Unxmaal.com

Posted to Reddit as “I found something while cleaning out a hoarder’s house”

I’d been working reclamation for a little over a year. We called it reclamation, but that’s a euphemism for ‘throwing away crazy people’s shit’. I work for CLK, one of the largest property owners in the Southeast. Chuck L “Chuckles” Langtry bought hundreds of distressed properties for pennies on the dollar during the recession, and built an empire renting them back to the same poor people the banks had just evicted.

I started working there after my sister kicked me out. Before she died, our mother had made me promise to make good grades in school, and made my sister, Carla, promise to let me stay with her so long as I did. College didn’t agree with me; I could pick up the facts just fine, but put a sheet of paper in front of me and call it a test, and my mind would become a complete blank. I made it through two years of community college, but I just couldn’t handle my Junior year. Carla seemed relieved, sitting there at Mom’s old, scarred kitchen table, telling me that I had to go. I couch-surfed for a few weeks, and found the reclamation job sheerly through luck. Trenton, a friend who was a part-time bartender, told me a tale of his cousin, who got bit by a rat at work.

“You seen ‘Hoarders’?” Trenton asked. “Barry goes into those hoarder houses, where they’s got like forty dead cats and jars of piss and shit, and he cleans it all out. It pays pretty big money. Except they was rats in the last one, and a rat bit him. So he had to get a bunch of shots, tetniss, friggin’ rabies, like twenty shots in his ass or sump’n. Worker’s Comp paid for it all, but when he got back to work the place chitchatted him, for ‘not wearing appropriate safety gear.’” A few careful questions later and I had the name of the company. Barry’s manager, now my manager, hired me on the spot. I had dressed in nice slacks and an Oxford shirt — the only nice clothes I owned. I think he smelled my desperation; the pay was truly lousy. “You’re gonna mess up them britches, boy,” he said. “You start today.”

People are filthy. I’m no neat-freak, but the way some of these people live is worse than animals in pens. Years worth of dishes stacked in sinks, counters, the floor. Junkie needles, rusted tips stuck everywhere, waiting to snag an arm or a hand. Toilets clogged months or even years past, covered in newspapers, shat upon, and re-covered in layer after layer of shit and newspaper until it made a kind of fecal papier-mâché. I’m dead serious about my safety gear. Trenton’s cousin was an idiot; you don’t go into these places without a lot of something between you and everything else.

Most of the houses I worked in weren’t disaster zones; they were just houses that, for some reason, usually foreclosure, had sat empty for a long time. Houses aren’t made to sit empty. A tiny problem that would be instantly noticed and repaired by an occupant, like a dripping faucet, a bit of missing weather-stripping around a door, or an animal scratching around in the attic, would turn into a full-blown disaster after six months of neglect. I would back up a dump truck to a house, and my partner and I would haul out broken furniture, cracked toilets, sodden carpet, ruined drywall. The people who lived in those houses usually left when they didn’t want to leave, and some left mad. I had seen entire plumbing stacks filled with concrete, wiring pulled from walls, and fixtures smashed with hammers. My partner on one job, Hank, opened a kitchen cabinet, only to discover it was full of baby raccoons. Mama Raccoon tried to eat Hank’s face. Some days were luckier than others, though. In one place, I realized the strange odor I had been smelling was kerosene, only a moment before I triggered a tripwire that some meth-head had strung across the hallway. The cops said the whole place was rigged — the tripwire, and several others, had been tied to crude nail-filled claymores, and pipe bombs were wired into the light switches. Since then, I always cut power to a place first thing, and I always smelled the air.

The air told me something was wrong with the Kelling house. At first glance, from the street, the house seemed small, a modest bungalow, shrouded by trees and overgrown shrubs. When we backed the truck down the cramped, curving drive, I could see the house was very large, verging towards mansion. It appeared to have three distinct wings. Three floors rose over the porch, the topmost crowned with a row of small windows. I had just forced my way through the large, heavy front door with a pry-bar, past no less than three deadbolts. The air was warm, and wet, like the exhalation from the mouth of a carnivore. “Fuck, that stinks!” cried Jacob, my partner for the job. He was nineteen, stood about six foot three, weighed about three hundred pounds, and had a rosy child’s face framed by ringlets of curly blonde hair. He looked like a giant, oversized baby, belly straining against his rip-proof environment suit. This was his first real job. I doubted I would see him after Friday.

“Put your respirator on,” I said, pulling mine into place. “Stinks like mold in there. You don’t want any of that shit in your lungs.” I pushed the front door open, and stepped into the hallway. The heat inside the house was oppressive. It was early October, cool outside, so the heater must have been running. Daylight from beyond the low-slung front porch showed a hallway packed floor to ceiling with stacks of papers, with only a narrow path between them. Grey dust, or mold, coated everything, piled into small drifts in the corners, and floated in the sunlight. “Great, a hoarder house.”

“Like on TV?” Jacob asked.

“Yeah, like on TV.” I flicked on my flashlight. “Be really careful near these stacks. If you bump into one, the whole pile can fall on you.” Jacob had been watching long-legged centipedes scurry for cover from the beam of his light. He gave a nervous laugh, and shrank back from the stacks of papers. Jacob reached for the old two-button style light switch near the front door. I blocked his hand. “No, use your light. There’s no telling how bad the wiring is in this place.” I motioned at the papers. “I don’t want to be stuck in here with a fire.” We made our way farther down the hallway, between the teetering stacks of dust-covered and cobwebbed papers. The light faded as the Kelling house swallowed us.

