There is a freedom in lying, and Moira found it and adopted it with more sincerity than most of the house did.
With her days unnumbered, bound to the stake of the house, there were few amusements that went untested. Although solitary, she occasionally joined another spirit for a game of "kill each other all over again", but most days they stuck with cards because event the thrill of death ran stale.
The invisible residents made their own trouble and stirred up enough drama to keep themselves amused. Moira sought higher pleasures and drank up the rush that came from luring people into the house on false pretenses, false promises and false seduction.
Part of their job- all of their jobs – was lying for the sake of the house's secrets. When new residents moved in, they showed up one by one and days apart and sometimes not at all, not until the living were asleep.
Moira would appear in the house as one of the first ones. She was glad she had kept that uniform all those years ago and not stolen some of the resident's clothing.
She'd show up in the yard, or the backyard, and introduce herself with a shy smile, a flash of her bad eye. "I'm Moira O'hara," she'd smile, extending a hand. "I'm the maid. I come with the house."
Bitter truth to that one. She'd be a part of that industry forever, because she'd be a part of the house forever.
She'd fake the rest of the dialogue – negotiating her payment, her history, her qualifications. All of her statistics and tips were thirty years old and had been buried with her, but she freshened them up for newcomers.
She kept the money they gave her on her person, as not to have it stolen by other ghosts or found by residents. The dead had no use for money outside negotiating with living counterparts, betting amongst themselves, or shopping sprees on Halloween.
Nora liked to hoard the money ghosts lost or left around; the others let her, because they barely cared but she seemed accustomed to stockpiling it. A habit that carried over from life. They pitied her and would occasionally pay her to stop crying or at least muffle herself.
Outside of the Harmons, Moira liked to settle with Lorraine and her children. Moira was happy to take care of the children, telling them not to touch their smoldering skin, guiding them around the house, mending cuts and reading them stories when the sun sank down and the basement lights flickered on.
Lorraine was quiet. Moira understood that she had a lot of deal with, things in life and death and the wall between the two that were still resolving in her heart, but Moira had days like that too, and they sat together quietly and sipped tea, saying nothing as Lorraine's skin repeatedly crisped, flaked, fell, and regrew.
Despite the violence she had been driven to out of grief, she had a motherly quality to her that spoke of stillness and confidence, and now, because of her awful death, experience. It almost came down to competition when Lorraine was in the room. Yeah, you shot yourself in the head, she seemed to say, blackened nose in the air. I burned to death.
She wore her wounds constantly, something that the other residents didn't like. Moira thought it was an interesting way of coping; ballsier and louder than most, Lorraine showed everyone who cared to look what had happened to her, what she had gone through, what circumstances landed her here permanently. Others hid their wounds – Tate's gunshots never showed, Moira's eye was perfectly healthy, Elizabeth wasn't sectioned like lunch meat.
As it were, Moira and Lorraine were part of the same tangled web and this drew them together, despite the topic never breaching their conversations. Constance was the source of their entrapment, as hateful as it seemed to pin one person down, she was the stem, the root. Lorraine visibly bristled and vanished immediately when Constance came calling; Moira, rooted in her job, was usually unable to vanish.
On weekends, Moira would loiter around in her young form around the front of the house. She'd sit on the front steps, waiting for someone to walk by so she could approach the front gate just as they walked up and twine her fingers around the metal, eyes large and lonely, smile suspicious, but seemingly harmless, as she enticed them to come have tea because she was lonely and wanted to have lunch with someone.
This turned into a game, once the Harmons caught on. It was usually young men who were brave enough to come in. Lured by Moira's rich red hair and short black uniform, they followed her swaying hips up into the murder house, where she politely took their coats and sat them down in the dining room. Vivien prepared delicate tea sandwiches in the kitchen, smiling to herself at the thrill of speaking to someone new, someone living.
"Hell of a cook," Ben would remark as he pretended to casually pass through, slipping an arm around Vivien's waist with a proud squeeze before exiting. He usually sat out on these lure-a-stranger games, but liked the come in and make snacks or do dishes to keep up the semblance of a normal family.
Violet thought these rituals were both thrilling and mean – you can't just bring people in and pretend we're all happy goody-goody when we're all dead, that's so fucked up – but there was an undeniable pleasure to seeing a new face in the house, especially one that could leave. It brought them together.
Partially because the responsible dead residents of the house hand to protect their guest once he stepped past the threshold. Not all of the residents were kind. Not all wanted to share. Not all of them were looking for healing and redemption by sharing experiences with the outside world. Some of them wanted more suffering – and this is where the nature of evil comes into question.