife’s features to that damnable doll’s face.”

“I couldn’t sleep, feeling afraid of my wife who was lying next to me in our bed. When I managed to close my eyes, however, the woman in the picture that I found on the cellar appeared in my dream. Her appearance strangely soothed me. She looked at me sadly, and before she left, she kissed me tenderly on the temple.”

“I woke up the next day not in the morning, but in the beginning of the evening. I woke up shocked. I never slept until that late before. And do you know what I found when I woke up? My wife and my daughter, still holding her doll, standing before my bed, looked at me coldly. I’d never seen that look on them before. They always appeared before me warm and full of love. It frightened the hell out of me.”

“My wife then asked me if I wasn’t able to forget her. I asked her in return whom she was asking me about. She then said that that person hadn’t been able to love me properly and that I was supposed to forget about her by now.”

“I was confused, and before I knew it, they left the room, leaving me strangely spent, so I fell back asleep.”

“Never before had I a day like that, just passing it through without doing anything. My head was heavy when I woke up the next day as if I had been drugged. Someone was knocking at the front door repeatedly. I immediately went downstairs to open the door. It was the guy who delivered grocery. He started to chat and told me that it had been the first time he had seen me. I never saw him before either. As he was about to leave, I asked him if he had been in charge for delivering the newspaper. I meant to talk to him about this. You see for the past–I don’t seem to know how many years–we hadn’t received any paper. He then told me that I had called off the subscription several months ago. I didn’t recall of doing that, but he was pretty sure I had. I told him that if I had withdrawn my subscription a few months ago, then how come we hadn’t got any papers for the last couple of years or so. He didn’t answer me, looking at me as if I was mental. Anyway he went out of the door, muttering something about a funny smell in the house.”

“After that I was just too upset to think about the comment. I decided to go to the store and gave that guy a piece of my mind, considering that he had been cheating me of my paper-money for the past years.”

“I went out; but instead of going to the store, I decided to just drive around to ease up my mind.”

“I got home pretty late that night. Pretty sure, I was going to get an earful from my wife for not telling her where I’d been. As soon as I entered the house, it hit me like it never hit me before. The smell, it stank terribly inside the house that I just didn’t know what to make of it. I called out my wife to ask her if she noticed about the smell as well, but apparently I couldn’t find her and my daughter anywhere, so I just went and investigated where the smell came from. It got stronger the moment I reached the door to the cellar. I went down the steps and checked out the room, looking for animal that might’ve had crawled down there and died. I couldn’t find anything. As I was passing by a trunk, I got a strong whiff of that putrid smell, so I opened it.”

“A body lay there. A human body. Already in the process of decaying.”

Joe put his hand to his head. His face was bloodless. Rene stared off ahead. The nightfall was coming.

“I’m not going to tell you the part of the story where I was so stupid as I stood there stupefied by this discovery. I’ll tell you now the great crime I had committed. First, it didn’t tell me anything; all I knew of, the body was female. How I knew this was probably from the long light-brown hair or the dress she wore. And then something else caught my eyes.”

“In her left ring finger she wore an engagement ring. I knew that ring. I knew it because I had helped her put it on the day I had proposed to her. And I knew then for sure that the woman in the picture that I had seen in that room was her, my wife, the woman I had married; the woman, who had dreaded going to the cellar so much, was laid there in that room at that moment.”

“How could one forget the woman he married, how she looked like or the color of her hair and eyes; how could I completely mistake someone else for her?”

“Her name was Celia, have I told you that?”

Rene shook his head.

“She was Celia. She had a long light-brown hair. I remember now that she had the gentlest blue eyes I have ever seen. Celia Bellamy. I helped her once finding an apartment before we were married. I refused to take any commission from her, and that was how we started out.”

“I stood there, I don’t know for how long. Everything that was foggy and vague became clearer by the minute. Years, I thought had passed since we moved in, but now, for certain, I knew that it just had been a few months”

“I felt then a presence behind me in that room, and without turning, I could guess who it was. My present wife, the woman I hardly remembered proposing or marrying, stood behind me. I turned around and saw her for the first time for what she actually was; a phantom, a non-existent being that had played a doppelganger for my wife. They weren’t even alike.”

“She was holding our child’s hand, our daughter who I hardly remembered as a baby or ever seeing as she grew up. I knew now both were non-existent.”

“She gave me a soft smile, my so-called wife. She then told me that she had known I would’ve had soon found out. She loved me, she said. The house loved me, so it had given me all this, a wife and a daughter who had adored me and a contented, protected life.”

“A house was playing me up, can you believe that? I was past of feeling afraid as I ran out of the house. I ran out in the street, hitching for a ride to nowhere.”

