ritual purposes

 

Dim yellow lights shifted overhead. Not the steady flicker of candles or braziers, but crawling along some lofty ceiling, too fuzzy to make out. Where were his spectacles? Van lifted a hand to paw for his nightstand, but the chain around his wrist only gave a foot of slack before it pulled taut.

He gasped, trying to fling himself up, and the fog in his head sharpened to a panicked edge when chains at every limb jangled mockingly and snapped him fast to the cot. Beyond, muffled sounds through the walls like the wails of dying animals. A scream welled up in his throat. It only just escaped when a gloved hand clapped down over his mouth. His eyes rolling, he thrashed, but the hot leather glove covered his nose as well.

“Shh,” said the dark-robed figure suffocating him. As he blinked away gathering tears, Van could make out a golden mask, shadowed by a curtain of golden hair. Deep blackness lay behind the empty eyes. His voice echoed within the mask like soft, strange music. “Are you going to be good?”

His air was running out, his lungs screaming. Van nodded. The hand was gone, and he didn’t try to scream. But he cried, and this at least the masked man tolerated better. He swiped his thumb over Van’s tears and appraised them; he seemed to find them satisfactory.

“There we are. No more yelling. We’ll speak to each other like civilized men, hm?”

Van hadn’t the breath or composure to answer. The masked man glided away to some counter, where Van’s near vision failed. He returned with a short blade and a deep bowl.

“And no more trying to escape! Believe me, it’s worse out there than it is in here.”

Blanching, Van tried to wriggle away from those hands, that knife. “Where am I?” he hiccuped, like that would distract his captor.

Of course, the masked man caught him. Cheerfully, he said, “You don’t want to know. Right- quick sting!”

The knife slid across the joint of his elbow. Was it dull? He hadn’t felt a thing. But then the masked man squeezed, and a stream of blood trickled down into the bowl. Now it more than stung- it burned, the demanding press of hard fingers widening the wound. Van grit his teeth. The crying had stopped, though. He could only focus on one pain at a time.

The masked man murmured encouragements to him, praises, and when Van thought he would swoon from loss of blood, finally let go and bandaged him up tight. He bustled away around the dark room, muttering to himself. At last, he brought a pitcher, and held it to Van’s lips for him to drink. Gods, he hadn’t known until that moment how thirsty he was.

Swiping his chalky tongue over his lips, he asked, “Would you at least tell me what you want?”

“My master wishes to enter this world. I cannot rest until he does.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

He paused. His voice thickened. “He’s insisted upon fresher test subjects. More meat on the bones.”

“Test subjects?” Van echoed hollowly.

“Well. I should say ‘conduits.’ Do you know what a conduit is? Yes, of course, you’ve had more learning than your predecessors. I think you’ll do nicely.”

Van faded in and out, unaccounted time in between darkness and slow-crawling lights. The masked man kept himself mostly to a smudge in the background, a soot stain on black bricks. He whispered steadily, cursed, heaved, while around them the beasts- were they beasts?- continued to moan.

He was awoken for another sip of water. Beside him, the man perched on a stool, that deep bowl settled in his lap. A pestle stuck out of it, stiff with some ugly reddish pitch. The smell defied comparison, but for a kind of fungal sweetness. He sat humming as he worked, transforming Van’s very blood into something unnatural. If he lived through all the preparations, something much worse would be done to the rest of him.

“Please. Please, let me go.”

The masked man sighed. As he turned, scattered light caught on the golden rim of his eyeholes, and lit the flesh behind. Purple bruises of a long weariness underscored yellowed, bloodshot eyes. Anything human which those eyes could belie had long been beaten out. Or perhaps Van was seeing things. Very quickly, they passed back into shadow, and the masked man gently stroked his hair.

“Oh, my poppet,” he cooed. A sweet, lullaby warmth. How could this voice belong to a monster? “No more of that. If you’re lucky… and if you’re a very good boy… you might yet survive.”

Van relaxed back into his petting fingers and wondered: will I want to?

death walking

 

You wade thigh-deep through blood, searching for the shore. Warm silt below sucks your bare feet down with every step, and the fog shrouds even the sun above. All that remains is a slanted red glare. You’re shaking. You haven’t stopped shaking since your first glimpse of the beast. It did not approach; you stilled your breath, nearly stilled your heart to silence it. Blood pounded in your ears, rushing like the terminus of a river, a waterfall roaring, and the creature must have heard.

It may have been a warning. Many creatures of the world are fair. You cannot afford to heed it. You cannot survive on fairness alone.

The swamp bubbles, rippling as you part it. Nothing living has passed through the narrow gate since you were a little girl, and the blood is in some places congealed, so long undisturbed by men. After hours of slogging, upon the hours it took to find the gate, to crawl through the crack in the mountain, your whole body is a raw muscle. Your head spins with exhaustion. But rest is impossible here, in this featureless red expanse which grasps up to drown you. No hound nor horse will follow you into this place of death, and that is your one comfort.

How many great men have passed this way before you, and vanished forever in the mist? (Great men like your husband–) How many of their bodies rot around you? (– as great as his hands are broad, as his hands are liberal, as his hands are absolute–)

All this, you chance on a rumor of a far shore. Naked but for your thin chemise, at one time white, bunched in your hands so at least it doesn’t drag. Whether or not you live, they will never find you.

Nothing grows here, not even the slimy algae and weed which grow in your husband’s pond. All that moves are yourself and the mists you disturb. When old mother witch gave you her map to the narrow gate- lost now somewhere in the swamp- she said death would walk with you, and you took your chances. You think she must have been mistaken. Death does not walk. It snatches at your hem and tempts you to fall.

Your breath catches as your eyes do. Something dark. Large. Choking on your fear, you cast your eyes down.

It strides atop the pool, its cloven feet making no impression on the surface. Ragged skin hangs off its legs. You have walked so long that to be still is agony. You let it come to you only because you cannot turn back. It stands before you and lowers its blackened head.

Forgetting your dress, you hold your arms to your belly. (You would beg for it not to hurt her, if that had ever helped before–) The beast snorts. It sniffs you between bursts of cold, putrid breath, and you thought you had lost all sense of disgust after hours in this bloody mire, but it comes back to you again in a wave of nausea. Your chemise soaks blood until it is stained past your waist, clinging sticky to your skin. You are too numb to feel your shuddering heart, but you know it is bursting to escape, because so are you.

It snorts once again. Slowly, it rounds back the way it came, and you are left holding yourself to keep from crumbling. Your breaths come shallow. The brightness parts for the beast, and when you build the courage to lift your head, you know its name.

Death looks at you over its shoulder, bony fingers at its crown tearing the sky. It beckons. Tears wet your cheeks. And you follow.

It walks at a pace that won’t kill you. Again it remains a shadow in the white mist, its rottenness fading as carcass becomes bone. In a silent swirl, it springs away and vanishes. You stumble forward, crying out for it to come back, when your hands strike bare earth, cool and black.

Your strength fails all at once. It is all you can do to pull yourself onto solid ground, elbows trembling. Here the fog still shelters you, hides this new world from your weary eyes. The setting sun shines violet and gold through strange air as you drag yourself up a low, muddy bank. It is warm and damp, and the freshness of soil finally overpowers the reek of copper.

Collapsing, you manage to roll onto your side. Between yourself and the dying sunlight extends the low branch of an unfamiliar tree. Its leaves like little red hands hover and tremble, knobbly midwife crones giving you their blessings. (Old mother witch would not give you a pill, for your husband nor the baby nor for yourself, but said–) The faint light shines through them, glowing bloody around thin black veins. They have bathed in mercy, just like you. Though spent, you raise one arm.

Foil

 Kieran throws his foil down in disgust. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong!”

A few other teens titter in amusement until Mrs. Markoulis fixes them with a look. They pretend to busy themselves with their drills again, affecting the saintly innocence of young people. She really hates teaching children.

Kieran is an especially difficult student. She cannot fault him for effort; he is more dutiful to the lessons than many people in her adult classes. He stands at attention like a soldier when she gives orders. He seems to think he is training for war. Most 14 year olds do not consider fencing a sacred art. Most of them are dropped off at the studio by their parents, who want their child to learn discipline but are too precious to throw them into karate with the unwashed masses. Kieran takes an hour long bus chain from Providence to Brigham City every Saturday just to get here.

He pays in cash, money he has spent the better part of a year amassing, and he makes no bones about this. Sarge, he has explained to her, and by this she can only assume the boy is referring to his father, would shoot himself in the head before paying for him to come and ‘play with swords.’

So she understands, she really does, why Kieran may have more roadblocks than his classmates.

