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. She kept finding new avenues of contact, until I started getting ahead of her and plugging them up. It’s 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