The Price Of Clean

Some time ago, my ceiling had an aneurysm, letting a rich spray of arterial roofwater into my apartment. Since then, I've been inspired to launch a number of cleaning assaults onto my already questionable carpet, in the hopes of reverting it from bad beige to good beige. My latest ploy to this end involved buying a mediocre steam cleaner, immediately losing the instruction manual, and improvising from there.

At first, the large tufts of pitch black hair that the cleaner kicked up delighted me. I didn't know where the hell they came from, but each one was proof that my house was getting incrementally better.

Then I heard the scratching coming from the attached water tank, and found out that I've got a damn ghost stuck in it. Not one of those mostly domesticated Midwest ghosts, either. I've got one of those Asian Longhairs that came over to America six years ago, before Customs learned to check shipments of imported Asian lumber for infestations. Without any unnatural predators to control them, the damn things are popping up everywhere.

I don't know to do about her, and I certainly don't know what she was doing in my carpet. The apartment's previous tenant has moved to Japan, and asking him over long distance if he happens to know why there's a dead girl in my room seems ill advised. Plus, the guidebooks agree that knowing a Longhair's secret past just pisses it off, anyway. What the guides don't agree on is a way to successfully get rid of a Longhair. I could just drop the water tank off at a landfill, but then I'd be out of a water tank, and constantly afraid that the ghost would go on an Incredible Journey back to my place.

The worst thing about the situation is her age. My apartment does have a contract that assures me that "Any spectral denizens within your apartment are all eighteen years of age or older, and do not represent any living or fictional characters." It would be a nice piece of CYA legalese, if it wasn't so obviously a pack of lies. The girl is...eight, perhaps. I'm willing to go so far as twelve. Either way, it looks bad, and I want her gone before my neighbors find out.

I'm probably going to have to get Narraptor to deal with the damn thing. Longhairs are pretty damn instant that they get the last word in, but after his extra-strength exorcism of this blog, I'm pretty sure he can handle her. But that means I'll have to commit to PAX, and watch people play Dance Dance Revolution for cash and prizes. There are worse fates, but none of them involve complete strangers telling me how great The Minibosses are.