In spite of all his effort, he always gives up the touche.

“Bench,” she says. Kieran’s face falls, and then rises again with fury. “Now.”

He kicks the blade on his way over, hard enough to send it flying. It twangs against the ground. She watches him to make sure he doesn’t throw anything, knock anything over, or otherwise deface studio property. He does not. The foil is his, and he can kick it if he pleases. He goes to his cubby and grabs his sweatshirt, with which he hides his face when he tucks himself into the bench.

She continues the lesson, though thankfully it’s only another 20 minutes in this block, her last of the day. When she dismisses the class, Kieran wobbles to his feet, until she tells him to sit back down. They need to have a discussion.

Kieran is a hunched up hedgehog, sitting painfully still and waiting for the predators to lose interest. His buzzed head pokes out, only adding to the image of him as a strange, pathetic animal. She stands in front of him with her arms crossed. At last, the room clears and the door shuts, and they are alone.

“Why do you think I had you sit out today?”

Kieran says something miserable, but it’s buried in his sweatshirt. Mrs. Markoulis snaps her fingers and demands he speak up.

His face is splotchy from restraining tears. “Because I was bad.”

A childish sentiment. But he’s so distraught, she has to believe he means it.

“Kieran, if your behavior was bad enough that I needed you to leave the lesson, I wouldn’t have allowed you to stay in my classroom. Do you understand?”

She’s not sure if he does, but he just mumbles, “Yes ma’am.”

“I needed you to cool off,” she goes on to say, “so you would be ready to train individually.”

His big, dark eyes fix on her, red-rimmed and unreadable. “I can’t afford private lessons.”

Against her better judgment, she thinks her heart breaks. “We’ll put it on credit for now.”

“I don’t have credit. I’m 14.”

“Kieran. I don’t think you’re listening to me.”

His brow pinches.

Delicately, she says, “You don’t need to worry about payment for the moment. We’ll come to an agreement.”

“Oh. Okay.” He has that cagey street urchin look he sometimes gets, like he expects to have this snatched away as soon as he accepts it. She doesn’t entertain his anxieties. She claps her hands and tells him to grab his foil and show her his en garde.

His form is fine, she supposes. Stiff. She barks a few commands, appraises the results. He follows her instructions to the letter, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He has seen the way she moves, the way his classmates move, studied them until he thinks he can copy them. He cannot.

His blade swings too wide, his feet almost trip over themselves when he lunges. His actions read loudly even to his fellow novices, unable to disguise their honesty. In some ways, this is her fault for not pulling him aside sooner. Months’ worth of frustration pushes him to move sharper, suddener, but it makes him wasteful.

“Slow down,” she tells him at last. He doesn’t understand, but this one at least is common enough to correct easily. “Speed is not about how quickly you move. It is about how efficiently you move. We’re going to squeeze this hastiness out of you if it kills us both.”

They have to start at the beginning again with basic exercises. They’ll start slowly and build back up, without even using his blade. He doesn’t protest out loud, though he scowls and huffs and sets his foil down a little too roughly. Neither does she say anything aloud about his attitude. The look in her eyes is more than enough to cow him. Kieran stretches, squats, lunges, at a speed which allows him to feel the movement in his body rather than moving blind.

At the end of the lesson, Mrs. Markoulis realizes the real source of his hesitation. She closes up the studio for the evening, and with the keys in her hand, walks to her car. Kieran is sitting in the parking lot beneath an unlit spotlight. His eyes are glued to the street, where cars race by in the twilight, sending up thin clouds of scrubland dust.

“Kieran, what are you still doing here? Is your mother coming to pick you up?” she calls. She can’t very well leave until all the students are safely off the premises.

He just stares at her. “The last bus to Logan was like, an hour ago.”

That’s a no, then. She sighs. “You live in Providence, don’t you? It’ll be faster to take you there myself.”

In her passenger seat, occasionally mumbling directions back to his house, he’s awfully small. He pulls his knees up to make himself smaller. The sight of his shoes on her upholstery makes a muscle twitch in her neck, but he has had a long day, and she can tell him to keep his shoes on the floor next time.

Kieran’s progress is slow and painfully won. He struggles especially during the main class, when eyes are on him. He tries to apply the lessons from his private sessions, but she catches him hastening, moving oddly, and has to come and correct him just as often.

He misses a lesson one week, and returns the next with a bright red, freshly healed wound on his lip. The stitches haven’t even fallen out. That day, he’s utterly quiet, unfocused. He hardly even tries. His arm is limp.

“We should stop doing this,” he says after the other students have files out the door. “There’s no point.”

She looks him over. His dull eyes fix to the wall over her shoulder. Her stomach turns, knowing how little she can do for this boy. Clearing her throat, she asks, “You’re giving up, then?”

Kieran shrugs. “I’m a bad fencer.”

“You love fencing.”

“But I’m no good at it. Why am I bothering with anything when I’m not any good?” In an instant, his eyes go from too dull to too shiny, as he blinks away tears. Kieran knows better than anyone that men don’t cry.

Mrs. Markoulis takes hold of him, both hands digging into his shoulders. He’s almost as tall as her, but still so thin that the little bones in his arms dig into her in turn.

“Kieran, look at me. Look.” It’s like pulling teeth, but he drags his gaze to hers. “You are good. You are. Do you think I would waste my time if I didn’t see any potential in you?”

It spills over in lines of shame down his cheeks. She allows him to look away. His modesty is all he has.

“You have the core skills comfortably in your arsenal, but you struggle to apply them because you are focused on comparing yourself to the rest of the class. This is unacceptable as a fencer. You need to build your foundations, your technique, to best suit you. Not just in body, but in mind.

“You are not a stupid boy. You are not unresponsive and your reflexes are more than adequate. But you are slower on the piste because you spend too much time thinking about your opponent. Watch the others when you are judging them for weakness, for strategy. Do not watch them with envy. You do not exist beyond the end of your blade. Do you understand?”

He doesn’t. But she trusts he will someday.

Bit by bit, Kieran leaves his anger at the door. Out there, for all she knows, he’s still burning himself up, spitting and biting and throwing things at anyone who crosses his path. At war with the world. But in the studio, he is his body, and he is his arm, and he is the sword in his hand. He ripostes. He lands more hits. He begins to feint, and soon his second intention is as natural as breathing.

He doesn’t need private lessons anymore, but they are both creatures of routine. By the time he’s nearly 18, they spend most of their extra hour on Saturday evenings simply dueling. Sometimes, he talks. There are very few adults in his life with open ears. He can lecture for tens of minutes at a time on obscure historical notes and bladecraft. It’s honestly extremely dull, but she can tolerate it.

Too soon, Kieran graduates high school. As a college student, on the pre-med track no less, he will no longer have time for fencing. But he thanks her, and shakes her hand. And Kieran disappears.

-----

One Saturday evening in September, cleaning up after her youth foil lesson, she startles to find a stranger standing in her office.

He’s taller, and his hair is long and bleached blonde, with roots only faintly showing. His hands, buried in his jacket pockets, fiddle with something. It’s much too warm to be wearing that heavy bomber jacket, but he’d always dressed a little unseasonably. He looks at the pictures on her wall, framed certifications and awards and photos of herself with her students. Kieran is not on her wall; he didn’t like having his picture taken.

He looks back at her. There is metal in his face, piercings. He’s not smiling, not in a way she can recognize, but there is a lightness to his eyes. The soldier is gone. She does not know what he is now, but it suits him better.

“Hello ma’am.”

“Kieran.” She can’t identify her own tone as it comes out. To his credit, it doesn’t make him flinch. “I see you didn’t become a doctor.”

He runs a hand through his hair. “Is it that obvious?”

“What are you doing here?”

“My sister is having a baby shower. Since I’m in town, I figured I would see how everything is, uh,” he gestures vaguely, “going.”

The studio hasn’t changed in the ten years since he first became her student. She has not changed, excepting inevitable wrinkles and grey hairs.

“Everything is fine. Have you kept up with your fencing?”

“I haven’t really had the opportunity to practice. I mean, I try, but I’ve been busy. And, speaking of being busy.”

Kieran pulls his hand out of his pocket, and it is stuffed with a thick wad of cash. Mrs. Markoulis raises an eyebrow.

“What, pray tell, is that?”

“Well. Three years of private lessons, around 25 a year, give or take, that’s 75 lessons, around an hour long apiece. Adding in pain and suffering, I would say that comes to about $4000.”

“Pain and suffering,” she repeats, tearing her eyes from the sheaf of hundred dollar bills in his hand.