Jacob and I entered what once would have been a grand foyer off the front hallway. Our lights picked out beautiful woodwork, and glinted off an elaborate chandelier hanging three stories overhead. Dust-covered shelves lined the walls, floor to the ceilings high overhead, each crammed to overflowing with junk and papers. Galaxies of dust swirled in the thick air, disturbed by our intrusion. In the gloom, the room was dizzying; the mind recoiled from so many details, from having to track and account for so many things. Jacob’s respirator whistled faster and faster. I lay a hand on his shoulder. “Calm down, man. Breathe.”

“Sorry. It’s just … so much.” His eyes were shocked huge behind his face mask.

“We need to find the main breaker panel and cut the power. We only have until Friday to haul all this shit out. From the looks of it, we’ll be living here until then.” Stepping over scattered papers, I walked through an archway into a new hallway opposite the entry hallway. This one was more narrow, and only had crudely-assembled wooden shelves on one side. I checked each door along the way. “These old houses, the panel’s in the kitchen half the time.”

The kitchen was as bad as I had feared. The food hadn’t simply rotted; it had disintegrated and merged into a sheet of decaying matter that glued the layers of plates and dishes into a near-solid mat. A mottled Amana refrigerator, once yellow, or even white, slumped in a corner like a murder victim, its door open to display ancient, furred food crushed beneath broken wire shelves. Every level surface had been stacked with dishes, as if whoever had brought them into the kitchen had dropped them off, expecting them to be cleaned by a servant who was no longer there, or who had never been. Jacob and I picked our way across and around the heaps that may have been tables or chairs, our lights aimed at the walls where we hoped to find a breaker panel. We found none. “And the other half of the time?” Jacob asked, though the resignation in his voice meant he knew the answer.

“Yeah, it’s in the basement.” The other door leading out of the kitchen was stuck firm. Even Jacob, who had nearly a hundred pounds on me, couldn’t get it to shift in its frame. We backtracked to the foyer. “Look, we have to split up. You take this hallway, and I’ll take the other one. You walk the right-side edge the whole time.” I punched his arm. “Hear me? Right side the whole time. I’m following the left side. I need to make sure you’re checking every wall in every single room. This is a big house, there’s trash all over, and it’s dark. We’ve already burned two hours, and we only have until the end of the week. We don’t have time to waste checking the same room twice. If you find it, text me. Got your phone on you? Turned up loud?” He nodded. “Got signal?”

“Yeah, man. I’m not an idiot.”

“I know,” I said, even though I was pretty sure he was an idiot. “Langtry doesn’t give a shit how big this house is. He wants it cleaned out by the end of the week. If we do a good job, haul a bunch of loads, he’ll give us a bonus.” He’d give me a bonus. Jacob would get a pat on the back, and he wouldn’t show up to work on Monday morning. “Let’s go. Keep that mask on.” As Jacob stumbled down his hallway, clumsy in his environmental suit, motes of grey dust sparkled in his flashlight beam, until the darkness closed upon him.

An hour later, I had to admit that I was lost. I was furious. It was a big house, and yes, there was trash everywhere, and yes, it was dark, but it was still just a house. I had spotted a promising doorway at the end of a hallway, but the hallway was blocked by an impenetrable stack of furniture and, oddly, garden implements. I backtracked to a narrow, spiral staircase, and climbed up. My plan was to go up one floor, go down the length of an upper hallway, and find a way down on the other side. At the top of the staircase was another long hallway, but this one was empty of both trash and doorways. Grey mold, or dust, lay thick across carpet that might have once been red. I walked the length of the hallway without finding another staircase. Instead, the hallway turned sharply left. The first door on the right was slightly open. I pushed the door open, and walked into a dusty, but otherwise clean bedroom. Large bay windows looked down upon the driveway. I could see the front of the truck. Except I was too high up. Somehow, instead of climbing up one floor, I had climbed to the topmost level of the house.

When my phone rang, I nearly wet myself. “Yeah?” I said.

“I… zzz … own … here,” Jacob said. The connection was terrible.

“I can’t hear you. Move towards a window.”

“… all … go … me …”

I looked at my phone. “Call feature: Call Failed.” I’m not sure how that’s a feature. I sent him a text. “Meet at truck.”

I was hot, thirsty, and I really had to pee, so I was ready to kick down a door and climb out a window just to get to the truck. I left the bedroom, thinking to retrace my steps. After that, I’m not sure what happened. I’d always felt like I had a good sense of direction, especially inside a building, but the Kelling house was different. I know I went left out of the bedroom, then right down the long, empty hallway, and down the spiral staircase. But when I reached the bottom, the pile of rakes and garden shears shoved through decaying chests of drawers was missing. It seemed to be the same hallway, at first. I hurried down to the end of the hallway, towards what I had earlier thought must be the door to the basement. I hauled the door open, but instead, the room was stuffed nearly full of dolls. I backtracked again, opening doors. Another was piled high with books. A brief look revealed them all to be molded, water-swollen paperback romance novels. Not one had a breaker panel on the wall. Worse, the windows in each room had been boarded up, then painted. After the third room, I noticed the carpet pattern in the hallway, only sparsely visible beneath mouldering papers and dust, had changed from a red grid to green with yellow flowers. I checked my phone again: no signal, and no texts. I tried calling Jacob anyway, but of course the call didn’t go through.

