Chapter 4: The Skeletons Want Hot Water

The first thing Blackthorn Keep did after recognizing Milo Finch as its landlord was try to kill him slightly less enthusiastically.

The front gate, which had previously shrieked like a rusted cathedral organ full of knives, ceased grinding its iron teeth together and settled into a sulky creak. The gargoyles along the parapet stopped vomiting green fire into the courtyard and began vomiting only smoke, which Milo decided to count as progress. A swarm of bats that had been spiraling toward his face with murder in their bead-black eyes veered away at the last second and rearranged themselves into a question mark above his head.

Even the goblins paused.

They had been crouched behind broken statues, aiming sharpened bits of cutlery at his kidneys. Now their pointed ears twitched as invisible power rippled across the ruined castle stones. The contract Milo had signed—half out of exhaustion, half because he had found a quill and parchment in the gatehouse and his apartment-manager instincts were apparently stronger than reincarnation trauma—glowed with a warm golden light in his hands.

The light crawled over the page like sunrise over a lease agreement.

ABSOLUTE LEASE AUTHORITY ACTIVATED.

Property: Blackthorn Keep

Status: Cursed, Haunted, Structurally Unsound, Sentient in Several Locations

Occupancy: 413 Undead Residents, 29 Goblin Squatters, 7 Unregistered Wraiths, 1 Thing in the Well

Role Assigned: Landlord

Primary Obligation: Maintain Habitability

Primary Right: Collect Rent

Milo stared at the floating blue text until the words blurred.

“Four hundred and thirteen,” he said faintly.

A skull embedded in the archway turned its empty sockets toward him. “Four hundred and twelve,” it rasped. “Old Mallory fell into the cursed laundry chute last winter.”

“She still counts!” another skull snapped from the opposite wall. “She screams on Tuesdays!”

“Screaming is not residency!”

“It is if you do it from inside the walls!”

Milo looked down at the contract. Then up at the two arguing skulls. Then at the goblins, who were slowly lowering their forks.

He had managed three apartment buildings in North Saint Vesper back on Earth. He had survived basement flooding, raccoon infestations, tenants who paid rent in commemorative spoons, and Mrs. Delgado from 3B, who believed laundry rooms were a government conspiracy. He had once mediated a dispute between a violin student and a man who owned seventeen parrots, all named Craig.

Somehow, this felt familiar.

“Okay,” Milo said, voice cracking only a little. “All right. We can work with this.”

A ghostly moan poured from the castle’s broken windows, rising and falling like wind through tombstones.

“You cannot work with Blackthorn Keep,” hissed a figure drifting down from the second-floor balcony. It had once been a woman, possibly noble, possibly dramatic. Now she was translucent blue from the waist down, dressed in a gown of shredded moonlight, with hair floating around her like drowned ink. “This fortress was raised on betrayal, sealed with blood, and doomed by the last breath of Archduke Vellum the Unforgiven. Its corridors rearrange themselves to devour hope. Its towers drink lightning. Its stones remember war.”

Milo nodded slowly. “Does it have plumbing?”

The ghost stopped.

Every goblin head turned toward him.

The bats lost formation and became an exclamation point.

The skull in the archway whispered, “Plumbing?”

Milo gripped the glowing lease with both hands. The courtyard around him was enormous, surrounded by black stone walls jagged against the bruised evening sky. Thorny vines crawled over everything, their red blossoms opening and closing like hungry mouths. The air smelled of wet ash, old blood, and mold. Somewhere deep within the keep, chains dragged across stone with the leisurely menace of a thing that had all eternity and no hobbies.

But under the rot, Milo could smell something else.

Minerals. Damp warmth. Faint sulfur.

A utility man’s nose never forgot.

“This place is built over hot springs, isn’t it?” he asked.

The ghostly noblewoman’s eyes widened. “You know of the royal baths?”

“Royal baths?” croaked a goblin, rising from behind a cracked statue of a winged wolf. He was knee-high, green, and wearing what appeared to be a soup pot as a helmet. “Bathhouse dead. Pipes scream. Floor bites.”

“Floor does not bite,” said a skull.

“Floor bite Grib.” The goblin pointed at himself with wounded dignity. “Grib remember bite.”

“That was the drain.”

“Drain part of floor!”

The ghost drifted closer, her expression sharpening with suspicion. “Why do you ask, mortal landlord?”

Milo had been called many things in his life. Slumlord, hero, idiot, sweet boy, emergency contact, legally responsible party. Mortal landlord was new, but not inaccurate.

He adjusted the strap of his messenger bag. The bag had somehow reincarnated with him, though its contents had changed. Instead of unpaid invoices, pepper spray, and an emergency granola bar, it now held a coil of copper wire, a wooden-handled screwdriver, a roll of sealing tape made from something called slimegut, and a small brass key that occasionally hummed.

His cheat skill had not given him a sword. It had given him supplies.

“Because,” Milo said, “if you have hot springs and an old bathhouse, I might be able to get hot water running.”

The courtyard fell so silent that Milo heard a droplet fall from a gargoyle’s chin and strike a puddle.

Then the castle exploded.

Not literally, though several windows did blow outward in sprays of dust and spectral pigeons. The dead screamed from every wall. Bones rattled under flagstones. Rusted armor suits banged their gauntlets against shields. A chorus of skulls embedded along the battlements began shrieking at once, their voices overlapping into one catastrophic wail of longing.

“HOT WATER!”

“THE WARMTH!”

“THE STEAM!”

“MY SINUSES!”

“I HAVEN’T SOAKED SINCE THE THIRD BLOOD MOON!”

“LANDLORD! LANDLORD! LANDLORD!”