“I came into some money recently,” he says by way of explanation, because the inner workings of Kieran’s mind are as obvious and as mysterious as ever. “Legally. It’s not, I mean. It’s good money.”

“I appreciate the gesture, but I’m not interested.” As if she would have kept a child in her debt.

He doesn’t budge. “If I leave this here, what will you do? Throw it out?”

“You’re forgetting that I know where your family lives. They have a mailbox, don’t they?”

That finally gets him, and he grimaces. “You could at least give it to someone who deserves it.”

“Kieran, either you earned that money, in which case that is your desserts, or you obtained it by some illicit means, in which case I will not be laundering it for you.”

“Do you really think I would be caught up in some shit like that?”

No, she admits to herself. Unless there have been some bigger changes than she realizes, fastidious young Kieran would not have ended up a petty thief or a drug dealer. Even if he does sort of look like some kind of gang member, with the hair and the piercings and the… eyeliner? He looks like a certain brand of apostate, she amends, which is almost as much trouble in a place like Brigham City, if not for her then at least for himself.

“I’ll take your money if you can win a bout against me.”

Kieran juts out his chin. “Best two of three?”

She agrees.

He borrows a foil. He doesn’t have his own anymore. She allows him a short time to warm up, get limber and get his blood flowing. Kieran slides out of his jacket and tosses it onto the bench, revealing trashy cut-off sleeves, fraying halfway down his ribcage, and a tattoo on his shoulder. A dragon, iridescent copper-green, entangled with a knight in armor, aiming a spear to its heart even as the dragon threatens to crush him. His shirt has a picture of a cartoon duck.

Since he doesn’t have the right shoes with him, Kieran elects to duel in his socks. To make it even, Mrs. Markoulis takes off her own shoes.

He cuts a few experimental arcs with his foil, testing out the new-old limb. He hops on his toes and shakes the tension out of his shoulders with a little full-body wiggle.

“Alright. I think I’m good.”

They take their masks and their places, on opposite sides of the piste. He settles in with his knees bent. His spare arm curls to his side. For being out of practice, his posture is still balanced. Kieran has never been graceful for as long as she has known him- he has never moved like a dancer, like a swan, and it would be unfair to expect it of him- but he has never been more utterly purposeful.

He must be studying her as well. Looking her over, weighing the way she shifts, the way she breathes, holds her foil, tenses her muscles.

“Allez!”

With her first steps, she pushes in aggressively. Testing. He retreats and bats her off. Foils clash as he moves, backsteps heel-toe-heel-toe, her advancing, until he’s nearly at the back line and shoots his arm out in a well-calculated lunge. She’s over-extended herself, chasing him to the edge of the field. The tip catches her in the shoulder.

They both back away, taking a moment to breathe and return to their places. She has to wonder what he looks like under the mask. Is he surprised to have taken a point?

“Allez!”

An even trade of blows. She attacks, then he attacks, only managing a step apiece as they deflect one another’s blades and search for the opening. He’s hungry for it. He took the first bout, it would be so quick, so simple to finish it here.

His blade grazes her chest, but it comes a moment too late. She’s already got him. His shirt catches on her foil; he rubs the spot after, and of course, he’s only wearing that flimsy thing so it’s bound to hurt. Or perhaps this is a psychological tactic. Lowering her guard with his pain. If she wants to win, she must be willing to hurt him.

This Kieran knows things about the world which adults can’t express and children cannot understand. She couldn’t have taught him that.

“Allez!”

A foil finds its mark. Touche.

They both unmask. She smiles at him for the first time in years.

“I can see you’ve learned a lot.”

I Was a Bad Neighbor

 Hello Reddit. Me again.

Some of you may recognize me from my disastrous r/legaladvice thread from a couple months ago. I have made innumerable apologies to the mods and members of the subreddit since then, so anyone planning to derail this with bullshit trolling and further harassment, kindly shove it up your ass. I've learned my lesson, okay?

I only bring it up here because I have a dreadful feeling that it's relevant to my current situation. For those of you unaware, I can summarize the original thread by saying that I witnessed a death in May. My across the courtyard neighbor, specifically. I live in an apartment, her window faced mine, and I was having a quiet night in by myself when I happened to look into her place and saw her, let's say, making preparations. I've already made the mistake of "doubling down" when I mentioned in comments of the now-deleted post that I didn't go out of my way to watch her kill herself, that I was having a typical "freeze" reaction to something unspeakably awful happening right in front of me. I called the police some time after the deed was done and I had processed what I saw. It was a terrible tragedy and we all feel very sad about it.

Well, to all those who hounded for my blood and my comeuppance for the high crime of being fucking human, here's karma for you: I think I am being haunted.

At least, haunting is the first term I reach for, but "cursed" might also be apt. Maybe I'm a superstitious man. I don't think of myself that way, I'm open to skepticism, but I struggle to come up with a logical explanation for everything that has happened to me. Calling it a coincidence is just too much to stand.

I am not experiencing the typical pop cultural signs of a haunting. No cold spots and flickering lights. If anything, this only strengthens my conviction; if my HVAC was busted or I was having a gas leak (I check my CO alarms regularly) I would be getting these more basic faux supernatural signals. 

It started several weeks after Eloise died. Her name was Eloise, to be clear. I think her family couldn't make it down to pick up her stuff for a while, or she didn't have family, and the landlord hasn't gotten a new tenant in yet, so he didn't bother cleaning the place out for ages. My work desk is right at the window that directly faces her balcony where I used to see her- another thing which made the occasional eye towards her place pretty inevitable.

When the light is on and the blinds aren't drawn I can see clear to the kitchen through the balcony window. Obviously it's much harder to see without the lights inside, but especially during the day with some sun coming in, it was enough to see that the place was abandoned. Full of lumps and shadows outlining the things she used to own, like little burial mounds. But, you know, still.

Until it wasn't. I looked over one day from where I was doing some bullshit emails because something had caught the corner of my eye. It was late afternoon, getting dark with the sun falling behind Eloise's side of the apartment building. I stared over for a while, thinking maybe it was just a bird taking off. I saw it from somewhere in that dark apartment. This shadow. Big, person-sized. It moved really slowly, really deliberately, until it crossed out of sight behind the far wall.

I thought for a half second that maybe it was the landlord, but what fucking landlord walks around the place in the pitch black like that? I didn't think a burglar would walk around so slowly. They'd just want to bust in, grab what they could, bust back out, right?

It freaked me out. Describing it feels really stupid, like, oooooh I got scared by a literal shadow! So spoopy! But I don't know man, it hadn't been that long since I saw her, and something about that shadow really upset me. I got up and made myself a coffee (bad idea by the way because I was up all night being jittery as well as unnerved) and after I got back to the emails I didn't notice anything else from her place.

And then it happened again. It happened at almost the same exact time. Maybe one time it could have been a burglar, but two nights in a row? Who the fuck would break into the same apartment twice?

I swear to god, this time it was watching me. I noticed the shadow moving around a little, but then after a while it just kind of stood there? It stood still for a long time, right in the middle of where I knew the kitchen was. The first time it could maybe have been anything, but this time I know it was a silhouette. I couldn't make out anything distinct but it was the shape of a person if nothing else. It stood there staring back through the window until it got too dark to see even shadows.

Look, I'll be up front, I have nothing to lose. Especially on the internet, I put on kind of a tough guy front. We're probably all guilty of that at some point, I'm not embarrassed about it. But I'm a nervous person in real life. I don't handle conflict well. Someone so much as raising their voice at me makes my heart basically explode with cortisol. I don't even watch scary movies. So the only way I've learned to live with that is by doing dumb things to reassure myself and put my mind at ease. I went around the long corridor the next morning- fuck no was I doing this at night- to Eloise's apartment.

The door was locked. In my book, that's definitely the worst option.

This kept up another few days, not quite a full week. I saw it more frequently too, if my overactive, paranoid mind wasn't getting the better of me. I saw it in the morning before work, plus in the evenings. Then this thing, this spirit, whatever it is, I think it shifted. It came closer.

I started noticing things going missing or being out of place. Keys, my laptop, kitchen knives. Little things, but things that really disturb me to notice. I wasn't seeing the shadow in the other apartment anymore, but I can feel in a way that can't be articulated that there is a presence in my home. Obviously I live alone, I have since I moved out. At times there's this weight to the air when I come home from work or have freshly woken up in the morning, like the air has just stopped moving around someone who was here before me, like I'm about to hear a footstep from the other room. And a few days ago this smell started in my kitchen. I can smell it from most of the apartment now, it's not very big, but it's worst in the kitchen. It smells like something died. Literally, putrid meat. I've been vegan for the last three years for medical reasons (fuck alpha-gal allergies), but I checked my fridge and pantry anyway for rotten vegetables and I can't find the culprit. It's driving me nuts.