There was a diminutive silence, slight, but perceptible.

“Do you want me to tell you the rest of the story, Joe?” Rene looked at him sadly.

Joe chuckled, “Something similar happened to you as well?” And then he drew a deep, shaky breath. “Do you think I just make it all up to scare you?”

“You did scare me at first, but now I see you’re just lost.” Rene mulled over if he ought to tell him what he was about to say. “I don’t usually converse with people, you see.”

“You’re a loner. That is no surprise.”

Rene shook his head slowly. “The moment you found out that your wife was dead, probably already dead for months, in the process of decomposing, you got scared and wanted to leave the house.”

“It’s getting dark. Are you gonna do me this favor or not?” Joe stood up and shook the sand away from his clothes.

“But you hadn’t the chance to leave it.”

Joe stopped in motion.

“It wouldn’t let you. Just like you said, you felt like coming back when you entered the house, and it’ll never let you go away now, Joe.” Rene sighed. “After you found your dead wife, your first reaction was to flee away from that house, but you never got to reach the door. The chandelier that you had found in the cellar, the one that was hung back on the ceiling, fell and struck you on the head. You were dead instantly.”

“You felt like waking up a moment later and managed to drag yourself out of the house, but it wasn’t bodily you. It was in the afternoon like this when you got to this road and was looking for a ride out of the hellhole. But when the night fell you were back in that house.”

“Morning came, and you’d always got this far, looking for a ride. You don’t know long you’ve been running away and that every night they come for you.”

“There’s some dirt that you’d never be able to shake off.” Rene pointed at the blood stain on the back of Joe’s shirt, “Life that you’d never be able to escape.”

Joe then felt the blood trickled down his head. In trance, he touched some of the liquid and rubbed it between his fingers. At that very moment, along with the darkness, came a white mist. Crying and wailing malevolently, it took the hitchhiker away.

A chuckle then was heard coming from behind him. Not bothering to turn around, Rene greeted him, “Hoax.”

Lucius Hoax stopped beside him, still chuckling, “Didn’t see that one coming. Married to your house! Ha! Some life, he got.”

Flicking off invisible dirt from the lapel of his hip-length blazer, Lucius looked down to Rene. “Don’t you just feel sorry for the guy, just a little maybe?” Rene shrugged in response.

Lucius drew out a pack of cigarettes and offered it to Rene. “Now, aren’t you a heartless beast.”

A young face with an old voice depicted Lucius’ appearance in general. An expensive dark custom made suit enveloped his lean, tall body. Glossy ankle boots complimented his ensemble. Sleek aviator sunglasses covered his fine-shaped eyes, praising his classic handsome features. It was all about appearance. He wasn’t afraid of putting on airs. He was the mood of sophistication itself.

If Rene’s eyes were of a dark shade of brown, looking jaded and detached most of the time, than Lucius’ eyes were the exact opposites. In a light shade of brown, they were most bewitching to behold; they held a depth of intimacy and dynamism, but sometimes they tended to darken maliciously.

Rene was quite used to this side of Lucius, considering that it was the side he mostly showed, so he made no reply and got up from the ground. He walked to his car. Lucius followed and slipped into the passenger seat.

“You can get a better car than this you know, something flashier, least something that runs would be nice for a change.” Lucius sighed as he looked around the gloomy interior of the car.

“It runs well from time to time.”

Lucius lifted his brow disdainfully. “Still the ole sap, you are. Haven’t you learned the lesson of being attached?” He tapped his finger against the glass vase on the dashboard. “What happened to little goldie?”

Rene closed his fingers around Lucius wrist and yanked it away from the vase.

“Easy there, big, strong man.” Chuckling, he rubbed his wrist. “Even a pet fish couldn’t stand living with you. That’s sad, Rene. That’s like a story-book character–Oliver Twist, all that shit–sad kind of things.”

“After all those time you spent together, you’d think he’d come back to you, but no, the moment he got a chance to escape you, he did exactly that. Kinda remind me of that girlfriend of yours, that Winnie girl. How is she by the way? Is she still in that loony bin, rejecting any contact with you?”

Rene stopped his car abruptly. He pushed open the door to the passenger side in one swift, angry motion. “Get out!”

Lucius stepped out of the car reluctantly. When the door was closed and the engine was turned on, he knocked on the car window. “Rene, you know I can’t travel by myself like this. What should I do, discard this body I grow so fond of? C’mon, Rene. I’m sorry, okay? Please forgive me?”

The car zoomed off in accelerating speed. Lucius chuckled, shaking his head as he muttered to himself. “Wuss.”