Milo clapped both hands over his ears. The sound hit him physically, shuddering through his skull and teeth. Somewhere above, a gargoyle fainted and fell off the roof.

“Quiet!” he shouted.

No one heard him.

The ghostly noblewoman covered her mouth with both translucent hands. Her eyes shone with something almost like tears. “Hot water,” she whispered. “After all this time…”

“We can’t do anything if everyone is screaming!” Milo yelled.

A skeletal hand punched up through the soil beside his boot, followed by another, then a skull wearing half a jaw and a rusted bath cap.

“Did someone say hot water?” the skeleton asked.

Milo startled so hard he nearly dropped the lease. “Why were you under the courtyard?”

“Waiting.”

“For what?”

“Developments.”

Then the skeleton turned toward the nearest wall and joined the scream. “HOT WAAAAATER!”

Milo closed his eyes.

All right. Fine. You died saving a delivery drone full of snacks. You woke up in a fantasy world. You accidentally rented a haunted castle. Now skeletons want hot water.

He opened his eyes.

“Everyone,” Milo shouted, and this time something in his voice carried. Not volume, exactly. Authority. A golden thread tugged from the lease in his hand and zipped outward through the courtyard, touching stone, skull, bone, goblin, gargoyle, ghost. “Tenant meeting!”

The words cracked like a gavel.

The screaming stopped so abruptly that the last echo stumbled into the mountains.

A new blue window appeared.

LANDLORD DIRECTIVE RECOGNIZED.

Common Area Assembly Convened.

Attendance: 287 present, 126 listening through walls, 29 hiding poorly, 1 unknown entity in well pretending not to care.

Milo inhaled slowly.

The courtyard now contained more undead than it had a minute ago. Skeletons crawled out from beneath paving stones, climbed down from balconies, emerged from cracked fountains, and unfolded themselves from places that did not seem large enough to contain bones. Some wore armor. Some wore shrouds. One had a feathered hat and no torso, but compensated by walking on its hands. Ghosts drifted in clusters, pale and luminous, whispering among themselves. Floating skulls orbited the courtyard like grim lanterns.

The goblins had gathered at the back in a nervous knot, Grib at their center. They clutched their cutlery-spears and watched Milo with the wary awe of tenants who had just realized the new building manager knew where the shutoff valves were.

Milo climbed onto the cracked base of the winged wolf statue. It gave him maybe two extra feet of height and a fine view of the worst maintenance nightmare ever built.

“My name is Milo Finch,” he said. “Apparently, I am now your landlord.”

A skeleton raised its hand.

“Yes?” Milo said.

“Are we required to pay rent in coin, screams, or memories of regret?”

“We’ll get to rent later.”

A dozen disappointed groans rose from the assembly.

“What about viscera?” asked a skull on the wall. “I have been saving viscera.”

“No viscera,” Milo said firmly.

“Then why have I been saving it?”

“That’s a personal question.”

The ghostly noblewoman drifted to Milo’s left as if taking the position of someone who had once run committees and never recovered from the habit. “Residents of Blackthorn,” she called, voice ringing like a wineglass struck by a dagger, “you will attend. The mortal speaks of restoring the baths.”

The courtyard leaned forward.

Milo felt the collective hunger of hundreds of dead things focus on him.

It was, unfortunately, not the hunger for flesh.

That might have been simpler.

“I said I might be able to restore them,” Milo clarified. “I need to inspect the system first. I need access to the bathhouse, boiler chamber if there is one, main pipes, cisterns, and any magical pressure regulators.”

A ghost raised a translucent hand. “The boiler chamber is cursed.”

“Specifics?”

“It whispers your mother’s disappointments.”

Milo winced. “Manageable.”

“The eastern pipe tunnel is infested,” said a skeleton with a captain’s hat.

“With what?”

“Regrets.”

“Again, manageable. Anything with teeth?”

“The drain eels,” Grib said.

Milo turned to him. “Drain eels.”

Grib nodded gravely. “Long. Wet. Tax collectors of pipe.”

“They take fingers,” added another goblin.

“And soap.”

“Mostly soap.”

Milo rubbed his forehead. “Fine. Drain eels. What else?”

The noble ghost’s expression grew solemn. “The Bathhouse Choir has not ceased its mourning in seventy years.”

“Choir?”

Every skull in the courtyard suddenly became fascinated by the sky.

Milo looked from one empty-eyed face to another. “What kind of choir?”

The answer came from the far side of the keep.

A scream rose from within the castle, high and piercing, a note so sharp it seemed to peel moss from stone. It was joined by another, then another, until dozens of skull voices braided together in agonized harmony. It rolled through the courtyard like a wave of knives, struck the statue beneath Milo, and made his bones vibrate in self-defense.

“That kind,” said the noble ghost.

Milo’s eye twitched.

The choir continued, climbing octaves with the passion of abandoned teakettles.

“Do they do that often?” he asked.

“Only when sorrow overwhelms them,” the ghost said.

“And how often is that?”

“Constantly.”

Milo stared at the dark archway leading into the keep. Somewhere beyond it, a choir of screaming skulls was apparently expressing seventy years of bath-related grief.

His first act as landlord, he decided, would not be heroic.

It would be noise control.

“All right,” Milo said. “Before anyone gets hot water, we are establishing quiet hours.”

The courtyard gasped.

A skeleton dropped its own femur.

“Quiet hours?” hissed a wall skull. “In Blackthorn Keep?”

“Yes.”

“But we are damned!”

“You can be damned between reasonable hours.”

“Our anguish is eternal!” cried a ghost.

“Your neighbors are also eternal,” Milo said. “They deserve sleep.”