That's not the worst thing.

Two weeks ago, I heard her. I fucking thought I was hallucinating. Do you ever hallucinate right on the edge of sleep? I've gotten that a few times in my life when I've been really exhausted, and I have been recently, understandably with all of this shit going on. So I'm lying in bed and I hear this tiny little voice, really quiet and really close. It was like it was right in my ear. She could have been lying in the bed right next to me.

I don't remember the first thing she said to me, I was half unconscious. I snapped awake and went rigid in bed. It took me a minute to think: did I just hear that? Was that in my head? And I was ready to write it off as just a random nighttime bleed over between waking and dreaming mind.

It came again. Something like, "I don't think I ever told him," or maybe it was "told you?"

At this point I am pissing myself because that's not a hallucination. I froze. I could barely move to breathe for the longest time.

Silence for a while. Biding her time or just unaware of how much was passing. I doubt ghosts have much sense of scale.

A sound like she was taking a shallow breath in through her nose. Something soft and wet, tongue shifting around audibly over her lips. "Never…"

I got just enough breath in my lungs to throw myself out of bed and book it to the living room. I threw all the lights on as I passed and cowered on the couch with my knees to my chest. Eventually I fell asleep because exhaustion overwhelmed me, before I'd even realized. 

Sleeping on the couch, I didn't hear her the next few nights. But she found me. Like the first time, murmuring so close she could be on top of or beneath or all around me.

I don't write down or remember everything she's said. Some of it is weird, like she's just talking to herself. I tried talking to her once, answering a question she asked ("I don't know. What do you think is going to happen?"). She didn't respond. Her voice was so sad.

It's not every night, but it's enough nights. When it happens, I usually run downstairs and sleep in my car. Thank god she hasn't caught onto that yet, or hasn't learned how to follow me. It took her a week to break into my apartment, a few days to follow me from the bedroom to the couch; I consider it only a matter of time. She hasn't said anything so far that is malicious. Honestly, she seems more sad than anything. But I'm scared to death that something I do will anger her and she'll turn on me.

I didn't mention it back in legaladvice because it seemed too macabre, too much. I didn't want to be called a liar over a stupid little detail that meant nothing. And honestly, if I had said something, I have no doubt it would be used to smear me as the most disgusting bastard alive. 

Eloise looked at me. She knew I was there.

I'd talked to her a couple times at the mailbox. Just casually. We'd been looking across the courtyard at one another for a year. It's small enough that I could see her expression, tending the pigeon box she kept on the balcony. She got rid of it a couple days before she jumped. I don't know if maybe she felt better that somebody was watching. Or maybe she hated my fucking guts for not helping her.

I wish I knew what she wanted. If she's mad, you know, if I could appease her, or if she's sad and I could… I don't know, get her to move on?

The smell has gotten worse lately. I'm trying to tell myself it's a dead rat in the wall, but that means I'll have to put up with it until it rots away. I'll put out some air freshener. Hopefully that makes it bearable. I seriously don't want to be in my kitchen these days. I don't want to be in my apartment at all.

I'm not sleeping well. This has already been going on for so long, I'm at my wit's end. I can't afford to move, rent in this city is stupid and I don't know anybody in real life who would be willing to room with me. Even my one bedroom in a shit neighborhood is barely within my price range. I'm reaching out here because if I can't talk to someone about what's been happening I'm going to lose it.

A few weeks ago, the landlord finally came through to clean the place out, dump her stuff. Maybe a relative finally came by. I think someone might be moving in soon. He's in there as I write this, giving the place a fresh coat of off-white paint. I'm afraid for whoever plans on moving in.

I'll update if anything else comes up. Call me pessimistic, but I'm already sure that it will.

- Neighbor

-----------

So I found the smell. Where it was coming from.

It was getting worse. I started wearing a mask in my apartment just to handle the stink. A bit after the first post, I opened a cupboard door I almost never use to grab the slow cooker. I figured, I can't be in the kitchen long enough to cook anything on the stove, I might as well put something on to simmer all day while I'm at work.

When I opened the cupboard it bowled me over so hard I thought I was going to puke. I gagged even with the mask on. It was only the thought of puking into my mask that stopped me, convinced me to slow down and breathe through my mouth. I grabbed some rubber gloves and pulled the inner drawer out to look.

It's not strictly impossible for a bird to have gotten trapped and died in my kitchen cupboard without me noticing. But it's pretty fucking unlikely. I rolled the drawer open and behind the slow cooker, melting into rotting meat sludge, was a fat little blob dotted with brown and grey feathers. I bagged it up and threw it down the hallway chute and spent the next hour scrubbing everything down. The wood is discolored and a little warped from absorbing liquid from its decomposing body. If my landlord sees this, I can kiss my deposit goodbye.

I tried to put this incident behind me and ignore all other misgivings. I know I'm paranoid, I know I overthink and work myself up over nothing. I did my best to balance that out with calm rational thinking and whatever shit.

Then I got a call from the building super, who got a call from the landlord, who got a complaint from the mailman about the contents of my box.

A pigeon. Intact but extremely dead. Left in my mailbox. My locked(!!!) mailbox.

It's only by luck that I didn't end up being the one to see the thing. Eloise loved those little winged rats. She took better care of the box she had for them than I've seen parents care for their children.

The noises are worse. They haven't made it to my car yet, but it's not just at night now. When I'm in the shower, I hear her humming, almost drowned out by the water. Just walking around, going about my day, she could speak up at any time. Always from the same places, like she's sitting in my living room or lying in bed, watching. I managed to catch her on recording on my phone because some of you were insisting that this is all in my head. IT'S NOT. I can play her voice back and hear her say the same thing over and over. It's quiet, but it's real. This is happening to me while you fucking people are yukking it up. 'Haha you should fuck the ghost bro!' You're sick.

I hear this laugh sometimes. I think it's hers, but I don't know, I never heard her laugh. It's the voice of a woman for sure, but it's soft and low and so overflowing, so dripping with malice. It comes when I think I'm adjusting, ready to live peacefully with this entity. It's there to remind me something worse is coming.

I wish it would fucking happen already. Sitting here biting my nails, camping out in my car, shaking like a little purse dog every time I have to get my mail. It's not dignified. It's not fucking humane, is what.

Oh, and about my mail. It hasn't stopped with the bird. I mean, there haven't been any more dead animals stuffed inside, thank god, but two days ago I got her junk mail. I called the company who sent it out, said hey, she's been dead for more than two months! Not to mention this isn't her address.

You wanna know what the lady told me? "We're very sorry sir, but we haven't sent anything to this client since we were made aware of her passing." Which was apparently six weeks ago, maybe more.

More junk mail yesterday. Credit card bills. Sue me, I peeked. I don't think mail fraud counts for the deceased. They were pretty steep, and what's more, dated for this month. To reiterate, the woman has been dead since May. I called again and got the same run of bullshit. Every company insists they have already been apprised of Eloise's death and they're so very sorry. Not as sorry as I am.

Today it was a struggle to open. The key went in fine as usual, but when I tried to pull it, it was stuck, like it was rusty or jammed. My palms started to sweat, sure it was going to be another bird. Once it popped loose, like vomit, letters to Eloise spilled across the floor. Forty. I counted.

They're mostly bills. Open lines of credit, psychiatric outpatient bills, therapy, car insurance, bank statements in the red. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise to hear that Eloise was troubled.

I opened one envelope, hand written with no return address, made out to "Neighbor." I don't mean it said my name and I'm substituting my pseudonym. It said "Neighbor," just like that.

Empty. There was a single downy grey feather at the bottom.

I took all that shit out to the local park and threw them on one of the public grills. I know you're not supposed to burn paper in those but I needed them gone. It's only as I came home to write this up that I thought maybe I should have kept them as evidence, but I don't want evil things in my house. I'm not letting this thing get any stronger.

I don't know if the burning helped. I had a brief flash of regret when I came back to my apartment and there was another dead bird on my doorstep.

They're definitely pigeons. I found out during all of this, you know, I never liked pigeons because I live in the city and they're dirty and they shit everywhere, but they used to be pets. They've basically feralized and their populations exploded because people just threw them away. I bagged the bird up and sent it down the chute already. Its neck was broken like it slammed high speed into a wall. I should have taken pictures of things at least. Maybe that's what she wants me to do? Fuck, I don't know.

But I was reading about pigeons because I wanted to learn about her. She's not hurting me yet but she's giving me signs. Leads. So I should be investigating them, right? And then I thought, maybe she had socials. Maybe that's how I can get in contact with her folks. I went back and found out her surname from the obituaries (I won't share it because I'm not a monster) and she did have a facebook account.

