Ears

A new haunted house novella by the new master of horror, Stephen Graham Jones, in which a mysterious girl in lavender footie pajamas will do anything to keep her house from being sold.

Mr. Morning Gun, the hapless narrator of this first-person novella, is a disgraced history teacher who is now an unhoused person who is largely living within his electric car and the empty homes he looks after for local real estate agencies in a specific way: he flushes the empty houses’ toilets to keep, primarily, the wax seals on the toilets fresh, and the plumbing flowing. For this, he gets a bit of money under the table.

One day, at “The Messner House,” he gets caught by an aggressive realtor having a tryst. When the ghost of the previous owners’ missing child intervenes, killing the couple and saving the former teacher, Mr. Morning Gun finds himself embroiled into an ever-increasing layer of cover-ups as the girl in the lavender footie pajamas keeps killing folks to keep the house empty, except for him.