I remember living in this old and dirty building in a low cost area when I was a kid, it was an abandoned building probably since only ourselves and the old lady on the upper floor used to live there. I remember the wood uncarpeted flaky floors, the falling tile in the bathroom and the empty unpainted walls, no refrigerator ,no electricity in the building and there were no rooms in the apartment but I was happy there and it was until time passed that I realized that only I was happy there.
My mother wouldn’t go out much and spent most of his time hand washing clothes for other people with water that she had to carry from several block away, my dad was not happy at all and I guess that he probably had other big plans for his life than ending in that place.We were surrounded by a lot of empty space, old abandoned houses in worst state than this building but the little things counted for me like the once a month ice cream we had altogether. We should all be happy there but I started noticing things as I grew up like the yelling between my parents and how it continuously increased month over month, it became ever more loud, more violent and more insulting. The hitting started only with small pushes but by the end they were constantly hitting each other more and more stronger like this memory I have of my father kicking something that I couldn’t see because it was covered by the bed, his eyes were fixed into what he was hitting like nothing else existed out of that moment and I particularly remember the sweat of so much kicking coming down from his forehead and it was until many years later that I realized he was kicking my mother.
There were always some weeks of calm after a big confrontation at least during that moment they both seemed happy and then without any reason the yelling started again, this happened over and over for years.
There was always cats and dogs that live in the streets that would become kind of our pets my mother would feed them and they’ll spend time with Us as if they were part of our family, the cats would come in from time to time through the open windows and sometimes make a mess and my dad hated the cats at the beginning but after some time he felt more sympathetic for them. The dogs would follow us at night when we went to the nearby abandoned houses to get wood and materials we could take from those houses to repair our walls and floors. My father told me that the whole building was infested with termites and that was why our apartment was getting weaker and weaker.
You could see the old lady on the floor above us most of the time from outside as she would usually sit near the window and people used to say that she was a witch but she was just an old lady she was sweet and I helped her a couple of times when she could barely go up the stairs back to his apartment, she was old and because of this she wouldn’t go out much.
When I returned from school and the dogs saw me coming they would run as fast as they can to get to me and then they would follow me back to the apartment and after many times I got so used to their company that I started to talk to them like if they were people and they were my best friends also I like them more than the cats because the cats would just come into the apartment and start walking around us or laying on the floor somewhere just looking at us until they got bored and left.
It was around this time that the strange things started to happen and most of it was just things that I could not explained at that point since it was just a bad strange feeling like per example when I returned from school and the dogs followed me back it was just us in that big emptiness but when I talked to the dogs I started to feel like they could actually understand me, I can’t explain what it was but they just started to act in a different way and it was just one of those things that the brain picks up and also the cats, what were they looking? They didn’t seem like bored cats just laying around anymore but you could see how they started reacting to our conversations and sometimes even walking towards Us if we started to talk in a secretive low voice.
It was around this time that the dreams started or more exactly the nightmares even though some of them were not scary but weird like when I had a dream that we were been attacked by wild animals and at night I could see the dogs, cats, crows trying to come through my window barking and crashing against it trying to break it.
After that everything changed,my father would be angry and angry most of the time and I can swear I once heard at night some dogs talking outside the window, they were talking between them in human voice but in a different language until they left and later the cats would come in the house and just stare at me constantly.It was a weird feeling now when the dogs came to me in the afternoon because I was to scared of saying anything to them I really didn’t want them anywhere near me and I could also see how their playfulness just went away and by that time I felt more like I was being escorted than accompanied.
I had a dream just before it happened where I was in my bed at night and I started hearing this slow steps coming from outside my room getting closer and closer, I can’t move so I just stay there waiting to see his image coming through the door and when it happened I could see that it was a dog but a really big dog walking towards me, then I notice immediately his eyes as they were completely white and he walks in a strange way with the pauses more like a human would do instead of an animal and just after him another dog enters and this one followed by a cat and all three of them just stay still standing next to me but there was something in the way they acted and looked at each other like they could communicate between them and after that I woke up.
That night my father got home more angrier than ever and started to throw my mom around and hitting her when she was on the floor but this was a different type of hitting because on the previous hitting as violent as it was you could still feel the love between them but this was different this was like trying to attack an enemy, I tried to stop him but he would just push me around very easily, at one point when I was at the floor after been thrown away by my father I noticed the noise coming from the upper floor, it was like a group of old women yelling and laughing constantly and loudly and sounds of dogs barking and cats screaming in that horrible way when they sound as small children, I then I looked at the window and in the reflection I could see that that was not my father and it was just like this being in human form but without any real form just a black entity with no face, no skin and no physical presence but you could feel his heavy weight on every attack he made until my mother just stopped crying and this thing in the body of my father just stopped. I knew what that meant and I didn’t know what to do after that. Then my father or whatever this was looked at me very deeply and he just ran away and I never saw him again.
I sat next to my mother’s body for some time.
I stayed there for hours not knowing what to do while cats and dogs were wandering around looking at what had happened. There was no noise coming from the floor above anymore like there was no one there and after some hours the light of the day was starting to come through the windows and I realized it was time to go but I didn’t want to go because I knew now that this was the last time I was going to be with my parents even if there was only their bodies now I still fill them with me until finally the animals around started to become more and more aggressive trying to make me leave so I left and never looked back.
For many years I tried making sense of what had happened trying to come up with possible stories but after some time I just accepted the truth, my father was not any big target for them and we had nothing special so we just came into their attention and they used my family for any type of satisfaction they could get out of us the same way I keep seeing this happening over and over in this city you just have to dig a little bit and you can also see it for yourself.