Room to Rent

 The rain hammered the creek with a relentless grey weight of soil that had formed a soup of dead leaves and grit.

Simon was wearing shoes which were resembling paper thin and he had nothing in his pockets and the only thing before him was the looming shadow of Oak Estate.

It was a rotting Victorian tooth of a house with a flicker of lights in the windows trying to be welcoming and warm with a big sign out front saying Room For Rent which felt like a lifeline to a drowning man 

Suddenly the door opened an in front of Simon and he saw in front of him was a man in his eighties by the look of his parchment-like skin, yet he moved with a disturbing, fluid grace.His eyes were a clear blue and when he shook Simon's hand it was like a vice.

"You’re thin, Simon" the old man remarked, his voice a rich, vibrating baritone that seemed too large for his chest. "But life is a fuel. Some of us just have more than others."

Simon was too tired to care about the eccentricity. He took the room on the second floor for a handful of copper.

Simons first night he was the smell of damp that had a heavy metallic tang similar to an abattoir and a sound which was a rhythmic slap drag coming from the hallway.

Simon peered through the keyhole.

He saw a girl or what can be said of what remained as one.She was translucent but terrifyingly physical. Her throat had been opened from ear to ear, the wound a jagged, weeping mouth that never closed. Her nightgown was fused to her skin by old, congealed blood, and as she moved, her bare feet left shimmering, red-black prints on the floorboards.

This was Claire. The old mens daughter daughter. She wasn't haunting the house; she was tethered to it.

Simon tried to bolt, but his legs felt like lead. He collapsed back onto his bed, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. The door creaked open.

The old man stood there, his chest bare. In the dim light, Simon saw the horrific truth.The Old Man's skin wasn't just healthy; it was pulsing. Beneath the surface of his torso, things shifted—undulating shapes that looked like frantic fingers trapped under a sheet of silk.

"I told you, Simon," The old man whispered, stepping into the room. Claire also drifted in behind him, her head lolling at an impossible angle, her severed windpipe whistling with every ghostly breath. "Life is a fuel. But it’s a finite resource. It leaks out into the ether unless you have a sieve to catch it."

He gestured to his daughter. The ghost girl reached out. Her fingers weren't cold; they were searingly hot, the heat of a fever that kills. She touched Simons cheek, and he felt a sickening tug, as if his very marrow was being liquified and pulled through his pores.

"She is my siphon," The old man roared, his voice now a terrifying, booming resonance. He looked younger by the second; the wrinkles on his face smoothed out, and his muscles swelled with a grotesque, borrowed vitality. "She died in agony, and in that agony, a vacuum was created. She pulls. I drink."

Simon tried to scream, but the ghost’s other hand plunged into his chest. It didn’t break the skin—it slid through the meat and bone like a hot knife through lard. He watched, eyes bulging, as his own life force—a glowing, viscous gold—was dragged out of his ribs, clinging to Claire’s spectral fingers like taffy.

The gore became physical as the ritual deepened. The vacuum was too strong. Simon skin began to shrivel, turning a bruised, necrotic purple. His eyes sank into his skull. The pressure in the room built until the windows cracked.

Then came the sound of tearing.

Because the old man needed more than just the energy; he needed the vessel to stay open and produced a rusted bone-saw from behind his back.

"The transition is better when the blood is still moving," the old man said, his face now that of a man in his thirties, glowing with a terrifying, unnatural health.

Simon was paralyzed, his soul half-tangled in the ghost’s weeping wounds. He felt the cold teeth of the saw bite into his thigh. He felt the hot spray of his own life hitting the floor, mixing with the spectral blood of the daughter.

Simon did not die quickly as the ghost of Claire held him in a state of hyper awareness which he felt every notch of the saw blade the old man had the precision of a butcher and was humming a lullaby as he was peeling back stripes of living muscle to find his life force.

As the sun rises through the trees of the creek Simons room was a slaughterhouse of crimson red and the Simon was but a cadvar of grey flesh and exposed bones and the old man stood in front of the mirror more youthful 

.

"Go to sleep

, Claire" Joe murmured, kissing her forehead. 
He placed the sign Room to Rent to the side until the next time he needed to renew his youth with the help of the ghost of his dead daughter.