I started walking back to find the spiral staircase. Preoccupied as I was, I nearly missed the door to the basement. It was made to look like the walls of the hallway in which I stood, with dark wood trim and covered in yellowing plaster lathe. As I walked past, I noticed something near the floor — a light? The door opened easily, to reveal a short set of wooden stairs, dimly lit by an ancient, naked incandescent bulb. The steps ended at another door. This door was not wood, but metal, and was much larger. A wheel was set in the center of the door. I turned the wheel, and pulled open the hatch. Hot air, hot enough to feel through the Tyvek of my suit, rushed past me. Brilliant white-blue light spilled around the edges of the doorway, blinding my gloom-accustomed eyes. I hissed involuntarily, shading my eyes from the harshness of the glare. After my eyes adjusted, I stepped through the doorway onto a white-painted metal landing. A long series of white metal steps descended from the platform. The walls, also white, were spotlessly clean, as were the floor and steps. My phone dinged, and vibrated. It claimed it had a bar’s worth of signal. Three missed calls, all from Jacob. Several texts.

“Where r u?” “Not funny” “I QUIT” “jk u at truck?”

I called Jacob. The call connected, but it went to voicemail. I texted him, “Found basement. Meet you at truck” and hit Send. In the dry stillness of the stairwell, I could have sworn I heard the text tone sound off in the distance. Floodlights glared overhead as I climbed down the steps to the sterile white basement floor. There was no dirt, no dust. Row upon row of steel shelves silently receded into the brightly lit, immaculate distance. The shelves gleamed under the lights, and on each shelf lay dozens of white cardboard boxes.

I picked a box near me. A small, elegantly hand-printed label was affixed to the front. “623,” I read aloud. The box was light, but something was inside. I removed the lid. Inside the box lay a woman’s dress, a pink fabric that was polyester, or maybe acrylic. Under it were a pair of buckled pink shoes, and a purse. “Maybe someone really likes to play dress-up,” I said to myself, as I replaced the box upon the shelf. Deep down, I didn’t believe it. Deep down, I needed to leave. Right then. But I didn’t.

I heard a ping, loud and echoing against the concrete and steel. Jacob’s phone, reminding him of my text. I looked around, but did not see him in the bright, cavernous room. I walked towards where I thought I had heard the sound, and picked up another box. “898”. Mens white dress slacks, pink shirt, white sport coat, loafers. Black Ray-Ban glasses. A wallet. I flipped open the wallet, but it was empty. In the corner of the box, I noticed a gold ring. A wedding band. Though the room was swelteringly hot, I was suddenly cold. I put the lid back on the box, and the box back on the shelf. The humming was louder here, more of a throb, so I continued my way down the corridor of shelves towards its source.

At a certain point, the shelves emptied of boxes, their steel racks gleaming in the floods. At the far corner of the room, taking up nearly the entire wall, crouched an enormous furnace. No, it was an oven. Its surface, vast and black iron, was studded with rivets. Across its dark face were five large doors, and in those doors were portholes, and in those portholes fire danced and played. Next to the oven was a cart. It was small, and steel, and very clean. On the cart was a single white box. Its label read “1248”. The box pinged, loudly. I opened its lid. Inside, it held a respirator, a Tyvek environment suit, and Jacob’s phone.

“Lowest man on the totem pole.” That’s how my boss described it. That’s how I got stuck on night shift. That made me “The New Guy”. Or “TFNG”, as my coworkers said during the two weeks of day shift training I got at the start of the job. I’m a junior network administrator, right out of college, riding on a friend of a friend’s recommendation. I was responsible for making sure everything stayed the same over night — all the little red lights stayed red, and the green lights stayed green. I had very little idea what I was doing, but in government work, the one thing you can count on is that the task is documented somewhere. Usually on paper, in a binder. I’d done PC tech support for a few years during college, but had never worked with network gear before. If my résumé isn’t outright false, it definitely stinks of cheese.

The office is thirty miles inside the gates of a military base. The speed limit is thirty miles per hour, and the MPs will write tickets for one mile over. It’s a straight road, no hills or curves, only scrub pine for thirty miles. The gates are only five minutes from my apartment, which makes the hour-and-five drive even more infuriating. The building itself is bland in a way only 1970s-era government buildings can be: a long, low building, brick walls pierced by narrow, energy-efficient windows.

My shift is Sunday through Wednesday, 1800 until 0800 Sundays and Mondays, 2000 until 0800 Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Mandatory overtime. I only work four days a week, but when you work nights, or long shifts, you’re wrecked the next day. I have no social life to speak of, excluding League of Legends. My roommates all work day shift, and are usually gone to work when I get home, and out partying when I wake up.

Did I mention I worked completely alone? That’s not entirely true; my shift overlaps with a co-worker’s for an hour. In the short time Dan and I see each other, we spend the time going over activity logs and any issues he thought might crop up overnight. Other than work, Dan and I had nothing in common. He was in his fifties, with a bushy beard, thick glasses, and a penchant for plaid shirts and overalls. He’d worked in the Network Operations Center since he was eighteen, and would likely work there until he retired.

Sunday nights are the hardest. After the long drive in, I badge through four sets of security doors into the dark cave of the NOC. Drag up a chair next to Dan. Half pay attention while he mumbles over a few things, since he had been there for twelve hours and wants to leave as much as I do. Just like that, he’s gone.

I couldn’t blame Dan for not wanting to be there. The NOC is lit only by its screens — three large projector displays and dozens of monitors. The room is in the middle of the building, with no windows. Three rows of low, carpeted cubicles fill the room, with a bank of monitors just below the projector displays. The rest of the building is on low power overnight, which means only one out of every four banks of lights were on, the rest off, or sometimes flickering and buzzing. The MPs patrol the building once a night, around 0200. They can’t get into my area, or at least they don’t. I learned their schedule the hard way when they went into the restroom I was using one night. They laughed when I screamed, so I stayed in the stall until they left. The restrooms were, of course, at the other end of a very long hallway, past dozens of dark, open doors. I have considered peeing in a soda bottle instead of making that walk.