She was 30. I scrolled back through almost a year of her timeline. Her next birthday would be a couple weeks from now, and she would have celebrated it alone.

Eloise didn't have living relatives, or at least none that she had added on facebook. I won't discount the idea of a sibling or a cousin with whom she kept in very light contact. A one-phone-call-per-year relationship. But from what I can tell she was an only child who had lost both of her parents several years ago. I think to cancer? She shared a lot of pink ribbon stuff, a lot of little PSAs about getting your colonoscopies and HPV vaccines and shit.

I don't know if she even had friends really. None close enough for them to memorialize her page. It's just this husk now. Detritus. I bet most people on her friends list don't even realize she's dead.

Something about her page weirds me the fuck out. I looked at her friends list, and she's got a couple thousand people added, like one of those old people who adds everyone they see. There's no way she actually knew any of them well because this woman would post and post, and nobody would respond to anything. You know, pictures of food, pictures of her birds, selfies, scans of her paintings- Jesus, I mean, she was a painter! A hobbyist, she wasn't Monet or anything, but they're pretty- and status updates just talking about whatever, movies and books and how her day was going, how she was feeling. She'd be making 12 posts a day, linking to her instagram and shit and just… nothing. Maybe one reaction from some random. It's like she was fucking invisible. Like she was already a ghost.

Her IG is probably equally depressing but I don't have an account so I can't see much of it. I want to look but I also don't want to, because something awful is going to be there waiting for someone to see it, and just like before I am the only person watching Eloise. I feel nauseous. The last post on her facebook, literally the first thing you see on her page says, "Would any of you miss me if I was gone?"

I'm so sorry Eloise. Please, I understand, okay, you were in a lot of pain. You want to be seen. I see you now. I see you everywhere. I pass by your favorite noodle place every day when I go to work and I see you sitting alone with your pad thai sketching the cashier lady as though you never left. I've never gone there but they have vegan options and I wish I could go inside and try except I'm sure you'll be waiting there, watching me from the table by the window you liked. I hear you, I know you're there, so you don't need to do this to me anymore.

Fuck. I'm sorry. I had to go take a break but I'm okay now. I took a nap in my bathtub. I'm forcing myself not to go back and edit things even if they're embarrassing because I want to be honest with you all. You won't be able to help me if I'm not honest with you, and I really really need help.

I heard her by my pillow last night like a lover, like always. I've gotten better at tuning out the words, treating them like the sounds of the pipes. She asked me, "Can you see me?"

She was quiet for a while. So I waited, and then I said, "Yes."

It's not a lie. I can't see her with my eyes since she left her apartment but I can still see her, I can feel her presence.

"I feel like I'm fading… What would you do if I disappeared?"

I have trouble reading Eloise's tone. Her voice is sometimes so quiet. She could have been frightened or angry. I said what I thought would placate her. Soothe her.

"I would miss you."

She laughed again. The more I think about it, the less sure I am that Eloise is the one laughing. How could someone so sweet and delicate laugh like that? My Eloise painted sunflowers.

What if Eloise was being haunted by something too?

I was right about the new tenant. I saw her come through, though I haven't seen much of her. She drew the blinds but I'm pretty sure she's moved all her stuff in; I saw some guys in uniforms carrying furniture into the west courtyard entrance, so that's a pretty good indicator. I'll give it a few more days before I talk to her. I don't want to freak her out, you know? But at the same time, I have this horrible feeling. Like, what if I do nothing and she gets hurt? Can I stand living with a second dead girl on my conscience?

I'm weighing my options here. It might be worth a temporary discomfort on my part, might be worth making her a little upset, if I can reassure myself that she'll be safe.

What do you guys think? Is this nuts?

She's pretty. Not that that's a factor but, you know. She is.

Well. I'll update soon.

- Neighbor

----------

I can’t tell whether things have gotten better or worse.

The good news is I talked to Nicole, my new across-the-courtyard neighbor, and I honestly think she's going to be a big help. The bad news is Eloise is trying to hurt me now. Or, whatever this thing is.

That probably sounds drastic but it won't make sense unless I explain things in order, so I'll try not to ramble or jump around too much. Apologies by the way for how, uh… disorganized my last post was. Ironically, being in the hospital and staying with my sister afterwards has given me the chance to catch up on some much needed sleep. I didn't realize how badly deprived I was until I spent a week in and out of Benadryl comas. I don't exactly feel good now, but at least I'm more myself.

It took me a day or so to work myself up to talking to Nicole. I hung out on the ground floor by the vending machines for an hour, waiting for her to come to the mailbox. Nothing makes you feel more like a creep, but I just kept reminding myself that it was important. She came down the stairs instead of the elevator, and where I was standing I almost missed her.

She jumped a little when I passed by her, acting like I was going to my own mailbox. But she smiled at me and scurried over to her own. Instead of checking it- I'd already made sure there were no bullshit letters that day- I turned and acted like I didn't quite recognize her.

I said hey, all fidgeting, and when I got her attention I asked if she had just moved into apartment #X.

"Yeah?" she said. She has these big nervous eyes like some kind of fairy. I doubt she'll ever read this so I think it's okay to say that.

"It's just I'm your across the way neighbor. My window faces yours."

"Oh! Yeah, I keep that thing closed."

"I noticed." Yeah, I know, dumbass thing to say, makes me sound like an absolute mouth breather. I'm not good at talking to women. I added, "I knew the woman who used to live in your place."

She nodded politely, but she clearly wanted to get her mail and go. Checking around to make sure we were alone, I dropped the big question: "You haven't seen anything weird since you've been here, have you?"

Nicole looked at me for a little while. "Well. Not in my apartment," she said.

Then she told me she was busy and had to get back upstairs, and I said, "Oh, yeah, no problem," expecting that this was her way of blowing me off. But then she stopped and asked me when I was free next.

Look, I haven't told anybody about this in real life. Or, I hadn't then. I don't have a lot of friends here since I moved into the city for work. I talk to my guys still, but they all live on the other side of the state and we don't see a lot of one another. I haven't mentioned this thread. It's sort of like a diary other than the fact that I'm sharing it with Reddit; some things are too private to tell anyone but a total stranger.

So what I mean is, this was the first time I felt like I was being taken seriously. Not that a couple of you guys haven't been kind or a comfort, but to have someone in real life look me in the face when I'm coming at them like 6 feet of crazy, and say yeah, I'll bite, let's go out for coffee. It's just something else.

We exchanged names and numbers, and she said she could meet me the next day.

I didn't tell her everything. I showed up after work and I sat down at the outdoor cafe seating and said I'd been experiencing something strange since the last tenant died. Nicole nodded at me very eagerly.

"The woman who killed herself, right?"

That just about had me jumping out of my seat. "How did you--?"

"I wasn't totally honest with you yesterday, when I said I hadn't seen anything weird." Nicole fidgeted with her coffee. She worked weird hours, mostly middle of the night, so this was like her morning pick-me-up. "I've always had kind of a gift. I get feelings about places. I can sense things. Spirits. You probably think I'm nuts though, right?"

At that point she could have told me she was psychically linked to the queen of England and I'd still be ecstatic to hear it. While she never claimed to be able to communicate with ghosts or demons or anything, she is sensitive to their presence. She'd been hesitant to move here because the spiritual turbulence (her words) was so strong.

"The thing that convinced me to move in anyway was that the bad vibes are all coming from your place instead of mine. I figure I'm out of the splash zone."

"Is that why you keep the shades drawn?"

She grinned at me. "Well, that's more to stop perverts peeking into my windows. But, yeah. The place was just too good a deal to pass up, you know? Even if there is a little bit of…"

Nicole wiggled her hand. I understood perfectly.

She hesitated just a little when I asked if she would come to my place to feel it out. If she thought my visitor was still Eloise, or I have something else on my plate. But eventually she agreed. I think her own curiosity won out over the apprehension that I'm some kind of serial killer.

The minute she stepped inside my place, a visible shiver went through her. Without speaking to me, she walked around my kitchen, looking over certain spots and frowning: my fridge, the oven, the cabinet where the bird had been rotting. (Someone on here advised me recently to replace the shelf, but I haven't been able to get around to it.) Then, in my living room, she stumbled back from my couch like an invisible barrier had jumped out to hit her. All the places my unwanted guest was strongest gave her at least visible apprehension.

"The energy here is strange. I can definitely feel a strong presence. Something dark." She smiled at me, apologetic. "I don't mean to scare you or anything. I'm just trying to think of why I would feel this concentration of darkness here when there's hardly any in my own place."

