Her name was Cynthia and we met because of work. I took a job halfway across the country and my supervisor hooked me up with another recent hire who was looking to move closer to work. We talked on the phone a couple times, did some video chats and everything seemed fine. Plus, I didn’t have a lot of options as the city was too expensive for me to pay for my own place.
She was also from the area so she could scout out the rentals and talk to the landlords in person, which made it easy. Eventually we found a place we were both happy with and I took the plunge, paying the deposit and driving for almost ten hours. This was back in mid-winter, and when I finally got to see the place in person, the snowbanks outside were as tall as I was.
It was the first time I ever had to shovel out a parking spot.
Cynthia wasn’t actually moving in for like a week so I had the place to myself in the meantime, but she’d already been there to move some of her stuff in. Most of it was confined to her room, but she’d moved a couch into the living room, which was convenient because I didn’t bring any furniture with me. I was planning on sleeping on the floor the first few nights and going to ikea or something later. As it was, I just ended up sleeping on the couch.
That first night I unloaded all my toiletries onto the kitchen counter, the only surface in the house, and ordered in some food. I was planning to read a little before I went to sleep but there was no coffee table near the couch and I didn’t want to leave my glasses on the floor. Plus I was tired, so I passed out almost immediately.
That was when the first thing happened, and it was barely anything.
That night I had awful dreams. At some point in the early morning, the sound of the water turning on upstairs woke me. It was a soft, bubbly sound, not enough to be startling, just enough to make me open my eyes. I would have fallen back to sleep if I hadn’t seen something moving. At first I thought it was a trick of the light, filtering through the blinds onto my skin, but once I was fully awake and I could feel them, there were hundreds of little beetles crawling over my skin.
I screamed, tripping on myself as I leapt off the couch. I scraped them off my skin as I staggered into the shower, blasting the water.
I was probably in there for half an hour, sitting in the tub and shaking.
There was a rash on my legs, it was splotchy and when I googled it, it didn’t look like any traditional pest bites (bedbugs, ticks, scabies).
I called my future roommate and told her what had happened with the couch. She acted horrified, saying she couldn’t believe it, that her friends had given her the couch after it had been sitting in their garage for a while. She said she didn’t see anything on it when she was moving it in.
I told her I was going to put it by the road, but that I’d replace it myself when I got around to going to ikea. She had the nerve to act put-out by that, but I didn’t care, I wasn’t going to risk the bugs getting into anything else in the house.
Luckily, it was pretty easy to disassemble and put into large contractor bags. Which I left by the road for trash pick-up.
The very next day she showed up, completely out of the blue.
It was a tense first meeting.
She apologized for the couch but she was obviously pissed about it.
I spent the day assembling ikea furniture in my room while she hung around on her phone.
In the afternoon, I asked if she could help me assemble the new couch I bought and we got to talking a little.
Very quickly the conversation was steered back to the old couch.
She said she looked through the bags trying to find one of the bugs to “show her friends” so they could “keep an eye out” but couldn’t find anything. It was clear she was being passive aggressive, accusing me of lying.
The bags had been taken away earlier in the day, so there was no way of proving myself.
Eventually she let it go, and we tried to move on.
We rarely ever talked. The back door of the apartment was near my room and the front door was near hers, so we could both come and go without ever running into each other. But that didn’t stop me from knowing that she was a slob.
Her hair was always everywhere, her dishes sat in the sink for days, her laundry hamper sat in the bathroom until it was practically overflowing.
Plus I couldn’t stand her, her voice was like nails on a chalkboard, so I avoided it whenever possible.
The job started, but thankfully we didn’t work in the same department. So if anything we saw even less of each other.
Our only conflict consisted of who got home first and took the closer parking spot. One of our reserved spots was right in front of the house, the other one was probably a hundred yards away.
We swapped pretty evenly at first, with our schedules being pretty balanced, but one week about a month into the job, I was put on a project that tended to wrap up pretty early, leading to me beating her home consistently.
She did not like that. She started slamming the door everyday when she got home. On wednesday she actually walked into the kitchen while I was cooking to tell me a whole story about how she’d slipped walking from the far spot.
“Make sure you’re careful!” She said.
I didn’t even think about it, at least not until the next morning.
I was walking out to my car, like always, but this time when I stepped up to my door, the ground was slick as oil.
My feet slipped right out from under me and I fell hard, knocking my head on the asphalt so hard it bled.
When I finally recovered enough to get up, I inspected the area where I had fallen and looked all around my car, and I swear the only place with ice was right in front of my door. It didn’t make any sense. There was no method for water to accumulate there.
That’s when I remembered what she had said to me the night before, “be careful!”
I have no doubt in my mind she did it, poured some water in front of my door to make me slip.
I didn’t say anything to her about it of course, I couldn’t let her know I was on to her, but from then on you can bet I was careful.
After that things went downhill fast. It started with my toothpaste. The apartment had one bathroom and it was the only place in the house where our stuff wasn’t obviously divided, where she could have unfettered access behind a locked door.