The day shift people have decorated the halls with all manner of pumpkins and scarecrows and zombie heads. Earlier this week I made my way to the restroom. Only every fourth light was on in the hallway, the dim fluorescents revealing a stale, institutional green. I walked past all those dark doorways, steps echoing off the hard tiles. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a life-sized glowing green skeleton. Its eyes lit up, and it shouted “TRICK OR TREAT” at me. I hate this place during Halloween.

The base is located in an area that is prone to get massive thunderstorms, including tornadoes, nearly every week during autumn. A big storm hit a few nights ago. I had the Weather Channel pulled up on one of the overhead projectors. With the sound off, I watched the weather alerts crawl by. In the NOC, the storm was a slight increase in the ambient noise — something new, apart from the whirring of the ventilation system and the hum of computers. Then, at 0245, an alarm went off.

“Well, shit,” I said. The alarm was old, an actual light on the wall, with a buzzer, not part of our automated systems. I grabbed my white Protocol Binder. Found nothing. Went to my manager’s desk, and looked through his stack of PBs. Nothing.

“The UPS has a fault,” my boss, Mike, said, when I called him. “Go down to the battery room and check the board. It probably caught a surge from this storm. There’s a reset button on the board. Mash it, and it’ll turn the alarm off.” Mike was another lifer, a short man with short cropped red hair who flew a Dixie flag on his leather jacket when he rode his Harley into work.

“Ok,” I said.

“And kid, don’t touch anything. I mean it. All that shit’s on DC power. If you get zapped, you’ll fry to jerky before anyone gets to you. Just reset it and call me when you’re done.”

The battery room is about the size of the first floor of suburban house, filled with row upon row of what are essentially car batteries. Each battery was open on top, and the cases were clear so as to show the level of the acid in them. The room stank of ozone, and aside from a few dim lights down the central corridor, pitch black. The huge copper bars connecting the rows of batteries hummed in the darkness. At intervals, long wooden poles were hung from hooks on support beams. Wood is a poor conductor: the poles are used to pry off anyone unlucky enough to touch one of those copper bars.

The control board was at the other end of the battery room. I walked past racks of humming batteries, my skin prickling from ambient currents in the room. “Great,” I said. “Let’s walk through a billion volts of electricity in the middle of a crazy thunderstorm.” I had been talking to myself within weeks of starting night shift. They say that talking to oneself is an early indicator of insanity. If so, at least I’ll have myself for company.

Like most equipment in the building, I had never seen the UPS control board. As my coworker told me once during one of our overlaps, “We’re mushrooms. They keep us in the dark and feed us shit.” Amongst multiple dials and gauges, I spotted a red RESET button and pushed it. A red light on the board went out. I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

I turned to leave. There was a WHAM! CLANG! from next door. Then a slowly building roar, which meant we were on generator power. I picked up the phone near the control board and called my boss. “I reset the alarm but we just switched over to generator power.”

“Yeah, the wind outside’s a real bitch. We lost power about a minute ago here,” Mike said. “You should have plenty of fuel, enough for five days.” He laughed. “Don’t worry; we’re essential services, so they’ll get our power on sooner than that. Four hours, tops. We We still gotta follow procedures though, so I need you to go check the generator. None of that shit is automated, so go look at all the lights and check the fuel. Go in the door, turn right and go straight back. And wear some damn ear muffs!”

I hung up the phone, and sighed. Even with ear protection, when the generator was running, it was like standing next to a jet engine. I grabbed the ear muffs off the hook next to the door to the generator room. “This sucks. I need a new job,” I told myself, for the hundredth time that night.

The generator room was lit only with dim red lights. The generators were two tractor trailer-sized diesel engines crammed into the room, leaving only narrow maintenance aisles on either side. The room stank of grease and poorly-exhausted diesel smoke, and was very hot. Sweat beaded around my hairline as I walked down the aisle. The sound covered me like lead blanket, hammering against my chest and back, vibrating my eyeballs in their sockets. I made my way through the thickened air to the control panel at the of the room. “Fuel gauge looks good. All lights green,” I said, as I scribbled the readings in my notebook.

Something touched my neck.

I may have screamed, but it was impossible to tell in that room.

I’ll confess: I’m scared of spiders. Well, not so much scared of as utterly revolted by. When I felt the first touch, I instantly visualized a huge black spider crawling on my neck. I flipped. Did the Spider Dance — brushed the back of my neck a dozen times, shook my clothes, spun around in circles. Nearly knocked my ear muffs loose. Said a lot of bad words. After a few seconds of this, I realized there was no spider. “Shit!” I said, and bent to pick up my notebook. Something pushed me. I stumbled forward, away from the control panel. I spun around. There was nothing. “What the fuck?” I frantically looked around me. I was alone. Still trying to see both in front and behind me, I stooped and grabbed my notebook.

I decided there that no matter what, I wasn’t going to run. This was a prank, and my coworkers were watching it on video. It would probably get a million hits on Youtube. “It’s great to be the new guy, you assholes!” I shouted, even though I couldn’t hear myself over the din of the generator, and I knew nobody else could either. I walked down the tight corridor beside the generator, toward the door. The whole way, I felt little pluckings at my clothes, like something pinching and pulling but only for a second at a time. I yanked the door open, stepped through, and slammed it shut. I pulled the ear muffs off and threw them on the floor next to the control board. I was covered in sweat, and my ears were ringing, despite the ear protection.