"Is that not normal?"

Nicole shook her head. "Usually when a place is inhabited, the energy has a pretty decent radius. And I mean, your neighbor died in my apartment, right? So why would her spirit be in yours?"

I never told her about seeing Eloise. In the time we'd been talking about my apartment situation, I had managed to steer around the topic. It's not hard to find screenshots of that old legaladvice thread bouncing around, and what would I do if she recognized me, realized who I was and wanted nothing to do with me? I'm a coward, but Nicole had been such a breath of fresh air. She's really nice. I couldn't risk fucking that up.

So I didn't say anything. Just agreed that it was weird. If it's any comfort, I felt like a sack of shit about it.

She asked to use the bathroom- too much coffee. I pointed it out to her, but when she opened the door, she looked back at me and asked, "You don't have a girlfriend, do you?"

I stammered like a massive clown, jumping to reassure her that I didn't.

Nicole pointed into the bathroom where Eloise had made herself at home.

On one side of the sink, there was a hairbrush, a toothbrush, a jar of lotion, and a little sample bottle of perfume. Woven in the brush's spines was her long, black hair.

I wanted to bag it up and toss it right away, but Nicole made me stop and breathe. (She also wanted to use the bathroom without me in it.) We compared the hair to a photo of Eloise, and the length looks correct, but something about the hair is weird. It's coarser than hers looked. Nicole said it felt like the same spirit, presence, whatever. That there were powerful feelings of resentment, of vengeance. I was just relieved when she let me throw that shit away. 

But even so, now when I come home, I can smell something in the air like cut roses and vanilla. Coming closer.

Nicole and I kept in touch. I was curious about her, her job. Over the next few days, that was the most I've talked to a woman I'm not related to since college. And I… stopped talking to Eloise.

I'd been talking to her more and more at night. I know I mentioned it offhand, but I may have understated how often. How much. I slept in my car less often than I said, even when she started talking.

We can't really talk. We have two conversations running parallel and never touching. But even that's something, you know? More than the silence I had before. I had the thought of putting on music to drown her out, I could have done anything to avoid her, but I didn't.

Anyway, I stopped. I didn't need to talk to her anymore, with Nicole right across the courtyard and on my phone. And I was nervous, I was angry with Eloise after she crowded into my space, after Nicole's visit. I didn't want to encourage her.

I wasn't really paying attention while I cooked. Nicole was telling me some story from her study abroad. I make basically everything from scratch, down to the sauces; most people who avoid meat by choice won't notice if there's some factory error on their boxed vegetable stock and it gets some tiny amount of pork or whatever in the broth, but my immune system will. I know I don't need to cut chicken and eggs out of my diet, but I do because if there's cross-contamination, I could get really sick. So my guard was down. And it's my fault that I wasn't paying attention, because this food was mine and I trusted it, and I didn't notice the weird smell in the tomato sauce until a forkful of pasta was already in my mouth.

I took a bite and gagged halfway through swallowing, my mouth filling with a sharp iron taste as though I'd bitten through my tongue. I went to the sink and spat the rest of my mouthful out. I heaved a few times but couldn't manage to vomit, and I stared down at the mess in the sink with my eyes watering. Hysterical now, I grabbed the sauce jar and dumped it out, and I could see now that the consistency was all wrong, the color was way too dark. Something had made a poison pill of human blood out of my pasta sauce.

The sauce wouldn't drain when I rinsed it down. Murky red-brown water simply rose and filled my sink wrist-deep. There was a clog. I shouldn't have been fucking with it, but I wasn't thinking straight, I just kept thinking about how Eloise's blood went down my throat. It wasn't anything caught in the sink trap. It was deeper. I stuck my arm down the drain, up to my elbow, and when my fingers touched something squishy and wet like seaweed I really could have puked.

I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled. The drain glugged ominously, and slowly began to wash away the poison red water as I dragged a thick wad of long, black, matted hair out of its depths.

That's when my mouth started to swell up. I know from the last time I had a reaction that my throat was next, so I ran for my epipen. I always keep one in my car and one by my bed. There is no reason I would EVER move it. Sweat poured down my back, my chest heavy and head light. I dripped water and tomato and blood all over my bedside drawer, my sleeve soaking and disgusting

She poisoned me. She fucking poisoned me. She'd never hurt me before, never threatened me. Not until Nicole.

I didn't have time to lock my door on my way out. I ran blind, hitting every wall. It's only by luck I didn't break my neck going down the stairs, and I got the front desk guy to call an ambulance. My throat was choking me on my own angry flesh when I wrestled my epipen out of the glove box. 

The swelling went back down after a minute but I still felt like I was going to pass out. Collapsing on the sidewalk in front of my beeping, demanding car, I could see that my tires were equally limp against the ground. Slashed. Deeply slashed.

My older sister is my emergency contact and the hospital got ahold of her at my request. She lives an hour away but since I wasn't going to work anyway, and I sure as shit wasn't going back to my apartment, she agreed to let me crash. It was a good excuse to see her and my nephew, and make sure I had an eye on me in case I had a secondary reaction. That's happened to me before, allergies are no fucking joke, but thankfully this time I was hopped up on steroids and antihistamines and I rode out my sentence in peace.

I forgot how it felt not to be jumping at shadows. I didn't carry that thing with me when I came to stay with Jenny. Maybe it's just that place that's evil; maybe if I stay here long enough it would follow my scent.

I've taken the time while I'm recovering to go back more deeply into Eloise's facebook. Turns out she was engaged a few years ago, but her ex isn't in her friends list anymore. I reached out to him to see if he'd heard anything about her or spoken to her recently before she died. He cursed me out, called me some names I can't repeat on Reddit these days.

Following a hunch, I did some digging on the guy. He has a prior charge for battery and what do you know, that happened right around the time they split. I feel like I'm piecing something together, that the vision of what happened to Eloise, what is continuing to happen,

Fuck.

I don't know how this happened. I just realized I have her added. I swear to god I didn't, and if I had tried there's no way she could accept me. I thought I saw that green light by her name. That's how it got my attention. It's not there anymore, it might have been a trick of my eyes, mixing up a couple of lines to make sinister new shadows.

Went back to her page. Fuck this. That old status, would you miss me if I was gone, it's not there anymore.

What is there is a photo taken twenty minutes ago. It's my bedroom. Things are scattered all over the place, just how I left them looking for my epinephrine. The red stains are still visible faintly on my sheets.

She was there. She was just there, now, while I'm hiding on my sister's couch. And she knew I would be looking.

I need to move. I don't care if rent is a nightmare. I'm not safe in that place. Jenny will help me find somewhere, or if I can crash here, she'll read over my resumé and help me apply for something local. I'm not putting up with this shit anymore.

I'll feel bad leaving Nicole in that apartment while this thing is loose. There isn't much I can do. I just hope that this attack wasn't out of jealousy. Even if it was… Once I'm out of the building, Eloise has no reason to target her.

She has no reason to target me. I haven't done anything wrong. Or, I mean I have, but not wrong enough to deserve this. Nobody deserves this.

- Neighbor

----------------

Something isn't right.

I mentioned in my last update that when I got sick, I thought my allergy was triggered by human blood. All I could think about, in that moment and looking back on it in the following days, was Eloise wandering around the place like a banshee, magicking her own blood into my mouth. But I've since been informed that it couldn't possibly have been human blood, which I have to grudgingly agree with after doing some research. In fact, the very reason humans can develop meat allergies from lone star tick bites is because we don't make that sugar in our bodies. When a tick bites you, it vomits inside you, ejects foreign matter into your blood. Sometimes that foreign matter is alpha-gal from another mammal, whose blood is still rolling around in its system. Your immune system does the rest; it learns that meat, by extension, is a danger.

I'm not a scientist. I work for an insurance firm. I am just a parasite beset by parasites. Sometimes I don't know how shit works. But I don't need to be a scientist to tell you that I tasted blood, and I had a life threatening reaction to it. That means it was animal blood. And… I don't know what that means.

Why would a ghost, why would Eloise, do that? How would she do that? It's always been the pigeons with her so far, she's connected to them, but like I've said before, birds don't produce alpha-gal either. If she's strong enough to find an animal and kill it… maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe she manifested it the way she manifested her letters, which I'm still getting, or her hairbrush, or the other things of hers which I find scattered around the apartment.

There's more of those showing up, by the way. Her clothes in my wardrobe, her shampoo in my shower, her hair on my pillow. Crowding me out, or staking a claim on me?

