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