I wiped my face with my sleeve, and started walking past racks of batteries. Then stopped. Something moved down one of the side aisle. I squinted into the murk. Batteries hummed around me. My scalp prickled and itched. At the end of the aisle, a slumped, dark shape rearranged itself, and slouched towards me. I staggered back, then recoiled as my arm brushed against one of the battery racks. I stood still in the center of the main corridor, and the shape edged closer to me. My nose filled with the sickly-sweet stench of burned pork. It reached the edge of the aisle, I could see its shape. It was a man, staggering towards me, flesh charred dark. Cables writhed across his body, and trailed back into the dark. I heard the coils scrub and squeak against each other. The man had no eyes. They had burst and cooked onto his cheeks. He shuffled closer. A cable wormed out of one socked, crossed the ruined bridge of his nose, and pushed itself into the other socket. For a moment, I realized I could read the print on the cable. His withered mouth gaped open, revealing teeth that had cracked and burst from heat. He stretched a sticklike, charred arm out to me, and the cables twisted upon it. I glanced down, and saw cables on the floor, snaking closer to me.

I ran.

I don’t recall badging out of the battery room, or badging through the multiple security doors to get into the NOC. I remember sitting in one position for long enough that my leg went to sleep. I remember watching the doors, and listening to the quiet noise of the NOC, listening for any change, or perhaps for a muffled, choked scream. I heard nothing, but I sat very still.

Mike came in early that morning. “Good job last night,” he said. “I double-checked everything this morning. Looks good.” He handed me my notebook. “You dropped this in the battery room.”

“Thanks.”

He looked at me, eyebrows furrowed. “You didn’t … see anything in there last night, did you?”

I looked at him, at his orange flat-top shot through with white, at the tobacco stain around the corner of his mouth, burst veins in his nose, at his eyes, pale blue and watery.

“Nope.”

Audra forgot to lock her laptop that morning. We had been dating for about four years, and living together for three. I was happy, had been happy, and I truly thought everything was fine. She left for her Saturday run in the park, and I stayed behind, content to play video games on my lazy weekend morning. When I went to the kitchen, my cat, which had been sleeping on the laptop keyboard, got up and meowed at me. I noticed then that the screen was unlocked. I pushed the cat out of the way, and sat down, thinking I would ensure the cat hadn’t made a mess of anything. Then I noticed an instant message window. “I love you too!”

That was strange. She would say that to me, but I had not used my computer that morning. I didn’t recognize the name, either. Maybe it was her mother? A cousin? As I scrolled through the chat history, my world fell apart. Audra had been cheating, secretly dating a coworker, a married coworker, for over three months. Sometimes they met at work, in the parking garage, but they always saw each other on Saturdays, when she went for a run. They laughed together, at me, in their instant messages, at how easy it was for her to slip away.

I stood, in shock. I felt like someone close to me had died. In a sense, it was a death: the death of our relationship. I had to get out of that house. Suddenly, I felt her everywhere. No, I felt him, smelled his lousy cologne, saw his tie in her car two weekends ago, that she said must have been mine even though I knew it wasn’t, saw the red mark on her neck that she claimed was from her messenger back, saw the bruise on her pale thigh and the line in her chat message “you were too rough last time. you left a mark. he cant find out.” Moaning, or screaming, or crying, I staggered to my car, and I drove.

I may never know how I ended up in that cemetery. I remember driving out of the city, past the suburbs, through desolate country back roads, turning again and again, onto roads that hardly deserved the term. I saw the cemetery gates by the light of the dying sun, the high metal fence glinting through dense hedge like a hidden jewel. I had stopped at a disused railroad crossing in some place that may have once been a town, but had since become overgrown by vines and weeds as to nearly merge with the scrubby forest it inhabited. I parked the car in the dense weeds by the roadside, got out and walked to the gate. Thick vines had woven through the metal bars, but the gate opened readily enough when I pushed.

The cemetery was beautiful, those last red rays of sunlight splashing upon the mausoleums and statues and stones in a watercolor wash. Row upon row of tombstones spread before me. For all the overgrowth outside, the grounds were well-kept, ornamental shrubbery sculpted and lawn trimmed. In that moment, I forgot about Audra, about her infidelity, about my pain. I was in a place of beauty, and I enjoyed it. I walked down the central pathway, stepping over buckled cobblestones pushed up by hundred year old oaks. I knew a bit about architecture, from my college years. Here was a many-columned mausoleum in the Greek Revival style, and there was Egyptian Revival, with its wings and sphinxes. The stones bore the names from a hundred other cemeteries: Smith, Hardy, Robertson.

As I continued down the path, the stones and mausoleums became less grand, more crude, and their dates grew older. Instead of 1920s and 1900s, there were 1880s and 1860s. There was a stone marked 1843, its top half crumbled away, and its inscription worn away. The statues were smoothed and hunched, covered in moss. I noticed another mausoleum, this time a stack of rude brick, set with the massive metal door that appeared to be mostly rust. Its only marking was the date: 1775. I thought this was passing strange, as I did not think this part of the country to be settled that long ago, but entranced as I was by the scenery, I dismissed the thought with a shrug.

The many paths of the cemetery converged ahead of me, against a tall hillside bluff at the back of the place. The sun had truly set and night was upon me, yet I was still able to see in that dim dusk light. I reached the end of the path and gasped. Before me, set into the raw rock of the bluff was a statue of a woman, a beautiful woman, her stone arms slightly reaching out as if to console or comfort. The pain came back at once, crippling, suffocating. In my grief I collapsed there in the path, wracking sobs echoing against the still stones. It began to rain as I wept, softly. After some time, I stood, wiped my face, and looked at the statue.

“No, it can’t be.” I walked closer to the statue, straining my eyes in the dim light.