If she wants me out of the place, she can have it. I've spent as little time there as possible, and I think I have another place lined up. Just a few more weeks, and I'll escape this hellhole. I'm already starting to pack up some of my things, keeping them in storage. I tried leaving the boxes in the apartment at first, but I came home from work to find the things I had put away thrown around the place and the cardboard shredded. I hope she knows moving boxes aren't that cheap.

I'm avoiding cooking for the time being. If I can't buy food raw and eat it as is, I get vegan takeout. It really fucking sucks- another thing eating through my wallet.

It wasn't just the pasta sauce that was contaminated. The blood was rancid by the time I got home from Jenny's place and cleaned the fridge out, and the stink showed me where the poison was hiding.

It's so elaborate. But that's not quite wrong for Eloise. She seems like she couldn't half ass anything, even when it was killing her.

I made an instagram account so that I could go through hers. She had a lot of video posts. Some of them were live records of her painting with some music underneath. A few of her with the birds. A lot of them were just her talking, reading her poetry aloud. Her voice is so familiar it almost makes me sick trying to listen to it. She says a lot of things that sound like I've heard them before. Not like quotes, but as though when she's spoken to me before, it was an echo of her living words.

Eloise did a little better here than facebook, but she was still obviously putting in much more than what she got out. She had clips of Lives that she'd done. Not many people in attendance. I don't think she even saved all the ones she did, and there were already a hell of a lot. She talked about her ex in a few of them. I think at some point he was stalking her, before she moved in here.

Other than one thing, it's been quiet. I've been sleeping in my car, parking under overpasses or snatching a couple hours in 24-hour McDonald's parking lots. With all these things in combination, she gets very little time out of the day to terrorize me. Once I went home and a ton of my work clothes had been splattered, practically soaked in more blood. It was mostly dry by then, stained rusty brown. But it still stank like copper, like fried old wiring with power still running through it. The black stuff I could at least get dry cleaned and you can't really tell, but I bought a few new things to keep at the storage facility. Another loss, another hit to my checkbook. There's another bird at my doorstep nearly every day. I'm fucking numb at this point. She can do her worst, and I can weather it.

Nicole is a godsend. She's keeping me sane, talking me through it. She helped me get new clothes. I think she's a little hurt that I'm leaving so soon, though she's obviously trying to hide it; she gets it, you know? As much as I like her, I can't stay here when Eloise is threatening my life. My new place won't be too far away, at least. We'll be able to hang out.

She has so many stories. About supernatural stuff, but also just some crazy experiences she's been through. Maybe when all this is over, she'd let me write some of them down for her? I've gotten kind of attached to this whole Reddit journal thing.

It's probably pretty obvious that I'm into her. I don't even know how you're supposed to ask someone out normally. Plus, she's way too cool for someone like me. I'd embarrass her just putting the question out there, or I'd give myself a heart attack from the stress.

Ugh. God dammit. So there's a real reason I'm posting this update. It's not to tell you that I'm getting ready for the move and my troubles are over, as much as I wish that was it.

Because something is happening. Eloise still has one way to reach me no matter how far I run from her.

'You deserve it.'

The message popped up across my screen in the middle of texting a coworker. The dread hit my stomach so hard it made me nauseous.

It was from her. Who else could it be but her? Her smiling face with her long, dark, pin straight hair, leering out at me. A barrage of messages came through as I looked helplessly into her eyes. Like an idiot, of course. She doesn't see from those anymore, and she has not yet developed a taste for mercy.

'You stood there and did nothing.'

'Did you enjoy it?'

'Did you like watching me suffer?'

'Well now I'm watching you.'

'You were always watching me, weren't you?'

'You spied on me.'

'Preyed on me.'

'Voyeur.'

'Sick sick sick little boy.'

'Don't you have anything to say for yourself, Neighbor?'

That name again. "Hey there, neighbor!" Eloise said to me once, on her brightest and best day. Her voice a little quaint and a little older than she looked. But this Eloise. When she says Neighbor, she has me by the balls.

Working around my heart pounding in rabbit overdrive, I tried to tell her that I never wanted her to suffer. This was all an accident. She didn't respond. I asked what I could do to make amends and help her move on.

'Kill yourself.'

I've been online long enough to see those words thrown back at me, to be numb to it. I'm obviously not a suicidal person or I wouldn't be fighting so hard to stay alive. It still hurts though, to see it coming from her. Eloise's smiling face and heavy eyes don't belong with anything harder than "oh dear!"

"You want me to kill myself?" I asked. "To put you to rest?"

'It only seems right, doesn't it?'

'After all the time you spent getting off to my death.'

'You deserve to die.'

The way she was talking reminded me of nothing more so than the things people said to me back on the old thread, or in my DMs. That's when I blocked her.

I blocked her on everything I could find with her name attached to it, even LinkedIn.

It was hard, knowing I can't get back onto her page. That I'll never see her paintings again. The little birds she used to keep. Where did those pigeons go, I wonder, when she got rid of the box? Was that part of her preparation, or was losing it the last straw that tipped her over the edge?

I'm not going to hurt myself. If this thing wants to hurt me, it'll have to try harder.

But it doesn't add up. The Eloise who talks at me and the one who talks to me are different. Her voice is totally different. My Eloise is sensitive and hesitant. Maybe… I mean, the digital attacks have only started since I reached out to the ex-husband. It's possible he could have gotten into her accounts, that he's trying to intimidate me or scare me off. I can't imagine what he did to her, but maybe he knows I'm onto something and is trying to shut me up? I left my fucking door open when I went to the hospital, so if he knew where Eloise lived then it would be easy to find me and take that picture.

It doesn't account for everything else. It doesn't account for most of the things that have happened to me. Still, ever since I opened myself up to the possibility that it was him, it's been harder to convince myself that Eloise is here with me at all, despite all the evidence in front of my eyes.

I believe in the supernatural, I believe in ghosts and curses, because it is less horrible than having to believe that a living human being can haunt you. It doesn't seem possible for a spirit to do everything Eloise has done, but at the same time how can it be possible for a person either?

It doesn't matter. Freedom is right at my fingertips. This is going to end, and it's going to end my way.

Unless anything else happens in the next few days, I think this will be the last part of Eloise's story. Hopefully, wherever I go next, things stay quiet.

- Neighbor

-----------------

My lawyer has advised me against continuing to post. My sister, Jenny, has asked me to please stop. I apologize to both of them for acting against their wishes.

Everything I am about to tell you is the honest truth. I would testify to it in court. As a matter of fact, I intend to.

After my last update, there was nothing to report. I was staying with Jenny and just eating the cost of the commute for work. Within a couple weeks, I had a new apartment lined up, and Jenny offered to help me move the rest of the furniture to save on money for a moving service. Plus, I don't think she wanted me to be left alone for too long. Even now in my new place, she calls me almost every day. We're closer than we've been since we were kids, but it's fucked that it took something like this to…

So the furniture. We borrowed her husband's pickup and were just taking my stuff down. I didn't ever have a lot, a table and a desk, a couple chairs, nightstands, my bed, and the couch. Consummate bachelor shit. Not even any wall art. I noticed that as we were taking stuff out. Spending so much time with Jenny's family, it was suddenly weird to me that I had left my walls totally bare for as long as I'd lived here and it never bothered me. Which made me think about Eloise's art, and I had this crazy urge to own one of her paintings, like a consolation prize for all she'd put me through.

We were carrying the couch through the kitchen, and ended up knocking it into a wall while I was distracted.

I heard a thump. Jenny and I set the couch down so we could check our pockets, thinking someone had dropped a phone. Neither of us saw anything until we'd gotten the couch out into the hallway.

There was something flat and square on the ground, blue and a little bigger than a credit card. I thought it was some bit of junk mail or a gift card or something that had fallen off the fridge or out from beneath the couch cushions, but when I picked it up, it was slim, cool plastic, and on the down-facing side, there was a little speaker. The upwards facing side was sticky, and sure enough when we tipped the couch over there was a strip of duct tape dangling.

We found the second one under my bed, taped to my mattress. By this point I was hysterical, tearing up the apartment for anything else unseemly. I hadn't told Jenny all the details of my life for the last several months and she assumed this sudden move, the hospitalization, my erratic behavior, were symptoms of a mental health crisis. Now she was seeing in sudden, confusing detail that the mental health crisis was a symptom of this.

How had I missed it this whole time? I don't know how I could have been so stupid, because when Eloise's voice came out of the speaker, it was obvious. Tinny, an inadequate recording playing out of an ill equipped speaker. It was one of those optical illusions where once you see the intended shape you can't make your eyes unfocus enough to find the old one. 

