How to Sell a Haunted House

“You will,” Louise reassured him. “You always do. And if you don’t, Girl Sparrow will bring you home. Because you always come home again, Freddie. You and Pupkin. That’s how every adventure ends—

It didn’t make her as sad as she expected. She was okay. Things changed.

It felt like someone had picked it up and shaken out all the people and all the history and left it empty, not a house anymore but a series of boxes, connected by wall-to-wall carpeting, with nothing left inside.

Their house didn’t feel haunted anymore.

“A puppet is a device for driving the personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take control,” Clark said. “Puppets have no freedom, but they give the puppeteer freedom. They have no life, but they live forever.”

Put one on and your posture changes, your voice alters, and you can feel what it wants, you can feel what it’s scared of, you know what it needs. You don’t wear the puppet. The puppet wears you.

“A puppet is a possession that possesses the possessor.”

don’t you feel the vibes

the house doesn’t feel empty

i feel like we’re doing something wrong

statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times.

wishing harder than she’d ever wished before that for just sixty seconds someone would hold her, but no one holds moms.

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse. “When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.”