“Audra?” The statue’s face was clearly hers. I noticed then how still the cemetery was, and how dark. I turned and looked behind me, up the path. It was black as pitch. A low, sliding sound came from behind me. I turned. The statue was clearly looking at me. It was looking at me with Audra’s face. Audra’s lips turned up slightly, knowingly.

I ran. I ran mindlessly through the dark, hands outstretched, without thought. My shins met the top of a crumbled gravestone with a blinding crunch. Momentum carried me forward and over the low stone, and down I fell, face first into the mud at the bottom of an open grave. I lay in the muck with the fetid earth pushing into my nostrils. The rain tapped softly on my back. I could see nothing in that pit, but I could hear the grating slide of stone against stone.

Her cold hard fingers found my legs first, grasping them in a short, sharp shock. I screamed and kicked, flipping onto my back. I kicked again with all my might. She lunged forward and seized me in an impossibly strong embrace. Her harsh stone lips pressed against mine. Her tongue forced my jaws open, grinding sharp against my teeth. Sand, or dust, trickled down my throat, gagging me. I thrashed for a last breath of air, but she held firm. After a time, I relaxed, and let go. The rain pooled in my open eyes, and I was still.

It was dawn when I climbed from that grave. The statue was gone. I did not look for her, as I knew she was back in her shrine, watching over her domain. The pain was gone. She had taken it away, and filled me with stone. I closed the cemetery gate with a smile. I knew what I had to do.

I needed to pay Audra a visit.

My name is China Westerson. China, like the country, not the dinnerware. I am nearly nineteen, and I am haunted. You might think it strange that I say that I am haunted, instead of saying, perhaps, I live in a haunted house, or I have seen a ghost. There’s a difference. When you’re haunted, it follows you.

I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, in my great-uncle John’s ancient Greek Revival, and it was a haunted house. Nothing too impressive; objects would move when you weren’t looking, doors that you had closed on the way out would be open upon returning home. We liked the ghosts of that house. They seemed like family, and according to my great-uncle, a few were. Old houses always have ghosts, he said. They have ghosts just like they have wood rot, plumbing problems, and bad wiring.

This is not to say that new places don’t have ghosts. If you thought that, you’d be wrong.

I moved to Florence, Alabama, to attend the University of North Alabama. My mother is a teacher, my father is a teacher, and I knew that I wanted to teach since I was six. Although UNA isn’t the best school in the state, it is a very good teaching college. Besides, my great-uncle, grandfather, and mother are all alumni, so it was practically required that I go there.

My first college apartment was at a newly-opened complex at Irvine and Pine street. Some member of my family had pulled strings, again, and I found myself in a beautiful one bedroom wonder, full of light and the scent of new paint. It was an easy walk to class, which meant I never had to fight for parking. As the first few weeks of college passed, I made new friends, and had them over, and each one professed jealousy of my fabulous new apartment.

My friend Marcia complained about the flies first. “Close the windows, girl. You’re letting flies in here,” she complained. I blinked. I honestly hadn’t noticed anything, but Marcia was right. There were several flies buzzing around. We checked the windows, but they were all closed. I checked for gaps in the sliding glass door, and around the front door, but they were new and looked fine.

“Maybe they got in during construction, like, as babies,” Marcia said.

“Flies don’t have babies. They have maggots.”

“Ew gross! Hey, maybe this is it,” Marcia pointed at the far corner of the living room, past the sliding glass door, behind a beat up old rocker I found at the thrift store for twenty bucks. (I call him Eddie Money, ha ha).

“What … the …” I shoved the rocking chair aside, and peered up at the corner of the living room wall. There was a gap.

“Well there’s you’re problem,” Marcia said, making a walrus mustache with her fingers. “If that leads to the outside, that’s where your bugs are coming from.”

“How the hell did this happen? This is a brand new apartment!” I growled. I dragged one of many of my unpacked heavy boxes of books over to the corner, and stood on top of it. The gap ran from the top of the corner to the bottom. It was barely visible at the bottom, near the floor, but was nearly an inch wide at the top.

“Gotta love Alabama building codes,” Marcia said. “Ew, don’t stick your fingers in there!”

“I think I see light coming from the other side. That sucks. It goes straight through the wall to outside. No wonder there’s bugs in here!”

I called Maintenance for the complex after Marcia left. Before I could get to sleep that night, I shoved some wadded-up paper towels into the gap.

When I got home from class the next day, there was a note from Maintenance on the door, saying they had fixed the defect and sorry for any inconvenience. I went inside to find the gap sealed up and painted over. I checked the rest of the apartment, and everything seemed fine. Even the flies were gone.

A few weeks later, Marcia and I were studying for an exam, and she looked over at the corner. “I thought you said they fixed that gap.” She was right. The gap was back, a small dark line zigzagging down the corner between the two walls. Marcia handed me her cellphone, which had a fancy light on it. I stood on the same box of unpacked books, and shined the light on the gap.

“Those lazy jerks from Maintenance didn’t fix anything,” I said. “They just squirted some caulk in here, smoothed it down, and painted over it.”

After the exam, I went back to my apartment to meet with Hector, the head of Maintenance for the complex. Hector was short, stocky, nut brown and had the largest teeth that I had ever seen. He seemed very concerned about the gap, and promised to fix it as fast as possible. He radioed another member of the Maintenance staff, and soon there were two other guys shoving my furniture around, walking in and out of the sliding glass door that led to the small back patio. I went to the kitchen to make a sandwich. As I was eating, I heard several raised voices, arguing in Spanish.

I walked back to the living room. “Is there a problem?” I asked.

