He's all around. He's cold and dreamy.
Jules Anderson was found sitting upright at her kitchen table, alone and medically braindead. Her face was covered in blisters that, upon first observation, resembled purple lipstick that had been left over from a kiss. Her eyes were clouded over, and her mouth was agape, dry from being held open for so long. There were wounds on her hands from trying to fend off against something.
A thin, fine smoke filled the room, it smelled of perfume. A note lied on the table, hastily scrawled by an unsteady hand.
“There’s nothing quite like a soft, fuzzy man.”
The house Jules moved into had been left abandoned for around a decade, before being bought out by a real estate agent. The house was pale lavender with white accents, some saying it looked like a Greek temple, just standing in the middle of ranch-style homes. The house never had a history, no deaths on property, no abuse, not even a break-in. It was always just… there, watching everyone else’s moves. No one even knew who built it.
Soon after she moved in, notes began to appear, in almost every nook she checked. Simple "hello"s and "have a good day"s, innocuous, probably from someone who was squatting. The notes were never uniform, often scraps from a larger piece of paper. They seemed older, too, yellowed from age, being a bit hard to read from the ink being smeared. One note did stick out to her, though, one that said "can we be more than friends?"
Crash! A vase fell over as soon as she read it out loud, busting into hundreds of tiny pieces. She gripped the note in her hand and went to clean up the mess. Jules broke out the broom and dustpan, not wanting to forget about it and step on the shards of porcelain in the morning. As she did so, though, she felt her hair move in a wave, like someone was running their fingers through it. It tugged a little, making her jolt in pain. Immediately, it went away.
Flowers were also being scattered around, alongside the notes. Most looked like weeds from the garden at first, dandelions, buttercups, sometimes just blades of grass as opposed to proper flowers. Soon, though, there were white roses, partially wilted and limp. When Jules found them, they had dried up and crumbled into dust when picked up and ground with her fingers. She threw these advances in the trash, unaware of why they appeared.
Every once in a while, she'd smell smoke. Not heavy smoke, mind you, a faint smoke, akin to that of a burning incense. She'd sometimes see it, too, in thin wisps at first, before becoming heavy, grayish purple clouds. They'd cloud up her view, making it impossible to see. Once, she fell over, but was caught by something that held her steady, letting her get up. Sometimes the smoke would put its "hands" on her in a different way, usually causing Jules to curse out the invisible presence, terrified.
Jules would wake up groggy and drained of all her will to get up. She slept in until noon on some days, to the chagrin of her employers. Some days, she felt too weak to get out of bed, preferring to just lie there. One night, she saw the smoke pour in from beneath her door. It creeped across the ground before floating up to envelope the area around her bed. It squeezed her tight, making it hard to breathe, but she felt a sense of indistinct love, indirect compassion. Something didn't seem right, though. She still had no energy.
Days and nights began to blend into one for her, just being another variant of evening. When she walked into the living room, the television flickered to life without her even touching the remote. The sputtering crash of static jolted her awake, giving her some energy for once. She didn’t bother sleeping, as it was just another task to do instead of a human need.
"I don't feel good," she said to whatever was lurking around and sucking the life out of her, trying to confront it, but also be indirect. Silence was the only thing that met her, besides the chirping of crows outside. "Are you doing this?" she asked again, expecting no reply. She could see those wisps again, floating around the room, before combining with one another. Instead of forming an amorphous cloud, though, it took on a humanlike shape, before grabbing Jules yet again. Instead of ending it with groping her, though, it picked her up, holding her a solid foot off of the ground. Its "face" leaned closer to her's, before it phased through in an asphyxiating kiss. The whole time, Jules fought back, trying to get away. All of a sudden, she froze in place. "Please love me," was a thought pumped into her head during the "kiss", and the last thing she remembered before reaching for the phone on the wall.
She rang up a priest, Daniel Moore, as soon as she could get the phone working. Her voice was hoarse, but frantic, she read out the address before running to her room to put on more that just a night gown. She locked the door behind her, paranoid. She grabbed some tape from her nightstand and sealed up the bottom, to keep the mist from pouring in. She pulled her pants on, but froze yet again, like a deer in the headlights. There was a loud banging at the door. Jules refused to open it, not saying a word, rushing to put on a t-shirt. Then, the man on the other end finally yelled out that he'd come to cleanse her house. She breathed a sigh of relief and opened the door for him.
As she did, however, that purple haze suddenly flew around the room, throwing books off of their shelves and pulling the rug around. Daniel took out a bundle of sage from his pocket and lit it with his lighter, holding it towards the spirit. He gritted his teeth, trying to hold it back, trying to not be knocked to the floor. Instead, the atmospheric man knocked the sage out of Daniel's grip, seeming to extinguish it as it flew towards him. Jules screamed, trying to get it off of him, but seemed to be pushed off.
Its eyes, pale white and manifesting from the smoke, locked onto Daniel, before he felt his head pound and a message broadcast to him through the air, injecting itself into his psyche, read in his own voice.
“Show me your hands.”
Daniel did, raising them in full view of the spectre. He quivered uncontrollably, sweat rolled down his forehead, despite the room getting colder. His view was clouded up by the haze, his vision went dark. When he could see again, he felt pain from the knuckle up. He lied in a hospital bed, with Jules and a nurse beside him.
Every finger in both of his hands had been broken.
Later that night, Jules drove home from the hospital, worried for Daniel. More importantly, though, she was paranoid that she would be targeted next, due to her involvement with the house and, by extension, the spirit that may haunt it. She unlocked the door, hung her keys on the nearby rack, and sat down her purse at the dining room table. This was where she was found a few hours later, dead.
Under the table, police found another note from the Soft Fuzzy Man, dropped from Jules' loosening grip. It read, "Although I have no arms to hold you with, a human passion burns within me, I need to feel like I exist. Please, baby, please step into the mist."
Later, in the autopsy room, the doctors checked to see what her cause of death was, and it was declared as asphyxiation, due to a pale handkerchief being found lodged in her trachea. The "lip marks" were presumably postmortem, alongside the position of her body at the table. There was a struggle near the front door, and the living room. Jules' coat had been left on the ground, as was most of her other clothes. All her cadaver bore was a nightgown, the same one she wore when she first saw him. He seems to have liked her better that way.