I wanted it to be her. Even if it meant she hated me. It wasn't that I was fooled. I wanted to be fooled.

We did a thorough sweep of my apartment and found cameras. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, one aimed at my front door. An entire spying operation dedicated to me. I crushed them, snapped the speaker things. Jenny was sitting really quietly on my kitchen floor, just watching and trying to process all of it.

She asked me what was going on. I mean, she'd been asking me, but I wasn't ready to speak until I had gotten rid of as much of the stuff as possible. I thought the best way to explain it was to show her the Reddit stuff, and she almost thought I was fucking with her.

Yeah, I shouldn't have busted up all the evidence. I never said it was a good idea, but it was an absolutely necessary one. Could you live with something like that in your house, still recording, for even a minute longer than it took to eliminate them? I don't want evil things in my life. And in front of my fucking sister no less, who is innocent in all of this regardless of what I've done or what this fucking sicko that had invented Eloise thinks of me.

Because it was clear now. Eloise was a fiction. A pretext to stalk and terrify me, to remind me of one of the worst things that has ever happened to me and use it as a weapon to hurt me. I'm not going to apologize or feel callous for making this about myself anymore, because Eloise is dead and she's not listening, and I'm still here living with the consequences. I brushed it off like it was no big deal? Well, it was. I lied. I'm telling the truth now. The day Eloise killed herself was the second worst day of my life.

This was the first.

I told Jenny to stay there and I ran to Nicole's. I pounded on her door for a good couple minutes, and I felt bad waking her because at that time she'd normally be asleep for her night job. This couldn't wait. I was already running it through my head, what I would have to tell her about the Reddit thread and my stalker to catch her up to speed. She lived in Eloise's old place for god's sake, so how could this person pass up involving her?

She eventually opened the door a couple inches. She peered through it, heavy bags under her doe eyes. "What's…?"

"Nicole, I need to talk to you. Please, this is seriously urgent."

"Oh. Um, about Eloise?"

I pushed my way inside, scared someone would overhear us. For all I knew, her apartment had been tapped. We would have to de-bug the whole thing, do a clean search, with profuse apologies from me for roping her into this. I don't think she was expecting me to be so forceful, but she scrambled out of the way. 

"Yeah," I said. "About Eloise." 

I'd never been inside her place before, but it was really dark. Obviously, I mean, she was semi-nocturnal, she'd probably barely had a chance to put the lights on. But it unnerved me. The only light came from her multi monitored computer setup in the bedroom, visible through the doorway; and the outdoors through her drawn curtains. 

"I don't know what to think. I was just with my sister. It's too much."

She wandered or maybe ran to the balcony, and I followed her. I couldn't make out the look on her face in the dark. I don't think she was even really listening to me.

Shutting the door, I glanced around again for some spy or assailant. I was utterly tunnel visioned. Nicole had pressed herself into a corner, her back to the balcony railing.

"I just found all these cameras and shit. It all makes sense now. Her Facebook page, her accounts, the shadow, everything, I mean someone must have--" It was a hot summer afternoon, but between one breath and the next the air turned sharp and freezing in my chest. "Someone must have…"

Nicole the psychic moved into my dead neighbor's haunted apartment. Except there never was a haunting. Which means she was never a psychic. God, I was so stupid.

"Nicole…?"

She blinked at me. "Neighbor?"

I reeled. From the very moment I started talking about Eloise, she'd been there with me. Neighbor, neighbor, neighbor, not in Eloise's wholesome next-door voice but the anonymous chatter of the mob. I could finally put a face to it all. My voice thickened, burdened with choked back tears.

I asked her, "How could you do this to me? Why did you do this?"

And do you know what she did?

She shrugged. Like a little kid when you ask why they didn't do their homework. Perfect innocence. Obvious guilt.

I thought I was going to throw up, my heart was beating so fast. "Don't fucking shrug, Nicole, you poisoned me!"

"Oh come on, like you actually have a meat allergy? A little pork blood wasn't actually going to hurt you. You just had a panic attack."

"I went to the hospital."

"Yeah, because you panicked and shot adrenaline into your leg."

Oh my god, I realized then. I'm talking to someone who tried to kill me, and this is her only response. Nicole looked just as honest with me now as ever. Big open eyes, and nothing more off to her voice than a condescending tone. It was surreal. I think she really believed it.

I tried asking again: why did this happen? She wouldn't give me a straight answer. I was in her space, with half a foot over her, and she didn't so much as flinch. Her hand went to her pocket. Did she have a knife, or a taser? The steady drip of adrenaline left me shaking. If I had to, I knew I could stop her, but there's a difference between telling yourself something and putting your body into motion.

"What do you want?" I begged. "What were you trying to accomplish? What did you think this would do?"

She rolled her eyes. "I thought that was pretty obvious."

Yes, right. Killing myself. "But why?"

"Because you deserve it."

The internet is not real life. The internet is a brick wall. You press your ear to it to hear voices on the other side. Maybe you whisper along. Across the courtyard, I saw Jenny in my apartment, frantically on the phone with someone, but I couldn't tell what she was saying. I'm no good at reading lips. She looked up and saw me crying. She ran out.

Nicole kept talking.

"You know, it's not really hard to pick a lock. It's not hard to print off bills. She had a bunch still in the trash when she died. Even the expensive stuff, getting ahold of the cameras and setting up the hotspot to keep them streaming, that can all go on credit cards. You can open a new line of credit basically anywhere, anytime. You don't even have to use your real name. Lots of people do it; you've got stuff in your name, I bet, you wouldn't even believe.

"But you know what the hard part was, really?" She kind of laughed. "Catching all those fucking pigeons."

If I ran out of there, back through that dark apartment, would she follow me? Nicole was feverish, pink, and ready to take matters into her own hands. If I'd pushed her to this point where she was confronting me face to face, what could I make her do? I was thinking all of that, but I still said, "You are a fucking sociopath."

Her nostrils flared. "Oh, I'm the sociopath? When you watched her die and did nothing, and then pretended… It's offensive, honestly, to think you could have stopped her."

"I never said that," I insisted. You guys know I've never pretended to be some hero, right? I've never acted like I could have changed things, and wishing I had isn't the same thing.

"You don't have to say it. I know you believe it."

I didn't, I don't, but there was no reasoning with her. "She was just nice. Why can't I just care about someone who was nice to me? I mean, as though I don't understand how it feels to be lonely."

Nicole crowded up into my space, and I had to put my hands out to block her. The first time I ever touched her. I thought she was going to jump up and maul me. Her teeth were out in such an ugly snarl it barely looked human.

"See, this is why. You're so arrogant, you're obviously not the only one who's seen her stuff. Because I have. I found it before you, and I showed it to you. All you can ever have is a voyeuristic, secondhand Eloise, but I've been her. I've been in her skin in ways you could never understand."

I was at a loss for words. I was deep in the swamp of panic and it was sucking me down fast. I didn't know how to interrupt her. Even if I did, what could I say to defend myself that hadn't already been said?

Nicole kept going, more vicious the longer I failed to respond. "You're a fucking monster. You think you're in love with her? You think she would have gone for some manipulative, soft little creep? You couldn't even save yourself, but you have the gall to think you could have saved Eloise? The best thing for either of you now is to kill yourself."

I shook my head. I tried backing off, up against the glass of the balcony door. From behind, loud enough we could both hear, someone was pounding on her door. And she got this wild look on her face, electric. The way I imagine racers look when they're about to take a curve too fast to pull out of.

"It's too bad she isn't really here to see you now. She'd be proud of me for avenging her."

That's when Nicole jumped.

She snapped her neck in the courtyard. When I got up the guts to look down, she had landed in the same flowerbed that Eloise's falling body had crushed in May.

I can't tell you what must have been going through her mind, and speculation is not admissible in court, as my attorney keeps reminding me. But this is not a courtroom. 

This was how she decided to punish me. Nicole- and that wasn't her real name, of course- was fucked up. Like Eloise, she was underwater on credit, falling behind on rent. She decided her best course of action was to take that out on someone like me, who had done something she thought was wrong. She dedicated months of time, moved across the state, stole identities and committed god knows how much fraud, just to ruin my life. She ruined her own life out of pure spite. That's not the work of a rational mind.

So when it looked like I might get away unscathed after all that effort, she thought, like I have thought: can he live with a second dead girl on his conscience?

I can. And I will.

Some of this may not seem to add up, but sometimes the truth is inconvenient.

My court date is a few months from now. I've moved to a different part of town. I have heard no voices and seen no shadows. God willing, a jury of my peers will determine my innocence.

Nicole jumped.

Goodbye, Eloise. I wish we could have been friends.

- Neighbor