Hector turned away from his argument with the two other maintenance men, and smiled at me. “No ma’am. We’re just having a … technical discussion.” One of the men, looking unhappy, said something in Spanish.

“So there is a problem,” I said.

“The measurements… they don’t add up,” Hector said. He pulled out a tape measure, and walked to the corner. “On the outside, this is four feet, three inches, from the stud to the edge of the door.” He extended the tape, and ran it along the inside wall. “On the inside… it’s four feet, five inches.”

“Dos,” said one of the workmen, shaking his head.

“Two inches,” I said. “Two inches bigger on the inside than on the outside. Maybe the angles are off?”

“No ma’am. I’ve been checking with a plumb bob and a level,” Hector said, pointing at a pile of gear on a sawhorse table nearby, “and everything checks out. I even drilled two holes all the way through the wall and out the siding. One here by the door, and the other down at the end by the corner. It’s one and a quarter inches’ difference between those two holes, inside to outside. It’s the damndest thing.” Hector glanced up at me. “Pardon my language, miss. This thing, it worries me. I worry about some sort of foundation damage, or even a sinkhole, that might be causing the walls to lean, and that’s messing up my measurements.”

The complex management moved me to another apartment in a building on the opposite side of the neighborhood. It looked exactly the same as my old apartment, but the light was different, and it was closer to the football stadium, so game nights were pretty loud. As the nights got longer, classwork, exams and research papers loomed over me, and I buried myself in work, shunning my friends in favor of studying for exams and completing papers.

Just before Halloween, the college had a mid-semester break. Classes were dismissed on Thursday and Friday, giving us a four-day weekend. Of course, all my professors scheduled mid-term exams on the Monday and Tuesday before the break. When I stumbled out of the last exam, I was ready for some relaxation. Marcia picked me up at seven, and we went to the annual Halloween party at the Kappa Sigma frat house. The Kappa Sigs might be a bunch of nerds, but they have a certain affinity for alcohol.

Early the next morning, head still numb from Kappa Sigma booze, teeth chattering from the cold, I let myself into my apartment. I staggered to the bathroom, fumbled for the light, and scared myself silly when I saw my reflection in the mirror. My zombie makeup had not held up very well over the night. I washed my face, twice, brushed my teeth, peed, then went to my room and collapsed into bed.

When I woke, it was still dark. I felt the somehow familiar creak of the bed as someone sat on the side of the bed behind me. I felt the pull and tug of the covers as someone slid into bed, and heard the faint whisper of breathing beside me. I slowly opened my eyes, and looked to my right. In the bed next to me lay a large man, or maybe a woman, although he seemed male to me. His lank black hair lay tangled on the pillow next to mine, and his pallid skin almost seemed to glow in the dim light of my bedroom. His mouth was a horror of metal and leather, shuttered by a bit of some sort, bolted or fastened to the skin. His jaw fluttered and twitched, and I could hear the faint noise of his teeth as they ground against the bit. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, on some undefined point above us.

I tensed, heart racing, and began to sit up and away from him. His arm shot out across my chest, and held me down. I opened my mouth to scream, but only a few whimpers emerged. He snapped his head towards mine, and fixed me with his terrible eyes. They were quite clear, even in the darkness of my room, and I can see them still, pale yellow, circles moving within circles. He raised his other hand to his face, extended a finger, and said “Shh.” He turned his eyes back toward the ceiling. I quit fighting, and made no more sounds. We lay like that for hours, or decades, and I finally fell back asleep.

When I awoke, he was gone. I vividly remembered the experience, but I was skeptical enough to dismiss it as a particularly horrific episode of sleep paralysis, perhaps brought about by too many tequila shots. I laughed at myself for checking under the bed and in the closet, then opened the bedroom door.

There were flies everywhere.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of dead flies littered the apartment floor. A few live ones buzzed lazily around the hallway, but most were dead. My slippers crunched on insect bodies as I dazedly walked to the living room. My heart had already confirmed what I would see, before I saw it. There was a gap between two walls, in the corner of the living room. It was wider then, at maybe an inch and a half. I walked slowly towards it, disturbing a few living flies such that each of my steps was accompanied by a slight buzzing noise. When I reached the wall, I stopped. I stared at the gap. With a deep sense of dread, I saw my arm raise, and saw my hand put my fingers into the gap. Why did I do that? My fingers brushed the broken plaster at the edge, and I felt, more than heard, a deep, growling roar. The wall shuddered as if struck by a massive blow. I jerked my hand back, and ran out of my apartment.

Maintenance never found any flies. That was the line the apartment complex management gave me each of the six times I called. I demanded they send an exterminator, and they agreed to send someone to look at it. I called back to check, and they told me the head of Maintenance had investigated and found no insects in the unit. I asked to speak to Hector, but they said Hector was no longer employed with them.

I refused to go back to that apartment. I waited in Marcia’s car as she went in to retrieve some of my essentials — clothing, toiletry, homework.

“There’s no flies in there, honey,” Marcia said, with a concerned look on her face. “I saw two dead ones in the bathroom sink, but not bunches all over.” She looked at me. “I bet that new maintenance guy came in and cleaned it all up, cos he’s new and it made him look bad.”

When I called Uncle John, he promised he would fix everything. He called me back later in the day to say that the apartment complex management agreed to let me break my lease. He had found another apartment, in a tower a few blocks away, and I could move in immediately. Later I found that my uncle had made some fairly severe threats, such that the complex management admitted there was a small crack in the wall due to “settling”, but refused to acknowledge any major structural anomalies, and flatly denied any insect infestation of any sort.

