The funeral home next door to me is hiding something. I know that for a fact. Nobody I’ve talked to about it will believe me though. Not my friends, not my family back home, definitely not the cops. They all think I’m being paranoid. The way the cops brush me off, it almost makes me think they’re in on it. Let’s just say it wouldn’t fucking surprise me.
Now, I’m going to lay this out step by step: This is almost my sixth year living in New York. I’d lived in Midtown Manhattan in the dorms of my college for four years, but come to the end of college I had to find somewhere more affordable. I settled on somewhere pretty far uptown. It was shockingly cheap for a place with an in-building washing machine so despite certain problems I had with the surrounding area I went for it. It wasn’t really a neighborhood, more a closely stacked series of very old buildings, half of which were abandoned, another third owned by real estate companies.
I had a first floor apartment, the kind that sort of descends down into a half basement so your barred window is visible at shoe level. And believe me, we needed those bars. To the right was an abandoned building. My own building was mostly empty except for a family that lived up on the fifth floor and a single older man on the third. Next store to me to the left, as part of the same old building dating back to the 1800’s, was the funeral home.
Further to the left was an alley off the street. It was a place covered in all kinds of weird surreal graffiti and when I ended up back there taking out the trash I would always find evidence of people shooting up, though I never saw anything. It was pretty thin, only enough room for maybe a car to just barely squeeze through it if the garbage had been picked up, and went back a great distance ending in a dead end and a sewer grate. There was also a steel door into the funeral home up some steps. The people in my building and the surrounding neighborhood kept to themselves but the few times I did talk to them they would always tell me to keep out of that alley after dark. “It isn’t safe”, they would say. I had gathered that from the heroin needles but it was nice that they cared.
I never liked the place myself even before anything happened. I noticed the brick walls are sort of curved, very slightly, inward. It reminds me of a mouth. My hair always stood up on the back of my neck whenever I walked into it.
This one time, there was a homeless guy who took up residence in the alley, a younger guy. It really surprised me because I had realized that in all the months I had been there it was the first other human being I had ever seen in the alley. The next morning he was gone, but all his stuff had been left behind. He never came back for it.
I never stayed out too late in this place anyway unless it was for work. It was no midtown. People went missing regularly. The cops wouldn’t do anything about it. They’d just add the names to the list. I didn’t ever really talk to the neighbor, the funeral home director. She was a woman in her forties, kind of attractive but that doesn’t really have anything to do with this. She dressed very conservatively, with a veil and everything. It makes sense. I guess if you spend all of your time at funerals it makes sense. She always gave me weird vibes, however, but I chalked it up to her representing a fear of the dead, at least at first.
I had heard weird noises coming from that funeral home as with the layout of my house, the funeral home sort of wrapped around it on the left side and the backside. Late at night, around 3 am, I woke up to the sound of barking through the wall. Not animal barking either, I swear it sounded like a man barking. From there, it got weirder. I heard a sort of animal type sound but it was in a woman’s voice. It was like this: “meeeep”. The barking followed in the male voice with a meep in the woman’s voice. It went back and forth like that for a while. It was like they were having a conversation! I don’t think she had any hired help. I’m pretty sure she ran the funeral home all by herself.
I had heard weird noises before coming from not the walls but under the floor. Every once in a while I heard a sort of scratching under the floorboards. I thought it might be rats but never saw any. This one time I swore I could hear whispering from down the drain in my bathtub.
So basically, here’s what I saw and then what I heard. One evening, getting home from work, I noticed a white van had been parked in the alley. It was around the height of the pandemic at the time so dead bodies had been coming in and out of the funeral home all month. More coming in then out, I think. The van was marked with the logo of the funeral home and the back of the van was pointed away from the street, towards the back part of the alley. I had never seen the van before, and when I had seen a vehicle at the funeral home it had always been a hearse.
That night was some of the worst noises I ever heard at this place. They echoed out of the alley. It sounded like dogs fighting. Ripping and tearing. That’s what I thought it was at first and I almost expected a neighbor to come out and check it out but nothing. I realized looking out the window onto the street everyone in the neighborhood had turned their lights off but me. The sound got worse and I knew it couldn’t be dogs. There were screams and I swear… laughter! It sounded like people! Human beings! But it was off because I knew what kind of sounds they could make and some of those sounds were not noises I had ever heard a human make! It went on for an hour. I guess by then they’d gotten what they needed.
The laughter and the meeping and gibbering continued. It got closer and closer and I swear it moved across my apartment under the floorboards. I shut off the lights as fast as I could once it got under me. I stood on the couch and I didn’t move, I didn’t dare move an inch. The entire time I was terrified the floor was going to crack open under me and they were going to pull me down. Every dark corner I thought something was going to crawl out of.
I didn’t go to sleep that night. I was up until dawn just staring into the darkness and trying not to breathe too loud. I reported it to the police. The detective who questioned me treated it like a joke. Accused me of watching too many movies and getting freaked out by some alley cats. I know what a cat sounds like. He was wearing a nice gold Rolex, that detective guy. The kind of watch you bury someone in.
That woman, the funeral home director, I got a closer look at her the other day. It’s like she’s almost human but not quite but I don’t want to extrapolate. I’m just here to tell you the facts and you can make up your own conclusion. Her eyes are a weird shade of almost red brown I’ve never seen in anyone before. Her whole face has a very angular quality to it. Tightly pulled back skin with almost canine features. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before but I guess most people ignore things if they don’t line up with your worldview.
Once you have the pieces, it starts fitting together. It’s the kind of merging of thoughts I wish I had never had it now people need to know what’s really going on. I’m not saying anything at all, you can make up your own mind, but something is going on in this city and as soon as I can I’m moving into a new place however many floors up off ground level I can find.
If anything else happens I’ll let you know