A/N

I'm not sure if I'm going to continue this story, I'm not sure if it's going to work. It's supposed to be more of a ghost story than a crime story, (think Stephen King's 1408), and I was pretty confident with the idea when I started, but now I'm not so sure anymore. We'll see what happens with it and if you think it's worth working on, do tell me. I really don't want to sound like I'm holding the story hostage and only release it if I get enough reviews, because if the muse doesn't cooperate, no amount of comments will change that. But it's always easier to work through the brick wall of difficulties if you know someone wants to read the results. :D

(Also, I don't know why the hell they're in that damn house to begin with, story just started with this scene so I'm running with it…! LOL )

JJ carefully navigated around an unsteady pile of God-knew-what that reached almost all the way up to the ceiling. The unsub's abandoned house could have been featured in any of those TV shows about hoarders. There were things everywhere, it stank to high heaven and the air was thick with dust. Each step the agents took roused up even more dust to the point where it almost seemed like ground fog. Nope. They'd have to return with face masks, this was a health hazard. JJ caught up with Blake, who had almost disappeared into the dust-fog. The older woman had pulled her shirt sleeve down over her nose and mouth as a makeshift (and probably not very effective) air filter, and her entire body language revealed just how uncomfortable and revolted she was.

"Let's get out of here," JJ said, coughing and waving her hand in front of her face to clear the air in the hopes of getting more oxygen than dust into her lungs. Blake nodded and looked relieved.

"This place can't have been cleaned since Reagan was president," Blake said in a muffled voice and sneezed. "Ugh, I've got dust everywhere, it's disgusting," she complained and sneezed again.

JJ glanced at her colleague. It was disgusting - the dust in here seemed to have an almost greasy quality somehow - but they had been visiting crime scenes so grisly that a slaughterhouse would seem like a pretty nice place in comparison, and Blake had never seemed uncomfortable or creeped out before.

Wait, that wasn't entire true. Once had JJ seen her shudder, and that was with the case of the unsub who brought maggots with him to the crime scene. Blake did not seem to do well with crawling insects, something JJ was about to witness beyond all doubt.

As they stepped over some old stacks of newspaper, Blake stumbled on something and lost her footing. She was forced to steady herself against the wall, what little of it that was free of junk. The wallpaper was old and crumbled and it peeled off from the impact of her weight. It bulged, and from beneath it, what looked like a wave of living darkness welled up.

It was silverfish.

Blake didn't shudder this time. She screamed - a scream so high-pitched it was probably only fully audible for animals - and nearly knocked JJ over in her rush to get out of there. JJ shone the flashlight at the hole in the wallpaper and noticed something sticking out from underneath it. She certainly didn't find crawling insects pleasant, but she wasn't afraid of them, and she brushed them off and took out the item. It would have been a different thing with spiders. Big ones. She could deal with the occasional spider if it wasn't too big, but ugh… at a certain point she felt sure the were large enough to view her as prey. Nasty creatures.

She looked at the square-shaped item she had pulled out. It was an envelope. The glue was long gone - eaten by the insects, probably - but it seemed to contain something. She looked closer at the wallpaper, but saw nothing else of interest, and so she decided to get out and check on her colleague.

She found Blake by an old apple tree in the garden, brushing her hands frantically over her clothes and hair while twitching all over. It was like watching her colleague performing some kind of bizarre rain dance, and JJ couldn't hold back a grin.

"Sorry I ran," Blake said breathlessly, without looking up. "I freakin' hate silverfish."

"You do? Really? Could have fooled me," JJ teased. Blake stopped twitching and glared at her. JJ relented. "Sorry."

"I can deal with serial killers. But I can't handle creepy, crawling insects." She shuddered and made a disgusted face. "Can you check my hair? It feels like I've got something crawling in it."

JJ dutifully obeyed. "Nothing. You're fine. Look what I found under the wallpaper."

Blake glanced at the envelope, but she made no move to take it.

"Gloves or no gloves, I'm not touching anything that might have more creepy crawlies in it."

JJ shook her head, smiling a little, as she very carefully opened it to reveal a faded piece of paper. It was folded over and when she unfolded it, what it showed was a bloody handprint. JJ's eyes widened. This unsub had dipped his victim's hands into their own blood and made handprints somewhere on each crime scene. Given that the handprints and blood both belonged to the victim, it hadn't helped in identifying the killer, and by the time they had found who he was, he was long gone. This print was small enough to be that of a teenage girl or a petite adult woman.

Blake looked at it and her lips pressed together. She said nothing.

JJ put the items in a plastic evidence bag and sought Blake's eyes. The brunette refused to look back; her eyes were fixated at the house. Eventually JJ too turned to look at it. There seemed to be something gloomy, almost sinister about it, even in the bright sunshine. Neither of them wanted to say it out loud - they were both very practical women who did not believe in ghosts - but this house felt haunted.

"We need to look through everything in that house," JJ said. "We might find something that explains this. There must have been more victims that we don't know about yet."

"I'm not going back in there without a damn Hazmat suit," Blake muttered, but the words came automatically. She was barely listening to them herself.

"I don't think we'll be allowed to go back in there without protection wear even if we wanted to," JJ reassured her colleague and tried not to think about the mould and spores they had inhaled. Ugh. It was supposed to just be a routine check. Well, this job was full of surprises. Most of them unpleasant.

"I'm calling Hotch," Blake said.

"Yeah, I'll get the local cops to seal off this building. I can't believe they didn't think about it themselves. I've never been at a place where the local police is so sloppy."

"Well, they clearly don't want us here," Blake stated while she took out her cell phone. Given that the handprints were always found at the place where the body was dumped, everybody had just assumed there were no previously unknown victims…

Assume. If the English language had one really ugly word with a completely useless meaning, that was it.

When Hotch picked up, Blake gave him a brief resume of what they had found, taking great care to sound professional. But her eyes kept wandering towards the house and the windows that seemed to glare back at her with ill-willing glee. She felt like she had insects crawling all over her skin. There was something very wrong with this place ,and she didn't want to go back in there even if the field office put her into a spaceman suit.

That place is evil, she thought. It was a thought very unlike her; she didn't think in terms of good and evil, and even if she did, places and things could not possibly be labelled as evil. Actions could be, people could be, but not places.

Except possibly for this one.