Marcia and a few other friends of mine put my few belongings into the bed of a pickup truck and moved me into my new apartment. It was on the fourteenth floor of a building in Florence’s downtown, and turned out to be a three-bedroom corner apartment. I love it. The light is great, and it has a beautiful view.

But.

There are six cracks in the ceiling. Six.

There are two hairline cracks in the bedroom wall, one lateral, extending eight and three quarters inches from the window, and one vertical, extending twenty seven inches from the left-hand power outlet.

There are four small cracks in the long wall in the living room. 38 5/16. 42 1/2. 16 1/4. 33 9/16.

There is one long crack in the kitchen wall behind the refrigerator. 48 5/8.

There is a gap in the bathroom between the tub and the tiles. This is the one I am worried about. I didn’t measure it when I moved in because I have been very tired and have not slept very well. Which was stupid. I should have measured it. I know better. But the gap is very small. It is really too small to use U.S. customary measurements.

I may have to switch to metric.

When I was about thirteen, I stayed at my uncle’s house over the summer. I didn’t know it, but my parents were getting divorced and they wanted me to have a fun summer without dealing with the stress of moving. I loved my uncle’s place, so I was thrilled to find out that I would get to stay there all summer.

My uncle’s house was not very pretty, a big old farmhouse with peeling yellow paint, but the farm was amazing. I was from the city, and my house barely had a yard, much less twenty acres of fields and forest, and a creek that ran through it all. At first, my favorite thing to do was to simply run through those fields, as hard as I could, until I was so hot and exhausted I thought I might pass out, then jump into the cool waters of the forest-shaded creek.

In the evenings, my uncle would go out. He was divorced, and preferred to spend a few hours across the county line at his favorite watering hole. Neither of us felt unsafe about me staying alone. It was a small community of neighbors, and there were quite a few loaded guns around the old farmhouse. As dusk fell on those long summer days, I would climb into my uncle’s beat-up old recliner, and watch his old TV until I fell asleep.

Late one evening, I started having problems keeping the TV tuned to the right station. I crouched in front of it, slowly turning the fine-tuning ring. The TV was built into a huge wooden cabinet, but had a relatively small screen. This was long before the days of digital tuning, so picking up broadcasts from far away was often an exercise of patience and of amateur radio skills. I was desperate to see an old re-run of ‘Lost in Space’, so I kept fiddling with the tuning dials in the hopes of picking up audio, and more video than a fuzzy, rolling outline. In a fit of frustration, I spun the knob far to the left, and stomped off to the kitchen to make a sandwich.

While I was making my sandwich, I heard a sound from the living room that made me pause. There is a sound that a person makes in a room, an absence of absence, rather than any real noise. I spun around, butter knife clutched tightly in my hand. There was nothing there. I cautiously walked back into the living room, where the TV sat showing snow and hissing quietly. Nobody. Weird. I went back to the kitchen and finished my sandwich. As I opened the refrigerator for a can of soda, I heard another sound. “Aaaahhh,” it sighed.

I was alone in the house, but I refused to be a chicken. I thought the TV must have finally started to pick up some channel. “Oh, yeah,” I said, as I remembered. Old TV’s, like my uncle’s, could sometimes receive radio stations, or even shortwave. My uncle showed me that trick last year. “Maybe that’s what it is.” I took my sandwich and cola back into the living room, and put them on top of the TV. As I reached for the tuning knob, I saw something on the screen. I blinked, and moved back away from the screen.

The white and black dots of electronic snow danced on the screen, accompanied by a low whispering hiss. I stared at the screen for a second, two, three. Nothing. I laughed. “Now you’re seeing stuff. And talking to yourself.” I looked away for a moment, and something caught my eye. I looked back at the screen. There, in the bright swirl of dots, was a shape. I don’t know if the shape had been there all along, or if it had simply taken my mind a few moments to see it, like those dot-pictures at the mall. I stared, eyes riveted to the screen, as an image resolved. In the static, I began to see the sweep of a brow, the slope of a nose, the curve of a mouth and chin. The screen rolled once, black bars slipping down, and the static faded away.

I was looking at the face of a girl, dark eyes, black hair curly and cropped at the shoulders. Her face briefly filled the screen, and then grew smaller as she stepped away. I realized with a shock that I was looking at my uncle’s living room, at my uncle’s chair. I saw myself on the screen, and I saw the girl walk towards me. I looked around wildly, but there was nobody in the room. I looked back at the TV. She was standing right next to me. She looked directly at the screen. I watched, on the TV, as she took my hand. My hand began to burn with cold, and I saw her smile the most terrible smile.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said.

I ran, as fast as I could, through the nearest doorway, into my uncle’s bedroom. I slammed the door and flipped on the lights, then jumped onto his bed. I sat there, on his bed, watching the occasional headlights splash through the large windows, until he came home. I tried to tell him what I saw, but he wouldn’t listen to any of it. He was mostly drunk and just wanted to go to bed. The next morning, he had me nearly convinced it was just a dream; that perhaps I had fallen asleep in his chair, and had a nightmare.

I went home the next weekend, to a house that I’d never seen before, and to a father who had moved to a different town. I mostly forgot about the thing I saw on my uncle’s TV. I thought about it when I overheard my mother and my aunt talking in hushed tones about a terrible thing that happened at my uncle’s place — a tenant family had died, in bad circumstance. I thought about it more recently when my mother told me the house had burned down after a car came off the curve and crashed into the side of the place.

I think about that summer a lot now. We don’t have analog TVs any more, and I never listen to the radio, so I never hear static. But sometimes, in the white noise of a thunderstorm, or even in the stillness of my own room at night, I hear her voice.

“I’m still waiting.”