Her body was limp, every bone so brutally crushed she looked barely human. Every inch of skin was a mess of swollen bruises with slivers of finely pulverised bone peeping through. Even her teeth were little more than white crescents that were hardly visible for all the blood left congealing in her mouth.
She was the fourth owner of 76 Slipshale Street to be found like this.
This time the police were not called, they hadn't managed to solve the last three cases and this one would be no different to them - just another photo to add to their collection of unsolved deaths. Her family were the ones who fought to have a priest come to the house as soon as possible, even going so far as to ask for her body to be left in place until he came.
He arrived the day after her funeral, already looking like a mess before he'd gone anywhere near the house. It wasn't just his appearance that made him seem just as distraught as the family of strangers who'd begged him to come halfway across the world, every word he spoke seemed like he was forcing them out against a wall of utter exhaustion.
As the weeks passed with him bustling between Slipshale Street and the town library, he only got worse. Still, he'd managed to outlast all four former owners which made him a target of suspicion as much as it did admiration.
Nobody in town knew what he was doing in the house, only that it appeared to be working.
They hadn't the faintest idea that not one, but two lingering souls wandered the rooms and that they detested their confinement almost as much as they detested each other. Their faces were in every mirror, their footsteps pounding across the halls as they tried and failed to kill the other.
In all their rage, they stopped seeing the living as their own kind and instead saw them as a means of transport out of the house and away from each other. Unfortunately they would argue over who should be allowed to leave and who should stay, jumping in and pulling the other out over and over again, forcing the original soul out and shredding it before it could even comprehend that it had died.
When their potential host was too broken to be useful they would retreat to their preferred corners and seethe until the next one arrived. It had been that way ever since they discovered that the other existed and could have been that way until the house collapsed of old age and disrepair if the priest hadn't offered them a better solution.
The people who reached out to him initially were the recently divorced parents of the deceased, having cometogether for her sake to solve her death. Neither had many friends or other relations to miss them or debate their sudden change in personality.
And the house was at peace at last.
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