I’m not someone prone to toothaches, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I can remember having one, so when I started getting them daily I knew something was wrong. My teeth were also getting yellow-er so I started paying more attention when brushing. I think that’s how I started noticing that sometimes my toothpaste wasn’t in the same place I had left it.
I can only explain this next part by saying I had started using a new brand of toothpaste, so I wasn’t intimately familiar with the flavor.
Additionally, I don’t paint my nails very often. My hands shake so it’s difficult for me to do it, but I had a pretty important presentation coming up and I wanted to give myself a little burst of confidence, so I opened up a fresh bottle of pink nail polish.
Almost immediately my hand slipped and I needed to pour some nail polish remover on a cotton ball and try to dab it off of the side of my finger.
Immediately the remover smelled familiar, and I tried to place it while I worked on my nails.
It wasn’t until the next morning that it clicked, when I went to brush my teeth. The nail polish remover smelled like my toothpaste. Someone had put acetone in my toothpaste.
I rinsed my mouth until it burned, scrubbing it with a washcloth in case the acetone was embedded in my toothbrush.
That’s when I knew for sure she was crazy, but it just kept getting worse.
I found sharp rocks in front of my tires. My food began tasting different after I left it in the fridge for a while. I started getting sick, the first time could have been a fluke, but the second?
I’m writing this having just recovered from being violently ill, my whole body was shaking from dehydration.
She is slipping something in my food.
Things didn’t really come to a head until yesterday, she came home late, through the front door while I sat on the living room couch, the lights were off and she didn’t know I was there. I watched as she tried to slip a bag of something into her room.
“What’s in there,” I confronted her. She turned and I saw the whites of her eyes, her face the perfect picture of innocent shock.
“Huh?” she said, still holding the bag, “why are you sitting in the dark?”
“What’s in the bag?” I asked again. I was trying to stay reasonable.
“Uh, nothing,” she said, “you’re kind of freaking me out right now.”
I laughed, It was funny.
“Okay,” she said, obviously on edge, she wasn’t expecting me to confront her, “is something wrong?”
“I don’t know, is there?” I pressed, “why don’t you show me what’s in the bag?”
“Why should I?” she deflected, “it isn’t any of your business.”
“My business?” I demanded, “it became my business when you started threatening my safety!”
“What are you even talking about?” she said, sounding irritated, almost as if she was exhausted by the conversation.
“The ice, Cynthia,” I said, “the food, the acetone in my toothpaste!” I continued to list it all out. Her eyebrows raised and lowered cartoonishly, her mouth stretching into a sinister frown.
“Holy shit,” she said, “you’re crazy, and I’m leaving.”
She made for the door.
I got up, crossing the room in only a few strides and coming between her and her escape.
“Not until I see what’s in that bag,” I said, my voice calm.
“Bitch,” she said threateningly, “You need to get out of my way.”
I lunged, trying to snatch the bag from her hands, she reared back before dropping the bag and charging me.
I’ve been in fights before, but she was taller than me by quite a few inches, so I had to fight dirty.
She was grabbing for the door handle, I tried to stop her but her knee came up right into my stomach and I staggered back.
The door was coming open when I saw the shovel, before I even knew what I was doing it was in my hands. I swung it against her back and she went down with a shriek, but she wasn’t out.
She growled at me, grabbing onto the shovel and trying to yank it from my hands. I had leverage, but she had strength, and I felt it slipping.
Once she got the shovel, it would be over for me, you have to be able to see that. She was taller and stronger, and she would have been armed with a deadly weapon. I already knew she wanted me dead. What I did next was life or death.
When the shovel finally slipped from my grasp her own momentum brought her down and, for a split second, her head was positioned between the door and its jam.
I swung it. Hard. It cracked against her skull. Once, twice, I just kept swinging until it was over, until she stopped twitching.
I checked outside, but no one was on the street, though our neighbors must have heard the noise. I don’t know why they didn’t come out during the fight, at least then I would have had witnesses.
As it was there was no proof that I hadn’t just randomly murdered this woman.
I dragged her inside and shut the door.
The only place I could think to bring her was the tub, so I dragged her heavy body towards the bathroom. I only made it a few steps when I saw the bag laying on its side, the handle ripped off. On closer inspection it was from a pharmacy.
I looked inside, and found exactly what I was looking for. Not only did she have a prescription for psychiatric medication, she had two huge bottles of contact solution, something she must have been using to poison my food. On top of that, as if I needed any more evidence, there was a bottle of nail polish remover, 100% pure acetone.
She’s still in the tub now and it’s just after midnight. I’m going to call the police. I guess I just wanted to get it all down and set the record straight before I did. I don’t want the police to think I’m some kind of lunatic when I try to explain it to them, let me know if you have any advice, this situation was just so traumatic that I don’t know if I’m thinking straight.
If you take anything away from this, just be careful about your roommates, you never know who you’re going to get. There’s some real crazy people out there.
What’s even crazier is I just looked at Cynthia’s body slumped over in the tub, and those bugs are crawling all over it.